Maccing Around

We at work spend a lot of time with our noses in the Macquarie Dictionary, and there are some page headings I seem to pass every time I open it:

interrupted screw
koi
deicide
projectile vomiting
trehala
viewdata
Spree

Our favourite mis-caption for the week (not mine, for a change):

The caption read:
You see, David needs two - bi-friendship.

It should have said:
You see, David needs to buy friendship.

And then...

..after writing that I fell spectacularly down our front stairs!

The bubblebath was long and hot, and there was a BIG glass balanced on the side.

The Gallery of Broken Girls

For myself, I guess I'm just pissed off today. A lot of it is my own doing - as always, I've loaded myself up with too much stuff to do and not enough time to do it in - and some of it isn't - now that it's connected there's a fault with our phone line and we have to wait for technicians and I have to drive across town to check my email and there's a mouse living in the kitchen that our estate agent doesn't want to know about and my old estate agent needs me back to sign MORE forms and I've given up my day off in favour of captioning Oprah for five hours - and then some of it doesn't have anything to do with me but pisses me off anyway. It seems that virtually everyone I love is having an utterly awful time at the moment through no fault of their own and there's nothing I can do except be there and listen and make cups of tea. And sometimes I can't even do that. I know, deep breath, things will settle down, it's a test of strength, it's not as bad as you think - but sometimes I have the feeling the universe is conspiring against us, and if anyone else uses the word 'challenging' today I think I'm going to bite them.

Warm and Fuzzy

It's been a blissful long weekend. Ginette and I have been 'at home' to visitors for the first time and it's been wonderful to have the house full of good friends. Friday night was a birthday party for Mel and the Divine Miss P ending in coffee and stargazing at 2am. Saturday was the long-awaited reunion with Miss Vilee (she brought me Pyrex!) and a very welcome visit from Alana, who then insisted (through sheer bloody-mindedness, I think!) on helping me clean out my old flat ready for the new tenants. More Spray and Wipe up the nose for both of us and fits of giggles trying to order a pizza. On Sunday morning I was home to Mum and Dad (both already suffering from acute Walnut Whip overdose - they always start in on the chocolate on Friday) and spent the afternoon - and then, when they couldn't get rid of me, the evening - in the company of Anika and her wonderful family. (Sighs contentedly)

Today I've been a bit more domestic, if only to avoid starting work on the essay I've got due next week. At the moment I'm back at Ma and Pa's waiting for their washing machine to finish spinning my clothes. My little Fisher and Paykel is refusing point blank to function for me - Ginette can convince it to rinse, but ask it to spin and it sits there beeping plaintively until you take pity on it and switch it off. We've had the same set of towels in there for a week and it's all getting pretty ugly.

Night Prowl

I'm going to have to stop making polite conversation with the guys who work at the convenience store. I just nicked up there to buy some balloons, and I was quite surprised at the range they had - it's only a little shop and they've got about eight different kinds.

"That's a killer selection of balloons you've got there."
(Pause) "Are you being sarcastic?"

Oh. Luckily I didn't go on to point out how ironic I thought it was that their pet food is next to their mouse traps, Ratsak, Mortein...things for keeping animals alive, things for killing animals. Very neat.

Self Assembly

If you're trying to assemble IKEA furniture in the wee hours after one too many glasses of red and you discover that you don't own a hammer, take my advice and use the baked beans tin. Frankly, those tuna cans just aren't sturdy enough for the job - something about the density of the contents, I think. At least I now have some bookshelves again, even if I did have to have baked beans for breakfast.

Ginette and I are moved in and gradually getting ourselves organised, although it's been a bit difficult to fit in setting up around a bloody busy week. When I got in after work the other night I had to walk carefully around a neatly composed pile of dust, paper scraps and glitter in the middle of the living room floor. "We," said Miss P, "don't appear to own a dustpan." Nor, after a week's wrangle with Telstra, do we rent a phone line, but apart from that we're coping rather well. And we now have a hammer.

