Dude

Such a beautiful Little Dude! ♥

131/361

My countdown as of today stands at 131 and 361.  131 days left til the wedding, and 361 working days left for me here.

The weekend was fun - went to the house that M&J were housesitting.  The dog + cat there are weird.  The dog doesn't play with a ball or toy like that, she plays with PEBBLES.  Large driveway/plant bed pebbles.  And she plays with the cat - biting him around his entire head.  Very strange.  It's a very nice house though and we had yum pancakes.

Saturday G and I caught up with the chores, and then G read and I sorted through my box of papers.  Getting there, slowly but surely!

On Sunday I drove to mom's house and G and I hung out a bit with sis and got stuff down from in the ceiling.  A whole box of teddies, my box of cars, my luggage set and some other odds and ends.  It's going to be fun sorting through them,  I will clean all my cars, probably wash all the teddies but it might have to wait til summer for me to do that because they will need a long time in the sun to dry!

I then drove from mom's place to G's folks' place.  Was very enjoyable.  I felt a bit "eek" at first but it went very well.  On the mountain pass I took (on both trips) I drove at about 50kmph because of all the tight bends and my not being so used to the car... but then when we went on straight bits I went faster and left the cars behind me way behind! 

I had my first road-block too!  There was a road-block near G's folks' place, in front of the police station - there are a few bays along the road there and I was directed into the front one and I was trying not to hit the traffic officer or mount the kerb and I must have tipped the brakes a little hard coming to a stop.  I grinned like a doofus at G and wound the window down and the traffic officer said "hi there license plskthx" so I handed my big goofy temporary licence paper out the window.  She looked at it and said "you just passed your license recently...:)" probably wondering wtf I was doing driving an Audi... buahahah!!  She walked around the car, probably checking the numberplates, came back to the window and handed my licence back... said "have a good evening - and next time a bit less hard on the brakes".  Hehehehehe!!

We spent quite a while at G's folks' place, and when we left it was dark and VERY misty!  So we had a nice slow drive home.  G got stopped at the same roadblock but the guy just said "do you have your licence sir?" and as G began to take his wallet out of his pocket the guy said "no no, don't worry, you do have it?" "yes" said G.  "Are you sober?" "yes, definitely" "Ok have a good evening" and that was it!  Strange...

I really want to finish with those papers now, and get back into stitching.  Golden Ice is very neglected now!

Oohhh, in other news, when we got home from work on Friday, I popped out of the car to check the letterbox.  There was a puffy envelope in it, addressed to me.  A friend in the UK had posted me a cross-stitch chart and some fabric she had left over from when she did the design.  I'm going to stitch one for my mom and one for G's mom :)  Get them framed and present them to them before the wedding.  It's going to be SO FUN!!

Ok I have a PILE of filing to do so I'd better get to it - yay only 361 days left!

Uhhhhh

Once again I have a post titled "uhh".

Hbbm isn't at work til 2pm today, and I'm doing filing which I haven't been able to do until now.  It's quite a lot.  I must admit I've been "taking it easy" and listening to my ipod while filing.  Hbbm didn't leave any work for me which makes it easier.

One small problem though - I don't FEEL LIKE FILING!  I guess I never do :P  Right now I feel like doing other stuff like wedding planning... little things like that.  Hardihar... little... maybe to the company it'd be little but it's our WEDDING for heaven's sake, it's NOT a small thing.  Large enough for one of the bosses to take the day off in preparation for his daughter's wedding tomorrow... will I be able to take time off like that? HAHAHA... ummmmmmmmm well probably not?  Because I'm using my leave for honeymoon... I'd have to put in for unpaid leave for the Friday before the wedding.. yay.  Unpaid leave, my favourite!

Ok anyway, I hope this blogpost works better than the previous one.  It seems that when I put in a blank line in the email it converts it to two in the blogpost.  Will check it out later.

