Adventures

One of the (many) reasons I love AJ is that we can conduct phone conversations that go like this:

ME: Let's go to the beach!
BANANA: OK.

I should mention that it's 7:30 on a Tuesday evening
and the beach is 80km away.

And so we're away, pausing only briefly in our journey for me to lock my keys in the car at a motorway petrol pump (Laughs idiotically) Of course, I've got a spare ignition key in my bag (Looks wistfully through locked window at handbag sitting demurely on driver's seat), politely defer offers from assorted shady characters to break my windows and all hail the nice man from the road service.

The beach is beautiful at night. We walk along admiring the lights, disturbing strolling romantics with our deafening singing and squealing as the foaming water tickles our toes. As we settle ourselves on the sand to drink in the scene for a while, we realise that the party just up the beach from us are sitting under a beach umbrella in the pitch darkness : )

Great Joy to the New

Joy, health, love and peace

Be all here in this place

By your leave, we will sing

Concerning our king

Our king is well dressed

In silks of the best

In ribbons so rare

No king can compare

We have travelled many miles,

Over hedges and stiles

In search of our king,

Unto you we bring

Old Christmas is past

Twelfth Night is the last

And we bid you adieu

Great joy to the new.

My favourite carol - an English folksong - about the wren, king of the birds.

Joy, health, love and peace to you all, now and always.

Free

Jim Heidinger

(Sings) A Compromise with Charlie Helped the Situation...

So, the selection of programs on TV is so dire that I'm watching a 4-week old tape of 'Temptation' and not even bothering to fast forward the ads.

My God, I hate 'Survivor'.

I'm making a star for the top of the Christmas tree. (All I need is a prison sentence and, yes, Lauren, my Martha Stewart transformation will be deemed a success. It's sickening. (At least I don't make my own fruit mince or anything.)

This is last night. The problem is, of course, that it's very late, and before long I need to be up and coherent and busily achieving all those kinds of things that modern people insist on burdening themselves with.

Ergo, Night Brain is talking to Morning Brain.

I'm going to finish this point before I go to bed. It'll only take a minute.

Ha! Do you realise how late it's getting? You're supposed to be up again in six hours. You know how bloody cranky you are in the morning when you haven't had enough sleep. Besides, finishing that bit will take you at least 45 minutes and you know it. GO TO BED NOW. By the way, you've got your elbow in the glue.

There's plenty of time. It won't take me long to get ready in the morning.

It wouldn't if you were organised, no, but you're forgetting you haven't done any washing for two weeks, so you'll spend at least half an hour rummaging through the ironing basket to find something that bends, and you knocked all your earrings down the back of your bed this morning and you haven't bothered to fetch them out again, and do you really have any idea where you put down your mobile when you came in? It'll take you another 20 minutes to find that, because I know for a fact it's on the floor of the car and you won't think to look for it until you've given up and huffed out the door in a snit.

In fact, I think I'll have a coffee. It doesn't really affect me, you know,
not since I was at university.

Oh, for the love of God...

And so it goes. I'm a night fish, and I have absolutely no problem with living in denial until the following morning, when, after three hours in the sack, Morning Brain kicks in, seriously pissed off, and reminds me what a yutz
I am for always believing I'll get away with it. I'm not 19 anymore.
I can't do all-nighters of any kind.

Beleagured though it might be, however, Morning Brain is occasionally possessed with extreme cunning and gets its own back. I came home after a late shift tonight ready to fall face-first into bed - and what did I see?
No sheets, of course. I washed the old set this morning, and when I came to remake the bed with a fresh set, I thought, "It's OK. I'll do it when I get home. It'll only take a sec."

Ha ha! SUCKER!

Oh, do you know the pteranodon?

Tonight I edited a 32-minute episode of 'In the Box' where they managed to use the word 'pteranodon' 60 times.

It's not even in our dictionary.

The saddest part was we never even got to see what a pteranodon looks like. (To spare you the ignominy, you can see one here.)

