Life in 2D/3D

I'm moving house. You can now find me here .

ok, it's been a long time since i last posted, so let's get straight to the important issues. What exactly is the difference between regular mac & cheese and mac & cheese deluxe? And for that matter, why would anyone want macaroni cheese that was flavoured with imitation chicken or imitation tomato? it's just not right.

I'm a big fan of fake foods, and i think mac cheese sort of falls into that category. When i say sort of, i mean entirely, because i'm sure that cheese in its most natural form doesn't present as a powder or as a sticky gelatinous glob in a can. Regardless of the complete unnaturality (is that a word?) of fake cheese, it does taste pretty good. Just not when you add fake tomato flavoured powder to the fake cheese powder. There should be no mixing of the fake powders. Worst fake flavour ever? Bacon. You can't fake bacon. All fake bacon flavoured things end up tasting like smoked plastic. Not a good flavour.

 

Sometimes i feel as though i'm the only person in the universe who doesn't think U2 is the greatest band to ever live.

5 days until i move in! It's so exciting. It doesn't really feel quite real yet. I suppose because i've always lived in the same house it will be strange to call somewhere else home. I wonder if moving in somewhere else instantly makes it 'home'? I wonder if i'll feel weird and spend a long time getting to a point where i don't feel like i'm in someone else's house.

The house is going to look so empty at the beginning. We have a lot of stuff, but most of it will get packed away in cupboards or drawers and then we'll be left in a house that's just about as empty as it was the day we moved in. Maybe i'll just leave all of our dishes out on the benchtops so the place looks lived-in. At least that way it will save me trying to remember where i put everything. I could claim that i wanted to have them 'on display'. People have all sorts of trinkets and things in their houses, i could just claim that i was confused about the whole idea of displaying pretty things. At least then the things people saw wouldn't leave them saying htings like "what a nice....vase. Oh, I'm sorry, i didn't realise it was a decorative glass replica of a volcano...". They would just be looking at things like plates and cheese graters, and they couldn't be left wondering what they were for. Or maybe i could claim it as being 'art'... The possibilities are endless.

Dear American people that may be reading,

Maybe someone could help me with something – what’s a “stick of butter”?
As a general rule, I like to buy butter in something a bit more conventional – like a tub. Sticks are for poking, and you can’t poke someone with butter, even if it is stick-like in appearance.
I have an excellent cookbook that I want to use, but everything is in American measurements, including “sticks of butter”. If anyone can clear this up, let me know.

I bought a house! Well, not so much bought as ‘borrowed a large sum of money at a stupid interest rate and put myself in debt for a long time”. I move in on the 16^th of June. It’s great, I’m looking forward to being domestic. I’ve bought a stack of home wares already. I’m sure it will be a lot less thrilling when I actually have to look after myself and pay the bills on time etc. etc, but I’m enjoying living in a deluded state of bliss, so I’m just ignoring all the hard work that will be involved for now.

I'm sure at some point in the past i've mentioned how anti-sport i am. Really, why would anyone want to run when no one is chasing them? So the fact that we're right in the middle of the Commonwealth Games doesn't exactly thrill me.

What thrills me less is the fact that they're being hosted in Melbourne and sport has moved from being a TV-show killer to something that is affecting my everyday life. Traffic is chaos, TV is crap and Australia is kicking ass which really is just rude, when you think about it - a host should be a bit more gracious than to be kicking butt all over the place and taking all the medals.

I did, however, like the way that in the opening ceremony, the olympic baton arrived with the 'high-tech message' inside from the Queen. The Queen then stepped forward....and read her speech of a piece of paper she got out of her pocket. i can't beleive she made them carry it all the way around the world and then didn't even read the message off the screen it appeared on.

I'm counting down the days until the Games are over. Why couldn't they have interesting sports - like pie eating or bumper car racing?

I'm a little disturbed because after checking out who i had been 't-matched' with i found that my ideal match was in fact a frontline flea and tick control product.

