Cunningly Chopping Dexter

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Everybody lies.

“What if you’re mad? What if you can’t walk past a window without being overcome by an uncontrollable urge to lick it?”  - Jeremy Clarkson

TONIGHT, on new Darkly Defending, I injure myself in new and interesting ways, I feed evidence to a roaring fire, and I continue to be freakin’ awesome.

Having a wood fire means I have to do some work occasionally, and part of this involved trying to split wood with an axe. You would think that this would be straightforward – balance the wood, belt the living daylights out of it with an axe, and voila, you have two or more pieces of wood. There’s only two problems with this approach in reality at our house – one, we bought an axe so small it’s more properly a hatchet and thus hasn’t got the weight behind it to split wood properly, and two, I’m the one wielding the axe.

The problem first started when I decided that a rotten wood stump where a tree had given its life some years previously was a good place to chop small bits of wood, and to be honest, it was. For about three seconds. When I first rolled my shoulders while holding the axe over my head to impart that first bit of motion to get the piece of wood to rip itself asunder, part of the stump cracked and fell off when I hit the log. That wasn’t a good start, and when I rebalanced and struck out again, the axe hit the log this time, and with such erratic application of force that the axe skittered back off the log rather than sinking into the intended log. That was fine, right until the axe blade then smacked me solidly in the fingers. This bloody hurt, but thankfully it was just a glancing blow and I just had a spot of minor flensing rather than a bad injury, so I got away lightly. After this, I had a few more goes before giving up and just feeding the little logs to the fire whole.

The fire itself has also turned out to be quite a convenient way of getting rid of sneaky snack evidence, like a set of jam donuts that we’d decided to eat while Mum was asleep. Naturally, we scoffed them, and then shoved the box in the fire, where it burned away immediately and handily got rid of the evidence before we got shouted at. It’s also handy for getting rid of all sorts of rubbish – paid bills for example – and it is frankly astonishing how fast the thing eats evidence, logs and generally anything that’s chucked into it with a voracious appetite. The heat rolls off the thing, too, which means that burning your evidence to hide it from people who think you’re probably more than fat enough to begin with.

This capacity to injure myself, however? That just keeps growing. I was sat down with the dog in the front room, and at one point, I decided to play fight with her, because it’s fun, and because all she does is gnaw your hand and then give you multiple licks. Today, however, she felt fiery – probably because I waited until she’d stopped fighting and then gave her a little slap across the face – and she really got involved, throwing her paws about while I pretended to deliver a one-two combo to her face, and trying to stand over me in the fight we were having, and enjoying some rather spirited gnawing and gentle mauling until she twisted my joints a bit too hard in my left hand while attempting to eat my right hand, arm and everything upwards, and I asked her to stop. The fact that (a) I was beaten by a dog and (b) I was beaten by a girl dog means this is highly embarrassing, but what is even more embarrassing is the fact that several hours later my left hand is still sore from where she twisted it. She doesn’t care, to be honest; she’s happily asleep at the base of my computer chair, snoring gently. Obviously the fact that she has quite literally bit the hand that fed her and buggered it up doesn’t mean anything to her. Good on her. Add to this the fact that she’s just turned two, and I don’t know what to think.

Fortunately, however, my ability to gain consistent results in my Physics assessments seems to continue unabated. This time, my markers decided to be confusingly consistent and awarded me 88%, several 94% attempts in a row, and then a 95% just to break the monotony. Clearly they must be bored, but my more important question to me is what am I missing that I’m not getting 100% every time I turn in a lab; and why the hell am I so stupid that I keep making the same 6% worth of errors every single time? Still, it’s nice to see that my greatness is being rewarded and my ego appropriately stoked.

Finally, a couple of days after my misadventure with the axe, we had some more firewood delivered, already chopped this time, and as part of this we had to put some effort into moving it around. This was all fine, until right at the last minute we decided to tidy up the backyard by putting quite a lot of rubbish into the trailer and connecting it up to Dad’s car, which we then left behind the gates. Of course, fate decided that since I’d evidently succeeded in not injuring myself while moving firewood about – despite the fact I couldn’t hold things properly in my left hand thanks to the dog’s energetic fighting the day before. Thanks to some spectacular miscommunication and the fact I was near the car and snapping twigs out of the way to try and stop them scratching the car, I ended up with a 2 tonne SUV on my foot. I suppose I should be grateful that I was on grass and wearing flexible shoes, so my foot was simply mashed into the ground and bruised, and that I wasn’t stood on concrete, otherwise I would have gotten an awful lot of time off work with a broken foot. I’ve always wanted to play with a set of crutches, mind you, but I don’t really want to have to break something rather important just for the experience. Nicking them off people who actually need them, I believe, is the bastardly but socially appropriate way to test them out. Snapping your foot is guaranteed to get you a pair, but with consistent amounts of owies, and people “accidentally” kicking your foot. That’s why if I ever did break something important and need crutches, I’d fit them with a hammer.

Speedily Slicing Dexter

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“It’s said that everything is connected to everything. The butterfly effect. You drop a pebble into a pond and the ripples radiate outward, affecting everything. Until finally a fish grows arms and legs and crawls out of the water, and picks up a rock and smashes the next two fish over the head, and we have the first serial killer.” – Dexter Morgan

Ah, the fun of slicing into flesh with a very sharp knife, and watching as it comes cleanly away from the bone. Ha, had you going for a minute there, didn’t I? I did indeed slice into some flesh today with a big sharp knife, but thankfully it was a ham and not a real person. The fact that I’d accidentally deliberately drowned the ham in mustard sauce and pineapple, shoved a whole bunch of potatoes and onions in with it, and then slammed it into the slow cooker for 8 hours may have made this somewhat easier, especially since the ham practically fell off the bone by itself. Either way, I am very full, have a hugely warm stomach, and am somewhat impressed at my meal that I cooked for the night.

I’ve been somewhat active in the kitchen recently – probably because it’s somewhat more rewarding than studying – and I’ve discovered that despite the fact our new house in the country is nudging somewhere around and about 50 years old, the oven that’s in the kitchen, which is probably about 10, is bloody brilliant. The one at our old house was pretty new – it quite literally came with the house – and it was a Smeg oven, but it was rubbish. This older one is a Fisher & Paykel oven, and its greatness was discovered when I submitted the litmus test food to it – steak and kidney pie. Once I’d finished stuffing my face with it, I have to say the oven did a much better job of doing the pastry just right and making everything work properly. Sure, it occasionally catches fire and sets the smoke alarm off because the person who had our house before us never cleaned it – the fact that they have been dead for about 2 years may have something to do with that – but it’s a bloody good oven all the same.

