~say fin

So we're now well and truly in the second half of the year, with December looming around far too few corners for my liking. But things are going okay. I just now finished the final (fingers crossed) edits on my seminar paper, which will be delivered with grandiloquence and pizazz this evening. It feels good to have written something I like, even better that my supervisor also likes it. The biggest potential stumbling block is the questions, which considering the group will be many, varied, and excellent in quality, no doubt leaving me opening and shutting my mouth for whole seconds at a time whilst frantically digging through my brian to find something intelligent to say. Oh well.

I'm doing black and white stripes again today. It's a look that makes me feel funky and young, instead of all the ordinary like how I normally feel.

bastardang  and I had another market stall on Sunday, which didn't go too well because (we think) of it being Father's Day and therefore people looking for daddyman things not babyperson things to buy. So because we hardly sold anything we'll do the October markets as well, and definitely December, and probably November too, so hopefully that all goes well. bastardang  had her new sun hats for sale which are great, lovely colours and entirely unisex; I had my new pram-toy range, almost half of which got sold to a crowd of kids imploring their dad to buy them. I am gratefuly he was easily persuaded, though my favourite toy (the bee) went very quickly, as I knew it would. I have plans for stainless steel + silk bracelets...

Once again I am having dreams where I speak French fluently and wander around Parisian cafes ever-so-stylishly, reading Sartre and pondering the meaning of things by the side of the Seine. My subconscious isn't very subtle about wanting to go back, preferably on the back of the BWTAS next year. Speaking of which, I'm joining in a group art experiment Thursday lunchtime, should be fun, and signing up for a printmaking class in October. Yay. Finally I get off my ass and do something!

mandellebrotte  and _toastedcheese_  have been in town for the last week and a bit, and it has been really great to bask in their awesomeness once more. Like the warm glow from drinking 2 glasses of danox 's luvverly stout :)

All in all, huspaz, as my phone says when I try to type hurray.






*Would you stop spitting on me when you're talking!

So in my most exciting news of late, I have gotten myself a second hand macbook. It was a strange journey, and ended up not being a sale through ebay as I had expected, but so far things seem to be going well. It came pre-loaded with Office for mac, which is a relief, so now I just have to download all those other programs onto it.

Although it's got a brand new battery, the battery life doesn't seem to be as hot as I would expect, so I'm going to install iStat to try to keep on top of things. I suffered the usual late-night-money-spending guilt, thinking I should have used the money to fix our fridge (which keeps freezing things) or spent a few hundred bucks more to get a brand spanking new one. But I guess it's okay, since really it wouldn't have been a few hundred bucks, it would have been another 8 or 9 hundred bucks, which is a bunch of money.

I do love it a lot though, now I've calibrated the display (it was very blue before for some reason) and done all the little settling-in things that you do with a new computer. For some dumb reason it won't connect to the usyd wireless network, even though it says it is, the page won't load. Most irritating.

Apart from that I have been remarkably lazy this week. And last week. Flew through Anathem (though the stupid misprinted pages thing still needs to be resolved, I contacted the publishers and they sent me the pages in a pdf, but I still need to get a new copy sent out by Amazon, bitches), and loved it, am now re-reading A Room of One's Own in an attempt to get back into the thesis and research frame of mind. There's a seminar paper I'm due to give in a month or so, and I can't figure out what to talk about. There's an article I need to edit (badly - maybe rewrite would be more accurate) and submit it to either Woolf Studies Annual or Modernism/Modernity. I think the latter would be best since it's about music as well as Woolf. Then I need to come up with an abstract submission for a conference in the US next year. And, in between times, actually do some research and come up with a vague structure for the thesis.

*le sigh* July seems to have gone by awfully fast, and I have not kept up with things as I should.

Oh. And I'm now a SUPRA Councillor, too, in charge of Publications. So I need to familiarise myself with all their print and digital content, and come up with a style guide, sometime in the next month.

Also need to start thinking about who to approach to sit for my Archibald entry. I've a few ideas...

Busy busy!

It's a tricky skill that I havent't mastered for a research project of this scope. That will go for this long. I'm beginning to think I should keep some kind of journal of what I do in a day, what I pursue and what ideas I have, so I have something to look back on if I lose the trail.

Is that a stupid idea?

