...mums - it takes all kinds

...so andrew and i thought this was a cool thing to do to mark (literally) getting engaged.

laurie, the burly hells angel who did them for us asked me if my mum was going to smack me when i got home, but in actual fact she wrote a very short poem about it for her creative writing homework...

'is it a sign of the times today

that a couple about to be wed

instead of wearing their hearts on their sleeves

wear them tattooed on their arms instead?'

...eww gross

a couple of weeks ago i was suitably fascinated/disgusted whilst listening to a formerly-obese comedian talk about his visit to a health spa in thailand. apparently he had been large all his life, but when his doctor tagged him 'morbidly obese' he decided that enough was more than too much and went to thailand to kick start his weight loss. he spent 2 weeks existing on juice and twice daily SELF ADMINISTERED colonic irrigations (he was actually pretty proud of the whole self-administered thing). then proceded to let me know that he was so fascinated/disgusted by what was coming out of him that he kept a photo journal ?!?
the point of the story being that last week while i was in hervey bay my sister introduced me to...relax, it's only ear candles, but after they burned down there was that same feeling of f/d as i unwrapped the base to see what 40+ years of slightly-above-average aural hygeine looked like.
i highly recommend them - its so fascinatingly disgusting. oh, and your ears are amazingly clear afterwards!

...fun times

...ever realised the split second after you do something that it's going to end in tears?
Like noticing the teaspoon in the sink in the microsecond between turning on the tap and being soaked by the backspray, or realising just as you wave at him, that the gorgeous guy is waving to the girl behind you.
Almost before i pressed the on switch i realised there was too much soup in the blender......i'm off to the shower now that i've washed down the walls, vegie soup looks a lot like vomit when it's all over the kitchen.

aaah adelaide

...i know people have this idea that adelaide is a sleepy little country town where nothing ever happens - but some of us love it for that reason.

however come february everything happens at once, adelaide puts on it's party dress and we arent going to be before, ooh, midnight for anyone! we have the arts festival, the clipsal, the fringe, womadelaide and hundreds of music and cultural festivals etc etc all squished into a couple of months.

one of my favourites is the northern lights

thanks to etsa and their electrickery, the gorgeous buildimgs along north terrace become breathtaking

it creates a beautiful atmosphere in the city - we all get warm and fuzzy - and it was the perfect setting for andrew's proposal =)

comment should not be empty....

one of the great things about reading other blogs is the reassurance that we're all in this together (great, now i have ben lee stuck in my head), that aside from different scenery out the windows the trip down life's highway is fairly similar for most of us.

one of my favourites is 'mr london street (if i could do that link thingy i would) not only is he an awesome writer - you have to check out his '100 word challenge' section - but i like to think we would get on amazingly well if we met.

anyway, his latest post is about giving people your full attention or, more precisely, how we dont often do it. guilty as charged. i might be writing a mental shopping list or thinking about work and lose track of what is going on around me and then have to resort to the old 'smile and nod'.

i went to comment on another post just after i had read his and accidentally hit the 'post comment' box before i had written anything and was told 'the comment should not be empty' - way to drive the point home universe!

halle-freakin-lujah

ladies and gentlemen may i present (huge drumroll) ...the newest HACC cert 3 holder in your neighbourhood!

that's right, folks, all over bar the shouting - well in this case, the final presentation. last class yesterday, first day of certified care today and a HUGE sigh of relief that the study is finished....for the time being.

because now that i've got cert 3, the door has begun to swing open and there is a plethora (do you know what it means to have a plethora?) of options!
continue on to cert 4...? specialise...? become a trainer myself...?

what to do, what to do....

