Sue Zann Toh

We left on Saturday morning and made our way south to our lunch spot, the Other Side of The Moon Restaurant in Quay West Bunker Bay. We’ve been to that restaurant before and loved it so much we came back again. They have a beautiful view and great food and service. We shared a gourmet pizza, which was mouth-wateringly delicious, before continuing south towards Losari Retreat. We checked in the afternoon and after a quick introduction by one of our hosts, Jacky, we made our way to the horse riding place, Naturally Horsey.

Naturally Horsey is unique. It uses the natural horsemanship, also known as horse whispering, method of riding horses. It’s aim is to be able to ride a horse without a saddle or bridle or any other restraint. Obviously, this can be dangerous, so as beginners, we had a saddle and a natural bridle made of rope.

We spent the first hour with our horses before going for a trial ride. The hour was spent getting to know our horses. We started off brushing the horse and letting them smell us. My horse wasn’t very interested in me at first, but then decided to take a good whiff of me and left a lovely stain on my new white shirt!

We then moved onto playing some games with the horses, this was also a bit of training for us to learn how to control the horses in case something bad happened. It was also a great introduction into natural horsemanship as we played energy games with the horses. One of the games I distinctly remember was standing in front of the horse, looking directly at him, lifting the reins (made of natural rope) up in front of me, then tapping the reins with my fore finger and the horse would automatically start walking backwards! Neat party trick. When the horse did as he was “told”, I would then beckon him back to me and give him a good stroke on the neck.

My horse didn’t respect me very much at first, he was pushing and nudging me a lot and I had to learn to push him back and show him who’s boss. He eventually stopped trying his luck with me and we got along fine, for the most part.

At the end of the games, we had to mount our horse. The only other time I mounted a horse was with the aid of a platform, making the distance from the ground to the horse’s back less. This time, we had to mount our very big horses from the ground. I’m glad I do yoga, because it requires quite some flexibility and strength to get your leg in the right place and push up.

The trail ride itself was beautiful. It was so peaceful and quiet in the natural bush, and we even got pretty up close and personal with a kangaroo. My horse, like the last horse riding trip we took in Brookleigh, was slow. No matter how hard I was squeezing him, he just wouldn’t go any faster! The poor guide and my partner had to constantly stop and wait for me to catch up.

After the trail ride we had a shower to wash the horses off us, then jumped in the jacuzzi for a couple of hours. We didn’t really want to get out, but we had dinner reservations at Ze Arc of Iris, my favourite restaurant in Margaret River. The food at Ze Arc was fantastic as usual, thanks to Pascal et al. After dinner, it was back to our jacuzzi for a couple more hours, then bed. The next morning was going to be another adventure!

I just noticed that there’s a six month block where I just didn’t write a single word on here. That means I didn’t report on my birthday holiday.

I usually head off on a short holiday around the time of my birthday. The weather’s nice that time of year, it’s the end of summer and the beginning of autumn so it’s still warm but not scorching.

This year I got to plan my ideal holiday away. I decided I wanted to have a luxury time away with a little adventure in my favourite get-away destination, Margaret River. The adventure activities were going to be horse riding and mountain bike riding. Ok, so they’re not really that adventurous, but still…

The most important part of any of my holidays is the accommodation. As I said, this was going to be a luxury time away for me and my partner so it had to be romantic, tucked away in some hidden resort, but not too far from civilisation. After looking through what seemed like dozens of possible places to stay, and I mean dozens, you wouldn’t believe how many luxury accommodation there is in such a small area! Anyway, after looking through dozens of possible places to stay, I finally settled on Losari Retreat, a beautiful retreat with four different types of villas to choose from. Of course I had to go for the one named, “Endless Luxury Spa Villa” and as the name suggests, it’s seriously endless luxury.

It was a small house with wooden floors throughout, a big, beautiful, comfy bed, a gorgeous bathroom with two monsoon showers and dual sinks, one for him, one for her, a fully stocked kitchen with a deluxe coffee machine, a plasma television and best of all, an outdoor jacuzzi! Imagine that! A outdoor jacuzzi… not a spa… a jacuzzi, with constantly warm water always in the tub so you don’t have to refill the spa, just lift off the cover and jump in.

As I said, it was luxury, pure luxury, and I can’t wait to go back and spend another weekend there.