There’s much to like about the house, really. It has a wood fire with a voracious appetite. I was half expecting that this would mean the council came round swearing volubly at you for polluting the atmosphere the moment you even looked as if you were going to break out the matches, but it turns out that burning wood is apparently the “most environmentally friendly” way of heating your home and apparently goes so far as to score 4.5/5 for greenhouse gas reduction. I think that’s due to the fact that you’re simply emitting all the carbon in one go rather than once the plant breaks down, so it doesn’t actually increase emissions, and the fact that you can dig the ash into the ground due to the fact it makes quite a passable fertiliser, and make a tree eat its parents. Such cannibalism appears to not harm the tree, but whether it has psychological issues when it finds out, we’ll never know.

I’ve certainly made my mark in some erratic attempts at DIY with my father, who has a much better command of what needs to be done than I do. We were cleaning an outside lamp with glass panels, and we needed to remove the glass panels to clean them. I made a spirited attempt at unscrewing the lamp’s shade, and promptly smashed one of the panes (thus negating the need to clean it, if you have to find a positive in everything), while Dad simply moved the clips out of the way and removd the glass panes without breaking them. I also broke several other small but important things, and then nearly fell over laughing when Dad broke a fluorescent light fitting which had been fitted to the house for  years and was so brittle I’m surprised it didn’t break earlier. He’s fixed it, while half of the stuff I’ve broken will probably stay broken for the rest of time.

One of the things that will probably stay broken for the rest of time would have to be the vacuum cleaner. Not satisfied with breaking it originally so that you can’t store the pipe on the vacuum anymore, I upstaged myself the other day and promptly broke the actual pipes the vacuum uses, which meant it now doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. This made me cop much abuse, and we eventually poked around the local shoppies to see if we could find a new vacuum. After much hemming and hawing over all of the different types of vacuums on offer, we forked out over $500 for a Dyson, which appears to be able to suck up anything up to and including a small planetoid. At any rate, everyone has suddenly developed an appetite for vacuuming to see what the Dyson does, which was to hugely embarrass everyone by stripping loads of dirt out of what appeared at first glance to be a reasonably clean carpet. At least it’s easy to clean out, which I suppose is a bonus.

Mind you, this sudden largesse isn’t just restricted to people who break vacuums and having to replace them. I myself decided that the near 10-year old chair I use for cosseting my arse, which has lots of spine support stuff but I generally find a little uncomfortable (but is suitable for Dad, since the spine support stuff is helpful for him), was due to be retired and I went chair shopping. This involved much sitting around until I found a chair which was like sitting on a little cloud. I baulked at the price tag – $279 – and then tested a whole bunch of other chairs which I found uncomfortable before I eventually decided to splash out and secure the little offender for myself. I did feel somewhat better when I found out that leather backed chairs with massage functionality and whatnot go for stupid money (stupid money being about $3,000, which will just about buy 75% of an unrestored Impala!). Now I just have to go pick the damn thing up.

Whimsically Wheeling Dexter

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“In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ah, country roads. You have to love them, those long, long strips of tarmac with absolutely nobody in sight for miles. It’s a good feeling to be able to mush your foot into the floor and take your car up to the legal limit, as you make your merry way to work. Or, at least it would be.

You see, I learned to drive in the city. Out there, it’s basically a game of The Quick and the Dead. People are very quick and the speed limit is viewed as a minimum, so you can be trundling along at the legal limit quite happily and watch as someone goes fishtailing wildly past you well in excess. Occasionally, these people end up going a bit too quick and end up in various states of injury or in varying states of deadness. It does mean, however, that there are no dawdlers out there. Except, of course, when there’s a bloody massive traffic jam, which usually occurs with astonishing regularity, meaning that the prevailing speed of traffic usually plummets from 100km/h to down in the doldrums of around 30km/h.

At any rate, back to the country roads. My problem with the country roads is not the roads themselves, or the fact that there are no lights on there – that somewhat pales into an insignificant question when your car has driving lights and can light most of the surrounding countryside and the eyelids of sleeping animals with nearly half a kilowatt of light – but the fact that people seem to have no concept of what the limit is, or a ‘leisurely drive’, but seem to coast at a speed which has no relation to the prevailing speed limit whatsoever.

Out here, the speed limit isn’t seen as something that is the maximum legal safe speed on a stretch of road, determined by much number-crunching and serious poking of calculators and beard stroking over a number of years by road engineers, and thus a good guide as to the speed that you are allowed to travel on a stretch of road, but more of an aspiration, that, on a good day, you might think about getting within 10km/h of. It’s either this, or they see the 80km/h sign on the way out of my town and then develop a peculiar type of situational blindness which means they can’t see the ensuing signs that warn that the speed limit is increasing, and markedly so.

This is somewhat annoying when you’re getting a good rhythm going – even more so when you’ve just turned a corner and you suddenly see someone dawdling along, and after adjusting your speed so you don’t end up with an insurance claim within seconds, you become somewhat puzzled as to why they are doing 80km/h. Then, of course, there’s the other, more confusing type that rocket along at 100km/h, and when you get within range, they suddenly start slamming their brakes on as they’ve now decided that they want to practice either defensive driving, or driving dangerously. One of the two, at any rate, it’s bloody hard to tell sometimes. At any rate, I’m getting quite good at overtaking, although since these are country roads and this necessitates overtaking on the wrong side of the road, it’s great fun trying to overtake at night and guess whether you’ll be killed or not. One particular example involved me overtaking a Ford, and then a truck. I overtook the Ford with no problem by using the overtaking lane on the wrong side of the road, and was flashed by the Ford to say that it was safe to overtake the truck. I ignored them, which turned out to be an excellent idea, as the overtaking lane in the other direction abruptly ended and would have gifted me straight to oncoming traffic.

However, it’s not all bad news. Because my work is now a significant distance away from where I live, meaning I can’t simply fall out of bed about three minutes before I have to start my shift, my car loves the journey. It’s high speed, no stopping, and the car is returning somewhere in the neighbourhood of 8.5L/100km – or about 27.6 miles to the gallon if you swing that way – which is fairly impressive for a big car. At any rate, it’s thundered around netting about 250km and has only burned a quarter of a tank of petrol, which is quite an achievement considering that I used to burn half a tank of petrol doing the same distance when I lived in the city. While this boon of petrol consumption is good, it also means that the car gets to stretch its legs a lot more.

