Author: Justin Page 24 of 65

Today I went to help out in the Kinderbeast’s class for the morning. He’d impressed his teacher a while back with photos of some geometric shapes he’d built out of his Cranium Super Fort building set, so we decided it would be fun to take it in one day, so his whole class could have a go.

Today was that day.

It also happened to be the day that one of the Kindy classes got to spend a morning as a pre-primary class, meaning that the Kinderbeast’s class ended up relocating to one of the kindy classes–which also happened to be same class (and teacher) that the Kinderbeast had last year. Confused yet?

The children did a drawing exercise to start off with, then split off into groups for different activities: one of which was building with the Super Fort. I ended up with a group of about six five-year-olds, most of whom got really into building with the toy, and wanted to build everything, and each of them wanted to build as many parts as possible. We managed to make a house, a castle and a boat before it was time to pack away, and even then the kids wanted to do as much of the packing away as they could. And managed to repeatedly thwack me in the face with the foam poles as they did so. Which was just …. fine.

After that I ran away back home.

This weekend I’ve watched two very different, but oddly similar, time travel stories. Next to horror, time travel is fast becoming my most-watched genre. Yes, it’s totally a genre. I’ve made a habit of trying to dig up Netflix curiosities to watch on a Sunday evening, and many of them seem to end up being time travel stories (maybe because it allows for interesting, grandiose sci-fi tales that can be told on a limited budget).

So, yesterday I began watching Dark, and this evening I watched The Man From The Future. Dark is a grim small-town drama that kicks off with a child murder or two and then gets seriously timey-wimey. The Man From The Future is a romantic comedy.

Yet, they have things in common. Both have a relatively small scope; encompassing a discrete set of main characters across two or more different times. Both have a central theme about about the past can not only affect the future, but how the future can affect the past. Both embrace the darker side of time travel, albeit with radically different takes.

And yes, both are also very enjoyable too.

I was expecting this to be a hugely stressful weekend. It’s one of my Kinderbesten weekends, which is fine. However, between them they have two birthday parties to attend this weekend–which means noise, socialising and leaving the house (three of my favourite things! Twice!! So … six???). I’ve also got to fit in the traditional Saturday morning weekly shop before the first birthday party happens. Finally, the Elderbeast is having his best friend sleep over on Saturday night. As I’ve probably written before, the best friend is a relatively excellent child BUUUT the noise levels when they get together are something else. I should really look into appropriate medication for it. Or headphones.

Anyway, as you’ll have gathered by the title of this post, it all turned out to be far less worse than expected. Shopping happened nice and quickly. The first party was a drop and run affair, which meant the Kinderbeast and I got some quality PlayStation time in together (which essentially translates to a Plants vs Zombies session in which he tells me what to do, and I generally fail to do it with any degree of success).

The Sleepover, later that day, was probably my most dreaded part of the weekend … but the beasts ended up spending most of the evening in their room playing on their Switches. It was so peaceful, in fact, that I was able to start watching the first couple of episodes of Dark on Netflix–which is definitely not the sort of show to watch when you have limited capacity to pay attention to it .

That just left the party on Sunday morning (yes, I’m actually writing about tomorrow right now, what’re you gonna do about it?) This party was in a park by the beach, which means it was not the sort of party I could slip away from (because I generally prefer it when the Kinderbesten don’t disappear into the wilderness). It was also late in the morning on a roasting hot day, meaning that everyone would be heading to the beach and there would probably be nowhere to park.

Yes, I will embrace the doom and gloom in the face of a child’s birthday party!

Furthermore, it being post-sleepover I also had to take the Kinderbeast and his friend along, with the inherent risk of them getting (even more) bored and whiny (than me). I will freely admit that I spent much of the morning wishing I had an excuse not to go, but fortunately I’m not (yet) evil enough of a parent to deprive my kids of some birthday party fun.

Parking was a mess, as expected. But we parked. The weather, in the best twist of the day, was almost perfect: it was hot, but the sky had clouded over (which meant there was no need to spend the whole morning hunting for shade) and there was an excellent breeze coming off the sea to keep the heat away. Furthermore, some genius had brought along a box of water pistols, which kept the kids entertained for a ridiculously long time. Even the Elderbeast and his friend managed to last the whole two hours without complaining once. Things got so okay that I even ended up being sociable: I started chatting to the mother of one of the Kinderbeast’s friends and found out that she feels much the same way about these parties as I do. A kindred spirit!

So, a weekend that I was partially dreading, but pushed ahead with anyway. And my reward? Everything was okay …

One of best things about watching a horror movie every single Friday evening is the opportunity it offers to stumble across previously unseen gems. So far, among the old favourites and classic choices, we’ve watched a handful of movies that had either slipped under my radar or that I just hadn’t gotten around to watching. Many of these come from ‘best horror movie’ type lists that I research every now and then, just to make sure that we have enough horror movie choices lined up.

Tonight’s movie was Raw, which had turned up on more than one of these lists. It’s questionable whether I would have even heard of it, let alone watched it, if it wasn’t for Horror Friday–which is (almost) a shame, because it’s a great movie. It’s very different style of film than most of our Friday viewing, which shows how versatile the horror genre is (when it tries). Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a good stalk’n’slash movie now and then, but I also love seeing what can happen when someone plays with horror tropes but is equally happy to leave the other genre markers at the door.