What are you trying to tell me, Tblog?!!!!

I was going to blog about going to the zoo, but am having trouble forming complete sentences because it is late late late and now with the flea thing, i think it may also be inappropriate.

Last night i went to a Chinese restaurant in the city to celebrate the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations - at least, i think that's what it was for. I was a little unsure because the restaurant was decorated with heart shaped balloons and there was "happy Birthday" confetti sprinkled all over the table. A dragon/lion-looking character danced around the restaurant eating bright paper envelopes stuffed with money out of people's hands and several of the waiters ran around the room with flaming chicken-shaped objects. A magician who looked like John Cleese made balloon animals and did magic coin tricks on the palm of my hand between countless courses of food. We sat on a table of 10 people,the youngest 18 years old and the oldest in their mid 60's - none of whom i had met before. it was a strange dinner party that we were invited to suddenly and without any apparent reason by a work colleague of KJ's -a very hard to read man; quiet, down-to-earth, unobtrusively wealthy. he seemed very relaxed and very unconcerend with the fact that we all sat down to a sunday night dinner that cost (to us, at least) a very large chunk of money. I don't think i've ever spent that much money on a meal, even on a special occassion and especially not on a Sunday night. It was nice, it was an interesting change. I hope we can do it again (maybe somewhere a little less expensive!)

So after not logging into tblog for....well, for a long time, i was devastaed to find that on logging in today, i had been swindled of over 100,000 tbucks.
It's t-theft! Despite the fact that those tbucks were allegedly earned in dealings with people who could only be described at the tblog mafia (you know who you are!), i had come to treasure them; to look forward to purchasing seven or eight thousand irritating javasripts with them; to know that i was not in t-poverty.

Alas, my dreams have been shattered.

What once was a great fortune is now no more than t-poo change.

Over the last week, we have seriously started to look for a house. We've been to the bank to beg them for money and worked out what we can afford. Then we headed for the Real Estate Agents (or realestagents as they should be called) to see what they had for us.
They pretty much managed to shatter my dreams of owning a 6 bedroom mansion with an indoor pool and an aeroplane hangar.In fact they obliterated that dream by telling us that the sort of place we could afford probably needed quite a bit of renovating - mostly with a bulldozer.

After looking through a place that was slightly above our budget and discovering that it bore a creepy sort of resemblance to a badly arranged sardine can, we began to worry that maybe we couldn't afford a house, especially not in the area that we would like to live. We had looked online at the sorts of areas that we could afford, and it was odd to find that the realestagents didn't have anything in our price range. We thought maybe they were trying to rip us off because we are so young and innocent :P

As it turns out, we were just at the wrong realestagent office. Who would think that there would be more than one branch of a realestagent office in one area? It's crazy if you ask me, and confusing. They should just have one big office that covers the entire area. The entire state, maybe. At least that way you know you're not missing out on anything.

My neighbours are seriously sending me nuts. There's a kid who lives about 2 houses away and he's just turned 18. He got his license last week and now he spends every night sitting in his car outside his house playing with the subwoofer he had installed into his tiny little car. It is so loud that i can't even hear my TV over it. If it wasn't every night, i could live with it. If he was just setting it up to sound good while he was driving i could live with it. But the fact that he is just doing it because he is an idiot really bothers me. I mean idiot in the nicest sense of the word, of course.

Soon i will be buying a house and moving to another suburb, so it will be less annoying. At the volume he has it now, i will probably still be able to hear it in another suburb, but at least i might be able to turn up my TV to drown it out.

House hunting is going slowly. I thought we would have already been to the bank to talk $$ and be picking out a house by now, but it seems like we always run out of time to get it done. I think maybe it's a little bit of being too busy mixed with a little bit of being very nervous. It's a big deal for someone like me. I have never spent more than $1000 in one go in my life. Splurging out and spending $250,000 is a big step for me. Still, i would gladly pay that to get away from my crazy neighbours.