I’ve also found that one of my favourite shows on TV, Pawn Stars, appears to be on DVD. It also appears to be quite popular, which means getting a copy of it is sometimes a bit fraught with difficulties. At any rate, I’m trying to get it as I enjoy the show. It is also somewhat ironic that my first paying job was actually at a pawnbroker’s, and now I’ve gone over to the retail side of things, where I sometimes wonder if the stuff I sell will end up at a pawnbroker’s. At any rate, I remember my days at the pawnbrokers as paying very badly, since it was the absolute minimum wage at the time, not to mention the fact I was pretty much just the minimum legal age for working at the time. It makes me laugh now that my hourly rate is nearly 4 times what I used to earn – a 40 hour week at the pawnbrokers would net me $200, whereas I earn that now in about 2 days. It will be an especially amusing comparison on the next public holiday I work, where the rate will jump to the insane heights of double time and a half.

Naturally, I didn’t get anything hugely interesting coming through the door – like Harry Houdini’s jacket, for example – but we did get a few bits and bobs. This was still in the days when the original XBOX was still on the go. I remember that they retailed at a pawnbroker’s for about $150, and that was also where I got one of my first phones, a Nokia 8250. I miss that phone, it was epic. However, I certainly still am friends with my iPhone, although I have to say I don’t mind the Samsung Galaxy. I’m still an Apple man at the moment, especially after forking out $150 for the newest Adobe Photoshop Elements, as it is Mac compatible, and my old copy of Photoshop wasn’t. Now to go modify things muchly…

Insidiously Imminent Dexter

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“I think I smash buildings because my father was distant.” – Godzilla, All My Friends Are Still Dead

Shopping at the airport usually doesn’t have its perks. Everything, including a bottle of water, usually requires you to sell your firstborn. After you’ve sold them and given a part mortgage on children you haven’t had yet, you usually walk away with the feeling that you have been been robbed in a very personal manner via your wallet. Despite this, while I was spending 4 hours at Sydney waiting for my connecting flight coming back from Armidale, I decided to go and explore one of the bookshops at the airport.

To my shock, they had books on special, so I decided to spend what was left of the $110 I’d pulled out the previous week for my intensive school – $40 of which evaporated on transport to and from the airport – and picked up The Hunger Games - and yes, the odds were ever in my favour as I then saw two books I’d had my eyes on for some time, the All my Friends are Dead series (which published a new book this year). It’s sort of a macabre comic that’s written like a children’s book but so very isn’t for kids. At any rate, I had my glasses on and was trying to look erudite while reading my books at the gate waiting for my plane to turn up. This lasted for about three seconds until I actually started reading the book in front of me, and I had to try very hard not to burst out laughing. I spent the next twenty minutes sniggering and guffawing as I read through the books I’d just snared.

This provided a very entertaining diversion until my plane arrived, disgorging its passengers and then having its fill of aviation fuel, which was rather handy since the next thing it would be doing was flying me home. I waited until the tannoy summoned me out of my happy reading fugue – I’d moved on to the Hunger Games by this point so I didn’t get on the plane with permanent snigger lines – and took up residence in my spot near the front of the plane – and for some reason, with a lovely view of the 12ft propellor blades that were all that stood between me and a fiery death plunging from 6 kilometres above sea level. No worries, then.

For some reason, I always seem to be sat near critical machinery. On the initial flight to Armidale I got a lovely view of the wings, the next two flights left me looking at the landing gears, and then finally I got to gawk at the propellors. Feeling that I must be privileged if I get to look at something so important, I sat there and watched as the plane span them up from dead stop – and figured out that the proximity of my seat meant I got a free massage chair all the way home. This staring at critical machinery wasn’t helped much when my seat buddy informed me he’d flown from Broken Hill one time with a young man from the mines out there who’d been fine until the propellors had started spinning, and had then locked up in a fetal position refusing to do anything until he was moved to another seat. By this time we were 4,000 feet above sea level and climbing, so it was fairly obvious I didn’t give a damn about where I was sat, but I had a conversation with my seat buddy (the first person to actually speak to me on a plane in the 1,600 km I eventually ended up covering in one!) and explained I’d been on planes that frequently that I didn’t care what the propellor was doing in mid air as long as it kept spinning.

The day after I returned from Armidale, we went poking around for a bit of shopping, which entailed me going into Rivers for the first time in a while. I decided to have a poke around at the jeans and had a look there. At the height of my weight accretion I was filling out pants with a 42 inch waist, and walked out feeling somewhat smug when I managed to fit into 37 inch pants, a good six inches thinner around the waist. I also snared a pair of 38 inch ones, since the 36′s would be a little bit too tight round the packaging departments, and there were no other 37s. 32 was right out, and I would have been swimming in the 46 inch pants available, so as long as I remember to wear a belt it’ll be fine. Still, cannoning down in weight from 110kg to 85kg is one hell of a change, although it means I do have to buy quite a few new clothes. And shift the flab that is still sitting there doing not much else apart from decoration, but that involves exercise. Le sigh.

At any rate, there’s at least some surprising success on the Internet front. While I was in Armidale not enjoying the benefits of the National Broadband Network because half of the Uni’s computers were so excited that they fell over repeatedly, we managed to organise Internet at our new house out in the country. This has fared exceptionally well. Despite the fact I’m now well over 300km west of Sydney, I speed tested my Internet today and it clocked in at 10MB/sec. That may not sound particularly impressive, but when you consider that I was previously living in a major city and receiving 6MB/sec on a good day, it’s pretty damn funny. Considering we’re also getting the same deal from a different provider, it’s not too shabby.

Finally, unpacking in our new house is proceeding apace. I’ve just about finished annexing one of the rooms and turning it into my study – I’ve got about two boxes left to do – and there’s the odd bit of maintenance to do. Naturally, to make sure that I’m not horribly killed driving along country roads very late at night, I’ve had driving lights fitted to the car so that I can see where I’m going. Aside from being able to produce anywhere up to half a kilowatt of light output on demand, I’ve also gone mad and fitted an all-singing all-dancing radio which has Bluetooth and all manner of fancy ilk in it – it can even play DVDs. The first time I was driving along and the radio muted my CD, piped my ringtone through the speakers and then allowed me to answer the call via the touchscreen, I wasn’t really paying attention and nearly missed the call until I looked down and saw the screen did everything short of launching a fireworks display to let me know there was an incoming call. It’s still a little spooky making calls in the car, since the microphone that’s designed to pick up my lovely vocal timbre is in fact mounted under the steering wheel, so I have to talk to my crotch without looking at it while I’m driving, which would look weird to anyone who’s looking, but oh well.

