the howie

If someone said “Hey Howie your blog has been pretty crap lately, you rarely update and when you do it’s just some dumb picture or video”

I would respond with this

If someone said “Hey Howie your blog is cool, you are so witty and clever and insighful, I love logging on to your site to see what silly observation you are having and all my firends love you blog too”

I would respond with this

I bet no one else has done this with their FarmVille farm

For dramatic effect the following post is also available as an audio download.cold-post.mov

It is so damn cold today, all morning I was walking around the house muttering to myself about how cold I was.

At lunch time (2pm) Jenny, Oscar and myself walked to Waitara maccas for a healthy lunch. In blizardous conditions we climed through the imfamous dead mans alley with the wind ripping at our dry blistered faces. Once we reached the summit it was time to carefully manouver ourselves along the pacific highway ridge towards the frosted over golden arches.  My lungs where heavy and I began dragging my feet along the icy cement.

Once we arrived in the warmth and comfort of the McDonald family eatery we devoured our food as if we hadn’t eaten in weeks.

The time came, we knew we had to leave the womb and return to the cold, shivery glom outside and traverse the pacific highway ridge once more before the decent into base camp. The food in our belly’s helped our bodies fight the bitter chill, we descended off the pacific highway ridge and made it safely back to our base camp cabin.

I retreated to the warmth of my bedroom for a much need rest.

After being awoken to the sound of a screaming baby I returned to the main room of the cabin to keep and eye on the unhappy child. As soon as I stepped into the main room I could feel my limbs beginning to freeze, it was insanely cold in the cabin. I opened my laptop to begin writing a journal entry of the day, my fingers froze to the keyboard. My wife was nowhere to be seen, I couldn’t shout out. I was stuck, frozen and lonely.

I didn’t know how i was going to survive, I thought it was the end. Robert Howie died like a snap frozen bag of birds eye peas.
Then in the distance I could faintly make out the misty shadow of a gas heater.  But I couldn’t make it, it’s too far away. It began to play with my mind, I was torn between trying to reach the heater and surely dying on the way or staying put and hoping i would be rescued.

In the end i managed to break my fingers free from the keyboard by sawing at them with my sharp icicle teeth.

I began to crawl across the glacial floorboards towards the heater, stopping every few hours to rest and drink my own urine, it was the only way i could hydrate myself.

After 6 long days I made it to the heater and with my last ounce of energy i pushed the on button.

Then i began to feel quite warm and it was back to facebook to check on my farmville farm.

I know everyone has probably seen this, but it could be some of the chasers best work.

These cakes and donuts got given to us today in the office, there is only 3 of us here today so it’s going to be a lot of work getting through them all. So far today i’ve had a chocolate crackle donut and a slice of cookies and cream mud cake.

Starting to feel quite rotund

As you should all know by now my eyes are not amazing, infact they are pretty crap when it comes to things like eye sight, sensitivity to light etc etc.

someone with perfect vision has 6/6 vision (used to be 20/20 but thar is using feet, 6/6 uses metres)

My vision is around 6/30

you need between 6/6 and 6/12 to drive

and if you want free transport you need 6/60 or above.

So i’m in the middle of loop hole land, too broken to drive not broken enough to get help with public transport.

Anyway lately i’ve been getting headaches almost every day and a couple of migraines. So MY GP thought it might be eye fatigue or eye strain. Which is something i get on and off.

Today was eye test day, and all was pretty much the same. The optomotrist who happened to be someone from church did all sorts of tests and found that there was a bit more pressure in my eyes than is normal which would account for headaches. My eyes are straining too much to focus on things. So more tests and some killer eye drops that have made the last 3 hours hell. I haven’t ben able to read or see anything clearly. Luckily they are starting to wear off now.

Anyway the verdict is I need some glasses for reading and computing. They won’t really make any difference to my sight, as glasses can’t fix the the problems i have but these glasses should help my brain and eyes not strain so much, which intern should reduce pressure and fatigue. So there you go, in a week or so i’l be a nerd.

It’s a bit strange the thought of wearing glasses that won’t actually make seeing stuff any easier but i’ll take his word for it that they will help fatigue reduction.

Today marks 7 years since Howie’s Halfpipe began.

You would think I would at least make a new banner or something, but instead all i did was badly edit the old one and put in a celebratory spelling mistake.

My life has been pretty plain lately so nothing exciting has been on here for months.

Today i’m getting my eyes checked, bet you can’t wait to see and hear how it goes.

Anyway thanks for reading the old halfpipe, and here’s to another 7 years

Blogging during a staff meeting makes me smile, I think it’s the naughty boy inside me.

It’s also good for filling in time while others are rambling on about stuff that doesnt concearn me.

You know when you walk into a public toilet and someone is coming out and you cross paths in that little space between doors. Normally there is a little smirk as you shuffle past each other.

Or the footpath smirk when you are head straight for someone and then you both divert to the same side and smirk again.

Well yesterday Oscar and I where walking home from the post office and a man came out of the brothel just as Oscar’s pram was going past the door, so there was almost a collision. The man gave the little smirk as I brought the pram to a halt. But I didn’t really want to smirk back, as in this situation it wasn’t like he had just done a sneaky poo and we where crossing paths in the bathroom. I know what he had just been doing and i didn’t want him to confuse the smirk of ’seedyness’ with the smirk of ‘whoops we almost collided’.

Should I have smirked?

We have been trying to work out how to clear some space in the dining room of our house so that Oscar can have a more permanent play area set up. One option we thought was to get rid of our chunky old TV because it takes up a fare bit of space. This is the sort of idea that excites me because i love technology and was hoping it meant I would get to go and get a new TV.

I was in westfield getting some bats for a TEAR simulation and thought i would pop in to a few TV shops just to look at prices.

The space we have for a TV is quite small so i went to look at all the small TV’s in the stores. The cheapest i could find was $500 and that was in Kmart, some brand that no one in the whole world has ever heard of.

I went to several differnt shops, Bing Lee, JB Hi-Fi, Kmart, It seemed that the new tv idea was a lost casue, I’m not spending $500 on a tiny tv.

I thought I would give David Jones a go, so I went in and looked around at their TV’s, then I found this ugly white one that was $549 but on sale now only $349 Bargain. So i rang Jenny to see if she thought it was a good idea. We did lots of umming and arrrring. Then Jenny said i needed to put forward a better case. So I spun my magic and walked to the register with a TV in a box.

The man scanned it in and it came up at $249, that’s $300 OFF!!!! I had to buy it now.

So we have a new little LCD tv, it even picks up fuzzy 10, 9 and 7. Unlike our home theatre that only gets ABC and SBS.

We put our old chunky TV out on the footpath and jenny made a sign that said “FREE!!! Works fine, includes remote”

Some smart arese came along and stole the remote so I had to tear that part of the sign off. A few hours later the TV was gone.