The story of my fantabulous birthday and more

Pos­sibly the best birth­day in a long time.

At mid­night as my birth­day star­ted, I was up at the Kelvin having a glass of red wine after having treated myself to a movie. I bumped into Ben, an old mate from The Age who now works for ABC TV. We’ve always got on quite well, and now it turns out he lives about five doors from me. Yay for new friends. We had a lovely night and I very much enjoyed the start of my birth­day. *grin*

I woke up around 8‑ish to the phone ringing… “Hmm,” my groggy head thought. “Bet you any­thing that’s dai­syn­erd or my Mum.” I vaguely toyed with the idea of actu­ally rising but decided not to. I’m kinda glad I didn’t, actu­ally. dai­syn­erd leaves the best phone mes­sages ever. It was a superb thing to have as my first con­tact with the day. Had myself a long, lus­cious bath, indulged in green­wytch’s delect­able cin­na­mon and nut body butter, went up the road to the café and had a lazy brunch with the Good Week­end. Took myself off to the tennis and bought myself a ground pass… wandered into the Nalbandian/Gonzales game just as it was start­ing… and it was great tennis.

Dinner looked as if it would be a dis­aster for a few moments as the chef had been injured, but as it turned out, they simply closed the res­taur­ant to any one else and made it a private func­tion for us. Sure, ser­vice was some­what slower, but we were all able to wander around and drink lots and be noisy. I’m sad that so few of you could make it, but that’s how it goes with this week­end in Janu­ary. Dinner was amaz­ing: I shared a plat­ter with fizit that has braised kangaroo with quan­dong, grilled wallaby, smoked eel, cro­codile, buf­falo saus­ages, oysters, grilled bar­ra­mundi with lemon myrtle (omigod) and a side of emu liver pâté with damper. As prom­ised, I ate your share too, dai­syn­erd. Dessert was native fruit icecreams. Yum yum yum yum yum. Because of the delays, we were actu­ally there for about four hours, which made it a really cool party. And my mentor, Gaye Murray came and had great chats with my boss from Mel­bourne Uni, Jenny (she says Hi!, by the way, pcat).

The only dis­ap­point­ment was really after the birth­day was over: Ben had said he’d try to pop round after work (he fin­ished at mid­night) but he didn’t make it…

Anyhow, life is good. Very good. Today I had a meet­ing with some people about a very cool online pro­ject I’m going to be con­sult­ing on and tomor­row I start work edit­ing the first issue of a brand-new magazine that will be pub­lished by Via­me­dia, the people who do MELBOURNE magazine. (I had a one-hour meet­ing sched­uled with Gaye on Wed­nes­day morn­ing which I thought was a tent­at­ive dis­cus­sion about the pos­sib­il­ity of the role. I arrived at the office at 10am… I didn’t leave until 7pm, by which time we’d nutted out the con­tent for the entire issue, brain­stormed names, star­ted on the con­trib­utor list and agreed on timing and money. Very very exciting.)

Anyhow, I’m off to a meet­ing with the News­Real video col­lect­ive to talk about making sub­vers­ive DVDs. I do like my life right now.