exposing my comestibles

Eddy started it... Tom did it a week ago... I once showed off the outside of it... but today we have the contents of my refrigerator...

The photo is actually from Saturday afternoon, once my fridge was all chockers with post-shopping goodness and nothing-has-been-eaten-yet fullness...

1. Thar be meat in tham thar trays! While I know the middle one is a big chunk of mince (because I'm having it for dinner tonight, turned into chili con carne), I couldn't tell you what the other two are without going to look... or what's on top of them (I think one of the things is pita pockets, and there's probably some frozen chicken stock in there too). Actually, this is the spot that is supposed to be for the ice cube tray with the little drawer underneath so you can catch the prepared cubes for later use, but my freezer is usually too full to give up valuable real estate to an empty space.


2. Honestly, I'm not completely sure what the hell is in this pile... I know there's leftover pasta sauce (and ravioli) from Friday night kinda in the middle there and the box on the far right has frozen fish in it, but other than that it's all a mystery (I'm betting on there being more chicken stock though, my freezer is lousy with chicken stock).


3. Sara Lee Rocky Road Overload Icecream (mmmmmmm), demolished while watching Cars on Saturday night... and behind it somewhere (currently hidden) is the blue coldpack I bought when I blew out my knee.


4. All those narrow looking things standing up behind the bread rolls are various left overs (curries, pasta sauces, stews, casseroles... things that are gloopy in other words), popped into Glad ziplock bags (I tell you what, I couldn't live without those little baggies now), frozen flat and then stacked thusly.


5. Once something is frozen laying down flat, you can stand it however you like... just like this gravy beef (the perfect meat for the aforementioned curries, stews and casseroles)... and there are more Glad bags filled with leftovers stacked up behind that too.


6. Frozen chicken breast, slightly frostbitten frozen chicken breast (really need to use that one), frozen chicken breast, half a frozen chicken breast, frozen chicken breast (have I mentioned that I eat a lot of chicken?) and a spare margarine.


7. The seldom used "Chiller" section of my fridge complete with a take-home pack of Beyond India Lamb Rogan Josh... that will probably be dinner on Thursday with a bowl of steamed green beans on the side.


8. Rolls of film and printer cartridges should live in the fridge, don'tcha know... and there was a can of Black V in there that I got free in town on Saturday... demolished on Saturday evening with pizza.


9. King Island Dairy Chocolate Crème Dessert... Yummy! First of all, it's King Island Dairy, hello (expensive but tasty)... but damn this stuff is good (and just crying out to be licked off somebody's nipples or something)... and even better when eaten with strawberries. Also on that shelf there's cheese (the stuff I bought from the Market the week before last), a couple of different brands of jam and a jar of Beerenberg crushed garlic.


10. You want sauces? I've got sauces from here til doomsday... I've got sweet chilli sauce, I've got two types of barbecue sauce (Heinz BBQ with Honey & Black Pepper and Beerenberg Coopers Ale BBQ), I've got regular tomato sauce (which kinda gets turned into my own slightly more exotic blend, because I add some sweet chilli and some BBQ sauce to it as I go), I've got sweet chilli and sesame sauce for pouring over veggies (not really THAT impressed with that one though), I've got oyster sauce, fish sauce and soy sauce for those Asian cuisine moments... and there's some American mustard and Heinz Salad Cream in there somewhere too.


11. My collection of plain yoghurt, for use in Smashed Broccoli... I keep forgetting how many tubs of it I have, and end up buying extra ones and thus having way too much. And just behind it is the really nice Moo Yoghurt, Rhubarb and Raspberry flavour (although their Passionfruit flavour is nice too).


12. The tart-tastic Nippy's Tangy Lemon Drink (one of my three or four favourite beverages ever)... I can go through two litres of that in just a couple of days... I think it lasted maybe half an hour after the photo was taken, but in my defence there was only a little bit left.


13. Water bottles... there are always some of these in the fridge... come rain, hail or shine... but I really should be using them more often (although I do tend to use the one on my desk at work a lot, so it's not all bad).


14. All my veggies, safe and secure in their little crisper (emphasis on the word little... it's only about half the depth of the fridge, and has a tendancy to fall out at just the wrong moment)... pressed up on display against the plastic are way too many Royal Gala Apples (my current fruit of choice), a head of broccoli (no prizes for guessing what that was for) and the big bag at the bottom that's gone all condensed for some reason, that's full of the aforementioned green beans... I LOVE green beans!


