Leaving On a Jet Plane

Not any time soon - the end of next year - but going away.

I've been feeling a little bit like this:

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.

But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do
Leaves no doubt of it at all.

(Said by Philip Larkin in a not particularly Larkinish mood.)

So, I'm going to go and work in the UK for a couple of years because... there's no reason not to. I want to travel in Europe, particularly to see more of Italy, and I want to get to know my English family, and now, I guess, is the best time to do it. I'll pay off what I owe, wring as much training as possible out of work, see if anyone would like to pay me to be a captioner, and then away I'll go. Part of me is nervous about making this kind of decision - I think I must be afraid of 'missing out' on things that might happen, or, worse still, finding out that everyone copes just fine with having me away! - but really, that's bollocks, isn't it? Otherwise, feeling excited about being able to choose my own future. Here I come!

The Upside of Anger

Jenny and I knocked off work early on Friday and jumped at the opportunity to do something 'normal' with the start of the weekend. We were making for the Sith but took a bit too long over our dinner and so ended up in this film. In a way I was relieved - while I don't mind Star Wars I haven't been keeping up to date with the later - should I say earlier? - films, so I would probably have asked a lot of silly/irritating questions.

I'm not sure if I liked it! There's no doubt that Kevin Costner was fabulous, and that's quite a compliment given that I usually can't stand his films. I liked the simplicity of the storyline and the subsequent focus on the characters and I thought it had a nice moral going about accepting people as they are and finding love in unlikely places, but the ending stuffed me up a bit. I just didn't know what to do with the twist, and I was surprised that the film rushed through it without really showing what I thought should have been a considerable impact on the main character, the girls' mom. Oh, and I don't know why he had to kick the bathroom door in. Thoughts, anyone?

Reasons Why Stenographs Are Dangerous #37

The stenoed caption in my Oprah file read:

OPRAH: Wow, I can feel myself being beaten into a suck mission.

I don't think I've ever been happier to find something was a mis-key!

And #38

I spoke too soon - a recipe segment in the same episode features such exotic ingredients as crashed cornflakes, almond yag and beef pender line. I'll give you a prize if you can guess what the middle one was supposed to be!

And #39

AND - last one, I promise - I've gotta get myself to the New York beauty salon that offers man cures : )

Destruction

I was rounding off an easygoing day. Spent this morning lounging around in the sun eating honey puffs at the Greek festival with Julie and GP and this afternoon visiting Gran in hospital and wandering around the shops with Mum. Finished the novel I was reading and the cheese I was saving for just such an occasion, then caught up on all the TV I'd recorded from last night. Didn't mind the first episode of the new series of 'Doctor Who' - obviously the scenery doesn't wobble anymore : ( but they haven't made it too slick : )

ANYWAY, I've got one foot into the tub and I'm adjusting the water for a long, hot shower, when there's a damp CRUNCH! from next door. I wrap myself in a towel and drip hurriedly back into my bedroom, which has a aquatic motif all its own going on. Rivulets of water run down the front of my dresser, drip off my bed and pool on the floor. The floor itself is scattered with pebbles and shells interspersed with large shards of glass. I start raking through the debris. It takes me 15 minutes to find both goldfish and amazingly they're still alive and whole. I run back to the bathroom, chuck my toothbrush collection into the bath and fill the empty mug with water, dechlorinator and two very shocked fish. Back in my room, I spot a second trail of water. It leads me through the sitting room, into Ginette's room and under her bed. Hunched against the wall in the furthest corner is a saturated and shivering tabby cat. Ziggy Stardust has landed.

I put myself into a bathrobe and go back to clean up. When my mobile rings I'm under my bed scraping gravel onto a piece of newspaper and sopping up water with a towel. I stretch one arm back into my handbag to answer it. It's Anika.

- Hi. Listen, do sheep belong to the ovine family?

I haven't spoken to Neek in person for about two months.

- What? Err...do sheep...? Uh, yes. Yes, they do.
- Thanks! If I win a million I'll give it to you. 'Bye!

When Ginette got home she was kind enough to place me in the recovery position and make a cup of coffee.

Lovely Spam

If you could use a giggle - I know I could - check out Spamusement - cartoons inspired by the subject lines of spam mail. I think the one that takes a crack at Real Player could be my favourite.

But when I got outside...

Bloody hell, it looked like it'd been snowing!



This is the best picture of a bad lot - you should have seen the place!
Driving home some of the streets were two or three feet deep in hail.
Police and Energex trucks everywhere.

