Dark Day

Today is a dark day. A dark, bleak, soul crushing day.

It started out like any other Tuesday. The uneventful drive to work. The slow grind of the Tuesday work day. The routine of computer, factory, computer.

It happened at 11:23am. I remember the time well, because I had just seen the postman deliver the mail, and I checked the clock to see what time he had arrived. I headed downstairs, and out through the factory to grab the mail.

There was a large parcel, and the return address told me it was from a government agency, so as I wandered back inside, I was looking at the envelope, and not at where I was going, as I should have been.

As I reached the edge of the stairs, I suddenly felt my feet catch on something. It took me half a second to realise I was falling and in that insignificant moment, I thought I could right my balance.
Within the next half second, I knew it. I was going down. Envelopes flew from my hands and rained down around me as my palms and knees slammed into cold, hard concrete. I let loose with a string of obscenities that startled the guys in the factory.

As quickly as the pain could start, the embarrassment overtook it. Five faces peered at me, looking torn between amusement and concern. I thought quickly of my Mum, and her own recent fall. It’s a rare thing, falling down when you’re an adult, yet here I was; face down on the concrete floor of the factory.

I stood up as quickly as I could, and began to brush myself off. And that’s when I saw it. That’s when my heart dropped out of my chest and hit the floor.


I had torn a hole in my favourite pair of jeans.

Oh, my poor jeans! There are no other jeans like these jeans. They’re comfortable and slimming and they make my ass look perfectly rounded. They can be casual, or they can be slightly dressy. But most of all, they’re long enough to drag on the floor, despite my height. And at 5’10, that’s a hard thing for me to find. And now they’re ruined. RUINED!

Oh, my poor poor jeans….


Today is a dark day. A dark, bleak, soul crushing day. For now begins the quest to replace the most perfect pair of jeans that have ever graced this body. Yes, today is a dark, dark day.

Also, my knee hurts.

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.

Retail Therapy

I have been known to eschew a lot of stereotypical 'girly' things, but one thing I will never doubt is the therapeutic benefit of retail therapy.
After what would have to be one of the worst working weeks I have ever had, I spent Saturday and Sunday emptying the contents of my bank account on a myriad of new clothes and shoes.

Minutes after getting home, I felt completely relaxed and at ease. It's something I don't think men will ever understand. You only need to look at all the boyfriends and husbands who have been dragged along to the shops by their partners to realise that the benefit of retail therapy is something that will always elude men. Moments after enter the shopping centre, they're already bored and desperate to leave. They just don't get the same kind of thrill from the shopping experience as women do.


Women, on the other hand, understand the true value of shopping. Its not just about spending money - although something about that does provide a kind of release. It's about feeling good about yourself. It's about walking in to a store and putting something pretty on, or trying on a pair of jeans and having a sales assistant, some random person you've never met before, telling you that you look hot. And it doesn't matter one bit that they're paid to say those kinds of things even if you look like a sausage that has been stuffed in to a skin two sizes too small, because it feels so damn good either way.


It's been so long since I went shopping for clothes, that once I started, it was hard to stop. Saturday I went alone and it was like a warm up for Sunday, when I caught up with a friend and did the most damage to my bank balance.

The benefit of retail therapy with someone else there is that they suggest that you try on things you otherwise wouldn't. In this case, it happened that I wanted a new pair of jeans for when I go out - something a bit dressy but still casual. My friend suggested that I try on a pair of black skinny leg jeans - something that I've avoided up until now.

I was sceptical, but I tried them on anyway - because that's what retail therapy is all about. Good move. They looked awesome in every way. They made me look thin and tall, they made my butt appear perfectly shaped. When I tried on a pair of heels with them, I felt like I could have stepped right out of a catalogue. Well, my legs did, anyway.

The overly effeminate salesman gushed about how wonderful they looked, and so did my friend. For five minutes I felt really damn good about myself. And that's what it's all about I guess. Taking a week worth of crappiness and putting it behind you in five minutes of retail therapy.

