/karen/

When I see you smile ...

Friday, 18 April, 2008

Sunday 6/4/08

Ben was up early to go hear his brother preach at our old old church. I needed a rest so I stayed home and slept in. The rest of the day was spent doing laundry, ironing and dealing with various computer-y things. Ben made risoni for lunch. I really needed to get into the knitting though—I was making this scarf for Bec and I wanted to finish it before she left for Paris on Sunday. So in the late afternoon, I finally sat down with Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 7 and got some serious knitting done. By the time church rolled around, I had two episodes of the series to go.

I went to church, stayed to help clean up afterwards, then came home and got stuck into some work for C.S. Lewis Today, and ended up going to bed way too late.

Monday 7/4/08

Back at work, I got stuck into Briefing assessing. I met up with Elsie to read the Bible (Ezekiel) and pray. Our Briefing meeting in the afternoon was postponed because certain key people were away. Then in the mid-afternoon, Toby messaged me and said he had extra tickets for So You Think You Can Dance? that evening and did I want to go? Well, Bec and I had already arranged to go several weeks ago, and Toby has gotten us tickets, but extra ones opened up further possibilities. Anna couldn't make it (and was fuming about it) but Jess G could so we arranged things transport-wise with Bec, and then I elft at 4:15 to avoid the traffic and hang by myself for a bit in Newtown.

When I got out of my car, I noticed Bec had called several times so I called her back. She said she was feeling sick but would drop Jess off and then go. That was a shame! I wondered who else I could ask, and then thought of Crystal who, not only was a big fan of the show, but lived close enough for it to be convenient for her.

I went to Champion Textiles looking for yarn for my bag (they didn't have any either), wandered around Goulds for a bit and then picked up dinner from Urban Bites (they have a $10 pasta/risotto special Monday to Thursday, 4 pm to 7 pm) and a small bottle of water from the local supermarket. Crystal messaged back an affirmative wild-horses-couldn't-keep-me-away “Yes!” I started walking down towards the Carriageworks. Jess rang to say she was there and where was I? “I'm on my way,” I said. I had to wrap my cardigan around the food because it was so hot.

I met Jess just outside the entrance and we went in and were told to take a seat in the café area because the people who were giving out the VIP wristbands hadn't come out yet. I'd never been to the Carriageworks before; it's certainly a very cool place!

We ate our dinner hastily (but enjoyed every minute of it)! Finally two women set up a table to give out the VIP wristbands, crossing off our names. We picked up one for Crystal and waited for her. She showed up while I was using the amenities but fortunately Jess had my phone so she wasn't left hanging.

We still had a bit of time, so Crystal got herself a drink and bought us cookies. Then we headed in—through a different door to the hoi polloi because we had seats. The set was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but Toby says that's because they use wide-angle lenses. One of the security people in black (he was a lot more stressed than the security people outside who were very nice and helpful) asked me where we'd gotten our tickets from and seated us in the area with Fremantle Media Australia people (whatever that meant). So we were seated on the far right hand side facing the stage three rows from the front next to the aisle. We had an okay view—we couldn't see the stage, and when they started filming, our view was blocked by two cameras—but it was still fun to be there with all the crazy people who were so enthusiastic about the show—about as enthusiastic as we were.

The warm-up guy came on at about 7:15 and got various people up to dance on the stage—Khaly from the Top 20 (Stephanie and Anthony were also there, seated in the bleachers with us), then mothers who wanted to win a Sony bag with stuff in it for their kids, then kids, then dads. I think they did that so they could test the cameras and shots, and get the crowd excited. It was certainly very amusing for us in the audience.

Then the show started, with the pre-recorded packages showing on the big screen, along with the various screens around the set. When the opening credits started rolling, they got us to clap and cheer and scream (I never realised they recorded that bit live). The opening group number was pre-recorded (they do that on Mondays in the middle of the day, along with the guest performance), and then they switched from the recording to Natalie Bassingthwaite walking across the stage. And the show unfolded from there.

It was a bit weird being there—I'm so used to watching it on TV—and, in some respects, being there wasn't so different to watching it on TV: it felt a bit unreal. All around us, there were people screaming out the names of the contestants. Onstage, everyone looked so tiny—especially Rhiannon. When things happened, I wasn't sure if the contestants were acting or whether it was real. We noted with some amusement that those who were safe for another week danced their way offstage with joy, while those who were told they were in the bottom four who had to “dance for your life” practised their moves when off-camera while sitting on those white bar stools. We had to crane our necks to see those solos—we didn't get to see that much of them—but it was just nice that we got to see a bit of live dancing, since so much of Monday night's show is pre-recorded.

I don't think the verdict (Rhiannon and Henry) surprised very many people, though we could see that Rhiannon was very disappointed. (I loved the dance they did together in the Top 10 performances.)