I mean, I take lots of notes, I'm pretty organised about that, but it's not necessarily the same thing. And it doesn't tell you *why* you got all distracted in one direction, or disheartened by another.

Hmm.

Meanwhile the sound of circular saws on concrete and tiles is not exactly music to my ears. Hopefully the work in this building will be done soon.

I was given some advice this morning from my supervisor, which was SLOW DOWN. 

This is not advice I am used to. Difficult to contemplate, difficult to shake off the feeling of not-working-guiltness. But I shall try. He's off to the UK for seven months shortly, and while he gave me some good tips for the intervening months between meetings, mostly he said I should not expect so much. Just put in the travel funding application, read a bit, write a bit, and enjoy life. So that's my official To Do list.

Unfortunately I have spent the last 2 weeks doing pretty much fuck all. I handed in my 12 thousand words, and deliberately took a week off (for birthday celebrations also, which were numerous and fun), after which I came down with this horrible cold that I'm still suffering the after effects of. So that was no fun. I'm partway through a painting and keep having billions of ideas for other paintings, which is good, but missed the BWTAS deadline (again). So am very angry with myself for screwing that up for two years in a row.

On the upside I will definitely be able to put together a portfolio in the next 11 months worthy of the name. So I'll focus on that, and a submission for the Archibald for next year.

I moved desks at PG ARC to try to get away from the crazy Korean girl, but she left a cross note on my desk I guess yesterday evening telling me to pack up my stuff when I leave. Which is totally uncalled for given the plentitude of other (empty) desks, and the fact that I'm in here every day. But whatever. I'll stay sweet unless there's some kind of need for a direct confrontation.

Things are good. Blue skies even though it's winter, Tanglecat is going well, friends are great.

*stretch*

Feels good. Oh! And I have a Ginseng Bathhouse voucher to use! Woo!

Wish I was in Paris...

here are some words i am tired of

• text
• context
• intertextual
• scholarship
• field
• aesthetic
• study
• approach
• alternatively

here are some words i am glad i got to use

• bastion
• definitional
• zeitgeist
• tension
• picaresque
• satirical
• profound

it's slowly coming together. i'm certainly feeling a lot better about it - and things in general - since i took warren's advice and started taking anti-inflammatories for the various pains in my back and neck. makes sense really. chronic pain isn't good for anyone's state of mind, and inflammation just makes the underlying problem that much worse and much harder to treat.

so huzzah for voltaren!

I had what you could call a productive day yesterday. Personally I think it's a somewhat generous description, but my word count is fast approaching unreasonable proportions. There's one critic in particular who, while I was reading my typed notes of his work, is so awesome that I couldn't fathom how to condense his arguments down any further, and just ended up copy/pasting the entire chunk of notes into the vaguely relevant section of the review. Which does not a good review make.

*Sigh*

In other news me and bastardang 's market stall a couple of weeks ago went really well, which makes me really happy. We were both pretty nervous about how it would go and whether there would be enough people who thought what we did was awesome enough to hand over money for it... but there were, and they did. Now to make more stock in time for July! Which is not so far away. So far two hats and one pair of booties. Need at least 3 more hats and matching booties for all.

I'm also trying to make my mother in law a stole called Juno Regina, which is knit on 2ply on 3.5mm needles, which I'm finding quite tiring as I need to watch what I'm doing the whole time. The wool is so fine it's about 3 of my hairs thick, so it slips around a lot. And this is 'due' by the end of the month (it was her birthday last month so it's already late). Plus gloves for myself, house socks for Adam, and a jumper for William (or Wigwam as he is called by the in-laws). Gah!

There are things that should be making me happy, like the prospect of spending a fortnight covered in paint and charcoal trying to work enough for a decent submission. If I can finish this lit review in time, and get in my application for research funding for next year, then it _should_ be possible.

Neal Stephenson is getting in the way of this. He is so awesome. I'm almost halfway through Confusion already, which is testament to my procrastination of all these other pressing issues that I keep complaining about.

