montage monday: glenelg redux

I took so many photos wandering around Glenelg last weekend... there were more than enough to make up a second "non deco" Montage...

It's been one long, slow, lazy day today... I woke up when it started hammering down with rain this morning and just lay there all warm and cozy listening to it... eventually I got up, had my shower, ate breakfast, blah blah blah... but with no sense of urgency to anything... I left my hair all fluffy, put on very comfortable clothes and had no intention of leaving the house. And let me tell you, that was an incredibly pleasant sensation.

I kind of faffed my way through the morning... watched last night's episode of Bones, fiddled around on various websites (and just as a side note... if you're in town for a limited period of time, say so... if you're not interested, say so... if you're a total and complete headcase, don't say anything, just go away)...

Then, at the risk of descending completely and totally into "noodle blogging", I made myself a big bowl of tomato soup and some cheese on toast for lunch and settled in to finally watch High School Muscial 3. So gay, I know... although on that whole note, could they stop with the whole "Ryan isn't really a big old queer, look possibly romantic subplot with a real girl" undertone... hello, wearing hats in the Disneyverse = Very Gay... although at least they tried to match him up with the character who's obviously a total dyke (she's the only other character who wears funky hats... I'm just saying). Ahem... now, piecing together the few lingering threads of my credibility...

Actually that has been about it for my day really... lazy, comfy, tomato soupy, camp Disneyness... which is brilliant for recharging the ol' batteries...

Do I really have to go back to work tomorrow?

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montage monday: glenelg deco

The results of my search for Art Deco architecture in Glenelg... and the first time I've pulled out a Monday Montage since my birthday...

Actually I'm not sure that all of it is authentic deco... I think some of it could be slightly Art Nouveau... some of it is just flat out faux. And it's certainly not as plentiful as the Art Deco buildings in Potts Point...

It's been a trying day today... possibly because I never really felt like I got to wind down much over the weekend, I was out and about for most of both days, whereas normally I turn into Couch Potato Man on Sundays.

But no matter what the cause was, I've been decidedly atypical...

I didn't really even say very much at work until midway through the morning... then I wanted to hurt people in line at Subway mostly for just being annoyingly themselves, and then for trying to steal my sandwich *grrrrrr*.

I also discovered that the Boost Juice near work won't be doing the Hot Choconana drinks this year because their hot milk frothy machine is broken and they're not getting a new one... *pout*...

Then the internet server at work was up and down like a $3 hooker all afternoon... *sigh*

Here's hoping I don't burn dinner...

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montage monday: thirty five

Guess how old I am now...

Yeah, it's not really much of a mind scrambler is it.

I mentioned to Ma at dinner on Saturday that I'm not sure if 35 is the bottom of the valley before the long climb up to 40 or the top of peak before the all too quick slide down to the same place (it made more sense on Saturday because I was using visual aids, ie the dessert menu)... not that I'm overly stressed about getting to my next "0" birthday, I managed the last one fine.

Unlike a usual Monday Montage, I didn't restrict myself just to house numbers or external signage or anything... there's my bedside clock, my mobile, a roll of film and a page from a novel (bonus points if anybody recognises it) amongst others. It did however point out to me the absolute insanity of building/house numbering in both North Adelaide and the city... skipping numbers seemingly at random, or having both odd and even numbers on the same side of the street (where the street faces onto parklands) with no real pattern to it.

Anyway...

Around noon I headed off to Rockchick's "Farewell Lunch" (and managed to avoid being rained on, although I did take a jacket which I'm not certain I really needed)... she doesn't actually leave until Thursday (or possibly Friday, I'm a little fuzzy on the details to be honest), all I know is that I start back at The Nut House on Thursday and there's enough time for a handover.

It wasn't bad... we went to The Wakefield Hotel (formerly The Bridge Under Troubled Bad Moon Rising Damp or something)... which looks much better than the last time I was there, but they'd gussied up the menu so much that there wasn't a burger (which is usually what we all end up with)... so I had steak instead. Which wasn't bad (although it means I'll be having steak for two out of three meals today).

Interestingly, even though I know it was on the calendar on the wall at work, nobody mentioned my birthday... so neither did I (I also didn't mention Watchmen to Sugarmonkey and H-San, but that can always be brought up later)... there was never really an appropriate time to slip it into the conversation, plus it's not my responsibility to remind them, it's up to them to remember (or not).

One thing that did strike me was when I was watching Rockchick eat (slightly unavoidable when she's sitting across from me)... she's a tiny little birdlike thing at the best of times, but she was cutting seemingly tiny pieces of her steak, not to mention the accompanying chips. Granted her steak kind of ended up looking like she'd been chewing it rather than cutting it (and she didn't finish it all), but I did kind of have an "I really should be more like that" moment... I'm invariably the first one to finish eating whenever I'm out with people, and I think part of it is that I go with the caveman approach to cutting my food... big chunks. So we'll see how that works out... I know I'll end up forgetting (plus half the time I don't eat things that require cutting), but it's worth a shot.

And after two phone calls I finally got a little bit of love (potentially anyway) from my Rental Agent... now let's see if it actually works out properly...

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montage monday: marion street art

So obviously after the photo excursion there has to be the Monday Montage... behold the colourful abstractness...

You know what, as much fun as random scruffage is, I always tend to find that after the more enthusiastic or adventurous sessions that I'm sore in places I obviously don't use that much (get your minds out of the gutter)... presently it's kind of in my triceps and dorsls (I'm just guessing, I looked up the muscles of the back and that sounded about right)... all stiff and sore. The sign of good scruffage I guess, you should remember it for days afterwards...

Although there was that bit of fence climbing yesterday that probably didn't help...

The Torrens is on the mend... they've scooped out a vast amount of the trash/bikes/trolleys (at least in the section between the King William and Morphett Street bridges)... and as I mentioned on Saturday, they did indeed extract the car... turns out it went missing from a car yard a decade ago... which kinda tells you how long it's been since the river was really drained (although I kinda thought it had happened more recently than that... maybe it's never been drained to quite this level before). Amongst some of the other stuff they found was a silencer... because, you know, we're big with the mafia here in Adelaide *rolls eyes*. But the river itself is doing what it's supposed to do... it's slowly being refilled by some combination of the rest of the river upstream (I assume), and groundwater... now I didn't quite understand the whole "groundwater" concept, but I saw it in action this morning... just water trickling out of the mud and down into the river. Weird, but kinda cool.

