At an undisclosed place and time in the following days I will be meeting Bret McKenzie for a cuppa. (I say undisclosed, but really I know exactly where and when, but you don’t.)

Bret and I will laugh and chat and he will say “Oh Howie, this is great just hanging out, here have a guitar signed by me and Jermaine”.

About 2 weeks ago I saw a link on twitter for an online charity auction to meet up with Bret.

I clicked the link and noticed the auction website (TradeMe) allowed bidders from NZ & Australia.

The current bid was $1510 NZD so I made a bid for $1520. with over a week til the auction ended I knew it wouldn’t last and was just a silly thing probably so I felt I was part of it.

After leading the bid for a few days I decided to tell Jenny that I may have bid on an Oxfam charity auction and that my bid was leading.

I think her response was something like “you idiot, you won’t win”.

Well I did. With a few extra bids placed in the last 5 minutes of the auction.

So I’m off to meet Bret.

I’m excited and a bit nervous too, I don’t want to be all shy and noobish, and don’t want it to be all awkward. Maybe he’ll give me a job.

I’m partly nervous because he is really funny, and I really really really like the stuff he does and that is a bit daunting, also people often say I’m funny, and see myself as a funny(ish) guy but nothing compared to him sheesh.

Yesterday the NZ Herald interviewed me and today they put it online.

you can read the article by clicking the picture.

Exciting.

The 4th video in our little series of father son productions, this one has a Mothers Day theme for 2012

As I was scrolling through I noticed two odd purchases. I love internet shopping and a lot of the stuff that Jenny and I have has been bought online and some times strange thingsd appear on my statements but then we realise it’s something we have bought and the place just has weird trading names. But this time there was two pending transactions from places I have never heard of. I did some googling to see if I could find out what they were. Turns out I have had some work done on my car in the USA at a place with car technicians, and I have also applied for a visa online through third party website that helps people apply for visas and passports, also in the US.

What kind of idiot uses stolen credit card details to pay for a passport / visa ?????

anyway I called my bank and they agreed that these transactions were probably not made by me, but as they are pending they couldn’t look into it deeper until the money has actually been withdrawn from my account. (Which can be up to 8 days after the card authoraisation).

The canceled my card so no further dodgy things can happen. But that is very sad. I’ve had the same card number since Visa Debit cards came into being. It’s my number and now it’s gone. Jerks.

Anyway with a canceled card it means I don’t have easy access to my account until the new one is sent in a few days. Which isn’t a big hassle as we still have Jenny’s account but actually it turns it it is friggen annoying.

Yesterday Jenny was having a day off so Oscar and I decided to get the train to Brooklyn and hang out down there for a while, have lunch, play in the park etc.
We went up to the station and I had enough cash for the ticket but that’s about it.

In Brooklyn we headed straight for the playground and Oscar and I played for a quite a while before needing some lunch.

First stop was the takeaway that we like the most. I ordered a burger each and some chips and a drink then when I produced my card the man said he couldn’t find his eftpos machine.

A little bemused I asked where the nearest ATM was and he directed me to the pub. Oscar and I headed off to the pub and low and behold there was the ATM. I put in the card for jenny’s account and the machine rejected it I tired again and again and again. I guess the ATM doesn’t like ANZ. We then went to the general store where the man said I could get cash out if I spent $10. I didn’t really want to do that so he suggested we try the post office.

I went to the post office and asked if I could withdraw some cash monies, the man then asked what type of card I wanted to use, I said ANZ to which he replied. Sorry ANZ doesn’t let you withdraw cash at the post office. Sp back to the general store we went while our burgers would have been well and truly cooked by now and OScar spent the whole time asking questions like “why didn’t the ATM work? Can we get some money now? Why can’t we get money at the post office? etc etc etc.

The man in the general store on our return made a new deal and said we could withdraw some cash for $1.50. So he got $1.50 and we went to pick up our luke warm burgers.

We got our burgers, sat down and Oscar said “I don’t want a burger”

This post was written on Sunday intended to be a Sunday rant but we have had no friggen internet for 3 days!!!!!!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a business networking breakfast hosted by Fairtrade Australia & NZ. As part of Fair Trade Fortnight (which is May 5 – 20).

