A Phone Call from Last Night

Me: Hello?

Caller: Um……..er…….ah……hi there!

Me: Hi.

Caller: This is John calling from *Insert random company name which I ignored*.

Me: Hi.

Caller: Um….Can you put mummy or daddy on the phone please dear?

Me: Excuse me!?!

Caller: Er…..um…ahhh….oh! Are you the lady of the house?

Me: Ok, bye now.


Now I’m not sure whether to be flattered or offended at having someone think that I was a child.

I also think I missed a golden opportunity for a smart come-back to the ‘Can I talk to your mummy or daddy’ comment. Maybe I could have said “Sure! Have you got a pen? I’ll give you their number.”

Or, “Tell me John, Who’s your daddy?”.

Or I could have just said ‘Sure! Hang on a minute!’ and put the phone down and gone to watch TV.

Sadly, comebacks like this only come to mind after the fact.

Home Alone

KJ is interstate again tonight, as he quite often is. Usually being alone in the house doesn't bother me at all - in fact I usually enjoy having the time to myself. And I've never been one to get scared just by being alone.

But tonight, for some stupid reason, I decided it would be a perfect night to get a start on watching season one of Dexter. And I have to admit that I've managed to freak myself out a little bit. Home alone at night is not the best time to watch a TV show about a serial killer that breaks into peoples houses and chops them into little pieces.

It's just that little bit creepy, and while horror stuff doesn't freak me out, creepy stuff does a bit.

Probably should have watched something else instead.

If I don't ever blog again, look for me in a garbage bag (or two) at the bottom of the ocean somewhere.

Australia Day Awesomeness

Soooo.... Australia Day Awesomeness. I promised it, and I shall deliver. I may have been a little bit misleading by calling it that – I don’t mean that I will necessarily deliver awesomeness myself, but I will definitely deliver something about the Australia day awesomeness that I was involved in.


I like to think of myself as quietly patriotic, much like most Aussies. That truly is the Australian way – we love our country so much; but the part we love the most is the laid back attitude, so our patriotism is usually conveyed without moving from the lounge room sofa. Australia Day is generally celebrated as such, mostly involving sitting in the sun all day doing as little as possible while enjoying the things we like to consider the truly Aussie traditions.

We’re only a very young country, so our traditions aren’t quite steeped in history the way traditions of other countries are. Our traditions mostly involve relaxing and enjoying life. BBQ’s, beer drinking, backyard cricket and the hottest 100 form the basis of our Australia Day celebrations and that’s exactly the way I spent my day - minus the cricket, of course. I think I’ve well and truly made my thoughts on sport & exercise in general known by now.


After debating what radio station to listen to, I did end up listening to the Triple J hottest 100 after all. My best friend came around and we sat outside in the sun, listening to the countdown and drinking beer. I chose to drink Crown Lager, because it seemed fitting to drink a beer that was originally only available to visiting dignitaries but after being released to the public has been embraced in truly Australian fashion by being given a good Aussie nickname. So I drank ‘Crownies’ all day.

The countdown was followed by an awesome Paul Kelly tribute concert, which apparently was filmed/recorded back in November of last year somewhere here in Melbourne. It’s a shame because if I’d known about it I definitely would have gone along. I’m not a massive fan of Paul Kelly as such; I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to go to a Paul Kelly concert, but he is an amazing songwriter and hearing some of his songs performed by other artists was pretty cool. There are a few that really need to be sung in his very unique voice, but it was otherwise a great show.

We rounded out the day by watching Aussie Comedian Carl Barron on the Comedy channel. I just about wet myself laughing, which is much better than the traditional ‘wet-yourself-from-drinking-too-much’ that can generally follow an Australia Day celebration.



So that was my Australia day awesomeness. I’ll end by sharing some highlights of my day - the number one song in the hottest 100 countdown, one of my favourite performances from the Paul Kelly Tribute and a bit of Carl Barron.

Happy (belated) Australia Day everyone!

