www.flickr.com

nothing because it has to be connected to my computer to work, grrr


prawn cocktail crisps

pilchards on toast (you can get pilchards there but they just don't taste the same)

decent tv

jaffa cakes

Greggs pasties

proper beer (as in Black Sheep, or Timothy Taylor's Landlord, or Cwrw Haf, the list goes on...)

Friday, February 29, 2008

Bastards

Why do people not realise that the urgency with which their message gets pasesd on is inversely proportional to the degree of rudeness with which they treat the person taking the message?

Therefore, someone who is lovely, will most likely be dealt with as soon as possible, maybe with even unasked effort being put in.

Someone who is abrupt, rude, treats you like an idiot and is downright nasty might very well find their message being forgotten or put to the very bottom of the pile.

It's not rocket science is it?
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Ick

I love having a pool*

I love being able to go for a swim when I'm too hot

I love waking myself up in the morning with a swim when I've got the time

I don't love having to fish dead witchetty grubs out of the pool first however. That, I could live without.

*even though it's not completely ours and we have to share it with the others in the complex

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Cake Stress

I just want a wedding cake. Why is this turning out to be such a drama?

I'm, unwisely perhaps, organising my wedding through a wedding co-ordinator which sounds all well and good and stress free and easy.

I wish.

Trying to get help or information out of him is like trying to get blood out of a stone and trying to get something actually organised is proving somewhat difficult on occasion, as the whole cake saga proves.

Anyway, this particular organiser has on his website several cakes but they also say that if you send them a picture of a different cake that you like they will make it for you.

All well and good so far.

So, I find this cake with cute little octopusses on top holding tentacles in a magazine and send them a picture. Having previously quoted me $355 for a 3 tier chocolate mud cake, with little figurines on top, they then decide that this cake is different and because of the weight and blah blah blah it has to be done differently so it's going to cost $640. Slight price difference there.

After a brief apoplexy I decide that never mind the bakery, I can cook my own cake! the day before the wedding! And ice it and buy little decorations for it and become a master chefess over night...

It took both my mother and my aunt to calm me down and make me see sense over that one.

So the hunt was on to find a cake that I liked that didn't cost the earth. I decided to stick to the website cakes in the vague hope that the costs would be reasonable for those ones. I picked a rather nice one with blue ribbons round it and a little crystaline bridal couple on the top. Right price, right colours, nice cake. Wonderful.

Only they don't have those figurines any more do they. The co-ordinator said I could have a couple from a different cake but (and this is being nice here) they aren't really US (for the record, here's the couple he suggested, you see my point?). So, I'm fairly certain I know which bakery he gets his cakes from so I pointed out a couple on that website and asked for something similar to that. He said that that was fine but it would be a $55 surcharge!

I'm sorry, they can't give me something that they are advertising as available and so are going to charge me EXTRA for something else?!

We've finally managed to come to an arrangement and I've found a cake, that I like, that won't cost the earth and that they have or can make the decorations for.

Why is this so hard?

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Wishing for winter

I've come to the conclusion that my cold is because, although it's bloody humid out there, my body KNOWS that it's February therefore has gone 'Ooh, it's winter, I should have a cold' and promptly socked me with one.

So, rather than shouting (well, whispering hoarsely) at my body and telling it not to be so bloody stupid, I've given in and am pretending that it's dark outside because of a winter storm, not a summer one and that we don't have the air-con on, instead it's a decent temperature because we have a heater on.

As I sit here cradling my hot honey, lemon and ginger drink I'm doing quite well at this delusion

Unfortunately, I am sure that I will go looking for my hat, coat and scarf when I go to leave the office.

I also know that I'll be quite disappointed when I don't find them.

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Monday, February 18, 2008

I hab a cowd

How, in the tropics, in the summer, I've managed this I don't know but I'm sniffling and snuffling and sneezling and coughing my little lungs out.

Urgh.

Christopher Robin
Had wheezles
And sneezles,
They bundled him
Into His bed.
They gave him what goes
With a cold in the nose,
And some more for a cold
In the head.
They wondered
If wheezles
Could turn
Into measles,
If sneezles
Would turn
Into mumps;
They examined his chest
For a rash,
And the rest
Of his body for swellings and lumps.
They sent for some doctors
In sneezles
And wheezles
To tell them what ought
To be done.
All sorts and conditions
Of famous physicians
Came hurrying round
At a run.
They all made a note
Of the state of his throat,
They asked if he suffered from thirst;
They asked if the sneezles
Came after the wheezles,
Or if the first sneezle
Came first.
They said,
"If you teazle
A sneezle
Or wheezle,
A measle
May easily grow.
But humour or pleazle
The wheezle
Or sneezle,
The measle
Will certainly go.
"They expounded the reazles
For sneezles
And wheezles,
The manner of measles
When new.
They said
"If he freezles
In draughts and in breezles,
Then PHTHEEZLES
May even ensue."
* *
Christopher Robin
Got up in the morning,
The sneezles had vanished away.
And the look in his eye
Seemed to say to the sky,
"Now, how to amuse them to-day?"

A. A. Milne - Now we are Six

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Other good news

We got the car back yesterday too...

