mishap list

Horoscope today from the SMH Good Weekend:

"Bloody Mercury's gone on the blink again, so expect a month of frustrated endeavours and electrical mishaps."

Mishap list so far:

• old fridge carked it (but of course that was weeks ago)
• DVD player is misbehaving (plays a disc for about a second, then says "Stop" and turns itself off)
• CD player started imitating DVD player (caught and skipped at minute 1:35, but then behaved itself when I cleaned and thoroughly dried the CD)
• dropped tv remote on the floor, the cover of the battery compartment came off and one battery popped slightly out, I put it back in but now the remote has forgotten the code for my tv and won't work. I have the code to reprogram it, but it's in the filing cabinet whose drawers I can't open because the bookcases are in front of it, because I had to move them to get the old fridge out and the new fridge in.

That will bring us back to - d'oh!

New Fridge

The new fridge is supposed to come tomorrow. It had better come tomorrow - they tried to deliver it today, I got a message saying, "We're at your residence, we've been trying to get ahold of you, we're going back to the warehouse now", on the wrong day, I had always said Saturday. I called them and I think we've sorted it out, but will call to confirm tomorrow.

It has taken all, all week to get ready. I had to move all the books from the hallway to the main lounge room (folded the stools and pushed the table aside to make room). I did one a night - all the books out and stacked on the floor, push a towel under one end of the book case, drag it into position, put all the books back in (nowhere else to store them). Then last night was fridge defrosting. Then tonight was fridge emptying and cleaning, and the esky was in a shocking state from being stored outside so I spent quite a bit of time cleaning it as well. The only, only last thing to do is move the boxes (collected from storage in Gosford (see previous entry) but still sitting on the front porch) into my bedroom, which I can do at the last minute tomorrow morning.

But note the time. 2:25 am. The delivery guys could come any time from 8am - they say they will call an hour before, so my plan is to be awake (only just awake, not much more than awake) by 7. This whole endeavour has meant many late nights this week, and once even coming home from work early and sleeping for six hours straight, and also missing a Russoc that I had planned to go to. And of course once the fridge is in I have to put all the books back, and deal with the boxes.

I'm reminded of the move down from Queensland. We called around and found the cheapest possible movers, and decided to do all the packing ourselves. The movers were coming at like 8 the next morning. We ran out of boxes. We ran out of tape. It was February in Brisbane, stinking bloody hot, and it all got a bit completely insane, running out to a 7-11 at 4 in the morning trying to buy tape and only finding masking tape and then it wouldn't stick because it was so hot, and we just used it anyway and thought fuck it, the mover guys can deal with it tomorrow. The sweat of S's brow running like a stream into the box he was packing. Tonight, at now 2:29 and I have to get up at 7 for the fridge whole thing, I again think, how do normal people do this kind of stuff? Why am I always doing this kind of stuff in the middle of the night, with medically dangerous levels of sleep, and thinking, she'll be right, I can handle it, I've done worse.

Mostly I'm thinking, it will be over soon.

But I'm very excited about the fridge.

More news as it happens.

Playing with the Oracle

Should I ask ___ out?
Yup, but keep it mega-light.

Does my Ex-Lover Still Think of Me?
Oh, come ON - why do you care?

clicked by accident:
Do I Have A Soulmate?
Two people, meant to be together, but heading in utterly different life directions. Oh the pain but count your blessings.

Which Aspect Of My Romantic Persona Most Lets Me Down?
That you throw yourself at people who do not really like you.

(so, no, don't ask the shop boy out)

If you have some questions of your own, you can ask them at http://www.mysticmedusa.com .

What I'm listening to

Going through a serious Beck phase at the moment. I got the song "Girl" stuck in my head a few weeks ago, and was pleased to see it on my iPod on the last Triple J Hot 100 cds, but I needed more. Fortunately, I found both the album it's on, Guero, and a copy of Odelay at a discount sort of record store, so I ripped them and now have lots of Beck.

They always make me think of the Flash guy at work, because he has a Mexican girlfriend and speaks fluent Spanish.

And I'm just off to Google the lyrics to that Girl song to see what kind of the girl is - "summer"? "sunnin'"? "Southern?" "sun and"?

Fridge/Man

Today after putting it off for weeks and weeks I actually went out and bought a fridge. It's a very lovely Fischer and Paykel, 411 litre, white because the chrome surchage of about $1000 was more than I could swing. It was a run-out model and I think I got a good price, even though the man at Harvey Norman wouldn't haggle at all.

I had purposely put this weekend aside to rest, forgoing a Dialectic, and yesterday I just hung out, read the paper, watched Sopranos (I just got season 5 recently, which I still think is the best one), and slept. Today I had lots of errands to do. I was also feeling achy and fat and a bit down emotionally, but I know what I need to do to fix that - exercise, eat right, get the errands done.

So, in pursuit of exercise, I walked back from the Supa Centa all the way up South Dowling to Oxford Street, where I had seen some nice tops in a shop across the street when I was having coffee at Berkelouw Books last weekend. I really need some nice tops for work - it's less and less a suit-kinda place (I was forbidden from wearing one last week to a pitch meeting because we were trying to come across as small and hip) and I just keep wearing the same three identical twin-sets (in 3 colours) that I got last year for $10 at one of those Chinese import places.

