No more sleeps!

Yippee, today we are off. or if you want to be pedantic, tomorrow we are off at 12.50am but as we are heading to the airport today, via dinner with the Belly and Zig I reckon today is close enough, although again not accurate if you consider that possibility of plane sleeping, cos that might be another one...but fuck it it's close!

So I slept well last night which is most unusual. I thought I'd be stressing about getting up and washing sheets and shit, but no I must have been pretty calm, and I will tell you why I think this.

My before waking dream went like this.

I was in Paris. I'd entered a cooking contest and the preliminary stuff was people cooking up banquets for the other contestants, to show off or intimidate.  I'd dutifully attended a couple and then decided that it all really wasn't for me....what a revelation! even in a dream I don't want to cook.

So I hired a pushie and took off into the peak hour traffic. It was exciting. The cars and trucks and buses were frantic and I just tootled along trying to mind my own business, but when I came to a 'Time's Square' type intersection I was in the wrong lane and so really upset the locals. Luckily for all, the lights turned red to match the colour of the faces all around, and I stopped and waved and laughed and shouted gleefully, 'It's ok I am a foreigner.'

This did not go down too well so I pulled over into a side street and momentarily lamented that I was going the wrong way for coffee.

But I rode along this little side street and enjoyed looking at the close packed strange looking houses until I came to one where the front door was open. Never being shy about things like this, in I strode. There was a package in the mail box so I picked it up and opened it - yeh definitely not too shy, and inside was some strange wooden sculpture like a long pipe with a number of bowls except that the bowls had not been carved out so more like spheres on a branch. Anyway, as I stood in the  lounge room I became aware of very loud snoring. Too nervous about getting caught or smacked over the head with a shovel by an angry old bloke, pissed cos I opened his pressie, I legged it outta there and flew onto my bike and went looking for a loo.

How often are really cool dreams interrupted by the very real need to pee?

If this all means that the plane is gonna crash, well please just don't tell me. Advanced warnings of those sorts are not welcome. But if it predicts a long lovely adventure with no cooking then I will be a happy girl.

London here we come.

The Bachelor and Now the Bachelorette Reality Bullshit.

I am very pleased to say that I have avoided like the plague, watching even the promos for The Bachelor. On the rare occasions when I have just not been fast enough to ferret out the remote and when someone has popped up on The Project or similar, I have all but thrown shit at the tellie. The whole premise of pitting all these heavily made-up women against each other in a bid to win the attention of some bloke, well it just gives me the screaming irrits. The bloke is all powerful and the women are just too often directed to look like idiots or bitches, flouncing around in frocks left over from Dancing With The Stars. And maybe they are both but more likely some sponsor has said they would like to so and so to do such and such and so some embarrassment makes it's way onto our screens.

For an example of REALITY, it's piss poor. It is in deed so piss poor that if the dating scene was anything even remotely like this, I would fear for the future, cos no women I know would entertain the idea of it and so no more babies. Building designs would be limited to single person dwellings designed to collapse in a little over 50 years as the human environments just crumbled to dust.

Yep it is truly shitful, in my opinion.

So of course what do I see being advertised now? Oh how Fabulous! The Bachelorette. Not The Spinster or The Old Maid. And it appears that some young bird from the tellie, who got thrown over last year by some bloke, has overcome her psychological denting and dyed her hair and now is gonna get to choose a bloke from a herd of fellas again all in front of the cameras.

At a glance it might make feminists everywhere thrilled that the power will swing from the girlie hips instead of the fella's bits, but I rather doubt that is gonna be the case.

Currently the fella chooses and the women do their best to be appealing. The fella has the power, but the way this new thing is being touted, the fellas still have all the power cos they are fighting to win the girl. It seems the girl is still expected to be a passive receptacle who awaits filling.

I could be wrong about this. It is possible that the sponsors are different and the bosses at Channel 10 might have been involved in a tag team relay, swapping in people interested in showing men to be fools and freaks and giving one woman all the power, but I so very much doubt it.

The most exciting thing about this new show, as well as the EVENT FINALE or whatever other trite title will be bandied about for the current series, is that it will all happen while we are away, so it will just appear as periodic updates in the entertainment section of my online news, and I can very easily choose not to open that.

