Pinball Mind

The Ratio Of Birds To Stones

2009-12-13T20:40:00.008+11:00

I am going to open a day spa.

The treatments offered will consist entirely of the client throwing a rope toy for a dog - or therapist, if you will - over and over again in a muddy field.

As the mud and the dog dribble coat their hands they will find that the moisturising effect of the all natural earth supplements and butt-enhanced mouth enzymes will greatly improve the elasticity of their skin.

Various grades of gravel can be added to the muddy field to achieve an exfoliating effect.

A scented wash will be available to complete the treatment and is best applied via the medium of soaping it into the dog's coat and washing it out along with the residual exfoliating supplements.

The natural oils in the dog's fur and the massaging effect of the hairs will gently coax the best possible outcome from the clients' skin.

Tell all your friends.

Incidentally I'm also opening a dog care and grooming service around the corner.

For a quite reasonable price I can promise that your dog is exercised, washed and pampered and returned to you bright eyed and bushy tailed...

Also, The Grassy Knoll Shot JFK!

2009-12-05T00:11:00.010+11:00

Every now and then for no discernible reason I get a little 'conspiracy theory-ish'.

I'm never quite sure what brings it on and it never lasts long enough for me to start a website, lobby my local member of parliament or fold an aluminium foil hat but one thought leads to another leads to suspicion leads to a brief spike of paranoia leads to this blog post.

Want to hear the current theory before it evaporates? Of course you do.

Here it is.

I think some religious group has bought out the contract to fill the vending machines in ladies public bathrooms.

What? You think that sounds outlandish?

Used to be that the little vending machines in public bathrooms would offer you the opportunity to purchase three emergency items: tampons, sanitary pads and condoms.

Now they still offer the tampons and sanitary pads but any extra vending space is taken up by toiletries.

Even if the unit has six items for sale the other four will - instead of holding useful contraceptives - be stuffed to the gills with perfume, hand lotion, toothpaste, lip gloss and other such items.

I don't know about you but I can't imagine too many scenarios where a woman might be desperate to buy some emergency $1 perfume or moisturiser out of a toilet vending machine.
I can imagine a scenario where a woman might need to buy an emergency condom.

The questions about how dependable a vending machine condom might be aside, there are some women out there who might be too shy to buy condoms at the chemist or supermarket.
The vending machine option might have been their only chance to buy a contraceptive discretely and take charge of the night's activities and their sexual health.

So what do we have so far?

Condoms gone
Cheap perfume, moisturiser and lip gloss provided

Conclusion? A shadowy religious group wants us to lower our standards, tart ourselves up and get pregnant!

Yeah, it all comes together now doesn't it?
You once were blind but now you see!
The truth is before you and can never be concealed again!

Now I must go speak The Truth to The People before The Truth starts to look a bit crazy and I back away from it like an electronic monk backs away from the belief that everything in a valley is a uniform shade of pink!

PS. If I mysteriously disappear it will be because this one is actually true and the cabal involved is a lot better funded than anyone would expect and more prone to overreacting than a prudent financial plan would advise.

How To Get An Australian To Like You

2009-11-21T00:14:00.000+11:00

It's all in the pronunciation.

We're really that easy.

I will give you some examples.

Aussie
This is pronounced Oz (as in the Wizard of Oz) + e (the letter e)
Oz-e
Not Ors-ee.

Emu
This is pronounced e (the letter again) + mew (the word for the sound cats make)
E-mew.
Not E-moo.

Melbourne
Ignore the spelling, it is pronounced Mel + b'n (like 'bun' but without the u)
Melb'n.
Not Mel-borne.

Armed with this secret knowledge you can instantly be proclaimed a good bloke/blokette, be included in shouts at the pub and can get Australians to like you!

Unless you're a bit of a twonker.

In which case you're on your own.

Sorry mate.

Carefree Confession

2009-11-13T21:05:00.007+11:00

I discovered the backdating widget for posting which I have used in a rather shameless fashion to pop in the posts at the times I wrote them but couldn't be bothered to type them up because I was either:

a) busy freaking out because I was about to go overseas, or
b) faffing about overseas.

I know some people might consider this a bit dishonest but to them I say:

"Pfft, it's only dishonest if you pretend you haven't done it!" and "Yeah well you enjoy your rapturous indignation and I'll enjoy looking back at neatly spaced posts!"

I like patterns, so sue me :-)

Here I Go Again On My Own...

2009-11-13T02:36:00.004+11:00

Alrighty, it's NaNoWriMo time and the failing voice of failingness is singing in my ear saying things like "Hey there! You didn't even get back into the country until the 4th of November, then you were jetlagged and self-indulgent and didn't start until over a week had passed!" and other such helpful things.

Yeah well, shut your pie hole failing voice of failingness!
I can come up with plenty of stuff like that all by myself without your help!
Like the fact that whenever I should be doing one thing that I really want to do (ie. writing) I find myself wanting to do something else I really want to do instead (eg. drawing) and get all distracted and then have lovely productive circular arguments with myself on the topic!

Circles and ranting aside I'm doing it and there's not a damn thing you can do to stop me!
I'm also having dessert before dinner and mmm it's delicious, you hear me!? DELICIOUS!

PS.
Goin' down the only road I've ever knoooooooooooown!
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone!

*Ahem*

Travel Edition Ricochet - Week 3

2009-11-07T22:14:00.013+11:00

Moar learning!

26 Oct - I hadn't done my homework again Monday morning, I was beginning to get flashbacks to high school and university as I stayed one question ahead of the answers we were giving in turn.
The Cooking Class today almost killed me, just like all the others, we made penne puttanesca and penne carbonara with zucchini fololowed by a short cust pastry with baked pears and chocolate custard in it. I knew I shouldn't get seconds, or eat the entire wedge of torte Agostino gave me but I did it any way and luckily Donato decided that as we were the only people in the Art History class that afternoon he'd take us on another walk rather than sit us down in a cosy dark room where we would fall asleep.
He took us to Santa Croce and showed us the art work in situ, pointed out before and after examples of restored paintings and explained what the restorers who were working on the church whilst we were there were doing.
One of the last things we saw at the church was the Pazzi chapel, built by a family who was unwise enough to try and assassinate a member of the Medicis and were wiped comprehensively off the map. In Rennaissance Florence that is apparently what you get!

Creepy clown bags!

27 Oct - As this week the Art History and Cooking Classes were on the same days rather than alternate days we had a big free block in the afternoon which we chose to fill up with meeting up with my uncle and aunt (also on holiday) and visiting the Uffizi gallery.
I will never get sick of Caravaggio's Medusa or Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes, Boticelli's Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's Holy Family* or basically any of the other pieces in the Uffizi. I could come back here over and over again and probably will.
After we wound our way out through the series of shops I dragged my family and two friends of my uncle and aunt to a wine bar that I'd been eyeballing for days and smugly enjoyed my marvellous glass of wine whilst they questioned why we'd stopped here particularly.
We'd stopped because our dinner reservations we're until 7:30pm and we had some time to kill before we again tried to rupture our stomachs.
The stomach rupturing attempt took place at Ristorante Aqua al Due and holy heck!
I had a porcini mushroom risotto and a fillet of steak done with blueberries and I have no idea where I found room for my part of the dessert platter or the *coff* 6 bottles of wine between 7 people.
By the end of the meal I was glad we were just walking home instead of getting a taxi back to the station to get a late train like my uncle, aunt and travelling companions were doing.
Our steps homewards may have been a bit unsteady but they were very satisfied.

28 Oct - I know I still sound like a 5 year old with a poor grasp of tenses when I speak Italian but when you're learning a different language you're so excited by remembering enough to make sense you feel like you're cracking a secret code. Badly but still!
Today was our last Cooking Class which was a wrench but Agostino came through with Neapolitan meatballs and a chocolate almond torte and then spent about 5 minutes berating us for leaving in that lovely way so many people do.
Donato took us for another walk around town today, a couple of the churches we went by were closed for the day or had set entry times for tourists and we wound up at a few of the more obscure or hidden churches, around a corner you wouldn't have turned on a whim or tucked behind another building. It's so different seeing these things with someone who is so passionate about their content and the role it played in history.
We went for another walk over the Ponte Vecchio and around Piazza Signora before dinner, it's hard to stop walking this area.
The abundance of good wine at ridiculously cheap prices is a terrible temptation and I can't say it's one I've been resisting it at all.

