An update
Hello I'm typing this from my Dad's house in Perth. Got here this morning. hespa will be arriving in Perth tomorrow or the day after, and we will be going to SwanCon. I kept meaning to get on livejournal and mention that this would be happening, but I never got up to it.
The week before I left was a bit hectic/stressful. Hespa had been teaching me some sewing (and just doing a fair bit of the work herself) so that I could have a costume for the maskobalo, and after she left (she's doing the 10 day road trip version of getting from Melbourne to Perth) I still had a fair bit of work left to do on it, and two evenings after work was all the time available for it. Only, I managed to forget to bring my keys with me when I went to work on Wednesday, and then aurellia was out on a night shift when I got home, so I couldn't get in at all to do anything useful. So I went to fasangel's place and FINALLY saw the end of Angel. Then went to work on Thursday, came home and frantically sewed and packed and got far too little sleep, went to work on Friday and desperately tried and failed to get the stuff I was working on in some sort of finished state before taking a week off, despite making massive progress (it's one of those jobs where you can't see each problem until you've successfully resolved the previous problem, so you never know how many there are until it's done), left work late, came home, voted on how neo_leviathan's character in another roleplaying game is going to die, finished packing and dragged my bags to Mum's house, so that she could drive the_fibber and me to the airport on Saturday morning to fly to Sydney.
Why were we flying to Sydney to get to Perth? Cause we took the Indian Pacific railway across the entire continent of Australia. It was pretty fantastic. Several stops along the way with interesting tours, lots of amazing views, and of course just three days to relax and not have to do ANYTHING.
Then Perth this morning, and Dad picked us up from the train station and we went to walk around King's Park for a while (very beautiful), and then went and looked at the bell tower (Swan Bells I think it was called), which has the 500 year old bells originally from St Martin's church in England in a very modern building (apparently it symbolises the past with the future, and sailing, and the importance of mining to Western Australia, but mostly it looks like a rocket with dragon wings), and is constructed so that you can actually see both the bells themselves and the bell-ringers in action. It was quite neat.
Lots of catching up, Isaac and Jacob were very happy to see us, and Linda cooks MUCH better food than is available on a 3-day train journey.
ETA: Oh, I forgot to write about the other stressy thing that happened just before I went on holiday: the_fibber's webcomic died. I became aware of this on Friday while I was at work. As I'm kinda his webmaster, I felt the need to look into it, in the copious quantities of spare time I had that day, and as far as I could determine, what happened was that the server fishinblack.com was stored on exploded, and the hosting company replaced it and restored a backup, only the machine they replaced it with has PHP installed without the graphics library, which means no image manipulation by PHP scripts, which means the comics can't actually be displayed on the website and there's nothing I can do about it. Grr. the_fibber is going to send them an email asking them to fix it NOW please.
Oh yeah, and in addition to that, Friday night also involved me at Mum's house ringing aurellia and interrupting her roleplaying game to ask her to log onto my computer and get my Qantas E-ticket number from my email so I could get to Sydney the next day, without using a mouse as I had packed it to take with me for use with a laptop (aurellia, you are still awesome for that, thanks!).
The week before I left was a bit hectic/stressful. Hespa had been teaching me some sewing (and just doing a fair bit of the work herself) so that I could have a costume for the maskobalo, and after she left (she's doing the 10 day road trip version of getting from Melbourne to Perth) I still had a fair bit of work left to do on it, and two evenings after work was all the time available for it. Only, I managed to forget to bring my keys with me when I went to work on Wednesday, and then aurellia was out on a night shift when I got home, so I couldn't get in at all to do anything useful. So I went to fasangel's place and FINALLY saw the end of Angel. Then went to work on Thursday, came home and frantically sewed and packed and got far too little sleep, went to work on Friday and desperately tried and failed to get the stuff I was working on in some sort of finished state before taking a week off, despite making massive progress (it's one of those jobs where you can't see each problem until you've successfully resolved the previous problem, so you never know how many there are until it's done), left work late, came home, voted on how neo_leviathan's character in another roleplaying game is going to die, finished packing and dragged my bags to Mum's house, so that she could drive the_fibber and me to the airport on Saturday morning to fly to Sydney.
Why were we flying to Sydney to get to Perth? Cause we took the Indian Pacific railway across the entire continent of Australia. It was pretty fantastic. Several stops along the way with interesting tours, lots of amazing views, and of course just three days to relax and not have to do ANYTHING.
Then Perth this morning, and Dad picked us up from the train station and we went to walk around King's Park for a while (very beautiful), and then went and looked at the bell tower (Swan Bells I think it was called), which has the 500 year old bells originally from St Martin's church in England in a very modern building (apparently it symbolises the past with the future, and sailing, and the importance of mining to Western Australia, but mostly it looks like a rocket with dragon wings), and is constructed so that you can actually see both the bells themselves and the bell-ringers in action. It was quite neat.
Lots of catching up, Isaac and Jacob were very happy to see us, and Linda cooks MUCH better food than is available on a 3-day train journey.
ETA: Oh, I forgot to write about the other stressy thing that happened just before I went on holiday: the_fibber's webcomic died. I became aware of this on Friday while I was at work. As I'm kinda his webmaster, I felt the need to look into it, in the copious quantities of spare time I had that day, and as far as I could determine, what happened was that the server fishinblack.com was stored on exploded, and the hosting company replaced it and restored a backup, only the machine they replaced it with has PHP installed without the graphics library, which means no image manipulation by PHP scripts, which means the comics can't actually be displayed on the website and there's nothing I can do about it. Grr. the_fibber is going to send them an email asking them to fix it NOW please.
Oh yeah, and in addition to that, Friday night also involved me at Mum's house ringing aurellia and interrupting her roleplaying game to ask her to log onto my computer and get my Qantas E-ticket number from my email so I could get to Sydney the next day, without using a mouse as I had packed it to take with me for use with a laptop (aurellia, you are still awesome for that, thanks!).