Waffle irons and popcorn makers and GPS’ Oh my!

Posted on 17 April 2009 by boryssnorc

Hit the road little Jack and don’t come back no more, no more, no more, no more!! Hit the road little Jack and don’t you come back no more. And this is precicely what very nearly happened to me last night.

I am up in Twin Waters helping out Mr K by attending a work ‘Gala Awards’ dinner (and I use the term loosely given there were blue jeans, t-shirts and inappropriate footware aplenty) so that he might give his bosses,clients and co-workers the impression he is a respectale family man. I know, I know. It’s like trying to push shit uphill with a shovel but we do what we can 🙂

The drive to this once familiar location was stressful and worrisome beyond belief. First there was the truck that had smooshed a 4WD full of Mum and Dad holidaying with the kids and a trailer full of camping gear into a concrete road works barrier that had the traffic bumper to bumper from the Bribie Island turnoff all the way back to THE GATEWAY FUCKING BRIDGE!!! Then there’s the wankers with their heads up their own arses who aren’t giving way so the ambulances can get to them. And then there was the impatient fuckwits who think theyre going to be getting there quicker by constantly switching from one creeping lane to the other creeping lane while tailgaiting the guy in front of them! Morons the lot if them. Which reminds me – I am totally going to get a new horn in my car that doesn’t sound like you’ve just stepped on a rubber ducky squeaky toy when you’re trying to honk at someone with righteous indignation.

On top of dealing with Mr Beer Swilling Male Pattern Baldness Testosterone Fuelled Cockhead I also had to contend with a spectacular Google Maps clusterfuck. Luke a good little girl who doesn’t own a Refidex I jumped on the PC to check the directions before I left. I used to come up here all the time as a kid but haven’t been here for about 20 years. Sigh… There was a whole bullshit drama that started with a ‘take the first exit off the roundabout’ that should have been a ‘take the THIRD exit off the roundabout’ and ended with Google Msps on my phone leading me the back maintenance entrance of this massive golf course resort.

I’ve always had an aversion to GPS units and thought of them much in the vein of other single use appliances that rarely get used but I was wishing for one on this drive though god knows it might have still be all gone to shit given that it was Google Maps leading me astray in the first place. 🙁

So after forty five mins wasted driving around in circles I finally arrived as pissed off as all hell and feeling in just the right mood to go dealing with a bunch of Bus People (who seem to have some uncanny similarities to Circus People) none of whom I had met before.

Fun fun fun for the whole family.

Just do it…. Just do it

Posted on 16 April 2009 by boryssnorc

I have tickets 🙁
Tickets that were booked last December.
Tickets to New Zealand to attend SCA May Crown.
Tickets that cost $475.00 each.
Tickets for myself, Sir Phil and Shagsy Wagsy.
Tickets that I… we… won’t be using.

It was all arranged months ago and I really thought by the time it rolled around that all would be well. I thought it was something positive to look forward to and given my anti-social attitude and hermitic habits of late… I honestly thought it would be a good thing to have something, anything, to look forward too. But now it’s only a week or two away and I just can’t bring myself to go. In the cost / benefit analysis… the pain and bullshit totally outweighs any potential fun.

Don’t want to sit still on 4 hr flight – that’s gonna hurt.
Don’t want to be handling luggage – that’s gonna hurt.
Don’t want to sleep on crap motel beds – that’s gonna hurt.
Don’t want to sit on bad chairs all weekend – that’s gonna hurt.
Don’t want to wear heavy SCA frocks – that’s defintely going to hurt!
Don’t want to be driving around getting lost in an unfamiliar city….
Don’t want to get stuck talking to people I couldn’t give a shit about atm…
Don’t want to deal with pretentious and officious Laurels at meetings…

The whole idea of going away is already churning my stomach and filling me with anxiety at the predictable exacerbation in pain and emotional disquiet the trip would inevitable provoke. I don’t think I’m up for this at all.
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Driving along in my automobile

Posted on 14 December 2008 by boryssnorc

I was being driven home tonight after a pleasant couple of hours having a cuppa with some friends… and we were coming through a fairly deserted area of road with no traffic to speak of and some fucking little brainless cunts (yes… pissed off and wound up enough for the seaword… probably only it’s second or third appearance in this whole journal) threw something at the windscreen of our car.

We were just driving along, I don’t recall if anyone was coming in the opposite direction or not and we heard a really loud crack noise (which was so loud that I initialy thought it was possibly a gun shot. I looked up (I was tapping a calendar reminder into my iPhone at the time) and saw a massive splat of goo all over the windscreen. Obviously not a gunshot (thank fuck) , too much goo to be bug (or one helluva fucking big bug), definitely not a bird (no blood and guts)… just goo.

We pull over (I’m sitting in the car ready to call the police if it was some sort of ploy to get the vehicle to stop… yeah my mind always immedately jumps to the worst conclusions) and we were trying to figure out what it was when sir_phil finds a bit of egg shell near the wipers. Some bored and obviously IQ defficient individual/s threw a raw and possibly rotten (judging by the aroma) egg at our vehicle’s windscreen while we were travelling along at highway speed.

I mean honestly… what the fuck? Where is the entertainment value in this? If Sir Phil had reacted badly to the noise and sudden visual impariment of egg splattered all over the windscreen… we could very nearly have ended up in a fucking ditch or rammed into a road sign or something. What sort of moron does shit like this for fun?

I am so totally over being freaked out in cars. I’ve spent the last year over reacting to every little slight irregularity on the road… flinching when anyone feels like they are too close… hypersensitive to feeling like I’m being tailgated… really uncomfortable when someone else is in control of the vehicle and I sit there biting my tongue trying not to tell them to ‘slow down’ or ‘dont follow too close please’, working really hard trying to either not pay attention or pretend I’ve got my shit together and am not bothered. But I am really really tired of freaking out on the road over every little thing…. and then some fuckwit throws an egg at us…

I am starting to feel like I am cursed. Like I was supposed to have gotten dead back in 1991 (in my 2nd accident) and someone’s been trying to get it finished ever since. I honestly think I am destined to die in an automotive incident and for ages now have been just totally waiting for the hammer to fall.

PS – I need nooo shew-hoo-hews 🙁
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Short chick tries to be the bigger person

Posted on 21 November 2008 by boryssnorc

Even once in a while when you’ve been a nob or done something that you reflect on and it doesn’t do you credit, life throws you a ‘phone a friend’ and gives you an opportunity to be ‘the bigger person’ and try to set things right. I find it doesn’t happen that often as I rarely act without considered forethought regarding the consequences of my actions, the feelings and reactions of others and whether I’m actually emotionally invested enough to act at all.

Today one such an opportunity arose where I could a big person and try and mend a destroyed bridge of my own making and apologize for my actions on an occasion when I threw out my best knee jerk reactions and went ‘blargh’ all over the place without thinking about someone else’s feelings. And I did it not once, not twice, but three times.

I was majorly pissed off but acting like I did doesn’t help fix anything and certainly doesn’t remove or undo the damage. So I am sorry BigSal I will try to wind my head in, in the future…
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If only it were raining men instead of morons.

Posted on 17 November 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.
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