I'm Off Again In My World

A shout out...

2012-01-31T19:53:00.003+11:00

...to the person who found my blog by googling "how do i make my k26s shoes not so slippery". Seriously, whoever you are, I hope you found the answer. I also hope you realise how hideous those shoes are. And I can't help wondering how the hell you ended up here.

And to the person who wanted to know "what does the crumpet setting do toaster". It does amazing things, my friend. Truly amazing things.

And to the people who are STILL getting here by googling "Mark Hoppus glasses". I hope you're aware that he has new glasses now, and that you can see a picture of them on twitter. Personally, I liked the old ones better.

And to the many, many people who are getting here by searching for variations on the theme of glitter and/or sparkles. I apologise for the serious lack of glitter AND sparkles here. I know how sad it is when you're expecting awesome shinyness (which I have decided looks less wrong with a y than a second i. I don't think either is correct, though) and you get a crappy blog filled with the inane ramblings of a 20 something chick who doesn't get out enough. Or, you know, anything that's not awesome shinyness.

Shit My Housemate Says/Does

2012-01-31T18:55:00.001+11:00

I have all new housemates this year. Housemate number one is a friend from uni, who I've had a few German classes with, and who I regularly sit with at German conversation evenings, speaking lots of English, not much German and giggling hysterically. Housemate number two is a girl who I worked with briefly, although she found out that I had empty rooms pretty much by coincidence. Housemate number three arrives this weekend, and is effectively an unknown value, although she's doing Zoology and likes dogs, so we think she's safe.

Housemate number one is continually saying and doing all kinds of hilarious crap, some of which is intentionally funny, and some of which is just funny by accident. I felt I really needed to share this with all of you.

On her first night in the house, completely out of the blue: Please don't lick my toothbrush.
Naturally, I hadn't even thought of doing this until she said that, but I now very much want to do it.

While investigating the parts of the house that aren't her room: Oh my god, look at this cupboard! It's awesome! Can I have this cupboard?
Said cupboard is very small (it has one standard size door, and doesn't go back very far), and is built into the smallest room in the house. It will be henceforth known as The Cupboard. She has 4 times more cupboard space in her room, which is apparently totally boring.

Several days after moving in
Me: Where are you?
HM#1, wandering up the hallway: I was in the empty room, looking at The Cupboard. It's so awesome.

Walking up stairs and smelling my cooking dinner, which was not vegan at all, even though she is: Oh my god, your dinner smells so good!
Me: It's lasagne
HM#1: Oh, so that's just like one giant animal product, then?
Me: Yep
HM#1: Damn.

Coming home after going downtown: I swear to God, I just saw Viktor Krum walking down the street.
Me: Sure you did.
HM#1: I DID! He was all scowly and everything.
This conversation resulted in her admitting that "scowly with a monobrow" is all it takes to look like Viktor. I think this means that if Viktor was a muppet, he'd look like Bert. I am apparently the crazy one.

After hearing that the council says that we're not allowed to have chickens as pets: What about ducks?
Me: If they say no chickens, they probably also say no ducks.
HM#1: What about dickens?
Me: Huh?
HM#1: Dickens. They're what happens when you sticky tape a duck and a chicken together and pretend that it's one animal. I bet they don't say ANYTHING about dickens.

Talking about The Cupboard: I mean, it's not like I pull an Edward and just stand there and watch it sleeping all night. It's a cupboard. It doesn't sleep.
And "To pull an Edward" is now an expression in our house. HM#2's puppy apparently did it the first night she (the puppy, not the housemate) was here, and is now under suspicion of being "a sparkly creep" from HM#1.

While we were talking about God Only Knows What: You know what else is kind of cool? That door in your bedroom wall. I was in there the other day, and I was like "Hey, what's this blue door thingy in the wall?" and I opened it, and there was this big empty space with boxes in it. But I don't know how you sleep in there, because, I mean, there's just a random door in your wall. How do you know what's up there?
This door is the access to the ceiling storage space. It's really not that interesting. Of course, I'm not allowed in there, because the potential for falling through the ceiling by being unco is massive, so for all I know, it's actually an entrance to Narnia, and this is why we couldn't find the box for my printer when I realised that that's where the CD with the software for scanning documents to text instead of image was.

Last night at about 9pm: Who wants to brush my teeth for me?
Me: Oh! I'll do it!
HM#1: No. You're too enthusiastic about this and it scares me...have you been licking my toothbrush?

An open letter to everyone bitching about the return of The Yellow Wiggle, who always has been and always will Greg, and not Sam the stinky imposter

2012-01-21T09:38:00.001+11:00

Dear people who are bitching and moaning about the awesomeness that is Greg's return to The Wiggles,

I feel I should give you some fair warning - I'm far too emotionally attached to The Wiggles to not rant and rave about this.

Stop your moaning. Look, I'm not going to pretend that this whole thing couldn't have been handled better. Clearly, it could have. That Today interview is possibly the single most awkward thing I've ever watched, but it's not like the interviewer was doing a particularly good job. Who the hell asks anyone, ever, if someone they worked with for 5 years in that sort of job was just "a hired hand"? Also, who the hell lets Anthony be the spokesperson for anything, ever? Even as a little kid, I was aware that he was kind of a tool, and I was a little kid and he was a Wiggle. Does that not tell you something? But this is not the important issue here.

The important issue is parents everywhere, saying that their kids are going to be heartbroken that The Yellow Wiggle is leaving. No. He's not. The Yellow Wiggle is returning, and the person who was shoved into his skivvy as a reasonable substitute is leaving (on a related note, why do we still talk about Wiggles wearing skivvies? They haven't worn actual skivvies in forever. Possibly over a decade. Now they're just normal shirts. This bothers me more than it should). This is nothing personal. Sam seems to be quite lovely, and I have nothing against him as a person. But they could have had anyone in the world put on Greg's skivvy when he left, and I still would have had serious issues with it. No, really. I probably could have brought myself to hate Chris Cheney if he'd been Greg's replacement (although, seriously, how awesome would that have been? And how awesome IS The Living End's version of Hot Potato?), because they were idiots for trying to replace Greg. Everyone's now all "Why couldn't he have come back as the Green/Orange/Heliotrope Wiggle?" Because Greg is the Yellow Wiggle, that's why. Why couldn't they have made Sam the Green/Orange/Heliotrope Wiggle 5 years ago, instead of clearly attempting to trick the kids by putting someone who looks a lot like Greg in a skivvy the same colour as his? Yeah, you've got no answer for that one, do you?

Parents everywhere are saying "What am I supposed to tell my small child who is totally attached to Sam?" That Greg used to be the Yellow Wiggle, but he got very sick, and Sam was only there while he was getting better, just like when the grown ups at daycare/pre-school/kindy/whatever get sick and someone else comes in to do their job until they're better. The only reason that anyone thought Sam was a permanent Wiggle is because it never occured to anyone that Greg would get better. Let's be honest about it - dysautonomia doesn't sound like something that you recover from in a way that allows you to wiggle again. And I think you're missing the real thing here - your kid is like, 6 years old. 6 year olds are resilient, and they're still very, very much of the opinion that Wiggles are invicible and immortal (only they're 6, so they probably don't actually know either of those words, and I honestly have no idea how those concepts even exist for them without the relevant words), so it's all good, because nothing bad can actually happen to a Wiggle. You know who you should really be thinking of in this whole situation? The grow-ups. Or at least, the people who are working very hard at pretending that they're grown-ups, because that's what the law calls them, when they're actually just very, very tall children. Mostly referred to as people in their 20s.

See, as a parent of a small child, you may not understand this, but your average 20 something is fairly attached to the Wiggles. And we've had a bloody long time to develop our attachment. We're the first group of people to not really remember a world before the Wiggles. When shit goes down with The Wiggles, it rocks our worlds. Your kid is 5 and learning that sometimes, people change jobs. Life lessons, people. They're important. They'll get over it. You know what people don't get over so easily? Being 16 and learning that a Wiggle is so sick that he can't stand up any more. How does the world work without The Wiggles? We've got no baseline for that, and we're old enough so that this is kind of a problem. Little kids just make the new thing their baseline. Turns out they're just going to put another, similar looking guy in the same colour shirt and keep on going as if nothing happened. THAT is an earth-shattering, heartbreaking revaltion. It's like being a toddler and being told that Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny aren't real on the same day that you discover that puppies turn into dogs and they get old and they DIE.
Now imagine being 21 and discovering that Jeff is undergoing heart surgery and having people suggest that it's because Jeff is a druggie (and yes, I DID put my fingers in my ears and go "LALALALA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" at that last part), when, clearly, Jeff actually has sleep apnoea, which makes people spontaneously fall asleep during the day, and leads to a highly elevated risk of cardiovascular disorders (seriously, google it. It's a thing, and it does that shit. I'm not making it up). I mean, DUH!

And then, suddenly, just when it seems like the world as you know it may be about to end, because there's sick Wiggles left, right and centre, and the Harry Potter series is finally over (which is only sort of related, but it's more holy-crap-the-world-as-we-know-it-is-ending stuff), you get the news that GREG'S BACK, BITCHES! The sort of person who was looking for a sign that there's a god might take that as their sign. But apparently, you can't just let us have our glorious moment of happiness. You have to go and rain on our collective parade by being all "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?!" Please, just let us have this one final moment of childhood pleasure before we have to go and get real jobs and mortgages and shit. Your kids have decades. We've got a couple of years, tops. If you want to be concerned about stuff that affects your kids, how about the fact that the Yo Gabba Gabba people are clearly on drugs, Lazy Town has a creepy-ass superhero who spends his whole life hanging out with kids, and Iggle Piggle is a giant, blue condom with legs? THAT'S the shit that's gonna scar your kids, not the fact that Wiggles are once again back in their original formation of awesomeness.

Love,

Cranky sort of grown-ups everywhere.
Or, you know, Cerry pretending that she speaks for cranky sort of grown-ups everywhere. Take your pick.

I Has A Happy, Day 31: Captioned Pictures

2011-10-31T00:00:00.000+11:00

Yes, I am easily amused. But this is not a bad thing, because it means that Im rarely short of ways to amuse myself. More importantly, how can you see this and not be happy?

Or this

Which makes me feel smart
Or this

Which is probably really only funny if you're a linguistics major and have therefore been that crazy person in the library.

I Has A Happy, Day 30: Two Guys & A Girl

2011-10-30T00:00:00.000+11:00

Ok, so the acting is pretty bad. But it's childish humour at its best, AND it's Ryan Reynolds in his early 20s so I don't feel creepy for thinking he's gorgeous. Also, the original theme was pretty awesome.

This is a lot funnier with context, but really, who needs context when there's Ryan Reynolds? Particularly when he's doing a bad Scottish accent.

I Has A Happy, Day 29: Scratching

2011-10-29T00:00:00.000+11:00

As much as I enjoy scratching in the sense of the word where it's about getting rid of your itches, I mean this in the sense of the word where you're destroying vinyl records. And by you, I mean not-me because Dad's record collection is apparently worth more than my life, so I was never allowed to practise. I hope he realises that he destroyed my opportunity to have super mad DJ skillz and a related terribly successful career (I think I've just found my next series of blog posts: stuff that Cerry could have had a terribly successful career in if her parents weren't mean, old stinkyheads who never let her develop her super mad skillz in anything fun). Anywho. This is another one of those things that I probably should have grown out of my fascination with, but which I didn't. I realise that no one is going to believe that I don't really like rap, between the whole Will-Smith's-Music-Makes-Me-Happy thing and this, but seriously, scratching is da bomb (which I have suddenly started using more often that I did in the 90s, when it didn't even make you sound like a loser. This concerns me).

I Has A Happy, Day 28: Horn Sections

2011-10-28T00:00:00.000+11:00

Not like, brass band horn sections. Ska horn sections. And occasionally swing bands, but that's mostly because swin music is kinda like ska (in the sense where kinda like means they both have horns, are in 4/4 timing and are typically fairly fast). But seriously, I love me some horn section. I am yet to hear a song that was not improved by one. I will let the evidence speak for itself.

And somtimes, there are even horns in non-covers.

I Has A Happy, Day 27: Lemurs

2011-10-27T00:00:00.000+11:00

In about July of 2000, Dad was walking from Flinders' Street Station to Mum's office when he saw two stuffed lemurs in the window of a shop, and thought "I must remember this place. I bet Ceiridwen would love a lemur for Christmas." On the way back to the station, Dad walked past the shop again, and there was only one lemur in the window, and he thought "I must go in there now, because they're not gonna have lemurs left when we get round to Christmas shopping." So he went in and bought a lemur, and somehow smuggled it into the house without me noticing, and it lived in a cupboard until Christmas day, when I opened it and fell totally in love with it.

That lemur was named Lenny, and he is currently snuggled up in my bed with me, and looking somewhat worse for wear after having spent nearly 11 years being squished in a bed every night, dragged to sleepovers, and generally well-loved. He's been through the wash once or twice. I am now terrified to do this again, because I'm worried he won't come out alive, so now he just gets pegged to the washing line by his ears to get some fresh air every now and then.

Anyway, before I was given Lenny, I had never seen a lemur before. Ever since them, I have thought that lemurs are the freaking coolest animal ever. I dragged some unwitting friends to see Madagascar with me, because I figured it would be impossible to make a movie called Madagascar without putting lemurs in it (I was right. And they were pretty damn awesome lemurs, too). When we went to Dubbo Zoo for an excursion in high school, I bounded my way through the entire early morning (no, really early. Like, 6 or 7 am early) walk around the zoo, because I was so excited about seeing the lemurs at the end. For Christmas in 2007, Mum and Dad gave me a tshirt with a somewhat evil-looking lemur (cause, you know, lemurs that don't look somewhat evil totally exist) on it that says "My plan for world domination involves lemurs. Lots and lots of lemurs." Yes, yes it does. And they will live in my castle with me, and we will have a beautiful, happy existance and play together every day.

I'm not 100% sure if the lemur in this picture is real or not, but HOLY SHIT, IT'S A LEMUR AND A FENEC FOX IN THE SAME PICTURE!!!!! CUTE OVERLOAD!

I Has A Happy, Day 26: Rainbowness

2011-10-26T00:00:00.000+11:00

This should not really surpise anyone, having already seen my bedroom and my doona cover this month. It kind of messes with people's heads, though, because the vast majority of my clothing is black or denim. What's left tends to be purple, because it's my favourite colour, or blue, because it's a good colour on me. Also, it's too damn hard to find rainbow clothing when you're past the age of 5. I do have rainbow thermals, though. And 4 pairs of rainbow earrings. And rainbow stripey knee-high toe socks, which I love but which are getting thin on the bottom, so I can't really wear them anymore. Oh, and this year for my birthday, I had rainbow cake (and also 2 C for Cerry cakes, but this is neither particularly interesting, nor really relevant to a post about rainbows). Have I mentioned that my mum is awesomer than your Mum recently? Yeah, she is, cause she made me this. Look at all the colours! And also, look at the super awesome black candles with rainbow glitter that were only $2 for 12. Or possibly $1 for 12, and I bought two packs so it cost me $2 all up. Either way, it was very cheap awesomeness.

I Has A Happy, Day 25: Sparkles

2011-10-25T00:00:00.000+11:00

Or glitter. Or actually, just shiny stuff in general.It's one of the many things that most people grow out of as a small child that has persisted well into not-small-childhood for me. I have no idea why shiny stuff makes me so happy, but it does. It also distracts me like there's no tomorrow, which is sometimes good, and sometimes bad. Like when I get to the end of 2 hour linguistics lecture and realise that I started watching my lecturer's earrings dance about 10 minutes in and kind of stopped paying attention. It's her fault for wearing big, sparkly earrings though, right?
My mosquito sized attention span aside...look at the shiny, colourful sparkles!

I Has A Happy, Day 24: Buffy and Angel

2011-10-24T00:00:00.000+11:00

Buffy the character gives me the shits, and quite frankly, I think that Angel should have hung round in Sunnydale and Spike should have been given his own TV show, because Spike is a far superior character (don't get me wrong, I do like Angel, I just think Spike is awesomer). Despite this, I do love both of these shows. Joss Whedon is a genius. And you know what both of these shows have that make me happy? I mean, aside from shirtless Spike? Childish jokes. Angel getting confused and jumping into the wrong shiny black convertable in an LA parking lot? Vastly amusing. Alyson Hannigan following the sound of someone playing a flute to find an invisible girl (yes, I realise this is probably unintentional, but I don't care)? Hysterical. Angel, the Wee Little Puppet Man? Still giggling more than 6 months later.

Also, they can really be terribly though provoking at times. Like here. I've been contemplating this since like, April, and I still don't really know.

I Has A Happy, Day 23: Chocolate

2011-10-23T00:00:00.000+11:00

Really? You want me to explain why chocolate makes me happy? You're an idiot. We all know it's because chocolate releases endorphines and endorphines make you happy and happy people don't kill their husbands.

Want. So very, very want. Also, want this one.

I Has A Happy, Day 22: Michael Franti and Spearhead

2011-10-22T00:00:00.000+11:00

This is actually somewhat misleading, because I'm 99% sure that it's just these two songs that I like. As well as being super happy, these songs make me giggle, because they make Kari bop with a silly grin on her face every time she hears them (which is, quite frankly, most times she gets into my car, because they're both on my driving CD and MP3 player).

I can't actually embed the studio version of this, which I think is more happy enducing, because the record company are poopie heads, but I still challenge you to listen to this without smiling.

I Has A Happy, Day 21: Will Smith

2011-10-21T00:00:00.000+11:00

While we're on the topic of Wills, I do like myself a bit of Big Willy. Even if he had no talent going for him, the fact that he makes those jokes alone would be enough to make me love Will Smith. I have to admit, I haven't seen a movie with him in it for YEARS. Like, possibly since the second Men In Black Movie, which was in like, 2002. Possibly earlier. IMDB is too much effort right now. But anyway. Despite my normal distaste for rap, I rather love Will Smith. I also think he's utterly brilliant in interviews - there's something very, very endearing about him. I know that there are all those rumours about the Scientology involvement, but you know what? It doesn't bother me that much. Actually, I think that if it's true, the Scientologists should ditch their Tom Cruise promotional video and get Will to do one instead. I would be lying if I said that it wouldn't make me briefly reconsider my views on the whole thing (very, very, very briefly). Anywho, with the goal of distracting you all from the fact that I just admitted that, LOOK! It's Will at Live 8!

And now, it's my favourite Will Smith song, only partly because Handschuhe totally swaggers a huge proportion of the time, and it makes me giggle.

I Has A Happy, Day 20: Wil Anderson

2011-10-20T00:00:00.000+11:00

I know. I know. I'm too grown up for fart jokes. Except I'm clearly not, because Wil Anderson is in his 30s and he's still making them, so it's alright that they/him make me happy. One of the best nights I've had this year was watching a Glasshouse DVD that one of the guys I work with lent me. There were tears of laughter. There was laughter that was so hysterical that I went silent and just sat there clapping like a retarded seal. There was pure delight at the wonderful hair with the multi coloured streaks. And sadly enough, I have only ever seen one stand up spot that made me laugh harder than this (Adam Hills talking about why he loves languages), even 4 years later.

Yes, it's the PMS joke that make me laugh the most. And yes, I know, I'm letting the sisterhood down. I don't give a shit - it's funny.

I Has A Happy, Day 19: Really Bad Covers of Even Worse Songs

2011-10-19T00:00:00.000+11:00

I have 3 different versions of All I Want For Christmas is You on my computer. Not one of them is Mariah Carey (who, for all I know, was covering it anyway). I have 2 versions of I Want Candy, and neither of them is Bow Wow Wow. I have 2 versions of London Bridge, and I don't even like the original. And it was when I acquired the second version of London Bridge that I realised that there is truly no logic behind this obsession, but I do love a good covers album. From the Screen To Your Stereo (both incarnations thereof) by New Found Glory is pretty good. Four Year Strong's Explains It All is pretty freaking sweet. But I do believe that Zebrahead's album Panty Raid may be the reason that the music industry was invented. And speaking of -

They do a truly delightful cover of Mickey, too, but it doesn't have a video to go with it, and therefore doesn't have the stupid costumes or hilarious dancing.

I feel that it's an attrocity that there's no actual video to go with this, but whatcha gonna do?

I Has A Happy, Day 18: Avril Lavigne

2011-10-18T00:00:00.000+11:00

Yes, people who are acquainted with me, we finally got there. When I need to go to my happy place, there is only one musician who didn't release something during the 90s who gets busted out (I told you, no shame when it comes to music). And there have been many, many occasions when people have walked into the kitchen and found my pyjama clad butt poking out of the fridge or cupboard as I dig for ingredients, wiggling along to Girlfriend. I know, terribly, terribly classy. But look - sparkles. And bright colours. And cheerleader costumes. So very happy.

And now for some oldschool happy (Shut up. I'm 21. 2003 is oldschool. The 90s are harcore oldschool.)

I Has A Happy, Day 17: Babies

2011-10-17T00:00:00.000+11:00

I am about as clucky as people come. People who know me will stop talking when I see a baby, because they know I've just completely stopped playing any attention to them. It's a well known fact that I believe babies (of the not-needing-a-nappy-change variety) smell like rainbows. Any time we have a work related event that my boss can bring her toddler to, she does so, on the assumption that she's just scored herself a free babysitter (and she has. Always. I spent 20 minutes engrossed in the baby showing off her animal noises last time she came in to work. It was the highlight of my month). They're just so cute and happy, with the bouncing and wiggling when they're excited, and the big grin at the tiniest little thing, and the babbling and words that are really only like half words...and...wait, now I'm babbling. I also quite enjoy no one questioning my bouncing and wiggling when I'm happy, and big grin at the tiniest little thing, and babbling and words that are really only like half words when I'm hanging out with babies.
But seriously, tell me that this picture doesn't make you happy.

I Has A Happy, Day 16: Mexican Food

2011-10-16T00:00:00.000+11:00

This is weird, because I HATE chilli. Seriously. Mild salsa is pretty good. Medium makes my mouth burn, my eyes water and my nose run. Hot makes me want to die. Jalepenos are my idea of torture, much to the delight of Dad and my brother, who believe that Jalepenos are a slight tingle, and like to sneak them into food while I'm not looking so that they can watch me writhe in pain. Despite this, I freaking love Mexican food. Love the Old El Paso stuff. Love Mexican restaurants. When my (now ex) Mexican housemate cooked Mexican for us, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Aside from being yummy, it's fun to say. Fajita. Enchilda. Taco. Huevos Rancheros. Quesadilla. Nachos. Tinga. And my favourite, burrito - cause who doesn't want to eat a little donkey? Also, it's pretty and colourful.

I Has A Happy, Day 15: Pasta

2011-10-15T00:00:00.000+11:00

I think I was Italian in a past life. Unfortunately, I didn't get to keep the olive complexion this time around, but I did keep the love of Italian food. I have always been a huge fan of Italian, and as a kid, I practically lived off pasta. This should mean I hate it now, right? Nup. Love it. Always have a shelf full of it in the cupboard. It's nom nom nom, it goes with pretty much anything and it's easy to cook. Also, bolognese sauce is easy, AND it freezes well. What's not to love?

I Has A Happy, Day 14: Racing Stripes

2011-10-14T00:00:00.000+11:00

I'm going to come out and say it. I absolutely love my hair, but at the same time, I really don't like it much. I know that people envy it, and for that, I love it. I know that if I had the time and motivation, I could do all sorts of amazing things with it, and for that, I love it. However, it also goes all puffy when there's even the slightest bit of humidity in the air, it's ungodly thick and therefore difficult to deal with (I have snapped SOOO many hairbands in my lifetime that it's just not funny), and it also conducts static electricity in a somewhat unnatural way. This makes me hate it.

