Hmmm, another week gone by and I haven’t written anything. I suppose I’d better do something about that.
OK, so last Saturday was my birthday. The dinner at the Red Orchid was good, although Justin and Marika were a no-show (anyone really surprised?). Everyone seems to have had a good time, and the food was excellent. Even the service was passable for once which makes a change.
Things did take a slightly surreal turn when everyone decided to sing me happy birthday though. I hadn’t arranged a cake because – well it seems kind of weird to me to organise one’s own birthday cake (that’s probably symptomatic of living at home for so long or something :), and I always find the whole singing and blowing out candles thing an embarrassment anyway, so I was sort of hoping that with no cake to sing around everyone would just skip it. No such luck – they sang. Also since there were no candles to blow out I had to blow out an imaginary one stuck in the top of an empty champagne bottle. As if that wasn’t weird enough I then had to fake blowing out the imaginary candle since Andrew had failed to get a photograph the first time round. What the..?! 🙂
Anyway afterwards Rebecca and Dom and I went and got gelatos and talked about Survivor Allstars before they dropped me home (they also gave me a lift there in the first place, which was nice of them :).
So, all in all a good night.
I had dinner with the parents and aunts the next night, which was good except it had got close to 40 earlier in the day and Mum insisted on us eating around the table in the (uninsulated) dining room rather than buffet style in the much cooler loungeroom. I had to keep getting up and fleeing into the relative cool of the lounge throughout the meal just to cope. Next year I think I might specify a buffet 🙂
Anyway I suppose I’d better post a list of what loot I managed to score 🙂
- From Aunty Mary in England – Some Tupperware
- From Rebecca and Dom – A large non-stick frying pan
- From Katie – Some chocolates and a Lord of the Rings bookmark
- From Ryan – A Games Workshop Sauron figurine
- From Andrew and Travis – The first season of Futurama on DVD
- From Mum and Dad – A Short History of Almost Everything by Bill Bryson
- From Aunts Faye and Bev – A new vegetable steamer and non-stick pasta saucepan
- From the Cousins – Some candy in a 50’s era Coke machine styled tin box
I think that’s about it – not bad considering 🙂
Since then I’ve pretty much been taking it easy. Well, apart from being extremely nice to a woman in Sydney who needed last minute tickets to see Infected Mushroom on the Gold Coast for her son, and needed them like yesterday (managing the online sales for Earthcore is getting to be more trouble that it’s worth 🙂
Well, I was taking it easy until yesterday when I went out and bought myself a number of things.
Firstly I got a new pair of boots as my old ones had developed a large split along the sole -which meant that I either had to but new ones or a whole load of black socks. This presented a slight problem as for years I’ve been buying my boots from the Discount Shoe Sale place in the city, down the back of King Kong Sales (yes, yes, that’s a very uncool place to buy anything from but you could usually find a good pair of boots there that would last two or three years and cost thirty dollars so nyaaaah!! :). Now – because of the Mandurah Railway project – that entire city block is going to be demolished, so everything (including King Kong and the Discount Shoe Sale) has been closed down (although there are a few die-hards living siege style in their stores until the Government pays them decent compensation – cool no?).
So I had to find somewhere else to buy shoes.
I also wanted to move into the 20th century (some years late, but what the heck) and buy a microwave – because I’m sick of surviving on sandwiches and pot-noodles when the mercury climbs above 36. I was looking at ones on sale at Myer because I had $25 of gift vouchers left over from Christmas (from the aforementioned Aunty Mary) – but then Rebecca pointed out that K-Mart were selling some at only $99 each. She also mentioned that they were pretty good for shoes, so I decided to head over to the Galleria and kill two birds with one stone. Oh – three actually because they have a Myer there and I decided to buy a CD.
I was tossing up between the Mountain Goats’ We shall all be Healed and the Darkness’ Permission to Land. I eventually decided on the latter since I really really want the former and am hence much more likely to spend my own money on it at some point (if I bought it with the vouchers then I probably wouldn’t get around to buying Permission to Land because while I wanted it I didn’t really want it enough to use $30 of my own hard earned cash to buy it – all clear? No? Good! 🙂
(As it happened it was priced at $24.99, so that worked out well 🙂
So, I am now the proud owner of a pair of ex-display boots (they’re exactly my size and only cost $30 – woot!), a 800 watt 20 litre microwave oven and a copy of Permission to Land. Each of which I shall deal with separately below.
