See You Next Wednesday
It doesn't rain but it pours.
It was raining when I drove to the cinema yesterday. It was patchy rain. When I drove through the intersection at Hugh Street you could not see the road markings on Woolcock Street, even the catseyes were under water. Two hundred metres later when I turned off onto Dalrymple Road the rain had stopped, but the road was wet. Another hundred metres on the rain started again and then, about two hundred metres further on the other side of the Bayswater Road lights, it stopped and the road was dry except for two tyre tracks. Fascinating.
If you thought
Clerks was gripping,
Mallrats was deep,
Chasing Amy was uplifting, and
Dogma was tightly plotted you are going to adore
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I didn't, but I laughed a lot anyway and Kevin Smith's hour and a half of location jokes has inspired me. Quality control is obviously not too rigorous, all I need are some ideas...
Work: Public servants whine about working for the Bastard Squad and read secular significance into
Buffy the Vampire Slayer over pizza.
Monty Dogs: A character piece set in a bowling alley. Something inexplicably mystical happens to the team at the end.
Chasing Polly: Love and multiple personalities.
Karma: A road movie like
Dogma except the religious stuff isn't made up. Well, no more than real religious stuff is made up. What I mean is the religious stuff is real religious stuff: Metatron and the Lord of the Flies, not shit demons and the thirteenth disciple. And Björk is God.
Dave and Jimbozelbub Strike Back: Everybody gets to suggest a scene they would like to see in the movie and then Dave and Rob write a Torg adventure to link them together.
I had a chat to Martina Hingis at about half past two this morning, she was having trouble sleeping. She felt she should have lost at about the quater-final stage, that she did not merit her place in the final and this would be made plain to see. After about forty-five minutes of talking it out Marty felt more positive and thought she would be able to get some sleep. I don't think it was enough though and after she lost the tiebreaker in the second set she was just going through the motions. It's astounding how much money your attitude can be worth.
Karma Fried Chicken
Yoga was good on account of I achieved one of the things on my list of why am I doing this. The thing that I did was to sit on my heels, something that I have not done since 1984. That was a nice thing, however the day was not over.
"If you stop to buy lunch at a multinational fast food outlet on your way home from a yoga session then you deserve all the headaches you get." -
urban jungle saying
Not only did I see it coming, I even had second thoughts, but it was right near the post office and I had to stop anyway and... whatever. I've paid my debt to the cosmos, one breastless spirit chicken was pecking away at the back of my eyes all day and all of the night. It was only appeased when I offered up my dinner at half past two this morning. Here endeth the lesson.
Meanwhile Chris had a birthday. Happy birthday Mr Flynn. You are so strong, and smart, and everybody likes you.
Sun goes up. Sun goes down.
On the way home today I popped over to The Yoga Space to confirm they had reopened on the fifteenth. The sign on the door now says the fifth, which means I've missed two sessions already. More annoying for the fact that I've been slacking off recently because I think my rusty technique may be doing more harm than good. (Not that it was shiny to start with, but it wasn't causing pain either.)
Emily is back to her leapiest: clearing tables, activating keyboard shortcuts, and attempting to trap herself behind the louvres. Look, her tongue is sticking out, only you can't look because her image has not been recorded in an electronic medium. Maybe one day. In the mean time you will just have to trust me. If it weren't for the patches of recently shaved fur you would never know the universe had been threatened. Now she is sitting on my lap and pressing her claws into my thigh. She has the brain of a cat.
I saw
Lantana. It is a good movie. You just want to cry. But you don't. (Not even when you get in the car and Dianah Ah Naid sings
Perfect Family all the way home.)
Learning experience.
I wonder how you put a
link in this...
Lord of the Ringses.
I went to see the best story ever last night at the movies, again. The first time I saw it with my brother who has a theory about our mother reading Tolkien's stories to us as children and our moral philosophy. This time there were seven of my friends from university with various degrees of Tolkien knowledge; from Dave ("great, now I don't have to read the books") to Chris ("Gandalf's sword should glow like Frodo's"). Afterwards we eventually found a coffee shop that was open and sat around comparing experiences. Dave was surprised when the movie finished before the ring was destroyed; Chris had an interminable list of bits from the book they missed out; everybody enjoyed it thoroughly.
Happy birthday Rodney who is called Ted.
He says good things and clever things. He writes impenetrable poetry (which is also a good and clever thing). He laughs well and looks mighty cute in them glasses. He is thirty-four. Many happy returns of the day.
My application to participate in the March system testing exercise was rejected today. Apparently I can't go because it's during a slow period and lots of staff are expected to be away on leave then. So I can't go to this exercise with all it's personal development and expert training aspects because the management are hoping staff will be taking their vacations in the off season. It is going to be so easy to leave this job, with any luck it will be in February or March when everyone else is on leave.
