H is for Happiness

H is for happiness, and in particular all the tiny little everyday things that make me smile. So here are some of them (in no particular order).


Slipping into bed at night when the sheets are freshly washed. It’s the most comfortable place in the world.

Dancing in stiletto heels. It makes my posture better, I feel more attractive and my body moves in ways it otherwise couldn’t. It puts a smile on my face every time.

When a random person favourites a photo of mine on Flickr. I mostly only post stuff for the people I know to see, but it’s still kind of nice when a stranger likes one of my photos enough to make it a favourite.

Rearranging my scrabble tiles and then realising that I can make a bingo AND that there’s somewhere on the board to play it. I play a lot of scrabble against a lot of people, although I only have two opponents who are a real challenge to beat, and it always makes me smile when I can play a bingo against them. Against the others it just seems kind of mean.

Drinking an ice cold beer with Indian food. My beer of choice is Crown Lager; my Indian food of choice is dahl gosht (lamb & lentils). The colder the beer, the better.

Driving fast along sweeping roads with the music playing loud. It’s relaxing, especially if I sing loudly and if the sun is shining warmly but the air is still cool.

Family dinners. We have a big family dinner at least once a month, and the idea of seeing everyone makes me smile because they're not the kind of family that makes you cringe.

Getting unexpected snail mail that isn't a bill. It's nice to know that there are still people who use the postal system for something other than demanding money or sending you stuff you bought online.

Laughing at something that isn't that funny, then finding that you can't stop. It happens a lot when I'm having dinner with my family-in-law and someone comes out with an unintentional double entendre. As a result I'm pretty sure they all think I'm a psychopathic pervert or that I have frequent small seizures that they're too polite to mention. That just makes me laugh more. They say a LOT of dirty things without meaning to.

Getting messages from my Nanna on my answering machine where she doesn't realise she hasn't hung up the phone properly and then bitches about how she hates answering machines. Guaranteed to happen at least once a month.


I guess I could keep going on forever about the little things, but I'll leave it at that. I think if I didn't have all those little things, I would probably be pretty miserable. A few big happy things in life could never compare to the happiness that the little things bring.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

G is for Grandad

Grandad?

Recently I watched the movie Gran Torino. The character played by Clint Eastwood reminded me a little of my Grandad. He was a quiet, grumpy man who tried to keep to himself and had little tolerance for that which was different. He was kind of racist, but without malice – he just came from a different time and found the increasing multiculturalism of our country hard to accept.

To be fair, I never really knew my Grandad all that well. I was too young to know him when he was active and we spent a lot of time with him; and then as we got older he withdrew more and became that introverted, grumpy old man who didn’t want a bar of anyone. I mostly just have little memories – things like him brushing my hair when I was 5; the way he would get up at the exact same time every day and eat the exact same thing with his breakfast dishes in the exact same place; his love of reading.


He had an amusingly cynical outlook on life and an abrupt bluntness in his dealings with people that we all remember fondly. How can you not love a guy whose opening response when asked by a virtual stranger “How have you been?” is “Oh yeah, alright – a bit sick – nearly carked it actually.”


He had a brother who I don’t think I ever met. They didn’t see him very often, and apparently he wasn’t 100% all there. My Nanna, who has been known on occasion to embellish and often entirely make up stories, told me the reason he wasn’t quite right. Apparently when his mother was in labour, she was in the car on the way to the hospital when he started to arrive. According to my Nanna, his mother refused to deliver in the car and pushed his crowning head against the car seat so he wouldn’t come out before they got there.
Clearly, I don’t believe a word of this story, and it makes me wonder more about my Nanna than it does about the distant relative that I don’t really know. It might have been the 1920’s, but I’m sure people weren’t THAT oblivious to how childbirth works.


Grandad had a triple heart bypass when he was about 70, and that’s the memory that stands out the most for me. The medication he was on after the operation didn’t sit well with him and it made him go ever so slightly crazy for a while. They stuck him in a ward with the other mentally questionable seniors, and that made visiting him somewhat of an event.

The man who was in the bed across from him had been in the war, and seemed to be reliving his time in the trenches. He kept taking off his shoes, banging them on the table and wailing:
“I’m in the trenches! Ohhhhhhhh! I can’t feel my toes! Ohhhhhhhh! They’re coming for me!!”
In the end they had to restrain him when he tried to escape.

Grandad’s condition was a little more on the paranoid side of things rather than being an unpleasant trip down memory lane.