1. Thou shalt not jump onto the keyboard when thy human is using the computer.
2. Thou shalt not pull the phone cord out of the back of the modem.
3. Thou shalt not unroll all of the toilet paper off the roll.
4. Thou shalt not sit in front of the television or monitor as thou are not transparent.
5. Thou shalt not walk in on a dinner party and commence licking thy butt.
6. Thou shalt not lie down with thy butt in thy human’s face.
7. Fast as thou art, thou cannot run through closed doors.
8. Thou shalt not leap from great heights onto thy human’s lap.
9. Thou shalt not climb on garbage cans with hinged lids, as thou wilt fall in and trap thyself.
10. Thou shalt not reset thy human’s alarm clock by walking on it.
11. Thou shalt not jump onto a seat just as thy human is sitting down.
12. Thou shalt realize that the house is not a prison from which to escape at any opportunity.
13. Thou shalt not trip thy humans even if they are walking too slow.
14. Thou shalt not push open the bathroom door when there are guests in thy house.
15. Thou shalt remember that thou art a carnivore and that houseplants are not meat.
16. Thou shalt show remorse when being scolded. (yeh….as if!!)

As we all know, the next generation consoles are well on their way. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was released in Australia on March 23rd, 2006, about 4 months after the Amercian, Europe and Japan release. Sony’s Playstation 3 is also on its way with a projected release date of the second half of 2006, some sources have cited September 2006, others have said November 2006, but nothing has been confirmed as yet.

We managed to hold off purchasing a Xbox 360 for all of one week before curiosity about the new console got the better of us. In the end, we forked out about $1000 (AUD of course) on a Premium Pack, an extra controller, an extra headset, a Play and Charge kit and the following games:

• Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
• Kameo
• Perfect Dark Zero

I also bought a one year, Gold membership subscription to Xbox Live and it’s possibly the best $79.95 I’ve ever spent. I was never much of an online game player, but G.R.A.W. together with Live has definitely changed my mind.

Many countless sleepless nights have been lost to that game in multiplayer Live mode. It’s very addictive and very fun to shoot characters controlled by another human being, instead of the game’s A.I.. The headsets add another dimension to the Live play. It’s a thousand times more fun being able to communicate with other players around the world using the headset. It makes teamplay in Co-op missions and Team Elimination much more meaningful.

As for Kameo, it’s a very sweet and cute game but pales in comparison to G.R.A.W. The graphics are cute, the characters are cute. It’s just a cute game. I would almost call it a chick game. There’s nothing wrong with chick games, I’m a chick myself, and I did enjoy Kameo, I think I just prefer more grown up games.

I can’t even comment much on PDZ because the damn game freezes up at the same spot every time. We’ve exchanged the game and still no luck. We’ve exchanged the console and still nothing! We’ve played the same 5 minutes about a dozen times and we’ve pretty much given up on it. From the short 5 minutes we’ve been able to play, the game is very hectic. Lots of stuff going on and it’s very loud, almost relentless.

All in all, I can’t believe I’m saying it, but Microsoft and done a fantastic job with the Xbox 360. Now I can’t wait for the Playstation 3 to show what they can do!

Continuing the big update saga. The modelling portfolio and catwalk modelling pages have been added. They’re password protected for now since I’m a little shy about showing them off.

A directory has also been added for links to sites I like but don’t want to clutter up the sidebar with.

That’s enough update for this site for today. It’s 11:41 pm and I should be getting home to sleep. Tomorrow is another day afterall.

Finally cleaning up the mess I started… well, almost. The big update is nearly over and I can almost breathe a sigh of relief. Almost.

I still have to get the modelling portfolio back up some how. I don’t even know if I should really be bothered because it’s not as if I model anymore. I guess it would be interesting to have just so I can look back in a few more years and think, “Geez, did I really do that?!”

Anyway, so I cleaned up some posts and pictures that didn’t really fit properly into the new layout. Other than that, there’s just been some minor changes here and there, boring stuff like formatting the title tag.

As promised, here’s the before and after screenshot:

The old format - Note the extreme use of blinding pink… ick!

The new format - Ahh… much better… a nice reflection of the adult I should be.

It’s been a while since I’ve touched this site. It was so messy and degraded that I couldn’t stand to post on the site, hence the long breaks between infrequent posts.

What ever possessed me to use that shocking, super-bright pink theme? What was I thinking?

I decided it was time for a site update and finally found some time to spruce up the look of this dreadful looking blog. I’ve moved a lot of pages off the site, mostly the yoga posts. They’ve been moved to my new-ish dedicated yoga blog, Asthanga Diary, which is all about the yoga part of my life, which is considerable.

Other uninteresting posts have also been removed. The technical computery tips have moved to the company web site, Zann Marketing (look for the Developer Blog) and the Prince of Persia stuff has moved to a dedicated Prince of Persia fan site, you guessed it, PrinceofPersiaFan.com.

I’ll still have my modelling portfolio online, but I haven’t quite got that up and running yet.

So, what’s left? I’m pretty much reserving this site for rantings on the other parts of my life, which will mostly be whinging about some video game or another, reporting on some fantastic holiday trip and sharing tasty, tried and true, simple recipes because I’m not much of a cook!

I’ll soon post a screenshot of the old and new design just so we can see how braindead I was to even come up with that pink theme.