The show wrapped up and everyone filed out. At one point, Kate walked straight past me and I thought I should have told her how much I loved the dance she did with Graeme to “Fix You” by Coldplay (one of the best dances of the season, along with Vanessa and Henry's African Samba).

We said goodbye to Crystal and I took Jess home, getting a little lost on the way because part of Botany St was closed off. Then I drove home, played on the computer for a while and went to bed.

Tuesday 8/4/08

We woke to pouring rain (it's so nice sleeping in to the sound of rain outside!) We had arranged to meet with Tim, Liz and their two little girls for breakfast, but I hadn't heard from them since we last spoke. They did email us but for some reason the email didn't get through. We sorted it out, though, and met them at the Flower Power Garden Centre in Enfield. We parked in their carpark and went across the street to the park to eat in one of those covered areas with the table and benches. Tim and Liz supplied the food; we supplied the picnic set. And we got to meet little Lucy for the first time.

Fortunately for us, the sun came out as we ate and it was beautiful and bright. Little Miriam got to run around for a bit, and play on the play equipment.

After breakfast, we went into the Flower Power Garden Centre to get a hot drink at Cafe Belle Fleur, the café inside of it. Miriam insisted on pulling out all the sugar packets from the holders and Tim and Liz kept coming up with ways to keep her occupied. After downing our hot chocolates, lattes and milkshakes, we went for a wander in the garden outside where there were some very beautiful fountains and an aviary with all manner of birds inside it.

I played with Miriam for a while and we all took some photos together, and then Ben and I had to go. We stopped at home first to pick up our lunch and Ben's computer, then headed in to work, arriving at around 1:30. I continued with the Briefing assessing. Bec stopped by and I casually hid her scarf from her and gave her a badge I'd picked up from the Carriageworks because I knew she liked badges.

We stayed back until 6 pm, then came home and ate leftovers for dinner. Ben left for Bible study and I watched taped television and, once again, ended up going to bed later than I should have.

Wednesday 9/4/08

Day off! But the pest inspector was coming so I couldn't sleep in. Ben went off to meet Richard B about a website. I got up, did laundry, worked on the computer and watched Buffy. I finished Season 7 and watched the special features. In the afternoon, the plumber turned up to fix something in our bathroom and to seal the taps in the kitchen. In the evening, I made chicken drumsticks and vegetables for dinner, and we watched Law & Order and Numb3rs and went to bed too late because I found a site called Zoho Creator that will let me make online databases using drag and drop, and I got excited about it because it meant I could have a centralised database for The Faithful Writer conference that I could access from both home and work. (Yes, I know; I'm such a geek!)

Thursday 10/4/08

I went in to work early because I needed to make up the hours from Tuesday. But I ran out of urgent things to do (thank goodness!) Tony and I met in the morning to talk Briefing things. Then, because I didn't have any urgent things to do and Emma was overloaded, I got to do Briefing cuts and fills. Apparently the issue was meant to go to proof-reading that day. And I had three meetings to attend: Briefing, staff meeting and Product Development meeting.

I had lunch with Bec and Guan (once again having to hide the scarf, or at least not draw attention to it), and because I was tired and dopey, it was easy for them to poke fun at me. After my last meeting for the day, I worked on cuts and fills and ended up leaving at around 6:30 after everyone else had gone home.

I drove to Glebe to have dinner with Marinka, Rosey, Fiona, Jan, Bron and Araya. Somehow we got our wires crossed: I didn't realise Ben was invited too. Oh well! Ben P was also there, and we sat around in their kitchen talking, then moved to the lounge. Rosey made a very delicious dinner. It was nice to spend time with all outside of the church context and to get to know them better. They gave me the house tour and it was interesting to see how the different rooms reflected the personalities of the different girls.

At 9:30 they kicked me and Ben P out which was fair enough because it was a weeknight. I dropped Ben P off at his house and then drove home, finished Bec's scarf while watching TV with Ben and blocked it in the study:

I don't feel like I'm a very good lace knitter—I think my tension must be way too tight because if you compare this to the pattern, her holes are much bigger. Hmm, maybe I should have used bigger needles (the pattern recommends 3.25mm and I used 4mms; maybe I should have used 5mms. I'll have to experiment next time).

Friday 11/4/08

The scarf was still drying when I checked it again the following morning. Ben and I drove into work together and got there around 8 am. I worked on cuts and fills, and on the new Briefing blog, and did some resarch on the formatting question. See, the internet is filled with bad code. Blogger, for example, is just dreadful with the way it nests tags and uses deprecated tags like <b> and <i> for formatting (interestingly enough, Expression Engine does too if you use their toolbars). LiveJournal is worse; it still uses tables for layout (tsk tsk!) And it's weird that so many content management systems don't recognize <cite>. The thing is, the bad code is not a problem because we have such forgiving web browsers which cover over our mistakes instead of drawing attention to our errors. So things don't break and most people are pretty happy with that because they can't see anything wrong; if they saw something wrong, it would be more of a problem.