He became convinced that the hospital staff were trying to kill him. On one visit, I remember that he told me that he could hear them having séances up the hall at night, and that he was worried they were coming for him next. He started hiding his pills because he thought the nurses were using them to poison him, and then when Nanna visited him next, he slipped a piece of paper into her hand that said “Call the cops; they’re trying to kill me”. Disturbing and amusing all at once, really.

Some of the other things he said were a lot less troubling and kind of funny – like telling my sister that he heard over the hospital PA system that she had lost their dog (their dog had been dead for over 5 years).
Luckily once they took him off the medication he went back to normal, and I don’t think he remembered a lot about what had gone on.


Grandad passed away about 2 years ago. It makes me sad to think that I learnt more about his life from his eulogy than I ever knew when he was around and could have had the opportunity to ask. I’ve been thinking about him a lot this week because my Nanna is going in for surgery to remove bowel cancer. Thinking about hospitals usually reminds me of Grandad because all of my last memories of him are his trips in and out of hospital, and then my last visit to him in palliative care the day before he passed away.

I choose to remember Grandad pre-heart bypass, when he was still reasonably fit and active, but with a little bit of that cynicism that we all knew and loved thrown in. He was an interesting and often difficult to live with man, and that’s why I loved him.

F is for Freak

Freak is the nickname that I gave my little sister when I was about 12 and she was 10. All those years early teen years of calling her Freak mean I still call her that today, but without it really meaning anything. In fact it never really meant anything to begin with – I think we just decided that she needed a nickname and that it should be ‘Freak’.

She’s never minded the nickname, but there was a time during her teenage years that I felt a little awkward in calling her that, and that she was a little over-sensitive to hearing it.


When my sister was 16, she was getting her dress fitted for her deb by my Nanna. When it came time to take it in a little at the back, Nanna noticed that there was something odd about the shape of Freak’s back. Her spine seemed to curve up on one side making her shoulder a little hunched. It was a pretty pronounced curve, which made it odd that no one had ever noticed it before, but I guess at 16 the only person who sees you scantily clad on a regular basis is yourself (depending what kind of 16 year old you are, I guess), and you can’t see the shape of your own spine.

A trip to the Doctor’s ensued, then a trip to the specialist, and before she knew it, Freak was scheduled for major surgery to correct Scoliosis.

Freak was opened up from the top of her back to the bottom, and they stuck about 20 grand worth of titanium rods in her to straighten up her spine. They did something tricky that they called Spinal Fusion and her before and after X-Rays ended up looking a lot like the ones you can see here.

Freak ended up with a gigantic scar down her back with little dots either side of it from the stitches or the staples or whatever it was that they used. For the next year or so, she was super paranoid about her ‘zipper’ mark, and you couldn’t mention it even in passing without her being bothered by it. On top of the zipper marks, she began to be paranoid about walking through metal detectors in case her spine set them off. Even to this day, when she travels overseas she carries a doctor’s letter with her in case she’s stopped at the metal detectors. I think her fear is that she’ll be strip-searched by an angry foreigner while they try to find some hidden metal item that they could never locate without an x-ray.


She’s 26 now and 10 years on she’s still a little sensitive about the whole subject. But the zipper mark is so faded you can barely notice it, so I don’t think the nickname is such a problem. But you can understand that during that year or two, the nickname ‘Freak’ was a little on the inappropriate/awkward side.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

E is for Eating

Just a note: for some reason this didn't post yesterday after I hit the publish button. I found it this morning in my drafts.  Oh well, either way, I wrote it yesterday and that's what it's all about anyway.

I’m sure I’ve thoroughly covered this subject on my blog before, but in the spirit of being able to write every day, and given the fact that I am spending today on a 3 hour road trip that was devised for the simple purpose of going to eat Chicken Parma, it seemed appropriate.

I love to eat. Food makes me happy. There is very little that I won’t eat, and not a lot that I won’t try at least once. I have a particular soft spot for Indian food, but my absolute favourites are all comfort foods, like Chicken Parma. In fact, I would never eat a cold meal if given the option between that and a hot meal – regardless of the temperature of the day or the time of the year. I love stews and risottos even in the middle of summer. I adore soup – particularly anything that is super thick, like pumpkin, or Potato & Leek. I eat a lot of casseroles and curries, year round.

I even prefer my snack foods to be hot. I would rather eat hot chips that potato crisps and drink a hot cup of tea than a soft-drink.