My external hard drive is obviously still not well... I plugged it in a little while ago and it seemed "dead"... no vibrations or general electronic humming, although the power light was on... but I thought it might just be playing possum, so I left it there, not plugged into the computer, just the power, and eventually it woke up and made with the electronic vibrations. Possibly this means that I will need to invest in another one, especially because it didn't seem to like the different USB port I plugged it into when it did finally come back to live this afternoon, and I think I'm starting to run out of ports I haven't tried it in. On the upside, at least it's currently working, even if it's all wonky and falling to bits like every other piece of technology I own.

I've also got a bunch of other thoughts rolling around in my head, but none of them are formed enough to make a whole coherent sentence (other than the fact that it needs to be haircut day soon) so I think we might leave it there...

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montage monday: toy soldiers

A Monday Montage with a difference... this is my toy soldier collection...

The glass ornament (bottom left of the left hand set of four), the red and green stocking and the nutcracker giftbag are the only things from before this Christmas (actually there is another giftbag that has "proper" toy soliders on it, but I'd prefer to have Ma use that for my presents), everything else is new. Which is impressive, yet scary!

I have noticed a theme developing though... first off, they have to be red. Toy soldiers and/or nutcrackers seem to come in red, green and blue (as per the giftbag and the card at the bottom of the post), but for me they have to be red. I don't know if that's part of my ongoing obsession with scarlet or not (or just some part of my brain going for what it considers to be historical accuracy), but if they're not red then they're just not right as far as I'm concerned.

And there also seems to be a theme towards drums. Partly that's incidental, because a number of them just come with drums (however the Jim Shore drummer/soldier at the bottom right of the right hand set is one of the drummers from The Twelve Days of Christmas... which also explains why he's not in red)... but if I had a choice between one with a drum and one with a different instrument, provided they were both red, I'd go with the drum.

Now that I've kind of "bulked out" the collection this year, I'm going to be more choosy (in theory anyway) about what I get from here on out. I'd like something in the soft toy genre (actually, what I'd really like is a little fat knitted soldier, so I might have to hit the craft markets next Christmas), something in a snow globe, maybe a coffee cup and something involving clockwork. But given how hard it was just to rustle up these ones, I think I'm going to be lucky to get that specific.

It'd be nice though...


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montage monday: botanic green

Behold the greenness of green...

I hadn't actually intended on making a Montage when I went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday... but then I went for a wander looking for an out of the way bench to sit on and read (the first two suffering from "Goldilocks Syndrome", the first was too cold, the second too hot), and found myself taking a few shots... which then became a "green/textured" theme.

It's been a bit of a cruisy non-descript day... probably partially because I spend a chunk of the morning organising Mikado tickets and emailing people about hats and photos from Friday night's beerfest and partially because the website I needed to access crashed this morning and didn't come back up until after lunch.

I ended up booking the most expensive tickets for The Mikado, partially because they were in the "Premium" zone, right in the middle of the stalls (although the ones I ended up with are about 15 metres back from the stage and possibly right at the very back of said zone, but still), but mostly because they were about five dollars more than the next lowest category of tickets, so I figured why the hell not.

So in the last two days I've spent a grand total of $257 on "supporting the arts"...

Now all I need to do is make sure that I don't let slip to Ma that I've bought tickets, while at the same time making sure that she doesn't go booking any other excursions for that particular weekend (or worse still, float the idea that we should go to The Mikado, which means I'm going to have to lie through my teeth... which isn't really a problem, just annoying).

I am a little annoyed with the whole online ticket system though... it doesn't let you pick the seats you want. I guess that makes sense, because there would be times that the system would be so packed with people that it wouldn't be able to do that, tickets would be disappearing too fast to keep track... but if they can do it at the branches, I don't know why the website can't show you the same detail. Greater Union does it with their Gold Class system... can it really be that hard? Anyway, enough rant...

The final (and most amusing) act of this fourteen part ticket story occurred when I went to pick the tickets up at the closest outlet (which turned out to be a newsagency in the middle of City Cross)... and of course, after she printed all the tickets out (in one long strip of eight sections, five tickets, three receipts) she did what they're obviously supposed to do and talked me through them all to make sure that they were the right ones.

That was fine (to give her credit, she didn't even pause at Another Gay Sequel), until she got to the last one... The Adventures of Butt Boy and Tigger... she didn't quite make it through the title before she starting chuckling, which in turn made me laugh.

But WOOHOO, tickets!

I just want to arrange some sort of Japanese themed "wrapping" for the Mikado tickets now (I'm thinking about getting either a small black lacquer box or a gold box and wrapping the tickets in some Japanese style fabric, with or without the possibility of rope bondage)... I might have to do a bit of research on that.

I also got a copy of one of the photos from Friday night (I haven't seen the others, even though the girly responsible for taking them was supposed to send me copies today)... whoooooo nelly. I don't know what facial expression I was going for, but between the borrowed hat and the face and somebody's disembodied hand reaching in from the side, it's a bit of a worry. It's pretty much just a typical unflattering beer-fuelled pub photo really...

And when I got home I found one of those little "We tried to deliver this parcel while you were out" cards... woohoo... the two calendars I ordered from Amazon got here in seemingly record time (the expected delivery date was the week before Christmas).

All in all, a productive day... now all I have to remember to do is buy pistachios (the only thing I forgot to do today)...

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montage monday: backstreets eight

I'm going to assume that it's just me and that this isn't actually one of the single dullest Monday Montages I've ever done (although I want that door knocker in the centre)...

Can you tell it hasn't been a stellar day?

I've got blisters on the balls of my feet (always guaranteed to make me cranky), I had an annoying tangle with a Bootcamp squad on my walk this morning, I got stared at (and as a result got all paranoid for no good reason) by a Father/Son duo on the bus and then when I got to work it was full of people being overly sociable and noisy and just put me in a mood...

And once I got in the mood, I couldn't shake it, so I ended up just closing myself off in my little corner and I maybe said half a dozen words to anybody all day. Well, nobody at work anyway...

It's doubly annoying when I get like this because if nobody notices or says anything then I get moodier because nobody noticed... and if they do notice (which, I'll admit, a couple of people did or at least made a comment about me being "quiet") or attempt to cheer me out of it then I just want them to leave me be.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't...

And I'm still not completely over it, which is fun (not)...

I actually wrote this whole thing out in much greater detail earlier, but there's nothing worse than listening to somebody else whinge about their day, so I decided against posting the whole thing... and I'm going to shut up now...

Thank all appropriate deities I have a couple of Magnums in the freezer though...

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montage monday: lions

I've "officially" been working on this Montage for over a month now. Unoffically I've had the idea for a while... probably since my visit to the Body Mind and Psychic Fair... and the fact that I see three of these lions every morning on my walk...

