You got a great rack Lady.

Posted on November 18, 2008 by borysSNORC

The last of the men with the little shorts turned up today to deliver the last box of wine that I ordered last week. So now the sadly neglected wine rack can hold it’s head high again after many months of looking like it belonged to someone who was maybe up the duff and off the drink all because I didn’t make it to the Annual Spring War Wine & Cheese Tour this year. We’re well stocked for the silly season and emergency presents… no problem!

Does anyone else do that? I have a box or rather one of those large plastic crates in my closet that I have filled with ‘Emergency Presents’. These are things that I’ve picked up on sales or have spotted going for good prices that I think would make great gifts for people even though I don’t necessarily have any one in mind to give them to at that point in time. The Emergency Present Box has things in it that would be suitable gifts for kids parties that the Small Child gets invited to, books and sundries that would make good gifts for SCA friends, lots of toys for girls of varying age groups (I have five neices), a handful of things that make good Secret Santa gifts at office Christmas Parties and various other bits and bobs that would be good gifts for any one of a number of Hallmark occasions that I had conveniently forgotten to shop for. Or am I alone in my gift giving preparedness??? I love giving presents, particularly when there is no occasion for it so I like to have things on hand. I should clarify that – I love giving presents except for…

Christmas. Which is upon us again… already. As anyone who knows me is aware I fuckin’ hate Christmas. Hate the Carols. Hate the rampant shopping. Hate the ritual Christmas tree nonsense. Hate the wasteful Christmas card exchange. Would gladly skip the lot of it. Why can’t I just have the family dinner and piss up and skip all the rest?

In an effort to spare myself some of the special Christmas torture, I’m endeavoured to do as much of my Christmas shopping online this year as humanly possible. So I hit the (online) shops today with gusto and I’m pretty impressed with my progress thus far. If I keep this up, I won’t have to go near the stores for anything except food…. and there will be much rejoicing by the peasants (that’s me) on the slopes if I manage to pull that off…. Ladies 🙂
.

If only it were raining men instead of morons.

Posted on November 17, 2008 by borysSNORC

BrisVegas had a HUGE storm last night. I know this to be true. Because I read it on the BBC News. Interesting that we had a ‘cyclone style storm’… here in the subtropics we just call them cyclones yeah? It was a pretty big storm that moved over the north west of Brisbane and it seems The Gap, Morayfield and areas in between were worst hit. (Pictures here – some of them are quite good photographically speaking)

Reports of green skies meant heaps of hail, strong winds knocking down 10m tall trees and 100,000 homes left without power. Ours wasn’t one of them for a change… the improvements to the power grid in our area must have spared us that. Rainwise here in the south-east we didn’t get any more of a dousing than we’d normally expect from a summer thunderstorm and while windy it was hardly cyclonic … but maybe that’s because of our newly installed 5m windbreaker out back. You know.. the one they optimistically call a noise barrier. It don’t stop jack shit in the noise department but seems to do a fair job at deflecting and redirecting wind.

So yeah… an extremely bad store… one person drowned taking photos down a storm drain (very ill advised behaviour in my book)… not sure how many injured… power cut off to thousands… trees uprooted… cars smashed…. localized flooding… rooftops blown away… hail damage to cars and buildings…. Bunnings and other hardware stores cashing in on generator and emergency lighting sales… other services disrupted including phone, internet, transport… emergency services overloaded… natural disaster zone declared by the Premier.

But even with all this… we live in a first world country and while it may take several weeks or months to clean up and sort out insurance claims and repairs etc no one here will have to worry about whether or not they can feed or shelter their family tomorrow as funds and resources have already been allocated to assist affected families, volunteers, SES workers and military resources are already on site and apparently working round the clock. We do live in the lucky country there’s no doubt about it.