Hailstorm

It hasn't hailed for ages! About an hour ago the most cracking storm came through bringing torrential rain and deafening thunder. "Quick!" I thought, in a typical moment of genius. "Go and move the car so you don't get wet getting into it later..." I dashed out into the carpark. Idiot. Saturated, I was, and when I came back inside and shook myself off, tens of tiny hailstones fell out of my hair! Of course, the rain stopped 20 minutes after it started. D'oh!

Strange Evening

Hopped into the car after work last night and discovered, as is not unusual, that there wasn't anything on the radio or in the glovebox that I felt like listening to - so I switched over to ABC Classic and caught the end of an intro for Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells'. They were going to play the whole thing, all 50 or so minutes of it. I hadn't heard all of 'Tubular Bells' for years. I used to play it a lot from vinyl as a kid - one of my Dad's more decisive influences on my taste in music - and I really think it's a superb piece. Even more so, given that Mr Oldfield was only 19 when he wrote, performed and recorded the thing all by himself, track by track. Bastard.

Anyway, I couldn't go home. I wanted to listen to all of it again, and I wasn't going to sit in my own driveway to do it. So when I got to the turnoff for my place I kept going...and going. It was quite eerie, driving through the dead streets listening to this peculiar yet very familiar, comforting thing as I got further and further away from town. Eventually I was out of the suburbs altogether and on unlit roads winding up into the range, gradually dragging the aerial further and further out of its socket to keep the signal. It was a beautiful night last night - cold and still; cloudy, but a gorgeous, scattered cloud lit around the edges by an enormous, low half moon. If I was a smoker I would have stopped at the top of the range for the perfect cigarette. As it was I wound the windows down and sucked in lungfuls of fresh, pine-scented air. I did a huge loop and managed to roll back into my driveway well after midnight just as the track ended.

Slept like a baby.

I Are An Edgitor

Office scene this afternoon:

Lynda: Congratulations, Karen, you've passed your editor's assessment.

Glen: Excellent. We've got a lot of crap due out this week.

I have entered the glamorous other-world of editors : )

I Keep Dreaming About Tom Baker

Get your teeth into that one, you somnanalysts, you!

I don't really hold with this idea of dreams having hidden meanings. (And, anyway, try finding an entry for Tom Baker in a dream dictionary : ) I think that like any information system, when you shut down for the evening your brain has to review everything you've taken in during the day and decide what to expunge. I think it reflects feelings, mainly - even if the image you get doesn't match what it was that triggered that feeling. Something you felt very strongly about - positively or negatively - might get a little rerun of its own to help the brain decide if it's worth keeping. It's for that reason that I don't think a dream interpretation can apply to more than one person - it's not the image, necessarily, it's how you FELT about the situation presented there.

Maybe this would explain recurring dreams - feelings you just can't get rid of. I only have one of these. In it I'm driving a car. Over time it's been my Minis, my Toyota, my parents' cars, my friends' cars, other strange cars. Everything is going well until I go to put the brakes on and nothing happens. There's resistance in the pedal but the force isn't being communicated to the wheels. It doesn't matter how hard I stand on the brakes, the car won't stop. I guess the classic interpretation would be that this is a fear of loss of control, but I never had a dream like this before I started driving - how unimaginative I must be!

What I would like to know more about is the system that allows us to 'see' without having our eyes open. Is the visual cortex still involved, or is this not sight in any way that we know it? Is this the sort of seeing you do if you're blind or become so? Does anyone know?

Outside

There's one of those sepia sunsets that makes even our office carpark look beautiful in the rain.

The Terrible Allure of New Ideas

For someone whose main talent seems to lie in agreeing to do stuff, I seem to be getting the hang of this 'no' thing : )

Got offered a job this afternoon. A day job, if you like, a few mornings a week teaching Italian at a primary school down the coast. Like I always do, I jumped at the idea, the brain started whirring... I LOVE new ideas.
But - I know, I know - that doesn't mean they're any good, and after a bit of thought I realised it wasn't for me and called back to say so.

THE PROS

• keeping my hand in with teaching in general and with Ed Qld in particular (if you quit the department you tend to be relegated to the 'sin bin' for a bit to contemplate your wrongdoings - I seem to have been prematurely forgiven)
• working with little people - something I've not done before and a useful addition to my CV
• brain stretch - actually getting to apply all that study to something and really having to THINK about work

THE CONS

• it's down the coast, which means daily trips on the M1
• having to give up Vince's work, which is, let's be honest, easy, well-paid and guaranteed for the next year and a half
• it's more work for less pay - and that includes prep and marking, people :- {
• let's not forget it's down the coast
• I keep bitching about not having any free time as it is!

