*Note: this is a transcript from my journal hand written on the plane*

Well, here we are up in the air on our first flight. Unfreakinbelievable. Who'd have thought we'd ever get here.

Anyway, we are now 6 hours in to a seven hour flight to Singapore, which will be a transit stop on the way to Bangkok. The flight so far has gone remarkably quickly, we have had two good meals, as well as red wine or two.

Most of my time has been whiled away here playing in flight Nintendo, and I can now remember why I used to call Super Mario Brothers Super aggravation Brothers. Aye Aye Aye, I am supposed to be relaxing, stupid bloody game. I have had a brief break though to watch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind", which was an absolutely amazing film and definitely worth a second watch. (edit: fortunately I bought a dodgy copy on DVD...)

Karen has been on a movie marathon, and is now getting to the end of her third one. I know the first film was the same as me, but the other two are chick flicks of some description.

We have now begun our descent, and over the last few days I have picked up a bit of a sniffle so it will be interesting to see how my ears go with the decompression. I have got some of those "earplanes" ear plugs that are supposed to help, they'd better for $15. (edit: they work!)

Ok, I am sure I am not the only person on the net reporting this or passing opinion on this, but the name of the new star wars film was released today. It's going to be, wait for it....

Revenge of the Sith.

Now I am not going to be like every other bloody geek on the internet and bemoan the fact that its not called "Rise of the Empire" or "Jar Jar dies of anal electrocution" or any other such Star Wars fan boy bullshit, but the title does concern me a little. Why? Because it reminds me of Revenge of the Nerds that's why.

It just bothers me that the plot might revolve around the Sith getting kicked out of their frat house by the Jedi and then having to live in the gym, but then reforming the tri-sith fraternity to beat the jedi at the interstellar skulling race on Coruscant.

Actually,  come to think of it, in the film Revenge of the Nerds,  at the end when the head nerd is making sweet love to the hot chick Betty, wasn't he wearing a Vader mask? Scary......

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Another Sunday night, another wind down from a big weekend of stuffing around with houses.
Yesterday Karen and I did the final clean out at Magill, in readiness for when the tenants move in. Tenants that we still have to find I might add since the ones we thought we had pulled out at the last minute, but I'm sure someone will sign up to rent our lovely home soon. At least I hope so.

Now that we are pretty much moved in here at Aldinga, today was spent digging out the driveway in readiness for the concrete to be poured this week. Hooray. An inch of rain adds an interesting dimension to a house that has no driveway or paths, but has light coloured carpets and a dog. I will post some photos of the finished property later in the week, once I can walk from inside to the street without being an inch taller from the layer of mud on my shoes.

Anyway enough of this house talk rubbish, and on with the real stuff.

In less than 6 days, this blog is going to change. Change from a whiney account of someone trying to build a house, to a bona fide travel blog. True story. I still have trouble coming to terms with the fact that at 13:05 next Saturday we will be boarding a plane to do a full lap of the globe.  It still bends my head that it doesn't matter what happens at work this week, because someone else is going to have to worry about it next week. Yeah!

So anyway, might give her a bit of a facelift for the occasion.

Well, we moved house over the weekend.
 
As much as I’d like to go into a detailed blow by blow account of the whole experience with amusing photos, the fact is that our belongings are spread between two houses so it's just not possible. My PC is now at Aldinga, which presents an impediment to blogging for two reasons, firstly because I am still based at Magill until later this week, and secondly because the good people at Telstra haven’t got around to connecting the phone so I can’t access the net from down there anyway. I actually rang Telstra foolishly thinking that in this high tech age that I would be able to get the phone and ADSL connected all at once, but that is another story.
 
So here I am at work late in the afternoon,  and here are some random observations about moving house
 

1. Cut Price Truck Rentals in Adelaide should be called Cut Corners. Or more specifically in my case, don't cut corners if you don't want to knock the wing mirrors off of our trucks.
2. When you have been eating take away all week whilst packing a house, a nice home cooked stew is something to behold (Thanks Lea and Jon).
3. Good friends (and family) are people who will help you move house. Great friends are ones that will help you even if you are only moving house in a greedy attempt to make money. You all know who you are - and we thank you and will reward you with a big Aldinga housewarming in October.
4. When you bite off more than you can chew in your life, there's no one that can bail you out and put in grunt work to help you finish projects quite like your parents. As if Karen and I don't owe our parents for enough, this experience has depened our debt significantly to them significantly. We also don't have enough thanks for you.

There is this little film you may have noticed around the cinemas at the moment, although if you haven't watched TV, read the newspaper, caught a bus, been to the supermarket, listened to the radio or left a dark room without windows in the last few weeks you may not have.  Spiderman 2 - it's true that there is more than just a little bit of hype around for this film at the moment.
 
For the record, I loved Spiderman as a kid. I watched the cartoon, read the comics and bought the showbag. Furthermore, I absolutely loved the original Spiderman film, the action was heart stopping, the effects were amazing and it nailed Peter's internal struggle over the sacrifices required to be a hero. So with all this in mind, and the almost universal praise for the film, I had fairly high expectations as the lights dimmed in the cinema where we saw the film on Tuesday night.
 
