Girlie Shopping

 

New Mall seating. This was cool! Some of the other was very ordinary.

No this is not about sleazy men going on the hunt for some underage female ready and perhaps nots so willing to massage their way to a happy ending. That is just a hideous thought! Oh dear, I might have to go out and surround myself with pretty things again to get the image out of my head.

Nik and I trouped out to Pac Fair today for a little look around. Some of the new centre has opened up and we thought we should venture in before it gets too old and tired.

The building works are hideous and would put off many shoppers, except the most determined. The noise and the mess and the lack of signage could well have seen us just do a drive through had we not really fancied a spot of shopping, although even a drive through was not as easy as you might think cos where there should have been a sign saying NO EXIT AHEAD, there were arrows  and hope where there should have been none.

Once inside, the lingerie section of good old Myers was as predictable as ever, so we made our way quickly through to upstairs where we enjoyed a lovely little look around at pretty things but found no photo frame which was the only thing on my shopping list. Never mind. Onwards and outwards we went.

The Mall section looked much the same though some of the shops had changed hands and Crab Tree and Evelyn was gone and this was a bugger cos that was on Nik's list.

Downstairs to the cafe where we were told that there wasn't much left cos they were using up all their ingredients cos they were closing on Saturday. Bugger again. Except that we were pleased for the heads up and grateful not to be sitting down for stale stuff ready to hit the bin on Saturday. I mean they couldn't even make a pancake, so if the flour and eggs and milk are gone what else could be left?

So off to the new section. Some of it was lovely, but really as I had rather hoped for something in the way of the Westfield at Carindale, or Sydney Centre or White City in London, I was mostly disappointed. What grabs your attention immediately is the HUGE JB Hi Fi store with double storey bright yellow windows with all the garish signage and discount stickers. I mean classy it is not. Pretty it is not. Inviting it is certainly not.

But passed this eyesore is a cafe which has an outside eating area next to the river. Yes please!

We order some stuff and then the 11 year old on the til asked me if I wanted to use my seniors card! Well after I climbed inelegantly over the counter and chocked him with his bib and dummie, he said a sorry that wasn't worth a damn. Little turd! And there was me thinking I looked OK cos I had gotten out of my house clobber for the first time in days. Little upstart!

We went into MUSE which is a flash Pillow Talk and I fell upon a doona cover that was too pretty to leave in the shop. Ah lovely. and even though I obviously looked like an old woman I managed to carry it most of the time as we trawled through other pretty stores looking for nothing in particular. Shoes and skirts and dresses and togs and makeup bowls and cups and more photo frames. Our actual carry out purchases were few but the good done to the girlie psyche was wonderful, the dickhead's gaff not withstanding.

Roof down and home we went.

Girlie look sees... just gotta be done.

Online Forums = Bullying and Poor Comprehension

I do love a good old banter. I rarely find myself surrounded by either minions too scared to utter an opinion or herds of people who agree wholeheartedly with every pearl that slides out of my mouth.

That's the beauty of living amongst others.

I have never lacked the confidence to say what I think, and even though I am pretty arrogant about reckoning I am right, I know there are lots of people with other ideas that I find interesting in the hearing and occasionally so compelling that I am lead to research to possibly change my beliefs.

So life is a colourful leap through lively conversations with people that I know and like.

Until that is, you venture onto online forums.

Now it should be noted I guess that people enjoy the safety of the company of like minded souls. So if you are madly anti abortion then security could probably found in some fundamentalist religious right to life forum, though if you are looking for directions to such, I am sadly bloody useless, and if you have always been a card carrying unionist with greeny leanings, then being part of the right wing conservatives forum probably wouldn't be for you.

I read all sorts of online stuff. I think it is a habit built from years of having such a shit knee that sitting was my preferred position, and I am yet to wean myself form any of it.

Trolls, which used to be those nasties hiding under the bridge who scared little kids, seem to enjoy winding up the settled secure audiences of forums, by making inflammatory statements and then running away.