A few months back, my grandmother passed away. Since then, i think about her often. Certainly more often than i thought about her when she was alive. I feel guilty about that - it's so easy to take it for granted that someone who has been in your life since you were born will always be there. You always think there will be time to visit later, to catch up when your life isn't so hectic.

I think about her a lot, and i think about how little i understood her. I think that since she passed away, i have come to understand her much better than i did when she was alive. Her death has brought back a lot of memories about her that i would never have rememebered if she were still around. It suppose it seems odd to spend a lot of time reminiscing about things in the past when someone is still around to have new times with and that's why it only happends after they die.

It's just little things, like something she said to me, or a look on her face. I try to remember her from when i was younger - when she was younger. I try to remember her the way that i think she would want to be remembered - young and happy and able to do things for herself, how she was before the arthritis crippeld her and old age took it's toll.

When she passed away, it wasn't a surprise - we knew it was only a matter of days before she left us. I just never expected that i would feel so strongly about her passing, so many months after the event.

I didn't expect that i would miss her this much.

I am spending today cleaning. It has been way too long - i can tell because as i move things around, i'm discovering that surfaces that i was certain were a dull greyish colour are actually just covered in a protective coating of dust.

It's making me think twice about buying a house. I'm now only a few months away from being able to buy my first home and the thought of the dusting involved in an entire house is enough to put me off.

I wonder how much a housekeeper would cost?

I must get back to work. Blogging is just one of many excuses i have found in the last hour to take a break from cleaning. I may be back soon. How many times can you use the same excuse in one day, i wonder?

I've succumbed to the peer pressure and bough myself an ipod. I'm a technology junkie, so what can I say, I was helpless to resist!

The main reason that I finally decided to buy one was the idea of a 'podcast'. For those that don't know, a podcast is kind of like radio by subscription. But free. You set up your program to automatically download audio files as they become available. I only subscribe to one, which is the podcast for the afternoon radio show on Triple M (105.1 FM). There's something about this show that I find incredibly funny - it's the kind of show that makes you want to stay in the car longer. They only podcast the funniest bits of their show (or what they consider the funniest bits), but I like that I can download it onto my ipod and listen to it at work, where I don't have a radio (there’s no radio reception in a cave).

I think you can tell a lot about a person by the radio show that they listen to. Here in Melbourne, there's about 5 or 6 main radio stations that everyone listens to, and everyone knows the people that listen to them. One of the stations is for teenyboppers and people who've just turned 18 and get drunk every night. One is for people over 50 who call new music "that noise you listen to!". One is for the 'alternative' type of person - these people are always defending their radio show and putting down the more commercial stations. AM radio is for business people and your grandparents.

Triple M is sort of more like your eclectic station. They play pretty much anything and everything, which I think is why I like it. You can be listening to Rob Thomas and then hear a Tina Turner song. It's a bit of everything and I get bored with my music a bit too easily to just listen to one sort.

For anyone with an ipod (or even without, all you need is free the program 'ipodder') who is interested, the podcast address is:

http://www.triplem.com.au/rss_melbourne.xml" title="http://www.triplem.com.au/rss_melbourne.xml" target="_blank"http://www.triplem.com.au/rss...

I always speak too soon and manage to jinx things. Funny how things work out that way. My elation over being finished my work catalogue has gone right out of the window all thanks to my printer.

He was supposed to arrive on wednesday with the proof so that i could check it over, approve it and the thing could get printed. By thursday lunchtime i still hadn't heard from him. At 4pm the phone rang and it was him, calling to tell me that they'd run into a problem that had held things up. As it turns out, the very time consuming way in which he had instructed me to prepare the files was incorrect, and they now needed them made differently, or the pages wouldn't line up. It's a little upsetting to find out that those last six months of long and tiresome work WERE ALL FOR NOTHING.  We sorted out a solution and he promised me he'd be in today with the proof. I'm at home now and when i left work at 5:30pm, he hadn't shown up or even called to say he wouldn't be there.

