I'm back at work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: I like work and I like working. Unfortunately, I don't feel "rested" after my Christmas/New Year break in New Zealand because I spent my holidays with the Orthomyxoviridae family. As you most likely know, members of this family make themselves right at home, and are so messy. They are annoying in the extreme, not least of all because they always outstay their welcome. While I thought I had escaped their clutches by flying home to Melbourne, it seems one of their more tenacious members has followed me across the Tasman and is making my nose run and my ear ache. If I'm really lucky, and have a quiet weekend, this last lingering member might actually get the hint, finally bugger off, and I can get back to some normal breathing and sleeping and hearing, which would be nice.
Apart from whinging about feeling ill through Christmas and the New Year and completely failing to travel south to see my family in Taranaki or catching up with many people in Auckland - I had a nice time with my offspring. Just hanging out, snuggling up, sharing meals and talking with, is what I like doing best. We did have a glorious day at the zoo, and while I took a whole gigabyte of photos, my memory card threw a wobbly and corrupted all my shots. A real shame because Auckland Zoo is such a fabulous place to get really close to the animals, that my shots were nice and close and you would have felt as if you were there just by viewing them! I took a Flip! or two, so check out this chocolate-loving Meerkat. There were several people who were eating Magnum icecreams, and had (before I started filming) dropped a sliver or two of chocolate into the enclosure (please, never feed wild animals, in zoos or otherwise, it upsets their metabolism feng shui and turns them into horrible little scavengers) and this little guy fancied it more than a little bit. The voice you can hear calling "puss, puss, puss" is 2 year old Tandia - who also owned the blue-topped drink bottle before tossing it over the barrier. She's got an arm on her, let me tell you - the hippos nearly got a new sheepie!
David and I spent, what turned out to be a very windswept, rainy day down at the Viaduct taking photos. He is planning on studying photography this, his final year High School, so was out testing his new (to him) SLR. We got pretty damn wet, and cold, so decided to warm up and dry off in the Gold Class Cinema watching the Curious Tale of Benjamin Button. It worked a treat - not only did we dry off nicely, we were very comfortable for the extremely long tale. Me with my beer and my other beer, and David with his coke and his Maltesers, we both decided that the only curious thing about said Tale, was why anyone had ever thought this world needed another Forrest Gump movie!
So here I am, back at work back in Melbourne and the beginning of a brand new year. I have made a few New Year Resolutions which include:
lying morephotographing more stuff- reading more
- drinking less
- drawing more
- spending less
- learning more
Vague enough? none of them are measurable or specific - which is the key to making a goal achievable. So let's have a go at putting some detail into those ideas and see what we come up with:
Lie twice per weekCarry a camera every day- Read from a book 30 minutes per day
- Drink one glass of water for each glass of alcohol
- One drawing per week
- Don't buy anymore Moleskines until the ones in the my bag (beautiful new red one!), my bookshelf (pile of about 6 black hardbacks) and my wardrobe (mishmash of smaller notebooks and exercise types) are full
- One hour of focused learning per day/5 hours per week
Dude!
As you can see, I deleted the "lying" resolution. It's too difficult and I don't really see much benefit when weighed against the effort. So I'll take more photographs instead.
PS: resolutions start in February too, right? because I just bought a new, red Moleskine plain notebook. oops!