But because the web is changing, and because the general direction of things seems to be towards XHTML and XML, it's becoming more and more important to have good code. Unfortunately we don't seem to be at the stage yet where there are HTML editors out there that will spit out nice code without you having to look at it in code view (and, indeed, is there anything that can always accommodate human error? [On second thoughts, maybe I shouldn't be talking about this; I know some stuff but not as much as some webgeeks out there who will probably shout me down.]) Nice code won't break your site in obscure browsers (because, remember, your page has to look halfway decent not just in Internet Explorer [evil!], Firefox and Safari, but also Comino, Opera, Netscape, Mosaic and a whole lot of browsers you've never heard of (as well as their different versions). Oh, and other devices like mobile phones, PDAs, screen readers for the blind, etc. (I learned on this day that the organising committee of the Sydney Olympics was sued for failing to provide an accessible website for disabled people.)

Of course, most of the people who write for the internet don't know how to code in HTML, which, I suppose, is fair enough (though the purist part of me grumbles and thinks, “Come on, it's not that hard to pick up, and then maybe you'll put things in <blockquote> instead of misusing italics!”) And these days most content management systems have all these plugins that are supposed to help you by doing some of the coding for you—inserting paragraph tags and the like. But they can only go so far. They can't do things like em-dashes properly (you're supposed to use &#8212;), curly single quotes (&#8216; and &#8217;), curly double quotes (&#8220; and &#8221;), etc. I normally have to put those things in manually. And here's where you enter the fuzzy area of shady characters and what to do with them. If you were cutting and pasting your blog post from Microsoft Word, for example, Word would retain the curly apostrophes and insert them in as ’ (as opposed to '. And, oh my goodness, the debate over the curly apostrophe vs. the straight apostrophe! I never realised. It's amazing that one little symbol is so loaded with such a semantic range). Certain browsers don't recognise ’ (though a lot of the modern ones do), and they may load them as question marks, empty boxes or collapse them into the nearest vowel to produce things like è or é or even ’.

So the formatting question had to do with the new Briefing blog and whether it would be coded to the same exacting standards that I apply to the rest of the Matthias Media website. (Remember, I'm a purist: when I blog, I code everything in HTML because I find it's neater and cuts out a lot of the problems later.)

I went out at lunch time to buy food for Word by Word. Unfortunately the ATM swallowed my keycard so I had to spend longer than intended sorting that out. I ate lunch on the go because I had to get The Briefing to proofreading that day. Fortunately it wasn't as complicated as the last time I did it; I must be getting better. It was out of my hair about an hour before we had to leave, so I spent the rest of the afternoon tackling Briefing meeting minutes.

Ben and I drove to counselling, and I found it was a very productive session compared to the previous week. It seems I'm a bit of an enigma though: in general, I do like myself—I like how God has made me, and even though there are bits of me which I think could be better and areas that definitely need improving, overall I do like myself. However, I find it incredibly painful when I'm not valued, recognised or acknowledged. I have no idea why.

We drove home, and I played piano for a bit before Elsie turned up. I made her a very basic dinner—noodles with vegetables in soup—and then we drove out to Canterbury Racecourse for the Sydney Vintage Clothing, Jewellery and Texiles Show (Ben went to have dinner with Luke). Google's instructions weren't very helpful but we eventually got there. The signage to the entrance wasn't very clear and we were stumbling around in the dark for a while. Finally we were inside, and we spent almost two hours wandering around the different stalls looking at stuff.

There were lots of racks of clothes, jewellery displays, shoes, luggage, bags, knitting needles, jewellery chests and an entire stall devoted to parasols (very expensive parasols ...) I bought some jewellery as a present for someone, buttons, black suede gloves and a brooch to go on Bec's scarf.

We left just past nine. Elsie dropped me home and went home herself because she was tired. I did computer things to prepare for Word by Word the following day, I dried Bec's scarf a bit further with a hair dryer and turned it over so it would dry on the other side, I wrapped the rest of her present (an Odessa hat I made last year for a stall Marinka was going to run but never did, and Armchair Apocrypha by Andrew Bird) and wrote her a card. Then I went to bed.

Saturday 12/4/08

It was hard to wake up this morning because I was so tired, and I only woke up because Ben was poking me to turn off the alarm. I got up, unstacked the dish rack, pulled my stuff together—tea, Word by Word folder, Bec's present, iPod, etc.—and then we were out the door. As always, all these people SMS-ed to say they couldn't make it for whatever reason, someone called for a lift and someone even SMS-ed me to see if they could still come. I need to remember for future meetings to be more prepared for this sort of thing because I know it's going to keep happening.