Now my elation has turned to irritation. By monday, he will have had the files for a week and i will have had nothing in return except the wonderful feeling of knowing that i could have been spending my evenings at the pub instead of in front of the computer.

IT'S DONE! IT'S COMPLETE!!!! The last 6 months of being too busy to have a real life are over!

Yesterday the first official catalogue for the company i work for went to print. It has been a long, hard slog to get the thing done, but finally, the problem is out of my hands. I am free to have a life once more.

You wouldn't guess, by the amount of time it has taken, that the thing is only 28 pages long. The better part of those last few months has been spent going back to the drawing board and starting all over again because the business keeps changing. I have probably created oer a hundred pages for this catalogue, only to have to toss them as suppliers go out of business, deals fall through and products change. But yesterday the printer came and picked up the files and in a week and a half i will be able to hold 12 months worth of hard work in my hands. I think we should have ordered more copies, because i am going to be so excited that i will want to give one to every person i have met ever.

it's a very exciting feeling to work on such a huge project for so long and at the end of it to show it to your bosses who praise it and then are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on printing it. To have someone spend so much money on something that i created - that i thought up - is insanely thrilling. I should have studied graphic design at school. I would have if i'd known that it would give me this much of a buzz.

I think i will go and celebrate at the pub now that i have the time!!!

I've been tagged by Badaunt, so here are my answers. Luckily, i don't know 5 other blogger who i can pass this on to, so the rest of the blogging world is safe....for now.

What I was doing ten years ago:
Back in 1995 I had just started high school and was enduring the most anguish-filled years of my life so far. My school was academically the best school around, but also had this sort of underground-drug-dealing reputation that was known to everyone from ages 12 to 18, but which every parent was blissfully unaware of. I had very few friends and was teased mercilessly about…well, anything people could think of! I stayed at that school because it was better than any other school around. Eventually I found my niche (away from the drug dealing) and everything worked out for the best. It seems like so much more than 10 years ago….


5 years ago:
I had a dead-beat boyfriend and a dead-end job and enjoyed getting very drunk on Friday, Saturday (and sometimes Sunday) nights with my best friend.


1 year ago:
I had my current job, current boyfriend. Actually, come to think of it, not much has changed since then!


Yesterday:
I started work at 8:30, got home at 7:30 and watched trashy TV till 11..


5 snacks I enjoy:
Only 5? How unfair! I’m a compulsive snacker. I must be eating at all times of the day.
5 of the best would be:
1. Apricot Pies – yes, contrary to popular belief a pie is not an entire course of a meal - a pie is a snack!
2. Smiths Original chips. Only crinkle cut because I don’t believe in smooth chips
3. Raspberry drops from ‘Suga’. Heaven! Absolute Heaven!
4.  Any kind of dip with Arnott’s Savoy biscuits
5.  Weston’s Quattro Biscuits – all that chocolate and caramel and nuts and biscuit *drool*


5 songs I know all the words to:
I know the words to almost any song you can think of. Unfortunately, if you asked me to sing a specific song, I couldn’t, because I don’t know the names of the songs or the artists who perform them. If it’s on the radio, I’ll sing along. I like to sing loudly in my car on the way to work. It makes the trip a little more interesting.


5 Things I would do with $100 million:
1. Buy things. That may sound obvious, but I really like to just go to the shops and buy whatever I feel like as I go. Last week I went shopping for shoes for work and bought 2 pairs of jeans and 3 knitted tops. No shoes.
2. Go overseas to the places I want to see. Not the generic places that people go because that’s what everyone does, but to the places I want to go because they sound nice. (see next question for which places they are)
3. Buy things for my friends and family. Everyone would do the same if they had that much money to spend.
4. Buy a house
5. Buy my 2002 model HSV GTO


5 locations I would like to run away to:
1. Queensland. It may not be exotic or far away, but if I had that $100 million from the last question, I could live there in style….
2. The Greek islands.
3. Fiji. It’s tropical, it’s cheap and it’s only a 4 hour flight from here, which suits me quite well since I hate traveling.