The only shot that isn't new is the centre one... that's from a trip to the Zoo about four years back not long after the lion cubs were born. And I'm guessing that the Chinese lion (fourth row, right hand side) actually IS a lion...

Okay, that Three Little Pigs quote I made this morning about "huffing and puffing"... a little bit inflammatory to the Universe methinks... no, the house is fine (cold, but fine), but the heavy grey blanket of cloud that lay over the city as I made my way from the bus stop to work this morning didn't bode well...

I looked at the cloud (it wasn't even "clouds" plural, it was just one big cloud from horizon to horizon) and thought "if that can just hold off until I get into work, I'll be okay"... which was tempting fate once again... because just as I was being blown through my usual shortcut between two buildings it started to HAMMER down. We're talking "somebody start finding two of everything and a lot of lumber" kind of rain... which was also blowing horizontal and upwards and whatnot because of deflected wind from various big buildings.

But I found a little nook to hide in at the base of one of the aforementioned big buildings, but I had no idea how long the rain was going to last, and work was just a quick dash across the street and so temptingly close...

All of this might have been a moot point if I'd bothered wearing a jacket this morning... but I hadn't, since the last time I saw a weather forecast it was supposed to be ick this morning and then improve, so I figured I wouldn't need it, and with the insane wind there was no point in using my umbrella (which I had brought with me) because then all I would have had was a broken umbrella.

So I dashed across the street...

I dashed across the street, in fact, just as it started to hail (those little tiny stinging chips of ice that feel like hard rain, but then you realise rain never gets that hard... although as I said to Ma a few weeks ago, you just don't get hail these days like you did when I was a boy... big, scary, 20c piece sized hail)... And then I (along with a group of other people) discovered that the security guards, in it's gormless capacity for mediocrity had LOCKED the side doors where I usually go in. Of course there's no way to get from the side doors to the main doors without going back out into the elements again (coz that would be silly, providing cover from the weather between the doors)... the upshot is that when I got in the building, my pale ecru business shirt was basically transparent (and yet flesh coloured, so not easy to tell where I stopped and the shirt started). Thankfully I haven't worn a white business shirt in YEARS, because that would have ended badly for all concerned.

Then, when I went to see if the bathroom on my floor had one of those warm air hand blower things, no luck. But I know there are some in the building somewhere (and I should, given the number of floors I've worked on), so I went down floor by floor (fortunately the men's bathroom is right next to one of the stairwells) for about five floors, sticking my head into the bathroom to check on the air dryer situation... nothing. Fortunately the overly warm air in the building, and my running around had taken the "very wet and clingy" aspect of the shirt away, and it did dry off pretty quickly (by about 11am I was all good).

And we won't even talk about how much of a twat I was not to bring a jacket given how arctically cold the wind was at lunch time (and again on the way home) or about the window that's situation just in front of my workstation that kept making odd little rattling noises, or that I'm sure I felt/heard the building swaying once or twice in the afternoon... the less said about all of that, the better...

Other things we won't discuss include the fact that the tasks they're currently discussing about the website right now are actually all the stuff that should have been discussed BEFORE I GOT THERE. It's going to be a long, slow, painful process by the sounds of things, and there really isn't a damn thing I can do to hurry it along. Be like the water, yani... flow around the problems and find the right path... you can always drown them all later...

On the topic of "people I'd like to drown", I realised something yesterday... something not great, and something that I would have realised earlier if I'd stopped and thought about it.

I just signed a twelve month lease (this is not any kind of news, I've been fussing about it for a while now). I haven't been on an official lease for some time... but neither has anybody else in my building, whether they've been here longer than me, or five minutes. And that means that EVERYBODY in my building just signed a twelve month lease (because you would think if they were going to just leave, they would have done that already)... which means that I have to put up with these useless, idiotic, inconsiderate neighbours of mine and their army of brats for another YEAR at the very least. That's not one of those thoughts that warm the cockles of your heart... it's more the type of thing that wakes you up screaming at three in the morning...

On a completely unrelated topic...

I've mentioned before that where certain movies and teevee shows are concerned (and occasionally books, but not so often), it's not really that difficult to turn me into a big weepy blubbery mess (or at the very least to get me "all faklempt"). I mean, I'm not sobbing during episodes of Top Gear or anything, but certain shows just get to me. The new and improved Doctor Who is one of those shows (yes, yes, I love the new Doctor Who, I'm a big nerd, this is no kind of surprise to anybody). And usually Doctor Who season finales are the kind of episodes that make me tear up.

Last night's episode wasn't the finale, but we're in the home stretch, so they're ratchetting it up. It had me alternatively sobbing my eyes out (seriously, I cried for almost forty minutes straight) or sitting with my fists up to my mouth (to fend off what, I'm not sure, the story maybe) or yelling at the teevee or all three.

I fully acknowledge that my body most likely took advantage of the fact that I was getting all teary to let go of a lot of other built up tension and emotion that had nothing to do with Doctor Who... but it doesn't change the fact that I was a basketcase for the whole episode.

Bloody Doctor Who... bloody Rose Tyler (oh how I love Billie Piper though, she's magnificent in EVERYTHING from Companion to Call Girl)... bloody Catherine Tate (which is interesting, because I'm not really fussed on her comedy show, but she's great in Doctor Who, which just proves the old adage "comedy, hard... drama, easy")... bloody Russell T Davies (damn you Davies, damn you to hell... so long as you don't stop writing Doctor Who episodes like this one)... and the really annoying thing was that it was all an "alternative reality" story, and I knew that the whole time, so technically none of it really happened (and yes, I'm aware it's a teevee show and none of it REALLY happened, shush).

Bloody teevee show... I can't wait for next week's episode!

Speaking of "bloody people"... Bloody Tom and bloody Eddy... they both made comment on yesterday's sauna adventures post about me writing a book based on (I'm assuming) my slutty adventures... which of course got me thinking about the whole thing.

Now, I know I can string a sentence or two together (even if sometimes I forget to make that sentence stop when it should), but I gave up any delusions I'd ever had about being a "real" writer ages ago. I'm no Tony, I'm not even an Alex...

Plus (and this is an element of self-justification which I only thought about late in the process) Adelaide is WAAAAAY too small... even if I made some of the stuff up...

Interestingly enough, even though I can never seem to tell a short story here on the blog, pretty much everything else I've ever written (and completed) has been pitifully short. And the stuff that's longer never really seems to have a decent plot, or in the one particular example I'm thinking of it had plenty of good moments, but I could never actually nail down the singular unifying and driving plot that would have made the whole thing hang together.

There are ways around that, I could try writing something in the vein of Michael Thomas Ford, short little "essays", each on a different topic, but my writing is never intentionally amusing enough to pull that off.

