krisalis

You get home from work after a long day at the office. Check the mail box, pick up a couple of bills and some junk advertising flyers. Rummage in your handbag for the house keys. Let yourself in, dump your stuff in the nearest chair and head to the fridge.

Grab a couple of pieces of bread and whack them in the toaster. Pour a glass of juice. Pick up the junk mail to throw it in the bin, but instead start reading about yet another appartment complex opening in the neighbourhood and begin browsing through the Victoria’s Secret sale catalog.

Take a sip of juice. The toast pops. Put toast on a plate. Back to the fridge to find something yummy to put on the toast. Locate the margerine. Decide against marg. Look for jam. Snigger at some ridiculously ugly items for sale in the Victoria’s Secret Catalogue. Locate jam. Wonder if ridiculously ugly items in catalog are the height of fashion in the US. Mmmm, jam. Grab a knife from the draining board.

Sit down at the table with the plate of toast and glass of juice, whilst still reading the junk mail. Open the jam jar. Catch a strong vinegary smell coming from the vicinity of the jam jar. Realise it is not jam at all. Read the label. Discover that you came within centimeters of spreading Fermented Red Residue on your toast.

Wonder what in hell Fermented Red Residue is, and what on earth it is doing in the fridge in the first place.

Go back to fridge in search of jam. Read labels before selecting jam.

I know it’s early, and the wedding is ages away, but I’m already thinking about bridesmaids.

Truth is, there are a lot of people I’d love to have as bridesmaids. I’ve managed to narrow my wish-list down to six, which is still a lot. I really want my three sisters to be bridesmaids. So, for the time being, I just asked them to make sure they are willing to do it.

This is what they said:

Billie (24): ‘I would be so honored to be your bridesmaid!’

Katie (21): ‘I would LOVE to be one of your bridesmaids! How very exciting!’

Lennie (16): ‘OK, I will be a bridesmaid if you pay me!!’

Nice, eh?

And since we’re on the topic, how many bridesmaids is too many? Is there a rule governing this sort of thing? Should I even care if there is? Could you really not care less?

Do tell…

Comments were down overnight because I intelligently managed to delete the ‘post’ button on the comments template while fiddling with my site last night. I’ve bashed together a temporary (but not very pretty) fix that will do until I have a bit more time. So, comment away!

Oh, and I stole the title of this entry from an email that someone sent me yesterday. I thought it was funny. Heh.

There’s a cold going round my office. Lots of phflem-filled people blowing their noses and coughing roughly into their hankies. And then there’s Captain Snot.

Captain Snot thinks he’s above the use of a common hanky. Captain Snot prefers to noisily snort his snot back up his nose. He sounds like a snot-filled pig. Snort. (Incidentally, Captain Snot is the same guy with the incredibly annoying mobile phone ring).

Occasionally, he makes a series of gurgling-hacking noises and hocks a big loogey into the bin. It’s utterly disgusting.

Unwilling to get too close in case of infection, yet no longer able to contain my annoyance at the snorting, I took a deep breath and put on my sweetest smile.

“You sound like you’ve got a bad cold, would you like some tissues?”. I leaned forward, offering a pack of unopened tissues.

“No thanks”, he replied, ” I don’t need them.”

“Yes you do!”, I screamed, “You’re disgusting! You’re revolting! Blow your nose, for God’s sake! Stop snorting your own snot and spitting large snot-balls into the office bins! STOP IT!!!!!”.

Actually, I didn’t say that at all.

Instead, I smiled weakly, and quietly retreated to my desk to pop some vitamin C tablets. Something tells me I’m going to need all the help I can get to avoid getting sick.

I went for a jog this evening after work.

Not feeling terribly energetic, I plodded my way round my usual route, huffing and puffing in the heavy humid heat.

Up ahead of me, I could see a woman pushing a child in a push chair. It was a steep section and the lady was having to put some effort in. As I approached, she looked up and caught my eye.

“I think I need a push too”, I wheezed.

She grinned, and the kid in the push chair looked up at me, wide-eyed.

“You want to get out and push me?”, I said to the kid in the chair, smiling.

The little girl looked at me for a second, and then her face split into a wide grin, and she began giggling. She spoke to me in a babble of Chinese, of which I understood only three words:

Seow Ang Mor.

which basically translates to:

Crazy White Lady.

I laughed at her laughing at me, and continued on with my run. Her mother looked vaguely embarrassed.

Later, on my way back home, I crossed paths with them again. This time the little girl was out of her push chair. When she saw me, she ran towards me, hands stretched out above her head clapping, her eyes bright with mischief, her head tilted backwards as she laughed and laughed.

Again, I laughed at her laughter. Again she babbled excitedly in Chinese. This time even her mum laughed.

I have no idea what was said, but I get the distinct impression that the joke was entirely on me.

Latest Mirror Project submission is up: Mark’s Sunglasses.

I’ve also been working on putting up some pictures from the Canberra/Sydney trip, but the pages still need some fiddling. Nevertheless, you can check out the progress so far here and here.

Hope you had a good weekend. I did.

It’s Friday Five time:

1. Hey, baby, what’s your sign? Do you think it fits you pretty well? Cancer. Do I think it fits? I guess so, but then I also think that star sign descriptions are vague and flexible enough so that most people can see elements of themselves in them.

