16 July 2008
So OK I was cleaning up the kitchen last night, after I wrote that post actually. I hate that; when I forget that it was me who cooked dinner and therefore I have to clean up the kitchen. (Do you have that rule? Because we cook almost equally, it works out better not to have to clean up another person’s mess. It also means you can’t get shitty with the person who left the mashed potatoes lurking in the pot to harden to a solid mass; because that person was YOU.) Anyway, I wandered into the kitchen, went “oh bugger” because there was crap everywhere, and noticed a sort of delicious chickeny smell. Why would that be? Oh, because I made risotto, using chicken stock, and the now-empty saucepan I used to heat the stock up in was still sitting on the gas hob. On low. For over four hours. Ah. So that pot is now filled with baking soda and water, in the hope that the Magic of Baking Soda will remove the charred remnants of chicken stock burned deep into the saucepan. I rely quite heavily on the Magic of Baking Soda. Also the Power of White Vinegar.
Actually, speaking of, I have a related laundry story. I know, it’s all domestic and shit over here! But a couple of weeks ago I was pulling washing out of the washing machine, and as I pulled a shirt out, there was An Odour. Not a pleasant one. I stood there blankly for a minute, trying to figure out what it was and where it was coming from. You know what it was? It was FISH. A definite, strong, fishy smell. I started pulling items of clothing from the washing machine and smelling them, much like a bloodhound on CSI. And a few items later, the smell increasing in potency with each piece I pulled out, it was determined that the smell was concentrated in… a pair of Mr. T’s work trousers. Why? How? What… what? I couldn’t even focus; the smell of fish was everywhere, my vision had narrowed to one blurry point and I was finding it hard to breathe.
When Mr. T got home, I confronted him with his Piscine Pants of Doom, hollering, “SMELL! SMELL THEM!” (Actually, now that I think about it, he didn’t even blink at being forced to smell his own clothing. I should think up more bizarre things for him to do.) Being the great judge of flavours that he is, he couldn’t even pick up that it was fish. Then he flat-out denied that it could be fish. How could it be fish? It’s fish! With pants! Pants and fish don’t mix! Then I showed him this odd yellow crunchy plastic stuff in the pocket… oh. Oh yeah. Now he remembers. He remembers putting the trousers on in the morning. He remembers not having time to take his fish oil capsule. He remembers PUTTING IT IN HIS POCKET as he left for work. And he doesn’t remember ever eating it.
A fish oil capsule. I have no words.
Those pants are fucked, basically. They’ve been washed four times, and hung up in the rain/wind/hail/sleet for weeks at a time on the clothesline. Every time they dry, the smell of fish returns. Not even the Magic of Baking Soda and the Power of White Vinegar COMBINED has worked. Any suggestions? Bueller? Bueller?
OK now I have detailed my domestic shortcomings… a picture! This is from my trip back to New Zealand in Easter, which was mid-March. What can I say, I don’t clear off my memory cards that often. Again, suck it, dead hard drive! You’re not the boss of me!
This is Mr. T’s sister with one of his nephews. They’re identical twins, so if they’re not both in the photo, neither of us can tell which twin it is. We think this might be the Fat Twin (whose name starts with F) but it is just as likely to be the Little Twin (whose name starts with L). Hard to say, and I don’t think you guys can help me here.
I posted this because I made the bib he’s wearing. In fact I made approximately 30 bibs for these babies, as apparently most bibs are quite small and the huge size of this one was a hit. It does have a gorgeous fabric on the front, but he’s wearing it towelling-side out, due to his unfortunate habit of being sick on it. Babies. No respect for craft.
14 July 2008
Hi! It’s me again. And my laptop woes are over . O-V-E-ahhhhh. Because, of course, I have a new one. The other laptop ended up breaking on me three times. THA-ree. Turns out third time is the charm… or, not the charm; rather, third time is the point where I throw a fit and whine and order a new laptop from Dell. It’s green. It’s extremely green. I’ll post photos when I’m ever home during daylight hours to take any. It has Windows Vista on it, which went well right up until the point where I restarted it and the whole thing hung with just the mouse cursor visible on a black screen. Um, perhaps I shouldn’t have buggered around with the C drive quite so much? The System Restore point took me back to JUST before I installed all the programs I wanted, which means I keep thinking I have something installed only to discover I had System Restored back before it happened. Like time travel, but more aggravating. (Did everyone else know that Firefox has an FTP program as an add-on? I am wildly excited by this. I love you Firefox!) Regardless, Vista is pretty, especially if I overlook the fact it is consuming 53% of my RAM just by sitting there and batting its eyelids.
