Easter weekend: Amber and Bella came to visit from chilly old Chch… They spent most of their time here hanging out with Clara, but on the Saturday, they came over after going to the Draculas stage show thing, hung out a bit, had a few drinks, then we went into town to the goth/metal club – danced around like utter idiots.. it was great

Ways to die...

I got invited to go on a day-road-trip out with my housemate (that’s what they call them here…) and his girlfriend out along the great ocean road on Easter Sunday. The road itself reminded me a lot of the road on the way up to Kaikoura. Being the last day of the long weekend, there was just streams and streams of bumper-to-bumper traffic… going the other way. Thankfully we managed to avoid the worst of it coming back into Melbourne. We ended up in Lorne, which is a small beachside town, where we had some nice, but extremely overpriced fish and chips, most of which ended up in the bellies of the local seagulls. We also went for a short bush-walk out the back of Lorne. It was very pretty, although right as we were starting to turn back, it started bucketing down with rain, so tried to run up the very steep steps to get back to the carpark. We were all totally out of puff after that Lots of photos are here. Of special note is the sign showing you the multiple ways in which you can die on the track….

Blooduster gig / DV8: The next weekend was shaping up to be very quiet, Clara was busy doing something else with a friend of hers, and it looked like I was going to spend the entire Saturday night blobbed out in front of the PC. Not good for troop morale, no sir. A quick look on the an online gig guide showed that the Royal Melbourne Hotel had a couple of metal bands playing, and because it’s only a few blocks away from here I thought fuck it, I’ll just go along. So I did. Only really got there in time to see Blood Duster, who were pretty good… the singer was thowing bottles of water everywhere, and as a result the mosh was a slippery disaster zone. Awesome. While there, I bumped into the very nice female DJ from DV8 that I’d had a chat to a couple of weeks prior (yes, I’d totally failed to mention that in any of my other posts.. oops). She had to leave to go DJ at DV8, so I figured I should head along to that and have a few (more) drinks and dance around like an idiot. I was going to request that she played “Imperium” by Machine Head, but she beat me to it as I was lining up at the bar. Got her to play some Arch Enemy instead. Just as I was about ready to go home, Clara shows up…. it seems that great minds do think alike

More stuff with Becca: Went 10-pin bowling with Becca out in Northcote… I normally suck pretty bad. I still sucked, but I started to suck less when I realised that I should be keeping my arm straight. Naturally I had the usual sore arm/wrist the next day, as I’m forced into using the heavier balls, as my fingers won’t go in the holes of any of the lighter ones….

On Wednesday, went with her to see the “Monty Python’s Spam-a-lot” stage show, which was excellent. It’s basically the story from “Holy Grail” but with songs from other films mixed in, as well as a couple of originals as well. It was all very big-budget, and over-the-top, but it worked very well. Even though I was pretty familiar with a lot of the material, I still laughed my ass off Aparently I need to see Priscilla next, and then Guys and Dolls after that. This town seems to be overflowing with musicals…

Shipping woe: I got the rest of my stuff delivered by the moving company recently. Well most of it. It looks like they managed to lose one of the boxes… it doesn’t seem that anything of great monetary value was in it, except that there was a bunch of sentimental stuff in a box inside of it – stuff like school yearbooks and such .
Also, Harcourts have continued to be utter dicks about the finishing of my tennancy in Chch, and after a drawn out process (including the Tennancy Tribunal), it looks like I’ll have to pay them a chunk of money. Ass.

V Festival: Which is a fairly large music festival, apparently the last major one of the festival season (which is still a concept I have trouble dealing with). The timetables were somewhat compressed with a fair bit of overlap, but even so, I managed to see decent chunks of Hot Hot Heat, Cut Copy, Air, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Queens and the Stone Age, CSS and Duran Duran. I did make sure I saw the complete sets for Modest Mouse and the Smashing Pumpkins. I’ve always been really bummed out I never saw the Pumpkins in 1995 when all my friends went… and the wait was definietly worth it
Usual drill: I’ll be putting videos from my phone up at http://youtube.com/user/haxtheplanet.
Also, some kind soul has put their photos up on Flickr here.

Outdoor comedy: I recently joined a “meetup” website, and one of the groups on there had arranged to all meet at this free comedy showcase that’s being put on as part of the Melbourne Comedy Festival, in Federation Square. By the time I got there, the place was packed, and there was no chance of finding any of the other people from the meetup group, but I stayed and watched the shows anyway. My favourite definitely had to be “Mario, Queen of the Circus“. Hilarious stuff.

Work: Today we spent the entire day in a “training session”, mainly going through the process of building stuff in at the various layers of a Spring J2EE application, and how we go about testing them. I’ve learnt heaps, which is great, although Spring seems like a lot of work to get going, and seems to have insane amounts of configuration that needs to be done…

Movie meetup: The same meetup group I mentioned before also had organised a trip to the local art-house cinema (which is fairly close, and has much better films on than the local Hoyts) to see The Dinner Guest, which was a French comedy. The film itself was fairly average, but had some good funny/cringe moments. The main thing is I got to meet a few seemingly really nice people, who I suspect I will be seeing again at similar things

Melbourne is full of random: On the way home from the movie, I got off at the tram-stop near the Library / RMIT / Hungry Jacks, and saw that some enterprising souls had covered the entire inside of the shell with Post-It notes… and people were just writing all sorts of stuff on them…. Sometimes this city is just… awesome

(Click the images for bigger versions… they’re a bit blurry as the flash on my phone isn’t the greatest…)

It’s going to be quite an adjustment I think, certainly very different than living with a girlfriend – but I hope it’ll be better than living alone… it’s been 3 months, almost to the day, that Daisy and I split up. Life can really throw curveballs at you – if you’d asked me a year ago if now I’d have a new job, be single, and Maria would be living here, I’d have thought you were totally nuts.