I'll go give myself a good talking to, and get it all done, and stop complaining.

i recently started re-reading the farseer trilogy, from lack of anything else inspiring on my bookshelves. they're really good.

however i discovered that the third book is missing. and i somehow have two copies of the first book in the second series. i suspect that what has happened is that mandellebrotte and i accidentally swapped - she probably has two copies of the 3rd book in the first series. we both had our own copies of them independently, but stuff gets tangled up when you move house. nobody i know has the thirs book. which sucks. they have it at sydney uni library, but in the rare book section. the rare book section! i ask you.

this led me to examine my bookshelves in greater detail. turns out i have lots missing (and only two books belonging to someone else). i hate missing books, especially when i want to read them so badly.

at the moment i am missing:

written on the skin - collection of true crime forensic work, i think dave has this
dirt music (tim winton) - mum may have this
haroun and the sea of stories (salman rushdie) - eli may have this
the ode less travelled (stephen fry) - again, eli may have this
the dragonbone chair (tad williams) - pete has this
everything is illuminated (jonathan safran-foer) - no idea who has this
smoke and mirrors (neil gaiman) - no idea
benang - no idea
titus groan & gormenghast (mervyn peake) - no idea

and those are just the ones i can think of. *sigh*.

The armchair guy got back to me - $900 plus GST if I supply the fabric for the two chairs. I consider this to be an awesome price, so we're going to go ahead with it.

Our house smells at the moment - like really strong mothballs. It's this stuff we had to use to bathe the two cats, called Malawash. Man it's feral. But it has hopefully killed all the fleas they seem to regularly pick up from other neighbourhood cats. They're both really pissed at me, in spite of my attempts to befriend them again. Just too traumatic for them I suppose, and fair enough. Their sense of smell must be horribly offended.

Not much else to report. Made a yummy lunch of scrambled eggs with fetta and semi dried tomatoes, so so salty and good. But now am feeling slightly egged and buttered, in that way you do. Sigh. Work to do, knitting to do for the market, house to clean. And the weeks and months just seem to keep on rolling by with very little accomplished!

the highlight of my day today was staying in bed until 10am reading pride and prejudice in my warm nesty bed. adam went to class and came back again and i had barely moved, and then he proved how awesome he was by going and getting me the coffee i'd been wanting all morning, but unable to drag myself out of bed for.

truly, he is the best of men!

(as an aside, at the moment he's learning all about Hand-Shaking Lemma and fixed vertices in graph theory... *shudder*)

i'm eagerly awaiting several things, which is a state of tension that if i'm not careful will lead to impatient tetchiness. number one, not important, but cool, are the needles that i ordered from knitpicks, a whole set of all the double pointed sock needles i could ever want. they are such sexy sexy needles. the ones i bought for my baudelaires have been awesome.

secondly and somewhat more frustratingly, there is the waiting for inspiration to strike in terms of my chunky ass lit review that's due at the end of june. which is really just a matter of self discipline, but that's not something i have vast reserves of at the moment.

thirdly is mandellebrotte 's return to sydney, along with monsieur _toastedcheese_ . *pom poms*

SeeSee have pushed back publication until mid June. damn.

apart from this there're about a million things i want to do any time i stop and think for about 5 minutes. very few of which i actually follow through on. painting, writing, cleaning, other knitting, letter writing, article writing...

*sigh*

I'm finally beginning to feel like I deserve to be here. I probably shouldn't get complacent about it, but I'm really enjoying the routine, the space, the light, the fact I finally pretty much have a regular desk. There's this great sense that I have reconnected to the life I've been missing for such a long while.

So far my days consist of making delicious coffee in the mornings (how I love the noise of a stovetop coffee maker doing its percolatey thing), eating breakfast (I know, what's come over me!), and strolling in to uni between 9 and 10. 'My' desk isn't really mine, but there seem to be plenty around all of a sudden, and there's never been anyone else sitting here so far. I guess all the final year postgrads have gone into the 'completion space' - sounds like something that happens to Necromongers or something. Anyway suddenly it's gone from being pretty noisy and pretty crowded to being reasonably chilled and not too busy. Again, not taking it for granted that this will continue, simply enjoying it while it's happening.

The research side of things is fun, too. Even when I'm really annoyed at some idiotic article written by a post-feminist deconstructivist focusing on VW's life (rather than, I don't know, her writing), I remind myself that this is all to the good, as it gives me a clear justification for pursuing the road I am currently going down. Which is a close textual analysis. Interestingly there have been the occasional lone voices almost lost in the welter of scholarship from the 1960s onwards, pleading for more close analysis; but they seem to have been overwhelmed in number, if not in quality, by the various other mobs shrieking over VW's body of works to claim as their own.

