» Impulse buys

I bought a new life..
A couple of years ago, I bought tickets to a music festival in California. A little pricey at $250US, but it was Rage Against the Machine's first live show in around seven years.
Only problem is I live in Australia...
So $250 quickly turned into another couple of grand for a plane ticket, $150 for a passport application and another $50 for a copy of my birth certificate so that I could even get the passport. Oh, and travel insurance, taking time off work etc etc.
In the end, I did what any intelligent person would do. I quit my job, applied for a Canadian work permit (amazingly, the cheapest part of the whole ordeal!) and moved to Vancouver after the festival.
Since then I've seen most of North America and have just got back to Australia after spending six months in Europe. I plan to see more of Europe next year with my girlfriend, an American who I met at Disneyland in LA and now live with in Melbourne.

Best $250 I ever spent. I meant the ticket. Not my girlfriend.
(Mon 25th May 2009, 7:58, More)

» DIY Techno-hacks

My grandpa..
My Grandpa is the king of these stories..
He once bought a full set of snooker balls from a charity shop - just because it was a bargain.
Of course, he didn't have a snooker table, so what to do? Simple - he built one out of an old bed base, a blanket, a couple of old garden hoses for the sides and a pair of my gran's tights cut up and tied for the pockets.
Christmas at my Grandpa's was much more fun after that. If only he'd found a full set of beer glasses and decided to build a pub as well..
(Fri 21st Aug 2009, 1:15, More)

» Workplace Boredom

I work in a kitchen..
Actually, with a fairly impressively titled - if low paid - position. Being a chef in a fine-dining restaurant is like being in the army - you spend most of your time bored shitless doing mundane tasks and a small percentage of your time frantic, run off your feet, being yelled and and highly stressed out.
It's during the quiet times that plenty of fun and dangerous games have been invented to pass the time. They include:

Spraying cooking spray into your hand, lighting it on fire and throwing it at unsuspecting kitchen-hands and waitresses.

Battering and deep-frying various edible and inedible objects to see what happens. FYI, battered marshmallows are to die for, battered sugarcubes don't turn into toffee, and battered icecubes spit oil at you and cause severe burns.

Creating fireballs by heating oil in a skillet for a good 20 minutes, until you get some nice blue flames, dropping it in the sink and spraying it with water. There are clips on youtube which I can't be bothered to look up..

And recently, finding a believable excuse to be outside for a minute and then returning with a couple of snowballs to throw across the kitchen.

Also, regular 'safety meetings' which usually involve going outside for a smoke or sneaking tequilla shots from the bar.
(Sun 11th Jan 2009, 1:02, More)

» I'm going to Hell...

I'm going to hell..
..because when my friends and I were about 13-14ish, we realised that the Giddeon bible pages made excellent papers for rolling spliffs.

On a side-note, I stayed in a horrid backpackers hostel in North-West London when I first got to England, and the window in the room was being held open by a bible. To make ammends for my earlier sins, I replaced the bible with a copy of Angels and Demons that I found in the lounge, and left the bible in the bar..


First post! Hurruh!
(Thu 11th Dec 2008, 14:12, More)

» Drugs

One new years..
Myself and a bunch of mates had an awesome holiday house for 5 days or so, which we spent drinking huge amounts of beer and doing any and all drugs we could find..
One night, my best friend and I got pretty fucked up on ketamine, whilst sitting in a couple of inflatable boats on the lawn. Everyone else had gone to bed (read; greened out, passed out, mildly ODd..) so we were left to let our dug-addled minds wander. Somehow that night we decided that we'd sailed to mexico and back, and taken photos the whole way.
Coming down the next day, we showed all the photos to the rest of the group, most of which were of us laying on the lawn making funny faces, but one was of both of us in our boats, taken from the upstairs balcony. It took another couple of days until we had all got out heads straight until somebody asked; 'So wait, if you guys were the only ones up, who took this photo?'.

We never did work out who it was..
(Thu 16th Sep 2010, 14:16, More)