Ketchup

You know how you've got that friend that you meetup with at the same coffee place whenever you're in that part of town?  And how you don't really ever have them over for drinks, nor do you make it to their kid's birthday parties, but the invite is always there, and you always mean to but never really break that friend out of the box labelled "have a coffee at that place when I'm in that part of town"?

Yeah, this blog is like that.

I'm too old and not fiery enough to get ranty about shit on here, and when I try I fail because I just don't mean it enough.  If I'm feeling passionate about something, I post a link on here and then get off my ass and go and do something about it.

Or I build some armour.  Or I write a song.  Or I sit and play guitar all morning in the backyard sun.

When I write, I write in a place that really isn't read by anybody, and won't be until it's ready to all be tied together.

When I want to communicate something, anything, with the outside world, I use Facebook.  If I want to share pictures of my kids, I use my other site.

What do I do on here then?  I think I may have lost the plot a bit.

It just seems like too much work to try and get a piece of my writing polished and ready for public consumption.  Then, there's always the subject matter.  When you're anonymous and use codenames, you can write pretty candidly about just about anyone.  In today's web, there IS NO ANONYMITY and it makes it harder to do this.

What's all that mean?  It means that I can't talk about how funny it is that your boobs turn red so easily Nic.  Because then you'll read that and know that I'm talking about you.  Kind of ruins it.  Heh.

How's life in general then?

Pretty good.  I work too much, but if I don't then these weird pieces of paper I get in the mail keep coming and coming but turn redder and redder.  Crazy how that works.

My office has bare concrete floors because a lot of water messed them up and we haven't fixed them.

My toddler bounces around in this office a lot and loves The Wiggles.  We watch a fair bit of kid's shows around here.  We play a whole bunch too.

I play my guitars at least once a day.  I love it and I'm getting a lot better.  I can even write and perform an entire song all on my own.  Sometimes they kind of suck though.

I ride my bike, with the little trailer in the back for the Bug, around my shitty little suburb and I wave to my shirtless, tattooed, drunk-in-the-middle-of-the-day neighbours.  I actually love it here.  Home is where you make it.

My house is messy.  Kids and pets will do that unless you dedicate a fair bit of your day to cleaning up after them.  Answer this next question honestly: Who in the hell wants to do that?  Not me nor wife, I can tell you that.  We'd rather laugh and sing to music we like and make nice meals and talk about things in life that please us.  At the end of the day, that's a far more useful lesson to pass on to my children, I believe.

I play swords.  Every weekend.  It's actually at the point where I've accepted that I'm a carny, as in carnival folk, and what I do can pretty much be considered "theatre".  Oh dear.  Seeing it in writing makes me think that I'm not actually that accepting yet.  Especially considering the pain in my right hand I'm experiencing while typing that's a result of a sword blow.  I still like to think about the fact that we smash the fuck out of each other with swords, pretend play-acting or not.  I think I've always been meant for theatre, and while there are many that know me that would nod their heads in an obvious way right now, I don't think I actually knew this until recently.

My kid's can make life difficult, but I love them and wouldn't trade them.

Despite too much work, I love what I do and am going to actually change the world with what I am doing.  This excites me.

I miss some folks back in America, but not as much as I once did.  I miss some of them much more now than I once did.

My favourite radio station is the classical music station with the boring and stuffy sounding DJs.  Some of my favourite friends here in town are metalheads and blast music that makes my colon spastic, but I like it.

After almost 5 years of marriage, I still kiss my wife with passion at least once a day, I still look at her with genuine respect and appreciation once a day, and she still gives me wood at least once a day.

If nothing else, I enjoy dropping in and being completely candid on here, listing out sentences that need to be next to each other for a full picture yet in and of themselves they are all good indicators of my state of life and mind and happiness.

Now go find someone you love and tell them you love them for no reason other than it is a good thing to do.

Posted by JuddHole

This blog was the one that changed everything in my life, so it stands to reason that it continue to do so. I hope it starts with my underwear.

June-oh it’s been a while…

...when I make puns using the name of the month.  Haha.

Been a while since I caught up on here, so I'm thinking I'm a bit behind in getting some pics up and talking about life and such things.

I just posted a bunch of pictures that were on my Facebook only until now, from a visit to the Koala Park and now I'll catch you up on some things with some snaps of life and things.

I'd just gotten out of hospital for a compressed nerve between my L4 and L5... or something that sounds like that, I have no head for medicinally talk, and because I was so determined to make it out for wife's birthday (for shooting range awesomeness) they made me take a walker frame and a wheelchair.

And by "made me" I mean "I really couldn't move without them." Good times.

Last weekend, I was getting thrown around and stabbed in a roped-off arena in front of the Western Australia Museum for the "Day in Pompeii" exhibit.

Barely 3 months ago, I couldn't walk.

Interesting when you apply some perspective to things.

Wife showing off her photo edity skills. Since I dyed my hair for the World's Greatest Shave I've been enjoying life as a blonde. It's nice, though I did put dog food in the fish tank the other day...

I'm kidding.

So yeah, now we're BOTH blonde and it's pretty wild. Having never coloured my hair before (except for those stints in High School when I had a rattail and a semi-mohawk) I like feeling like the youthful sprite that I am.

Aside from hair-colouring fun, we had a rough go there for a while.  Most of 2010 thus far really.

First, my back did me in, then Mother Nature peed on all my stuff.

At the end of April, Damon lost a schoolmate. He was a good kid, I knew him from working in the school canteen (like a concession stand), my niece Imo knew him well from her class, and Dames played footy with him at lunches.

I'll give the short version and say it was a traffic accident, that hit our community, and our family, pretty hard, and we wanted to do something to send him off. I threw it around on Facebook but never really got anything organised other than buying a bunch of balloons and some cards. Wife's idea, and it was a beautiful one, to write little messages to Zak, tie them to a balloon, and let them go.

We went to a park near where he died and where his friends had been congregating after school and had our own little ceremony. Despite the fact that it has the potential to feel voyeuristic or wrong, wife and I both agreed that capturing some of these moments for posterity's sake would mean a lot to our children in the future.  Some things should be shared I think.

Below is Damon on top of the playground equipment in the park.

You can see that above Zak's mates, mostly 11 and 12-year old boys, expressed their condolences in the ways that they knew.

We needed that little sendoff. Though it isn't "goodbye", it's "'til we meet again".

Just some random shots from a random day. Sometimes these are the best little snippets into our life. I know I love these kinds of candid pics, and it doesn't hurt at all that wife is a very talented photographer.

My boy returning from school and being the doofycool kid that reminds me of a young me.

Smoove.

Jadeybug having a bounce. The weather's turned a bit and it's cold now until about midday, but when it's sunny and nice she LOVES being out there.

Sometimes herself is so SERIOUS. This kid thinks a lot, about pretty much everything.

I know what you're thinking and you're right, "She's getting so BIG." Crazy. I keep threatening to stop feeding her because of a lack of clothes that fit, but she insists on eating, so there you go.

Wife got a bug up her butt and decided to follow through on the threat she's been making for months, to lop all her hair off.

Well, not all of it, but she knocked quite a bit of it down and then had me finish up the edges in the back. I'm the straightest hairdresser I know. I also dig the fact that the best haircuts she gets are when we do it.

If only it worked that way with the kids...

Anyhoo, isn't she HOT?  I like that.  That my wife is HOT.

So there you have it.

There's Ups and there's Downs, and when another day draws to a close we find that we're still doin' alright.

Posted by JuddHole

This blog was the one that changed everything in my life, so it stands to reason that it continue to do so. I hope it starts with my underwear.