It's also good that not many people have written on the particular text I plan on studying. It hasn't really been taken seriously by most Woolfian scholars, which in itself is interesting as it gives you a pretty good clue as to their agenda. Anyway. I feel like I'm making headway. Which is great.

In other news, we're going over to visit James, Ev, Isabelle, and the brand-new William this evening! Hurrah! Everyone seems to be having babies at the moment, which is a bit random.

I've also finished knitting my gorgeous Gatsby Girl in a kind of Yves Klein blue cotton, which should be great. Now for the arduous sewing up and hemming, and then I shall wear it!

Nothing much else to report. Autumn has finally arrived, with its clear blue days, buttery sunshine, and cool temperatures. Lovely!

in the last few weeks, my sister has broken her back, my dad has lost his job, and my mum has been hospitalised for being insane.

bring it on, 2009!

so it's been an awfully long time between posts.

my man and  i are flying out of this godforsaken town next tuesday morning, bound for deutschland (uber alles), then the uk, then paris. should be a lot of fun, but i don't really believe that it's less than a week away. at some point someone, probably ashton kutcher, is going to spring out from behind a parked car and point and laugh at me and yell "punked!"

at which point i like to think i would karate chop him in the neck, thereby saving the world from further reality tv travesties, and earning the undying gratitude of millions.

we're overnight in seoul, then landing in frankfurt on the 10th, and then i'm not really sure what we will do. we could stay in mainz overnight and then try to get the ferry down the rhine, but i suspect it doesn't run the whole route in winter... which would be a pain. so maybe we should just get a train straight to heidelberg and then stuttgart, and then meet up with anna and noam in munich as planned.

also have yet to sort out edinburgh accommodation. and cambridge. apart from that, the rest is looking okay.

i should be more excited, but work and humid weather is sapping my will to live :P

I just got invited to ravelry!

Woo!

*happy dance*

This is so great I am actually posting in my journal. Sorry for the general lack of updates recently.

Other news: Adam and I are in Melbourne, which rocks
    : My mum is better after being in hospital
    : The bacon, egg, and hollandaise sauce rolls sold by Toby's Estate are great
    : slice left for Cambridge this week, and mandellebrotte is settling in to Chicago
    : I've started painting again
    : I may get some writing published in a journal

Woo!

hurray hurrah hurray.

tomorrow evening i shall proceed, after work, to the Cross. i shall exit at the train station, taking care to step over recumbent street people carefully, flip my loose change into proffered blankets, and walk out onto the street. opposite me will be the huge Coke sign made famous by the dance scene in Strictly Ballroom. i wish, incidentally, that it was still made of the metal disc collage that it was then. alas, alack.

i will turn right, then walk directly into the Crest Hotel, ascend the stairs, and hand over large amounts of cash. i will take my locker key on its sproingy band, go to my locker, and remove and stash all my clothes. then i will step out onto the rubber mats, hang up my clean white robe on its allotted hanger, have a drink of water, and walk into the bathhouse interior.

there will be billows of steam, obscuring the yellow lights. the mural will be covered in condensation, and flaking slightly at the top. i will take a seat on one of the low stools, and have a shower sitting down, watching the runoff spill down the tiled channels in the floor to the drains. then i will soak in tea. my friends will be coming slightly later than i, so i will soak, and drift, and strike up idle conversation.

there is nothing quite like this experience. somehow nudity is effaced, interesting but not self-consciously so. a realisation that struck me the first time i visited the bathhouse was that it really is true that everyone is pretty much the same, and that that standard is one that is appreciable and attractive pretty much equally from person to person. there are women of all sorts that visit this bathhouse, all ages, orientations, and body shapes. there are various levels of hairlessness, decorated skin, cellulite, a vast array of skin colours. and it's all fine. everyone has a shower, in the same room, and somehow through the collective experience of shared nudity, it feels much more like taking care of yourself than a shower at home, which tends more to be functional cleanliness rather than self aware care and attention.