It could be worse. I could be reading All My Friends are Dead by the glow of my driving lights (which, despite the fact they can strip paint at 200m, still manage to not be visible over the edge of the bonnet so the only way I know I’m too close to something is when I hear the lenses break), and virtually crying with laughter, which would be somewhat more difficult in the whole driving stakes at any rate.

Darkly Differentiated Dexter

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“Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.” – William Godwin

TONIGHT, on a Darkly Defending that likes adventuring, I take an arrow to the knee, I nearly get killed by a fashion implosion, and I take some blood evidence to the mouth.

Alright, alright, maybe I should really be shot with an arrow in my patellar region for blatantly stealing one of Skyrim’s most famous sayings, but I couldn’t resist. You see, part of this week’s adventuring involved replacing my headlights in the car. There was nothing really wrong with the old ones; they still worked, but since we’re moving out to the country soon and my old lights didn’t have much range, I wouldn’t have seen anything that I was about to get killed by. Since these new ones have far more range, I can now see what’s about to kill me, which means I would have some time to compose a suitable epitaph, possibly with a dash of wit, before I got a kangaroo’s arse to the face, for example.

We also bought the same set of lights for Dad’s car, and we started on that one first because we thought it would be difficult. It was very easy – undo three bolts and out came the headlamp assembly and a massive Huntsman spider. Once that was made all dead, the actual lightbulb change was pretty quick, and we had Dad’s car fitted up with its new bulbs in short order. My car, however, was not so easy.

For some reason, Holden thinks it’s funny to hide one of the bolts that secures the headlamp assembly behind the front bumper. While it’s possible, if you are very nimble, to unscrew the dust cover and nearly kill yourself as your arm makes contact with the battery from the inside, if you are worried about such things as impending electrical doom or you just want to play it safe, you have to take the entire front bumper off. This led to half an hour of poking about with a screwdriver and much swearing before my car’s front bumper was off and sat happily on the grass while the Commodore looked daft with half of its insides clearly visible to the world. After that, I undid all of the bolts and promptly dropped one in the battery tray, leading to much more swearing and poking around near the battery with pliers, made more difficult by the fact that a 12V battery for a car might be ever so slightly magnetic, and the feeling of dread as my arm brushed right over the negative terminal (thank the good Man Upstairs my arm wasn’t touching anywhere else, or it would have been a really nasty surprise). Once that was done and my headlamp assemblies were finally coaxed from the car, I got on with changing the bulbs, which was pretty anticlimactic and done in about three seconds. After that, I dropped a few more bolts, leading to even more swearing and very un-Christian words, since it had also started raining by this point, and I eventually, with some assistance, wrested the bumper back into its proper place, fastened it on properly, and secured the last headlight bolts.

The upshot of this very swear-y and drenched afternoon is that I can now see much further in front of me, which is all fine and dandy, and now I will be able to see just how I am about to die, which will take much of the mystery and pondering just how awkward the obituary would be out of things and make it all easily explained. Or not.

Amidst much running around and shouting at many things, and suffering the ignominy of killing Shadowmere when I accidentally fell off a cliff – I was in the middle of Boethia’s quest, and it had taken me forever just to get there, so I just left Shadowmere gently rotting on the landscape while I went off killing things (I hope the reports that he resurrects within 15 game days are actually true, I did like that horse until it died), I saw the Skyrim trailer. I bought the game without seeing the trailer and just went with word of mouth, but I am glad I did. If you have never seen the trailer, maybe it might convince you to buy Skyrim if you haven’t already got it. I attach the trailer itself by means of explanation:

YouTube Preview Image

I am also of the opinion that the Dragonborn’s Fus Ro Dah! in the trailer is better than in the real game itself, but since I’ve got the PS3 version it’s a little hard to modify that. I also have a copy of Skyrim on PC, because I’m thinking of getting a gaming PC at some point in the future. No rush – kind of obvious since I don’t have any money, but I want to keep the iMac because it’s great for doing studying and stuff on.

Anyhow, I wasn’t actually going to put that whole Skyrim thing in there, but I kind of got distracted by the trailer’s epicness. At any rate, once I’d torn myself away from it, I had to go to the dentist at some point, which involved much muttering both over and under my breath and some rather frank assessments of how much I really wanted to go. At any rate, I was eventually forced to go, and once I’d had the requisite torture and spat much blood all over the place, including one horribly disgusting moment where I had an irrepressible cough burble its way up while the dentist was doing his thing, causing water and blood to go everywhere as I faux drowned in the chair. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I heard a faint splash as some of the horrible mixture hit the chair, and then felt a icy cold dribble down my back as it slowly made its way along the chair’s back, and mine by extension. That was an experience I don’t really wish to repeat.

Continuing with the theme of weird and wonderful ways to nearly get killed, I started packing my wardrobe, and was of course nearly killed by the amount of clothes that promptly made a bid for freedom. It took two hours, but now I’m down to the bare essentials and have a moderately neat wardrobe for once. And I still have a hell of a lot to do, I haven’t even started on the wardrobe’s floor on one side, and the whole desk, the TV and a bunch of other things. At any rate, I did get the chance to identify any shirts that have seen better centuries, and some that don’t fit – I have no idea why I still have Mediums kicking around in there, I haven’t fitted in those for years. I still don’t now. I have to say, however, that half of my current clothes now don’t fit any more since I’ve dropped from 110kg to 85kg, which is pretty darn impressive – and also awkward, because I am now actually lighter than some of my friends while still having a podge to contend with.

Finally, I leave this post with two things: happy news regarding the job hunt for the country, which was terminated with alacrity when I went to resign at work last week. This resulted in a  phone call to another store, which would be pretty close to where I’ll be living, and shortly after that I had a job offer there. Needless to say, I slammed in a transfer application instead of my resignation and that got the green light from Head Office. Now there’s very little else to sort out before I move, but that’s all good, because the biggest worries of looking for a job and financial security and what not are all over. I’m pleased.

