the howie

First things first, Photo Booth! 

Jenny and I finished our pre-natal classes tonight. It was mostly a good course.

And it ended well, the last words the lady taking the class said where ‘Jesus was breast fed’

Haven’t heard that in a church before. I enjoyted that comment

Please comment on this site, not this one. It’s what Jesus would have you do.

Since Tom’s ego boost from the general public he now has more comments than me on his blog, So it’s time you banded together and helped the poor little guy with a disability. You can’t say no to commenting on a disabled persons blog.

Say “G’day”, tell me your favourite quote, write a recipe, gossip about me, get me at least 14 more comments and you’ll save me from having to go through my archives and comment on long dead conversations. Plus if you meet me in person I’ll even let you get your photo taken with me. I’m a man of the people.

Oh and don’t comment on Tom’s blog for a while, just so I can get ahead.

I’m not sure if it because i’m old and have more nose hairs, or if it’s becasuse i’m old and dont care what people think. Or is it just becasue there is a much bigger build up, or need for nasal relief.

I have been getting caught picking my nose a lot more these days, but i cant work out if its becasue i’m picking more or is it just becasue I have been married 2 years now so my quirks are no longer quirks and now wife is finding them anoyances.

man oh man sometimes it feels good to have a scratch up there, or pick out a winning goober.

Do you pick?

Remember how i was building a city out of paddle pop sticks.

Well it wont fit in this house anywhere and I dont think i’ll ever have time to finish it. So i don’t know what to do with it. It’s cool and i like it so i dont want to just break it and throw it out.

any thoughts?

Well after years of wanting an upgrade, and lappy’s hard drive filling to capacity. It is now upgrade time.

And my new baby will be a MacBook Pro

With Final Cut, and Adobe creative suite 4!!!!

I’m going to be doing more creating with work now and this old ibook just wont cut it. more videos and publications. So the machine to do that is heading me way. It’s very exciting.

now its just about counting the sleeps then coming up with a name! Any suggestions?

Being the extremely observant person that I am. A Social Examiner if you like!

I have been wathcing the trends that have rolled out in the last few years, Lance Armstonrg brought us the rubber wrist band phenominon, All beginning with a yellow rubber band and eventually taking over the world. Every organisation, corporation, camp and $2 shop had their own type. MAKEPOVERTHOSTIRY was early to jump on the wrist band train. It was quite a successful campaign until the whole world released their own wrist band. You ended up being able to get quality ones that said things like ‘Love”hope”friendship’ who wants that dribble?

People threw off their wristbands that scaled up their arms to the elbow. It’s hard to type with that many wristbands on, and computers hold the key to the next trend. Myspace.

In an effort to avoid face to face contact, and also in search of place where young people could share with each other who they bonked on the weekend, myspace was born! A place where online asthetics and quality html was thrown out the window and replaced with tiled images of sponge bob square pants and slow loading photo galleries with captions like ‘me and jim’ ‘me and jim again’ ‘me and jim with sophie lol’ ‘me and jim ;)’.

Everyone had to have a myspace, it was the place to be and it was set out so well. You get to write on someones page, then they login and write on your page. You end up spending 3 hours a day trying to work out what you said on their page to make them say that on yours, following a simple conversation now involved several clicks, muting of jackson 5 tracks, entering your password 45 times and waiting for 13 galleries of you and jim to load. In the end myspace stopped being the trend of the hour, people got so fed up with waiting for things to load that they made online pacts to end it all.

After the myspace revolution it was Emo’s. One depressive young person all in black who decided that their little brothers jeans that where 5 sizes two small would help them find their identity. In putting on the extremelly tight black jeans they managed to cut thier wrists whilst trying to do up their fly.As all young radicalls do they decided to then cut their own hair. Starting at the back of their head they began to trim, after 20 mins or so Mum came home and burst into the bathroom shouting ‘What are you doing Toby’. Toby slammes the clippers into the sink and stormed out of the bathroom shouting “you don’t understand me mum’. And this is how the Emo got their extremelly long fringe. Toby’s frineds who were aslo stuggling with their goth image decided to follow suit, cutting theor own hair, wearing tight black jeans and ensuring everyone could see the wounds from doing up their flys. Emo’s then faded out after they realsied that in trying so hard to not be goth and be different that they infact all ended up being the same, to steal a phrase from my buddy Ty, they became ‘MainstrEmo’.

So Emo’s faded out and that brings us to today. Today the trend is to save to world. but not just use light saver bulbs and recycle you dolly magazines and drive a prius but today it’s cool to start your own NGO.

It seems everyone is creating their own Charity that is saving the world one mission trip at a time.Now i know this is a bit of a tricky issue as a lot of people are trying to do great things. And peoples lives really are at stake, and we all must take action. But i’m not convinced that every church and every person needs to start their own NGO and go and build and orphonage.

Just becasue we have the money doenst mean we know what we are doing whehn we jump on a plane and go save the poor. We could infact be doing more damage as we take our stuffed up western culture into places that really dont need our influence. But rather need our support. Just becasue we are rich doesnt give us permission to do things our way in places that have never lived ‘our way’.

