krisalis

A hypersonic jet, capable of travelling at 7 times the speed of sound, would enable a plane to fly from London to Sydney in just two hours.

Ok, so this is still pie in the sky, fancy scientist stuff at the moment, but, wow, can you imagine?

I’d be able to pop back to the UK for the weekend. Well, provided I could afford the 12 squillion dollar fare.

Aside: I happen to have the speed of sound stored in my brain as being 340m/s. Why do I remember that? I haven’t needed to know that for at least 5 years. Probably more.

A quick Google reveals that my brain has retained this information pretty accurately, assuming room temperature.

Now if I could only remember something useful, like where the 3 missing remote controls for the air conditioning are.

At the company I used to work for, Monday mornings took some getting used to.

Fifteen minutes every Monday morning were designated as “5S” cleaning time. Each employee was given a small flannel cloth, and required to spend this alloted time wiping down their work area – dusting down the computer, polishing the desk surface, cleaning up the layer of grim from the top of the cubicle dividers.

At 9am sharp the receptionist would fire up the loudspeaker system to blare out a combination of the following songs:

• D – I – S – C – O by Ottowan (?)
• The Venga Bus Is Coming by The Vengaboys
• The Cup of Life by Ricky Martin
• Livin’ La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin
• Life After Love by Cher

I started work on a Monday morning. I was perched on a hard plastic chair in the HR office, filling in a bunch of forms when the loudspeakers started blaring Ricky Martin. I was somewhat surprised, but the HR girl didn’t bat an eyelid.

“What’s with the Ricky Martin at this time in the morning?”, I enquired.

“Oh. That. It’s cleaning time. Every Monday, 9am. Here’s your cloth.”, she replied, without looking up from her paperwork.

I peered over the cubicle walls. Sure enough, most employees were standing up out of their seats and were half-heartedly dusting their work areas.

My desk was unfortunately positioned directly below a speaker, and it gave me a jolt every Monday morning. I didn’t mind cleaning my desk. In fact, I quite liked having a cloth to clean up minor spills and keep the place dust free. But the music. Loud, tinny, trashy, it was a lot to cope with on a Monday morning.

In the 18 months that I worked there, the playlist never changed. I suggested a change more than once. My suggestion was always refused, on the basis that “people would argue”.

So now, when I’m slouched in my office chair early on a Monday morning, reluctant to begin work and wishing I was still home in my bed, I remember that somewhere out there, my former colleagues are probably still dusting to the dulcet tones of The Vengaboys, and I count my lucky stars.

Nifty MT hack from leusche.org that enables you to see what people are looking for when they use MT search.

Easy to implement – took me less than 5 minutes, and I’m no scriptygoddess!

In the few hours the script has been operational, I’ve had two searches for “audrey tatou n@ked”. Charming.

Oh, and I made chicken soup for dinner. From scratch. It’s very tasty. Mark say’s he’ll marry me for sure now ;o)

Somewhere along the line, I got sick.

It may have been Thursday or Friday that my throat started bothering me. But there was a ton of stuff to do at work, and I wasn’t ill enough to justify sitting at home in front of the telly, sipping mugs of hot soup.

So I ploughed through, sucking on Strepsils, downing large glasses of Redoxen, sniffling into paper hankies.

By Friday evening, it was clear I was coming down with a cold. I didn’t listen. Mark and I went for dinner at The French Stall; moules marinere and garlic bread, pork escalopes with ratatouille, and a couple of stolen spoonfuls of chocolate profiterole from Mark’s dessert, all washed down with a couple of cold mugs of Tiger.

Yeah, I know, beer doesn’t sound like the best drink to pair with that sort of meal, but The French Stall isn’t a fancy place. It’s open air, hawker-style dining, with hawker-style prices. Tiger beer fit the bill just fine.

From The French Stall we went to Muddy’s to collect Derek. A couple of G+T’s were sufficient to surpress my cold symptoms. I was feeling fiiiiiine. So we went to join Andrea and Neil at Carnage.

I stayed out too late and drank too much. Fame.

I blame the t-shirt. I was wearing my “Fame” t-shirt, finally returned by Lennie, after many months spent in her closet in Austin. Everytime I wear that t-shirt I end up staying out too late and drinking too much.

I actually think I would have been OK on Saturday morning, had my neighbours not decided to begin hammering at 8.24am. They kept the periodic hammering and drilling until about 11am. I tried sleeping through it, to no avail.

