It's amazing how much of your life you can find in Microsoft Outlook.

From a draft email, first saved April 7 2008.
Words that are Awesome

Chaos
Disciple
Mimisis
Big Ideas
Blind
Hegemony
Occam's Razor
saccharine
niceties
nicked
defecated masonry
intrinsic
Figurehead
Kowtow
Rodentine
Cerebellum
Subvert
Plunder
Andragogy
Mollify
Brutism
Penumbra (partial/half shadow)
Trope (using words in non-literal ways/a metaphor)
archipelago (collection of islands)
Dystopian (opposite of utopia - pure hell)
Autoclave (pressure cooker)
Surfeit (noun or verb, satiate)
Autonomous (not controlled by others)
Shibboleth (a characteristic of pronunciation that reveals characteristics of a person)
restive - restless, but not caused by boredom - caused by repression
microcosm - a smaller symbolism of an object within an object
Pathology
Homophony - sounds the same but is different
Sartorial - of or relating to a tailor
(showed) Consternation - paralyzing fear
Mulligans - a do-over at something you should have been able to do first time, but for some reason didn't.
archetype - a base model that a chartacter is inspired by.
Providence - luck from God/divine intervention

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For even more fun, read through my 2008 entries and Facebook status updates from April onward and try and spot how many times I used one of these words.

By the way, if anyone knows how to save a whole Outlook mail folder into traversable HTML, please let me know before July 14.

We went for a drive in the Blue Mountains today to scope out a potential wedding venue. Afterwards we drove up Mount Tomah to gander and take some photos. The visitor's centre had a lookout so I braved freezing winds to take a panorama.

I was woken at 0630 this morning by the daily whinging of the rebooted HLT142VMI00A for last time. After two weeks of talking fast into a mobile phone I have almost all my client handover done. All that I really have left to do this week is enter my final timesheet entries, hand in my laptop and write a meaningful farewell email to BCC to everyone I can remember working with or for in the past five and a half years.
Friday is my official last day, and I have two weeks to rest, reflect and prepare for what should be a glorious and brutal return to office life.

Working purely from home the past six months has had many pros and cons. I have developed an addiction to preparing thickly stacked sandwiches for lunch each day; monstrous, appetizing structures free from the deforming of a morning spent shrink-wrapped. I think I will miss that the most. Con: the only way I'm getting a goodbye cake is if the postman can squeeze it inside our narrow, unforgiving mailbox. Assuming someone posted me one.

Pro: I'll have more interactions with other people. Con: I'll have more interactions with other people.

Lesson's learned from being a teleworker: try and fit a walk in everyday, don't grow a moustache, don't eat cereal for every meal of the day no matter how tempting it is, claim random things on tax, try and do at least two walks on the days you eat five bowls of cereal.

Yesterday's themes of reflecting on the past, and thinking about sandwiches, reminded me of this. I don't think it needs any further explanation..

I spent the past few weeks making myself redundant. Now I can enjoy two weeks of time off before my position on the training hierarchy becomes polarised.

One of the first things I did with my free time was read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It covered several things that I am currently interested in when reading fiction: social commentary, fourth wall breaking and main characters who slowly go insane. I enjoyed it. And because I had no work to get back to after I finished reading it I decided to indulge in some tracing to work out why I actually read it.

Vonnegut has been recommended for decades. It was only recently I decided to find one of his books, after hearing him referenced on a track by Baltimore rapper E-Dubble. I first discovered E-Dubble's talents after he posted a freestyle over a remixed version of the Parks and Recreation soundtrack, which I only watched after it was posted in a thread about Parks and Recreation on the Something Awful forums. I was reading that thread because I'd just watched two straight seasons of Parks and Recreations in about three weeks. I started watching Parks and Recreations because it appeared on a few people's "TV Shows" list on Facebook, and they also had The Office and Arrested Development alongside it. Arrested Development is close to my favourite TV show. I discovered it when another thread on the Something Awful forums advertised that it was good the day it started on Australian TV in 2004. I originally signed up for the Something Awful forums for the files, not for TV Show recommendations, but that has been a welcome bonus. I found out about Something Awful's files from a member of another forum which was mainly about the computer game Age of Empires II: Age of Kings. This is going back a while now, but I think I first started reading that forum to try and find strategies to help me beat Ballard at Age of Kings when we played against each other back in high school. I first became an Age of Empires player when Josh's family bought a new computer somewhere around 1997 and it came packaged with it. I became friends with Josh after my parents and his parents started spending a lot of time together after we were born.

That was fun. I think the internet is really working hard on the way it's able to recommend and suggest new forms of entertainment or new directions for life. However, I think once you dig deep enough everything in my life can be traced back to either Josh or high school.

Vicks First Defence Micro-Gel Nasal Sprays are the bomb. You pay $8 and shove it up your nose four times a day and it stops you from catching a cold. I've bought a new spray every week this Winter since May and only caught a cold once. That's an outstanding success rate. What an excellent product! It's definitely something I'd prefer having to money.

Yesterday morning I was playing some 2 versus 2 in Starcraft. Halfway through the game my ally dropped out, leaving me outnumbered and outgunned. Unlike every other time this situation has occurred I went on to win the match and felt like the greatest video game strategist in the world. I couldn't wait for Vanessa to arrive home from work so I could tell her about my awesome victory. Then I thought it would perhaps be a little sad that the best thing I achieved on my day off was to win a game of Starcraft. Even if the amount of rain this week has justified spending the whole time inside. So, instead of celebrating with a massive sandwich I jumped in the car and drove to the nearest Bunnings Warehouse so I could complete as many lifehacks as possible to regale her with that night.

The first thing I did was buy two wooden, decorative corner pieces. They were about the size of a drinks coaster but about four inches thick and each had a gorgeous, carved spiral on the face. I am using them to prop up the fridge where the front wheels bent in.

I didn't do this one yesterday, but when we first moved into this house the tap fixture for the washing machine was so close to the wall that I couldn't attach the hose because the rubber grips on the end of the hose were being blocked by the wall. Instead of spending $30 on a new hose and connectors I spent $10 on a lifehacksaw and sawed back the grips, giving it a narrow enough diameter to reach the top of the spigot.

I also bought a door mat for the backdoor which I didn't do anything special with or to, but it only cost $3 so I thought it was worth a mention.

My favourite piece of minor household maintenance, however, was the addition of the mount for my phone I installed on the side of my bedside chest of draws. This one took a little bit of preparation as I had to buy a car mount with suction pad for my Galaxy, and then remove just the housing. After that I bought some screws at Bunnings, discovered a few things about drilling, and ended up with this:

Hello, new alarm clock!

North Sydney:

Click for Big:

Lens Distortion, Scooters