15. And last, but by no means least, Sunday's ration of Farmers Union Iced Coffee, and next to it a 600ml carton of the Strong variety that got demolished with dinner last night.

Current Mood:

exposing my apartment again

Actually this really didn't start out with the intention to be another "Exposing Myself" post, at least not on this scale anyway... I just wanted to show off the placement of my Ticky Tack painting now that it's up on the wall...

But the last time I did this was September 2006, so there have been at least two "post-Christmas major change-arounds" since then... okay, major is perhaps not the right word... it's not like I can move any of my big furniture around... it's like jigsaw puzzle pieces... no matter how you try and squish it in a spot, it will all really only go together properly in one configuration...

But I changed some stuff around after Christmas 2006... and again this year... as well as the fact that all my tchotchka got taken down and dusted and rearranged this year. And I also put up my new cheap Ikea star lights in place of the pre-existing fairly lights (actually the set I took down was a different set from the ones in the original photo... same principle though).

There's also one of my first attempts at painting, Safari, down at the bottom of the bookcase, and I haven't actually noticed since I changed the lights over, but it used to look really groovy when the fairy lights were lit, because they fell behind it, and it would kind of glow from within.

I'm thinking about maybe doing a revisit of my DVD collection once I get back the ones that Ma borrowed on the weekend... especially now that the collection is spread across three cabinets (well, four technically, but three together in one spot)... we'll see I guess...

Current Mood:

exposing my handwriting

I think this week may be a little light on actual blog content... unless of course something terribly interesting happens... which I kinda doubt, but you never know.

I mentioned last week that I went hunting for new and unusual memes... and it's kind of scary the number of things you can find when you put "blog meme" into Google... lots of references to the "book tease" meme though...

Anyway, I found this over on Logtar's Blog and it jumped out at me as not only a good meme, but also a good "Exposing Myself" style post... even though lots of you have already seen my handwriting...

Go ahead and get a piece of paper, then write the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." Sign it with your first name or your handle (not your signature) and take a picture. Then post this and your picture on your blog! It is that simple...

Big and girly and very printed (I did learn how to write in cursive, honest, but once they stopped making us write that way, I stopped doing it)...

Oh, and I haven't bothered dotting my i's for, ooooh, years and years and years and years (I actually don't know how long I've been doing that)... I do cross my t's though... otherwise I'd just have l's... straight legs on my y's... and usually big scary loops on my little f's, although that one is kinda tame...

And if I hadn't been going for clarity in the photo, it probably would have been in pencil, since I write almost everything (with the possible exception of birthday cards and mailing addresses) in pencil.

Current Mood:

my christmas decorations

Given that thus far this week all the posts have had a vaguely Christmas vibe about them, and just to prove that I do actually do something vaguely seasonal at my place (since I don't have room for a tree)... these are my decorations...

There's the two hot guy cards, which I actually bought myself and which come out every Christmas (well, except for one year when I couldn't find the damn things)... the shirtless Santa is from Lip International and Rudolph is by Glen Hanson... and while I think Santa came from somewhere cool and groovy in the city, Rudy was found quite by accident in a newsagents in the middle of suburbia...

The purple baubles are actually one of the things Ma and I bought last year to add to various parcels this year... but when I got them out I figured I could make better use of them by leaving them in the box. Plus, purple...

The longlegged Santas and snowmen came from Target a couple of years ago, marked down during the after Christmas sales... in the case of the snowman in the bathtub, he was originally $19.99, but was marked down to $2.49... gotta love a bargain...

And finally, my little neon Christmas tree... which is just so tacky I think it goes all the way around to cute again... the tree part is green, the star is red... so cute, so tacky...

Oh, and in amongst the rest of the Christmas sales items, Ma found two additional sets of fairy lights that she'd gotten for 60c a piece... so I was able to replace my now defunct lights... yaaay.

Current Mood:

what's on my fridge

Andrew always seems to find the best visual meme's... I guess it must be a Flickr thing...

You've already had a half-assed view of the stuff on my fridge when I showed off the photo of my kitchen, but this time you can actually see what's on there. Given where it is though, there's really not any good place for getting a shot of the fridge... it always ends up too dark... and there's only so much brightening you can do in Photoshop to things that are white...