Emotionally it's been an odd one. File this under tired and wrung out - I was skulking around Paddington earlier in the week trying to find somewhere to park Erik the Red. As I pulled up with, I thought, just enough room to clear a 'No Parking' sign painted on the footpath, a lady popped her head out of a shop window.
"Err...I have to go out in a minute."
"Oh. That won't be enough room, then?"
"Afraid not."
"Sorry. I'll move."
A very civilised exchange, but when I got back into the car I burst into tears. Hmm. True, rejection is tough, but you've got to learn to draw the line somewhere! I think we might both have sniffed too much Spray and Wipe getting the kitchen together. Definitely time for a holiday.

Favourite Words

I think my favourite words are 'yellow' and 'cry'. I'm not especially a fan of yellow, but I like the way it sounds when people say it, and I like cry because the way the 'c' curls over makes it look like the word itself is upset. My favourite French word is 'matelot', sailor - a remnant of a long-lost fascination with Noel Coward, I think. Jenny, who's not doing any work at the moment either, says she's going to have to think about it, but she remembers reading a book in which the character's favourite word was 'serendipity'. So, favourite words, folks. Whichever language(s) you choose.

Women In Voice 14

Jenny, my esteemed partner in New Year's Resolutions to See More Things Live and I went to see this on Saturday night. And what a show! This year's women are Jenny Morris, Kate Miller-Heidke, Alison St Ledger, Barbara Fordham, Zulya Kamalova and Queenie van de Zandt, and it was those I knew the least about who impressed me most. I had expected to enjoy Jenny Morris's set the most, but she seemed a bit tired, really - and we were both convinced she was singing flat for the first two songs! Once I'd stopped being envious and resentful of Kate Miller-Heidke (three years below us at KG, Moose?) and started listening properly to her sing I was bowled over - she's only 23 but what a voice, and what confidence. She was really entertaining and found great support in our audience. I couldn't wait for the end of the show and rushed out to get her CD in the interval : ) Queenie van de Zandt was really funny and did a wonderful impersonation of a scout hall singing teacher leading people to their Personal Harmonic Mantras ("There is tea and coffee available in the back of the hall, please help yourself. But do make a contribution to the honesty biscuit tin - those biscuits don't buy themselves, you know.") But the top moment of the evening was discovering that the percussion in the supporting band was being played by a kid I'd had a killer crush on in Year 6! He played the snare in our recorder band when I was drum-majoretting. Aww. I'm glad I gave up the baton but he obviously had some talent brewing there.

All in all, it was the sort of performance that reminds me that I really can't sing, but that I should anyway : )

This Week's Band Name

Although I'm still working on the tour shirt for Inflatable Crocodile, my all-time favourite, the latest in my list of names for potential bands, inspired by Saturday's performance by Women in Voice (more about that in a moment), is now The Honesty Biscuit Tin.

Discovery Channel Units of Measurement

Length - number of football fields
Height - the Statue of Liberty
Area - number of football fields
Circumference - the Capitol dome
Width - number of football fields

Writing's on the Wall

You might be interested to check out http://www.blooddiaries.com, the website of an artist whose house is quite close to where I work. As we've all trekked backwards and forwards from the train over the last few months we've been watching the messages change. Full marks for candour and that groovy door, even if he goes a bit overboard sometimes.

An-nyong-ha-se-yo!

Jeo neun Kasbah i ye yo. Ban gan wo yo.

An-nyong-hi kye-se-ho!

(Had my first Korean class : )

Autopilot

Either I'm living with a masochistic sub-conscious, or it has a far better idea of what's going on than I do.

I'm having problems being awake when I'm needed. Last week when we went to inspect the house, I woke up three minutes before I was supposed to be at Ginette's. I was nearly at Enoggera before I managed to prise my eyelids apart. (Comprehensive insurance, anyone?) Now, before any of you get the wrong impression, I must stress that I had set my alarm. Well, nearly. I...fell asleep setting it.

On Monday I was booked in for a dental check-up, and at what seemed like the crack of dawn I was rudely awoken by the phone. When I'd hung up, just as I was about to fall back into bed, I thought, "Perhaps I'll just check the time. After all, maybe my alarm is just about to sound." Not about to sound. Had already sounded, an hour and a half ago. I had 15 minutes to conduct an emergency floss and rinse before I was due at the dentist's.

