Jibber-Jabber-itis

Over the last week or so, i've been battling a cold. I had Friday off work, and during a trip to the pharmacy for some cold and flu tablets, I made a few observations that I thought were worth sharing.

• While pharmacies are mildly suspicious of you for wanting to purchase Cold & Flu tablets containing Pseudo-ephedrine as a general rule, asking for these tablets in a slummy area like where I work means they are VERY suspicious of you. Suspicious enough to make you talk to three separate employees about why you want the pills. I think they were hoping I would slip and say "I want them for my drug-la...ahhh...no, that's not it, I mean for my cold. Yes, I have a cold and/or the Flu."
  
  
• Asking for "Cold and Flu tablets with Pseudo-ephedrine instead of that other crap" apparently makes you seem even more suspect. I have discovered, however, that requesting 'old formula' cold and flu tablets makes you seem clueless about drugs, and therefore obviously less likely to be purchasing the tablets to take home to your secret drug lab in order to cook up a bunch of Speed. Because apparently people who make drugs are better educated than any law abiding citizen.
  
  
• Pharmacies are the epicentre of that world-wide phenomenon known as old-man-illness-jibber-jabber-itis. You may also know this as 'Sick-old-man-talk-itis' or 'Old-fart-talking-pus-itis'. Visit a pharmacy on a weekday during working hours and you will find a wide variety of elderly people telling anyone who will listen about their boils, blisters, constipation, growths and rashes. And that's just for starters. If you hang around for long enough you'll hear about the REAL problems - You don't even have to be the one having the conversation, they'll talk loud enough so everyone can hear. They're thoughtful like that.
  
  
• Elderly people in pharmacies are just as suspicious of you as the pharmacists, only their suspicion seems to stem more from their feelings about your age/apparent lack of employment/refusal to hear about their pus-filled sores.

The benefit of all of these suspicions and medical jibber-jabber is that what you thought was a day that would be dull and spent wasted eating chicken noodle soup and watching trashy tv actually becomes quite entertaining. And it gives me new respect for pharmacists and pharmacy employees who have to deal with this stuff every single day.

Size Matters

In a conversation with my best friend this past weekend, we came across a topic that I felt warranted sharing with the World Wide Web.

It’s some free advice for men who are purchasing an engagement ring for their girlfriend/future wife without any input from the fiancé-to-be.

Once you’ve chosen a ring that you think is perfect, get the jeweller to up the diamond size by at least a quarter of a carat. That’s minimum. Because in my experience, men always overestimate size.

The Bones of Wisdom: A Cautionary Tale for Mother's Day

Motherly advice is always
just a phone call away

The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent.

It was a Wednesday night like any other. Outside under a vast and solitary sky, the rural suburb of Torrytown* was bathed in the soothing, cool glow of a full moon. Amidst the wash of pale blue, a single ray of yellow light peeked out from behind the curtains of a cosy little house nestled into a quiet Torrytown valley.

Behind those curtains sat a young woman of extraordinary beauty, intelligence and Scrabble playing skill**. Encased in the warmth of her home, she sat quietly; tapping away on her keyboard, chatting online to a friend in a strange and distant land.

As she worked away on the keyboard with one hand, the other speared tiny pieces of salmon onto a fork from the plate beside her. She ate absently, her mind on the conversation and not really on her dinner.

Suddenly, a sharp pain jabbed at her throat! Her hands flew to her neck. The fork clattered to the table. Her typing stilled. She gasped!
Looking down at her dinner, the cause of her pain became apparent.

With shaking hands, she reached for the keyboard and typed a desperate message that crossed thousands of miles to tell her friend the cause of her agony.


'I'm choking on a fishbone!' She wrote. 'In my (allegedly) de-boned fish!'

