You can’t give ketamine to a dwarf

Posted on August 31, 2009 by borysSNORC

Grrrr… hardly slept at all last night. Was loaded up with enough sedatives, painkillers and endep to sedate a small horse but woke up again in so much pain. I can’t express how sick and tired (absolutely bone tired exhausted) of this constant pain I am at this stage. 🙁

I was going to go up the mountain with the boys to take some photos of them and to have a poke around in the snow a bit but I am in really bad pain I didn’t feel up to going. So the guys went snowboarding for the day and I got to spend the day stuck on the couch trying to do a bit of study with my hotwater bottle and a packet of Digesics for company

Sniff… sniff… sniff :(

Posted on August 30, 2009 by borysSNORC

Woke up this morning in soooo much pain. I hope it settles back to normal or this isn’t going to be much of a holiday. Yale went back to Christchuch to pick up Narc and I pottered around here for the day getting things squared away and just getting oriented. First item on the agenda for the guys was to arrange their lift passes and snowboard hire equipment. First (and only) item on my agenda was to obtain a heat pack as soon as humanly possible… will have to make do with port until a hot water bottle can be acquired postee hastee.

Ouch :(

Posted on August 29, 2009 by borysSNORC

Get to Christchurch in the middle of the night and ‘low and behold discover that I can’t hardly walk without lots of pain and wanting to spew and not looking forward to what I assumed would be crappy hotel beds. On this point I was unfortunately not disappointed and the bed I found myself spending the night in was indeed soft, soggy and in no way conducive to sleep for one such as myself who needs a decent firm bed for any sort of sleep let alone good sleep.

We discover once we turn our phones back on that one of our party who was supposed to be meeting us at Christchurch airport as he was flying in from Sydney had missed his flight… apparently poor Narc had undertaken the two hours of public transport required to get from his place to the Sydney International Airport only to discover he had left his passport at home! So he had to go all the way back and try to get on a flight the next day instead. I left my pre-purchased duty free shopping at home once back in the old days and Mum drove home and back in the mandatory 2 hour before your flight check in time bullshit.. but never my passport – touch wood.

Woke up much as expected…. that is, feeling like a wrung out dish rag and very stiff from the flight and crap bed. Went and did some grocery shopping and headed out to Methven to get settled into the little cottage we have rented No 52 (link). It is a gorgeous private little place and had a lovely kitchen which is important cos I hate eating out all the time. And… this is the most important bit… the place is new enough that the mattresses aren’t total crap – thank Christ for that!

The Odyssey Begins

Posted on August 28, 2009 by borysSNORC

Right this moment I am supposed to be getting ready to go off to New Zealand and getting ready to pack my stuff I am totally ambivalent about going. I feel like I need a holiday but holidays in foreign countries (regardless of how close or similar in culture they may be) tend to involve a lot of stuffing around. Airport transfers, manhandling luggage (or in my case cajoling someone else into humping my luggage about), arranging for things that are likely to crop up in your absence – I was expecting a tapestry I ordered online to have arrived by now but Customs have their dirty little hands on it and no amount of attempting to be proactive and square away any duty payable on the item proved fruitful…. more bureaucratic bullshit than you’ve ever seen before one of those –

Call Customs and get –
‘you need to call Australia Post to find out about your item’
Call Australia Post and get –
‘you need to call Customs to find out about your item’ type situations… blah, blah, blah, di fuckin’ blah!

Anyway, between that and paying school fees and trying to write a bunch of stuff down for Mum who is kindly looking after the house, the Small Child and the Small Dog and then getting to the whole packing thing… it has just left me ambivalent about the trip in general.

So I left my packing to the last minutes which was okay given that I had already decided I would pare down my pack for this trip. One item of ‘real’ warmth (polar fleece jumper from hell) and lots of useful layerable items, toiletries, some study material and my latex pillow all went into my UberBag which I then cant pick up to roll it along cos it’s about 15-16 kgs (damn latex pillow is about 1.5kg of that).

We get to the airport with plenty of time to spare and then do that horrible wasting time hanging around the airport bullshit… airport gate waiting lounges are always how I kinda pictured Purgatory for some reason, We get on our flight no probs but unfortunately the flight is packed so there was no extra space to be had and it was three hours of forced sedentary posture with a movie on my laptop to try and keep my mind off the rather annoying way back was screaming ‘FUCK YOU’RE AN IDIOT FOR AGREEING TO SIT STILL ON A STUPID CRAPPY AIRLINE SEAT!!!’.

Somehow I don’t see any decent long haul travel in my immediate future….

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire…. no hang on it’s just shaking to pieces in front of us.

Posted on August 27, 2009 by borysSNORC

It’s late. Again. And it’s noisy. Again. And I’m tired. Again.

Like sands through an hourglass… this is the soundtrack to my life 😐

Really really tired…. and feeling really rather… oh what’s the word I’m looking for… PISSED OFF!!! Yes I think that’s about it at this point The roadworks are still going and we’re so sick of the ceaseless bloody noise from out the back. I thought the truck reversing beepers were the worst. Then after a while I was proven wrong and it was the constant screeching of metal on metal from the track of the bulldozers and escavators that I thought was the worst bit. But no! Proven wrong again – for they had new torture up their sleeves for us. There’s some damn machine out there that is some sort of vibrating roller thing that rips up the old bitchumen which emits a low pitch pulsating vibration (which is something one isn’t ordinarily adverse to 😉 that has been going incessantly for weeks. It literally is hurting my eardrums after a few hours… actually my left ear kinda feels like it’s bleeding which I know it’s not.

We had a gaggle of suits who turn up here this evening to meet with us after Mr K was ranting at them at 1130, 1245 and 0200 last night (third day running that he’s been calling every night I think) to let us know they are ‘taking our concerns very seriously’.

All the Leighton Abigroup Joint Venture Upgrade Project bigwigs here –
The actual Director of the entire Gateway Upgrade project thinga-me-doova
The Head Honcho Structural Engineery dood whose name I’ve already forgotten
The Manager Community Liaison at Leighton Abigroup Joint Venture
and some other guy whose name and job I missed entirely.

So all them got an advance copy of the nasty arse Ministerials I’ve been penning that are going in the mail tomorrow bitching about the whole friggin’ mess…

Craig Wallace – Qld Govt Minister for Main Roads
Rachel Nolan – Qld Govt Minister for Transport
Steve Kilburn – Member for Chatsworth
David Wright – General Manager Gateway Upgrade Project
Hugh Boyd – Project Director Leighton Abigroup Joint Venture Project

Apologies to anyone who might be an underling working for one of these Ministers and high faluting over paid stuffed shirts cos by the time I finished with my various complaints it was a ten page epic that will have to be pulled apart and send to ten different divisions within each organization and then some poor bastards going to have to spend a few days compiling all the shit they got from the underlings before they write me a letter that goes something like ….

‘we’re very concerned about your concerns because your situation is very concerning and we are taking your concerns very seriously, however we have no concerns strategy for dealing with your particular concerns because your concerns dont really affect our concerns so we are going to pretend to empathize with your concerns for a while so you think we are concerned about your concerns before making a concerted effort to do nothing to ameliorate any of your conncerns… blah blah di- fucking blah.

Maybe I should send it onto Anna too….