marc.vic.max.elliot

The All Blacks lost their semi-final at the world cup.  Frankly they deserved to lose as they met a Wallaby (Australian) team that wanted it more then them.  England (read Johnny Wilkinson) beat France for the second place in the final 🙁 I hate English rugby with a vengeance.  Yes I’m English and I know that they should be a team I support but I hate their boring, spoiling, unimaginative but oh so efficient style of play.  I sincerely hope they don’t win next weekend but have a feeling that the Wallabies may have used up their best against us on Saturday night.  The English have the best record of anyone this year but that doesn’t make them the best in my book 🙁

I know I haven’t posted much about Max here lately but that’s laziness on my part rather than lack of things going on.  The major thing with Max is that he’s started to stand on his own.  It’s actually quite funny to watch He’ll be standing there holding onto the table or your leg playing with a toy in one hand. He’ll then take his supporting hand off so it can play with the toy as well and stand perfectly upright and unsupported without thinking about it for about ten seconds.  After a while he’ll look around, figure out what he’s doing and slowly sink to a sitting position!  Very funny to watch and proof that his middle and inner ear is developing.

On another front I got my first pay cheque (well direct credit into my bank account) over the weekend!  The last one I had was in March so this has come as a great relief to our bank account. In honour of having some disposable income we went out and bought a lounge suite – a lovely chocolate brown leather number that’s kind of art-deco’ish We figured that leather should be fairly immune to the spills and splashes that are bound to happen over the next few years.  I’ll post a photo when in turns up in a couple of weeks.

I am VERY surprised – out of the four prints that I submitted for the WPS annual exhibition three got selected!  In total 60 were selected from 150 so to get three from four was most unexpected! Here are the images selected:

All in all yesterday was a good day – pics chosen for the exhibition, $10 won on the lottery and $260 won on the bar gaming machines

I did a big long update yesterday and lost it all due to sheer incompetence and me shutting the window down accidentally 🙁 I couldn’t be arsed trying to do it again until now…….

Max has started waking up in the middle of the night at the moment the little bugger! We can kind of forgive him though as his seventh tooth (bottom left, second out from the middle) has come through in the last couple of days and we think number eight is on it’s way too He’s also getting much more active and now lets go of things and just stands there for 5 seconds or so. He and Vic went to the Plunket rooms yesterday for his nine month check up and while he was playing the nurse asked Vic if he was there for his 15 month check!  At 9 months and 3 weeks he weighs 10.52kg (23lb 8oz) and so has tripled his birth weight.

On the photography front I have entered four prints into consideration for the Wellington Photographic Society’s annual exhibition.  They have been professionally mounted (unfortunately at a not inconsiderable expense) to give them more of a chance at being selected.  Two really good things have happened this year for the exhibition.  The first is that we got some funding from the city council so we can afford to have the exhibition at Wellington’s premier arts and convention center, The Michael Fowler Centre The second is that we have professional photography editor and publisher Geoff Blackwell selecting the images to be displayed. For those that don’t know he selected the images for the M.I.L.K series so if I get even one out of the four chosen I’ll be happy!

Working from home is taking a bit of getting used to but I’m getting the hang of it I spent a big chunk of yesterday doing online training for Ethics and Export Compliance…. yay

Have a great weekend.

Penang is off!  There weren’t enough people booked on the course to make it worthwhile so it’s been canned.  The following week I might be back in Sydney though………

Vic is very excited (as is her Mum) because Alison, Vic’s sister, gets back after two years of travelling around the world. Her flight from Santiago, Chile gets in tomorrow morning and she’ll see Max for the first time!  It’ll be interesting to see how Max reacts to her

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions in regards to my ICS problem (esp. Tom and Stu) I finally tracked the problem down this afternoon – it was a Zone Alarm Pro issue and I seem to have it sorted out.  The easy thing of course would be to go wireless and buy a router… maybe next payday 😮

What else was I going to say………………….. oh, that’s right! The next 26 things project has started and hopefully I’ll get time (about a 20% chance I’d say)

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I’ve spent most of the day today loading a laptop up with XP pro and then trying to get it to share my internet connection using ICS. It’s supposed to be easy – is it f*ck!!!! If it’s easy then why won’t the bloody thing work?! Oh well I’ll shut down for the night and see how we go in the morning…….

This was a surprise win as a POTD at digitalphotocontest.com today

yay – I’m back! It was VERY nice to wake up this morning next to Vic and then have Max come crawling through to play after his morning feed.

The trip to Sydney went pretty well – there is just so much to learn though!  The people seemed nice enough and I think I’ll enjoy working at Dell.

The highlight of my trip was going to a bar at about midnight on Tuesday, recognising this guy at the bar, going up and offering to buy him a drink but then him buying me drinks for the next hour and chatting about the rugby world cup.  The person I recognised? None other than Stu Wilson, one of the greatest All Black wingers of all time!  When I offered to buy him a drink saying that it would be an honour (and great bragging rights) he said “Channel 7 are paying and wouldn’t it be even better to tell the people back at home that I bought you drinks?” Damn right! Plus I very rarely turn down free drinks

Anyway, I’m back and very happy about it I find out early next week whether or not I go to Penang, Malaysia the week after next… oh joy

Well it’s almost 8:30pm and I’m off to bed. My bags are packed, my cab booked and my alarm set for 03:15am.

Have a great week everyone and think of me hard at work in Sydney for the next week

Ciao!