Not that I should have bothered. Sat in the chair, three of the dentist's fingers in my mouth.
"So, Jeanette, we're going to extract these molars, is that it?" Panic.
"Uh-uh. Nod Jened."
"I'm sorry?"
"Careb. Careb. Nod Jened! NOD JENED!"
My appointment was for Thursday. It knew!

This morning it gave me slightly more warning. I woke up a whole 20 minutes before I was supposed to pick up Ginette to sign our lease. Fine. My alarm had gone off an hour before. It appears either I can turn the damn thing off in my sleep or I can sleep through a frisky gavotte and a Texan accent. "It's 7:45am. Please hurry." Head under the tap, roll-on under the armpits and we're off.

This afternoon, in between Vince's class and work, I thought I'd sit myself outside somewhere and catch up on some readings for international politics. I drove down to the river, found a shady tree and spread myself out under it. I woke up again at 3.35 genuinely amazed that no-one had nicked my shoes/handbag/glasses and with ten minutes to get to work. God knows I probably need the sleep, but...

Either it knows when to wake me up or it's a bastard.

A New Winner

Here in the office we've just nominated a new contender for the Outstanding Achievement in Inane Children's Programming. I won't out the offending show - the song speaks for itself:

We're gonna make
We're gonna make
We're gonna make, make, make, make, make
We're gonna make
We're gonna make
We're gonna make, make, make, make, make
We're gonna make
We're gonna make
We're gonna make, make, make, make, make

(Repeat)

Look, the boogie-woogie backing music is sinful enough in itself, but make WHAT, for Christ's sake? 'Make' is a TRANSITIVE verb! : )

Slurp!

Out for a drink and a dance with AJ and GP last night. We've all three of us decided that while we're all for public displays of affection, the following just aren't acceptable stages for gratuitious displays of snogging:

- escalators
- taxi ranks
- stairwells

The Necessity of Beauty

Every now and then I'm struck with the overwhelming feeling that everything is going to be alright. It's an uplifting, I believe quite spiritual, experience that leaves me with a deep sense of connection to everything. Why it should strike me now, generally - I'm disturbingly busy trying to balance the (all self-inflicted!) demands of work, prospective work, study and life - and why, on Sunday afternoon in particular, which I usually find a very unsettling time, I'm not sure, but it's a welcome feeling indeed, and very calming.

In light of this I was reflecting this afternoon on our need for beauty. I've been reading a lot about nationalism of late and therefore wondering about people's attachment to their homelands. Theorists often argue that the sense of belonging (surely a very powerful psychological need) is often carefully cultivated as part of a nationalistic movement. I don't doubt it. But I think we must do a fair whack of the convincing for ourselves.

I was born and raised in this country and I think it must be the most beautiful place I will ever know. Like anywhere it has its horrible patches, and in my travels and in the pictures of others I have seen more spectacular, more breathtaking landscapes than exist here. And I long too for other climes - there are many places in the world I would love to visit and would be happy to live in. But this one is the most beautiful to me, because this is home. I could be away from it for 30 years and this would be home.

I think we need beauty to survive, and so it's relative. Your home will be the most beautiful place, because you need to see its beauty to survive in it. And when your home is associated with all your other formative experiences, that idea will stick. I remember watching a documentary a while ago that said if our planet was a big ball of bubbling mud we would see beauty in it all the same - we would find some patterns of bubbles, some colours, some textures of mud more beautiful than others. You couldn't find it all disgusting, because you'd self-destruct. I guess the same goes for physical beauty and for ideals.

Now feel free to tell me I'm talking pants : ) I'm off to the ironing.

Yum-Yum

Well, guess who shook hands with Graeme Garden?

The folks and I have, of course, just been to see the Goodies at QPAC.