So I got up and made omlettes – two eggs, tomatoes, a couple of slices of bacon, a sprinkling of cheese and a dollop of ketchup – one for me and one for Mark. Mark’s omlette turned out perfectly. Mine fell apart when I tipped it out of the pan. It still tasted good. Then we settled into the sofa, and watched “The West Wing” on DVD. Man, I love snuggling into the sofa under a blanket and watching DVDs.

We finally made it out the house around 5pm on Saturday. We went to Carrefour to do the shopping for the BBQ we are meant to be having this afternoon. I don’t know what we were thinking. Carrefour on a Saturday evening is a psycho deathtrap. Hundreds of people wandering around the aisles, piling their massive trolleys sky-high with everything from camping gear to carrots. It’s even worse than Ikea.

Fortunately, we survived, and returned home to fill our fridge to bursting point with goodies. And that was our excitment for Saturday night.

I slept in ’til noon today. My head is fuzzy and throat is still sore. I’m loaded up with Panadol. I don’t want to be sick over the weekend.

I don’t want to cancel the BBQ. I want to see my friends, and besides, what would we do with all the food?! So now I’m marinating chicken breasts in garlic, lemon and olive oil, and making salads; one special tuna salad and one green salad.

Mark’s in charge of lighting the fire, and taking care of the red meat and sausages. Division of labour. Heh.

If I feel ill tomorrow morning, then I probably won’t go to work. But getting sick on the weekends just isn’t fair. So I’m denying it.

1. How long have you had a weblog? Since mid-May 2001.

2. What was your first post about? The first one that I’ve kept is about moving into the new flat. My first few posts are pretty cringe-worthy.

3. How many changes (name, location, etc.) of your weblog have there been, if more than one? In it’s very first incarnation, my weblog was titled Netsirk, and it was hosted on Blogspot, powered by Blogger. Man, it was ugly. I changed the name to Krisalis pretty quickly, and bought my own domain name, and moved to Geocities so I could have pictures. Eventually I decided to get proper hosting, and moved off of Geocities. A few months after that, I made the switch from Blogger to Movable Type. I’ve come a long way, baby.

4. What CMS (content management system) do you use? Do you like it or do you want to try something else? Movable Type. I love, love, love it. No desire to go through the pain of trying something new at the moment, though I have been tempted to take a shot at using GoddessBlog.

5. Do you read people who have both a journal and a weblog? Or do you prefer to read people who have all of their writing in one central place? Yeah. Row has both, and I read them. I can see why some people like to seperate out the blog and journal stuff. But I’m just as happy to read everything in one place. Means I’m less likely to miss stuff.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if all the traffic on the motorway just suddenly stopped. All of it. Completely still. All lanes. Both directions.

Not just a traffic jam, that slowly inches forward, but rather a complete stand-still, such that the cars, trucks, buses, vans and motorbikes are all rendered immobile for hours at a time.

After the initial patience period wears thin, how long would people stay seated in their cars before someone decides that enough is enough, and they are going to walk home? How long until people start getting out of their vehicles and chatting with their new neighbours, sharing snacks and drinks, bitching about being stuck, playing silly games to pass the time.

Or would folks stay seated in their cars, sealed inside the air-conditioning (or heating) with the engine running and the radio turned up, chatting on their mobiles until the tank and battery ran dry?

How many people would bed down for a snooze the back seat? Or pursuede the furniture delivery van man to let them snuggle into the sofas he is transporting? How long ’til the police or army sent in supplies to support the stranded motorists? What about ambulances, women in labour, or people with young kiddies and pets, on thir way to the park? School buses full of kids, tourists on their way to the airport, trucks with perishable cargo? And nowhere to go to the loo. Better hope there’s a motorway service station nearby!

How does everyone get home? And how do the authorities go about clearing up all the cars?

I don’t expect that this is going to happen any time soon. But sometimes I think about it, when I’m stuck in morning rush-hour traffic, day dreaming over the noise pollution of passing cars and bad radio chat shows.

What would happen if traffic stood still?

I went to the gym tonight. Did my warm up on the treadmill, with a plan to stretch and then move onto the stationary bike so I could read my book.

So there I was, plonked on the bike, reading my book, listening to the radio, when two women bumbled in. Singaporeans. Mid to late thirties. Dressed for exercise – lycra shorts, t-shirts, aerobics trainers, carrying a little towel each.

One of them got on the treadmill. She cranked the speed up to 2.1, grabbed hold of the hand rail, and proceeded to run. Little, itty, bitty, tiny, bouncy steps. 2.1 is just about the lowest, slowest setting. For reference, I usually walk at speed 5.2, and that’s with a 10% incline. I need to start jogging when it hits around 6, and only get into a full-on run somewhere around 7. But I digress.

