The Circus is Coming!

Posted on July 12, 2012 by borysSNORC

The circus is coming to town again and I’m so excited! I’ve become enamoured with the Cirque du Soleil for many years and I can’t wait to go again.

I first went to the Cirque du Soleil in 1997 in London with my friend BluddyMary. She had bought us tickets as a Christmas gift and being the uncultured swine that I was I had no idea what I was in store for because I had never heard of the Cirque du Soleil before. It was amazing – Alegria at the Royal Albert Hall. A once in a lifetime experience and I loved every minute of it. The building was amazing… I mean it’s the Royal Albert Hall!!! The show was amazing, there were some incredible little contortionists who twisted and turned themselves inside out until you couldn’t figure out which bit belonged to which artist!

But other than buying my Mum and Dad some tickets to a Cirque du Soleil production that was in town, I didn’t get to go again for many years. It was January 2008 when I got to see Dralion for my birthday with the full Tapas Rouge experience. Fancy nibblies, champagne, red carpet treatment and the most amazing seats right up the front. The show was fabulous – there was one particular act with two ‘lovers’ dancing together suspended way above the stage, using long strips of billowing blue fabric almost like they were extensions to the dancers bodies. They were so beautiful and sensual the way they moved together, it was absolutely mesmerising!

Then the next show I was fortunate enough to see was Saltimbanco last year in mid 2011. One of the most striking things about Saltimbanco was the skill, wit and vivacity of the ‘clowns’. I’m reluctant to call them clowns, they’re so much more than that. They’re fantastic mimes and have a great sense of comic timing and audience involvement. Saltimbanco was a show full of ‘wow’… ‘wow’ at the amazing things that the human body is capable of. The act that left the most indelible mark from that show was the trampolinists who were doing incredible acrobatics and running up walls that appeared to be several stories high! They were jumping back and forth with such speed and such agility and such amazingly tight choreography that I thought they would smash into one another!

And now Ovo is coming to town! Tickets were purchased just after Christmas and I’ve been looking forward to for months. I know nothing about it at all and have deliberately avoided watching any videos or listening to the soundtrack so it will be all new and interesting. And now the tents are going up over at Hamilton and so it’s only a matter of time! 🙂

Shake your groove thing.

Posted on July 9, 2012 by borysSNORC

Alright now! Because having the flu (euphemism for severe bronchitis that doesn’t seem to want yield to anti-biotics) isn’t bad enough, one of the three new medications I’ve been given – two to try and kick it and one to add to my usual cocktail of pain meds, muscle relaxants, analgesics and sedatives is giving me the shakes. And I don’t mean a strange little old lady quaint type of trembling in my hands as I fluster with my purse either… I mean something that is giving me the whole body tremors and making my head bob about like a Parkinsons patient. 🙁

Whole thing is making this typing business a bit of a challenge (so I will take the opportunity to blame my typos on the shakes for a while) and my fingernails are chattering against the keys as they hover over the keyboard, like your teeth do when you’re really cold. One of the weirdest sensations ever and I can’t seem to ‘mind over matter’ control it. Stupid brain.

Question is how to figure out the culprit when you’re on so many medications, and in particular so many new ones, or is it very likely a combination deal? I think I’ve narrowed it down to one likely suspect where studies have patients reporting tremors, trembling or ‘shaking palsy’… about 10 in 5930 patients report getting the shakes from it – 80% are my gender, 50% in my age group but 100% report it after 2-3 years on the medication… not 2-3 doses!

Oh well, it’s all fun and games until your damn doctor prescribes something that makes you feel worse than you did to start with. This is going right up there with the Mouse Tails side effect.

Living the iLife again…

Posted on July 7, 2012 by borysSNORC

So I’ve got my MacBook Pro thingy finally out of the box… took me about 26 hours after purchase before finally pulling it out to have a look at it and trying to figure out how it works. Gotta say initial impressions weren’t positive given I’m not as tech savvy as I should be and I’m obviously quite a creature of habit! Must have been about an hour or so of personalising shit and attempting to synch stuff between my mail, address books, calendar (still haven’t conquered that one), and doing silly little things like trying to change user pictures, wallpapers and the like when I started to think, ‘Oh Jebus, what was I thinking? I don’t have the time or inclination to figure out where everything is?” :S Swiftly followed by, “Holy snappin’ duckshit how ugly is that orange frame they’ve put on the default calculator on the Dashboard thingy?” (Very little techno joy and a good deal of bronchial distress going on here for the record!)

So what have I learned about my Mac today? The F1 and F2 buttons control the screen brightness… handy to know, that. The F5 and F6 buttons control the strange little lights that are on underneath the keys on the keyboard. The F3 button brings up the Mission Control view, the F4 takes you to the Launchpad thingy and the eject disc button is NOT a delete key even though I keep attempting to use it thus, given it is inconveniently located where the delete button was on my old laptop! Next week… learn some of the Command key shortcuts so I can actually find shit and/or attempt some pretence at efficiency with this thing.

