/Karen/

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“Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless”

Saturday, 19 July, 2008

Monday 30/6/08

End of the month. I'd completely forgotten I needed to do all the current issue Briefing stuff. I was in at 8 and got the prime parking spot in the alley near work (yes!) Guy had laid out some sticky cockroach traps the week before, and I came in to find a whole bunch of cockroaches stuck in them, frantically waving their antennae because they couldn't get free. There were also several mothers in one of them (you knew they were mothers because they carried egg sacs on their backs which, Guy assured me, would eventually burst and all the baby cockroaches would come tumbling out and get stuck in the sticky traps too. Hope you're not eating anything as you read this ...) (By the way, did you know cockroaches are cannibals? Another reason to hate those disgusting creatures ...)

I did the final draft of my article for Salt for Bec and sent it to her, then worked on July/August e-Briefing, store, web things, e-news, plus Sola Panel editing. The server was being hugely annoying and our sites kept crashing (think we've worked out why now, though). Elsie and I met up to read the Bible and pray. I ended up leaving work 10 minutes early because my computer was being too annoying and I knew I could do what I needed to do at home much quicker.

I did the fruit and veg and fish shopping on the way home. Ben made some ravioli to go with the leftover spaghetti bolognaise sauce. I worked for two hours, then stopped for dinner and watched taped Law & Order: SVU. Then I worked for another three hours, finishing The Longing, e-news and store things. That left The Library. I had a shower and went to bed late.

Tuesday 1/7/08

Canada Day. (“O Canada ...” how I miss you ...) I slept in and came in to work late (given I'd just worked five hours the night before). Bec and I had lunch together to talk about the editing seminar and found that we were pretty much on the same page (good place to be for two editors!) I worked on stuff for The Library and managed to get most of it done. What I didn't finish, I finished at home as I decided to leave at four anyway. I stopped by the video store and returned the 3-day releases and asked for another copy of No Reservations because the disc scratches (and they kindly gave it to me).

I don't remember what Ben and I did that evening; perhaps more television. Ah, television ...

Wednesday 2/7/08

Day off. I slept in way later than I thought I would, then started the laundry. I kept trying to do it all day. I hung stuff outside because it was sunny, but it was also windy so the clothes rack fell over and I had to wash all those clothes again. I watched No Reservations and Ella Enchanted (grr, skips ...) plus the special features, and really enjoyed it (oh, Hugh Dancy! And Anne Hathaway has a nice set of pipes. Did you know that she was almost going to be in The Phantom of the Opera but couldn't get out of it due to The Princess Diaries? [What an awful movie!] And she would have been Johanna in Sweeney Todd but then Burton decided he wanted to cast an unknown ... all right, enough trivia ...)

Because of my laziness, I got to making dinner later than expected (grilled dory and bok choy on 2-min noodles). We watched NCIS from the night before, then Numb3rs. Then we cleaned up and re-made the bed because I had washed the sheets. We went to bed around midnight because we were both feeling so sad.

Thursday 3/7/08

We got up around 8 and left at 9 or so to go to work. We dropped the DVDs back at the store and then drove to work, getting in around 9:30. I finished off the last of The Briefing stuff and dealt with email things.

I'd arranged to have lunch with Bec to talk editing seminar (she had written a great little role play for it), and Ben and Guan came too to listen in. I think we were all pretty out of it, but apart from the examples, the seminar was in pretty good shape.

Ben and I worked until 6 and then he dropped me off in Newtown so I could have dinner with Anita. I was early so I went to Better Read Than Dead and bought Peter a birthday present (Haruki Murakami's The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—my favourite Murakami novel) and saw an amigurumi book called Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More! (so tempting to buy it and then I remembered I don't crochet). I also went into a couple of music stores before going to hunt for the restaurant where Anita said we'd meet. Unfortunately my sense of direction was all out—I walked up and down King St to no avail, and then Anita rang me—she'd spotted me from the other side of the road (it was the red urchin hat that made me stand out)—and I went to meet her. We went to Le Kilimanjaro for dinner—African food (I made Anita choose because I was sick of making decisions). It was really yummy! And we had a good talk for ages and ages, moving on to the Ice & Slice for gelato for dessert (gelato + good heart to heart = effective tonic for the soul). Then she dropped me home.

Friday 4/7/08

Back in at wor, Ben and I arrived around 9:30. I worked on web things, Sola Panel things, fighting foo things, and so on. I think we also had Friday Thai day on this day, but because the weekend was filled with meals not at our place, I abstained from Thai and finished off the grilled dory (which everyone was really impressed by).

Ben left for counselling at 3. I kept working away at what I was doing. Just before 6, I quit and started decorating Tony's office because he was due back from leave on Monday. When Ben returned, he helped me: we stuck Post-It notes on everything and labelled them with “bookshelf”, “chair” and “Caution: sticky!” (that last one went on the sticky tape dispenser).

Then we drove home. Fish came to get us around 7, and we went out to dinner at The Italian Bowl in Newtown (yes, dinner in Newtown two nights in a row ... I am spoiled). There were no free tables so we sat at the counter and talked all manner of books and comics and art and walking adventures and stuff you don't really remember talking about, but at the end you feel like you really enjoyed the conversation. When we'd finished eating, we felt the restaurant staff giving us the unspoken pressure to go, so we went and wandered around the Newtown shops for a while—Fish Records (where I had a listen to Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits cover album Anywhere I Lay My Head—not a fan) and then hung out at Better Read than Dead (where I talked to my mum on the phone about coming to sort through my things) until the movie started: Batman: Gothic Knight. It was showing as part of the Reel Anime festival organised by Madman. I didn't realise that it was like The Animatrix—six short films by various writers and anime production houses telling six short stories about different facets of Batman and Gotham city. I enjoyed it (“Working Through Pain” especially), and some of the animation was just beautiful (kind of weird to see Batman/Bruce Wayne drawn in traditional anime-style) but it wasn't as good as The Animatrix and, as Fish said, it brought nothing new to the character.

