Where The Hell Have I Been?
Aug 19 '07
The Bottom Line I took my sweet time getting inspired to write again… this is what I’ve been up to in the meantime.
For those of you who don’t already know, I took a bit of a break from review-writing over the last seven months or so, for a variety of reasons, which you can read about here.
A couple of weeks ago, I made my Epinions return with a review on the Sandra Bullock / Keanu Reeves movie The Lake House. Well, I can now confirm that publishing that review does indeed mean I’m back. I’m determined not to disappear again.
So is this an improved dbcint? Can you look forward to a bigger contribution to the site than I’ve ever made in the past? And what’s the deal with all those reviews I started but was never inspired to finish while I was away – will you be seeing those anytime soon? The short answer to all of the above is: no.
I do have one review nearly finished, and it’s one I’ve been adding pieces to for a couple of years now, and I can guarantee it will be posted by September 24th, and it will mark my return to the music category. There’s also a movie review half running through my head at the moment and I’m confident I can get that out in the next couple of days.
However, I still have a life outside Epinions and more importantly, I have goals within that life that I’d like to achieve – the sooner the better. So just because I’m writing again, don’t take it to mean I’ll necessarily be doing any more than say one review every couple of weeks. If I find myself in the position that I’m so (here’s that word again) inspired, then who knows how many I’ll get done in any one period of time. All I’m saying is there’s no guarantees.
Now, I suppose you want to know what I’ve been doing with myself since I haven’t been writing. Rest assured that I still get my Epinions alerts and have been reading some interesting pieces by some of my favourite writers. I don’t rate or comment very often – too many times I don’t really have anything to say other than "good review", and if you’ve already got 20 VH ratings, I doubt mine is really going to make that much of a difference. Besides, you know if you’ve written a good review or not. If you’d prefer I did leave a rating, be it purely for your Income Share, because you want reassurance that you’ve written a good review, or you simply want to whether or not I’ve read it – whatever the reason – let me know and I’ll make an effort to try and remember to hit that button.
I know I personally like ratings and comments because they show me who’s been reading my reviews, and what that’s shown me is I do have a few loyal readers – people who deserve to know what’s taken me so long to get back here. If one of my favourite reviewers came back after being away for so many months, I’d want to know what they did with their "time off".
Well, I’ve been spending as much time as possible with my Godson Jayden, who’ll be two early in September. I’ve also been steadily working on my computer course, for which I’m two assessments away from finishing the level two component. And of course, let’s not forget the fact there’s an actual job which takes up a guaranteed thirty-three hours of every week (although one week recently I did fifty hours).
And considering I’ve been full-time at that job since October, and with the company two and a half years now, it was high time I had a real holiday. So along with a mate who’d also been at her job long enough to warrant a holiday, we packed our bags and headed over to Australia, for my first holiday without my family. We landed in Sydney and spent a night in a backpackers in what was called the "red-light district". Walking down the main street that night I saw one hooker, and I think there may have been another one when we went down that same street again the next day, which gave us a pretty big clue as to how "red-light" this district was.
Before checking out of the backpackers in the morning we went for a walk to the Sydney Opera House – well, the other side of the bridge anyway. Still, we got a pretty good view, and a fair bit of exercise (although not as much as some people, apparently Sydney was holding a marathon that morning). After lunch we boarded our pre-booked bus to Newcastle. However, if any of you were around the bus terminal in the early afternoon of May 19th, and happened to find a light blue denim jacket / hoody with a New Zealand five dollar note in the breast pocket, I’d like it back please. The fiver is yours if you want it, but I swear that’s the last place I had the garment and no-one can remember where it came from so I can’t replace it.
Anyhoo, the Sydney to Newcastle bus trip lasted about five hours from memory, and much to the dismay of my travelling companion there were going to be no stops along the way, which means she had a cigarette rolled and ready to go the minute we were off the bus. With the most important item of business out of the way, we immediately agreed how beautiful Newcastle was. I could seriously see myself living there one day. Not that we probably would’ve even gone there, except for our main motivation for even going to Australia – P!nk, live at the Newcastle Entertainment Centre.
