six impossible things » Uncategorized

little dog

jac — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:49:00 +0000

On 28 December we had to have our Black Dog put to sleep. He was almost 10.

He had bloat – where the stomach twists over, common in big dogs and dogs who bolt their food. The Black Dog was both of these things.

He was also the happiest, most touchy-feely, most irritating, most loving dog there was.

Goodbye scouterdog. You did good.

pa rumpum pum pum

jac — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:12:00 +0000

I lost the internet for a while there. I was down to dialup. DIAL. UP. I actually fell asleep waiting for my email to download. It was a horrible, horrible time and I thought our internet company was going to charge $149 for the privilege of reinstating the ASDL… then, last night, my Skype button came up as Online and my eyes went wide with the wonder of the season and lo, it was suddenly a Very Merry Christmas For All.

Even though all my Christmas shopping is done and dusted (you hate me don’t you), we went out for breakfast today then stopped into JB HiFi to have a look around. Don’t question me. Anyway, it was a bit crowded and I got bored, so as we walked out we noticed the queue for the register was snaking back towards the doors, and the more we walked towards the door THE LONGER THE QUEUE BECAME. It was like a cartoon where the background loops round and round; we kept walking past racks of DVDs and CDs and a never-ending single file of people, all standing still clutching Harry Potter or a Wii or some other electronic paraphernalia. Twas scary, scary I tell you, and when we got outside it was pissing rain, so we made a pact to stay in the house for the next 48 hours. Now the internet is back, I don’t think I’ll have any problems with this. There is actually a wet cat trying to climb onto my lap as we speak, I DON’T THINK SO.

Anyway, in case I don’t get around to posting before Festivus, I hope everyone has a lovely holiday and manages to eat the weight of a small child in scorched almonds. I know that’s my new year’s resolution, right there.

Photo taken two years ago – tree is still alive, just a little bushier.

I didn’t realise this was so long when I started it

jac — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:38:00 +0000

What kind of soap is in your bathtub right now?
The green minty Lush one – Demon in the Dark? It doesn’t last long enough though.

Do you have any watermelon in your refrigerator?
Yes! I should go and EAT IT!

What would you change about your living room?
Less dog hair. Cleaner fireplace. I don’t mind it, apart from that.

Are the dishes in your dishwasher clean or dirty?
No dishwasher… and I don’t think there are any dishes in the sink (because I ate leftovers for dinner, ahahaha!)

What is in your fridge?
Cheese, cheese, milk, cheese, condiments, aforementioned watermelon, I think a green vegetable or two, eggs, cheese.

White or wheat bread?
I prefer white bread, but will eat multigrain if feeling glum.

What is on top of your refrigerator?
Massive amounts of dust, tall jar of spaghetti because it won’t fit in the cupboards, multivitamins and various jars of whey protein powder stuff (which belong to Mr. T, obviously).

What colour or design is on your shower curtain?
Glass door over thebath, thank god. I always hated the way the shower curtain would gently touch you with its clammy fingertips, then suddenly suction itself to you and stick all the way up your back. Brrrrr.

How many plants are in your home?
In the actual house? Four succulents, a jasmine plant in a wire hen (I should take a photo of that one), baby’s breath in the bottom of the birdcage (ditto photo), tall skinny succulent-like thing in the lounge that’s losing it’s green through lack of direct sunlight. I think that’s all, but it’s probably not.

Is your bed made right now?
Um. Yeah, of course it is.

Comet or Soft Scrub?
What are these, cleansers? Jif. Which to you Comet people means peanut butter, and IT SERVES YOU RIGHT.

Is your closet organized?
No. And neither is the wardrobe. In fact the door came off its runner about a week ago and I haven’t bothered to get Mr. T to put it back in. I heaved the door over to his side so that you can’t get in — he hasn’t noticed yet.

Do you drink out of glass or plastic most of the time at home?
Glass. I can’t remember the last time I drank out of plastic, unless you mean a plastic bottle?

Do you have iced tea made in a pitcher right now?
Why the hell would I?

If you have a garage, is it cluttered?
Lack of garage, hence the cluttered house and the camping equipment piled up in the spare room.

Curtains or blinds?
Curtains in the bedroom, nothing on any of the other windows.

How many pillows do you sleep with?
One.

Do you sleep with any lights on at night?
No, although I can.

How often do you vacuum?
Never, ever enough. Hence the Roomba.

Standard toothbrush or electric?
Normal. There is an electric one somewhere in the bathroom cabinet. I could look for it, if you’d like.

Do you have a welcome mat on your front porch?
Yes, a coir one. Covered with leaves. Very welcoming, I’m sure.

What is in your oven right now?
Three roasting pans (clean).

Is there anything under your bed?
Another bed.

Chore you hate doing the most?
I hate vacuuming because it never ends.

What retro items are in your home?
More than I care to admit. eBay, you are my weakness.

Do you have a separate room that you use as an office?
Oh, of course. It’s right upstairs next to the gift wrapping room. I just haven’t found the stairs yet.

How many mirrors are in your home?
Um… five, I think, if you count the little inset mirror in the mantlepiece of the fireplace. And why not.