The place turned out to be mostly a jewelry store, but I found a rack of the tops in the back and started going through them looking at colours and sizes. Turns out they are embroidered tops from Bali, probably overpriced but so gorgeous, and each one different. Three people were running the store - an older lady, one of those ladies with dyed red hair pulled back in a pony tail and a smoker's face and big rings; a young lady, sylph-like with brown hair and perfect pale skin; and a young man. At first I thought the young man was with someone shopping but then he took up a place behind the counter near the cash register.

They don't really have a change room so I just went behind a curtain in the back and had to come out to look in the mirror. The tops go over a t-shirt anyway so I was just trying them over the outfit I had on (Eddie Bauer green t-shirt and Eddie Bauer cropped black pants, with red Monro slide sandals). The older lady had gone across to their other store next door, so the young lady was giving me feedback ("No, that's way too big, look at the shoulders. That green is nice on you.")

I went back to change the green one for a black one and when I came back out the young lady had gone to look for some more Mediums and the young man was there. I looked in the mirror and he looked at me in the mirror too, and we both agreed that the black one looked very nice. He came up behind me and said, "Hang on," and adjusted the collar around my neck so it was rolled just so. And then he kept doing that, and giving me feedback on fit and pattern for each new size I tried.

Now, this was not the kind of guy you typically see in an Oxford Street clothing store. He was a completely ordinary, boofy Aussie bloke. One of those blokes with a round head and cropped hair and jeans on, who might have played junior footy for some first-grade team but now just plays a bit of touch with his mates in the park on a Sunday. And this very straight, very ordinary Aussie bloke was evaluating me, my body, the way clothes fit and flattered or failed to flatter me, and then coming up and taking command and rolling the collar down. Swoon!

I bought two, needless to say - the pretty green one that the girl had liked, which is a Medium and fits more neatly looking shapely and elegant, and then the first black one that had impressed both the boy and me, we worked out because the colours were better than all the others, and we agreed even though it was a bit looser it was good to have one tight and one loose, to have options.

I had to spend some time down the street at Ariel Books just to calm down.

***

And the fridge gets delivered next Saturday so tonight I did the first of the book-moving project. My books are stored in five bookcases of five shelves each, all down the corridor from the front door to the main room. That leaves the corrdior about a person wide, and certainly not enough to get an old fridge out or a new fridge in. So my project is to move one bookcase at a time into the main room, all week, to get ready for Saturday. I did the first one tonight - took all the books out and lined them up in the hall, scooched the bookcase to the far corner of the lounge room by a towel under one end of it so it would slide, then put all the books back in - because there's no place else to store them. Welcome to "New York style loft" living. One down, four to go, but I feel very brave and independent for being able to manage it myself. Because I got nobody I could call to help me move furniture, at the moment.

But all my horoscopes have been talking about the conjunction of Venus and Mars and me finding true love this week. Maybe I will have to back and buy a necklace from the Aussie bloke at the jewelry store, and try to suss out if he has a girlfriend....

Prairie Home

The film Prairie Home Companion has just opened in Australia. I can't imagine what people here are making of it. I went to see it when I was home, with two former residents of Lake Wobegon. They turned and whispered every 10 minutes or so, "I know that street! I used to drive that way to the airport!" and "I went to see that band when I was in school!" and "Did you know that old so-and-so moved out to such-and-such town" - probably not exactly those statements, but things that suggested they were watching a home movie from their teenaged years, not a high-concept Robert Altman film.

I saw a reviewer on breakfast tv here who liked the movie but so didn't get it. He didn't mention at all that Garrison Keillor really does this show, still, and you can stream it online from Minnesota Public Radio. In fact he didn't mention Minnesota at all. How can you talk about Garrison Keillor and not even mention Minnesota? I think the confused the location and thought it might be someplace out West - he said something about a cowboy film or cowboy culture, meaning the whole film and the theatre it's set in, but I'm sure he was confused by the cowboys that are played by Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly. Those are cowboys as a boy growing up in Minnesota would image them! Those are not western kind of cowboys! Duh! Minnesota people are farmers, and fishermen, not cowboys! How can you get that wrong?

This is an interesting part of the ex-pat experience, the fact that people here believe your country is one big homogenous lump, and they have no idea at all about regional differences, or how importantly different it is whether your relatives come from Minnesota or from Texas.

Mid-life

Today on the walk to work I had a realisation. All this time I have been mostly thinking of S's mid-life crisis, as part of the "Why, why why" process. He left me because: he turned 42, he had his first health problems (teeth), he felt his mortality, he went back to the B-word town and wanted to recapture his playboy 20's, he found himself with emotional and moral responsibilites to another human who needed to lean on him and freaked and ran, etc.

But today I realised that I am having my own mid-life crisis. I don't need his one! I am 43, I'm getting portly and matronly looking, I have a very average and ordinary life of boredom and 9-5 grind and struggle. I am nothing special. I am not a better writer, speaker, teacher or thinker than anyone else my age. This happens after 40, I think, I remember a professor of mine who had been a wunderkind, PhD at 24, and he was 40ish and having a very hard time of it, I don't know if he told me or someone else did but I remember hearing at the time that at that age everyone catches up to you and you're nothing special any more. 20 years of hard work catches up with pure effortless talent. So. There I am.

And financially, I realise that because I am nothing special I just have to live an ordinary life on a modest income and that if I want to be rich some day I will have to do it by saving tiny bits out of my very modest salary, like everyone else. Damn. These things won't be easy, I'll have to put some energy into coming to terms with them, but it did make me feel better, sort of empowered in a way, that I can have my own mid-life crisis. I was enough of a bright spark wunderkind that turning 40 can hit me hard, too. Hit with my own ordinariness. I don't need to live vicariously through his one.