29 Oct - After school it was time for the torture that comes with all travel, gift shopping.
I hate gift shopping. Hate it.
I love the people that I'm buying gifts for but I'm usually so distracted by where I am and what I'm doing that I never randomly notice something that would be 'just perfect' for them by chance and have to spend a specific allocated time running about trying to find something suitable, trying not to get ripped off and trying to remember to buy something for myself. Usually what I take home with me is a diary and photographs, I would say memories but my memory is terrible so I take a diary :-)
I survived but it was a near thing!

30 Oct - It was sad saying goodbye to everyone at the school after our last classed, as a tribute I have carefully left my last round of homework completely uncompleted.
It was our last day visiting our little café as well which was equally difficult, I've eaten more pastry on this trip than in many of the months beforehand but I would do it again!
For our last afternoon we took a bus up to Fiesole which overlooks Florence, unfortunately the air was a bit hazy but Fiesole itself has enough to look at, for instance we found a house with a koala lamp...

There were a couple of items of modern sculpture up at the Roman amphitheatre that reminded me of Stargate which meant I couldn't stop thinking of fighting aliens the whole time I was there, not that that's a bad thing.

31 Oct - Our last morning in the flat was the usual blend of panic, double-checking and coffee. Had we packed everything? Turned everything off? Taken everything out of the fridge? Left the keys in the right place? Taken all the bags out before locking up? Left enough time to get to the train station?
On the last point we got to the station about 15 minutes before my train, said goodbye and I spent the next 5 hours on trains to Turin to spend a couple of days with the relatives before going back home.
I would have gone at the start of the trip but I would never have gotten away, my Grandmother's cousin envelopes you in a cloud of food and love and questions and almost the only way you get permission to leave is by showing her your plane ticket.
They picked me up at the train station and immediately began to remind me exactly how much I still don't know about Italian, 70 year olds with little to no English don't stick to the simple stuff, though sometimes they speak louder and slower (but not clearer) in an effort to get you to understand. Seems this is a universal tactic.

1 Nov - Went for a walk with my Grandmother's cousin's husband after breakfast while his wife was preparing lunch... I love Turin, it's so easy to wander about and there are so many beautiful old buildings and people just live in them like they're normal buildings, it's ridiculous!
We went through a food market, past a bookshop about a hundred metres long and only three metres wide, past fountains and open-air sculptures and then back home for a five course lunch with their daughter, her husband and their two young kids.
After lunch the young family took me for a drive to Sacra di San Michele and I learned several things:

Italians talk with their hands from the moment they can talk
The Italian version of the annoying 'turn green' chant kids take up in the car is 'diventa verde!'
Churches on top of mountains that look like they're balanced on top of castles are epic.

I didn't understand a lot of the guided tour but the guide was so excited telling the story I enjoyed it anyway, everything below the mountain was hidden by mist so the whole experience was very Spirited Away like.
After that it was home for dinner, more dinner, extra dinner, dessert, coffee and limencello**, more tellings off on the theme of how I must visit more often and for longer and a lot of other things it is quite nice to hear.

2 Nov - I was awake for ages this 'day'. I haven't done the maths on it yet but I got up at 7:30am in Italy, had breakfast, gathered my bags, went down to the train station with everybody, said more goodbyes, got on the train, went back to Milan, stopped for a quick shop, got the bus to the airport, got the plane to Amsterdam, got another plane to Kuala Lumpur, had a 7 hour stop over there in an airport lounge, got another flight at 10:00pm-ish Kuala Lumpur time, completely failed to get any sleep on the one flight I'd promised myself I was allowed to, arrived in Melbourne, bought a coffee at the airport against my better judgement, got the airport shuttle home and collapsed into a boneless heap.

In summary:

Yay travel!
I somehow always end up reading Douglas Adams when I travel which is strange considering what happens to his characters when they travel...
I shouldn't be allowed to write travel blog entries because I just go on for-bloody-ever and start introducing completely irrelevant points about Douglas Adams!

Now I'm off for some extra lashings of sleep followed by a nice lie in.

*I'd just re-read Douglas Adams' Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul before we visited the gallery (and strangely enough just before my last visit too, although I'd forgotten until now) and was particularly tickled to see Michelangelo's Holy Family (or Doni Tondo) after hearing it described in Adams' wonderful way.

**Sweet mercy limencello is delicious! And now I have a recipe! Now I'm unstoppable! Mwah ha ha ha ha ha!

Travel Edition Ricochet - Week 2

2009-10-27T22:13:00.015+11:00

This week was somewhat more sedate, what with the school, the homework and the eating but there was still a lot to see and do.

19 Oct - First thing in the morning we toddled around the corner to the school we were attending to take our placement tests and find out which class we would each be in. I started the test cheerfully filling in answers, slowed down frowning at some of the trickier tenses, got completely lost on a couple of grammatical points and got placed in a class with students from all over the place: a Kiwi, a Russian, a German, a Norwegian, a Mexican, a Spaniard and me.
Our teacher Monica was a lovely woman who rolled her R's so much it sometimes sounded like she was speaking under water.
The first day was an exciting lesson in exactly how much Italian I've forgotten and how quickly I could pick different parts of it up again. When you're a foreigner learning Italian you start waving your hands around a lot, this is an attempt to distract people whilst you try and remember the word or conjugation you're looking for as an effort to fit in.
We had an Art History Class in Italian in the afternoon which was spectacularly baffling* but which included a slide-show of paintings to admire.
We went out for a stroll around town, stopping to stare at the river and Piazza Signora before returning to the apartment for dinner and to meet Paolo again so he could turn on the heating.
Most Italians don't turn on the heating before 1st November because the charges are significantly higher out of season but we'd been damn cold the night before and were willing to take that chance!

Hannibal Lecter and now Darth Vader!?

20 Oct - In the break between language sessions we headed down to our local café to get our daily hit of coffee and pastries *drool*, ran out of time to pick something up for lunch and sat back expecting to starve.
We did not starve.
Today was the first Cooking Class.
Holy Crap.
Our teacher Agostino is a middle-age Italian man who knows his way about the kitchen but who leaves you in no doubt that you are in a man's kitchen - flinging ingredients into bowls, flinging used bowls into the sink, opening packets with a Stanley knife**.
We learned how to make traditional lasagne and a grape torte which was ridiculously tasty.
I know this because at the end of the class we all whipped out plates and got to dig into the prepared food.
Best. Class. Ever.
Once we could face the idea of walking again we hauled our stuffed stomachs back on top of our legs and staggered off to do a lap around the Pitti Palace and over and around the Ponte Vecchio.

21 Oct - By the third day I was remembering more but also remembering how bad I am at doing homework. I am woeful. I get the homework. I take it home. I go 'Eh, later', 'Eh, dinner first', 'Eh, don't feel like it', 'Eh, bed time', 'Argh! Class is in 5 minutes!'.
Our regular café is shut on Wednesdays so we went for a walk around to Piazza Santa Croce and found a coffee and flaky indulgence there before remembering we still needed to go back for some advanced bilingual thinking.
Another round of semi-incomprehensible but still pretty Art History followed by a long stroll around town, admiring the Duomo and rolling our eyes at the people complaining they couldn't go in because there was some damn ceremony on or something. The damn ceremony is called Mass people, it is a church - doi!

22 Oct - After surviving another round of language class, conversation sessions and warning my fellow students to remember that 'preservativi' is a 'false friend' and doesn't in fact mean 'preservatives' and if you ask the baker if there are 'preservativi' in your bread you are asking them if it is full of condoms***! Don't trust internet translation programs people!
At Cooking Class today we made Ignudi Alla Fiorentina which is a spinach and ricotta version of gnocchi and a Torta di riso (it's a cake made with rice! Oh the insanity!).
When we could waddle away from Agostino's kitchen we turned ourselves towards the Galleria Dell'Accademia to go see that big naked fame-whore Michelangelo's David.
He continues to be large, made of marble and entirely awesome.
I will never get over the surprise of walking into a room and HOLY CRAP IT'S DAVID!
Look around at something else, look back and HOLY CRAP IT'S DAVID!
He's one of the things that don't disappoint when you see them in real life, he really is that great.
They also had a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition running which had some excellent photographs, they didn't have any of his more risqué pieces on display but the ones on the human form were already too spicy for some of the visitors. Despite the fact they'd come to stare at a bunch of paintings and sculptures of naked people...

Yes I know the last two photos have had nothing to do with what I was talking about but I like them so nyerh!