Really, I guess you must be wondering how I even considered it at all... I think I'm just addicted to opportunity. But be proud of me, my friends, for saying no for a change : )

The First Tights of the Year

Winter is on its way, and I stamp my little feet with anticipation (and to keep them warm : ) I know winter is coming because today, for the first time in 12 months, I wore tights, had a hot Milo, craved crumpets with golden syrup and could smell the sour waft of the brewery on the cold, still air. And now it's raining; heavily, persistently, calling me to a book before bedtime and pyjamas fresh from the dryer. Winter may not be the special subject of this wide, brown land, but - oh! - it's my favourite time of year. Today, cotton - tomorrow, corduroy!

The Quest For Chocolate Custard

If you'd been in Woolies early this morning you might have caught Mum and I bent in intense concentration over a shopping list.

"What do you supposed crumbled fillets are, then?"

Slightly more difficult to decipher than 'tiramisuey', but we found the frozen fish eventually. My gran suffered a mini-stroke a couple of weeks ago and, although otherwise her lively, acid-witted self, is finding it very difficult to move around at the moment. Mum, therefore, has appointed herself Commander-In-Chief of Groceries, and is doing a splendid job. But we'll be buggered if we can work out what Gran means by 'chocolate custard'.

Yes, we KNOW you can buy cartons of chocolate custard. We did. We bought a one litre carton. That's not it. It's too big. We bought a 600ml carton. That's not it either. It comes in little tubs, like yoghurt. We bought a 12-pack of little tubs of Dairy Farmers chocolate custard. No, that's not it. It's self-saucing. Self-saucing custard, I hear you ask? Isn't custard ALL sauce? Apparently not. We took home some Yogo. That doesn't taste like custard.
(I agree. It doesn't taste like anything.) I've got a nasty feeling that what she actually means is creme caramel, but I received such a bollocking when I last suggested that that I'm going to have to wait until she's out and sneak it surreptitiously into her fridge to test my hypothesis.

Stiff upper lip aside, I felt anxious when we waved her off to the hairdresser's. Gran is as tough as they come, but how old is too old to live alone? Does anyone have the right to insist on care when the border between independence and safety has been breached? Gran lives in a retirement village but she didn't tell anybody for almost a week that she'd 'fallen over' - she didn't know she'd had a stroke either - and even the neighbours can't look out for her all the time. Stubborn as she is, she would, I know, flatly refuse to live with family. I can understand the frustration at the deprivation of privacy and self-determination that must go with accepting care, but I love my gran and I want to make sure she lives as long, as comfortable and as dignified a life as possible. I want to know she's safe when I'm not there.

This Week's Band Name

Is 'International Walrus'. (My chronic mishearing of the name of an insurance company in a program we're working on : )

Dogs Die In Hot Cars

These Glaswegian folks I went to see last night with Miss Pope and Miss Jones and sensational they were! True, GP was nearly squashed to death, drowned in careless public distribution of beer and subjected to unwelcome and prolonged dance instruction from a pack of rampaging Goths. True, the second support act, The Camels, SUCKED almost beyond belief (chauvinistic and crude and unadventurous and utterly, utterly monotonous).

But the The Boat People (a Brisbane outfit) were charming and we enjoyed their set a great deal, and the Dogs themselves made me dance and dance and dance. VERY hoarse throat this a.m. But I wish I'd been able to use it for longer - they were only on for 45 sweet, sweet minutes, which means we endured the Shits of the Desert for almost twice the time. God help us all.

Just Nuts

Visitors to the office in which I work are often surprised to discover how humble it is. I think they expect some combination of a call centre filled with busy cubicles and a television studio with banks of expensive equipment and flashing lights - when, in reality, we operate out of a not particularly imposing Queenslander, and just half of the downstairs of it at that. After all, subtitling isn't that high tech - all you need is a VCR (albeit a pretty posh one), a computer, a dictionary and a pair of headphones. And, seeing as our roster can be pretty sparse (only two of us have worked here today), that's pretty much all our wee office-ette contains.

