Whoopsie-doodle

Tsk, this is getting ridiculous.
OK internets, I have a confession to make.
I only have access to you on the weekends.
Well, unfettered access.

My workplace is unfairly suspicious of its employees' intentions and seems to think we'd spend the entire day looking at pictures of kittens or watching viral videos so they have blocked a lot of websites, and I mean A LOT.
Actually I'm kind of impressed.
Most of the websites we need for work are easily accessed but anything that might be a webcomic or social networking site is on the 'no no' list.

As I live in an area outside of the city that hasn't yet embraced the idea of internet cafes, my other option is the free internet available at the local library. Unfortunately they too have concerns about their patrons' online behaviour and have blocked many photo sharing sites and forums, almost anything to do with online gaming and yet I can still log on to Whitechapel.
Strange fish to slip through the net. Ha Ha Ha! Pun!*

And I haven't yet invited you into my home, internets.
It's not that you wouldn't be welcome, well some parts of you, it's just... well first I'd have to look at the different types of internet packages available and the conditions attached and the costs and all those lovely details and along with buying a watch and a new winter coat I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

But I'm going to soon because only getting to trawl the fun bits of the internet when I visit friends and family is a) annoying and b) kind of rude, what with the ignoring them for hours on end whilst I giggle at webcomics or lurk on forums.

In some ways it's an advantage because when I finally do come to check in on my favourite sites the magical internet fairy has come and updated them several times and there's plenty to see.
Unfortunately there are also disadvantages such as missing out on events announced or messages that people have sent to email systems that I don't have access to during the week.
There is also looking like a bit of a technotard because I've made a mistake and have then left it there for all to see for weeks on end until I notice they exist... Or don't, of course.

Even with this blog, on more than one occasion I've hit 'Save Now' instead of 'Publish Post' and haven't noticed because I've gone rushing off to do something else or attempt to be less antisocial and haven't been able to look at the webpage during the week because it's blocked at work and then have continued not to notice for weeks at a time as I leap onto the internet, fling things onto it and then run away yet again.

Until I get myself organised I'll have to keep on as I have been but I'm going to at least double-check that I've posted things correctly otherwise I'll end up looking like a damn fool.
Sort of like now.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm just going to fix March and then I'll go look up internet packages.



* Sorry I've been watching a lot of Harvey Birdman lately, it's been
Ha Ha Ha! Everything! this week.

Tonight I Have No Doona*

This is because one of the cats, probably the smaller one, decided to go tinkles on my brother's bed and as I'm only home on the weekends he borrowed my doona whilst his is being exorcised/washed.
By the time I got home this weekend and heard this exciting story he had already achieved unconsciousness wrapped in my cosy blanket but I'm not fussed because it's not yet cold enough for me to need it and also this makes me laugh.

As the only person who leaves my room completely open at all times to kitty access and perusal I am richly rewarded by never being the focus of their occasional ire.
Anyone who, worried about the exact peril that befell my sibling, chooses to keep their room quarantined will be punished during the merest slip of vigilance with a urine-based demonstration of exactly what at least one of the cats thinks of this.
They don't do it very often but when they do they never do it to me.

My slow transformation into a crazy old cat lady continues smoothly and despite my lack of doona I will be quite warm tonight.
I've got the cats :-D


*Doona = eiderdown, duvet, counterpane, comforter

Beep!

One of the supermarkets near my flat has just installed a bank of those self-service checkouts.
After some in-the-field research and speculation I have decided that I don't like them.

Sure they have some good points, shy people are more likely to buy condoms, pregnancy tests or items of a personal nature; you can pack your own groceries and don't have to stop the checkout kid from putting tins of food on top of your bread or carton of eggs; and they take up less space and help speed up the tempo of the store so you can get in and out quicker but the bad points seem to outweigh the good.