I am pleased however that I will get to see the final of Dancing with the Stars tonight. This I have thoroughly enjoyed and it does seem mostly REAL, even if the scoring sometimes seems a little contrived and I don't understand how the viewer votes get added in and I wonder what ever happened to Bruno.

How much Reality TV is too much?
Do you know where Bruno went?

Books V Kindle 'The Girl on the Train'

I have nearly always got my nose in some book or other. I'll read just about anything.

I like a paper back over a hard cover cos the heavy ones are just too easily dropped into the bath and are not easy to squash around for ergonomic bedtime reading.

However mostly I read on the Kindle. I used to have a Sony e reader, but I never really got on with it and then someone bought 'em out or some other business bullshit and the little thing might have blown a fuse or whatever, anyway my Pink Kindle replaced it. It is back lit or side shiny or moon faced or otherwise lit up so that you can read in any light, and I have adjusted the print so that it's small enough to have sufficient words on the page to make it worthwhile, and big enough so that glasses are not necessary. Win win I reckon.

I reckon the contents on a kindle might say quite a lot about the owner, a bit like what you have on your I pod.

Mine has got more than a fair share of Autobiographies and crime thrillers. So I must be a fame chasing psycho.

The latest one I read was, 'The Girl On The Train' This is a bloody good read.

However, as has not happened before, I found myself wanting a paperback. I have not suffered paper longing since I first charged up my little pink machine. It has kept me company in the bath and the hospital, every night in bed, and at leisurely coffees and I have never found it wanting, it's always been perfectly satisfying, BUT can I suggest that if you are gonna read this book, that you might think about borrowing it from a library - how about that for a very old fashioned idea, cos in the first half of the book I really wanted to be able to flip back to the title page of the previous chapters to notice Name and dates and on the Kindle this is just too much trouble, well it is for me at least, but then I am one of those saddos who still think about going to a library for reasons other than Carrie's wedding to Big.

Sorry if you thought this was gonna be a proper review. I will say this, 'the Girl on the Train' is fast moving - pun intended, a little disturbing and full of enough twists to keep you guessing til the end.

What are you reading at the moment?
Do you have a Kindle?

These Vacuum Baggies are Crap

 

 

 

 

So the spare room has become a dumping ground for those weird bits and pieces you just can't live without, but will routinely forget to pack when you are in the final flurry. When I walked in there this morning, I saw an explosion that might well be what is disturbing Dog.

 

The carefully packed and suckered out topper had marshmallowed out of the bloody suitcase and when I tried sucking it out again, I heard a whizzy noise and discovered that there was in deed a leak not in the zipper bit but in the flat part away from corners...Not a bad effort for a $20 bit of plastic.

 

Steve got up me cos I had been bloody minded and refused to get a bag from Howards Storage after the bullshit service over the kitchen rubbish bin, but that's another story. He rather naively suggested that if I had spent 20 bucks there the baggie would have been a good one. Lucky he wasn't standing by the stairs when I told him that I HAD paid 20 bucks for this piece of shit from Target. He'd have taken a tumble and we haven't got insurance to cover that. I reckon his silence might well have been covering his calculation of the cost at Howard's if Target are charging 20 bucks.

 

So I have had to reconsider the taking of the topper and I know this saga has been ridiculously long and on going, but instead of thinking of me, imagine the Princess and the Pea story, except that it is not lumps that worry me as much as the concrete type lack of lumps.

 

I'm gonna try inverting the bedding and will pop the doona on the bottom and sleep on top of it all. Not sure how the sheets will fit, so the logistics of this will need some practical investigation, but the really exciting thing about this revelation is that I can take another 5 KILOS of stuff, perhaps another handie and definitely another pair of shoes or 2, and some extra boredom fighting clothes. Yippee!

 

So there is the silver lining... there nearly always is one.

 

But I am left wondering if I can be arsed trying to return the faulty piece of poo. I would have to take the topper out and then try to fold the plastic as it was before. Yeh that'd be like trying to re-fold a large map sheet, something untested by the Sat-Nav generation, and then take it back and have the 12 year old stare at me like I am some sort of devious retard who purposefully misused the baggie, or maybe I have swapped it for an old brittle one, which could well resemble my demeanour.