Today it continued to rain all day long… just solid rain all day. Which means a couple of things – people seem more hurried to get on with things and get out of the rain… and this seems to make for more discourteous and ill tempered drivers than normal. Also more people decide to drive to work because they don’t want to walk to their buses/trains in the rain. Why do we give a shit about this? Well there’s quite twice as many cars on the road when we have wet weather AND NOT ONE IN TEN OF THEM HAVE THEIR HEADLIGHTS ON!!!

As someone who has a Rating One for life on their car insurance but has been involved in four serious motor vehicle accidents this is something I percieve as gross negligence and it pisses me off no end. I’m driving to collect the Small Child from school in the Pizza Caper car (because my car is in the shop to have the dent repaired) and it’s a black Suzuki Swift covered in bright orange sign writing. Now I’d do this in my bright red car anyway but especially because today I was in a predominantly black car and the roads are grey, the skies are grey and visibilty is impaired in the rain so I have the head lights on from the minute I turn on the ignition until I reach my destination. But do you think anyone else is trying to improve their visibilty on the road? Noooo. Why would they do a sensible thing like that?

Especially up near the school. There’s kids darting everywhere to get to their cars or bolt home and stay as dry as possible and the usual line up of flashy luxury 4WDs is even pushier than normal because everyone wants to get home… and NONE of them have their headlights on. Jesus people, these are our kids running about… surely you want them to see you coming. I don’t get it. Everyone is supposed to put their headlights on in the rain… and you’d think people who have silver, black or gunmetal grey cars would be particularly diligent knowing how easily they camouflage into the landscape under rainy conditions but no one seems to give a shit.
.

Oh who are the people in your neighbourhood? In your neighbourhood? In your neighbourhood?

Posted on November 16, 2008 by borysSNORC

Several years ago we purchased our house (in the middle of our street,., our house) in Belmont which is on the south east side of BrisVegas. Unbeknownst to us at the time this particular little section of Belmont is actually officially known as the rather snooty sounding ‘Belmont Heights’. I guess I never felt that this was a particularly upmarket area considering the guy around the corner with his front yard that continually looks like a fire hazardous flea market, the guys two doors over with their Harley’s rumbling in and out at all hours and the huge family of islanders that were living next door with car bodies on the lawn and their youngest son murdered in a drug deal gone awry… yeah what with all that going on I never felt we were living in the flash sounding ‘Belmont Heights’ so comes to filling out forms etc with our address, I can’t be fucked so it’s usually just Heights-less ‘Belmont’ that I fill in.

Anyway our neighbourhood hasn’t always been as salubrious as one might like, but we are rather privately tucked away on a largish battle axe block which means we rarely even see the neighbours except as we are entering and exiting the property via the longish driveway so it ws neither here nor there at all. Given that we hardly ever see our neighbours and there’s a number of houses on our street that recently acquired new owners (there’s one house on our street that has been sold about four times since we moved in here and we keep wondering what is wrong with it?!?!) it’s no wonder I’ve been a bit slow on noticing that there’s seems to be a recent upturn in the juvenile delinquency around here.

Last week, Thursday night or rather the early hours of Friday morning, it seems there was a spate of fires lit in people front yards on the two closest main roads to our place – Belmont Road and Meadowlands Rd. One of these fires was lit on someone’s patio while they slept. Some absolute wankers put an old futon couch on fire under the patio and it was only a passing trucker who saw the fire and pulled over to alert the home owners of the situation that stopped it before it turned really ugly. No one has smoke alarms outside their homes and if the futon couch burned well enough to ignite the patio roof etc then it could have turned into a full blown house fire wile the occupants slept. What sort of peurile morons thinks that maybe burning someone’s house down is a good night’s entertainment?

Further to this Yale mentioned that he’s noticed a number of cars in our neighbouring streets that have had their badging ripped off. i hadn’t noticed them, stashed away as we are at the bottom of our cul-de-sac. So I had a look around as we left the house last night and easily found nine cars all missing their badges before we’d even hit the main road. Seems we might have some new petty criminals in our midsts. Oh and I do mean petty… who’d steal badges off a Holden Barina??? None of the cars we saw missing badges were what you would call prestige vehicles so I don’t know what anyone would want with a collection of Holden, Hyundai and Daewoo badges!?1?! It makes no sense.

