2012

Far be it from me to thumb my nose at ancient beliefs...

I am prepared to make an exception for the ancient Mayans because they were savvy enough to use astronomy whilst also believing in the power of goats and such.
Mainly, however, I choose to embrace the prediction of the Mayan calendar, that the earth will encounter it's end, catastrophe, or simply a major change in spiritual dynamics on 21-12-2012.

Indeed, I hope it's so.

Being on board the day the world ends would be almost as exciting as being swept up in the mosh pit at a Ramones gig, and I've already done that, so I'm up for something bigger this time.

As such, I issue ample notice that on 2oth December, 2012, we will be hosting a party, just in case.

Fancy dress no less, and the theme...
...Let's confuse future intergalactic archaeologists!

Imagine for an insane moment that the prediction is correct and the world really does end that day.

Wouldn't it be nice to leave a confusing legacy so that in years to come, alien investigators will discover beautifully preserved pirates, milk maids, zombies and 7 foot chickens all happily spending time together?
Universal recorded history as we know it will change for the better.

Earth's reputation as a planet will change from "narky, stupid and violent bipedal life form who polluted their own planet" to " we don't know what they were exactly, but they looked to be having a good time!"

And that sounds a little better, doesn't it?
Almost like partially writing your own eulogy. Hey that's an idea... hmmm

But not as entertaining as Bukowski's epitaph which reads, "Don't try" or Spike Milligan's which was meant to read, "I told you I was ill..."
Such a pity that his stupid, boring family dropped the ball and denied him that final laugh, a bigger pity too that the bastards refused to allow him to be buried in a washing machine, which would surely have been a fitting acknowledgement of his genius.

Anyhoo, pencil it in.

TWSS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Doomsday_prediction

About 7:30 will be fine.

Our garden.

Our house is kind of on a battle axe block, meaning that it's really deliciously private.
Like retire and run a nudist colony out there private.

A weird, half-arsed tropical oasis complete with banana tree, mango tree, koi pond and conceptual art, courtesy of the area's friendly, if incontinent fruit bats.
Absolutely nothing gets that stuff off, so we choose to regard it as beautiful.

The cats adore this garden, enjoying a variety of hidey-holes from which to spring at one another with no warning.

We also share land with a family of blue tongued lizards who appear to be evolving specifically to be better equipped at frightening the pants off me at regular intervals.
Bastards.

This block came to us, equipped with an intricate cat alarm system, maintained by those shitty little grey minor birds that some idiot brought over from India.

And you know what I like best about these birds?

They're blatantly rascist.

Seriously. They have major issues with black cats.
Brown's OK though.

These intolerant, noisy "junkie" birds as Hell Boy calls them , squawk mercilessly in groups of up to 20, as soon as they see one of our black 2 cats enter the garden.
I've had to turn the hose on them to be able to hear myself think.

Poor Poppy, she's never known anything different. She just thinks that's what the great outdoors sound like.
In one way it's quite good, in that we always know where the girls are.

Honourable mention to that community of hand sized spiders who string their webby business up from October-April each year.
Why they choose to live at 5m intervals in a direct line between our front door and our garage door is known only to them.
Sometimes it looks like an Indiana Jones movie out there.

What I do appreciate about them though, is that each year, they actually learn the measurements of our tallest regular visitor, and they then make the necessary adjustments to their nightly engineering, so that after about a month of mutual disaster, all webs are precisely 1 inch higher than their heads.

Nifty.

So, the garden renovations are about half done, with no immediate plans to advance that.
We can see that as being slack, or we can see it as leaving nature alone for a change and enjoying some level of domestic wilderness.

Anyhoo, for now, the frogs, ants, bugs, fish, cats, rats, white peacocks, possums and whatever the hell else is out there are all happy, healthy and noisy.
So all is well in our little piece of 'straylia.

Welcome any time.

New life

What a year of change 2009 has been.

I felt it arriving, ready or not, and so followed my intuition and went with the flow.

And what difference.

My health has improved, I feel happier, more enthusiastic towards all areas of life, and I wake early each day, barely able to make it to 7am before getting up and starting my day.

My life is filled now with only positive people, and I believe all aspects will continue to grow and increase with joy and fulfillment.

I have found the perfect clinic space, and in so doing, I suspect I have discovered a bunch of new friends who will go on to become very important to me in the years to come.

All of my life experience and professional experience will now be able to emerge, uninterrupted and complete.

The support and encouragement I have given so freely to others during the course of my life is now returning to me ten-fold.

I accept that there will be bumps on the path, but from now on, it's my path.

Yay.

Maturing nicely.