So the hard drive from the Snapped Laptop is apparently irretrievable. My geeks started talking about kernels or platters or something, which made me think of corn on the cob and I stopped listening. Suffice it to say that if I want those months of photos back, I have to pay someone large amounts of money to go into its guts, and really my photos aren’t that good. Also I’m lazy about getting photos off the memory cards, so I have most of my gaps covered. I am still pissed off about losing the “before” house photos though. It looked so much worse than now! Honest!
Shake-shake-shake, shake-shake-shake, shake your booty (shake your booty)
See? I still have these photos from the long weekend in June. Suck it, dead hard drive!We remain on our busy renovation schedule, currently deeply involved in the “ignore it and just step over it until you stop noticing it” phase. The electrician has removed the extraneous wall light that I claimed was the reason I wasn’t finishing painting the lounge. The new taps and toilet seat are sitting on the floor of the bathroom. The one thing we did get done was installing the heated towel rail, because damp towels when you’re getting out of the shower sucks. Powerful sucks, even.
This is not my dog. This dog completely ignored my dog, waiting only for us to throw sticks or rocks into the water for her to chase. My dog in turn completely ignored this dog and indeed all the sticks and rocks, in favour of swimming aimlessly in circles.My sister came to Melbourne for a week and bought the whole place out. Sorry, for anyone else who lives here or wants to visit here and had the idea you might like to do some shopping. The whole place is squashed into a suitcase and back in New Zealand. We also went to Wicked, which is the new musical here based on the Wizard of Oz. I really liked it, and even Mr. T didn’t actively hate it. (I made him go). It officially opened in the weekend, yet I saw it two weeks ago, because for some reason those two weeks of performances Didn’t Count. Also I didn’t know that many Australian Idols were in it (Millsy! Anthony Callea! Rob Guest! …wait, something is not right) but I did wonder what all the frantic clapping was. I just thought they had lots of friends in the audience.
Throwing rocks for the dogs. Sometimes AT the dogs; not on purpose, but due to 4-year-old coordination skills. Which are around about the level of mine. I tried to skim stones and just about gave myself a hernia, so don’t look to me for your stone throwing techniques.All this typing and my hands aren’t clutched into claws! There is something to be said for laptop screen hinges. And that something is: They are useful. Don’t break them.
4 June 2008
OK, so my poor ghetto laptop. I told you I’d come back and talk about it. I don’t blame you for not believing me.
See, I’m not very good to my laptop. Although it’s only two years old, it lies around the house, mostly on the floor, and stays open and gets food on it and god only knows what other abuse. The area next to the touch screen is scratched all to shit from me using an external mouse on it without a mousepad. But the worst part is that because I leave it open a lot, the easiest way to pick it up is by the top of the screen: I KNOW THIS IS BAD and if you don’t know this is bad then TAKE MY WORD FOR IT IT’S BAD. Anyway, spare me your tsking because of course the hinges have snapped. The hinges at the sides that allow the lid to open and close, I mean. At first, it was only one hinge, and I was irritated and rough with it because I had no idea what was going on… you don’t really expect something MECHANICAL to bollocks up on your laptop, you know? Catastrophic hard drive failure, or pixels failing in the screen, fine, but not a piece of metal wearing out from fatigue. Well, maybe you do. I sure as hell didn’t. Googling has since taught me that this particular laptop is rife for broken hinges, well THANK YOU GOOGLE as I DID NOT THINK to check ‘hinge durability’ during my quest for a laptop. If you did think to check this, then kudos to you, because it certainly never crossed my mind.
