I arrived in Armidale on Friday, and upon getting off the plane discovered that none of my fancy gadgets* work in this blackhole, there was no food in the house, I was without transport, and somehow in the course of the day I spent $60 on taxis. And the dog is really very bloody hairy.

I was seized by the horrible thought that this was all a terrible idea, and I will surely go mad** in the three months that I will be here. But then I started to look at some photos that had been hidden in the depths of my camera because we all know that escapism as a general tool is a fantastic way to ward off maddness.

In between playing with Aperture and trying to figure out how exactly its folder heirarchy works, and finally concluding that Photoshop has better editing tools, perhaps making the incredibly time-consuming migration from iPhoto over to Aperture in itself a terrible idea,*** I found this.****


And was reminded that beautiful things are happening all the time, if you just open your eyes and stick your head very far out the window.


The end...


*That would be my phone and my mobile broadband, because Telstra is some kind of...of... argh. Bad. Equal. Opportunity. Business. Provider. What the fuck use is a 3G network in regional areas if Telstra is the only provider that works on it?! Can you answer me that?? No. You cannot. I was sitting in a cafe with someone on Saturday, thank christ a cafe that serves soy chai latte,** who also has an iPhone. He had full 3G reception and I had 2 bars of edge. EDGE. You can't even access bloody email on edge, and that makes me angry. Even angrier making is that there is a Vodafone store in Armidale. And WHY, since there's not even a signal in the middle of bloody town. Bloody bloody bloody. Ahem.

**Madder

***In that regard I believe I have changed my mind, because although it took me some time to figure it out (which was possibly because of my refusal to look at the tutorials, because they are, obviously, a waste of time), it is clearly a better management tool, and perhaps the editing suite will grow on me. But either way, I have restored my copy of Photoshop (I lost it migrating from iBook to MacBook), so it doesn't matter overly much. And I found a copy of Illustrator as well, so now I can play with vectors in my spare time.

****Which, incidentally, has much more vivid colour when I'm looking at the master version in Aperture. Perhaps you're meant to save in a particular way or some such to preserve the original. Who knows, I'm sure time will tell, but it did somewhat dull the picture, and make the whole post sort of...pointless...

*****Because I am a pretentious wanker, though not a pretentious wanker in this vein, more just in a snobby city way because it's funny and it outrages my mum :D And also, I do realise that soy chai latte is an insult to coffee, but that's only if you think it's supposed to be a kind of coffee and forget the fact that it's extremely yummy.