I've been Invited to go on orchestral tour again with the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra for their 2006/7 season. That means touring in the summer to the Mediterranean and the following winter to central Europe.

Travelling and making music.. who could ask for more!

Got a phone call from Tank yesterday. He's engaged.

My response was, "Fucking hell! Oh, and congratulations."

So congratulations to Tank and Paula.

It's done!
I'm coming home!

After messy deliberations with freaky flyer points and kind hearted travel agents telling me I was stupid to book a flight at this time and do I know it's Easter? Everyone's travelling then... I'm making it home for my 21st Birthday. I'm missing the last two days of term to get home before the 26th, which could mean that I miss my technical exam, but really that's College's fault for not having organised the date of it yet.

I can't wait to see everyone, the sunshine, the cafes, the 21 cakes I've requested for my birthday....

Since I'm reading Cryptinomicon I figured I'd look up GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard), which is a PGP (the afore mentioned Pretty Good Privacy) compatible public key encription / verification system. So I've had a bit of a play with it and come up with some nice long obscure passphrases.

In other news, Evan left this morning, heading back home. He's got lot's planned I think, and will enjoy seeing everyone in Melbourne.

Hopfully I'll actually post a little more now, I've been pretty busy, but that's no excuse. I'll post my GPG key finger print later.

Some new photos up. Evan and I had a day in the kitchen on Friday, whipping up delights like his lemon and lime tart, my special mince pies (we needed a use for the leftover pastry, and leftover alcoholic fruit from Christmas) and a scrummy dinner of Coq au vin. Last night 'me n the boys' went out with Claire to a German 'Oktoberfest' pub, where some friends of ours from College were playing in an Oompah brass band. We managed to miss the music entirely, but still caught a couple of steins while we were there. Evan now looks like a yeti.

Today I played with the City Chamber ensemble in their lunchime concert at St Olaves. Built circa 1450, interred in the Church's grounds is none other than Mary Ramsay, reputedly the woman who brought the Plague to London, and an eccentric Elizabethan known as 'Mother Goose', who used to knit little boots for her geese so that their feet wouldn't get sore as they were herded to market. The arch over the churchyard's entrance has a cluster of sculls, and a Latin inscription which translates as 'death is a light to me'. Charles Dickens was much taken with this inscription, and in his 'Commercial Traveller', he refers to this Church as 'St Ghastly Grim'.

Anyway, the point is that it's certainly haunted, as no one could manage to turn on the heating while we were there. Being extremely cold (a top of 0 degrees celcius today) meant that the piano - to which we tuned - was extraordinarily sharp, and my flute very flat. This made for some interesting intonation experiments, especially when we were playing Haydn's 'La Poule' (translated as 'The Chicken') Symphony, and the oboe and I took turns at being the solo chicken. We had to apologise to the audience and play in our coats and scarves! My fingers are only just recovering from the ordeal.

I'm coming back to Australia... for a holiday.

Actually, the working part of my working holiday visa runs out fairly soon, so I'm coming home to apply for an ancestral visa - British grandparents. I'll be flying out of London on the 15th of March, loose a day and arrive in Melbourne on the 17th. I'll be sticking around for about three weeks before flying back on the 10th of April.

It'll be nice to catch up with everyone and get a bit of decent weather for a change. To everyone in Melbourne, I'll see you soon.

I think I'm going to be able to go the whole day without updating our new site. Posts don't count, there's no code involved. Sure there are a couple of spelling mistakes here and there, but spelling never was my strong point.

Busy day at work as per usual. Hopefully launching the back issues section of Titan Magazines UK site tonight, we'll see how that goes.

Well Elisse and I have spent the last four days putting together a new web site. We decided that the old helisse.ath.cx page was crap and that we needed something that looked nicer and was easier to update.

Rather than just create another site, with slightly nicer HTML and a new 'look & feel', I've built a complete PHP/MySQL back end to the site so we can post through the page itself and an RSS feed is generated every time we write a new post. Hopefully all this will mean that we post on here a little more often than we did on the last site.

Welcome to our new website!
It's a snapshot of the goings-on of Elisse and Haydenin London, far, far away from home. There'll be photos (regularly updated, I promise) and news from the land of the cold and miserable.

This is my second week back in London from a tour of Spain, the Netherlands and Austria with a youth orchestra, JMWO. I met some very cool people and we played in amazing places, including a 5-star hotel - the Kurhaus - in Holland (they built a stage for us overnight!) and the legendary Wiener Konzerthaus. There's some photos up there.

We had a wicked Christmas with Mike, Soph and Evan at home in Aldeburgh St - a rather fancy and intimate affair with so many desserts that we couldn't even try them all! The Christmas tree is decorated with Ferrero Rochers.

Haydenand I went to Brighton on a whim last weekend. As you can see, the "beach" doesn't match up to Brighton beach in Melbourne, Australia... mainly because it's made of ROCKS. I also dyed my hair again - it's back to the preferred dark red.

And finally, It's Mozart's birthday today. Happy birthday, dude. And thanks for the Nachtmusik.