Bucket o' Coma

I have a bucket of Maltesers. That's 1/2 a kilogram of crisp malt centres covered with smooth milk chocolate. If I don't hide them soon, I will have an empty bucket, and probably some kind of weird diabetic coma.

Pleb Sickness

I am officially sick of having a pleb.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but a month or two ago, my bosses hired me a sidekick to help me out with the boring day to day stuff that I'm too lazy busy to do. I get that this is probably an important and useful thing to have done, however after almost six years of working alone, I have to say that I'm not very receptive to having someone around all the time asking me questions and making lame joke. I'm also not a huge fan of people who don't pick something up after being told three times. I figure two or three times should be enough to have it sink in. Once so the idea is out there, a second time to remind him and a third time because there's a lot of stuff to learn and it makes sense that some things would slip through. After three times, there's no real excuse for not remembering, and after five or six, I'm just pissed off that I have to keep repeating myself.

Plus I think he escaped from a Revenge of the Nerds movie, so we don't even really have anything to talk about when he's not asking annoying questions.

If anyone wants to trade plebs, let me know.

Ceiling vs. Floor

Why would anyone in their right mind put a heater vent into a ceiling? It makes no sense at all - and I will tell you exactly why.
1) How can you sit on it to keep warm if it's in the ceiling?
2) How can you use it to dry your clothes that didn't dry on the line overnight when you're running late in the morning?
3) How can you put your underwear on it to warm up on a cold morning?
4) I could be wrong here, but I think basic science tells us that hot air rises - so you're denying the warm air the right to fulfil it's scientific purpose if it's already at the top of the room
5) How can you find that last 50 cents to pay the pizza guy on Friday night when the number one storage area for lost poo-change is upside down and hanging from the ceiling?

Craziness, I tell you.

Chief Suspect: Laziness

Laziness broke my coffee table. I was trying to collect all of the junk (mostly coffee cups) from it without having to make two trips to the kitchen, and I dropped a mug on it, which bounced and shattered the glass tabletop. So really laziness and a mug broke my coffee table. I, on the other hand, am totally innocent.

I've been trying to buy some stuff from America and the annoying lady who runs the store told me that I wasn't ordering enough for it to be profitable for her to put the work into mailing it internationally. Since when is $700 cheap, and since when is it hard to stick some stuff in a box and take it to the post office? It's not like I was asking her to pay the postage - I have to pay nearly $100 for that too, so I don't really get how much work is involved in taking a box to a post office and handing over someone else's $100 to send it off.

Honestly, how lazy can one person be? I think she's just slack because when she ships within the USA, the company that makes the product ships direct to her customers, so she doesn't have to actually move at all. It's possible that she hasn't left the house in years, and has forgotten where the post office is and how to use her legs to walk there. I bet she has one of those electronic wheelchair things and she scoots around the house in that so she doesn't have to even put any effort into the day to day menial tasks.
Actually, that's not a bad idea - i might have to invest in one of those. If I had one, I could have filled up the little wire basket at the front with my coffee mug, and it wouldn't have broken the coffee table. Although that doesn't discount laziness from the equation, and who knows what could have happened as a result of laziness that severe...

The Birth of Bridezilla

Oh I have been so slack about posting. This planning a wedding thing has become mildly consuming and I'm probably only about 1 or 2 tantrums away from becoming a full blown, stereotypical 'bridezilla'.

I spent yesterday shopping with my two bridesmaids for dresses and it was a lot more traumatic than I had hoped. They're both very strong willed people when it comes to what they want, and sadly for me, what they want it to look supremely hot in their bm dresses - not an unreasonable request I guess, although I do keep telling them that they're not allowed to look too good - I think all brides secretly want their bridal party to look just a little bit scruffy so as to make themselves look so much better.

The trouble is that when one of them is a busty size 10 (size 6 US) and the other is a not so busty size 6 (I think that's like a size 2 US) then, you start to run into problems with finding a dress that suits them both. What looks cute on one looks almost pornographic on the other. It can't be too low cut or one of them is all boobs, but it can't be too high cut because the other looks too flat chested. As i'm now aware, dress shopping is apparently all about how it makes your boobs look compared to the other bridesmaids. My sister very kindly offered to have a boob job (at my expense, of course) so as to look the same as my other bridesmaid. I politely declined, since I hadn't budgeted silicone boobs into my wedding expense list.

I took a little bit of evil delight in making them try on some hideously ugly dresses and pretending that I thought they were great, just to see them try to fake enthusiasm. I know, I'm cruel, but it starts to get pretty boring watching other people try on dresses while you wander around aimlessly looking at things covered in frills and tassels and beads. It's especially funny since we all have very different tastes in dresses, so they're inclined to believe that it's entirely possible I might want something like this for them on my big day.

It's going to be an interesting few months trying to keep everyone happy without going crazy.

A Toe Tale

I stubbed my toe on nothing and now it's a funny colour. By nothing I mean the floor and by funny colour I mean a strange kind of purpley/black. I thought it was broken, but now i think it's just angry with me for hurting it. It's not bruised, it has just turned purple with rage at me being so careless.