And we don't get the bill until tomorrow so for today, life is good :)

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all loved up


I feel loved :)


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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Bugger

And I just sprayed soy sauce over my white shirt.

Bugger.

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adding to the woes

Things seemed to be looking up with a new gas bottle for the barbeque, woohoo!

So, I bought some rumps steaks from Coles and some sausages from the butchers and went home looking forward to my barbeque.

Only, I'm not sure that beef's supposed to be green. Florescent green at that...

Still, I got my money back (dumping it on the refunds desk probably had a lot to do with that) and bought some nice steaks from the butchers so it's home to try again tonight.

Wish me luck

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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Yummy

Mmmmmmmmmm........Chocolate cake...




And not even slightly sausagey :)

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Monday, February 11, 2008

Anything else want to go wrong?

Our car is shit. Graham says it's because I don't like it that it goes wrong but I'm certain that it's just because it's shit.

anyway, recently that car has been the source of many woes.

A shock absorber went about a month or more ago. So every corner or bump has sounded a little noisy.

The car needed a tune as it had virtually no acceleration. So, we forked out a couple of hundred dollars to have that done.

A headlight has gone. This meant that when I had to venture out to pick Graham up from the airport a couple of weeks ago I should have gone by the back roads, why I didn't is because for some bizarre reason I trusted my (drunk) fiance who said that I'd be fine on Mulgrave road. Where the police were doing alcohol checks. Not that I'd had even a sniff of alcohol so that was all ok, but they really didn't like the light. So, that was a $30 fine. Yippee.

Mind you, it could have been worse, they threatened to pink sticker it (you get a lovely pink sticker that means the car is unroadworthy and you can't drive it until you've had it fixed) for the tyres being bald. We talked our way out of that one and thankfully they didn't notice as we drove off that a brake light had gone too...

Anyway, we finally had the time, and the money, to have the shocky fixed, yippee! Graham even had the full weekend off so was going to fix the lights too!

The car went in on Saturday morning and, at around 11.30am, we got a call to go and pick it up. Wonderful! A car that didn't make horrible noises whenever you did anything, perfect!

So, to celebrate, we went shopping. We bought a Monopoly set (a special cricket Ashes edition, only $30, bargain!) and Graham really fancied having a barbeque so we went out and bought one, then we headed to Coles to do some shopping.

This was a mistake.

A couple of km's from home and the car starts to stutter. We coast to a stop at the side of the road and even though Graham has his foot flat to the floor on the accelerator, it splutters, coughs and finally, painfully, dies.

Bastard thing.

So, we decide that it's safer in the area that it's in than in front of the mechanics outside Graham's work so we, with our barbeque and Monopoly board, head home. Sans food because we never got to Coles.

Pissed off we decide to have a game of Monopoly before putting the barbeque together.

Another mistake.

For a start, I lost 2 games in a row, badly, which made him feel better but did nothing for me. Secondly, once the bloody barbeque was together we realised that our gas bottle was too small and didn't fit the sodding fitting.

Another 3 lost games of Monopoly, a fair bit of wine and beer later (me wine, him beer) we finally fall into bed.

On Sunday, we walk to the local IGA before the sun gets too hot (it was overcast but trust me, my white English skin can still burn so I was plastered in sunscreen). We discovered that we could buy a new gas bottle at the Supercheap Auto on the way but it would be empty. They do a 'swap and go' systemy type of thing but this would mean buying a brand spanking new bottle and swapping it for an older one. Hmmm. Methinks not somehow.

So, still no barbeque.

And we discover that BWS (Beers, wines and spirits) has cartons of VB (the only thing apart from Crown Lager which is made by VB, that Graham will drink) on special offer. Given how expensive cartons are usually, this is a good thing. Or would be if we a) had a car to take it home in or b) weren't 2 hours early for it to open, it being Sunday.

Bugger.

So, home we go. Still without being able to use the barbeque. On a plus point though I did win the first game of the day against Graham. Quite comprehensively actually.

Mid-afternoonish, after a sausage sandwich for lunch (and wedges for Graham) I decided that I would cheer both of us up with a cake. A nice big chocolate cake (sod the diet). I used the oven we've got (a fantastic thing, it's a big glass bowl with the fan oven in the lid, cooks like a dream and evenly too) to cook the cake and, unfortunately, it's missing two supports under the bowl so large cakes especially end up thicker at one end. I set it for 15 minutes and was going to turn it round after that but Graham suggested just piling a couple of coins under the bowl to even it up so I took the lid off to stop it cooking and found, to my great surprise, a sausage in the middle of my cake mix.

It turned out that Graham had cooked his wedges in the oven earlier and when he'd taken the lid off he'd balanced it on the frying pan used to cook the sausages. We'd left 1 1/2 sausages after lunch and one of them had stuck to the hot oven part. When I'd then turned it on, the fan had made it drop off and into my cake mix.

All I can say is that I'm glad I noticed it after 1 minute, not 15 or even 50!

So here we are, Monday, no car, a barbeque that we can't use, a cake that hopefully doesn't taste of sausages (I didn't have any, I was good) and as I typed this last paragraph I've just found out that Graham's got to go to Townsville tonight so I'll be all alone.

If anyone's listening, some good luck would be nice.

A new car wouldn't go amiss either... :)
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