23 Oct - Today after we chattered through our classes and ordered our coffee and increasingly decadent pastries in broken Italian we went to see the inside of the Duomo and the Battistero. When you have a good look at the Rennaissance and Gothic churches in Europe you begin to understand why the people of a few centuries ago were so devout.
First of all, big ridiculously ornate buildings are quite intimidating.
Second, the art. Dear lord, look at a couple of the paintings of the Last Judgement and you know that you do NOT want to go to Hell! The paintings of demons eating lost souls at one end and pooping them out so they can eat them again are not very welcoming!
The mosaics in the Battistero are amazing, even with the 'Beware Your Sinful Ways You Bastards!' section, especially with that section, I can't lie, I love that stuff.
They also have a lot of floors tiled to emulate the patterns of arabian rugs in Florence, the artisans were brought in from the Christian Middle East at the time and obviously did a lot of work whilst they were over.
We went out to dinner at a restaurant called Osteria del Gatto e la Volpe which takes its name from the characters in the Pinocchio story. The pizza with the bresaola and rocket was really really good, almost supernaturally good.

24 Oct - Slept late this Saturday, shouldn't have but we remain unrepentant, once we had come to terms with our deviant ways we spent a few hours exploring the Boboli Gardens, took a pass on the museums inside the Palazzo Pitti this time (being slightly museum-ed out for the time being), staring at some of the creepier bits of porcelain in the one museum we accidentally wandered into because it looked kind of like a gazebo.
We had to hotfoot it from the gardens back to the school because they were running a walking tour of the city we wanted to take. When we got there it turned out it was just us three and Donato the Art History teacher who was going to be running the tour. So he decided to take us up to San Miniato Church, one of the oldest and most important churches in Florence and we got a personal guided tour of the church and the area leading up to it complete with history and art commentary. As we were walking along the hill Donato pointed out the wild laurel that grows everywhere in the area and picked some to use in his kitchen the next day. I would love to have the knowledge and confidence to pick ingredients straight from the world around me but I'm sure I would end up with poison ivy in my mouth or something so I leave it to professionals and cheerful art enthusiasts.

25 Oct - We got a little overambitious with today, the original plan was to see both Pisa and Lucca but we got rather distracted by the parade that we came across in the Piazza Duomo on our way to the train station - men in tights, ladies in period dress, flags and drugs and trumpets! All the things that you think are now relegated to sappy movies about going to other countries to 'find yourself' and have sex with their men and/or ladies and find the happiness that does not exist in your own darn country.
We finally broke free, found our way to Pisa on a train with a super stinky toilet, survived the rather excited bus ride to the Piazza Miracoli and immediately had to fortify ourselves with lunch. We'd all been up the tower before and the wait was somewhere around 5 hours so we passed on that and went to admire the Cathedral and the Battistero of Pisa instead. The Cathedral in Pisa is in some ways more impressive than the one in Florence, more ornate, much more busy and it just feels older.
In contrast the Battistero was a lot simpler than the one in Florence but had such well balanced acoustics that a person standing in the centre of it can sing rounds with themselves as an employee demonstrated for us whilst we were there.
It was dark by the time the train headed home and all the little houses on the hills and the church with a timely tolling bell were being lit from within and below. It was nice.

*For some silly reason I completely forgot to brush up on my art criticism vocabulary before we arrived!
**You know, one of those box-cutter dealies.
***I didn't do this but I saw another English speaking lady ask that very question and the baker laughed so hard he almost inhaled his stylish 1970s moustache!

Travel Edition Ricochet - Week 1

2009-10-18T00:51:00.028+11:00

Listen as I sing the deeds of Ricochet Abroad!

Bright was the sun and high were our hearts when we set out on our... Eh, when I say me and really my heart wasn't high so much as going gang-busters in my chest...

Alright I'll start again!

11th Oct - The trip official didn't start until the 12th of October but the bitching starts on the 11th.
I'd just spent a rather nice 5 days away for a work thing in Adelaide which was, as I have mentioned lovely, but we had booked it quite a while before I decided (twitching and daring people to challenge me on the point) that I was going to go to Italy for three weeks.
So on the evening of the 11th my workmates and myself landed at Tullamarine airport, fought through traffic and distance and an hour and a half later were back where we all live, then I loaded up my car with all my 'crud to pack later', drove another hour back to my parents' house, almost hit a kangaroo, seriously, I was less than 5 m from the damn thing when it finally decided to hop out of the way, got home, unpacked, sat up until 3:00am packing my bag, stared at the darkened ceiling for 2 hours commanding myself to sleep dammit and finally somehow drifted into an unconsciousness of a jittery, unsettled type.

12 Oct - I woke up at 6:30am (briefly convinced I had missed my flight) TO DO MY TAXES because otherwise the damn things would be late and I would be fined or something, finished packing, said goodbye to my sister before she went off to work, rang my friend who had offered to drive me to the pick-up for the airport shuttle, rang her again, started to get worried, checked her other phone, several times, started getting panicky, woke up my confused and grumpy brother, rolled him out of bed and into a car and commanded him to drive me to the shuttle, got onto the shuttle, breathed a sigh of relief, received an apologetic phonecall from my friend who had left her phone in the bathroom over night and not heard my calls*, fell asleep on the shuttle because buses are my narcolepsy zone, arrived at the airport a good 3.5 hours before my flight, got rid of my little suitcase, changed some money, gummed a sandwich, had a quick expensive flutter on the internet and then got on a plane to be plied with food and drinks for hours on end.

13 Oct - This involved a bit of time zone swapping, I stubbornly stayed awake as long as possible to try and minimise jetlag, landed in Milan, braved the metro system, found my hotel, checked in, had a shower and actually started looking around.

Milan is pretty. I don't give a damn about fashion** but the city itself is quite lovely. I decided that either I could curl up in a little jet-laggy 'Dear God I'm by myself in a foreign country!' ball of panic or go outside. Before I could think too much about it I quickly went outside and found myself at Castle Sforzesco which is a huge beautiful old building crammed with museums.

Oh and there was a market between the castle and the metro station, the food was delicious, yes it was.

If I'd known how many museums the castle contained I might not have gone in but luckily I was blissfully ignorant as I forked over my ridiculously small entrance fee and then spent the rest of the entire day wandering through museum after museum, level after level, gawping at paintings, sculptures, armour and weapons! Oh how I love ye olde armour and weapons, they're so fancy and yet the dings and holes in various pieces show they were definitely for business as well as pleasure.

Once I staggered broke free of the endless tempting succession of museums and staggered weakly out of the castle, I loaded up on bits and pieces from the market, found my way back to my hotel, gorged myself on my finds and then lay there in a coma like state watching BBC News on how we're all terrible and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
But it's hard to be too bothered about that when you have arancini and dolci.

Oh and here is a statue of a fat guy with his brains scooped out just because it is excellent.

14 Oct - I woke up, remembered who I was and where I was and went to have a proper look at the Duomo***. From the outside the church looks like a cake. A giant elaborate marzipan monstrosity.

I honestly spent the best part of a day walking around the church, in the church, on the church roof.
I find that I miss the smell of churches. I miss the ritual and the responses. I don't miss the religion so much, not at this point, but I miss the familiar scents of frankincense, linen and years.
The rest of the day was spent wandering up and down some of the streets just enjoying the unfamiliar familiarity, the people and the coffee, oh the coffee!
Just in case you're getting worried and you're not sure you're still in the right blog here is a photo I took of a bronze horse butt!

I also bought a mobile telephone so I'd be able to contact my Italian rellies and my parents and then shamefacedly had to ask the receptionist at the hotel how to open the damn thing so I could put the battery in. He was very sympathetic, very tall and had a lovely pony-tail. That is all.

15 Oct - It was time to move on so I checked out, found my way to the train station and got the train to Verona, the home of 'Romeo and Juliet', also the home of a delightfully flustered and slightly embarrassed gay B&B owner. Turns out the room I'd booked was in the B&B he was in the process of repainting (as evidenced by the paint smudges on him, his boyfriend and their two dogs) but he had another B&B around the corner they could accommodate me in.
I walked all over town, went to visit the amphitheatre which would have been a lovely place to watch gladiator fights back in the day and which now offers opera, just as bloody in its own way.