Shoes

I’m really excited that we’ve finally made it to spring after having the coldest, rainiest winter since 1996. We’ve been in this drought for so long now that no one is accustomed to cold, wet winters any more and we’ve all had enough.

Personally, I’ve had enough of the cold, although I’m not too fussed about the rain. I miss the sun, but most of all I want the cold weather to end because I don’t think I can handle another day of having to wear shoes.


I hate wearing shoes. More specifically, I hate wearing closed toe shoes. I would wear sandals, thongs or go barefoot every day of the year if I could. Real shoes are like a miniature prison for my feet. They're uncomfortable and constricting; and that is why I still own the same pair of runners that I had when I was 20 - because I wear them so infrequently that they're practically brand new.

Like any woman, I own way more pairs of shoes than I could ever possibly need - however there are only two or three pairs that are closed toe, and unsurprisingly they're all in as-new condition.

I have one other pair of shoes that remain unworn - an embarrassingly stripper-esque pair of heels that I bought one evening while very upset, when the purchase was more about therapeutic shopping than shopping for something I would actually wear. I gave in to a very clever saleswoman who preyed on my weakened state to sell me something that no one in their right mind would buy unless they were shopping for an outfit for a Bar 20 audition. Black vinyl stiletto heels are definitely not my thing. Needless to say, they sit in the shoebox at the back of my cupboard gathering dust along with the closed toe shoes, which I am forced to drag out every winter and wear against my will. It’s either wear them or freeze my toes off.

But with the temperatures looking like they’re on the way up again, I think it’s time to tuck my runners back into the far reaches of my wardrobe and break out the sandals again. Bring on summer!

Not Cool

Technology, specifically the internet, has made the world a much smaller place. It's not uncommon for people on opposite sides of the world to chat regularly, and romances spanning tens of thousands of miles are no longer a rare occurrence. Video web chat means that you can now look someone in another continent in the eye when you speak to them. The internet has created a virtual world which is practically borderless. I adore this virtual internet world that lets me buy foreign products, avoid supermarket chaos and indulge my scrabble obsession with other people the world over.


So why the hell is it that when I find something online that I really want, I can't bridge a mere 13,000kms to the USA to get it!? Outrageous!

I want these:

NINJABREAD MEN™
they’re cut out for action

But there isn't a single place in Australia that has them, or a single place in the USA that will ship the stupid things to me. Damn you international postage and you internet retailers too lazy to use it!



I feel a little let down. This tiny little world has suddenly become very vast and isolated. And it’s not just the cookie cutters that I have been denied by my beloved internet.

For the last month I’ve been counting down the days until the release of a new album by a band I like. August 16th arrived, and it was with immense excitement that I logged into iTunes and typed the name of the band into the search box.

Nothing. No new album. Confused, I went to the band’s website – yep, new album released today. I clicked through to iTunes to buy it and what did I get?! An arrogant little popup that told me I can’t buy the album because I don’t live in the UK!

Noooooooo!

What happened to the amazing, practically borderless virtual world that I have come to love so much? You’ve let me down, internet. I’m so disappointed. I thought you were cool, but you’re not – you’re just telling people what they want to hear so they’ll like you, and now you’ve been caught out in your lies. I love you a little less today because of it.

And don’t point out the irony of me writing about my disappointment with you on my Weblog, because no one likes a smart arse.

Survival Skills

Yesterday we went bed shopping. Bed shopping would have to be the greatest form of shopping possible. I say this because it is the laziest form of shopping possible, and I’m all about maximum laziness.

Basically, bed shopping involves sitting in the car until you get to the bed shop, then lying down on lots of super comfy beds for extended periods of time. Finally, after lying down all day, you pick whichever bed was the comfiest, and then you go home where you either sit down on the couch, or go to bed. In my case I decided to nap on the couch, because it’s way comfier than our bed, which is completely stuffed. Stuffed in the broken sense, that is – not in the full of stuffing sense.

Can shopping really get much lazier than that?

