5 November 2011
OK, so I did not get around to making the cake. What, nobody is going to even pretend to be surprised? Mr T expressed a desire to make an orange poppyseed cake, and that also did not eventuate. Woe. No cake. Regardless, it was a beautiful warm day, the sort that Melbourne just throws at you all casual-like to keep you hanging on through the blustery scattered showers of spring. We went down to pick up some dinner earlier and the beach/pier/foreshore/reserve area of our little suburb was heaving. I personally counted three lobster red arms + white singlet outline casualties in the first ten metres alone. Mostly, I was glad it wasn’t me.
Still too cold for swimming. Then again, I am a wimp.
4 November 2011
I went to Ikea today. I got none of the things I particularly went to get (linen curtains, a particular type of storage box) and instead ended up with Christmas decorations and a silicone cake tin. Although it’s silicon, so it’s not really a tin, is it? Cake pan. Cake holder. Whatever, you know what I mean. I’ve just looked it up on their website (it’s the SOCKERKAKA which clearly needs to be in caps, and also said aloud with JAZZ HANDS) and apparently it’s a cake mould. And because there are two of them I’m supposed to make TWO cakes and put one on top of the other. I did not realise this. This sounds good. I will do that tomorrow. It is supposed to be 30 degrees tomorrow, to which I say: OUR TURN FOR SUMMER, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE. It has been cold and dark and dark and cold here and I have been doing a LOT of sleeping. Not your ideal cake baking weather, true, but if I do it I will have a lovely sunny day and also cake. This is win-win.
I went to find another photo to add to this post and could only find the one below, which is the first photo I took with this new camera. Oh, I dropped my old camera in wet sand at the dog beach. Don’t do that, by the way; your camera won’t like it. I did try to get all the sand out with a little paintbrush but it ground its little gears at me and still refuses to turn on. I live in hope. Anyway, I got a new one (thank god little cameras are cheap these days), charged the battery, sat on the floor, turned around and took a photo of the nearest thing to me, which was my ginger cat in the dog’s bed. Apparently the flash was on. He wasn’t impressed.
I AM NOT IMPRESSED
ALSO THIS DOG BED IS COVERED IN DOG HAIR, THIS IS GOING ON MY ONLINE REVIEW
3 May 2011
Guess what? It’s May. MAY. I don’t know where the hell this year is going. Anyway, I’ve been in New Zealand for the past three weeks, which explains my complete lack of internet-ness. The previous weeks… well, I’ve got nothing. Disappearing! It’s what we do! Anyway, now I’m back and I have some sort of hideous throat infection which has become an horrific sinus cold thing. Why am I always getting sick lately? I remember when I was never sick. Never! I took the train by god and no germs could touch me! Now, however, I have been coughing weakly and staring with great suspicion at anything which looks like food. Which is to say, anything. This has only been compounded by the smell of my kitchen, which I have not walked into for a week. You think I am joking but I am not. We came back from holiday to find the power had gone off and tripped a fuse, which meant everything had been off. Including the fridge and freezer. For a week. A WEEK. Thank god Mr T dealt with all of that because in my sickened state I couldn’t even face it. We have three fridges and two freezers and all of them were mouldy. Currently they are filled with nothing but giant mounds of baking soda and, funnily enough, ground coffee. The coffee is really doing the trick. There’s a tip for you, should you ever need to throw out $500 worth of spoiled meat. And I sincerely hope you don’t.
Little dog is back, and is… pretty big now actually. He went to his breeder’s house and played 23 hours a day with his sister and three other dogs. He’s exhausted. Also skinny, as he walks away from his bowl (an only dog, obviously) and the other four fling themselves towards the unattended food like homing missiles. Three weeks and he never learned that if he turned his back on dinner, it was NEVER THERE when he came back. The cats, on the other hand, are fat and glossy. I have no idea what they were feeding them but they are in far better condition than when we dropped them off. Sushi? Avocado oil? I should find out, they look like a shampoo ad.
6 January 2011
Happy New Year internet! Cue tiny glittery trumpets, and party hats, and party poppers with streamers (and may I say that last New Years Eve, someone set one of those off right in my face. This year they were setting off marine flares. I kept my distance.) I do have lots of photos of my entirely too short summer camping getaway(s), but as aforementioned I have an iPhone and as of about 20 minutes ago I now know how to take screenshots. Cue the text messages between me (walking through Costco, stung with the consumer desire to BUY THINGS ANY THINGS NEW THINGS, and emailing photos of said things to Mr. T); and Mr T (at home in a slightly more rational state of mind). Note Mr. T had previously looked at watches at Costco, so that comment is not entirely out of context.