That’s what Raw is: a horror film that isn’t really a horror film. It has some impressively gory moments, but it relentlessly avoids any manifestation of the stalker-victim scenario. The closest analogy I can think of right now is George Romero’s Martin–the vampire movie that isn’t really a vampire movie, but is absolutely steeped in vampire [movie] lore.

So, in summary, if you want to watch a horror movie that isn’t really a horror movie, but is also relentlessly and undeniably a horror movie, check out Raw 🙂

Today I spent the whole day in training. These training days can go one of two ways: a complete waste of time, which finds me fighting to keep my eyes open by the end; or the chance to enjoy a break from the usual work routine and learn something new.

Fortunately, today was the latter. It was a small group, the training schedule was relatively informal and–most importantly–there was catering.

Definitely not a bad excuse to escape the office for a day 🙂

Today I’m starting to get a real sense of the end of the year looming.

Yesterday, the Elderbeast had his final PEAC session of the year, and today brought his final Mindfulness class. Next week the Kinderbesten both have their various Christmas assemblies and sing-song type affairs. Meanwhile, I have my ‘Christmas’ party at work on Friday.

Obviously, it’s not even December, and yet things are starting to wrap up. The campus has entered its seasonal Deathly Hush phase: exams are all done and the students disapparate. We’re talking about next year’s [work] projects as if this year’s projects are no longer a thing. There’s that conflicted sense of starting to wind down, while also trying to wrap up as much as you can in the remaining weeks of the year.

I’m beginning to stress, albeit very mildly, about how to keep the Kinderbesten occupied over the Christmas break. My mind is starting to occupy itself more and more with thoughts of how to manage the logistics of Christmas and New Year.

On the positive side, the beasts are dead excited about opening the first window on their LEGO advent calendar on Friday. I’m even more dead excited about being able to start on the mince pies (I have a personal rule that I never eat mince pies before December 1). I’m also looking forward to the break from work, and the chance that it offers to rest and reset–and do all the seasonal fun stuff too.

So, Christmas: bring it!

Today was one of those days where everything just took too long.

Most of the day went okay. Most …

Then I had a 30 minute meeting, that should have probably only been ten minutes, that ended up taking an hour. After that, I had answer some emails, before rushing home as we had a deployment scheduled for 5pm and I needed to be ready to do some post-deployment testing. Naturally, the deployment was delayed and took place an hour later than scheduled, which delayed the testing which took longer than expected anyway because things weren’t quite right.

At the end of it all I was exhausted. It was like the last hour of my working day had ended up taking four hours–which it pretty much had.

So, a cool thing happened today. I was working on the story I wrote about earlier this month, and making some of the changes I wrote about making, and I realised I was having a pretty good time doing it.

The changes seem to be pushing the story in the right direction, and for the first time in a few weeks I felt like I wasn’t simply writing for the sake of writing: I was writing something that might possibly end up worth reading.

I’m sure it’ll take me many more weeks to maintain sufficient motivation and enthusiasm to get this one over the finishing line, but it’s good to know that the spark is still in there somewhere.

This weekend I made a conscious decision to keep the weekend entirely to myself. I did my food shopping after work on Friday, enjoyed the rest of the evening with my Friday Horror companion, then did some brief Christmas shopping on Saturday morning … and that was it. For the rest of the weekend I stayed at home enjoying my own company.

I had a couple of reasons for doing this. Firstly, I’d been wanting to have a #childfree weekend completely to myself for a few months now, but there was always too much fun stuff happening. Secondly, I was in need of some time without any background noise, or the stress of having to be at particular places at particular times. In fact, now that I think of it, I have a thirdly as well: namely a few niggling odd jobs that I wanted to get out of the way without having to worry about running out of time.

My running theory was that I would get intensely bored and, having had this mythical complete weekend to myself, would quickly decide that I never wanted to do it again. Except it didn’t quite happen that way. What did happen was that I had enough to time to get almost all of my to do list done and spend a whole bunch of time sitting on the sofa watching TV. And, when I wasn’t doing that, I was eating lots and lots of delicious food.

Pretty good, all in all–and a much needed couple of days that allowed me to reconnect with that whole ‘quality of life’ business. I watched some things that I really, really enjoyed. I made my house a marginally better place to live in, with a bit of strategic cleaning and tidying. I also treated myself to some good food. That’s not a bad couple of days 🙂

This weekend I took a break from my typically genre based viewing and went all in on the western front. Yes, I know ‘western’ is a genre: shut up.

I’d been reading about a new Netflix show called Godless that sounded pretty darned good, and with it being only 6 or so episodes long I saw a chance to binge the whole thing over the weekend . Of course, I didn’t realise until I got started that each episode was abut 70 minutes long, but I got halfway in and got thoroughly hooked.

I’d also treated myself to a couple of new blu-rays in a 2 for $20 deal: Tombstone (which I’ve only seen once, but loved and have meant to add to my collection for a while now) and Heat (another film I’ve wanted to rewatch for a while). For my Saturday evening viewing I initially chose Heat, but switched it out at the last moment in favour of Tombstone, which seemed a more appropriately themed choice. It was definitely the right decision: Tombstone has so many great lines and great moments, plus a career-best performance from Val Kilmer, and I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it.

There’s also a difference between Heat and Tombstone which swung my choice. Tombstone has a rich vein of humour and ‘spirit’ running through it; it’s a film that takes absolute joy in the story that it’s telling. Heat, conversely, is a relatively cold and passionless affair–not necessarily the thing you want for a Saturday night.

(For the record, I did find time to settle down in front of Heat on Sunday afternoon – and also thoroughly enjoyed it).