Festivity

A motorcyclist who passed me on my way to work had reindeer ears sticking out the top of his helmet : )

The Heat is On (Da na na na na, na na na na na)

Ziggy and I are upside down on the bathroom floor, the coolest place in the house, deeply absorbed in some Zen contemplation of the ceiling. He grunts when I pat him because even the slightest movement upsets the arrangement of his limbs, splayed just so to ensure maximum heat loss, which he has spent all week perfecting. When he tires of this he will range from room to room, settling nowhere for more than a minute and a half. But when he's here, every so often I must pat him to make sure he hasn't just boiled to death and become stuck in his macabre feline yoga pose.

I love, love my home town, but I wasn't built for it. English blood, you see.

I can cheerfully put up with a steering wheel that burns blisters into my palms, water taps that give out equal measures of liquid and ants and glasses that fog up should you be foolhardy enough to venture out of the airconditioning. I have learned to put my T-shirts in the freezer and keep a supply of rolled socks next to the bed ready to hurl at the pedestal fan when it starts shrieking at 3 in the morning. I know that the second I've dried myself off from my shower I am going to start sweating again and will put up with that infuriating salty trickle down the backs of my knees. But I hate the twitch the heat gives me, the involuntary impatience and the unnerving sensation that my brain is melting Brie.

I love the suffocating heat of the car when you open the door for the first time in the morning, but I'm living for the fury of the summer storms that cool the fever, turn the grass a phosporescent green and wash the air with sepia.

Urgh.

Realised halfway through the can of tuna I was having with my dinner that its label reads 'natural smoked flavour' instead of 'naturally smoked'.
Feel strangely queasy.

The Raddling Trouty

I'm trying this post out in Verdana just for you, Danny :)

Here I am, sat in front of 'Jackie Brown', drink can in hand after the umpteenth trip out to the vending machine. I'd prefer water, but there's none in the machine and some fiend has binned my resident drink bottle and the canteen's closed. I'm too scared to right my coffee cup from on top of the monitor and deal with the (potentially furry) contents. I'll bill the station for my Clearasil. Right now, there's nothing to do.

But let us cast our imaginations back 20 minutes.

The studio have finally nailed their update on the seventh take. There is steam rising from my keyboard as I try to hammer in the 1.5-minute cross with the help of a VCR that probably pre-dates the moon landings (hell, probably pre-dates the discovery of the moon) and a keyboard with a self-ejecting shift button.

The phone rings. Fool that I am, I answer it.

ME: Captioning.
LIL SIS: Hi, matey, I've just...
ME: Not now!

I hang up on a bewildered Chicken Legs and make a mental note to apologise later. The studio buzzes me.

STUDIO: Captions, transmission for that last update in 3 minutes.
ME: (Sweating quietly) Oh, goody.

2.5 minutes later I'm about three-quarters of the way through the sodding thing when its intro appears on the TV I've got set to the live channel. It's starting.

ME: Fuckity, fuck, Mcfuck.

I fumble back to the beginning of the file with one hand and buzz the Chief Cheeses downstairs with the other. I reminded them half an hour ago this was going to happen and they've forgotten me - there are no captions on air.

ME: Captions through to air, please, Control!

There is the sound of gentle, almost bovine, chewing over the intercom. I can almost smell the nougat.

CHEESE: Huh?

ME: (Frothing at the mouth) Captions through to air, please, now!

CHEESE: Ah. Right.

Just as I'm switched over my monitor drops out. The studio has started recording the next update. Now I'm sending with one hand, fumbling with the remote with the other, twisted around to watch the TV behind me to monitor my transmission. With my third hand I'm trying to convince the reluctant jaws to for-Chrissakes-eat-a-cassette. I finally get the monitor back on and realise I'm hurling myself headlong into a 10-second gap of no captions. You'd be amazed how ordinarily composed and agile fingers type complete shash under the pressure of going to air. I stamp out the literary equivalent of a mobile phone love poem service advertisement which captures perhaps one in six words rattling out of the presenters, thump record and clear on the machine and start the whole process over with the new piece.

Finally the panic is over and I collapse, shaking and burping, onto the floor. (Alright, onto the chair. Dramatic, though, eh?)

STUDIO: Next record in an hour, Captions?
ME: Oh, sure.

So now there's nothing to do but drain another can and toddle off to mark another cross on the glass of the vending machine. All that's left is a faded packet of Skittles. Never before have I craved broccoli with such passion.

I Like It

Some community-minded soul in The Gap has 'SLOW DOWN' written on the side of their wheelie bin.