There is just no comparison for the warmth and comfort of good, hot food. If I had a different metabolism, I would probably morbidly obese. I would love to be a food critic, and just eat and eat until I eventually exploded, Mr. Creosote style (minus the vomiting, of course.)


Sadly, I’m not a food critic. Instead I have to settle for travelling to places that make great comfort food, and that’s why tomorrow we’re heading back to Alexandra for more awesome Parma. We organised for a group of about 30 of us to head up there this time so we could make a big event out of it, but as of 10 minutes ago, that 30 was down to 20, which is kind of disappointing. I'm blaming the crappy weather for all of the people who pulled out - It's raining pretty heavily. I could use some comfort food to cheer me up. Parma, perhaps?


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

D is for Directions

This is a little one – just a titbit of information about me. I fall into what I guess is the stereotype of the female in that I am appallingly bad at directions. I don’t know the names of any roads; I have no idea where any of them lie in relation to one another and I have to turn a map around to read it properly.
KJ, on the other hand, travels a lot for work and knows just about everything there is about getting around Melbourne. He always knows more about direction related things than I do.

The only noticeable exception to this was one day when we were discussing Punt Rd. I pointed out that Hoddle St becomes Punt Rd just after you cross over Bridge Rd. He was adamant that it wasn’t until after Swan St. As we were travelling down Hoddle St at the time, I waited until we reached Bridge Rd and pointed out the signs.

‘Wow’, he said, ‘you’re right! That’s a first for you!’
‘Thank you.’ I replied smugly ‘We will always remember this day as the day I knew more about directions than you. We shall call it the Punt St incident.’

At this point he started pissing himself laughing at me. ‘Um, actually, I think you mean Punt Road!’

Now whenever we refer to my uselessness at directions, KJ reminds me of the ‘Punt St Incident’.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

C is for Caught Out

Back when I was at Uni, and well before I had a full time job, my best friend and I were out at the Casino one night. We were both flat broke, bored and desperately in need of a few drinks that we didn’t have enough cash to buy.

Clearly, in this situation, the only thing to do is to find someone who is willing to buy drinks for you in exchange for the pleasure of some sociable conversation; however we didn’t even have enough cash to buy our first drink, which would have given us a reason to be in a bar in the first place. Instead we were loitering around the pokies trying to come up with a way to salvage our night.

It was only when an American couple wandered past chatting loudly that we came up with a plan. What guy can resist a couple of girls with accents!? So we settled ourselves into a couple of chairs in a walkway and began to chat very loudly in what I can only assume were terrible American accents. They might have been terrible, but American accents were the only ones that both of us could manage without it being obvious from word one that it was a put-on.

The casino is a big place full of drunken men, so it wasn’t long before a slightly inebriated guy stopped next to us and exclaimed something along the lines of “Oh! You’re American! That’s awesome!”
There followed a few minutes of nervous conversation, during which we both felt that it was inevitable that he would call our bluff. We claimed to be from New York, having decided that it seemed like a suitably varied place accent-wise, and that we were travelling students. Thank, I’m sure, mostly to his state of drunkenness, he seemed believe everything we said, and invited us to go with him to meet up with his friends, who had won some kind of competition and were getting free beer all night at what was then the All Star Cafe.

When we got there, we found a group of about 5 guys who were all even drunker than the first. The accent seemed easy after that, because they never asked any question more difficult than “So what do you like about Australia?”
The beer flowed freely, and for the next hour we enjoyed ourselves endlessly.

About an hour or so in, and while I was in the process of being chatted up by a very attractive guy, another of their friends showed up. We remember him as annoying mustard shirt guy, because he had come from some other function and was wearing a hideous mustard coloured shirt made of that horrible 80’s/90’s fabric that feels a bit like suede.

Problem - Annoying mustard shirt guy was sober.

This was a problem, because we weren’t sober anymore, and the terrible American accents had undoubtedly become appalling American accents. Five minutes later, and annoying mustard shirt guy started in with the questions. Where are you from, how long are you here, where in New York do you live...
After a few questions, It became like a quiz. Where do you like to eat, where did you go to school...

When he asked us who we voted for in the last election, we knew we were caught out. We faked a bathroom break and ran out the door as fast as we could. Which if memory serves me, probably wasn't that fast. You can drink a lot of free beer in an hour.


It was a short night out by our normal standards, but more memorable than most. I’d like to say that I feel bad about the deception, but I would be lying. The guys had a great time, we had a great time, no one had to buy drinks and it made for a memorable night. If only it weren’t for stupid annoying mustard shirt guy, the fun could have gone on.