Firstly, without the perceived judgement of the checkout clerk or other shoppers in the queue certain folk may be far more likely to make food purchases that are bad for them which they know they shouldn't be making but can't quite reign in their impulse control enough to reject. I speak from experience :-b

Secondly, the more of these self-service checkouts they install, the less actual staff they have to employ and train and now is not the time to be phasing people out.

And the biggie, thirdly, for some people the supermarket checkout represents the sum total of their regular social interaction.
Public transport ticketing systems are automated, you can buy almost anything online and certain lines of work don't require any verbal communication at all* so this may have been their only moment of mandatory small-talk and the more they're able to avoid it the more difficult it will become and the less likely they'll engage in it voluntarily.

This probably sounds a little 'back in my day' or 'you're taking this too seriously technophobe' but I do think it's a factor.
Some people will always be social and tactile and interactive no matter how many virtual options are available and some people will always struggle in those situations but the less practise they get the more likely they are to withdraw.

I'm not saying people should be forced into situations they're uncomfortable with but without a little push and a bit of chance I might not have found out about or become involved with a lot of the parts of my life and the close friends I really value now and I would hate to have missed out on that.

And that's why I think self-service checkouts are The Matrix.
Thank you.
Wait, what?


*And of course some people don't work

Sparkle Sparkle!

I have been cleaning the ever-living heck out of my house this week.
'How domestic!' you might think, 'How quaint!'.
But this is the first time I've given my place 'The Business' since I bought my lightglobe changing ladder and there are parts of the place that I didn't even know existed that are filthy.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
The ceilings are so high I need a ladder just to reach the lights and the people who lived here before me were in their 70s and not exactly suited to balancing on the tops of ladders and wiping door lintels. Or being able to see, bless their slightly blurry eyes.

My newly officially identified allergies have been going gang-busters but I'm consoling myself with the fact they'll be a lot happier once I'm finished and the place is actually dust-free.

I keep making little multi-pronged plans of attack.
All the high-up stuff first, then I can put the bloody ladder away and coax my calves back into talking to me again. Then the two carpeted rooms so I can vacuum and be done with it. Then I can cram everything from the lounge into those two rooms so I can scrub the kitchen and the bathroom and attack the damn wooden floors.

Those floors are the bane of my rental existence and a big part of why I don't mop very often.
They are sealed pine boards with a 5mm gap between each board that make sweeping inefficient and vacuuming time-consuming as you have to follow each line up and down the room whilst imitating an inverted L. The shellac, or whatever it is, is older than I am and flakes off if you scratch the floor even slightly and as the wood seems to have the consistency of a none-too-firm cheese which you could gouge a groove in with your fingernail if you tried.
This makes moving the furniture very bloody annoying so I tend to avoid doing it.

My flat is what I like to call 'venerable' so a big part of my relief at the end of this process will come from having managed to clean the place without making any bits of it fall off or disintegrate and knowing when to leave well enough alone.
As the previous part-time abode of several doted upon grandchildren it features several clusters of exciting texta marks low down on some walls and surprising patterns of brightly coloured nail polish blobs on different parts of the floor and a Peter Rabbit sticker next to the bath which I have been affectionately protecting.
I get the feeling if I tried to 'fix' any of these problems I would do more damage than I would good and would take away part of what I find so charming about the place which is that it is so very definitely lived in.
I've never been entirely comfortable with new houses as they feel sort of 'unfinished' or as if they have no personality whereas this slightly daggy, slightly banged up place is very definitely a home. Mine for now.

And after all this cleaning and moving and arranging I can collapse into an exhausted grubby heap in my nice clean flat, feeling smug and self-satisfied and at the same time quite quite glad that I won't have to do some of that stuff again for months - I'm not sure the old place could take it and frankly neither could I.
My finges are all pruney and scraped and my back and legs have taken out a restraining order against me.
But at least I've stopped sneezing long enough to type this now!