I got my first tattoo after i turned 30. i'd been thinking about it since i was 17, but it wasn't quite as acceptable back then and, at heart, i'm a good girl. Anyway by the time i'd reached the stately age of 30 i figured that i'd be able to make a sensible design choice (see what i mean - 'sensible' + 'tattoo'), which is how i ended up with a very nice, quite delicate band around my upper arm.*

then you have to get the next one, because it's addictive, so a couple of years later a gecko appeared on my lower back - i would like to say that my tattoo has been in place since 1998, way before everyone else got theirs and they became so common (in all senses of the word) they are now known as the 'tramp stamp'.
one of my christmas presents, from andrew, is a voucher for a new one - i've been building up to this for a while and am fairly certain now on the 'what and where', however this post is not really about tattoos.

in 2002 i had my nose pierced. it got infected a couple of times in the first year, but apart from that, never a problem. in the last 2 months i have lost both of my favourite studs - one down the plug in the shower and the other - who knows? thats the thing, they've just fallen out. which makes me wonder if the universe is telling me that at 42 it's time to give it up. i've always been aware that there would come a day when i would take it out (nose stud at 86? dont think so) i just hadn't thought much about when that would be.
i figure i've got a couple of days before the hole closes to decide what to do...






*= ( now - thanks to my declining close up vision and lack of skin tone it just looks blurry to me

worth a thousand words...

i cant help it...i just find these sooo amusing (not laugh out loud funny, just good for the occasional immature snigger)

i'd like to thank brisbane for supplying endless smirk inducing signage

and of course my more than willing to be humiliated models

the universe has the last laugh...

and i guess it serves me right for getting all ' i look much younger than i am'. When i had my eyes tested on sunday for the first time, and not before time, the results came back that although my distance vision is outstanding (overacheiver), my close up vision is atrocious and 10 years ahead of where it should be = (

it all evens out in the end...

straya day 2010...

was very quiet this year. The middle one, the boy and I had our 'very nearly almost straya day' bbq on sunday - and it was almost a barbie thanks to the wasp nest which has appeared down by the bbq. Still, it all tasted just as good cooked inside (lamb marinated in vegemite, honey and rosemary - sounds disgusting, tastes AMAZING)
So Andrew and I had a late brekky tuesday and went off to see sherlock holmes - robert downey jnr - need i say more ;) Then we pottered off to Port Willunga (one of my favourite beaches) to watch the sunset...aaaahhh!

the 'f' bomb...

yep, one of my clients dropped it today. She's 78 and is on her second go round with cancer (first time ovarian, this time stomach). She was telling me a story about some baking she was doing for christmas - she'd got all the shortbread and rumballs done and was mixing her puddings, and for some reason she glanced at her hands. 'Bother (or something to that effect)...where are the bandaids?' Apparently she spent the next hour rummaging through her rubbish bags to find them. She found one of the two...

stuff like this reminds me that my clients all had lives before they met me - lived, laughed, loved .... and swore!

if i'd WANTED to know about a ruptured ovarian cyst i would have googled it...

yes. well. having spent yesterday in the local emergency department in huge amounts of pain and with 500 of my closest friends piled moaning and crying in beds throughout the hallways, i have decided a couple of things.

nurses and doctors are amazing (how do they keep smiling and caring?)

public hospitals suck (which reinforces the first point)

if, as i was warned may be possible, this happens again next month, all those girly bits are coming out! (they're old news now anyway as everyone within a 12 mile radius of the hospital had a look up there yesterday)

oh, and as a ps i'd like to say that andrew is the best boyfriend in the world xx

and ppss - the bright spot in an otherwise grey day was the orderly looking at my chart, then at me and saying '42' in a VERY surprised voice!

lets schedule some time to be spontaneous...

Sometimes getting older creeps up on you. I was being a good citizen, using my handheld, trigger nozzled hose to water between the defined hours for our area and started the mental checklist for the day. Bike ride (trying to get fit and stay limber) - check, watering before 9am - check, then better have breakfast before I start cleaning the car so I dont pass out at 11.30. See. You'd think that was the inner voice of someone twice my age. Better get out the crochet hook and get that knee rug finished in time for Murder, She Wrote.

she started it...

Kids are sooo embarrassing!
I posted yesterday (it's addictive, ok) about picking my daughter up from work in full abba regalia and at the time a friend mentioned that it might be a bit unkind given her 'sensitive' age. 'Pshaw' I replied (or something like it) 'she started it'. When she was 4 we were in our local woolies and spotted the new recruit for the local basketball team heading down the aisle we were heading up (who knew they could afford an american?)
'That's what I call black' she pronounced at the top of her voice - they never say those sort of things under their breath or even in a stage whisper - everyone has to know.