 

I haven't read the small print on the box but I would not be the least bit surprised to find that you are in fact prohibited from putting something soft into the bag and vacuuming out the air with an electronic device. Perhaps I was meant to suck it out with a straw? Or maybe I was not supposed to pop the baggie into a suitcase because it is claustrophobic and has a fear of flying so it shit itself on purpose to avoid travelling further than to the linen cupboard. 

 

Anyway I am guessing that it might be pretty obvious that a return is not on the cards.

 

It's a good thing that I am more flexible than the 'Original Space Bag'

 

 

 

 

How clever are dogs?

Only 5 more Sleeps!

And things are getting a bit manic.

I started the day shoving the mattress topper into the big plastic bag and  then stuffed the walloper thing into my suitcase and then suckered the shit out of it. Yep it fits even if it takes up all the space. I am re-considering the whole idea.

However, as soon as I was phaffing with shit instead of taking her out to play with her bally, then Dog knew something was up. She definitely knows something is going on as soon as the cases are taken out of the cupboard and popped onto the spare bed. Yep, Dog knows something is up.

If I believed she spoke doglish then I reckon she might have a better than fair idea that she is being left behind. Or maybe that's just my mummy guilt speaking.

Steve has spent the day doing all things plumbing, fixing the dripping rain catcher gauge pump thing which was buggered and dripping and driving him a bit nuts. He was just gonna turn it all off, but then discovered that none of the loos would work and neither would the washing machine. Don't reckon the 2 Js - our sitters, would have been best pleased.

Just as an aside, isn't it interesting - read shitful, irritating, that a few years ago the government insisted that we put in a water tank and that it be permanently plumbed into the loos and the washing machine, cos god knows everyone wants their new loos to be grubby brown and they want to wash their clothes in less than clean water, yeh that's really smart. So dutifully that's what we did at stupid expense and now just a few years later it is no longer necessary. What sort of a dick comes up with these regulations?

So that's done and dusted and he's also fixed the leaking loo up stairs, and McGyvered a plumbing tube to carry his beloved golf sticks across the miles.

Sheets have been washed and I have sorted 2 bathrooms, and I have packed away all the sewing bits and pieces strewn all over the studio, and the deck area has been given a bit of a lick and polish. Yep there has been quite a bit of activity and Dog notices things like this. She is used to a quiet slothful existence, so when there is enough movement to register on one of those FITBIT things, and the radio has been blaring and her parents have been bursting into intermittent song, you know when you only really know 2 or 3 words from a song and you wait around for that bit so you can belt it out, well she definitely notices. She has not been too far away all day.

It'd be very cool if we could just sit her down and explain that we are going away but that we love her and that we will be back. I hope she has enough faith to believe it even if our dogspeak is not what it should be.

The Countdown has begun.

It shouldn't come as any great shock, but it seems that not everyone in the world gets ready for a holiday in the same way I do, and really that's just nuts, cos my way is the best way. Oh yeh, I guess Steve reckons his way is the best way too, but he'd be wrong, oh shit there it is I said it out loud!

We are both getting ourselves sorted for 2 months away. I am making sure that my feet are scraped and my toes look pretty, and I've even found the courage to book in for a waxing of the face YUK, I really hate that. My hair is dyed and the split ends trimmed and I've manicured the nails ready for a swipe of clear lacquer sometime soon if I can stand it. In my mind I have selected a range of clothes that hopefully will mix and match so as to not leave me bored shitless having to wear the same stuff all the time. I have 25kgs to take cos I am taking my mattress topper which needs to be stuffed suckered and it weighs in at a lightweight 5kgs. I know this might seem like an odd priority, but 2 months is a long time to wrestle with an uncomfortable bed, and yeh I know I could buy one there, but it wouldn't be as good as the one I already have, unless I went to Harrods and parted with 700 quid - yeh I looked into it, before I opted for a $20 vac bag.

Steve took himself off for a haircut. I don't reckon I am a high maintenance type of gal, but in comparison to Steve, I sure as shit am.

