How To Occupy One's Time In Townsville!

So yea, I've procrastinated updating the blog, what's new? My excuse is that my brother hogs the laptop the whole day playing Fallout 2, those apparently addictive Facebook RPGs (Elven Blood/Blood Lust etc), or looking at webcomics. He does so for hours on end, surfacing only to eat or to go to the toilet. I'm just waiting for him to get his own laptop so I do whatever I want with it whenever I want to.

Truth is I'm just lazy and easily distracted. I think I tried to make my blog too much an elaborate chronicle of my life here, which is painstaking. So I'm gonna try a different approach and just be random and not too worry about being absolutely meticulous.

Here goes.

It's been about 47 days since settling down in Townsville. Things have certainly progressed somewhat. Visa applications have been submitted and now we're just hoping they give us an answer before December, cuz that's when government offices start winding down.

So, as the title goes, I'm gonna write a lil about what I've done to pass the time in Townsville just for fun. More for my own amusement than anyone else's. Let's see:

Music: So I'm in 3 musical groups and within the next few months (if I'm still here) I'll be performing in all of em. This Sunday I'm performing with the Choral-Aires and showcasing my ability to be multitalented haha. I'm singing a solo, accompanying for soloists, and singing in the choir. In December I'll be performing in Carols by Candlelight down at The Strand (an esplanade that's well known in Townsville). At the end of January (this one's pending my visa approval), I'll be playing the piano with an ORCHESTRA (WOOHOO!) for a short run of the hilarious musical homage to Elvis' songs (think Mamma Mia) All Shook Up! Also, I've discovered that due to a dearth of accompanists in Townsville, there are job opportunities available to me that pay quite a handsome sum. Awesome!!

Exercise: Since I have so much spare time and I'm no longer a 14 year old with a metabolic rate that incinerates calories, I've taken to jogging around the nearby park, working up quite a sweat on my mom's exercise machine, doing pushups and situps and swimming in the pool. My goal: to be in great shape by the time I get to uni - cuz that's when a hot bod's most important, bwahahaha. Now if only I can get my hands on a pair of dumbbells.

The Block: We've gone down every Saturday to "The Block", which is the land where the new house will be built. As of this week, the irrigation's up and running and the once barren land in the paddocks is now growing a green carpet of grass. The fences have been painted and the fence posts are insulated so that electric wires can be strung through the enclosure. The annoying thorny bushes have been snipped away so there's less of a chance we get our ankles bloodies by them. We've discarded hundreds of palm fronds littering our considerable backyard so that the lawnmower can be driven through the tall grass choking the entire area, and now it looks like a herd of elephants has stampeded across the area. In time, hopefully that can be transformed into something aesthetically pleasing. It is however really awesome that there's a creek behind the house. It gives off such a... Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn kinda vibe. Rustic charm, that's what it is. The creek is dry most of the time, so it's full of dry leaves, fallen trees and animal poop. Pretty sweet. I wonder where you'll end up if u keep following it. What's sweet is that there are many wallabies hiding around the creek, and a whole assortment of birds make their nests nearby. Totally appeals to the nature lover in me.

Books: In a strange twist, my tastes in books have swung towards the horror genre, which in films, I fastidiously avoid. Just look at my reading history since I came here: Dreamcatcher, Lisey's Story, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 'Salem's Lot, which are all by Stephen King. Then there's The Great and Secret Show and Everville from Clive Barker. Also, there's the darkly enthralling Faerie Tale by Raymond E Feist. Right now, I have my hands on the 1300+ pg Stephen King novel "It", which I've been wanting desperately to read. My aversion to the horror genre began with the two-part TV adaptation of the book, which features a child-eating clown as its antagonist. Stephen King perhaps was responsible for coulerophobia... or perhaps clowns just have a sort of twisted macabre charm to them in their corpse-white face paint and grotesquely exaggerated make up. Either way, Stephen King has a knack for producing some all-out weird monstrosities like "shit-weasels", killer automobiles, killer artificial teeth... Enjoyable nontheless.

Movies: Thank God for Civic Video. Renting DVDs is sooooo worth it. $3 a DVD for a week, $1.50 on Tuesdays. They've got special offers and promotions here and there and I walked out of Civic Video last week with 7 movies that only cost me $10. Great stuff. Most recent watch: The History Boys.

Writing: Still working on what would hopefully be something epic. The Tolkienesque high fantasy genre is appealing to me, and I've often seen fantasy as a way to explore real world issues in a larger than life setting. Still, I find myself often stumped by a limited understanding and vocabulary when it comes to areas such as medieval politics, government, social structure, warfare, architecture and even trivial things such as the names of flowers and trees. Well, that's what research is for I guess.

All rite, time to get my lazy butt up and work up a sweat.