New years Eve, and it's really, really hot here in Melbourne. I think it's about 39 degrees currently, and set to hit 41 before it gets any cooler. Off to Mike's place for new years tonight, and I've made some of my second-favourite lemonade (the first being from the Falafel House in Paris) and a whole bunch of hummus, which is always good.

In other news, Mike Lee - the self confessed world's toughest programmer - is doing his bit to save the lemur. You can learn more about it at the Club Thievey page.

In the end, the Romanian diaries are too depressingly impulsive to post here. So in short, here's where I'm currently at:

I'm touring Spain and France with a Romanian concert orchestra (aptly known as the Symphony Orchestra of Mediterranean Europe). There's three of us non-Romanians on the tour, but as the rehearsals and general banter is in Romanian, we're learning fast (I can already count to 10). We are travelling stupid distances back and across Spain, and virtually live on the bus. The places we stay are far from glamorous, and are generally in the middle of nowhere - on the outskirts of any city which we see from the bus, then play in, then leave. We're given two meals a day (apparently dinner is not necessary for these people) but aside from that, the atmosphere is generally nice and the whole thing is at least interesting - occasionally even fun!

It's certainly opened my eyes as to how spoiled I've been touring with JMWO, but at least at the end of this I will be duly paid for it, which is neat.

Mike and I went surfing down at Jan Juc yesterday. Since he's now got roof racks we could take the boards (rather than the body boards as we usually do), it was great to get back in the water and back standing up on a big chunk of fiberglass. I was fine on Bruce's 8'6" mal, but found my old 6'8" a bit wobbly in the water - it wasn't even big enough for Mike to ride at all.

It's getting hot now, high thirties today and up to 41 for new years eve.

It's damn slow but by god it's good.

I will post the Romanian diaries when I have returned from the concert tonight. Once again we are in the middle of fucking nowhere and have to travel yet another hour at least for the rehearsals and concerts....

But as Gruff Rhys says, this is just the beginning.

Since I'm a sucker for new technology - and since I've just written some myself - I had to actually add some photos. So I've put up some shots of me at Bruce's 60th a week or so ago. This really is just me at the party, for a broader spectrum you'll have to check out Thea's flickr site. I'm not going to advertise it for her, since she's already been using my new comment system for exactly that.

I just heard from Mike, who has passed his supplementary exam and has therefore finished his Engineering degree. So congratulations - time to get a real job.

I hadn't mentioned, I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson on the way from Spain. It's brilliant - possibly now my favourite bits of cyberpunk fiction. It really makes me want to (1) learn Kendo, (2) become a better hacker & (3) write something as cool as The Metaverse.

On the subject of fiction, Bruce Schneier linked to this short story, which I thought was very clever.

As you should have noticed by now, there have been some changes made by the Occasionally Human development team. Elisse has been carrying on about wanting comments on images for ages now - and allowing people to comment on posts has always been something we've wanted. Well now we have both!

This is mostly thanks to me getting home at about 11:30 last night and deciding it was a perfect time to do some web work. I wrote almost all the image stuff last night, then cleaned it up and rewrote the posts (with added comments) section today. It's not all done - most noticeably the hayden, elisse and miscellaneous sections haven't been updated yet, but that's for another day, maybe tomorrow.

Hope you all enjoy.

Yeah. I'm in Australia. I arrived last Wednesday (5th).

We had a whole elaborate secret plot - basically involving me getting back to Australia to surprise Bruce for his birthday. To this end only three people knew I was coming back. Thea (who also provided financial backing for 'the job'), Grandma (who many believe is the true master-mind of the 'outfit' in question) and Mike (the driver, who's position on 'the team' was vetoed at the last minute by higher powers). Of course Elisse (our European agent) also knew.

All in all it went well - I got to arrive home with Bruce completely unawares and then announce my presence with a wise crack about Bruce falling asleep in front of a 20 year old game of cricket.

I don't believe in long posts - so more on what I've been doing shortly. I also just realised that this web log is still set to BST - which is no longer relevant.

We were 3 Catalans that lived in Milan for a year, one Catalan boyfriend, one Austrian that studied in Milan with the girls and myself. And what a great time we had! Speaking in a mix - probably quite evenly split - between Castellano, Catalan, Italian and English, and everyone understood everyone and had a great time.
I'm not getting enough time to myself to be miserable about missing Hayden! I haven't even spoken to Victoria about it! And for once I'm loving being such a social bee - it's great for the language and the people here make everything so fun. I was half tempted to write this post in Spanish ...maybe next time I will.

So in short, things are super, thanks for asking!