I'm posting, I'm posting

Alright. Here it is. I am sitting down in front of a computer and my fingers are moving across the keyboard in a way that correlates with the appearance of words on a screen, and this is enough to be considered "forward progress". As happens in Teh Blogosphere (a large continent of Teh Internetz), sometimes you fall off the wagon and the longer you wait to get back on, the more you have to say, the more daunting the task of restarting, and the more confusing the relevance (or non-relevance) of things becomes. Needless to say, I am already rambling somewhat, but it is momentum and therefore I am running with it.

Yes I turned thirty (hoorah!). Yes I failed to complete many tasks on my thirty list, for various reasons. I have a note from my mother, sir. I didn't forge her signature, I swear. I don't regret my failings as much as perhaps I should, but instead I am ruminating on many things, both expected and non-expected, and enjoying a cooling off period. I may have had a teensy tiny freak out about "life" somewhere in there -I think this is a pre-requisite of thirty-dom - and as a result I have not returned to my second job and instead am blissfully able to allow myself some headspace between the first job (more specifically, the gruelling commute), the two bands (both are excellent, thanks for asking), and doing things normal people do such as chores and groceries and grooming (my hair looks like that? Why didn't anyone tell me?).

I feel better already.

We got rid of that beastly car and upgraded to a trusty Toyota Corolla. His name is Chairman Kaga, the Xtra Good Vehicle, and he likes capsicums. He is also an automatic, which means I can already achieve a status reminiscent of driving without having to panic about what the clutch is doing and which gear I am in and what the hell why is the engine stopping???? Ben says "see? It's like driving a go-kart". It is true!

Okay well I best not get too ambitious at this point. There has been a long hiatus and I might pull a muscle or something.

An open letter to The Car

Car,

You are no doubt aware of the care, attention and money that Ben and I have poured into you. The way we washed and buffed you in an attempt to bond. The way we changed you from a young hoon's doof-machine to a clean respectable vehicle. The way we tried not to lose our minds every time you decided to stop running for no apparent reason in the middle of heavy traffic.

I have less than four months now in which to successfully learn to drive and get my provisional licence.

Do the math. Your days are numbered.

Regards,
Dee

A downer

So, on Friday we didn't go horseriding. Again. This would not have been so remarkable had we not made a booking to do so, obviously, and the promise of it had pulled me through the horror of my working week; a carrot dangled in front of the nose of someone who has a tub of excellent hommus but nothing to eat it with. I had to arrange to leave work early, we had to catch a cab, plan outfits both work- and horse-friendly, and then when we arrive, our booking doesn't exist. I tried not to show how one person's incompetence had completely destroyed me for a tiny all-important moment, feeling stupid for wearing those huge boots all day, hot and bothered. But the horses were going to bed, and nothing could be done except make another booking and psyche myself up for the whole rigamarole again on Tuesday.

We decided not to waste our trek all the way out to Fox Studios and watched a film instead. (I give 'Tangled' 3 and a half stars. It is beautifully moving, old school classic Disney, and I enjoyed being the only adults in the cinema unaccompanied by children).

We went driving today. Until the car decided it didn't feel like it any more. I stayed with the car, who I feel no longer deserves to be known under an affectionate moniker, while Ben dashed for oil. I thought I'd take the opportunity to meditate, but each tweeting bird and sweet rustle of leaves gave way to imagery of myself taking to the windscreen with a baseball bat. I couldn't escape. Eventually the engine restarted, for whatever reason. We went for coffee and I tried to be zen about it all. Ben said I'd been doing a really good job up until the vehicle's revolt.

I couldn't get the fundraiser up. Other bands did. I figured there was no point after that. I'm better off just donating more money and supporting one of those events.

Did I mention I bought an iPhone4? After resisting for so long, I felt I could finally get use out of something like this, have instant access to posting photos, be able to listen to my own music again, be able to receive picture messages without the entire phone crashing and needing to reboot. It's a shame that its 4 days later and the phone doesn't work, and Telstra can't tell me why, and also its not compatable with my shitty old Macbook so I can't get any of my music off it. iPhone sucks so far.

Honestly, universe. What did I do? Is there any particular reason you are having so much fun shitting all over me? I am a good person! A good person trying really hard to do good things. Documentation is a funny process. I spend so much energy trying to generate a positive outlook, see silver linings on dark clouds, concentrate on the things that make me happy. I don't want to fill this blog with all the negativity brewing around me, but sometimes, I run out of positive things to hold onto.

And so begins 2011

Ahoyhoy! Sorry for the absence but we have been out in the internet-less desert lands of my hometown. The temperature started at 31 degrees on the day we arrived and steadily increased to be 40 degrees on the day we left. Unbelievable. We arrived back in Sydney yesterday - Crunk did the whole thing without a hitch - just in time to drink a lot of cider and ride our bikes down to Ashfield Park for midnight. Happy new year!

Will do a more thorough post after we've been to see The King's Speech, and Harry Potter 7A, and eaten more junk food, and been swimming, and had more wine, and sat around on our arses watching episodes of Giles & Sue Live The Good Life until I'm crying with laughter. Man I love being on holidays.

