Ship Steering

6am is hell of a early to be up on a Sunday morning, but I’m up in any case. Sunday is basically the only day I have the opportunity to sleep in, so it’s rather annoying that my body clock has decided to wake me up. I lay around tossing and turning for a bit and couldn’t get back to sleep, rather than wasting my effort, I decided to do something a little productive and write in my daily journal.

The only problem is, I don’t know what to write about, there’s about a million things processing in my head at the moment, but none really worthy of being penned. Nothing is harder than trying to force something to happen when, well, it doesn’t want to happen. Whether it’s this blog entry, trying to fall back asleep or one of the many challenges that face you in life. I guess it’s sometimes a good philosophy to just go with the flow and see what happens. To accept that sometimes we are merely spectators watching a play unfold before us.

Sadly, the result of such an approach is that more often than not, not everything turns out the way we envisage it, however we just need to accept whatever the outcome and make the best of whatever situation arises. It’s really difficult and I’m still trying hard to find that balance as when to let things go and when to take control of the proverbial wheel and steer the ship on its course.

I believe that both are necessary, if we live our lives too candidly without regard of consequence, things quickly start to fall apart; however if we are too controlling we will most likely be dealt a harder hand in dissapointment.

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

The stupid hamster bit me. Luckily it didn’t draw blood, so at least I don’t need a Tetanus shot, but still, I feel betrayed. You raise the little critter, give it a home, then wham! It nibbles on your finger like an entrée!

Speaking of nibbling, woohoo for waffles, I had a Belgium waffle earlier from Gelato Mania with Kinder Joy gelato and Ferrero Rocher chocolate sauce. It could well have been the greatest (definitely sweetest) 10 minutes of my whole week.

Have you ever had that urge to get something off your chest, but you weren’t sure if it were the right thing to do or say? But if you didn’t you might completely regret it? I find myself in that predicament all too often and again, today, find myself wanting to do something that I’m not sure if I should.

I've always adopted the gung ho attitude of rather just get it over and done with but in past experience sometimes it's just better to let certain things slide on by, as often, instead of the result you expect it just opens up a whole can of worms…

Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

The trouble of waking up really early in the morning during a work day is that by midday it feels as if it should already be the end of the day. Technically you've spent more hours awake compared to if you had woken up later.

The only way I survive when that happens is by overdosing on coffee. So guess what, I'm already on my 5th or 6th cup today, I had to keep alert as I had some important meetings to attend. As a result my eye has developed a nervous twitch, I've got heart palpitations and I feel as if I'm having an out of body experience, but at least I've stayed awake and brought my A-game to the table.

The other problem with waking up ridiculously early is the fact that there is absolutely nothing to do, no one is awake and nothing is open. I sat there bored out of my mind staring at the wall, I even resorted keeping myself entertained with some work before the gym opened up its doors.

Abomination

I may be pregnant! Yeah, you heard right, at least all the evidence is pointing in that direction!

I'm not certain I know what's going on with my body at the moment, some have told me that it may be the after affects of the flu that I recently had. But lets look at the evidence as to why I've come to this damning conclusion: Firstly I've been experiencing quite a lot of heart burn and headaches as of late; and yesterday besides feeling incredibly hot; in the evening. before going to bed, I had a sudden craving for Spur Spare Ribs (the craving was particularly specific, it had to be Spare Ribs and it had to be from Spur). This morning I started feeling queezy. Not to mention the fact that I've never in my life menstruated - missing menstrual periods are another clear symptom of pregnancy.

Bar the fact that it's anatomically impossible for me, a male, to bear children, and the fact that I've been abstaining like a priest... I'm starting to believe that I may not be male at all but instead some abomination of nature, tending more toward the female species than my physicality would suggest.

Woman have been ignoring my manliness ever since I can remember and for some reason decide to have "men-bashing" or "baby-talk" sessions with me in plain sight, accepting me, almost as if I were one of their own. I'm not certain what it is that I project that would suggest that I would be interested in such feminine topics, but have concluded that it must be some hormonal imbalance in my mutant genetics that lull woman into a false sense of security. Also, just the other day a woman off the street approached me and asked : "Please Miss can I have some change?"

Whatever. Maybe I'm just being paranoid with an over-active imagination, but I'm a risk manager and at the moment I'm managing for the worst possible scenario. If I am indeed about to bear a child I'm thinking of the name... Jules, it's asexual enough to fit either a boy or a girl, if it is human at all of course...

Out the Box Thinking

So i got tired of playing the bubble game last night and decided I'd take some short cuts to beat everyone in our mini-competition. All one needed to do to validate their high score was to take a screen shot as proof of their achievement.

After a few hours wasting my time, I decided the game was frivolous and opened up my favourite image editing tool to up my score a bit. They called it cheating...I called it out the box thinking. Whatever. No rules were established upfront in any case - so if a screen grab was all we needed - I win.

Bubble Trouble

I fear that my daily blogs may become a thing of the past.

I received a game earlier, that may consume most of time in the near future. It's called Bubble Shooter and is highly, highly addictive. The concept of the game is really simple: you get different colour bubbles, and as the player, you aim and try to match up at least three bubbles of the same colour. When you do, they burst. The trick is to try to get a lot of bubbles in one go, you get more points that way; you can even try to isolate other colour bubbles and if they are, they burst too. Its along the same vein as Tetris, only better...

There is mini competition going amongst me and some of my friends, being uber competitive and geeky I will win, and win by a large margin. I wasn't one of PE's top Quake 3 players for nothing you know, and there is no ways I'm going to lose in some silly bubble game...gosh, who knew computer geeks had such big egos?

That's enough blogging. I have some winning to do.

Stunt Rat

Found a nice little surprise in my Inbox this morning, courtesy of my good friend Darryn. I received a couple of screen grabs, one of me getting killed and another of my name in the credit list from the movie (Tunnel Rats) that I was roped into (doing some stunts). It still hasn't come out in South Africa , so besides the trailor I have yet to see any scenes, let alone any scenes with me in it.

It's super sweet to finally get some evidence of my involvement, the experience was so surreal that after such a long time, it seems like only a faded dream. Remember, I'm a boring software developer by profession, so doing stunts for an action film is certainly not part of my day to day activities, only with Paul's expert guidance and training sessions was I able to pull it off.

As I recall Action Dan had a strange, if not misplaced confidence in my ability to play dead and decided to kill me off on a number of occasions. I remember in one particular take, I was killed not once but twice and somehow had to get shot, die, crawl out of the camera's line of view, have my makeup and costume adjusted; just to run back into picture and get killed again. Being killed so many times, the make-up and costume department did well to hide my ugly mug, but I think in one instance there is a semi-close up of my face where I'm actually recognizable (Look Ma! I'm on the silver screen!).

Working on set for the first time was a real eye opener, I felt like a kid again; absorbing new information and trying to take in as much as I could. Tristan, my roomie for the shooting of the film, and I tried to get involved in every area of stunting that we could: we helped out with rigging, performance and doing general errands. After a while we even got so used to handling the AK47s and M16s (assault rifles), we lead some of the training and demonstration sessions for the "new recruits" and in some cases even tested out a couple of rigs. I'm not even an adrenaline junkie, but in one of the tests they threw me out of a 15 m high tree...blind-folded!

Besides the amazing adventure, the cast and crew were all great and I've made some really amazing, life-long friends. I'd have to say that of all the things that I've ever done, doing this film ranks right up there with one of the coolest and most gratifying experiences of my life.