Salt and corrosion

Hello, f-list. Where do we stand on people who bring their own tea-bags on social visits? Not for health or religious or other reasonable reasons. I mean taste. You just really like Lipton's Earl Grey (or whatever), so you take them everywhere, just in case the person you're visiting only has Bushell's Blue Label (or whatever).

One of my mother's cousins came to visit today, driving through town on her way to somewhere else. She (the cousin) had her own peppermint tea-bags. "Oh, we've got peppermint," said my mother, but her cousin said no, she only liked this particular brand, which she has only ever found in one shop in Brisbane (where she lives), so she had to go there and buy a big stock of them to take on her driving trip. Which you would think would be as irritating for her as it was for me, but apparently not.

(After she left, I said the tea-bag thing was a bit precious, and my mother reminded me that during John's illness/funeral a couple of months ago, we had several visits from his son and daughter-in-law, who were so fussy that they refused all hot drinks that weren't made (a) in their own house or (b) by professionals. So yes, that really is precious.)

In other news, I have the 48,159th most common surname in the world, shared with fewer than 10,000 other people, with a full quarter of them living in a tiny corner of Scotland. You can find out the same sort of thrilling information about your own surname here. (I had fun typing in surnames to work out the most common one, which isn't Singh as I always believed. So if it's not Indian, I thought, it must be Chinese, and, indeed, I got it on my third attempt. There are 76.5 million people surnamed Wang in the world, 74.7 million of them in China. That makes the Daisies look a bit lonely, doesn't it?)

Hello, f-list. I have been away, and now I'm back, having suffered a Disappointment. Oh, it was disappointing. The hotel my work uses for meetings has a seasonal breakfast menu. As I was heading down to breakfast this morning, I realised it was probably time for the winter menu, so the porridge would be back. The porridge! Their porridge last year was so good. It was officially Porridge with Warm Apricot Compote and Greek Yoghurt (and raspberries, although they weren't mentioned on the menu). I loved that porridge.

And they did have porridge; a new recipe. This year they are offering Porridge with Poached Pears, Honeyed Walnuts and Vanilla Cinnamon Sugar. Which is a lot of sugar, what with the honey and the sugar and the sugar syrup the pears were poached in. And not even any yoghurt to offset it. I could feel my teeth rotting as I ate it. Hmph. I might have to try the Lemon Ricotta Pancakes next time.

What would your name be if you were born in the US today? I would be Sophie, apparently. I'd have been Beulah in the 1930s.

There was a woman celebrating her 100th birthday in the paper this week, which was nice. Even better was her name: Leura Urch. (Leura is the name of a local mountain.)

I was supposed to go and see The Great Gatsby the other day, but, come the planned evening, we found that it was a closed charity screening. Hmph. But then, maybe not hmph, maybe instead it was a sign that I should avoid it? If so, I didn't take the hint, and plan to go on Monday instead. Hmmm. I am really not sure I want to see this.

Anyway, since our cinema plans were thwarted, we watched a DVD instead: Bernie, featuring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey. I am ambivalent at best about two of those three actors (Shirley's great), so I wasn't sure about this choice. I had to eat my words, though, because it's a super little film that manages to harness Jack Black's Jack Black-ness for the purposes of good. If your plans for viewing The Great Gatsby are thwarted, I highly recommend this as a replacement.

Yesterday was day 17 of the City by the Sea's great telecommunications failure, and I finally came back on air. Phone and internet both. So that's all jolly good. Normal service will now resume.

All year, from December 2011 to the end of November, I have been keeping lists of baby names recorded in the local paper. I was going to make word clouds of them to put in my annual Christmas newsletter, but (1) they're too big and (2) I just don't have it in me to do a letter this year (I am having one of my fits of the glooms). Anyway, having kept these lists all year, I feel I should do something with them, so here they are (click on them to see the bigger version).

( Jack James and Ruby Grace )

Also, I think my Kindle is dying. It won't turn on without being charged for several hours; once it does turn on, I can't turn it off again. Hmph.

There is a news story at the moment about one of Australia's Olympic archery competitors. Or maybe she's not going. I don't know. I only read so far, then zoned out. I am shockingly uninterested in the composition of the Olympic archery team. What level of interest I do have, though, is piqued by the name of this young woman: Odette Snazelle. Say that aloud. Doesn't it beg to be accompanied by jazz hands? 'Hi, I'm Odette [jazz hands] Snazelle!'

Driving home tonight, I was behind a car with a set of those stick figure family stickers on the back window. There was a woman playing golf, a space, a child on a bike and another child with a ball. The space puzzled me, because it was large enough not to be someone applying the stickers wildly, but not large enough to be a design statement. Just before I turned off, it hit me: the space was big enough for another sticker. Somebody has been removed! It's a stick figure family breakdown. So sad.