Let me tell you I wasn't disapointed. Not by a long shot, as a matter of fact I am going to go out on a limb and rate it amongst my top ten films. Seriously, this film is an absolute pearler! Everything that made the first film great, it had plus more, the action was mind blowing, the characters emotionally engaging and the storyline satisfying.  I walked out of it with a grin like a chesshire cat, and I am praying for it to be on inflight a couple of times on our trip so I can watch it again. It's probably a bit to early to go revealing spoilers at the moment, but it contains a sequence that was one of the best cinema moments ever in my opinion. I am lost for enough gush words about this film, so if you haven't seen it yet, stop what you are doing now and go for a look. You won't be sorry.
 
While on the topic of films, I have grave, grave concerns about the upcoming film I, Robot. This is a film based on, inspired by or at least has the same title as one of my favourite books ever. It is a piece of literature is as close to my heart as The Lord of the Rings and Dune, so I guess any film made of it is going to concern me. So the fact it stars Will Smith with a big, futuristic looking gun worries me a lot. But I won't wax cynical too much about it now, after all you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. I will wait until I actually see it, and then rest assured I will be lining up behind the rest of the internet geeks to point out it's faults if it's not up to scratch. Asimov, like Tolkien, is sacred ground as far as us nerds are concerned.
 
Moving along to stuff people might actually care about, Karen and I have found a tenant to live in our Magill house whilst we go overseas and move to the coast for a brief sojourn, which is a bit exciting and at the same time a bit strange.  The property manager rang us up on Wednesday arvo to let us know that she had some prospective clients that wanted to look at the house at 8:30 on Wednesday night. So when we got home from work at 6, it was a bit like that Spray and Wipe advert, Karen and I madly rushing around to get the place clean. As a matter of a fact, when they arrived, I was still vacuuming dust out of the exhaust fan grate in the bathroom! Didn't matter though, they were still duely impressed with the house and signed a lease the next day.  One less thing to worry about, while we move house this weekend!
 
 
 
 

Yes that's me. I know, it's cheesy, but as you all know I have no shame and so don't mind being a schmaltzmeister. Today I had an epiphany - a moment of clarity. The sun broke through the clouds and there was a rainbow and strange, distant choral voices. Ok, that's enough of the saccharine, here's the story.

I was walking down Adelaide's Rundle Mall today in my lunch hour, on my way to the outdoor shop strip on Rundle Street today to get some bit's and pieces for the upcoming circumnavigation of the earth. As I passed the famous shiny balls, I saw in the distance an old familiar face, none other than the woman who I was once engaged to but didn't end up marrying. As she approached, hand in hand with a man, a smile came across my face. Partly because she had her normal look on her face, one so sour that it could turn milk, partly because the man she was with was older, greyer and fatter than me, and partly the smile you get across your face when you are about to greet and speak to someone you haven't seen in a long time.

I didn't actually get to speak to her though, because it would appear she is still bitter about our breakup in '99. She only removed the sourpuss look for the merest fraction of a second to give me the iciest glance you have ever seen. One that if looks could kill, Dubya would have had his troops on her looking for weapons of mass destruction. Then, following the glance, she just looked straight through me and kept walking.

I stood there, slightly dumbfounded, hands on hips just watching after them as they kept walking. Then the moment happened - my smirk turned into a full blown belly laugh. I was suddenly the happiest man ever - I could have been that guy, trudging down the mall with the ice queen, but instead I am the guy with the worlds best wife about to embark on the trip of a lifetime and move to a new house at the beach. Onlookers must have been puzzled as I contained my laughter, said "chickachow" and kept walking.

The smile was then plastered on my face. I went into one of the outdoor shops, and plonked down nearly $50 for a money belt and 4 luggage padlocks. Potentially, this is a negative about the upcoming holiday, having to spend money to be security conscious, but today, the purchase had to do with the trip that I never would be going on if I was still stuck with her, so all was rosy.

Whistling and walking back to work in the glorious winter sunshine with a spring in my step, I thought to myself that I couldn't top the experience off any better than with a good coffee. (Alright, I could have had a beer, but I was going back to work). So I ducked into Illy, on Grenfell street and let me tell you, you'd be hard pressed to find a better cappucino in this city. Deeeelicious.

On the last entry to this weblog, I made the whingey analogy that our lives at the moment are like running the closing stages of a marathon. If that is the case, and I wasn't just being a sook, then last Saturday we ran past the drinks stand. However, we didn't just take a gulp and then throw the cup like you see them do in the olympics, we skulled one down, had another, asked the volunteer if he had any beer instead of water and then got settled into a few while the other runners wen't on by.

Tara and Nicks engagement party was the venue of this drinks break, and any party that starts at 2 in the afternoon and goes until midnight rates as a good one in my book. There's something just wholesome about drinking, nibbling and talking crap with old friends for 10 solid hours.

Since I was so self involved in the three activities just mentioned, I didn't actually get many photos. I did however get this one of Nick holding the most important bit of the very delicious cake.


Nick with the most important bit of the cake 

Not much else going on really, except working, working on the house and planning the OS trip, which I am conciously not going into details about too much. You will hear all about it when the time comes...