Brother update - had the halo & vest off yesterday, final checkup in a month assuming he doesn't do anything stupid in the meantime.
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For a day where I did hardly anything, and which included a nap, I'm exhausted. Probably I just need the chance to slow down for a couple of days and crash safely.

I socialised a bit and caught up with a couple of people I haven't seen in ages, and it was good. Met P & L's youngling for the first time, seems a cheerful and easygoing little chap.

Stopped by a local fish & chip shop I've been visiting for ... going on 20 years now (and the decor hasn't changed in that time...). It was dead - 7:45 on a Saturday night, no other customers. The drinks fridge was bare (not that I ever bought from it), I got the impression they've stopped selling fresh fish & it felt like I could have been their only customer for the night. The food was as one would expect when the heat was turned back up immediately to cooking - not the best.

I wonder how long it will keep ticking over - it'll be a bit sad to see it go.

Letter just arrived to say that my explanation for (not) using an unregistered vehicle has been accepted.

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My brother was taken out of traction and moved over to Burwood this week, where he will learn to be upright again. I'm heading over to see him this afternoon.

My brother has an Ipod, but the cable and his laptop are still in Australia. So he's asked if I can find some movies & a way to get them onto said ipod.

codym I figure you can probably help on the movie front, I can stick iTunes on my tablet [shudder], does anyone have an iPod <-> USB cable I could borrow?

Edit: Cable sourced :D

That'll give him some entertainment while he's lying there staring at the ceiling with a weight attached to his head.

Rarotonga. Auckland.

The first completely missed the exploded vertebrae in their x-rays (and were none to gentle acquiring them) and sent him back sitting in cattle class wearing a too-large neck brace.

The second reportedly had a maniac ambulance driver and a whole lot of staff not trained in handling spinal/neck injuries. They got the halo put on him on Friday (after which they reportedly felt any further care in handling was unnecessary), but 'the vest has to be done by orthopedics' and orthopedics don't work after hours - or weekends. People don;t stop getting injured just because it's the weekend y'know!

FFS. He could have been down here on Monday. As it was he got the vest put on Monday, and transferred down by the Flying Doctor Service (did you know NZ had one of those? We didn't). Currently in Chch Public Hospital, where he seems to have been lucky enough to be placed in the care of someone with spinal experience. She was demonstrating how to wash under the vest for my mother (and a couple of nursing students), something Auckland had neglected to bother with.

All going well they will get him on his feet tomorrow, remove the catheter and send him home Friday. Where he can look forward to a further 12 weeks of not being able to turn his head or do any activities requiring same. He may be back in just a neck brace in time for sisters wedding in November.

Anyway, having by some miracle made it this far (mother reckons the two grandmothers don;t want to see him again just yet) he should make a full, if slow, recovery.

Again with the voluntarily up @ 7 and a run??!
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Mother met with the 'big wigs' this morning. Brother 'v v v lucky'. C1 vertebrae exploded outwards. Some spinal cord damage but all in place.

In Middlemore until it settles and then he'll be transferred down here to Burwood.

Wikipedia article on the "Jefferson fracture"

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LJArchive link for those I promised it to. I do recall I had to download and initialise something else, maybe a .dll, to make it work on my (Windows XP) system originally.

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So after my energetic start to the day I've done the invoicing, laundry, dishes, and caught up on a certain amount of online reading (bulked out by the fact that several of the articles I had set aside were lists of links to start with...). OTOH, it's nearly 3 o'clock and I'm just getting around to lunch....

New CSS and PHP tricks I has them, but brain has started to feel a bit mushy. Since I've actually been more-or-less awake since ~5:30am, I think a nap might shortly be in order.

because I can put everything in one post.

Turned up to the SAGA board games briefly this afternoon (1 1/2 games of Settlers) before joining uaekiwi and friends for his birthday dinner at The Flying Burrito Brothers.

[burp]

Following which was a group trip to see "Dead Snow" at the Film Festival. There were sadistic Nazi Zombies, a lot of snow, splatter galore, moral lessons (the people who have inappropriate sex die first, always check your pockets, don't touch a zombie's jewels) and a serious overdose of shaky-cam.