Sigh…. I guess we should do a check around the yard to make sure there’s nothing of value or highly flammable left outside at the moment. No doubt we should chain our BBQ to something solid too. 🙁
.

Anyone got a “J”?

Posted on November 15, 2008 by borysSNORC

I’m all the way up to the “J’s”… who’d’ve thunk? I sure as hell didn’t expect that I’d persevere with it but the letter lists are proving fun. The previous letters are all tagged under ‘list’ over there —->

List of 10 Things I Like That Start With “J”….
1.   Jewellery – custom, unique or unusual items mostly
2.   Jambalaya – good jambalaya is awesome
3.   Jasper Fforde – frivolous fiction for classic literature snobs
4.   Jam drops – only Mandy’s ‘special’ jam drops circa 1990
5.   Juniper berries – without which we would have no tasty gin
6.   Jarlsberg – don’t know why it took me so long to think of this!
7.   Jack Russel Terriers – smart like Eddie from Frasier
8.   Juxtaposition – artsy fartsy twonk words ahoy!
9.   Joe Cocker– Fisherman’s Wharf on the Gold Coast… good times
10. Journal comments – helps alleviate that feeling that you’re a cantankerous old misanthrope who spends your time going ‘blah’ about life’s little injustices all over the internets when actually you’re a certifiable lunatic who spends all your time talking to yourself 🙂

List of 10 Things I Hate or Dislike That Start With “J” List
1.   Jackass – doing their bit to cleanse the gene pool since 1999
2.   Junk – yard sales or $2 shops are not for me….we prefer quality
3.   Jealousy – such a wasted emotion, nothing good can be gained from it
4.   January – It’s always too fucking hot… and too hot for that too
5.   Jellyfish – pure evil… and I suspect smarter than we think
6.   Jacaranda Trees – one month a year they drop purple mush everywhere
7.   Justin Timberlake – other than blonde bimbos, what does he do again?
8.   Junk mail – ‘Oh I want one and it’s cheap!’ even though I don’t need it
9.   Jay – of “and Silent Bob” fame….that character just grates on me.
10.Jalapenos – prefer not ‘feel the burn’ when dining. I don’t know what it is but if you go out for curry or Mexican with more than one man at the table there invariably ends up being some sort of dick waving contest to see who can handle their meal the hottest that comes in pigeon pair with inevitable taunts of “wuss” to whomever pikes first. I don’t get it and am not interested. Perhaps this is because I like to taste my food rather than feel it or perhaps it’s because I’m comfortable with the size of my equipment 🙂

Bloody hell the “J”s were hard.
.

I had the worst stool for dinner :(

Posted on November 14, 2008 by borysSNORC

We went out for dinner last night and even though we had phoned ahead to book a table we found ourself sitting at one of those shiity high bar type tables. Which means that we were given bar stools to sit on.

Why is this a problem? Because I’m only five feet and one half an inch tall and have a bad back! They were so busy that if we hadn’t accepted the high table (that sounds weird) they wouldn’t have been able to seat us at all. Bar stools really suck if you’re as short as I am. Fristly they’re like way above your bum height so you have to pull of some gravity defying ass jump to get your butt on the seat. Secondly there is usually a foot rail for you to put your feet on to make you comfortable but they’re usually way too low for short arses like me so you either end up perched on the edge of your fucking stool in order to use the foot rail or you sit back on the chair properly and you end up sitting there swinging your feet like a five year old all night…. which incidentally sends your feet painfully numb after 20 mins or so. ‘And of course the other extraordinary shitty thing about bar stools…. they have no back support and this means that you tend to sit with very poor posture for the duration.

So while dinner was nice, I came out of there with mega stirred up back pain and painfully numb feet 🙁
.