Pocket PC

C purchased a pocket PC (as opposed to a Polly Pocket dolly) off Ebay and it came in the mail today. He has been talking about little else for some time now. Apparently this thing is going to revolutionize our lives. He has already left the carry-pouch on top of the washing machine in the laundry. I don't think that he wrote down on his Palm PC where he has left it - therefore this organization theory is complete bosh already.
I had a productive day for a change today. Actually put in the full quid. Did such interesting stuff as analyze the bosses' horse-racing syndicate. Gee whiz, lucky I get paid to do the company's accounting!
I'm in a blither. Uninspired. Can't find a topic that lights me fancy. Gimme a topic anyone, anyone and I'll have a rant.
Aaaah C has just given me inspiration after doing a little Cher inspired boogie in the 'puter room. If I didn't know him better I would say that he is gay. He has flamboyant tendencies. And likes Cher (a lot). And sings Abba. And the songs from jesus Christ Superstar. He acquires a lisp when talking on certain topics only. He likes wearing my clothes. He particularly likes a purple pair of bloomers that I bought when I was pregnant. It enfuriates me when I find out he has been wearing them. I'm thinking of throwing them out. However then he may move onto other pieces of my underwear. For the time being I can live with the bloomers.
However he is all man in the bedroom. LOL. TMI!!!

6 foot tall and Bulletproof - Eating Mangoes

After a somewhat glum day yesterday, I'm completely on top of things today - Look out world! (or I could say Hello World! like John Laws but one twit saying that is enough).
I still feel blue about Paul Hester. Depression is a dreadful thing. The news indicates that there is more to his suicide than originally thought, broken relationships etc etc. Terribly terribly sad. I loved Split Enz and I loved Crowded House. I ache for his loved ones.
I just read a blog post about pineapple that has me drooling. http://melllyfeline.blogspot.com/
So I'm sitting here guzzling down green grapes as a substitute. I have a similar emotive story about fruit - but the culprit is mangoes - the sweet lush flesh of Bowen mangoes grown in our backyard before the cyclone in Darwin. Having so many beautiful rose coloured mangoes that we didn't know what to do with them. Mango chutney bottling sessions on the weekends. Sitting on the back steps with the mango side cut into squares and turned inside out. Sticky juice running everywhere, staining clothes. Slurping and biting, never quick enough to contain all the juice. Neighbourhood kids stealing them off the trees by the bucketload. Dodging green ants as you picked them off the tree or the ground. The odd smell of the rotten and squashed ones.
Those trees were completely flattened during the cyclone. We were re-assigned a different house in a different suburb once the rebuilding began. Dad didn't really have the heart for gardening anymore, he had put so much effort into the other house. He eventually planted two mango trees in our new backyard, but they were just not nice. He chopped them down many years later. The green ants were just so annoying when you had to mow around the trees.
I rode past our old house block years after the cyclone on my bike one day. There had been a big ugly brick house built there - no cyclone was going to move that sucker. And sure as anything those big old mango trees were back to their full glory. As I rode past, I noticed some little kids high up in the branches.....
On a side note, apparently the green ants disappeared from Darwin for a few years after the cyclone. They eventually regathered and marched their way up from Katherine, just like the cane toads are doing as we speak. There was a teacher from New Zealand (her name was Miss Kidd from memory) at my school in 1975. Just why she was teaching in a totally demolished city will remain a mystery. But she didn't believe that there were green ants - she wanted proof. Hopefully she stayed in Darwin just long enough to have one bite her on the bum.
Now I live in Southern climes and pay $4 each for extremely average mangoes. I still have to have a couple a year, even at that exorbitant price. Weiss Mango Bars are pretty yum also.
Yep, there are still some things that I miss about Darwin...sigh....