Anyway, when your hinge breaks, and then your other hinge breaks, and Mr. T unscrews your laptop screen surround and informs you that your laptop is ALL KINDS OF FUCKED, what happens is that the screen part becomes attached to the keyboard part by only a couple of wires. This seems fine, until you realise that to use a laptop, the screen has to be sort of VERTICAL. Being attached by wires only means it pretty much stays HORIZONTAL, if not leaning drunkenly towards the floor or sliding alarmingly to the side, meaning you have to lunge desperately at the screen lest it part ways entirely with the rest of the laptop. What this means in practice is that you have to use your laptop with your knees drawn up, so as to let the screen part rest backwards against your knees. The other way you can do this is to lie on your side on the new carpet, and stand the laptop up on its side, tilting the screen to its preferred angle. Of course, it’s then completely impossible to type, so apologies if my commenting dips from its current craptastic levels down to non-existent.
This all sounds sad, right? It’s even sadder when you realise this happened several months ago, and I ebayed and purchased the correct hinges, and they arrived and Mr. T installed them and my laptop was all happy again (although not really, as the hinges were second hand and already temperamental). Anyway, this lasted about eight weeks and I sort of got back into my laptop routine and I once (twice) (couple of times maybe) (definitely) picked it up by its screen again. Guess what? Yeah. I need to get back onto ebay. And also stop being such a DUMBARSE.
2 June 2008
It’s June! Month of sporadic posting! Let’s see how I go. Actually, I keep emailing entries to myself from work so that I can post them when I get home, then when I get home and read them, I conclude I am clearly on drugs. Such as the below, which I wrote around about Wednesday last week:
Today I am wearing a long skirt, pulled up to tube-top style so I’m wearing it as a dress. There’s a long sleeved top underneath, but I don’t know. I can’t get past the fact I’m wearing a skirt up to my armpits. I feel a bit like an old man with my trousers pulled up too high. I’m also wearing my suede Boots of Pain, and you know what? No pain. It’s also not raining today, a strategic advantage when wearing suede boots. Actually I’m lying about the pain, now that I think about it the sides of my index fingers are sore from pulling up the zips. Send in the clowns.
Right, see, so I’m not too fussed with editing my own stream-of-consciousness, so the whole emailing stuff to post later is a bit confronting for me. Blurt it out and forget about it, that’s my motto. Anyway, here’s another one about the one thing I’ve actually done recently:
I booked our flights to San Francisco last week… yes I did. It’s on frequent flyer points, but we are still paying the taxes (damn you Qantas and your craphole frequent flyer system) and all the expenses associated with it. Why are we going on a three-week overseas holiday in the same year we bought a house? Because we are mental and have no idea of the concept of money. I scare myself, frankly. Regardless, once I get over the hyperventilation, the trip itself will be great. In my defence, this holiday has been planned (in a concept sense) for over 12 months and I insisted on the annual leave when I came to the new job; so might as well take it up. It started as an adjunct to a conference Mr. T had in Oklahoma, but the conference was cancelled and the holiday was… not. There will be road tripping, Grand Canyoning, Disneylanding, tramping through national parks (likely Yosemite but maybe over to Joshua Tree? to be decided), vague plans of maybe Canada or more likely Mexico (TOLD you this was vague), then back through Honolulu for a few days to get over the vagueness. Suggestions welcomed.
And suggestions are indeed welcomed, although that probably means I have to do something about them, and frankly I don’t know if that’s on the cards. But if any Americans reading want, I don’t know, Tim Tams or a cork hat or a wombat or something, I am more than happy to import one for you. Except for maybe the wombat as those are heavy fuckers and I’m pretty sure that would blow my baggage allowance. Also wombats are probably classified as ‘liquid’ and I’m sure as shit not attempting to stuff an angry wombat into a small plastic bag.
