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Good news: Our zucchini plant has calmed down. We are no longer living on an all-zucchini diet.

Bad news: Our long, green vegetable nightmare isn't over. My mother picked eighteen cucumbers off the single cucumber plant in the last two days.

Friday was my half-day at work and I came home about at about one to find my mother on the phone. On the landline, which I want to get rid of, but which she insists on keeping for some of her elderly relatives. Apart from the elderly relatives, most of the calls to the landline are junk: surveys, charities, scams.

So she was on the phone, and as I came in she said, "Oh, here's my daughter, you can talk to her," and handed me the phone, saying, "There's a problem with the modem."

Now, our telco is Telstra, and we have had a letter from them recently about them doing work in the area this week, with a number to call if we have problems, and, indeed, the Telstra van was parked round the corner on my way home. So this was plausible; but if I'd had time to think, I would have realised that my mother would rather be waterboarded than call Telstra voluntarily. She would have waited until I came home and made me call. But I didn't have time to think, so I just took the phone to find out what the problem was.

The problem was a very angry man called Sean, who claimed that our modem was sending too much data and was going to overload the network. He thought our wi-fi had been hacked. He wanted me to tell him what colour the lights on the modem were and if they were flashing or not, and when I told him, thinking this was a stupid question, he repeated the answer back to me incorrectly. So I concluded this was some sort of scam and ended the call.

"No, it's urgent, he'll call back!" said my mother, and sure enough, the phone rang immediately with the same number. I let it ring out and blocked the number. It turned out Sean had called (not my mother), saying he was from "Telstra Technical Services" and started his nonsense about the modem, and my mother, sensing a scam, had hung up. He'd then called back twice more and was really aggressive, convincing my mother that he was legit and the problem was urgent, largely because he knew our phone number and address. I think he'd have run into a problem if he'd tried to get her to download something or give her credit card details, or whatever the plan was, but she was quite upset that that he'd got as far as he had.

Anyway, she's promised that she'll hang up on any more Telstra Technical Services calls.

(I've just checked the call list, and we had three more blocked calls from Sean's number Friday afternoon.)


February

Not very exciting questions )
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My old work had a spam filter that provided a list of quarantined emails, so you could go through them and pick out any real ones. While I was there last year, I collected the best subject lines to use as my headings in the post-Cartland era. Today's is one of my favourites. It raises so many questions. Mostly variants on: What does it mean?

January books read

* A Monstrous Commotion: The Mysteries of Loch Ness - Gareth Williams (2015) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* The Last Tudor - Philippa Gregory (2017) ★ ★
Read more... )

* Lying in Wait - Liz Nugent (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Night Music: Nocturnes Volume 2 - John Connolly (2015) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Throne of the Crescent Moon - Saladin Ahmed (2012) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* After Many Years: Twenty-One "Long-Lost" Stories - LM Montgomery (2017) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson (1951) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )
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Today at work I received an email from donna.casw@haemorrhoider.com with the subject line Why your ears keep ringing (and what you can do about it!). I haven't had a good piece of spam for ages. (I am intrigued by the idea of a company called haemorrhoider.com, though. What would it do, if it existed?)

I have been looking at knitting books on Amazon and clicked on one called The Manly Art of Knitting. As you would. So now my Amazon browsing history consists of Barbara Cartland, Booker Prize nominees and knitting books, and it seems The Manly Art of Knitting was enough to make Amazon finally stop recommending further Barbara Cartland titles to me. I am not sure that its new suggestions are an improvement, though.

And I clicked on the dancing one, so things will probably take another turn )

(The one that's been cut off is Does God Ever Speak Through Cats? No, is the answer to that.)

I have been dog-sitting for the Next Doors for the past three weeks. Sort of. Next Doors have a large, secure yard with three sheds with pet doors, plus an undercover patio, so their dog, Chester, has been able to play in his own yard during the day and sleep in his own bed at night, and come to visit me through the side gate when I'm home. Here he is after his walk:

Wondering why I am taking his photo instead of giving him a Schmacko )

Next Doors came home yesterday. It felt strange walking to the shop for the paper this morning without him.
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Martha Stewart sent me an email yesterday, subject line 'Glittered skeletal parts'. That's the sort of serial killer she'd be, isn't it? It certainly put Oprah's email about '3 ways to make a bold statement with coloured pants' in the shade. (The statement this woman is making would seem to be 'I really like teal', which on the face of it isn't quite as bold as 'boil the flesh off and roll the bones in glitter'.)

My mother said to me today, 'Did you go to your school reunion?' Well, no, I didn't. I didn't know it was on. (My mother heard about it at her monthly Old Nurses' lunch, from the mother of one of the people who did go.) I mean, I wouldn't have gone even if I did know about it, but the organisers clearly didn't stretch themselves finding their former classmates. It's not like I live in a cave in the Himalayas, communicating only by carrier pigeon. I wish I did, but the commute would be dreadful.

