Fri, Mar. 7th, 2025 07:19 pm
annarti: (I feel pretty)
How has it been over a month? Gdit and I thought I was getting better at this shit. I am better on Insta, so there's that, I guess.

So anyway, somehow it's March already, dunno how that happened so fast, but February went pretty sodding well. Finally got to Chihuly Nights at the Botanic Gardens. It's an exhibition that's been on since October and runs til April, of these massive glass sculptures all around the gardens. I've been several times during the day, because it's just a great place to go for a walk or run after work, but yes, finally got there for the night showing :D The stuff inside the tropical glasshouse was all new to me, since that costs money during the day, and god it's stunning. I mean the whole thing's stunning but... yay new things!

Last weekend we drove to Melbourne to see Green Day! It was SO awesome. Baby's first mosh pit, at the tender young age of 39, aww. Boys were fantastic. It was a bit of an anniversary concert, of their first album, Dookie, 30 years ago; and American Idiot, 20 years ago. They ran through both those albums, track by track, with stuff from the new album last year scattered around, so it wound up being like a 3-hour concert. I last saw them right there back when Marvel Statium was the Telstra Dome back in 2005 (better rundown here on the Adelaide concert, which was earlier that year) and I promise they rocked just as hard as back then. Billie-Joe Armstrong doesn't look like he's aged at all; Mike Dirnt (bass) does look like he's aged about 20 years; Tré Cool (drums) looks like he's aged about 40. BUT LIKE. Drumming is frigging hard work. Mike was often running up and down right in fornt of us and god, that man makes some fun faces <3 I got a couple of them!

The brought up one girl from the mosh pit to give her a mic and sing with Billie-Joe and, after like three seconds of deer-in-headlights panic, it as like she consciously chucked all her inhibitions out the window and just ran with it. She was running up and down the stage, air-guitaring with both the guitarists, also sang really well after the initial fear of holy shit people had been thrown away. Then at the end of her bit, Billie told us all her name was Honey, so of course the crowd started chanting, 'Hon-ey, Hon-ey, Hon-ey!' and it was just a delightful moment :D

Thank you, boys. I did, indeed, have the time of my life 🖤❤️

The final show of the tour was supposed to be this Saturday on the Gold Coast, but um. idk if you've heard but it's a little... breezy... on the Goldie right now. So sadly that one was cancelled :< I feel so sorry for everyone up there, woulda been awesome, obvs.

On Sunday~ we went to Cranbourne Botanic Gardens, which I've been excited to go to for a while now. So many native botanic gardens are planted to look like they do ~in nature~ but like... I already live in the Hills, the bush is literally right there. I don't want to come to a curated garden to see bush, I come to see curated garden. So that's what Cranbourne is, properly architecturally-designed native gardens, and it is stunning. From photos online I've already taken a lot of inspo for the Raykinian royal palace, but seeing it in person is so cool. The red desert one is what you see first walking in, then everything else surround that. I could've spent hours more there, but we got home around midnight as it was, so I'll just have to go again when I go back to Melbourne next. Maybe it won't bloody rain, too :P Seriously, can't remember the last time we had rain in Adelaide* but it was last year, the two-ish days I'm in Melbourne and I get rained on when I'm out in a garden with no shelter. Course, then we started driving home and it was clear blue skies by Horsham. Bloody Melbourne.

I~ have bunged my ankle. This happened last Monday, the week before Green Day, by stepping in someone's footprint wrong in the wet sand on the beach. It's not bad but has just enough of a twinge that it's clearly warning me not to do more than like stand on it. Clearly walking is out. Running 10km? HAH. So I have disappointingly not done any fitness since last Monday. I'm so pissed off. I was doing so well! Running was starting to actually flow and feel natural. Doing the fitness literally every day, even on both days of the weekend, had become just a normal thing I do. I was excited to see the little wheel of confidence (how confident my Garmin app is that I can achieve my goal) go up and up and break from the green Confident range into the purple Very Confident, Maybe You Should Make Your Goal More Ambitious range. I got my VO2 Max, which is a key number for fitness, go from 32 up to 34, just this year! One more point and I'll be up from Poor into Fair! I could even become Good! Not Excellent cos that's the realm of elite athletes and shit knows I can't be bothered with that.

But all because of a bung ankle, that's just stopped. I can pause the actual training app, the one that tells me different running things to do each day, but that doesn't stop my actual body and fitness from going backwards. SO miffed. It's feeling much better just today, no swelling when I got home from work, which is a change, so I'm hoping by Sunday I'll be able to start working back up to doing fitness again. I'm not letting this slide, not this time. I've been doing so well and feeling so good about it, I won't drop it.

I've submitted four stories to various competitions, which I believe all start judging this month? So it'll be exciting to see if they go anywhere. First time submitting to competitions, I don't expect to, but it's still exciting!

Limes were $4.50 for a bag so cosmo's for cocktail hour tonight when Amanda gets home 🍸

OH and Sculptures by the Sea, that was in Feb, too. See, I'm good at Insta!

OH OH and I won a thing! Just on a whim I entered a radio contest to go see Tommy Little's Naughty Fortieth, which is basically part of the Fringe in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, and I won! It was a lot of fun =3 Opened with a stripper Fringe performer who uses FIRE and she was awesome. Then Tommy Little and Carrie Bickmore, who are said radio show, plus three comedian Fringe performers in Luke McGreggor, Ivan Aristaguierta (who is Venueulan and awesome) and Ross Noble came up to play Tommy's card game. Ross waid he got the single most Fringe experience ever, cos they didn't see the opening fire boobies act, but he was backstage. So what he got was this extremely hot, semi-naked woman (she had star nipple stickers and a gstring) wandering around with a giant cannister of parafin under her arm. 'No idea what the show was but it looks like fun!' XD That is indeed the most Fringey thing I've ever heard and I'm so pleased he had that experience X3 And he's been doing Fringe for frigging decades by this point. Ross Noble and Arj Barker are like the unofficial mascots. I LOVE THE FRINGE. And then walking back up Rundle Street to get back to the car, street closed with lights up everywhere, tables and chairs from the restaurants all out on the road, and this at like 11:30 on a Tuesday night. It's just such a fun, vibrant time to live here. Got another, this time paid, show happening next weekend, so excited for that one, too X3

All right now that's everything. Probably.


