On Top of the World

At tafe at the moment we’re doing Deaf History Studies. The topic was the Ottoman Empire, which I knew nothing about, so it was very interesting. It’s weird that in school I absolutely hated history, and stopped taking it as soon as I could, but now I find it really interesting. I have a memory like a sieve though - I forget dates and times etc (which is why I was so bad at school), so every time I watch history programs, even if I’m fairly familiar with the subject matter, there’s always something I’ve forgotten, so it’s as though I’m seeing it for the first time. I guess that’s good and bad. Anyway, one of the things that the teacher said was that the Sultan of the Empire chose which of his sons would become the next Sultan after his death. After this choice was made, his other sons were executed. Who says that life isn’t one big popularity contest?

After class, a friend and I went to our new regular place, Hungry Hippos. It’s actually called Hungry George, but I called it Hungry Hippos one day and that’s what it’s been ever since. Hungry Hippos is located on Hindley St, which has long had a reputation for being a pretty dodgy part of town, with lots of bums, beggars and drunkards. It’s also home to a fairly decent strip joint, but I digress. When we first started going there, we sat at a table close to the edge of the place, overlooking the street, where we were invariably asked for money. The last few times, though, we sat further inside, where they have some rather comfy lounges. I was thankful that we were sitting there last night and not on the edge, because two guys came in, with one of them looking quite scared, and the other being aggressive, yelling at the first guy. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but the other guy was trying to placate him, although the other guy wouldn’t have any of it. He made a few lunges towards the scared guy, and threw a couple of punches. They did the cat and mouse thing for a bit, with Aggressive Guy walking out into the street every now and then, and Scared Guy walking inside HH, seeing what AG was doing. Meanwhile, my friend had got up and I called her back, worried that she was going to try to get between them. She was only going to the staff bit to ask if they were calling the police, which they had.

A little while later, SG left Hungry Hippos and walked up the street, and a few seconds later I saw AG running up the street after him. SG hightailed it to the other side of the street, and came back into Hungry Hippos, with AG walking down the street just as a police car was cruising by. I don’t know what the policeman said to him, but my friend overheard some people on the street jeering AG, saying “you’re not so tough now, are you” etc. AG really was a Class A Wanker.

Fortunately, times have changed since the Ottoman Empire, but I guess the moral of the story is still the same - don’t piss anyone off, especially if he’s a Sultan or your girlfriend’s ex.

I’m really annoyed with all the tv shows we get from other countries (which is most of our tv shows), which have some Australian guy or girl doing a voice-over, like a commentary on what’s happening. Like Myth Busters, and Wife Swap etc. Do the the tv stations think that if we have an Australian talking every now and then, that the viewers will think the show is from Australia? Or are they really that stupid that they convince themselves that the shows are Australian?

Obviously they have to meet some quota of Australian programming, but since they can’t make any that people actually want to watch, they resort to the voice-overs on shows from overseas and call it Australian content. Why can’t they just admit that the majority of Australian shows suck (especially the ones they try to put in primetime) and noone wants to watch them?

I LOVE MEXICAN FOOD.

We went out for dinner last night with some friends, and since the place we had orginally planned on going to was closed (at least, we got voicemail every time we rang to make a booking), we decided on Mexican instead. So even though I’d been looking forward to having risotto at the original place, having enchiladas at the Mexican place was a welcome substitute.

I love the restaurant we went to. M and I go there fairly often, because they have great food, and the prices are quite reasonable too. I love the smell of it as well, you walk in and straight away you can smell food cooking. I don’t know exactly what the smell is, but I think it’s a combination of tortillas and cheese and other stuff. They seem to have a limited collection of CDs, because they’re usually playing the same music every time we go there, but that’s ok because I have a favourite song, and listen out for it every time I go. They didn’t play it a couple of times ago, but they did last night. It’s just a peppy-sounding song, even though I have no idea what they’re actually singing about. But I assume it’s something good, because you wouldn’t write a happy melody to go with depressing words, would you?

We started off with a combination dips, which had frijoles, guacamole, salsa, and a divine cheese dip that I could happily drink out of the container without the need for corn chips. Mmmm.

Then came the enchiladas. I had two chicken enchiladas, frijoles and rice. Last time I only had one enchilada, but since the serve was quite small, I thought I could easily forgo some rice to have the yumminess of an extra enchilada, in not that much bigger a serve. I was wrong. I got two jumbo enchiladas, and a huge serve of the rice and frijoles - definitely not in proportion to the one-enchilada serve. But that’s ok, because I LOVE enchiladas, and particularly the sauce they use. The sauce is something else that I could just drink out of the container, except it would probably make me sick after a while.