My watch stopped last week, so I took it to the jewellers for a new battery. The woman said, 'We'll call you when it's ready.' On Friday, over a week later, I happened to be walking past the shop, so I went in and asked how it was going and the same woman said, 'Oh, it's right here, waiting for you.' So why didn't she call? Hmph. I sometimes think I have some sort of power of forgetability: the second I walk out the door, salespeople blink and wonder why they're standing there. Anyway, I've got my watch back now. I've been feeling lost without it.

Photos of the week:



Day 282. Here's an idea, Day 283. Leaves, Day 284. Collection of mice, Day 285. Stack of saucers, Day 286. Sink full of broccoli, Day 287. A head of lettuce, Day 288. Refilling the shower soap, Day 288a. As day 288, Day 288b. As day 288
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1. I seem to be a bit out of sorts lately. Just blah. I see something and think I should write an entry about it, but don't. So maybe doing a ten-point list will clear the backlog.

Toilet tissue illness, spammers who have lost their whimsy, lotto syndicates and that little radio I bought at the Post Office many years ago )
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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?
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I got some seasonal spam today: Santa's best friend is your dog. Even spammers get the festive spirit.

There is an Australian character called Quinn in the comic strip Luann at the moment. Well... he says he's Australian but he also recently claimed that Australians celebrate Thanksgiving, so I think he's from that northern part of Australia known as Canada. Anyway, after celebrating a traditional Australian Thanksgiving, he's moved onto Christmas, claiming that he's going to sing that well-known song 'Oi'm draymun ava woit Crassmiss', which is half right and half completely wrong.

I thought no more of this until today, when I saw a poster in a bookshop window advertising a re-release of Let Stalk Strine by Afferbeck Lauder*, an old book that rendered common phrases into phonetic broad Australian. I can't wait to see Quinn the fake Australian singing that New Year's Eve classic, 'Shoulder Quaint S Beefer Got'.

A prize** if you can translate the subject line ('tiger teasie') of this entry into English. Unleash your inner Strine!




* Let's Talk Australian by Alphabetical Order.
** Self-satisfaction.
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My spammers are inventing words now: Would you like to biggicize your device?, the last one asked. No, thanks, Mr Spammer, but I may appropriate your new verb next time I want to enlarge something.
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Today's spam promised me that [my] watch will be screaming in luxury, which sounds unlikely, I must say. I think the fake designer watch spam got scrambled with the Viagra spam.

Rather than making New Year resolutions, in January I decided that I would do eight things this year, each one dealing with a different part of life - work, creativity, health, and so on. Yesterday, I crossed off the first, and easiest, one (finance: I will finally close that account with nothing in it). That's one thing in four months, leaving eight months to knock off the other seven. Yes, that's going well.

Bank chap wanted to do a review of my banking options when I went to close the account, which, oh, all right then. If we must. And he was quite good really, changing one account type to something that earns more interest. Except when he did that, it generated a new password for my internet banking. 'We'll just SMS that to you,' he breezed. Um, no, you won't, bank chap. I don't have a mobile phone. Well, you'd have thought I'd just told him I'd been living without a heart for all these years. The bank's whole password-changing system is based on SMS. He consulted a couple of colleagues about how to get around this astounding state of affairs, then, because such a thing had never been heard of, he had to ring the bank's help line - the actual help line that we, the customers, would use - and wait on hold for ten minutes (which amused me, I must admit) and get them to tell me over the phone. And then he had to leave the room while I used his computer to log in with my new password and change it again so that no-one else would know. So didn't I feel special?
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I got an email this morning from Ocogimifise whose message was entitled 'Jtapibuh enidjacyl jsipucy'.

It's like your hearts aren't in it anymore, spammers.
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As I was walking over to get the paper this morning, I passed two baby magpies lying dead on the footpath. They seemed too small to be out of the nest, but I didn't look closer than that. On the way back, there was an adult magpie in the tree above them, making sad little calls. So that got the day off to a depressing start.

I've been getting a lot of spam recently from someone called Trip Van Noopen, who is apparently keen to tell me all about The Plight of the Grey Wolves. That's a step up from my usual spam. Back to normal today, though: I received an email that asked if I was at all concerned about my thinning eyebrows. Er, no, I'm not, but thanks for asking, spammer.

Also, I've just started a new bottle of shampoo, apparently made by L'Oréal's Random Bolding and Hyperbole Division. It features a NEW Light Reflecting BOOSTER and TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION: PEARL PROTEIN. This is what the back of the bottle says:

Instantly the micro-splits of the hair cuticle are more even. Smoother, the surface of the hair captures and reflects the light better. Perfectly nourished, the hair fibre becomes stronger and soft to the tough. Your hair looks revived.

Not just revived (sorry, revived), though: apparently I can look forward to PROVEN RESULTS of MIRROR SHINE, CASHMERE TOUCH. I... I can't even imagine what that would look like on hair.