P.S. For those concerned about the fate of the universe, Emily is behaving more like a cat on the mend than a cat on the way out. New antibiotics and cooler weather have seen her appetite improve and her right hind foot return to it's weight bearing and ambulatory duties.
Travelling the rut.
I went back to my regularly scheduled office today after reducing the staff shortage in town for the last three weeks. Same old same old: find out which pile of paperwork has been voted most likely to make our stats look better, then spend the day trying to look at it between the interruptions. One of the interruptions was my access becoming inactive while I was having a tea break. That was interesting because, of the three people authorised to activate access: one is on leave; one is acting in her bosses position which doesn't have the authority; and the other one is me, only my access had become inactive.
Emily has been sewn back together and she has some antibiotics which smell like they are very banana flavoured. She is much less leapy with bits of thread tying her skin together. The stitches come out in a week but I think I'll take her in for a check before then as she is not enjoying her convalescence. Tonight she has decided her right hind leg should not be used at all even though her other back leg has four times as many stitches in it.
Upstairs Mr Stompy and Mr Sweary have invited Mr Shouty over to be excited. Either Mr Shouty is easily excited or they have many very exciting things upstairs because the last six hours have been punctuated by shrieks of joy and other happy exclamations. Many of them beginning with the letter F.
An animal was harmed in the production of this log.
I saw Ken Besgrove today. I think the last time I saw Ken was 1988. Unfortunately he was busy listening to the veterinarian tell him how to cure his dog and I was busy finding out how dead my cat was. So we didn't manage much more than a brief salutation before we had to pay attention to someone else.
Emily, Defender of the Universe saw off the evil forces of evil last night. Boy was her tail looking big and puffy when she had finished with them. Unfortunately her battle strategy involved being bitten across the back by the evil forces' doglike projection into this world, so she is spending the night at the Western Suburbs Vet Clinic where Doctor Dick will decide what to do with her tomorrow. She will definitely need stitches. The list of her injuries is not happy reading so instead I'll mention that Emily was purring so much the vet couldn't check her heartbeat. She has the brain of a cat.
The battle itself was over before I realised I didn't know where Frank keeps the hose. Catching the telltale sound of the evil forces being lured up the driveway to their doom I went out to watch. The doglike object had its head in the garden but turned around as I approached. This is when I began to wondered where the hose was kept because this was a particularly sleek and muscular object with an aggressive stance and obvious teeth. I didn't wonder about the hose for long though because a second doglike object joined the first from the garden. Given the range of choices in the driveway at that point I would describe doglike object number two as the mean looking one. Then they fled, thwarted in their evil schemes by Emily who limped victoriously out of the garden and around the back of the house.
How I finished 2001 off with a bang.
The guys upstairs had been playing the music loud for a few hours now (something Marilyn Mansonish I didn't recognize) and although Mr Stompy was home Mr Sweary seemed to be out for the evening. Mr Stompy had a couple of friends over for some inebriation and at one point the friends were both out on the back verandah yelling into their mobile phones because Mr Stompy's music was too loud. Soon after that Mr Idiot complained loudly about the cab company phone being engaged (at 10:40pm on New Year's Eve) and how he had failed to hail one in the street after five minutes of standing on the road shoulder. Then I left.
Having discovered most and sundry had other circle plans for the evening I had decided to stroll into town for the jazz festival and to watch the fireworks. So I did. The jazz was jazzy, James Morrison was in town for the event and he was blaring away rather well in between the lyrics. Ella (not Fitzgerald) did a fine job advising us it's summertime and the livin' is easy. Ella could have kept everyone aware that the fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high without a microphone, so while she sang Linda Cardellini and I played a bit of spot the phone call. Is there some new fad where people attend concerts so they can crouch over with their back to the stage and their hands over their ears trying to ignore the performance?
Other highlights included:
Katie Underwood asked me to get her a beer because she had been refused service at the bar.
An unidentified man tried to climb the freestanding metre high picket fence (easily lifted out of the way or even walked around) and succeeded in cracking a rib and scaring the children.
Ellen Degeneres apologised for her girlfriend's behaviour when she threatened to poke my eyes out with the heel of her sensible shoes (ouch!) if I tried to rape her. Fair enough, and special mention for the non-sequitur, Ellen and I had been talking about the Quit Smoking billboard.
Watching some guy drop a pencil down Britney Spears' natal cleft. He didn't really, he'd left his pencil at home. But he certainly spent a long time lining up the shot.
The count down caught many people by surprise, but if you're really concerned that you shouted "Happy New Year" two minutes early you can always hop on a plane to Los Angeles and have another go. Then the fireworks went off. It took me a while to realize that the big pause between the pairs of starbursts was meant to represent 2002. (At least I hope it was meant to.) Fortunately it got busier shortly and by the end of it there were huge flurries of dazzling lights arrayed across the heavens. Fireworks are pretty, and they go bang.
