Salutations

And now with a flourish, the ring master sweeps his cape in an expansive gesture as a cataclysm erupts within the big top. The audience hushes and all eyes turn to the portly gentleman standing with an imposing and yet unassuming stance amidst the sparks of some devised contraption which has - by its inventing - emitted sparks to which this gentleman is, well, standing in the middle of.

Alright, I may have slightly lost the imagery there but still, give me some measure of credit to start with a bit of melodrama. So, to this end and beside this minor digression, I would like to welcome one and all to this, my latest venture. I have recently migrated from utilizing services over at Live Journal on my journal here. To be frank, I found that blog an embarrassment as through my more naïve years, I have had less than respectable influences which spawned a certain level of immaturity in my mannerisms and interactions with those around me. That doesn’t mean to say that I have gained any future wisdom that has changed me in the intervening years, but I simply wished to separate myself from that which was and focus on that which may be.

On more serious reflection, I have to admit that I may laps into brooding tendencies to which my other blog was sporadically afflicted with and the odd period to which I refused to post for some reason or another – be it sheer stupidity or an irrational belief that I may effect some balance in the ether by my lack of input on worldly affairs or the bowel movement of the African Elephant.

I would like to mention at this point that Microsoft word has a ceremonial crash and I lost about 2/3 of the entry which I had prepared so, oh well, I’ll have to write it again. I really thought I had enabled the auto-save feature in this install but obviously, that was only on my laptop.

I have come to grasp some of the magnitude that people speak of when they refer to the penultimate year of secondary schooling. This year has really faced me with some challenges which have made me re-think past decisions that I have made – some for the better and some for the worse. It doesn’t help that I have an inability to say “no” to people who request my musical services – be it performance or compositional – for some project or another. I have had the good fortune to be included in the 2009 music team of the production of The Wedding singer being produced by a Gold Coast amateur theatrical company Spotlight. After the success of my school musical Little Shop of Horrors where I starred as Audrey II - a sadistic plant who has an unquenchable hunger for human blood and flesh – I found the drive that my arts director (Cilla Scott) refers to as “the theatre bug”.

About the time when I was doing the musical, I was lucky enough to be successfully matched with guidedog Q446 (Flack). He is a black Labrador male, just weighing on 33KG (72.6LB) and 55CM (22In.) to the shoulder. As his working goes, my trainer (Andrew Barnes) thinks of him as a “two-speed dog” for harness work, which my friends at school find hilarious; when I ask him to “straight on, let’s go” he seems to literally interpret this as “Come on, yeah yeah yeah, see how many times you can make me nervous whilst speeding past very imposing objects”. Flack’s program has had to be slightly modified to get the most out of our teamwork, considering that I am one of the youngest guidedog recipients in Australia. Further administrative errors in GDQ have compounded the irregular nature of the program: I was scheduled in June to be handed over to Joe Dutton – an instructor who was shipped up from South Australia due to the lack of resources that GDQ has to support its client base - however, he has been rendered legally unable to work with me has he has not been issued with a Blue Card – an initiative which ensures that the card holder poses no dangers to those under his or her care. Therefore, my trainer who took me through my program – who has been appointed field services manager and reassigned to the northern Brisbane district – has had to run back and forth from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to ensure that my program doesn’t fall ass over the proverbial tit.

Sheesh, it has taken me about 2 hours to write an 800-900 word post. Although, there have been several intervening interruptions such as a late lunch, phone calls and solidified Jell. This entry also seems to follow a trend to which most of my previous bloggings attempts seem to resemble – either nonsensical gibberish or a lot of different ideas crammed into a few hastily jotted down paragraphs. To that end, I do wish to bid you a jaunty farewell, or in the vernacular, cheers.