Don't Dance On My Boots And Tell Me You're Raving

I went to a Nine Inch Nails concert on Wednesday and even though Wednesday is not usually considered the ideal night to cut loose and get down it was still amazing.

There seemed to be a certain amount of confusion amongst elements of the crowd on the function of doors and how you need your ticket and ID to get through them and into the licensed area so we were still standing outside when the support band started up.
Well, the support two dudes.
The support band – Jaguar Love – was… wait a second, I just want to savour the name Jaguar Love… Jag-uar Looove… Heh heh heh… OK, no I’m back.
The support band Jaguar Love was supposed to feature three people but one of the guys, I’m guessing the drummer, was mysteriously missing. So it was a very brave guitarist working through his set, the haunted keyboard playing some backing electronica all by itself and the singer going completely batshit insane with his hair in his eyes so he didn’t have to see where he was going or what he was doing. He did have a rather impressive vocal range though, no idea what he was saying but he could say it in a range of tones.

After our two-thirds serve of Jaguar Love had vacated the stage and we were waiting for the main event to begin one of the people I went with decided to pass the time by having a self-indulgent quasi-elitist grumble to his partner, my mate R, that half the people there wouldn’t know which album any of the songs had come from and had probably started listening from With The Teeth and had never bothered to check out the back catalogue.
As I am one of those people who is hard pressed to put song to album I ignored this with my usual good grace, waited for the lights to dim again and then just listened to Trent Reznor straining and hating and emoting and hoping like a professional.
And it was great.

The band was a well-oiled note-remembering machine, Trent put on an excellent performance and I am reliably informed that he spoke more to the audience in that one night than at many of the previous concerts combined, and the atmosphere was excellent.
Except for this one dude who seems to have gotten lost and apparently accidentally bought a ticket thinking this was the city’s most expensive rave party.
And he stood right in front of us.
Well I say stood.
It was more an explosion of syncopated elbows and knees than anything else.
I will never have that guy’s level of rhythm or coordination but I also hope that I never have that many people hoping that I either bugger off or quietly OD and fold up into a much less obstructive heap on the floor.
By virtue of his much lauded elbow-action he was taking up the space of five people and made it dangerous to attempt to stand still and impossible to see the band.
He definitely appeared to be enjoying himself but I got the distinct impression he would have enjoyed himself just as much if the two of you were standing in a deserted warehouse and you had kept pulling the string on a soft toy that played Pop Go The Weasel. Or even if you’d got bored, ditched the soft toy and bunked off for a beer, leaving him in silence.
What’s the point in that, fella?
Couldn’t you think of something else to spend the ticket price on?
For instance, more drugs as you were obviously somewhat enhanced already.

After a short amount of time and several near misses with the elbows I took life by the ho-jos and just pushed in front of him. If he managed to hit me in the back of the head I vowed that things would go badly for him but he seemed to be capable of avoiding that which was in front of him, just not that to his rear or sides.
That left the people behind me to deal with him but it’s every person for themselves in the concert world and given I’m a maximum of 5 foot 2 in flats I tend to be a bit more mercenary than some about this rule. I have to use all my swaying and jumping and toe balancing skills to get a good view and that’s when things are going my way.

Luckily partway through proceedings two girls, to whom I shall remain forever indebted, started making out right next to me and suddenly I was in the centre of a circle of men standing very still and staring and I could finally see the band without having to jump up and down. Thanks ladies!

The lessons I learned from this particular concert are fourfold:

• Next time I see any gig at Festival Hall I will be on the balcony - the vertically challenged must seek out high ground!
• Support acts are very gutsy - standing up in front of a crowd who is there to see someone else and putting on your best performance (I assume) when missing a band member has got to take chutzpah.
• Guys who have waited years to see their favourite band will still completely ignore it just to watch two girls kiss.
• Nine Inch Nails put on a phenomenal live show.