By and large, 40th birthday presents should be elegant, boring or appallingly tokenistic. Perhaps all three.
That is, if the person celebrating the milestone is generally regarded as an adult.

Apparently, I am not generally regarded in such light.

But that's good, right?
Right?

What am I talking about?

I'm referring to the list of gifts I received for my 40th birthday. I think you'll agree that either, this is:

a) pretty damning evidence
or
b) worthy of inclusion in bold on the cover sheet of my CV.

In random order, because that's the way my brain works, I recently received the following:

• 1000 worms (incl vegetable scraps and a clump of pubic hair for them to eat)
• compost bin 1
• compost bin 2
• floor cleaning slippers
• hand sewn "Still hate the Roosters" block by Clair
  
• pirate bandaids
• giant eraser
• home made doll of Lila by Lila
• home made earrings from cat bells
• home made Beatles reiki pack by Cath D.
• Glo-Stix earrings
• The Atheist Manifesto
• Edelweiss handbag
  
• Pandora turtle
• Pandora bunny
• Pandora football
• comical underpants
• slipper socks with pig pompoms
• brass flying pig watering can which is not water tight and looks a lot like Phoebe
  

Please be advised that all of the above mentioned gifts are cherished.

Okay, okay,so that's not all I got, I did in fact receive some lovely, sensible gifts, but I'm not proud of that, and I'm not inclined to mention them.
Of course, amongst everything else, I did get the gift of freedom when I quit my job, but that's not silly, so I'm not counting it.

Hooray for life, luv sim xoxo

Thanks a lot, Michael...

I'd like to take the time out of my busy schedule to thank someone for reacquainting me with my dark side.

The OCD- I cannot leave it alone once I start it jigsaw puzzle gene I inherited from Dad.

Staying at Clair and Michael's (and Dawn and Daniel's) as I was last month,Michael popped out his Australian map jigsaw puzzle...which I tried to resist, briefly, and later had to drag myself away from as I feared I'd complete it before he returned home from work the next day, thus ruining the experience for him.

Hooray for my self discipline.

A week or 2 later, I made Hell Boy take me jigsaw shopping, both of us knowing full well that this was going to be bad for everyone, except maybe the cats.

K-Mart obliged us with a selection of ghastly $4 jigsaws, which sadly meant that between the 2 of us, we came to the conclusion that we should purchase all of them.

I've done an average of 1 per week (1000 pieces) and the last one was virtually within 2 days...and we went out for Yum Cha into the city, so...

In other news, my neck and shoulders seem to be quite painful.
I was even so brazen as to confess to Ed, my osteopath, that I had indeed injured myself doing a jigsaw, perhaps the nerdiest thing I've ever said.
I didn't help that he was genuinely impressed.

The last puzzle, I even had the help of Igor's 5 year old boy, Lennon. He actually found 2 pieces of the sky which was all the same shade of blue.

Lennon declared to me," not everybody can do this...you have to be smart."
"And patient," I added.

The second puzzle I did - the one with the missing piece - I'll blame the cats, but honestly I believe I vacuumed several pieces up, I got Dad to help me with.

He was over at Easter and I brought the board out. He went through his usual routine of,

"Shit, Simone, what are you doing to me? No, Jesus, that's terrible!"

And then kept Viv waiting for 2 hours while he refused to budge until he'd found that piece with the stripe and the crooked leg.

Glorious.

So, after doing 3 1000 piece puzzles of images I really didn't like at all, I decided that I wanted to do a puzzle of Schloss Neuschwanstein - my favourite building in the world, and a place we're going back to in October.
We trekked into nerd headquarters, HobbyCo in QVB, but they only had a 1500 piece one, so now our house has a permanent source of frustration, triumph, musculoskeletal disorders and profanity right in our dining room.

So, once again, hats off and a very big thank you to young Michael for setting me off and a bender.
Where was Beagle Bay btw?

New places

Apart from being a year crammed full of huge changes for me, this year I will be visiting a few new places.

I like to visit new places.

Additionally, I will be re-tracing footsteps in places that will look totally different due to seasonal changes. eg Vienna, Budapest and Salzburg sans black ice!!! woot woot

This trip , we will be seeing the following new cities:

Melk - to the Abbey of Melk, where I will hopefully be finding a wicked souvenir or two for Monica

Berlin -cripes, where do I start? Hitler's bunker, Unter den Linden, Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburg Gate, Nazi walks, Reichstag... better bone up on the WWII history. TWSS

Sans Souci/Potsdam -Charlottenburg Castle

Dresden -to visit the scene of Slaughterhouse 5, and to dash though the medical museum so that I may claim my trip on tax.... oooh, and to see the most heavily bombed city of WWII

Leipzig - to visit Samuel Hahnemann's statue - he founded homoeopathy, thus another tax dodge, God love him

Bled -the most beautiful place on earth

Celje -Dad's birthplace

Vitenje -Tischler town - meeting my Slovenian relatives

Ljubljana -including day trips to the coast line and to wicked castles

Potoroz

Piran -Jeff would like to retire here

Predjama

Harburg

Liverpool - BEATLES pilgrimage

But what I'm really excited about is meeting some of my Slovenian relatives. Just yesterday I received an answer from Matja, who is married to my Oma's brother's grandson...what's that, second cousin?