The Boots: Um… well there’s not a lot to say about these. They’re leather, brown and have all sorts of funky looking metal studs and hooks and things all over them. I haven’t worn them yet – I’ll do that tomorrow – and I fully expect they’ll give me appalling blisters.
This isn’t anything to do with the shoes themselves, it’s to do with some very shoddy coding in my genome. Apparently whoever was responsible for writing my DNA skimped a bit on the feet, leaving me with foot ligaments too big for my foot bones. This means that whenever I try and use my feet – for instance to stand or maybe walk – rather than form into the classic arch shape, they splay out flat. This in turn means that the width to length ratio of my feet is much lower than normal and hence a shoe that fits me widthwise is way too big lengthwise, resulting in large amounts of forward-back shifting during walking and hence blistering.
Although it does mean people can stand on the toes of my shoes without me noticing 🙂
(By the way don’t get me started on the DNA for my ears. Or my fat metabolism. Actually on any part of my genome. In fact when I consider all the problems with this body I strongly suspect that my DNA was compiled as an end of year project by an un-gifted first year who spent most of the semester drinking and going to frat parties rather than hitting the books. I’d give him a C-, but that’s purely because I haven’t died yet)
The Microwave: The microwave is cool. So far I’ve cooked two things in it. A microwaveable pasta dinner that I brought specifically to christen it with, and a toasted cheese sandwich. The pasta was great. The cheese sandwich on the other end had some problems – specifically that the only microwave safe container I had to put it in was a bowl, and I overcooked it somewhat. This resulted in the cheese bubbling up like crazy in all directions then setting in a kind of porous matrix in the shape of the bowl. It was completely edible and in fact quite tasty – it just happened to look like a component from the engine room of a Klingon Bird of Prey, that’s all 🙂
Permission to Land by the Darkness: I wanted a copy of this because of the songs Black Shuck (which I carried on about in an earlier entry) and Growing on Me which – well has been growing on me frankly. So I bought it, and have listened to it twice. My opinion?
The Darkness are a truly horrible horrible band who perform absolutely appalling songs.
I should probably clarify that 🙂
Yes, they’re a horrible band who sing truly awful songs – but the point is that they know this. And so they don’t bother to pretend that they’re anything else. They just dress up in spandex and fake leopard skin and camp it on stage like complete and utter glam-rock dorks – and have a fantastic time doing it. This attitude is captured perfectly in their songs – so although they’re really terrible (c’mon, when was the last time you heard anyone not just yell ‘Guitar!!’ but yell ‘Guitar!!’ and follow it up with a thirty second guitar solo? 🙂 they’re having so much fun that it’s infectious. When Justin Hawkins hits the high notes you can’t help but break into a spontaneous grin at the sheer stupidity of it all, and before long you’re trying to join in, and having a great time (even though you’re failing miserably 🙂
Or maybe that’s just me? 😉
Anyway, as far as I’m concerned the Darkness Rock!!
Hmmm, I’ve got other stuff to write about – but I think I’ll leave it for later. Like next Sunday for instance 🙂
Oh, but before I go as may have been noticed by some I’ve dropped the whole Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week thing because I’m bored with it – and some weeks it’s a pain to have to find someone to nominate *g*. That said however I happened to catch the video clip for Stella One Eleven’s new single last week and the lead singer (Cindy Ryan is it?) looks so insanely cute that I just have to – well, say that she looks insanely cute in that particular video clip 😉
Mind you at least some of the members of Stella One Eleven are gay. I don’t actually know which members but with my luck Cindy is one of them. Which is no doubt great for her, but somewhat depressing for me *g*. I don’t really know why that should actually be depressing – I mean assuming for a minute that she’s straight then my odds of actually a) meeting her and b) us hitting it off are virtually nil anyway – her theoretically not being straight really doesn’t affect them at all. But for some reason it’s still rather disheartening. Hmmm, probably some messed up male ego thing. Well how about that, I’m as screwed around as every other guy after all! ;-D
GUITAR!!