I have something called a Lion Operating System… apparently (well, so I’m told). And I understand that Mac have been using big cats for these things from way back – Jaguar, Snow Leopard etc, etc., though Job knows why!?! I guess it’s marginally better than being called an Ice Cream Sammich or a Gingerbread Cookie or something but I’m wondering where the synergy comes in with the big cat monniker and the space themed naming protocols???

I mean the Task Bar is a ‘Dock’, the Start button is a ‘Launch Pad’, the overall Desktop is ‘Mission Control’ and I haven’t found ‘Sputnik’ or ‘Pizza Planet’ in here yet… but I’m sure they’re in here somewhere hiding the Network and Sharing Centre and the Device Manager or something. Don’t these people know that whole ‘space’ thing is so 50 years ago? I don’t get it. Why the ‘space’ jargon for a computer? And what on earth has it got to do with the Lion?

When I try to figure out the correlation, all I keep thinking is, “Lions in spaaaace!” (yes, complete with a Muppetty ‘Pigs in Space’ voice over)

Big Day O’ Mass Consumerism

Posted on July 3, 2012 by borysSNORC

Mr K has a schexy new Samsung Galaxy III phone in pearlescent blue (to compeiment his eyes) and is busy adding contacts, downloading apps, making strange message and ringtone noises and basically becoming acquainted with the wonders of Android interface after years of being a MacWhore.

Yale has recently acquired a new TV and is busy figuring out that a TV these days isn’t just for watching shoddy free to air programming or slightly better illegally downloaded international content, but it also has wifi, doubles as a fancy monitor and has built in Sudoku … the latter of which briefly had him FML’ing and in our book, this seems a perfectly justifiable reaction to discovering your new piece of fancy technology has an inerasable crappy game like Sudoku on it, so we’ll let that one slide. No doubt he’ll recover from the shock of it soon enough.

I too, have made a significant new high tech acquisition this afternoon – a new MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles. Couldn’t tell you what the specs are (I largely leave these details to ‘other people’), don’t know what it came with, am pretty sure it will look like the store model, will turn on and do what it’s supposed to, but at this stage thatt’s just an assumption… because even though I bought it nearly five hours ago, I haven’t actually pulled it out of the sealed box yet. To be honest I’m in no particular hurry to do so – it’ll still be there when I get round to it.

Apparently this makes me a bit of an oddity. Most people these days have techno-joy and have to rip off the packaging, discard the box, pretend to flick through the handy multi-lingual user manual and jump right on into playing with any new gadget the minute they get their hands on it. But while I am sure this Macbook thing is perfectly lovely and I will grow to know it quite well, at the moment I’m a bit… meh, I’ll get there eventually.

So my new MacBook is a bit box of chocolates at the moment. Wonder how long I can leave it in the box before the others start to twitch…

All on a sesame seed bun.

Posted on July 3, 2012 by borysSNORC

Am I the only person who sees sesame seeds and just HAS to pick them up and squish them between their fingernails? And I don’t mean just picking them up and making them go pop between the nails of your thumb and forefinger… I mean picking them up and putting it on the back of your thumbnail and applying pressure with your other thumbnail until it pops in a manner that is familiar to mother’s the world over who have ever had to groom their child for head lice?

Because there’s this thing you do every time your school sends home a notice saying that some kid has nits. You go through the procedure of checking their heads, checking their heads, checking their heads… and then the day comes when you notice with horror that there is a louse in your kids hair. Whereupon you carry out the following procedure in this order –

1) Freak out and start scratching your own head… because ewww!
2) Douse your poor child’s head with some disgusting toxic chemical concoction
3) Half drown said child trying to wash away the disgusting toxic chemical shit
4) Comb repeatedly with itty bitty painful lice comb until your kids hair is squeaky clean…

All the while continually resisting the urge to keep scratching your own head at the very thought of it.

And if you do happen to find a live one, then you pick it up by dragging it along the length of the hair strand and then it’s trapped between the pad of you thumb and finger… even though lice can’t jump you treat those little buggers like they’re as hard to nail down as fleas because the last thing you want is a louse in your house moving at his own recognizance! You then carefully put it on your left thumbnail and then you squish that little fucker with your right thumbnail until you hear it go pop… because if you don’t – the little blighters don’t die! Btw, if you don’t have kids you have all this to look forward to EVERY summer.

But I digress, because I wasn’t talking about nits, I was talking about my OCD-like compulsion to squish sesame seeds in the same way I squish nit. Am I the only person who does this? Do other people see sesame seeds and leave them to languish in peace on the table cloth? Or do they happily sweep them up and discard of them thoughtfully? Or are there other people out there who, like me, see an errant sesame seed and think that its pernicious little presence needs to be squished into oblivion?