And here’s the last one I wrote, we’re now up to date as this was written last weekend (not the weekend just gone, the one before that, not that you care):
This weekend had stunning autumn weather (Melbourne does this so well) and as a result I got completely zero accomplished. Oh wait, we bought the rods for the wardrobes, but didn’t hang them. The wardrobes are these giant built-in jobs, and when I say ‘built in’ I mean they go all the way to the ceiling, but they’ve been added in after the house was built. What this really means is that they were nailed in OVER the top of the old carpet, causing us to freak out and wonder how the hell we were going to get the carpet out to recarpet. (Answer: just pull the carpet out from under the framework. I shudder to think of the building compliance of our house.) Anyway, apart from this small glitch, the wardrobes were sort of organised; in that there were racks of those white wire baskets built in. Now, I am no fan of organised wardrobes generally (I KNOW, I am a heathen and hate all that most home renovators hold dear) and twenty-year old white wire baskets, which are flaking and cracking and discoloured and generally vile, are not likely to help me change my mind. So those got pulled out (they’ll be on my front verge soon if you want to come and pick them up) and there will be hanging rails across the whole wardrobe space. Well, there WILL be. After the weather turns bad again, probably.
….and to finish: they are up! I have hanging space! A happy ending. I know you’re as thrilled by this big finale as me.
Note to self for tomorrow: ghetto laptop. Cryptic,no? (No. It really is a ghetto laptop). All will be explained.
5 May 2008
My internet is intermittently phasing in and out and it is KILLING me. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. I am trying to DO STUFF here, internet! I mean, the correct thing to do here is turn the internet off, but it is patently obvious that I don’t know how to do that.
I have spent an horrific amount of money lately and it needs to stop. I aimlessly wander through the internet and then I BUY IT. Just like other people wander through stores, only I am too lazy and busy to do this. Actually I was wandering through Target at one stage, minding my own business, when a saleslady of advanced age came up to me. She was brandishing those PixiFoto portraits that Target had at one stage, trying to sell me a photo package. “Would you like these beautiful family portraits?” she asked me, waiving a large portrait shot of two mildly ugly children in my direction. I opened my mouth to say, “But I don’t even know those people!” then snapped it shut again. But really, I should have said it. I really DIDN’T know those people.
I think I have had too much sugar today. This is rating up there with the day I had a bottle of V at work (energy drink, similar to Red Bull but not as horrible); and the bottle is significant as it’s twice as large as the can. Then, as you do, I bought a bottle of red ice tea at lunch, but I failed to see that the ice tea contained guarana. And really, why would I look for that? Who would expect ice tea to contain guarana? Who would put that into tea? Anyway, after the equivalent of 4 energy drinks, I was a wired mess and couldn’t sit still. I basically kept printing things out, one page at a time, so I could stomp the length of the building to the printer and work off some energy. I feel sort of like that, but for no reason. Rarg! Hulk smash!
Also, I am allergic to something and have little itchy hive things. I never react to anything, so this is odd. (First person to suggest I am allergic to the carpet and should stop rolling on it gets a DEATH STARE from me. Only because this started before we had the carpet laid… don’t think I hadn’t thought of it.) I think it might be the soap I’m using, so I went back to the original soap. Hopefully this works out for me as otherwise I am out of ideas. Anyway, being itchy is not fun and I don’t enjoy it. If I get hayfever next I will not best be pleased. Oh, this paragraph should really be in the post below, as it’s something I’m annoyed about, but really this whole blog is Something I’m Annoyed About so I don’t feel I’ve miscategorised.
30 April 2008
Every time Mr. T gives me a snack, like a biscuit or an Easter egg or something, he bites it first. Just to annoy me. HE TAXES MY FOOD. He tries to pretend he is testing it, like for poisons, but YOU KNOW it’s not true.
In this new house, Mr. T taught the dog that when he comes in the back door, he cannot walk through the kitchen to get to his dog bed – he has to go around it, by walking through the lounge and back around into the dining room. (There’s no real reason for this, apart from Mr. T’s belief that dogs aren’t allowed in the kitchen.) Unfortunately we are now severely confusing him by INSISTING he go through the kitchen… as this keeps his dirty outside paws off the new carpet (my prreciousssss). The poor dog is trying to be good and dart past whoever is acting as point guard, to go his normal way through the house… then he gets yelled at. I’m not annoyed at the dog for this, more that we didn’t see this coming and let him walk through the kitchen from the start.
Actually, that’s all I think I’m annoyed about at the moment. Surely that’s some sort of record?