The second thing? A quote from my own Facebook feed, which I posted back in October 2010, and some sage advice from a fat then-20 year old me: When someone annoys you, it takes 42 muscles to frown. It takes 17 to smile, and just 4 to swing your arm back and smack ‘em straight across the face.

 

Splendidly Shouting Dexter

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“Stay away from India!” – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron, to Top Gear

TONIGHT, in the language of the Dovah and everything else in between, new Darkly Defending makes absolutely no sense whatsoever in bringing the following news: I continue to run around shouting at things, I shout at even more things in real life, and following all of this shouting up with even more shouting.

As you’ve probably guessed, I have been heavily into Skyrim and have been going gangbusters on it. Currently, I’m halfway through the Companions quests, have killed the Emperor and occasionally wander around in his robes, and I’ve won the Civil War for the Imperials. This prevents a slight problem with getting Hjerim cleaned for free by completing a side quest, because all the Stormcloak guards are either dead or surrendered, which means the quest won’t trigger. I don’t really want to start a new game for one quest so I’m just busying myself running around killing things.

Sien siev a handy knife, hmm? Alduin's appearance usually means you are ABOUT TO DIE. Good thing I've already killed him

Yes, I’ve decided it’s time to randomly put images through my posts know. Speaking of dragons now that Alduin’s sat there staring at things, I have to say that although Skyrim has a bit of a reputation for glitches, the one and only annoying one I have ever encountered has to do with dragons. I’d just finished happily murdering a Blood Dragon, something I have always enjoyed ever since killing an absolute bastard of a dragon at Dead Man’s Respite that kept killing me very quickly – until I Storm Called it – and I absorbed the dragon’s soul, as you do. The dragon promptly reincarnated and started trying to kill me again – but since my main weapon is enchanted with Absorb Health, I killed it again very quickly. I then had the rather odd experience of a dead dragon which didn’t break down staring at its own skeletal body.

Why the long face, Paarthurnax? Oh, don't fob me off with that "It's biological, Dovahkiin" crap. BETTER EXCUSES NEXT TIME.

Still, running around shouting at things is fun, but since I’ve got certain One Handed perks enabled, I have to say that one of the most enjoyable (and quite believable) bits is chopping someone’s head straight off their shoulders, complete with impressive blood spatter. When you’ve just managed to do this with a dagger, it’s even more impressive. Yes, I am sick in the head, but at least I’m not doing this in real life.

If I could have one Shout in real life, apart from Storm Call and Slow Time, I would have to go for Unrelenting Force. It would have come in especially handy the last time I was travelling back through the Blue Mountains, when “minor delays” turned out to mean “You’ll be sat there for about 30 minutes while we let traffic through in the opposite direction sporadically and then generally do sweet FA.” I sat just outside of Hartley with my engine off in a traffic jam caused by the stupid non-moving roadworks for some time before I got completely bored, fired the car and let the Commodore nose itself out into oncoming traffic, chuck a U-turn and then let out its V6 roar as I shot up to the speed limit heading back towards the detour.

While I have to say that taking Bells Line of Road from Lithgow all the way to Richmond and then coming south from there was far more interesting and had no traffic jams (although without a GPS I have no idea how the hell I managed to even pick the right roads to get home only an hour late), it would have been immensely satisfying to get out of the car, plant both feet squarely on the ground, bellow FUS RO DAH at the top of my lungs and watch cars and trucks alike go flying out of the way. Sadly, that doesn’t happen in reality just yet, so I’ll have to settle for my assassinations in Skyrim doing this. By the way, if you ever want to kill someone in an assassination mission and don’t want a 1,000 septim bounty, just hit them with Unrelenting Force. I Shouted one of my targets off a bridge in Markarth 100 feet down into a river where they promptly drowned, and I was only done for assault. Not too shabby.

Godric Hammerfell discovered that dentistry is a bit of a poser when your patient can set you on fire in the middle of an extraction.

There’s not too much else on for this week. University is back, and to celebrate I’m off to the dentist again, which I hate with a passion because it’s uncomfortable and costs money. Still, it means I can grin at people since my teeth will be all shiny white. The least painful bit is sitting there with fluoride on, which comes in a foam can which is suspiciously tropical in flavour. If it’s anything like before, I’ll spend most of the time spitting blood everywhere and generally making a mess of everything within sight. This time around I’m aiming for the walls so the next person who comes in thinks we’ve been filming Psycho.

I also took the opportunity to download the Top Gear India special from iTunes, rather than watch it on normal TV, which, as I predicted, bloody ruined it by stuffing it full of adverts. It is hugely refreshing to be able to watch without adverts, and the iMac and Apple TV both did their respective parts in making sure I had to do as little possible. That is also where the quote at the beginning comes from, but I have to admit that Clarkson and Hammond’s re-engineering of May’s Rolls Royce so it blasted its horn every time he braked was quite ingenious. Clarkson’s own self-professed phobia of manual labour and general technological inability to fix things seems to have suddenly evaporated – although Clarkson did enjoy a spate of fixing things in one TG episode.

The rest of the week’s plans? Find out a Shout to speed time up, so in the middle of a class I can bellow that, then pack up and go immediately. Yol Toor Shul (the Fire Breath Shout) may also work, but I don’t really want barbecued human infesting my airways for the rest of the day. That smell puts a downer on things.

Brilliantly Bicentennial Dexter

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Jeremy Clarkson is excited.

Jeremy Clarkson offers a professional opinion on Darkly Defending's 200th post.

Dex & Rita on couch

“Children, if you’re watching this at home and you don’t know why this is inappropriate, ask your parents, but this is as inappropriate a bike as it’s humanly possible to conceive.” – Jeremy Clarkson

TONIGHT, on an absolute bicentennial of posts on the rambling nonsense that is Darkly Defending, I nearly get killed on my way to hospital, I manage to wire things up without killing myself, and looking back on some of the weird and wonderful posts that have occupied Darkly Defending’s server from its inception.

With all due apologies to Top Gear, I do believe that the expression on the top is necessary, since this is now officially the longest-lived blog I have ever contributed to (and owned). It’s been kind of interesting to watch Darkly Defending, which was originally Darkly Dreaming until a lapse in attention meant I nearly lost the domain, and I bought Darkly Defending to keep running the site. I then successfully reclaimed Darkly Dreaming, and rather than not bother using the domain, I just added it as a redirect. I have to say that over time the technology I’ve used to create the posts has wended its way through HTML and some basic designs (including that yellow one I started with ages ago), and finally ended up on WordPress, where changing themes is as easy as click-click done.

