Salt and corrosion

1. I am going to try to do one of these new-fangled ten-point entries. They're all the rage. The big question is: do I have ten things to say?

2. Probably not.

3. Yesterday I was alone in the office while everyone else was out and about when a lean, grey-haired man came up the stairs. He had come with a new A4 drawer for the photocopier. I didn't know we needed one, but all righty then, Mr Photocopier Man, whatever you want. He changed the drawer and said, 'You know what was wrong with the old one, don't you?' Indeed I do: one day a couple of months ago we found a little plastic wheel rattling around in it, but the photocopier didn't seem to mind.

4. He sighed in exasperation and said, 'People push them in!' and followed that up with a lengthy lecture on the correct way to push in the paper drawer. He gave the whole office the same lecture when we told him about the little wheel. The short version: do it gently. Don't slam your photocopier's paper drawers, dear readers, or Mr Photocopier Man will be cross.

5. When he first came to look at the photocopier, he changed the A3 drawer to an extra A4 drawer for no apparent reason. We supposed it had something to do with the little wheel, even though the A4 drawer still worked. He just gave us two A4 drawers so we couldn't print on A3. So I said to him today, since we had a new A4 drawer, could we have our A3 drawer back, and he sighed again and poked some menus deep within the photocopier's touch screen and said, 'Ooh, that's a big job.' Then he left.

Bonus (or 'I can't count properly') 4. When the office manager came back from lunch I told her that Mr Photocopier Man had been and changed our drawers over and she said, 'Did he give you a lot of attitude?' Yes, now you mention it, he did.

6. The Catholic Church is getting ready to canonise Australia's first saint, a nun called Mary McKillop who did some of her nunning in this area. She founded her own order and was excommunicated for disagreeing with a bishop and in death has been performing miracles. Apparently you need to do one miracle to be beatified and two to be canonised, and the Blessed Mary has even performed a third just to make sure (this was reported as a 'backup miracle'). Busy lady.

7. My mother went for a walk on the beach promenade the other day and found it signposted with fun facts about the Blessed Mary. It turns out it was for a school thing, in which the kids dressed up as nuns and learnt while they walked. A couple of them were interviewed in yesterday's paper, being asked what they thought it would be like to be a nun. The girls didn't mind the idea, but Travis (11) thought it would be 'bad', because 'you have to do stuff with other nuns'.

8. A sparrow roosts in the eaves under the verandah, just in front of my bedroom. I don't mind this. I do mind that it wakes up at six-thirty every morning and chirps non-stop for an hour. No respect for my day off. Tsk.

9. Last night I watched Julie and Julia. My considered verdict: the Julia parts were great, but Julie was a pill.

10. I found it quite odd at the end when the film puts up a couple of paragraphs about what happened after, and it said that Julie wrote a book about her blog, and that 'her book has been made into a film'. Yes, that would be the film I just watched, wouldn't it? How circular.

Three words, f-list: fried, crumbed and avocado. Yum.

Something I do not like: when books put the first chapter of the sequel at the end. It confuses me when I skip to the last page.

My colleague Brian told me today about a meeting of his gliding club over the weekend. A group of older men, they went out to a restaurant dinner together, and one of them scandalised the others by picking up his empty soup bowl and licking it clean.

Also, my mother reports that her fortnightly card night was held at her friend Barbara's house in the country and was interrupted when a mouse ran across the living room floor. My mother viewed this as a delightful piece of insouciance, but poor Barbara was mortified and one of the other players, Lynn, actually stood on her chair and screamed. I always thought that was just in cartoons. Anyway, Lynn and Barbara were both so traumatised by the event that the card game broke up early, much to my mother's disgust. 'As if Lynn has never had a mouse in her house,' she sniffed.

Last week was not a good week at work and several times I found myself reading that position description I downloaded. But this week seems to be off to a better start. And I'm on leave from next Thursday, so I've cheered up a bit. Also, my work computer is due for replacement and should be changed by the time I get back. All good, then. My boss said today, watching me twiddling my thumbs while I waited for my poor old slowcoach computer to do something, 'You can grizzle about things sometimes, you know. That's allowed.' Which was nice, but why complain to him when I've got a LiveJournal?

My mother will be sixty on Saturday, although her birthday seems to be taking a whole month to celebrate. I bought her tickets to see Tom Jones, but Tom didn't think to organise his tour around my mother's birthday, so she had to go to that in March. She didn't want a big party or anything like that, so her friends have been taking her out in groups: her nursing colleagues/card circle took her out for dinner last week and two of her oldest friends took her out to lunch yesterday, and so on. By not having a party, it occurs to me she's doing very well for meals.

Last week there was a photo in the classified pages of the local paper to mark the sixtieth birthday of a lady named June Bonnet (which is a great name). The photo showed June Bonnet as a student nurse, back in the days when student nurses wore little red capes, and veils starched into the shape of fighter jets. My mother has a photo just like it, but June Bonnet's was a fine example, with her fighter jet veil beautifully perched in her hard, permed hair. My mother showed me the newspaper and said, 'I did my training with her.' A pause. 'If you do that to me, I will kill you.' Righty-o then.