I have a schedule for the washing and the ironing and cleaning so that we can leave the house all spick and span for the house/doggy sitters, and so we don't have to leave a pile of festering undies hidden in the bottom of a cupboard for our return...Wouldn't that just be lovely little homecoming pressie. Steve reckons he might pack his dirty bits so I can wash 'em while we are away. He is very good to me like that. ( Perhaps this is not a bad idea, I mean you pack to come home with dirty stuff, so why not?)

The fridge and the freezer are about as empty as they are gonna be and I have sorted the pantry so that old shit has been binned and nearly out of date stuff has been delivered to Belly - I am good to her like that.

Today Steve decided that the time was right for a dry mopping, and a wet mopping of every hard surface in the big house, and that's a lot. Perhaps lucky for me, I am allergic to the smelly shit which is his preference ( he noted today that not only does it do a damn fine job on the floors, but it also kills bugs - this doesn't surprise me cos it about kills me too) so that means he has to do it all. To be truthful, the floors have always been his job - yippee for that! Anyway, I always make myself scarce when he's about to set loose with the mop.

There were a few things that I needed to pack so the shopping was a hotch-potch of bits and  bobs. The woman at the register, whilst she didn't come right out and say anything about the oddity of it all, couldn't resist a comment about how much she liked the bog brush I had selected, ( The old one had seen better days and would not have been much use in the loo scraping department, so this was the least I could do for our visitors) this all the while shoving it next to my new lippy and a vacuum storage thing into my Target placcie bag. I got Steve some new socks cos it's always nice to take away some new ones, and cos it was on sale, some choccies that should just about stop us killing each other as time counts down and I get more stressed. Oh and I needed some asparagus for dinner too. I got 2 copies of 'Red Dog' to give to the pommie kids so they can keep a little taste of Down Under, a new eyebrow pencil which sort of screws up instead of needing to be sharpened, and a lovely purple toe nail polish that will match just about everything. So it was in deed a strange assortment of stuff. 

I am hoping that that is the end of it.

Do you go a little nutty while getting ready for a holiday?
What can you just NOT be without ?

Hand Washing Woolen Jumpers

I am going for the Chinese Laundry look with this photo. Mm very attractive.

Can it be that I am the last person on earth who still washed woollens by hand?

Surely in this day and age, someone aught be able to invent a woollen fabric that you can just chuck straight into the washing machine along with your jeans and knickers.

I used to sort the washing...you know the old story of whites over there and blacks here and the bits that were hard to decided on in another bundle, and then I'd dutifully wash each pile separately and my clothes line was colour matched...not to the point where I would worry about colour coding the pegs, you will be pleased to know. Oh don't laugh too hard, cos I know a number of gals whose clothes line could be inspiration for a colour between the lines catalogue.

But then we got this huge fucking machine that can do almost a whole week's worth of clothes in one bash and so sorting went by the wayside. Now it all gets tossed in at once and if occasionally some thing dark marks something not so dark, well I just squint and pretend I can't tell.

But I haven't been able to get to a point where I chuck all the jumpers in. It's not because they are expensive to replace, cos they just don't seem to be. And it's certainly not cos I enjoy rub-a-dub-dubbing the bloody things in the sink, and then carefully lying them out as flat as possible for days at a time until they are dry enough to iron.

I think it's Martha's fault really. Martha Gardener that is.

The only possible thrill one can get from hand washing jumpers is that you get a nose full of that lovely eucalyptus form Martha's.

If you read the bottle carefully you'll soon see that Martha's is not recommended for front loading machines...it just must be too sudsy. BUGGER! So even if I was tempted to run a short cut on the jumper washing race, and I bloody am, it's not possible to chuck 'em with a bit of Martha's in the washing machine.

I reckon it must be time for Martha to address this issue.

I think I should write to her immediately.

Dear Martha,
I am the laziest cow in Queensland and would love it if you invented a Wool washing mix for front loaders. And after that if you could petition for all clothing manufacturers to start making machine washable jumpers pronto, I would be very grateful.
Yours sincerely,
Lazy cow Sue

I hope I have now finished with the 'special' and I don't mean that in a good way, washing, so I can start working out what 30 kilos of clothes is gonna make the cut for London.

Do you still hand wash woollen jumpers?