montage monday: port adelaide

It shouldn't come as any kind of surprise to anyone that today's Monday Montage is from my trip down to Port Adelaide last week, for no other reason than I've mentioned it in three out of the last four posts...

Funnily enough there's two faces to Port Adelaide... there's everything between the river and St Vincent Street, which includes all this really beautiful historical and maritime related architecture that I shot... and then there's everything else from St Vincent Street on inland... which is all pretty crappy I have to say... not to mention the whole surrounding area is very industrial... as you would expect from the area around a port I guess...

Oh, for the record, in case anyone wasn't paying attention, I got myself a yaniblog email address from Gmail (that makes about six working email addresses I currently own), so if you've just been dying to email me, now you can... it's at the bottom of the "More About Me" section... I will warn you though, generally I'm crap at replying to email, unless I do it right that very second... but I will get to it... promise...

I'm actually pretty impressed with the way Gmail works... when I first read through the "How To" stuff on the site I was a little skeptical... having message threads instead of individual messages... but in practice, it actually works pretty well... I can see how why everyone was tripping over themselves to get one back when it was all very exclusive and "invitation only"...

I had a pretty full on Saturday, even more so than the ritual culling of the dustbunnies last week...

After some of our regularly scheduled retail therapy, Ma and I came back to the supermarket in North Adelaide to grab some stuff for lunch, but instead of the bruschetta we've been making for the past couple of weeks, we decided, in a fit of deli-inspiration (ie we were standing at the deli counter and saw all the yummy looking things) to do a whole antipasto thing for lunch... so we bought wholemeal Pane di Casa bread... some plain and marinated bocconcini cheese... random antipasto mix which included capsicum, artichokes and olives... marinated octopus, partly because Ma wasn't sure she had ever had any, and for some unknown reason, I just really had a hankering for little purple tentacles with suckers still attached... and some apricots and figs both filled with mascarpone (which featured heavily in last Monday's ramblings... funny how these things happen)... in addition to the basil pesto I already had in the fridge... it was all very nice, and I had most of the leftovers for lunch on Sunday, with the addition of some hommus dip, which was the perfect addition...

Then, after the feast, we continued with the orgy of Cleaning a la Spring...

I've been complaining to myself for a couple of weeks about the amount of stuff I have crammed into my wardrobe, and how difficult it is not only to find stuff, but also to get things in there so that they don't end up wrinkled before I've even worn them... so I went through everything, cleaned out my entire wardrobe (or at least the clothes and stuff in the bottom half) while Ma folded and bagged the clothes I didn't want...

Seven bags of unwanted crap came out of the wardrobe in all... four bags of random clothes that I was either completely over (so three years ago darling) or that were too big for me now, one bag with a few of pairs of shoes in it, one bag full of unwanted coathangers and one rubbish bag full of clothes that I should probably have chucked out a while ago for one reason or another.

Actually a lot of the stuff that was still wearable but got bagged up to go to whatever random charity Ma feels like dumping them off to was actually because it was too big for me *does the Snoopy happy dance*... the most amusing thing was that there were several pairs of pants that were WAY too big for me... so big in fact, that I could put the pants on, do them up, and then slide both arms down by my sides INSIDE the pants... scary... and I was pleased to discover that I can now actually button up my big black overcoat again... okay, so it's still a tiny bit snug... but it will actually do up...

After the culling and removal of all the stuff from the wardrobe I reorganised everything, changed over a few of the coathangers so they all pretty much matched and put it all back in appropriate sections... pants and crappy teeshirts that I only really wear for walking now went in one section... tees I do wear regularly and some of my lighter jackets in the next section... and shirts and the heavier jackets in the last section... the scary thing is that there seems to be a lot of blue and brown and variations on khaki in my wardrobe... especially the shirt section... I might need to remedy that...

Once we'd dumped all the bags of unwanted crap into Ma's car, we set about on the second half of the cleaning frenzy for the afternoon... cleaning the filth of of everything in my kitchen...