She clutched at her throat, clawing at it as though she could remove the bone from the outside. Her mind flew to the advice that she had received about these kinds of things; tid-bits of advice from mothers, uncles, grandmothers, fathers.
She sifted through these kernels of wisdom, searching for something she knew she'd heard about fish bones.
'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' - No.
'Always wear clean underwear,' - No.
'Don't pick your nose' - NO!
'Be careful of bones in fish or they'll get stuck in your throat.'; YES! That's it! Her mothers voice rang though her mind, telling her over and over again to be careful.

Backwards and forwards she played this information in her head, as the fish bone jabbed painfully at her throat. But try as she might, she could not find a single piece of advice in that vast catalogue of wisdom to tell her what to do if that initial pearl of wisdom should fall through!

From the other side of the world advice was coming in thick and fast from her friend (the guy who sometimes kicks her ass at Scrabble, and who has this awesome website, and he's really funny and handsome, and writes great)***.
'Are you dying? Should I long distance call you an ambulance'? he typed. 'Can't you just pull it out? Mash the keyboard if you're turning blue!'

She tried to reach in and grab the bone, but alas, her hand was too big (or her mouth too small) and her gag reflex much too strong.


'Blergh, cough, splutter' she typed back; then realising that her fingers still worked - 'No, I can't.'

'You should have listened to your mother' he typed back. 'Mothers always know best.'


Inspiration!

Gasping for what could be her last breaths she grappled for the phone and hit speed-dial. Her mother answered after what seemed an agonisingly long time.


She croaked out her dilemma through stilted breath, feeling the fish bone jabbing into the soft flesh of her throat with every word.

'Mum! you never told me what to do when your advice failed!' She cried out.

'Bread.' Her mother told her calmly and knowingly. 'Eat a large piece of dry bread and it will dislodge the bone.'

With this simple advice, and another firm 'Mothers know best' from the Las Vegas Larrikin, she picked up a slice of bread and began to chew.

She could feel the fish bone moving a little as she swallowed the great wodge of bread, then a little more when she swallowed another. But four slices of bread later, while her breathing had eased, the little fish bone was still sharp against her throat.

'Mothers know best' she said to herself, 'until they don't! And then what?'

So what does one do when all the advice a mother can give you fails dismally?! She was stumped. Short of a trip to the ER, she had no idea how to remove the fish bone. If only her gag reflex wasn't so strong and her hands too big (or her mouth too small), then she could remove it easily enough.

The answer, then, was simple. What do you do when all roads lead nowhere? You have a drink.

There was some element of logic in this, although the specifics eluded her. Something about the medicinal, sterilising properties of alcohol and the muscle relaxant type of effect that it would have on her body.

So she poured herself a Bourbon and drank it down fast. Then she had another. And another. She could feel the tension in her muscles melting away, could feel her senses dulling. After four bourbons in as many minutes, she began to feel that she had underestimated her ability to extract the fish bone manually.
Suddenly, her hand seemed smaller (or her mouth larger) and her gag reflex dulled. With the kind of swift (and thoughtless) decisiveness characteristic of a drunk, she contorted her hand and somehow, she reached into her mouth and down her throat to pluck out the sharp little bone.

Later, she would look back on this moment and be unable to explain how she had managed it. Sober attempts to replicate the fitting of her hand into her mouth proved impossible. It was as though some law of physics had been broken - or perhaps just stretched momentarily to allow her to do things that she couldn't normally. It wasn't the first time that Bourbon had this effect on her, and she was sure it wouldn't be the last.


She called her mother in relief, telling the tale of how bourbon had worked more effectively than bread, believing wholly that things had come full circle and she was now the one handing advice to her mother.

'Have another bourbon' her mother told her knowingly, with the tone of one passing on an important token of wisdom. 'The alcohol will do your throat good, you know.'


This brings us to the moral of this tale, which is threefold:

1. If you're a mother, give advice to your children that is not just cautionary, but which is also problem solving. There will always be those rare times when caution isn't enough.

2. When advice fails you, you can always fall back on alcohol and its ability to help you defy the laws of physics.

And finally (and most importantly):
3. No matter what you think, Mothers always know best.