Anyway...

1. Joe Phillips "Little Bear" dress-up magnet... he's currently undressed because I realised he was getting a reverse tan line and his arms were paler than his body from the sunlight...
2. Elephant magnets... and the one on the right is holding up the flyer for my street's big dumbass Christmas party, so I remember when it is, and can avoid it like the plague...
3. Lifeguard magnets... these are really old... at least fifteen years... and I may or may not have stolen them originally, I don't remember...
4. Flat bottom taco magnet which came with some other Mexican brand food item... it's holding up the scribble drawing J did ages ago and I stuck on the fridge, and a flyer for the Dolphin Cruise that I picked up in Port Adelaide...
5. Cybertart Bunny Bones magnet I got from Melbourne, which has the name of the Indian place Stu took me to for lunch a couple of weeks ago under it...
6. My Wish List...
7. Photo of Mouja the cat...
8. Random magnetic hotness from DNA magazine...

I also have some stuff around the far side too (but trying to get a photo from that angle would have been near impossible)... three goldfish (for luck/prosperity), a little movie poster magnet for Teenage Monster, another magnetic hotness from DNA and a magnet with "useful numbers" on it... Police, Gas Emergencies, Lifeline, stuff like that...

So, yeah, that's my fridge...

Current Mood:

exposing my apartment

I'm taking another leaf out of the collective books of Eddy and Nathan again today...

You've seen my favourite things, and what's on my bookshelves.... what's in my DVD collection and then where I blog...

Today I'm exposing my loungeroom/kitchen...

Since Ma and I have busted a proverbial gut over the last couple of weekends cleaning all the filth out of the kitchen, I figured now was as good a time as any to take a photo and blog about it... granted that also lead to me reorganising one of my kitchen counters on Monday night so that the stuff that has been cluttering them up (although it was still tidy) is now away in one of the cupboards.

And while this shouldn't come as a great shock to anyone, I will say up front that I am so NOT all about clean lines and surfaces (unlike some people I could mention... you know who you are)... I'm all about the tchotchka baby! Although I have to say, that what I have now is a totally stripped down version to how it used to look...

I actually shot these yesterday morning, which was good, because the last two mornings have been very sunny and pleasant, but today was a world of grey (although still pleasantly warm, which was good)... and much less worthwhile for taking photos...

My apartment has three rooms... my loungeroom and kitchen are one room, my bedroom is the second room, and the bathroom is the third. So the loungeroom shot was taken with my back (literally) up against the shelf on the back wall of the kitchen (I was half sitting on the countertop actually, since I was using the tripod)... and the kitchen photo was taken from just in front of the teevee and stereo.

This is my loungeroom...

Most of the stuff in here that would fall under the interesting banner has already featured in the other Expose posts I did... but you can also see the painting J did for me in it's new home atop the bookcase...

The poster for A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually from around the time of BlueDragon's visit... I got tickets to the preview upstairs from where I used to work and they gave me the poster at the same time... it also serves a second purpose in that it covers up a hole I made in the paintwork when I pulled down the previous poster (damn that sticky BluTack). It's set at exactly that height because I used to have another four foot bookcase in the gap between the six foot ones, and it came exactly to the bottom of the poster.

The skinny dark brown thing on the wall above the DVD bookcase is an "African" dagger... I don't know if it's actually from Africa or not, or even, really, how it came to us, I think it was sent by some random relative to somebody in my family, and it ended up with me. I've always had a fascination with it ever since I was a kid... it's bound in leather and has a little leather tassle at the bottom... the blade is as dull and rusty as all hell, but I still like it.

And the thing hanging in the top right corner is a wooden model (one of those build it yourself kits actually) of a pteranodon, that I've now had in all four houses I've lived in, which would make it about fifteen or so years old... he's hanging by fishing line from the top of the curtain rod, and only has enough wing space to rotate about halfway around fortunately, otherwise I'm sure I would spend all my time looking at dead-dino-butt...

For the record, my bedroom door is between the walking staff in the loungeroom photo and the three photos on the wall in the next photo... it just didn't actually feature in either of the photos properly...

And this is my kitchen...

The freshly cleaned, newly organised, incredibly spotless kitchen...

Unfortunately there isn't really a way to get a well lit photo of my kitchen (although I did think later that I probably should have switched on the kitchen light when I took this shot... d'oh), since it's not really possibly to get a full shot from inside the space, since it's less than a metre wide.

