the week that was...

This is to celebrate the highs and lows of the week that was (fairly uneventful)...

The high - Saturday night Carnaby and I went with friends to Rockpool (restaurant) at Crown casino. The casino itself is incredibly depressing (we lost $20 in about 30 seconds on the pokies), but the restaurant was pretty wonderful. It is expensive - seafood and steaks, the latter from $50 to upward of $150 (they are partially made of gold).

Anyway, we looked at the menu once or twice online before we went in (Read: Carney committed the menu to memory and can recite the mains verbatim. He even printed a copy to read on the tram in, threatening to tell the waiter he did not need a menu as he had brought his own - he was strongly advised not to do this). Anyway, the food was fabulous! I have done a complete 180 on the whether or not trifle is a good desert (it is! it is!) and dream about eating brussel sprouts with a german ham/bacon-type small good (starts with 's').

The week's low point was waking up Sunday morning... The dog had spewed on his mat (and most of his left leg) and it was less then impressive to wake up to. There was a theory that tie-ing him to the oven at night - this sounds far worse than it is - would mean if he desperately needed to pee/other he would do so one the lino and not the carpet. Not so.

Kitty

happily ever after...

This is a tardy, tardy post - apologies internerds.

I've recently re-discovered fairy tales... serious, serious fairly tales (repeating things makes them even truer) aimed at children, whose basic message is: be good or die.

Case in point, the book (published in 1907) 'Cautionary Tales for Children', which includes the stories of Matilda 'The Girl Who Told Lies and Burned to Death', and George 'Who Played With a Dangerous Toy and Suffered a Catastrophe of Considerable Dimensions'.

I love the thinly veiled message (and the non-catchy titles... there's also a Charles Augustus Fortescue 'Who Always Did What Was Right, and So Accumulated an Immense Fortune). There are also a couple of German ones that are same-same but much scarier... e.g. the story of the scissor man, who comes in the night to cut of the thumbs of children who are thumb-suckers (depicted). Ouch! It is made very clear the thumb does not grow back.

In other news - house headline - the much revered estelle saute pan has been scratched by the use of a metal soup spoon for stirring.

That's if from me,
Mud.

my two cents...

Kyle Sandilands, offensive, offensive man – Why that Stare-y McLarey look? - but I must admit he makes pretty compelling reading... He’s been everywhere (except Channel Ten) in the wake of the lie detector scandal, and while it’s hard to go so far as to like him, I'll begrudingly admit he can be entertaining (not in the context of the lie detector scandal itself, obviously)...

A snippet from yesterday’s Age:

"Rove. Fk you, Rove. You're dead to me. There's also Merrick and Rosso, but no-one gives a fk about them,'' Sandilands said. When asked if he ever hated himself, Sandilands replied: "Of course not. No one ever hates themselves, unless you're a fat biscuit eater.''

Such defiance!

And here is part of an interview with Andrew Denton:

Kyle Sandilands won a lot of awards last year - Who Weekly Most Hated man, FHM Tosser of the Year, Fugly Awards Worst Male Personality on TV - whether it's as a judge on Idol, himself on his radio show or a house intruder on Big Brother, he always manages to rub people up the wrong way. And yet his audience continues to grow. How does someone end up playing Australia's number one jerk and why does it work? Ladies and gentlemen, Kyle Sandilands.

ANDREW DENTON: Welcome… how are you?
KYLE SANDILANDS: Wow… all those awards.
ANDREW DENTON: Yeah I know it’s and, and not a Logie in sight.
KYLE SANDILANDS: No.

Cut to his diagnosis of his girlfriend (now wife?) being ill:

KYLE SANDILANDS: She’s living sort of half in this country, half overseas um and she’d got some weird dizzy fainting spell and you know that, that was quite a few weeks ago now and we’re still not a 100% sure what, what that is. So it’s a bit of a worry. I’m, I’m not sure exactly what’s wrong with her. I told her I think she’s mental but um apparently ah that’s, that might not be it so she’ll have to have scans and tests.
ANDREW DENTON: Yeah. That’s comforting though that you told her that.