I also had a trot up the tower and went to see 'Juliet's House' which was covered in excited love notes, surrounded by people who were frantically rubbing poor statue Juliet's breast into a concave for good luck and general jollies and full of period furniture and quotations. I've always hated Romeo and Juliet for it's 'everybody is an idiot and if you'd just run away properly you wouldn't have ended up dead like a pair of assholes'-ness**** but I can't deny I love Shakespeare's way with words and I'll be re-reading my collection when I get home.
I picked up a take-away panino and an aranciata from a bar near my B&B to take home for dinner - onion baked into the bread, tuna, cheese and capers *drool*.

16 Oct - I'd cheated actual jet-lag but still woke up at a few odd times during the night and then early enough in the morning to get out and about, this time to spend most of the day in another castle *glee*.

I went for a walk down by the river, visited the Castelvecchio, had another art trawl through a maze of levels and corridors, took far too many photos, including this one of a child with their drawing (the more things change, the more they stay the same)...

... and then continued on over the bridge for a quick geek out over the pattern of the cobbles...

... before going for a wide-ranging ramble about town that ended in me eating an entire large mushroom and prosciutto pizza by myself. I regret nothing!

17 Oct - I sort of crapped up the start of this day, I had a luxurious sleep in which I rather enjoyed but which meant I didn't get into Bologna until about 2:00pm, a ridiculously easy amble into the centre of town later I found my hotel, checked in, popped into the Piazza Maggiore to get a map from the Tourist Information Centre just in time to join in on a walking tour run by a local lady. It was full of contradictions (eg. Bologna has never been conquered! Except for by the Pope, the Germans, a few other people...) and I have to admit I spent a bit too much time looking at this tiny dog one of the other ladies had brought along with her...

The different churches, the parts of the university, the fact that they built the famous arched walkways just so they could house university students (at least according to our guide), the two towers built by competing powerful families (one more successfully than the other, unless leaning is a sign of power) were all lovely...

...but I have to admit I got a little bit more excited by the view out of my hotel window...

This is the first time I've travelled with money not budgeted down to the last cent and I've been able to stay in hotels instead of hostels, less people to meet but it has its compensations.

Sorry, I'm sounding weird again. Here is a picture of Neptune with his willy out and a pigeon on his head.

18 Oct - Today was a bit of a jumble, I spent the morning wandering about taking photos of arched walkways...

... and buskers playing tiny electric guitars with their speakers/amps/whatever mounted on their motorbike...

... before heading back to the train station to meet up with my parents who were swapping trains on their way from Venice to Florence.
We're all 'functionally fluent' in Italian - which means we can ask for directions, hold halting and slightly stilted conversations - but Dad had apparently been unable to get any information out of the disinterested Venetian train station employee they'd bought the tickets from. Based on information Dad has SMSd me I'd worked out they'd been sold regional tickets which would mean an unnecessary 4 hour stopover in Bologna before a regional train to Florence was due so when he and Mum turned up I stole their tickets, upgraded them to a direct service and we all headed off to Florence to find our apartment and prepare for the 2 week language and cooking course we'd signed up for.

The first thing we did to prepare was stop in at the closest café to our apartment for coffee and the start of what looks to be a pastry splurge, before Paolo came to meet us with the keys, then it was time for dinner and a bit of light collapsing and blissful slumber.

*To be fair we hadn't set a time or confirmed but she had said 'Call me if you need a lift' which I think is fairly clear cut.

**Whilst at the same time admiring people who have their own style.

***As last time I was in Milan we carefully went to see The Last Supper (woo!) then had a quick decko around he middle of town and quickly ran off to another city/country/everywhere else.

****It's not that I'm NOT romantic, I just think that there are better ways to go about things than sucking and dying.

Right Place, Right Time

2009-10-11T00:52:00.014+11:00

This week was work-lite for a work week as a handful of us got to go to Adelaide on a work trip that involved meetings, presentations and very little actual participation on our part.

This was excellent.

It also managed to bring together a range of things I'm very fond of. Dining out, good wine, amazing bookshops, trawling for quirky cafés, graffiti and street art...

And the other...

Well I will set the scene thusly.

It was Saturday night, the work commitments were well and truly behind us, a friend and I decided to take a leisurely stroll down the street, admiring the way Adelaide's weather had remained stable the entire day - and indeed the whole time we'd been there - and generally putting it on the list of places we wouldn't mind living at some point.

The evening was balmy and pleasant, the light was fading, a little take away noodle place was sending out come hither odours, a local bottle-o promised chilled beverages.

As we were negotiating which dishes we would each get so we could divvy them up like the indecisive scavengers we are, a terrifying shriek filled the air, multiplying and reverberating and growing and echoing until the whole street seemed to be wrapped in it.

And then they came.

Running.

At the front quick figures in black, belts and straps, side-arms and quickly improvised weapons.

One long-legged female figure in a slinky red dress and solid black boots, stopping coolly to aim behind her when the moment presented itself.

And behind them.

The horde.

Shambling, running, staggering, falling, clothes torn, limbs bent, intestinal integrity compromised, blood smeared and dripping from foaming mouths.

They lunged uncoordinated at gawping pedestrians, only stopped by barriers that separated the street from alfresco dining areas.

Policemen tried valiantly to herd them away from witless onlookers, twisting out of the way of open jaws and reaching hands as they went.

The Adelaide Zombie Walk was upon us.

We were right in the thick of it.

And it was glorious.

The photos I took were terrible and blurry so here is a link to a site which has much much better ones.

Keep your eyes open for Zombie Ghandi, Zombie Stormtrooper, Zombie Jesus and Zombie Panda amongst others!

Conclusions:

Adelaide, I will be seeing you again.

The first wave of undead in the zombieapocalypse will have its ranks primarily composed of people who stopped to take photos and admire 'costumes'.

Get Over, Get Over The Third Of October

2009-10-04T16:47:00.004+11:00

OK, that's it!

If anyone else wants to celebrate their plans to be happily entangled for the rest of their lives they will have to offer me bribes or hold the celebrations in my backyard!

Look, I know that people face far more complicated and serious dilemmas every day and that I'm a huge crybaby but I get a bit stressed about other people's exciting days going right and like them far apart so I can help, can go months without any big events or demands on my time cropping up and then this happened...

Saturday was the day of my cousin's wedding - aw! *cue ecstatic aunts!*

It was also the day of my mate Awesome's engagement party - aw! *cue overexcited friends!*

Both events were on at almost exactly the same time... in two different towns... two hours apart... *cue freaking out and screaming!*

Crud! Crud! Crud! Crud! Crud!

I didn't want to miss either event but going to both was going to be a bugger.

Not to mention I was in charge of organising the cake and signature book for the engagement party from a third and completely unrelated town and was doing the Prayers of the Faithful during my cousin's wedding ceremony.

Things sort of shilly-shallied about for a few weeks leading up to the wedding/engagement party weekend.

The cake was fine.

The people at the shop decided that the picture that was to go on top of the cake was too dark and wouldn't turn out.

I found a new picure.

They were no longer accepting pictures by email, the picture had to be printed on photo paper and brought in personally.

Oh and the day you leave work early and drive an hour to bring the photo in we will have closed early.

Eventually I got the bloody cake squared away, found a dress for the wedding, hand-cut 80 pieces of ornate cardboard for the engagement party signature book and bought metallic ink pens and badass stickers for them to decorate them with, explained the situation to both occasion-stressed women without being torn a new one, looked at transport options and then began Operation EVERYBODY STOP TELLING ME THAT THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! WHAT ARE YOU A BUNCH OF QUITTERS!?*

Step One. Wake up, get preliminary dressed, go pick up cake.

Step Two. Drop off cake with another friend, hand over cards, pens and stickers.

Step Three. Drop car off at the train station, get sister's fiancé to pick me up and drive us back to the house.

Step Four. Collect clothes and sundries for the wedding, herd entire family into cars and drive for two hours.

Step Five. Get changed into wedding clothes at a relative's house, herd everyone back into cars, have argument about best way to get to church, misidentify church, have another argument, find the right church, get everyone out of the car.

Step Six. Find the other cousin who I am doing the readings with, find a seat, sit down and make chitchat.

Step Seven. All agree she looks lovely and he is probably not a serial killer and can be let into the family, realise the priest is mental as he starts rambling about changing the wording of 'what God has joined let no man put asunder' to gender-neutral because 'people are running off with all sorts these days', ruins part of the service by trying to make comments addressed to the the groom and bride separately gender-neutral and then forgets to ask the bride to say her vows before being reminded by the wanting to be happy couple.

