Well, considering that the past 7 days has included 4 days of wedding celebration and camping (for camping read: sitting in a big car all day and eating too much tasty food all night) it is unsurprising that the first week of the Diet wasn't so successful.
Hm, -0.6 kg loss.

next time!

That is all.
Thank you.

After a rehearsal of some success, we went to pub.
After a couple of extremely successful ciders, singing seemed like a good idea.

At the behest of Katherine, we began trawling our memories for the a capella pieces of Elijah which we sung for Ben-fest back in 2006.

Until we started singing, i couldn't remember a note, but then it all poured out on autopilot without seemingly engaging my brain at all. It is amazing how it sticks in your head somehow...

My faith in the magic that choral work can be has been restored. Paul - go stick it up your jumper cos we sound great! It is nice to be reminded that my enduring love of SUMS and the IV movement is not entirely misplaced.

"Lift Thine Eyes" just made it onto my wedding song list. Thanks Katherine!!!

P.S. You smile beautifully when you sing something you love. So cute! :)

To Do list from yesterday:

8am - Wake up and wonder where the hell my Man is.
10am - Get bored of my book and get out of bed, just after he has finally crawled into it.
11am - Dither, wondering what to do with this cold windy day. I am restless, and itching to leave the house, with a weekly ticket to the city in my wallet (which is unusual) but with nothing to do there.
12pm - Wander to the shop and get various potential foods for lunch. Soup. Pork. Cheese. Strawberries.
12:30pm - get home, realise i am not hungry at all, and put everything straight into the fridge. Dither. Make another cup of tea.
12:45pm - Walk back upstairs to the study where i left my mobile to find a message, time stamped 12:15, saying "We're on the 5th floor, in the back corner." What on earth ... ?

12:46pm - OMG I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT YUM CHA WITH ANNA WHO I HAVEN'T SEEN IN 5 YEARS!! Shit. That's why i bought a ticket to the city this week. Knew there was something i had to do today.

12:47pm - Throw on some real clothes and race out the door to catch the 1:02 train.
1:20 pm - Arrive at Yum Cha. Hi everyone!
1:25 pm - Leave yum cha. Good thing i wasn't hungry. Even better, Anna doesn't have to catch her flight for a couple of hours yet...
2pm - Hot chocolate at the Lindt cafe on Cockle Bay is tasty tasty. And those delice things are kind of cool.
3pm - Winter pepperberry Ale at the James Squires Alehouse is also tasty.
4pm - Say farewell to Anna.
4:05pm - Shit. Didn't i start this afternoon with a scarf? Gr.
4:28pm - Just miss my train at town hall. Hm. I wonder what is in JB HiFi?

4:40pm - Ooh! Look! A vodafone store. I need a new phone. NEED!

4:45pm - Sure. Sign me up for this one thanks.
4:55pm - Credit check? Oh yeah, it is a plan. I can miss another train, i guess.
5:20pm - WHADDYA MEAN THE CREDIT CHECK IS STILL PENDING?!?!?
5:22pm - They need pay slips? For proof of income? For a $29 plan?!? You just did a credit check! I have credit to pay the whole thing ten times over!! I have to come BACK? Argh. WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SOMETHING HALF AN HOUR AGO!?!?! *weeps* Fine. See you Wednesday.
5:24pm - Run to train. Run like the wind!!
5:27pm - Makes it. With 30 seconds to spare. Small mercies. *thanks*

7:00pm - home, fed, watching Lethal Weapon 2 with my Man. Mullet-orama makes me happy.

On Saturday, we went to see Sigur Ros at the Hordern.
An amazing show. Musical genius and ninja skills. Unique voice, and he plays his guitar with a cello bow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWR-jJ3v1pk&feature=related
Although they were wearing much funkier costumes on saturday.

WOW.


in other news,
I just found out that a mate whose indy rock band dissolved three years ago has formed another band called The Glass Ceiling and they're launching their debut EP in september at the Gaelic club. So i looked up their stuff on myspace and youtube.
Turns out they were the runners-up in this years Toohey's Extra Dry Uncharted comp for unsigned bands on MTV. For months, they were all over MTV. How cool is that?
I had no idea....