I can only think of 3. I don’t really have any great desire to travel, let alone to run away.


5 bad habits I have:
1. I’m impatient – particularly with people who aren’t as quick to learn as I am
2. I stay up too late watching trashy tv and then run late for work every morning because of it
3. I take extra long showers even though we’re on water restrictions (sort of)
4. I eat junk and do no exercise
5. I’m bad at keeping in touch with people


5 things I like doing:
1. Eating. I like eating A LOT.
2. Sleeping in – not actually sleeping, but being in that half awake half asleep state where it feels really good to know that you don’t have to get up in the morning.
3. Buying things (I may have mentioned this already)
4. Surfing the net. For whatever reason – I like it.
5. Trivia night at the pub. Lots of drinks & lots of fun!


5 things I would never wear:
1. Hot Pants
2. Skinny leg jeans
3. A beret
4. More than 1 ring per hand
5. One of those ponchos with all the tassels.


5 TV shows I like:
1. CSI – all of them, but the original the most
2. Desperate Housewives
3.Who’s Line is it anyway? – Funniest show ever made, imo.
4. Law & Order SVU – Only SVU because the original is awful without Lenny
5. Last Man Standing. A great Aussie show about a bunch of Blokes.


5 Biggest joys of the moment:
1. Playing with my niece and not having to stay awake all night listening to her cry
2. Being right near the end of two massive projects at work than have consumed my life for the last 6 months
3. Warm winter food
4. KJ getting a big payrise – meaning we can buy our house sooner
5. Spending 2 weeks house sitting in the suburb where we want to buy our house


5 Favorite toys:
1. My Car
2. My Computer
3. My PS2
4. My Niece
5. My new Printer

On Friday we had an ‘End of Financial Year Luncheon’ so we could celebrate….well, the end of financial year, obviously. It was at a very expensive waterfront restaurant. We had their function room booked and when we arrived the place looked as though it were set up for a wedding party. It was very romantic with white linen on the table, large, graceful golden candelabra’s with white candles burning quietly amidst sparkling white place settings. In the corner was a bottle of champagne and two glasses amidst a mass of white flowers and a fire was crackling soothingly at the back of the room. So romantic! A very romantic dinner for 20…

After waaaaaaay too many drinks amidst all this beauty and charm we ended up in the main bar having a very disturbing conversation about the benefits of colonics. Our resident health Guru gave us a blow by blow account of his experiences in having his colon flushed. That was pretty much the high point of the evening.

After this incredibly enlightening/disturbing conversation we decided to move on to another bar. Don’t let the pictures of the smiling young women on the website fool you – there wasn’t a person in the place who was under 28. Except for me, of course. After being looked up and down by 30 or so men who were old enough to be my father, I decided to call it a night.

Very disappointing for a work function – usually they involve a lot more booze and a lot more fun. It was strange to be getting in a taxi at 9pm and be heading towards a hangover. It felt like 1am.

Can we talk about embarrassing moments for a second here? About horrifically embarrassing moments like the one that I had today?

 

Let me start from the beginning.

 

If you were to meet a guy named Spiro, what do you imagine he would look like? Imagine this ‘Spiro’ is a tradesman of sorts – let’s say a printer fixing tradesman - Just hypothetically, of course. And, hypothetically, if you were to ring this man named Spiro to fix your printer, and the person who answered the phone had a very thick Mediterranean accent, what would it lead you to believe he looked like.

Well not to seem as though I’m a stereo-typer – but to me, Spiro the tradesman with the heavy accent would be mid 40’s-50’s with a large nose and thinning hair. I apologise to every guy named Spiro out there – but that’s just how my brain works. Since I’m already sounding awful, let’s just say that a bit of plumber’s crack peeking out of tracksuit pants wouldn’t have surprised me either.

 

My printer broke today. Er….my hypothetical printer broke today…….