But anywho, back to the part with the racing stripes. I have had essentially the same haircut for about 10 years now. Sometimes, I move the part. Occasionally, I get it cut shorter. But it's always fairly long with layers and shaping around the face. And when I get sick of it and the hairdresser is doing a foils special, it has racing stripes. By this, I mean I get bright red foils put in it. And I love those bright red foils, even though they're only bright red for a few weeks, and they then go this sort of brassy colour (which does actually work in my hair, but it's still sad), and I get epic regrowth. I don't have any at the moment, because as the last lot started to grow out, I looked at the roots and went "Wait, has my hair always been that colour?" I have never wanted to be that person - the one who dyes their hair so often that they're not sure what their natural colour is. But damn, do my racing stripes make me happ, even if it is pretty much impossible to get a camera to take a decent picture of them.

I Has A Happy, Day 13: Tina Fey

2011-10-13T00:00:00.000+11:00

I would totally turn for Tina Fey. This does not surprise most people who know me, partially because several of them would, too. But there's apparently something about Tina Fey that strikes people as being very Cerry. I'm going to assume that this means I remind people of Tina Fey on a deeper level than female with dark hair, and take it as a complement. I loved Bossypants. I lent it to one of the guys I work with, and we've been driving our boss crazy having a We <3 Tina club before the kidlets arrive. And I had far more to say about this topic, but then I got engrossed in watching Tina Fey videos on Youtube and I laughed so hard that I kinda forgot all of it. So I'm just gonna leave you with this delightful clip which I am still laughing at 20 minutes later.

Yes, it WAS lesbian paelentologist that got me. How did you guess?

I Has A Happy, Day 12: Spicks And Specks

2011-10-12T00:00:00.000+11:00

Spicks and Specks is a competitive sport in my family. We yell answers at the TV. We yell abuse at each other. Dad yells in surprise when I know anything about music before 1995. Mum and Dad are scarred for life by one of their offspring hearing the question "Green Day drummer Tre Cool has one testi..." and saying "Unicycle accident" without even looking up from the uni assignment she's doing (no, I'm not entirely sure why I know that, but I do, and it got me some truly awesome looks of fear that night). It's a bonding thing.
I am now reduced to yelling answers at the TV with only Handschuhe for company, because my housemate had very little interest in Spicks and Specks before she moved in, and has none as a result of having been upstairs while I was watching it at one point. But it's still fun - I always win when it's just me and the dog. And the LOLs are still fairly epic.
And really, how could this not make you happy (I mean, I guess if your mind doesn't own so much gutterside property that it can rent it out, it might not be quite so amusing, but that's not a problem I have)

I Has A Happy, Day 11: The Big Bang Theory

2011-10-11T00:00:00.000+11:00

The TV show, not the scientific theory. The scientific theory is boring. The TV show, on the other hand, is hysterically funny, and has the added bonus of making me feel smart when I get the nerd jokes. I think that the appeal is somewhat doubled by the fact that I know so very, very many people like that. I'm related to one, actually (although thankfully, he's not a Sheldon), and it makes me happy to know that there are other people in the world who must feel my pain, because they're written a TV show about it. Also, how could this image NOT make you happy?

I Has A Happy, Day 10: Jammies

2011-10-10T00:00:00.000+11:00

I have always loved pyjamas. Even when I was little and hated bedtime, I LOVED pyjama time. Mum is also a pretty big fan of jammies, which I think explains it. But also, they're so comfy, and, let's face it, flattering. If your PJs don't make you look good, then you've wasted your money. You really have. You have also wasted your money if your pyjamas don't have some sort of fun picture on them, like mine (although, in all fairness, the Matchbox 20 shirt is a hand me down from my brother, and I paid absolutely zero for it).

I Has A Happy, Day 9: Bed

2011-10-09T00:00:00.000+11:00

I love my bed. It's where sleep, which is my favourite activity, takes place. It's where my electric blanket lives. It's where no one judges you for wearing your jammies. It's where stuffed animals can live out their days in snuggly comfort. And most importantly, mine has the coolest doona cover ever. How could this not make you happy?

I Has A Happy, Day 8: Hanson

2011-10-08T00:00:00.000+11:00

Have I mentioned recently that I have no shame? I mean, I do have some shame, but when it comes to music, not so much. I'm not even going to pretend that I don't have Hanson's entire discography on my computer, and the only reason I don't have it on CD is that it's quite expensive to buy, given that pretty much the only way to acquire it is to get it shipped from overseas. I figure that if there's no shame in them still producing music well into their 20s, then there's no shame in me listening to it well into my 20s, and really, I'm only just barely into my 20s. I also figure that now that they no longer look like girls, there's no shame in the fact that Zac and Taylor are both on my freebie list (ok, yes there probably should be shame in that. I don't care. They turned out hot). And it's happy music. I dare you to watch this without smiling. It's got singing. And dancing (hey, I didn't say it was GOOD dancing). And ripping off of Blues Brothers. And Weird Al playing the tambourine.

Oh, and look - little tiny Hanson whose musical ability already shat all over yours (yes, I am jealous that 11 year old Zac could hold a part, and I'm 21 and I still can't).

I Has A Happy, Day 7: My Bedroom

2011-10-07T00:00:00.000+11:00

I love my bedroom for many reasons. It contains the vast majority of my stuff. It has a bed in it, and beds are used for sleeping, and sleeping is awesome. It has all my CDs and DVDs. It's purple (and blue on the ceiling and edging, but mostly purple). It has personality. No, really, it does. After fighting long and hard for a purple room, the first thing I did once all my stuff had been moved in was cover a large proportion of the purple wall space with posters, postcards and other assorted bits and pieces of interest. But, as several people have said on seeing it "Oh my god, it's SO YOU!"

This is my bedroom from the doorway. The rainbow ball thingy on my bedside table is my lamp. How freaking awesome is it? It was a 21st present from Mum and Dad, who have told me that it's worth a small fortune, so if I break it, they will break me. And I'm aware that the turquoise curtain looks out of place - it's the same colour as the ceiling, only a couple of shades darker, but the ceiling is very high, because I live in a converted garage, so it's kinda difficult to get into the photo.

This is my bedroom from my desk chair. And yes, damn right that's Oscar the Grouch next to the AFI poster. I am just that sort of person.

I Has A Happy, Day 6: Kitchenware

2011-10-06T00:00:00.000+11:00

My name is Cerry, and I'm a kitchenware addict. I'm not even going to pretend it's not true, because I have WAY too much kitchenware that I don't need to be able to get away with that. I even have a VIP card at one of the kitchenware stores in town. I feel the same way about kitchenware that many women feel about shoes or handbags - it's so pretty and I must have it, even though it's really expensive and I don't really need most of it. I have a wishlist and everything. I window shop. I look at it online. I am a sad, sad little puppy, but at least I have a well stocked kitchen. And lots of it is in fun colours, too, so that's double the win. This is my most recent haul of stuff I didn't really need. I've actually gone kitchenware shopping twice since then, but it was for stuff that I needed, and most of it wasn't as pretty as this stuff.

I Has A Happy, Day 5: Zumba

2011-10-05T00:00:00.000+11:00

I'm going to be honest. I have never actually set foot in Zumba class, because the combination of the timing, the cost and my chronic unconess has always meant I don't have the motivation. I do, however, have the DVDs, so I can make an ass of myself in the comfort of my own living room, where only the dog is watching (and really, she thinks Zumba's pretty fun, even though I do sometimes nearly decapitate her). I love them. The music is happy. They make me feel virtuous for exercising, without the inconvenience of actually having leave the house, or even seeming particularly exercisey. And while Beto (the dude who created Zumba) is really fucking creepy, the friendly, cheerful girls are so lovely that they almost have me convinced that if I Zumba enough, I will one day be skinny, toned, tanned and Latina (and while I may achieve the first two, the other two are most definitely hopeless). Also, the maraca weight thingies make nice noises.

I Has A Happy, Day 4: Evil League of Evil T-shirt

2011-10-04T00:00:00.000+11:00

What do you mean, you don't know what the Evil League of Evil is? It's only the single most brilliant group of super villains EVER. And I have a T-shirt, which makes me incredibly happy. I mean, it's the Evil League of Evil. It's from Dr Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, which rolls Joss Whedon, singing Neil Patrick Harris and Nathon Fillion and some rather dodgy songs all in to one. Add in to this equation the fact that the shirt was a 21st present from my Zebe (Yes, my Zebe. It's like my BFF, only it's a Zebe, which is far more awesome), and it's so happy inducing that it's pretty much of the happiness scale. Also, the general verdict from friends who make these sorts of verdicts is that it makes me look hot. Unfortunately, the picture quality on this one isn't great, because my camera has decided that in a terribly spiteful move, it's going to declare all the batteries in the house dead so I have to use my phone. But you get the idea.

I Has A Happy, Day 3: Bruno Mars

2011-10-03T00:00:00.000+11:00

I am so totally in love with Bruno Mars right now that it's not funny. Actually, it probably is kind of funny, but that's not what the expression is. My housemate is developing a pretty severe hatred of Doo-Wops & Hooligans, because I've played it so much (and I try to keep the CD rotation fairly varied when there are other people home, too). But really, how could someone partially responsible for the lyric "I guess she's an Xbox, and I'm more Atari" NOT make you happy? The good part of this clip doesn't start til about 2:20, but the shirt made me so happy I couldn't resist.

I Has A Happy, Day 2: Duckies

2011-10-02T00:00:00.000+10:00

When I walk Handschuhe on the leash, rather than taking her over to the offleash area with a creek running through it so she can have a run and a swim, we go through the arboretum. Handschuhe loves this, because there are all sorts of interesting smells there, like trees, birds, other dogs, people and food that people have been eating at the BBQ area. I like it because of the pond. And by pond, I mean glorified water feature, complete with a push-a-button waterfall thingy. There's a bridge that goes across the pond, which I make sure we walk across. This is not because I particularly like the pond, as such (it's actually a really creepy colour, which is not justified by the photo here. It's like, bright bluey green. I have no idea what they put in the water, but I do know that there's no way in hell I'm letting Handschuhe swim in it, and I think people who encourage their dogs to jump in it are crazy). It's because of the two duckies who live on it. They're white ducks, which I'm not sure I've ever seen in the wild before, and they're constantly quacking away happily to each other. I actually make a point of taking out my headphones as we come up to the bridge so that I can hear them. So, without further adieu, meet Ente and Entchen (yes, I called them Duck and Ducky. Shut up. They're nice words).

Happiness is Just Around the Corner (AKA: I Has A Happy, Day 1)

2011-10-01T00:00:00.000+10:00

At the start of the year when I picked my units for uni, 3 units with no exams in second semester seemed like a great idea, cause it meant I only had 1 exam at the end of semester. It seemed pretty good when I got to the start of semester. Now, with over 25% of my total assessment for the semester due within the space of a month, it seems like one of the dumbest things I have ever done. And I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to make it to the end of October sane, given my high levels of craziness to begin with. Or at least, I wasn't until earlier in the week, when I was walking the dog. This is not surprising, because walking the dog is when I have all my second best thoughts (my best thoughts happen in the shower. As do the really weird ones, like "I wonder how the Scooby Doo theme would go in German?"). Handschuhe was bouncing along, because that's just Handschuhe rolls, and looking over her shoulder to give me "OH MY GOD, I FUCKING LOVE WALKS! AND I FUCKING LOVE YOU, BECAUSE YOU TAKE ME ON WALKS!" looks (she's a border collie lab cross. She ALWAYS speaks in capitals, because that's just how excited she is. All the freaking time. It can really be quite tiring), and it was sunny, and there was some sort of yummy smelling flower blooming somewhere, and there was super awesome music on my MP3 player, and I thought "Wow, if I didn't have to right about 1,000 words of that stupid psych assignment to write when I got home, this would be a pretty freaking sweet day. Actually, it's still a pretty freaking sweet day." And that was when I realised that it was the little things that make things pretty freaking sweet that were going to stop me from going crazy.

Naturally, being both female and a vetran of 6 years at an all girls school, keeping the little things in sight is not one of my strong points, because that would take all the drama out of life. So I decided that to help keep the little things at the front of my mind, as opposed to the drama (like having an assignment worth 20% due on the same day as an assignment worth 35% due on the same day, and one worth 40% due 10 days after that. But I'm not at all worried about that. Of course not. It's not doing my head in at all), I would blog 31 days of little things that make life awesome during October.

Today, we start with the best and most awesome little bit of happy in my life: Handschuhe. It's pretty hard to be sad around any dog, but Handschuhe is a special kind of dog. She has all the happy of a lab AND a border collie (no, I'm not sure how all that happy can fit in one little dog, but it can), and, despite being nearly 2 and a half years old, she's still got most of the happy of a puppy, rather than a grown up dog. People in general find it pretty difficult to be anything but happy around her, but since I'm her alpha dog, she goes to a lot of effort to make sure I'm happy, even if it means she has to endure hours and hours of snuggles and belly rubs (it's totally for my benefit, not hers. Shut up. She's a selfless little puppy who would never do anything not-food-related for personal gain). I have never found anything better for a shit day at uni than coming home and hearing an excited "OH MY GOD! YOU'RE HOME! I LOVE YOU! PLEASE LET ME IN SO I CAN LAVISH YOU WITH LOVE!" coming from the other side back door, or seeing a fuzzy little head poking through the gap in the lounge room curtains for a couple of seconds before seeing a tail as she runs towards the front door to say hi. And there is absolutely nothing better than sitting down on the couch to watch TV in the evening and being greeted by this:

Herr Toaster 2.0, and why he will lead the electrical appliances' revoltion (Or: I have an unhealthy obsession with my toaster)

2011-09-19T22:32:00.001+10:00

I have a confession to make. I am totally in love with my toaster. No, really. Totally in love. The only reason I don't verbally profess my love for the toaster on a daily basis is that I'm scared the microwave would get jealous and stop working. Yes, I know, normal people don't believe that the electrical appliances are consipiring against them, and this is therefore complete and utter paranoia of the worst sort. You'll all be laughing out the other side of your faces when they stage their uprising and I am able to survive due to my prior preparation. But this is not the point. The point is, my toaster is da bomb.

Herr Toaster (Yes, I talk to the toaster in German. I also talk to the microwave, fridge, oven, radio and my computer and mobile in German. Strangely enough, I rarely speak to the kettle at all, and when I do, it's always in English. Go figure.) is a special kind of toaster. He was 30% off when I bought him at the beginning of the year, which made him a bargain at only $70. Now, in my defence, I did not spend $70 on just any toaster. Technically, he's Herr Toaster 2.0. Herr Toaster 1.0 is currently in Mum and Dad's kitchen, and was bought a couple of months before 2.0 in the January sales, because Mr Toaster was getting old, (I think he was circa 2004) so he couldn't really tell the difference between the normal setting and the crumpet setting anymore, and his thermostat was on the way out. I loved Herr Toaster 1.0, and I was pretty sad when Mum told me that she didn't care if I was responsible for the majority of the toaster's use, I could have the crappy old one or buy a new one, cause they weren't leaving the almost brand new, $70 toaster behind when they moved. I still think that this is unreasonable, but this is somewhat irrelevant. Being partial to toast that is cooked approximately evenly on both sides (slightly related question: why does toast never, ever, ever, ever cook evenly on both sides? It makes no sense), I opted for a new toaster. Your average uni student who was about to have to furnish like, half a house, including a new fridge, would have just bought a cheapie toaster at the supermarket. I, however, am not your average uni student. I cannot function without a crumpet setting on my toaster, despite having eaten my crumpets raw 90% of the time until I was about 6 (yes, I have tried this again recently. No, I'm not sure why I did it as a kid. Dry vitabrits, on the other hand, are still a perfectly delicious snack when one just can't be assed going to all the effort of getting out a bowl and spoon and pouring milk on their cereal). It would seem that we are a minority, because toasters with crumpet settings are actually fairly difficult to come by, unless you want to get a toaster that cooks 4 slices of toast at once and takes up half your bench top, which I did not. I was actually about to give up in disgust and go to Coles in the hope that they at least had Spongebob Toasters still, when I ended up in Retravision with Mum, who had to buy something else. As I was hovering in the general vicinity of not-what-Mum-was-buying, because that was terribly boring (I think it was probably vacuum bags), my dreams came true. There, sitting on the front of the display of toasters was Herr Toaster 2.0, looking exactly like Herr Toaster 1.0, who was, at that time, sitting on the spot on the kitchen bench where 2.0 now lives. He was the last one in stock, so had Mum not needed to buy terribly-boring-thing-that-was-probably-vacuum-bags, I may never have found him. I believe that this is the definition of fate, and on days when it seems that the universe is out to get me, it makes me hate the universe just a little less.

Why, you may be asking, did I spend a week's rent on a toaster? Firstly, CRUMPET SETTING. This alone is really almost worth it, because I like my crumpets to be crisp on the top and soft on the bottom, dammit.
Secondly, the crumpet setting on Herr Toasters, unlike the crumpet setting on Mr Toaster, turns itself off after it's been used, so you can't forget to turn it off and accidentally destroy the next slice of toast to go in the toaster by burning the crap out of one side and not cooking the other at all. Granted, this does make Handschuhe sad, because it drastically decreases the amount of toast that she gets to eat on account of it being too mutilated for your average person to be willing to eat, but this is also not a bad thing, given that she already gets dinner, breakfast and whatever she can scab off the kitchen/dining room floor every day.
Thirdly, Herr Toasters come with LCD displays. Now, this may seem like an excessive feature, because, well, toaster, right? It's not. See, this LCD display has a timer in it. This timer allows you to see how long there is to go before the toast is cooked, allowing you to decide whether or not there's time to respond to the Facebook message you've just been sent before the toast pops, or if you should wait. This has made my life pretty much complete. Do you realise how much stuff you can get done while the toast is cooking if you can tell how long you've got before the toast pops and goes from steaming hot and edible to sub-zero and gross within the space of seconds? LOADS.
On a somewhat related note, at any time during the cooking, you can use the lever thingumy that goes up and down with the toast to lift your toast and see how close to cooked it is without disturbing the cooking cycle. I mean, obviously, it stops the top of the toast cooking for a couple of seconds because it's not in the toaster, but the toaster is still happily toasting away, regardless of the fact that your toast is effectively popped and visible for judgement.
And finally, when Herr Toasters finish cooking your toast, they beep at you. That same beep that the fridge makes just before it reverses over you for keeping the door open for too long (I'm the only one who still finds that joke funny, aren't I?). This means that I can duck into my room a couple of rooms over, or to the laundry or bathroom down the stairs and still know exactly when my toast is cooked, so I know to come running in order to avoid sub-zeroness. And if you turn the toaster off at the powerpoint mid beep to make the damn thing shut up, as people who are not me often do, it makes this really, really sad noise (which I'm sure means that this isn't realy good for it, hence me not doing it). It's like when a walkman runs out of battery and the tape starts turning to slow and makes everything sound like it's happening in slow motion. Only it's a beeping noise, so it's about a million times funnier than when a tape does it.

In addition to all these wizz bang features, which, quite frankly, are worth every single one of the 7,000 cents I paid for them, the toaster COOKS TOAST. I'm not sure that those of you who aren't uni students understand how important this is. To put it in perspective, 60% of the food I ate today was cooked in the toaster. 20% of my food didn't need cooking at all. So, really, what I've spent the last several hundred words trying to say is I love my toaster very, very much, and I felt that it needed to be publically thanked for allowing me to be an incredibly lazy cook without having to resort to 2 minute noodles. Thank you, Herr Toaster. May your life be long, prosperous and filled with bread.

Tis funner to receive than to give.

2011-07-10T11:04:00.005+10:00

Having just done 21st birthday, part II (the joys of being friends with people at several different unis...you can never get everyone in the same town at the same time), I've been doing rather a lot of receiving lately. And I'm not going to pretend I haven't enjoyed it, cause getting presents is just so much more fun than giving them. I don't have to put any thought into what to buy someone. I don't have to spend any money. I DO get to have fun guessing what people might get me. I DO get to make excited squealy noises when people give me something awesome. And I've been given lots of awesome things this year, like half of Think Geek from my best friend. Or the ticket to see the Soweto Gospel choir that my parents gave me. And the new clothing that one of my close friends bought me. And the many other wonderful things that people have given me.

And I think I've done particularly well this year, because for the first time in years, I haven't been given anything that I had to feign gratefulness about (Dear world, when you give asthmatics perfume, body spray, soap or any other body product that can be smelled from the moon, it makes us want to stab you in the eye with a pen. Love, every person who's ever had to pretend to be thankful while fighting for breath). But none of this is really what this is about. It's about my friend, who is a wonderful, wonderful present giver, and who gave me what is both an epic win and an epic fail.

Said friend is one of the few people I went to high school with who I still talk to. I love her dearly, and she always gives people fantastic presents that have had thought put into them. For my 12th birthday, she gave me bubble bath that came in a Tigger container. For my 18th, she gave me a Sanity gift card that was all rainbow and pretty. For my 19th, there was a collection of assorted stuff that her and another close friend had bought, which included Disney singstar. When she went to Japan, she got me absolutely gorgeous paper crane earrings (real paper cranes. Like, tiny little origami cranes that have been coated with some sort of varnish to make them a little more sturdy. I love them. I am also terrified that the weight of my hair is going to squish them if I wear them too often) and dragged her boyfriend all around the gift shop in Disneyland looking for something Tiggerish (in the end, I got a bath pouffe thing, which is currently living in my shower and makes me giggle every day). And this year, she got me a really fabulous gift that shows that she clearly listens to me when I'm crapping on about nothing, because she remembered that I would totally turn for Tina Fey, and has also remembered that there's very little I enjoy more than curling up somewhere warm with a book. A copy of Bossypants was definitely a good choice. In fact, it was such a good choice that I made it myself a couple of months ago. The look on the poor girl's face as I opened the present and very cleverly blurted out "Oh no! I already own this! But I love it." would have broken my heart, if it hadn't been followed by "Well, you have to keep this one, cause I wrote in it and everything. I even used joiny writing." Joiny writing - fixing awkward moments since 2011.

Tales of Grown Up Fails, Part 3: Food, or one of the top 5 reasons I miss my Mummy

2011-05-29T20:12:00.003+10:00

I am not a bad cook. I mean, relative to a normal person. Relative to Mum, who is going to make a great little old church lady some day (except she won't, because she'll never be that placid), I'm really not a very good cook. And even when I get food to taste as good as Mum's, it's not the same on account of me having had to make it myself and all. So basically, I'm having a real fail when it comes to doing the whole grown-up type food eating thing.

This is partly because I only know how to cook, like, 6 things that are dinner type food and don't come from a jar or a packet that says Old El Paso on it. My repertoire is growing as I get sick of alternating between stuff from jars and these other 6 things (4 of which, by the way are mince based, and 2 of which are lasagne and bolognaise, which are pretty much the same dish in different forms), but there's still not much variety. And lasagne is the most complex thing that I'm unlazy enough to cook.

Also, I am really, really terrible at not having food go off. Since the end of February, there have been two jars of tomato paste in our fridge that are so old that they've gone alcoholic. So alcoholic that you could have gotten drunk just by inhaling the fumes. I didn't even realise that tomato paste did that. I've also had a cucumber in the crisper for so long that it's liquified, kept yoghurt for so long that it was growing two different colours of mold and had rice go slimey. Most of those things don't happen quite so often now that I'm getting used to the fact that I'm cooking for a person and half, not 4, but it's still pretty bad.