The night before last we clipped Dude's nails again... we haven't played with him much lately which isn't a good thing.  Poor neglected Dude.  He had a lot of fun that night though!  Well, nail clipping was fine this time again, except for his two inner back toes.  They were very long and his foot wasn't positioning properly on the perches.  Now he should be fine.  With those toes G had to hold him in a little blanket (he doesn't like the nailclippers around his butt evidently, but then, who would?)... for the other nails he sat on my finger and allowed them to be clipped.  Brave Dude :D

In other news - my sis had a fender bender yesterday.  She's alright, the car bumper, bonnet, lights and stuff are a bit damaged, the driver's side door doesn't open, but the car she bumped into was worse off - it was between two cars and being bumped from behind by my sis bumped it against the car in front of it.  Not good!  I guess things like that just happen so there's no point stressing about it.  Not that I can talk, not having ever been in an accident. 

I did have a dream, however, about driving off an EXTREMELY high bridge over a rocky river.  It was very freaky - G and I were in the car, driving around a wide sweeping bend and I suddenly realised that *I* was the one driving (I didn't KNOW?!) and that I should be buckled in.  I pulled the seatbelt across and took my other hand off the steering to buckle up and next thing the car hit the barrier and launched into the air.  I think G's words in the dream were "oh fuck"...  I was busy trying to decide whether it'd be better to crash down with the seatbelt on, or if it'd be impossible to unbelt myself and swim out if the car became filled with water... all that time we were soaring through the air.  I woke up before we actually crashed though.  MAN that was a freaky disturbing dream.

What's with that?

Ok this is going to be one of those rant posts :P  I don't recall ranting for a good while now so it's about damn time!

 

Sometimes, you just wish you could bash someone over the head.  Yesterday I had a moment like that.  Scenario =  Lunch time at the office:

 

I come into the kitchen, armed with my lunchbox (2 slices of toast) and tin of hot choc + mug.  I put my lunchbox down by the griller and I  say "I'm next!! :D" to a friend-colleague who is busy toasting her sandwich - she replies "there's no queue! :)" - so I go about washing my cup and making hot chocolate... I grab a knife out of the drawer and put it on my lunchbox, put my mug next to the kettle because it's still busy boiling, and get a plate out of the cupboard and put it next to my lunchbox.  Turn back to the griller area and this BLOB of a colleague from the other dept has jumped the queue.  She's plonked her lunchbox etc next to/around my lunchbox, and already put her sandwich on the griller next to my friend-colleague's sandwich!

 

I was SO annoyed that I just made my hot chocolate and brought it to my desk.  Went back, and it's still the same... like hello?  What is with that... jump the queue?  Surely ANY normal person would SEE lunchbox, cottage cheese, knife, next to the griller and ask "anyone in the queue?" just to make sure...?  But no, f*** whoever is actually waiting to use the griller.

 

I come back after going to the loo, and now my friend-colleague's taken her sandwich off the griller and someone ELSE had stuck their damn sandwich on the griller next to Madame Blob's sandwich.  By now I'm so annoyed I pick up my plate+bread, cottage cheese and knife and go and wait at my desk - I'd rather seethe at my desk than become enraged in the kitchen... but HONESTLY!!

 

After about 10+ minutes I go back to the kitchen and the griller's free.  The lady after Madame Blob is sitting on the chair next to the griller (which interferes with using the griller but that's another story altogether! see below) but thank god she's less than half the size of Madame Blob who usually plonks her ass there and will not move or move her stuff so you have to lean all over her food/awkwardly take the griller-grid off the griller almost tipping your bread out the other side so as not to knock her stuff.  ARGH!!!!!

 

Where the hell is your brain + consideration for other people?  Ok background - Madame Blob has pissed me off in the past by sitting essentially hogging the griller.  Her offering to plug the griller in and turn my toast for me is NOT going to help... to elaborate a little: the griller is like most grillers out there - it does not toast evenly.  To get evenly toasted bread you have to rearrange your bread slices.  So by offering to do it FOR me you just piss me off more!