You may therefore not be surprised to learn that we also only have one fork. How this came about is something of a mystery - did we always only have one fork, or have they gradually been bumped off? - but I think at least it's very telling about human nature. That is, rather than BUY other forks, we will:

- actively aim to bring food that doesn't require forking
- stagger our lunch breaks so the fork can be equitably rotated between us
- if fork is occupied, use other cutlery (even, once, a corkscrew) in its place
- HIDE the fork in other parts of the kitchen to prevent others accessing it

And that includes me. What makes this all really sad is that a veritable cornucopia of fully serviceable forks, our local convenience store, is but a hop, skip and a jump from our front door. There's nothing wrong with us, really.

No More Romantic Comedies

In fact, no more romantic anything!

I took Mum to see 'Ladies in Lavender' on Monday while Lauren and Dad went to see 'HHG'. What a beautiful film - stunning Cornish scenery, the magic of the 'foreign', the wonderful horribleness of unrequited love, the romance of music... I may have been the youngest person in the cinema by about 25 years, but I did enjoy myself.

But, really, it was the last straw. Before this film, in reverse chronological order, 'Fever Pitch', 'Something's Gotta Give', 'Wimbeldon', 'Notting Hill', 'Life as a House' and 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' had been through my VCR while I ironed and cleaned out my filing cabinet and hung upside down over the sofa. It's enough to make me run into the street in my pyjamas and proposition the first bloke I see. Dangerous, I'm sure you'll agree, for everyone involved. So I'm going on a diet. Bring out the Van Damme!

Hey, hey, HTML!

Feeling very satisfied for having - apparently successfully? - fiddled with the template of this thing without the least idea of what I'm doing. Mind you, having got it almost right I'm at a loss to work out what I've done to my profile box. Hmm. Might enjoy feeling smug for a bit before I go ahead and 'fix' anything else : )

My Little Sister is Cool

I got to go flying yesterday - something I love to do. Heights normally give me the willies but I love being in an aircraft, however big or small. The thing that made it truly extraordinary, though, was the fact that the person performing the safety demonstration, radioing the tower, winding at the trim and just keeping the thing in the air was my baby sister, Lauren. I'm so proud! I knew the first time I simulated a stall I wasn't pilot material (I passed out!), so my respect for her achievements knows no bounds : )

We hired a Cessna 172 (a four-seater) from Lauren's flying club and went for a joy flight out over Moreton Bay, along the coast, around the Glasshouse Mountains and back to the city over Samford. It was perfect weather to be in the air - beautifully smooth and clear, despite a bit of early haze, and we weren't the only ones to be taking advantage of it. By the time we left the Archerfield circuit was pretty full, and the radio was alive wtih MBZ calls from parachuters, helicopters, surf patrols and other hacks like us just up for a ride. I was amazed, as always, how neat the Earth looks from the air, and I gave thanks again that I have grown up in such a green little pocket of the universe. (Mind you, you realise this city has a LOT of swimming pools!)

And just when I was convinced that all pilots must be as cool and professional as my little sis, as we were coming in to land we heard this reply to a request for takeoff clearance:

TOWER: Clear for takeoff, runway 28 right...and, by the way, you've left your keys in the cabin door.

Pilots are people too!

PHOTOS BELOW...

More flight photos...

Bribie Island

Moreton Island

Don't Panic

I didn't spend the whole film annoying Jenny with "That's not how it is in the book!"

Four days after seeing it, though, I still don't really know what to make of the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. Bits of it were great - much as I hate to admit it, Stephen Fry was an apt choice for the Guide's voice, I liked the animations, and the Magrathea sequence with the splendid Bill Nighy was truly gorgeous. I didn't even really mind their choice of actress for Trillian (whose name I can't, however, be bothered looking up), and there were some nice little extra jokes for we nerds in the audience who'd already heard the original ones many times over.

But what was going on with the plot? I spent the first 15 minutes worrying I'd be able to talk along with the film and the remaining 95 worrying it'd never get anywhere. I'm glad it wasn't exactly the same as the book, but I really, really resented the insertion of a truly poxy love story - thanks, Buena Vista, you bastards - and I didn't think the whole "Zaphod is stupid" idea was an improvement on the original character. He WASN'T stupid, he just didn't care - that was the whole point. Hmm. Jenny, who'd never read the books, thought it was pretty good, and it's a damn sight better than the TV series they made, but I still think, as I've thought for some time, that it's best left either on radio (as originally intended) or as a novel (as we love it best). I'd be interested in what you thought, if you saw it.