It was at Customs House in Circular Quay which I have never been to before. It has the coolest 3D model of Sydney ever. You walk over it as it’s under the glass floor in the lobby.

Anyway it was a nice morning, There were people there representing major corporations like Woolworths and Cadbury, and there was me a little market stall holder.

It was a ‘stand up’ breakfast, which when I first read that I thought it was some kind of advocacy statement and we would eat breakfast standing up for the poor. Turns out they just didn’t have chairs.

The keynote speaker was Craig Foster, Former Soccaroo and SBS Commentator, sports analyst etc.

I’m not a huge fan of soccer, in fact I don’t really like it at all but I have loved Craig for many years. He has the best head of grey hair of anybody in the world. I have wanted grey hair forever, I think it’s the bomb. So potentially meeting my grey haired idol was pretty exciting.

Turns out I did meet him, and Grant who I with gladly brought up my grey hair drooling of Craig, which at first I was a little shocked by but Craig enjoyed it, He told me the grey hair was good but he worries about his grey eye brows.

It was great to hear about the growth of fair trade sales in Australia and the expansion of the range of products available.

One company that caught my eye at the breakfast was ‘Nudie Jeans Co‘. not all their range is fair trade,  but they are on the way. All their stuff is organic already. Check them out. They have some stores in Aus.

Buy Fair Trade – Good Things Will Happen !!!!!

On Sunday I returned home from my week away in WA. So yesterday was family day.

We decided to head to Bobbin Head. (if you are interested in what we did as a family then you can read the wife’s blog, I’m only going to talk about myself, which is a skill I picked up from Tom).

Oscar was happily playing in the playground whilst the wife and I sat on the outside of the fence enjoying the sun and occasionally losing sight of the boy.

Jenny for some reason thought it might be a good idea to enter the fenced land of children and interact with the son and maybe push him on the swing.

I remained on the rug and laid down for a little and much deserved nap.

My nap was interrupted by two sharp pricks behind my knee followed by a rather large amount of pain.I quickly sat up and flicked off the little prick that pricked me and rocked back and forth for a while in pain.

Having the eyes that I have I wasn’t exactly sure what attacked me but on closer inspection of the rug there was a bunch of MASSIVE ants with green heads. Turns out there is an ant called the Green head ant. You can read about this little monster here. Rhytidoponera metallica.

One thing it says in this wiki page is that the pain generally lasts from 5 minutes to two hours. IT’S BEEN A DAY AND A HALF and it still friggen hurts….a lot.

Also you can tell it’s a pretty hardcore Ant when you read it seems to have legally changed it’s surname to Metallica!

I’ve taken Phenergan and Telfast in the last 24 hours, and it still looks like this.

Jenny reckons I should see a doctor, settle down Jenny, I was bitten by an ant not an Alsatian…sheeesh. What am i some kind of pansy?

Yes.

A couple of years ago for Christmas, or fathers day or a birthday or something else significant I gave my father the present of ‘A holiday with your son”.

My Dad works hard in his little shop and needs a good break. So it was finally arranged, and thankfully convincing him that he needed to pay for his own present seemed to go down well.

I asked if it was ok to book everything as a surprise, and my parents thought that was a good idea and let me loose with their monies.

So after a few years of waiting my Dad and I are somewhere else on a holiday.

The only info I gave him was his train ticket from Armidale to our place, which he caught yesterday.

On arriving at our place Oscar handed him an envelope which revealed more details of his trip away. “Your holiday is to: Perth, Fremantle & Rottnest Island”

He seemed chuffed which is good because it was too bloody late to change anything.

After spending some time with a feverish Oscar and some dinner the two of us headed off to the Formule 1 motel at Mascot Airport. You can tell this trip is going to a posh with with a start in the upmarket Formule 1.

The train trip into the city was uneventful, the only thing that happened was me remembering the stuff I had forgotten to pack.