Anyway, I’m not going to get started on the fact that my piece of S$#t Xerox printer now requires a replacement part that is worth more than the damn printer itself. I’ll save that rant for another day.

I got a phone number off the side of another printer in the office for a guy that fixes laser printers. The guy’s name was ‘Spiro’. So naturally - as I am pre-disposed to do - I imagined that the thickly accented man that I spoke to on the phone was a large nosed, butt-crack showing middle-aged man in tracksuit pants. Sorry Spiro’s of the world – but that’s how it happened.

 

A bit after lunch I got a call from reception that Spiro was waiting out front. I headed out there expecting to meet a man that could be my dad – and came face to face with a man that could be a model. He was young. He was hot. He was Spiro the printer man.

 

I was dumbfounded to say the least.

 

So I took him to my office and blah blah blah, fixing printer boring boring…. Until about 20 minutes later when he realized he had run out of some printer-fixing chemical that looked suspiciously like water (mostly because it was in a water bottle) and he had to duck out for a second to get some more. He left, and naturally, all the girls in the office came together to discuss what a hottie he was an what a travesty it was that his name was Spiro. The idea was tossed around that maybe he called himself Spiro because it made him seem more attractive when you actually saw him and realized he wasn’t a bald middle-aged man, and then KJ showed up, to make fun of us all for checking out the hot printer fixing man.

 

Things all went downhill as I headed back to my office and KJ yelled out “Where’s Spiro the hottie”…..RIGHT AS SPIRO WALKED IN THE DOOR.

Imagine a fire engine on fire. That is how my face went. (Remind me to discuss, at a later date, how bizarre the sentence “that is how my face went” is.)

 

Busted.

 

Spiro pretended not to hear, but he can’t have missed it, because no-one misses the sound of their own name. That’s why we have names. Not to hear people checking us out, of course, but so that we will notice when people are trying to gain our attention.

 

I stuttered some ridiculous things, managing to sound like a complete fool and practically buying a new printer off the man in my effort to appear nonchalant about the whole thing.

 

How can I be sure that Spiro heard that I’d told everyone he was a hottie?

 

Because he didn’t charge me for the service on my printer, but asked for my email address and promised to send me a quote in the morning instead. I have spent all afternoon being taunted by my co-workers about Spiro the hot printer guy who will be contacting me tomorrow to sell me a printer I don’t want because I’m so horribly face-burningly embarrassed by the fact that I was busted checking him out.

 

 

 

Isn't it amazing the amount of junk you have to lug around when you have a baby?
My Brother, his girlfriend and their baby arrived to live here in Australia about 2 months ago (2 months! I can't believe it's been that long!) and our house has gone from "quietly disorganised" to "bomb-blast-chaotic".
I can't walk in the door without standing on mushy half-eaten biscuits that used to be shaped like bears (or some other equally as cuddly looking animal that it is just WRONG to be chewing on) or without tripping over a few dozen toys that sing random songs or bark like dogs.

Babies really aren't my thing.

It has been 2 months since i've had a complete nights sleep. She has a sixth sense that tells her when i have to get up early in the morning and she cries at 3am on the dot every one of those mornings. The only night she slept right through was the night i stayed away from home. How does she know? How can she tell that it's the perfect time to wake everyone up so that they can't get back to sleep? Do all babies have this freaky talent?

How do they cry for half an hour non-stop? How could anyone cry for that long at that high-pitched note without doing themselves an injury? It's wrong. Just like their littleness is wrong. People aren't supposed to be that small. It's not natural.

Can you tell that i've never had anything to do with children before?

Badaunt quite often posts photos of the things she finds at Flea Markets, and i've always been a bit jealous, because we don't really have flea markets here. We have a lot of hippy markets (which i assume are similar) but they're not nearly as fun as the flea markets look.