Dee vs Crunk

Since a friend gave Crunk a once over (explaning everything the garage did wrong and what glitches we may still have to contend with), my piece of mind has been somewhat more at rest. At least we now know that he should, in theory, make it all the way out to the sticks and back for Christmas without anything breaking and leaving us stranded on the side of the road.

Newly invigorated, Ben is coaxing me back behind the wheel. He discovered an industrial area where we could practice driving on a quiet circuit and get used to changing gears. A big deserted carpark proved a good place to learn how to get the clutch and accelerator to speak to each other again. Mostly I am fine with changing up, but get a bit flustered changing down - it's trying to do this just before turning into a corner, for example, that makes my brain go "oh ok, that's just way too much to process all at once, so uh, I'll be over here singing early 90s TV themes if you need me. 'Kay? ". Thanks, brain.

Ben probably deserves a medal for stepping into Instructor boots with no prior experience. It is kind of nice to do this in a car that doesn't belong to the driving school, and doesn't have a second set of controls. I can be confident that I am directly responsible for everything the car is doing, and I can experiment in my own time. Yes, I had to stall the car 28 times before I figured out the magical clutch/accelerator combo again, but now I know I can do it. Of course you can take your foot off the break when you leave your other foot on the clutch and want to start moving. That's kind of the whole point. But starting and stopping fluidly is my largest hurdle at the moment and small milestones feel very big.

My curbside parking leaves a lot to be desired, but that's another milestone for another time.

But...but... we've got immunity...?

I think it was the December of 2003 that we went camping for New Years, somewhere out near Tathra. As a glaring reflection of the pop culture at that time, an unintentional game of Survivor played out. I was in Team Shakira. Team Aguilera didn’t stand a chance. Carly’s Mum had thoughtfully provided the immunity: a hideously ugly belt made of seeds and shells, a gift from a recent trip to Thailand. At the end of the trip, we decided there was no more worthy recipient of the immunity than Mr Bump, Carly’s car. He had taken quite a beating traversing the dirt trails and ditches, and done a stellar job of getting us back out again. Despite his age, Mr Bump delivered us many hours of carefree motoring.

Last month, Mr Bump succumbed to the great big scrapheap in the sky. Yesterday, we received the immunity belt in the mail. Thanks Carly-le!

There has been a whole lot of stuff going on with Crunk that I have not blogged about. At this point, I’d like to say “one of which times ended up like this” and insert a picture, but technology is not my bitch and the photo in question will have to remain on my tantrum-throwing phone (sooo getting an iPhone for Christmas). Let’s just say that the roadside scenery 55km south of Canberra is lovely at this time of year.

Immunity has found a new home with Crunk, and I am placing what I know is a farcical amount of faith in it. I attempted to drive the car back from choir practice yesterday, but an unfamiliar car, in the dark and hilly backstreets of Petersham, is not a good combination for someone who has pretty much forgotten everything she has learnt. Then we saw that it was leaking something.

I hate you, car.

In other news, the choir are singing at Leichhardt Community Church (cnr Lord and Foster Sts) at 7pm-ish this Saturday 18th December with some other acts. Now, for anyone scared of walking into a church, don’t panic. Apparently there were drag queens performing last year. So I think you’ll be ok. Besides, we’re not half bad, so if you’re interested please come along! Plus I just found out that that the show is also a fundraiser (as with all things choir, the details were classically vague but I’m sure it was for a good cause), so in your face, challenge Number #2!

And that was the weekend.

On Saturday morning, I woke up quietly buzzing. Wow! We’re going horseriding! And we’re driving there in our new car! And we’re going to hang out with Jaimi! Our lesson had been bumped forward to 1pm which meant more time to check out Jaimi’s hood and still fit in a well-deserved BBQ afterwards. I tried to piece together a suitable wardrobe, aware that my yoga pants were perhaps not quite as fashionable as I’d led myself to believe but wearing them anyway, and got out a notepad to plot a route northwards. It’s an easy journey but as only passenger and chief navigator I take my job very seriously.

We left late in the morning hoping the weather would hold out. I was secretly studying Ben manoeuvring the manual and chanting “2 to 3… 3 to 4…” in my head as the gears shifted. Then the oil light came on. And then the engine died. And then the power steering cut out. All this while we were going quite fast along Parramatta Road. Fortunately Crunk had enough steam and Ben had enough wits about him to idle into a side street without causing too much chaos. We knew there was nothing wrong with the oil – a new filter had been put in the day before. This is the second time this had occurred, but the first since we’d sold a kidney to pay for repairs. Ben got the car started again and we elected to head home rather than challenge the volatile teenaged wreck with our lives. The horses weren’t going anywhere (well, not out of the valley anyway).

So the car still sucks, and no horses – double whammy.

On the plus side, it freed up our afternoon to go and crash Carla’s birthday non-party. We fitted in a BBQ after all, just before a massive thunderstorm ripped through north Sydney, all lovely and humid.