What colour are your walls?
Cream, with a mud coloured feature line at dog height. (Actually I’ve just scrubbed that off. AGAIN.)

Do you keep any kind of protection weapons in your home?
The hell? I think Mr. T has a bat or an axe handle or something.

What does your home smell like right now?
Nothing.

Favorite candle scent?
I don’t like scented candles much, sorry.

Ever been on your roof?
No.

How many TVs do you have?
Two.

How many house phones?
Four, because the base unit came with three extras. We only use one.

Do you have a housekeeper?
No. Are you offering one?

What style do you decorate in?
You are too kind. ‘Style’ presumes too much.

Do you like solid colours in furniture or prints?
Solids, although some prints I like. Mainly I’m too chicken to decorate in prints.

Is there a smoke detector in your home?
Yes, although I haven’t heard it go off lately. Either we’re burning less food, or the battery is dead.

In case of fire, what are the items in your house which you’d grab if you only could make one quick trip?
The backup hard drive, the photo albums, and I’d herd the animals out the door in front of me. Who am I kidding, they’d be out long before I would.

facts of randomness

jac — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:31:00 +0000

I am tres slack. Bernice tagged me for five things and have I done it? I have not. I have had a massive week at work and lo, it was crap and sucked the will to live from me, verily. So here we go:

RULES (v. important)
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post by leaving their names, and links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

FACT THE ONE
I don’t get enough sleep. I get extremely tired around 3pm (work nap? oh I wish), then again at 7-8pm, then come right with boundless energy at about 9.30pm. I know I am tired right now, but it’s 12.45am and I don’t feel tired at all. I WILL feel this in the morning. I am a night person stuck in a day world. The sun! It BURRRRNS!

This dog sleeps 22 hours a day and yet is always up for a nap.

FACT THE TWO
I would have said I am not a skirt person, but this whole NaBloShoeThing has made me rethink this: it seems that in reality, I wear skirts to work all the time. I think it’s because it looks dressed up with no effort. I actually feel the same way about heels: as long as they’re comfortable, you look like you’ve put some thought into what you’re wearing. Whereas my average thought process takes around 20 seconds: is this clean? Well, then, where are some clean things? Does this clean thing need ironing? Can I find a clean thing which doesn’t need ironing? Then this is the thing I’m wearing.

Metallicus skirts never need ironing. Bless them.

FACT THE THREE
The number of animals in this household has gone up to eight. Well, it was eight on Sunday when Mr. T bought home five goldfish & some oxygen weed to live in the rainwater overflow barrels. (They were to eat the mosquito larvae which had started to breed in the water.) As of today, Friday, we can only find one. Here fishy fishy fishy?

Fishy?

FACT THE FOUR
I dream about work a lot. There’s nothing more exhausting than waking up in the morning and realising you’ve done your job all night. That sucks.

I don’t have a photo for this one.

FACT THE FIVE
For someone who hates people looking at me, I do a lot of stupid things. Last week two co-workers were in one of our glassed-walled meeting rooms, on a phone conference. To make them laugh and get them to disrupt the phone hookup, I did a wild, flailing dance from my side of the glass wall. I forgot that my side also contained the entire rest of the office, who were all looking at me with great interest when I turned around. Ah well. Fuck ‘em.

Set my dog on them, I will!

I’m not tagging anyone as it’s too late and all normal people are abed. Lucky, lucky sods.

happy feet

jac — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:11:00 +0000

So I took a photo yesterday, but forgot to post it, as – in an interesting twist – I went to the doctor to ask about a shooting pain in my foot. I know! It’s like a theme! Turns out I have an aggravated nerve, or something. I sort of lost focus when he measured my feet and pointed out that the left one was bigger than the right. I then told him about my winter quest to Make Those Shoes Fit, a.k.a. the Nine West Heels of Pain. He agreed trying to stretch shoes with only the power of my mind is bound to be painful on the feet, particularly if one of the feet is a Giant Mutant 5mm wider than the other. So I’m pretty sure that’s what’s done it, and since it’s coming into summer and it will be all about the open shoe, he thinks the nerve will come right. Which is good. Because nobody likes an aggravated nerve. God only knows what could happen.

Anyway, here are my shoes from Thursday. Yes they are the gold versions of the black ones. They’re new and they don’t aggravate my nerve (that sounds sort of dirty) so I wear them a lot. Go to Flickr if you want the extensively annotated botanical listing.

And this was today. Actually, it wasn’t really as I wore the black ones AGAIN. However this is after I got home and was going out again to pick up dinner. It was 30 degrees today so Havaianas are perfectly acceptable, I think. And they don’t get on my Nerve.

feets!

jac — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 09:52:00 +0000

Hey, so OK, apparently there’s this thing where instead of posting once per day, you take a photo of your shoes once per day. Now THAT is something I can totally get behind. If I had known this at the start of November, you might have heard a bit more from me. What? It’s not like I had anything important to say. And if this shoe thing keeps up, you might want me to disappear back to whence I came.

Here are my shoes from today, after I got home from work.

