The Book of Ashes

The mud fire hose story at Tech-Tonics. 7:14AM

I now wear the cloak of invisibility. The Perihelion can no longer see me. Although I walk every where, I raise no hit counts on any pages. This is good as I have made a fair few number of hits on the main page and also on my own page. Now I no longer count. But now others have come to take my place. The main page is getting about 50 hits per day which is pretty cool. My page is averaging around 10-20 hits per day which isn't too bad either. Hey other savants, keep up the good work. I read every new entry you put in, usually within a day since you write it. Unfortunetly my read will no longer count as a hit on your page.

So now I must open up the big book of tales and tell you of one that began one fateful Friday afternoon at TechTonics (my work) about a year ago. We were all a bit younger and full of more energy then. The Crispy one had not yet been chained to the Earth by his better half and I, well I was just learning how to use water pistols...

I think it was after a staff meeting. We had had a few drinks and then a few more. Most people had gone home and it was just the usual younger crew, Crispy, myself, Tom, Emma, Peta, Merrin, and others, I forget who. Crispy and I were engaged in a stand off in the main area where the lifts open out. He had the big water gun that could empty a buckets worth of water onto you in a single squirt and was holding me back behind while he stood behind a keypad door. We both knew that if I ran at him I'd get drenched, then would have to contend with the lock before I could catch up with him. After a bit of firing at each other I decided to do a komakazi mission and I just ran at him yelling. He paniced and fired quickly, missing me, then closed the door. I fumbled with the key combination, head feeling a little faint from the exhersion mixed with the alcohol. I got through the door to find Crispy holding the fire hose and going fuck, fuck, fuck. It was squirting brown mud all over the carpet. In his panic he couldn't turn it off so took it back out the stair well and pointed in there while he worked out how to turn it off.

Now what had happened was this. Cripin, low on water had decided to unleash the mighty fire hose on me. This resided in the stair well so he ran in there while I was running towards the keypad door and grabbed the hose, brought it out into the office and as I came through the door he turned it on. Of course it hadn't been ran in ages and had rusted inside a bit. Muddy coloured water went everywhere on the carpet and he shat himself. He pointed it back into the stair well and it went all over the walls and down an entire flight of steps before he managed to turn it off. He was panicing big time. No one had seen us, and I just had to laugh, what else could you do. Brown stains were everywhere, on the carpet, in the stair well, down an entire flight of stairs and not just on the steps but the walls as well. We took the hose into the toilets and let the mud coloured water run out. Then we went into the kitchen and grabbed your usual little kitchen sponge. We found that was quite insufficient for the job so we ended up using the powerfull water pistol to hose the carpet down then soak it up with the sponge. After 15-20 minutes we got the carpet semi cleaned up then went into the stair well to see what the damage was there. As of yet, no one had found us yet.

The mud fire hose story continued... 7:15AM

We were shocked to find muddy water on every step and all over the walls for an entire flight of steps. We decided to turn the hose back onto it to wash some of it away then we set to pushing it down the steps. 30 mins later and we were mopping it up at the bottom and walking into the girls toilets there to remove it. Then a security guard, doing his nightly stair well check came up. Oh dear! Crispy told him we'd had a mud fight and asked him if he'd heard of TechTonics as they did that kind of thing often. The guy just looked at us strangely then moved on as we seemed to be cleaning the mess up ok. Man that was funny. We got a phone call from the other guys and Crispy was so embarrassed he wouldn't tell them where he was. He said he was outside going to a pub and would meet up with them soon. They were still around at reception, not far away, unaware of the kaos we had created. So that night we were the cleaners. Crispy owes me for helping him clean up, but to tell the truth that was sooooo funny, I had an excellent time. Still to this day you will see brown stains in the carpet and in the stair well. We did a pretty good job and no one noticed, except for those we told. But man, what a cool story. Of course we went out and got motherly pissed after that... Good stress relief

boring stuff... 7:19AM

Hmmm, the rest of my Sunday was spent doing a little house work and baking some chocolate chipie biscuits. Char came over and her hair cut is looking good. Fi came over and brought me and Gerry an experiment muffin of her own design. Very nice! Martin called by and we caught up and Gerry came home with a dude she had been climbing with that day. Now I have few plans for the rest of the night. Sleep might be one idea but then again that might not be nessesary.