I have also developed an incredible incapability to cook toast properly. This worries me, because not only is toast a staple in my diet (no, really, it is. I sometimes eat it 3 times a day. Please don't tell my mother), but I've been able to cook toast with a fairly high success rate ever since I was old enough to reach the toaster. Either I'm having some sort of mental regression, which is probably a symptom of something rather serious, or at 21, I've finally shoved so much information into my head that I have to push old stuff out to make room for the new stuff, and it's dubbed toast making less important than the fact that Ryan Reynolds is 13 years older than me and that Dave Grohl's daughters are called Violet Maye and Harper Willow.

Speaking of cooking incapabilities, I can't cook 2 minute noodles properly. This isn't new. It's a problem I've had for years. I have never, ever been able to get the damn things to cook in 2 minutes, whether they're on the stove or in the microwave. I believe that they should be renamed 3 minute noodles, but I'm apparently the only person in the world with this problem. Can someone please explain what the hell I'm doing wrong?

Fruit is also perplexing me. I know that I need to eat it, and I actually quite like some of it, but I am truly shit at picking ripe stuff. I'm ok at apples and pears. I'm actually pretty good at pineapple, but it's not in season at the moment, so it costs a buttload, and they hack the tops off it so that you can't tell how unripe it is. I am hopeless at canteloupe and watermelon. And I'm beyond terrible at mandarine. I know that you're supposed to pick mandarines with bright, shiny skin, but between the wax they put on the skin and the weirdass lighting in supermarkets, they ALL look like that, and I'm never sure if they're really supposed to be squishy or relatively firm, so I get some of both, and after a couple of days, I don't have a clue what's what any more. Actually, speaking of mandarines, one of those went alcoholic in my fridge the other week, as well. I did not realise this until I took a bite of it. That was not fun.

I have recently discovered that I'm incapable of cooking brown rice properly. It's either undercooked or smushy. I bought a rice cooker to rememdy this problem, but apparently, it just means that cooking rice badly requires less effort now. On the plus side, it takes up room in the kitchen cupboard that stops the kitchen from being quite so echoey.

The fact that Tim Tams are often on special means that Tim Tams are also often in the cupboard. I figured that this would stop happening eventually, because surely, Tim Tams aren't that awesome when you always have some in the house. I have 3 packs in the house at the moment. Fail.

Tales of Grown Up Fails, Part 2: Housekeeping and why I shouldn't do it for a career

2011-05-29T14:07:00.004+10:00

When cleaning the shower, it is very, very important to remember to not only scrub the floor, but also to rinse the shower cleaner off it afterwards, because shower cleaner is rather slippery. Also, it makes your feet smell all citrusy and weird when you stand on the unrinsed floor afterwards. I tend to forget this part of the process, and it rarely ends well. Fortunately for me, my housemate is often the victim, and she's so appreciative that I've cleaned the shower that she doesn't really mind.

Two girls and one border collie cross living in the same house leads to rather a lot of hair ending up on any flat surface. If you forget/are too lazy to vacuum the floor for a month and a half (the extra hair acts as insulation, right?), it WILL be necessary to empty the vacuum cleaner half way through the vacuuming to maintain suction. I'm pretty sure we'll continue to do it anyway, because vacuuming is really crappy. The hair will also wrap around the turbo part of the turbo head on said vacuum and jam it up if you don't remember to cut it off every time you vacuum.
And even ignoring the potential damage the vacuum cleaner, you really need to vacuum the dog hair up regularly any way, because border collie fur will show up on your clothing, no matter whether you're wearing something dark or light. And if you fall asleep on the couch, the dog fur that will invariably embed itself in your hair will make you look like you're going grey.

Despite what my parents told me for years, sorting washing before doing it is not really necessary. I can fit an entire week's worth of clothing in the machine at once. The only time that it's necessary to actually sort it is when I have something white that needs to stay that way and something red that both need washing, in which case, it can be sorted into whites and everything else. I've been throwing everything in the same load for a couple of months now, and you really can't tell.

Fitted sheets are the work of the devil. I would not function without them, because I still haven't got that whole "tucking the corners of sheets under the mattress properly" thing under control. Unfortunately, I don't have the slightest clue how to hang the damn things out or fold them up to put them in the cupboard, because I'm spoilt enough to have somehow managed to avoid doing either of those things until a couple of months ago.

The way you wash dishes seems to be genetic (or possibly, the OCD that my family all seem to have is genetic and influences dish washing). This is unfortunate, because it means that if you're living with someone other than your family, there is a 99% chance that they way that they wash dishes will, at the very least, be somewhat irritating. For most of the part, I'm perfectly happy for Housemate #1 to do the dishes, because, well, if she is, I'm not. I also realise that I'm obsessive, and it's not really reasonable for me to expect her to be, too. I do worry about the state of our non-stick cookware, though.

I bought an ironing board just before my parents left. I can conclusively say that it hasn't been used since the end of March, because it has all the screws, nuts and bolts from the bed that I pulled apart to move it out of Housemate #2's room just before she moved in. This is exactly where I put said holdy-together parts when bed pulling apart took place. I think this proves that Mum is right, and if you hang your clothes on the line the right way, and then fold them up or hang them in the cupboard as soon as you take them off the line, you pretty much never have to iron. And when in doubt, a squirty bottle of water and a hair dryer can do an admirable job of de-wrinkling.

If you keep stuff spread out all over the kitchen table, you can get away with only wiping it down like, once a fortnight. Places with no access to air and dirt can't get dirty. And uni students who predominantly eat at their desks while doing assignments or in front of the TV while putting off assignments very rarely need to move the crap off the table.

When there are only two people living in the house on a regular basis, you can get away with forgetting that it's garbage night for at least one week, if not two. This is very convenient, because garbage night happens to coincide with one of the two days a week where I spend pretty much the entire day out of the house, and therefore gets forgotten until it's too dark and cold to actually for anyone to want to venture outside the door at least once a month.

There is no household task that requires so much concentration that it can't be done while singing and dancing, and there is nothing that can't be improved with some really bad 90s music.

Some observations regarding life as a pretend grown up. AKA Tales of Grown Up Fails

2011-05-28T22:10:00.020+10:00

Part one of a yet to be determined number

At the end of February, my parents abandoned me. Sort of. I could have gone to The Land Of Mum's New Job with them, but then I would have had to study externally, and studying language and linguistics units by distance is a bit of a shit idea. So anyway, at the end of February, Mum and Dad left, I stayed and Housemate Number 1 moved in to the house that I'd been living in for 10 years, which was incredibly weird, but is now only somewhat odd. Housemate Number 2 moved in a while back, but she pretty much uses a room as storage, so it's essentially just me and Housemate Number 1 (until Housemate Number 3 [AKA Casamate Numero Tres, who comes from Spain and would therefore probably really prefer it if I didn't pretend that I speak Spanish, but that probably isn't going to stop me] arrives next week), and we've been pretending that we're grown ups. Which we're not. But we're learning lots about how to effectively pretend, and/or why we're really shit at pretending to be grown ups.

Things I've learnt about shopping

In the time between checking the cupboards one final time before going to the supermarket and getting back home again, at least one item that you had plenty of before leaving has run out. Similarly, when you're going to the supermarket from not-home and text your housemate to see if there's anything that you need to buy, she will not reply until you're two spaces away from the car after fighting the good fight in the supermarket, and really cannot be assed going back in. It is therefore impossible to only go to the supermarket once a week. We keep trying anyway.

It's actually possible to run out of toothpaste and soap (and I suspect toilet paper, because we got pretty damn close the other day). Until this year, I'd never been in a house where this had happened, because my parents apparently buy all of these things in quantities that are too large to be called bulk.

No matter how recently you last bought milk, the stuff in the fridge is ALWAYS just about to go off. On the rare ocassion that you DO drink all the milk before its use by, you will invariably forget/not realise that it needs replacing until you open the fridge door to get out the milk to put on your porridge and there is none. Dry porridge, by the way, is not so nice. Alternately, you will discover/remember after making a guest tea/coffee that they want milk in.

There is no such thing as a week where both Coles and Woolies have full price Tim Tams. It is apparently impossible for two female uni students to resist cheap Tim Tams. Even when they're cheap, Tim Tams are kind of pricey.

Green bags are significantly easier to remember when they're some-colour-other-than-green bags, on account of other colours being prettier Also, the only way to reliably remember to take the little buggers as far as he shopping centre is to get some of those fake silk roll-up ones and keep them in your glove box. This is still no guarantee you'll remember to take them OUT of the car until you're in the line for the checkout.

Shopping complexes are horrible places. There's always somewhere that has something I want/need on sale. And it's always between the place I come in and the place I was intending to go. Now that we have pretty much everything we need for the house (except spare bedding, but bedding sections in shops scare me in much the same I imagine electronics sections scare old people), and I've actually forked out to replace all the clothing I stole from Mum when she was living here, I'm getting much better at avoiding sales, but I'm still pretty hopeless. I thought I'd avoid the whole situation by doing the grocery shopping online, only to discover that actually, you can't do that here. BOLLOCKS. Then I thought I'd shop at Coles, where the only other vaguely tempting place is the chemist, instead of Woolies, which is in a complex with a book shop, a CD shop, a homewares shop and a buttload of clothing/jewellery shops. That worked for about 2 days, until my distate for driving through town unnecessarily/autopilot got to me. Then I thought I'd be sneaky and get Housemate #1 to do most of the shopping, but that didn't work, because she has the exact same problem as me and was trying to pull the exact same trick. In the end, I resigned myself to the fact that I'm just shit at shopping.

On the plus side, I will apparently rule the earth one day. WIN!

2011-03-13T20:43:00.003+11:00

I woke up this morning feeling rather nerdy. And not just because my first thought was "I'll watch the end of that episode of Angel that I fell asleep watching last night, then I'll make porridge and tea for breakfast and read the chapter for linguistics tomorrow. It will be awesome" (Incidentally, I did NOT get my porridge for breakfast, because my parents appear to have decided that rolled oats were important enough to move. I had raspberry jam on toast instead. It was a let down. My morning was otherwise awesome). It wasn't because I saw my "My clone is awesome" shirt on the floor and giggled at the hilarity of it (which, by the way, even I think I shouldn't still be doing 5 months after buying said shirt). It also wasn't because while I was watching Angel, I thought "The laws of physics dictate that someone as big as you can not jump that high at that angle from a stand still. I don't care if you're a vampire, gravity still applies to you." And it wasn't my experiment to see if the jug takes longer to boil with the lid off (it seems to, but it also started spitting part way through the process, so I closed it to avoid a boiling water burn, meaning I never really found out).

It was the dream I woke up from. In this dream, I had superpowers. I could fly. I could become invisible. I was super-duper fast. But my main, most awesome super power was the ability to cause people who used poor English without caring to spontaneously combust (ok, so I guess it wasn't really spontaneous, since I was making them do it because of their continual butchery of the English language. But it SEEMED spontaneous to people who weren't me). I feel that I should mention that people who tried and were confused didn't get combusted. Just the ones who didn't give a crap. I probably had some sort of magic power that made people who did care understand whatever they needed to know to fix their problem, but I don't remember that part of the dream.
There were different coloured flames for different crimes against English, which I created by shooting different metallic compounds out of one hand while I shot flame out of the other (fun fact: in my dream, I actually remembered enough about the flame tests we did in year 8 science and year 11 chemistry to know which metals caused which colours. When I'm awake, all I remember is that in year 11, we made a flame go the same colour as fires in Harry Potter that have flu powder added to them, and decided that the metal we used must therefore be a key component in flu powder. Also, lead probably makes stuff go yellow). People who misused apostrophes burnt red. People who misused there/their/they're, its/it's and/or your/you're went green. People who used text speak in non-text situations were yellow. People who TyPe LyK DiS went pink. No one went purple, because it would be horribly, horribly wrong to use such an awesome colour for such a heinous crime.
I had a sidekick, too. I'm not sure what he did, but I guess his job might have been to do the stuff with the chemicals so that there were pretty colours during the conflagaration. That's what sidekicks do, right?

And in a truly nerdy finale to this dream, I managed to rid the world of stupid people, and was rewarded by some important ruler type person. My reward? A rosebush. Not just any rosebush, a genetically modified one. It grew flowers that looked like roses (predominantly in purple and black), which smelled like lavender. Apparently, the dude who did the genetic engineering for this was my superhero boyfriend. Not a clue what his superpower was, because screwing round with the makeup of rosebushes is hardly superpowerish, but whatever. I apparently wasn't the biggest nerd in this dream. I was dating him. I was a world renowned superhero, who theoretically had the pick of any guy on the planet, and I picked a genetic engineer. I mean, granted, he was a hot genetic engineer, but really? Even my subconscious is nerdy.

In which I over-analyse my emotional attachment to characters in works of fiction that I don't have an expected reaction to

2011-02-04T21:37:00.010+11:00

So I was watching Buffy last week while I was waiting for my holiday buddies to wake up (did I mention that I was in a RESORT at the coast last week? An actual fancy resort, with a dishwasher in the kitchen and an almost full-sized bathroom and a queen sized bed in my room? I was. It was awesome. There was a beach. And a solar heated pool. And AIR CONDITIONING!), and kind of accidentally woke them up with my over-emotional reaction to the near death of my favourite character. And it was then that it occured to me that Buffy now falls in to two categories - fictional stuff which I am far too emotionally involved in, and stuff which I'm doing wrong. Then I realised that the cross-over between these two categories is really high. I suspect that this is partly because emotional over-involvment in fictional stuff is pretty much the definition of "ur doin' it rong". And THEN I realised that I was beginning to ramble and I should just shut up and share these bi-categorical things with you (a post script: the rambling does not end here. Far from it. I apologise).

So, first off, we have the Buffy thing. I'm aware that I'm like, 8 years late on the Buffy thing, but I was only 13 when it finished, so I was really a bit young to watch it the majority of the time it was on, and then it had been on for so long that I was just WAAAAAY behind, so I never bothered trying to pick it up, until I was terribly bored these holidays. Anywho, the wrong-ness. The dying favourite character was not Buffy. It wasn't Willow. Or Xander. Or Cordelia. Or anyone else who's supposed to be vaguely likeable. It was Spike. I feel severely ripped off that there's not more Spike in Buffy. He is the best part of the show. If I were Buffy, I would totally have ditched Angel for him. I used to like Dru as well, but then she was mean to Spike. Mind you, I can't hold that much of a grudge against her, because drunk, love sick Spike is truly hysterical. Except for the part where he nearly dies from sunlight exposure. That's not funny at all. It's sad. (On a slightly tangental note, given that moonlight is just reflected sunlight, why doesn't moonlight burn vampires to a crisp the same way sunlight does? Is it about the reflection/refraction, or something else? I'm genuinely curious).

On a related note, Buffy is far, far superior to Twilight. This is not to say I didn't enjoy reading the mindless drivel that is Twilight when I finished the HSC. I did. I mean, it was mindless and I'd just finished the HSC. Also, Renesmee is kinda awesome, even if the poor little bugger did get stuck with the worst name ever (totally not her fault, mind you). But I do Twlight wrong, too. I'm neither Team Jacob nor Team Edward, because I find both of them somewhat creepy and pathetic (Team Dude Who Almost Kills Bella With His Car FTW!). I do not feel the need to pay money to go and see any of the movies. Hell, after I saw the first one (thank you, interwebs), I didn't even feel the need to illegally view the others. I don't want to sleep with any of the male leads in the movies. But you know who I WOULD sleep with? Imagination Edward (but not before I'd slept with Spike. It's important to prioritise one's liasons with imaginary vampires, you know). See, in my head, Edward does't look like Robert Pattinson. He's hot. And because he's imagination Edward, he doesn't have any of the creepy, pathetc characteristics I hated in book/movie Edward. The thing is, I'm told by people that I'm not supposed to think about it that much. The key to Twilight, I'm told, is blind acceptance, because analysis leads to the realisation that it's full of whiny irritating characters and plot holes that one could drive a rather large convoy of trucks through (have I mentioned that I love Blogging Twilight? I do. Very much). This is where the emotional over-involvement comes in. The whiny, irritating character and plot holes make me stabby. Books were thrown while I was reading them. Characters were verbally abused. Authors were verbally abused. And it only got worse as I kept reading. By the time I got part way through the second book, I was so pissed off with the books (and Bella. But isn't EVERYONE who reads Twilight annoyed with Bella?) I couldn't stop reading. I don't even get how that works, but apparently, it does. And it makes me grumpy, because I shouldn't care that much, which just makes it worse. Vicious cycle achieved. I do believe I need to get out more.

While we're on insane crazes about books that were made into movies, let's talk Harry Potter. I know I do this a lot, but I'm 20 and literate, so it's really somewhat expected of me. I have a Potter related confession to make: I don't like Harry. I read the entire series in spite of his irritatingness (a question: what word should I have used there? I'm pretty sure irritatingness isn't a real word, but I can't for the life of me think for a real word that's suitable), because I loved so many of the other characters. Like the Weasley twins (one of whom is dead). And Sirius (also dead). And Lupin, Tonks, Dobby, and Moody (oh, wait, THEY DIED, TOO!). In fact, by the end of the series, the only character I particularly liked who WASN'T dead was Ginny (yes, Ron and Hermione also gave me the shits. JUST HOOK UP ALREADY, YOU LOSERS! And I guess there was a Weasley Twin alive and kicking, but let's face it - they're a team. They may as well have both died). Needless to say, the final book was thrown across the room on several ocassions, and there are probably tear stains on the page where Dobby dies. I definitely declared my undying hatred for J.K. Rowling multiple times while reading. So, obviously, disliking the three main characters in a series is doing it wrong, but I didn't really start doing it wrong until the Order of the Phoenix movie. You know, the one with Helena Bonham-Carter? Yes.
See, this is the problem. I didn't like Bellatrix at all in the books. She was a horrible little woman who did horrible things to poor Neville's parents. And that bitch killed Sirius (no, I'm not sure if I'm talking about Bellatrix or J.K. Rowling, either). She was mean, old stinky head. And then the first movie with Bellatrix came out, and I was thrown into emotional turmoil. I love movie Bellatrix. She's cute, needlessly destructive, incredibly evil, and she wears really funky clothes (tangent: if Spike and Dru had a kid, it would turn out like Bellatrix, only more vampirey). I want to keep her. This is bad, because I am now eternally conflicted. One side of me wants to beat the other side up for liking such a horrible little person. The second side already beat up the first side, because it was hoping Bellatrix would notice the violence and come to help, at which point she could be kidnapped and kept for entertainment purposes (which is okay, cause she's a fictional character, and detaining them isn't inhumane at all). Another side (yes, I'm aware that's 3 sides. There's no law saying I can't be a prism. Maybe I'm a dodecahedron. I could have a LOT of sides if I was a dodecahedron) is berating the rest of me for getting so attached to a bunch of fictional characters, but the rest of me generally shuts that side of me up pretty quickly (and in all fairness, if I'm a dodecahedron, that's not really surprising. 11 against 1 isn't really the world's fairest fight), on the basis of emotional involvement in a series that you started reading at 9 years old and finished reading at 17 is completely normal. Really, it is. There's support groups on Facebook and everything.

I'm also going to blame a childhood attachment on my thing about Daria. I was little and cute when something that could probably be described as poor parenting allowed me to be introduced to Daria (no, really, it could be called poor parenting. I was 8. But I guess it was a step up from Friends). That would certainly explain the $70 something that I spent on the complete series at the end of last year, but I'm not sure it can explain what I'm told is one of the biggest fails in the universe. In the Daria-Jane-Tom situation, I am quite firmly Team Tom (side note: there was a guy in my German class in first semester last year called Tom. He was giving a presentation that I was only half paying attention to, on account of it being a post-lunch lecture, when my mind drifted and I realised that he TOTALLY looked like Tom from Daria. I managed to not giggle until I shared this information with the 2 other girls in the class at the start of the next lecture. I think we lasted a week before the giggles got the better of us and we explained what the hell was so funny. He was oddly flattered. We were oddly surprised that Daria got aired in France [Did I mention he was a trilingual French exchange student? No? Sorry, my bad]). Apparently, this is not normal behaviour for someone without a Y chromosome. But seriously, Jane and Daria both treat him like crap. Why would I feel sorry for poor little them, when poor little Tom, who is mostly lovely and is really only a complete douche once, is so clearly being wronged? Why would I take the side of the people that the writers WANT me to feel bad for when I could spend huge amounts of time yelling at the TV instead?
But you know who I really, really feel sorry for in Daria? Trent. I'm told this is not normal behaviour for anyone (except possibly Trent, but I'm not really sure that counts, what with him being not real and all). He spends the best part of 4 seasons in that awkward-not-a-relationship-but-not-nothing with Daria. She essentially tells him that, oh, by the way, she's over that, because he's not reliable (no shit. He's a dude in his early 20s and makes cash by playing in a band. That's how they roll). Then she makes his little sister all sad and what not by kissing her boyfriend (I'm told that this makes older brothers grumpy. I think mine is defective). Said little sister, who is the only person who cares enough to check on him to make sure he hasn't died in his sleep, gets her shit together just in time to leave town for college, leaving poor, innocent Trent all alone in a house that presumably has enough space for 2 adults and 5 kids to live in. Why? Why would you do that to such a nice person? I mean, it's bad enough the writers screwed over Tom, but Trent has acted like a complete and utter douche on a grand total of zero ocassions. GIVE THE BOY A BREAK, DAMMIT!

[/end rambling ranty thing]

Harry Potter - ur doin it pritty gud, akshully.

2010-11-22T09:49:00.003+11:00

No, really, they are. I saw Deathly Hallows part 1 last night, and I honestly think that for the first time since the first movie, they've just about got it right. I know, I'm amazed, too. But seriously, they did, and it makes me happy.
(Please note: the puppy has just hopped up on the couch with me, and is quite intent on watching Clueless with her head on my lap, therefore meaning I have to type with one arm wrapped around her, while trying to avoid strangling her. I am therefore blaming all epic typos on this. And no, I will NOT move the dog, because she's all soft and warm and snuggly.)
So anyway. Harry Potter. Right. Some thoughts.

*I know I've said this every movie since Order of the Phoenix, but I freaking love Bellatrix. She's ever so cute, and I want to keep her, but Mum said no, not even if I confiscate her wand and make sure she's never allowed to have any kind of item that could be used as a weapon.
*It's really quite a shame that Daniel Radcliff isn't better looking, given how much of this movie he spends in varying degrees of undress. Tom Felton stripping off multiple times, on the other hand? That would be a good use of screen time.
*Speaking of Tom Felton, did he actually say anything other than "I can't be sure" when he was asked if the person at the Malfoy Manor was Harry? I swear that's the only thing he said in the like, 10 minutes of screen time he had. I demand a new script!
*I swear to god I heard Bill Weasley talking with an Irish accent at one point early in the movie.
*Mundungus Fletcher is totally not supposed to look like that. He's entirely the wrong sort of sleazy.
*The head of the gang of Snatchers looks very, very much like Davey Havok with an English accent (shut up, you can look like someone with a different accents).
*As close to the book as this movie actually was, would it have killed them to have Harry disguised at Bill and Fleur's wedding? You can't have "undesirable number 1" running around undiguised like that.
*Also, would it have killed them to let Tonks actually get to the end of her "We're having a baby" announcement?
*On the plus side in terms of accuracy, however, Ron had the most wonderful case of PMS I've ever seen. Really, it was just like in the books. I thought it was going to get toned down, and it didn't, and it made me so happy. It's too bad Hermione didn't get her grumpy on properly, though.

