Yesterday our office was invaded by a fast-talking Santa Claus look-a-like character selling paintings. At first we thought he as just some crazy dude trying to flog knock-offs, but he told us his story and showed us (all) his work.

And it was good. Real good.

His line was that the galleries sell them for $1200-1400 a piece, and then 40 days later he gets half of the cash. He spends his days traveling around WA painting things he likes the look of. He's heading up to Broome next, so he wanted to move a few paintings beforehand so he had a few bucks to get him there.

All of the paintings were really, really good. We all expected it to be quite poor quality, but instead he had awesome scenic paintings of the trees in Pemberton, the Bathurst lighthouse at Rottnest, wheat fields in Kalgoorlie and yachts in the bay at Geraldton.

We bought a painting for the office, shown below. It was created last December in Pemberton. I like the idea of a "think tank" in our office :)

You can see my toe in the bottom right corner. I think I will ask Andrew Wall about making a frame for it.

After a week-long hiatus from the Internet, our home network is now reconnected to the outside world. We're using iiNet now, having moved from Westnet. Our phone's also bundled with them, not that we care/use a phone.

My ADSL 2 router should have arrived today but the courier screwed something up, so we're connected at 8Mbit at the moment, using my old DSL-500 router.

Maggie's got a new email address, though she will be checking her old Westnet one until the end of the month. She'll be in touch with you shortly if you're a real friend, and if you not, contact her for the new address and become friends.

So Hale picked me up this morning at about 9:30AM and we went to work via the old office to collect the mail, as usual. Again, as usual there was a package (but for Adam - normally it's for Nayan ;) and an envelope - my America tickets were here!

They were sent via registered mail so it came in the distinctive red, orange and white envelope, and I knew straight away what they were. I jumped into the Subaru again and we drove through West Perth to our office. I opened the envelope and confirmed that I had been sent what I paid for and was very happy to see that was the case. Two tickets, front row (30DD and 31DD - my favourite dual-letter combo).

I had the bright idea of Mark pulling over out the front of Epic and me jumping out to collect our morning coffee. He did that, I put all my stuff on the floor-well of his front passenger seat and departed. It has been really windy this morning.

I strolled back to the office and saw my laptop and a magazine was sitting on my desk... but no envelope? Mark said it wasn't in the car, so I emptied my pockets and felt my heart rate double instantly. Shit. This could turn out to be $2,000 wasted (2x tickets, 4x airfares, accommodation).

We raided the car with no luck. I retraced my steps to Epic and searched the streets. No luck. I asked in a few shops and cafes if anyone had received an envelope, but alas, they had not. I called the old office and asked that if anyone handed in a registered letter to contact me immediately - it hadn't been handed in yet.

Then the possibilities played though in my head. First up Ticketmaster have a pretty tough policy on reissuing tickets - they straight up won't. What they might do is give you a voucher (between two days and two hours before the performance) which was going to be tricky considering I'd bought these via eBay. I'd have to get in touch with the seller, they'd have to be especially understanding, it'd probably cost me more in a "thankyou" gift for the seller's extra assistance... or I'd end up in Melbourne with dad and no concert to go to.

Then I started thinking about how I could scam the door people at the concert. I'd expect some tough opposition, but maybe with the right person and my right approach I could convince them that the reasons seats 30 and 31 were empty was because I lost the tickets in a Perth wind-storm?

I jumped on the phone with Ticketmaster to gauge their response, knowing that they'd have a policy of some sort (and knowing that it probably would not be in my favour). On hold for 15 minutes when I decided to check the car again. Mark came out after a few minutes and we turned it over.

Then he pulled out an envelope from under the front seat. It had gotten wedged in the actual metal bracing holding the seat to the chassis. I had flashbacks of when my mobile phone was lost between two flaps of leather on the underside of my driver's side seat.

There were emotional embraces. There always is with me.

We've theorized that the envelope was sitting on the magazine, which was sitting on the laptop, which was in the floorwell. That was just the right height so that when Mark accelerated, the tickets slid off the magazine and into a very, very thin space.

Fuck I'm so happy now. This day won't be wasted... this weekend won't be ruined... and all it's gonna cost me is a few celebratory beers over lunch.

Well technically I'm going to the America concert, in Melbourne, in 6 weeks.

It was a bit of a whirlwind purchase after dad mentioned they were touring Australia in a month or so. I picked up two front-row tickets to their Melbourne gig, adjusted dad's flights forward a few days, booked myself some flights, and told him what was going on.

Their latest album, Here & Now, is really quite good, and I'm looking forward to seeing them with my dad, who also likes their new tunes.

Thursday night my BJJ club held a grading session for those students that were ready to advance to their next belt/stripe. Adam, my coach, had suggested that I was ready to grade to I rocked up with a knowledge of the white-three syllabus.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, one of the things I really like about BJJ is that it constantly builds upon core foundations. The requirements for achieving your first blue tip on white belt are made up entirely of movement drills - you have to know how to move around a person whilst maintaining control of them. For your second tip, you have to perform the first grading again, as well as show some sweeps and chokes. Your third grading is the same as your second, with the inclusion of a variety of armbar and figure-4 joint locks. For the nerds among us, the gradings are effectively recursive :)

I passed the grading, which means I'm now about half way to my blue belt, having two more gradings ahead of me.