I got runner up in a photo competition :) I took this picture months ago when on a trip to Broken Hill. This picture was taken 50kms north of BH on the Silver City Highway, and yes this is the main highway. It was just one of many I took and one of four I entered into the comp.
I didn’t win anything except being able to tell people I got runner up, so here it is.
Ordering anything online these days usually includes word verification. Tonight I was ordering tickets for Billy Elliot and I had to type the word in the box, the word
thrush
I had to go into the city at lunchtime today (doctors appointment for vaccination booster, BP -120/60 thank you very much, pretty much perfect, blood test, re-prescription and weight –gone up a little since last time) and I found myself missing Martin Place.
I got off the bus on Elizabeth Street and started walking down the hill. I had a Red Cross Give Blood bag thrust at me only to have it taken away again when I said ‘I can’t give blood’ (I might have mad cow disease according the Aussie Red Cross). Then the Socialist Alliance drones tried to ply me with leaflets about how they are going to change Australia when they get into power at the next election, all I have to do is vote for them. The Bobbie Goldsmith foundation asked me to help fill their bucket and I nearly got knocked of my feet for daring to look around at my surrounding and take in the atmos. This was all before I reached the fountain at Pitt Street.
The flat bit of Martin Place between Pitt Street and George Street was the usual gauntlet of Greenpeace, WWF, some Cancer charity and ‘homeless’ asking for cash, all this amongst many, many office workers (dressed mostly in black) all rushing headlong between their desks and food and back again.
Hustle and Bustle how I miss you ;-)
I picked up the voicemail on my mobile today. I knew I had a message from Todd, but as it’s normally ‘Call me’ I didn’t pick it up yesterday morning. You can imagine my surprise and belly laughs when I heard the panic stricken voice saying;
‘I’ve just had a dream about Munchkins giving me a blow-job. We are never watching a movie you pick out ever again!’
I would never have believed, in the first years of the twenty first century that I would have ended up cooking dinner for my hubby two months after I left him. We ate, we drank wine, we even chatted while we sat in the back garden, then he fixed my iTunes.
- Whilst walking home last night I saw this beautiful hang of wisteria and had to take pictures. The bee thinks it's tasty.
- Basketball clearly isn't played in the Spring or Summer
- Wisteria look completely different if looked at from underneath
After a day of ironing and watching Season Three of House on DVD, I needed to get out of the house on Sunday so I picked up the car and went to Bondi Junction for a spot of shopping. Actually it was window shopping but seeing as the wind was doing its best to freeze part of the anatomy off I felt window shopping inside a shopping centre was the way to go. Ohh… and I had to buy a pair of gym shorts.
Some lunch and a few kilometres of walking later, I left the shopping centre to pick up Todd for some more window shopping of the increasingly expensive kind. Car shopping. He’s getting a car when he goes back to the States later in the year and he wanted to suss it all out here first. So we took a test drive. Afterwards when we where sitting with the salesman and Todd is explaining how he’ll be paying cash in a few weeks time (anything to try and get out there without signing paperwork), the salesman turns to me and asks if I was his mother.
This isn’t the first time I been mistaken for being older than I am, but I have never been mistaken for being in my fifties. I politely explained that I was a mere twelve days older than my son and that I was a medical miracle at being able to give birth at such a young age. Then I suggested that the eighteen year old salesman keep his age suspicions to himself in future.
What I should have said is that with a female more insecure about her age he could very well have lost the sale.
Todd and I laughed about it for at least three more hours, before we started laughing at Matt Lucas as Sharon's sister on Kath and Kim.
Since I moved into my little cottage in Surry Hills/Redfern I seem to have had a trail of tradesmen in and out. All have been there in a professional capacity. First there was the Hire-a-hubby to put up picture hooks and put together my Ikea units. Then came the handyman to fix the door, only he never actually came until he had missed several appointments and many phone calls. There was the plumber who fixed my revolting drain problems and now there is the renovator.
The Renovator is the man who put in the bathroom vanity and painted the house before I moved in. He’s coming to fit the new hot water tank (so I hope he is a qualified plumber too). I was told he would be calling me last Monday, so I waited. And waited, nothing. Yesterday when I was on the bus at about 11.30 I get a phone call from a private number.
‘Can you be at your house in fifteen to twenty minutes?’
‘Who is this?’ said I.
‘I’m coming to fit your new hot water system.’
‘Ahh, NO! It’s Sunday, I’m on a bus and at what point did we book this?’
‘I’m a very busy man you know.’
You may be, but…’
Anyway, the upshot of the conversation is that he’s coming between 6 and 7pm on Tuesday night. And I still have no idea what his name is.
Update 10:13 26-9-07 His name is Jim and he turned up at 1930. Ohh and he was really smelly.
A subject close to my heart was in the news today. World Youth Day, should or shouldn't it be cancelled due to lack of work being done at the chosen venue due to the horse flu.
According to Yahoo readers today it's currently at 48%/52% in favour of keeping WYD. So I decided to poll my own reader, what do you think?
Cancel or don't cancel
(please consider the influx of up to 500,000 catholic youth to Sydney for the month of July 2008 when casting your vote)
UPDATE : 1313 2-10-07 - The polls results are in. 80% think we should cancel World youth day to protect Sydneysiders and 20% don't care 'cause they'll be on holiday.
Today I’m having a colour crisis. I realized this morning when I was on my way to work that I am wearing a totally tragic outfit. Black boots, brown trousers (it gets worse) a red and white striped shirt and a raspberry jacket. I also currently have red nails. I really must do the ironing this weekend.