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Received a txt with an update on my brother, salient points are
- Waiting to have halo & vest fitted. To be worn for for 9-12 weeks.
- Has good use of arms and legs.
-'Jefferson fracture' of C1 & C2 vertebrae.
- Very lucky.
- May transfer[from Middlemore] in 48 hours</blockquote>

So, my brother went to a mate's wedding in Rarotonga (without insurance!) and took a deep dive into shallow water.

He can still move everything, is apparently aware that he -had- an accident, x-rays in Rarotonga have come back clean, and he's flying into Auckland airport at 5am with a nurse. Mother has managed to get a flight up to meet him - from there to Middlemore for a head scan.

He has connecting tickets back to Australia later in the weekend, but I think he'll be coming home for a while.

Item a) my father is trying to give up his smoking habit of 40+ years. Sister, doofus brother-in-law & the grandkids are visiting them this weekend. It's a good weekend not to be able to attend an early birthday celebration.

Item b) am I doing anything on, say, the 12thish of September? My brain says maybe but I can't find any record.

I hope not, because I think there may just now be a Dunedin trip scheduled for that weekend

Item c) All of you in Chch are planning on coming to the Gameathon this weekend, are't you? :)

My parents came in today with firewood and food, and while my mother & sister went to the mall my father & I went over some of the 8mm movies. In places it seems a lot of material has just basically evaporated from the reels leaving white empty film with the occasional few frames showing up, which is a shame.

There's actually quite a bit of interesting material. Some of the country around Cromwell, now flooded by the Clyde dam for example. Ilam Road, near Memorial Ave, circa '60's - I was like, seriously? wtf? Very tempted to youtube those few seconds.

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Went to Transformers II last night - the movie is best seen as a ride, and from that perspective it's done quite well. Don't go for the (lack of) plot, go for the big robots and explosions.
I would really like to have seen the Autobots from the first movie other than Optimus and Bumblebee given more character time. Was again disappointed by the preponderance of bodily-function humour, but at least there wasn't as much teen-comedy-shmultz to get in the way of the action this time.

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Soldier of the line how does it feel
you´re far away from home polishing steel
The sun moves in between the mountain and sky
As dawn puts out it´s fingers splitting them wide
Soldier of the line what do you know
About the other side, they never show
They must be well disguised biding their time
Their armour well prepared so nothing will shine

A good portion of my waking hours this weekend have been spent delving into WordPress. Actually a lot of it has been regular css stuff, because WordPress installed pretty snappily and natively supports a whole bunch of things I thought might need custom code.
It runs bloody slowly though.

The design I've been given uses an overlapping tabs scheme for the main navigation. I succeeded in an appropriate hover effect, but it doesn't look so good as a current-page highlighter so I've turned it off (it wasn't requested anyway, but is something I feel should be there - "tabs should behave like tabs" and all that). The order of the overlap actually needs to be reversed I think.

I'm only getting paid for this if the 'boss' is happy with it so there is a point where it's not worth solving the problem right now or exceeding my brief and changing the graphic design - but it was a good reason to pick up WordPress.

The other major issue was styling the first and last items in the list differently (no tab overlap) - given IE's lack of support for :first-child and :last-child . I spent a while digging in the page-list-generation code before just running a pair of preg_replace()s over the output to add class names into the relevant items.

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Yesterday I went out to my parents for lunch/the afternoon. The DVD of the old country calendar episodes went down well - even though it would only play on my sister's laptop not my parents' identical one. Result - I have a laptop to 'fix' this week. Hopefully a full Windows (Vista home basic - bleh!) update will do the trick.

I also have another bag of videos to copy and collate bits from - mostly news articles and TV shows us kids have appeared in however briefly over the years but also a home movie of the muster made by my Grandpa in 1957 (later copied from 8mm to VHS by someone).

I was so tired in the evening I went to be for a nap at about 7pm - and didn't get up properly until 8ish this morning.

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Now I need to get on to some real chores - cat litter, dishes, vacumning, ....

Parents are useful. Parents with trucks and chainsaws even more so.

I thought they were just coming through to take away the huge pile of rubbish once again accumulated on the 'vegetable' garden. (And which will not accumulate anywhere near as quickly in future now that we have the green bins). However Father also cut up the pile of timber for firewood (some years overdue) and sprayed.

An number of good-sized potatoes emerged from under the rubbish pile. We're talking meal-in-one potatoes here.

