Soon, I Turn a Quarter of a Century ...

... the clock is ticking.

Dancing in the Dark

So I'm home alone, in the middle of making dinner with Futurama on the TV and clothes in the washing machine, when suddenly BAM, the power goes out!

We're not very emergency-minded here in the ol' Henry house, so we don't really have any easily accessible torches or disaster candles or whatever. Luckily for me, however, Ben had recently decided to romantic up the living room a bit, so there were tea lights aplenty. I use my mobile to find the matches and the candles and pretty soon I'm soft-lit in catastrophe wonderland.

Given that the oven is gas-powered, that meant I could finish making the pizza I was putting together for dinner. I slid that in the oven and went about finding ways of occupying myself. There wasn't enough candle light to read, and there was no one to talk to, so I immediately started text messaging.

There were no power outtages where Simone was, Ben was in the city so there was power aplenty, and Li-Kim was busy making date muffins down the other end of the street (but not before reminding me that the last time we had a blackout it was because a possum had fried itself on one of the local transformers - just tried to find this on either Ben or Li-Kim's blogs, and came up empty. Damn!).

The pizza heated up pretty quickly, and after I ate it I was once again left with nothing to do. Remembering that my iRiver was fully charged, I ventured into my bedroom, candles in hand, to find it.

It's not too long before I have the perfect set-up - caramello chocolate, bottle of water, soft candelight and my iRiver playing blackout appropriate tunes, tucked up in bed with brand new flanelet sheets (!). It was almost disappointing when the lights finally came back on.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

And as a special gift, please accept this image of the dad from Arthur icing a birthday cake!

How appropriate!

I Have Been a Bad Blogger.

There's no denying it. All I can say is I've been very busy and let's agree to leave it at that.

No, there's no use singing Cat's in the Cradle at me, it won't work! I won't feel guilty! I refuse!

When am I coming home? I don't know when! We'll get together then, though, I know we'll have a good time then.

BIG Day!

Just quickly, and in no particular order -

1) Mum's birthday

2) Simone's and my 5 month anniversay

3) PK's last day! (check out PK's blog here)[It's also the last day of Simone's work friend, Bee]

Like I said, a biiiiiig day!

Happy Mother's Day, Mum!

Yes, I'm also going to call her, but in the meantime I wanted to take this opportunity to "Mum, thank you for everything, I love you very much, and I hope you have a great day!"

PK: A Glowing Tribute

No, not the gum.

With the URL for my blog bookmarked in their web browsers, apparently both my boss (aka PK, aka Paul) and my co-worker (aka Corey, aka Good Ol' Country Boy, aka the guy who is married and is younger than me) took the opportunity to go through my tawdry Internet scrawlings.

I just got off the phone with Paul, and through the course of the conversation, he accused me of having a crush on Corey. Apparently if you mention a guy twice in your blog, you're suddenly secretly in love with him. I mean, I do have that shrine to Corey made out of all his used coffee cups, but you don't know about that, Paul!

In any case, Paul seemed a little hurt that the only time he was referred to in the blog was in the capacity of being "the boss", so I made a promise to post a glowing tribute to him. In my ever-growing attempts to be a man of my word, here is that promised tribute.

I got hired at My Place of Business while Paul was away hot-air ballooning in the wilds of Africa. Yes, he's that sophisticated and interesting. Upon his return, he must have at some stage noticed the sickly looking boy hugging the walls while delivering the mail, and rather than call security, he deduced that I was the new office assistant.

Paul and I started to gel after, having had a few upsets in my personal life, he was kind enough to stay back, drink some wine and lend a supportive ear. If ever you're in the middle of a crisis, the guy you want to be there is Paul.

After that, I got a few invites to lunch and some subsequent shopping trips, and the ball started rolling from there. A few months after we moved offices, and I had been taking on an increasing number of responsibilities in the marketing department, Paul had me moved from my corner of the office into his (which apparently involved a bit of fighting behind closed boardroom doors, as this move involved my transferring of departments. I didn't know about this until months later).

From there, I've taken on more and more marketing responsibilties, to the point now where I feel like I'm actually doing some pretty important work for the company, and I actually know what I'm talking about.

Paul attributes my asking Simone out to the confidence I developed as part of the marketing team, and I wouldn't say he's wrong.

Now, you might all think I'm being a kiss arse by posting a wordy tribute to my boss five minutes after he's found out about my blog, but the thing of it is that he's just accepted a position with another company overseas and is going to be leaving at the end of the month. And the fact is, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank a friend - a great friend - for all he's done for me.

Paul is the best boss I've ever had, because he's far more than a boss. He's a mentor, he's a counsellor, he's a style consultant, he's a foul-mouthed schoolmate, and he's a brother. And he's one of my best friends.

Oh, and I accidentally said his team was the Cats. He actually goes for the Bombers.
But from the game I saw, he'd have been better off going for the Cats.

Paul, PK, boss ... I'm going to miss you.

Now how's that for a tribute?

As Promised, A Photo From the Wedding

As I mentioned between ceremony and reception, last week was Simone's cousin's wedding, where Simone was a bride's maid and I was the fortunate shlub who got invited to have his photo taken with a beautiful girl and eat a free meal.

I bought a new suit for the occassion. Turns out clothes do not make the man.

This is the second wedding we've been to this year, with another one coming up in October. You know what that means, don't you?

Yes. Lots of cake. Lots of it.

I Just Told a Little White Lie ...

I just posted about how I didn't have any photos showing off the beauty of the place we stayed in Sorrento. And then I remembered that I did have some photos showing off the beauty of the place we stayed in Sorrento.

I won't post too many, as the house they were taken in isn't mine (and I've just learnt a valuable lesson about blogging about people when they don't know it), but just FYI, here's the view we had from the room we stayed in.

That blue mass? That's the ocean.

Pretty sweet, huh?

Sweet Sorrento Moon

Just to let you all know, the stay in Sorrento was awesome. We stayed at a friend of Simone's place, which was pretty much a luxury compound, with a 180 degree view of the coast, many bedrooms, an elevator, and some really awesome kittens I took a total shine to you.

Anyways, I figured I'd post the photos that Simone would find the least objectionable. This is me, crawling through the cavity in the coffee table in the middle of the living room.



Once I did it, it seemed to set off some sort of masculinity challenge, as all the other guys present shot up to see who could get the best time, while all the girls sat around wondering how they'd managed to hook up with such complete idiots.

Then we played Jenga. It was awesome.

I went back to Sorrento today with Dad and Sue as a bit of a field trip, and they absolutely loved the place. It really is very beautiful. Not that you'd be able to tell from my red-faced photos, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.