Step Eight. Deliver prayers without saying a swear or making any embarrassing noises, agree everything went very well except for the mental priest.

Step Nine. Get back to the house, change again, drag my father away from all the cheerfully enthusiastic family shouting, say goodbye to my parents as they happen to be flying to Italy after the reception, drive to a train station, get a bit lost, use logic to find track, use track to find station, get out of the car, leg it through construction works, find ticket counter, buy ticket, get to platform at the same time as the train, get train, collapse.

Step Ten. Spend two hours thinking 'this is stupid, if we had teleporters I would be there by now'.

Step Eleven. Arrive at station, get changed in the bathroom, get into car cleverly left at station earlier, drive to engagement party, spend the whole drive hoping I hadn't confused the location with another.

Step Twelve. Arrive in time to preside over the revelation of the cake, be crowned Dëity Mønarch of Cake and join the party.

Step Thirteen. Help pack up, drive people out to the bottle-o for some travellers as I'm the only person who hadn't been drinking**, drive back to Awesome's place and spend the rest of the evening*** having a drink, eating chips and watching Wayne's World and Wayne's World 2.

Step Fourteen. Finally relax and realise that I've enjoyed myself.

*sigh*

...

OK, OK, I'll probably come to your bloody wedding/whatever but at least have it in an area well served by public transport!

Remember! No teleporters yet!

PS. An engagement party might not seem very important compared to a wedding but it is going to be a few years before Awesome and her fella can afford the wedding and what with all the going out of her way she does for other people she deserved something nice dammit!

*I'll be the first to admit it doesn't really roll off the tongue...

**Or eating, no time dammit!

***And some of the morning

That Old Familiar Song

2009-09-27T13:59:00.007+10:00

Ricochet?

Er, yes Always Slightly Accusatory Voice That I Hear Inside My Head?

Remember that talk we had?

Er, which one? We have so many.

The one about the short term relief of wussing out versus the long term benefits of following through on doing things that you've always wanted to do?

Oh, yeah. That one.

You're having a panic attack, aren't you?

It's hard to say...

You're having a panic attack about being abroad by yourself.

Well it's somewhat perilous being a broad by yourself.

None of your smart mouth.

But it's the only one I've got...

You're getting all nervy about being overseas by yourself even though you love travelling and this way you won't have anyone whining when you want to spend an entire day in a museum or being whimsical and giving yourself airs in a particularly fancy lookin' café.

I do like doing that...

So you're going to stop moaning about only having two weeks to get ready, remember that you've already got your ticket, your passport and at least a week's worth of clean underwear and open a can of harden the eff up.

Hey now, steady on Always Slightly Accusatory Voice That I Hear Inside My Head! No need for strong language! They don't appreciate that kind of thing on the internets!

But you get my point?

Yes, Always Slightly Accusatory Voice That I Hear Inside My Head, I get your point.

Excellent. Then I think we're done here.

Good.

See you tomorrow morning when you don't want to get up for work then?

Yeah, see you then.

The Cat Piano

2009-09-20T12:49:00.009+10:00

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

Smoke, shadows, jazz and the sultry sounds of Nick Cave.

Sure this is a cheat post but it's a beautiful cheat post!

Ambivalence And Rejection: A Modern Finance Story

2009-09-13T23:34:00.005+10:00

This week I did something I really didn't want to do.

I applied for a credit card.

Not because I'm out of money but because I'm going overseas soon and I'll need it.
Apparently hotels aren't willing to accept bookings or take it on the honour system that you aren't planning to wreck up the place or leave little 'gifts' behind the ventilation panels without some way of chasing you up if you don't turn up/do and they wish you hadn't.

I've never wanted a credit card, I hate the idea.
I don't like owing people money, I don't like complications and I don't like filling out forms.
But I had to.
So I did.

And I was knocked back.

I was knocked back for a credit card based on 20 or so questions on an initial form on their website.

I was stunned.

I'm in a secure full time job.
I am responsible with money.
I have savings which prove that not only am I responsible with money now I've been responsible with money for a long time.
But apparently I do not fall within their current parameters for approval.

So I rang them up and I asked them in polite, measured, mature tones what the dealio was.

It seems they've tightened their approval policy up of late* and all the little points my answers warranted didn't add up to enough to get me through the door with this particular provider.
I asked if there was anything on my application that had disadvantaged me.
The guy sort of danced around the subject but from what I could tell it was because I'd only been working in my steady full time job for 2.5 years and had only been renting my well-maintained flat for the same amount of time.
That and possibly my age.
Oh and my marital status is single.

Yep.
I'm a single girl in her twenties.
I must be crazy with the monies.
Any minute now I'm going to get onto the internets and buy a llama on eBay because it was for cheaps and I can't resist a sale.

The thing that really grated was that this same provider had given my now 19.5 year old sister a card almost without waiting for a signature only 1.5 years earlier when she was in part time work and 18!

I know we don't want to just throw credit cards at people like they're candy but I'm one of the few people I know who I'd actually trust to manage one of these things.

And when I don't want to do something and then somebody tells me I can't do it... well dammit who are they to tell me that I can't have that thing I don't want!

I've applied for another dang one through my bank this time and in about a week I'll find out whether I get one or not** and when/if I receive it I will be able to hold it on high with a strange mingled feeling of victory/satisfaction/dread/resignation!

At least I'll be able to book my own concert tickets then.
Every time I ask Mum if I can use her card to book a ticket she wants to know all about the band and inevitably she ends up comparing them to Dethklok.
According to Mum all metal bands sound like Dethklok.
Who she thinks are cute.
I love my Mum.

*Gee I wonder why *coff global economic crisis coff*
**If my own bank knocks me back I will be so very cranky.

Summertime

2009-09-06T21:04:00.003+10:00

We're only friends in the summertime.
When the evening light is soft and a cold drink tastes as it never does any other time of the year.
Then the words flow and the memories are made and the nights last until the morning.
When the seasons turn and the cold creeps in, silence begins to outweigh speech.
In the dark months when the outside is too cold for you and the indoors too close to share.
We're only friends in the summertime.
And I miss you the rest of the year.
But not as much as you might think.

It's Like A Party In My Mouth And All The Guests Are Chained Together...

2009-08-30T22:15:00.003+10:00

Steak.

Popcorn.

Nougat.

Toffee.

Lollypops.

Chocolate.

Chewy crust breadrolls.

I'm going to miss you...

Some time ago *coff May coff* my dentist told me that I should see an orthodontist about possibly getting braces.

In my usual efficient manner I put it down as 'To Do Next Week' and it kept 'Jam Tomorrow, Jam Yesterday, But Never Ever Jam Today'-ing* down the list until a few weeks ago when I finally made the appointment.

Then this Thursday at 9:45am I went along for my first consultation.
It all started out fairly routine.
They took a few hilarious photos of my teeth and asked me a lot of questions including 'Do you ever grind your teeth in your sleep?' to which I replied 'I don't know, I'm asleep' which seemed a perfectly sensible answer to me but which exasperated the dental technician who was taking notes.
Yes I need braces.
Yes they'll need to stay on for two years.
Yes I should make an appointment.
And the next available appointment is... Oh we've had a cancellation, would you like to come back at 2pm?
Uh... I... guess so...?

So in the three hours between the end of the first appointment and the beginning of the second I had to go down to the bank to withdraw cash for my first payment**, get into a favourite café for my last steak sandwich for two years and give my teeth a vigorous scrubbing.

Because I would usually have a longer first consultation or possibly a follow up consultation before the procedure in normal circumstances I found out about a lot of the do's and don't's whilst my mouth was propped open and the orthodontist was messing about with glue and wire.
On the one hand it was good that everything came together so quickly because it gave me little time to dwell on or worry about things.
On the other hand I didn't have time to go on a last forbidden food orgy and will now have to wait two years to eat quite a few things...
Probably on mature reflection this is plus as well, I've had a few too many forbidden food orgies of late without anything to justify them.

I've had the braces on for three days and despite the logistics of learning to chew with the dang things on and all the extra tooth brushing, they're not that bad.
They were slightly uncomfortable to begin with but they feel exactly like I thought a mouth full of braces would feel and it already seems as if I've had them on forever.
My completely erratic grasp of temporal reality and the way my imagination interacts with it has allowed me to adapt to the feeling ridiculously quickly and apart from the part where I keep going around telling people 'I'm a Piranha' and gnashing my teeth at them it's business as usual.
It has however confirmed my suspicions that I should never get a tongue piercing, I have been messing with the dang things with my tongue ever since they were put on and I predict that I won't stop for approximately 24 months.