And this right here sums up our entire relationship.
I should note that for full context (and slightly more value from this blog entry) you have to have seen The Castle. And not just to make sense of this exchange; but because it’s genius. The movie, not the exchange. That’s pretty pedestrian really.
…. This is going to be one of those things that’s only funny to me, isn’t it? Oh well. As usual, I amuse myself. Dog photos on the way, promise!
2 June 2010
Look, it’s the internet! HIIII INTERNET. Here I am. Did you miss me? (Great silence) See, that’s what I thought. Fickle internet! Now you’re onto your new sporadic-posting, giant-dog-having blogger of the moment! And I even updated my template (again). For you. FOR YOU, INTERNET. Oh the humanity.
Anyway, my most recent absence has been to to my parents visiting Melbourne for my mum’s 60th birthday, which has been fun. It also means my house has been cleaned to the apex of its possible cleanliness. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that my mum, and my sister to an even greater extent, are compulsively tidy people. By that I mean that yes, they clean, but more properly they Neaten. Neither will leave a room if there is a mug or a newspaper or a pair of shoes that should be whisked into their correct place. They will wipe down the bathroom sink before they leave the bathroom. They hang up clothes after they wear them. Me? I am not a Neatener. I am sort of its polar opposite: a Messener. Yes, I’m totally making up words here. You see where I’m going with this. Anyway, it’s not like my mum doesn’t know this, being my mum and all, but she is my houseguest and so if I don’t clean stuff up, she will get up and do it instead, negating the Guest part. So I have been strenuously houseproud for about two weeks now and damn, it does not come naturally. I wish it did, because my house is so much nicer to live in, but it is totally against my slovenly nature. And by that, I mean that I will leave a mug on the side table overnight. For a few days, even. Shoes will build up by the front door (mostly due to Mr. T, who is unfortunately a fellow Messener). The bathroom sink gets hair and toothpaste on it as well as the necklace I wore last week and the glass of water I drank the week before that. Clean washing builds up in a big pile instead of being folded and put away immediately. It’s not a Pit of Filth, but it’s far from the home of a Neatener, if you know what I mean. Anyway, if anyone knows some sort of shock therapy or something to make you enjoy Neatening, please let me know. Or just apply the electrodes directly to my scalp. I love surprises!
I have no more photos of the dog, surprisingly, but here is an update: he is either ripping things to bits (sheepskins, soft toys, bones) or fast asleep after having been to dog daycare. Have I told you the dog goes to daycare? It is HILARIOUS. We want to keep him well socialised around other dogs, so he goes to daycare a couple of days a week and romps around with tiny, tiny puppies. They still class him as a puppy so he’s in with dogs about the size of his head. He’s very gentle apparently, so he gets to stay with them rather than moving in with the big dogs. He comes home completely exhausted, staggers into the house, eats his dinner, and falls asleep immediately for about 14 hours. It’s brilliant. They also give you a little sheet telling you all about what he’s done during the day and who his best friend was. ADORABLE. Hey, I guess if you’re paying for daycare, you get the full daycare experience. No webcam unfortunately but possibly that’s for the best.
And although I can’t find photos of the dog, I have found more of the trip. This one is from one of the freeways, driving into Seattle. State freeways and highways are numbered, of course, and here in Victoria they’re usually in a shield or a circle or something. Nothing so boring for Washington state, however:
The road numbers were in a Big Head. The big head of, you’ll notice, Washington. Big Head! Of Washington! Awesome, I tell you. Hey, if you have a legitimate reason to include Washington in your signage, I am totally in favour of using his Big Head everywhere you can.
9 December 2009
Yes, I know there was a thing when people blogged every day for the whole month of November. But a few of us chose the path less travelled… to NOT post for the entire month of November! Ah, the rackings of my brains as I chose what not to post… it was epic, really. No, thank YOU.
Also: I have been sick. Quite sick. I blame Geelong, as I went down there for the day and on the way back I thought, self, throat feels sore. As in the muscles of my actual throat felt sore; not like I had a tickly throat. I got home, ate some dinner, and thought I might just drop my head onto the couch arm for a minute. Hours later, Mr. T was waking me; and I went to bed, and there I stayed for the next 18 hours. Then I got up for a few hours, then back to bed for another 18. This is pretty much the opposite of how I usually live, and it is REALLY BORING. Anyway, to top this off I lost my voice on Friday night for the entire weekend. I had sort of recovered it by Monday, so I went to work and everyone found me most amusing; then my boss turned up and ordered me home. I went, because thinking had given me a headache. Bit depressing really. I am sort of all right now, but still not 100%. Who gets a sore throat and goes down like a sack of shit for a week? Me, apparently. And I guess a special sort of languishing Victorian heroine. Although I’m guessing they’d be less likely to describe themselves as sacks of shit. That reminds me; I tried to watch some movies in the past 2 days I was sick but couldn’t connect up our ludicrously complicated home theatre so it would show movies in colour (they all came out black and white); however I did find the new BBC Emma on youtube and watched my way through a few episodes of that instead. Romola has the buggiest eyes. I say this as someone who also has buggy eyes; constantly when I watch her I am horrified that my bugginess may rival hers. Say it isn’t so.