I don’t know how authentic the sauce actually is, but I don’t care. That is what Mexican food has to taste like, and against which all Mexican food is compared. So if I ever get to Mexico, they’d better use that same sauce, else I’ll be mighty disappointed!

We’ve started feeding the ‘possums near our house. It began a couple of nights ago when M put out some old bread on our balcony, and hey presto - in the morning they were gone. We didn’t actually see what took them, so we assumed it was a ‘possum… for all we know a huge dinosaur came past, stuck its head over the balcony and yoinked the bread. But I think we’re fairly safe in our ‘possum assumption.

Last night he put out some old bread, and some tomato. He actually caught one of them in the act, but by the time I got there it was gone. I guess it didn’t like us turning on the outside light to have a look at it. During the night I heard what I assume were ‘possum noises, but I couldn’t see anything. It was sort of like a cat hissing, but not really a hissy sort of noise. Definitely not a koala, which sounds like a pig. They’re quite weird. So tonight I have to keep a vigil next to the window so I can catch them taking the bread. Ah bugger it, I’ll just go to sleep with a warm fuzzy glow that at least one ‘possum will have a full tummy.

In other news, my neighbourhood has a hard rubbish collection coming up. In case you don’t know what I mean, that’s when everyone dumps the rubbish that they can’t put in the ordinary rubbish collection, like furniture or scrap metal or computers etc. So all the houses have a collection of (what they consider to be) rubbish on their front lawn, waiting to be picked up by the Hard Rubbish Guy (or Girl). Unless, of course, it’s snapped up by some opportunistic neighbour first. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that.

It’s quite funny to see what people have put out one day, only to see that certain items are missing the next. I think someone drove around the streets with a huge trailer, grabbing whatever took his fancy. And some of the stuff does actually look ok. M saw a widescreen tv at one house. I don’t think that lasted very long - no, he didn’t take it, because it didn’t look quite right (and who would throw out a working widescreen tv), but someone obviously thought they could do something with it.

So we were trying to find stuff that we could get rid of in the collection, and there wasn’t really much except some branches that we’d trimmed. Because we live on quite sloping land, there isn’t anywhere flat to put the rubbish out the front because it would just fall onto the road. So he put it across the road, with another guy’s collection. Note that we only had about three branches. So anyway, the guy who lives there comes out and throws a hissy fit because we put the branches with HIS stuff. M explained that there wasn’t anywhere on our side that we could put it because of the slope, and the guy said that the garbage guys might think he has ‘too much’ stuff and not pick it up or something. Like three branches would tip it over the edge. M was dumbfounded. The guy ended up saying not to worry about it - what an idiot. And what’s more stupid is that that’s the back of his house facing onto our street - the front of his house faces onto a different street altogether, so he has two places to put his junk. And he was complaining about three branches! So anyway, an old washing ‘mysteriously’ turned up on our side of the road, leaning at a rather precarious angle. Gee, I wonder who put that there? How infantile.

I had my first drunk tafe lesson today. We had end of month drinks at work, and I had a few glasses of wine and got quite tipsy. I wasn’t going to to go to tafe, but thought that I should because it’s not good form to skip class because I couldn’t be bothered going. I guess it’s not really good form to show up drunk, either, but that’s a different story.

So I turned up a bit pissed, and I have to say that my overall classroom experience was better than usual. The only reason for this is that my inebriated state allowed me to ignore the one person who pisses me off the most. He just rubs me the wrong way for so many reasons, and way too many to enumerate here. The main reason, though, is that he thinks he’s so much better than everyone else there, because he did the course 5 years ago. Newsflash, sunshine - if you were so good, you wouldn’t have been sacked from your job for being incompetent in Auslan, thereby having to repeat the course, would you? What a tool.

We had a nice lunch at The Greedy Goose today. The Greedy Goose is one of the restaurants in the TV show, My Restaurant Rules, which is a reality show where competitors from Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth open a restaurant, and one by one they’re voted out of the game, with the last people standing getting to keep their restaurant.

We decided to go for lunch today because we figured there’d be less of a queue (you’re not allowed to book), and not too much chance of there being any TV cameras around. Fortunately we were right on both counts, so we could eat without feeling too self-conscious. None of the entrées really grabbed me, so I decided to have a main and a dessert instead. It’s been so long since I’ve had a dessert at a restaurant, because usually by the time I’ve had the entrée and main, I’m stuffed. So I got to enjoy a beef filet wrapped in prosciutto for my main, and a yummy chocolate mousse for dessert. Needless to say, I am feeling absolutely stuffed now.