And then there was the time when mum and my sister were waiting in the queue at the local post office - Helen was all of about 3 as the story goes, when a man on crutches joined the line. He may have been a veteran or the victim of an accident which had lost him a leg, and whether or not he had a prosthetic, he wasn't wearing it this day. 'Where's his other leg, mum?' Helen yells, as my poor mother tried to quietly distract her. She thought it had worked as Helen had given up fidgeting. I know you know it didn't! When she turned back to look there was my sister - lying on the floor, on her back looking up the empty leg of his shorts...

an illustrated history of dressing up...

Andrew had his first experience of dressing up last year when we went to his mate's 'cowboys, indians and mexicans' 40th. I was surprised to say the least - didn't every kid grow up with a huge basket or box full of interesting stuff to dress up in? Ours included mum's wedding suit at one stage but was just as likely to have petticoats, fur hats, weird skirts and wonderful dresses.

The parents were involved in amateur theatre back in the old country (roar of the greasepaint, smell of the crowd...) and still costume up on occasion

the red fairy is actually my son, but as he is the youngest he very early on became good at doing what his older sisiters told him to

I love a chance to dress up - pretending to be someone else is ridiculously liberating, and there is nothing funnier than your 17 year old daughters face when you arrive to pick her up from work in full abba get up!

Wow...

www.keithloutit.com - check this out, this guy uses a special lens and combines it with time lapse and produces films that look like stop motion animation using miniatures. It's truly amazing!

ladies day at the zoo...

if it had been ten degrees cooler...oh well, lucky we found this water spray!

procrastination...you say that like it's a bad thing

The youngest one just pointed out that I am behaving like Bernard in one of my favourite 'Black Books' episodes - the one where he is doing his tax but actually does everything he can to put it off including asking one of his customers to break his legs and getting involved in a long winded discussion with a couple of religious callers.
I hate bookwork (computerwork really). I hate doing the quarterly BAS statements and having to be accountable for everything. I hate that I'm supposed to do it in someone elses (the ATO in this case) time frame and not when I feel like it. That's the real reason if I'm honest - I dont like being told what to do when.
And being a reasonably intelligent person I recognise that if I gave it even an hour every week I could save myself huge amounts of grief - but here I am, yet again, cramming 3 mths into 1 day's work. It hasn't been a total waste though - I've done 4 loads of washing, made a fabulous dinner, tidied my wardrobe and backed up all the photos on the hard drive to a memory stick - and of course updated my blog. Sigh...back to work...or should i alphabetise my cd collection?

the great palm oil debate...

So yesterday we went to the Adelaide Zoo for the Giant Pandas to have a look at us, which was pretty cool for them and us. I personally (although I did like Wang Wang and Funi), found a couple of the other visitors more fascinating - an early 40's couple, both in quick dry clothing and serious walker sandals, both wearing flip up sunnies attached to their glasses and pushing a pram that had been stripped back to the frame bedecked with camera bags and bum bags - I was very surprised to hear them speak with no trace of an accent as I honestly thought they were overseas visitors, most likely from the US of A (racist much?). Anyway that is beside the point as what has happened since then has also been quite interesting...
I have to digress to give you a bit of background to the story. When the middle child arrived she came with a shock of the most gorgeous rich auburn hair, and as an orangutan at melbourne zoo had also just given birth...well you can see where I'm headed. She has grown up hearing this story and is quite fond of orangutans as a result, viewing them as a sort of distant cousin.
In the course of our zoo visit we found out that clearing the rainforest for Palm Oil plantations in Malaysia and Borneo causes the deaths of 5 orangutans each day. The poster showed a selection of products that contain Palm Oil and we righteously declared to boycott them in our house from now on - some quite easy - we don't like KFC much anyway, some much harder - damn you tim tams and pizza shapes!
This has caused a huge uproar today as the middle one's boyfriend suggested we have KFC for tea tonight and was promptly outed as an environmental vandal and orangutan killer. This led to the great information war as wi-fi ipods and computers were googled to see who was right and who was an idiot, and in the process we discovered that:
a) palm oil is not always listed as 'palm oil' in the ingredient lists
b) that pretty much everything yummy has palm oil in it
c) so does most shampoos and a lot of other stuff
d) a conscience can be very expensive