Her friend decided to get onto the elliptical stepper. She put her feet on to the foot pedals, and then sat on the back of the machine and started whirling the steps around, on level 0. That’s no resistance. It does nothing.

At this point I coughed, trying to get Mark’s attention. He glanced up.

“Un-bel-iev-a-ble”.

I considered going over and showing them how to work the machines, but frankly, I wasn’t sure they’d have taken my interference very well, so I left them to their own devices.

They kept up this charade of “exercising” for almost 3 minutes. I timed it.

Then they quit, making theatrically loud heavy breathing noises, and clambered off the equipment. They sat on the floor, gossiping for a further 10 minutes, making bizarre pretences of stretching and occasionally attempting to touch their toes.

Then it was back to work. They switched machines. Same routine. Treadmill up to 2.1 and the ridiculous jogging. Elliptical stepper on zero resistance and bum planted on the back of the machine. This time the only managed 2 minutes.

More theatrics – fake huffing and puffing, liberal dabbing of the brow with the little towel, and then they were off.

Now I know that not everyone knows how to use all the equipment at the gym, and not everyone is fit, and that everyone has to start somewhere when they begin going to the gym, but these women were really, really dumb.

Icing on the cake: They couldn’t figure out how to open the door to get out of the gym.

Perhaps they were dizzy from all the exercise.

Would you rather be able to fly, or make yourself invisible?

Me, I’d rather fly.

It’d be a cool way to get about the place. Make it a lot easier to cross the road. And stairs? Ha! A thing of the past.

Probably wouldn’t be so great if everyone could fly. We’d all bang into one another. We’d need personalised air traffic control monitors, to prevent mid-air collisions.

I don’t know that I require long-range flying abilities. I reckon an airplane is still the way to go for that lengthy trip to London. I wouldn’t fancy flying solo over, say, Iran. Or lugging my own baggage around – much better to dump it the belly of the plane.

Being able to fly could still come in handy though, if the turbulence got really bad, or some knob decided to start playing with his electrical gadgets, thus interfering with the navigation equipment at 30,000 feet. At least you could bail out and fly to safety. Provided you could withstand the -40C temperatures and lack of oxygen, of course.

I like the idea of going to the park, and instead of flying a kite and watching it dance in the air, being able to actually play with the kite, spinning and diving and twirling in the breeze.

I’ve tried to simulate the sensation of flying whilst scuba diving. Using the weighlessness afforded by the surrounding sea to support my body, I turned every which way, floating upside down, watching the fishes swim past my nose and staring up at the bubbles rising to the surface.

It’s not the same, of course.

Name a song or album that….

Makes you cry: Mr Bojangles. His dog dies. It’s sad. Stop laughing. Makes you laugh: Sharks, Morphine. Don’t let your fingers dangle in the water. Makes you wanna dance: Super Stylin’, Groove Armada You never want to hear again: That annoying Santana album that’s been played to death. I think it’s called Supernatural. Gah. Makes you want to mosh/bang your head: Nevermind, Nirvana. You used to hate but now love: Frank Sinatra. You used to love but now hate: But Seriously, Phil Collins. What was I thinking? You like out of your parents record collection: Sound of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel. Do’n'do-do-do, feelin’ groovy. You love that you wouldn’t know about if it wasn’t for a friend: Moon Safari, Air You like the video more than the tune: Sledgehammer, Peter Gabriel You like, despite your better judgement: Stuck In The Middle, A1 Makes you think of the moon: Teardrop, Massive Attack Makes you think of stars: Star Guitar, Chemical Brothers Makes you think of the sun: Sunchyme, Dario G. Makes you think of the night: Endtroducing, DJ Shadow Makes you think of being alone: Fast Car, Traci Chapman Reminds you of going clubbing: You’ve Come Along Way Baby, Fat Boy Slim

[questions taken and adapted from claire.]

My perfect sandwich is…

Half a fresh baguette, lots of mustard on one side, a very thin layer of mayo on the other, filled with sliced ham (not that stuff out of a packet, real ham) and little pieces of cheese (can be strong cheddar, gruyere or edam), sliced tomatoes and a few pieces of crispy lettuce. Sprinkle the tomatoes with a little bit of salt, and the whole sandwich with a bit of black pepper. Serve with ready salted crinkle cut crisps.

What are you having?