And here is a series of Glass Ceiling youtube clips. (My mate is the one who is almost embarrassed to admit that he's doing a PhD in chemistry. Would you have guessed?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WXoRdAIcT0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WXoRdAIcT0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgsgyGFggt8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ56E8aDmKs

Saw it.
Loved it.
Want to talk about it.
Won't, until you've seen it too. Hands up?

Hey, I'm a cynic and all, and I have ideological problems with religion as a whole, but then I was cynical about the World Cup soccer 'thing' until I got dragged to Manning Bar in the middle of the night to watch the infamous game when we were ROBBED by a dodgey dodgey umpire call...

What I'm trying to say is that I have humbly admitted that i have been wrong before.

I've griped righteously about the whole WYD debacle because
a) i don't think that a similar event planned in the name of, say, Islam, would get the same support;
b) the blatant disregard shown for the impact on the lives of people who live in the vicinity of Randwick is a disgrace; and
c) the 'church' (or which ever administrative body stands for the 'church') seems to be extrememly arrogant in their assumption of what they can demand from the state, and what they don't have to pay for.

BUT
( Nothing wrong with good clean fun. )
AND
On a more selfish note,
We have WYD to credit for the fact that the Public transport in sydney, which we laughingly call a system, was actually worth taking this weekend.
Hooray for the Pope Timetable!

:D


** Which was totally, TOTALLY awesome. Like, OMG...
*** Unless of course they are Nazis celebrating the successful annihilation of yet another country... You KNOW what i mean. Put your semantics flamethrowers down, please

Well, not quite front page, but it has its own clicky on the SMH webpage:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/hes-a-weird-burger-and-a-net-cult/2008/07/18/1216163118049.html

Hi, Who was it who wanted the James Squire Pepperberry Winter Ale?

Person in question drank some at the Ale house in Darling harbour. I'm trying to pass on that it is available in bottles as a special addition at, among other places, the bottle shop of the Marlborough hotel in newtown.

To miss the journey is the fate of all of us when we reach our destination.
You can never repeat a first experience - you can only ever chase after shadows.

So sad it is then, that i have finally, finally, finished watching every single episode of every single season of both Buffy and Angel.

*sob*
(poor Wesley...)

I will never watch them for the first time again.

To commemorate the event, i went back and watched the first ever episode of Buffy and giggled. (Gawd Angel was a skinny young thing back then!) heh.


Hm,
I think that when Buffy and Angel ended those couple of years ago, it heralded a new breed of emo who didn't have the delicious comedic torture of Josh Whedon's world to escape into.
I mean, just what is the modern girl to do without broody vampires to fantasise about? Who is the new kick-arse girl the boys can fantasise about rescuing from her fated isolation?
Obviously, the answers were Mal Reynolds and River Tam, but they too are gone.** Clearly there is a world crisis!

What ever are we to do? *angsts*


** heh. Until a couple of weeks ago, i didn't even know that Firefly was cast from Buffy and Angel super villans. What a cast!

If i hadn't stopped to blow-dry my hair this morning, I wouldn't have missed my train.
So I wouldn't have still been walking to work when it first began raining.
So I wouldn't have ended up walking into the office drenched and wondering why i bothered to dry my hair.

But if i hadn't blow-dried my hair this morning, I would STILL have had wet hair when i got to work.

So many time in the past weeks i've thought "I should post about that" but i never do. Here are my much-condensed bullet points of laziness. Sorry to bore you...

1. The movie Mongol about the early life of Ghengiz Khan is totally awesome. Amazing tale, amazing scenery, amazing acting, amazing people. My and my Man went out to Dendy Newtown to see it. (Going out to see a movie is a bit rare these days for us.)

2. Insert anti-WYD-everything here. Loved today's Heckler in SMH which ranted about the complete lack of say that the population of Sydney had in this massively disruptive event that is eating our tax dollars, and the ludicrous rules and regulations that are being imposed...
"I am annoyed to my core by the juggernaut that is World Youth Day. Who can I fine?"

3. There is a construction site outside my kitchen window. The trees, our fence and two feet of our garden have disappeared.
Turns out that when the old fence was put in decades ago, they kinda misjudged the property boundary and now next door has claimed it back. Oops!
But yay for Summer Hill - the development going in is a SINGLE STORY building. Hooray for retaining sunlight.