How do you stub your toe on the floor? With a clever kind of stumble-hop manoeuvre that is brought on by tripping over a laptop power cord and landing with pretty much all of your weight on your little toe while it's bent. I would be purple with rage too if someone did that to me.

The only good thing to come out of it is that I haven't been able to wear my shoes for a couple of days, so have been wearing some comfy thongs to work. That's flip-flops for all you sickos who think I'm talking about underwear. I'm not sure a g-string would be helpful in alleviating toe-pain, although to be fair, if you were wearing just a g-string you would probably be off your feet, which might be of some assistance.

Bald Mouse

I think I'm about to end up with a bald spot on my index finger. Bald of fingerprints, that is.

I've been using my laptop computer non-stop for the past few days and the stupid mousepad is wearing away the tip of my finger. It's actually beginning to cause me some serious discomfort. And now that I've noticed it, it seems even worse.

Damn you, laptop!!!! Why is this inter-web thingy so addictive?!!!

Time to Book

I'm going to book my wedding today. That means that after a year and a half of procrastination and fretting about how to afford it, we are actually getting organised and setting a date.

I have avoided writing about this until now, because I fear that I may easily turn into that girl who can't talk about anything but her wedding, and that would be a sad sad day. But as this is pretty much the only thing going on for me this week, I guess its ok to be that sad for a couple of minutes, since it's better than admitting I have nothing else to write about.

I will be a married woman on the 14th of March 2009. God that makes me sound old. I think getting married is something that I've always equated with growing up and becoming an adult, and I'm not sure that I'm ready to be a grown up yet. It sounds like a lot of responsibility.

Instead I'm choosing to look at this big moment in life as more of an excuse to have a giant, over-priced party with all of my favourite people. I started out looking at all of the things that I really wanted and knowing what everything should look like, then once I found out what a total rip-off anything related to weddings is, I changed my mind. I think that was a large part of the procrastination - should we save for the things I want, or just have the things we can afford now? When I came to realise that a decent wedding cake was going to set me back about $700, I decided that the things we could afford now really aren't so bad. Seriously, $700 for a cake that no one will even look at and that will be sent home with them in little bags to go mouldy on the counter top or get thrown into the bin? I think not. You can buy a lot of really cool stuff for $700 and just don't think that I want to spend it on a cake.

This is part of the reason why we've chosen the place that we're having our reception - they include the wedding cake for you, so that when you cut your cake, you don't feel like you're cutting into what could have been your much needed bathroom renovation, or that new set of tyres that your car desperately need.

In truth, I'm a little nervous because at about 3pm I will officially be heading towards our wedding and there is a lot to organise and I, unfortunately, am a total control freak. I want to do everything myself, because I lack faith in others to do it the way that I want, however being my wedding, this becomes hard as I will be otherwise occupied on the day and unable to be the person to set things all up the way I want. It means that I have to find someone else to do it, and this is not something that a control freak is good at.

So for now I am going to just book, and once that is done, I know that I have 287 days to stress about it.

The Great ANZAC

ANZAC biscuits are the single greatest biscuit in the entire universe.

I kid you not.

I made a batch on the weekend and they were so good that if I had had the ingredients to make more, I would have eaten every single one of them and baked more so that I could eat all of them without telling anyone about the first batch.

I'm drooling just thinking about them. Ok, that's a bit of a lie - i'm actually dropping crumbs all over my keyboard while i try to devour one as I type this.

Russia in '09!

Woohoo! Go Russia!
Hmmm, not something you would expect anyone to yell out all that often, but I'm just excited about Russia winning Eurovision 2008. Not that I thought that their song was all that good, but because the guy that was singing (Dima Bilan) has a special meaning for us here at Sad Aussie Eurovision Central.

Every year, KJ chooses the cheesiest, daggiest love song in Eurovision and calls it his favourite. Two years ago, at Eurovision '06 in Greece, Dima Bilan had that song. It was a great song - we took a lot of delight in trying to decipher the 'English' lyrics (if you think you have them worked out, read the actual lyrics here and see if you were as far off the mark as I was).
KJ was especially taken by his enthusiastic, emotional dancing and by the white-painted ballerina that emerged from the middle of the piano, and I have to say that I was a little taken by the fact that he looked freakishly similar to my next door neighbour. Sadly, heartbreakingly - he didn't win. He came very very close, but he came second to the Finnish band Lordi - aka Metal music that your Nanna would approve of.

This year, while watching the semi-final, I heard a strangely recognisable voice - and couldn't believe it when it turned out the be good old Dima. This year's song had nothing on the one from 2006, but I was happy to see him win because we were so sad that he lost to Lordi in '06. I was a little worried for him that their stage presentation consisted of Dima wandering barefoot while a man with a freakishly large nose ice-skated around him. That routine didn't seem like it was very well thought out, but perhaps it was the slight element of risk to it that they were hoping would excite viewers.

Other than Dima winning, it was a reasonably uneventful Eurovision. There was a lot less piano accordion than I like in my music. The trouble is that each year, the contestants tend to parrot the previous year's top three, so this year saw a lot of emotional ballads performed entirely in the native language of the country, and a lot of dance music.

You can watch the recap here. I especially enjoyed the Latvian entry. It seemed to be the one that was most in the spirit of the Eurovision that I have come to know and love.