I've mentioned the matching yellow countertops and door knobs before... the wardrobe and dressing table (which is also topped with the same yellow top) in my bedroom have the same knobs, and my showerhead, toilet seat and bathroom mirror surround are all the exact same yellow colour...

Well, what do you expect, there's a date stamp inside my wardrobe that tells me that the place was built some time around 1965...

Just to the left of the shot is my front door... you can actually catch a glimpse of all the crap that hides behind my front door at the extreme left of the image, although I did spare you the full view.

And the dragon that sits on top of the counter on the left is supposed to be good feng shui... supposedly, it's good to have a dragon to the left of your front door... but since my whole apartment is basically to the right of my front door, this was about the best I could come up with...

On the short wall of the shelves you can just make out my Joe Phillips calendar (the other one is actually inside my wardrobe)... and on the fridge you can just see my 2006 Wish List...

You will probably also notice Blossom and Cartman in amongst the clutter on the shelves... and very sharp eyed viewers may notice that the glasses between the pasta jar (possibly the gayest pasta jar ever, since I stuck a rainbow flag sticker on it) and the Grolsch bottles (mmmm... Grolsch) have superheros on them... god bless Nutella (although the last two have Donald and Daffy Duck on them, and were actually presents I got for my 21st from a girl I worked with at the time)... what you can't see from that angle are the Snoopys (in random "native dress" from various places around the world... I did have most of the set, but culled it down to just the places I liked the look of) and a couple of the X-Men and the small handful of Mister Men... oh hush...

If you look carefully over the top of the microwave, you can just see the top of the magnetic lion I mentioned on Monday...

And, for the record, there aren't strange things sticking out of the top of the green chair... there is actually a small bookcase (that I keep all my photo prints in) behind there... and, like all other bookcases in my house, it has stuff on top of it.

So that's my house...

Current Mood:

where i blog

I hate you Larry...

Okay, that's not true...

But when I saw Larry's "Where I Blog" post I started thinking, "hey, I could do that"... but then I looked at my computer and it's surrounds and went, "hmmm... dusty"... and I hate to dust... hate it with a passion... but the next thing I know, there I am with a feather duster in my hand getting rid of all the dust and tidying up the random crap around the computer... you know, all the stuff I would do if I could be bothered doing housework more regularly or thoroughly...

I can't completely blame Larry though, Eddy did the same thing a while ago... so damn that Eddy and his Nathan-inspired Exposure posts too... *wink*

So here it is... I've exposed my DVD's, my books, my favourite things... and now, where I blog...

Yeah, I know... I don't have a desk... I don't actually have ROOM for a desk... so I juryrigged my own desk about a hundred billion years ago (okay, I exaggerate, we all know this) out of this chest of drawers that I've had since I was a kid... took the top drawer out, turned it upside down and put it back in again, then closed it to just fit my keyboard... it does mean that I can't put my legs under a desk, which bugs me every now and again... but it's also has the maximum amount of storage space.

The drawers are right next to my bedside table (on the left there), then if you were to continue going left, that would be my bed... but this is about computers, not beds, so I digress...

That orange and grey thing with the aerial, that's the home base for my cordless phone which is off on the kitchen bench and only gets put into it's cradle on the very infrequent occasion that it needs to be recharged.

On top of the computer speaker subwoofer is my Happy House Faerie, which serves two purposes... the first being decorative, the second being something I can loop the cord for my digital camera around so I can find the end of it easily. And behind it (you can just see a sliver of purple behind the base of the faerie) sits the new USB hub I bought the other day from one of the el-cheapo shops (and which I thought I would have blogged about on Monday, but obviously didn't)... $4, four ports and it's a godsend... means I don't have to pull the computer away from the wall when I want to switch between my camera cable and my phone cable or even the rare instances when I want to plug my jumpdrive in.

Next to the subwoofer are my Elfquest hardcover graphic novels since I ran out of room for them in the bookshelves (and for a while there I was referring to them every now and again on one of the EQ fansites... yeah, yeah, I already know I'm a fanboy... hush).

Larry's blog post that caused all this is on my big-ass 19" monitor, which is turn shows Vuboq's post on Larry's monitor... I wonder if someone uses my post for reference it will become one of those things like when you hold a webcam up to a monitor and see infinite versions of the same image... no, guess not...