4. Airconditioning sucks arse. I've aged 5 years since i've been here, i swear. I'm trying to drink heaps of water to replenish my skin moisture, but mostly i'm just packing in my kidneys and tripling my toilet paper consumption.
You know, thousands upon thousands of women work in offices and manage to stave off the pruning of the face - or is that just the inch of make-up that they plaster on to compensate?

5. Went to Frank Woodley's solo show, Possessed, with my brother the other week. Awesome. Slapstick comedy and dramatic genius. Gotta love my brother.

6. Speaking of my brother, he's going to be moving in with the two lovely ladies who are to be my bridesmaids! This makes me happy.


Enough already. I should really post something of more immediacy next time.

In thailand, the Man and I were waiting for the boat to take us to a beach party around the cove. There was a couple of other Aussie girls on the beach, waiting for a boat, and we got to talking. We hung out a bit over the next few days and stayed in sporadic contact.

Today, I was telling a story of that beach party to my PostDoc* - how it got rained out and the storm made it impossible for the boats to come or go and how the Man miraculously got his Danger Mouse t-shirt back after leaving it on the beach where one of the Aussie girls found it.
PostDoc says, "That sounds familiar..."
Turns out that she is Aussie girl's best friend!
PostDoc had already heard all about me, just hadn't realised it WAS me until then. And now I have a face to put to all of Aussie Girl's stories about 'her crazy friend Lulu.'

It is a damn small world!!


* well, actually i'm her Research Assistant, but i don't know how else to explain her. She's not the Boss, but she's training me. To do her work.

The first dry day in two weeks, open up the windows,
and the house is just full of the scents of Autumn. Ah, love it!
What a beautiful day! Hope you're all enjoying it too.

I may have overdone it on the blueberry muffins... There was barely any room for the muffin in between teh blueberries and the white choc chips. Time will tell. Approximately 5 minutes will tell, to be more precise...

[edit] Well, only one of them fell apart as i took it out of the pan, so that means that others have just enough flour in them to hold them together. It also means that I had to eat the broken muffin. Gee, damn. TASTY!

and gosh it takes a lot of petrol to get there!

Went camping on the other side of the Blue Mountains with the Man's family and a couple of family friends. Nine adults, one 12 year-old, two dogs, three gas stoves, four cars, five tents, six eskies, and one babbling river populated with yabbies and miniture frogs the size of a fingernail.
The camp site is set amid the ruins of a gold mining settlement. It is private property now, but remnants of walls tell of at least a dozen houses, and the retaining walls along the hill sides run for a very long stretch of the river. Best of all, the huge iron pieces of the rock stamper and milling wheels still stand. History AND nature. Cool, huh?

We looked a bit like an adventure advert - the Nissan Pathfinder, the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado, the Subaru Forester and the Subaru outback, with tents and tarpaulins and camp fires all spaced out along the river bank. (After two cases of beer, six bottles of wine and two bottles of Tanqueray gin consumed over two nights, we looked less like an advert.) Certainly, it was not a 2WD road to get into the property, though we skipped the real 4WD parts of the track as a concession to the Subarus.

The sky was clear and beautiful, it didn't rain apart from a very brief shower on sunday morning, and Lithgow has a lovely cafe that serves good coffee until 3:30 on a sunday afternoon to fuel the drive home. Perfect. Pity we forgot the camera.

It is official.
The dress is a bust.

My step mother and i eventually resorted to slitting both side seams and completely removing the offending panels to reset them from scratch and see if it was even possible to get them to sit right. And the answer is a resounding No!
Cut wrong, off centre, wrong shape, wrong size... DOOM!

Oh well.
It was a gamble, i always said it was a gamble, and I lost it.
Ce. La. Vie.

Next?

What a picture of abject misery!

I don't believe it,

Nigella Lawson has just managed to get ABC Classic FM to play Kylie Minogue.

HA!

A friend just sent me this. Oh, so true...
http://bfg.hpc.susx.ac.uk/~irene/lord_of_the_rings.pdf


"Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?"
( only one page. Promise. )