after i have sat in the tea, enjoying the bubbles and the fountain and the temperature, there'll be a quick splash into the hot and cold baths, then a brief steam in the wet sauna. another quick sluice-off shower, and then my locker number (the band normally around my ankle, or else holding up the weight of my wet and heavy hair in a temporary ponytail) will be called by a small korean lady. i will be led into the treatment room. first, i will be placed on a massage table and doused with buckets of hot water. then i will be scrubbed fiercely, to the point of pain, with harsh little nylon gloves (on the hands of an indomitable lady dressed only in black knickers and a crop top). periodically, she will throw more water over me, rotate my body, manipulate limbs and joints to more amenable positions. a layer of dead black skins cells will be removed, the new skin underneath glowing pink and startlingly awake after the scrubbing.

after this i will be moved to a new table. my body will be wrapped, mummy style, in a series of clean white towels that have been thoroughly steamed. left there for 5 mins, my mind will obligingly drift in somnolent contemplation of... nothing. then i will be massaged, flipped over, trodden on and squashed, all the aches of my tense body will be harshly expunged from my muscles. a mix of milk and honey will be rubbed along the now smooth clean lines of my limbs. then more towels, doused in hot water, and more contemplation. my face will receive careful attention, pressure points pressed and jaw muscles massaged. my scalp also. a small white linen band will be wrapped around the edge of my face, to protect my hair. with painterly attention, minced cucumber (ice cold) will be dabbed on the skin. more hot water on the towels, more nothing, more delicious drifting thoughtlessness.

it's a state of suspense i don't often reach. suspense, in the sense being suspended, but also the anticipation of how wonderful, alive, tingling and intense, my whole body feels after this treatment. every time i go to the baths there is this sense of approaching relaxation, i always expect it to do these things, and it never fails in my expectations.

after i am gently unwrapped and have left the treatment room, and having washed off the lingering milk and honey, i will return to the tea bath to soak, think about nothing, and wait for my friends - themselves now lying on massage tables, being scrubbed, massaged, covered in foodstuffs, towels, and water.

hello, internets!

it seems like an opportune moment to fill you in on some of the recent happenings in my life. this will happen in installments - lots to catch up on.

installment the first - moving house.

moving house fills me with a nameless dread. somehow it conjours up more worry and stress than pretty much any other event i can think of other than injury or the injury of loved ones. there's just so much to DO, so much to organise and prepare, so much to throw away, so much to agonise over throwing away. it makes you heartless, it makes you hate your possessions, and it makes you BORING.

as i have whinged about, this dreaded event took place on my birthday, which i saw as being unfair up until the day we actually signed the lease. then i tried to turn it around into excitement - "i got a house for my birthday!" - which worked pretty well.

having packed frantically, and with the house looking (deceptively) like things were basically ready for the garage sale and moving that was to take place on that wintry day in june, we woke up to a morning that can only be described as brisk. my sister, nai, and her girlfriend, tash, were staying with us - yet another of those things that would have been great the weekend of my birthday except for the moving house thing. anyway. lovely and i walked up the road to put our names to the contract, initial thousands of pages and anything that was handwritten, and pay the bond (ouch) and another week's rent in advance. they had put the lease date as from the day before - which in the original plan was true, but we had been called by our Agent and he had asked that we come in on the saturday instead.

argument ensued.

Secretary Miss thought that since she hadn't been part of the conversation, we were making it up to squirm out of another day's rent. mutually suspicious glaring ensued. finally it was okayed by a senior-ish looking person. more initialling.

interestingly, though, no copy of the lease, since the Agent must sign it, and of course he was taking the day off. ah well. armed with keys, a deposit book which will never be used, and a condition report (as optimistic as they ever are, the dears), we exited the office to prepare for a day of mayhem.

as soon as we got back, we started organising the boxes and boxes of 'to sell' stuff. a couple knocked on our door and asked about both bookshelves, and if there was anything else interesting, and we silently pointed to the part on the sign that said "starts at 10.30 (it was 9.00 and we weren't ready). foolish us. they went up to king st for a coffee and never returned.

nai, tash, and mandellebrottemanned the blankets (shivering quietly), while adam and i continued packing, occasionally throwing more stuff on the 'sell' pile outside. and we didn't do half-bad, thanks in part to danox and bastardang, who came by the afternoon.

then i got a phone call from the movers. could they come 3 hours ahead of schedule.