The worst part is that after picking the most comfortable mattress our budget would allow for, we had to come home to our crappy mattress with all of its lumps and dents. The new mattress won’t arrive for about 4-6 weeks. So last night my body threw a tantrum at having to sleep on the crap mattress after spending all day on something that is so much better. It knows that something more comfortable is coming along.


The sales guy that helped us pick out the bed was a mattress guru. He knew everything about mattresses. I always wonder about people who have become experts in their field, especially when it’s something so specific. I mean, this guy knew everything possible about mattresses, posture, spinal alignment. He could also tell how much we both weighed by looking at us - but that’s a whole other story (suffice to say that as far as women are concerned, this is not a desirable skill for a man to possess).

It strikes me often how random it is to be such a specialist at something that is so entirely non-essential. I’m exactly the same - I know bucket loads about playgrounds and playground equipment. I know about standards in different countries, entrapments and safety surfaces. I know about materials and UV ratings of plastics and all sorts of completely random junk that is specific to one tiny industry. What I’m getting at here is hard to explain, but I guess it just seems kind of odd that such a level of expertise can exist entirely as a result of consumerism.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that we suddenly found ourselves in a ‘Tomorrow When The War Began’ kind of situation, and the country was taken over by some nameless foreign army. Everyone had to stop working and our lives just became all about surviving. If we had to rate the usefulness of each person’s skill set in a survival situation like that, I’m guessing that skills like ‘supreme playground knowledge’ and ‘mattress guru’ are probably going to be pretty low on the list.

If we were in a ‘Lost’ kind of situation and skills like medical training and weapons use became essential, a computer nerd like me would probably be one of the first to die a horrible death in aid of setting up the story.
Although, I guess to be fair I would kick arse at the whole computer/button pushing thing. But after that my days would be numbered.

I guess what I find the weirdest is that there are so many people who are exactly like me – and we far outweigh the people with the essential survival skills. Maybe I need to learn some kind of useful survival skill that would make me indispensable in an emergency. But what would that skill be? Is one useful skill enough to override a plethora of absolutely pointless knowledge? And most importantly, can I learn this new skill without compromising my supreme laziness?

Odd Graffiti

Last night we took a trip to Ikea. It was to pick up some stuff for work, but since I’ll take any excuse I can get to feed my totally unnatural love of everything Ikea, I forced KJ to take me along, and once there, to look at every kitchen and every workspace in the place. I think he became frustrated by my need to open every single cupboard in every kitchen, but what can I say? I love it! I think it’s partly because I dream of having modern furniture and fittings in our house rather than brown shag carpet and brown painted woodwork; and maybe partly because it’s fun to look through cupboards and drawers that aren’t mine. I guess I’m nosey like that.

After a very average, but very cheap meal on our way past the Ikea cafeteria (how can you say no to $4.00 schnitzel and chips and $1 hot dogs?) I stopped into the bathrooms. It was there that I found the oddest bit of graffiti that I’ve ever come across.

It wasn’t clever at all, or even particularly noticeable as far as graffiti goes, but there, scrawled on the wall of the toilet in that childish sort of handwriting that only graffiti scribblers have, was:

“Bushfires 2009 – thanks to all the CFA, Police and Ambos”

What the?! When did graffiti become a means of communicating well wishes to police and other public servicemen & women!? I was always of the opinion that graffiti was either crass jokes, rude comments (often with accompanying phone number) or demands on various political forces to free whatever the graffiti-er thought needed freeing at the time. I had no idea that it was a way to thank the CFA, police and Ambos for all the work they did on Black Saturday. I guess I just assumed that there were slightly more appropriate (and legal) ways to do that.

I guess at least you could guarantee that a toilet cubicle in Ikea would probably have a reasonably high turnover of people, and possibly a lot of them would be people who were in need of furniture after the fires, and who felt the same way. So maybe it’s not as silly an idea as it first seemed. Still, not exactly the sort of thing I was expecting to come across on my regular trip to Ikea.