* If I don't even need to turn my windscreen wipers on, it's not rain. Also for the record, even that's only happened twice this year.

Fri, Feb. 23rd, 2018 06:05 pm
annarti: (see it's like this...)
Facebook: Good afternoon, Anna! Clouds are clearing today in Adelaide. Enjoy the sunshine!
It's 34 degrees, you irresponsible dickwits.

In other news, I had my first lady-date on Tuesday! I've turned off the 'looking for men' option on Tinder and also downloaded Bumble to do the same, and by golly, gee whizz, does that narrow the options. There are literally six people to cycle through of an evening, across the two of them together. I've significantly lowered my bar to the point where even people without any text in their profiles are being swiped right.

Anyway. So I finally got a match! Chatted with her a while over text, discovering we're in much the same boat of having had boyfriends but never a girlfriend, so we met up on Tuesday after work :D First to Cocolat for a nice cold smoothie where we talked for a good hour and a half, then to The Apothecary for a cocktail and impromptu platter of antipasti that ended up constituting dinner because the smoothie had been pretty filling, and finally once the sun went down to the Parade of Lights on North Terrace, where they've illuminated a whole bunch of historic buildings (museum, art gallery, uni buildings, that sort of thing) with basically painted light animations. It's part of the Fringe Festival, which started last Friday. This was the highlight. They have a bunch of smoke machines around the lawn in front of the museum, and fire big flat sheets of lasers through the smoke above your head, so you lie back on the lawn and just watch this play of light in the smoke. It's seriously awesome. So surreal, like being on an alien planet, or maybe under the sea, sometimes like the Northern Lights depending on how the smoke was behaving at the time.

The date itself was no more than a friend date at this stage, just chatting about family, work, the Fringe, wine/food/cooking, small talk that lasted until about 11pm. She was suuuuper nervous at the start so I didn't want to make any moves or scare her away XD She's also tiny. I have a good foot on her XD She's a PhD student, previously worked for the CSIRO, super into sciencey physics, kinda shy but opened up a lot as the evening went on. Easy conversationalist, almost as much of a foodie as I am, and just a fun, casual, relaxed time. Already so much less pressure than any first date with a dude. See where this takes me X3

Unrelated, last weekend I finally presented Katie Hawtin with her first proof of her website. This is something I instigated a good, oh, two+ years ago now. I designed her business cards at work and we print them every couple of years, and the last time she ordered them she mentioned in passing that she hated her website and didn't want it on her business card because it's so outdated and ugly. In an effort to add some real clients to my digital media design portfolio, I offered to design a new site, bells and whistles and all, for $100 just so it felt more like a business transaction. TWO YEARS LATER and she has a proof! She's phenomenally enthusiastic, absolutely loves where it's going, so I'll get started on actually creating it in March with the aim to finish it by mid-April.

I'm also in the middle of updating my own portfolio, which is slightly broken and very out-dated. I have no idea where the slightly broken came from, since I haven't updated it since I made it, but the navigation icon up in the top corner now scrolls instead of sitting there nice and fixed, the gallery images on the print page are off-centre by about 70 pixels, and there's a 5-ish pixel gap at the beginning of each client. Also the header on the blog is now an error message. NO idea where all this came from, but that's this weekend's task. Just what I want to spend my weekend doing, bug fixing of my portfolio. Yay.

And I saw Black Panther on the weekend. It was pretty gosh darn awesome. The warrior ladies had the most badarse character design, omg. Also the villain was probably the best Marvel villain in a while. His motivations were just bang on. Loved this movie!

Mon, Mar. 12th, 2012 03:49 pm
annarti: (bring it bitches)
I've washed the car (thoroughly, including vacuuming the footwells and wiping down the centre console), cleaned the kitchen, done the washing and put it all away again, created lunch out of frying up many many chopped mushrooms, onion and garlic then mixing that with yoghurt and chives and putting it on toast, gone for two walks, and paid for rego/CTP ($797, fml).

I could say this has been a very adult weekend except I started it by going to see Puppetry of the Penis on Friday night, my first Fringe show I've actually had the organisation to go see in, like, three years. It was pretty amazing and I swear no words can describe the sheer awesome of this show. ANYTHING I SAY WILL SOUND CRASS because at the end of the day it's two blokes on stage playing with their dicks. There is no way around that. It was fabulous and I loved it :D

I also figured out the manual zoom on my camera o/ Only I somehow managed to make it take all those photos at 640x480 resolution. Who takes photos that piddly? Why is it even an option? And how the hell did I select it? I think I've got it sorted now, tho. When I go for my walk this arvo I'll take the camera again and do it PROPERLY. Only question is what to do with my old one? As I keep saying, it still works just as well as it did when I bought it... 7 years ago. I really should just chuck it but the [surname] in me keeps saying BUT IT STILL WORKS.

Anyway. I think I'm going to spend money at Amazon now because I can hide it behind the sheer volume of dollars spent on driving my car around for another year. I've also satisfied myself that Ghosts of Ascalon isn't good enough to warrant buying Edge of Destiny, so there's nothing to wait for now.

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