Salt and corrosion

Today I drove into the city, down the long, straight stretch of highway with three apocalyptic towers of grey clouds at the end, two in front and the middle one behind. It was like driving into the end of days. And then I stopped and bought a loaf of bread.

So that was an anticlimax.

Next to the bakery is an icecreamery (that's what the shop calls itself, The Icecreamery, but is it a real word?) and there was an old lady sitting at one of the outside tables. An old man came out with two ice-creams in cones, handed one to her and sat down. They looked so happy; it was lovely. The tables inside were also filled with old people enjoying ice-creams and I realised that they'd all come from the senior citizens' centre across the road. So there's something to look forward to in fifty or so years.

Then I went and bought a sample pot of paint (in Pale Eucalypt Green) for an forthcoming exciting (well...) mosaic project. Oh, I love those little cardboard paint samples. If I ever start a collection, that's what it will be.

I tripped over my sandals last night, while I was wearing them. Very clever, I know. Anyway, while I was doing that I felt something go "pop!" in my left calf and now I've got a sore leg and a limp. Some people climb mountains and cross deserts; I get injured wearing shoes. Hmph.

This morning I went to the funeral of my favourite great-uncle. Such a lovely man, Uncle Stuart. He was the youngest of my grandfather's brothers and married quite late in life, so his children are only slightly older than me. Teachers at school often thought I was the youngest of the Daisyname sisters instead of their cousin. Even today, I had several strangers ask me if I was one of Stuart's daughters as they leaned in to hug me. So, um, family resemblance, yes.

My mother gets on well enough with her brothers, but one of them lives interstate and the other is married to a woman who hates both my mother and I. She positively (or negatively, rather) radiates dislike in our presence. She was all over the cousins and other assorted relatives today, being so chummy and chatty with them, and then she saw me and said, "Alicia" and moved off. I'd be offended if I could be bothered.

I was thinking today as I watched everyone waiting to get out of the church that films and TV never get funeral attendees right. They only ever show a handful of people at the ceremony, comprising immediate family and maybe a few friends (and/or murder suspects, if it's that sort of film), and every single one of them is dressed in black. I've never been to a funeral like that. Today the church was filled with all sorts of people: immediate family, extended family, friends, fellow WWII veterans, former work colleagues, the medical staff who looked after him. Only two people were wearing all black (and both of them fall into categories of people who wear black anyway).

As I was walking to work this morning, I passed a man bent double over the Salvation Army's garden fence, left hand pointing behind him, holding a cigarette, right hand holding a camera mere centimetres from a fully open orange rose.

At lunch time, I passed a giggly teenage girl walking down the street holding hands with a teenage boy who was dressed as the world's thinnest Santa.

A little while later I passed a middle-aged woman carrying her groceries, wearing a sour face and a Santa hat.

Photographers with occupational health and safety issues and unlikely Santas aside, what else? My work's planned purchase of some dilapidated squash courts to convert into jazzy new offices (with feature squash court) has fallen at the last hurdle, with our national governing body refusing permission. Boo. I showed my boss this office and said it was a shame the deal fell through because we could have done something similar, and he suggested that it's a good thing I'm in charge of paying for things rather than designing them. But I like it (and the squirrel coffee table on the same page); it's much more inspiring than the poster of the sweaty, rock-climbing, older Lleyton Hewitt-lookalike doctor I can see from the corner of my eye.

Also, Toyota sent me a scratch and sniff card of a pine tree. Lucky me.

The teller who served me in the bank today didn't want to be there. She had one elbow on the desk so she could prop her chin up and conducted all our discussion in obviously bored voice. She all but sighed when I said I wanted a bank cheque, which meant she had to do difficult things like get off her chair to go and find someone to authorise it. I'm a patient, peaceful person, but, goodness me, I wanted to slap a bit of life into her.

On the plus side, she was too bored to bother giving me the patented sales spiel, so I didn't have to fend off enthusiastic offers of a home loan or a full financial review or whatever they're currently bothering people with. Small mercy, I suppose.

I was down the street shopping with my mother, who was there to achieve one of her lifelong dreams, that of owning a friand tray. (Her other lifelong dreams are (1) to own a tagine and (2) to own a pair of running spikes and thus become an Olympic sprint champion. I feel one of these is more likely than the other at this stage.) So she bought the tray and announced that she was going home to make some friands and she would serve them for afternoon tea. "After all, that's what friands are for!" She snorted at her little witticism all the way across the road to the bank and probably all the while I was talking to the aforementioned teller.

Dear teenage boy sitting in front of me on the bus,

If you can't work out where to go to purchase your electronic engineering textbooks, perhaps you're not really smart enough to go to university at all.

Yours sincerely,

An eavesdropper

Perhaps I'm being unkind. Perhaps he's a genius. A genius who is planning to go to a local newsagent to see if they've got copies of academic textbooks for an out-of-town university lined up with the magazines.


Disaster yesterday: I rang to make an appointment to get my hair cut, only to find that Mischief has moved. Horror! After my last hairdresser moved to Melbourne, I had such a terrible time finding a replacement. I auditioned three others before finding Mischief, and now I've got to go through it all again, starting with someone called Heather next week. Wish me luck.

Someone in a gorilla suit just came out of the café across the road, holding a bottle of water, and drove off in a little blue hatchback. You don't see that every day.