For the record, I'm not digging for compliments on my writing or the blog, I know what I'm capable of (and not capable of), and I'm okay with that (mostly).

montage monday: honeysuckle lane

Unsurprisingly, the Honeysuckle Lane Monday Montage... a little abstract, but some good colours...

I not a whole heap better this afternoon than I was this morning. On the plus side I didn't have to sit around and think about it all day, but on the downside my day at work was a trifle frustrating in it's own way... and because I had other things on my mind this morning I had trouble taking in what I was being told. Granted I could probably do the job vaguely blindfolded... but it was still somewhat hard to make my brain pay attention.

Add to that the fact that I'm not really dealing with ONE person, there are three or four groups that have a stake in this sight, so basically I'm going to be trying to arrange a committee to get this damn thing organised... or I just do what I always do, and do it my damn way... then let them work it out when I leave...

As far as my drama on the home-front, I don't have the mental energy to go into all the whys and wherefores of it, but after not having signed a lease for the last 5+ years (it could be more, but I don't know how much more) I got all the paperwork in my letterbox this morning. Now it could go one of a few ways... with one thing and another... the best case scenario is that I can use the lease to make my annoying neighbours be less annoying... worst case scenario is I'm looking for somewhere else to live. It's probably going to be somewhere in the middle, but with such a wide range of choices and the fact I don't like change, it's making for the wiggins. And on top of that my rent is going up $25 a week... could be worse, but it's still not great.

Anyway, I can hear broccoli calling my name from the other room...

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montage monday: sala walk

Okay, so it's completely unsurprising... Photo safari on Saturday, so when Monday rolls around, there's a Montage... but since the last one was in May, and the one before that was the end of March, I think we're about due...

Whether we're also due for me to rabbit on about nothing much in particular... well, yeah, probably...

• I keep forgetting to mention this, but I adore the new Lynx Dark Temptation... actually I adore how I smell once the fragrance has warmed up on my body... a little bit spicy, a little bit chocolatey, very yummy... I'm also amused by the tag line on the back of the can... "Chocolate Fragranced Bodyspray. Do Not Eat."
  
• I just need to dork out for a second... I LOVE DOCTOR WHO! Okay, better now... I did realise last night that one of the "TV Moments You Still Remember" I should have added to the Teevee Meme was Rose's exit in the second season finale...
• The Olympics don't start until Friday, but I'm sick of them already... I'm sick of the crap commercials, I'm sick of having to put up with having wall to wall coverage once they start... and most of all, I'm sick of China... whoever decided that China with their crap human rights policies, restricted internet and a cloud of smog hanging over the city would be a good place to hold the Olympics needs a good hard 2x4 to the back of the head...
  
• Speaking of both teevee shows and the Olympics, I wish I knew what the hell the networks were playing at just currently... both So You Think You Can Dance and America's Next Top Model are on Ten, which is awesome, but both shows are on "speeded up" schedules... we have two episodes of ANTM and this week alone there is going to be over FIVE HOURS of SYTYCD... which would make sense if it was an hour a night, but no... it's two hours, then an hour, then two and a half hours... what the? And Seven isn't any better... why the hell would they bother putting on two hours of Heroes the week before the Olympics start???
  
• Oh, and I'm also annoyed with the ABC, who've dumped Grand Designs at 8:30 on Tuesday night instead of returning it to 6pm Thursdays like they should have... grrr...
  

Yeah, I know... it's all just proof that I need to get out more...

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montage monday: backstreets seven

It's been a while since I managed to do a Monday Montage... but thankfully yesterday's little excursion netted me enough photos to knock one up.

Ahhhh... work...

You know how they say "be careful what you wish for"? Well today was pretty much a study in that exact phrase...

Towards the end of last week when I was drowning in the abject boredom of trying to organise the program that administers all the documents on the departmental website, I just wished quietly to myself that I had something a little bit more interesting and stimulating to do...

Today I got my wish... but it came at a price... and that price was a long shred torn off my sanity...

Firstly I was working for a woman who I'm SURE used to be a man... I actually found myself checking for an Adam's Apple a couple of times... it's not that she was butch... but just scarily tall and kinda built a little manishly... okay, she was probably never a man... but she has a scary transgender vibe going on.

Also, as a temp it's a little bit hard to just turn to somebody and say "Would you mind terribly just fucking off?"... she just hovered over my shoulder at various points... not for any particular reason, just to see where I was up to... and it was very annoying and very distracting. In the end I just ignored her and got on with what I was doing, and limited my answers to any direct questions. That's possibly why I came home with a slight headache... trying to resist the urge to punch somebody will do that to you (actually it's more likely to be my lack of weekend sleep finally catching up with me, but I like my first explanation more).

And she still thought I was fabulous by the end of the day... go figure!

There was a plus in the middle of my day though... Subway is currently doing a Tandoori Chicken sub... mmmmmmm Tandoori....

I made a discovery about my white Ikea Flört messenger bag this morning... I got dressed, black pants, sapphire blue shirt, black jacket, black boots, new black necklace... put the bag's strap over my shoulder and looked down at it...

GAYEST! BAG! EVER!

Actually that's not fair... the gayest bag I've ever owned (and still own) is a pink see-through PVC plastic Powerpuff Girls backpack... but Flört is certainly the gayest work bag I've ever had.

I'm not saying I don't like it... I still love it to death... but damn it was a gay, gay, gay colour choice! It's going to be even worse when I'm wearing my pale green shirt...

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montage monday: kites

This is the Montage that would have been posted LAST Monday had it not been for the fact that my camera battery died...

I would have made the whole montage of "things against blue" except that I really wanted to use the seahorse shot, and sadly, it never made it much further off the ground than that...

The shot directly in the middle is Ma's bird kite... I do have a couple of shots of mine in action, but, to be honest it just looks like a black rectangle with two red streamers... not quite so photogenic...

The dragon right next to it was amazing... it really looked like it was flying, and because it's head was anchored by the lines, it had that predatory bird thing going on (when the body moves, but the head is locked in position), and it looked like it was about to swoop out of the sky any moment. And the phoenix on the bottom row was good too... the flame edges were all ragged, so as it was moving it actually looked like it was on fire (not actually, because it would have burnt to a crisp in seconds, but, you know, figuratively).

In other news there really isn't very much to report... as I said yesterday, I think it's possible that Tribal is a big game-playing liar... partly because nobody's life is that interesting and fabulous, and when it all sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The thing is, if he IS a big ol' liar, then he's way up in the rank of the clinical sociopath, because he's putting some thought into stuff... and there's nothing that I can quite point to yet and go "A-HA! You big bad lie making man!"... it all seems reasonable... but at the same time it all kinda walks like a duck...