Although you can't see it from this angle, my mousepad is tucked in there next to the keyboard (and for the record, no I'm not left handed, I just like having the mouse on the left hand side of the keyboard, more room), and has Winnie-the-Pooh's head on it.

The two little animals on top of my hard drive are from Neopets... the yellow one is a Blumaroo (and a plushie, from a McDonald's Happy Meal actually, when Neopets and Maccas did a cross promo deal), and the red one is a Kougra (and both electronic and voice activated, although I normally have him switched off... and okay, technically it's MY Kougra... shut up). Next to the Blumaroo, although it's a little hard to see, are my amethyst crystals... partly because it's another purple thing, and I have four of them but also because I read something somewhere about keeping a piece on or near your computer to theoretically "soak up" the radiation from the screen. How much of that is factual and how much of it is urban legend I don't know, but when I'm working anywhere for a long while, an amethyst is usually the first piece of tchotchka I bring in from home.

On the other side, next to the Kougra, there's a smooth brown pebble... I have no idea why... I just have a thing about smooth pebbles and I'm not even sure where this one is from, or why it's still on the computer... but it is, so I'm leaving it there...

The two Post-Its on the bottom of the monitor are actually DVD's that are on sale this week... must remember to have a look at those either Friday or Saturday... even with all the appropriate technology, I'm still a big fan of the Post-It... invariably when I'm working they're stuck all around my computer monitor with random people's phone numbers or other pieces of information on them.

And for the record, the orange button on the front of my computer isn't some launch system for weapons of mass stupidity... it's actually the "tester" from the last toothbrush I bought that had a "tongue scraper" on the back of the head, and again, for unknown reasons, I ended up sticking it onto this "non-button" on my CPU.

Current Mood:

what's in my dvd collection

Okay, this is half inspired by Eddy's long ago Expose Yourself post where he showed off his DVD collection... half inspired by the What's On Your Bookshelf meme I did a while back.... and half inspired by the fact I can't come up with something really interesting to blog about...

And yes, for the record, that's three halves...

Unlike Eddy, I haven't sorted my stuff into "regular" and "gay" DVD's (if I did, I would currently have a "gay" collection of five movies... and yes Andrew, that is The Broken Hearts Club on the top shelf... it was a recent purchase)... although I have sorted my "teevee series" DVD's from the rest... so Buffy, Futurama and Press Gang currently reside in a different bookshelf, and I would have taken a picture, but most of my Buffy collection is off with Stu from Camera Club... the once exception to this is Golden Girls... but then I only have the first two seasons so far...

And again, yes... also like Eddy, my DVD's are all arranged alphabetically... well, c'mon... I have 203 DVD's (technically more if you count actual discs... I'm just going off the cases)... how else would I ever be able to find anything?

I'm also happy to say that the vast majority of my collection (bar perhaps three or four discs) has been purchased way below recommended retail price... thank god for ongoing specials at the Red Circle Boutique amongst other places...

The really annoying thing is that I've run out of room in that bookcase (which is actually why the teevee DVD's are elsewhere... although they did have their own section at the end of the movies), and I'm going to have to slide part of the collection over to the other bookshelf as I get more... rather than just moving the tail end of the alphabet over, I'm going to go through and weed out first the "strange and unpopular" DVD's (ultra-el-cheapo stuff mostly), then the "less often watched" stuff... beyond that... well we'll worry about that when we get there.

Current Mood:

what's on my bookshelves

I'm a sucker for a decent meme... and I'm even more of a sucker for anything book related...

Which is why I couldn't go past the What's On Your Bookshelves? meme that Andrew posted yesterday...

Unfortunately due to size restrictions (ie my apartment is tiny) I a) wasn't able to take just one shot to include my two bookshelves, and b) don't have as many books as I once did... although there is still a smallish (kinda) overflow living in a trunk at Ma's place... there is one other bookcase (just to the left of the CD rack) that is mostly full of DVD's but the bottom shelf of which has a lot of my large books, photography stuff for the most part.

Before I get to the books I will point out that the two Buddhas, the Laughing Buddha on the left and the multi-armed Buddha on the right, have appeared in posts before, as has the glitter lamp behind the multi-armed Buddha... the two Buddhas both sit on my stereo speakers, which flank my teevee, which is between the two bookshelves (you can see a tiny corner of it at the bottom left of the right hand pic).