PS I am going to put discussion groups in some time soon

Char cut her dreads off 12:41PM

I came home to find Char was cutting her dreads off. I had to come witness and take photos of that one. We sat around in their kitchen and she cut her hair then another friends and died it and it looked pretty cool, although a big difference. Its prety scary when that happens, I remember getting my long hair shaven off into a No#2. Man I was scared. Got over it in a couple of days though and now I love the short hair.

After that Amy came over to check out her 21st photos and check her email. I have 250 hours of internet usage and I probably only use about 30 of them per month so I'm happy for others to use it. Fi and I played 2 handed 500 (my favourite game) and I managed to beat her in the end but she is not bad. I was going to do some baking but it became late fast so ended up just eating a few chocolate chipies while we played cards instead. I'll do the baking now I think

Talked to my boss about my OOS. Did the 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes experiment with the breath 12:41PM

Friday I went and talked to my boss. Told him my OOS was not getting better and I needed time off. It has become so that when I wake up in the mornings my arms hurt and when I do things like play guitar or lift things they hurt. This is affecting my life too much so I've decided to take some time off and if my arms don't get better then I'm probably looking at a career change. This is necessary in life. I could not keep working like this as it is getting quite stressful. Anyway it looks like I'm coming into work on Monday, sorting my stuff out, then I have two weeks off, paid for by our insurance provider (equivilant of ACC). I hate this as I am fine to do everything except use the computer. This means I can go roller blading, relax in the sun, jog, etc. I feel stink, I hate bludging. Anyway I'm going to use the time to train as what else do I have to do. I shall set myself a training schedule which will be something like a run in the morning, one at night, some press ups and sit ups, some light weights as heavy ones can hurt my arms, and maybe a roller blade if weather permitting. I'm gonna be super fit if I can pull this off.

Friday after work we had planned the 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes at the Loaded Hog. They have a breathalizer machine there which gives blood alcohol readings in mg. We decided to test ourselves every 10 minutes to see how we handled our alcohol and how the readings went up over time and tapered off afterwards. It was 4 of us participating, Me, Crispy, Damian & Scott. We stagered our starting times by 2 minutes so that we would have a break between having to use the breathalizer machine. The bartenders kinda know us from the website and arranged to have pitchers brought over to us (they don't sell jugs or pitchers but for us they made an exception) and gave us a 20% discount on the beer. They thought it was quite funny. I took a few photos and it all went pretty well. There was a little bit of beer spillage and I had a spew at 68. This was just an unsettled stomach though as I had eaten just before. Crispy had eaten the same thing and also felt crook but managed to hold out. I felt fine afterwards. We are a little dubious as to the readings because first, you're meant to wait 10 minutes after drinking to use the machine and we couldn't do that with 1 shot of beer per minute so that probably affected things a bit. Second Damians score stayed pretty much constant in the 700s and even decreased some of the time. We are a little dubious as to the technique he used in breathing into the machine, using a new straw each time and taking multiple breaths rather than one large breath. I scored the highest through out but wasn't as pissed as Crispy or Damian at the end of it. We will analyse and graph up the results at a later stage anyway. I left early there as I was a little tired. Got home and knew I needed to sober up so sat around on the couch, ate a tub of cookies and cream icecream, played guitar and probably talked to myself to keep myself company. Gerry came home inbetween but was back out to a party shortly after. She threw rasins at me, was I that sad looking?

Anyway next morning I had zilch hangover affects which was awesome. I am becoming more diligent in my old age. I did a lot of house work and fixed our vaccum cleaner so that it now sucks 4 times as hard as once it did. I borrowed Damians DVD player and got out the new remade Dune movie. Unfortunetly my TV has no remote and no AV button on the front so I couldn't get it to work. So I scratched that idea and went up to Martins place with it. We watched the mamoth movie, a whole 4-5 hours worth and the afternoon went by.