I’ll have what she’s having.

bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards… bastards…

oh   yes!   oh baby!   oh!    yes!   yes!   yes!
  omg!   omg!   omg!    shudder   shudder   shudder 
      the end

I like to watch……

I like watching people type sometimes… especially if they have aesthetic pleasing hands 🙂    Strong masculine hands or slender well manicured feminine hands or if someone can touch type really well and it looks like they’re fingers are floating across the keyboard.  I quite like typing myself though I rarely watch my hands while I do so… especially since I got this DasKeyboard and there’s absolutely no point at looking at the keyboard while you type.

Yeah I know it’s a weirdness but it’s my weirdness so I don’t think we really get to choose whether or not we put up with them.  Shrug.  To add to the whole hands and typing weirdness I am prepared to admit that I like words that can be typed with one hand… and where this particular little strange psychological tic comes from?  I have no idea.

faxed             defeat
lollipop            uphill
teased              sweetest
mummy               polyp
faded             stew
junk                 inky
receded            averaged
puppy                starters
treads             career
poppy                excete
dears             bastards
punk                 deceased
base                    craze
plump                homily
redacted                 cases
oily                effected
rave                   referred
milk                 estates
redress                million
opium               cabbage
better               treaded
lion                   stressed
bereaved               kinky

and everyone’s favourite longest English word typeable with the left hand alone – stewardesses.  Sigh…  the crap that has no right taking up valuable memory real estate in your head – I don’t know!

Anyway there’s heaps of them.  I’d probably feel a little strange owning typing weirdness if I didn’t already know there were hundreds of websites out there devoted to words typeable with just one hand…  and isn’t that just the one true virtue of the internets?  Letting us know we’re not alone with our weirdnesses?  🙂
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Don’t call me late for dinner…

It’s my Mum’s birthday today… and she didn’t want to do anything to celebrate.  Since my Dad passed away it feels like she doesn’t want to acknowledge these things.  It’s almost like she thinks she doesn’t deserve to celebrate birthdays and happy occasions.  But I’ve been so depressed lately and I feel like the back pain has been on top of my pretty badly so I did what I always do when I want to ignore my problems… focus on trying to fix someone else’s problems.

Today I arranged to have lunch at my place with just us girls and a few glasses of wine of course and we watched a silly movie called Ghost Town which was just what the doctor ordered.  I had made a lovely cheese plate as movie snacks but accidentally made it as though there was going to be a couple of boys in the rooms so instead of what I had planned for lunch we just had way too much yummy cheseses.

I had talked her into dinner out at a local restaurant a few weeks ago (Eleven-17... fantastic place if you’re in the area and haven’t tried it yet) and promised her it would be just the family.  Once she got used to that idea, last week I conned her into letting me invite a few of her friends.  Not many just a few people who’ve known her for the last 30 odd years you know.  So far so good. 

The gift is hard.  What to buy the person who really has everything and really doesn’t ever seem to want anything???  My sisters and I decided to get together and undertake a Herculean effort to find a weekend where no one had any prior committments to arrange a family weekend away together.  We managed to find a weekend (eventually) and BigSal found a great place to called Gilston Retreat down in the Gold Coast Hinterland that could accommodate us all and where we could book the whole place out.  So after much wailing and gnashing of teeth (okay… after much back and forth on the MSN) the present was booked and squared away.

All up I think she’s had a pretty good day to celebrate her birthday. and I didn’t see Mum get upset or get maudlin about Dad at all.  She even joked with us that if Dad was around he would have picked up the dinner tab at the restaurant and seeing that she has his money maybe she should be paying for everyone’s dinner!  

Only now I’m home and really tired from sitting on crappy seats all night and acting all night like I’m okay and… I’ve got a monster headache to boot.   But  I think it was a good day for the most part… and I hope Mum will remember the day fondly even though I forced her into doing all that stuff to celebrate it.
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Window Willy

I was picking up the Small Child today from school and found myself parked ouside a property that shares a common fence with the school ground/  This house has been here since before I went to school there 30 years ago only now if is adjacent to the back wall of the kid’s new art block… but back in the 70s it was where our monkey bars and swings were.