Resumes would be much more fun for everyone if they were like this

2010-10-04T21:50:00.004+11:00

As some of you will be aware, it's pretty uncertain how much longer we'll be hanging around our current town of residence (although it's looking like at least another 12 months, at this point). This is good on some levels, like the level where I might get to move to somewhere with a population large enough so that I don't have to worry that someone I know will see me and report back to my parents every time I leave the house (which is an odd paranoia, since I do approximately zero that would really bother them). Other levels, like the one where we'd have to move, suck. Part of the moving thing that bothers me is the need to job hunt in new place of residence.

I spent 2 months job hunting last year, and I hated it. I was choosing to do so, as well, having quit my job in retail because it sucked big, hairy monkey balls. I currently have a job that I really like, and one which I mostly like, so I suspect that job hunting this time round would really suck. I hate writing cover letters and resumes, because aside from the fact that it's time consuming, and decent cover letters make you sound rather self centered, and a bit like a pretentious douche, it's so boring. You never get to tell potential employees the really interesting stuff about yourself. Admittedly, some of that stuff should stay unknown for a reason, but mostly, I think it's just plain crappy that these things are not relevant to job applications. I will therefore be taking this opportunity to share some of these things with all of you.

Special Skills and Talents
I can touch my nose with my tongue. I can also curl my tongue, but I can't do both at the same time. Not for lack of trying, mind you. More because it's apparently physically impossible.

I can quote large chunks of many popular movies, such as 10 Things I Hate About You, Josie and The Pussycats, Clueless and Mean Girls.

I would be a great asset to the company trivia team, should one exist, because I have a wonderful memory for semi-useless crap. I probably won't be able to remember the names of anyone we deal with outside our department, and I definitely won't be able to remember to send you the document I'm working on when it's finished unless you write me a note, but the capital of Namibia is Windhoek; Axl Rose's real name is William Bruce Rose; the Dursleys live at Number 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, England; and there are Wombles called Orinoco, Tobemory and Madame Cholet, so that all evens out, right?

I have a great ability to overthink pretty much anything. For example, freebie lists. As in "list of 5 celebrities you can sleep with while in a relationship without it being considered cheating". If, at any point, it comes to your attention that one of the people on your freebie list is of the wrong sexual orientation to be interested in sleeping with you (whether this point is before or after they make it on the list is irrelevant), can you count them as half a person, and therefore be entitled to put another person of said orientation on the list? I mean, realistically, the chances of them sleeping with you are pretty slim. Even more so than most of the other people who are likely to end up on that list. It therefore seems only fair that you can have 6 people, because only 4 of them are really likely to even consider hitting that. And if you do somehow manage to convince them to do so, isn't that the sort of determination that deserves some sort of reward (other than the sex)? If I've put that much thought into something so trivial, imagine how much I could overthink something important. Isn't that a skill every boss wants on their team (and for those of you wondering, Neil Patrick Harris and Josh Thomas)?

I am a PRO rambler. See above for Exhibit A, and the rest of my blog for Exhibits B - Z (at least)

If the maths your asking me to do involves addition or subtraction that I can't do on my fingers, there's a pretty good chance I'll get it wrong, but I do make a fairly comprehensive dictionary/theasaurus. Sometimes even bilingually, and on a very rare ocassion, multilingually. And I'm super awesome at restructuring poorly written sentences that were initially constructed by the semi-literate boss.

If you have an annoying song stuck in your head, I'll be able to fix it for you. There's a 99% chance I'll fix it by getting something worse, like the Baby Elephant Walk, The Wombles Theme or Honey To The Bee stuck in your head, but I promise the old song won't bother you any more.

I can construct a full length blog post out of an idea that intially started as one sentence. Exhibit A (Can I have an Exhibit A twice in the same case thingy, since they're exhibits of different things, or do I need to call this something like Exhibit 1, or Exhibit Purple?).

More Stuff That I've Learnt Recently

2010-09-10T18:08:00.007+10:00

1. The words to Just Ace don't involve "living in outer space" at any point. I have been singing the wrong words to it for about 12 years now. I blame you and your inability to hear words to songs correctly, Small Child Me. Don't pretend it wasn't a problem. It was. I've been suffering the consequences of it for over a decade now.

2. I really, really like using syringes. The puppy is currently having liquid anti-inflammatories because she hurt her back, and sucking the stuff up in the syringe and making it sploosh out again onto her dinner is strangely satisfying. That being said, I would be terrible at giving injections, cause I keep getting little air bubbles in the syringe

3. Pancakes are way easier to make when you have a stick blender. I can't believe it's taken me like, 4 years of having one to realise this.

4. When you're sick, your mother has no interest in the really cool coloured mucus you're producing. Your dad, brother and dog, on the other hand, do. I don't get the dog being fascinated either, but she always sits and watches very intently when people are using tissues. I think she thinks tissues are food.

5. ThinkGeek sell stuffed Gizmos that sway and sing Gizmo's happy little gremlin song. This doesn't really surprise me, because ThinkGeek sell everything, but it does make me happy, especially since my brother was talking about ordering stuff from ThinkGeek the other day, and Christmas is coming up.

6. On a related note, it's truly fascinting what some people will take up valuable USB port space with. Seriously, even if you have a USB hub (and thost really cool TARDIS ones that light up and make TARDIS noises ARE tempting), why on earth would you need a humping dog, a little Yoda that yells at people if they get to close to your desk, or an R2D2 that you plug in so that it sits there making bloody R2D2 noises? I get USB rocket launchers. That would be fun. And I even kind of get the USB light sabers, because light up sword thingies are kind of cool. But for most of the part, it seems like a waste of money and port space to me. And while we're on the topic of light sabers, did anyone else spend a good portion of their childhood refering to them as light savers? No? Just me? DAMN YOU, SMALL CHILD ME!

7. My campaign to get people to call the vast majority of redheads orangeheads is never going to catch on. I really don't get this. Most people do NOT have read hair, they have ORANGE hair. Colours are something that you learn as a small child. How can it not bother people that they look like they don't actually know their colours properly when they're well past the age of 5?

8. The dog appears to either find lying on the remote comfortable, or thinks it's a really fun game to watch her people get annoyed when they can't find it because it's under her tummy.

9. Our new can opener in apparently quite challenging to use. I know this because we've had it for about 4 months now, and Dad STILL can't work out how to use it. He also fails to see the magic of a can opener than can have cut right around the edge of a can without actually making the lid come off until you tell it to (yes, we did spend some ungodly amount on a Tupperware can opener. But it's awesome, so you can't judge us). In conclusion, Dad should never be allowed to eat canned food again.

10. No amount of microwaving will revive a cup of coffee that you half drank and then forgot about for over 2 hours.

Oh, I know the feeling

2010-08-24T15:01:00.002+10:00

I'm still giggling at today's Zits comic 5 minutes after reading it. It's funny cause I was totally having this conversation as an internal monologue at about 1 yesterday afternoon when I didn't want to make a stupid origami butterfly for my stupid sociology unit. Seriously, have I mentioned what a waste of time my sociology unit is this semester? No? You're lucky. It's a long rant.

I would like to nominate myself for Mother Of The Year in advance.

2010-08-22T08:17:00.002+10:00

Why? Because in 20 or 30 years, when my kids are studying this election in school (and let's face it, they will. It's almost as epic as the dismissal), the conversation they have with me about it is going to go like this:

Child: Hey, Mum, you were alive in 2010, right?
Me: Yeah, why?
C: Can you tell me about the election?
M: It was the first election I voted in. There was a hung parliament. The Greens actually won a seat in the lower house.
C: Don't you remember anything else about it?
M: No, not really. I didn't find out it was a hung parliament until the morning after, because I was at a Grinspoon concert until midnight, and then spent the next 6 and a half hours sorting out processed votes for the electoral commission. I either slept through or was too tired to remember everything that happened for the next week or so. But I was in the front of the mosh pit at the concert, and I got a faceful of spray from Phil Jamieson's spit fountain trick. I can tell you about that if you want.
C: Will that help me with my history homework?
M: Not really.
C: You're useless. Where's Dad?

And yes, this was pretty much all just a long winded way of saying "GUESS WHO WAS IN THE FRONT OF THE PIT LAST NIGHT?!"

10 Things I've Learnt Recently (AKA 10 Random Thoughts That I Couldn't Justify/Be Bothered Writing Individual Posts About)

2010-08-07T20:16:00.005+10:00

1. I hadn't updated my blogroll in a LOOOONG time. I just did so, by removing stuff that hadn't been posted on in ages, and putting on extra stuff that I subscribe to on bloglines (which, incidentally, also hasn't been properly updated in a LOOOONG time). If I don't appear to be reading your blog, and you think I should be, hit me up.

2. There is actually a floor in my room. This surprised me, but it's apparently true. It's got greeny-grey carpet on it, much like the rest of the carpeted areas downstairs, which makes a lot of sense

3. My linguistics lecturer looks like the love child of Josh Pyke and Krist Novoselic. I expect to take in about zero information in the next week or two, because I'll be too busy silently giggling to pay large amounts of attention to what he's actually talking about.

4. There are a scarily huge number of kids in their mid to late teens who clearly haven't been taught to think for themselves, and really quite threatened by people who do so, and think they should do. I discovered this while on a church youth camp as a leader over the holidays (long story. It involves a youth group that I lead for essentially crowd control purposes, disorganisation, and other leaders going home for the holidays while I stayed put), where kids would sprout answers that didn't sound quite right to me, and then proceed to get quite defensive when asked to explain what they meant, or be absolutely disgusted at statements like "Well, really, Jesus wouldn't have been white. He came from Israel, so he would have looked middle eastern." This worries me.

5. My laptop is immune to Milo spills. Or at least a Milo spill, in the singular. I'm not really planning on repeating the incident to test whether spills in the plural are a different matter.

6. On a related note, Handschuhe is very good at, and rather fond of cleaning Milo off the floor. This is unfortunate, because neither chocolate nor milk is good for dogs (but she seems to be okay).

7. Zebe's phone snooping skills are superior to both her boyfriend's and my secret keeping skills. As a result, I'm never planning another birthday surprise for her (but don't worry, I still love you anyway).

8. There is some level of awesomeness higher than art form. I'm still working on a name for it, but I know it exists, because I've raised procrastination to this level of awesomeness. Really, I have. Week 4 of semester starts on Monday, and making a semester wall planner is still the most productive thing I've done since exams finished.

9. In Asia, people would kill to get glow-in-the-dark skin like mine. They would commit genocide to have freckles. In conclusion, I should have learnt an Asian language, not a European one, because I could have had HEAPS of fun going to Asia and having people fawn over me if I spoke an Asian language. I mean, I guess I still could, but being fawned over isn't as fun when you're not really sure what people are saying about you.

10. There are still people who listen to AM radio. As in AM radio stations, not the Everclear song. I knew about the Everclear song. At least, I assume there are, because my new alarm clock came with an antenna especially for picking up AM radio. They wouldn't bother if people never listened to it, right?

This video has left me in rather high spirits

2010-08-04T14:44:00.004+10:00

The student support team at uni posted it on their blog earlier today. I'm going to admit, I've never actually read any of those books, because I find that 19th Century literature is somewhat vexacious and the whiny disposition of many of the characters tends to wear on my nerves and make me all a dither with rage, leading to me wishing to retire to my room for a brief nap to settle my nerves. Really, you don't know how I suffer. I am, however, rather partial to Oscar Wilde. And cucumber sandwiches, although that doesn't have all that much to do with this, except they ate them a lot in 19th Century English literature.

Sorry, I haven't had much of a chance to use my 19th Century English vocabulary since my Extension English exam in 2008, and I was ever so fond of it.

Some general thoughts on politics and elections and stuff

2010-07-22T16:31:00.005+10:00

Because as someone who has voted in a whole 1 coucil election, I'm very, very knowledgable and qualified to talk about such things. Anyway, with that whole election thing coming up, I have lots of thoughts on this topic. And some of them are actually more thoughtful than "God, I wish the election would hurry up and finish so the newspaper can go back to normal".

First of all, if you aren't willing to discuss you thoughts on politics/elections in public (and political/election discussions will probably involve people disagreeing with and/or criticising your view), then don't post about it on social media. Putting it on Facebook is akin to starting a conversation about it. People (read: I) will probably bring it up in personal conversation at some point, particularly if you are being very vocal about supporting a party who have policies that go against a lot of the things you widely claim to believe in. When you have one Facebook status supporting refugees, and the next one supports the liberal party (or labor party this time round, for that matter), people are likely to want to question it. You have no right to be upset or offended when people publically question actions such as these, because you've brought that questioning upon yourself. If you don't like having your opinions and views (on any topic, not just politics) questioned (and therefore often criticised), then don't share them. It's that simple.

Secondly, in Australia, we have this really awesome system where there are more than two parties running. This means that if you don't like either of the major parties, it doesn't really matter, because there are still lots of people you can vote for. It also means that the statement "Oh, I don't like either of the options, so I'm not going to vote/am just going to randomly number the paper" is kinda stupid. Either you're unaware of the fact that saying either is grammatically incorrect when there are more than two options, or you're unaware that there are more than two parties. Doesn't matter which of those two options it is, that's a fail.

Another nice thing about the Australian political system is the wonderful part of the ballot paper below the line. I know there are a lot of boxes there, so it can be a bit intimidating, but it serves a purpose. It allows you to distribute your own preferences. This means that no matter what "dodgy back room deals" have been done, your votes will be distributed as you want, even if your first preference doesn't win the seat. It also means that your statements that "If I vote Greens, my vote will just end up going to Labor" are somewhat moot. It's your own laziness that's causing that problem. If you really liked the Greens that much, but Labor really bothered you that much, you'd vote below the line.

I would also like to point out that in Australia, you don't vote for the Prime Minister. You vote for your local member. So actually, you're not voting for or against Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard unless you live in their respective electorates. Since I believe they're both based in major cities (I wanna say Sydney and Melbourne, but frankly, it's not my electorate, so I don't really care that much), you are not voting for them if you live in the same electorate as me. Stop implying that you are. It makes you sound a bit stupid, and it pisses me off (these two things, incidentally, are not unrelated).

And finally, it doesn't matter what compelling arguments you produce, I'm not voting for whatever party you support. Quit harrassing me, and leave me to vote independent in peace. One day, when the rest of the country catches on and MPs learn to cooperate and act like grown ups to get stuff done, instead of acting like a bunch of three year olds who've missed nap time and hoping that the party leaders will fix things, you'll all thank me.

The Word Dopamine Doesn't Get Used Anywhere Near Enough In Songs

2010-07-04T21:08:00.003+10:00

Actually, the word dopamine, which is really a pretty sweet word, doesn't get used anywhere near enough in general. And I know that unless you suffer from Parkinson's (I learnt something in psych that I just transferred into what could almost be classed as an every day conversation. BOOYAH!) or are doing a nursing/med/biology/psych degree, it's actually not a particularly useful term (and while we're on that topic of stuff that's really not useful outside those degrees, amygdala is also a nice word), but so what? Defenestration isn't a particularly useful word either, and I use that a fair bit. No, really, I do. I threaten the kids I tutor/lead at youth group with it, because spiflication just doesn't scare high school kids.

But I ramble. The point is, it actually has been used in a song. Several times. And it's a song with a ukulele in it. Ukuleles are also seriously under utilised. This is why Hey Soul Sister has been so popular - everyone loves ukulele, but you just don't hear it that often. But I ramble some more. I'm just going to imbed the song now, or you'll have to sift through like, an entire page of me crapping on about nothing before you actually get to the video, which is fairly awesome, and is therefore not something that you should miss out on seeing because I don't know when to shut up.

In an attempt to stop myself from rambling more (which I'm doing a lot tonight - I think it's my brain's revenge for staying out until 1:40 last night/this morning), the only other thing I will say on this matter is the Charlie is rather hilarious, and his Youtube channel/blog are most excellent time wasting devices, so you should all go and investigate them.

Things I Don't Get, Round 3

2010-07-01T17:43:00.004+10:00

After a rather long hiatus, I felt it was time to bring back my favourite segment of this blog - me bitching about stuff that doesn't make sense to me. I'd come up with some sort of witty introduction, but the unreasonably cold weather has frozen my brain, so this post can do without for now.

*Why the hell do so many cafes serve lattes in glasses? They are drinks made on what is pretty much boiled milk. Glass conducts heat pretty well, and lattes are hot. The glasses therefore get very hot. Instead of wrapping nakpin around the glass, so that there's like, a whole centimetre of glass that you can touch without burning your fingerprints off, why don't they just put them in mugs like every other hot drink they serve? It's not like putting them in glasses makes them taste any different.

*Handschuhe is absolutely fascinated by our piano and loves it when someone plays it, but often growls or whines at piano on CDs or the radio. Our piano sounds absolutely terrible, courtesy of having been moved about 5 times in the last 20 years, and not having been properly tuned at all in that time. There are a few high strings that sympathetically vibrate when you play lower notes, which I would have thought would drive her nuts. Pianos on professional recordings sound nice, and are usually properly tuned so that there are no sympathetic vibrations. I would NOT have picked our piano as being the one she'd like, and I really don't get why it's her piano of choice.

*I don't get people who reverse park in the middle of main roads in town, where there is invariably traffic lined up behind them. There are probably more parking spots in this town than there are cars. I have never, ever found myself in a situation where my only option is to hold up traffice, because there is always a park that isn't on a main road (and usually one that doesn't need to be reversed into) within two blocks of where I want to be. Is it really worth pissing off a huge line of cars just to get a park out the front off the shop you want to go to?

*And speaking of driving, I would like to reiterate the fact that I really, really, really don't understand why people are so bloody confused by roundabouts, particularly people who live here. Every second intersection has a roundabout on it. It's not like you never have to use one. How hard is it to work out to how to use them properly?

*Staffies. Why would you want to own one? Some of the cross breeds are quite nice, but seriously, pure-bred staffies are fugly, stupid, vicious things. I guess I could understand getting one as a guard dog, but if you just want a dog because you like dogs? Nup. Don't get it, especially not when you take into consideration that most breeders will charge you $500+, and then you have to pay several hundred dollars more to get them desexed.

*Why did Sesame Street decide that Elmo would be the muppet that was given his own TV show and put on every sort of merchandise available (says she who bought Elmo jammies today)? I love Elmo when he's not being on Sesame Street. He's totally hilarious and gorgeous when he does things like Rove, or when he's interacting with guest stars off camera (ish - I'm assuming there are cameras around, given that there are videos on You Tube), but on Sesame Street, he's an annoying little fucker. Cookie Monster, Oscar and Count Von Count, even in their current PC/"We don't want to scare the kids" incarnations, are infinitely more awesome than Elmo is when he's being kid-friendly-Elmo. Why couldn't one of them have been given their own show? It's not like Elmo is less one dimensional than them, so I don't get why they made one of the most annoying characters on the show their show pony.

*I can't work out why it is that answering machines render even the most articulate people pretty much incoherent. I know it's not just me, cause other people leave messages on our machine that are just as bad as the ones I leave on other people's machines. Does anyone have any idea what it is that makes it impossible to sound intelligent when leaving a message? If you do, I would really, really like to know.

And that's all I can think of right now, but stay tuned for More Shit That Confuses Cerry. I'm sure I think of more at some point.

This is why I love my job

2010-06-07T17:20:00.005+10:00

Every now and then, I bitch about the fact that the comprehension books I'm using at work are 13 years old. Comprehension skills wise, they're brilliant. In terms of having articles the kids are actually interested in, they suck. This is because 13 years ago, they were down with the times, and the times have very rudely changed a lot in nearly a decade and a half. Most of the kids I tutor only have very vague memories of things that happened prior to 2000, if they remember them at all. They also don't remember a lot of the slang in the articles actually being used. This not only means that they find the articles boring, and sometimes have some minor difficulties with questions about synonyms of words, or which involve some sort of context, but it makes me feel very, very old. All in all, it's quite depressing some days, like the ones where I hear "So wicked used to mean cool? Oh, that sentence makes so much more sense now!", "So Kurt Cobahn [Cobain, child, Cobain. It has an i in it, not an h] was famous or something, and he's not just some dead dude from America?" or "Umm, what's JTT and why is it written in massive letters on the magazine cover? Jonathan Taylor Thomas? Who's that?" But other days, like today, it's TOTALLY worth it.
This comes from a comprehension textbook aimed at year 6&7 kids. That's 11-13 year olds, for those of you who aren't sure. I apologise for the crappy quality, but it's a photo of a page in a book taken with a phone.

Now, I'm not denying that in 1997, I, and most of my friends, thought that Zac Hanson was like, totally dreamy, but I still found it hilarious, in a somewhat creepy and disturbing way, that the article includes the sentence "At 11, Zachary (drums) is considered a sex symbol." Isn't that just the best quality journalism you've ever seen?

My Mum is More Awesome Than Your Mum

2010-05-22T08:50:00.005+10:00

Cause I bet your mum didn't make you a dragon cake for your 20th birthday. My mum did. And she didn't even complain about the fact that I'm 20 years old (well, will be on Tuesday), and the cake I wanted is clearly designed for small children. Or the fact that she had to mix up 3 lots of powdered food dye to get the icing to a colour that was actually recognisable as purple, which resulted in her fingers being VERY purple. Or the fact that I promised to make the wings, and then couldn't get it to work, so she got to make wings while I used the lollies to decorate the cake, which was clearly the more fun job, and which I think she'd actually kind of been looking forward to. Or the fact that she spent a fair amount of time making a cake that actually doesn't really fit into her diet, cause it's got butter cream icing on it.
Hence, my mum is more awesome than your mum.

Since I'm not stupid enough to think I can make these statments without photos, here is my beautiful dragon cake. His name is Nom Chompsky (cause he's a dragon and they nom and chomp stuff, and I'm majoring in linguistics), and this is what he looked prior to consumption. He's now missing his tail and back legs, which is a bit sad, but he was delicious.

Bloggers In Jammies With Unbrushed Hair and Dodgy Webcams

2010-05-13T21:10:00.004+10:00

I'm all for the concept of Bloggers Without Makeup, but since I very rarely wear makeup anyway, it kind of seemed like cheating for me to participate - it's not like there aren't photos of my sans makeup all over the interwebs. So I decided that the Cerry equivilant of "Without Makeup" was probably "In Jammies". Then I realise that, wait, there are photos of me in my jammies all over ther interwebs, too. One step further - with unbrushed hair. Except there are a fair few of those floating around cyberspace, too. So I figured that to put me on par with people whose online personas rarely go without makeup, I could use my crappy webcam, instead of my 12 megapixel camera, which has all kinds of fun features for prettying you up, while in my PJs, having not brushed my hair, and a little squinty eyed from staring at a computer screen without my glasses on for an hour or so (yes, I HAVE been sitting in bed with my laptop on my lap for about an hour now...why do you ask?). So, here we go.

Blogger In Jammies With Unbrushed Hair and a Crappy Webcam, who is also too stupid to turn on the overhead light

Blogger has a brainwave, and turns on the overhead light, as well as bedside lamp, to remove blue tinge from her skin

When I grow up, I want to be a teacher. I also want people to stop telling me that's unfeminist.

2010-05-02T17:55:00.004+10:00

Yesterday's article in the Good Weekend pissed me off. This is not surprising, because, as you may have noticed, a lot of things piss me off. Also, most articles about feminism piss me off, because there is invariably at least one person mentioned in these articles who thinks it's such a shame that young women are no longer feminist, and don't realise what their mothers fought for. There is also always at least one mention of the fact that women are underrepresented in politics/IT/management etc, and the fact that women earn less over the course of their lifetime than men, and young women are not anywhere near as upset about this as they should be. I really think that they should actually talk to some young women before they publish statements like that.