Hippy markets are mostly a bunch of almost-homeless people who sit around smoking pot, giving each other henna tattoos and ignoring the supportive benefits of a bra. They weave things and tye-dye things and then try to sell them to you amidst inane conversation that is dotted with the terms "man" & "trippy" & "far out......"

I was always jealous that we couldn't have a good old 'flea market' where you could just buy stuff and not have to worry about accidentally overdosing by eating what you thought was a normal lunch. I was jealous, that was, until i found out where the name 'Flea Market' came from.

The name Flea Market originates from the very first street market, which was nicknamed the 'flea' market because of the flea-infested state of the clothing, rags etc. sold there.

Finding this out has really narrowed my options. Pot smoking hippies vs. Flea ridden wares. It's not much of a choice. I think i might have to stick to internet shopping.

I've decided that i'm not going to write a big blog about why i haven't been around much lately; i figure that will probably just be boring and it will manage to work it's way in to most of my entries anyway. instead i'm going to tell you a story that will make you realise how wonderful and innocent i am...Actually I think they call it naive. Anyway, To tell this story, i'm going to go completely against what i just said and cover one of the reasons why i haven't been blogging. (Alright, so i'm a liar, i admit it!)

One of the reasons i've been busy lately is because i've been having some medical-type-tests done. Nothing super serious, but of the kind that mean you have to go to a hospital to get them done. Since they don't really tell you a whole lot about what's going to go on during your tests, my sister decided it would be a wise idea to pull out her medical text-book (she's studying some kind of bone/muscle manipulate-ey type of thing) and see what we could find. Needless to say we ended up learning about countless other things instead of this, because the book is full of illustrations and photographs and while flicking, you can't help but become distracted.

After a bit of cringing/giggling/horror, we came across a diagram (beautifully illustrated) of someone having their prostate checked. A very large subheading declared it to be a "Digital Rectal Examination". My sister thought this was an hilarious name for it, but I, in my wonderful purity and innocence, had no idea why they would call it a 'digital' examination. My mind went immediately to digital clocks, digital radios etc. It wasn't until my sister explained it to me that it clicked.

So there you have it, i'm naive and innocent and unable to conceive of the idea of doctors creating 'code-names' for sticking things into peoples bodily orifices.
Honestly, why not just call it what it is instead of wasting all that time thinking up ridiculous names that no one will ever remember....

This is sort of a placeholder blog entry. It's not really a blog entry, because it isn't really about anything interesting (although it is arguable that this is pretty standard for my blog entries), It's more  of an entry to say "watch this space". I will be back to blogging & hopefully soon, but am currently unable to do a lot of the things that i normally would.
Why, you ask? Well i'm going to leave that as a mystery, something for you to puzzle over until i get back. Then I can get some joy out of the crashing disappointment that will emanate over the web when the 'mystery' is revealed as being something incredibly dull.

*interesting fact* I am currently burning a candle that was a gift, but has the unfortunate trait of smelling exactly like a toilet air freshener spray.

Badaunt has tricked me into given me the wonderful opportunity to take part in her 5 question interviews, so i'm posting my answers here. I thought about making the longest comment post in tblog history, but decided against it.

 

1. What do you remember as your finest moment, and why?
What I remember as being my finest moment is the day I finally walked again after being bedridden for 3 months. I’d been in hospital because I had glandular fever and it affected my inner ear somehow, making me so dizzy that I couldn’t move an inch without being sick (definitely not a feeling I’m fond of). For 3 months I couldn’t do anything – I couldn’t read, hold a conversation, watch tv – nothing to keep me amused, I just had to lie there with my head spinning. It took an incredible amount of will power to get up out of bed and try to walk again. I know it doesn’t really seem like much, but it was a huge event in my life and took me a long long time to recover from, so it’s the event that stands out most to me.

 

2. The phone rings. You answer it. Someone says, "Remember me?" Who is it?
That will be the newest sales rep, calling me on the office phone from upstairs to ask me some inane, ridiculous question about playground design, like “if you design a playground with one deck, do you need a way to get up onto the deck?”
This is the same woman who asks “Hi! How are you today” every single time she walks past me – on average about 20ish times a day. Even a response of “Same as when you asked me 5 minutes ago” doesn’t deter her. I suspect she is completely crazy.

