Salt and corrosion

I meant to say earlier in the week that I dropped Leeanne, the office manager, home one evening after work. One of those roundabout things where her car was in for a service and her husband couldn't pick her up and her daughter was out of town and, and, and. You know how it goes. Anyway, I dropped her home and went inside to see the extensions to their house, since she has been talking about them for months. Also to meet her dogs, Princess and Sooty Pom-Pom (I know). Anyway, while I was there her husband arrived home. He does something with the courts, delivering subpoenas and whatever (I don't really know). But he is also in the process of getting his private detective's licence, which I think is pretty exciting, and he showed us a new toy he had bought that day: a tiny hidden microphone. 'You put this bit in your shirt,' he said, 'and this bit on the person's desk and then you turn it on and-' but his explanation was cut off because he turned the microphone on and an electronic voice said, very loudly, 'BATTERY LEVEL IS HIGH!' So, yes, good luck to him placing that by stealth.

( Day 4: Sunday )

A question: if you, being villainous with dastardly intentions, immobilised someone and left them on the beach so that they would drown when the tide came in, would they? Or would they float? (This was inspired by a book, by the way, not something I'm planning in real life. Although if it was something I was planning, tomorrow's photos would certainly be interesting.)

( Day 2: Friday )

Late yesterday afternoon I was overcome by a strange and strong desire to have a nap. I fought against it, I really did, because having naps is for old people*. Particularly my mother, and I am not turning into her, no, no, no. But I couldn't stand up for ever and as soon as I sat down my eyes fell closed and my fate was sealed.

While I slept, I dreamt that all my molars were pulled out by some invisible force and floated about in the cavernous auditorium that was my mouth, watched by all my other teeth. So I have chosen to interpret my body's need for a nap as its reaction to having a tooth extracted, as opposed to it reaching The Napping Age.

Getting away from teeth at last, today I saw this thing advertised in a kitchenware shop catalogue. A device to cut a slice of toast into fingers! I've got one of them; mine's called a knife.



* Or younger people who don't have enough opportunity to sleep at night, I suppose.

I have some new fs on the old f-list! Such excitement. ( The obligatory introduction )

Back in the real world, I had my gardening hat on today. I planted some heirloom celery, which is pink. Ooh, fancy. I also ordered some Kunawase strawberry plants. These are a Japanese variety that are the nicest I have ever tasted: sweet and juicy. And now they will be all mine, mwah hah hah ha! (Unless the birds get them first.)

What's on my mind today: the Archibald prize. The Archibald is Australia's national portrait prize, and it always gets a lot of media coverage because it sounds smart. Also because the rules limit the competition to portraits of people who are culturally significant - no painting the plebs! - so we can all enjoy the fun of working out if that portrait of, say, Cate Blanchett really looks like her.

Anyway, this year, one of the portraits is of a TV weather man (that 'culturally significant' part is fairly loosely interpreted) and it looks like this. Is that a portrait? (The other finalists are here, if you want to compare them.)

[Poll #1539905]

I am writing this to the sounds of vigorous splashing, which means, I suspect, there is a blackbird in the birdbath. They are enthusiastic bathers. I'd best go and fill the bath for the next one.

A few weeks back, I was scoffing at the contestants on Masterchef Australia for their inability and unwillingness to do desserts. Well, they've since had that well and truly beaten out of them (when they were forced to make the ugliest cake ever witnessed by humanity), and because Masterchef is rating its socks off, their dessert-making has led to unexpected (even unprecedented) demand for what would otherwise be obscure, specialist products. A lot of Australians now own croquembouche cones, apparently, although I can't imagine them getting a lot of use. And, similarly, tonka bean sales have experienced a sharp upturn, as viewers attempt to whip up their own tonka bean pannacotta.

I haven't been sucked in that far, but I have, sheep-like, made a recipe from the Masterchef collection. For dinner with my mother and John last night, I whipped up some chocolate cigars just like theirs. Well... I didn't use ghee. And I used almonds instead of peanuts and orange-infused chocolate instead of whatever they said. And I didn't make the sabayon, or sit the cigar on a martini glass. But other than that it was exactly the same.

My mother and John came straight from an unexpected doctor's appointment. John had a biopsy of a thing on his head a few days ago and his doctor summoned him in to tell him the results in person. That's never a good sign. He has a stage two melanoma and is going to see a surgeon next week. John is matter-of-fact about it: he'll go, he'll have it cut out, he'll do whatever he has to do and then he'll be better. He's probably right: in the last fifteen years, he's had a heart attack, lymphoma (requiring chemo and radiation) and peritonitis, and recovered from them all, so I think he may well be indestructible. My mother's slightly more anxious about it, probably because she's a palliative care nurse; the doctor knows this and made a point of telling her to remember that she only sees the people who don't get well. But then, my mother has also had a skin cancer removed (not a melanoma) and my grandfather had several, so she knows the odds are good.