New Cat update: He LOVES the other cat and disdains us for his company. He also still does that annoying new cat thing when he flinches away from being patted and freaks OUT for no reason whatsoever, fleeing the room madly in a panic that he might be touched. However this is less frequent now and he actively comes to be patted now, especially when you are in bed asleep and not actively wanting, perhaps, to pat a cat. He will never be as affectionate as Orange Cat, who is aggressively loving and in fact annoyingly so; this is a Good Thing, as I don’t think we could cope with another such cat.
We has a moth.
4 October 2009
OK, so I go back to New Zealand tomorrow for a week of (I presume) frenetic activity and rushing around. Yay! I am totally organised, in that everything that needs to be done is written on index cards. I mean, I still have to DO these things, or get others to do these things, but apart from that it’s smooth sailing. Right? What could go wrong? *crickets*
Car Update: Picked up the new car on Saturday morning. I am a bit eh on cars normally (actual conversation: “What sort of car are you getting?” “A grey one.”) but turns out I really like this one. Which is good, because now I’m stuck with it. It’s going to live at work while we’re away, so that it is nicely locked away and undercover. And I’ve only stalled it three times so far! (I never stall cars usually, but the clutch on this one is much, um, zippier than the Land Rover. Yes, “zippier” is a technical car term.)
Breakfast Update: I made (heavily modified) dutch babies for Sunday morning brunch. This may be the third week in a row I have done this; I neither confirm nor deny. They are like gigantic fluffy pancakes, but really they’re half-pancake, half-omelette. Anyway, I opened the oven door to take a photo of them, like so:
Aaaaaand all the condensation whooshed out of the oven and steamed up my camera lens, like so:
Oh, there’s the roof of the New Car out in the driveway. And no, my kitchen doesn’t usually look like it’s clearing from a morning mist; I am clearly a photographic genius. However, I am a genius with A DELICIOUS BREAKFAST, which counts for something.
16 September 2009
You know it’s a bad sign when you have to read your own blog to figure out what you’re up to. Answer: you’re totally up to date. Nothing more has happened. OK, maybe a little bit has happened. Shall we do bullet points? Answer: Yes.
Mr T has bought some bathroom scales, which is an item we have never owned. He set them up and levelled all the complicated electrickery parts (of COURSE they’re the complicated kind of scales) and then weighed himself. I then weighed myself out of interest and was horrified. HORRIFIED. Now, I haven’t weighed myself for a good couple of years but I am quietly confident that my weight doesn’t change much. I like to think I weigh X, I actually weigh X + 3kg, and yet these scales were telling me that I weighed X + 8kg. The scales are WRONG. Clearly. Can’t be right. Can’t. I shifted my weight to see if that would help, and nearly tipped the cat off my shoulders where he was… ah. Right. That’s five extra kilos of STUPIDITY, right there. Ahem. After releasing the cat (who was quite enjoying himself) it turns out I weigh X + 3kg. As I thought. Actually, these scales can also tell you your fat percentage, a no doubt horrifying number that I have NO WISH to know.
Wedding update: OK, I was lying about the bullet points. It’s paragraphs, all the way!
Days To Go: Actually, I don’t know. Calendar? 23 days. OK then. That seems… close.
People Freaking Out: One, my mum. Maybe more. Although she now has something to wear, which is good.
Bridesmaids with Clothes: One, or 100%. This is good, because I forgot my sister can’t make a decision to save her life, and therefore telling her to wear whatever she wanted was actually a special kind of torture. Anyway, she found an awesome dress in peacock blue silk. Done.
Grooms with Clothes: One, or 100% (200% if you count the best man, who just has to follow along, poor lamb). Clothes had all been decided ages ago, but we couldn’t find any shoes (barefoot would have been fine but bloody cold). Shoes found: Chuck Taylors, which look great. He is considering bright blue ones, but turned down the silver velvet ones (silver velvet! They were so nice to pat). I’ll keep you posted on what actually eventuates.