As established above this is one posh trip so we got off that train at Mascot instead of the Domestic Terminal as it would save us $10 each. (downside is the 1km walk dragging our suitcases). We dragged our suitcases through the bowels of Mascot and eventually popped up at the F1 in all it’s glory.

checking in it was revealed we had booked a roo with a double bed and a bunk, sounds fine but the bunk is for kids and only 4 foot long. Thankfully the man was kind enough to ‘upgrade’ us to a twin room. (Not actually sure the F1 is capable of an upgrade).

the room was as expected, we had a view of the carpark, no avenues for fresh air to enter the room and the bathroom was conveniently located in a cupboard beside the bed.

The blind on the window looked like it would be super cooper. I love pitch black rooms because as soon as light creeps in I generally wake up. This bling blocked out the light totally.Well until 2am, 3am and once more when it opened itself. And woke me up each time.

Oh yeah and the lady in the room next to us tripped the power on our whole floor when we where trying to watch Graham Norton…

The sleep was terrible, not just because of the self opening blind but because it was just terrible.

Around 6am we head down to the ‘buffet’ breakfast that had a choice of 3 different cereals, and bread. I had some toast, then managed to spill a full cup of orange juice all over the buffet table. The man at reception kindly donated a cloth, but a cloth could not contain the orange flood I had brought on. I used up a months supply of paper napkins to build a table levy, the levy held quite well and the clean up operation went smoothly. I poured myself another cup of orange juice and enjoyed it.

A bit before 7 we walked to the airport and checked in, went through security then boarded our plane.

Earlier in the week I logged in to our flight booking to choose our seats from their diagram of the plane. I picked what i thought would be super seats, close to the front, window etc.

they where near the front of the plane, but we had the only seat on the plane that didn’t have a window, the row in front had a window, the row behind had one, we had a figgen wall!.

So the normal joys of take off and landing where replaced with wallpaper.

There was an entertainment system which included a forward facing camera, but of course my screen didn’t work properly.

I have never watched an episode of Glee before, I thought I would see what the fuss is about. It was TERRIBLE!!! never again.

Once we got to Perth we grabbed a cab to the city with a taxi driver who had the gift of red lights, always a joy when you watch the meter ticking over.

We had some lunch then caught the train to Freo.

We made it to our accomidation, a hippy house in South Freo that is solar powered, tank water, outside funny etc. It’s pretty quirky and cool. nothing in the house matches. On arrival we discovered to major flaws. The first being the internet is not working, the second being no power points work.

The land lady came up and fixed the power and let us know the internet is strongest on the back verandah, which is where I intended to write this post but it’s raining and the roof leaks, so I moved to the outside dunny.

Cheese sandwiches for dinner and tunes playing in the background.

While things didn’t really all go to plan and this quirky house is bloody weird, we are having a good time so far.

time to flush and publish this post.

In our little house we don’t pick up any of the commercial stations with our aerial and in the last few weeks we don’t pick up the ABC or SBS either.

My parents moved to the country a bit over 10 year ago, and when they come back to Sydney they are often overwhelmed by the pace and get frustrated by all the traffic and commotion. In fact even back in their little country town my Dad gets frustrated by the local ‘peak hour’ because he may have to wait at one of the two sets of traffic lights in town for over a minute. So he refuses to drive around town between 3:15pm and 4pm.

Why am I telling you that? Well it’s a little hard for me to admit to, but I quite like Australia’s Got Talent and I’m even getting in to The Voice. But they both frustrate the hell out of me too. As we have no TV reception I have to watch them online, normally the day after they have aired. That’s fine. The frustrating part is that I’m not used to ad breaks, and the even more frustrating part is that for some reason the online playback systems are only capable of playing one ad. So every time there is an ad break I get the same ad repeated 3 or 4 times before the show resumes. Then in most cases the playback fails and I have to watch the ads again while the video buffers or restarts. If you are going to bombard me with advertisements, put in some friggen variety, not just the same ad over and over and over.

Then inside the shows they spend half the time recapping what I have just seen and then previewing what I’m about to see so that when the next thing comes on I have already seen most of it. Commercial television and Baptist sermons are quite similar I’m realising.

So if you want to write a Baptist sermon or create a high rating talent show follow these simple steps.