I want to be a Fairy

I've had a bit of a bad day today, for a number of reasons that I wont go into. There are just some days that make me feel crappy and I feel like a bad person.
I feel devastated that Paul Hester (ex-drummer of Crowded House) hung himself in a park in Melbourne on the weekend.He has two daughters, eight and ten years old. It makes me distraught that he felt there was no other answer for him in his life. I didn't know him personally. My heart goes out (I hate that phrase but I cant think of another) to his girlfriend and children. It is awful to lose a parent young, no matter what the circumstance. C & I both know about that.
I also got a razzing off my dad for not keeping in touch with him. I'm not sure why I neglect the people I love. I think it's laziness, my biggest vice.
On an up-note, C was wonderful to me today. He read me Harry Potter in bed and fed me licorice, diet-coke and blueberries and taught me a lot about unconditional love.
My daughter and I watched Fairytopia on DVD. She was so caught up in the magic and the beauty of it all. I want to live like a fairy! If only the magic was real. Sigh.....
We went to the open day at the local Steiner School on Saturday. In some ways it was like a fairy land. The classrooms were painted beautiful soft colours, the beams and windows were swathed in silk and chiffon. There were huge cushions, beautifully coloured chalkboard drawings and fanciful poetry. I wanted to go back to primary school and live in this dreamland. However, tomorrow its back to partitioned offices, computers, files and the anonymity of an accountancy firm.

Muffin Tops

No, this post is not about a certain Seinfeld episode.
It's about a lot of the women in this town that I live in. Maybe it's the state I live in, perhaps it's happening everywhere in the world. However on recent trips to both Europe and the USA I didn't notice too much of it happening there. In Europe however, most of the women were of the correct weight for their height and their clothes seemed to fit well. This was not the same in America, however it was mid-winter and freezing cold so not really the type of weather to hang your muffin top out.
What I'm talking about here is the tendency for the heavier ladies to wear hipster jeans. There is always an overflow effect at the top, hence the muffin-top.
It seems to be THE fashion here. De rigueur, as it were.
Could somebody please tell these people that it looks really bloody awful!!??

Counter Wars

My lovely computer geek other half C helped me redesign my blog last night. He also helped me put on a really groovy counter that gives me all sorts of statistics. He also created his own new website last night. He posts scripts for his favourite open source software on it. He is a very active member of this particular software's community and so we have been comparing site hits. His is rapidly escalating into the hundreds whereas mine has been stagnant at 15 for about 8 hours now. Not happy.
He keeps telling me I have to provide more for my readers. Readers, I'm sorry to tell you that I have given you my all. Well I have only really started giving you my all.
I'm going to describe the cacophany of noise in the computer room at the moment. We have one bedroom of our house set up with puters, three on at the moment, all with two screens each. We have Dave Matthews band blaring out of the speakers, the five year old loudly doing an educational maths programme on the other computer and me madly typing. Bushy the errant cat is protesting loudly about being kept inside. We are all candidates for industrial deafness. C is quiet. He looks like he is browsing (probably logging up hits on his own site grrr...).
We went to see the Dave Matthews Band at the Palais in Melbourne the other night. Well worth it. I loved the Palais, I had never been there before being still fairly new to Mexico.It is so old and cool and yet cruddy at the same time. Just my kind of place. The skydome bit is quite surreal, a bit Escher-like. I'd like to live in a place like that.
I wore my clacky mules to the concert. It's not really the place to wear clacky mules. Every where I went I was disclaiming my shoes mumbling "noisy shoes" under my breath as a blanket apology to anyone I was annoying.
On Good Friday we went down to Queenscliff for a drive. The original plan was that we were going to go for a scooter ride along the foreshore. There was a huge seafood feast type festival happening when we got there that I thought might be worth a look. None of us were in the mood for munching on mussels at 11 in the morning, so we thought we would have a look at the activities.It was very bloody ho-hum I'm sad to report. However we gladly handed our donations over to the Children's Hospital appeal and moved on for a quick look around the towm. We valiantly followed our 5 year old midget on her scooter to interesting places such as the lolly shop and the book shop and then drove home, feeling mildly dissatisfied.