And yes, there are pieces of tape on my fairy lights... that's to remind me which of the bulbs have blown... I must get around to replacing them someday...

And yes, that obviously is a naked male headless, armless and legless pseudo-Classical statue on the bottom right... another Cheap As Chips find... I think it was around $15, and although it looks like it's made of plaster, it's actually metal (and hollow).

But onto the books...

The left bookcase is "the good stuff"... the right bookcase is "the other stuff"...

Going down the shelves, some of the highlights of the left bookcase are.... top shelf, Laurell K Hamilton's pretty much entire Anita Blake and Meredith Gentry collection... second shelf, Harry Potter and assorted gay photo books, particularly stuff by Howard Roffman... third shelf, almost completely Terry Pratchett's Discworld series... fourth shelf, the collected works of Matthew Reilly and Armistead Maupin's Tales series... fifth shelf is fairly random... bottom shelf, although it's hard to see, on the left hand side there are my folders containing my photographic portfolio and negatives, and on the right, a pile of old DNA magazines.

On the right bookcase... the top shelf is completely Anne McCaffrey, although to be honest, a large section of those are going to be "donated" to Ma (possibly on Mother's Day), since I'm kind of over them... second shelf, my incomplete Katharine Kerr collection including Daggerspell, the book I mentioned in my reincarnation post... on the third shelf we have a mixture of things, including (the blue book next to the big lime green one) my "bible" when it comes to all things astrology, The Only Astrology Book You'll Ever Need (which looks like it's out in a new edition according to Amazon.com... woohoo) and on the right side of that shelf, under a glass dome we have my collectible figure of Oz (Seth Green) from Buffy, this way he doesn't get dusty, and right next to him is my collection of bookmarks (I like to change bookmarks when I start a new book)... the fourth shelf has a lot of Agatha Christie... the fifth shelf is random again, although it does contain a couple of my Anne Rice books, and tucked away in the corner on the right hand side are my old Noddy books... and on the bottom shelf, a box of comics, my unused mini photo albums and a pile of random stuff...

And yes, for the record (and I did mention this once before), all my books are arranged from tallest on the left, to the shortest on the right on each shelf, and all the books are lined up with the edge of the shelf...

Eddy... don't say anything... not a damn word... you have no moral highground here...

Want to know something funny... for the vast majority of time while I was writing this meme, I could (and still can) smell old paper... you know, that old book smell, musty but comforting... and I have no idea where it's coming from! Weird!

Current Mood:

expose yourself

Originally I wanted to do this as a Monday Montage, but it just didn't quite work... so I'm going another way with it...

This is 50% inspired by Eddy's first Expose Yourself post (which, in turn, was actually inspired by Nathan's ongoing Expose Yourself theme) and 50% inspired by the regular Inside Story feature in the Sunday Mail's Home liftout where various local "people of interest" are photographed surrounded by belongings that mean something to them and the image is surrounded by little blocks of text for each item.

1. Wooden Staff
   This is the first of several "Me and J" stories that seem to go along with all this stuff... I did mention it briefly in my original post about him but basically he showed up on my doorstep one night carrying a tree branch and a handful of sandpaper so we could craft me a walking stick/staff... and all I'd done was say to him that I wanted to ask him about making one... next thing I know, he's there with not only the wood, but the tools (okay, just sandpaper) to craft it. We ended up going and sitting on the grass in a nearby park in the middle of the night so we didn't get sawdust all over my apartment. It doesn't show up in the photo, but it has this great curve in the top of it, and I've added a white cockatoo feather I found during one of my walks, and a wolf pendant I got a few Christmases ago to the top.
   


2. Farmers Union Iced Coffee
   I'll admit... I'm an addict... I've mentioned this Iced Coffee more than a few times in various posts, but it's my absolute favourite beverage in the whole wide world. It was named as a BankSA Heritage Icon in 2004. And with good reason! No other brand tastes as good, and if they ever stop making it I will cry... a lot...
   


3. Macquarie Dictionary
   I've had this dictionary for over half my life... the inscription inside says "With love on your 15th Birthday, love Mum"... and it's served me well in all those years. I also like it because it's an Australian dictionary, so it has stuff in it that you wouldn't find anywhere else. It's the same dictionary I mentioned in my first ever blog post too...
   