These fools are easy enough to ignore even though sometimes their outrageous nastiness is so mean that you wonder what in the world can have possible slapped 'em hard enough to leave 'em so brittle and miserable. It is ridiculously easy to really let someone have it, just tap away and click enter and walk away.

It's pathetic though isn't it? So cowardly and puerile.

Sometimes I read stuff and I so vehemently disagree with it that a comment flies out of my fingers. I don't try to sugar coat what I think and I don't second guess every word I write. I just write what I think and why I think it. It is an issue based response, not personal. How could it be personal, when I have no idea how to see through the anonymity of cyberness, to meet the authors of the opinions with which I disagree,

It would be a waste of my time and effort to spend time on name calling or making derogatory remarks about the arguments of others, so I am always surprised when I am the brunt of a personal attack, too often thrust by trolls who have neither fully read nor comprehended my comment.

Anyway, I don't suppose this modern phenomena is ever likely to disappear. It is just too easy to cowardly and ignorantly slap away at someone. It is so common place that perhaps I should write some guidelines to present to kids so they can become resilient to it all.

An intelligent exchange is far more common in person preferably accompanied by food and maybe a bit of a bevvie.

Party Weekend and Shithouse Fudge

It's no secret that cooking is not my favourite thing to do, but eating is definitely one of my fav things to do.

As we have people coming down for the weekend and as we are all going out to eat, I thought the least I could do was to whip up some little treaties.

So the bickies I made are about gone cos they are Steve's favourites. I should have been wiser and made less yummy to Steve ones if I wanted them to last.

Then I thought I'd have a go a individual baked cheese cakes. These taste pretty good, even if they look nothing like bought ones. I changed the recipe - no surprises there and added some salted caramel stuff to some of them so how they have turned out will be a bit of a wait and see affair and maybe after a few drinks it wont matter anyway.

Then I fancied some old fashioned hard chocolate fudge.

Back in the day when I was married and Belly was a lot shorter, a girlfriend Gayle and I took a stall at the local market every weekend, well a few times anyway. She made the best biscuits and way back then I could whip up fudge that melted knees and stacked on kilos just from smelling distance.

We'd bake all week and then head out at some appalling time in the morning with our good and a fold up table and a couple of chairs and signs that screamed out "Nothing over a Dollar". Gayle had 2 kids so the 3 of 'em were always disappointed that we sold out, and we girls had a fine old time counting our cash over a well earned drink when we got home.

Anyway the making of the fudge was second nature. I don't recall having a failure and I am not sure I even had a sugar thermometer.

Today I googled 'Old fashioned hard chocolate fudge recipe' and up they popped. I picked one that sounded sort of familiar, except that the temperatures were in degrees F instead of hardball.

It took a ridiculously long time to get the sugar mixture to 134 degrees F and then quite a long time for the temp to drop back to 110 degrees and then I attacked it with my wooden spoon cos it said no metal beaters and then the shit got stuck in the saucepan and the bits that I could poke off the slab were more gratings than chunks.

What a fucking mess I have made.

As I may well have to throw away my good saucepan, it seems like an expensive failure.

How could I have been so competent when I was in my mid twenties and now even with a recipe I can bugger up what really should be quite simple?

Ho bloody hum. Just lucky that the fridge has a good supply of sweeties and plenty of beer.  

Stinker!

It was not a day to be too busy. Up at silly o'clock and whipped up a batch of Macadamia and Cherry biscuits. This was necessary as I had banged on about being unable to do any baking cos of the stinky filthy state of the oven which has since of course been rectified, so bickies is was.
Yummo and one happy Stevie.

Out to the park with dog and there was chaos at the village. Scuttle and gossip had it that someone had died of an overdose in the village loos. There were plenty of police and detectives and cars and police tape. Sad and exciting all at the same time. Seems that best gossip was that it happened last night and the investigation was perfunctory today, the rest of the skuttle seemed hyberbolic so I wont spread it further.

