D-Day is approaching and I still haven't decided for sure what I'll do. Stay on here or work something else out, I was thinking of doing just one year here, then taking the rest of my long service from Holmesglen and spending the last 5 months of 2009 traveling.
Then again it depends on what happens at the next ALT meeting (on Monday), if they are restructuring the organisation it might be more attractive to stay.
Andrew (from Burwood) just bought a car here, if you keep it as a personal vehicle for 12 months you can then import it into Australia as personal property and avoid a lot of import taxes. This is attractive because you can get a low mileage recent model car here for around a third of the price in Australia. So you can spend 10 or 12 thousand and sell it in Australia for over 30 thousand. Or keep it. Andrew bought an RX8, but the cattch is the 12 month thing, for me to do that I would have to sign on for another year.
I've been submitting 'Flip', the animated short I finished when I was back in Australia, to several film festivals. Hopefully it will play in a decent sized festival somewhere in the world, and hopefully I can travel to the event. If I get a few different screenings in the second half of the year my plan to take long service looks good. But I won't know for weeks or months if that will be the case.
http://www.fonetikfilms.com/flip
It's been slightly less cold the last few days. I put a thermometer in my kitchen, last night was around 8.5 degrees. Usually it's 6 or 7 degrees in there, so it's an improvement. It's still like keeping everything in a fridge though, just by sitting stuff on a shelf in the open. The bananas are always too cold, it's better if I microwave them for a few seconds to try and get them to normal room temperature before peeling them.
Friday is my first ALT day for 2009, I am doing an animation workshop, my plan is to use my notebook's built in camera to do some pixellation, that's aniamtion using people. I did a test and it worked ok. Hopefully we can pull it off and get something usable.
If it works out maybe I'll put the results on youtube.