1. Outline all the things that are about to happen
2. Show / tell stories of the past
3. Re cap the stories of the past
4. Preview the main point or next segment
5. Replay step 4, 3 times
6. Re cap all the above
7. Preview next time.

I don’t even know why I like the shows in the first place, they are dribble.

I wish my internet couldn’t pick up commercial TV websites.

And yes I am playing a bus driver simulator game while I wait for tonight’s episode of The Voice to go online.

Leave me alone.

Remember in primary school whenever you hit your head someone would say something like “haha you just lost ten brain cells”. Well parenting is like a daily club to the head. It seems the longer you are a parent the more stupid the things you do are. Logic and reason are replaced by brain jelly.

A couple of days ago after breakfast the wife and I were discussing trampolines and how it might be a good idea to get one for the boy. He loves jumping on friends trampolines and we had recently moved the snail, bug, spider and slug infested sand pit to a hopefully more bug free part of the garden. So the poor bugs, slugs and spiders lost their home so it would be the right thing to do to provide them with a much bigger new home.

You would think at this point that maybe we would conduct some internet research and go and get one. Well we didn’t. It wasn’t until about 3:30pm that we decided to get a trampoline. Jenny set off to Target to see what they had, while the boy and I stayed home watching play school. Jenny rang up to say she was heading for Castle Hill as Toys r Us had a good one for half price. After a few more phone calls and Jenny going in and out of the store a couple of times we were owners of a flat packed trampoline.

Jenny got home around 4:30pm and Oscar eats dinner a bit after 5. The instructions indicated that assembly should take 1 hour.

Did we try to stick it to the instructions and get it done quicker???

No, for some reason at 5pm we decided to start construction.

We began by emptying the content of the box on to the front lawn. The instructions said to open it on a flat even surface.

Oscar then decided to ‘help’ by picking up random pieces and moving them to different parts of the lawn. We followed the first step and began clipping big long poles together. Then it was dinner time for the O man, so we sat him on the front steps with his dinner while we continued the build. We were past the point of no return but for no reason. There would be no time for Oscar to use it even if we finished it within the hour.

Somewhere between Oscar starting dinner and him finishing it became almost pitch black. I used to own flood lights but not these days, the best I could find was a 15 metre extension cord and a desk lamp. So I ran the cable from the lounge room out to the front lawn while Oscar went through my tool box in the dark distributing screw drivers around the front garden. To add to the chaos my extension cord is faulty so every now and then the little desk lamp would flash like a strobe light. Constructing something using long bits of hard metal, coupled with a 3 year old swinging screwdrivers was bound to end in tears, and it did. Oscar somehow manged to bonk himself on the head with one of the poles. So just before bed time we had an upset child, which always makes bed time just that little bit harder than it already is.

Oh and I forgot to mention just before bed time we also lost an important nut in the grass somewhere.

After the child was in bed we continued building the trampoline’s outer netting.

All but one of the long poles was bolted in to place when we realised we had missed a vital step. The vital step involved removing the top of the installed poles and inserting a piece we missed. Taking the tops off was mildly easy but putting them back on proved more difficult as it was a black top, secured by a black screw into a black hole in a black night. The desk lamp was useless.

We finished the trampoline at around 7:30.

We were flustered and tired. Why the hell did we do it?

We left for a week away the next morning so the poor kid only got an hour or two of jumping before we had to leave.

Stupid.

So I have disabled many WP plugins , installed a super cache thingy and switched themes for a bit. I’m waiting for a response from the tech support of my host, but it could be my server has been hacked or something.

The below is from everyone’s favourite Homestar Runner and Strong Bad.

OOPS! You bwoke it.

The requested URL was not found.

We’re sorry, you did something wrong.

Some possible reasons for this error are listed below:

• The page you have requested no longer exists.
• You have your head up your stupid, ugly butt.
• The page you have requested has been moved.
• Your crappy computer is full of crap, crap, and more crap.
• The web site you are trying to reach no longer exists.
• Homestar is a stupid crap for brains webmaster.

I Hope to have it all fixed soon.