I’ve also noticed that my posts have gotten longer, and I would hope they start to ramble less. Certainly, my writing style has changed, but either way I’ve enjoyed chronicling such austere events as why practicals in Physiology can cause fires, the inelegance of pissing into a jar for science and noting the disturbing, radiating warmth, my attempts to poison myself with my own cooking (and the rare attempts when I produced something edible), the usefulness of having someone of the operatic persuasion (I couldn’t resist), my own useless opinions on cars, and all sorts of other things. There’s another clip-show type post a bit further back, so if you’re bored, go read that. If you are too lazy to find it, search for Terrifically Twinned Dexter - interestingly enough, that’s when DD turned 2.

Speaking vaguely of cars in the last paragraph leads rather neatly to my next point. Dad had an appointment today at a hospital in Sydney. This one is in Randwick, and after about 2 hours of winding the Commodore through the traffic along with observations of how much easier it was to drive my car up steep hills that the Getz I was piloting last week (even though it made a heroic effort, I have to admit), we were nearly at the hospital. Part of this involved an offset roundabout – and yes, this is where the problem occurred. It wasn’t the roundabout itself, but the bloody idiots that seem to frequent Sydney as their favourite driving haunt, and my oh my doesn’t this one come with a heavy dose of irony!

I waited patiently until there was a gap in the roundabout. Basically, there are two rules that you must worry about when you are navigating roundabouts in Australia, and they are (i) give way to traffic already in the roundabout, and (ii) give way to the right. This basically means that if there is no one on your right, it is perfectly safe, and legal, to go. I was driving into the offset roundabout, which involves driving into an immediately obvious position before you turn right, and as soon as I began to turn right, guess who comes flying out into the intersection without checking for traffic on the right? A car? No, too mainstream. Just under 1 kilometre from a major hospital, I nearly suffer the ignominy of being hit by an ambulance. It was a brand new ambulance as well, and they weren’t driving to an emergency – they just didn’t know what they were doing.

Thank the good Lord that I wasn’t going very fast, because I brought the Commodore to a halt quick sharp. The ambulance then drives further out into the intersection and stops with a stupid expression on the driver’s face – and crucially, in such a spot that I am stuck in the middle of the roundabout with no way round the ambulance. By now there is other traffic starting to beep, prompting a few very un-Christian comments from myself, and an exasperated wave at the ambulance driver while quite loudly exclaiming “Do you know what you’re doing?” before the ambulance got the hint that since it had screwed up my chance of getting through the roundabout like I would have loved to be able to, and left. I think it’s funny that an ambulance which was coincidentally going to the same hospital complex that I was nearly put me in the hospital, but that’s irony for you.

The resulting scene after a handy Dragonborn appeared and Fus Ro Dah'd that mother.

On the way home from nearly being killed on the way to hospital, we swung into IKEA to pick up a new TV unit as the old one kinda looks like crap (and I picked up some lingonberry jam, purely because I like the taste of it and wanted to be difficult). We made it out of IKEA in short order and without major loss of life, and when I got home, I began the dutiful task of removing everything on the old entertainment unit and sorting out the small hydra of cables at the back which had inevitably formed.

Once I’d managed to construct the little TV unit (which wasn’t a bad looker at $59 and managed to fit all of the crap we have plus the TV itself), I began the task of plugging everything back in and trying to remember what in the Sam Hill did what. This was made somewhat easier by the fact that the DVD recorder and the Apple TV both have HDMI out, so there was no frigging about trying to find the right sockets. Within about 20 minutes, I’d managed to plug everything together and get it all working, and without major loss of life, I think that’s a winner.

In other news, I have managed to circumvent one of the obstacles to us buggering off west if we ever decide to do that. Because I’m enrolled as a Physics teacher and am now scholarshipped to that effect, I had to find a Uni nearby that offered the course. Fortunately, I managed to track one down that offers the same degree by distance education and will hopefully grant advanced standing for all of the stuff that I’ve already done at my home Uni, so it doesn’t matter where the hell we ping off to; I can study the degree anywhere I want, and once I graduate I’ve got a guaranteed job. Not bad.

Suddenly Stormy Dexter

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“It says here as well, “Do not rise to any challenges while you are driving.” What, like a duel? “Sir, your driving has angered me! I demand satisfaction!” I can’t see that happening.” – Richard Hammond

To celebrate the fact that Darkly Defending is about to crack 200 posts (this is the 199th), let’s go with that famous introduction style once more, just for the sheer hell of it: Tonight, on new, serious Darkly Defending, I finally flip my lid with a telco, it’s time for a bit of paint on the walls, and I suddenly learn to appreciate something.

I got bored, and decided that I wanted to change DD’s theme from its “industrial” dark look replete with Mr. Morgan up the top to a much lighter theme – this time, of course, with a new splash of red liquid and Mr. Morgan attempting to look all dapper up thar in the top corner. I’d had much faffing around before I finally settled on a new theme – you may have seen DD go through some brief but unexplained theme changes only to see them revert themselves almost instantly – the only one I really liked the look of was this one, and it was but a matter of moments in Photoshop to create a banner.

There’s still a few touch ups to make – for example, I want to write my own 404 page rather than using the default one, simply because it suits my perverted style of humour to come up with as many outlandish explanations for things as possible – but apart from that everything is ticking along merrily – or if it’s not, and everything is falling apart in a horrible mess, it is at least having the common decency to do it out of sight, which is considerate.

However, it hasn’t all been sweetness and light with my telco. While they agreed to terminate my contract without charge, I have had the devil’s own fight trying to get them to hold up to their own end of the bargain – to wit, supplying a prepaid return envelope so that I can send my old phone back, which was part of the agreement. I finally flipped my lid and threatened to refer the whole matter to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman – the final arbiter of all things telecommunication in Australia, who have the authority to make binding decisions up to $40,000 in value (anything after that goes to the Federal Government). In doing this, I slapped a timeframe on it and stated quite explicitly that unless I got something resolved to my satisfaction by Friday afternoon that the next phone call would be to the TIO (which, rather considerately, are actually open till 5:30, so I could have slapped the complaint through right after the deadline expired).

