First off, I have a sort of announcement to make. People have been talking to me recently about the girl that I mentioned in a previous post – the one that I’m interested in – as though we’re actually going out with each other. Just to make it clear – we’re not dating, we’ve got no plans to do so – we’re just friends. For starters I’d hate to rush into anything, we’re both busy and we live really far away from each other.

Moving swiftly on; it looks like we’ve got a bit of catching up to do. Now unfortunately I can’t tell you about the email I received because it’s on my computer and I’m currently on my Dad’s (remind me to remove all traces of “The Choad” from his history and temporary internet files folder when I’m done). My monitor has had some screen burn-in which screensavers protect against. However, when you use a computer as much as I do you tend to not give it a chance for the screensaver to come on. So my over-use has resulted in a bit of burn-in (basically a line that’s fixed down the left side of my screen).

But fortunately, being an Apple Cinema Display, leaving it turned off allows the static electricity to bleed off, so in short the image will dissapear given time. So I’ve turned my monitor off so that it can bleed. Hmm. Maybe I should have bandaged it up first?

Anyhoo. Almost 100 comments for the last post and over 300 for the one before? Maybe I should be calling this post “blimey”.

And I gotta tell you, typing on this computer is a pain in the ass. It’s a completely different layout to my Apple keyboard and I keep hitting the wrong keys. I even wrote software for my computer at work so that the key layout matched that of my Apple keyboard.

I love water. I really do. My mom even has a huge pond / mini lake (whatever you want to call it). She’s apparently selling that house now because she wants to buy a farm. My brother will have a paddock so that he can get a pony. But where the hell am I going to be able to row my boat? On the lawn? Sure, that’ll be fun. Failing that, I’ll dig one myself using the pony for slave labour.

I’m kinda touchy about the subject ever since someone hopped the fence, stole my kayak and ran off with it into the forrest. INGRATES!!!

But I do like water. I love water. I even find it quite the inspiration for a lot of things. There’s something about watching water that I’ve always found relaxing – especially when it comes to the bubbles. The bubbles I will go into another time (I miss the bubbles…)

One thing I also love are moving lights. It’s part of the reason that I had a KITT Scanner attached to the front of Tilt and why there’s a new one on my new car. I also loved that whole ending to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind‘ with the lights and the music and the aliens and the people and some of them wore glasses but I don’t wear glasses but Dave wears reading glasses and in fact I spoke to his sister today and apparently he’s gotten so wasted last night that he’s spent the entire day wearing his glasses just so that he’s able to focus and I’m thirsty.

When I was a kid I remember going to Scotland and seeing an attraction called The Waltzing Waters. It’s like the amalgamation of all that is good; light and water mixed together for a whole 45 minutes of pure technicolour-rainbow fountaintastic fun! It is actually pretty impressive. It’s been years since I was last there but I remember them saying how much water they used to create it. It’s a phenomenal amount and I remember thinking that some people might see it as a waste of water. But then again it hadn’t crossed my mind that fountains can recycle the water. Sometimes I grow up to feel such a dumbass…

But what brings me to this is that I was watching Countdown today on TV. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, basically what happens is that two contestants are pitted against each other to re-arrange letters to make a word or to generate a mathematical equation that results in a given number – all within the space of 30 seconds per question. If you want to find out more then you can do by visiting The Countdown Page.

And personally I feel that it can also be quite painful to watch. The jokes that they have are terrible (and you can see them cringing at the sound of them) and what’s more is that generally nothing much happens. But one thing I’ve got to say though is that it is impressive how quickly they can re-arrange the letters to produce a word. I’m terrible at that. When I was younger (before I learned how to cook) I was terrible in home economics class.

We had an exam and I got 4%. The marks were out of 50 – that meant that I only got 2 marks. What was that for? Well I got one mark for labelling “the yolk” and another mark for labelling “the shell” on a diagram of an egg. I couldn’t remember what “the white” was called, so I just wrote “the white bit” and didn’t even get a mark for that.

At the end of the test was a section where you had to rearrange letters to come up with a specific word. My teacher shouted at me afterward (yes, shouted) because apparently I should have at least been able to guess. But the clue to all of them was a word that I’d never heard of before – so if I didn’t even understand the clue word how was I supposed to be able to even guess the others?!?

Anyway, this afternoon I decided to see if I could give it a go. You know, do that whole shouting at the screen thing as though maybe I could get a better score than the contestants and make myself feel really smart at the same time.

I only managed to get one word throughout the entire show.

It was 5 letters long.

The word I got was “cruel”.

The winning word was 7 letters long. ‘Cruel’ should be a 7 letter word.

The main problem is that I still don’t know if I’m actually any good or not at re-arranging letters. It might be that in the time it’s taken me to learn how to cook, to learn what’s inside an egg and how to defend against the bears outside, I might actually be able to do it now. But I’m not sure.

It’s not that I’m not able to. It’s more that the clock has pretty lights that light up as the second hand goes around the clock from the top round to the bottom to indicate the 30 seconds of time they have to complete the puzzle. Something about those lights draws me to them, and it’s not until they take away the lights that I suddenly realise that the 30 seconds is up and that I don’t have any time to mix the letters around.

It’s not fair! I think that it’s wrong for them to distract someone that’s easily distracted by bright lights. This is the reason why it’s not safe for me to cross the road at night – if a truck comes by I’m going to be no different to a deer or rabbit in the middle of the road.

Poor little creatures.

I hope that there’s some on the farm my mom’s buying. I want to be able to train them to stand guard so that once I’ve finished digging my hole and filled it with water, that I’ll be able to kayak in peace without some lousy ingrates stealing it again!

I know you’re out there! I know you are! And if I find you… WHEN I find you, you’re going to be sorry – really sorry! I’m going to make you pay. Oh yes you’ll pay. And not in cash. Not by cheque. As much as I’d love to, I don’t accept credit cards. Especially not American Express. But you WILL pay!

I’ll craft my new kayak out of your skin!

For everyone else reading this, please ignore that. I’m not a scary person. Not really.

Unless you steal my ingrate-skin-kayak.

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