I think this experience is one of the reasons that I hate to be the only sober person when we head out for the night. Mustard shirt guy should have headed straight to the bar and had a few shots first, and then instead of ruining everyone’s night, he could have joined in the fun.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

B is for Ballroom Dancing

When I was 16, my friends and I started going to a social dancing class once a week. It was a place that we could hang out away from home, have fun and keep fit as well. It was also a good way to meet new people.

We did that for about a year or so, and then we started taking medal classes. In a half hour class once a week we would learn a routine, and then after about 3 months, we would take an exam during which we were scored on our performance. I learnt the cha-cha, rumba, samba, jive, waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, and my favourite – the tango. It was fun and kind of challenging and it meant that when we went out to formal functions, we could use our skills on the dance floor.

So we would dance and have fun every week, and when we turned 18 we started going to clubs that played Latin music so that we could all dance and drink and have a gold old time. It’s a time of my life that I remember pretty fondly – particularly the clubs, because bourbon does amazing things for the grace and flexibility of your body. Or it makes you think it does. Either way, dancing after a few bourbons was good fun.

Then, the year that I turned 19, some of our group decided to start taking lessons to do a bit of competition dancing. I like to reflect on this time as being the beginning of the end – or the last waltz.

Suddenly, everything was technical this, and posture that – and when I moved, I began to feel self-conscious. In classes, no one wanted to fool around and have fun. The competition crowd stuck together, and everyone else was on the out. When we went out to clubs, the competition crowd only wanted to dance their routines with their partners, which left those of us who were just out for a bit of fun sitting on the sidelines looking at our watches. No amount of bourbon could bring back the enjoyment to those nights.

In the social classes, a noticeable divide started between the competition dancers and the rest of us, and all of a sudden it wasn’t fun anymore. We had stepped out of the world of fun hobbies and into the world of bitchy dancers with bad fake tans, Strictly Ballroom style.

Not long after that, I stopped going to the social and medal classes. It just wasn’t fun anymore. It’s only when I go to events like weddings that I get a bit wistful about it all and wish I could go back. But even then I get a reminder of it all when KJ wants to dance. He was one of the less obsessive competition dancers, and every so often he’ll head off on the beginnings of a routine that is entirely beyond me and it transports me back to those classes.


Lately I’ve been tossing up the idea of taking some swing dancing classes. I love the way the Lindy-Hop looks. I’ve tried to convince KJ to come with me, but he’s not really interested, and I’m not enthused enough to push it – I’m worried that it will be end up being the same thing – a fun hobby that is ruined by overzealous people.

For now I guess I’ll just have to content myself with dancing around the house while I do the vacuuming. The vacuum cleaner doesn’t care about my technique or my posture. I wonder if bourbon or two would make the vacuuming easier as well?

A is for Animals

...and that makes it sound like I’m starting my A-Z by reading a kid’s alphabet book and using their ideas instead of coming up with my own. If that were the case, it would probably be A is for Apples, but it’s not. In this case, A is for Animals, and more specifically my pets (or lack there-of).


It seems like the norm for little kids to have a pet. Maybe a dog or a cat, or failing that, even a bird or a fish. I’m pretty sure it’s encouraged in order to give kids some experience with how to treat animals and with the responsibility of looking after something living.

When I was a child, I never had a pet – not even so much as a pet rock. The reason for this is quite simple – I come from a long line of pet killers.
Perhaps pet manslaughterer would be a more appropriate description, because the death of the pets is never intentional. It’s more like my family has incredibly bad luck and by freak coincidence, that bad luck is manifested in the form of any and all pets failing to live for very long.

Clearly, this meant that having a dog or cat was entirely out of the question, so for the early years of my life I found myself without any exposure to animals at all. The result of this? I’m pretty much the only person in the world who doesn’t really like dogs.

That’s a big confession for me to make, because if you tell someone that you don’t like dogs they immediately think that you’re secretly a psychopath. But that’s not the case – I just never had any experience with the companionship and friendliness of a pet like a dog, so now when a friend’s dog is slobbering all over me and trying to lick my knees, I can’t look at it with the gooey eyes of pet love and think how wonderful it is.

Really, my mother’s total lack of affinity for pets has turned me into a freak of sorts.
My very earliest pet memories are of her being asked to look after the neighbour’s budgerigar while they went overseas for a couple of weeks and then, inexplicably, at a later date their fish. By the end of week one, the budgie was no more. The same fate befell the poor fish when it was his turn to be babysat.
Poor pets. It’s not that she was neglectful or careless; it’s just that they didn’t seem to want to continue to live. I like to blame all the subsequent pet deaths on pet suicide – they knew the odds of surviving a week with my Mum and they opted to check out on their own terms.


