Copyright ©
Carey Evans.
Last modified: Wed, 11 February 2004.
Today is my twenty fourth birthday. I’m another year older — hooray. I’m not sure if this actually means anything to me as a milestone, since I don’t feel any different to yesterday. Except for having gotten a little too much sun.
The day itself went very well, though, even if it started by me getting up a bit earlier than I normally would have. My parents and brother arrived here at about quarter to ten, with a whole lot of presents for me. First, I got a tomato and a zucchini plant to go on my balcony with all the herbs, although I’m not sure whether these were part of my presents or just extras from their garden like the spare herbs I got a few weeks ago.
The first real present would have been from my brother, who got me Fiona McDonald’s new solo album, ‘A Different Hunger’. I must have missed ‘Sin Again’ as a single, but I know the tracks ‘Damage Control’, and ‘George’, a remake of the Headless Chickens’ hit that she sang. ‘Wish I Was A Man’ is also quite an... interesting track.
From my parents, I got a couple of things for my kitchen. First, an aerosol type thingy that gets half filled with olive oil, to spray over steaks, etc., before cooking them instead of brushing them with oil or frying them in it. It’s actually quite neat. The other is a holder for the supermarket bag that I put my rubbish in — it’s not really exciting, but it’s very useful, and I can honestly say that I’ll use it every day.
After all the giving and receiving of presents, we drove out to somewhere near Little River to have a look at a craft-type show they had on. Overall, it was actually quite disappointing.
The picnic lunch we had was good, though. We drove out towards the Birdlands Sanctuary, but turned off in a different direction and ended up on top of the hills looking south over a stunning view of the clear blue sky and the ocean stretching off to the horizon. We should have had a poet there to describe it properly.
Lunch was crackers and bread sticks, with a few different dips and toppings, eaten under the shade of an old pine tree on the side of the road leading down to the southern bays of the peninsula. It was actually better than it sounds, and it was very nice to be spending it in the company of my family.
The day doesn’t end there, though. We went out to a BBQ dinner for the fortieth birthday party of one of my uncles, along with most of my younger cousins on that side of the family. My uncle is actually 41 in a few days, but he didn’t really get a proper birthday last year so he got his 40th this time. I generally ate too much and was quite glad to go home after spending more than nine hours hard work on celebrating my birthday.
But tomorrow I’ve got to go into work and shift some shelving and desks around so that I can once again have a real desk, though in a different location, so that’s all for today.
Friday was Show Day here in Christchurch (or more accurately, Canterbury Memorial Day), so everyone here got a three day weekend. This was especially nice since everyone in Auckland didn’t, but it still would have been nicer if the weather had been just a little better.
Anyway, I did get something accomplished: I went into Freedom Furniture with my parents and picked up the table that I bought more than a month ago. After getting it home and setting it up, and getting rid of the old card table I had instead, my lounge looks much better. Now it’s just obvious that I need to get more paintings on the wall, and a bit more furniture like bookshelves or something.
The table itself is very stylish: it’s made of rough black-painted metal, with a square glass top which is going to be hell to keep clean. It looks cool though, and goes with the stereo cabinet well. One of these days I should get a camera of some kind and post some photos.
On Saturday, my brother and I went to the Rialto to see Pi and Cube. We watched Pi first, which is a strange film, but is actually very engaging. The whole thing’s filmed in black and white, which adds to the atmosphere, especially when the film gets more grainy, and doesn’t detract from watching the film at all. The music must be just right, too, because it only reinforced what was happening in the movie — it didn’t seem to clash with it or detract from it at all.
We decided after Pi had finished, and having seen the trailer for Cube at the beginning, that seeing both movies on the same day might be just a little overpowering, and probably confusing later, so Cube will have to wait.
I’m not really sure what I did on Sunday. I think it mostly involved sleeping in too late, and going to bed too late on Monday morning, so that I had a really hard time getting out of bed this morning, and looked awful once I got to work.
And at that, it’s probably time I thought about going to bed now, so that tomorrow morning is a bit easier.
I had a look at the website for Pi, which has a few photos of the sets that were used, and decided that using black and white film was definitely the right decision for the movie. I really can’t see the bathroom having green tiles, or Euclid being lit by yellow/orange lights.
I didn’t mention yesterday that I also did some gardening. I planted the tomato out early in the week, before it grew too much bigger. It took me a bit longer to do the zucchini, which I planted out on Monday. At the same time I pulled out the old parsley, which was flowering and wasn’t much use, and replaced it with a new parsely plant I’d been growing in a pot with my two varities of basil, and rearranged the basil in that pot. I also trimmed the marjoram back viciously again, before it took over the whole pot.
Growing herbs seems to be easier and more useful, overall, than the flowers I tried to grow last year.
Why do radio ads suck so much?
Why do TV ads suck so much more?