Fish dropped us home and I stayed up doing Word by Word things: printing out outlines, looking for another worked example, stapling, hole punching, getting stuff together for the following day so that I could just grab the bag and be out the door. I went to bed at around 1.

Saturday 5/7/08

Word by Word. We pretty much got up and went, picking up Ben M on the way. We got to the office and set up, and then I managed to squeeze in some breakfast. Dave was supposed to be doing devotions but when he didn't show, I assumed he was sick like his blog said. We did a writing exercise from The Little Red Writing Book and read Psalm 84 together. Then Bec and I went through our seminar on writers and editors. (We worked out what we needed to cut and how we could run it better.)

During writing time, I needed some air so Ben and I went for a walk to get the lunch. We ate Thai, then Bec and Guan made their apologies because they had to go (Guan was working on his sermon and Bec wasn't feeling well). We did some workshopping in the afternoon, then wrapped up and headed home.

We dropped Ben M off and then continued on to my mum'shouse. I fell asleep in the car on the way. At my mum's I started the cleaning up process: even though it's been 8.5 years since I lived there, I hadn't completely cleaned out all my stuff when I got married because it was too hard. But now that they are moving, the time had come. So I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening going through my things while Ben had a nap.

It's weird finding all the stuff you've forgotten—for example, drawings I used to do of cats (that looked like Hello Kitty) and rabbits (that looked like the rabbits on my old extremely cool pencil case [extremely cool because it had all these buttons you pressed to make things pop out: pencil sharpener, the drawer for my eraser, thermometer {yeah, what's a thermometer doing on a pencil case?} and so on]). It was also weird discovering that my interests haven't changed all that much: I've always been into comics (I used to draw a few ... my goodness, they were terrible! If I'm feeling energetic with the scanner, I'll post a few) and writing (I'm not posting the juvenilia so don't ask) and craft. Did you know I used to make woollen flowers with an Inox Flower Loom? Or that I used to make things out of plastic canvas (like tissue box covers, and cups and “saucers”)?

I also remembered that I used to hoard stuff. I don't think it was for any particular reason—I think it never occurred to me that I could throw things out (like gifts that I didn't particularly like). So in boxes in my own room I found notes I passed in class in high school, editions of Georgie Girl (our school newspaper), editions of Fred (the school newspaper of our brother school which was miles better than our school newspaper ... I even found the edition which had a photo of the graduating class that Dave was part of on the back of it) and exercise books from primary school (boy, was I good at drawing title pages!) I saved some things, threw out other things and put aside some things for the Salvation Army/Vinnies.

Peter made roast lamb marinated in yoghurt along with roast vegetables and stuff for dinner. We opened presents (for both Peter and myself), and then I rang my dad to see if he would store the cradle because we had no room for it at our place. (He made the cradle, you see, and I think my parents used it for me and my brother, and it came over with us from Canada. If Ben and I have children, I hope we can use it for them.) My dad was up and was happy to store the cradle, so Ben and I put it in the car and brought it over, along with several boxes of Lego which Ben wanted our future offspring to have, and some of my dad's old photo albums which hadn't made their way back to him after the divorce.

Then we returned to my mum's and I kept going through my old stuff. I finished around 11 o'clock at night. Ben and Peter loaded the car with old photo albums (my mum thinks I should keep them and not her. I don't know how we're going to move out of here; we now have so much more stuff!), books that Peter doesn't want any more (for me to get rid of on Bookmooch) and all the stuff I'd salvaged from my old room (which included lots of Hello Kitty things—my old Hello Kitty pencil case, my Hello Kitty library bag, my Hello Kitty honey pot ... okay, you get the idea ...). We said goodbye to the house, then drove home and went to bed.

Sunday 6/7/08

We had a big long sleep in and woke at 12. I can't remember what we did in the afternoon (computer? TV?) Ben went off to band practice and I went off to Unichurch to hear Guan preach. I parked in the multi-storey and walked over to the lecture theatre. On the way, I passed a troupe of hip hop dancers near Electrical Engineering who were grooving to a car stereo pumped up loud. There were people everywhere—surprising for a Sunday.

It was my first time at Unichurch and I was a little disoriented so ran into a regular who tried to suss me out for evangelism purposes on my way in. It was funny having church in a lecture theatre (nice that all the seats have those fold out table bits that you can use to write on). The data projector kept stuffing up and displaying a message about checking the air conditioning smack bang in the middle of the screen so most of our song words were obscured.

I sat with Bec. Guan preached well with characteristic Guan-ness. Afterwards, we said hi briefly to Haoran and Sarah, and Haoran and Guan's parents, and then I went home and made risoni for dinner. Ben called to ask if it was okay for Marinka to come over. I said yes, that was fine. So Marinka came over and hung out with us in our lounge room for a couple of hours. We had mini music appreciation in which we made her listen to Thao, Sia, Stars and St Vincent—all music I'm into at the moment. We also talked music festivals and our ideal line-up (she was trying to convince me to come with them to The Great Escape but it's $180 and the only band I'd really want to see are The New Pornographers and Neko Case if she does something solo).

Marinka went and while Ben did the washing up, I read in the cosiness of bed.

/Karen/ had a thought at 5:55 PM | | EE comments (5)

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