Wedding Dresses Owned: Three. Yes. Correct. Remember when, a couple of weeks ago, I said there was a long story here? Well clearly it has now gotten even longer, and is in fact so complicated that I can’t remember where in the story I am up to when I talk to people, and just sort of gloss over the whole thing. Short story: decided on dress and couldn’t find anything similar off the rack or as a sample or second-hand. My only option, with my short timeline, was to get it made in China. China sent me the dress, which was a) the wrong colour and b) had a gigantic starfish made of beading on the bodice. I pointed out this out. China flogged the 9-year old seamstress (I may be extrapolating this part) and sent me the dress again, without requiring me to send back the other dress. Received dress number 2, which was the right colour but (due I presume to being made within a week by a flogged seamstress) had one shoulder strap half a cm larger than the other and because this colour fabric was somehow thinner, the boning was visible through the dress. Well, I felt it was, even though my Objective Opinion Person thought I was mad and that the dress looked great. It just wasn’t as awesome as I’d hoped. But the dress is flattering and fixable and I was prepared to fix it, especially considering I got it made at the standard length and had to get it taken up anyway. Except that on Saturday I just stuck my head into the clearance bridal shop I had been to at the start of my search (and found nothing then) and… of course found a dress. It’s basically the floor sample of the original dress which had just made its way into the store that week: identical designer, identical colour, very similar cut, half price. So of course I bought it and now I have three dresses. And keep in mind this is the SHORT version of this story. Are you exhausted yet? Try being me. So the moral of the story is as I said it was all the time: buying a dress off the internet is a gamble, but it is one that can pay off. If it doesn’t, be prepared to deal with it.
No, Wait, Go Back to the Starfish: I know, it really is the funniest part. On the original picture of the dress, there’s a brooch on the bodice. I didn’t think to mention the brooch to the Chinese people, as I planned to turf any tacky brooch they sent me and source my own brooch. Here is a mistake right here: NEVER ASSUME. Because instead of just pinning a crappy brooch to the dress, they “interpreted” the brooch in beading. A LOT of beading. With ARMS. I was… mildly nonplussed when I zipped open the bag, that’s for sure. I have just gone looking for photos but they are all blurry once I crop myself out of them, so I’ll get right on that.
What, No Photos At All? I’m as surprised as you are.
Car Update: Eleven weeks. ELEVEN WEEKS. I have the patience of a SAINT. They tell me this Saturday. They have told me this EVERY Saturday. I am… not optimistic.
3 September 2009
I know, right? Let’s just move RIGHT ALONG and pretend I’ve been here the whole time talking to you all … my god I have just been distracted mightily by seeing Miss Panama’s Miss World costume, seen in the first pic here. Now THAT, my friends, is a costume!
And since I’ve been here the whole time, no doubt I told you a friend of mine had a costume party for her 40th. Did I also tell you I have a friend old enough to have a 40th, spinning the rest of us into a spiralling vortex of our own mortality? Anyway, my costume was lame but Mr T’s costume was Scooby Doo and was a sure-fire hit. He didn’t like people grabbing his tail, though. The only downside was that he wouldn’t do a bottleshop run in the Scooby costume – he insisted on stripping down to his shorts and T-shirt he was wearing underneath. Which didn’t look at all weird, on a freezing night of about 2 degrees. Maybe marginally better than the Scooby costume. And then we went to ANOTHER 40th birthday (oh my god how is this happening, I swear it was all 21sts just a couple of years ago), this one a birthday dinner (at which I made the cardinal mistake of not looking up the restaurant and turned up in jeans – albeit jeans with a fancy shirt – and found everyone else in suits & little dresses at one of Melbourne’s fancy CBD restaurants, um, oops) and ended up sitting next to a vet, who turned out to be no ordinary vet, but one of the spinal surgeons who consulted on my Black Dog’s gold-plated spine operation. He was very excited to hear how well he did after the operation, which was nice. He wouldn’t refund any money, though.
I went to Costco on the week of its opening (I made work buy a membership, which happened to be in my name, funny how that happens). (For foreigners: The first Costco in Australia just opened in Melbourne. Also: you all talk funny.) I was really hoping for more American food (Mr. T and I steered our giant trolley through the crowds chanting “Goldfish! Goldfish!” but unfortunately Costco FAILED to import crackers, damn their eyes) but we did OK. I did buy a gigantic bucket of caramel popcorn, complete with pecans glued into the caramel, and that was yum. Mr. T bought jerky and that was eh. We solemnly bought our 48 rolls of toilet paper (I don’t think you’re allowed out without that) as well as a few other bits and pieces, and got out relatively pain free. Having said that, all around us on the other registers people were buying stuff that I never even SAW (gigantic pizzas! Crocs! An orchid plant! A gigantic whole fish!) (SO not joking about any of these items) so clearly we need to go back when the entirety of Melbourne is not standing gape-jawed in the aisles like yokels. We may have hit a few people in the arse with our giant cart as they stood there vacantly staring at jars of coffee (hint: it’s JUST LIKE the coffee you currently buy in Woolworths, but in a BIGGER JAR) and we may not have apologised. You know how it goes.