Vultures Of Love

I have the mixed blessing of living near and knowing some of the folk from an Australian Army base.
I say mixed blessing because I always assume knowing and being near folk in the military could be a big plus when the zombies rise but until then I have to put up with their other little foibles.
And their little satellites.

You see folks, Army men – and I’m not being sexist here, just accurate – Army men tend to attract a certain kind of woman. I like to call her ‘the vulture of love’.
I assume it’s the same in a lot of armed forces, the enlisted personnel and junior officers are moved about on a fairly regular basis, shuttled to where ever they’re needed and sometimes just as a practice for the time when they might get shipped off overseas and need to be used to packing up and moving out.
This makes dating a little stressful as even if you manage to pick out the ideal partner on your first day in Town A you only have a year or two before you will be given your marching orders to Town B which could conceivably be on the other side of the continent.
So what do you do if you don’t want to have to keep going through the relentless dating mill, the getting to know you phase, the no-really-baby-of-course-I-love-you-sex-now-plz? relationship development and all the associated and sundry issues?
Why you get married of course!
Then you can take your girlfriend – I mean wife – around from place to place with you and don’t have to start from scratch each time.
Even though she does.
But that’s OK because she has factored this in to her plan.
Her plan to land an Army man.

The vulture of love is typically five to ten years older than the Army man she is grooming for matrimony as her desperation to marry is based more on the idea that time is running out and the biological clock won’t keep ticking for ever. She wants to get married, he wants to get married, it’s a match made in a sort of bargain basement heaven.
The vulture of love isn’t overly worried about compatibility as her spouse is most likely going to be away or largely unavailable for most of the year with responsibilities, training and – in some cases – deployment.
The most important thing for a vulture of love is that she can use the words ‘My Husband’ with unnecessary regularity, the hook-line-and-sinkered Army man effectively ceases to have a name as he must be referred to exclusively as ‘My Husband’ just in case everyone hasn’t picked up that she is married. When vultures gather together they may use the alternative ‘Your Husband’ to refer to fellow-vultures spouses which can lead to an orgy of mutual-validation that just really shouldn’t be seen in public.
Ideally ‘My Husband’ just has to be home long enough during the year to get the vulture of love pregnant. Because then she has something else to add to the list!



This also gives the colony of vultures something else to talk about along with the lamentations about the never ending washing of clothes that all look the same, what ‘My Husband’ is like when he gets back from any course or event that can be identified by an acronym, what ‘My Husband’ is like when he goes ‘out with the boys’, how you have to ‘let them have their own space’, how fast they’re all going up up up the ziggurat lickety split and now the joys of motherhood.

Don’t get me wrong I think both marriage and parenthood can be valuable and fulfilling experiences if undertaken by the right people for the right reasons. I also think that there are equally valid and fulfilling alternatives available to people with different expectations from life. However the vultures of love do not.
In their eyes marriage and spawning are the only possible goals for sentient mortals.
Either you have achieved them and are ‘winning’ or you want to achieve them and are currently in a state of ‘lose’, they will accept no argument to the contrary.
Even amongst those who are ‘winning’ there is a complex pecking order.

What is your ‘My Husband’s rank?
How old was he when he attained it?
How many times have you uplifted?
How many children have you had?
How close together were the children born?
How well behaved are they?
When did they reach their developmental milestones?
How well do they cope with uplifting and how fast do they make new friends and become the best swimmer/footballer/rhythmic gymnast this base has ever seen?

Some of these are common points of competition amongst civilian parents as well, who also take living vicariously through their children as a ‘from conception’ competition and don’t even wait until they can walk before they’re trying to make out that they’re better than other children and will indeed be a rockstar-supermodel-scientist just like Mummy/Daddy would have been if someone hadn’t been dragging them down and holding them back.

The vultures of love do not believe that you are not jealous of them, they also do not believe that you can possibly be happy without having achieved the Wedding-House-Baby trifecta.
The Wedding need not have been fancy (as they are saving for house/children/dune buggies).
The House need not be theirs (verily the Army may provide or the Rental market may take away).
In one or two ‘we-don’t-talk-about-it-but-we’re-all-pretty-sure’ cases the baby need not necessarily be his, I mean ‘My Husband’s – it’s just important to have it.