I never quite get that whole "make up a complete and total story and string people along" thing... well... I kinda do... but I don't get it when it's aimed at me...

Speaking of men and their manly ways... I got a text message from Marc yesterday... which is something of a record, I would have expected it to take him a week or more before he got in contact (although I had sent him a totally random message on Gaydar during the day just to show him something)... and we have a coffee "date" on Tuesday. Because the last one of those wasn't at all confusing...

On the up side, I do think that I actually know what I want this time around... "friends with benefits" with more of the emphasis on "benefits" than "friends" would be good, although I think that's actually what I said before the previous coffee date. I do know that I wouldn't want to date him, and I can't really see myself developing strings beyond the "I enjoy having the sex with you... can we please have more of the sex?" kinda strings... if they're actually strings.

I'm sure this is going to make me either sound like a bimbo who can't keep a thought in his head, or some kind of rampaging slut (I wish), or some combination of both... but really, when has that ever stopped me before?

Is it hideously tragic that I actually made a database to keep track of the guys I've been talking to (and/or have hooked up with)... I have a shitty memory for names, particularly profile names online... and there is one particular guy who I hooked up with a while ago that I wouldn't mind a repeat meeting with, but I can't remember his profile name (having said that I think I just found his email, so I might just email him)... and I completely forgot about one possible guy I could have met in Sydney (not that I really had the time... and I'm not sure how fussed I was anyway)... and sometimes you just need to remember that THAT particular guy is a wee bit psycho and should be avoided at all costs and on all possible sites.

So just a wee bit tragic then... yeah, figured as much...

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montage monday: benzo

This idea has been ticking along in the back of my brain for a little while now... an "all Benzo" montage... I've photographed more than enough of his work to fill up all the squares, and it also shows both the diversity of his artwork, but also the themes... the faces, the bots, the tikis... and the other bits and pieces that kinda exist outside of categories right now.

Stupid damn weather... can't make up it's stupid mind what temperature it wants to be... *mutter*... suddenly, after last week being wonderfully cool and pleasant, this week is going to be all hot and manky. I just hope that the Sydney forecast for the beginning of next week holds on... mid twenties... niiiiiice!

You know how sometimes you go back and find something and wonder why the hell you never knew it existed, and it's just annoying... I had one of those incidents yesterday. I was watching some show on the ABC about photography and started fiddling with my digital camera and suddenly wanted to flick through the manual. And as with all these things, as soon as you want to find the manual, you have no idea where the hell it is. In the process of looking for it, I had a look in the original box and discovered that there was an audio visual cable still in the plastic. I honestly don't remember ever seeing the cord, although I'm sure I was much more interested in getting my hands on the camera than anything else in the box. I eventually found the manual (in a bag with all my other manuals, where you would expect it to be, to be honest) and it turns out that the cable is so you can hook the camera up to the teevee and view the photos on there. Only it's doubly interesting because the camera also works "live" when it's connected to the camera... which ended up with me looking at myself on the teevee... very odd.

I happened across this really cool recipe the other day too... Smashed Broccoli. Sounds weird, looks slightly unfortunately, but damn it's tasty. I'm planning on making it again tonight, and I might post the recipe (not that it's overly complicated... broccoli, chicken stock, chili) later on.

I decided to watch the new series, Jekyll on the ABC last night. An up-to-date version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde... and damn it was good! They didn't go with the really over the top version of Hyde ala The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen... essentially the difference came down to a set of contacts, a slightly different hairstyle and colour and a truckload of personality from James Nesbitt. You have to love a version of Mr Hyde who loves Disney musicals and can throw a dead lion over a vast distance. The show originally aired in England as one hour episodes, but the ABC seems to have decided that lumping them together as two hour "telemovies" was a better idea, and while I don't disagree, it just means it will be over all too soon.

And that's about it really...

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montage monday: backstreets six

A combination of Saturday and Sunday's street art safaris... including three Benzo pieces, two from Jules... and the Robot Devil from Futurama oddly enough...

I was thinking about how this whole Sidestreet and Alleyways "project" has altered while I've been doing it. It started out very much in the spirit of the blog by Mark B that gave me the inspiration in the first place... signs and line and angles and general urbania (I may have just made up a word there, but stay with me)... and it's progressively got more of a street art focus and less of that urbania focus.

Whether it's because my focus has always been more of an artistic/aesthetic one rather than architectural... so I guess it's not really surprising that once I realised that there was this unexplored world of clandestine art out there I got sucked into finding and documenting and sharing it.

I had a thought while I was wandering about yesterday, it's almost like trying to collect the full set of some kind of trading cards or something (which I've never really done, at least not with any degree of commitment or for any length of time)... but a set that never ends and that you're never quite sure where any of the cards might be and when or even if another one will appear. Actually maybe it's more like the whole Pokemon thing... but then saying that just makes me sound like a sad case, so we'll just pretend I didn't...

And it kind of made me think about my photography in general too... I guess I have a tendancy to do this... get on one particular theme and stick with it for a while. Originally I was a bit generic, then I got on the whole portraiture kick and stayed with that for quite a long while (I still did other stuff, but that really was my focus for several years)... then when my supply of people to photograph dried up (and I got the digital camera) it kind of opened everything up again. I think I went back to a somewhat generic focus, but then got kind of obsessed at one point or another with architectural themes, botanical themes, colour themes... which leads us back to my current obsession with street art.

Of course I can already predict that my next obsession, albeit a brief one, with be with all things Sydney... but since I'm only going to be there for four days I'm not sure how long that one's going to last.

Current Mood:

montage monday: port adelaide redux

A second Port Adelaide Montage for the year's first Monday Montage...

But even though I was very careful, both in the shots I chose to take, and then the ones I selected to put into the montage, there's still one shot that's common to both of them. Ah well, at least it was only one.

Oh, and in case anybody is wondering... center row, second from the right... that's a guy in (what I assume is) an inflatable taxi costume. I never got close enough, thankfully, to find out why... but that's what it was. Weird.

I'm still feeling a little out of it this morning... I mean I slept really well (how could I not?) but I don't know that I necessarily got ENOUGH sleep to make up for the lack of same. I could blame my seeming lack of organisation this morning on the "not enough sleep" thing, but it's not really that I'm unorganised, more that I'm easily distracted...

Thank god I accidentally picked up a large bottle of Farmers Union Strong Iced Coffee instead of my regular choice of the Light version... I think it will come in handy.