I have never seen a telco cut it so fine while shitting itself –  barely 90 minutes before the deadline was due to expire, the phone rang, with an exasperated employee on the end looking to talk to the person who’d raised the complaint. I quickly identified myself to the telco’s satisfaction and we started talking about what I’d submitted, namely where the hell did they think I lived, and how long was it taking to fulfil a simple request? I finally got some news and was placated by the fact that it should be arriving early next week. Crucially, I managed to get authority to return the phone to a local store if all else goes to hell in a handcart. I am basically expecting that this is going to happen, but it would be nice to be surprised for once rather than constantly having to fight for every single step of the way.

I’d also been asked while my parents were visiting my sister in her new house to take the Ford Cortina for a spin – Dad purchased a 1981 Ford Cortina so that he could have a classic car to work with. Like most cars from the 1980s, it has neither air conditioning nor power steering, which means driving requires some actual effort. Nevertheless, I hopped in it and watched it stall as I tried to reverse it out of the driveway. This, rather annoyingly, was because it hadn’t been started in a few days. I am rather glad that most of our neighbours don’t know the car is actually automatic and that they are simply assuming I can’t drive a manual car. After I managed to get it started and keep it ticking over, I whisked over to the local hardware store to get a cord so I could hang a lamp shade from a normal light fitting.

This would obviously be a much shorter post if this trip had been easy. Despite this being a standard item at most hardware stores, there wasn’t any in sight, and since nobody even bothered moving even vaguely in my direction to see if I needed any assistance, I simply stalked back out of the store, dropped the Cortina off at home and picked up the Commodore, much to the frustration of the dog who thought I’d come home and was staying home instead of just blazing off in a different car (as I write this post, she’s sleeping contentedly at the foot of my bed, and is, for want of a better word, purring? It’s like a happy growl…). I shimmied my butt behind the steering wheel, and forgetting that my car drives nothing like the Cortina, swung the steering wheel hard right and put some pressure into the accelerator.

The end result, as you can probably guess, was a high speed U-turn from a standing start as the wheel shot round and the car leapt from its stationary position. Somewhere between getting out of the Cortina and into my car, I had obviously forgotten that while the Cortina has an accelerator with much the same responsiveness as a brick and a steering rack that will eventually give me arm muscles that don’t fit in my shirt, my own car has power steering and a much more sensitive accelerator. After I’d finished crapping myself, I set off to the next hardware store in town – a Bunnings – which our family usually frequents but normally has bad service. I toddled off to the requisite section, and much to my own annoyance, found exactly what I was looking for, and then ended up with two friendly people on the way out. This was unexpected, to say the least.

At least the story has a happy ending. I went home and fitted the light extension. It was of course too long – it was 70cm, which meant that the globe was hovering pretty much level with my nose – so I went off and, in betrayal of all good sense and design statements, cable tied the offending cable to a shorter length and then hid most of the offending cabling neatly within the light shade. Unless you stand directly underneath the light and look up, you’d never know – and it doesn’t show when the light is on. I amaze myself with my brilliance sometimes.

Perpetually Perambulating Dexter

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Violence“The backyard barbecue, it’s a holdover from the last Ice Age when food was scarce and men had to work together to take down such a large beast. Those who worked well with others survived and their genes have been passed down through the centuries until they landed here, in this… my community.” – Dexter Morgan

Yep, you guessed right and therefore know what’s coming: Tonight, on new, brain-disconnect affectation riddled Darkly Defending, I slither about while almost completely wet, why shouting “POWEEERRRRR!” is not much help if you are driving something with an engine capacity of 2L or less, and my bitter secret.

The beginning of this week has been taken up with helping my sister move house. Naturally, she is moving 350km away, so getting there by car is not exactly a wee trip to the shops and takes quite a long time. It also involves driving through the Blue Mountains, which are basically in a state of perpetual roadworks, so a 25km stretch that should, in theory take about 40 minutes to blast through, takes well over an hour and a half. This is not much of a problem, however, because once you finally leave the maze of safety cones and men supposedly at work, the speed limit rises sharply and it is a straight run for miles and miles, when you can really put your foot down (within acceptable limits, of course) and make up some of the lost time to arrive some time around the mid-afternoon.

While moving house was pretty easy – even though we did it ourselves with no delivery company or whatnot, all of whom wanted ridiculous amounts ranging up to $4,000 to move one person – and involved me building a bed from scratch without actually murdering myself due to generalised incompetence, and even correctly setting up a washing machine and fridge without electrocuting myself in the process, and adding to my DIY prowess by fixing a wonky table, and then rounding out the whole affair by committing serial murder on most insect life that dared cross the threshold – including beating the unholy crap out of a red back spider with a broom (in my defence, they are poisonous. In its defence, I had already poisoned it with the bug spray before I beat it to death, so it didn’t feel it).

I am beginning to think, however, that I am being unfairly  targeted by the weather. It started raining when we left, and despite me thinking that the rain would leave me alone at some point, it followed me for 350 kilometres. All the bloody way home. It is actually still raining now, as I’m writing this post, and guess what the forecast for the next bloody week is? That’s right, rain. It also doesn’t help when you have a truck which is going slowly up a hill and an overtaking lane opens up. What is certainly least helpful at this point is the fact that instead of a Holden Commodore, which has a 3.8L engine and can hustle when it needs to, is the fact that I was driving a Hyundai Getz, which has a 1.6L engine. What this translates to, is that if you are trying to overtake said truck, not only will you have to do it in second, causing the rev meter to climb alarmingly but industriously to the high 4′s to even start increasing speed rather than slowing down even further. What will also happen, if there is any traffic within about 300 miles of you, you will almost certainly be killed about 30 seconds after beginning your overtaking manoeuvre.

What will also happen at some point in your drive with bad weather being your constant friend? That’s right, it will wait until you’re trying to turn into quite a difficult intersection and then rain very heavily. I was attempting to join the Hume Highway, a major freeway which runs from Sydney to Melbourne, but the particular intersection I was doing this at involves crossing two lanes of oncoming traffic controlled by nothing at all to get to the freeway entrance. This is difficult enough in good weather, but when it’s hard to see in front of you it’s a complete bastard. Thankfully, I managed to get a large enough gap in traffic and then slithered onto the onramp. What didn’t help at this point are two major matters – firstly, the speed limit suddenly soars from 60km/h to 110km/h – again, no problem in a Commodore – and the rain is falling so thick and fast at this point that you can’t see a bloody thing. Add into the mix the fact that there are several people who have no idea of how the speed limit relates to them – i.e. they are doing about 70km/h on a major freeway – and trying to overtake in near-zero visibility becomes a hell of a lot of fun. Thankfully, I just took it safe, and using all of my mirrors, swung into the overtaking lane only when I could actually confirm it was empty, and managed to get all the way to my intended exit without causing a major accident.