27 April 2008
Ah, the Simpsons. Now I have been reminded, I can see “powerful sucks” re-entering my lexicon. Does lexicon mean what I think it means? No matter. Oh, speaking of word things, as I published that last post, Blogger popped up a message which said “auto save failed, cannot find content” or some such crap, and I tell you if nothing had published there was no way I was writing all that out again. Seriously. It wasn’t half interesting enough the first time round, and as I have set the bar so low, I see no reason to challenge myself.
Anyway, the carpet guys came on Friday (yes, on a public holiday, but it was their choice) and we were up until 1am the night before painting the lounge while we still had the freedom to drip paint all over hardwood floors. Yes, we have hardwood floors and yes, we are covering them up with carpet. You know what? I hate hardwood floors. I know I am the only person in the Western world who feels this way, but I don’t care. Every person who’s been in here since we ripped up the old carpets have raved about the floors and assumed we are going to polish them up… no no no no no. They are cold, noisy, drafty, the dog has been digging his claws in to prevent sliding all over them like he’s lost control of his limbs, and they require the purchase of multiple rugs which then slide all over the floors and look like shit. I KNOW, I AM HEATHEN. But really, people, they are COLD. They are NOISY: for the two weeks we lived with them, we could hear each other clonking all over the house, and there’s only two of us: we sounded like stampeding wildebeests. They are UGLY: there are replacement boards down the middle of some rooms, there are holes in the floor chinked up with spare bits of pine, some rooms have already been (poorly) varnished and require a complete strip back, and…. even when they’re done properly I don’t even like the look of it. KILL ME NOW I DON’T DESERVE TO HAVE THIS HOUSE. I know, I should be in a brand new 5 bedroom mcmansion in a subdivision. Well, maybe next time. Until then I have taken photos of the floor under this carpet and will keep them until we sell the house, where the next buyer can think of the GORGEOUS things they can do with the floors under the carpet. Better them than me.
Anyway, back to the carpet. I LOVE my carpet. When we bought the house, we thought the original carpet might be liveable – you know when you walk through a house a couple of times, then buy it, then don’t see it again for weeks in which you obsess about just what it is you have actually bought? Yeah, well we remembered the carpet being crap, but when we got into the house we discovered the owners had been extremely crafty with furniture/rug placement and not only did it suck, it powerful sucked. There was two different types of carpet through the house, swapping randomly from one to the other, room by room. The carpet in the lounge was grey shag, which clashed beyond belief with our brown sofas and furniture. The other carpet was blue and looked almost industrial. There were mysterious stains and bits unravelling and my favourite, an iron faceplate burnt deep into the carpet in the family room. So yes, we decided the carpet had to go. Luckily a friend of a friend is a carpet dude, who just happened to have a house lot of carpet that he had started to lay in a million-dollar house, before the lady of the house burst into tears and said she had ordered the wrong colour. It may have been the wrong colour for her, but it is damn perfect for us, just slightly lighter than I would have chosen (and only because of keeping it clean, not because I don’t like the colour). Anyway, we have super-expensive carpet, and super-deluxe underlay, for a nylon-industrial-carpet budget price. I love it so, so much. I may have, in fact, lay down on my back on the new carpet and writhed around with my legs kicking in the air like an ecstatic dog. I don’t have a photo of that, so you’ll have to make do with the below:
 The lounge, before. I don’t know what’s on the TV but this is mid-pulling up the grey shag carpet. Note the high-quality foam chip underlay (possibly the cheapest you can buy, if you don’t count egg cartons). The timestamp on this photo tells me this is 9.09pm, which is pretty early in the piece. We probably spent the next three hours pulling up carpet staples and swearing at each other.
This is the same shot of the lounge, but with the TV moved out to the dining room to the left. The hardwood floors don’t look half bad here… believe me when I tell you this was the best room for floors. It also had a fine mist of paint spray around every edge from the last time someone painted the walls (with a paint gun, obviously).
After. Mmmmmmmmm. Carpet.
21 April 2008
Look, I’m never going to write anything if i try to write down everything. I’m going to have to start slow and go from there.