It was weird yesterday actually... As I was leaving J's place I was completely and totally wide awake, then I was reasonably okay once I got home, and stayed that way for most of the day (although I did go out for a large chunk of the afternoon, so that probably helped, since I had visual stimulation), but when I got home and was having a couple of eggs on toast for tea (exciting, hey!) and watching the special features on one of my Christmas DVDs I could feel myself getting more and more and more and more and more tired, so in the end I came in here and fiddled on the computer for a while, which seemed to help... and then for the rest of the night I was fine. But like I said earlier, almost as soon as my head hit the pillow I was out for the count.

I didn't even get sleepy while I was watching teevee later in the night, which was good, because even though I wasn't (and still might not be) overly impressed with the idea of an Australian version of "Who Do You Think You Are?", the first episode last night, featuring Jack Thompson was actually surprisingly good. Even better was the first episode of the three part miniseries on the ABC, The Line of Beauty, which is described on the BBC website as "a story of love, class, sex and money in the Thatcherite 1980s". Which isn't really surprising, since it's based on Alan Hollinghurst's novel of the same name... and while I haven't read it, I have read his first book The Swimming Pool Library, which could almost have the exact same description applied to it (well, maybe not the "money" part). But I can't wait for episodes two and three... the miniseries is really quite good. And the star, Dan Stevens, is pretty damn cute and has that "dark floppy haired, lighter eyed" thing I quite like.

So that was about it really...

We'll just have to see what, if anything, this afternoon holds.

Current Mood:

montage monday: backstreets five

This is the follow-on Montage from last weekend's Sidestreets adventuring... this one being all about the colours, rather than the previous monochromatic effort.

Sweet Georgia Brown... I'm so VERY glad that Christmas only comes around once a year... out of the last three weekends, I've spent two of them down at Ma's and haven't gotten home much before midnight both times... actually last night I didn't get home much before 12:30am...

Yesterday was the ritual "Making of the Goodies"... and by "ritual" I mean "the second time I've been involved, but the process has been going on every Christmas since what feels like forever".

However, before I'd even left the house yesterday morning I realised that we forgot to get the makings for my "self invented" Rocky Road... and if the shops opened at a reasonable hour on Sundays instead of 11am, then I could have called off on the way to Ma's to get the stuff, but alas our shops are stoopid, so I'm going to have to go out at some point today and get the Turkish Delight (since it was the only thing we couldn't get when we did go out for more supplies around lunchtime).

I also decided, after Saturday's little "conversation" with the random guy about his dislike for the street art around his building, that I should probably make a brief detour into the city and snap some shots of the blue bird Ma and I had seen (that's a bird painted in blue... not a "bluebird") before he destroyed it. And I'm glad I did...

After I snapped the bird, I managed to find another Benzobot in the little maze of alleyways... then, because I'd caught sight of a very rough Benzoface in one of the streets on the opposite side of the road as we drove by on Saturday, I swung the car down a couple of streets looking for the piece in question. What I ended up finding, after I got out of the car again, was a whole new mural wall that I'm SURE can't have been there last weekend... although it was opposite the Benzobot in the previous link, and maybe I was so focused on that that I didn't see the other piece. Which, given the size of it (it took up the WHOLE wall) is pretty unlikely, especially since I had my "Street Art Spider Senses" cranked up to about 103 at the time.

I can tell that I'm going to have to keep my eye on that particular little section of town... maybe head down that way every couple of Sundays or something... see what's what, what's new, what's been painted over.

Anyway, after I snapped a bunch of shots, I got back in the car, cranked the stereo and headed northwards to Ma's...

And pretty much the rest of the day was spent "cooking"... by which I mean occasional use of the stove, but mostly the construction of vast quantities of goodies involving desecrated coconut, condensed milk and a food processor...

On the plus side, unlike last year I didn't overload on chocolate at any point... which was a bonus... post chocolate making barfy feelings are never good.

On the right there we have Exhibit A concerning what happens when I start getting a little bored and/or creative while making mince tarts (oh Robinson's Fruit Mince... how I love thee!)... it started because Ma was cutting out the pastry and I was putting it all together in the trays, including cutting the two little vent holes in the top... except she's bought, in her words "good pastry" and "crappy pastry"... and so we could tell the difference once they were cooked she asked me to cut three vent holes in the crappy ones...

Which led to me kinda making them in a little circle/triangle... and then after making one of the cuts a little longer by accident, I got little "sleepyface" mince tarts... some were more successful than others after they were cooked... but the one in the photo was my favourite... so CUTE! And I just ate him for "morning tea"... hehehe. So I just need to remember next year to make little faces on ALL of the mince tarts.

Unless of course people have some sort of aversion to eating something with a face when it comes time to hand out the tarts this year.

Other than the seemingly endless run of mince tarts (I have no idea how many dozen we made in the end) we made the usual Christmas suspects... Chocolate Balls, Sherry Truffles (now with extra sherry, because I was measuring... which is funny because I don't drink), Rum Balls (ditto for the extra rum in these ones), Hazelnut Delights (I love a recipe that has three ingredients in it, plus a chocolate coating and a hazelnut for decoration), Chocolate Puddings (these only have two ingredients... Christmas pudding and brandy... although the decoration stage is more fiddly) and a new entry this year (which I don't actually remember the exact name of), White Chocolate Apricot Brandy Truffles... which turned out really pretty, what with the white chocolate coating and the little grey/silver sprinkles we put on top of them. And as a double bonus, since they're white "chocolate" (which isn't chocolate by any stretch of the imagination, since it contains no cocoa) and neither Ma or I will touch them with a bargepole, they'll pad out the sets we're giving away to people, make everything go further... plus they're completely visually different from ANYTHING else we've made, so that will work nicely too.

We did just seem to have time vanish on us at some point though... and I don't know why. We were doing really well, and it was only about noon, and then suddenly we lost all this time and it was nearly 4pm... granted we did go out for more ingredients (for the puddings and the apricot things and the hazelnut ones), and wander around the shops a bit, but I could have sworn we weren't out for THAT long... but obviously we were.

So by the time we'd done all the making of, and some of the chocolate dipping (note to self for next year: the small end of a double ended melon baller makes a PERFECT truffle chocolate dipper/extractor) it was time for the Bill Oddie episode of Who Do You Think You Are (which I'm LOVING... although at the same time I'm kind of dreading when they switch over to the Australian version... oh, and Tom, too bad you're in the UK currently, next week it's Nigella!), so we had to stop for an hour for that... then finish up the stuff involving white chocolate, and tidy up...

