The World According To Me

Dinner was had last night in a beer garden with old friends and new friends. It was very enjoyable. Drinking glasses of champagne and smoking and talking on subjects I very rarely have the opportunity to discuss. My marinated lamb salad was divine, although I am having issues with eating meat at the moment and fear I will have to give up soon. Home by a reasonable hour and in bed not long after, I feel quite tired this morning however. It's more of a deep tiredness, as opposed to something that can be remedied with an hour long nanna-nap.

DETOX!: I usually do one of these about this time of year, after the silly season. It involves 7 days of no meat, no dairy, no caffeine, no processed foods, no fun. On the upside, you get to constantly take tablets which do questionable things to your insides. Intestinal Broom? OH, AND HOW. As a result I've dropped a couple of pesky kilos (only a few more bazillion to go), my skin is looking decidedly clearer however I am glad to be eating normally again because I'm not cut out to survive solely on fruit and vegetables. Who is? In any event, I feel good but I'm glad it's over so I can eat me some cheese.

THE PAST ALWAYS CATCHES UP WITH YOU: I had the pleasure of meeting up with my mate Stevo last weekend in Melbourne. Stevo and I were besties at school together in W.A. and it'd been 8 years since I'd graced him with my presence (ha!). In these times of transience and uncertainty it was just bloody lovely to know that some things don't change, such as ending piss-take arguments by flipping the other person the bird. It was like we were still 17. Brilliant. As a direct consequence of our night on the town…

NEW FAVOURITE DRINK: Who knew that the careful combining of gin, cranberry juice, lime and ice could result in heaven in a martini glass? I didn't, but after drinking 5 of them for the sake of completeness, I am now fully aware that this is the case. Oh my. I am planning on re-creating this wonder at my….

SECOND ANNUAL AUSTRALIA DAY BBQ!: This is the e-mail invitation that was sent out (amended slightly to protect the {not-so} innocent and also so the internerd doesn't know where I live). My mate wrote it….

==================================================================

I've had a turd of a morning so I set off shopping in my lunch break to cheer myself up.

My favourite clothing shop has a 20% sale on at the moment, and I'm on their mailing list so I get another 10% discount as well. That's 30% people. THIRTY BLOODY PER-CENT. Do you think I could find anything I liked that fitted me?

Of course I couldn't.

I tried on half the shop, sending one of the lovely girls who works there upstairs to the stock-room every 2 minutes to try and see if there was anything in my size of the items I took a liking to. There wasn't.

So, deflated, I visited a couple of shoe shops. Nada. Being a size 11 anyway, this doesn't particularly surprise me, but why oh why are there only nanna shoes in my size? Horrid clunky bland things, obviously designed to cover the hideousness of my massive, shameful hoofers.

I know that I'm taking it all a bit personally, but with reference to yesterday's post you can understand why. Plus, it's 40-bloody-degrees here today and I'm not cut out for hot weather. I've decided that tonight I'm going to inflate the pool and sit out in the backyard in it with a bottle of champagne and my dog. And maybe some ice-cream for afters.

Went camping on Friday night. CAMPING! I hadn't been camping in years. There were a group of friends up at a spot near Bundalong who had been up there for a week so we added some numbers and had a bloody excellent time. I forgot how much I love it. Had the best night's sleep I'd had in ages, on a 1-inch thick foam mattress atop lumpy ground inside a borrowed tent. Took Lucy as well, who transformed from sooky-cuddle-me-I'm-scared-of-everything-pup to Camping-Wonder-Dog-2007, barking at people who ventured too close to our camp, swimming in the river like a fiend and obeying commands to stay close and not run after other dogs. Sensational. We ate charred meat and drank around the campfire and had lots of swims. I spent most of Saturday morning (from 7.30am onwards) on a tube in the river, drinking cans and waving at passing boats, getting sunburned and feeling happier than I have in ages. I came home looking like the wild woman of borneo on account of not taking a hairbrush.

Spent the rest of the weekend being pretty lazy, aside from one burst of energy yesterday where I carved up mowed the lawn. If there's one downside to living on a sizeable block, it's the amount of time it takes to keep the garden in check. However, it's a small price to pay for the loveliness of sitting outside on balmy evenings with lots of green space around you.

Introduced Esme to the world of wearing a collar yesterday also. Not a happy response. She crept around for a while wondering where the ringing bells were coming from and then trying to eat the end of the collar once she'd worked it out. She eventually just cracked the sads and lay on the floor as though her head were far too heavy to ever pick up again. It was very dramatic. This morning it seems as though she has adjusted.

Was woken at 3.30am this morning by the sounds of the most horrible cat-fight I have ever heard. Right outside my bathroom window. Recalling that Agnes had elected to spend the night outside, I bolted out of bed and ran out the back, with Lucy the Wonder Dog hot on my heels. She raced around the side of the house and broke up the fight, chasing the offending cat (a big grey ugly Tom who continually comes into our yard at night to scrap with Aggie) across the backyard at full pelt until it slammed into the back fence before jumping over it and escaping with about half a second to spare before Lucy, well….I'm not entirely sure what she would have done. She was just protecting her family. Agnes is a little sore and sorry for herself this morning and overly cuddly, hopefully that will be enough of a lesson for her to come inside at night instead of taunting me from the top of the garage roof. (It won't).

10 days of officially not working (hurrah!). I am now feeling somewhat rested and having had adequate time to bore myself stupid, I feel ready to take on 2007. Also, according to A Current Affair's special horoscope report the other night (don't ask why I was watching it), this is Gemini's year for lurrrve. I'm excited. Hey, it was on ACA, how could it not be true?