There’s more but that’s the idea... He does, I should mention, go onto talk about having been homeless for a year as a fifteen year old, which is somehow a bit redeeming.

Anyway, that's probably only one and a half cents worth, you should dwell on the picutre - it's a shocker (that was intentional - score 1 me).

Q & A

I am sure they have gotten rid of a question and answer section in the Sunday paper. This was one of my favourite bits - I collect other people's words to describe myself and am very judgemental about the books people read. Given the chance, I would make sure to mention my 5 star rating system for date scones, that I would invite Stephen Fry to dinner, and some of my family's more unusual holidays (notably, the camp we went on for kids with intellectual disabilities... a curious choice, given none of us had intellectual disabilities*). Now who to tell showercaps are not fashionable but I love them?

Speaking of love, love... Love is in the air! Carney and I are planning our wedding vows/ceremony tomorrow night. It is hard - how personal to go? Brad and Jen (Pitt, Aniston) mentioned one party bringing the other cookies in bed. Should I mentioned hanging our underwear on the line in pairs - one his, one mine - so that they can 'do it' in the wind? I think that's romantic (though, maybe not Church romantic).

Stay tuned,
Kitty

*Interestingly, I rated this holiday very highly and had completely forgotten that all the other kids had intellectual disabilities until years later. Unfortunately, I have an elephant-like memory for another bizarre camp I went on at age 16, an un-advertised element of which was the presence of hundreds of naked women and being made to sit in a kitchen sink and sing 'row row row your boat' (but that is a whole other post).

glass half full...

Feeling pretty under the weather today... I was attacked by a bottle of wine last night and am less than sparking. I met my friend Dan this morning for a dog walk and a bizarre breakfast of 'coddled eggs, bread sticks and carrot pieces'. I thought it might be one of those strange-sounding-but-surprise-its-delicious breakfasts, but alas... carrots are not a breakfast food, and poppyseeds with brown sugar maketh a strange crumble topping.

Onward and upward though! Franks Sinatra said he felt sorry for people that don't drink, when they wake up in the morning that's the best they feel all day.

Today's theme is optimism! I started thinking about optimism looking at the internal, electronic noticeboard at work. Two ads caught my eye: one was a woman offering to housesit in the suburbs of St Kilda, Richmond, Windsor and South Yarra - pretty much anywhere east/south side and within about 5kms of the city - for a minimum of 6 months, no cats. The other, advertised a second hand ankle brace 'designed to be walked on if the ankle needs support' for $30. On the optimism continuum, these two are tending toward delusional.

At the 'beautiful' end of the same continuum, yesterday I saw the sweetest thing. Just around the corner from my house some kind souls have planted a community garden on a nature strip. It is a gorgeous concept, relies on strangers or passersby to help with the weeding, watering and share in the harvest! It was heartwarming - glass half full (and of delicious organic juices). I love the idea (though I can't help but wonder if anyone has peed on the vegetables - it is opposite a pub).

The Paper Towel Fiasco

Today at bikram yoga, a woman was drying herself after her shower with large sheets of butchers paper that she had bought along in a big roll. It was very strange, I struggle to imagine what had driven her to do this...

Did she forget her towel?
Did she not know they hired towels? Did she not have $1 for the towel?
Was she being 'environmentally friendly'? - she had an awful lot of hair, and appeared to have shower gel in a jam jar...
Would that even be more environmentally friendly, to use butchers paper?
Why were other people not looking?

It was bizarre. I could conceivably use paper towel to dry myself if I had had a shower and forgotten a towel, but the bringing along of butchers paper required forethought - consideration that one would need to dry off after a shower, the belief that an ordinary towel was not up to the task and then procuring an alternative... She was also completely nonchalant about it (as was the rest of the changeroom). There were little shards of wound up paper bits everywhere. (In the absence of a charged camera, this is difficult to find an image of on the internet. I have attached an image of a cardboard paper towel roll - it is the closest thing.)

In any case, I guess it's not the weirdest thing I've seen in a changeroom (I've been to the Melbourne City Baths - once).

Kitty

We have lift off!

The manifesto went live at the (virtual) launch yesterday...

Good* times had by all*. Party on, Wayne.

*mediocre.
**Carney and I.