No one spooked the fridge for weeks and while it was sitting there being all ‘meticulous’ that was getting pretty boring. Eviscerate isn’t a word one uses a lot… unless you’re a Small Child who happens to watch their father playing way too much WoW. 😐
Apolgies for the unnecessarily dreary and depressing post of yesterday especially given that I have previously promised that I would endeavour to be as trivial as humanly possible in this damn thing to avoid having a second teenagehood and turning into some sort of quazi middle aged emo thing… because lets face it there’s not a lot on this planet that’s less attractive than a once was… kinda… you know… crying into her red.
Though I can highly recommend the Maclarenvale 2006 Gotham Shiraz for such purposes while we’re on the topic.
That all made more sense in my head….. So after boring people to tears – myself included – with yesterday’s ‘Poor me – How dead is my cactus?’ shit… I took a hint from fabulous Dave2 who leads a far more glamorous and undoubtedly more productive life than myself and had a look back at my LIST. Yes… that list.
I made some changes. Cheered myself up by adding in some retrospective ‘things to do’. I think I might try to remember to have a look at it more regularly and remember that no matter how many petulant monkeys seem to be flinging poo in my general direction… I can always escape to some obscure foreign country of flexible culinary ethics and revenge myself by eating one.
August 28th 1991… Happy fucking Anniversary to me 🙁
Last week ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
shu_shu_sleeps from down south posted about having back pain. Which I totally understand I left a wee comment of genuine (yet ultimately useless…. sorry) sympathy. She asked me how I’ve managed to not become an axe murderer by now. I don’t know about an axe murderer… but ‘heinous bitch’ is probably right on target 🙁
Pain is usually your body telling you something is wrong.
Pain often makes us realize we need to slow down.
Pain is distracting because your body hurts.
Pain can cause you to be irritable over little things.
Pain has most people reach for analgesics for a while.
But what happens when you go to your doctor and he does what he can… sends you to the specialist and then another specialist and another specialist. And he prescribes suitable drugs and then more drugs and more drugs… but your pain doesn’t go away??? Well then you have chronic pain and chronic pain is another kettle of fish entirely…
Chronic pain is exhausting.
Chronic pain makes you try everything no matter how ludicrous.
Chronic pain drives your friends away because you have zero patience.
Chronic pain robs you of your sense of humour.
Chronic pain stops you from sleeping properly.
Chronic pain fucks with your concentration.
Chronic pain makes you less sympathetic to the temporary pains of others.
Chronic pain stops you doing things you used to love.
Chronic pain is inescapable.
Chronic pain makes you question how much more you can take.
Really bad and unrelenting chronic pain day in and day out might even find you absentmindedly researching on the internets for biologically friendly ways of opting out of your miserable existence that would leave your organs intact for some other poor bastard…
but mostly chronic pain makes you into someone you don’t want to be and you find yourself living a life you never wanted to have.
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I have no idea what these pictures are about but for some reason I found them strangely interesting. I believe they belong to some sort of advertising campaign, but it was all in Russian so I couldn’t understand it anyway. 🙂
Bet it would suck to have to clean their armour after the photo shoots though.
I was cleaning up my dresser this morning and discovered a long forgotten piece of paper which had a small toast written on it that I gave at a dinner I arranged to celebrate my Dad’s retirement. Dad retired in August 2002 and little over 12 months later, December 22nd 2003 actually he found out he had MND (I remember the date all too well… I was in hospital at the time myself with a post operative golden staph infection in my abdomen after a laparoscopy which you know… nearly kinda killed me).
Anyway I found this toast that I had jotted down and then promptly left behind on the night and had to wing it in the end anyway. I have obviously kept it for nostalgia’s sake and thought if I copied it into here… then I could chuck the bit of paper 🙂
“I remember in primary school being asked once ‘What does your Dad do?’ and I remember answering confidently that my Dad was a draftsman for Telecom. Unfortunately… the next question went something like ‘What’s that?’ to which I was forced to awkwardly reply ‘I have no idea.’ 😐 I recall growing up with this vague awareness that my Dad worked in an office somewhere and spent all day drawing “stuff'”…. ??? As I got older, Telecom became Telstra Fleet Smart and the ‘stuff’ became ‘designing/engineering mechanical vehicular modifications’.
So yesterday when I went to a farewell morning tea for My Dad at his Postle Street workplace where he had worked for the last 30 odd years, I thought this would be my last chance to find out a bit about what Dad had actually been doing all these years. And while I didn’t get to see 36 years of his ‘drawings and stuff’ … I did learn a few things.
Amongst his colleagues, it was obvious that Dad was respected as an integral and valuable part of their team for his many different skills. I heard Dad praised for the quality of his work, the dilligent, reliable, methodical and tenacious way in which he approaced it and for his stability and resilience when dealing with his co-workers. What I didn’t expect from a gaggle of mechanical engineers and draftsmen was this constant ribbing about Dad’s meticulous, precise and exacting nature. At home we always thought his anal retentive exactitude was an occupational requirement, but it seems they’ve had on going jokes about Dad’s thousandths of a millimetre for as long as we have.*
I also discovered that, for years we had been labouring under the misapprehension that all draftsmen (and public servant types) wore shorts and long socks to work. We had long thought this to be some sort of regulated dress code for people working in the Telstra drafting profession, but not so! It turns out that our Dad has been the only long sock advocate these many years and fortunately with Dad’s retirement, The Long Sock Brigade will haunt Postle Street no longer (by the way the official sock burnings will take place next week for any interested parties 🙂
Well, Dad, we thought you might be at loose ends for a while, and to help you ease into retirement, we have compiled a few necessities for budding retirees. So congratulations on your retirement .”
And then we gave him a box of ‘stuff’… funny things we thought he might appreciate.
A roll of toilet paper with a new little ‘dunny shovel’ to take camping.
A giggle hat… all old fogies gotta have a giggle hat.
A copy of War and Peace… cos now you’ll have the time.
A bobble headed Elvis for the dashboard in the Nissan.
A dreadful country and western CD.
A book of 4WD treks across Australia.
A packet of boiled lollies for dirty old men.
A brochure for a retirement village.
And there was other stuff that I’ve long since forgotten
