Yesterday, we went out for a drive. Christmas Island isn't the biggest island in the world, if you point the car's nose down the road and drive without stopping along any major track you'll end up back where you started in about half an hour.
We went out in an exploratory mood and took many photos. Of course all the photos Josh took while we were out and about were with Kerchunk and nothing on Snap so there's nothing I can post. We'll just have to go out again and take more when the battery charger arrives.
I'm rather annoyed with myself that it didn't occur to me to take a photo of at least one of the egg laden robber crabs that we skirted around in our trek. Not doing so had something to do with rain and being in the middle of the jungle and swarms of mosquitoes. Yeh I know, excuses, excuses :)
stock photo from LindaMarieB
Other than exploring we've been fairly cruisy here, just chilling out, catching up with family and old school friends and hitting the beach almost every day that it hasn't been raining.
There was this awesome moth at the house of one of my friends we've caught up with so far. We went there for a barbeque (and also got a free show put on by all our kids who were very happily playing together) and the thing happily landed on Josh's plate while taking a break from orbiting around the light.
There is a metric buttload of butterflies flitting about the island at the moment, mostly small yellow ones. Being able to study the moth up close and then comparing it to the butterflies that are everywhere (including Nanny and Granddad's garden) has led to discussion about the differences between moths and butterflies and how to tell them apart.
On one of our treks to a beach my sister and cousins found some aquatic wormy thing that my uncle reckoned was a baby eel.
I spent a bit of time in my head trying to classify the thing. Didn't work so good, need to brush up on biology. We had a campfire that involved about five packets of marshmallows which Ruan probably ate most of.
Tao was quite fascinated by it and spent a lot of time playing with sparks on the end of branches and trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to make a torch like he's seen people doing in video games. I conveniently neglected to tell him that fire torches work a lot better if you dip some rags in kerosene and wrap them around the end of the stick.
While we were playing in the garden, Ruan invented "bubble bending" when she found out that if she dipped her hands in the pool, she could catch and manipulate the bubbles Sprat and I were blowing. Tao started bubble bending as well though he did try to claim he'd known it all along he'd just "forgotten" til Ruan "reminded" him.
Earlier today we went out on a mission to hunt chilli padi. It bucketed down with rain. Of course the camera was in the boot so no photos, not that I would have been able to do run and gun shots out the window with my ineptitude at manual focusing and there's no way Josh would have let me do anything that had any possibility no matter how remote of getting a drop of water on his precious.
We found a bowl of chilli padi and two tapioca as long as my arm.
Hopefully the charger arrives early next week so that I can take more photos to post.
Now if you're only interested in photos the rest is just rambling so feel free to stop at this point :P
I was just thinking earier this morning when I hauled my carcass out of bed that I should at some stage do some coding. The only coding I've done since I got here was a few minor bug fixes with the tiny little theAbysmal Calendar module (and I'm not sure if the intercalary bug is fixed, will have to wait til the end of the year to find out :). Another thing I need to do with it is modify the code so that the converted date on each post is the post date not the created date as the two aren't necessarily the same.
There's work on WANLN and Red Planet that I should probably think about doing at some stage, and I really need to try to fix my Friendica install again (the dreaded ssl problem is back, I'd fixed it and then the provider went and rolled me back, I'm seriously considering getting him to fix it). Perhaps I'll be more in the mood for it tomorrow when I take up a whole pile of bandwidth downloading backups (I now know when the provider does their backups and I'm defending as best I can against another potential rollback).
Additionally Sprat and I are going to recommence work on a project for one of the clients up here, and I have to head down to CITA to see if I can fix the login problem with their kiosk. In that case though I'm seriously thinking that going to the isp and getting the guy there to download Ubuntu for me and whacking a proper server on the kiosk will actually be quicker and easier than trying to get stupid Windows to cooperate.
I've been spending most of my time 3d-ing and being annoyed that my computer is unable to keep up with me. It's making everything take a lot longer than it needs to. Sprat suggested I do just sme simple animation to cheer myself up before tackling the modelling again but the only thing I have to animate with is 3d-bek and even she's not done yet, I still have to weight map the clothes and work out cloth dynamics. I'll probably switch over again if the modelling really starts getting to me. I have this rather crushing feeling of "so many stories and so little time" as I can only work as fast as the tools I have.
Speaking of stories, I found some old ones from uni days (2003ish) when I used to write and wanted to be a writer. I was quite happy to discover that my writing wasn't terrible. I found three fanfics and two originals. Most of the work they need is a lot of editing, getting characters characterised properly and amending a few gaping plot holes. On one of the originals I probably had a good idea but buggered if I can remember what in the hell I was doing with it, and the characters need a lot of rework, they are so Mary Sue they're not funny. I have three different versions of the other and after I'd read them I worked out it's because it involves characters with X-Men like powers, therefore is really hard to write convincingly. So many stories, so little time, the current universe occupies most of my brain space so I'm not sure if I will get back to working on anything else unrelated.
And continuing on the tangent of stories and Mary Sues and things related to AR, I finally got around to giving Sprat a copy of the scripts. Much hilarity ensued while she was reading it (announcing "KROOO!" every time she encountered one of the Avians whose colouring and form is based off a pidgeon and putting on silly voices every time she came across lines she felt needed speaking in silly voices). And when we've been conversing about our respective projects, there have been random calls of "MARY SUE!" every time a character does...well...anything. She asked me at one stage if I missed sitting next to her while we were working, and in all honesty, I do. She's a lot easier to talk to about art and project related stuff than Josh is. It's one of the things I really miss in Perth.