When I go for my walks on the beach, there are often caravans or camper vans in the car park. They're not meant to stay there overnight, but obviously they do rather than pay camping fees in the caravan park next door. Tsk. Anyway, this morning there was a van there, and when I went down the steps, there were two people in sleeping bags on the beach. It was warm last night, I suppose, so it would have been quite nice to sleep there. I wouldn't though, because the midges would be all over them. It was worse than that, though, because when I came back, the two slightly baffled looking people were sitting up, completely surrounded by about twenty hungry seagulls.

In today's paper was a baby called Jaxon David Norman Brian, Brian being his surname. How weird that he has three perfectly reasonable names and not one of them is the one he will be called by.

I went to visit my mother today, and her partner John was looking particularly pleased. My mother has bought him a new hat. It's a baseball cap to wear when he goes into the space under the house, they explained. Very nice, but wouldn't his old baseball cap do just as well for that? No, John told me, because... he touched the cap and headlights came on (his is tan, not camouflage). As the packaging says, it has 'stealth LEDs in the brim'. I'm sure we'll all be wearing them this time next year.

There was a baby in today's paper named Daisy Alicia. I don't know the parents, but, clearly, they've named her after me.

In the newsagent today, I was picking up the daily paper when a woman came in and looked at the display of Christmas decorations nearby. I don't know what she did differently to everyone else who had passed by, but somehow she set off the Santa Claus figurine. 'HO HO HO,' he bellowed, startling everyone within earshot. The woman waved ineffectively at him. 'No, stop,' she said, but that didn't work. He kept bellowing and she fled to the greeting card section so no-one would know it was her.

Mere seconds later, another noise, this time from the direction of the greeting card section. This time a Santa Claus voice was singing, 'DON'T YOU WISH YOUR GRANDPA WAS HOT LIKE ME?' and when I looked up, I saw the woman quickly closing a card, putting it down and walking away. She's going to have nightmares about Santa Claus this Christmas.

1. Yesterday I had to ring a woman whose name was Aleica. That was her name as it appeared on her letterhead and in her email address. But when she answered the phone, she said, 'Good morning, Alicia speaking'. I feel personally affronted at this abuse of my name. That's not even a phonetic rendering of it. I told my mother at dinner, writing it down to show her the outrageousness of it, and she said, 'But a Leica is a camera!' Good one, Mum.

2. Yesterday, my colleague Brian cut up a homegrown pumpkin he had in storage and gave each of us at work a quarter. For some reason, we all decided to put our pumpkin slices on the top of our desks. It was slightly odd, going to talk to someone and finding them sitting behind a piece of pumpkin, and then going to the next room and finding the same thing. It was a little disappointing we didn't have any visitors to baffle.

3. Wandering the streets at lunch time, a man asked if I could direct him to the council offices. I'm not good at giving directions. I wish I knew what it is about me that says, 'Ask me! I know the way!' Whatever it is, it's priming people for disappointment. As it happens, the council offices were nearby, on the other side of the block from where we were standing, so the directions to get there should have been simple: go the end of the block, turn right, go the end of the block, turn right. But, oh dear, renovations to the performing arts centre mean that the footpath there is blocked off, and erection of the tents for the Fun4Kids winter holidays festival on the civic green mean that another part of the footpath is also blocked off, making matters complicated. Happily, we were standing about ten metres away from a public street map, so I showed him on that. Except I didn't, because the YOU ARE HERE arrow is pointing at the wrong place. Helpful. So I had to give him the actual directions: go to the end of the block, cross the road, turn right, go to the end of the block, cross the road, go straight ahead to the pedestrian crossing, cross the road, turn right, enter the tent, and once you're in there, there should be signs telling you how to get to the library and council offices. I hope there are, anyway. I watched him go as far as the tent and if there aren't signs, he'll have been wandering about in there all night. He came to Warrnambool for business and was never seen again. There's a thriller waiting to be written.

4. After I watched the man get into the tent, I turned back the way I came and realised I could have just told him to walk through the council car park and turn left. Oops.

5. My mother had dinner with me after her Pilates class. While she was at that, her partner John rang. 'I've got a note here,' he said, 'that says BOTH TOES. I'd only write that down if your mum told me to do something, but I can't remember what and I don't want to ask her.' So I said, 'What's wrong with your toes?' Nothing. 'You don't need to put ointment on them, or bandages, or something?' No. We agreed it was a mystery.

6. He rang back fifteen minutes later and said, 'Potatoes!'

7. Not that they needed potatoes on their shopping list after that, because I gave them the pumpkin quarter.

8. Last night on MasterChef, one of the competitors had a bake-off with a woman from the CWA (Country Women's Association, which is like the UK's WI). Merle had seventy years' baking experience, has won hundreds of ribbons at agricultural shows ('I've been a winner more often than I've been a loser,' she said), and they were using her hand-written recipe. The contestant was never going to win against that. She even brought her knitting to do while her cake cooked, bless her.