Friday before Christmas was the last day our office was open, thankfully Christmas was on a Monday as my firm are known to close only on Christmas eve even, if say, Christmas falls on a Tuesday. Who on earth needs lawyers on Christmas eve? (You'd be surprised). The good thing is that we pretty much shut up shop at lunchtime then sit around drinking champagne and eating seafood (or in my case, spitting out mouthfuls of sushi after being promised that it didn't contain shellfish, to which I am quite allergic, and then finding part of a prawn in the remaining half of my sushi roll). We all hit the pub after we'd drank the office dry and I seem to remember doing a lot of G.O.B chicken impersonations at the bar. It's a current obsession. There were loads of people who I hadn't seen in ages and it felt nice to be social again.

Christmas day was spent with my mother and my two sisters. We drank champagne and I made hummus and tzatziki and we ate cold meat and salads for lunch followed by pecan pie (made at my request) and trifle and chocolate ripple cake for dessert. Any more reminders of the 1980's and I would have had to get a spiral perm. I rolled home on Christmas night after getting the shits on a bit with my mother who kept saying "It just doesn't feel like Christmas. Sigh" and "It's just not Christmas. Sigh" etc, because we hadn't spent the day with the entire family pretending we're interested in who Aunty Pam is cross with today or avoiding Uncle Graham's leering gaze. (Actually I quite like Aunty Pam, she is unapologetic, offensive, prickly and perennially cranky but she always has a twinkle in her eye and I am quietly confident that I will be much like her when I get to 75). My line of thinking was that it was lovely just to have the four of us for Christmas day and I was delighted that we didn't have to make a fuss over roasting whole animals to feed the troops and pretending to be nice to everyone but we don't all think the same way I guess.

Boxing Day saw the lovely but jetlagged Jen come over for cans and cricket. We were doing so well until she went to the loo and I went to find more water crackers when Warnie got his 700th wicket and we missed it and got sad. So then we got quite bent to commiserate and she fell asleep on my loungeroom floor by 7pm. It is so nice to have her back in the country, albeit for a relatively short time.

And that's about the time when I started to run out of things to amuse myself with.

So I took some photo's. However, Blogger seems to want to prevent me from uploading them to show you, which make me angry. And sad.

I got a wonderful Christmas present from my boss, whom I adore and am going to miss (and his lady) terribly when they move away (I am not sure exactly when it is because I am trying to pretend it's not happening, but safe to say within 8 weeks I am going to be a sad little girl).

It is a massive 4 burner BBQ which came in a flat-pack box, but it only took an hour and a half, a lot of swearing and a semi-tanty, two monkey wrenches and a Phillip's head screwdriver to be turned into a mean animal-product cooking machine. Not only am I chuffed that to receive such an excellent gift, I am so very proud of myself for assembling it all by myself and only having one rogue bolt leftover. I have 'seasoned' the hotplates, (lingo, eh?!) and am just waiting for the right time to actually use it. It just doesn't seem right to cook two lonely snaggers on such a huge BBQ so I will soon have a gathering and make a boy wear an apron with fake boobs to cook lots of meat.

Then, with my one set task completed, I got bored.

I did do other things over the break, went to a couple of parties/barbies which were quite nice, but mostly I spent time with myself and the dog and cats, who truly are enough to entertain me.

New Years Eve was a bit of a disaster. I had plans to go away for a night of drunken debauchery with some lovely ladies, until my 'play money' got caught up in some sort of computer glitch rendering it not in my account and I wasn't able to go at the last minute. This made me quite sad and so I bought a packet of tim tams, rolled and smoked too many joints and spent NYE on my couch watching DVD's and being quite grumpy about the situation. I was asleep well before the new year rolled in, however woke up hangover-free and with a surprisingly clear head.

I made some New Years Resolutions which I have either not yet implemented or broken already. Mainly;

Give up smoking - A recurring resolution, this little gem appears every time I think about what I want to change in my life. I've decided not to beat myself up over it too much, although I would like to, at some stage, not necessarily immediately, at least have a good hard crack at giving up. I've convinced myself that when I'm not a slave to the Malboro Lights anymore this will have a flow-on effect to lots of other things I'd like to address.

Save some goddamn money - This one is slightly difficult as I love to go shopping and can always think of things that I absolutely need. And I have lots of bills. Plus I do like to socialise which is taxing on the purse especially when I am a single mum of three adoring animals and earn a reasonably shitty salary.

Moisturise religiously - I was chatting with a girlfriend about this recently. I moisturise my face every day without fail, it's just that rest of me that I mostly neglect due to time/effort constraints. My friend told me she moisturises every single day, twice, all over, without fail. I thought this was taking it a bit far but then she's 34 and has the skin of a newborn, so maybe there's something in it. I'm sticking to once a day though, that way there is less likelihood of me breaking the resolution. I've been doing it for three days now and my skin feels great. Big tick.

And the other one is that I'm not going to be scared to follow my gut feelings this year. If it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, run away screaming and don't be worried about offending other people. I'm going to be listening very intently to what my gut says this year (usually it's quite unintelligible and sounds like it's asking for chocolate. Maybe I won't listen to that part so much given yesterday morning's efforts).

This morning I was early for work and as I alighted from my car I caught sight of my reflection in the back window of our office. I quickly noticed, as I took in a side/back view of myself, that my ever-expanding butt had succeeded in busting the zip on my favourite black pencil skirt, and that my bum was freely exposed to the elements. Well, not my bum exactly, but my knickers. I didn't even feel that anything was different. I quickly got back into my car, drove home and changed into something that could accommodate my fat ass.

What I have learnt this morning - Vanity is not always a bad thing.

Other thing I have learnt - Stop eating cheese.