When I wrote my review of 2007’s Big Day Out, I posed the question of whether or not there’d be a better concert event this year. The answer is a resounding YES. With possibly the best album of her career last year (the amazing I’m Not Dead), P!nk had hit the road and put on one hell of a show. She performed a lot of tracks from said album – kicking off the show with ‘Cuz I Can, and then belting out a number of others including the five singles New Zealand had seen at that point (Stupid Girls, Who Knew?, U & Ur Hand, Nobody Knows, and the track with the live video, which I’d been practicing for ever since my ticket arrived, Leave Me Alone (I’m Lonely)), and what turned out to be the sixth single, Dear Mr. President, along with others like The One That Got Away, as well as mixing in tracks from her previous three albums like Trouble, Family Portrait, Most Girls, Don’t Let Me Get Me and more that escape me at the moment. However, one highlight definitely had to be Fingers, a track I’m Not Dead that I never expected to be played, mainly because of the subject matter. It’s basically the partner song to U & Ur Hand – this ones more like she’s saying "It’s just me and my hand tonight". On the CD, it’s funny. Performed live, it’s fantastic. There was also a track called Redemption Song, which apparently everyone in the audience knew but me, and she closed the show with Get The Party Started before disappearing while making sure the audience was kept occupied with the biggest confetti shower I’ve ever seen.
Yes, P!nk was excellent. Her opening act however, was a local Australian band called The Androids. They had a small hit in New Zealand a few years ago called Do It With Madonna, and we’ve heard nothing from them since. I gather they’ve found success in their home country now, as while channel flipping one night we came across an ad for the brilliantly addictive TV show Heroes, and according to the on-screen text, the ad featured a song by The Androids called Whole Lotta Love, and I think they performed it at P!nk’s show. They did not however, perform Do It With Madonna. I called them The One Hit Wonders Who Didn’t Play Their One Hit. A few weeks later, by which time I was back at work, P!nk and The Androids came to New Zealand for a show, and I sincerely hope they performed it there, otherwise the audience wouldn’t have known a thing they played.
After spending a few days in Newcastle we flew to the Gold Coast and did four of the five theme parks (we missed White Water World). I could go on and on about these, but suffice to say I had the time of my life. I’ve been to these places once before, about nine years ago, but Dreamworld’s most notable change since then is definitely worth a look. On the side of the Tower Of Terror, you now have the Giant Drop. You go up slowly, until everyone below you starts to look very small, then you just sit there. You never know how long it’s going to be, but all of a sudden you’re sent plummeting to Earth. It looks like a lot of fun, but I was scared stiff the first time I was up there. So much so, I was preparing to meet my maker. Movieworld has a similar ride, but they do the opposite. You sit at the bottom, and all of a sudden you go rocketing straight up, but they bring you down slowly. Thankfully.
However, the scariest ride of all as far as I was concerned was Movieworld’s Lethal Weapon rollercoaster. It takes you on all the twists and turns you’d expect of a rollercoaster, but it seemed to be faster and a longer journey than some of the other ones, and the seat was missing somewhere to put your feet. It doesn’t sound that scary, but when you’re tipped upside down going a million miles an hour, it would at least be some comfort to know there was something solid underneath your feet. There’s not. I highly recommend serious thrill-seekers go on this ride, but you may not want to go twice.
My original plan was that a holiday would fully recharge my batteries and I’d be ready to return to Epinions as soon as I got back home. Unfortunately, I received some bad news while I was away. My grandmother, who was fit and healthy the day I flew out of Dunedin, took ill one day and died rather suddenly. To have someone close to you die like that is certainly not a pleasant experience, but to be thousands of miles away at the time, it was just awful. Thankfully, I was able to make it back in time for the funeral. At one stage I thought I might not be able to, but it worked out in the end.
The reason I’m telling you this is because as I said before, there’s people who deserve to know what I’ve been up to for the past seven months or however long it’s been, and Nana’s death was a big part of it. Leaving that out would be as bad as lying. So please don’t mistake this as a plea for sympathy. Nana left behind a big family and we’re all helping each other through it, and I wasn’t alone when I found out either, so I’ve been through The Sympathy Thing. There’s some tough times ahead, as Nana and Granddad both had their birthdays in the same month, so January could be a bit hard on Granddad, but still, please do not do The Sympathy Thing. For the moment, we’re moving on and we’ll deal with those tough times when they come.
So, for those of you who wanted to know what I’ve been, that’s pretty much it. I don’t know when the reviews I started while I was trying to get inspired again are going to get published – if they ever do. One of the units I’ve done for my computer course was on FrontPage, so I’m going to be using that soon to get my MySpace page "all totally pimped out" (as "Weird Al" Yankovic would say), and eventually that link in my profile will lead to my MySpace. In the meantime, make sure you’re getting your email alerts, cos I’m back, and here to stay.
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Epinions.com ID:
dbcint
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Member: Dean Cowie
Location: Invercargill, New Zealand
Reviews written: 198
Trusted by: 39 members
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