I wouldn't have done that anyway, because (a) I don't know where my mother's student nurse photo is, and (b) I've always thought that people who put embarrassing photos of their relatives in the paper to wish them a happy birthday are only slightly less suspect than people who get personalised number plates on their cars. Not my sort of people at all. But even though she doesn't want a fuss, I do want to give her something on Saturday as she can't really unwrap her Tom Jones tickets again. So I have brought an old copy paper box home from work and covered it in wrapping paper and I am filling it with small things that she likes. So far I have got: the CD that came with the Tom Jones tickets (I didn't tell her about that when I bought them), a collection of quilting fabrics, the loudest pair of socks I could find (she wears them to work) and a gift voucher from her favourite clothes shop. On Friday I will pick up a plant for her garden and something tasty from the gourmet food shop and a book (although she usually doesn't like my choice of books, so maybe I will just get some nice smelly stuff instead.) Any other suggestions?

My dental check up is on Friday at 11am. I got a phone call from the dentist's office yesterday evening. 'We've had a cancellation,' said the woman, 'if you'd like to see the dentist sooner.' She sounded so happy that she could offer me this exciting opportunity, even though Friday is not far away and I was already pleased with how quickly I could get an appointment. 'Would you like to come in on Friday at ten-thirty?' Half an hour earlier, lucky me. I said yes, because she sounded nice and cheerful and really seemed to think she was doing me a huge favour.

Speaking of half hours, my colleague Brian crossed the state border yesterday, changing time zones. He got to live thirty minutes of his life again and have a twenty-four-and-a-half hour day. How very sci-fi.

They do things differently over the border. I once rang a hospital administrator there to ask what day the new interns started their term. She told me the date and I said, 'Thanks for tha... no, wait, that's a Wednesday,' and she said, speaking the obvious truth slowly for the benefit of the stupid Victorian, 'Yes, the week always starts on Wednesday.' That told me.

The best passer-by seen from our office window today was a tiny girl, all pink and pigtails, who had a full-on, stamping, screaming tantrum because her mother wouldn't take her into the tattoo shop. Her mother just looked bemused while her little daughter cried herself hoarse wanting a tattoo-oo-oooo, and then got her moving again by promising an ice-cream instead. Fair exchange.

[Poll #1508640]

Also, when I bought the papers, I met a pack of guide dog puppies out for a group socialisation day. They were in their special coats and leads, but they were still too little to know what that meant yet, so they kept stopping to roll on the ground and have their tummies tickled. They were very cute. I don't think I could be a guide dog puppy walker. It would be too hard to give it up at the end of the year. I would have to sabotage its training so I got to keep it.

I made a stop on the way home from work last night: parked on the street then nipped down the alley to the bakery. Coming back out of the alley, swinging my loaf of bread, I found myself in the middle of a scene. A bikie, a huge man in faded black leathers, was roasting a teenage boy, roaring colourful, almost poetic, obscenities at him (the only remotely printable one of which was 'if you had a dick, son, I'd leave it lying in the gutter bleeding'). There were little groups of onlookers stopped on the footpath on either side of the road. I felt like I'd stumbled into a play so I scuttled off stage right and kept scuttling, all the way to my car.

My sympathies were with the teenage boy, because I wouldn't want a large angry man shouting obscenities at me in front of an audience. Or at all, even. But none of the onlookers seemed particularly bothered, and the bikie didn't do anything other than shouting, and I gathered in between the swear words that the kid had been caught vandalising a car. I don't know whose car it was, or if it had anything to do with the bikie at all, or if he was just a man with a righteous anger and a loud voice with which to express it.

So, yes, an odd little scene. I couldn't help but feel I'd wandered in halfway through the performance and missed something.

I took this week off work so I could write an essay. Then I found out that Dream Chronicles 3 came out on Tuesday, so my essay writing took a back seat. But I'm back on schedule now.

Today I had to go and queue in the bank and found myself in conversation with an old lady. I attract them like a magnet, I really do. This one was telling me how she couldn't eat fish. 'Doctor told me not to,' she said. 'Doctor told me no more fish at all.' She sighed. 'Such a shame, I love chips.' Ah. It's probably fish and chips she can't have, not fish in general, isn't it? I didn't tell her that. My grandmother was the same: if it wasn't battered and fried, it just wasn't fish.

After the bank, I had to go and buy a new doona* cover, having inadvertently burnt mine last night. I was vacuuming my room, you see, and noticed a cobweb on the ceiling, hanging right over my pillow. I've got an upright vacuum but the hose comes out and attaches to a long nozzle for those hard to reach spots. I did that and waved it around in the air but couldn't catch the cobweb, so then I tried standing on the bed with the vacuum cleaner next to me. That worked a treat. I was engrossed in vacuuming my light fitting when I realised I could smell burning and found that the vacuum cleaner had burnt a twenty centimetre hole in my doona cover and had even started to char the doona itself. Much longer and there'd have been feathers everywhere. So there you have it: don't put vacuum cleaners on beds. I share my experiences so that others can learn.