*For anyone who has never seen the 1985 version of Alice in Wonderland, which stars Sammy Davis Junior and Carol Channing among many others, and has no idea what I'm talking about I give you this.

In The Shadow of My Supernumerary Pseudonym

2009-08-16T16:52:00.005+10:00

Behold the signs of the apocalypse!

The scent of summer is in the air despite the fact we've not even officially left winter yet!

People who spell death defying as 'defdethying' because they've heard the term used in context but never stopped to actually consider what the word means let alone how it is spelled have not been struck by lightning!

And my junkmail has decided that my name is Norma!

It seems that Norma is missing out on a lot of opportunities.

She could be taking any number of courses right now: CSI technician, law enforcement, big city law, mortician...

She could be having her home loan consolidated, her finances rejiggered, her chakras realigned and - in the most gender ambiguous offer - TNT campanulate added to her rocket!

Ever since the anonymous spambot sold my details to the ad-superteam's list my junkmail has more than tripled and yet I can't get mad about it.

I've become quite attached to Norma.

I see her as a slightly flaky Lara Croft wannabe trying to cram as many experiences into her life as humanly possible without being overburdened with too much judgement or concerns about quality control.

In another reality Norma is a lab savvy law enforcement officer who routinely takes time off from lecturing at Harvord* University to travel clandestinely to Nigeria and rescue stranded princesses.
Depending on her preferences she may even have an opportunity to test out the TNT campanulate of her rocket.
And you know what, good on her, the world needs more people like that.

Hopefully the next time some crazy improbable opportunity comes up Norma will give me the courage to at least consider it and my life will be in some small way enriched.

But still you really shouldn't give your bank details to the European Lottery Commission, there are other people who need that money more than you do...

*Yes that is deliberate, guess where Norma was recently accepted to university!?

I've Heard Wonderful Things About Eloping, I Even Made You A Brochure About It...

2009-08-08T19:26:00.004+10:00

Ugh.

Bridal Expos.

Do not want.

My lovely mate Awesome is getting married in the not too distant future and myself and Eep of the embarrassing teenage adventures have been proclaimed bridesmaids.

So when Awesome told us she wanted to check out the Bridal Expo at the Exhibition Centre this weekend Eep and I pledged our attendance.
Not because we're that interested in Bridal Expos* but because we are going to support our friend dammit!

I knew I couldn't take a book because - as I was reliably informed throughout my childhood, most of my high school years and just last week - it is very rude to read when you're out with other people.
Even when they are being boring and you are perfectly capable of following the conversation and reading at the same time.
So I left my book and took my mp3 player instead.
Just in case.

And thank all that is good in this world that I did.

I knew the stalls would be a bit of a gauntlet but that's par for the course when you go to any kind of expo or even a school/university open day.
I knew that there would be a lot of giggling, excited, bouncing hugging women giggling and hugging and bouncing excitedly.

I was not prepared for "The Fashion Parade".

The "Fashion Parade" opened with a pair of instructors from a local dancing school giving a demonstration of how you could spice up your bridal waltz instead of doing the boring bog-standard side-to-side.
I don't know about you but in the event I get married I don't really want to mount my new husband's thigh in front of my grandmother at my reception.
Also if my imaginary husband was prepared to swivel and jiggle like that I'd be a little worried.
I am an easily embarrassed person and I don't think I'd dance with a swivelling jiggler let alone marry them.

After the thigh-grinders came a lounge singer with a pleasant but in no way impressive voice singing a variety of schmaltzy romantic songs handpicked from the RomComs of the last ten years.
At this point I took out my beloved mp3 player and embraced the beauty that is Alestorm, Arch Enemy and Emilie Simon**.

Now according to the organisers the natural progression is thigh-grinding dance, crooning and then... male strippers.
Just in case you want them at the wedding.
Or I guess the hens' night.
I kept the mp3 player in for this too.
My music was better than theirs, the stripping wasn't that alluring and none of the however many hundred women were drunk at midday so there was mostly polite applause instead of woo-ing and demands for the gentlemen to 'take it off'.

So, if you're following me so far.
Thigh-grinding.
Crooning.
Stripping.
So the next logical step is...

That's right! Junior ballet troop!
A bunch of 9 year old girls run out onto stage and start doing a cute little choreographed piece in pink tutus.
I hope they had a different changeroom from the strippers.
The mp3 player continued to perform admirably.

After this fascinating presentation on the evolution of the wedding plan they actually started showing wedding dresses and grooms... wear? You know, suits.
The fellows modelling the suits had very nice cheekbones but all the suits looked the same to me.
The choice seemed to be between light grey, black or deep navy. Some with pinstripes, most with vests but don't ask me about cuts because I haven't the foggiest.

The wedding dresses... well all I can say is that the strapless look must be 'in' right now because 95% of the dresses were strapless and basically a variation on one design with varying degrees of baubles attached.
We saw one dress that Awesome found interesting.
In an hour of 'fashion gazing' we saw one dress.

It was at this point Awesome decided we'd seen enough and weak with gratitude we dragged ourselves out of the auditorium and back into the light.
Due to the occasional uncharacteristic bout of girliness since the engagement I had been politely terrified that Awesome was gazing upon the spectacle before us with glee and shining eyes.
However this fear was put to rest when the first words out of her mouth once we were in the hallway were "Well that was a steaming pile of crap!"
Eep and I have never been so relieved in our lives.

The expo wasn't a complete bust. We got a few ideas of what Awesome could do if she wanted to and what she definitely never will and we met a lovely silver-haired rockabilly limo driver with a bitching pompadour and blue and black leather wingtip shoes, but we were all glad to get out of the place and hit the nearest pub for a restorative glass.

There's only so much of that sort of thing a person can take in one day and it turns out that Eep, Awesome and myself have a common low threshold which might explain why we've been friends for so long :-D

*Well I'm not, Eep of the embarrassing teenage adventures and her fella are building a house so the dreamy 'I is can have bouquet' mindset is slowly gaining strength.
**I like to mix it up a little and I found that her style was much more successful in assimilating and destroying the schmaltz. Despite the awesomeness of Alestorm and Arch Enemy I could still hear schmaltzing going on in the background.

Technological Technicality

2009-08-03T01:03:00.006+10:00

Thursday evening we got a call from a local vet.
Not ours.
They said they had our dog which had been found wandering the streets and could we come and get it.

This triggered a confused freak out.
Our goofy-assed labrador has never even tried to get out of the backyard let alone wander all the way across town and hadn't she been in the backyard half an hour ago before people left the house?

We asked if she was OK.
The vet said 'She?'
It wasn't our goofy-assed labrador.
It was our twitchy maltese shih tzu who we had found another home for three years before when it became evident that living in a yard that had dogs in the three yards that bordered our own was eventually going to drive him delirious and possibly break his bark-box.

This may sound lazy and like poor pet ownership, I know it's possible to reduce barking behaviour in dogs with proper and consistent training but we didn't really have the chance.
My brother and I were in Europe at the time.
My sister was in the last half of Year 12 and was at school all day and the library every evening.
My father was away all week for work.
My mother had just had foot surgery and had to keep her foot elevated at all times.
One of our neighbours had started pushing threatening letters into our letterbox, had filed complaints with the council about the barking and a few other imaginary infractions (the barking we'll cop to, he did do that, but all the rest of it was bull taffy), and according to the council employee who came around to explain the situation to us we had two weeks to reduce his barking or we would be fined by the council and the neighbour concerned would take us to court.
This lovely neighbour never actually signed any of their letters or confronted us face-to-face or let us know what their name was*.

So we found twitchy maltese shih tzu another home a bit further out of town with a young family on a larger property who had another dog to keep him company.
We visited him to make sure he was happy and being treated well, which he was.
And then at some point after that... we managed to completely lose all of the other family's contact details.
We couldn't even remember their name or the name of the suburb/town they lived in.
It was all useful fragments along the lines of 'I think they were about this far from us' and 'their name might have started with this letter... or maybe that one'.

But all these years later the twitchy maltese shih tzu still had our contact information on his microchip.
So the vet contacted us.
And when they told us that we could either pick him up or they would send him to the RSPCA we picked him up.
We didn't want to risk him being put down by accident or if his other family didn't find him and the RSPCA couldn't re-home him.
So three years after we'd last seen him we brought the twitchy maltese shih tzu home again.
We still had his little jacket and one of his collars.

