been rubbing a bad charm with holy fingers

people think i'm dead. this has nothing to do with the way i look (although there is one guy at work who is full of compliments. specifically, in the last couple of weeks, we have these confidence-inspiring comments: "you look tired today"; "your eyes are puffy"; and then, when i gave him his extra large uniform t-shirt and i hadn't ordered one, "you're probably an extra large, too." thanks, guy. oh, and did i mention that you're fired?!)
but seriously, despite my puffy eyes and my overly large body, i am alive and well and the reason my mother thinks i am dead is because 3 weeks seems to have gone by without a peep from me to anyone back home. this is because i have been working, working and working. so i'm apologizing with updates on the miniscule minutes of my life that are not spent at work or dreaming about how many snow showers jellies gift wrap needs to complete production this week.

spiders from mars

everyone goes on and on about australia and how there are all of these awful things living here (aside from the people, i mean. the people are not bad, it's the british tourists who are gross. sorry, brits. there's just an awful correlation between the number of muffin-tops, british accents and the rising temperatures lately). but australians are always quick to point out that you never see these critters (tourists excluded). they're liars. there was a spider as big as a dinner plate on my laundry room door the other day. a spider so horrendously large that i cried and stood on a chair until it was gone. a spider so disgustingly gross that the bunhead had to chase it down the hall and out a window instead of taking the risk of trying to catch it and actually touching it by accident (although he claims it was just too fast. with the length of those legs, it may actually have been true). then, when i went to take the laundry out of the wash the other day, there were body parts in the machine that could only have come from some prehistoric relative of a grasshopper. this has caused me to have laundy-o-phobia. every crumpled sock is a nightmare waiting to happen. at the zoo, where scary things are usually in enclosures, a largish lizard startled me as i walked toward the croc exhibit. it wasn't part of the attraction. and while there are many stereotypes about this place that are untrue, there are definitely enough creepy bugs to make me reconsider my lifelong need to have a real christmas tree inside my house. i just can't risk giving the bugs a home in my home, even though they apparently already own the place.

x marks the spot

took bub to the taronga zoo and it was very cool. the older parts are like something out of a 1930s film set and the views are incredible. also, you get to take a boat there, which bub is pretty into at the moment.



it also made me remember how much i love chimpanzees and gorillas. there are some really interesting books about the development of language research with chimps and gorillas (dian fossey's work is my favourite) and also about human intelligence (carl sagan, of course! the dragons of eden - check it out). i'm always amazed by how similar we are. bub, on the other hand, was scared of them and their screeching and running around playfighting. i think she was having visions of the play group she goes to.



gouge away

took the bub shopping yesterday. i all of a sudden realised that christmas is coming, despite the 34 degree heat. we went down to the pitt street mall and the strand arcade and attempted to get something done in regards to christmas spending. i, for one, like spending money at christmas and i love the whole christmas tradition stuff. i like making cookies. i like decorating the tree. i made bub a hella-awesome stocking last year for her first christmas and i get excited about buying presents. what does annoy me, however, is when i go to the toy department and the the big truck that bub loves is marketed with the slogan "grows with him from baby to big boy". WHA??!!
fuck off gender assignation at two years old! good thing you separated your toys into girl and boy sections - i almost bought a ball for her until i saw that it wasn't in the appropriate area. PHEW! my baby missed dykedom by that much!
also on the annoying list was visiting santa. there was a weird cavern with 10 foot high elves on either side (hey, australians, i know you're upside down, but you're taking this opposites thing a bit too far...) and you couldn't see anything until you were admitted into a small room where santa sat and waited for you to get your photo taken. it was all about the photo packages. i guess it has been for a long time now, but they sure have tried their hardest to take any of the magic out of it. in you go, click click... they talk about the photo you're going to get while you're in there (was she smiling enough, do you want another angle?) and then out you go to look at the digital and buy up your santa experience. *sigh* at least she was happy when she saw santa's "moo" lying curled up on his reindeer mat. i guess you just have to make it what you want it to be and forget about the rest. like alfred says;

"Yeah, there's a lot of bad 'isms' floatin' around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism. Make a buck, make a buck. Even in Brooklyn it's the same - don't care what Christmas stands for, just make a buck, make a buck"

what a great movie. during all of this, i was also DYING for a coffee, which made me more susceptible to grumpy, scrooge-esque thoughts. come to think of it, i never saw him drinking coffee during a christmas carol. perhaps this lack of coffee had something to do with his own general malaise, no?

i also got a new swimsuit. the first since before my pregnancy and therefore fraught with misgivings about my body shape and size (not helped by my employees thinking i need an XL shirt, either.) amazingly, i found one with minimal disgust at myself and even managed to wear it today at coogee beach while bub played in the sand. my christmas sadness disintegrated when i saw how lucky we are. you can't have everything. a green christmas shouldn't make me blue. the following video is rated "B" for bright - don't let the glare of my white legs blind you. you've been warned...



and this is an instructional video on how to bury a child.