If you are a woman who is married to a non-Army man this is considered an acceptable consolation prize but in no way as good as the alternative, you will be accepted but only to a certain point as there is no way you can ‘understand’ what it’s like to be married to a military man.
If you are not married at all then you are to be pitied and reassured that one day all this could be yours if only you play your cards right. Try not to gag too hard on that one.

Observing a colony of established vultures and vultures-in-waiting in action can be quite entertaining but you have to be careful, spend too much time around them and they will start gently trying to match you up with any so far unencumbered friends of their ‘My Husbands’ and you will be lucky to escape with your life.



[Disclaimer:] I know there are many, many women who have married Army men because they love them and the fact that they are in the Army is neither here nor there. These women factor any moving about the country into their lives/careers/plans, see their spouses as actual people and stay as far away from the vultures of love as physically possible as they have standards. And brains.

Nanna Had It Right

Written Monday 09/02/09

Almost as addictive as the weekend sleep in and twice as decadent, ladies and gentlemen I give you the ‘nanna nap’.

I was a shuffling zombie corpse at work today. I staggered between my desk and the tea urn and the bathroom, I re-read sentences multiple times, if I didn’t actually smell like the undead I certainly sounded like a member of the grey-skin clan as I responded to questions or comments with a uniform ‘Hurhmmmmm’.
I, of course, had nobody but myself to blame for this.
I got delightfully trashed on red wine last night.
I was light-headed and witty and gay*, well at least in my own mind I was. The main point was that I was having a good time and even though I knew I had to go to work the next day I didn’t want to relinquish that good time.
So I didn’t.
This, or a variation of this, occurs on a semi-regular basis as I often have a hard time denying myself things I really want. Luckily it’s usually things such as the odd sleep in or CD rather than anything hugely expensive or really detrimental. I’ve always known I have a somewhat addictive personality so on that front it’s lucky that I’ve never really been interested in drugs. Besides, considering some people don’t think it’s a great idea that I continue to have access to sugar I think it has been fairly unanimously agreed upon that I don’t need drugs and in fact could bring about the apocalypse if I ever got my hands on them.

Anyway back on topic, I got to the end of the day and I was wrecked, I was still tired, didn’t feel like I’d accomplished anything and could foresee nothing but bad things for the next day if I didn’t fix this.
So I took matters into my own hands. I declared ‘nanna nap’.
This evening at 6pm I eschewed clothing, rolled myself into bed and snuggled down with all the determination of a general in WWII who is sure that if only they send enough of our laddies over the top at Fritz we’ll all be drinking champagne in Paris by Christmas time.
And I slept.
And it was glorious.
The sun was still out, the open window and the gentle breeze was testament to this and yet I was asleep.
There were probably some not particularly engaging programs on television but they had to be mediocre without my company because I was asleep.
The small cabal of people who call me on a regular basis to explain their problems to me as if I somehow know what to do about them despite the fact I never have any of them and think everything could be solved with a liberal dose of Hellboy must have sensed my serenity and left me to my sleep.

In fact I have only just awakened at 11pm, gently and somewhat shame-facedly prompted by my stomach who doesn’t wish to be a bother but does madam remember that during her less than stellar day she didn’t have a particularly edifying lunch and dinner would be appreciated if it isn’t too much bother.
It isn’t. I will have dinner at 11pm. I am nothing if not reasonable.
And then I will go back to bed.
And I will sleep some more.
And it will be awesome.


*Not that kind of gay, the kind your Gran used to talk about. So unless she was in a rather adventurous cabaret group or was living an alternative lifestyle for the time she probably meant 'happy'. And if she did mean the other kind, good for her, go for it Gran(s).