Being a list-making, panicking weirdo I wrote up a 'found notice' for the local newspaper, typed up posters for the area he was found, started estimating the likelihood of finding his new family and researching obedience classes for if we couldn't find them and had to readjust him to our still dog-filled neighbourhood.

On Friday we tried to check with the RSPCA whether anybody had called up looking for a maltese shih tzu.
At first the person we spoke to thought we were looking for one and explained whilst they didn't have any in at the moment there was a lovely little terrier who was looking for a home.
We explained we already had a maltese shih tzu who used to be ours but wasn't any more and we thought that maybe somebody might have been looking for him...
They got confused and asked if we were trying to surrender him for adoption.
We said we weren't and started telling the story about the microchip.
We got passed to somebody else who actually got what we were talking about.
But nobody had called for him.

I reminded twitchy maltese shih tzu of the existence of 'sit' and 'stay'.
Goofy-assed labrador got a little excited and decided that twitchy maltese shih tzu was a spy sent to steal her food and started trying to ignore her 'sit' and 'stay' commands and bolted her food so quickly that she almost swallowed her tongue.
I reminded goofy-assed labrador of the existence of 'sit' and 'stay'.
She obeyed and then bolted her dog treat, giving twitchy maltese shih tzu a suspcious squinty look.
I started planning taking both of them to obedience classes and the logisitcs of parallel training and walking two dogs at once.
Twitchy maltese shih tzu was now nine years old so I also started compiling a list of things to run past the vet and any nutritional requirements he might have as an older dog.

Saturday morning we tried calling the RSPCA again, asked whether anybody was looking for a twitchy maltese shih tzu and they were!
Half an hour later twitchy maltese shih tzu's new family was in our yard making a huge fuss of the little nutter who was going completely mental with joy.
Turns out he'd managed to climb a new bit of lattice fencing they'd put in (and were now going to take straight out again) and gone for a trot across town.

So happy ending for everyone!
Twitchy maltese shih tzu went home to his new family who spoil him absolutely rotten.
New family was reunited with their little dog.
We filled out a 'change of information' form for the microchip and wrote down new family's details in about seven places around the house just in case.
Goofy-assed labrador stopped inhaling her food**.
I threw out my accumulated spreadsheets and badly calculated estimates.
And as far as we can tell the jerky neighbour must be one of the ones who have moved out in the intervening years because for the few nights twitchy maltese shih tzu was back and proclaiming this excitedly to all and sundry we received exactly zero threatening letters.

So that's what happened to me this week.
Sure, I could probably have summed this up in about a paragraph... but where would be the fun in that?

The moral of this story?
Um... Microchips work and you should always remember to fill out change of details forms when getting or re-homing a dog and not just take the other party's word for it that they'll remember to do so.

Also labradors are apparently a little paranoid, who knew.

*In another cranky resentful note: As soon as we'd found twitchy maltese shih tzu another home and our yard was silent it became apparent that our neighbourhood was full of yapping dogs and it might not have been our dog that had been bothering the jerky neighbour in the first place as soon the sweet little old lady down the road started receiving threatening notes in her letterbox too.
**She's still going to those obedience classes though

The Hazards Of Being Gifted

2009-07-26T18:23:00.005+10:00

Oh thank you sweet merciful Lord/demi-lord icon/random convergence of events/flying spaghetti monster!

Almost exactly a year after starting physio for my crappy crapped out knees I have been declared fit enough to return to the gym!
I am at the stage where repetitive (but gentle and, for the moment, limited) movement will do me good instead of harm.

I missed it.
I missed feeling actually awake the whole day after going in the morning.
I missed the way it reminded me to drink water.
I missed sleeping better at night.
I even missed that funny carpet underlay + sweat + chlorine smell that most gyms have.
But I had completely forgotten one thing.
I had forgotten my... problem*.

It's nothing drastic, I just...
Well, I can read things that are printed backwards.
It's not that special, a lot of people can do it, but it means if you put me in front of a glass door with the word 'PUSH' carefully printed ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE DOOR that is what my brain will see and that is what I try to do.
Every time.

You'd think I'd remember after once or twice and I do but my brain sees the word, my body says 'oh cool, PUSH' and before I can stop myself...

I think some of the gym staff and regular patrons are starting to think that I have special needs.

Ah well, it's not so bad.
I'm just dreading the day it causes me to do something truly stupid.
And having to explain it afterwards.
If I'm in any condition to do so.

In the meantime, onwards to the gymnasium!

*No, not the one where I notice typos or grammatical errors on things I haven't even been reading - signs, newspapers, labels - although that can be pretty disorientating.
There's nothing quite like stopping in the middle of the pavement, confused and slightly concerned because you're sure that something, somewhere nearby is misspelled.

Lord I Don't Know What I Have Done To Offend Thee...*

2009-07-19T22:00:00.004+10:00

Being sick when you're the only person in your house is stupid.
It is hella stupid.
I'll go as far as to say it is dang hella stupid.

First of all there is nobody there to feel sorry for you so you have to do it all yourself.
It also means that you have to fight through the hallucinations, the wistful longings for sweet death and the confused musings on how on Earth someone managed to replace your mattress filling with bricks and syringes and organise your gross self.

Examples

If you have enough strength to stagger to the bathroom and sob brokenly into the toilet roll about how your eyebrows ache, you have enough strength to find a face washer and a container full of cold water to keep it in. Later on, if you're lucky, you'll forget that it's beside your bed and you'll get to kick it over!
If you are lucid enough to remember the existence of such concepts as hunger and thirst you must take advantage of this God-like knowledge and take bottles of liquid and boxes of mild, non-threatening dry biscuits into your germ hovel for when you're too weak to move but too hungry not to whine about it.
If you don't take a bucket you will need a bucket. If you do take a bucket, take a towel too. Just in case. You'll need it when you kick over your face washer water anyway.

I don't get seriously ill very often so when I do I tend to go on about it and mythologise it to a grand degree.
I honestly do flail about in bed muttering phrases like 'Why hath thou forsaken me?' and 'I wonder if I could suffocate myself just enough to achieve unconsciousness without causing brain damage...' which is all just self-indulgent tripe and 90% just to amuse myself but this time I really was feeling a bit forsaken.
Because this time the Family Failsafe failed me.

When my family is ill unless bits of us are actually falling off or changing colour we do one thing: we sleep.
We sleep until we're better.
Usually it works a charm.

This time I couldn't sleep. But I also could move or focus enough to read or even watch anything.

So for three days I lay there somewhere between awake and asleep, nibbling vitawheat and listening to an unabridged audiobook of Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay on an endless loop.

I like to think it was the healing powers of Sam Vimes that restored me but the cold and flu tablets I managed to procure on Day Three probably didn't hurt either.

Now that I'm fit to mingle with other human beings again I'm probably going to stay on a paranoid supplemental diet of hot lemon drinks and extra vegetables for a while just to stave off any relapses or the like.
And I am not taking my sleep for granted.
I am going to be in bed by 9pm every night!
At least until something really really good comes on the telly!
But it'll have to be really good.

Now if only I could get my damn ears to pop...

*Well it could be any number of things really... but they're more misdemeanors than actual offenses...

Unanticipated Anticipation

2009-07-11T22:51:00.007+10:00

Next week for the very first time I am going to attend a book club.
This as far as I'm concerned is A Good Thing.
I have been very lazy with my reading for quite a while now and this is going to introduce me to new books and authors in a way that will probably snowball and completely decimate my free time.
That's all for the greater good as well. I waste the hell out of my free time.

As I know and quite like the people who are going to be there the only wankery and pseudo-intellectualism I'll have to look out for is my own*, so I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about My Turn.

The rules, as far as I remember them, are:

We take it in turns to pick the book we're all going to read for that month's meeting
It has to be something that none of us has read before
Um... yeah, that's all I remember, that might be it.

The first book chosen was A Thousand Brilliant Suns by Khaled Hosseini.
I've just finished it and it was brilliant.
The pacing of the story and the presentation of the themes were both done in a very effective way and the manner in which the author describes things is deceptively simple and very stirring**.
I'm going to talk about the use of timing so hard on Thursday...
Ahem, excuse me.

