My back hurts. It has for months. Sometimes it's OK and I can ignore it. Other days it's awful and I feel extremely cranky and sadsacky. Like today. The only curative I can conjure up is a Things I Loathe installment. (Earlier hateful things are listed here and here.)
1. The Little Prince Saccharine, insipid, supposedly inspirational book on a par with The Alchemist for new agey awfulness. Magical? PAH.
2. Magazines Almost without exception, magazines are catalogues of tricks to make the reader feel a) inadequate and b) desirous of things they don't need. Save the planet and become a better person by buying more shit! Worst of all are those targeted at my demographic. Frankie (sorry Ms Honey) is one of the worst culprits with its blank-faced willowy covergirls, paint-by-numbers creativity and diluted feminism. Just scroll through the past issues here... there are whole runs of covers that have the same paper dolls on the front cover. Long hair, slightly open mouths (mouth-breathing isn't alluring, it's creepy), boring, weak and girly.
3. Drivers who don't indicate. I curse you all.
4. People in the changerooms at the pool who stand too close. The only way I can manage being naked around people I didn't expressly choose to be naked with is to keep my eyes averted and pretend they aren't there. How can I do that when you dump your gear on my gear and I have to interact to retrieve it?
5. Being asked if I've seen someone about my back. Wanna see my bank balance? Wanna see how much I've spent on its repair and maintenance? Wanna drop the subject? Me too.
Done. Your turn. Dump your abhorrences, your grievences and your bugbears (bugsbear?) in the comments.
Now I have to go and glare at the television and mutter about all the fools upon it.
I picked up some corker books at a scout fundraising sale. One was the LIFE World Library 1965 edition about Australia and New Zealand. It's full of gold. Here's a schnippet from Chapter Four, entitled "A Breezy, Unpredictable People".
Certainly the Australian male is tough--very tough--and in appearance lean-eyed, hatchet-jawed, relaxed and slightly ungainly. The girls generally run in two types -- either a rather stringy, small-breasted, leggy girl with a sun-baked complexion, or else one with a large-hipped figure and an easy grace of postrure. Both sexes look athletic, purposeful and healthy; yet each may be said to lack style and glamour.
Soon to follow - highlights from "Exploring Mime".
Kath's beloved reckons that going to see a movie just because it's got Clive in it is shallow. Clearly, Kath doesn't mind what he thinks because she came along to The Boys are Back this evening without knowing a thing about it, other than its Clive-ness, its Cliverilitude, its proCliveties.
We scored the best seats in a sold-out cinema, middle of the back row. Only we were stuck between two sets of biddies. The biddies to my left talked the whole way through, for example, such cinematic criticism as "that linen jacket of his is quite wrinkled, isn't it," and then began humming along to the soundtrack. The biddies to Kath's right also talked the whole way through - "Oh look, that's an IGA he's gone into."
Of course, in a few decades that'll be us. We're half-way there. Thanks for a top night Kath.
Tanks overflowing. I'm the mad bugger out there moving the hoses around the garden in the dark to put the overflow somewhere useful. And grinning the whole time.
Curmudgeon and I just got back from a wee bicycle jaunt through the countryside (Lilydale to Warburton rail trail) to celebrate our fourth anniversary.
Plusses:
1. Constant hilarity, typical example:
Me: Do you think an 'anadversary' is something you celebrate with people you don't like? Him: Maybe. Do you think that Aquaman's adversaries were 'Sea AnEnemies'?
2. Woori Wheels at Woori Yallock. These are the local bakery's FAR SUPERIOR version of your bog standard, fairly ordinary Wagon Wheel. They were a cult snack item at Curmudgeon's work during the fire season since colleagues visiting the Woori Yallock CFA office always returned with tales of Woori Wheels so large and rich and fabulous that you couldn't finish one by yourself. We did research. We concluded that they are difficult to finish all by yourself because your companion keeps stealing bites.
3. Tree ferns, stringybark trees, rolling hills, whispering grass meadows etc etc.
4. Peacocks and donkeys at our B&B.
5. Curmudgeon and I still are rather fond of one another after four flippin' years.
Minuses:
1. B&B was 8km uphell, oops, uphill from Warburton along a howling main road.
2. On the return train trip, the rotters at Connex decided to do maintainence and run a bus between Ringwood and Blackburn. Bikes aren't allowed on buses. So we rode it - in the hot sun, up and down hills, along Whitehorse Road megatraffic and the sick, twisted people in 4WDs who spend their weekends at Early Settler, Baby Bunting, Bed Shed and other nightmarish consumer warehouses.
3. Squid's dogsitter said she was "a handful".
GINGERNUTS - tidying up the last few crumbs. Tasters who did not
taste immediately discovered something curious - the NSW ones, which
are teeth-crackingly hard straight out of the pack, rapidly soften up
and go chewy. Clearly they are the most hygroscopic gingernut. I wonder
why?
One is that we took the bi-yatch to the bea-yatch. Squid bounding through salt and sea and sand. Her natural habitat. And a night away where there were shallows to be splashed in and sunscreen to be smeared was rather good for us bipeds, too. We were never a beachy family growing up so anytime I get away, it feels like a special treat, like when I managed to sponge a weekend away with rich schoolfriends who had family houses at Lorne and Barwon Heads and Point Lonsdale and so forth.
The other is that we stopped at a cavernous storehouse of glorious old junk on the way back and I didn't buy a thing.