 

Another rant, also a longterm one:

 

What on earth is the point of finishing the loo roll which is on the holder (not an industrial-style one like you get in shopping malls which are locked), and taking one from the backup-holder and balancing it on top of the empty cardboard still on the holder?  It is *hardly* a strenuous exercise: 1) remove cardboard roll from holder, 2) put new roll on holder, 3) take cardboard roll and put it in the bin when you leave the loo... VOILA!!

 

WHAT IS SO HARD ABOUT CHANGING A LOO ROLL?  No, seriously.  I want an answer.

Clearing out stuff

This weekend has been great. Today is a public holiday. We went to G's folks' place yesterday for Pop-day lunch. I HAVE to get that recipe - chicken + veg on rice... yumMY!!

I've been doing some clearing out this weekend. I finally dragged out the packets of papers+odds and ends and boxes of junk and sorted through them. I now have a box of magazine pages I tore and kept over the years - have to go through them. I have a box of stationery/writing paper/stuff like that, and I have another box of odds and ends like slinkie, HP chocolate frog cards, keyrings and stuff. It is so liberating tossing out such a lot of stuff - for example I'd kept a softcover A4 book which was my matric geography project. Yay... wtf?

Anyway, I now have a clear idea in my mind what all I still HAVE. It is no longer this insurmountable PILE of junk. It's great because now that I have gone through it all, I have a better idea of what all I will have to take with us to Aus.

Next on the cards (after sorting through the box of magazine articles), is fetching stuff from mom's place. There are bags and boxes of toys and stuff that are stored in the ceiling cavity (and possibly, although I doubt it, in cupboards). THAT's going to be a challenge. Toys that have been kept ever since I can remember... games, books, puzzles, teddies, etc. I also have to fetch my dinky-cars (a BOX of them). I have a plan for them once we've moved to Aus. Basically a wall-display, like a printer's tray, with a space for each car, with transparent perspex doors to keep all the dust out. The cars are by no means in good condition, they were played with and left outside and some were even lost in the sandbox for a while, but I'm sure that a whole wall's worth of cars will make a nice, memorable display!

Anyway, there's still a lot of stuff to go through, but I intend on bringing all of my stuff to our place, even if they are in boxes and bags, because then at least I will be able to sort through them in my own time. I can't believe how liberating this all is! Preparing for the wedding is one thing, preparing for the honeymoon is another, and clearing out junk? Now that's a long-term thing but it's great... if I do it all gradually, there will be less stress when we have to move. Also it refreshes in my mind what all I have, and it makes having our own home in Aus more of a goal and not just a dream because I can envision where our stuff will go. I hope that our place will have 'display walls', which I can use to hang up Warpony, Heremia and Golden Ice. At the moment, we only have 1 display wall, so the latest completed cross-stitch goes there. Heremia is there now, Warpony has been demoted to another part of the lounge where he is all but neglected!!

What I want to do this evening is go through some pc games we have. I have Captain Claw, LOTR (seems to be the first one that came out), we have Sam&Max Hit the Road. I want to install them and give them a bash :)

I'm very frustrated about my laptop though. I'd kept a ripped copy of all my CDs on it so that I was able to listen portably, and now I'd burnt almost all of it to DVD so that we could play them in the car. ALL of it except for about 3gb has been successfully burnt and deleted off my laptop. The last 3gb for some reason refuses to be burnt. I don't know whether my DVD drive is giving trouble or whether it is Nero itself, but it burns perfectly until at the end it says "burn failed" (at the lead-out). I'm SO fed up because all I want to do is get rid of that 3gb of music! I cleared a lot of stuff off my laptop (pics, videos, music, docs etc), so it's all but empty now... but ARGH that 3gb..................................

I also want to buy more RAM for it. It's such a great laptop, but now as the programs update and everything gets suited to super-specced machines, the RAM is showing itself to be insufficient (512mb). I still love this laptop though, everything else is 100% with it :D

I think that's all for now... I'd love to do some stitching but I don't know how likely that is what with these games.. ;)

Sushi!

I tried and succeeded to make inside-out california rolls (uramaki). They were quite a bit larger than I'd intended, so we both were rather full afterwards.