It was a great show - very interactive and a very, very enthusiastic audience (the octogenarian on my left was in there foot-rumbling with the best of us), and even though we couldn't squeeze a second encore out of them and the Funky Gibbon routine at the end was a bit limp, a fine time was had by all. While it was organised as a pre-arranged Q&A (apparently you could submit questions via their website) there was room for improvisation and it was all very relaxed and friendly. And it wasn't exclusively Goody, either - there were skits in there from the Footlights and ISIRTA days - big cheers from the Lady Constance fan club in the rafters (and the dags in the fifth row - thanks again, Jenn, we owe you one!)

We were disappointed to find after the show that no-one was around to sign autographs as promised...until we gave up and wandered down to the stage door, where a lively throng was...thronging. Three Goodies and all freely available! They were all very generous (and oft-kissed, even!) and seemed genuinely chuffed to sign my vinyl single of "A Walk in the Black Forest", finally unearthed in Mum and Dad's garage yesterday afternoon after several days of searching. I knew it'd come in handy eventually : ) Mr Brooke Taylor told us he'd been delighted to find the car they'd had hired for them in Frisby turned out to have 'TBT' as its numberplate. Photos to follow - if I can find one in which my hair looks alright ; )

We got the house!

Hurrah!

Bad Haircut

I love having my hair cut. I love having my hair washed and my head massaged. I love the smell of the shampoo and the expensive wax stuff and the shininess my hair takes on after it's been cut. I love the scalding powdered salon coffee that would be totally undrinkable if it was served to you in a cafe. However, I find it a bit disconcerting that, given that success in my job(s) depends upon my ability to communicate, I seem to be totally unable to translate my vision for my hair into anything intelligible to a stylist.

The process is always the same:

1. Explain the vision - thinned out so it sticks up but not too much shorter, and wispy so it's not too brutal.
2. Talk at length about captioning.
3. Give up and say, yes, I work in advertising.
4. Gratefully accept haircut which looks devilishly funky in salon mirror.
5. Leave salon.
6. Buoyed by knowledge of funky haircut, flirt outlandishly with attractive men.
7. Catch sight of short, thick, brutal haircut in shop window.
8. Curl into ball and roll feverishly towards nearest bathroom.

This morning's haircut, combined with the sandals I had on, made me look like I'd just been dishonourably discharged from a Roman legion. Even after an emergency rake-over in the ladies' I felt so decidedly unsexy that I had to go immediately to buy several pairs of girly earrings. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it :p

Daddy

The young couple on the train this afternoon have two young children. They have an expensive-looking pram and their children are wearing new clothes, but there's evidently not a lot of money left over for themselves. The mother balances her small son on her knee. She is tired and rather pretty with long hair - it's been a while since it was coloured, and the regrowth looks about the same age as the baby. He is thin and unshaven with dark hair. When we reach a station he gets out of the carriage and stands on the platform. When the train pulls away again he sits across the aisle from his family listening to a Walkman and flipping through a newspaper while his daughter calls, "Daddy! Daddy!" Eventually she walks over and makes eye contact by pushing up between her father and his newspaper.

"Daddy! Daddy! Next time we come here, will you buy me this?" She points to a picture on the box of the doll she's carrying. He nods absently. "Oh, thank you!" She wraps her arms around him and gives him a big kiss. At the next station, he rushes outside for a smoke while we wait for the signal to change.

"Can I have my pony?" Mum looks down at her daughter.
"No, honey. We're getting off in a minute."

Dad gets back in the carriage as the doors close.
"Can I have my pony?" He fiddles in the duffle bag looped around the pram handles.
"Jake! I just said no!" He hands the girl a toy horse.

Mum hoists the baby onto her hip and starts gathering up their bags. She coaxes the little girl into the pram. As they leave the train she is carrying the baby and pushing the pram. He stops on the platform to relight his cigarette and follows a few metres behind them, still listening to the Walkman.

In Love

With a house, but that's a start, isn't it? : )

Ms Pope and I went to visit a house this morning and, I think, had simultaneously decided it was the one when we got the front door open. We are going to be a dangerous pairing - both of us are serious suckers for charm and all too ready to accept a fault as a quirk. Still, that's what makes life beautiful, if you ask me : ) It's just made it very clear that when I am (eventually) in a position to buy my own home I must take along a very level-headed and rational person who doesn't, like me, get pathetically excited by a stuck serving hatch and a sunken (i.e. inconvenient) laundry.

