Saturday, February 23, 2008

See, that's just wierd.

Tanja and I stopped at the Marlborough Hotel for lunch today and had a bottle of beer and then a schooner of beer each with our food. Then on the way home we bought a six-pack of beer. Upon arriving home, we each had two of those in the backyard. Tanja was admittedly a bit tipsy, while I retained my hard-drinking untouchable air. I then made us each a couple of cocktails (Kiwi & Coconut Caipiroska: 1 shot vodka, 2 shots Malibu Rum, half a kiwi, half a lime, 1 tsp sugar, muddled, then shaken with ice) with more alcohol in than the beers, and Tanja is suddenly sobered up. Completely. She could juggle knives if she could, well, juggle knives. Wierd.

Oh, and Soundwave is happening so close to our house we can hear Atreyu or some other Screamo shit from the backyard.

And Edlinger beer has created beer bottles where you can use the bottom of the bottle to open the TOP of another bottle. Brilliant!!!

Monday, February 18, 2008

For Dooga

...comic book lolcats.



Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Feline

So... Watching the first 10 minutes of 28 Weeks Later at the train station is not a way to create a positive, motivated outlook for the rest of the day. I'm glad we've all learned this.

Our stupid cat escaped last night. Again. This time the first place we looked was the neighbour's yard she got into last time. No luck. We wandered the streets for a bit, doing the incredibly plaintive and somehow pathetic cat-food-bowl-shaking thing of cat parents everywhere. No joy. With Tanja and I sniping at one another from the stress, we headed home, only to hear faint meowing from over the fence. I knock on the neighbours door and he and I search the backyard and the side of the house, finding nothing. I go back out into the alley with Tanja, only to see Magrat shoot out from the damaged roller-door of the backyard I had so recently searched. We tried to approach her, but she shot away, with me pounding after her. Hot pursuit. She turned a corner... and disappeared. With both Tanja and I cursing, we wander around. Tanja finally gets her out from under a car, catching a few scratches for her trouble.

I'll leave a post script that a neighbourhood tomcat followed us around through this whole ordeal (which lasted more than an hour), happily trundling along, sometimes with me, sometimes with Tanja, looking under cars and bushes. He seemed to think this was all high adventure. I wanted to adopt the little Chaperone, but he probably belonged to someone. We'll leave some tinned food out for him.

Friday, February 08, 2008

Musings

I took a different route to work today, and as usual when I do this, I found myself wondering: what if I just kept walking around looking at things and didn't go to work. I never got the urge to skip school at any time in my academic career, but I've had this sort of urge since I've begun working in Australia. There just seem to be so many interesting things to do and I just want to wander and see them. I don't know if it's sad, but a lot of those things revolve around food, wine, beer, and cocktails. Not the doing any of those things to excesses, but the enjoyment and interesting nature thereof. For example, I want more Innocent Bystander Shiraz Viognier. We had some and it was great, but I felt we rushed it a bit.

It seems I've become a magnet for gossip at work. Not the usual who-shagged-who gossip. More like oh-no-that-special-project-we're-working-on-is-ending-we-might-get-pwned-on-hours-and-supervisor-infighting-and-it's-all-coming-down-man gossip. It's giving me an unsettling sense of impermanence with everything I'm doing. I miss the illusion that managers know what they're doing and have things under control. And our back-of-house work has ceased being about quality of work lately and has just become a race to make your quota for the day. It's fair demoralising.

I stole a lobe off a cactus on the way to work today. I felt no guilt, as the cactus was about the size of a volkswagon, and I had no worry about storing it until i get home, knowing that succelents like cacti can survive for up to two weeks off the plant, then grow new roots. This particular cactus had no needles that I could see, so I had no trouble handling it. What I didn't realise is that its needles are 2-3 mms long, half the thickness of a hair and fall out on their own to coat what's nearby. In this particular case, what was nearby was the inside of my right sleeve. I spent the following half hour to work attempting to tweeze (with no tweezers) these little spines out of my wrist. They didn't hurt, but would twinge whenever they caught on something. Which was whenever I moved. So I got pwned by a plant.

Been listening to a lot of Spoon and the New Pornographers. Melodic power pop. Recommended, but not for Ted.

Tanja and I are about a third of the way through the 7th season of Star Trek TNG. Tanja's become a nerd to the point of discussing with someone at her work whether a colleague is a Ferengi or a Cardassian. I vote Cardassian. Oh, and I forgot how good the episode "Lower Decks" is.