i delicately explained that this wouldn't really suit us, as we still had to demolish (by which i mean dismantle) most of our furniture, and that many things, mainly in our bedroom, still weren't packed. they asked again, more insistently. i said no, firmly. we agreed on the time of 2 rather than 3.30, which was still too early. they arrived and we were at that point of looking around at the wreckage, knowing we have to keep going because we couldn't turn back, thinking "how in hell do we still have so much STUFF when half our HOUSE is for sale on the lawn across from this stupid house?". we ran out of boxes, throwing things wildly into bags, stuffing things into other things, making makeshift sacks out of bedding and so on.

i saw a side to my sister i had never seen before - her selling side. she is often quite shy around strangers, and doesn't usually put herself forward in social situations. yet here she was, insisting on the usefulness of our junk, adding things to people's piles with amazing efficiency. i see now why she does so well at the bikeshop. stuff that wasn't sold was taken to the charity bins at the end of the street, disappearing within minutes like magic. nai had her own pile of things scavenged (much to tash's disgust) set to one side.

the removalists were awesome. never again will i move my own house full of stuff. they packed and carried and lifted and strapped, and our whole house (2 bedrooms, many books, though slightly less furniture than two days' previously) fit into their truck, which i considered to be quite a feat. then unpacking at the other end over in a mere 30 mins. awesome. they were great.

when i returned to our ex-house, lovely and i did many more carloads of the Random Crap variety. when i took him back to the New Place with the first carload, i realised this was actually the first time he had seen it. he liked it. we both noted that nothing in the house is straight - the floors bend in the corners, the kitchen doorway is askew, the cupboards are at a slight angle... it all makes it feel Alice-in-Wonderlandish.

kept working. kept packing and unpacking the car. we went out to dinner, and were joined by the In-Laws and by lutters, so an impromptu and unexpected birthday dinner ensued. then back to the car, which i was beginning to hate, but had to drive because lovely has no license.

finally we decided to build the bed and fall into it. but where were the bed bolts?

i trudged back to the Old House. they were nowhere to be seen. i filled the car with my pot plants (those which hadn't been stolen) and went back to the New Place, just as lovely, on a stranger's mobile, texted me "hav them here sry please come home". neither of our brains were working well.

built bed. fell into it. slept.

new house.

moved house. went well.

had birthday. likewise went well. continuing Festival of Awesome at the Rose in Chippendale on Firday from 6pm, all welcome.

work going well but tiring.

things generally well.

loves and missings you alls

so.

been a while. lots and nothing going on, which seems to be when i get my least talky and most hermity.

anyway. so we have a house, in an excellent location and it's quite sweet. small but nicely appointed, and i hope the nicest place we'll have lived in. at which point this house sprang a leak in the ceiling, with unsightly brown water stains dripping down the wall in the kitchen, ew. just the right time to be moving. so now things are kind of preoccupied with packing and cleaning and taking the opportunity to overhaul our possessions.

i'm getting a few other things out of the way, too - lots of cute knitted things for dalring isabelle. oh yes! i am now an auntie to a beautiful little 2-week old girl. she's very sweet.

captain lovely is currently hurtling towards brisbane for the improv comedy festival there, he has a show on sunday night which should go well. boss man has left for dubai, then bristol, and pillkin and i are sharing the houseminding and dogwalking duties in the lovely huge house on the top of the cliff overlooking the sea :) ah, the onerous things i do!

that's about it.

more later when more talky with the things.

greetings, and a happy tuesday to you. may the benificent rays of the autumnal sun shine upon your lofty brow with soothing honeyed caress.

ew, actually, honey on your forehead.

anyway. my jackets and jumpers are multiplying in my office, which is irritating. it's because *i come to work laden with clothing because of the weather, then strip half the layers away and leave them here. repeat from *.

in house news, we got official notice yesterday, and the mad buggers backdated it to last friday (apparently they are only required to give us 30 days' notice, but i am curmudgeonly enough that i will bother to check this on our lease), which means we have to vacate on the 29th. the day mandellebrotte's thesis is due, and the day before my birthday. oh what wondrous timing is this! will update on the search for a new place.

work is busy but not the madness it has been, since we completed our last module until september on friday last week, hurrah. so now there's a month of setting everyone up for going overseas for conferences (in a european summer, but hey, it's not easy being an academic), then july and august should be relatively easy months.