Today I went to the hairdresser. There is a salon at the end of the street where I work, which I like for convenience and don't like because (a) they're all so very young and make me feel so very old and (b) they once forgot to put my appointment in the book. Convenience won out and so today I made a return visit. Despite not having been there for two years, they are all still, inexplicably, as young as they were two years ago. A different girl, Jess, cut my hair this time (and I think she cut every single hair individually, such was her attention to detail) and she beamed when she saw me. 'I know you!' she said. 'You walk past the window every lunch time.' It's true, I do - even if I don't have anything to do down the street, I like to stretch my legs - but it surprised me. I'm so used to watching things unobserved that it's slightly unsettling to be noticed myself.

The music in the salon was some sort of 'quiet songs of the sixties' compilation and when the Velvet Underground's 'Sunday Morning' came on the hairdressers all started giggling. Jess tried to explain why, but it's hard to explain inside jokes. Essentially, it seemed that after multiple listenings the girls find 'that singer guy's voice' very funny. 'I wonder if he looks funny too,' said one of them, 'but I don't know who he is to be able to look for him.' Lou Reed does look kind of funny, I suppose, but I already felt ancient enough in there without explaining I know who he is.

They've got a fun game going on over at Ayyyy! (their exclamation mark): identify the former teen idols. I'd say 1-4 would be Val Kilmer, Mel Gibson, James Spader (pin-up of choice by teen me) and William Shatner, but I'm stuck after that. I'm convinced that Charlie Sheen should be in there, maybe at 6 or 10; Corey Haim had hair like 9's, but the body looks too large. If Johnny Depp's anywhere, I think he'd be 5, but could he honestly be classed as a 'former good looker' when he still looks more or less the same as he always did?

My extended family are the only Daisynames in the region where we live so you can imagine our collective shock when we opened the new phone book and found a mysterious and unknown M Daisyname listed. Phone calls were made, let me tell you. I was all set to write an entry all about it, but then I found out that it was my second cousin Mia Daisyname, who recently moved back here from Melbourne. Phew. But that was the end of my planned entry, which is unfortunate because now I'll never have a good reason to mention that Mia's grandmother is known to the rest of the family as Jinny Grizzlebritches. (I have no idea why. She's lovely.)

I have to go to work tomorrow and then I have two weeks off. This is a Very Good Thing.

So, I don't normally post memes and I like to think that's because I can come up with my own things to rabbit on about, but it's really because I'm too wordy. I tried doing one of those 'tea or coffee?' memes once, and it's so hard to choose between two things. My answers were discursive essays, covering the situations in which I would drink different beverages.

Which is just a way of warning people that mockduck tagged me to do this LiveJournal meme and, well, it's a long meme anyway and my answers make it longer, even though I grouped some of the questions together.

How did you come to start your LJ?

I'd been reading a friend's LJ for a while. Then I did a work-related course and the leader planned to create a community on LiveJournal so we could have class discussions and such. That didn't end up happening but by then I'd created my account and decided that I liked it. So I stayed.

How did you find your first friends?

I had one friend right from the start, emma2403 (the friend mentioned above), and that was good. If it had just been me rattling around here by myself, my LJ would probably have been like every paper journal I've ever kept: kept enthusiastically until I got sick of myself and then torn up.

Apart from that, my first friends found me. I remember being ridiculously pleased when someone commented on one of my early entries about finding exciting (for a given limit of 'exciting') things in library books (and if that sentence teaches us anything, it's how little my content has changed over the years). She became my second friend and my friends list was immediately enlivened by her constant updates on (a) how her polyamorous arrangement wasn't working for her, (b) how much she was into polyamory despite that and (c) how her son was a genius but was having a lot of trouble at school. She was quite an unhappy person who seemed to think the whole world was against her and I found reading her entries quite stressful after a while.

My third friend was, I'm fairly sure, tabouli, drawn by the fact I had (and, in fact, still have) Antonia Forest's Marlow family novels listed as an interest. She is also the only person I know through LJ that I've ever actually met (or defictionalised, as she put it).

After that, it's all just a blur.

( And there's a lot more to follow )

This seems like a good place to mention that when I post polls, often I get responses from a couple of people who aren't on my friends list, suggesting that they're long-term readers. And that's lovely, but I have to say: go on, friend me. I don't bite. And if you friend me, you'll get... um, what will you get? Oh, you'll get to read about Angela, who only ever gets mentioned in my friends-locked work-tagged posts. So that's a bonus.

Finally, tell us the reasons why you keep an online journal.

When I was at school, my best friend and I wrote each other letters in class. I suppose a lot of kids do that, but we took it to another level: we wrote exercise books. That is, we spent all day together at school, we'd write letters to each other in the odd class we had separately, we'd go home and talk on the phone for a couple of hours, then we'd hang up and write a few pages in our exercise books. I'm amazed we had time to do anything else. The books would take a couple of months to fill and we put all sorts of stuff in them: maps of our houses showing the location of everyone in them at the time, lists (the 500 cutest people in the known universe), games (she still complains that I put 'robin' on the list in my Christmas find-a-word but forgot to put it in the puzzle itself), paint samples, amusing pictures from Smash Hits magazine...

We each wrote ten volumes of every thought that went through our silly heads. I still have mine (that is, her books to me) and I love them.

And this, I think, is an extension of that.