No other news for now... ;)

Progress

This is what Golden Ice looks like now. He is definitely equine now!



At the moment I am at home, sick, kicking the last bit a cold in the butt. My boss is away, I was very sick on Monday but had to go to work because he was there that day before going on a business trip. Yesterday I went to work because he was going to leave me work to do which wouldn't have been fair to leave for the (also sick) typist to do. So today I am at home, keeping warm, getting better.

Last night G and I went to the huge shopping mall (not so nearby). Were sposed to do odds and ends shopping like getting vacuum bags and chopsticks but do you think in a mall with 400 shops in it you would find them? Ok granted we didn't look in every single shop... but still. Sheesh...

We did however pick up a 2nd copy of Diablo II's expansion pack. Now G and I can go on missions together :D We tried it out last night and it was VERY fun!

I had a lot I was going to blog about but now after reading stuffs on teh internetz, I am uninspired.

And now

I am sick with a cold. W00t!

I'm feeling all stuffy-headed right now... and not being up for much means I can finally do some housekeeping on my laptop. I've just cleared out an emailbox and still have some more to do. It's all old stuff I've just left lying about and I think it's time to clear it out. Just like having the study upstairs tidier than before, this feels uplifting too.

Friday night, we went to Synd and had soup and chilled and chatted. Sat morning bright and early G and I headed off to FH for me to have my hair highlighted. Didn't take too long (2hrs total), and then we popped to Mom. She impulsively bought a budgie on Friday, and he's very cute but at such a young age we can't tell yet what he's like. Or in fact whether it IS a he. The whole story of how mom bought him and then went shopping (leaving him in the box in the car!)... just brings it starkly to my mind that mom's thinking is not really clear and logical, and well... will it ever be? Her response to my exclamation and saying it was not right to keep him in the car while shopping (she could have dropped him off at home and THEN gone shopping!) was to say (basically) that after that experience he must be enjoying being in the cage! *sigh* I don't know... if she can't see what's wrong with that, then I dunno.

Anyway, he seems a cute enough budgie... and we hung about and had a bit of lunch and then came back to our place. Yesterday night S & L and I were going to a restaurant/wine bar for a bit of fun, but at 13:40, when we got home from mom's place, I was already feeling that all too familiar feeling in the back of my throat/in my nose that means I am getting a cold (or something like it). As the afternoon progressed I felt worse and worse, and headed to bed for a nap. Woke up at about 4pm and felt so rotten I had to sms S and tell her that I just wouldn't be able to make it. I'm very disappointed. Murphy is a real tool... grr. *sigh*!!

This week HBBM is away again (TueWed+Thur). I'm very glad about that but it doesn't mean I won't be busy. He's probably going to leave a TON of work for me, and if he doesn't, the other guy who I do filing for will more than likely have a lot of filing for me to do.

I still can't believe I passed my drivers. I keep having 'flashbacks' or things prompting my memory, and then the re-realisation that it's over and I don't have to worry about that "pre-trip inspection test" again! It's done! Finit! Yay!!

Things are coming together for the wedding. At the moment we are organising the invites and stuff. I'm still waiting for the coffeeshop/bakery to send through their quote. I'm disappointed but she did reply to my query saying that she'd send it, they were just hectically busy this week. I shall wait and see. We're going to email the venue about catering shortly, that really will be a huge load off our shoulders.

I'm so excited though, seeing how things will fit together. I can't wait to see everything finally ready! The colours and everything will look WOW!

Dude is so cute. He really is a special little thing ♥

And that is all I feel like blogging about for now. I'm not exceptionally inspired right now, what with having a head full of cotton wool...

Sushi 'n stuff!

I'm really sleepy right now so I'll blog a proper blog some other time, but I just wanted to post a pic of the fashion sandwiches we had tonight. The avo we bought a few days ago hoping for it to get softer didn't in fact get softer. So our sandwiches were sans avo. But they were tight enough for me to cut up AND eat with chopsticks!



And my progress with Golden Ice.