Which made it at least 9:30... and we still had to finish wrapping the last of my presents for Christmas... including J's hamper... which, I have to say, got seriously out of control at some point... and the poor little Bart Simpson shopping bag is not only bursting at the seams, but is also filled to overflowing. That's partially my fault, because I wanted all the little things wrapped in cellophane and tissue separately so that I could put appropriate, amusing and sometimes esoterically worded gift tags on them all. I did forget to take a photo of it all spread out before we wrapped it though, so I'm either going to need to do that after he's opened it, or just take a shot of all the wrapped stuff... I dunno... we'll see.

So that took us what seemed like forever (and with about sixteen individual items, is it any wonder)... then there were the things for Sheeba's kids, which didn't actually take that much fiddling (although I did dress up the little bag for RubbaJelly's present with some ribbon and one of our random Christmas decoration things, since it looked a bit meagre otherwise)... it's "interesting" though... the presents actually go in reverse size order to the age of the child in question... Showgirl is getting the biggest gift, and RubbaJelly the smallest...

But by the time we'd finished all of everything, cleared up a bit, packed all the stuff I had to bring home into the car, etc... it was pretty much midnight... then of course when I got home again I had to unpack everything and wind down before I could go to bed... so it was pretty much 1am by the time I rolled myself into bed.

Which was then followed by my usual 6am alarm...

And now I think I'll head off to buy Turkish Delight...

Current Mood:

montage monday: backstreets four monochrome

Obviously this is from yesterday's Sidestreets and Alleyways wander... which I will freely admit turned into more of an Urban Street Art Safari... there was just SO much stuff to choose from.

So much so in fact, that as I was picking out shots for a Montage I realised that I'd selected almost enough for TWO montages (so guess what happens next week!)... and that a vast number of the shots I'd taken had this whole black & white/monochrome colour theme happening in them. I know it's not exactly TRUE black & white... there's quite a bit of red in there, some blue, bits of yellow and brown... but I think it's the most colour-themic montage I've done since the Colour Story Montage last August... and before that the individual Colour Theme Montages I did way back at the beginning of 2006.

I think I might need to take a little vacation from the Sidestreets Project for just a little while... maybe photograph something else, because while I was trying to fall asleep last night my brain was just throwing out all these random street art images... not stuff that I'd seen... but completely random stuff it seemed to just make up out of thin air. Scary.

And that's really about all the new news that I have... which, I know, isn't much... I do have to sort out getting Ma's 2008 Calendar printed (an updated version of last year's one, but with pictures by me instead of seahorses... although she did end up talking me into making a seahorse one for her Workgirly even after I'd repeatedly said it wasn't going to happen)... but that doesn't necessarily need to happen this week, since I'm just going to get Orificeworks to print it as well as binding it this time around. I also need to make a decision on the last of her presents and poke Stu to get him to finally give me something he's had since before Ma's birthday... *grrrr*...

Other than that... I'm just "enjoying" the slipperly downward slope between here and Christmas...

Current Mood:

montage monday: backstreets three

A very "street art heavy" Montage from Wednesday's walk for today...

There are a couple of "odd" images that I just want to discuss briefly... In the top right hand corner, yes, that IS a shoe... actually there were two shoes there, inside this fenced off vacant lot (I'd slipped through the not terribly well secured fence to grab a few shots... the grey spiral and the Pikachu looking thing in "armour" on the fourth row, and the red wave with black squiggles on the top row)... they looked a little plaintive laying there all on their ownsome. Also, the bottom right corner does, in fact, say Flickr... and that was the way I found it... there was this warehouse doorway (biiiiiiiiig doorway), and on the metal frame on the inside of the arch were what I assume were magnetic letters, although I never actually touched them... there were more words and letters, but my eye went to that one word straight away. Odd.

And speaking of odd, the shot next to the shoes... I may have to run a large version of that, because whoever lived in that house obviously wasn't taking their medication... there were six or seven signs up about how people had been "stealing" the sign maker's songs... people like Madonna... Telstra (with the help of "Lobster Woman"... your guess is as good as mine at that one)... Peter Gabriel (although that one may be the least outlandish, given the title of the song in question)... k.d. lang... and Celeine Dion. Amusing, but sad.

Let's stay in the realm of odd just for a minute shall we... now I've had various and sundry profiles on a variety of "gay personal" sites for some time now. Specifically Gaydar, but other places too... with Gaydar though I'm fussy about what kind of photos I use (one bad experience will do that to you). But last Monday, since I now have the cute, short, new blonde 'do going on I thought I would take some new photos of varying appropriateness levels and update some of my profiles. Which I did... I pulled various things out of the wardrobe and had my own little photoshoot right here in the house. Some of the shots were better than others, as is always the case... but there was one shot that was kind of interesting, because I'd moved my head right when it was being taken, so there was some blur going on... blur, but interesting blur you understand. And I was wearing an all black outfit which is usually always flattering. Now I don't know if it's because I'm in a black outfit and I'm sitting so the edges of my body are a little blended into shadow, or what, but since the photo went "live" I've probably increased the number of people viewing my profile by a factor of about 20... seriously... before I added the photo I got maybe one or two "tracks" a day... yesterday it was just under 20. What shallow little creatures we homosexualists are... of course I say that because people are looking, but I'm not getting any more messages when I would usually get... which is to say... none... *wink*. Shallow, shallow, shallow.

I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning after last night's little excursion... but I did, as always, and toddled off for my walk... and on the way back I kept a special eye out for the Home of Myer Lady... and it was exactly the house that I thought it was. Scary.

I ended up getting an answer this morning from the folks at Norton... well, somebody somewhere in an Indian "call centre" on Norton's behalf anyway... fortunately, after I cleared out the Window's Temp directory of all the files, they stopped replicating on their own... so now I just need to get around to following some of the other advice in the email to clear up the rest of the files and maybe work out what the hell was wrong in the first place. I wasn't overly optimistic when I read the beginning of the email's broken English, but once he got to the portion where he could just copy and past existing answers it made more sense. Unexpectedly helpful actually.

Now, because I have a bad ongoing case of "Inside Legs" (ie they almost NEVER see the sun) I've been trying out the Johnson's Holiday Skin Body Lotion... that stuff with the "gradual" fake tan in it. I don't know about the gradual to be honest... in certain spots it seems less gradual than others. It's not bad though... although interestingly it seems to work faster and better on places where you're already a little bit tanned (like my arms, and oddly enough, my feet... must be all the barefoot/thong wearing)... but my legs do seem to look browner... but it's hard to tell because it IS so gradual... you end up thinking "hang on, wasn't I ALWAYS this colour?". Because it's "body" lotion, I'm not brave enough to try it out on my face (plus I know I'd miss spots and end up blotchy and unfortunate looking)... but I don't hate the results... even if I'm the only one who ends up seeing them. Mmmmm... tan.

