Patio

So a few weeks ago we got a quote about having our patio paved. We were hating it—it was half bare cement and half grubby mulch that was infested with weeds and dog hair, and was sludgy mud due to the endless months of rain. Moreover, our entry gate opened right into the mulch not the cement, so you had to slog through the muck to get in.

So the paver guys came much sooner than we thought and had it all done in 3 days. We had them dig out all the mulch/dirt, cement it, and lay stone pavers over the whole thing. I’m pretty happy with it: the stones over the ex-mulch area are not laid quite so nicely as the stones over the ex-cement area, but altogether its an awful lot better than it was! It’s an actual outdoor entertaining area now, instead of a cement slab with a picnic table on it and a lot of stinking muck.


In the beginning (mulch dug out, is all)

Partway done

Finished! Still wet from hosedown

The finished deal, from another angle

Misdeeds

Today I am a miscreant. I have done the following bad things:

- Left for work at 8:30
- Overturned a 10L jug of chlorine bleach in the back of the car
- Did not eat the homemade lunch I brought but hid it in the fridge and went out to the fish & chips place instead
- Went shopping at KMart during Team Lunch: bought DVDs that it was absolutely unnecessary to buy
- Spent valuable work time searching for attractive Desktop background pictures instead of doing work
- Spent more valuable work time making V. listen to Cleo Laine’s ‘Embraceable You’ in the parking lot instead of doing work
- Fed ice cream to the cat
- Did not make dinner: ate ice cream instead
- Sneaked out of band rehearsal during the boring part to go to Maccas (aka McDonalds) to get chicken mcnuggets

Mozzies

Why is it, that when mosquitoes bite you, they ALWAYS pick some hard-to-itch body part like elbow ankle, in between the toes, etc? The mosquitoes are driving me literally insane. So itchy! It’s like a plague. And worse than mosquitoes are these teeny little yellow flies that jump like fleas and as completely silent and impossible to catch. I don’t know if they are sand flies or what, never saw them before I came to Brissie.

SO ITCHY.

So we got our back patio paved this week. It took about 3 days: they dug up all the stinking mulch and paved it over with stone tiles from India and it looks pretty good, I think. Gives a much more spacious impression now, and you no longer have to tromp through the dirt when coming in the back gate. It’s nice.

BUGS. EVERYWHERE. BAAARRRRRRRRRGH.

Weekend

Was going to post last night, but I was so tired I was drunk with it, I’m not really any less tired tonight, so coherence may be at a minimum.

Last night we (band) played my first real gig, ever in my life! I mean, I’ve played plenty of concerts over my existance, some that charged a lot of money, some for free, in many different countries, with many different people: orchestra concerts, park gigs, charity events, pit orchestra, and so on and so forth. But I never before played a gig where we were hired for a party. And it was cool! We played our stuff, and people got very drunk and danced and sang and it was quite hilarious. I was very paranoid because I was the only person playing my part: there was one other tenor sax but he was playing a different part to me. A lot of the charts I’d only gotten in the last week and so I wasn’t confident on them! I’m generally good at sightreading, but I still find myself having to transpose sax music (since it isn’t written in concert) and my fingers still don’t always obey my commands. Some of the charts and soli were pretty tough.

But, it was altogether really enjoyable, and we played well, and hopefully got some good exposure so other people will hire us too :-P

Zaubi bought a trombone yesterday! It’s gorgeous, a pro pink and silver and gold Conn (little brother to my sax!) with engraving on the bell. His old tromb was a basic student instrument and didn’t have a trigger. He says it is much easier to play in general and having the trigger makes a big difference. Can actually hit those high and low notes now I guess. It was 50% off, since the store was going out of business, so it was a great deal. Still, were in Australia, so it was expensive. Anyway he played it last night, and everyone oohed and aahed over it.

I have given up on Windows OS once again. Vista is such agonizing crap, and since I was too stingy to shell out for other than the most basic version (Vista Home Basic) I do not qualify for the free downgrade to XP that Microsoft offers! Still, it cracks me up that MS has found it necessary to offer a free *downgrade* at all… tells you what crap Vista is!

So I’ve installed Ubuntu again, and I’m very happy with it thus far. True the graphics don’t look quite as good in SL (game works just as fast if not faster tho) and I can’t seem to get my sound card to work wholly properly and I haven’t even tried to tackle the webcam yet. But there are some great benefits, and installing stuff is easy, and networking is a breeze, and it deals well with my iPod, and I think I’ve found a good Money app, and I have discovered a stunningly wonderful gem called sitecopy. I’m in love. Sitecopy makes webdev a joyful experience! Why did I ever bother with Windows and WebDrive?

This would have been more interesting if I wrote it last night, I’m stupid depressed exhausted tonight, rather than silly witty exhausted.

How many ways can you say I HATE WINDOWS VISTA?

IS Google really coming out with an OS? I can hope.

I’m grumpy today, namely because I have only gotten 3 hours of sleep per night for who knows how long because every day horrible endometriosis pain gets worse. But that’s all I’m going to say on that front because I am sick of complaining.

However, I shall continue to complain about other things. A site that I made which is hosted by some host here in Oz was apparently hacked. They didn’t tell me, they just replaced all the files with ones from July without so much as a by your leave. When I contacted them to ask why all my files were gone/changed, they told me my site was hacked and spreading viruses, but they didn’t say how. I restored my own backup but now I am all paranoid. I know very little about the world of site hacking. I thought I coded the thing pretty well so now I am feeling highly depressed. How exactly do sites get hacked? What loophole should I be looking for? Obviously I do not run the servers myself, thus, it would have to be something either in a directory permissions or the code itself, no?

How do I make my site unhackable? What am I missing?

Oh brilliant, the site has just gone down again.

Bleeeeeh. I SO cannot deal with this on pain and no sleep.

Kirilisa bats for the other team?

For some inexplicable reason, Facebook thinks that I am a lesbian.

It sends me little messages “someone likes you!” and when I click on it, they are always girls. And then it shows me all these pictures of girls and asks me if I like them!

Bah. I’m so over Facebook.

The rain continues on. Everything stinks. The ground is sodden, old dog poop turns into slimy sludge, everything is mildewing. Dog and cat food absorb the water in the air and become puffy and stale. Moss grows over the path so it becomes a serious hazard when I’m sprinting out the door, late as usual. The garage floods, the dogs curl up all day on their damp stinking dog hammock and stare at nothing. I have no clean underwear except thongs.

I like rain, I do. But the constant dreary dripping (alternating with torrential downpour) becomes tedious after weeks, nay, months!

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Virtual cash

To my great amusement, in the past month I’ve made about $50 US via Second Life selling virtual saxophones. Of course, I haven’t bothered actually turning it into US, it isn’t enough to make the effort, but I’m still terribly amused. Real money from virtual items! Granted it took me quite a few hours to build the sax, but I think my time has been refunded by now and still going :-P

Virtual saxophones hahahahahahahahahaha