In lieu of actually properly writing something, here are some recent tweets:

My Sunday exploration has revealed that Karori has two supermarkets and not much else.
2:01 PM Jul 26th

I love that Color Me Badd’s Wikipedia entry has a subsection titled “Downhill Slide“.
1:38 PM Jul 27th

A #nzff poster taunts me with its image of the good-times train while instead I wait for the crap-times bus.
5:39 PM Jul 27th

I made a Mad Men cartoon likeness of myself: http://bit.ly/ojc28
12:13 AM Jul 29th

In lieu of sitting down and actually properly writing something (which would take a bit of effort), I redesigned my blog.

Well, I switched WordPress themes from K2 to Atahualpa. K2 was OK, but I got a bit sick of how the text was justified and, well, I felt like a change. Atahualpa is nice. It does what I want it to do, and now I can finally start mucking around with WP widgets. It takes a bit of self-restraint to not fill up all the sidebars with stuff. Oh hey, stop looking over there – keep your eyes in the middle!

In lieu of putting some time aside and actually properly writing something, I took some photos:

I take lots of photos but I don’t get around to uploading them much due to my iBook being almost ready to donate to a technology museum as an example of how computers were in the olden days.

But eventually I get motivated enough to set aside an hour or so and get the photos off my camera, tagged and uploaded.

See the last photo – the one of the train? That’s a drawing of one of the new Matangi trains that’ll be replacing Wellington’s urban trains next year.

As previously mentioned, Matangi was also the name of the little village I grew up in, south-east of Hamilton. But now seeing this train with Matangi in its destination board makes me feel a little bit ill.

It’s as if one day I could get on the train, expecting it to take me to the Hutt, but actually its destination would be Matangi, and I’d end up getting off at the siding by the old dairy factory:

View Larger Map

Also, see how it’s quite a nice sunny day in the Google Streetview pic but yet it looks really bleak and desolate? That was my childhood. I hope this helps explain my my issue with the trains being called Matangi.

In lieu of actually properly writing something, I renamed my website. Sort of.

My site has been called Robyn’s Secret Passage since I bought secret-passage.com in 1998 (You can read more on that history here.)

I thought it was a perfectly nice name, but I eventually got sick of the “Hur hur hur O RLY” response when I’d first tell someone what it was.

I’d switched to robyngallagher.com but my site was still titled Robyn’s Secret Passage. Then a couple of weeks ago, I decided to ditch that name and just name the site after myself.

Even though it just required changing text in a box in WordPress, I found it a strangely emotional experience. It took a while before I could click the “Save Changes” button.

I also ditched the tagline “The coolness that is Robyn”. That one originates from something that OG journal girl Olivia wrote in her online journal about a party she’d held and how “the coolness that is Dean and Robyn” came. (Jesus, that was too long ago.)

From memory, I originally used it ironically, but 10 years later it’s tired and faded and what it says doesn’t match me any more. Like a pair of those bumster jeans from the late ’90s.

In lieu of actually properly writing something, I’ve sort of tricked myself into actually properly writing something.