We had sloped off to the pictures to see 'The Second Best Marigold Hotel' last night, - yeh not too impressed, but on the way home we saw lots of police cars in and about the village so it's possible that they were starting to get things sorted.

Just as an aside, we thought we might have gone for Yum Cha in China Town before the movie, but I wouldn't race out there unless you are keen for a happy ending massage. There was bugger all open and certainly nothing that could tempt us in. Very disappointing!

Coffee and a chat with the officers standing guard at the loos and then home to grab the mower for a park path pass AGAIN. Ho bloody hum.

Pool, washing, tender attention to my baby herbs, and then collapsed onto the couch for a movie veg.

Back to the pool and on with the aircon, and just some snags and salad for dinner.

Done sod all but am pooped. Shit I hate the heat! Roll on winter...please.

Elf and Safety at it again.

We thought we'd take a leisurely drive down the coast today to Brunswick Heads. It's a bit less than an hour's drive, unless of course the council somewhere decides it is necessary to dig up a bit of concrete on the far left side of the left hard shoulder of the road.

This was the case today just before the Tugan tunnel. 2 lanes needed to merge into 1 and that meant stoppity stoppity stop stop, little bit of start for bloody miles. We figured that there must have been some enormous smash up between 25 cars and a truck for good measure and that countless folk were either dead or seriously maimed.

We inched our way forward while discussing the much debated idea that if an accident happens as you open your car door and a bike rider is flung off as they ride passed you, not the obligatory 1 metre away, while undertaking a truck, then you should be found guilty of something terrible increasing to murder if the biker unfortunately dies.

We wondered when and in deed how accidents became illegal. We are a 'Blame Game' society.  When something bad happens, it means that someone else must be responsible. So when I had cancer, it must have been someone's FAULT. Shit I hope it wasn't MY fault, much better if it was someone else's because then I can lay blame and maybe even sue 'em, maybe get 'em locked away. Yippee!

This became a lively discussion and I suppose it was lucky that we agreed on the idiocy of it all.

It passed the 30 minutes it took us to limp our way to 'Ground Zero'

2 lanes did in fact merge into 1. Soon after there was a walloping truck with an electric sign more than a storey high with a graphic of a someone digging dirt, and a 40km speed sign. There were the usual bright orange witches' hats shoving the cars over to the very right lane, leaving free the left lane and the hard shoulder. Because of the positively glacial pace we were going, we had more than sufficient time to count the workers and observe the work being carried out.

After the big truck sign thing, standing safely behind the barriers, were 2 blokes about 20 metres apart leaning on SLOW signs. I wondered if the signs were meant to be instructions or descriptions of the holders - maybe for a surprise both - multi purpose! That would be more unusual for the council. How wonderful.

Just a little further on there were 3 more blokes milling around on the edge of the hard shoulder, one was pushing on a jack hammer, the other 2 chatting. Maybe they were doing rock paper scissors to see who was next on the machine, or maybe they were texting through their lunch order, or maybe they were calculating where the closest loo was and whether they should even be 'on the job' as it was too far away. A small bit of concrete was being broken up. Why we couldn't say, perhaps because it was there.

I didn't know what was being done, but I would bet that if it were being carried out by a private contractor not beholden to any unions, it would have been done more efficiently, for less money and with far less disruption to the traffic.

The cost of the blame game and the old elf and safety bastard is out of control.

The number of people in charge of the 'telling what to do' now so far outstrips the number of people 'doing'. More clerks and administrators than medical personnel in hospitals, ever increasing numbers of office staff and aids in schools while the numbers of permanent placements for teachers dwindle.

Doers are being outnumbered by tellers. I wonder what happens when the doers really get the shits up with being told by people who haven't got a clue.

Is a little revolution possible?

I doubt that the blokes with the SLOW signs will get a look in.