*names have been changed to protect those suburbs involved.
**My story, so I'll look however I want!
***Individual results may vary

Losing my Costco virginity

Regular readers (if I have such a thing) will notice that my blog has had a little spruce-up. Much more friendly, me thinks. Feel free to let me know your thoughts - and I shall feel free to ignore any thoughts with which I don't agree!

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Last weekend, I had my very first Costco experience. Now, given that a lot of the visitors to this page are from the USA, home of mega-bulk-buying, that might not seem like a big deal, but here in Australia, Costco is still a bit of a novelty.

To put it in perspective, in the USA there are 416 Costco stores. In Australia, there is one. One single store to cater to the bulk-buy whims of the entire 20 million of us. So a visit to Costco is something of an experience.

I'd never had much interest in it before, other than a vague curiosity after hearing a rumour that you could buy a barrel of 1000 chupa-chips in it from there. But for some inexplicable reason, my Sister had bought herself a membership when the place opened a while ago, and she finally decided she wanted to use it. I was privileged enough to be dragged along as her 'guest'.


When we entered the car park, I started to have reservations. The place was jam-packed. We spent a good ten minutes trying to find a parking space. These reservations disappeared, however, once we'd wedged our car into a nearby crevice and I got my first glimpse of a Costco Trolley. They were HUGE! It was like someone had taken a regular trolley, fed it steroids to pump it up a little, then shipped it off to a bulk buy warehouse once it got too beefy to be sexy any more.

That was when I started to get excited.

We pushed our enormous trolley into the store and found ourselves standing in an aisle full of bulk-packaged sweets. That was it. That was the moment I realised I was in Heaven. Then I tried to move down the aisle and got bashed into by a swarm of other shoppers fighting for trolley space. That was when I realised I was in Hell.

Thus started two hours of good and bad. Tiny little joys - finding a half kilometre roll of baking paper; marvelling at 9kg tubs of washing powder; my sister impulse-buying a kilogram of processed American cheese slices - inter mingled with moments of overwhelming trolley-rage that would put any seasoned road-rager to shame.


The shoppers were a mix of Costco hardened parents bulk buying food and nappies, and excited sight-seers who were simply there for the experience and to exclaim over the amazing things you could buy in bulk.

At one point, we rolled our over-laden trolley down an aisle full of hardware. I paused in front of the biggest set of spanners that I have ever come across. Next to me a man had stopped to look at a set of saws.
'There's so many tools!' he exclaimed feverishly. 'I want to buy them all! I'm going to buy them all! And I don't even know how to use them!'


The biggest problem we faced was that when we first arrived, these bulk packs of food looked HUGE. But after an hour or so of getting lost amongst aisles full of oversized goods, things that were actually massive began to seem normal sized.

The danger in this was highlighted by our last purchase of the day - a fresh pizza, which we intended to cook as soon as we got home. We umm-ed and ahh-ed over it for ages, trying to decide if it would be big enough to feed four of us because it looked a little on the small size. When we got it home, it turned out to be so big that it wouldn't even fit in the oven.


My best purchase of the day, bar none, was this glorious, wonderful item:

That's right - 1.8kg of Jelly Bellys!

Anyone who has been reading this blog long enough knows that I have a serious Jelly Belly addiction. So having access to almost 2kg of Jelly Belly jelly-beans at a very reasonable price is not necessarily a good thing.

This is one of many reasons that I won't be hurrying back to Costco anytime soon. I think it's best to leave bulk buying to those of us with slightly stronger jelly-bean resisting will power.

Drinking right before bed is bad because...

singing in the shower can turn into dancing in the shower, and shower dancing can result in embarrassing, hard to explain injuries.

Keeping my Heart in my Sock

Freaked out

I’ve never really understood those ‘Funniest Home video’ type shows, where everyone pisses themselves laughing at some poor person falling down, getting kicked in the nuts or crashing a bike/wheelbarrow/pogo stick in what could only be a dangerous and painful way.
That kind of thing just doesn’t make me laugh. So you can imagine my horror when I got to witness a real life version of one of those videos the other day.