The wedding planning continues but my mum is now panicking, which is annoying because there is nothing to panic ABOUT. I think she just wants to. There is a gigantic amusing saga with my dress which ends with a seamstress being flogged, but remind me to go into all of that when a) I have more time and b) my dress is safely in my possession. I have bought all sorts of other fun bits & pieces (clutch bag, underwear, hair fascinator thing) so I am still enjoying the whole process. Buying fun things! What’s not to like? I also went and checked on my ring once it was finished last week (but which I’m not picking up until the week before we leave) and I love it. New jewellery! This whole wedding thing is really stimulating the economy.
Oh, also I still have no car. That’s over eight weeks, people. And I have developed a horrible chesty cough thing, no doubt caught from my feral fellow commuters. Curse you all! They are promising my car back any day now, but I am now resigned to the fact that it will NEVER RETURN. I always said I didn’t want a new car and I would just drive this one into the ground; well, turns out I’ve done that. Huh.
6 August 2009
It is really windy outside – howling and whistling around the windows. I am thinking much more about the weather since I have been catching the train for the last month. Or is it more than a month? I’m pretty sure the mechanics who have my car are fobbing us off with stories and slowly stripping my car for parts. All I can say is, I wish they’d hurry up about it as it’s bound to rain on me one of these days. I have been walking around four times a day, five days a week, for five weeks in the middle of winter, and I’ve been rained on twice. Plus one sort of drizzle which I didn’t count. If that doesn’t tell you we’re in a drought I don’t know what will. Over the same period in Auckland I would have been soaked to the skin at least three times, and dampened considerably for another dozen. But: Rain = 2. In other train counts, Crazy = 1 (a guy who was probably more drugged than crazy but was wearing a large Mad Hatter-style hat, rendering him quaint rather than scary), Inappropriate Conversations = 1 (one lady ringing up her daughter’s school to plead for her to stay on the netball team even though she hadn’t paid the school fees), Wrong Trains Caught = 1 (I leapt on a departing train, congratulating myself for my cleverness, before discovering far too late that it was running express to Laverton, which is a long way from where I live; and also is not the sort of place you want to stand around at night waiting for a train to go back the other way, necessitating a call to Mr T to pick me up, as fortunately he was working out that way and on his way home, and this is the longest sentence EVER that is totally official).
… and it is at this point that my laptop shut down without warning. AGAIN. It has been overheating regularly in the past few weeks, so this time I cracked the shits and made Mr. T open the back of it to see if there was any dust in the fan thing. Apparently this can contribute to the overheating. So he waited for it to cool down then unscrewed the back and… um. Turns out this laptop is quite an effective vaccuum cleaner. Packed into the fan vent bit was a tiny carpet of compressed dust and dog hair. He peeled it out of the little recess like he was picking up a thick piece of felt. Whoops. Hey guess what! The laptop is SO MUCH COOLER on my lap now. Who could guess? And here is my post, saved automatically into Drafts, thank you WordPress. I mean, it’s not the best post ever written, or even the best written TODAY, but I would have been annoyed to lose it.
OK here is a photo of my cat. I was taking it to show his new collar (I have never known cats to lose collars as often as this one and his brother, it’s an epidemic I tell you) but I don’t think I’ll send it to the Etsy seller as it looks like…
… I’m poking the cat in the eye. I’m not, for the record. And he’s sitting on my stomach as I’m lying flat on the bed so the photo was quite hard to take, OK? I’m not sure that justifies me not-poking him in the eye (I’m NOT), but I thought I’d point it out. Mitigating circumstances, and all that.
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phantasmagoriaReading:
Stephen King, "Everything's Eventual". I found this abandoned in a suitcase.
Listening:
The snores of the Little Dog, who sadly seems just as loud and snorty at night as the Brown Dog.
Watching:
Endless episodes of UFC, which is some sort of fighting... thing. Do not want.
Eating:
I'm having a bit of an avocado binge. The Little Dog likes them too.
Liking:
Renovations! Apart from the cost of said renovations. Let's not think about that part.
Pondering:
If there is dirty washing in the basket, the cats ignore it... but if it is CLEAN, one of them has made a nest in there within 10 minutes. Five minutes, if it's black clothes.
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