It's a beautiful little house. I say little because it looks that way from the outside, but the rooms are huge with polished floors and I love the layout. The kitchen is cavernous. It's an old building, which gives it its charm, and the decorating is all practically original - which means that my potential bedroom has the world's most hideous wallpaper and the bathroom looks like something out of a Victorian hospital.
I love it. I love it. I love it. I have to admit I was getting quite uneasy at the prospect of living in a new new house I can't touch - I need a soul. And it has a garden, complete with complimentary dead kookaburra, and there's space for my all my plants and we can have barbecues and guests to stay and a cat if we want and I love it.

I have to admit now that it's not ours yet (why tempt fate when you can kick it in the arse?) but we were the first to view and our applications are in and I can't anticipate there being any problem...I hope...

I was on such a high after this morning that it didn't faze me at all when Erik the Red's water pump exploded in the middle of the South East Freeway this afternoon, and it didn't faze me at all when the mechanic showed me the quote for a new one. (Arghh!) It fazed me a little bit to wait 45 minutes in the rain at West End for a taxi to get me to work, but other than that I am faze-free. (It must be love.) And, really, I'm buying a new car...one piece at a time. See what happens when I get attached to things?

Lasagne Update!

It's just been retrieved from the oven and all the other flats are salivating with envy, hahahaha! Alana, a healthy portion is being couriered to a workplace near you : )

Surely...

..having the theme music from 'Danger Mouse' stuck in one's head all day constitutes a recognised medical condition? Dminnitus, perhaps.

Weekender

After my bitter complaints on Friday it's been a much more social weekend. Saturday was an exhausting and utterly fruitless househunting marathon saved by the accompaniment of the delightful Miss Pope, who's condescended to be my flatmate. (She has no idea what she's in for.) At four in the afternoon we were both totally out of blood sugar and quite delirious - by the time we made it to our last inspection I'd stopped talking entirely and was into grunts. Two sugary espressos later I'd spun the other way and blathered happily all the way through dinner with my folks and woke up at midday to find my uni readers in bed with me. God only knows what it was I read or what time I stopped reading it - I only hope it reasserts itself when I sit the exam!

AJ dropped in midafternoon for coffee and a girly chat and ended up staying for dinner. Dinner started off as lasagne from scratch (trying to show off) but rapidly degenerated into frozen fish and veg and packet mix muffins when I got halfway down the second page and remembered how long it's supposed to simmer for : (
Sorry, Alana! Still, I was able to demonstrate my fairy lights* to great effect and even heard them complimented by my neighbour's lady friend as they headed out for the evening. (Still doesn't cook.) (Mind you, neither do I, it would appear.)

Feeling much better about the state of the universe. Thanks be to good mates : )

* They took me bloody ages to wind through the fence at Christmas and I just can't bear to take them down yet.

Non ne posso piu!

ARRRRGGGGGGHHHH! I can't take it anymore! I can't take being vacuum-sealed into this bloody stupid sardine tin with no chairs that adjust properly or stay adjusted for more than 30 seconds with an empty tin of Milo and de-caffeinated hedgehogging coffee and no-one to talk to except you guys who aren't even there anyway! I can't take any more bloody Hi-5 or another freaking song about sodding opposites or where I belong in the world or how great it is to share with friends! I don't WANT to make anything out of playdough! I don't want to look up the names of any more ball-less insignificant American senators who only have the guts NOW to say they knew all along what was going on! I want to bugger off somewhere where there is music and dancing and drinking AND LIFE! It's half-past nine on a Friday night and I'm at WORRRRRRRKKK!

