A photoblog and other things

I’m going to a Christmas party tonight and I’m trying to decide what to buy for a secret Santa gift for a woman who has a good sense of humour and a couple of kids. Three options are currently buzzing around in my head:

1) America: The Book

2) Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge: 8 rules of model behaviour

3) “Has Been”, by William Shatner

The Heidi Klum book is just up there for a laugh. I could just imagine a mother wanting to take life advice from a model.

I was thinking with the William Shatner CD that she may have had the hots for Shatner when she was younger. I dunno. Good for a laugh anyway. I know if anyone bought me that CD I’d be stoked (that’s the well suppressed Star Trek fan part of me writing that). Plus, Ben Folds helped produce the CD so quality lingers.

I think I’m going to settle for “America: The book”, just because I know it’s damn good and I think it’s a good gift for an American. If she hasn’t already got the book it should go down well.

It seems that today is one of those days that just seems to drag on forever. I’ve been trying to get motivated to do my work but so far that’s taken nearly 7 hours to do. My body just feels like it’s a ragdoll.

I went to see Santos Renuentes play last night at a place called Broadway in Aventura. They were awesome again. They have a new lead guitarist who’s only 24 but he added a whole new dimension to their sound. It was a really, really good performance. I was talking to the band members commenting on how good they sounded afterwards and everyone seemed pretty pumped from the performance. They’re hoping to get a record contract in the near future. Good luck guys!

I recently changed my diet a bit. No I’m not getting fat, not even with the American diet, but I just felt that cow’s milk didn’t do it for me anymore. So now I’m having soy milk on my cereal in the mornings instead. I’d say that I’ve been feeling a bit better generally, but I’m not sure if that’s a false perception I’ve set up for myself.

I decided to change web browsers as well. Internet Explorer has not done it for me for a while now so I’ve been using something called Avant Browser which added tabbed browsing to IE. It was good for a while but I grew tired of it occasionally crashing. I’ve made the switch to Firefox and I’m so glad that I did. It’s quick, hasn’t crashed and there is a slew of plugins that can be used. I’ve added ones to show the weather, stock prices, google image previews, auto copy of text, and a Gmail mail present indicator. I find I need at least 6 tabs open at once when I’m trying to find solutions to problems. That’s basically what I do actually. I am the solution guy. If there is a problem somewhere I program up a way to fix it. I wouldn’t say I’m an ace engineer – far from it. I just know how to find stuff. Firefox makes my life easier 🙂

God that was nerdy. I better sign off now before I do any more harm to my image!

This mall is one of the most awesome malls I’ve ever been to. It’s the premier mall in South Beach and it’s as pretentious as hell. Everyone there looks and walks like a model. I’d probably be looking like a kid in a candy store or something like it coz there are just so many good things to look at. The girls are absolutely stunning! Hehe.

Everyone is always talking to someone on their mobile phones because they like to appear just so damn busy and important. When I went last week for my birthday I saw one girl walking around for about 1/2 hour with her mobile phone to her ear constantly. She didn’t say a damn thing the whole time. It seems either a way of her avoiding being spoken to or a way of feeling important. Maybe I should set up a phone line that people can call and have some automated service dribble $hit to them (and not your typical phone sex service, that’d be just too plain expensive and, I’m assuming, not required for the ladies?) just so they feel important. Maybe I’ve already been beaten to that actually. Hmmm…

Dogs seem to be a fashion item. I don’t know whether people are following Paris Hilton in that respect or what the deal is but I’ve never seen so many dogs in a mall. I saw some dogs dressed up as reindeer, some wearing a scarf, some dressed up as their owners, it’s all pretty weird. I shall have to get some pictures.

It was pretty cold for Florida today with 19C being hit. I wasn’t expecting to see so many scarves being worn though. It’s like everyone should’ve been walking around in an esky. Not to be out done I bought myself a scarf plus some gloves and a couple of shirts and a beanie all for $85. Not bad I thought. Of course I’ll be using these items when I go to the west coast coz I’ll actually need them there.

One shop in Lincoln mall had me dumbfounded. I have quite literally never seen so much money in one store for items that were purely made for aesthetic purposes. I’m talking about sculptures. One sculpture had me nearly crying because it was so expensive. It was a 5 foot tall carving of a naked person made out of marble. It was worth (wait for it) US $495,000. You read that right. Half a million dollars. I seriously could not stop the tears from welling up in my eyes. Unfreakingbelievable. If I can, I shall try to get a picture of it.

There are just so many things that are stuffing up at the moment. Things getting lost, things just not going to plan, it’s hard keeping track of it all. I’ve been getting virtually no sleep in the past couple of weeks thanks in no small part to the air mattress I’ve been using at night. It’s something I should have gotten rid of a long time ago because every time I move it makes a god awful rumbling plastic squealchy sound (Ed: pfft, nice explanation mate) that is freaking loud! I can’t understand where all the sound comes from. Anyway, if I move during my sleep I’m woken up, guaranteed.

Ok, I dropped my parents off at Miami airport this morning after getting 2 hours of sleep. We got there at 6am and I ended up leaving the airport at around 8:30am. I got back to the short term car park and was wondering where the heck my parking ticket was. I couldn’t find it so I ended up paying $25 for 2 hours of parking when I should have been paying $3.

What else? My brother lost his wallet yesterday. I only found this out because I went to collect my mail and they said “Do you know a Joshua Golding?” and I’m thinking “Shit… they found out I’ve been hiding my family in my apartment”. Well, they’ve probably worked that out already but the fact of the matter was I was given a post-it note with the apartment number of the guy who had my brother’s wallet, but they were only going to be there after 6 pm. Anyway, the apartment was empty, I don’t know where that little slip that had the details has gone but I have to somehow find my brother’s wallet now and send it back to Oz.

I’ve also gotten no work done this week. I’ve done absolutely nothing of value, but my stuff isn’t high priority anymore so nobody cares. I’m thinking “you’re paying for me to be over here… shouldn’t you be trying to extract as much work out of me as possible?” I need some of those Mensa puzzles to keep me occupied.

Plus, organising this Christmas trip has been a pain but thank God most of it is out of the way. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to book flights over here. When I booked flights and trains for my family’s trip to New York and Washington D.C. I had no problems whatsoever with using an Australian Visa, and these are those small el cheapo plane companies similar to Virgin Blue. However, and I can’t believe this, I can’t use my Australian Visa to book flights with either U.S. Airways or American Airlines. WTF!?!?!? That just has me scratching my head and is considerably inconvenient for a little Aussie like me. Anyway, it’s forced me to open a bank account over here just so I can book those flights without bothering Americans for their credit cards, and as a bonus it allows me to buy the cheap stuff I want to buy off the net. Bah!