4. Mobile Phone
   This is more than just my phone... it's my radio (for when I'm on my daily walk), watch, reminder, alarm clock and calendar... and if I have to leave the house without it because it's charging or whatever, I feel a little lost...
   


5. Dragon
   This adorable guy was a present for either Christmas or a birthday when I was a teenager... he used to sit on top of the teevee in my bedroom when I was living at home, but a tumble resulting in a broken neck and dislodged "bubble" put an end to that. His feet hook over the edge of either a shelf, or in his case, a couple of books layed on the top of one of my bookcases.
   


6. Bladed Ankh
   I got this bladed ankh (and yes, the "tail" of the ankh actually does have a blade on it, although the point is actually sharper than the blade itself) pendant on my first trip to Melbourne back in 1998 at the St Kilda Markets. I hardly ever wear it (and it actually needs a good polish), but it appeals to my love of all things vampiric and gothic, as well as my connection to the ankh symbol.
   


7. Laughing Buddha Statue
   I mentioned this guy on Monday... he's the statue that J bought me for my birthday last year, and he sits in pride of place on top of the stereo speaker next to the teevee. I've lovingly oiled him over time until he's basically soaked to the gills and the wood isn't going to split any time soon. As a result he's also a little darker than he was when I first got him.
   


8. Film SLR and Compact Digital Cameras
   Not surprisingly with all my other photography related entries (9, 11 and 14), but I had to include not only my digital camera (although in truth that's just my empty camera case, since I was taking the shot with the camera), but my big Pentax SLR too.
   


9. Camera Club Medals
   These are the two medals that I won at my first Camera Club Annual Exhibition... you get big trophies too, but only for a year, whereas the little medals are yours to keep. I'm very proud of these (especially since I may never win anything in the Annual Exhibitions ever again).
   


10. Sunglasses
    Never leave home without them... except at night... my eyes are pretty light sensitive (probably from spending too much time indoors) so I can't go anywhere without my sunglasses, even in winter. I also never pay more than about $20 for a pair, since I drop, break, lose, fiddle, scratch and generally mistreat them. This pair is the ones that I scored at the post-Christmas sales last year.
    


11. Photographic Negatives
    These two folders contain all the negatives from my photographic work... 114 rolls of film... somewhere between 3000 and 4000 photographs... if there was ever, god forbid, a fire in my apartment, this is one of the things I would save.
    


12. Red Sofa
    Yes, with all the recent drama over my sofa, it's been a recurring blog theme for a bit, but I love this sofa for two reasons... firstly I've had this obsession with red sofas since I was a kid... I don't know why, I just have... secondly, this was the first piece of furniture I ever bought for myself with my own money... everything else in my house is either stuff that's been bought for me, or stuff that I had at Ma's place when I was living there and has travelled with me ever since.
    


13. Dragon Sword
    I'm not sure whether this is actually a wakizashi (the blade length is about right) or if it has another name, but it was a going-away gift from J when he was headed to London... whatever it is, it's very obviously only ceremonial, but it works in nicely with my love of dragons.
    


14. Jeff
    This is my favourite from three images given to me by the photographer Chris Reynolds. We met through PhotoSIG and emailed back and forth for ages. He told me to pick out a shot or two and he would send them to me (just because he liked me... I'm very likeable). They're only inkjet prints, and I think they've gone a little sepia over time, but I like that. He's been published more than a few times, and Gaydar also used to use his images as part of their website design. I framed all three shots so that they kind of looked like the images framed in the top left of this photo.
    


15. Parlour Palm (Chamaedorea Elegans)
    A year and a bit ago I decided that I actually needed some greenery in my apartment (probably around the same time that I got my red sofa actually), so one Saturday morning I went out to one of those huge Hardware/Garden Centre type stores and got a little palm and a small square pot and some pebbles and potting mix. I was more than a little bit surprised that I didn't kill the thing, but it actually flourished. Around the time I stopped working the little palm had grown and grown and it's roots had actually pushed their way into the water well in the pot, so it was off to the hardware store again for a bigger pot, more potting mix and more pebbles. I split the clumped palm into six smaller clumps, put four of the palms into my new pot and repotted the other two in the old pot and gave it to Ma. It's still growing like crazy (Ma, on the other hand, managed to half kill her palm by leaving it outside in the afternoon sun).

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