I don't have all that many shoes; I'm more about practicality than frivolity when it comes to footwear. However, I've been thinking lately that my current shoe storage system is just not working. The current system is "put them all on the floor at the bottom of the wardrobe" but this somehow results in almost every pair of shoes I own ending up outside the wardrobe. I think the problem is that the shoes I wear regularly - work shoes, casual shoes, walking shoes - are at the front and can be seen, while the others get pushed, forgotten, to the back, so I try to beat the system by not putting shoes in there at all. That's not entirely practical, I must admit. What to do instead: perhaps a low, tiered shelf that would fit into the bottom of the wardrobe, so I could see everything? Or the cloth shelf I've seen somewhere, like a wine rack, that could be hung in the wardrobe? How do you store your shoes?

That's it: my life is complete. Who would have thought all it would take is a PDF splitting program? I had need to purchase A-PDF Split for work purposes today, and I can highly recommend it. It only does one thing, but, goodness, it does it well. It took me all of five minutes to download, install and register it and then split the document I bought it for, and then considerably longer to open and split random PDFs on my computer just for the fun of it, and longer still to gather the others round to demonstrate what a marvellous little program it is. I do so love things that just work.

Passing the pretentious homewares shop while out for my lunchtime stroll I noticed that out the front was a white wicker basket lined with red fabric and filled with large, fabric-padded letters. I was torn, let me tell you. On the one hand, I find the prententious homewares shop rather... well, pretentious, but on the other hand, I love large letters. I have a large metal letter Q on top of the piano, as well as framed embroidery of an Illuminated manuscript-style A. I was very taken with the blue floral V I could see on top of the basket. I walked to the corner lost in thought: should I go back and get it?

As it happens, I didn't get a chance to decide, because at the corner a woman with a German accent called from across the road. "Excuse me! Excuse me!" Being the only person around, I turned, and met Wagner's Brunhilde. The woman was fortyish, very tall and substantial - not fat exactly, just solid. She had ringlets of golden hair down past her shoulders and an imperious manner. She was on crutches and was followed by a shorter, thinner, balding man laden down with suitcases and travel bags. They were coming from the direction of the hospital. "Where can I get a cup of coffee?" I gave her directions to the friendly café opposite the office. She sniffed. "Where can I get a cup of coffee on that street?" She waved a crutch at the corner, and I told her there was a café at the end of that block too. "Danke". She strode off. She held the crutches in position, but didn't use them. They swung with her arms like pendulums. The man trotted along behind her. I was going that way too, but I crossed the street so I could watch the passage of this most magnificent personage (I also didn't want to be nearby if she decided she didn't like that café). At the end of the block, she stopped and peered in the window of the café, looked up and down the street, then nodded for the man to open the door for her. He had to put the bags down to do so.

On the way back I met a man carrying a container filled with large punnets of strawberries. He was going along the street, selling them door-to-door in the offices and to anyone who passed him. I bought a punnet. Back in the office, Leeanne and Brian had a punnet each too. "I should have asked where he got them," said Brian. "They might have fallen off the back of a truck." They taste nice though.

Ooh, shiny new friends! *polishes and puts on shelf*

Do you ever read something in the newspaper and think to yourself, I just don't believe that?

Today's local paper is nothing but coverage of the May Race Carnival, which is a big deal in the City by the Sea (important enough that Cup Day, Thursday, is our public holiday in place of Melbourne Cup Day in November*) and also amongst the national horse racing community (who refer to the City by the Sea as The Bool**... eugh!).

Anyway, one of the big races is the Grand Annual Steeplechase, which is a little novel in that the horses jump over a hedge and actually leave the racecourse, cross a road and run around for a bit in a paddock, before crossing the road again and jumping back onto the racecourse to finish the race. This, The Warrnambool Standard boldly proclaims, is "world famous".

I just don't believe that. And I can check: had any of you heard of it before now?



* Some people, though, have far more imporant things to do. When I was a proper accountant, one of our clients, a s-l-o-w-talking vegetable farmer, came in during Race Week and while I checked his Quickbooks data we had the following conversation:

Client: Are you going to the Races on Thursday?
Me: No, it's not really my thing. How about you?
Client: No-o-o. The poe-tay-toes are keeping me busy this year.

Ri-i-ight.

** Which would make me a Boolean! Algebra jokes: they never get old. :-)

In a couple of weeks, Melbourne will play host to the Commonwealth Games (for those who don't live in the British Commonwealth, imagine a summer Olympics in which Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the individual countries of the UK celebrate beating Tonga at lawn bowls). I'm, well, a touch underwhelmed by it all, I must admit.

These Games don't have a torch but a baton, and we have been getting regular news updates on where it is and what it's doing each day. Torch or baton, this always strikes me as odd, as if the thing has free will and the ability to move itself about. "Today the baton went to Gippsland, and tomorrow it will be heading out to sea." Not like there's any people carrying it at all, just a baton jaunting about on holiday.

The baton will be sight-seeing in the City by the Sea later this week, and because it's predictable that there's always someone unhappy about something, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle about it. The baton's big photo opportunity here was that it was going to be carried down the beach by an ex-jockey on a locally famous, 28-year-old ex-racehorse. The jockey has hurt his foot and can't ride, so the organisers have given him another leg to run alone, and given the horse-back beach leg to another ex-jockey on another locally famous ex-racehorse. So the first jockey has gone to the paper, complaining that while he's happy with the new thing he's got, he's disappointed for his horse.

So the horse is upset it can't carry the sentient baton. Right.

*****

( And I mean: always someone unhappy about something )

My mother was telling me about a patient, a dairy farmer, who came in for emergency surgery last night. While he doing the morning milking, one of his cows stood on his foot. It hurt a bit, he said, but not terribly much; it happens, and he thought he'd probably have the usual nasty bruise. He kept thinking that all day until he was undressing for bed, when he took off his socks... and a toe came off in one of them.

How could you not notice a loose toe rattling about?

And while we're on the topic of disturbing things: Show your loved ones how much you care by making them a crochet hat.