Morticia Adams

Good evening mwahahaha. Have added an old favourite photo. C says that I don't look anything like this anymore. I've gone for more of the earth-mother/lazy cow type look. Ah well. Tis still me!
It's Easter. Can't say that it's a terribly symbolic time for me apart from Easter Bunny duty tomorrow morning. C just read some of my blog, the bits about him. He's gone all shy.
I told him that I was mentioning his love-handles in my next post. Anyway, I have now mentioned them. They're tiny, but extremely cute.
I have a lot to talk about but I'm going to postpone this till later. Might be time for a bit of love-handle fondling.

Multi-tasking

I have a complete inability to multi-task. If someone is even talking mildly loudly, or is talking about something interesting, I drive like a bloody maniac. I have nearly wiped out my family many times by getting involved in what is happening inside the car, and not being involved enough with what is happening outside the car.
C is an amazing multi-tasker. He can programme in C and listen to audio books and write music in his head all at the same time. He has an unusual brain. His body is very nice also (whoops where did that come from?)
We have an audio book playing at the moment. C is working on his stuff (it's secret computer stuff) and there is a Terry Pratchett book playing. I have no idea at all of the plot line. I occasionally notice the voices change, but apart from that it is going completely over my head.
Does anybody out there in the void have any slightly amusing multi-tasking stories?
How about customer service stories?
Anything?
Anyone?
Please?
My counter has ceased working.
bugger html
(hey everyone, I'm engaged! How about that?? Haven't got a rock yet, probably have to buy it myself)

The Swimming Pool

We had a family outing to our local swimming pool this afternoon. It's a nice little pool, heated, indoors(no sunblock - hooray - god I hate sunblock), and shallow so that we dont have to watch the five year old like a hawk. We have a favourite thing we like to do at the pool. It involves being swooshed through the water flotaing on your back. It is the most relaxing surreal experience (as long as you can block out the incessant squeals of little girls playing chasey). We go all the way to the pool just to do this. It's one of our bizarre mating rituals.
On the way to the pool C & I were talking about the psychology behind the "Baby on Board" signs that people put on their cars. I'm wondering if the real people that you have to worry about on the roads (like drunks and hoons) take any notice of these signs. It affects me, I'm a mother, but I dont exactly drive recklessly anyway. Does anyone have an opinion on this? Is a little baby's life more valuable than a child, adult or senior? Babies are probably more protected in baby capsules than any other family member in the car.
OK enough of the deep psychological crap. Onto dentistry.
I had four wisdom teeth out in one go last August. It was a completely crap experience. I've heard of other people having even crapper experiences like being able to feel the pain when the roots snap and stuff like that. I was knocked out for half an hour in a day surgery, but woke up in the middle of the operation. Not good. Almost brown underpants time.
Every time I drive past that surgery I get a shiver. The surgeon was a very sweet Chinese guy who must be absolutely worth a mint, a good catch for anyone who is looking. However, when I went to my follow-up consultation he didn't remember that I woke up in the middle of the "experience". Then he explained to me that he takes out 40 sets of wisdom teeth a week (40 x $950 = $38000 (!!))which equates to 2080 victims per annum. Hopefully a large percentage of them do not wake up during the ordeal.
We drove past the surgery on the way to the pool and C felt it wise to tell me something. Something he had heard on the Comedy Channel when he was in America recently. The segment was about people's greatest fears. One guy told of combining his two greatest fears. About parachuting, and the chute failing to open. And then falling head first with his mouth wide open into a water bubbler. Just thinking of this makes my whole jaw ache and I get quite nauseous. C has quite the sense of comic timing.