The Land of Guns, Convenience Stores & Erotic Books

In half an hour I'm heading for the airport for a weekend trip to Sydney. I've been to Sydney several times over the last few years, but only ever on business - never as a giant tourist like I will be this weekend! Ok, admittedly I do have to do work stuff today, but that’s only half a day and then the rest of the weekend is all mine.

I’m going to spend the weekend trying to discover if there really is more to Sydney than adult book stores, gun shops and convenience stores (people keep telling me there is). Mostly the convenience stores intrigue me. I’ve never been anywhere else where you can walk past two 7-Eleven stores in one block. That’s just weird. But very convenient, and I suppose that’s what it’s all about. And I suppose you need lots of snacks and stuff after all the gun and erotic book shopping.

Wish me luck!

Conferences & Shoes

I'm going to Sydney next week. Work is holding a conference that has been about 6 months in the making. I have been eating, breathing, living this conference for the past two weeks and I honestly can't wait until it's over so I can relax.

On the plus side, my bosses' penchant for treating themselves to the insanely overpriced means that we're staying in a 5 star hotel while we're there, so I can't complain about that! On an even brighter note, there is a bridal shoe store about half a kilometre from the hotel that I really want to go to. I am beginning to get desperate to find a pair of white shoes that won't require a bank loan for me to buy. Have I mentioned before how insanely overpriced weddings are?

10 more days and this conference will be over and i can have my spare time back!!

Mini Me

On Saturday just gone, I went to our local BMW dealership to look at new cars. I got it into my head that I wanted a new car, and although I’m not really a BMW driving kind of girl (ok, I’m not even remotely close) the only car with any real personality that is under stupid-thousand dollars is the BMW Mini. The plan was that I would go there, sit in the car, hate it and then leave without ever looking back. Sadly, this is not the way things panned out.

The car fit me. That was very unexpected.

For this to make sense, you have to understand how I feel about my current car. I love it the way that people love their kids. It is like a part of my family. When my car turned 30, we had a 30^th birthday party for it (ok, that was more of an excuse to get drunk than anything else). I have always been convinced that no other car could ever come close to being as great or suiting me so well. So I wasn’t expecting to want to own this new car quite so much.

The worst part about this whole experience is that now I have that feeling where you decide you really, really, really want something, but you know that it’s not really possible - because it turns out that the Mini isn’t quite as affordable as I’d hoped. I could stretch my budget and afford it, but sadly I’m supposed to be saving to pay for a wedding, which means that I can’t have the car that I want. Now I’m sad. And I feel like I’m cheating on my car, but without really getting anything out of it. I’ve spent the last few days trying to think of a way that I can stretch my budget in a creative way so that I can afford a wedding and a car. I figure if I just stop eating lunch and cut off my phone and possibly the electricity in my house, then I might be able to afford it.

That sounds like a silly thing to say, but the salesman who was trying very hard to sell me the car said at one point

‘If you really like the sunroof, then it’s worth spending the money – after all, it’s only the difference of one decent meal a fortnight’

Can you believe that?! I guess at a BMW dealership they’re used to selling cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars – so I guess they’re a little blasé about the money it costs to buy one of their cheap cars and how important regular meals are.

I actually laughed out loud when he was telling me about some of the features that come with the car. It has interior lights that can change to a whole range of different colours to ‘set the mood’. I had no idea mood lighting was so important in a car – especially a car that is too small for anyone to get up to no good in.

I guess the only bonus of me being so amused by all the silly options you can get is that the fewer options you want, the cheaper the car gets. Maybe one day I’ll be able to scrounge up the money to buy one. Until then I guess it’s just me and my 30 year old kid.

The Midnight Shopper

Since it's the holidays and I've spent most of the last six days sleeping, I decided at about 10pm last night that it would be a good idea to head to Chadstone Shopping Centre, which is open for 34 hours straight over Sunday/Monday. I don't have any shopping left to do, but I figured that because it was pretty late in the evening, it wouldn't be too busy there and it would keep me amused for a couple of hours.