How the Mighty Have Fallen

In order to make sure that everybody working on one program can tell all the voices apart and writes the right prefixes on their captions, we often have to leave little notes for each other describing the various people featured in a show. So no matter how important you are, beware - you could always be reduced to:

(Bald with salt-and-pepper moustache)
(Beige curtains, purple tie)
(Looks like David from The Movie Show)
(Really shrill English accent)
(White pleated lampshade)
(Revolting red sofa)

These are all from an expose documentary about the Iraq War that I'm captioning, and I'm not too sure about the quality of the editing. If ever there was a government job to go for, it has to be the one belonging to the man whose graphic read:

Responsible for the President's Daily Brie

Hee hee!

What are the ABC thinking...

..with Andrew Denton's new glamour photo for the 'Enough Rope' promo?
We love our hairy gherkin just the way he is!

And Did These Feet...?

Have almost finished Margaret Drabble's novel from 1967, 'Jerusalem the Golden' and need to put down some impressions before it's over. I read a lot and enjoy most of what I read, but it's not very often I get sucked in like I have to this one. I didn't think much of the first couple of chapters, but I'm quite stubborn when it comes to books and had to keep going. I'm glad I did.

It's the story of Clara, a girl who moves to London from a dismal town in Yorkshire to go to university and to escape the grip of her widowed mother. Accompanying her boyfriend to a poetry recital she runs into Clelia, one daughter of a variously creative family who turns out to be Clara's escape hatch into a more adventurous, more intimate world.

The passage that really grabbed me was this one:

"Clara spent the five minutes changing out of one jersey into another more or less identical one; all her clothes were the same. And during the five minutes she also considered that she would probably fall in love with Gabriel, because a summer in Northam always reduced her to a state where she was ready to fall in love with a taxi driver or the man in the restaurant car on the London train. She viewed the prospect of falling in love with Gabriel with a fatalistic pleasure; she thought she would enjoy it."

And she does. I find Clara a very interesting character - when I started the book I thought her rather irritatingly indecisive and clingy, but as the plot progresses you realise she has some plans of her own, even if most of them still involve putting herself in the way of something so it can happen to her. She's a leech, really, looking for someone else to lead her to salvation, but I find her oddly likeable. And I love the descriptions of Clelia's family - messy and open and argumentative and utterly devoted to each other. I'm interested to see what the ending does for my feelings about them all.

Backing Out

Feeling very sloshy having consumed my own bodyweight in Milo in an effort to stay awake while captioning an hour-long advertisement for Hyundai...sorry, Discovery documentary on shipbuilding.

Back to Disability Services at uni today, and so back to backing in at Griffith. I am the world's least talented reverse parker, but nothing will deter me from my efforts. I think the source of the problem is that I have never understood the theory of the thing. I was a champion reverse parker in the car I learned in, but that was largely because of the cleverly-positioned sticker on the rear window that told me when to turn. I now try to apply the same principle to my own car, but Erik the Red is not a driving school rollerskate and it doesn't work. Worse, there's no method to my experimentation - I just swing this way and that without much analysis of the consequences. After a few minutes I've usually attracted a crowd of advisers and well-wishers, and this morning I had a security guard giving me directions.

It wasn't really a good morning to be out. Actually, it WAS, and that's why it wasn't. It was such a beautiful day today and I felt it was some kind of grand insult to the universe to feel sad when all around me was so glorious. I am trying hard not to mope but it catches me unawares even now.

Vince, the student I support, is his usual delightful self after a three-month break - still enthusiastic, still persistent, and still correcting my Italian : ) He tried to shake me out of my funk by teaching me all the French sign language he picked up from a recently departed friend, taking my vocabulary to 'cat', 'French', 'firetruck', 'Melbourne', 'window', 'difficult' and 'work' in three different languages of the deaf. I love the logic and just plain...thingness of sign - it's great fun. Learning Auslan is definitely up there on my list of things.

Arrived home to discover - joy of joys - my Deakin student card has arrived.
Cheap stuff again, hurrah!

Doctor Which?

A quick office survey has revealed that, although people's loyalties are split when it comes to the best James Bond*, everyone's favourite Doctor Who is Tom Baker. We watch the earlier series in anticipation and the later ones in remembrance. Surely there's someone out there who doesn't agree!

* Along Connery/Moore/Brosnan lines - no-one seems to go for George Lazenby, the poor man.