2. What’s the worst birthday gift you’ve ever received? Hey! No such thing as a bad birthday present! Well, OK, possibly some seriously ugly clothes. The bad part was when I was forced to wear aforementioned fashion disaster to please the gift-giver.

3. What’s the best birthday gift you’ve ever received? Best? Eeek. I’ll go with the watch my parents gave me for my 21st.

4. What’s the best way you’ve celebrated your birthday thus far? My family threw me a surprise party for my 21st birthday in Austin. I thought we were just going out for dinner, but when we got to the restaurant, they had hired a little riverboat to cruise up and down Town Lake and invited a bunch of family friends. It was a complete surprise, and a lot of fun.

5. What are your plans for this weekend? Meeting friends this evening for a few drinks down Mohammed Sultan Road. Going Chinese New Year visiting tomorrow. Now that the ‘official’ period of the Lunar New Year is over, and people have visited all their relatives, it’s time to visit friends and exchange oranges and ang pows and play mah jong and eat ridiculous amounts of food. Or at least that’s my understanding. No real plans for Sunday at the moment.

Mark’s Grandma has a magnet on her fridge that reads “Some days I wake up grumpy. Other days I let him sleep.”.

I woke up grumpy this morning. As in, I’m grumpy. Not Mark. Mark doesn’t get grumpy very often. But me, I’m definitely grumpy today.

I’m tired. My face is all puffy. I haven’t done any exercise since last Friday. Yoga does not count as exercise, at least not the way I do it. I haven’t unpacked my suitcase yet from the Oz trip. Local TV is not showing the Winter Olympics, and getting the results online is not the same as watching the events on the tele. I appear to have misplaced my ability to write a coherent post.

I’m grumpy, and there are two working days to get through before the weekend. Hmpf. Maybe breakfast will help.

Today was a fairly crap day. So rather than linger on the different factors that contributed to the overall crapness, I’ll tell you what I did last Thursday. ‘Cause that was a much better day.

Last Thursday was Valentine’s Day. Not that Mark and I did anything even remotely Valentines-y.

Anyway, we had a great day. This in itself is surprising, given that I was forced out of my nice warm bed at 6.17am, after getting less than 6 hours sleep, to go and stand in a very long queue outside that National Library of Australia.

I was less than thrilled.

We arrived at the Library by 7am. The line stretched out the front door, along the front of the building and then wrapped around the side another 100m. It was long. We joined the end. I sulked and made disgruntled mumbling noises about being awake at 7am whilst on holiday. We later found out that some people had stared queueing at 5am!

It was a beautiful morning, and as the sun came up and the temperature rose, my mood began to thaw. A talented busker was making the most of a captive audience, energetically performing classical favourites on his violin.

The line was an orderly affair, with people reading newspapers or doing the crossword or chatting in hushed tones. Some people had even brought folding chairs and thermos flasks of coffee.

I ventured out of the line in search of cappucino from the coffee cart. A photographer from The Telegraph snapped a series of shots of me stirring my coffee, and said he was running an article on the success of the Treasures exhibit for the Saturday paper. (Note: we bought a copy of the paper on Saturday, but they didn’t run my picture with the article). Anyway, excitement about appearing in the paper aside, the caffeine did the trick, and much to Mark’s relief, I was soon feeling (and acting) human again.

The line moved slowly but steadily towards the entrance, and by 8.30am, we had secured tickets. We opted to head straight in rather than come back later in the day.

The exhibition was really interesting. It was an odd mixture of artifacts, from 4000 year old heiroglyphics to Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics to ‘Yesterday’. My favourite items were the old maps. I never new that Australia used to be called New Holland!

We wandered around for a couple of hours, talking to random people about different exhibits in hushed tones, reading the little plaques, storing away snippets of trivia for future use.

By the time we emerged into the bright mid-morning sunshine, I was starving. Mark took me to the The Pancake Parlour and fed me blueberry pancakes. Mmmmmm.

See? Last Thursday was good.

Mark and I went to the National Museum of Australia while we were in Canberra. It’s a fun museum with some truly interesting exhibits that explore the history of the people of Australia, both ancient Aboroginal and the more recent European arrivals.

Here are a few gems of knowledge I picked up along the way…

Pom: Pommy originally applied to an immigrant from Britain, and was formed by rhyming slang. A British immigrant was called a pommygrant, from the red fruit pomegranate, perhaps referring to the complexion of the new arrivals, which was then abbreviated to pommy and pom. Although some argue otherwise, it is not an acronym of ‘prisoner of mother England’.

Drop Bear: A modern-day mythical animal similar in appearance to a koala, but about 1.5m high, with very sharp claws and teeth. They are said to eat other animals and have a taste for humans. Drop bears lurk in trees, and drop down on their unsuspecting victims. They are particularly fond of overseas tourists.

Ocker: A rough and uncultivated Australian. Ocker was initially recorded as a nickname for anyone called ‘Oscar’, but the ocker as an Australian stereotype did not appear until much later. It was influenced by a television character named Ocker in the satirical 1960s comedy The Mavis Bramston Show. This Ocker was the beer-swilling, uncultivated stereotype.