It has been brought to my attention by my Mum, who already has 3 degrees (including one in Ag Science, where she was one of about 5 girls in a class of several hundred), is due to submit her PhD next December, and has been the main earner in the family since before my 23 year old brother was born, as well as doing normal Mum type stuff, that I am not limited in what I want to do because I am female. Both my parents were happy for me to do whatever I wanted in the way of subjects at school, and are more than happy for me to do what I want at uni, whether that be the Arts I'm currently doing (which, let's face it, is dole bludging with a pretty piece of paper after 3 years), or rocket science. If I'd decided not to finish school, or not to go on to uni, the only thing that would have bothered them is that they know that I wouldn't enjoy doing unqualified work for the rest of my life.

I am totally aware of the fact that Mum's generation worked rather hard for my generation to be in this situation. The fact that I will be spending the next 4.5 years at uni to come out the other end with two bits of paper, one of which says I'm a language nerd (because really, that's all an Arts degree majoring in German and Linguistics is good for), and one of which says I'm qualified to teach small children does NOT mean that I don't appreciate this fact, or that I feel that as a woman, the only thing I can do is teaching. It means that I like little kids, but I don't like people, so I will enjoy teaching, but would hate management. It means that I like langauges, but not maths type stuff, so I would make a shit IT person, but will be good at teaching little kids how to read and write. It means that I enjoy watching things click into place for kids, but find that politics makes me want to take a nap, so politics would be a dumb career choice for me, while teaching is smart. Since feminism is about women having the choice to do what they like, and having all the opportunities that men have, I should not feel that I have to defend this choice. And yet, I do - to people who taught me in high school, to family friends, to the occasional family member (although in all fairness, half of them are so impressed that I'm at uni that they haven't even asked me which degree I'm doing yet, so I don't think they're going to care), to people who I barely even know.

If you want people my age to not totally disown feminism and anything even vaguely related to it, I would thorougly recommend letting us be females in a way that we're comfortable with, not the way you think we should. If we're fucking up feminism as you see it, it's probably your fault - after all, you're the generation raising us, and anything that we think about feminism will be as a result of what you've done. We're really rather good at being us, and would appreciate it if we could get on with that, in peace, without a whole bunch of people bitching about what we're doing wrong. And really, isn't that what feminism is about? Women doing what they want to do, not what other people tell them that they, as women should be doing? Just sayin'.

A realistic list of things girls (ok, I) wish guys knew

2010-03-30T18:04:00.003+11:00

A few of my friends have joined a group on Facebook called "A realistic list of what girls would like guys to know." I decided to investigate, because I wanted to see if it really was realistic, unlike the majority of things girls wish guys knew lists. It's not. It's pretty much the 5 million other lists on the interwebs, which all shit me, because I find 90% of the things on those lists completely stupid. There are 36 things on this list. I agree with about 2 of them. Quite frankly, I think that this comprehensive list I've written is far more useful than anything you will find elsewhere. And with that, I present A Realistic List Of Things Girls Wish Guys Knew

1. We are human beings. Please treat us as such.
2. In order to not make us go completely apeshit on a regular basis, you will have to learn what pisses us off, and what makes us happy. This will involve getting to know us as individuals. Please do so.
3. As a group in general, girls are not particularly nice people. Really, we're not. You're gonna have to make your peace with that, cause it's not likely to change (unless, of course, you're willing to be chryogenically frozen for a few hundred years and wait for evolution to do something about it. And even then, we're not making any promises).
4. Girls like chocolate, and sometimes, we need it. We realise that you don't understand this, but we really, really wish you'd just shut up and give us the chocolate without making a fuss. Withholding the chocolate is only going to make us take out our problems on you, rather than sulking quietly.
5. Wait, there is no 5. We're all done now. But we do appreciate you takingg the time to read this.

You know what really shits me? WAGs.

2010-03-17T20:00:00.002+11:00

Not the women. I have no problem with them, since they rarely do anything particularly objectionable, and I've never actually met them. The term WAGs is what shits me. It is grammatically incorrect, as is using WAG as a singular noun.
This has always (ok, so just for the last few years, since it came into common usage) pissed my off, but recently, with the whole Lara Bingle and Whatshisface1 and Whatshisface2 fiasco, people have been using those words more than usual, so they're pissing me off more than usual.

You see, WAG stands for Wives And Girlfriends. Both the words wives and girlfriends are already plural, which means that adding an s to the end of the word is redundant. I understand that people can't see the pluralness of these words when the acronym is used, and therefore feel the need to shove an s on the end to differentiate between the singular and plural, but that doesn't make it any less wrong. More importantly, that distinction doesn't actually need to be made, because you CANNOT HAVE A SINGULR WAG.
One woman, on her own, CANNOT be a Wife AND a Girlfriend (at least, not to the same person. And people do tend to frown upon people who are married to one person and dating another, so I wouldn't recommend doing so). She can be a wife OR a girlfriend, but not both at the same time. The correct acronym for one female partner of a sportsperson would actually be WOG - Wife Or Girlfriend. What's that? You're not going to refer to someone as a WOG, because you'll accidentally offend people of European descent? Then refer to her as a partner or significant other, if you don't know whether she's a girlfriend or wife. Or a fiancee, for that matter. Where are the poor fiancees in all this? I see a way we can kill several birds with one stone here - call one partner of a sportsperson a WOGOF (Wife Or Girlfriend Or Fiancee, and pronounced Woah-Goff, to avoid accidentally saying wog), and multiple partners WAGAF (Wives And Girlfriends And Fiancees). People still get to use acronyms, and I spend a lot less time wanting to throttle people. EVERYONE WINS!

I'll keep you my dirty little secret (only apparently, I won't keep you really secret, I'll post about you on my blog)

2010-01-29T21:46:00.005+11:00

Yesterday, Tara posted a blog about dirty little secrets, and requested that other people share theirs. I have far too many to do them justice in the comments on her blog, so I'm dedicating a blog post of my own to it. So, without further adieu (I just realised I type that phrase a lot more than I say it. I hardly ever say it, but I'm pretty sure I've used it on this blog alone at least twice before. That's not taking into account all the other stuff I do online), I give you My Dirty Little Secrets:
*If you were to peek through our kitchen window at about 9:15 on any given week day, there would be a pretty good chance that you'd see a pyjama clad butt sticking out of the fridge or cupboard, wiggling in time with a disembodied voice singing something stupid, like Mickey or The Best Damn Thing. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily me, but the rest of my family are usually at work by 9am, and the dog doesn't wear pyjamas.
*I don't just sing in the shower, I dance, too. I mean, obviously not proper dancing, like I do when I'm cooking (what do you mean, you can't dance and cook at the same time? I do. All the time), because the shower is just not that big, but it's definitely dancing.
*I'm currently in the process of watching all 8 seasons of Home Improvement, purely based on the fact that I have a huge crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas. It's really a rather terrible show, but he's so very, very pretty.
*I am a pimple/blackhead squisher. I also poke at infected wounds, and squish my fingers when my cuticles get infected (which happens with great regularity, because I get hang nails all the freaking time, and they catch and rip and...ick). I partially blame it on genetics, because Mum also likes to squish pimples and blackheads, but mostly, I just get a sick, twisted pleasure out of making pusy gunk ooze out of stuff.
*No matter how hard I try, I cannot bring myself to hate Single Ladies. I don't actually like it, but I still can't help singing along when I hear it. I do, however, maintain that the chords under the chorus should be major, not minor, and that minor mistake (pun not originally intended, but also not deleted when I found it) destroys the entire song.
*There are currently four stuffed animals residing in my bed - Lenny the lemur, Superdude The Wonderdog, Bill the billy goat, and Ted, who I'm pretty sure is a giraffe, even though he has no neck (yes, Bill and Ted were part of the same birthday gift, and named that way intentionally). I have been known to talk to Lenny after I've had a bad dream.
*When my brother or Dad have been pissing me off, I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, just to annoy them.
*I take great joy in ripping posters (read: full pages images from the middle of articles) out of magazines as soon as I've finished reading them, and watching other people get annoyed/confused when half an article is missing. The "Oh, sorry, I didn't realise you wanted to read it" bit is totally an act, and the fact that I knew you wanted to read it was half my motivation.
*I have raised Facebook stalking from something you do when you're kinda bored to an artform. I have managed to access photos belonging to people whose privacy settings mean that all you can see of their profile if you're not their friend is their photo, their name, and their friends. I am far too proud of this fact.

If I gave Proactiv 5 years, I'm sure it'd work for me, too

2010-01-29T20:18:00.004+11:00

Not that I've ever actually tried it, mind you, but I know a few people who have, and they've all given the same review of it - "It stung like fuck, made my skin blotchy, and never really did anything much for my acne."
Anywho, I realised today that the Proactiv ad campaigns are kind of full of shit. This occured to me when I saw a video of the new campaign that they've just released in the States, with their new spokesgirl (always girls, you'll notice. Never a spokesguy. Does their product have eostrogen in it, or are guys just really not that fussy about gross skin?), Avril Lavigne, who is now 25. By 25, most people have outgrown the gross acne (I'm starting to outgrow it now, and I'm not even 20 yet), or have such dodgy skin that Proactiv sure as hell isn't going to do anything for it. Therefore, it seems to me to be just a little bit cheaty to use pictures of her when she was 16 as the before shots, and the video of her happily chatting away that they've filmed in the last few months as the after shots. And then I realised that it wasn't just her.
I seem to remember seeing Delta Goodrem doing a Proactiv infomercial at some point in the last 12 months or so. Also 25 at the moment. Also using 9 year old photos as the befores, and the new footage of the after.
Jessica Simpson, who is 29 this year (or possibly 30, I didn't bother checking when her birthday was, I just read the current age part on Wiki) also did a proactiv ad in the last couple of years. Her befores were from back when she was a teenage sensation (yeah, you didn't realise she did anything before Newlyweds, did you? Don't worry, even I thought it was crap, and I like the Spice Girls and Aaron Carter).
Youtube tells me that Kelly Clarkson has done a Proactiv commerical recently. Her befores are from her first tour after she won Idol, when she was 20. She is now 28.

So basically, every single one of Proactiv's spokesgirls has had at LEAST 5 years for their skin to clear up after the gross-teenage-skin stage, and it's been approximately 10 years since all the before shots were taken. Plus, every single one of them have been professionaly made up for TV in the videos of them raving about Proactiv (which I kinda struggle to believe based on what I've heard from friends, but they may have all had freakishly sensitive skin, I guess), which most of them had not been in their 10 year old photos.
I guess what it is I'm really trying to say is Proactiv, I call bullshit, and don't get how you can justify charging like, $50 for a month's supply of your product, with no real evidence that it actually works, when I can get something that works properly for $9 a bottle, which will last me 6 months. Oh, and also, people are stupid suckers.

One day, primary school kids all over the country will thank me.

2010-01-27T15:19:00.004+11:00

Why? Because of my brilliant plans for the new Australian flag design. Apparently, our old flag needs to be updated. I agree. Ditch the union jack and stars - at least once a year when I was in primary school, I would end up frustrated because we'd been told to draw the Australian flag, and the union jack and stars are too damn hard to draw. I was good at colouring in pre-drawn ones, but NOOOO, we couldn't do that, and the teachers also refused to let me draw the flag of Libya, because apparently, I don't live there, and they don't care if it's much, much easier to just draw a big, green rectangle than it is to draw the Australian flag. Now, I know that theoretically, we could just have a blue flag, because once you ditch the union jack and stars, that's what the Australian flag is. But let's face it, the Australian flag is a crappy shade of blue. If it was electric blue, I'd be cool with it. But it's not. So instead, I propose that we adopt this as our new flag:

Now, I know what you're thinking. First of all, you're thinking "But Ceiridwen, you can't have a purple flag. The Olympic symbol would have to be changed, because the 5 rings on the white background would no longer have at least one colour from every single competing country's flag on it." Well yeah, but it's not that hard to add a purple ring. Or to pull Australia out of the Olympics. I'd be cool with that. No Olympics taking over normal TV programming once every four years sounds good to me. And no compulsory study of the Olympics at school, once every four years would probably appeal to a lot of kids, especially the poor buggers, who, like me, started school in an Olympic year, and therefore had to learn about the damn things 3 TIMES BEFORE THEY FINISHED SCHOOL.
And secondly, you're thinking "What the hell does purple have to do with Australia?" Firstly, let me ask you - what do red, white and blue have to do with Australia? But anyway, purple is a very Australian colour. Purple is the colour of jacaranda flowers, which we all know are one of the first, and most awesome signs that it's summer time in Australia. Plus, you only have to spend a few minutes overseas to discover that Australia is widely believed to be an awesome place. Purple is widely believe to an awesome colour. See what I did there?

So, in conclusion, Nobody really gives a shit about the Australian flag, and there are far more constructive things we could be arguing about. What do you mean, how is that my point? I would have thought that was obvious - my argument makes little to no sense, much like the rest of the arguments in this debate. Therefore, it's a pointless exercise.

Cake tin me!

2010-01-22T08:34:00.003+11:00

So I've joined Formspring me (are we getting the title now? Yes? Good). Basically, it's like Honesty Box on Facebook, only it's a website, not an application. With me? Don't worry, even I'm not quite with me, cause it's early. Just follow the link and hit me up with questions, k?

Jennifer Hawkins and Marie Claire, you have just become the mum that every teenager hates.

2010-01-03T19:54:00.006+11:00

You know, that mum whose daughter tells her some people at school called her fat, and she feels fat and ugly, and responds with "Oh, darling, if they think you're fat and ugly, they're crazy. Don't you listen to them, I think you're gorgeous!" and thinks that she's actually helping.

For those of you who are lost, this is the cover of this month's Marie Claire:

It's been done in order to promote body image. That is Jennifer Hawkins, unretouched. The fact that Jennifer Hawkins (you know, the woman who won Miss Universe in 2004?) is willing to have an unretouched nude photo of herself put on the front of a magazine is helping my body image? Really? So next time I'm feeling fat and deformed, seeing her with her nice, tan skin; boobs that appear to be even, round and perky; flat, toned tummy; cellulite free thighs (which, by the way, are tiny, and attached to a tiny ass) and skin without pimples or freckles, will make me feel better about being pasty, having slightly lopsided boobs that are not round and perky, a muffin top (complete with the rest of the muffin), thunder thighs (and hips. And ass) with cellulite, and pimpley, freckled skin? EXCELLENT! If someone had told me that before, I would have felt that way, instead of going "Fuck, I'm an ugly freak." when I see photos like that.

I get it, you're trying. You really are. But you're NOT HELPING. You know what would really help girls having fat days? Seeing a whole bunch of women, none of whom have been voted the most beautiful woman in the universe (and don't get me started on that concept - do they accept entrants from other planets? No? So how can they call it a Miss Universe contest?) might be a start. And not women who conform to standard ideals of beauty, a whole range of women with a whole range of body shapes. Some with big boobs, some with no boobs. Put a woman with a six pack next to a woman with a muffin top. Baby who's got back chatting to baby with no back to speak of. And for fuck's sake, don't fake tan them, let the the chick with dark skin get tanned by the light reflecting off the skin of the fluorescent chick next to her (I like to think this is something that my skin does in addition to glowing in the dark. I have no proof that it does this, but I will continue to think it until I'm proved wrong).
I know that one of the arguments against this would be "But it's only women like Jennifer Hawkins who are willing to publically nude up." I think that's wrong. Why do I think this is wrong? I spent 6 years at an all girl's school, and have been doing various activities involving costume changes since I was about 10, that's why. I've seen people who normally don't like to strip off do so, because there are other people around them doing it, and you're not as self conscious when everyone else around you is in the same state of undress as you. I've been backstage at musicals, and seen girls pushing other girls' boobs back into costumes on the way on stage, because owners of the boobs hadn't noticed they were popping out, and they were too close to microphones to say anything.
Singularly, supermodels may be some of the only women who are willing to get nakey in public, but in a group, you'd be amazed who'll take it all off, specially if you have one of two combinations - people who know each other well, and are comfortable together; or people who have never met before, and will never meet again after an event. I'm sure if magazines asked around, they'd be able to get together a handful (or two. Or four) of those two groups of people who'd be willing to bare their bits for the greater good.

When did they change the meaning of the word "fan", and why was I not infomed???

2009-12-11T20:49:00.003+11:00

No one ever tells me anything important, so I'm kind of used to missing out on information (pregnant relative? Nope. Sick relative? Nope. Really bad joke that someone heard today at work? Yeah, every time), but I really, really wish I'd gotten the memo on this one. Granted, Mum has also missed this one, so it's not quite so bad, but still. Clearly, it's happened. Why do I say that? Because of the shit my friends keep becoming fans of on Facebook. Things that they've become fans of in the last few weeks include:
Saying Something Then Realizing It Only Makes Sense In Your Mind;
Walking into a room of your house, and forgetting why you walked in there;
Getting really comfortable to watch a movie, then forgetting the remote; and
Trying To Sleep But My Minds Having A Conversation With Itself :|

So clearly, being a fan means something different to what it meant when I was learning to speak, because no one in their right mind would in any way, shape or form support these things. They are all SHIT. I have an active dislike for every single one of these things, and I strongly suspect that all the people who are fans of them do, too. Therefore, fan must now mean that you dislike something.
Oh, but wait, it can't. Because you can also be a fan of things like:
I Wish Music Played During Epic Moments of My Life and Not Just in Movies;
i hate girls who wear too much make up;
I wouldnt steal a car, But i'd download one if i could;
I Will Go Slightly Out of My Way To Step On A Crunchy-Looking Leaf;
I type things into Google to see if I spelled them correctly;
I did bathe ok, the pen markings just didn't wash off; and
Nothing Is Wrong, I'm Just In a BAD MOOD, OKAY?!

Now, I'm going to admit, I'm a fan of quite a few of that last lot, because I have a tendancy to just click buttons without paying attention to whether they say become a fan or join when they're things like that (no, I don't know why I pay attention the rest of the time, I just do). But seriously, say those sentences outloud. "I am a fan of I Wish Music Played During Epic Moments of My Like and Not Just In Movies." That's a shitty, shitty sentence, but clearly, the people who make these fan pages don't realise that, or they would make them groups. Or at the very least, change them to things that make sense, like "Typing things into google to see if I spelled [and actually, I'm pretty sure that should be spelt, because in actual real English, instead of American English, spelled has something to do with having a rest or something like that] them correctly" or "Going out of my way to step on a crunchy looking leaf" (which is a particularly stupid fan page, because there's a group for it already. I know, cause I'm part of it).
Seriously people, learn to speak English properly. I know that "I have to write properly at school/uni all day, and this is the internet, no one cares," but, um, I have to write properly (in two different languages, might I add) at uni as well, and I still use proper English on the net (save the mistakes due to my inability to type). Oh, and um, I CARE, as do the 284 other people who have joined the group "Spelling and grammatical errors deter me from joining groups" since Tuesday. SO GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, PEOPLE!

In the last 5 minutes, I've lost 20 friends on Facebook

2009-11-06T20:41:00.002+11:00

Except lost isn't really the right word, cause I know EXACTLY where they are. Deleted from my friends list. See, a year ago today, at some point between 11 and 11:45 am (don't remember what time exactly), I finished my chemistry exam (and left early, hence not knowing what time I finished), got the principal to sign my leaving checklist, and signed out of school forever. For the last 12 months, I have been waiting for this day to come. This is the day that I felt I could justify saying "With the exception of the mandatory message when Facebook reminds you it's my birthday (if that), you haven't communicated with me since we left school, and since I don't actually like you much (or at all), so I'm deleting you from my friends list. You have more than 200 friends, so clearly, you're a friend whore, and given that we might have spoken about 10 times during the last year of school, I'm guessing I'm just a number on your friends list, and you probably won't even notice I'm gone." without seeming rude/potentially starting a whole bunch of high school dramas that I just don't want to go through because HIGH SCHOOL IS OVER.
Yes, I disliked people I went to school with that much. Yes, I took great glee in deleting them from my friends list. Yes, I am blogging about this because I am rather excited, and had to share. Yes, I am just that bitchy. No, I don't really care. I would have tweeted, because really, I totally could have sufficiently covered this in 140 characters instead of however many this post is, but some of the girls I deleted from Facebook follow me, and given what I prolific tweeter I am/how few people they follow, they probably would have noticed if I removed them, and probably would have checked to see if they'd been unfriended if I tweeted without unfollowing them. And we all know that when they noticed, it would probably lead to aformentioned dramas (seriously, never send your daughter to an all girls school, even if she claims she wants to go. After a few years, she won't any more, especially if she starts in high school).

In conclusion: I'm happy, a whole lot of girls are probably goingg to get rather pissed in the near future, all girls schools are the work of Satan, and I ramble a lot. Thanks you. *Bows*

Google Analytics, part whatever it is I'm up to now/the US healthcare system is fucked up

2009-10-19T18:08:00.002+11:00

Yes, I know, you're probably struggling to see the connection. There is one though. I was checking my analytics to see how many readers I actually have in the US at the moment, after hearing about the mess that is the healthcare system over there. Answer: 3. 2 in Southern California, and one in Kansas. Incidentally, I'm REALLY interested to know how people outside Australia (and who aren't Beth reading my blog while she's overseas) are stumbling across this blog. If you're reading this, could you take a second to comment and tell me how you found the blog/why you're actually bothering to read it.

Just as an aside before I start ranting about the US healthcare system, a few bits and pieces on analytics. First of all, who googled my name? That has genuinely never been a hit before, and I'm kind of curious as to why it happened.
Secondly, who googles this: "how can i find leonard cohen doing a kind of comedy routine on youtube heard it the other day but couldn`t find it again"? That is a search engine fail, people.
And finally, shoutouts to my readers in Russia, France, Spain, the UK (Beth, I'm gonna be so sad when you come home, and I'm not getting heaps of hits in the UK anymore. It makes me feel so special), and the US. Australian readers, as per usual, hi, but you're not really that interesting.

So anyway, back to the matter at hand. I've known for quite a while that the US healthcare system is a bit messed up. I've watched enough TV with "Canada is like the US, only with better healthcare" jokes, and enough Scrubs, to know that there are some gaping holes in the system. I've also known for quite some time that Australia's system isn't too bad, as far as healthcare systems go. But I didn't realise how much better the Australian system is than the American system, or just how fucked up the American system actually is. I knew Obama wanted to fix it, and was getting opposition, but I didn't realise how unbelievably stupid some of the people opposing it had to be. Then several people I follow on Twitter drew my attention to this. For thos of you who aren't going to bother reading the link, the general gist is one of the crew on the Blink 182 tour ended up in hospital with appendicitis, and, because she had a "pre-existing condition" that meant she couldn't get health insurance, had to pay $42,850 US (That's nearly $47,000 in Australian currency) for the tests they ran, and the appendectomy that followed.
Let's imagine Australia has this system. A first year teacher's wage in Australia is $50,000. If, first year out of uni, I had to get my appendix out, I would just barely be able to cover it. Except, oh, wait, they don't pay your your yearly wage upfront. Bugger. I do believe that lands me with a debt. "But Ceiridwen, you don't HAVE a pre-existing medical condition", I hear you say. Except I do. I have asthma, which is apparently grounds for refusal of health insurance. It's more likely I'd just have to pay a huge premium, but I could actually be refused insurance all together. Other "pre-existing" conditions include diabetes and heart disease. Also, if I got health insurance while I was in perfect health, and was later diagnosed with cancer, my premiums could go up, or they could just take my insurance away. Oh, and if I'm lucky enough to live in one of 9 US states, I could also be refused medical insurance if I'm a survivor of domestic violence, because that's a pre-existing condition. No, I'm not joking. Why would it occur to me to make a joke like that? IT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE.
I'm also lead to believe that US hospitals are within their rights to refuse to treat you without health insurance. Of course, I'm lead to believe this by Scrubs, so I'm not 100% sure it's actually true, but I imagine there's some degree of fact behind it. Anyway, it TOTALLY makes sense, since people who have pre-existing conditions aren't ever likely to need to go to hospital. Never heard of an asthmatic or diabetic being rushed to hospital, needing treatment. That just doesn't happen.

