Say Something...

Said my sister as I walked through the door half drenched from the feet up. The only response I could muster behind my seemingly semi submerged smile was, "I did!"

Sitting there on the bus home it didn't look all that bad outside. Sure, the hatch in the roof was leaking but it does that all the time. Once I had realised the extent of my miscalculation, I figured that there was no real reason for me to test the walking versus running in the rain myth since I was walking into a wall of water anyway. The worst part about it all was that I had only walked 100 metres from the bus stop back to my place, which gives you a good idea of how the rain was really bucketing down in my part of the world this evening.

All that talk of storms brings me to what was a weird day for me on Thursday. Being the second last day of work naturally there are things we need to take care of before we all bugger off for two weeks. I had been working away for the past two and a bit days on little computer generated overshadowing diagrams required for town planning, and I had been doing this using a program to draw up simplified massing models like the one below. Apart from tracing shadows it also allows you to give the client an idea of what it might look like as they may not have the same visualisation skills us professionals are blessed with.



Anyhow, I had done five of these in fairly rapid succession churning out render after render when it turned out most of my work had been wiped out in an act of overzealous hard disk cleansing. How I held the anger within is beyond me, I assume I'll just reach some sort of critical mass some day and go postal Hollywood style. Just make sure you'll all take good care of me, okay?

Luckily there were some files I had printed or hidden elsewhere which meant I didn't have to do it all over from scratch, but for the next hour I was in a very foul mood. This called for one of my emergency mood lifting songs, and as I walked down the street for lunch, who did I call upon for stress relief? Why, no other than the Jackson 5 with "I Want You Back"... there's nothing as upbeat and uplifting than hearing a future freak and his siblings sing about love and loss like it's something they've been through on a regular basis, is there? I guess that's the real problem with pop artists singing about relationship breakdowns when you're 13 years old, no one really believes you. Unless you happen to be related to Britney Spears.

Lunch further made up for the shiteness of the previous hour when the guy working at the burger joint (I was eating at Grill'd, not some sort of generic fast food chain) made too many chips and offered me a free plate. I'm not one to scoff at the offer of free food so this was a no brainer. Sitting outside does help a lot, being a complete contrast to the indoors of the office where it sometimes seems that all that temporary annoyance can just get blown away into the aether.

And all this time I sat there watching that nice little storm approach over the horizon. A little rain never hurt anyone... right?

Well it became apparent that that was a complete fallacy as the storm came along later that afternoon, knocking out the entire train network running to the Mornington Peninsula. That's what you get for catching the train to Frankston. I found it odd that staff are always present at Malvern station but on that afternoon they were nowhere to be seen, presumably too preoccupied with trying to figure out what to do to bother checking the validity of people's tickets. I eventually jumped on a tram which took about half an hour to get back into the city which wasn't too bad I guess. I did pass the famed ANL House which was the target of Darren's camera a few days ago which made me think about how the people who work there tell others where they are.

Well I think it's time for me to bugger off now, seeing that I'm about to launch into yet another tirade on why our public transport system has the reliability of Microsoft Windows at any point in its history in whatever form it happens to manifest itself, as proven by this excellent Blue Screen of Death on an advertising display at Northland. Geeky fun for all... well just geeks.