Forbidden Topics

They say there are three things that you shouldn't talk about in company. Sex, politics and religion.
I'm not going to talk about sex. There are way too many blogs and websites and chatrooms completely devoted to that. Plus one of my lovely readers is 17.
I'm quite interested in politics but talking about politics is usually a one-sided boring rant.
So that leaves religion. Who can I offend today?
I'm not religious. There have been many times in my life where I wanted to be religious, you know, to be sheltered from the storm. I just couldn't believe, as much as I wanted to. And I am from stock who have had Catholicism shoved down their throats for centuries, the Irish. My parents were brought up with religion looming large in their lives. My dad is a former altar boy, and my mother a nurse who was trained in a Mater hospital and who had considered becoming a nun.
My five year old daughter has been exposed to religion and has seized it with the frenzy of a zealot. She is VERY religious. We say grace at mealtimes on her insistance. C & I go along with it. C's family were/are also very religious, but of another faith - Christian Science (NOT SCIENTOLOGY!). This faith is of the genre that "You can heal your life" with prayer and positivity. The positivity part I do give a lot of credit to.
The only thing that draws me to some kind of religious belief is the whimsy that an after-life exists. My mother died suddenly when I was 14. I was completely bereft, still am in a way. The idea that I could see her again and hug her and cry and laugh is too delicious for words. It's ALMOST enough to drive me to religion.

Yahoo Games

Thought I'd do a bit of bloggin' tonight. Haven't blogged for a while now. Been too bloggin busy.
C is away tonight, he's staying with friends in the big city - he needs a break from me - lol. So I thought I'd be naughty and play some computer games. I don't mind a bit of Yahoo Euchre or Canasta. C hates me playing them. He thinks they're a waste of time, which they are, but they are also a welcome escape. I live in a household that does not have television remember! So when he's away, the little mouse plays. Squeak.
So I'm merrily playing my first game of Euchre, in a "Social Lounge". Thats the place where people are supposed to be friendly and they aren't playing for sheep stations. Things are going well for my partner and I. We lead 8 - 1. Then I get a brilliant hand, a real loner, so I go alone. Now all these technical details may be boring for someone who knows little of this game. However if you win on a lone hand you get 4 (or 5?) points and the first to 10 points in Euchre is the winner. Anyway, it was a bit of an overcall but I just love the opportunity to go alone. One of my opponents says to me "there is no need to go alone when you are on 8 Points" and I said "ah well" "its just for the drama of it". So this opponent then sends me an individual message and calls me a four letter word starting with c.
Some people in this world are so pleasant and such good sports aren't they?? Gee whiz I was glad I was in the "social lounge", not the "madman with a gun lounge". Needless to say I hopped out of Yahoo games and came to the safety of the blogging lounge. So far I haven't had any negative comments or been called any four letter words. There is always time I guess.
Yahoo Games are an interesting social phenomenon. I used to like a good card night in the distant past. It involved friends coming over, getting horribly drunk, a few accusations of cheating, some heated arguments, and the aforementioned friends crashing in your loungeroom because they are too drunk to drive.
Lets look at the positives and negatives of Yahoo gaming.
1)
Positive
It doesn't take any time at all to do the shuffling
Negative
There is never any time to get another drink or have a wee break without making the people you are playing with and against irritable.
2)
Positive
You get to play with people from all walks of life, from all over the world and sometimes they can be nice and friendly
Negative
Weirdos from all walks of life and from all over the world can abuse you via personal messaging and stalk you over the internet. You have no recall to punch them in the nose or yell "get the hell out of my house"
3)
Positive
Sometimes you chance upon a really talented player as a partner and this makes you look good
Negative
When this talented partner realizes that all they are doing is making you look good, they leave your table at the end of the game

OK now I'm going to list some things that I can only think of as negative

1) When you are addicted to Yahoo gaming you become a social hermit and do not leave the house and do not talk to people face to face. (This however is inherent in a lot of computer-based applications).
2) Yahoo is notoriously buggy and you can freeze or drop out just when you have the crunch hand
3) Yahoo players are not at all understanding when you race away from the computer because you hear your child vomiting in their bed. They generally boot you out of the game. Heartless sods.

OK that about covers it.

On another note I'm going to put in a link to a very funny website. I know the guy who writes this site. He does not know that I read his site. Before he recently went to Korea to become an English teacher, he lived in the same suburb as me. We were both members of a radical gang (Irish set dancing) and he always seemed to be a very quiet unassuming fellow. Little did I know he has such a wicked wit and entertaining website! It's always the quiet ones you have to watch. He is one very funny bathplug.
www.sunnybreaks.org
Have a gander.
Thanks to my readers (all three of you).
I am tremendously encouraged by humorous comments.