I know there were some other things I was going to babble about... but I honestly can't think of any of them right at this precise moment (and the ones I can think of don't seem all that terribly interesting or important right now)... possibly because I need some lunch...

Current Mood:

montage monday: backstreets two

Yet another page from both the Book of Monday Montage AND the Book of Backstreets and Alleyways... and because I like some of these shots a lot, there will be some that will be making a reappearance as larger versions later (actually the top right shot was already featured on Friday).

I'm not sure there's really a whole lot to muse about actually... pretty much all the "exciting" stuff happened on Saturday, and I spent around half the day yesterday painting...

In the realm of General Weirdness... the next door neighbour who I spoke to on Wednesday during the manhandling of Hard Rubbish, decided on Friday night to put up at least part of his Christmas decorations... which would be fine, if not a little early, were it not for the fact that the "decoration" in question is a reasonably huge (as these things go) light-up, flashing Santa in sleigh with two reindeer (who's legs appear to move, hence where the flashing part comes in)... and from where it's hanging, it pretty much shines straight into my bedroom windows. I was having a little bit of a persecution complex on Friday night, so it was just one more thing that was going on in the world that was designed to make me insane... especially if it had stayed on the whole night (which it could have had I not mentioned to said neighbour about the flashing light on his alarm system and how annoying that was), but luckily it seems to go off at some point between 10:45 and 11:00... but I haven't worked out if it's on a timer, or if they just switch it off when they go to bed. If it is on a timer, and I can catch said neighbour to ask him, I might ask if he can move the time up to about 10:30, which is my bedtime (in theory anyway).

Actually, to be perfectly honest, even though it's a highly tacky piece of crap (and a month too early), it's starting to grow on me a little... but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

And while we're on the subject of my removal of Hard Rubbish... a couple of things... firstly, I ended up with the strangest set of bruises on my right arm the day after... two little round ones around the back of my bicep, and a spray of really tiny things just inside my elbow that would have looked like insect bites if I hadn't known they were bruises. Very odd.

Secondly... dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb neighbours... after I'd busted my balls in the morning (and a large portion of the stuff that I'd put out there had already been lifted by the Seagull Patrol), Dufus from upstairs called the landlord who came around and they proceeded to find a bunch of NEW stuff to take out to the curb (although whether they would have bothered moving anything at all if I hadn't already lined the nature strip with junk is anybody's guess). Now I have NO idea where the hell this stuff came from... I know there's a little store room out the back, but there seemed to be way too much stuff that I wouldn't have thought would have fitted in there... but the nice men came and hauled it all off to wherever the hell they haul it off to on Thursday morning... but then I went into the car park around the back yesterday... there's a DIFFERENT mattress and base sitting around there in the same spot as the three I moved.

D-U-M-B-A-S-S-E-S!

Speaking of dumb... I mentioned on Friday that my blog doesn't show up in Google anymore... if you put "yaniblog" into Google, you don't get my blog come up ANYWHERE. You do get the somewhat disturbingly long list of 15000 results for that phrase, the majority of which (at least on the first several pages) seem to be links to my blog... but nothing that actually points here. And when I tried the whole "site: URL" thing, nothing! (well, not NOTHING, I still get four responses, but none of them are this site)... so I don't quite know what the hell is going on. I suspected maybe something was up when I stopped getting so many weird search terms showing up in my stats (or anything at all really), but I figured it was just a drop off in people visiting. Now as far as I know I haven't changed or altered any of the settings on my blog to stop it being searched on... in fact, I couldn't even FIND an option for that when I looked... and I tried resubmitting my blog to the search thing on Google, but it doesn't seem to have helped.

*waves to Google search programs* Hello! Over here, hello, can you see me? I'm still breathing and stuff... honest!

And it's a good thing that I don't ever start showing random symptoms for a variety of possible illnesses, because I think I could quite easily turn into a hypochondriac... late last week I discovered that there was a little sore spot next to my lip... which over the weekend turned into kind of scab (probably because I kept fiddling with it), so I became convinced that it was a cold sore. Now, I've never in my life HAD a cold sore, so technically I wouldn't know one if it came up and bit me in the butt (except that doesn't seem to be one of the ways you can get them)... and of course, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

"Around 90 per cent of adults have herpes simplex antibodies in their bloodstream, which means that they have been infected with the virus at some time. However, the first (or primary) infection does not usually cause any symptoms"... well at least that's a bonus, nothing potentially slutty I've done recently caused it...

"Primary Infection Symptoms include: Fever, tiredness, pain inside the mouth and on the gums, a sore throat, swollen neck glands"... great, so how do I distinguish that from either dental issues, or the semi-annual bouts of what I've always assumed were something to do with my tonsils...

"Triggers: Sunlight, exposure to windy conditions, emotional or physical stress"... yes, well I've been getting more than enough sun lately, it has been a bit windy, and hello, stress...

"Avoid: Close contact (such as kissing and hugging) with newborn and young babies"... oh great, what was one of the first things I did when I met Sheba's adorable SCN3... there was some baby foot-kissing... so now I feel like a schmuck...

Although the website did say that "cold sores are blisters around the mouth and nose, caused by the herpes simplex virus"... and what I have doesn't actually seem to be a BLISTER... and it's kinda fading a bit now...

So it's either a cold sore, or else I just burned the sensitive skin around my mouth with the thermonuclear tomato on the overly cheesy pizza I made myself last Thursday...

It's Feast Festival time here in Adelaide again... they really needed to make that sound gayer somehow... it doesn't sound like a gay festival, it sounds like a food thing (and really, is it me, or could their website BE any slower!). Anyway, the parade was on Saturday night, but even if I'd been planning to go, I'd had too much happen already on Saturday to decide to reemerge onto the scene...

There isn't really much of anything that I'm interested in doing or seeing to be honest... I did briefly consider going to one of the forums, specifically the one on body image... but when you've read the full description and realise that you've either slept with or know half of the male panelists (there are only four of them in total, so it's not as bad as it sounds) and you know that both of them have an "ideal" body shape in it's own niche... you kind of lose interest in that too...

Yeah, I know, that sounded childish to me too...

So yeah... other than two unsuccessful attempt to make a shrinky dink (remember back in the day when you could make them yourself out of chip packets?) out of the label from my big Iced Coffee bottles (one attempt was too hot and left in too long and came out all shriveled and brown... the other was way too low and didn't do a thing), that's about all the things that are rambling around my head at present...

Now I need to decide between having some lunch or going into town briefly since I don't know if I'll have time on Friday... I'm thinking maybe town, since it's only going to get hotter during the week...

Current Mood:

montage monday: petals in the park

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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