Chip's Place

In response to Bertie's comments.

Current Plan :

01/01 - 05/01           Singapore

06/01 - 14/01           Perth

15/01 - 22/01           Adelaide

23/01 - 01/02           Melbourne

02/02 - 06/02           Visit friends in Sydney

07/02 - 14/02           Skiing in Canada

15/02 - 17/02           (possibly) Visit brother in Nantucket

18/02                   Return to UK

19/02 - 21/02           (possibly) Trip to Iceland

22/02                   Return to work

OK - hadn't realised I'd decided everything so well, but that looks pretty good! Except being in "pre" mode - if anyone knows how to put a table inside a blogpost, please help!

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I could do differently? Not particularly interested in going to New Zealand, Sydney's off the list because I've spent 3 weeks there before already, and Melbourne at the end of Jan is obviously sacrosanct, but wouldn't mind other opinions. One variation I might try is rejigging Adelaide and Melbourne and spending a little time in Alice Springs between them, to go see Ayers Rock, etc.

In other news, I need to share this. The headline alone cracked me up. I'm glad they're unapologetic though - not sure I'd be able to cope if not.
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I still have a job, which is good news. Now I have to state a preference for whether it stays the same job, or whether I move on to something different, and then fight that out with everyone else who's in the same position. That'll be fun.

But now I definitely get to go to see the tennis (and other things that I'll be doing out there - that's the only one that I really care about right now though!) Assuming I book some flights, get a visa, book hotels, travel insurance, organise clothing... (this latter not obvious - I live in England, which intersperses one afternoon of weak sunshine every 3 years or so with otherwise continual leaden skies, so I own no suitable clothes for visiting Australia for 6 weeks in the height of their summer. Plus I'm planning a few days of skiing in Canada on the way back, and I'm not sure I want to lug a pair of salopettes and a skiing jacket all the way round the world!)

Planning skills are not my forte.

New place for lunch today. Dusk - only recently opened, and I'd quite liked the look of the menu, so I, as Lunchtime Dictator for today, decided we'd go there. Very good. I had a deli plate, which was some bread and oil together with any of about 30 cooked meats, cheeses, nibbles, dips, etc. Really good - I had goat's cheese, broad bean and coriander cakes, jerk chicken and marinaded red peppers. Unfortunately for others, my ordering jinx struck slightly to the left of me today. Neal's food was inedible - what they appeared to have done was to take a chicken breast, wrap it in Parma ham, then mistaken it for a conker and done all the traditional things to it to harden the shell. Which worked very well in this case - he couldn't cut into it at all. Still, he got a free sandwich out of it.

Will still include it on the list of possibles - difficult to screw up the deli plate thing, and also hard to exhaust the combinations available there.
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Yesterday and today I've tweaked quite a few things in the template, none of which should be visible to anyone but me, but if anything screws up please let me know.

NB - IE-specific errors will not be fixed. Unless you want me to come round to your house with a Firefox install disk and fix it like that.
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I have just discovered a new talent that I have. I can make balloon animals. As with many other activities (pole-vaulting, the one they sometimes do on Channel 5 with people jumping bikes over canyons while doing handstands on the saddle), I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to realise you might be good at it. Kind of like many of the Church's arguments against evolution - exactly how you notice in PE lessons that you're naturally suited to holding onto a long piece of fibreglass while contorting your body over a bar that's 5m in the air, without going through any intermediate stages, is a bit beyond me.

Anyway, judge for yourselves.



In the interests of completeness, I should probably add that I discovered my balloon-poodle-creating talents at Fibbers, while watching David Devant and His Spirit Wife. This is a very good band, whom I'd only heard of via Tom (who once received a maths exam through the post from them because he was a member of their fan club) and Helen (who owns a T-shirt of them in the style of a blue history plaque). For some reason, they opened their act with a 5-minute slot on how to make a balloon poodle, with helpful diagrams, finishing off with a painting of said poodle through which the lead singer then walked.

Apparently this is tame by comparison to former gigs Tom and Helen have seen, where at least 3 other members of the band served no useful musical purpose on stage, and one was there merely to provide grated carrot and to be a receptacle for custard.

I can only describe the lead singer's hair by referring to There's Something About Mary, and the scene where Cameron Diaz uses ... hair gel. In this case, it would seem that the lead singer has been quite busy. All his hair stuck up in the air, not just the fringe.

In a related topic, Helen offered to sponsor me to shave off both my beards (one at a time - not together, that'd be silly!), and donate the proceeds to "The Fund for Beardless Couples", which is apparently like a sperm bank for people who can't grow facial hair. Or she might turn the beards into a handbag. Or I could post them to Tom at work in an envelope.

The post title refers to one of their signature tunes, Auntie Mabel, which everyone chanted when they came back on after the encore. Only I misheard. I did quite a lot of that tonight - I thought one of the earlier bands was called Hawaiian Shirt Lady and the Bloody Marys, whereas in fact it was Ryan Shirlow and the Bloody Marys. (I'm sure Lint will correct me since I'm about certain that's still wrong, but once I've got something named in my head, it's stuck there. It took me nearly 2 months to start calling one of the guys in my Uni hall Marco rather than Michael. People should enunciate better.)

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Having so far done just this side of bugger all in arranging anything for my upcoming 7-week holiday, I finally have an incentive to do so.

I've just acquired something very special - tickets to all the semi-finals and finals of the Australian Open. The last Grand Slam to be held in my twenties, and the tournament's centenary. Between 27th to 30th January next year, I will be sat upside-down (relatively) in the scorching sunshine watching my favourite sport. And not thinking at all of any of you languishing up here in the dark and the cold on the wrong side of the world.

So now I just have to book flights, arrange accommodation, get Adrian to book some time off work so he can show me round Singapore, sort out the skiing in Canada for on my way back, hope I don't get made redundant next Tuesday and try to shake myself out of the extreme apathy that's been drowning me since June. Oh, and remember to take my glasses with me!

I really need to sleep tonight. Somehow I don't see that happening for a bit yet.

And next Tuesday seems a little less concerning just now.

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While walking along the pavement (sidewalk to non-Brits) today, I half-saw someone ahead of me walking straight towards me. On auto-pilot, my feet moved me a foot or two to the left, at almost exactly the same time his feet moved the same distance to his right. Leaving us in pretty much the same position as before, except we're now both in the road.

So I do what he did, move to my right. Unfortunately, he copied my earlier actions too. OK, still heading for a collision, but at least we're not going to get run over now.

This sidestepping happened a further twice before we got to about 3 feet from each other, at which point we're both smiling up at the ludicrosity (my blog, my words!) of the situation. Time for a last-chance solution to the problem.

You may have guessed what happened then - we both stopped dead waiting for the other one to walk past us. Both of us burst out laughing! I did a little half-bow and flourish as if holding open a door, he starts walking past me still giggling, and I head off into town, with a smile on my face.

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