Anyway, my concerns are as follows:

Like I said, I've been fairly lazy with my reading lately so I'm going to have to go looking for new books. Usually I just go down to the library or the bookstore and wait for something to catch my eye.
I hate, hate, hate recommending books that I haven't read before. What if they're terrible? What if I've just wasted your precious time and made you read something you can't unread? Like many things in life I'm perfectly willing to accept and forgive this sort of thing happening if somebody else does it and treat all knowledge and experiences as valuable in their own way, but if I do it...
Nobody in the group is a genre-snob but I'm probably a bit more zombie/sci fi/crime fiction oriented than they are. If I pick something in my usual range I'm going to have to make sure it's well written and accessible to everyone rather than just hilarious and/or interesting to me.

But even now that I'm thinking about it on a Freak Outs register of 1 to 10 this is barely registering a 3.
Despite my reservations I am more excited than apprehensive.
Much more excited.
Oh my God I'm going to read so many books!
Deploying Glee in 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1!

Glee!!! ^_^

*I majored in literature in university, I only know one way to talk about books and that is pretentiously.
**See what I mean?

Oh Lord He's Doing A Little Dance!

2009-07-04T19:44:00.011+10:00

There have been a lot of changes in my world of late.
Not with me - I am probably a bit too comfortable on cruise control - but with the people around me.

Two of my friends (R of the NIN concert and Eep of the embarrassing teenage adventures who is making her blog mention debut) have just purchased blocks of land with their partners and are planning to build houses in the near future.
Another friend has quit her brain-numbing job, enrolled in a TAFE course, gotten engaged... and crashed her car. She's OK but her car looks a little buck-toothed at the moment, there was some strange crumpling...

The job-quitting, course-taking, engagement-entering, car-crashing friend is my mate Awesome and in some ways I'm having more trouble with her changes than with those of any of the others.
Not because of the job-quitting or course-enrolling because that is a cause for celebration and jubilation across the land.
Not because of the engagement-entering because her fella is a genuinely nice guy and they balance each other out nicely.
But because of the... side effects of the engagement-entering.

Awesome, Eep (of the aforementioned house/land buying and embarrassing teenage adventures) and I have been friends for about 10 years now and none of us have ever been... excessively girly.
The other two have a lot more knowledge of hair sculpting or face painting than I have but haven't gone to extremes.
Eep has a higher appreciation of shoes and bags and whatnot than Awesome or I but has never gone buck wild with those either.
Whilst I'm probably the least accomplished in the girly arts due to equal parts laziness and allergy - huzzah sensitive skin huzzah! - Awesome has always been the most pragmatic and down to earth.
But since she became engaged...

There has been giggling.
There has been buying of magazines when there has never been buying of magazines before*.
And I have been given a small notebook and a coloured pen.
For just in case I have ideas for the wedding.
We are to compare notes at intervals.

So far all I've got is: There should be one.

I am ten kinds of happy for her but I've never made this kind of plan so I'm going to have to take a bit of a bit of a mental hop, skip and a jump at it and hope for the best.

This is being made more difficult by the concept of the hens' night.
Which Eep has already started planning.
There is apparently going to be a stripper.
He is apparently going to be dressed as Darth Vader.
Ever since I heard this I have been unable to get the visual out of my head.
And it is going to be the end of me.

*Well except for ones featuring space-faring adventures, music of a fairly epic nature or cricket players whose children she has offered to bear.

Ricochet's Four Step Plan To Greater Happiness

2009-06-27T19:43:00.006+10:00

Step One. Have a pair of pants with shitty, useless, shallow pockets.

Step Two. Put a dollar coin* in one of your shitty, useless, shallow pockets.

Step Three. Sit down or change position so that the dollar falls out of your pocket.

Step Four. Relish the feeling of joy that floods through you as you spot it and think "Hey! A dollar!"

OK, so eventually you will probably lose the dollar but the inordinate amount of pleasure you take from 'finding' that dollar even once before then far outweighs the small disappointment that comes from losing it.
And hey, if you lose it in your house or workplace or car possibly you'll get to find it again!

As a matter of integrity I have been trialling this system for the last week in order to ensure that it offers you all the happiness promised.

The first time was an accident.
I put my dollar change in my pocket of my stupid workpants** purely because I couldn't be bothered putting it in my wallet and later that day next to my feet - "Hey! A dollar!"
I picked it up and put it back in my pocket.
A few hours later - "Hey! A dollar!"
I picked it up, I thought about it, I put it back in my pocket.
And it just doesn't get old!

There is something awesome about finding a dollar that doesn't diminish with age or fiscal inflation.
All the amazement and glee you felt at the age of seven when you found a gold coin are still with you today.
It doesn't even matter that it is already your dollar, the magic still works!

I lost the original dollar two days ago, didn't even notice, and then today on the seat of my armchair - "Hey! A dollar!"

Give it a try, I guarantee that it'll cheer you up or your money back***.

*Or a pound coin, a euro coin, a quarter, whatever is appropriate**** for you.
**Who the hell designs the pockets in womens' pants anyway? Why don't they think that ladies want to keep things in their pockets too? I've taken to buying mens' jeans so that I can fit my wallet in my pocket. Also they last forever. For. Ev. Er.
***As long as you dropped it somewhere close by
****I know a quarter isn't as exciting as a dollar in some ways but it has to be a coin and they are the absolute perfect size for flicking across the back of your knuckles and I'm sure they were pretty cool to find as a child too.

Eternal Curiosity In The Face Of Wisdom

2009-06-21T20:56:00.005+10:00

Some years ago I got onto a train heading into the CBD and I found an abandoned book.
It was a cheap paperback with a pulp sci-fi cover and yellowing pages.
It looked lonely and wistful.
I had half an hour to kill so I started reading it.

I don't remember the title.
I don't remember the author.
I do remember that the hero of the piece was a brash, mouthy spaceman who was experiencing technical difficulties with his super awesome spaceship and who had to stop on the nearest planet.
Which had been colonised by Nazis.
Of course.

The Space Nazi dialogue had been compiled by watching a catalogue of the worst war movies ever made.
The mouthy spaceman's dialogue seemed to be a loving homage to Ash of the Evil Dead movies as written by a fourteen year old boy.

And it was terrible.
I know it was terrible.
It must have been because I put it back down when I left the train.
Partly for someone else to find and partly because it was so terrible I didn't really want to read the rest.

I'm certain that the plot was awful and that I could predict with almost 100% accuracy that mouthy spaceman would somehow manage to blow up or decimate Planet Nazi and abscond with one of their blondest women, probably one not overburdened with intelligence.
I'm SURE it was tripe.

And yet I've just spent the last two hours googling the damn book because all these years later I STILL want to know how it ended.

Taking Back The Grey Matter

2009-06-13T19:57:00.005+10:00

Alright, that's it.
I've done it.
I've turned off the spellchecker and the autocorrect on my computer.
It is banished.
And maybe now I can remember how to spell all by myself.
And my brain will stop melting.

I used to be good at crosswords.
Really good.
Of course I was living with my grandmother at the time* and used to be called in whenever she was stumped.
Woe betide me if I dared to give her the answer for a non-requested clue that she 'was getting to in a minute' but oh the basking in the shared word nerd satisfaction when I identified a word that unlocked a whole section of the puzzle.

I hadn't tried one for a while and then a few months ago I had a crack at the quick crossword in The Age, got two of them fairly quickly and then just ground to a halt.
I couldn't remember any of the... word thingies...
I got stuck on one possible interpretation of multi-definition words and couldn't even think of appropriately sized synonyms for them.
I got cranky and gave up**.
I decided to write a friend a balanced and objective email about how stupid the crossword was and how back in my day they picked words that didn't suck so much.

I got halfway through composing the email and I realised the following:

I couldn't remember how to spell one of the words I wanted to use and had been retyping it in a few different ways, waiting for the little wiggly line of failure to disappear so I knew that I had it right.
That whilst my already quick typing had become quicker that was because I was getting lazy with my keystrokes and depending on the program to autocorrect my ham-fisted attempt at English.
My email was peppered with z's I hadn't put in there and lacking u's I had because despite my best efforts the damn program keeps resetting to US English.

So I've turned it off.
And saints be praised, yes I do remember how to spell and dear Lord has my typing really gotten that bad and check it out I've remembered another word for incessant*** all by myself without hitting Shift+F7 because I couldn't be bothered thinking about it.

I have bought myself a book of crosswords.
Let it begin.

*Another side effect was watching The Bill which was actually quite good until it turned into a soap opera.
**Yay for being an adult! Eff you perseverance!
***It's ceaseless!