I hope this trend passes and that instead of going to do stuff we can start going to listen and learn stuff. That we can use the power we have here to influece Governments and descision makers, that we can use our money to support indigenous people doing community development rather than rich westerners going to fix stuff.

This evening wife and i went to the pictures.

We watched ‘Burn After Reading’

It was a strange film. I hadn’e even heard of it. but jenny told me it had Geroge in it so I was there for some eye candy. I would have liked George’s beard to have a bit more grey in it.

The movie, well it was strange, I already said that and it was. I enjoyed it on the most part, although john Malcovic’s character anoyed me after a while, which was probably the point. A bit of violence, comedy and romance.

Brad Pitt played a very strange man.

I know this doesnt sound all that positive, it wasnt bad, just weird and quirky. you should watch it.

4.5 / 7

The new Macbook Pro’s are now in shops ready for touching.

I touched today.

Now its just a waiting game for the work bean counter to give the green light

Today Wife and I headed to Bondi to look at this years instalment of sculpture by the sea.

I thought it was mostly boring this year, maybe I have lost my appreciation of art or maybe it really isnt as good as past years.

Anyway I only took 13 photoas, here are some of them.

Hopefully next year will be more interesting.

Oporto lunch was interesting, and a free cup of ice tee was good too so todays wasnt a flop, just the art was dull.

When I grow up I want to be like Optimus Prime. He’s super cool.

Tonight was nigh three of pre-natal classes.

What a night!

To start things off we watched a dvd on a giant plasma screen of two women giving birth. It was ummmm interesting and confronting and a bit relieving, I think from now on I need to thank God every day that I have a doodle.

Then we discussed the video and towards the end of the night was another video, this time of a C-section. That video was more like watching RPA. At the end one of the guys in the class stood up, walked towards the toilet and then with a massive thud hit the ground. He was out for a good 3 minutes. Eventually some stafff came running and he was whisked off to the emergency ward.

Child birth is an amazing thing! Sure am looking forward to it being in the past. As i’m sure jenny is more so.

I arrived home from Canberra to find that joshy had left me a birthday present on the table.

It is this book.

It’s great, it combines one of my favourite past times with data collection.

It’s a daily poo log book. You fill out a little form including data like time taken, unusual charactaristics, number if wipes and even a sketch section for the inner artist in me.

and to top it off, each day there is a poo fact, for example.

The average weight of a stool excreated per day is 450g, but it varies from country to country. the average weight in England is 106g while south Asians unload nearly three times that. due to a higher fibre content in Indian food.

Thanks to a loyal customer ‘Howie’s Ye Olde Shoppe of Global Goodness’ is going well.

check out the new shopfront and browse the goodness that is in stock!

click the ’shoppe’ link at the top.

I got back from Canberra last night.

Was down there with work. About 230 people converging on Parliment House to lobby politicians to ensure the millenium development goals are not just a goal but can actually happen.

My job was to take photos, so I spent Monday and tuesday running all over parliment house taking happy snaps of politicians meeting with lobby groups

It was quite hectic and its a bloody big building and somehoe it always seemed that i Had to go take a phot of a senator followed shortly after by an MP and they are at opposite ends of the building.

Anyway I think it was a success, in the end there was 99 visits with politicians which is pretty good.

My highlight occured on monday when i manged to find myself a 10 minute break. I made myself comfortable on a leather couch in some back corridor and slumped down to gain maximum comfort. I was there in my own little work for a few minutes, then Peter Costello walked past and winked at me. WOOOOOW!

I met a let of pollies over the 2 days, but only peter costello winked at me.

I’m never washing my whole body again,

The craziness of work is still in full swing. I am still dead from blackstump but no time to recover, off to our nation’s capital for 4 days leaving at sparrows fart tomorrow. Another weekend away from home, brings it up to 4 weekends in a row away from home.

Next weekend i’m closed for business!

Not long now and I will be a father. Well i’ll at least be a parent. I don’t think I ever got around to blogging about what happened when we found out jenny was pregnant. You see she was ticking off girly things on the calender or whatever it is that girls do and decided she should wee on some paper. She did the wee and it said “hey jenny you are pregnant’. So off to the doctor she went. The doctor did all the sums and worked out when the baby was due to pop out. In working this out they need to find the conception date, I’m not goiung into conceoption details becasue if i gave you a word for word explination with my form we would be here all night. Anyway the doctor worked out the date and guess what!!!!!

I was away at Uluru for the week!

Jenny is very quick to change the topic when i bring it up so if the baby comes out with dark skin or something we all know something is up.

In all truthfullness i’m pretty sure I am the father but it is funny to know that the dates the doctor worked out i was away for.

It’s all a bit crazy that in a couple of months I’ll have a little small combination being of me and jenny. I’ll be putting a baby to sleep, changing green soiled nappies and trying hard not to drop the baby down the staris or something. although i’ve heard they bounce!

My biggest fear at the moment is that guido will turn into a teenager, teenagers are scary. They all take drugs and do graffiti and stuff.

My biggest looking forward to is having a better excuse to leave parties early or not even go.

Oh my other fear is that i’ll start being old and boring.

I’m home from stump, but at this moment I’m too tired to think of anything positive from the experience this year to blog.