I'm feeling kinda tired. I think I need to go and take a solid nap before the party tonight.

Heading north for my youngest siter's engagement party. Reportedly 3.5 hour drive, if the road hasn't been washed out.

Hoping to make it back to Chch for the party tonight.

...still working on the peace thing. With myself would be a good start.

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Did not feel particularly or at all like Xmas this morning. Toured out to the farm throught the rain, attempted to make some games work on my niece's computer by upgrading the RAM, generally put up with expected stress caused by hyped-up sub-5s. Lunch, at which I managed not to overeat for a change. Presents, which nephew slept through despite his sister's encouragement, after which she remained far more interested in getting his open than playing with her own.

Received a package to my surprise (as my present was taken care of a month ago) which turned out to be one of my mothers cold-tea cakes. Nom nom nominess, etc.

Reacquired a variety of board-games from my childhood that mother is tired of having in the cupboard, and a more interesting looking one that my Grandad gave to youngest sister and brother and they never figured out how to play. It uses a d12!

Brother rang from Aussie, had the requisite turn sharing the lack of news.

Mood in the house improved all round once the kids and their parents left to visit the other side of that family. There was a variety of conversation and engaement party / wedding planning. Decided to wait for dinner after all rather than taking my leftovers (visiting my parents for Xmas is always good for a day or two of supplies) and heading home early. Compensated for lunch by eating to capacity at dinner.

Return of tired childers and parents seemed like a good cue to exit. All the others are staying with my parents.

Home. Tired. Full of food, if not cheer. Helping sister purchase a camera tomorrow.

Youngest sister has just become formally engaged, looking @ a February wedding.

It was mostly sorted out between them before October, but as mother put it, "the grandmothers weren't co-operating' :-/

Father has been keeping a secret, 'cos J asked his permission a little while ago.

I forgot to include this in my post last night, which is all right because it probably deserves a post of it's own.

My Nana was a very determined woman. She had a list of things to do before she died - people and places she wanted to visit again. She finished that list. When my cousin (her eldest grandchild) heard she was poorly he arranged to come over from Scotland to visit, and when told she said "OK, I'll wait then".

He visited the week before last, and returns to Scotland next week. (The funeral was yesterday, for those not on my FList)

Nana completed her life and moved on. May we all have the opportunity and courage to follow her example when the time comes.

That's both grandmothers in the space of a month. They're going in reverse chronological order.

Dad reckons Granddad has enough mind at the moment to understand what's happened, I reckon the odds he'll be gone by Xmas as well just jumped. It's mostly stubbornness that keeps him alive now.

For any of my Neverwinter players reading this - yes, we are still on tonight. (+ player absence tips the scales)

Grandma finally passsed away 11pm last night. Mother of 3, grandmother of 9, great-grandmother of ~6? Widowed in 1981.
( photos )

C4 on FreeView is (re?)playing Select while C4 on cable is playing used car infomercials. WTF?

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Went out to the farm & visited parents for lunch/afternoon. Beautiful day - bright sun, no cloud, green landscape, crisp crisp white mountains ahead.

First time in ages I've been out there & the only visitor. Took Father a book for bday/fathers day. A bit of an impluse buy - now back to feeling 'poor'.

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Read the Weekend Press while I was out there - an article on energy generation mentioned it's now legal for people to generate their own electricity and feed the surplus into the national grid for a credit on their power bill. I can't find anything about this online :(
...

wait - there is the article on stuff's website. Missed it the first time.

Veix says the other big regulatory change that few seem to know about is the new right of householders to feed electricity back into the national grid and get a credit for it. The grid is becoming a two-way network where, in effect, any of us can set up as miniature power companies.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4682415a13135.html , 3/4 of the way down.

I Want!

So my parents delivered a truckload of slightly damp firewood from my sister's this afternoon, and took away the pile of garden rubbish. There will be another pile soon enough, I've been slacking (as always, when it comes to gardening).

I may be OK for the next two winters, I may not.

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Most of the way through proving that the reason zakzhan's old laptop came up with the dreaded "Unable to load hal.dll" error is an excess of bad sectors on the hard drive. This has involved both DoS 6.2 and an old Ubuntu Live CD.

As reported to my mother by my Grandma. If her mind hasn't left the planet altogether it's certainly in a very erratic orbit :(