The rain continued the next morning and almost washed out our gig. They cancelled all the acts right up to us and just told us to “sit tight”. I gave up and went to bed with my Danny Wallace book, but then it cleared enough for them to get the gear onstage, so I had to get my shit together. Thank goodness for that. It was only 3 songs, but it was such a treat to play on a stage with enough room for me to jump around on when usually we are trying to avoid giving each other concussions with our instruments.

**hrumph**

Crunk, our car, has just unburdened us of almost the same amount of money that we paid for him in repairs, so that’s nice. The dangers of being so desperate for a car and wanting to see good in people. Hey Ramzi, you’re a jerk! Consequently, I’m a jerk too, particularly in my workplace where I’m starting to think knowing what you’re doing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I have some kind of eye infection, I think, which has been plaguing me for a couple of days. Relevant? No. Thematic? Yes. I will stop being grumpy soon. Promise.

Overwhelmed

I am now officially too busy to do anything, ever. This is multi-tasking at its most ridiculous level. It's Monday morning and I am no longer in denial about my desire – nay, necessity – for energy drinks. I’m wondering exactly at what point I decided my life wasn’t full enough as it was, who had spiked my drink at that time, and how I should punish them. Unfortunately, the more I think about it, the more acutely aware I am that this was my own preposterous idea.

What Would Danny Wallace Do? Quit his day job? If my day job was writing articles for the paper about how awkward my life is, it probably wouldn’t be this crazy. It would fuel itself. I bought ‘Awkward Situations for Men’ on the weekend as a reward to myself and am hoping it will somehow inspire me… another idea that is slowly dawning on me as not-very-well-thought-out. Also, the 22nd is 4 days away and I still have 2 songs to write. This is a problem because I have choir tomorrow, dinner on Wednesday, and band rehearsal on Thursday, but I’ll figure it out somehow.

I was asked to join Briscoe as a full-time band member, to which I immediately reacted in 2 ways: soul-leaping joy, and brain-constricting tiredness. Dusker have a lot of shows coming up, which means more frequent rehearsals, and doubling that worries me. But, you only get out what you put in, eh? I love that band too much to turn it down. I was thinking about sticking with the gospel choir longer-term but now know that the only sane thing to do would be to drop out once we’ve done a live performance and I can tick the box; free up some time for the next thing. I rode my bike again today but my head and lungs were working against my legs, and it felt like pedalling while being hugged by an octopus. I know I’m in an emotional trough right now and this will pass soon enough, but the fact of the matter is I’m still in a trough, and the pigs are looking in, and it smells a bit like rotting food scraps.

BUT! We booked our flights back to the UK over the weekend (our departure date is July 24th, 2 days after my 30th) AND we bought a car. Damn straight, we are people of action. It’s a 1997 VW Polo and it is Fully Sick, something us middle-class inner-west vegetarians-on-Thursdays bicycle-riding herb-growing white folk are going to have to work on. We’ve already removed the crass medallions from the rear view mirror and the Everlast car seat covers, but it’s the embarrassingly loud modified exhaust muffler that really needs to go. I’ll post a picture of it once I’m a bit more organised.

Our rescheduled horseriding lesson is happening this Saturday, so now we can even drive out to Glenworth Valley instead of catching the stinky old train. Amazing.

We also bought a new Jamie Oliver cookbook, 30 Minute Meals. I really dig the style it has been written (step by step through the whole meal, not just one section of it at a time. So for example it tells you to take care of the potatoes after you’ve done your bit with the meat, and then while the potatoes are doing their thing you go back to turn the meat and then you can start on the salad, or whatever). He’s still Jamie Oliver though so mostly it’s hard for me to get past the fact he’s a bit of a twat, but I have warmed to him somewhat over the years. Still, I resent having to go hunting for fennel seeds. Also, it took me 50 minutes to cook only 2 of the 4 components of his 30 minute meal, but that's probably saying more about me than it is about him. Just as well it tasted good.

Blowholes and buses

I've only had one so far, so I don't have much for a point of comparison, but Wedding Anniversarys seem to be pretty great. Happy 1st year, Ben Husband Pask! We had a little getaway down the south coast where we discovered that the Little Blowhole is more excellent than the Big Blowhole, coastal walking tracks are not greatly signposted, the Vietnamese restaurant is top class, and if you keep your eyes peeled on the ocean for long enough, you might even spot an unexpected and beautiful pod of whales. Good times.

Some interesting outcomes arose from the weekend, one being that Cityrail thoughtfully chose to have track work on the day we travelled down and consequently made our journey 4 hours long rather than 2. We were made to get off the train at Waterfall and take a rail replacement bus to Wollongong. Buses obviously travel less by rail and more by road. The road that is going to become more familiar to us in a few weeks time when we are pedalling feverishly along it (or potentially, when I am dragging my bike along the side of it). Needless to say, it was a little daunting. Even Ben felt a lump in his throat.

Secondly, we are officially tired of public transport. We have done our time with buses and trains, and even hire cars with their stranglehold of garage opening/closing hours, forcing us to drive through the loathsomeness that is East Sydney. The decision was planted and swiftly germinated into a hulking great oak - we're going to purchase a car. True story.