Anyway, I have discovered that she is a teacher and he is a scuba diver....WTF. They both trundle around the world scuba diving.

Don't you just love having cool relos?

Her manner of speaking is kinda familiar to me in that she was very friendly and offered me plenty of virtual hugs already. LOL Even I kept it reasonably unemotional for the first email, so I think from now on, anything goes. And most of you reading this will know how bad that might prove to be.

So, I have booked and paid for all the flights, and a couple of the tours. I'm fine tuning the Berlin leg and then I can book all that, although most of it will be independent anyway.

Then all I need to do is compile a list of the stuff we're planning to do as a group and cough up the cash.

Luggage is bought, got the North Face jacket this week, still have thermals and could pack the rest tomorrow if I had to.
Only thing I need is a new pair of boots, but as I want exactly the ones I already have, I'm resigned to giving in to the Gods of shoes, who hate me so very much.

Next week, I'll dump thew entire itinerary on here, more for my peace of mind than yours.

I'm writing this on my new laptop, which I bought for my new clinic, but it'll be coming along on the trip do that I don't have to be arsed finding God awful, smokey internet cafes all over Europe.

So, strap in for long winded blogs this time rather than 2 paragraphs of garbled nonsense on Facebook.

woot woot

Mercury pulled it's finger out.

By astrological terms, Mercury has been retrograde since at least January sometime, bringing all sorts of hitches to communication, transport, basically smooth progress of anything.

Seems that today it pulled it's finger out and played catch up for Simone. (TWSS)

Backing out of the driveway this afternoon, I almost ran into the delivery van.
It was close.

So, Hell Boy got out to see what he had - neither of us could remember visiting Ebay or Amazon, so we had no idea what he was going to present us with.

As Hell Boy waited for the guy to stop rummaging around in the back of his van (TWSS), he went to the letterbox.

Well, today, instead of bills or bad news, we were besieged with gifts.

From all over the place.

In the mail from Clair, I received a block (early WTF) made from killer red and green fabric. It came in an envelope with a Russell Crowe stamp, lovingly defaced by Clair with a talk bubble saying, "Go the Bunnies."
Majestic.

Then Hell Boy threw a parcel through the car window onto my lap from my aunt.
A belated hand made 40th gift, held up because it was entered in a competition somewhere and had been busy winning the GRAND CHAMPION award.
It's exquisite. Tiny, tiny, perfect embroidery stitches. Just amazing.

As I was yet enjoying this feast of crafty loveliness, I heard him say,
"Farken A! It's from Cleveland!"

Another much larger parcel, containing the North Face jackets he's been in love with these 6 months at least, sent on to us by Gretchen all the way from Cleveland clap clap clap Cleveland clap clap clap

Far better travelled than either the sender or the recipient, these magnificent items, even with postage costs, still were significantly less than store price in Australia had we bought them here.
And this tells me that either the good people at North Face don't believe Aussies get cold, or that they simply don't care.

Anyway, many, many thanks to the lovely Gretchen for the time and trouble of getting them here and making Hell Boy's day/year and for filling the box (TWSS) with all manner of goodies for me.

I'm guessing the Amish people cookie cutters were for me and not Hell Boy?
Fabric, cookie cutters, a Statue of Liberty building book (LOL) and my new favourite mug from Charlie's Dog House Diner....cripes, what a jackpot.
Chili Dogs!
WTF are chili dogs, and why haven't I had one yet?
Dammit!

Well anyway, Gretchen, I hope you enjoy the pics of me using my Charlie's Dog House Diner mug for the very first time.
Sadly, I feel as though I'm getting a cold, so I used it to take some of the worst tasting herbs in recorded history, and I've made up some shit, I mean,seriously, but the good news is that I was able to use that yellow cloth you included to stop myself from vomitting afterwards, so nothing went to waste.

Monica and Clair, you'll appreciate this ... Andrographis, Olive leaf, Golden Seal, Elder and Echinacea (all triple dosed)...not even a jot of Licorice to bust up the taste... gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarhhhhhhhhhhhhk, dirty son of a...

Nice to see me getting a dose of my own medicine though, eh?