I dropped in at my parents place, and it turned out that Mum was babysitting my niece and nephew. It was a nice day so we were outside throwing a ball around. My niece tossed the ball up in the air, way above Mum’s head, and for some inexplicable reason known only to her, my arthritic 60 year old mother leapt to catch it. She tripped on a loose paver and went down like a sack of spuds, whacking her head hard against the bluestone brick border on the nearby garden bed.

I freaked out. I felt my heart drop so far I was scared to look down in case I saw it lying at my feet. It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen happen. I’d never thought about it before, but at some point you reach an age where falling down becomes a really big deal. A while back I saw a woman of about 60 or 70 stumble in the street and hit the ground with a disturbing ‘thwack!’ and it was a terrible, horrible thing to see. But this time I wasn’t just watching some random person fall down, it was my Mum; the person who will forever in my eyes epitomise the strength and power of being a grown-up. It was a horrifying thing to see happen.

My niece and Nephew didn’t understand what the big deal was – after all, they fall down all the time. They couldn’t work out why their Nanna taking a bit of a spill had everyone running around like crazy.


Mum was ok – she had a bit of a headache, a badly scraped arm and bruised ribs, but no serious injuries. Despite the fact that she was ok, I still felt as though I was carrying my heart around in my shoes for the next few 24 hours.


And if I had through some freak of chance caught the whole thing on tape? There is no cash prize that could ever persuade me to air it on national TV with a cheesy voiceover and comedic sound effects.

Junior

We have a new junior salesman that started work with us a week or two ago.
When I say Junior, I mean junior. He’s 19 years old, although to be fair he looks a bit older than that. He could pass for 23 – if only he didn’t open his mouth and speak.

When he speaks, it’s like he’s spewing youthful ignorance out into the world. I’m sure that at 19 I wasn’t like this. I mean, we all come off sounding younger than we realise, but he sounds so young. And the thing is, he talks ALL THE TIME. Non-stop. He is so chatty that it makes me want to tear my ears off just to get some peace and quiet.
I don’t talk much at work. In fact, the less talking I can do, the better as far as I’m concerned. But here I find myself with a junior employee who is constantly asking questions, or giving me a running commentary on what he’s doing.


For the past few days he’s been sharing my office while I teach him how we do the design work here. I often listen to music while I work, and so we got onto the topic of music and bands.

I was feeling a bit sleepy, so I put on The Beatles ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Listening to The Beatles always perks me up. ‘The Fool on the Hill’ started playing. Then, as expected, Junior Salesman started talking:

Him: Is this ABBA?
Me: (jaw drops onto the floor) You’re kidding right?
Him: Nah, it’s ABBA, right?
Me: Ok, I’m going to pretend you’re kidding.
Him: So what kind of music do you listen to? Hey do you like that song by Rihanna? You know, the one with Eminem?
Me: Never heard it.
Him: It’s on the radio all the time.
Me: Yeah, never heard it sorry. Not really my thing
Him: So what music do you like?
Me: Well, my favourite band is probably CAKE…
Him: Who?
Me: CAKE
Him: I don’t know them.
Me: Stop talking please.

I suddenly feel very, very old. I know it’s rare to find someone who likes all the same music as you. KJ and I don’t even really like the same music. But at least KJ has heard of the bands that I like listening to – at least the ones who have been around forever, like The Beatles and like CAKE. So it’s begun. I relate better to old people than young people. This must be what it feels like to start getting old. How appropriate that it should happen just days before I celebrate my final birthday in my 20's.

Girly Girl

The Face of Evil

I’ve admitted before that I have been known to exhibit some embarrassingly girly behaviour. I don’t think of myself as a particularly ‘girly girl’; in fact I’d classify myself as leaning more towards the tomboy side of things.

But I do have some inexplicably girly habits that I can only put down to some innate feminine reflex that even a tomboy can’t resist. I’m scared of spiders (although to be fair, Australian spiders are well worth being scared of). When I’m feeling down, I feel an overwhelming compulsion to buy shoes. I like sappy, romantic comedy movies that often star Hugh Grant. I can’t resist shopping when I know there’s a sale.