- My hands are covered in paint as I’m writing this… there are one and a half rooms to go. This doesn’t count the lino-ed rooms (kitchen, dining room, 2 x bathrooms) which will wait for another time. The new carpet is coming on Friday, thus the haste for painting while I can still drip paint on the horrible, horrible old carpet with equanimity.
- I can’t see the TV because there is a mattress standing on its side between me and it. The TV. Because we’ve been sleeping in the lounge for weeks due to paint fumes. Well, for days due to paint fumes. Weeks, due to laziness to put back up the curtains. It’s not so bad except the dog can walk straight onto the bed and lie down on your throat. Well, he’s only done that once. Twice.
- It was my birthday. I had cake. It was good.
- The cat has gone missing, the day of the massive storms in Melbourne. This is not good and I am heartsick about it. We have letter dropped, signs, rung all the shelters repeatedly. We spend hours walking the streets calling. Which is also not good because it excites the dog and he looks around for the cat. Awful. I’m not talking about this any more, and won’t until we find him.
- Before all this, it was Easter and I went back to New Zealand. It was good and the weather was great. Man, I haven’t written here for a LONG time.
- I resigned from my job and am starting a new one in three weeks. This will be good but I am sad to leave all the people at my old job. Well, most of the people.
- I tried on a dress today and loved it, then casually looked at the price tag before I bought it. It was $249. I had no idea and I will not pay that. It was a tough call though, because I have no willpower. But I also have no money. I also didn’t buy green Camper boots, which were considerably more than $249, but they didn’t fit them properly so I didn’t feel so bad about leaving those behind.
I think that’s all for now. I don’t even have any photos. Well I do, but they’re all in the camera. But if I wait until I have photos… I think you know the rest.
22 February 2008
Yeah. So I posted my beach picture, stood up from the couch and went to have a shower… only to have Mr. T start yelling for me to come back and see this. Then he said, “Oh no wait… maybe you don’t want to see this.”
He was right. I really don’t want to see this.
Oh, you can’t tell how big that is? (Or you’re focusing desperately on my my pink glass lightshade in the dining room through there?) That is one BIG MOTHERFUCKING HUNTSMAN. Oh, you’d like a closeup? How nice of you to ask…
I actually couldn’t resize these to my normal size as I couldn’t bear to. Yeah, so guess who else likes the beach? Fucking giant spiders. Glorious. My personal favourite.
18 February 2008
You know what? This is my three-hundredth post. How about that. I would have got here sooner, but I’ve been busy. What with buying a house and moving and all.
Yep, Mr. T and I have finally bitten the bullet in Melbourne and purchased a house. Looking back I’m surprised I didn’t talk about all the many many weekends driving around looking at houses, complete with Mr. T’s carefully annotated spreadsheet of places in open-home-time order which we had to visit. I still have it – there is a column for comments, in which I have attempted to jot notes to remind myself which house is which. A couple of them just say things like “scary” and “bad renovation” and my favourite, “omg drug house” which… OK, can you tell we didn’t want to spend much money here? Not that we COULD spend much money, but in fact if we were willing to go with what the banks were willing to lend (“Sure, we think a monthly mortgage repayment of 1.5 people’s salary is totally manageable!”) we could be set up in a very nice mansion indeed. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to sleep, what with worrying about the mortgage and all, so we went for a more manageable (yet still SHITKICKINGLY expensive) option and ended up here, bayside on the wrong side of the Westgate Bridge.
That’s right, you heard it here first. I am. a. WESTIE. Also, I need to buy moccasins. And possibly trackie daks. We are in an old suburb, about 1km from the beach, in a brick house, and it’s a cross between liveable and a fixer-upper. We are pretty pleased. The dog is happy. The cat is unmoved (and yes I lost him outside for a few heart-stopping hours – things never go smoothly with the cat and moving). I have put off writing this for so long in the theory there will be photos… but I can’t find my memory card reader and since there are still boxes everywhere I can’t see it happening for a while. The kitchen is unpacked (LOVE the kitchen) and everything else is on hold under the premise that we might be replacing the carpets. Also, I just can’t be bothered unpacking any more. Oh look, I found a photo:
House keys.
Next post: Why I need hundreds of house keys.
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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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