Recently, in a mad jumble of chaos and confusion well coordinated and executed attack, my sister and I surprised our parents for their 60th.

I took a bunch of photos but didn't put them on my laptop due to the constant dramas I've been having downloading photos from the camera (keep losing connection, and the closer I get to finishing the import the more it breaks) and also the internet connection on Christmas Island is so agonisingly slow that photos would have taken aeons to upload anyway.  So now having gotten back to Perth and back onto my desktop, after struggling with importing 227 photos for the last two hours, I'm going to do one of those big long photo posts that is going to exasperate my sister.

Don't worry, I'm not posting all of them.

My plans rarely go according to plan.  They do usually result in a desirable (and sometimes even the desired) outcome though.

The latest one worked a charm, considering how many factors, unknowns and randoms got involved.

My parents are 60 this year.  When we were up for Christmas in December, I made some noises about attempting to come back for the big birthday bash they had planned in the middle of the year if I could scrape the money together.

As the party date drew closer, I realised I wasn't going to be able to scrape the money together.  When my mum asked about it during one of our phone conversations, I mentioned this.

That would be Blender the open source 3d application not the kitchen appliance.

2012-06-22: I want to split out the Lightwave viewports and have one view on the big screen so I can see a big picture of what's going on and work on smaller zoomed in sections on my Cintiq.  Lightwave can't do that.  Wonder if Blender can because it's all open sourcey and whatnot and it's statistcally improbable that I'm the only person on the planet that would want to do such a ridiculous thing.  Find out it can, download.  Messed around a little with menus (most important thing was change the rotation thing from turntable to trackball so it would move in a way I was used to) and made a mutant cube.

Have coding to do.  Must.  Wait.  Til weekend.

Because my wonderful husband is an impatient git (whom I love very much by the way), the photos are unprocessed so may be a bit dark on some monitors.  These are WiP shots of the skate ramp that's being built in the front yard.  Not so many photos as I was kind of keeping an eye on 5 kids at the time and also I need to get a photo of the state the thing is in right now as I don't have one for some reason, thought I did.

My head.  It's so full of stuff that I have a very mild persistant headache.  The cold isn't helping either, it makes my shoulder hurt.  I'm glad I don't live somewhere that's actually cold.

Following is a thought dump so I can work out what I'm doing and so anyone that cares can now know why techno was gone for the last month and why I've been in such a ridiculous distracted foul mood.

Last night, I was on a roll.  I went to bed slightly later than intended.

This morning, Cub woke me up repeatedly.  First, sometime before the sun came up.  Then shortly after the sun came up and the blue light was caning my eyes.  Then after the sun came up.  And shortly after Josh staggered out of bed I did the same seeing as I couldn't sleep anyway.

I continued work on Red, and it occurred to me that I should do the laundry.  So I did.  It also occurred to me as I was headed outside from the laundry that I should also do the dishes.  I still have to do the dishes.  I also noticed that my husband was missing, he had crashed out in my room shortly after getting out of bed and had gone back to sleep.

Or not.  Short version, according to last night's bizarro dream, there's going to be a merger between "this" world and "some other dimension/universe" soon if it's not happening already.

Now that I'm awake I'm wondering if it was Yet Another Incarnation of the Crazy Dog House, though I don't recall seeing a cliff this time.  One day I should probably try to explain The Crazy Dog House, which appears to be a stupidly large mansion not a doghouse.

Me: Here Cub, a green nappy to go with your camo.

Cub: Camo! What's camo?

Josh: Camoflage.

Cub: Camel barge? What the?!

We finally bought a NAS, it's living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router).  I'm currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). 

Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it's 53Gb and going to blow out as I'm shooting RAW.

Moving the iTunes library was a bit more of a hassle.  Dragged to new location, changed library reference is preferences, dumped original in bin, restarted to make sure all was good, it seemed to be, so I emptied the trash can.  I think I missed the consolidation step (another reason to not do this when tired) so it had a huge cry about not having a libary to use.  I "opened" the folder I'd moved and now all is well with the world.

The D5000 died on us, Josh was quite determined he was going to stick with film and never getting another digital camera as the thing had only been 2 years old when it stopped working, apparently afflicted by a known and common problem with the D5000s.  The film camera bodies he has (F3 and F4) are still going strong and they're relics from the 1980s.

I i nformed him that I needed a digital camera as I wanted to be able to blog photos shortly after taking them, not a month or so after we'd finished the roll of film and gotten around to getting it developed, and that I was going to buy one of those little point and shoot numbers that would fit in my cargo pockets.

He apparently couldn't cope with the thought, so he bought me a Nikon D70.

Nikond70front (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's a new-to-us thing and came with a Sigma lens (though I'm going to swap it out for my favourite which is an 18-55 that came with the D5000 and Josh doesn't think much of it) and a rather beat up old bag.  I'm now on a quest for a bag that will haul the camera, my laptop, wallet, phone and some miscellany, and I've also finally been able to take more photos of the aquaponics setup.

I have this bias towards cats and dogs in this piece, because I've only ever shared a house with cats and dogs. 

Fenrir and Taliesin bunking in

My random thought that triggered the blat was that Josh is not going to let me have any more cats.

Clockwise from top: Ghost, Sanguine, Graymalkin, Darkness, Itti Bitti Kitti