Author: Purple Wyrm

Mother Puss Bucket!

Well it seems my Mortgage Broker – for reasons best know to his tiny little mortgage broker mind – decided not to send me the forms to fill out to apply for the Government’s First Home Buyer’s Grant. Which means I won’t be getting it until I track down said forms, fill them out myself, and wait for the slow rumbling bueracratic machine to process them, which usually takes a couple of weeks. Which would be fine except I was sort of counting on getting the grant and using it to pay the Settlement on my new flat – which is due next week.

So, anyone care to loan me $7,000 before Wednesday? >:-|

I Name Hamsters!

Cool! Helen and Rob did end up giving their hamster the name I suggested! This discovery leaves me with a sense of power and importance completely out of proportion with something as un-notable as supplying nonclamenture for a Syrian rodent 🙂

(At least I think hamsters come from Syria, I should probably look it up).

By the way – this is brilliant 🙂

Scum

Although I haven’t had time to work on it lately I still get occasional emails concerning Abandoned in Perth. Today I got one from someone calling themselves ‘Will’ who was presumably informing me of what he’d like to see on the site when he wrote “i wont a girl being raped’.

This clearly is not what he wants. What he wants is

  1. Psychotherapy
  2. A spelling lesson
  3. A good powerful kick in the f’ing head

I deleted his email, which is a shame because it had a return address which I could have signed up to a number of well known spam sites. Oh well.

Intermittant signals from just above the event horizon

Man, buying a house/moving is so exhausting. I’m so stressed out that I barely have energy to crawl home at night and fall into bed. And then I’m not sleeping well either, which only makes matters worse. I find myself being short tempered and snappish at work too, which isn’t good for my co-workers or clients alike. I’ll be so damn glad when it’s all over.

I have managed to grab a few minutes for myself here and there though. I made a stir fry for dinner on Saturday night – first time I’ve cooked (as opposed to thrown stuff from the freezer into the oven/microwave) in months. It was pretty good too, even if I did risk salmonella poisoning or something by defrosting the beef in the microwave for too long (strips of meat that are cooked at one end and raw at the other are probably bacteria themeparks). I’ve been constructing some scenery for my Lord of the Rings miniatures as well – having secured a supply of foamboard in the form of supermarket meat trays (you can’t get the stuff elsewhere for love nor money – not that I’ve tried love mind you). I started small with some stone fences, then decided I might as well go for broke and build a ruined N

The Perverse Nature of Reality

Amazing isn’t it? The day I tell people to watch John Safran’s Music Jamboree is the day SBS plays the last episode.

Or at least I presume it was the last episode – it finished with a sort of retrospective of the series rather than the usual “get a musical group in to perform their hit song on some obsure ethnic instrument” segment, which seems like the kind of thing you’d put in a final episode to me.

Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to wait for repeats of John Safran vs God instead (you’ve got to love the epsiode where he goes door knocking in Salt Lake City trying to convert people to aetheism with a copy of On the Origin of Species 🙂

PS: Happy birthday Stephanie! I always remember your birthday about a week before Australia Day, then forget it until the day before Australia Day, by which point it’s probably passed. Good going me hey? 🙂

Observations on Carniv

  1. Clea DuVall looks like Alisen Down crossed with Maura Tierny but with freckles
  2. Clancy Brown looks like William L. Petersen crossed with Brendan Fraser
  3. Come the next season if Sophie and Jonesy are dead, I’m going to be really annoyed.

PS: The smoke finally seems to have cleared. Well, pretty much anyway. The city no longer stinks of burning which can only be a good thing.

PPS: SBS are replaying John Safran’s Music Jamboree on Monday nights. Watch it people!

The Smoke Rolls On…

And so into our third day running of choking smokey haze. It’s worse today than it was on Wednesday, even though the fire is supposed to be under control. I’ve decided that ‘under control’ is a fire service euphemism for ‘not likely to burn anything important’. If I never smell smoke again in my entire life I shall die a happy man.

Apparently it’s the worst fire the state has seen in 45 years, and has burnt out over 25,000 hectares. Under my proposed sentencing scheme (outlined yesterday) this would mean the arsonist would spend at least 12,500 years in jail. I maintain that this is a perfectly reasonable and appropriate penalty.

I’ve just had a quick look around for webcams to show just how bad conditions are, but every one I can find seems to be stalled at about 5:00am. I suspect that this is a conspiracy by the Tourist Bureau to prevent foreigners from cancelling bookings when they see nothing but a wall of hazy brown.

I’ve got a dentist’s appointment today. How about that then?

If it’s Brown, Breath it Down

For the second day running the city is choking under an all pervading cloud of smoke from a massive fire in the hills. Visibility is down to about a two kilometres (and hazy), people with heart and lung conditions are being advised to stay indoors, and everywhere you go reeks of burning. The fire is ‘under control’ now, so hopefully it won’t be as bad today as it was yesterday when we couldn’t even see the city from our office window*The city consisting of skyscrapers about 1.5km away – when you can’t see something like that you know conditions are bad and sunlight was reduced to baleful dull orange. I’ve never suffered from asthma in my life , but yesterday I had trouble getting enough air – just walking from the bus-stop to the office left me feeling dizzy and out of breath.

The government’s put up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the arsonist responsible for starting the blaze – not nearly enough if you ask me.

I’m not sure what kind of penalties the guy (and let’s face it, it’s almost certainly a guy) will get if he’s caught, but I’ve been thinking about it and reckon they should institute a standard scale of penalties for arsonists based on the damage done. One year’s imprisonment for every $1000 worth of damage, with bushland being valued at a standard rate of $500 per hectare. So if a deliberately lit fire burns out 50 hectares of bush, destroys two cattle sheds worth $8000 each and damages someone’s house to a value of $50,000, they’ll be looking at 91 years in jail without parole – which seems fair enough to me.

In this climate fire is not something to play around with.

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