| 25/4/2011 I'm currently in the house with my Australian relatives and it's fascinating to see how, even though they're on the other side of the world and in the opposite hemisphere, they still share characteristics with members of my English family. Bob is my Grandma's brother and one characteristic he shares with her is the tendency to not be so chatty and simply respond to or acknowledge other people's sentences, except he will go into a longer elaboration/explanation when asked a question. Guess who else shares that characteristic? My Mum and my brother. So it was a hilarious moment when, via Skype, Bob saw Nathan for the first time, said a sentence or two, and all Nathan did was respond with "yep". I admit I exaggerate but that pretty much sums up the exchange. I also find it too much of a coincidence that when I chastised Robert (Bob's son and my first cousin once removed) about closing the curtains and switching on the light during the day, he blankly stared at me and explained that the sun would cause glare on the TV screen. Nathan constantly complains about that, albeit in a different manner. Personality genes: an amusing puzzle. On a more sombre note, the amount of times I've been driven through bushland/countryside never manages to decrease the amount of roadkill I see on the ground. Usually they're run-over wallabies. What I find eerie though is the fact that their corpses are always in the same position, often facing the same way too. It's like an old-school computer game come to life...yes I'm thinking of System Shock and all its copy/pasted corpses. Speaking of System Shock, I introduced the game to Robert. Fascinatingly, I found out he was a hardcore PC-Gamer in his teens, hardcore because he frickin' built his own computers just so he could run the games! He hasn't played a single game in years but the fact that someone in my family was at one time such a gamer is amazing. What made me proud was that he never heard of System Shock when it first came out but he was taken by the intro and impressed by the game when I showed him the Let's Play that I watched. |