Oh, and finally, thanks to a recent discussion with [livejournal.com profile] rickfan37, I found my old links to these two pages: balaclavas and hats. Do take a moment out of your day to savour them.
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Oh, I am a sleuth! A super sleuth! Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden have nothing on me! By the way, f-listers, where did you stand on the Drew v. Belden issue? I was a Belden fan myself. In primary school, my best friend and I briefly called ourselves the Owls of Purnim in honour of Trixie's Bob-Whites of the Glen. We picked owls because they were the only birds either of us could imitate with any accuracy, although we never actually summoned each other with the call the way the Bob-Whites did. Nor could we could ever persuade our parents to buy us matching red jackets in order to cross-stitch "O.O.P." in white on the back of them. And we never found any mysteries to solve.

But other than that it was exactly the same.

Gosh, I haven't thought about that for years. I still have a clipboard with "O.O.P." written on the front of it in faded purple texta. It was for our meeting minutes, which probably went "No mysteries found. No mysteries solved. Practised hooting." Although I remember one meeting in which we had an argument about how to pronounce the word "laboratory" (as in, the place we'd have to send fingerprint prints if we ever found any or worked out how to take them if we did).

I should say, though, that while we were obviously impressionable nine-year-old idiots, we were still worldly-wise enough to laugh at Trixie Belden's friend, Dan, the streetwise street kid from New York, who objected to the Bob-Whites' matching jackets on the grounds that they might be a gang thing. I mean, The Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story were pretty sad gangs, what with all that finger clicking and such, but even they didn't wear matching red bomber jackets with decorative cross-stitch on the back. Now I'm older and wiser, I notice Dan didn't object to the jackets on the more sensible grounds that they were a bit naff, which makes me wonder just how streetwise and tough he really was.*

Anyway, I received an expense reimbursement claim yesterday from someone whose name was apparently Crthny Nedgem. And that clearly wasn't right. It's a cliché, I know, but doctors really do have terrible handwriting. Anyway, it took me the best part of an hour, but I managed to find the doctor's real name, based on the only two legible parts of the form (the post code and the first six digits of the eleven digit business number), using two helpful government websites. Take that, Trevor Surname-Withheld! Your bad orthography is no match for the long-dormant skills of O.O.P.!

Also, someone called Dante S. Durango emailed me offering a "part time hob". That'll come in handy.



* I've just googled to make sure I wasn't making any of that up and was reminded that, prior to meeting Trixie and co., Dan was involved with a New York street gang called The Cowhands. The Cowhands. That's his street cred lost, then.
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... each showing a view of a head from the appropriate angle." That was the subject line of a spam email I received today. Sadly, the offer inside of cheap prescription drugs was nowhere near as interesting.

I wrote a long entry - a proper entry, such as I haven't made for quite some time - at lunch, only to be confounded when the internet connection at work went down for the rest of the afternoon. I couldn't even email it to myself at home. Sigh. But I've saved it and will try again when I go back on Wednesday.

So I'll tell you about something else that happened at lunch instead. With our boss on holidays, we minions decided to close the office and have a quick snack at the new café around the corner. We went in and ordered and sat at a table and after a minute or so the waitress brought the hot drinks over. Now, I like to let my hot drinks cool a little before I drink them so I let my hot chocolate sit, but the others drank their coffee straight away. Then the waitress came back, took their empty cups, and returned a few minutes later with our falafel wraps. My hot chocolate was timed to perfection: it was just the right temperature when I finished my lunch. One of my colleagues looked at me enviously and said, "I wish I'd thought of that, I could do with a drink". And that's, I don't know, surprising. It felt as though the meal was timed oddly, as though the coffee was a separate course before lunch, but who is to blame: the waitress for bringing the hot drinks too early before the meal was ready, or my colleagues for gulping them down too quickly?

Coming Wednesday (work internet connection permitting): The Saga of the Beast!
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I got some festive spam today: "Check out the wonders of pound melting!" Surely a Christmas miracle.

I write a little newsletter-thing for my Christmas cards each year, which usually includes a page where I wax reminiscent about the Christmases of yore. Here's this year's memoir:

Harp, horn and apple )

*****

And as a bonus, here's last year's much shorter effort as well:

The worst Christmas )

*****

Merry Christmas to you all.
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This year is the fiftieth year of television in Australia, and we've been blessed with several self-congratulatory programs celebrating this milestone. I was horrified to discover yesterday that Channel 7 also seems to be marking the occasion by a weekly dose of "comedy classics" - two and a half hours of "George and Mildred", "The Benny Hill Show", "On The Buses" and "Are You Being Served" in prime time. After fifty years, I think they've stopped trying.

Today I received spam from Alerts Bison, who wanted to tell me that "A word spoken is past recalling. Possible Interpretation: Do not look for faults in a something received as a gift." Thanks for that, Alerts Bison!
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Lately I've been getting all my spam from the Israeli Brokerage Agency (it's the only place to get it, darling). The Agency is apparently keen to offer me "PART TIME WORK!!", but inside the email is a different story. Literally. I've been cutting and pasting the email contents as research for a science-fiction spam story, and reading the messages one after the other I realised they form a surreal, but ongoing, narrative. It's the story of Paul, a frustrated novelist, and Annie, his supportive wife. One of them (Paul, I think) has killed someone.

Episode I: Citron )

Episode II: Argon )

Episdode III: Anguish )

Anguish, indeed.

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