Parties, planes and the Terminator

Tonight I’m taking advantage of the fact I’m paying too much for broadband access by playing around with some of Telstra Bigpond‘s features. In the background is the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games streamed coverage. I also setup a Telstra BigBlog, available here. There isn’t point in me having yet another blog, except that I can post to it from my mobile. Maybe it will come in useful.

We attended my youngest brother’s engagement party last night. I was surprised that our trip time from home to the party at North Avalon only took 1 hour and 10 minutes, very close to the directions given on Whereis. Lovely location, the fiance’s grandparent’s house overlooking the ocean. Saw my mum and Sydney uncle and aunt and we had an interesting conversation with a young lady working for TEAR (an overseas aid charity – annoyingly Christian from their website) but we had to leave early due to the length of the drive home.

Still hungry (we had an early yum cha lunch), but we made it just as the local McDonalds was closing for the night (11pm). Not my first choice for food, but we didn’t feel like eating noodles. As we dug into our burgers Terminator 2 was ending on TV. That movie brought back memories. At the time, I held T2 up as a perfect movie – the music, tension, action, special effects, combined with a story about people making a difference for the future. It may sound strange, but T2 stirred something in my heart. I saw it with my family at the cinema in Rockhampton, then stayed back after school one night to watch it by myself in Yeppoon. That was quite rare for me – time by myself in my schooltown, 30 kilometres away from our house in the country. My life was in transition at the time, it was the last year of school and I couldn’t wait for university, where I hoped to use science to make a difference in the world. Once at university I joined the film club and T2 was one of the first movies I watched.

We slept in after the previous night’s events. I wish we could do that every day. After some housework we drove down to Ramsgate and ate fish and chips by the beach, along with leathery old men basking the sun, muslim families enjoying a picnic (one group even had a hookah on their picnic table), and a greek selling honey from a crate. We lay on a picnic blanket and watched the planes take-off from Sydney airport. My favourite was the Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340, long, thin, silver and red – wouldn’t fly it though after what I read about their air quality. What dreams and memories… I want to travel again, use our frequent flyer points to go to Asia. China seems sensible, seeing as we have not visited it before, but I still long for Japan. We were wandering around the Galleries Victoria last Thursday, through Made In Japan, and it reminded me how much I love the Japanese aesthetics as dinner at Sakura in Pitt Street reminded me about their food. Better check our finances…

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