 

3. What was your greatest fear when you were 10(ish)?
 I tried to think of what scared me when I was 10, and couldn’t come up with anything. I even rang my mother and asked her if there was anything I was afraid of, and she couldn’t think of anything either – and mothers always know these things. I was kind of a weird little kid, I don’t remember ever really being afraid of anything at all. The only thing I can remember is being really frightened when I noticed a huntsman spider crawling up my arm. I suspect that that’s not just a little kid type fear though.

 

4. Somebody said something to you once that you think is absolutely not true... but sometimes you secretly wonder. What was it?

Someone once told me that if you sneeze hard enough, you can die (bursting a blood vessel in your brain or something), and I thought that sounded silly, but it’s always been one of those things that i was never quite sure about….

5. What was your biggest ever fashion mistake?
well there have been a few, but the one that stands out most in my memory was from back when I was quite young - the transition from being dressed by my mother to being allowed to choose my own clothes. I’ll never forget it – going to a birthday party looking like I was going to a fashion show, all the other little girls wearing jeans and tshirts while I was wearing this hideous hot pink floral dress made of some terrible shiny synthetic satiny material (this was back in the 80’s). I think it was something that my grandmother had sewn for me, and my mother had me wearing this horrible dress with frilly white socks and awful white heels, with my hair swept into a ponytail on the side of my head. I’m pretty sure this sort of thing is why I hate everything to do with the 80’s now. I still have nightmares about it.

 

6. (bonus question) Skinny fries? Are you out of your mind?

What can I say? I walk on the wild side!

Have you ever had that strange feeling of being in the middle of a conversation with someone, and they drop in a reference to an event/object/person that you have no idea about? Where they speak about this thing as though it's common knowledge (and you suspect that it probably is common knowledge) but you have no idea what they're on about? And then, of course, you can't ask for fear of looking stupid/un-informed/weird.

I get this feeling a lot.

So i've decided to out myself. I am here to say that I don't know things. I don't watch the news very often, and i spent every history/geography lesson i've ever had at school doing anything that wasn't history/geography.

I'm probably the only person in the world who doesn't know which is which when people talk about left & right wing politics.
For the longest time i had no idea what wasabi was, even though i was asked every day at lunch if i wanted some with my sushi
I'm probably the only person in Australia who doesn't know what happened at Pearl Harbour (besides it being something war-like)
I am also probably the only person in the world who has no idea what a bolero is. Actually, wait - i'm pretty sure that has a lot of people stumped.

There are a thousand things like this that i am compeltely and utterly unaware of. So i'm here to out myself as an un-knowing person.

What will shock you even more is that i don't know these things because i'm not interested. That's right, i have no interest in boleros or war! I have negative interest in history and politics. Especially politics. I have no interest in the difference between the labor and liberal parties. I have no interest at all - i just want someone who will do a good job of it, reagrdles off this left/right wing business and all of that stuff. If i had it my way, the PM would be chosen after extensive personality tests rather than by a bunch of promises that everyone knows full well aren't going to be kept once the election is won.

And i don't care what a bolero is. At all. There may come a time in my life when i purchase a bolero (in fact, i suspect i may already unwittingly own one) but come that time, i'm happy to call it "this thingy here". I am, however, glad that i now know what wasabi is.

I'm not sure that asking people abaout things that you have no idea about is really the best option anyway. I think that sometimes, ignorance is bliss. My best example is from when my sister was in grade 5 and they had to find out the meaning of a word they hadn't heard before. She chose the word 'Jock-strap'.
'nuff said.

What i would like to know is whether all you bloggers out there are in the same boat, and have been nodding and smiling at things for years with no idea what's going on. Are there things that you have no idea about, or am i alone here in my cluelessness?