Saturday, January 30, 2010

Shipping Container

Apparently, I am the only one in my group of freinds that read such literary masterpieces as The Famous Five, The Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock presents .... The Three Investigators. It does strange things to a young boy, such reading.

I have always wanted, when I finally built my own house, a secret room, hidden behind a revolving door or bookcase, only accesiable up a narrow rickety hidden staircase. Regretablly The Wife didn't start reading for pleasure until her university days, so she doesn't understand my desires. So secret rooms in the house are probably out.

A shed though would be quite acceptable. And not one of those vanilla bogan ones. No three car tin cookie cutter design, what I want is a shipping container. I have a cunning plan to get it too. I'm going to accumulate so much stuff that the wife will have to surrender and let me have one just to get rid of the shit lying around.

Once I have my forty foot container I would dig out a bit of hill and I have lots of hill, and set my container down into it. Then I'd cut a few skylights in the top, cover it with a waterproof membrane then backfill with rocks, which I also have quite a few of, then cover with soil and plant out a wild garden of flesh eating hybrid triffids.

A few cunningly disguised solar panels would charge the battery banks to run the power tools, kick ass sound system and the Iron Man suit that I'd keep to go and round up any lost cows.

That takes care of the top approach. The front is more problematic. I have to have an access that I can drive my new beaut zero turn mower that my fantastic parents and grandmother bought me. Maybe a camoflauged door that I can crash through, A-Team style when I need to do some mowing.

Then maybe a blackberry maze for the walk in approach. So far my sphinx breeding program has not gone so well, they keep trying to use the quiz from the Sunday Mail for questions. So I might have to go with the traditional three headed hellhound, but that's ok, I'm down with going with the old school ways.

Inside I might need a small cold fusion reactor in case it gets a bit cloudy, a full kitchen, larder and aquaponics system under lights in case the zombies come or I get a bit peckish or I have to entertain a super spy who's got through my defences as some sort of training exercise. Probably some lasers too.

Oh and I'll need a secret room. Behind a revolving bookcase.

Lantanaland from the iPhone

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Physical vs Creative. Deathmatch

It's been an interesting start to the year. For the first time I am having a crack at playing over 30's representitive touch footy. I'm training the most I have since I was at university and had more time to burn. Now I have more fat to burn. Still, with all this running around something had to give a little in the old mind and it turns out it is my creative side.

I'm no artist, don't get me wrong. My creative outlets run to this blog, cooking and playing round with logos. Specifaclly for TShirts. I love a cool shirt. What I needed was some sort of kick start. Usually I am at my most creative when I have something else that urgently needs doing. That's when my creative brain kicks in and starts throwing awesome ideas at me. It's a natural developement from the procrastination skills I learnt at uni. I did all the classes, even thought of doing an honours in procrastination, but in the end, I couldn't be bothered.

January is a quiet time at work and other than the war I'm having with my free spirited goats, the only thing that is dominating my time is training. And after some of these sessions all I can do is crash, running up and back ten metres for two and a half hours in forty degree heat is not the best for generating ideas.

A mates blog though, gave me the jump start I needed. Dr Yobbo writes a fantastic fictional account of the band Flange Gasket, set in and around Brisbane and the Nothern Rivers in the same time that I was kicking around in the music industry. It's hugely funny, well written, lots of sex, drugs and rock n roll. My kind of story.

Flange Gasket in one episode had a band TShirt made up, a parody of The Monkees called The Drunkees. When I first read it I thought it was awesome. In the story, The Monkees quickly sue and the shirt gets pulled, making it a collectors item. I reckon that when I read that chapter I was already subconsciously thinking about doing the shirt. When it cropped up again in the latest chapter it was like a big candle to a moth. Here was a good bit of fun. So I designed the logo for the fictional shirt for the fictional band.

Of course it's no good just doing the design. To do it justice I needed to get one printed and send it to the Doc. I could have screen printed it myself, but it would probably be only a few shirts and my screenprinting rig really needs to do about 20 to make it cost effective. Google and web surfing came to the rescue. I found a site where I can set up a shop and sell the shirts and they'll do the print, no matter how intricate the art. The cost stays the same.

So I give you, Flange Gasket's, hey hey we're the drunkees limited edition band shirt!


Lantanaland from the iPhone

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

THe Catch Up

Wow. Been a long time since anyone has been in here. Just before my birthday in fact, but don't read anything into that, I love birthdays, love the celebration. Even the three death metal bands playing at The River Stage across the Brisbane river at my birthday BBQ didn't hassle me, cause I was having a fantastic time. To be brutally honest it has more to with a gift from my neighbours a few days before Xmas. Goats. Two desexed males that he'd bought for his kids and they'd tired of them. He had no real fences and no inclination to build any but didn't want them to end up in the pot.



I was initially reluctant, The Wife more so and with good reason, we had no idea how much they would escape and rampage through neighbours gardens, trampling goodwill as they went. Free is still free, however and I have a lot of grass, more so after the summer rains.

Being a smallholder is a funny business. You can read and research and watch but until you have an animal you don't really start learning. For instance, the goats love the very green long grass i have in amazing abundance at the moment, I had read that they prefer more woody and fibrous material, but gees, they love that grass.

The electric fence works well right up to the point where the feed runs out and they can see that green, long grass on the other side and then they bash through to get to it. But I'm learning as i go along and as well as being amazing clearers of rough land, they are very personable, a byproduct of being raised as kids pets, I think.

Other than building fencing to keep ahead of their voracious appetite, there's been the usual Xmas rush around. The Wife had this fantastic sign made up by a mate of ours in our Loveslugs touch footy team so visitors will be able to find us at the top of the hill. I've been baking a lot of bread. Reading lots and lots of books. Went to the Bell races, a small country meet where they ran out of rum three hours before closing.



Oh and the goats can't do all the work so I've been mowing a fair bit of lawn. Lantanaland looks like a small patch of England at the moment, we've had over 300mm of rain in the last six weeks. So between lots of mowing, slashing and training for a touch tournament i've been pretty bone tired and too slack to write.

That will be amended. After all, once i have this goat thing down, i'm expecting to see a lot less of the whippersnipper.