Somewhere in all of this, however, is some good news. At some point over the last few days, I have gotten hooked on lemon, lime and bitters. I have found that it happens to keep my notoriously picky stomach happy – ironically, this is because Angostura bitters, the major component of the “bitters” – which is about 45% alcohol by weight, is actually quite a good antiemetic and anti nausea treatment – and no, you don’t glug it, you use about 5 or 6 drops per glass. This small amount is a good thing, since the bitters are about $20 per bottle and involve a trip to the bottle shop – but the rest of the ingredients are pretty damn cheap – it’s just lime cordial and lemonade/Solo/Lift (according to preference). It makes quite a good drink, is quick and simple to make, and most bars can make it. This was especially good when I was nomming my way merrily through an amazingly cheap pub lunch – $5 for a beef rissole with mashed potatoes, gravy and vegetables, and with a wee lemon, lime and bitters for something to drink, it’s not that bad when you can get lunch and something to drink for under $10.

Tempestuously Telephonic Dexter

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“Most people don’t have two rolls of duct tape, eighty yards of plastic sheeting and a surgical saw in their trunk.” –  Dexter Morgan

Alright, this is probably pushing it, but here we go: Tonight, on new, vaguely bouncing off the padded walls in search of reality Darkly Defending, I shout a lot with actual results, I sign over my iSoul for another iDevice on an iContract, the happy tale of the dock of POWWEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRR, and 178.216.51.17 adds to the permaban party.

As I posted previously, I was having a wee bit of a tiff with my erstwhile mobile telecom provider. There was much harrumphing at my end and much harrumphing at the other end when I received my first offer from my telco. It was bonus credit and a 2 month waiver on my account. This was a start, but as I pointed out to the company, bonus credit is a fat lot of good if there’s no coverage. Since the credit and the waiver added up to about $300, I tartly suggested that the $300 could be put to better use, i.e. by my telco waiving that same amount off the Early Termination Charge. There was some more harrumphing with Chez Darkly Defending going on hold for a bit, until I heard the words I wanted to hear in the very first place – if I returned the handset I had (a Nokia N8), my contract would be terminated and the early termination charge waived in its entirety. This is fantastic, because it means I don’t have to get rid of my old phone, and it also lets me walk away from a contract that isn’t offering what it says on the paper. All I need to do is wait for a return envelope and then it’s bye bye Mr. Phone.

While all of this was going on, I toddled my sizeable bulk down to Telstra and enquired as to the possibility of a contract with them. It is a little bit more expensive than the now-dead one, but it has the major advantages of (a) actually working and (b) having a somewhat better deal than the first contract at any rate. I had distant memories of signing up for my first contract and asking politely for a phone, along with much dithering. This time when I went in, dithering was there none with Telstra. I politely meeped my request for an iPhone and stated that it would be excellent if it was a black iPhone. There was a brief moment when they thought there were no black iPhones, and I had mentally prepared myself for a white iPhone on the grounds that a phone was better than no phone, but then one arose out of the midsts of Telstra’s stockroom. The next part involved me standing there trying not to look nervous as I handed over my driver’s license, passport, and enough information to Telstra for them to decide whether I could be lent money, or if I should be chased out of the store, preferably on fire.

Thankfully for my sanity and my desire to get a new telephone provider, Telstra decided I was trustworthy enough to be given an iPhone with only some light maiming, and within about twenty minutes of first going in there, my signature scrawled its fine looking self across the bottom of a contract committing me to the phone for 2 years, and I toddled out of the store with a new iPhone in hand. It has since performed bloody admirably, and there has not been one occasion where it has forgotten what phone service actually looks like. This looks like the start of a long and happy relationship, and if it stays that way it’ll be brilliant.

Of course, buying an iDevice meant checking to see if my existing peripherals and twattery would play nice with it. The iMac was a no brainer, and it played happily enough with its brother, but my old iPod dock which has happily supplied electricity and a sounding board to my iPod touch sadly didn’t work with the iPhone. This meant getting a dock that did, and my eye alighted on a Sony one. At $167 it wasn’t bloody cheap, but the iPhone settled in happily with many beeping noises and happily supped at the power. Since I’d loaded some songs onto it, it also did alarm duty, and while I went to work, the hussy of an iPod touch went and nommed the new dock’s power supply with no worries. Quite why my technology is so happy to whore itself out for a power supply, I’ll never know. At any rate, the poor iPod Touch will be lonely this week, thanks to the new kid on the block.

I’m helping my sister move this week, and since we will obviously need phones (along with the resurrected Uniden UHF radios) in order to communicate or ring to organise stuff, I’ve simply shoved a whole bunch of songs on the iPhone to take advantage of its iPod application. It works well, obviously, although I forgot I’d turned on sync via Wi-Fi for the phone, and nearly crapped myself when iTunes suddenly blazed up with a message saying that new carrier details were available. I wasn’t quite sure how it knew the iPhone was there, until it clicked, and then I was left feeling pretty stupid for a bit. After that, I decided to just plug it in properly so that I could transfer some stuff over – I know, I know, it was already syncing – but I also thought it might enjoy a little go on the power at the same time. Add to this convenience the fact that I no longer have to go searching for songs in an endless list and can tell the iPhone’s electronic wench to pick the song out and play it simply by name. I still find her electronic voice annoying, but I can see that it does have some fantastic applications.

The only annoying bit about all of this recent travelling? We went to Ikea, which was actually quite good and I didn’t feel a sudden urge to kill myself. I actually managed to buy something – this time, it’s a poster print for the wall which rather helpfully goes through fluid dynamics – I bought it simply because it looks science-y, but I didn’t realise until I got home that it was actually helpful. The annoying bit was that because it was hot, I had my right arm hanging out of the driver’s window, and managed to get an epic trucker’s sunburn down one arm. This would have been fine if it wasn’t for the fact the bloody thing hadn’t started peeling after I caught it an epic whack while loading the truck. Now half my arm is hanging off in an undignified manner, and to make it worse part of it is a lovely tan colour, part of it is the shiny and quite disturbingly pink of new skin underneath, and then my usual pasty-ass white skin right up the top. I look like bloody Neopolitan ice cream again. Dammit.