Every day when I stop outside this house I have a fleeting memory of someone we called Window Willy’.  There was a man who lived in that house for the whole seven years I went to primary school there and he got that nickname because he was in the habit of occasionally standing in the window in his bathrobe and flashing his naked form to the kids playing on the monkey bars.  No shit.  Everyone in the school knew about Window Willy, even the teachers.  They would tell us ‘Stay away from the fence children and don’t look up at his windows”.   They pretty much gave the impression they thought he was harmless.

I don’t know if there was any action taken by the school in relation to Window Willy back then but the manner in which it was generally tolerated or ignored astounds me now that I’m a parent myself.  As it turns out a few years ago I found out that there was a priest in our parish around the same time who WAS meddling with children from the school.  The Year 7 girls used go over to the priory and cook and clean for Fr Fitzmaurice as part of their ‘Home Economics’ classes and it seems Fr Fitzmaurice used to take liberties with the girls by getting them in a closet or cubby of some sort and he abused untold number of girls there during his tenure.  It turns out that many of the women in the parish knew Fr Fitzmaurice was a bit ‘handsy’ but no one did anything about it. (Link to Broken Rites about Fr Fitzmaurice)  Unbelievable.

Well all I have to say about all this is thank fuck things have changed! I’m parked outside Window Willy’s place today thinking about all this crap and wishing it was mandatory for anyone living in the vicinity of a school to have a Blue Card.
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‘R’ we there yet? ‘R’ we there yet?

I kinda went off list for a few weeks.  Well quite a few weeks actually.  I was working on my “R”s and quite literally could not come up with ANYTHING that I liked or found positive that started with “R”.  No doubt this is due to the rather less than stable state of my back over the last few weeks and subsequent emotional disquiet over same.

But… I’ve tried really hard to think positive which is often very difficult for one so naturally pessimistic as myself and this is what I’ve finally come up with:

List of 10 Things I Like That Start With “R”….

1.   Respect – people who respect themselves and other have my vote
2.   Rail travel – there’s something ridiculously erotic about trains
3.   Rammstein – two CDs got me from CBR to BNE
4.   Risotto – am a sucker for interesting risottos on a menu
5.   RACQ – so I never have to risk breaking a nail
6.   Reality Bites – No one can eat 50 eggs
7.   Red – must be growing up and leaving my pink phase behind
8.   Ruins – this series of small walls was where they plucked pigeons
9.   Rapunzel Barbie – she always had such beautiful hair*
10. Remember whens – there’s nothing quite like spending time getting together with a group of good friends and reminiscing over old times.  Laughing over shared experiences, shared opinions, shared innocence, shared humiliations perhaps.  Fondly remembering common acquaintances or perhaps not so fondly remembering common acquaintances as the case may be.  Good friends, good wine, good conversation – it’s the best.

List of 10 Things I Hate or Dislike That Start With “R”
1.   Relatives – you can’t pick your relatives carefully enough
2.   Random – current propensity for overuse of the term is irksome
3.   Road kill – especially when it looks like road puree 🙁
4.   Risk the board game – Noooooo!
5.   Roger, I’m frightened! – I’m a terrible passenger, so slow down.
6.   Roses – personally I prefer tulips (just not orange ones)
7.   Rats – in Mi kitchen… what am I gonna do? (not really)
8.   Ronald McDonald – creepy clown bearing food for children? hello?
9.   Roundabouts – no one seems to know the damned rules
10. Religion – it is impossible to calculate the heinous crimes and permanent damage done around the world throughout history in the name of religion… and unfortunately it follows us every day and likely will continue to do so.

Rapunzel barbie*Until you let a 7yr old at it with a pair of scissors…

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