i bought totally awesome red boots on the weekend - flat heels, completely kickass, zippers on inside and outside leg, calf high... they look like motorbike boots, essentially, but less heavy. i will post a pic sometime. lovely and i played soccer with pillkin and astrodance on the weekend, which was fun. we got co-opted into a group game that was going on in the park at the same time, though, and raced around for a bit. the fun kind of went out of the day though when i was defending the goal (pillkin was keeping) and astrodance kicked the ball as hard as he could at the goal. would have been fine, obviously, except that my face was in the way. but thankfully just a nasty headache inducing jolt, no swelling or anything. fark me but it hurt, though!

there was also a highly successful party for mother-in-law at j+e's place, which was lovely. my orange poppyseed (and cointreau) cake was hailed a great success. yummy satay and bbq and salads by the others. j+e are bidding on a place next weekend, should be exciting. apparently the whole upper level is one giant attic which was used as a dorm for this woman's 8 kids. i mean, really.

haven't caught up with house of fun people for far too long... i had a dig at jackie loeb on dave's blog today, she had such a tanty because he thought her performance at the Melbourne Comedy Fest was not worth mentioning. really, it is quite the amusement.

occasionally i look around at my workplace and think, wow, how did i come to be doing the money stuff here? sure it's useful skills and all, but it's not something i am naturally good at. bossman and i figured out the budget to go out to our advisory peeps for a meeting tomorrow, and it was such a headache. there are complicated things that need to be factored into salaries and such like, then there are fairly arbitrary distinctions between such categories as "travel" and "other" (where do visa fees go?), and to top it all of it's a financial year split between two totally different accounting systems, neither of which i am trained in.

to relax my brain of an evening i have taken to studying various lit theory texts, which is good, and feels productive, even if it's more tilting at windmills than actually creating anything new. now that i know we're moving i am that much more reluctant to embark on new things - big paintings and writing and all that guff.

i want a MacBook.

very odd. got into work this morning and have so far done about 4 or 5 hours work in not very much time. especially given the coffee break that mandellebrotte, _toastedcheese_ and i went on. it's a lovely day in sydney and you just want to be lying in a park somewhere reading something lazy and interesting :)

i had a busy and fun weekend. after the building inspector investigated our house on friday (100K worth of repairs, and he didn't think that the agents and current owner should have been able to lease it in its current condition), we had more people through on sat morning, which was annoying. Lovely and I sat out on the verge opposite in the sun so as to be at some distance from it, but he said next time he wants to be inside for it so he can be suitably menacing. saturday afternoon randomblade and i met up for tea at taka (yay! it had been far too long) and general catch up. wonderfulness. there was a fellow strolling around past the golden sheaf on new south head road (I was waiting for a bus) with one of those stupid dog bags for your stupid small ratdog. anyway he was prancing around like a prize fool, and the lead of the litttle doggie was trailing on the ground. i had a flash of concern that someone would step on it and yank the little yapper out of its bag, but wasn't going to say anything. then he cam back, jumped in a cab, and shut the door on the lead!

i mean, it was flapping around on the ground scant inches away from the rear wheel. visions of decapitated dog's head bouncing around on the back seat assailed me, but before i could act, randmblade had leapt to action and was sprinting down the street. she pounced on the cab, told the guy, saved the dog, and was back at my side in a flash. very impressive - i have never actually seen her run at her fastest before, and this was hardly in running gear too!

yummy japanese dinner with pillkin, ingebjorg, and eli-major, at delicious place of deliciousness. funny conversation about oddities of japanese culture (such as vending machines at subway stations with used women's underwear for sale). the dragon roll was awesome, bbq eel, and the slices curved sinuously around the plate, and it had a little dragon head and tail made of artfully arranged prawn tails. then we went back and watched children of men, having been the last people in the place and full of raucous conversation, following which there was a long and involved discussion of science, ethics, philosophy, postmodernism, and literature. brains sparking all over the place.

sunday was a day of luxurious sleep in, followed by brunch with mandellebrotte and _toastedcheese_, then a stroll down to toasted's new apartment (very noice), then frisbee (yay) in the park and a bit of jogging on my part. mandelle sat under a tree being studious, making revisions on her chapter.

so hurrah. a weekend which left me feeling refreshed and invigorated.