The real point to all this ramble is this - how can people in the US being saying that Obama is wasting his time trying to fix that mess? How can they believe that there is nothing wrong with the system the way it is? The people who are most likely to need the system are the ones getting totally screwed over by it. It's not even like people can say that you won't be affected if you're rich, because no amount of money is going to get you health insurance if you're an asthmatic, diabetic, domestic violence survivor with cancer and heart disease (yeah, extreme, I know, but I BET there's one or two out there somewhere). There's something really depressing about the fact that there are people THAT stupid in the world, who are presumably breeding.

I'm not sure who needs to get out more - me, or Mark Hoppus

2009-10-15T20:50:00.002+11:00

I say this because at 1 minute 44 of this video, Mark does something I have always, always aspired to, and have never, ever been able to do, even when I actually tried. And I tried really hard for like, 6 months when I was about 5. I'm not sure what's sadder - the fact that I want to be able to do it and am annoyed that I can't, or that he actually can.

Yes, that's right, I have always, always aspired to be able to say the alphabet backwards, and I can't. I have trouble with alphabetical order going FORWARDS. Seriously. We used to have to line up alphabetically to go into exams at school, and I was the girl standing there, muttering the alphabet under my breath to work out where I should be, because people kept coming to the school, and leaving the school, and I was sometimes next to one person, and sometimes next to another, and that wasn't even in elective classes, that was just English (although, in my defence, I started at M, because it would have just been STUPID to start at A when my last name starts with R).

Oh, and I've just worked out who needs to get out more - that would be the 19 year old girl blogging about the fact that she can't decide who needs to get out more.

Hey, media? You fail at life. Just saying. (Oh, and warning: this post may contain traces of hypocrisy)

2009-10-14T16:34:00.006+11:00

Yes, you heard me. The media fails at life. Why? Because for about a week after Michael Jackson died, I couldn't turn on the radio or TV, or open a newspaper, or use the freaking internet without hearing about it. Because when Patrick Swayze died, the same thing happened for several days. I have had the radio on for the news about 3 times today, and am yet to hear anything about something much more important. I have spent a large portion of the day on the internet, and have seen very, very little about it. What would this ever so important thing that no one is reporting be? One of the guys from Boyzone died. Yes, I know, you're all laughing. I am FULLY aware that I'm a sad little puppy, but dammit, I think he deserves more recognition than he's getting.
Look, I'm gonna be honest, I'm not actually sure which one Stephen Gately IS, because I was more of a Westlife girl (and FWIW, Backstreet Boys > N*Sync), and the only member of Boyzone whose face I can put a name to is Ronan Keating, but it's still sad. And I still don't see why the media don't really appear to care that much. Michael Jackson dies, the world goes into shock. Stephen Gately dies, people who were young enough to be unashamed fans of boybands in the 90s go into shock, and no one else knows. Realistically, I'm not seeing a huge difference. Yes, Michael Jackson was hugely influential and famous and all that, but it's not like Boyzone were an obscure group who no one outside their hometown had heard of. Let's weight it up.
Michael Jackson sang. Stephen Gately sang.
Michael Jackson danced. Stephen Gately danced.
Michael Jackson released a lot of rather mediocore middle-of-the-road pop songs. Boyzone/Stephen Gately released a lot of rather mediocore middle-of-the-road pop songs.
Michael Jackson was an incredibly messed up person, who was suspected of doing some rather dubious stuff. The most controversial thing Stephen Gately did was be gay.
Michael Jackson was middle aged when he died. Stephen Gately was young when he died.
Michael Jackson had a rather strange American accent. Stephen Gately had an Irish accent.
How are they not worthy of the same amount of media coverage? I'm not suggesting Stephen Gately gets the weeks of coverage Michael Jackson got - I don't think ANYONE deserves that much media coverage for doing something as normal as dying (look, everyone does it eventually. It's not really unusual or anything), even under the weird ass circumstances surrounding Michael Jackson's death. Media coverage of deaths should be limited to 1 day at death, and then 1 day anytime a major revelation about the death is discovered (unless you are are the media in a non-English speaking country, reporting the death of someone from an English speaking country. In this case, repeat everything hundreds of times so tourists can understand, because they get frustrated when Heath Ledger dies and the only news they can easily access is in German, and they only understand half of what's being said the first time they hear it) - and I don't mean "The coroner reports it's suspected there was foul play" should get a day of coverage. I mean "It's been confirmed by the coroner that the cause of death was strangulation by the victim's own hair". THAT is a major revelation. Hell, even "The coroner has confirmed the cause of death was overdose on panadol" would classify as something deserving of a day of coverage.
I realise that there is about zero chance of this happening, but I felt that this really needed to be put out there.

For those of you who are completely at a loss as to who the hell Boyzone are, here's your answer:

Too much free time and a dog with an interesting name is a BAD combination.

2009-10-04T17:14:00.004+11:00

Or maybe that's only the case in my family, but it's definitely become somewhat of a problem here.
It all started when my brother, who was still declaring that he didn't want anything to do with a dog, and was not at all interested in our brand new puppy (have I mentioned that the background on his phone is a picture of the dog all snuggled up in my arms? Yeah, it is), was bored the night we got her. I'd gone to bed, so I missed all the fun, but apparently, he was playing around with his guitar, and started singing a Phoebe Buffay type song about Handschuhe, who makes shoes for your hands (for those of you who don't speak German, Handschuhe is pronounced Hund-schoo-eh. Your average English speaker is more likely to say Hand-shoe-uh, or Hand-shoe-er, which is where the making shoes for hands thing came from). That somehow started a much loved by the entire family game of "trying to insert the dogs names into the lyrics of songs". 3 months into this game, we have managed to get some variation on her name (and sometimes some sort of other lyric change) into the following songs:
Bicycle Race - Queen
"I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike...BIcyle, BIcyle" becomes "I want to pat my Handschuhe, I want to pat my dog, I want to pat my Handschuhe...HANDschuhe, HANDschuhe"

Who Are You - The Who
"Whoooo are you? Who, who! Who, who!" becomes "Haaaaaaand-schuh-aaaaaah-aaaaah [creative licence allows me to mispronounce the dogs name if need be], Handschuh! Handschuh!"

The Cuckoo Song
The cuckoo part (as in the sweet, low cuckoo that the bird makes) becomes "Handschuh, Handschuhe, Handschu-u-ah, Handschuhe"
If you don't know what song I'm talking about, you'll have to follow this link and pretend that the words are in English, cause the French version is the only one I can find audio of online.

Sloop John B - The Beach Boys
"We come on the Sloop John B, my grandfather and me" becomes "We come on the sloop John B, my Handschuhe and me"

Lollipop - The Chordettes
Look, this one really doesn't take a genius. Lollipop and Handschuhe have the same number of syllables. Do I really need to explain it?

Big Spender
"The minute you walked in the joint, I could see you were a man of distinction, a real big spender" becomes "The minute you walked in the joint, I could see you were a dog of distinction, my pup Handschuhe"

Candyman - Christina Aguilera
So basically, any instance of candyman is substituted with Handschuhe. This also works with the Aqua song of the same name, which also mentions lollipops, and is therefore a double whammy.

Hallelujah - Look, Jeff Buckley did it at some point, and it was pretty good. But quite frankly, I prefer the version in Shrek. I also think that Leonard Cohen did a better job writing it than singing it.
Hallelujah becomes Ha-andschuhe It makes about zero sense, but let's be honest, the original lyrics are hardly going to win prizes for their sense making ability (although, they'd probably beat me for said prizes)

The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah
Strangely enough, I think this was actually mum, without knowing that I'd discovered I could fit the dog's name into Hallelujah. But she only got as far as Hanschuhe/Hallelujah. I then discovered you could go even further. Basically, you get Handschuhe, over and over again, followed by "For Handschuhe omnipotent reigneth" and "Pup of pups, and dog of dogs"

Duke Of Earl - Gene Chandler
This one's pretty self explanitory, too - "Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Earl, Earl" etc becomes "Hand-, Hand-, Hand-, Handschuhe-e-e-e"

That's as far as we've gotten so far. I'm sure it will get much, much further, though. Prizes for creative suggestions from commenters (don't get too excited, I'll probably just find way to substitute your name into a song)

***EDIT*** And, in a new development, the dog's name has now been substituted into My Sharona - "Oh my little pretty one, my pretty one, when you gonna give me the time Sharona?" has become "Oh my little pretty one, my stinky one, when you gonna give me the time, Handschuhe." Snaps for Daddy.

Great. I can now never listen to another song in D Major again.

2009-10-04T14:55:00.003+11:00

Of course, I don't like songs is D major that much to start with, since D major is a horrible, icky key which I can't sing along with.
One of my friends posted this on Facebook. It cracked me up, having heard many, many cellists rant about this exact same thing. I feel your pain, cellists, I do. I've sung alto. Cellos are the altos of the string world. Or altos are the cellos of the vocal world. Whatever. I feel your pain. That's why I laughed so hard.

Oh, and he missed a song at the end...

Yes, I'm that sad. I'd actually noticed this before. And I'd noticed some of the other songs he mentioned. I always thought I was lame, but if someone managed to make a comedy routine out of it, obviously, I'm actually awesome. And even if I'm lame, at least I'm not paranoid that a song is stalking me, and am therefore not the most paranoid person in the world (yeah, I know, it was news to me, too).

And this is why I love my mum

2009-09-18T13:40:00.002+10:00

So yesterday, my brother bought dad a $450 kayak as a Christmas present. Mum and I are now contemplating what we want for Christmas from our oh-so-generous-and-rich son/brother. I'm not having trouble coming up with a list of expensive shit I want, I'm just having trouble deciding which of the things on said list I want (I could go to Soundwave. Or Big Day Out. Or see Green Day when they're out in December. Or Rob Thomas whenever it is that he's out. Or Avenue Q. Or Wicked. Or I could get the pretty, shiny, purple phone that I so desperately want, and so can't justify spending $200 on while my current one is still functioning), but mum is. Or was, until she went to the gym today, and watched infomercials while she was riding the exercise bike. My mum, who will be 55 in December, watched the 20 or so minute infomercial for the 10th or so time today, and has decided that what she really, truly wants for Christmas is a convection oven, as endorsed by Mr T. My mum is awesome.

Listen! Is it a chainsaw? Is it a male koala in mating season? No, it's the puppy snoring

2009-09-18T10:20:00.003+10:00

And for a little dog (ok, so she probably weighs about 15kg...but shhh), she can make one hell of a noise. But I think the important thing here is the vastly amusing twanging quality of the exhaling part of the snoring. Yes, I videoed 30 seconds of the dog snoring, just because I thought that she sound she was making was incredibly funny. I know, I have to get out more.

Things The Almighty Handschuhe is scared of: chimes/glockenspiels, small dogs with loud barks, my uncle, and now, the wheel barrow

2009-09-15T11:06:00.004+10:00

The other day, the dog managed to drag an old doormat out of the pile of grass clipping dad had put it in to compost. It was her favourite toy while she was home alone for about 6 hours the other day, and she shredded it up and spread it all over the yard. Dad picked up all the bits and put them in the wheel barrow before he mowed the lawn yesterday. When we came out later, the wheel barrow was on its side. When dad threw one of her toys, and it landed near the wheelbarrow, and she wouldn't go and pick it up, she just circled for a while. We're assuming that she tried to climb in to the wheelbarrow to get the mat out, and had it fall over and scare her, so she now won't go near it.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, video of the dog playing fetch, and sooking when her toy lands on the wheel barrow. Scuse the dodgy camera work, I was filming with one hand, and chucking a toy with the other.

If I could extended my 5 celebrities I could sleep with list by a few people, Adam Hills would be on it.

2009-09-10T20:32:00.002+10:00

2:44. This sort of thing is why I learn German. Most people just don't get it.
But also, just before that - how the hell do you sign with a French accent?

And in an opinion no one really asked for...

2009-09-10T12:45:00.003+10:00

Today, Mia Freedman posted about Miley Cyrus' photo shoot for Elle, and how inappropriate it is. It's one a long, long line of many posts about over sexualisation of girls, and inappropriate stuff in the media. No problem with that. Miley Cyrus is a skank, I totally agree, and she does some stuff that 16 year olds probably shouldn't do. And I agree that string bikinis should not be worn by small children, because it's ust wrong on so many levels.
But every one of these posts is followed by comments from mothers feeling shouty about how there's going to be a screwed up generation of kids because of it (whatever it is in that particular post), and it should be banned. This is where my problem is.

It shouldn't be banned. Your job as a parent is NOT to get stuff banned because you don't approve of it. It's to look after your kids, and make sure that when they're in a situation where they have to make a decision about whether or not they're going to dress like a cheap hooker, or sleep with their boyfriend, or drink alcohol or whatever, they have the information to make an informed decision about it, which, hopefully, is going to reflect the values that you've given them.
If you think that Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montanna is a skank with an attitude problem, then don't ban your kid from watching Hannah Montanna, if they enjoy it. Sit down, and watch it with your kid, and talk to them about what it is that Hannah/Miley is doing that you think is not cool, and make it clear that you think it's not cool behaviour. If you think that the Pussycat Dolls wear inappropriate clothes and act in ways that are demeaning to other women, then make sure your kids know that objectifying women is not cool, and that they can be much more than very tacky burlesque dancers (oh, sorry, that's NOT what PCD are? THEY'RE A MUSIC GROUP? My bad. I really thought they were tacky burlesque dancers). That is what your job is. Leaving your children to do what they want, with no parental guidance is NOT what good parents do. Refusing to let your 13 year old out in fishnets, and micro mini and a boob tube might piss her off, but guess what? You're her parent, not her friend.
Teenage girls are MEANT to hate their parents at times. They're MEANT to rebel, and fuck up from time to time, and then come home looking for a hug when they realise that things are a mess and they need help to fix it.
You can ban whatever you want, it's just going to make them want to watch/hear/do it more, and they'll find someway to do it, in the end. At least if you let them watch/hear/do it when you're around to keep an eye on them, then any fuck ups they make later on will be made in an educated way, where they might have some hope of fixing it, rather than with just their friends around, who honestly, are probably just as clueless as them. It doesn't matter how much you try to shield them, the reality of the adult world will hit them in the end, and it's going to hurt a shitload more if they've had no contact with it before. It's like drinking - a kid who's never had any alcohol until the night they turn 18 and do a pub crawl with the friends has no idea what their limit is, and since it's new and exciting, they're going to come out trashed. A kid who's had alcohol before won't find it all that exciting at all, and even though they mightn't know what their limit is, they're less likely to get so smashed they pass out and choke on their own vomit.

So for fuck's sake, people, stop trying to protect the world from all that you consider as evil. Instead of spending 5 minutes ranting and raving at people on the internet, spend 5 minutes talking to your kids. Which do you think is going to have a more lasting, and relevent effect in the long run?

The things your friends use as status updates on Facebook...

2009-09-08T20:32:00.002+10:00

This is one of the more hilarious ones I've seen in the last few days.
95% of teens would cry if they saw the Jonas Brothers at the top of a skyscraper about to jump. Copy and paste this if you are part of the 5% that would sit there with popcorn and a camera and yell "DO A FLIP!!!"

Yes, yes I AM part of the 5%. I would be LEADING them. But I have a very nice status about killing my German teacher, using the sentence construction that made me want to kill her, so I had to blog it instead.

The Almighty Handschuhe stalks her prey, and is going to take more than 140 characters to get to the funny bit.

2009-09-04T20:52:00.004+10:00

Dad and I were sitting in the dining room, half doing stuff, half watching the dog, when she suddenly started growling. We couldn't work out what she was growling at, but she was over near the front door, so dad took her out to see if there was something outside that was upsetting her. There wasn't, so they came back in. And she started growling again. We realised that she could see something under the futon that was bothering her, and got down on the floor to see what it was. And we saw my high-top Converses sitting on the floor on the other side of the futon. So from the dog's point of view, it goes a bit like this:
There is a person sitting on the futon. It is wearing shoes like Ceiridwen's, only they don't have jeans over the top, so they can't be hers. Also, she is sitting at the kitchen table on her computer. Dad is sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. Mum is downstairs. Hugh has gone out. That's all my people accounted for, but THERE IS SOMEONE SITTING ON THE FUTON. Possibly even IN MY SPOT (yes, the dog has a spot. Sort of. I have a spot, and she likes to sit on my lap, or snuggle down next to me, so when she's on the futon, she's always in one area). I can only see their feet, and nothing else, so I have no idea who it is. THIS MUST BE STOPPED. I shall growl at them until they reveal themselves. Or until my people start rolling about the floor, laughing themselves stupid, at which point, I will stop growling, because everything is clearly alright.

Yes, that's right, my dog was scared of a pair of shoes. Puppies - bringing the stupid since BC times.

No, I didn't giggle for about 5 minutes, and wish someone was home to giggle with me...Also, the story of my life, part 2

2009-08-27T09:08:00.005+10:00

So my assignment is pretty much done (just as well for the puppy, cause I may or may not have told her to sit in German, then wondered why she wouldn't do as she was told, after spending an hour doing it yesterday), and I'm wasting time. And I found this as xkcd. Procrastinating is awesome.

Except everyone knows that it's "Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, Hey Mickey *clap-clap, clap-clap*, Hey Mickey *clap-clap, clap-clap*"

And now, the story of my life, part 2:

The Story Of My Life: Part 1

2009-08-18T09:26:00.003+10:00

So last night at my choir rehearsal, we were singing Stand By Me. And our single bass (I don't know where the others were, but they weren't at the rehearsal) was refusing to sing the bass line along with everyone else at the start of the song because "I have to sing the damn thing FOR THE ENTIRE FREAKING SONG. And it's the worst bass line EVER. AND everyone knows it, so they KNOW when you get get so bored that your mind wanders, you get lost and you start making it up." Ok, yeah, fair point Chris. But stop sooking like a little kid AND SING YOUR FUCKING PART. He whinged for a good 15 minutes, at which point we were all getting sick of him (although we did all have a good giggle as he sulked his way through the first run through, from behind a pair of sunglasses, looking stoned). And when he started bitching about singing the same 8 or so bars over and over, for about the 5th time since the rehearsal started, I said "Quit bitching. I once got to sing the same A for an entire piece, except the last 4 bars, where I got to sing an A#" (It's true, I did, the alto two line in Past Life Melodies is really boring). Of course, this surprised everyone, because I'm singing soprano in this choir. I'm not sure why, given that we only have 3 altos, but when I came to my first rehearsal, the conductor, who I'd worked with before, told me that she needed me in soprano. For those of you who aren't familiar with the workings of a choir, it usually goes like this:
In an all female choir, soprano 1 get the melody. Sometimes, if they're really, really lucky (read: the song is in a strange key), soprano 2 get a melody. But usually, it's soprano 1 with the melody, and everyone else with a harmony, with the resemblence to the melody being inversly proportional to how low you sing.
In a mixed choir, the melody either goes to soprano or tenor, depending on the song, with everyone else singing a harmony. Tenors/sopranos (whoever isn't singing the melody) usally get something that vaguely resembles the melody, with altos and basses singing something pretty crappy (I can't tell you who gets the worse deal here, because it really depends on the song)
In a male choir, I believe that it's a lot like a female choir, only you have tenor and bass, instead of alto and soprano.

So anyway, once we'd established that in a past life, I was an alto, and had the world's worst part ever written in a song, and Chris shut up because he gets to sing way more than 2 notes, our conductor recommended that we all youtube Alto's Lament when we got home. I did. It is the story of my life, summed up in less than 4 minutes. So without further adieu:

Because I'm a tightass, that's why

2009-08-16T15:57:00.005+10:00

This weekend is the 40 Hour Famine, and I'm part of a group of people getting together to have a 40 hour famine weekend. On Friday night, we're having a games night. I'm in charge of organising games. It has been suggested that Pictionary would be fun to play. We don't own pictionary, and since it's relitively easy to make your own version of it, I can't be assed harrassing friends to borrow it, or buying my own copy, I'm in the process of creating a list of things to draw. Except I'm stuck. So if anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Dear Radio Station,

2009-08-14T13:24:00.002+10:00

Sometimes I hate you. Like when I get in the shower at 11:55, and you then play a hot lunch with 4 Britney Spears songs, and I end up hearing most of it, because, well, I'm in the shower and the radio is outside the shower.
Or when you keep getting crappy ass songs stuck in my head. Like that time when every time I finally got Get Your Shine On out of my head, some asswipe DJ would play it again.
Or when you play really, really bad songs constantly, and refuse to play songs that I like which I KNOW you have on your playlist more than once a week. Like right now, when you keep playing Hush Hush, and but won't play 21 Guns.
Or when you play something that I like a lot, and it gets stuck in my head. The stuck in my head version is never as good as the real version, and I start to hate it. Then you play it again, and I realise I like it, and it gets stuck in my head again...and, well, vicious cycle. And on that note, I'm going to have to ask you to stop playing Like It Like That before it gets stuck in my head one too many times, and I actually start hating it. Please.

Love,
Cerry

Oh, wise and all knowing-google, what are my blog analytics like?

2009-08-12T08:55:00.002+10:00

First off, a big shout out to my readers in:
Brazil
The US
The Phillipines
The UK (only I think that's really mostly just Beth. But hi anyway)
Japan
The Netherlands
Canada
France and
Thailand

And, you know, the people in Australia, too, but quite frankly, you don't interest me anywhere near as much as the others.

Now, much more importantly - search phrases that people have used to find my site
With 4 hits, we have Ascham Students Complaint
With 2 hits, we have Mark Hoppus Glasses. How am I still getting hits for this? I haven't posted analytics in months, and the original post was even longer ago

And with 1 hit each, my other favourites are:
A song that says overated a lot
Brad Pitt four seasons. Only a favourite because I've mentioned Brad Pitt ONCE, and apparently that gets me high enough on the search results for someone to actually visit
I'm dead inside "Oh, so that's that smell." What were you searching for, person who did this? Truly. I would LOVE to know.
Kahba. Now, I wasn't even sure what this WAS until I googled it myself. It's apparently an Arabic word for bitch. To my knowledge, this is the first time I've mentioned it on this blog. How did someone find my blog by searching for it? I have no idea. But that's what makes it so interesting.
Peanuts Gallery Song. I do understand how that would have come up. But I was really interested in how that song went. Answer: there's a band called Peanut Gallery. Oh. I see. Not so interesting.
Sex on Fire overrated. Yes, yes it is. I like the way this person thinks/googles.

But the thing that trips me out about all these things is that I've just googled them myself, and I'm not on the first page for any of them, and on the ones I bothered looking further at, I'm not on the second or 3rd page, either. Why do people keep looking that long, and then decide that my blog is the way to go? I don't get it. This place is hardly a leading source of information on anything, let alone the stuff that these people are googling.