I always think Boxing Day is the finest of the public holidays. It's got all the benefits of being the day after Christmas (leftover food, new stuff to play with), and absolutely no obligations at all (no gifts to give, no eight-hour work days to be thankful for, no, um, horse races to watch). It's a day off for no reason at all. What a brilliant invention.

As recently noted in these pages, I bought some new glasses recently. One pair is completely baffling. Sometimes (such as now) I wear them and they fit perfectly; other times (such as yesterday) I put them on and they press into the sides of my head in an extremely irritating way before popping off like glasses on a suddenly inflated balloon. I have no explanation for this other than my head apparently changes size quite regularly. I had no idea.

Not content with providing daily accounts of all the non-stories that happen here, my local paper has recently started bringing out a free weekly supplement with content specific to each of its large towns, called the [City You Live In] Extra (it basically consists of photos of people seen out and about at different local hotspots and events). It comes out every Wednesday. My delivery of this is quite erratic: some weeks I get it, some weeks I don't, some weeks it comes three days late . Except this week: when I passed my letterbox on Wednesday night, it was empty; I passed it again Thursday morning and the Extra was there. So some diligent soul was delivering Extras between 10:30pm Christmas Eve and 7:30am Christmas morning. That's... quite sad, really.

Today I cleaned out my airing cupboard/Cupboard of Mystery. I know: what a thrilling life I lead! Amongst the stuff I found in the deepest, darkest recesses: a tennis racquet, helmet, wrist, elbow and knee pads, and a basketball (these items may suggest a far more athletic lifestyle than I actually pursue); three doorknobs, a light fitting and a tap; eighteen coat-hangers; five pairs of gloves; two scarves; two beanies, two baseball caps and three straw hats; and my Brownie poncho.

My Brownie poncho! I didn't know that was there. It was de rigueur in my Brownie pack to sit round the campfire in a poncho made out of a blanket from the local woollen mill and covered with embroidered patches of places we'd been on holiday. We must have looked like a mobile pack of suitcases. When we graduated to Guides, we sewed on our Brownie badges too. I think the idea was that when we left Guides to become, er, whatever comes after Guides, we would add our Guide badges, but I didn't stay in Guides for very long (life in the 1st Ballangeich pack obviously being considerably less exciting than the Guide handbook promised).

My poncho reveals that I earnt Brownie badges for being a First Aider, Flower Arranger, Swimmer, Advanced Swimmer, Artist, Writer, House Orderly and something represented by a magnifying glass that I can't remember (Private Eye sounds unlikely)*. I would have sworn I had Musician and Animal Lover badges, too, but I can't see them. Oh, there are also Footpath, Roadway and Highway badges for community service-y sort of things; three Brownie stars for three years of membership; my Six badge (I was in the Mullokas, if you care to scroll to the bottom of that page to see it); and my Sixer stripes (yes, I was the fearless small girl leader of a gang of fearless small girls). I was an awesome Brownie. There are no Guide badges, though, except my Patrol badge (I was a Rosella)... and my Patrol Leader stripes. Oh, that's why I left! About six months after I became a Guide, Rosella's Patrol Leader had to leave (presumably because she reached the age limit) and the Guide Leader didn't like the girl next in line and somehow the job ended up being mine, aged eleven and still green from the Brownies. Cutthroat Girl Guide politics, obviously. Anyway, some of the older girls didn't like me being in charge and I didn't enjoy it all that much either, so I left. I'd forgotten about that.

I'm not the only one with such a tragically dorky past, am I?




* That's it! The magnifying glass was my Collector badge. I was a pre-teen philatelist (or rather, I was a pre-teen philatelist long enough to get my Collector badge).

A few people on the f-list have been doing that meme about personal quirks, so I thought, well, there's a few new arrivals here, perhaps I should do it too. So here we go:

Glow-in-the-dark things

I love glow-in-the-dark things. For my confirmation, I was given a glow-in-the-dark shrine of Lourdes. Every bedroom I've ever had has had glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. My new alarm clock has glow-in-the-dark numbers. I'd like a glow-in-the-dark stripe painted along the walls of my house as a guide for walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Or, or glow-in-the-dark walls! How much electricity would that save at night?

Toast

I have very specific rules about the toasting and eating of, er, toast. It begins with choosing and placing the slice of bread in the toaster: the bread must have a "fluffy" side, which must be placed so it faces the outside of the two-slot toaster. While it's toasting, the knife must be prepared with the butter (or alternative spread), so that when the toast reaches optimum toasticity (a light tan, slightly bready, toast), it can be buttered as soon as it pops up; no delays at all. If more than one slice has been toasted... well, I think you get the picture. There are rules about which slice should be buttered first and which slice should be eaten first and how long it should be left to sit (until it goes cold, which seems to be quite controversial) and how to eat (around the slice, leaving the tastiest-looking part till last). People - people who are otherwise quite fond of me, even - find this routine both odd and annoying. It's probably quite obvious that I would never eat toast made by anyone else.

Jelly snakes

If offered a snake, I will always choose a yellow one (or green, if no yellow is available).

( And there are four more equally interesting things to come! )