We picked Ben M up from Newtown and drove in to Kingsford. George called just as we arrived, wondering where we were. We set up—unlocked the doors, put out the food, turned on the coffee machine, etc. The meeting ran very smoothly because I had delegated everything to everyone else: Dave looked after the coffee, Guan did the devotion, Bec did the writing exercise, George took us some through excellent training on how to write training courses (which will come in handy when Bec and I do our seminar at The Faithful Writer) and Ben went to get the food when it was time.

After lunch, we sat around and talked about the things we were currently working on (which I found hugely interesting; not sure what the others thought of it). We workshopped one piece by one of our newer members, then wrapped up for the day and went home.

I spent the afternoon/evening doing laundry and chilling out in front of the television, getting a well-deserved rest.

Sunday 13/4/08

Ben left early to go have breakfast with Nancy and Rosey and talk about their band. I tried to sleep in (and failed somewhat), then got up and did Faithful Writer stuff for around five or six hours (because registrations were due to open the following day). Ben went off to band practice in the afternoon. We had church in the evening, then helped pack up and headed home. Ben watched Lost while I kept at it with The Faithful Writer. It was another late night.

Monday 14/4/08

I got to work at around 7:30 and spent the morning writing a CHN and editing the rest of the CHNs for the week. I also worked on the new Briefing blog, then met with Tony in the afternoon for my 15 minutes of fame.

Toby called my mobile while I was in the meeting and couldn't get through, so he called our customer service line and they put him through to me. He had tickets to So You Think You Can Dance? for that evening, and did I want to go? Definitely, I told him, and then went to check if anyone else was free. Once again, Anna was not (and was very unhappy about it) but Jess was and was keen to go again. So instead of going out to buy the fruit and vegies before I headed home, I stayed back at work until Jess was ready to leave, and we drove to Newtown, parked at the Carriageworks, ate dinner at Urban Bites ($10 pasta special!) and walked back down to the Carriageworks to pick up our wristbands and wait for Judith. She soon turned up and we headed inside and managed to get a better seat that last time (more towards the centre, four rows from the front, right in front of the choreographers. Rhiannon, her friends and Henry were at the other end of our row, and others in the Top 20 were across the aisle).

My goodness, it was such a great show! The opening group routine was choreographed by Jason Gilkinson and it was marvellous (but unfortunately it's not online). Jason was filling in for Bonnie while she was at her son's wedding in Las Vegas so we got to see him in the flesh. In addition, while I knew that Cirque du Soleil were going to be on the show that night (the week before, I had entered a competition hoping to see them but guessing that I probably wouldn't win), I had thought that that segment was pre-recorded but no, they came and performed live!!! I was so excited, Jess teased me mercilessly. But they were so good, and when they finished their routine, we gave them a standing ovation.

The other wonderful thing was that the Top 6 all performed solo for us so we got to see them all dance. The atmosphere was just fantastic as everyone was so excited to be there and to support their favourite dancer. Whenever each of them came out to perform (which they did on the other side of the stage as Natalie interviewed the one who had just danced), everyone just screamed and clapped. And there was such enthusiasm as the Top 4 were revealed—those who were safe running up to our side of the bleachers to be congratulated by friends and family during the ad breaks.

At the end, squealing fangirls (carbon copies of one another—like in Josie and the Pussycats) came up to Henry and Rhiannon wanting photos and autographs. We hung around a little because they were so funny to watch, but eventually made our way out of the theatre, saying goodbye to Judith and heading to my car. Once again, I dropped Jess home (this time not getting lost), then drove home to go to bed early (or, at least, earlier) for once.

Tuesday 15/4/08

Back at work, I tackled the rest of the Briefing minutes from the week before and then tried to see if I could create an online database for the Briefing articles. I experimented with Zoho Creator, and though it took a couple of tries and much tinkering, I managed to import all the data and set everything up so it was a lot like our existing Briefing database. I left feeling pretty proud of myself, then went and did the fruit and veg shopping, bought some fish for dinner, went home, washed the sheets, vacuumed the bedroom, put away the clean laundry and made fried fish for dinner with bok choy.

Ben was sick so didn't go to Bible study, so we watched Law & Order together. Then I watched Samurai Champloo and Monday's So You Think You Can Dance? and other TV while sorting receipts (I haven't done the accounts in about two and a half months).

I started doing the accounts and managed to get quite a bit done before I went to bed. And Bec emailed me from Paris with a photo of her wearing the hat and scarf:

They look so good on her! I just wish the scarf had more of the lace pattern in it—more holes.

(Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that she really really liked her present!)

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