Painting and Stuff

It’s been a long week. Despite the incredibly high temperatures, I’ve been working hard to paint the lounge/dining room and entry to the house in aid of preparing to get rid of our hideous brown 70’s shag pile carpet. I’ve worked solidly from 8am til 7pm for the last 3 days and I’m almost done and incredibly over it all. I'm also a little high from the paint fumes.

The guy who owned the house before us decided that he was too lazy to paint the ceiling white, so for the last 3 years we’ve lived with an entirely beige house. The only highlight to the beige was a lovely floral wallpaper border that he thought might ‘brighten the place up’! (Insert vomiting motion here).

Luckily, I have a super secret talent – I am an incredibly gifted house painter. If I was bitten by a radioactive spider or something tomorrow, my new super power would be the ability to paint walls quickly and incredibly well. It might be a dull super power by comparison to say, Superman, but it’s dead useful and requires no spandex whatsoever. Wearing my undies on the outside is also purely optional.
So it’s been a long and yet oddly uneventful week up until now.



I know I’m being slack about posting lately, but I’ll be back in the swing of things soon. I have one more week of holidays and then I’m chained to my desk again – so expect more in the not too distant future.

I Like Mondays

Mondays are a beautiful thing when you have the week off and the temperature is going to be mid 30’s every day!

Mac Time

This week KJ got an iMac. We’ve always been a PC household, so this is kind of a big deal. We’ve been PC people because we’re nerds and we like to change around our computers all the time, and PC’s are a lot more budget friendly for chopping and changing than Macs are.
As KJ has told people about his new computer, the whole Mac vs PC thing has come up, with the Mac people banging on about how wonderful the iMac is and how crap PC’s are, and the PC people going “yeah, whatever....hippy.”

To be honest, straight out of the box the thing is pretty impressive. It’s so neat and tidy and spiffy looking and it only has one cable. But then, I guess you expect it to be for what you pay for it. I would kind of like to have one, because my nerdy skill is being able to learn to use any kind of computer program that I come across within about 15 mins, and the idea of a whole new OS seems like a good challenge.

The last time I used a Mac was when I was about 10, and they were still ‘Macintosh’. They definitely weren’t super slick looking then - they were big hunks of grey plastic, and the logo was still that stripy, rainbow apple.

It would be cool to have a bit of a play with a new one, but given the price tag, I think maybe I’ll be sticking with the good old PC.
With KJ being a Mac guy now and me being PC, do you think our family photos will start to look a bit like this?:

Photos and a Hot House

The Photo5 finalists were posted late yesterday and sadly, I didn’t make the cut. A couple of people I have met through my photography did though, which is great because if I can’t be in the finals, I’m glad that someone I know is.

I thought some of the judges choices were a bit odd, in particular in the close up brief, where they seem to have picked some of the less creative entries, which doesn’t really seem to match with the info from the judges about what their choices would be based on. I guess there’s no accounting for personal taste though.


We’re in the middle of some kind of random November heat wave here at the moment. Apparently this is the biggest streak of super hot weather since 1925 or something like that. It’s been 34 degrees for the last few days, and it will be a minimum of 30 degrees every day for the entire week. I don’t mind hot weather usually, but when it’s consistent for a week like this it sucks because the house bricks heat up and no matter how long the air-con is on, the second you turn it off, you’re in a sauna again.

Also, sadly, we only have one air conditioning unit in the house and it’s on the entire other side of the house to the bedroom. So when it’s boiling hot in the middle of the night, you’re in the hottest part of the house. I might have to take to sleeping on the dining table so that I can keep cool. I also briefly considered replacing my bed with a wading pool so that I could stay cool, but the risk of accidentally drowning in my sleep far outweighs the benefits of being cool all night. Although then again, a wading pool is a hell of a lot cheaper than another air conditioner...