For some reason, at the moment the cat finds everything I do FASCINATING. He follows me around and watches me. He’s a nice cat. Except yesterday I emailed Mr. T and asked if I could get an orange cat and call it Colonel Mustard. He said no. Which is why I asked him, because another animal is not something we need. But still! Colonel Mustard! I would call him “the Colonel”. Genius.

nablogrowmo

jac — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:45:00 +0000

I get nabloplomo and movember mixed up. Throw in some ‘o’s and I’m all askew. Also, I’m not signing up for either. My work is a massive Movember sponsor and I have received no less than a dozen emails asking me to sign up to someone’s team, including the CEO. (Disclaimer: probably was not the CEO, but whatever.) Keep in mind that most guys LOVE growing moustaches and you can imagine my workplace will be a sort of throwback to the seventies in several weeks. And they TOUCH them all the time. Creepy. I keep yelling, “Nya-ah-ah! It is I, Dishonest John!” but they are all youngsters barely out of short pants and they look at me blankly.

I counted out all the change lying around the house and took it all to the bank again this morning. Then a collector came to the door tonight, gamely standing his ground with only a screen door between him and what must have seemed to be a Hound of Hell, baying and stamping and puffing gusts of hot breath through the wire . And of course I had no change to give him. I scraped up some gold coins from the bottom of my handbag (thinking “bugger there goes my parking money”) and wished him godspeed. Well, I had to do something, brave soul that he was.

I made spaghetti sort-of-carbonara onight for dinner OH MY GOD THE CAT HAS JUST POKED HIS HEAD OUT FROM UNDER THE COUCH, DIRECTLY UNDER ME, THAT WAS REALLY SURREAL and had to pour out the bacon fat after I cooked the bacon. I won’t pour fat down the sink and hate figuring out what to do with it. This time, I poured it directly onto the slice of roast pork saved from last night’s roast, and destined for the dog’s dinners. They should treat me like a GOD. …oh wait, they do.

Whilst cooking, I forced iTunes to play the soundtrack from Across the Universe, which was better than I was expecting. However it’s quite a short soundtrack, and by the time I had finished cooking and had moved to the lounge for eating, iTunes had moved on to the next A, which was Aerosmith. And I would not get up and change it. (The collector guy arrived right in the middle of Love In An Elevator, and I was slightly embarrassed, but not enough to hit shuffle.) Then two songs I did not know came on, and this is because we have the Billboard Top 100 Hits from every year from 1980 – 2003, which is way, WAY too much 80s and 90s music. iTunes tells me this was After 7, a group I have never heard of, but I do know that they had a top 100 Hit in both 1990 and 1995. It was awful, and I was sort of twitching, but I STILL would not get up to change it. Now we are onto Air, more specifically the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, and I like Air but this is quite maudlin and I am close to despair. Woe! Hopefully we will move onto something good soon.

I just checked, and you know what it is?

Air Supply.

Send help. Or someone able to hit a Shuffle button.

pictures

jac — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 15:31:00 +0000

It was hot here this weekend.

And we ended up with a yearly bonus after all.
I may have begun spending mine.

Old friends.
Yes, they choose to sleep in the messiest place they can find, purely to spoil my photo.

waspish

jac — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:42:00 +0000

I have to get the rugby off the top of the page. It was cold today, didn’t . . . → Read More: waspish

woe!

jac — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:05:00 +0000

Woe! We lost the rugby: badly, ignominiously, and quite frankly, we choked. Sigh. Another four years. I watched the Wallabies/England game with my English friend in an English pub and had the greatest time – then I was punished for my schadenfreude within a very short time. Woe.

And now I have discovered that the reason my email is playing up is that Thunderbird (which I use for email) has been affected by a McAfee update. But that shouldn’t concern me, right? I don’t even own McAfee! Ah, but I USED to run it on this laptop (actually I had no choice, it came free for 30 days already pre-installed) and it turns out there are still bits of it running, even though I have uninstalled it. Woe! HATE. HATE. HATE. I have fixed it now, but not before it ate my entire folder with emails to/from this blog. At one point I had the headers but no content; now after a bit more tinkering, I have nothing at all. G-O-R-N. It’s gorn, all right. Bugger. Nothing important on there, as such; but still, nothing that I wanted to lose. Curses! If you emailed me and I didn’t reply, now you know why. (Asides from the fact I am lazy, of course. You knew that.) Woe.

Anyway, enough woe. I have unpacked some more boxes and we can see the TV. Mr. T got the ironing board out and ironed his own shirts, then ironed some of my clothes. Liking the Mr. T v2.0 I have to say (although the original problem had nothing to do with ironing, of course. However! He is ironing! Slowly and poorly, but it’s not me!) Of course, this means he has to watch a DVD while he’s doing it, so we have Batman Begins booming at top volume. All those bats are awful and flappy in surround-sound, so you know. Woe. (Not really woe, it just rhymed nicely.)

I have no photos, again. This was taken by Mr. T on a shocking phone camera, then modified and emailed to me.

That’s MY laptop, I’ll have you know.