So since childhood, I have successfully managed to avoid having (and therefore killing) any pets of my own. But last Christmas, my brother and sister-in-law gave us some pet fish. Their reasoning, they told us, was that if we could keep the fish alive we were ready to have kids.


Oh well. I was never really that sold on being a parent anyway.

The A-Z of Me

Since I’ve been sick for the last few weeks, I haven’t really been around here much and I feel a bit guilty. I like to try to write at least a couple of times a week if I can because it stops my brain from turning to mush.

In aid of getting back into the swing of things now that I’m feeling better, I’ve decided that for the next month I’m going to try to blog every day. That’s a pretty big undertaking for me, especially given that I’m usually entirely removed from the blog world over the weekends.

I’m pretty sure that if I tried to write every day for the next month with no kind of idea what I intended to write about, you would find 30-odd entries about the weather and how boring my job is on any given day. To avoid this kind of dullness, I’ve decided that I need a running subject and I’ve come up with this – “The A-Z of me”. It’s really quite catchy if you pronounce it “Zee” instead of “Zed”, although my grade 1 teacher would slap my hands for pronouncing it like that and tell that me I’m not an American.

For the next 26 days, I’m going to write a post that tells something about me, my life, my interests, my memories or even just my random thoughts – and each day’s topic will begin with a new letter of the alphabet. It would probably be more aptly named “The A-Z of random crap about me”.

I can’t promise that it will be interesting reading, I can only promise that it will be alphabetically accurate, although I think it would interest me to read an A-Z about some of the bloggers I read regularly. Having said that, feel free to join me for the next 26 days and write an A-Z about yourself!

Dance Music, Glam Metal & Boy Bands

The new formula for my life this week:

Illness = Medication = Insomnia = Me in a very grumpy mood today

I guess you could say I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m in a terrible mood, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason other than the fact that sleep is eluding me this week.

I think what might really be getting to me is the fact that having been ill for the past 3 weeks, I’ve barely left the house. I’ve had to cancel a lot of plans and I think I’m going crazy, like a prisoner thrown into solitary confinement for just a little too long.

Even thought going to work isn’t much of a social occasion for me given that every other person in the place is male, I’m even starting to miss that tiny bit of human interaction. Up until the last few days, I haven’t even really had the energy to spend much time online, which means that even online chatting has been out. My lifelong dreams of becoming a hermit are getting closer and closer to becoming a reality.


Luckily, this weekend marks an event in my calendar that no illness could stop – that’s right, it’s Eurovision time again!! This Sunday Night, a group of my friends and family will be coming around for our annual Eurovision party, where we will which the tackiest best musical talent that Europe has to offer.

The best part about watching Eurovision (aside from the complete and utter dagginess of it all) is that it transports you back about 10 or 15 years. For some reason, Europe seems to be a decade behind the rest of the world musically. Obviously there’s the occasional modern song which will usually fail dismally, or something traditional which fares well with the countries located nearby. But there is an overwhelming abundance of what I would call imitation retro music.

Last year’s completion saw a lot of bad 90’s style dance music:



with a bit of what I’m pretty sure is classified as glam metal thrown in:



as well as a few 90’s boy band-ish love ballads (I call this one Danish Ronan Keating):



It was like a trip down memory lane – that is, a trip down a foreign and slightly confusing lane where everything looks sort of familiar, but the signs don’t make any sense and you have no idea where the lane is leading.

As always, I highly recommend that everyone watch Eurovision. It might not be quite as funny since Terry Wogan retired from doing the commentary, but it’s still pretty amusing, and this year should remind you of a lot of music in the early 2000’s.

Now all that is left to be decided is what kind of foreign food I’ll serve at the party. I was angling to make something Norwegian since this year’s competition is being held in Norway, but it turns out that from what I can find, Norwegian food is slightly less than exciting and also pretty heavy on the flatulence inducing ingredients. Not ideal for a small room full of people if you ask me. I’m thinking maybe I can just go with a Scandinavian theme and do a bit of grocery shopping at IKEA. Maybe meatballs will do the trick – they seem appropriate.

I’ll leave you with last year’s winner, a guy that freaks me out because he looks a lot like a boyfriend I had in high school.