Fire Mania

We’ve just started to slip into summer weather this week and it’s caused this kind of fire prevention mania. Last year’s bushfires have everyone freaked out. Everyone is (understandably) paranoid about another Black Saturday since they’re predicting that the weather is going to be even hotter this year than last year.

As a result of this excessive paranoia and because of the fact that I live very close to where last year’s bushfires were, not a single day goes by when I don’t get a brochure in the mail for some kind of fire repelling product or service.

This means that I now have a house full of paper – just the thing I need to fireproof the place – a nice big pile of good old fire friendly paper. Thanks, anti-fire product suppliers. You might have sold me fire gel, mesh and roof sprinklers, but you have made the inside of my house a fire’s best friend.

In un-fire-related news, this weekend is the party that I was dreading. My problem has been solved (sort of) by the fact that we aren’t able to go. It turns out we had already planned to go away for the weekend, so we won’t be around to go to the party. Really this just pushes the issue back for another time, but at least for now I can forget about it.

The Bee Slayer

Last night, when I got home from work, I parked my car in the garage as usual and closed the door behind me. The garage opens into a downstairs room and the main part of the house is upstairs.
As I opened the door to the downstairs room, I heard a dull droning hum that I immediately recognised as the horrifying sound of a very large swarm of flying bugs. Inside my house.

Bees, to be exact.

Between the window and the curtains there were about 40 or 50 bees flying around, buzzing like mad. From the crazy buzzing going on I could tell that they were worked up, which didn’t really do anything to put me at ease with having a swarm of bugs in my house.

I slipped carefully past the window, trying not to draw attention to myself – you know, in case the bees saw me and decided ‘this window is dull; let’s sting that person over there just for the hell of it’.

I crept up the stairs and began looking around the house to see if the downstairs room was the only place infested. I found one or two bees in the bathroom, but nothing in any of the other rooms until I checked the spare bedroom. There was a very loud but distant humming that told me they weren’t in the room – they were in the walls. I opened the curtains and outside, there were hundreds of the little suckers flying around and in and out of the vents on the side of the house.


At this stage try to imagine me doing a little freak-out dance, jumping up and down as I suddenly imagine I can feel bees crawling all over me.


As I stood in the room listening, the covered, domed light shade began to fill with dark, buzzing shadows. I flicked off the light, slammed the door shut and ran to the other side of the house, as though 10 metres of distance would save me from death by bee sting.

Several hurried phone calls later we had found someone to come out and take a look - a mighty Bee Slayer !!! (pest control is such a boring name don’t you think?)

An hour or so later in somewhat of a letdown after the excitement of a stinging bug infestation, we were bee free and I had learnt something about bees that I thought I might share with you.

Bees are not as bad-ass as they want you to think they are. Sure, they have that stinger; and that creepy buzzing they do makes your skin crawl. But the truth of the matter is they’re stupid. The reason that the bees were buzzing around in the window and didn’t fly out to sting me to death was because when they get stuck somewhere dark, they freak out and try to fly somewhere where there’s light. They try so hard that they panic, and fly around until they exhaust themselves to death. That’s right – they fly around and around until they die. Not so smart now, are you bees?

Regardless of their stupidity, I’m still happy to be Bee-free. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of bugs invading my house.

It's here!

Finally, Finally, FINALLY after years of waiting I have it! Fast internet at home. Those of you who scoff and say that fast internet isn’t especially exciting – you have never had to pause a download so that it doesn’t kill your regular internet browsing. You have never had to wait half an hour to receive all of your emails. You have never had to go and make a cup of coffee and still have time to bake a cake to have with it while you wait for a YouTube video to load.

Now after 3 years of messing around, we are now in the fast lane instead of driving in the emergency lane like a confused old lady who can’t see the road ahead of her. I don’t know what to do with myself. Where to start? The internet is a vast and magical place filled with large files waiting for me to download them. It is a wondrous place filled with videos to stream and games to play.

Where to begin...?

Home

I am so so so so so so glad to be home from Sydney.
Melbourne, I love you.