These are all things that I have come to accept, and also to try to ignore. I thought that these things constituted the extent of my inborn girly behaviours. I thought that I knew how bad my feminine behaviour could get. But I was proven wrong this week when I did something so stereotypically girly that I felt overwhelming embarrassment (and shame) – even though no one was there to witness it.


It was a Monday morning and I had arrived at work early – about 7:30am. No one else had arrived yet, and that was fine by me, because I had come in early to try to get some work done uninterrupted.

I was standing at the printer waiting for it to spit out a couple of pages when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement. I looked over just in time to see two mice darting across the room so fast that they were nothing but a blur.
A shiver ran down my spine – I’m not a fan of mice, but I wasn’t too bothered. They weren’t near me, they weren’t bothering me, and since we’ve got something of a mouse plague going on at the moment at work, there wasn’t really anything I could do.

Then the two mice popped their heads out from behind the filing cabinet and ran straight towards me. At least, it looked that way, although they may have just been heading for a nearby desk. Either way, I did the most embarrassing thing I have ever done in my life.

I jumped up onto the desk.


THE SHAME! THE EMBARASSMENT! I’m like a 1950’s cartoon wife. Like a silly woman with a straw broom, wearing high heels and a house dress, balancing on a chair, screeching at her husband to kill the mouse.

So that’s it. I’m an embarrassment. I am the girliest girl that ever was. I am a woman who thinks that climbing on a chair will keep me safe from a mouse. I am a spider fearing, shoe buying, mouse hating wimp. Mock me if you will. I deserve it.

What's the time?

When I was 16, I got myself a watch that I wore every day for the best part of the next decade. It was a good watch – styled a little like a men’s watch, with a metal band – only girly. It was the one item of jewellery that I was obsessive about remembering to wear, because it helped me with my ridiculous and compulsive need to constantly know what the time was. If I forgot to put it on in the morning, I would spend the entire day glancing at my wrist in frustration, fighting with my deeply rooted psychological obsession with knowing the time.

When the watch stopped working a couple of years ago, I made the decision not to replace it. I figured the best way to break my obsessive tendency was to remove the item that fed the obsession. I thought that if I couldn’t constantly check the time, then eventually I would stop wanting to.

Sadly, the removal of my watch only led to a much more annoying habit. For the next three years, I irritated everyone around me by constantly asking the time, pulling out my phone to check the time, or leaving the room to find a clock. What can I say – crazy isn’t an easy thing to shake.


Lately things have been pretty hectic at work, and keeping track of the time has become essential for me so that I can remember to do important things like stop for lunch, or go home before the sun rises. So this weekend just past, I went out and bought myself a new watch.

I would have liked to buy a super expensive watch with all sorts of second and micro second counters. A precision watch that was so fantastic that I never had to remove it – even when I showered. A watch that could tell me the time in 15 different languages and was so smart that it could read my brainwaves and knew as soon as I began to wonder what the time was so that it could pipe up and tell me without me having to look.

Alas, a watch like this does not exist. And its closest relative would have set me back a month’s wages and been like carrying a small toaster around on my wrist. So instead, I decided to take baby steps towards easing my obsession. I bought myself a watch that while functional, is primarily decorative. Four simple lines on the face of the watch give me an approximation of the time, without letting me obsess over exactly what minute and fraction of a minute the time is. It doesn’t even glow in the dark. It’s basic. And it’s a start towards becoming a normal person without an obsession with the time.

Funnily enough, only time will tell if I can stand using a watch like a normal person, or if in a couple of months from now I’m lugging around a toaster on my wrist.

City meets Country

This morning, whilst driving the back roads to work, I passed a guy driving a tractor. As he bounced up and down inside, he was attempting to drink coffee from a take-away cup. Very strange.

I guess the world has changed a lot over the years - somehow I can't imagine old-school farmers sipping lattes in their tractors.