Did you know you can get a synopsis for your very own Harlequin romance? I described myself as feisty, feisty and fiery. Lacking a significant other, I had to come up with a suitable name for the hero. I think Trevor works.

MY HARLEQUIN ROMANCE
International Jet-Setter Alicia has no intention of buying into New York City's absurd werewolf legends. Until she rescues an ordinary dog shot with a silver bullet, and meets his male model owner, Trevor.

A founding member of the Alpha Force on a nearby military base, Trevor has developed an elixir that helps werewolves control their shape-shifting abilities. Trevor has always tried to keep his distance from the civilian population, but Alicia's feisty nature soon wears down his defenses. With attacks on people and animals in the area mounting, can their fiery attraction withstand their toughest challenge?


* Duvet

I've just a phone call from my bank. They sent me a letter the other day to tell me that my term deposit (a small amount I put out of sight as an Emergency Fund) was due to finish today (Friday) and that I had to come in and tell them what to do next. They also sent a table of interest rates, which varied according to the amount of the deposit, the length of the term and the frequency of the interest compounding. I spent a good hour whipping up a spreadsheet to work out the best rate.

So I went to the bank yesterday (my day off) and got this woman, this very strange woman. So well-coiffed and polite, and yet so... so off, somehow. Softly-spoken and aggressive. First she said, "Before we look at the term deposit, can we discuss your banking?" Oh, all right. If we must. ( In which the bank lady and I smile icily at each other )

And a quick question: is "genuineness" a word? It doesn't sound right, does it? At least, I've never said it. Still, it's in the dictionary, so it must be true.



* A retirement or self-funded pension fund.

That politician who was in trouble a few months ago for sniffing a woman's chair and snapping a journalist's bra strap? Yes, he's resigned. Funny that. But let's look back on him fondly. Thanks to him, I learnt a new word: he's a snedger, someone who enjoys sniffing seats recently vacated by women. So there's some knowledge that will come in handy.

My watch has been playing up lately, measuring time by a method known only to itself. One minute it's hours behind; reset it, and five minutes later it's ten minutes ahead. So I took it to the jeweller's yesterday to get a new battery. Browsing around while I was Waiting for the woman to finish dealing with the customer, I found myself face to face with a wall of those creepy little Swarovski crystal animals. Brrrrr. I don't like them at all; I think it's their beady little eyes. I went to primary school with a girl whose grandmother gave her one of these tiny glass beasties every birthday (or Christmas, one or the other). I hated going to visit her - well, visiting was fine, but staying the night was something of a trial - because of the feeling of being watched by a row of beady-eyed wildlife. (The other thing I didn't like about visiting her was the odd set-up of the toilet. It was one of those in a small, oblong room by itself; the door was on one of the short sides and had a push-button lock on it. That was ultimately pointless, however, since one of the long sides of the room was a sliding door that opened directly onto the kitchen. It's not just me being paranoid, is it? That's an odd way to design a house.)

Anyway, the display of crystal animals in the jeweller's was topped by a limited edition peacock with special dots of green paint on its glass feathers. It was enormous, bigger than my fist, a freaky giant peacock that towered over all the other animals, but it still had horrible, soulless eyes. And it cost seven thousand dollars. That's a lot of money to pay for something that will probably come to life in the night and peck you to death.

The other night on Collectors, the collector of the week said that he hoped that, when he died, his family would take over his collection, which is a nice thought but quite a burden to put on his children. What if they don't like Winston Churchill Toby jugs (of which he had a shelf-full)? (Disclaimer: I don't like Toby jugs any more than I like beady-eyed crystal animals, so I am biased in my thoughts on this.) He also had not one, but two copies of the LP of Winston Churchill's state funeral. Imagine popping that on at a party.

I said as much to my mother at our farewell dinner the other night (she and John are currently on their way to Western Australia for a month), and she told me about the time (long, long ago) one of the senior nurses invited her and another trainee to dinner. They had a nice meal, then the lady put on a reel-to-reel tape recording of her mother's funeral, which she liked to listen to once a week and on special occasions. "And then she said she was sorry she didn't think to record her father's funeral too."

People: quite interesting, really.

Today I was asked for directions three times. Three completely different people sized me up and decided that I look like the sort of person who knows (a) where to get shoes repaired, (b) the location of particular café and (c) how to get to the cemetery. As it happens, all three were right, although my directions to Mrs Broken-Shoe were a bit vague. The easiest one was the woman who stopped me as I was walking past and said, "Excuse me, I'm not from here and I'm meeting a friend at a place called Logan's. Can you tell me where it is?" I thought she was joking at first, but eventually I pointed to the big sign not two metres behind her that clearly said "LOGAN'S". She was quite embarrassed, but we had a laugh about it.

I received a postcard in today's mail. I saw the picture side first and wondered which of my friends was wintering on the Gold Coast. Then I turned it over and read the following message printed in a handwriting font:

Dear Miss Daisyname,

It's amazing up here. Just been for a surf and Daniel stood up for the first time! Will email you a pic from the road...

Patrick & Daniel

What? I don't know any Patrick or Daniel. I suspect advertising, but I don't know for what.