You know what slows me down 99 times out of 100 when it comes to blogging... working out what the first sentence should be... breaking the crisp white desert which is the blank page... it needs to have something that will make the people keep reading, but you can't keep recycling the same thing over and over and over again because then it gets boring... so sometimes you just have to write your way through it.Today's Monday Montage is, unsurprisingly given Saturday's excursion, all about the Botanic again... and had a little bit of colour match planning going on as I was putting it together... not sure if that was a good thing or not though...
I swear that my landlord is up to something (again, or possibly, still) ... Not only has he bought/requisitioned a bunch of new wheelie bins for the apartment block (the existing ten or so we have currently have been fine for the ten years I've lived in this building, but since he changed the type of tenant living here to "asshole", suddenly those bins aren't enough and they're regularly filled to capacity by the weekend... which isn't so good given that our rubbish pick up is Tuesday... although I do think that DOUBLE the number of bins is just a wee bit excessive... we would have been fine with maybe three or four more)... meaning that I'll have a lovely view of big dark green wheelie bins from my living room window... but he got the "gardeners" in over the weekend...
I figured when I saw them in the courtyard on Saturday that the three struggling trees were possibly not long for this world, since he had a history of getting them hacked down right when they start to get useful for shading the apartments (the ones we have at the moment are what's growing out of the remains of the chopped down versions), but it turns out that they were just there for a random "make more pretty" exercise. And the garden does, as a matter of fact... they clipped and dug and raked and trimmed and basically made sure everything was back inside the colouring-in lines of the garden beds. But I'm positive he's up to something sneaky or underhanded or whatever... it's been FOREVER since anybody has touched the garden (not since Skateboard Guy left I think... and he was only doing a half assed job at it). So why suddenly has he felt the need to do something about it? I'd say I was paranoid, but I know what he's like...
Given that this weekend probably marked our first taste of real summer weather since, well, last summer... I think I can sum up my mood quite simply... ME NO LIKEE! And it wasn't even as bad as it will get once we get to summer. There are two upsides however... firstly it meant that the honey I put on my Weetbix was actually a liquid instead of almost a solid this morning... and now that it's over, today's weather is much more to my liking, thus far anyway... that warmish but totally overcast and raining intermittently type of thing... I LOVE that!
Oh, and it's possible that the rowers are back... well, the girls and the old people have been around all year, but the boys could be back (probably not the SAME boys... but boy rowers anyway)... they weren't out and about when I was walking this morning, but the river was so packed out with big rowing boat things (what the hell are those things called?) on, I think, Wednesday last week that it got a little ridiculous at times (three or four boat things waiting while other boat things turned around at the end of the run... although why they all needed to turn in the same square foot is anybody's guess... it's not THAT narrow a river).
Still on the subject of my walk, I saw possibly one of the stranger things I've ever seen while walking (and that's saying something!)... two Asian girls (well, I think they were both girls... one was kind of round and somewhat gender non-specific and I wasn't paying that much attention) and the rounder of the two was carrying a tortoise... a big ass tortoise too... as far as those things go (I know because my Year 7 teacher had two of them and we looked after the pair for the year... but they were only little tiny ones). I did wonder what the hell they were doing... whether they were stealing it (at the time there were some racial stereotype thoughts about the possibility of them turning it into soup)... but thinking about it afterwards I wondered if the tortoise had managed to get itself stranded up in the carpark near the weir and they were returning it to the river (and since that particular bit of path is seperated from the river by a proverbial load of reeds, they would have had to carry it further down the path). I think I saw two little figures heading down towards the water as I headed down the other bank, but the trees were mostly in the way, so I can't be sure.
And my walking trackpants are on their last legs... they've finally succumbed to the illness that most of my pants end up suffering from... Rubbingthighitis... the number of pairs of pants I've lost to that disease are too numerous to mention... and although the pants look just fine overall, they're developing the telltale holes that signal an attack of this fatal condition. And of course all the sweatpants they currently have at the Red Circle Boutique are just plain UG-A-LEE! I really, really should have bought at least two pairs of this style back when they had them... *sigh*
Bloody buggery Ma... when we were out on Saturday she mentioned something about calendars, not for the first time, and made a reference to me making her one like last year... I think the first time she brought the subject up a while ago my response was just "No way"... given all the random drama of actually getting Stu to print the thing (although her response to that was that we could just go and see the nice folks at Officeworks and get them to print it). Plus I had enough trouble finding appropriate images last time... and any other ideas that Ma was considering were things that you could already buy as a calendar... like lighthouses. But then she said (and I'm surprised that it took her that long to come up with it as an idea) that I could do her a calendar using my photos.
I didn't give her any kind of definitive answer, but yesterday I found myself going through all my digital photos and picking out things that could possibly be used in the same calendar format as I already have (if I do this thing I'm SO not reinventing the wheel to do it)... then recut and resized my choices to be the correct size for the calendar... trouble is there are about sixty images... I actually have enough images to make one of "blue sky with stuff", one of "flowers", one with nothing but "water", nearly one of "architecture" (well, I could do a whole one but I'd have to reuse some of the "sky" images) and then I'm one image shy of one make up of everything that's left (which would be less interesting, so we won't be doing that)... alternatively I could do one with images appropriate to the month of the year that they're for...
Last night I ended up retrofitting a new copy of the Photoshop file from last year so that all the months start on the right day and have the correct number of days in them. And rather ominously I have a browser window open at The Quotations Page to possibly dig out some new/different quotes to add to each month. Looks like maybe I might just be making Ma another calendar this year... dammit, dammit, dammit.
And interestingly enough I have no idea what I'm doing about my calendars this year... the ones FOR me I mean, rather than the ones BY me... it looks like Joe Phillips has stopped doing the full sized square calendars... which is very annoying, because I love his stuff most of all, and if he WAS doing the square ones, then I'd just get one of those and be happy... so I'm undecided between his "skinny" calendar... one by Cameron Frost... and a 2008 version of the Bel Ami/Howard Roffman one I bought last year... Joe has also done a zodiac calendar, but that says something about it being a "permanent birthday calendar"... so maybe we won't go with that. But since they're all the "skinny" kind rather than the "square" kind, I'll probably end up needing another one to hang in the kitchen (since I like a square one in there). I'm also wondering if three years running (counting this year) is too much when it comes to buying J another one of the Joe calendars for Christmas... it also depends on whether he's actually going to be back here at Christmas like he thinks he is... either that or I'd have to be organised and actually get Amazon to ship it straight to him.
And lastly but not necessarily leastly (is leastly even a word?), the decision on whether or not to use my tax refund to take Ma and I to Sydney early next is being taken out and thrashed around again in the next few days... when I know more, you'll know more.
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