The Lost Realm

I cooked dinner for Debs tonight.

No, wait; it wasn’t like that. No, not that either. We just talked. It was good to sit down and talk without being in shock. I won’t say it was happy, but it certainly left me feeling a lot better. A little closer to resolving all the thoughts and feelings.

We discussed why we were just where we are, and a little of where we’re going next. Most importantly, we discussed Romilly (who I’ve had the pleasure of entertaining all weekend). She’s caught in the middle of all of this, and doesn’t understand any of it. I’m not sure I really understand it yet, either, but I’m trying my hardest to make sure that she doesn’t get hurt.

I’m trying to make sure I don’t get any more hurt too. I’m still not quite ready to take off this wedding ring, but I think I’ll be able to get there now. It’s not what I want, but I think it’s where I’m going.

As the old saying goes: “life sucks, and then you die”. I guess I’ve got a lot more suck to deal with, because I’m not planning on dying any time soon.

Not having a car at the moment, I’m catching public transport to and from work. That takes a while, but today it took me 2 hours, 15 minutes to get home, most of which was on foot. Just because a bus leaves from the stand that you’re waiting at and is labelled to go to your destination, apparently does not mean that you should catch this differently numbered bus. When it terminates half way to your destination, particularly when that half way is half way in the wrong direction, it leaves you with quite a walk to the train station.

I’m hoping that rounds out my three things.

All bad things happen in threes, you see. They group themselves together, just to make life that little bit more miserable. They’re like that.

My first bad thing is fairly obvious. The second is that I can’t vote in the upcoming state election. That’s right, I’m 28 and I can’t vote. When I moved from my previous address, I was apparently delisted from the electoral roll. If someone had told me this, I would have worried about changing my address properly. I did not. I was waiting for Debs to get her citizenship details, and now it’s past the cut off date and I am not enrolled at my previous or current address. I’m hoping I don’t get fined.

The bus incident is hopfully the third of the set, leaving me with no further bad things to encounter this week. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.

Things to do that are better than moping about all weekend, just because your wife left you:

• Be surprised when your brother arrives at your doorstep on Friday afternoon.
• Enjoy the company of your brother and a friend, eat pizza, and talk until nearly 2am.
• Try to sleep.
• Stare out the window until someone else wakes up.
• Go shopping, as you have no food (other than left-over pizza).
• Watch Alien III Special Edition
• Complain that Alien III Special Edition has really bad sound.
• Sweep, mop and vacuum.
• Consider rearranging the furniture, even though you probably won’t have most of it for much longer.
• Stare at the TV, just to prove that there’s really nothing worth watching.
• Try to sleep again.
• Go for a bike ride to time how long it takes to get to the train station.
• Clean the oven.
• Stare at the computer a lot.
• Clean out the fridge.
• Rewash most of the dishes, just because you’re not sure that they’re clean enough.
• Water the plants so often that the chillies are still sitting in a puddle the next morning.
• Plan to make pasta, only to realise at the last minute that you don’t have a proper pot anymore.
• Sit around hoping that you’ll get another call from your daughter and try not to take it personally when she doesn’t want to talk to you.

Last night, Romilly fell asleep while I reading to her. I was part way through The Cat in The Hat and she just quietly dozed off in her cot. She just looked so very beautiful and peaceful there, her tiny fingers clutching at her little pink dog, Bawoof.

Normally, I would share these moments with Debs. That isn’t going to happen anymore.

Debs has decided that we’re separating. She told me on Monday evening. Valentines Day: now the most appropriate day to tell someone that you don’t love them.

I’m not sure where life goes from here. I’m not sure I want to think about it just yet.

I am the last person to link to Google Maps on the planet. I was avoiding doing it, mostly in protest of it being so darn cool, and yet only covering the USA.

Now, though, I’m forced to link to it. Not for cool factor. Not for reverse engineered javascript, XMLHttpRequest, DHTML goodness. No, not even so I can point out the nearest pizza joints or purveyors of pornography to the Whitehouse.

No, I’m going to link to a Buffy reference (and I’m not even a Buffy fan). I’m not quite sure how those people qualify themselves for that search, except perhaps for Miss Adrienne, who appears to be some sort of psychic consultant. Well, and Apple sort of qualify based on the whole serpent/satan thing in Genesis.

Oh yes — and Google. Only a deal with the devil himself would leave anyone capable of producing such a stunning web application.

I predicted this the moment I heard about unicode domains, and now someone has gone and proved me right. Have a look at these links in anything but IE. Yes, this exploit doesn’t work in IE because it’s so out of date that it doesn’t keep up with the standards (see definition of irony).

Yes, it looks like Paypal. Yes, that SSL certificate looks sort of valid (until you inspect it closely). No, that’s not Paypal. No, that isn’t an “a” in www.paypal.com. It’s a а, which just happens to look exactly like the character “a”.

For now, those that are worried can diasable network.enableIDN in Firefox/Mozilla, but I can see far too many people getting caught in phishing attacks with this new trick.

See, if someone had just listened to me when I started whining about this months ago, we could all have thought up a neat trick to save people from having their bank accounts emptied and their pet dogs kidnapped. But does anyone ever listen to me? No-o-o — of course not. In fact… hey… where are you goi… come b…

Oh, bah humbug.