Queen Mary II

On Sunday March 14th, 2010 I headed to Fremantle to shoot the Queen Mary II departure and festivities. It was hard to take your eyes off the immense Queen Mary II as she berthed in Fremantle Harbour, she arrived early Sunday morning and departed late in the afternoon bound for Mauritius. Thousands of locals flocked to secure vantage points and witness the largest ship ever to visit Western Australia depart Fremantle.

After some quick talking and social engineering, followed by Assassin’s Creeding through the crowd, I was given access to the Fremantle Port Authority building to shoot the departure and took some great photos on the roof. My only regret was that I didn’t format the CF card before shooting, leaving me with limited space, I missed a few good shots while deleting photos to make room. Lesson learnt.

Queen Mary 2 Fremantle Departure

She was indeed majestic, even a tad gorgeous, as she sailed into the sunset cheers of “aussie, aussie, aussie” from passengers abroad were followed by “oi, oi, oi” from the flag waving crowd on the docks who gathered to watch her depart.

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Tahlia's Twentieth

My dearest friend Tahlia celebrated her 20th birthday today. I first met her when I was 21 and she was 15 years old at a costume party – I was a bunny rabbit and she was a nurse – she ran up to me, gave me warm hug and then introduced herself. I fell in love instantly with her and I feel blessed to have such a kind, funny, positive and wise person as a friend. She has always been there for me, during good times and bad.

Last year we went to Kings Park for an afternoon of relaxing and playing in the park with friends. As always, my geeky friends and I were armed with laptops and cameras. As the sun went down my boyfriend and I took a few photos of Tahlia, the light was warm and perfect for a spontaneous photo shoot.

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Happy 20th birthday, my gorgeous Tahlia. You’ve grown into a beautiful and wise woman that I shall cherish forever. :mrgreen:

A Belated Christmas Story

On Christmas eve 2009 I found myself in my local supermarket pushing a trolley with race car precision through the isles to hunt down a few remainder Christmas items. I inquired to a stock lady where the ham bags were kept, she tried to help me find one, but another staff member informed us they had sold out days ago. I decided to use a pillow case for the ham. It won’t mind, it’s just a ham, and I’m sure the smoked ham aroma could be washed out of said pillow case. An announcement came over the speaker alerting customers that only a few kilos of prawns were left. “Shit! I forgot to grab some prawns!” the stock lady exclaimed loudly, as she rushed between two trolleys about the collide with her reindeer hat bobbing along.

As I contemplating licking the ham pillow case I suddenly remembered I needed butternut pumpkin. I did a three point turn with the trolley and headed towards the fresh produce section to grab the last pumpkin. I was checking my list (twice, got to find out what food is naughty or nice) when I noticed a scruffy man with no shoes and a backpack, containing all his belongings, strung over his shoulder enjoying a few grapes. One of the junior stock boys noticed too. He scolded the shoeless man and waved his hands at him in an attempt to make him put down the grapes and move along. The shoeless man said sorry, that he hadn’t eaten in two days, and attempted to leave as the manager arrived. The junior stock boy looked very proud about his accomplishment of protecting the grapes. But the manager wasn’t pleased. He grabbed a bunch of grapes and handed them to the shoeless man. “On the house” he said with a friendly smile. A radiant smile appeared on the shoeless mans face, while a look of confusion appeared on the junior stock boys face. They both walked away, leaving the shoeless man alone with his grapes. Moments later the manager returned, handed the shoeless man a $30 gift card and said “Merry Christmas.” He thanked the generous manager, then proceeded to buy copious amounts of fresh food and other items.

As I looked around I noticed that everyone was far too busy with their last-minute Christmas eve shopping to notice what had just transpired. I received many gifts for Christmas, one of the most precious was to witness a gift given to someone who really needed it.

One Point Oh

A year ago today a cute boy sat outside my house waiting for thirty minutes because he was early, picked me up for our date, spilled his drink because he was nervous, watched the sun go down with me, picked a sad movie that made me cry, and then made me fall madly in love with him.

love you

love you

He’s the only person in the world who knows what ‘homp’ means.

Southbound 2010

All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go, I’ve had no sleep… something, something, something. It’s 1:50am, our alarms are set for 6:00am, and we (Devar, Antz and myself) have only just finished packing for the Southbound 2010 music, camping and arts festival.

For now, this minuscule blog update will have to suffice, I’ll upload any photos I take to Flickr and blog about my adventures down south upon my return. After I have shower and have a long nap.

Project 52

project52

I’ve decided to participate in the Project 52 (p52) blogging challenge, starting today January 1st, 2010. Project 52 was devised back in 2007, when Anton Peck proposed the idea of posting a blog entry every week for one year.

“Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about! All you need to do is just commit to the challenge and write the content. This site is just here to remind you of that commitment. The Project52 challenge will go from January 1st, 2010 to January 1st, 2011. It will be interesting to see how many of us make it that far.”

The reason for my participation in Project 52 is that I need to form a healthy habit of publishing blog entries. I suffer from lack of time, not lack of content. To rectify this I will be forcing myself to make the time and post once a week, 52 times, during 2010. Hopefully I will slide back into the habit of publishing, instead of letting draft posts collect binary dust. My other hurdle is Twitter, I find it easier to post a tweet than compose a blog entry. I need to learn to save the good bits for my blog. As I’m starting to get into photography more, I’m hoping to publish some photos and other content.

Project 52 starts on January 1st, 2010. There are over 400 bloggers signed up already, if you’re interested you should sign up at the website and join us. And feel free to contact me if you notice that I haven’t posted an entry.

Pirate PTUB

pirateptub

What: Talk Like A Pirate Day PTUB.
Where: Little Creatures, 40 Mews Road, Fremantle WA.
Date: September 19th, 2009.
Time: 6:30pm till late.
Dress: Pirate costume theme, but a simple eye patch and pirate hat will suffice.
RSVP: Please RSVP on the Facebook event.
Tags: If you take photos at the event, please tag them ‘PTUB’, ‘PTUB19Sept09’ and ‘TLAPD’.

If you’re wondering what to wear or what to expect, check out the photos from last year’s Talk Like A Pirate Day Pirate PTUB. If you’re wondering what a PTUB is, check out the PTUB website.

Do You Love Heather?

The gorgeous Heather (known as Hesa on Twitter) will be in the upcoming channel Nine Network reality television series, The Apprentice.

“One of Australia’s most successful, high-profile businessmen, founder of Wizard Home Loans, Mark Bouris, is searching for his Apprentice. Bouris is exceptionally well regarded in the business community and working as his protégé will give one capable Australian an unprecedented start to their new career. The winner of The Apprentice will be guaranteed a new career with Bouris at his financial-services firm, Yellow Brick Road, with an incredible six figure salary.”NineMSN.

Heather is currently filming the series and has been featured in the above promotional advert for the series that aired on channel Nine over the weekend. A fan website has already spawned at weloveheather.com to show support and allow fans of the brilliant blond to share information. I’ve joined the website to show my love and support for our Heather.

Good luck, gorgeous!

More Than Meets The Eye

I’ve spent a few days last week trying to find a mobile car mechanic to fix a broken fan belt in my Mother’s car. I was given the task because the car couldn’t be towed to her workplace and she isn’t fond of car mechanics. I assumed finding one would be easy and would only require a phone call.

The first one I contacted had moved to Albany, the second had a car accident, the third was busy watching a movie, the fourth said he’d be there at a set time and never arrived or called. Frustrated, I told my mother that she should just buy a new car and sell this one to the Autobots so they can save the human race. She wasn’t amused by the Transformers joke, nor did she like this idea of a new car and preferred the fan belt to be fixed.

After receiving numerous rejections from various mobile car mechanics, I was quite shocked to finally find one that was happy to exchange money for services rendered. I booked a date and time, then relayed the information to my Mother, making another Transformers joke about how the Lube Mobile cars are probably Transformer porn stars in disguise. Ba dum tish.

The mobile car mechanic arrived on time and took a look under the hood. He said that one fan belt had died and took the other one with it to fan belt heaven. May they rest in pieces. He fitted the new fan belts, tinkered with a few other problems, then took the car for a test drive. I paid him, took the keys back, and as I was studying the invoice when he asked “do you go out much?” and my brain registered the question as him asking why I wasn’t out anywhere today.

“I had to wait for you to fix the car, I’m going out later” I replied.

“Oh yeah, where you going?”

“Out for dinner” I replied, still studying the invoice.

“With friends, at a pub or something?”

My concentration was broken by the unrelated question that had nothing to do with cars. I looked up from the invoice, thought about what I was doing and said with a smile, “I’m going to my boyfriends father’s house for dinner tonight.” His face dropped. My female brain registered his facial expressions, alerted me, did some calculations, and finally concluded that he was trying to ask me out. My brain has never been very good at in regards to such events, I went through high school unaware that a vast amount of my male friends spent years trying to hit on me.

After an awkward moment of silence he said, “well… ahh… hope you have fun, later, bye.”

I told a friend this story, she laughed, then we spent the next thirty minutes making car related sexual innuendos about lube and revving your engines. Thankfully she thought my Transformer jokes were hilarious.