People must be looking at me and thinking (just as I did last week when I saw a girl in a black suit with a fuchsia blouse and brown kitten heels), did she get dressed in the dark this morning?
Found out what the sewage issue was this morning, finally. After an hour with and electric eel and a bath full of water the plumbers drew out a larger grey lump of goo and the smaller guy of the two man handled it for a few seconds before withdrawing a small gold crucifix and then he said ‘Ahh…god botherers and white mice’.
It took me a second to realize what he was talking about…now it's your turn, think about it.
Imaginative answers will be marked out of 5 and the correct answer for the person I know will be rewarded by a few bevvies for actually writing the word.
Driving south on the freeway tonight I saw this van, as it was doing exactly the speed limit I couldn’t really overtake, but I did have to take a picture because after twenty odd kilometres and not a single other car on the road it was still sitting in the middle lane. It seems he forgot about moving into the left lane.
You can image how it looked when I got close enough to see the branding on the side, back and front.
In light of our trip to see the War of the Worlds last night, Todd had to alert me to this little story from Peru about a 'meteorite'.
The BBC
Living in Peru
The Guardian, UK
- Richards Hologram (on the left)
- The Tripod
About two months ago I moved into a house on street level in the city. I have come to realize that this has both benefits and drawbacks.
While I love having my own space I find it is invaded by a plethora of junk mail on a daily basis. Catalogues from Coles, Woolworths, BuyLo, Freedom Furniture, Myer and David Jones are just a few of the many I receive. The quality of the paper stock improves as you work your way through the list, which is nice. But these don’t arrive in my letterbox, nope, they are thrown at my front door to be found when I get home somewhere on the step or amongst the plants on the front border. If it rains, they get wet and are useless pulp.
Puss gets to sit outside. He also get to go for walks in the evening, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t go far because he’s never gone for long. There are big scary noises out there in the big wide city world. The bush is much safer.
People trying to sell me stuff/convert me on a Saturday morning. So far I have had Jehovah Witnesses at 9.45am, raffle tickets for some charity or other (I don’t know who because it was 9.01am when the doorbell rang and I was less than polite), the Smith family at 0845 asking if I had any unwanted items (I told them they had more chance if they asked after 10, but no, I don’t) and finally the Jehovah Witnesses again at 9.30. I’m thinking of having a sign that says ‘if it’s the weekend and before 10AM, do even think about ringing my doorbell’
Drainage Problems. When living in a flat on the seventh floor, drains were never a problem. At Bucketlike we had a sess pit and again drainage was never an issue. But Now I seem to be the outflow for the neighbour sewage system. For the last couple of weeks my little house has been getting smellier and smellier, at the weekend I went outside to find the drain had overflowed I had fag butts, cotton pads and toilet roll all over the back garden. Eww! After two weeks of asking the agent to get it sorted, I figured a photograph of my new garden décor would do the trick. Today a plumber arrived on my doorstep at eight o’clock.
Buses. I don’t like them very much, they are unreliable, noisy, dirty and they scare Puss. They run up and down outside every 5-10 minutes in both directions. They do however alert me when they are just around the corner by being noisy and I have just enough time to run across the road to the bus-stop without having to ‘wait’. Marvellous!
All-in-all I like living at street level.
A few months ago, June and I decided to have Yum Cha for lunch. Bad I know, but it is indeed Yum! I have since been told Yum Cha translates to Drink Tea which is something to do with dissolving the fat in the food…but whatever, the tea’s all part of the fun of Yum Cha. Next up, in a couple of weeks - one of the following;
Anyway, apart from steamed prawn dumpling, my favourite dish is a dessert dish. Mango Pancakes. At the first place (Zilver) we went to we decided that the pancakes were too thick and there wasn’t nearly enough actual mango in the tasty little morsels. In a discussion on the way back to the office we decided to visit all the Yum Cha places (within walking distance of Central Station) in an effort to find Sydney’s best Mango Pancake.
So far we have been to (we’re rationing ourselves);
Zilver - pancake too thick, not enough actual mango (1/5)
East Ocean - nice thin pancakes, lots of real mango (4/5)
Today, we went to Marigold on the 5th floor of the City Mark building on George Street. The service wasn’t too bad but the overall food selection was a little on the naff side. Very few steamed dumplings, but loads of fried stuff. We did get fresh greens though and for some reason two pots of tea. The mango pancake however was a little disappointing. Although the pancake itself was nice and thin, it was very soggy. The cream seemed to be watered down slightly and it all gave the appearance of a sweaty sock. They tasted OK, but they weren’t good enough for us to mind leaving the last one.
Overall I would rate the Mango Pancakes at the Marigold three out of a possible five (3/5). 
- These one are slightly brown from the pan, the ones today were NOT, and they're missing the dodgy paper doily ;-)
The Regal (in china town, somewhere)
Sky Phoenix (Sky Garden, Pitt Street)
The Palace (Piccadilly Arcade, Pitt Street.
I had planned a little trip to the garden centre today but the car battery was flat. So after waiting for the NRMA man to arrive and to have him tell me the parking lights had been left on. He then told me I had to drive for at least forty-five minutes to charge the battery back up.
Where to go?
Wentworth Pots was to be my destination, a random trip into the Blue Mountains to get a couple of pots, some polished river stones and compost. The car was riding a little low on the way back but I have managed to turn the garden from this …
to this ...
Picture to come ;-)
