Musings

Did you know that in Queensland, the sun rises at 4.15am during the summer?
I’m sitting here at about 7.30am and the sun is as high in the sky as it normally is at about 10am in Perth.
I’m here because my grandma passed away on the weekend.
My parents offered to pay to fly me over for the funeral, and since then, I’ve found out I will be delivering a eulogy and will also be a pallbearer.

I’ve never really had to deal with death in my family before. I’ve been pretty lucky in that respect. As you guy know, grandma’s death was expected. That doesn’t really make it any easier. I was okay when I was in Perth, but once I got on the plane and started to get closer to Brisbane, it started to hit home. This would be the first trip I had made to Brisbane without seeing grandma.

I guess the thing that has hit home for me is that death is so… permanent.
Meeting up with family I haven’t seen in ages has been great, but reminiscing about grandma just makes me sad. No longer will I be enveloped in those big, warm grandmotherly hugs. No longer will I be able to walk up the back steps of the house on Long Street, through the sleepout and into the kitchen that always smelled fantastic.
No longer will I be able to have thick slabs of bread with lemon butter, surrounded by Tupperware containers that are older than I am.
But she’s in a better place now.
And I’m here to celebrate her life, for want of a better cliché, with my family. That’s the important part.

Seasons Bleatings

It's that time of year again!

Every year, I fail to get swept up in the pre-Christmas hysteria. Usually it's not until a couple of weeks before Christmas that I actually click and think "it's Christmas!"

Usually it's one event that sets me off.

Today, I was standing out the front of my house waiting to be picked up and a bus went past that was driven by Father Christmas.

He turned, looked at me standing over the other side of the road and we waved at each other.

This set me off like a giddy little child.

I'm not embarrassed to say I get excited at these times of the year. Christmas, Big Day Out and, to a lesser extent, Easter make me feel like a little kid again.

I love it. Get excited people :)

Bad bad bad

Now that I'm living in a house with cable television, I find myself searching for the best movies to record and watch at my convenience.
My search for the best movies, however, has seen me neglect my other favourite movie pasttime - watching really bad movies.
So it was purely by chance I happened upon a movie the other night called Renegade Justice. It was made in 2007. It stars Steven Seagal.

Now, I'm having trouble conveying just how bad this movie really was. I'm talking uber bad. I'm talking so bad I was genuinely laughing at the cheesiness and predictability of it all.

Here's the plot - Steven Seagal plays some sort of martial arts expert (of course) whose son, a policeman, is killed in an apprently random gang-related killing. So he goes into the heart of gangland, wherever that is, and kills everyone in his way.
My favourite scene, however, was when he was telling the token love interest about how much his son meant to him. All of a sudden, this a capella voice starts singing over the top of Seagal (think the final scene where Russell Crowe dies in Gladiator). The viewer is then subjected to a montage of black and white mocked up photographs of Steven Seagal with his son as a kid, a teenager then finally, as a young man.

It was soooo bad. So bad I loved it.

End of Year Report Card for the Liberal Party

Ability to perform as an effective opposition FAIL

• Able to give constructive criticism D-
• Able to offer good alternative government E
• Able to make ground in polls F
• Able to unite party behind leader D
• Able to make PM and Wayne Swan look bad F