I think I’m going off chocolate. There’s one sentence I never thought I’d type - all my life I’ve made an automatic beeline for the most chocolatey dessert/cake on offer, but I’m just not that into it any more. I’m finding now that I prefer a fruity-tasting dessert, with chocolate being an accent rather than the main thing. My chocolate mousse today was excellent, but towards the end it just felt like too much chocolate. Wash my mouth out! As M says, maybe my tastebuds are ‘maturing’… either that, or they’re becoming as much of an old fart as the rest of me.

I am feeling so much better today. After feeling a bit nauseous on Thursday afternoon, I decided that I’d had enough and made an appointment to see a doctor on Friday. After poking around a bit he said that I probably had a virus and was over the worst of it, and I’d probably feel fine the next day. Which turned out to be correct, but I didn’t even get any drugs! I was a little dissatisfied with that visit.

But I’m feeling back to normal today and was even able to eat a full meal for lunch, which I don’t think I did all week.

M and I went to a local pub for lunch today, which was nice, and we watched some of the Clipsal 500 while we were there. I wouldn’t have minded going along, but it’s only the V8s, so it’s not a huge loss (although they do make a quite a nice rumbly noise ). I wouldn’t mind going to the Grand Prix next year though.

After lunch we went to see my mum. My uncle’s wife is here from Taipei before the two of them move to London, and is staying with my parents for a while. My uncle has lived overseas in various countries for pretty much as long as I can remember, and in all the time that he and his wife have been together, I’ve never met her, so it was nice to finally meet her today. It will be good to see my uncle as well when he comes in a couple of months.

I finally ordered my new phone today - yay! I was going to get the Treo 650, but decided against it for various reasons, so I am getting the Samsung D500 as originally planned. I can’t wait to get it! At the time I ordered it, though, I didn’t know that it wasn’t due to be released here until next week. D’oh! Australia is a great country, but why do we always have to be the last country in the world to get the cool gadgets? Sigh. Aaaaanyway, I’m hoping that by the end of next week or early the week after, I’ll have my new toy.

I’ve been feeling a bit odd for the last few days. I was developing a sore throat, so I took some echinacea tablets. My sore throat cleared up within a day or two, but after that I got an upset stomach, which is still feeling a bit dodgy, and I don’t know whether the tablets caused it, or if it was going to happen anyway. Maybe the tablets foiled the sore throat, but when it came to the wobbly tummy (inside that is, nothing can help the outside!), it was a case of ‘not my job’.

The flowers I got the other day have opened up nicely. I changed the water and trimmed the stems yesterday, so hopefully they’ll last a little while longer. They seem to go quite well with the poppy on my page. They’re not poppies, are they? Probably not, the petals don’t look the same.

I got the windows on my car tinted the other day - they look really good. I’m tempted to make faces at people I pull up next to at night to see whether they can see me through the glass, but of course I’m way more mature than that. Heh heh.

A friend from tafe and I have a new regular spot for coffee after class. We used to go to a cafe around the corner, but the guy there is a jerk and I don’t know exactly what time they close, but they’re always packing up chairs and cleaning off tables to give us the hint to leave. It makes me really edgy - my friend doesn’t care and just sits back in her chair, determined all the more to stay longer, but I just get really uncomfortable. Our new place, however, is open 24 hours, so there are no worries with being kicked out. Aaaand a hot chocolate is only $2 - bargain! That’s an 80 cent discount over the other place, people! So see ya stupid coffee shop guy, we’re going elsewhere now!

I’m not doing the Relay for Life any more - the people organising the team I was in couldn’t do it after all, so it looks like I’ll have to find something else to do that weekend. It’s a bummer, because I was looking forward to it, but I’m too lazy to get a team together myself!

I’ve just finished washing my car. M came out when I was almost done, and we polished it together, and now my arms are well and truly buggered. In true Murphy’s Law style, my car had bird shit on it before I could get it back under the carport. Bastards!

I have signed up to do the Relay for Life. This is a walking/running/whatever event to raise money for cancer research. You enter a team, and each team has to have at least one member moving a baton around the track for the duration of the walk. I think this continuous movement the people with cancer who have to live with it day in and day out without a break. We’ve got 15 people in our team, and it’s a 20-hour event, so we’ll be camped there overnight. I’m actually quite looking forward to it - it should be good! There are a couple of people from my Auslan class doing it as well, which I only recently found out about, so I might see them there. Naturally, the whole point is to raise money, so… if any of you would like to donate to a great cause, please send me an email (the address is in the sidebar) and I’ll let you know how you can do it, as well as give you my eternal gratitude. The walk’s not until April, but I’ll take my camera along and hopefully have some good photos to show you after the event.