9. They made something called a Peach Blossom Cake, which is apparently a vintage CWA recipe. Maybe in the northern states. My grandmother was in her local CWA and they'd never heard of Peach Blossom Cake. They would have called it a marble cake (because it's got pink and white batter marbled through it), but they weren't concerned with matching the pink batter to the icing, which was quite important to Merle. Remember that if you want to make one. (You'd think they could have taken a photo of the cut cake, to show the marbling inside.)

10. My grandmother was always a bit sniffy about CWA members who entered cakes and jams and such in agricultural shows. It was odd seeing MasterChef oohing at Merle's ribbons last night, thinking how disapproving my grandmother would have been. Confident in her ability to out-bake all-comers, I think she looked down on people wanting prizes for validation.

1. I have been feeling... disengaged lately. Flat and sluggish and blah. It's probably from my cold. Maybe a list will get me back on track.

2.My mother went to a quilting camp last weekend. While there, talk apparently turned to her meat-free sausage rolls (so meat-free they don't even include bacon) and she promised to give copies of the recipe to all interested parties. She finished telling me this by saying, 'And you're so much faster at typing than I am.' Which is true.

3. So I typed this recipe for her, so while it's fresh, ( you can all have it too )

4. May I say, they really are quite good. The raw filling looks like grey gloop, but is more or less indistinguishable from normal sausage rolls when cooked, but not as greasy. I mean, you wouldn't want them every day, but as a party nibble, they're fab.

5. Today I read a couple of articles about the 'last name effect'. Apparently, if your last name begins with a letter early in the alphabet, you deliberate longer over shopping choices; if your last name is towards the end of the alphabet, you shop more quickly. People with last names in the middle of the alphabet (like me) are somewhere in the middle. But! The effect is only linked to childhood last names, so if you changed your last name as an adult from Zebedee to Arbuthnot, you'd still tend towards speedy purchasing decisions. So there you go. Make of that what you will.

6. I'm not really happy with my Monday and Tuesday photos. I actually forgot both days until quite late at night; part of the previously mentioned sluggishness, I think. So yesterday, I thought I'd make an effort and stop somewhere scenic on my way home. And it was beautiful. Officially the first day of winter, but really a lovely late autumn day, crisp and still, and I was looking down a hill at a lake surrounded by golden-red trees, with the sea in the distance. Oh, it was lovely. Then I turned my camera on and the screen said MEMORY CARD ERROR and wouldn't let me take a photo. So that was the end of that.

7. MasterChef hasn't been gripping me at all this year, which is sad. Still, last night someone made wasabi and lemon myrtle spring rolls, so that's a taste sensation to think about. Then reject.

8. It's inspired a poll, though.
[Poll #1748047]

9. I am currently harbouring ill-will towards cold people at work who insist on having the heating turned way up. I tend the other way, but I'd be happy to strike a deal whereby the heating is permanently left at a mutually agreed level and cold people could, you know, put on a spencer, as opposed to the current arrangement whereby they can turn the heating up as high as they like. Yesterday morning the temperature had barely managed to get above zero, but inside was tropical. I hate it. I'm all hot and bothered and it makes my nose block up (admittedly, that will stop when my cold clears up). My colleague Brian is retiring at the end of the year and the office manager has suggested that she might move out of her lonely, sweltering office and sit at his desk. 'Would you like that?' she asked. Well, no, not if she controls the thermostat.

10. Finally, I've lost my good gloves. Has anyone seen them?

I love the names on spam emails. Which is good, because I get a lot of it at work. For a while, I was getting messages from names like Enchanted Q. Hatstand, which I thought was delightful. Recently they've changed to real, slightly old-fashioned names. Today I was offered the chance to buy cheap pharmaceut1cals by both Gladys Calhoun and Agnes McGill. Don't they sound like a pair of tough old grannies?

Waiting for the sandwich squisher to heat up at lunchtime yesterday, I was looking out the office kitchen's window. Brian came in and said, 'It's a good little window to look out while you wait, a good view over the sea,' and I admitted I wasn't looking across to the sea, but down into the car park, where a green-P-plater (a second-year driver) was attempting to pull into a park and making a terrible hash of it. He pulled in crooked but instead of backing all the way out and straightening up, he would back out a tiny way, move forward, back out a tiny way, move forward, and so on. A fifty-point turn, in other words. Then Leeanne came in with a stranger, who turned out to be a signwriter, and they wanted to look out the window so he could see where to paint our new logo on the fence, and the four of us stood and watched this boy trying to park. Over five minutes it took, and it still wasn't remotely straight when he decided he'd had enough. He looked exhausted when he got out, poor kid.

In yesterday's mail I had a letter from a charity, one I've never had anything to do with, and taped to the letter was a five cent piece. The letter said I could keep the five cents to remind me of all the fine and necessary work the charity does, or I could return it as part of my donation. I chose the unspoken third option: I shredded the letter and used the five cents to buy the paper this morning. Was this wrong?