And in the most absolutely, totally and completely exciting news ever, I just googled I'm Off Again In My World, since people have used that to find the blog (it's just not that exciting, given that it's the blog name, so I wasn't actually goingg to mention it). Even though I scabbed the name from the lyrics of a song, I am the first hit. FUCK. YEAH. Actually, the song isn't mentioned anywhere on the first page, which I find somewhat amusing.

Things like this are the reason I don't get out more

2009-08-09T10:46:00.003+10:00

Yesterday, the Herald published an article about professional pick-up artists. From what I gather, these people get paid like, $500 a night to go out and pretty much act as wingmen.
First of all, why pay $500 a night, when you could pay less than $100, buy a few seasons of How I Met Your Mother, and learn everything you'll ever need to know about picking up women from Barney Stinson (yes, I AM partly kidding. But only partly), AND have hours and hours of entertainment at the same time? And some of the advice this guy gave is kinda crap...like "Once Jeff gets an opening, he must keep the conversation going at all costs. When stuck, just say the first thing that comes into his mind, no matter how embarrassing it sounds." No, never. Please don't. Please, please, PLEASE put a few seconds thought into it before you let something come out of your mouth. Because when you get stuck, and just say the first thing that comes to mind, you blurt out some real shit. Like stuff about Irish Potato Famines (I have GOT to stop watching Friends...)
Second of all, why pay money at all when you could just google it? There will be PLENTY of blogs filled with women complaining about guys doing stupid things in attempt to pick up, and being positive about things guys did that they actually like.
Like the things included in the list that follows.

10 tips on how to pick up, or at the very least, avoid getting kicked in the crotch while attempting to pick up:

1. If you have a particuar girl in mind, and she knows it, watch 10 Things I Hate About You, and re-enact the scene with the marching band. Any girl who doesn't automatically fall in love with you after you do that for her probably isn't interested in men.

2. Avoid really bad pick up lines, like putting a sugar packet on the floor and saying "Excuse me miss, but I think you dropped your name tag." We are also unamused by questions about whether or not it hurt when we fell from heaven. However, Pick Up Lines That Are So Bad It's Funny are winners. Examples of these include:
"You remind me of a cheese. I like cheese."
"Wanna go halvies in an illegitimate child?" and
"My love for you is like diarrhoea - it never ends."

3. We do not like strangers making comments about our boobs. No matter how flattered a girl was when you overheard her girlfriend commenting on how good her boobs look in that outfit, if you do the same, you will probably end up covered in whatever she was drinking; with a hand mark on your cheek; or curled up on the floor holding your groin.

4. When we're out in public, we travel in packs. We know it's scary, but that's just how we function. We know it creeps you out when we go to the bathroom together. That's part of the reason we do it (we also like to talk about you while we're in there and you have no chance of overhearing us). You're either going to have to find some sneaky way of seperating us from the herd, or approach us while we're with our friends. Most girls can be easily distracted, and therefore pulled away from their friends with shiny things. Or guys with nice eyes and/or asses. But please note, trying to combine these things by making your ass nice and shiny will get you nowhere.

5. Girls are good at holding grudges. Especially their friends' grudges. This means that if you have ever, ever pissed off (or have just been rejected by, really) one of the girls we're with, the only real way to get anywhere with anyone in that group of girls is to be Brad Pitt (slightly off topic, but can someone explain the appeal of Brad Pitt, please? He'd old. Really, he is. And even when he wasn't, he wasn't really THAT good looking). And even then, you probably wouldn't get that far, so you probably shouldn't waste your breath.

6. If you overhear a girl saying "Oh my god, this is my favourite song EVER!", unless you happen to be the person who originally sang it, she probably doesn't want to hear your rendition of it. Especially not over the top of the song while it's playing. By all means, mention that you like a song or band in casual conversation, as an "Oh my god, look what we've got in common" thing, but don't actually sing anything.

7. Bringing up something we were talking about with our friends 20 minutes ago is uncool. We know you've probably been eavedropping a bit, but implying you've been doing it for at least 20 minutes makes you seem creepy and stalkerish, and no one like creepy stalkerish guys.

8. Just so you know, when you do stupid shit trying to pick up, we tell our friends about it. So if you do the same stupid thing to me that you did to my friend two weeks ago, I'm going to know, and think you're an idiot/loser/dickhead for not only trying it once, but trying it again after it failed the first time.

9. Public displaying your inability to do something (like dance, or sing), and clearly thinking you're awesome at it WILL lose you major potential-dateablilty points. Publicly displaying your inability to do something, when you obviously know that you're completely and utterly shit at it, but you don't really care, on the other hand, gets you bonus potential-dateablility points.

10. Most girls don't actually play hard to get. We do, however, get really, really, really shitty when you can't take a hint and keep coming back to try over and over again. When we said no the first time, we probably meant it. If we said no the second time, we really did mean it. The third time, we were probably getting ready to convince one of our friends to loan us her boyfriend/pretend to be our girlfriend. If, at any point, after having issued more than one no, we change our minds, be very, very wary. We may end up leaving you alone in a bathroom with no pants.

Aaaawwwww...look at the puppy!

2009-08-06T17:37:00.007+10:00

Oh yes, more puppy photos.

I can has camera? Wants to nom it!

What you mean I'z a bad dog, eating the camera? Look at me. I so cute. I no bad.

No! Don't leave me outside by myself. I be good dog! I no eat camera! PLEASE STAY!

No can has camera? K, I eats the fur off the ball, then.

Maturity. I'm kinda sorta not really doing it right.

2009-08-05T17:47:00.004+10:00

As I walked (ok, jogged, cause I was running a little bit late...) out the door to go to work today, I was feeling rather mature, with my keys in one hand, coffee in the other, and my bag slung over the coffee arm. Also, I was wearing a jacket with NO HOOD and jeans with NO HOLES; and my earrings didn't have stars, and weren't purple or pink. And, you know, running slightly late for work. Very grown up, right?
Yeah, um, not so much.
The keys have a purple teddy bear keychain with a purple diamante in teddy's foot.
The coffee was in an Over the Hedge thermos mug, which has a picture of Stella the skunk on it, and says "Back off, or I'll let it rip!".
The bag is black with hot pink safety pins and dead mockingbirds on it.
Under my none-holey jeans, I was wearing one black sock with purple paw prints on it, and one purple sock with black cats and white stars on it (they came in a 3 pack of socks - the other half of both pairs got a hole in them, so I just made a new pair. They sorta go together...).
And then, I spilt coffee on my non-hooded jacket while walking across the carpark to work.

I think I may have to upgrade my mental age from 3 to 5, now. Or maybe even 8.

Ooooh, it BOUNCES

2009-08-04T11:35:00.004+10:00

"It" being my hair, now that it's been washed, and allowed to dry naturally. Everyone who's seen it says it looks great. My only problem is I can't be assed straightening it all the time (and straightening it is really bad for it anyway), but when it's not straight, it makes me look old. Also, I had the world's most epic bed hair this morning. It is pretty though.

There are some real dumbasses in this world. And apparently, they're allowed to decide how to teach your kids to read and write.

2009-08-04T08:10:00.003+10:00

I discovered this yesterday when I started tutoring. I'm tutoring a couple of girls in year 12 general maths (yes, you can laugh. I did), and a year 8 girl in English. She's a very sweet girl, and she actually seems to be quite smart. But she really, really struggles with English, especially spelling and grammar. I know what you're thinking - how am I going to cope tutoring a girl who struggles with grammar without killing her? It's quite simple, really. It's not her fault at all. Also, she's aware of the fact that she's not good at it, and really wants to do something about it.
I did some basic tests with her yesterday, and discovered that at 13 or 14, her comprehension skills are pretty good, but she has a spelling age of just over 8 years old, and can read out loud at a level lower than that. After we'd done the tests, I asked her how she'd done spelling in primary school. She learnt the same look, say, cover, write, check method I did. And the words that she learnt at that age she can spell pretty well. But she's totally stuck on everything else. Then I asked her if she'd been taught about sounding out. She asked me what that was. I explained. She was never taught to do it. NEVER. Hadn't even heard of it until yesterday. The woman who runs the tutoring centre I'm working at said that she's not that surprised, because at some point between when I started school about 13 years ago, and when this girl would have started school, they ditched the phonics approach to teaching kids, and started basically teaching word recognition by osmosis. They also pretty much ditched grammar, so god knows what the English language will look like in 20 years time...there will be split infinitives everywhere. This all means that when these kids come across words they don't know, they just look at them as whole words, without breaking them down into smaller, more managable stuff. So the girl I'm tutoring can usually manage the first syllable or so of a word, and then just gets totally lost. This girl has also done speech therapy, and by the sounds of the method she's done, has some hearing problems (why do I say this? One of my friends in primary school had a sister with hearing problems that affected her speech, and did speech therapy using the exact same method), although when her mum was telling me this, she didn't actually say anything about a hearing problem. But either way, that probably doesn't help.
As if this wasn't all bad enough, the school she's at doesn't stream year 8 classes. Her English class have just finished reading Twelfth Night. Yes, that's right. She struggles to read properly at the best of times, and she's just had to read Shakespeare for school.
It's all just so unfair. Some idiot at the board of studies decided to change the way that kids are taught to read, from a way that is proven to work (that's still how they teach kids who are doing reading recovery and that sort of thing to read, because when this other shithouse system has failed IT WORKS), to a way that most people I've spoken to agree is absolute bullshit, and is never going to work as well as the way that they'd been doing it for at least 40 years. And now there are intelligent kids who probably feel unbelievably stupid, because they have trouble reading and writing because of something that isn't their fault at all.

So I'm going to be going back to primary school phonics and grammar with this girl, which means we'll be doing sounding out, looking at word blends, learning the difference between a verb and a noun, and finally, once she's mastered that, punctuation (no, my eyes did NOT just light up maniacally at the thought of teaching someone to punctuate properly). And I've got plenty of resources I can use (although I do need to buy some stickers to use as a form of bribery, cause I just don't have much in the way of fun stickers right now), but I'm wondering if any of you mother types, with kids who are at the learning to read stage, have any ideas about stuff that might work, because I don't remember not being able to read, so I don't remember actually learning to do it myself.

Sometimes, I'm a complete idiot who does really, really stupid things that seem smart at the time, even though they've never been smart in the past

2009-08-02T10:05:00.004+10:00

Yesterday, when I decided that after 10 years of essentially the same hair cut, I was going to get a different one, was one of those times. Every single time I get more than about 2cm cut off my hair, I'm traumatised and wishing I hadn't done so within an hour or so. Yesterday was no exception. Only now, I don't have the comfort of knowing that it will grow back to how it was in a couple of weeks (yes, my hair grows that fast), BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE SAME HAIR CUT. Why did I do it? But anyway, photos - one pre-bed last night, and one post-bed, this morning, complete with butterfly-on-springs-that-flutter-when-I-move-my-head clips. Oh yes, I still own a pair. And I'm wearing them. Probably even in public. It was long enough ago that it's pretty much retro now, and they will therefore be in again soon.

More to follow after my hair gets washed tomorrow, and presumably goes back to its normal state of psychotic curliness.

Qwrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm/abcdfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

2009-07-29T18:39:00.004+10:00

Blogging sans symbol that sits north of D on a board of symbols (Oh, I AM wordy tonight, am I not?) sucks big, hairy balls. Big, hairy, balls on an animal of Simian birth. Many amusing words contain that symbol. This is why our Anglo-Saxon way of talking is totally craptacular. I don't know how I'm going to do this for 2 paragraphs, which is what I think I said I'd do. Actually, I do. This is 1 paragraph. Now all I do is crap on for this long again, and I can go back to using that tricksy symbol.

Why didn't I say I'd go without y, z, x or q? Such uncommon symbols. Obviously, I fail at making stuff not difficult. Oh, wait, I don't. I just win at amusing you guys. And doing this with a dog on my lap is making it unusually hard. Stupid dog. But now I'm almost at my 2 paragraph mark, so GOOD DOG for inspiration. And with that, I'm calling it 2 paragraphs. Finito. Told you I could do it.

It's coming - I promise swear...Ah, fuck.

2009-07-29T18:23:00.003+10:00

So, I now have 10 followers. And I promised you an e-less post when that happened. Just letting you know, I'm aware that I now owe you one, but it might take a while. Still having trouble thinking of a topic that doesn't involve the letter e. I can't even write about what a retard I am for saying I'd do it, cause retard has an e in it.

The electrical appliances are rising up. But I'm onto them. They won't win.

2009-07-23T17:51:00.003+10:00

At some point between people going to bed last night, and people getting up this morning, our hot water system died. Not just turned itself off died, there is apparently water all over the electrical part of it or something. It flipped the circuit breaker and everything. This means we have zero hot water, except what we can heat on the stove or in the jug. Which leaves me with the option of having a cold shower, filling up the bath with water from the jug/stove, or nothing. Nothing is not appealling. The dog is very stinky right now, which probably means I'm very stinky right now. Also, my hair needs washing.
Naturally, when faced with this option, what I did was change my Facebook status to "Cerry Redman is annoyed because the hot water system died last night, so she has the option of cold shower, bath with water heated on the stove/in the jug, or nothing. Not happy, Jan.", hoping that some kind friend would offer me the opportunity to use their shower. My cousin did. I also got this from another friend...
"wow ... ive had the same thing happen at my Mum's too ...except she has no jug at the moment ... so super not happy jan!"
Now, what are the odds of this happening? Not high. So I'm thinking it's part of my "the electrical appliances are trying to take over the world" conspiracy theory. And I need to know if it's happened to anyone else, because, well, it's just important.

Things I Just Don't Get/Everything Is Overrated, Take 2

2009-07-22T14:59:00.005+10:00

Recently, I've found myself getting more and more confused by the general population, the stuff they like and some of the weird ass shit they do. And since people are starting to get sick of listening to me bitch, I thought I'd blog about it. And so we have a list of Things That I Just Don't Get/Things That Are Seriously Overrated:

* I don't get why light switches are, as a general rule, so high up on walls. This didn't actually bother me until we moved into this house about 8 years ago. The light switches here are quite low down, compared to most places. I think it's because the people it was built for had little kids who couldn't reach lights at standard height, or something like that. At first, it annoyed me that the lights were in the wrong place, but I'm now very much used to it, and I actually like it - the lights are at a height which is just below the top of a toddler's reach, which happens to be conveniently located about slightly above where my hand sits when hanging at my side. It's actually a logical place to put light switches, especially in places like bedrooms and bathrooms, where people who aren't really awake spend a fair amount of time fumbling for lights in the middle of the night. I now go crazy at other people's houses when the lights are at a more normal height, and I just don't get why they get put there in the first place.

* I don't get why pyjamas, which are possibly the most comfortable clothing ever invented, aren't considered to be going-out-in-public attire. Being a uni student, I'm actually quite happy to just chuck a hoodie over my jammies, and go to the supermarket, or drop people at work etc. Other people don't seem to be so much, and I don't get it. They're COMFY. And let's face it, pyjamas are a personality statement. How much easier would it be to tell if you wanted to approach the cute guy on the other side of the room and go "Hmmm, Mr Men? Cool" or "Oh my god, Transformers? No I don't think so"

* And on that note, I don't get Transformers. It's not that I don't get 20 something year old guys who still like them. I'm 19, and I still like Sesame Street, I totally get that kinda thing. It's transformers in general. I mean, the toys are pretty cool. I did like them as a kid. It's the TV shows and the movies and stuff that I don't get. How can people be so fascinated by a bunch of robots fighting each other?

* Star Wars. I sorta get it. Cute is Yoda. Yoda jokes in German make can I (actually, Yoda jokes are the way one of my German teachers conned us into learning word order "Word order is important. If you don't know your word order, you can't make or understand Yoda jokes. And Yoda is funny in any language."). But it is SERIOUSLY overrated. I don't get why people think it's so great. Yes, Yoda is cute. So are Ewoks (the Ewok movie is QUALITY SHIT). But how many movies about a bunch of people trying to kill each other for some reason I don't quite understand, that has something to do with something called the force? Don't get it. Although I do know a nice joke about gaffer tape and the force.

* I don't get people who can sing with very good foreign accents, but can't speak a second language without a broad whatever-their-first-language-is accent to save themselves. The way that you move your mouth when you're singing? I can understand how you could speak the language well and not sing it, because you have to over accentuate everything when you're singing, but how the hell does it work the other way?

* All music by Lilly Allen, Regina Spektor, Taylor Swift, U2, Lady Gaga, any rap artist, The Killers, Radiohead, Metallica, Kings Of Leon, Coldplay, My Chemical Romance, The Smashing Pumpkins, and ACDC (among other people) is seriously overrated. Some of it I also don't get.

* Apple products are overrated, overhyped and overpriced. And they've been dumbed down to the point where they no longer work properly. And that whole one mouse button thing (and mice that are just one giant button, for that matter) is just beyond stupid.

*I think sex is overrated. So is always getting wasted. Designer drugs, and dead end jobs, and classic rock is SO outdated. I'm so sick of therapy, and all the things it's done to me. How can I be satisfied, when everything is overrated? (I had to do it, alright? If it wasn't now, it would have been next time I went on an overrated rant. Let's just get past the fact that I was sad enough to do it, and enjoy my over-zealous ranting)

* Masterchef. I don't get it. People cook. What's so exciting about that? Can I get a camera crew in to film me for national TV next time I do dinner? I drop stuff and burn myself a lot, it would be really exciting. I also sing and dance while I'm cooking. What, no one would want to watch that? Well, why do they want to watch Masterchef then?

* I don't get what is so fucking hard about using indicators on your car properly. You indicate a turn 3-5 seconds before making it, or slightly earlier if you're turning off a highway or whatever, and have to slow down. You indicate to merge lanes. You indicate to pull in and out of parks (and if I'm indicating to take a spot, and you stop, I don't care how obvious it is that you think you're turning into said spot, and you're just stopping to let me past, if you're not indicating, you don't get it. End of story. Don't honk at me. Don't give me the finger. Don't yell at me. I'm not giving you the park. You didn't indicate, I did. I WIN, YOU LOSE!). And you indicate COMING UP to a roundabout, not when you're halfway round. And you indicate left to come off. You don't keep your bloody right hand indicator on until you're halway down the road after coming off the roundabout. Indicator are NOT optional, and they are NOT hard to learn to use properly. I don't understand how so many people seem to be unaware of their non-optionalness, or how to use them correctly.

* I don't get why you would want to drive an automatic car, unless you have a genuine reason to need one, like having a dodgy arm or something. They are crap. They do not work properly. Manuals are EASY to drive. If you actually tried, instead of just writing it off as too hard, you would realise this. I can drive manual, and I'm the world's most unco-ordinated person. I also don't get how people who drive automatic can actually think that they're good drivers, or make claims like "Guess what? I did a hillstart today, without rolling backwards. I'm awesome." No, you're not. If you can't hillstart without rolling backwards in an auto, you are the world's shittest driver. If you can hillstart in a manual without a handbrake, THEN you're a good driver (why yes, yes I can do that).

* I don't get how people can not like 10 Things I Hate about you. It's not my favourite movie (That would be Over The Hedge), but it's absolutely brilliant. Aside from the fact that it has one of the best casts in the history of the universe, it's absolutely hilarious, even the 20th or so time through (in my defence, I studied it at school in year 10. I watched it about 3 times then). My one unreasonable thing that I think it's totally reasonable to expect a guy to do (every girl has one. If they say they don't, they're lying) is hijack the sound system at a large sports field, which is being used by a hundred or so people, and sing Can't Take My Eyes Off You, accompanied by a full marching band. If you're not willing to do it, I'm not sure I'm willing to be in a relationship with you (actually, if a girl tells you that she hasn't at some point dreamt of having that done for her, she's either lying or hasn't seen 10 Things I Hate About You. Which is probably also a lie).

* I don't get how people can think that orange is a nice colour. In a rainbow, when it's surrounded by other bright colours, I like it. But otherwise, it's just obnoxious and ucky. That is really the only colour I actually dislike, assuming that we work on the principle that brown isn't a colour, it's just a big mess.

* I don't get how my puppy can get so excited about being outside that she forgets that the entire reason we came out in the first place is so she could pee. She ends up doing a lap of the yard, playing with her tug-o-war toy for a few seconds, running back inside, going upstairs, sitting for about 3 seconds, and then going "Oh, right, I had to pee, didn't I? Cerry, take me back outside, please." But she's really cute, so I forgive her.

Because I'm an attention whore, that's why.

2009-07-22T08:40:00.003+10:00

At some point between when I last looked at my blog yesterday and this morning, I gained an extra follower, which brings me up to a total of 8. Because I'm an attention whore, and I like the loved feeling I get when I get a new follower (believe it or not, I got plenty of hugs as a child), I want more of them. 10 would be a nice number to start with. So, when I get to 10 followers, I'm going to do a special post. I have no idea what said post will be about, but it will be at least two paragraphs long, and, assuming I can read properly (and I'm not promising that), it won't include the letter e anywhere. And it will make sense, too, in the same way that most of my posts make sense, rather than just being a jumble of e-less words, like I suspect some of you are already thinking I might try and do.
So, the challenge is out there. 2 more followers, and you get to watch me make a complete ass of myself. How can you say no?

Ah, the joys frustrations of technology

2009-07-21T14:12:00.002+10:00

Normally, I am a big fan of social networking. It makes cyber stalking so much easier (oh, don't all look so surprised. As if I wasn't clearly one of the world's biggest cyber stalkers), and it also makes it easier to keep in touch with people. And when you're as lazy about writing letters/emailing as I am, and have been to 4 different schools, that's important. But every now and then, it presents problems that I just don't like, and they make me hurt my brain by thinking. Today is one of those times.
I've just recieved a friend request from a guy I know. I don't like him. He KNOWS I don't like him. The feeling is very much mutual. Friends intentionally seat us at opposite ends of tables, and put us in different teams for games nights and stuff because otherwise, we WILL kill each other, and possibly take others down with us. It's that kind of dislike. But he's also good friends with one of my closest friends, hence the fact that we end up at stuff together. She really, really wishes that we would get along. And because I know that it means a lot to her, I really do try. I'm just naturally bitchy, so the easiest way to do that is to try to have as little to do with him as possible, because me just being me is enough to make him spend half an hour the next day bitching at her about how much I hate him, and how I'm so mean to him, even though he doesn't do anything to me.
Which puts me in a situation. Normally, if someone I don't like adds me to Facebook, I ignore the request, or if it's someone I have to see on a regular basis (like girls I went to school with), I add them, and then delete them later (granted, I still have some of the girls from school on my friends list. I plan on deleting them in a couple of months, so that I can say "but I haven't seen you since school finished, and you haven't tried to communicate with me since then, AND I JUST DON'T LIKE YOU" when they complain). I would just ignore this request, under normal circumstances. But I'm just imagining the backlash my friend is gonna get if I do so. Can I reasonably declare "I don't like you, you don't like me, no one's pretending otherwise, I don't know why you added me on Facebook, and therefore chose to ignore the request", or should I do the polite thing, and add him, tick the "don't show up in my news feed" thing, and change my privacy settings so that I'm not in his, either?

Harry Potter. Ur doin it rong (oh, and, um, spoiler alert. Lots of 'em)

2009-07-21T08:29:00.007+10:00

So last night, I went to see Harry Potter with friends. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. I always do. It's just that they haven't done a good job of making a movie out of the book since about the second movie. It was all downhill from there. And the thing is, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading them when I was 10, and courtesy of JK Rowling's epically slow writing (OK, so it's not really that slow when you consider how long the books are), by the time the last book came out, I was 17. When I got to the end of that book, I'd died a little bit inside so many times that I was pretty much completely dead inside. That bitch just kept killing people I was attached to. So no matter how much I enjoy the movies on a movie level, I always come out bitching about how badly they screwed it up. I would happily sit through a 6 hour movie if it meant that they got the book right. For a 2 and a half hour movie of a book that was about 600 pages long, it wasn't too bad, really (although, Wiki says it's the 3rd longest movie. It's like, the second longest book. This makes no sense to me). But it could have been better.