Health Insurance - Government Sanctions Rip-Off

I am a snob when it comes to health care! I want to pick my doctor and if I need to be in hospital, it's a given that I already feel like shit, so sharing a room with half a dozen other sickos, would hold no joy for me. I want my own fucking room! My own loo with my own skid marks and my own shower with my own pubes! My own pillow to sob into without fear of pissing off the neighbours, my own little bit of silence as and when I want it.

Consequently I have ALWAYS had private health insurance. I have paid for this since I was 19. As a newly wed I was happy to forego stuff like food just to make sure that my health was covered, and as my unreliable body has far too frequently failed me, I am very pleased to say that I have made good use of the insurance.

But it's March and it's time to stump up the cash again. Now I am very lucky that Steve forks out for this now cos it is hellishly expensive, even though it is a gamble I have long won.

Up until I went to live the high life in London, various Governments had been grateful for those with private insurance cos they were not a strain on the public system. The Oz government was definitely ahead in my case as I claimed for everything from Childbirth to cancer through my private fund.

BUT in a move that I just cannot fathom for a conservative government in 2000, Howard's conies introduced penalty rates for folk without insurance after the age of 31. This wasn't me, or so I thought.

I gallivanted around for 7 years and paid no premiums of course, as I was out of the country and was unable to make any use of it, but imagine my surprise when I got back with a Pom in tow and we went to buy some insurance and even though he's older and has never had any insurance, my premiums are dearer. Yeh I have some fucking penalty rate cos I dared to go away and not pay for that which I could not use!

I was 7 years out of the system and the government as a gesture of generosity decided that I could go for about 3 and a half years, but after that they were gonna slap me. And so I have a penalty rate of 4% for the 3 and a half years of extra cavorting.

But it is possible to whittle away at the penalty percentage, but that takes 10 YEARS. So for 10 fucking years I will pay the penalty rate for daring to be away and not paying for insurance, I couldn't use, even though I had continuously been covered for more than 20 YEARS.!

I just can't see the economic advantage to the government in making private insurance so expensive that people are driven sobbing in to the public system.

I am sure this is a simplistic view and it is certainly anecdotal in the extreme, but every March it gives me the screaming irrits to see that my premium is more expensive than the older immigrant, who has paid no tax and has contributed nothing to the Australian way - no offense Steve.

Roll on April when the bill is paid and I can forget about it again til next year!

The Last of Innocence

I have been wondering at what age kids become more adolescent and less childlike and I reckon it is likely to be sometime soon after 10.

I say this because at yesterday's party the kids were sort of on the cusp. Bell was concerned that as we were venturing into the unknown public territory, we might lose one or two and she was not looking forward to explaining that to the parents, in case they were truly enamoured with their off spring and got all a bit shitty cos we came home a few short. I wasn't worried about that cos I reckoned, rightly as it turned out, that they had not been let loose too often so there was still a significant degree of nerves which led them to not wander too far from us and to nearly always move in a pack. Consequently, they were easy to keep track of.

 

The Gang, Travis a little out of focus at the back - ok a lot out of focus.

So I figure we have maybe 2 more years to come to grips with the sneaky little fuckers who disappear behind the dunnies for a sly fag or a quick grope, and then we will have to put on the police hats which will never fit well on either of us. Yes then we will need to be on the hunt for drugs and trying to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

It might happen even quicker than that now that Queensland has caught up wit the rest of the world by sending Year 7 kids off to 'Big School' 

Our 5 kids - 4 boys and a girl, who was definitely no shrinking violet, were excellent. The party was LONG! 5 Hours and we were wrecked by the end of, but so too were the kids. They Jumped at Sky Zone and swam and picnicked at South Bank and played ball games and ate cake at Bell and Zig's.

 

Sky Zone - Aptly named.

 

South Bank - about to hit the beach

 

 

Bloody brilliant cake that Zig managed to chop up into 5 pieces - they were door stopper size!

 

My 2 lovelies.

 

It had to be a new format this year for the double digit party and even though the planning was a complicated and more than a little back and forward to the parents of the kids, once we jumped in it was great fun! - for all of us.