We did only get through about half of it though... I think that the real problem, and the reason it all took so long, was mostly because I started using sunflower oil for cooking several months ago, and it spits everywhere, and gets into the air and leaves a residue on everything, which is near impossible to get off, especially when mixed with common house dust... which means that I may have to go back to using olive oil... which in turn means I'll be setting off the smoke detector every time I cook... but I think I prefer that to the alternative of the hard to remove toxic sludge... that stuff is just nasty...

So we managed to do all the countertops and the shelf that runs kind of around the kitchen (I'll take some photos once we've finished up properly) and just cleaned and cleaned and cleaned until my back was killing me (okay, technically it was killing me when we started, but it got worse), and because it was such a beautiful day and I had the door open, both to let in some air, and to let out the toxic fumes from the stuff we were using to clean the toxic sludge (I exaggerate a little... there weren't any fumes... that I know of... although it may actually have lightened some of the paintwork on top of the shelves... oops) and of course all the neighbours in my building who I already hate (ie Soccer Ball Boy, his father, his random similarly aged friend, Skateboard Guy and his skanky girlfriend) all decided it was a good time to play a very noise and annoying game of football together outside the apartments... so naturally I wanted to kill them all and bury the bodies in shallow graves somewhere... possibly in the parking area behind the house... let's just say, by that point, with the back and the cleaning and the neighbours, I was cranky...

So we gave up before we were properly finished and left a full attack on the cooker, and the tops of the fridge and microwave until next time...

By this time it was around 6pm, and it was very much feeling like a takeout kind of night, so we went and got a burger from this gorgeous "gourmet" burger joint in North Adelaide, Burger It (I thought about just sending Ma on her own, but then I probably would have killed my neighbours)... which made me feel like a person again... well, other than the back thing...

Actually my back seems to play up only on weekends... I wonder if that has anything to do with my daily walk and either shaking my spine loose or else compacting the hell out of it every morning... but the whole walking thing isn't part of the daily routine on weekends, hence my back takes revenge... or something... I have no idea...

Changing the subject now... for the record, I totally *heart* the new series of Doctor Who... It just gets better and better every week... Christopher Eccleston was brilliant in the first series... but I've gotta give snaps to David Tennant... love, love, love, love him... LOVE!

I'm currently waiting for the third shoe to drop on some kind of technical screw up... on Friday afternoon I managed to bollocks up my computer for a good hour or so (my own fault really, I knew that I shouldn't change that particular setting because it led to trouble in the past, but I changed it anyway, and then I couldn't access the Start menu to actually change it back again)... but fortunately it managed to fix itself... then on Saturday morning I got a text message, grabbed my mobile, only to see that my wallpaper was gone, and there wasn't actually a message alert on screen... then when I tried to turn it off, the dumb thing just wouldn't switch off... then it would, but it wouldn't switch back on again... so I ended up taking out the battery, crossing my fingers and putting it all back together again to give it another try... and luckily it worked... the second time I tried it... it's been okay since, I think it was just suffering from a case of "Switch-me-off-itis" like it had back in May...

Last week some time I got an invitation to go and have drinks with the folks I used to work with... although not a personal invitation, a mass mail-out of all and sundry who used to work there, or in the very closely associated company who did most of the technical side... it's this Friday... and I'm not sure if I'm going to go or not. At the moment I'm leaning more towards the not, to be honest...

Partly because I don't know that I want to go through the whole rigmarole of "oh, you're not working anywhere"... partly because I'm not really that big on drinking (I still have most of a six pack of Coopers Pale Ale left over from Christmas in the kitchen cupboard) and partly because, well, that ship kind of sailed... do I want to go hang out with a bunch of people I used to associate and work with but was technically never really "friends" with, especially since there's only two or three of them I would actually want to see... and one of those possible three is actually overseas still as far as I know. It's a conundrum...

And if any of them still read my blog, I'm potentially in deep shit for even saying that outloud... but I don't think any of them do anymore... thank god...

Oh, and for the record, this week (or at least 1-8 September) is Adult Learner's Week all around Australia... I know this because I used to work with the team that was in charge of co-ordinating South Australia's main ALW events for 2001 and 2002... so go out and learn something...

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