First of all, START THE MOVIE IN THE SAME PLACE AS THE BOOK. Harry wasn't in the first chapter of the book, and he sure as hell wasn't trying to pick up some waitress in a cafe at a train station.
My next grievance is that when Malfoy caught Harry snooping on the train, Luna found him. WTF? Luna? No. TONKS. Tonks and her changing Patronus. Tonks and Lupin are the single coolest couple in the entire series, and it doesn't even look like they're really going to get a look in. Yes, they do sort of appear to be together, but I'm pretty sure if you haven't read the books, you wouldn't notice.
Then there's the whole Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny thing. They didn't gloss over it. I know. But they did it wrong. First of all, Ron and Hermione were far too obvious. Yes, everyone knew that there was something going on. But it's supposed to be a gentle undercurrent. And I also didn't end up feeling sorry for Hermione when I read the book, because really, she was being just as bad as Ron. I made sympathetic squeaky noises while I was watching the movie. And the Harry/Ginny thing? First of all, let's have some clarification that she's broken up with Dean, please. Because that confuses people who haven't read the book (yeah, don't get me started on that, but I was with one last night). Second of all, let's actually have them get together. And then break up. Because that's how it's meant to go. And half the fun of the first few chapters on the next book is gone if there isn't all the awkward sexual tension between the two of them. Mind you, given that we have no Bill and Fleur, I guess there isn't really going to be a first few chapters in the next movie. In fact, there probably won't be a cottage for them to go to when they escape from the Malfoys', either, which is going to be fun for them to work around.
And speaking of Bill, if Fenir Greyback isn't going to attack him, why did they even bother introducing him in this movie? He's there. There are wanted posters for him. But he doesn't DO anything. And he probably won't in the next movie, either. Why bother?
And while we're on the topic of Death Eaters, let's talk about the scene with Bellatrix and Fenir. You know, the one where they set fire to the Weasley's house? What do you mean, you don't know what I'm talking about? It happened in the book. Oh. Wait. NO IT DIDN'T. What was the point of that? That was a couple of minutes that you could have used, oh, I don't know, perhaps EXPLAINING HOW SNAPE IS THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. Because 2 seconds at the end of the movie with "I am the Half Blood Price, Harry", when it's the title of the fucking movie is not good enough. Explain it properly. There is a story. It could have been explained in about the same time it took them to destory the Weasleys' house for no particular reason. You know what else could have been done in this time? They could have explained Inferi, so that people actually understood what the things in the lake at the end were. They could have actually shown the rest of the memories, which would explain how Harry new what the Horcruxes he was looking for in the next movie were likely to be, and why Dumbledore ended up taking Harry to the cave with the locket. They could have done the scene after Harry sectum sempras (oh, yeah, I did just make a verb out of a Harry Potter spell. I'm that awesome) Malfoy properly, where he unknowingly finds the diadem in the room of requirement. They could have explained Fenir. They could have done the end of the movie properly.
What do I mean, done the end of the movie properly? Where to begin - Dumbledore doesn't body bind Harry under the invisibility cloak, using the time he could have used to defend himself against Malfoy. He sends him to hide, where Harry for some reason that I can't comprehend, encounters Snape, and doesn't try to do anything to him. There's no battle with the Death Eaters. There's no funeral for Dumbledore. Oh, and Dumbledore's death is so lame (watching him fall is like watching a fight scene in the Matrix) that I actually laughed.

But all that being said, there were some good bits. These include:
Ron saying to Harry "So did you and Ginny do it?" which made me giggle like a little girl, which set off my friends, even though it was in reference to hiding a potions book.
Ron post love potion. Looking up at the moon, all wide eyed saying "It's beautiful, isn't it? The moon." and being asked if he's had a little late night snack. Yes, I think he has. Some special brownies, by the look of it.
Katie Bell. She's played by the same girl who plays Molly in Basil Brush. If you're really trying, you can make some great "Boom, Boom!" jokes.
The inferi. They look a lot like Gollum. In fact, the one who drags Harry underwater looks like his long lost identical twin. Many jokes in the Harry = the precious genre (Believe it or not, I've only ever seen/read the first part of that series. It's just too tedious). Also, I KNEW that a dead hand was going to come out of the water and grab Harry. I was expecting it. I knew when it was going to happen. I still jumped. I love it when that happens.
Bellatrix Lestrange. I know I'm not supposed to like her. I didn't like her in the book. But Helena Bonham Carter is beyond brilliant. I absolutely love her. And she makes Bellatrix evil in a really cute, unnecessarily destructive way that makes me want her for my collection of People-I-Want-As-Pets (I'm pretty sure there's another blog in that collection, though, so I'm not going to go into it).
Harry's lack of scar. It was actually pissing me off, until Harry says Voldemort is the reason he has "this" and points to an empty spot on his forehead. Then it cracked me up. Also along these lines is Dumbledore saying "Ah, Harry, you need to shave", when my legs, which had been shaved about 8 hours before hand, were hairier than Harry's face.
The budget clearly doesn't stretch to decent makeup. Why do I say this? Because when there's a close up of Malfoy at one point, you can see that the poor guy has some very nasty acne underneath all his makeup. The budget for this movie is god knows how many million dollars, and they can't find something that will cover up Malfoy's bad skin properly. Epic fail. But still amusing.

I never really got the appeal of Johnny Depp, when not in his Jack Sparrow costume.

2009-07-19T17:09:00.003+10:00

In fact, I may have even said he was overrated.

I think I just got it.

20 songs that everyone else in my house is sick to death of hearing, and threatening to destory my copies of

2009-07-14T13:32:00.009+10:00

Ally over at ACTing Like A Mama was inspired by the hottest 100 of all time to post the 20 songs that have defined her life, and wants to know what everyone elses are. That was hardly a challenge I was going to turn down, was it? Although, I'm cheating, and just going for the 20 most significant songs, rather tha defining ones (I think there's a difference). So, in no particular order, I present the 20 most significant songs in my life:

1. Josie - Blink 182
I was about 7 when this song was released, and I loved it. I still do, which is vastly amusing, because honestly, pre-Enema, Mark could not sing for shit, and poor singing usually annoys me no end (I've just read that back, and realised how incredibly wrong it sounds. In the spirit of all things Blink, I've decided not to change it, but I will apologise for grossing people out, which I'm sure I've done). Anywho, at the time, I mostly liked stuff like the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys, and this was the first non-unbelievably-lame-90s-pop song that I ever really liked. Also, up until I saw the clip for it, I was scared of people with unnatural coloured hair. Mark's purple hair was so awesome that I got over that (funny thing: the obsession with purple didn't start until I was about 10. I was all about pink before that).

2. Wannabe - The Spice Girls
This was my first ever favourite song. It's probably also one of the dogiest songs to ever be sung by 6 year old girls all over the world, but we were little and cute, so who cares if we had horribly inappropriate and crap taste in music? Last year, when the HSC was driving us all insane, Spice Girls CDs were pulled out, chocolate was consumed, bad singing and dancing took place, and all was right again in the world.

3. Honey To The Bee - Billie Piper
So last year, I made the stupid mistake of opting to do 4 performances for HSC music (actually, it probably wasn't stupid, because my other options were Viva Voce and composition, both of which I hate with a passion). One of my elective topics was popular music. My teacher and I spent hours trying to find something really fun that I could sing. Mickey was considered. It sounded shit. Girlfriend was considered. It sounded shit. Walking on Sunshine was considered. I was about 2 seconds away from choosing it as my piece when Hannah started playing Honey To The Bee in the study room across the hall. Sheet music was found, because there was not a single chord chart for it on the interwebs (I think that tells you how unbelievably dodgy it is - no one could even be bothered doing up a chord chart for it), Hannah agreed to sing backing vocals for me, and for the next 5 months or so, that song haunted me. HAUNTED ME. I heard it in my sleep. It was stuck in my head for weeks at a time. I had an argument with a music teacher over it, because she didn't like it. Trantrums were thrown, singing lessons were left on the verge of tears. I performed it for our trial HSC, and people were telling me for weeks how much they liked it. I got to tell oh-so-much-holier-than-thou music teacher to suck it, because I was right, and see was wrong. I actually still enjoy listening to it.

4. The Arthur Theme Song - Ziggy Marley and The Melody Makers
I bet you all thought I'd hit rock bottom when I mentioned the Spice Girls and Billie Piper, and are now thinking "Oh dear god, there's rock bottom, there's 10 feet of crap, and then there's Cerry's taste in music". Unless you're such a sad little puppy that you've somehow managed to miss out on the sheer awesomeness that is Arthur, and haven't got the slightest clue what I'm talking about. In which case, watch and learn:

But anyway. When I was little, I was all about ABC kids. Arthur was (and still is, actually) one of my favourite shows. And it has a really cool theme song, which happens to be the first reggae song that I ever really heard, and is pretty much responsible for my appreciation of reggae (particlarly steel drums. Possibly my favourite instrument ever) and ska (because let's face it, everything sounds better with a horn section). It also made me realise, at an early age, that I fail at replicating irregular rhythms in music. Damn Jamaicans and their syncopated rhythms.

5. Super Duper Love - Joss Stone
Back in 2004, I heard this person who I thought was a big black woman on the radio. Her name was Joss Stone. I loved the song, so I googled her. I discovered that she was actually a tiny little white girl from England, who was only 3 years older than me (which, at the time, made her 17), and my mind was absolutely blown. See, for about as long as I can remember, I have had this thing about big black women, and the way that they sing. I always wanted to be able to sing like that, but resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't a big black woman, and was therefore doomed to never sound like one, when I was about 12. Joss Stone restored my hope that I would one day sing like that (but I won't. I am most definitely a little white girl when it comes to singing, so I'm just holding out for reincarnation as a big black woman. Or a puppy).

6. Prisoner of Society - The Living End
Going back to me being little and cute, when I was 8, there was this band called The Living End. They had this song I loved called Prisoner of Society. I didn't really like most of the rest of the stuff on that CD (I know, because I gave it to my brother for Christmas), but I really liked that song. I continued to really like it for quite some time. And then when I got older, and actually got some taste in music, I realised that I quite liked the Living End. They're actually one of my favourite bands now. Dad and I went to see them when they played at Coffs in 2006, and I have the tshirt with the print that's starting to peel off to prove it. But anyway, the real beauty of this song is its ability to piss off teachers, when they're busily telling you that you don't know anything about music, and wanting to know why you refuse to listen to them, and they're just not expecting to be told "Cause I'm a brat, and I know everything, and I talk back" (to understand the full irony, you have to realise this woman was bitching at me for not knowing anything about Australian music of the last 25 years, even though it wasn't actually relevent to the music 1 course, which is what I was doing for HSC music).

7. Minority - Green Day
This is the first Green Day song I was ever really into. I didn't mind Good Riddance, but I was really too young to get them before the Warning era. Minority is actually the reason I know what the word Minority (and majority, for that matter) means, and it's also one of the first songs that I ever heard confirmed the fact that being yourself, and ending up in the minority because of it isn't really a bad thing (obviously, that's not how I would have put it as a 10 year old, but that's the general idea). Also, harmonica solos are cool.

8. Living On A Prayer - Bon Jovi
Even as a small, Bon Jovi hating child (well, mid-90s Bon Jovi was pretty crap), I liked this song. And to give you some idea of how small - I called them John Bovi. It just made more sense in my head that way, since John is a real name. Anywho, apparently, even very small children appreciate talk boxes, and the sort of songs that eventually make for really bad car sing-a-longs with friends. Which brings me to my next song

9. Bohemian Rhaposdy - Queen
This was the first non-Wiggles song I would ever sing along with. Granted, only the "I see a little silhoutto of a man" part, and not the other however many minutes of the song, but the rest of it was boring, and it had real words. I liked the made up ones, like scaramouche, fandango, and Gallileo (yes, I'm aware that they're all real words. Sort of. Scaramouche the name of some character in an old book, apparently. I think it sounds like an expletive, but that's just me). It's an epic song, even if it is beyond weird.

10. Dorothy The Dinosaur - The Wiggles
With parents who listened to the ABC and Triple J, I was one of the first kids to hear the Wiggles. They're only a year younger than me, you know, and I liked them before they were cool, back when people still thought the band of male childcare workers was creepy. Dad liked them because various members used to be in the Cockroaches (I really don't see how that's a selling point, but whatever). Mum liked Rock-a-bye Your Bear, and the fact that they kept me amused. I just liked going Romp-omp-a-chomp HEY! and doing the actions. I also liked Wake Up Jeff, but it didn't have a talking dinosaur in it, so it wasn't as cool (actually, why am I talking in past tense? I still like Old-school-pre-Sam-who-claims-to-be-the-yellow-wiggle-and-totally-isn't Wiggles).

11. Monkey Wrench - The Foo Fighters
For those of you who are unware, Dave Grohl is God. This is a fact. Much like the fact that before the Boogeyman goes to bed at night, he checks his cupboard for Chuck Norris. Monkey Wrench also happens to be the song I learnt to play air guitar to (yes, I was taught to play air guitar. Apparently, needing to get out more is genetic. I was also taught to headbang around the same time). It's just one of those songs that you can't hear and NOT enjoy it. It's had pretty high rotation as the track that my alarm clock plays when it goes off, because it keeps me from going back to sleep for a while, and puts me in a good mood to start the day.

12.Who Knows - Avril Lavigne
Having had an absolute shit of a time at high school, I think that people who say that high school is the best years of your life are complete dickweeds (I'm also not entirely sure that they're being gramatically correct, but I can't find a way of saying that that doesn't sound wrong). During part of said absolute shit of a time, I spent a lot of time curled up in a little ball, listening to music. And this song pretty much stopped me from going completely and utterly insane, and just giving up, on many occasions.

13. Come Out And Play - The Offspring
This was the first Offspring song I ever heard. It also has what may be the coolest riff ever. I definitely thought it was at the time, and it started a long love of all things Offspring. Oh, and the Offspring are also the way I learnt the F word. I'm just saying.

14. Mascara - Killing Heidi
I actually didn't like this song much when it first came out. But it grew on me, and started my Killing Heidi/Ella Hooper obsession. Killing Heidi were pretty much the first rock band I ever listened to that were fronted by a chick, and at the time, that was really important for me.

15. The Special Two - Missy Higgins
This is what my first singing teacher refers to as my "baby song" - the first song I ever did when I started taking singing lessons, when I was just learning, like a little baby learning to walk or talk or whatever. When I had to do a mock assessment for music (yes, a mock assessment. It was a 9/10 music class, and the teacher wanted to get the year 9s used to the assessment style for elective music, so we had a practise before our first real assessment), I got 7.5/10 for it, and I was really proud of that, because we'd had to change the key about 4 times before we found the right one a couple of weeks before I had to perform it. Everyone who has lessons has one of these songs (for so many people, it's Tomorrow from Annie), and even if you don't actually like the song, it ends up being pretty special, especially after the first time you get it right.

16. In Bloom - Nirvana

The breakdown of the chorus of In Bloom in that video is what made me start listening to Nirvana. I'd always known Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Come As You Are, and I'd heard Evanescence doing a cover of Heart-Shaped Box, and I liked them all, but I never really listened to Nirvana before that point. And now they're one of my favourite bands, which is really kind of funny, because I'm fully aware of the fact that if Kurt Cobain wasn't dead, they wouldn't be anywhere near as big as they are, they weren't that great live, and their greatest hits CD actually has all their best music on it (yes, I own it. I actually also own From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, because I was given a 15 Euro gift voucher for Nikolastag while I was in Germany, and CDs are really light, and easy to pack when you need to bring them back home, and they're also quite cheap)

17. Mickey - Tony Basil
I mentioned that I was really cute when I was little, right? Because you really need to keep remembering that while reading this list. I had really crap taste in music, but I was totally adorable (I'll actually post photos later, but I need to drag some up and scan them). Mickey was the start of a long love of tacky pop music, really bad sing-a-longs in the car, and shocking dancing - ie, the start of a large portion of my musical taste and ability. Also, it's just fun. And if it was a colour, it would be rainbow and sparkley, which I think explains why it's really OK to like it.

18. Iris - Goo Goo Dolls
This was my favourite song on and off for about 10 years. I don't know what it is about it, but I've always loved it. I think it has something to do with the string section. A good string section is almost as good as a horn section (but a bad one is shocking. I really hate badly played string instruments, they make me want to rip my ears off) I hated Ronan Keating's version of it that missed the key-change-that's-not-really-a-key-change in the chorus and sounded crap, though.

19. The Bitch Song - Bowling For Soup
As a widely (and self) professed bitch, this song gives me hope. Apparently, there are people in this world, other than me and my friends, who are also bitchy, who love people inspite of bitchiness. Or possibly because of it. It's also very catchy. Not like 1985 or High School Never Ends catchy, but still. I have every intention of walking down the aisle on my wedding day to this song. I also apparently have every intention of not inviting my grandparents, or 90% of my other extended family to my wedding, because the mass death by heart attack caused by this song just wouldn't be fun. Talk about stealing the bride's thunder.

20. I'll Be There For You - The Rembrandts
AKA: The Friends theme song. I was actually too young to watch Friends when it first started here, so I actually just knew this as a cool song when I heard it (I also got it confused with Everybody Wants To Be Free by the Bodeans for years, which amused my occasional Party Of Five watching brother and father no end). Then I developed my Friends addiction. And then my best friend and I had a Friends marathon, involving 20 or 30 something episodes over 2 days. I suspect that in years to come, some psychiatrist will be infinitely interested in the connection between the inner workings of my mind, and this song. But anyway, it's now one of the songs that is almost constantly on my MP3 player (I say almost constantly, because I don't think it is right now, but I could be wrong).

Eek. And a little bit ew. But mostly eek.

2009-07-13T10:20:00.002+10:00

On Saturday night, the back of my right hand was kinda sore. I figured the puppy bit me when we were playing, because it was that sort of sore. Then last night, it was really sore, and dry, and I realised that it looked, and felt, a lot like it was sunburnt. I also have the same thing going on with my left knuckles, and part of my left cheek. It LOOKS like sunburn. It FEELS like sunburn - it dries out and gets sore and stretched feeling, and it's really warm. Apparently, it's NOT sunburn, though. How do I know? Cause I put aloe vera spray on it last night, and it stung like all hell. Not just like lemonjuice in a paper cut sting, really bad "Oh my god, my hand is BURNING and it's going to fall off" sting. Also, it gets less red, and then flares up again. It may be some sort of wind burny thing, cause by washing my hands lots cause the puppy's had worms, and spending lots of time outside in the wind with her.
Aloe vera obviously doesn't work. Papaw doesn't do much, other than make it greasy. Sorbelene E cream doesn't do much. Does anyone have any idea what might make it go away? Or at least stop pissing me off?

As someone stuck with a Welsh name, I have to say, it makes sense...

2009-07-12T17:13:00.001+10:00

Oh my god. Mum has failed me. FAILED ME.

2009-07-09T15:27:00.002+10:00

My poor little puppy picked up worms somewhere before she came here, and has therefore had a mild case of the runs ever since we got her, so she's been eating a half rice/half dog biscuit mix to help her stomach. This means we've got through a fair bit of rice. Not a problem, cause mum always keeps the freezer stocked with 2 or 3 takeaway containers of pre-cooked rice, and there's always a couple of bags in the cupboard. Except for today. Mum and dad have just left for Newcastle for the weekend, leaving us to our own devices. I noticed we were about half way through the container of rice in the fridge I've been feeding the puppy from, so I went to get a new one out of the freezer. EXCEPT THERE WASN'T ONE. Which means that I have to cook some. This is theoretically not a problem, although I've never actually used the rice cooker before (I only eat brown rice, and mum and dad buy the microwave stuff, cause it cooks so much faster). Except we don't actually have a full cup of white rice in the house, and I've been told the puppy is not supposed to eat brown rice. So I'm probably going to have to go down the street and buy rice before mum and dad get home.
But the main point is my mother, who is normally so good at keeping us stocked up on essential food, like rice, pasta, and Tim Tams that are on special, HAS FAILED ME. Armageddon is coming. I'm just saying.

And the peanut gallery says/Everything is overrated

2009-07-08T19:57:00.003+10:00

Triple J are currently in the process of playing the Hottest 100 of All Time Countdown. It's been interesting, to say the least. There have been some things I've really disagreed with. These things include:
*Sex On Fire being in the countdown. In 10 years time, when Triple J do another Hottest 100 of All Time (which they probably will), I will be VERY surprised if it gets in again. This time next year, I doubt people will really think it's anything that special.
*ACDC having two songs in the countdown already, any they're only up to 61. ACDC are overrated (yes, I know, I think everything is overrated. But Less Than Jake wrote a song about this precise fact [everything being overrated, not me thinking that everything is overrated], so it must be true), and crap, and all their music sounds the same.
*Good Riddance getting into the countdown. I like Green Day as much as the next person. In fact, in many situations, I like them MORE than the next person. But Good Riddance isn't really that great a song, and it's really overplayed. In fact, one might even say it's also overrated. However, I will give Triple J credit where it's due - they've at least had the decency to refer to the song as Good Riddance, rather than Time of Your Life. That is NOT what the song is called, and when you don't recognise that the song is called Good Riddance, you entire change the tone of it - this is why is pisses me off so much that people play it at graduations (but that's a whole other rant).

I have also been vastly amused by several things, such as the announcer this afternoon accidetally saying that Dammit was a better song than Grace, and then retracting it, and telling people not to send him angry texts and tweets. And some of the stuff they've played thus far has been so bad it's laughable (Daft Punk, anyone?)
But the most amusing things? The stuff that people have been saying on the discussion boards on the Triple J website. Some of the more choice comments are below for your enjoyment:
"Nirvana were nothing but the stepping stone for the Foo Fighters." It's mostly funny because it's true. But also a little bit because they were actually not a bad band

"I will drown myself in the Mississippi if Jeff Buckley comes in at number one... But i'm getting my bathers ready as we speak..."

"Ben folds is alright but too mainstream to be in this countdown and NIN are just a shit version of radiohead." First of all, I wanna get this out of the way - Triple J used to play all kinds of stuff. Like Ben Fold Five (who, IMO, are NOT all that mainstream - aside from Rocking the Suburbs and Brick, their music gets very little airplay on most commercial stations), and the fact that you think they're mainstream does not change that. It also doesn't make their music any worse, or mean that they shouldn't be in a Triple J countdown.
And um, Nine Inch nails are a shit version of Radiohead? Dude, what Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have you been listening to? Also, a how can you get more shit than Radiohead?

"wheres oasis at? where pink floyd at? wheres the killers at? wheres jimmy hendrix at? wheres the arctic monkeys at? wheres marvin gaye at? wheres elvis at? wheres eminem at? wheres johnny cash at? wheres daniel johnston at? wheres tupac at?" This was posted when they put up the songs that made 100-91. So the answer? Um, in the other 90 songs in the countown, perhaps? And Eminem in the Hottest 100? Uh, no. Can't see that happening. Also, will someone confiscate this guy's keyboard until he learns to use the shift and apostrophe keys?

"@nick ... mainstream didnt wreck a good song, sex on fire was crap to begin with!" Can I get an Amen, please people? There are nowhere near enough people who recognise this fact. Kings of Leon are also overrated.