Ok, so it was a stupid, totally unoriginal idea. It seems that every other person in Melbourne had very inconsiderately left all of their Christmas shopping until the last minute and were managing to ruin things for those of us who, by some miracle, finished their shopping early.

It should have a been a good sign that we should turn around and head for the hills when we got to Warrigal road and the traffic was absolute chaos. Three lanes of traffic, all trying to merge into the right hand lane was not a pretty sight. It's amazing how many people think they can just sneak a tonne of metal into a 10cm gap between cars - and that sticking out across two lanes of traffic is a-ok.

It's no wonder people get so road rage-ey at Christmas.

We stuck to the left lane and headed around to the other side of the shopping centre, which was relatively tame - although it did take four changes of lights for us to get into the carpark. We fluked a parking space almost immediately, without even having to stalk anyone, which made a nice change.

Inside it was more crowded than I had thought - the walkways inside Chadstone are pretty wide and the centre is absolutely enormous, so I figured that even with the crazy traffic, things shouldn't be too bad. Again, I was wrong. Someone had the brilliant idea of filling the walkways up with vendors stalls, so it was chaotically busy. I was belted with so many boxes of Barbie scooters and train sets that I expect my shins to be solid purple this morning. Kids presents are dangerous when placed in the hands of frantic, last minute shoppers.

Don't these people know that Santa does home delivery?

We stuck it out as long as we could, but had to bail out after about an hour as the throng of people just seemed to swell with every passing minute. It was bizarrely hot in there with all those bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder and 20,000 people all talking at once in stone corridors is loud.

Leaving was a lot easier than getting in, and I didn't even mind being stalked to our parking space by a desperate looking man with a car full of kids. I guess my great idea of a late night shop while everyone else was asleep was not really as great as I hoped.

Christmas shopping really could kill the Christmas spirit in even the most dedicated holiday-lover.

Cheating on Old Reliable

My very worst and saddest habit is shopping with friends for clothes when I have no money. For fun I will pick up the most expensive item in the store and try it on while they try their more reasonably priced garments.
I find that there's nothing more dull than waiting for friends to try on clothes because they dress with the speed of a lethargic turtle. That's right, not just a regular turtle but a sleepy, dopey one that gets confused half way through the process and has to start all over again so they remember what it is they're doing.

This game of dress-up always spells heartbreak for me, because as it turns out, i would have fantastic taste in clothes if i was a millionaire and could afford to spend $1200 on a slip dress.

Yesterday's effort was on a shopping trip to purchase a dress for a friend's wedding. I had already bought the trusty reliable old favourite - the sensibly priced little black dress - a few weeks earlier, so we were shopping for my best friend. After loitering around various stores looking like a bit of a change-room stalker, I decided that it was time for the old 'try on a dress that's worth more than my car' routine. We had entered a department store that has a large designer clothes section, so while my friend tried on affordable clothes, I picked out a very cute dusky-pink dress from the 'can we check your credit card limit before we let you in' section and headed for the change-rooms.

Sadly, as fate would have it, my taste had remained impeccable and the dress was absolutely stunning. It was without a doubt the most comfortable, cute and sexy dress I've ever had the opportunity to wear. Even more sadly, being comfortable, cute and sexy comes with a price tag of just a little over $800. I danced around the change rooms umming and aaahhing over whether or not I would buy it (a well rehearsed show for the benefit of the store staff) and found that I didn't really want to take it off. I began to wonder if maybe I could just leave wearing the dress without anyone noticing. I began to think of ways that I could afford to buy the dress, like getting a second job or a second credit card or selling some body parts. Who really needs their liver, right?
It was at about this stage that my best friend emerged from her change room, saw me dancing around contemplating how to sell my soul for a designer dress and dragged me back into the change room to take it off before its evil spell took hold completely.

She dragged me out of the store and we continued on with our shopping. I spent the rest of the trip picking out and trying on accessories that I would never buy for a dress that I will never own.

Today I will feel a little like I'm cheating on my good old reliable black dress, because although I will be wearing it, I will secretly be thinking about wearing another.