it must be the season: call me veruca, but i've finally decided to bite the bullet and follow in the footsteps of so many internet hopefuls before me - welcome to my wishlist.
i'm all for believing!

since meredith i've been quite lethargic... i go all listless-like in the afternoons. i dunno, must be the approach of christmas and summer that's doing this to me... oh, well. this morning we met with the kitty crew for yum cha and chats, which was rather nice - oh, there are some exciting prospects on the kitty horizon, tour t-shirts being one of them - i'll keep you posted! bit of a debacle oragnisation-wise, though - when i looked up the number to make a booking for our group, instead of calling minh than 3 (the place we usually go for yum cha), i called and booked a table at minh than 2. anyway, mark and i turn up at our 'usual', the place i thought was called minh than 2 but was actually called minh than 3, and it turns out that it's changed ownership and is is no longer called minh than 3, but 'bar number 1' (you following me?)... luckily minh than 2 was walking distance from there, and not a bad place for yum cha (though how far wrong can you go on victoria street?). why is it that restaurants you've been frequenting for years (literally) choose the only time you actually make a booking instead of just rocking up like you usually did, to change their names? actually it could have gotten a lot uglier... the last time i had a yum-cha related venue mixup, i took a wee hysterical turn and nearly had a nervous breakdown in the car (mark will vouch for that). heaven help whatever tries to come between me and my fried taro dumplings. did some christmas shopping today, and tomorrow all is left i think is to go mega-book shopping. i envision some 'christmas presents for other people' purchases amongst the guilty presents that mark and i end up buying ourselves...
hmmm. i'm so tired, all i think i'm up for for the rest of the day is maybe some mind-numbing, beer-swilling, couch-sprawling action... i might catch up on some bollywood.

yesterday i tried to get myself motivated to write in this blog several times, but i just could not manage it - i was tired as after our weekend at meredith. even now, i feel a little 'blah', but not as bad as i had been monday. weekend was great, sunday in particular - great memories of sitting in the sun, drinking beer and istening to xavier rudd. though some other things happened that were a little less than savoury, i have decided to put them to the side for the moment and workshop them in my next counselling session (read: rant about them on stage next time i'm doing stand-up). yesterday, i left the house once to go to the supermarket (had a craving for spagetti with tomato and basil sauce for dinner, pink grapefruit juice and guava juice, so i went to safeway to get them). on the way back i stopped at the video store and got two dvds out - under the tuscan sun (old faithful feelgood movie, main character is a writer) and new york minute. i swear... that. movie. was. so. bad. i was feeling like crap and i still thought the movie was bad, that's how bad it was. i am convinced the olsen twins are aliens. they come from a planet where logic is non-existant, where emotion is not something that registers on one's face, where life is one long session of dress-ups and pretendys. the whole movie reminded me of a childhood game... 'okay. lets pretend we're... sisters! yeah! and then we go to... new york! yeah! and we get lost in an underground water main tunnel! and we find this dog, and oh yeah i meet a cute guy *giggle giggle* and you meet a cute guy too!! *giggle giggle* and, and, and... and then we get into a film clip... and then you get a scholarship to oxford! yeah! and then we bust an international ring of dvd and cd piraters..."
argh!! why don't you both just shut up and eat something.

i'm sitting in my lounge room with cold pizza and a glass of tea (i like my tea in a glass instead of a cup for some reason) for brunch, and i can hear someone outside singing 'oh come let us adore him' in a voice that sounds like a violin underwater. maybe there's a busker on racecourse rd somewhere... yesterday when i was on a tram going past bourke street mall, i saw a four piece brass band at the gpo. though i'm not usually a christmas carol kinda girl, they made me smile anyway.
it's raining outside - i guess it's our version of a white christmas - and this weekend we are off to the meredith music festival. the weekend forecast for the geelong region is for more rain - won't that be fun. camping in the rain with thousands of other people. muddy portaloos. wearing an oh-so-attractive blue plastic rain poncho all weekend. a mushy moshpit. i'm almost tempted to just stay at home - how sad is that? i have my fingers crossed that our car makes it to and back in one piece, it's been giving us a bit of grief lately. please please highway gods, remember all those karma points mark and i have notched up over the years... like all those times mark stopped on long drives to power-nap, like us taking all our rubbish home with us in a baggie, like stopping and nudging that echidna off the road that time, and that time we gave the squeegee guy ten bucks... we could really use some good karma payback this weekend. thank you!
p.s. penguin has confirmed that my first novel will be out in august 05... for more on that, click the blog title above or my byline below to be transported to my writing blog - giddy-up!

this weekend, we celebrated my mum's sixtieth. her actual birthday was last week, but we had the party saturday night - it was a lot of fun. i made the cake myself - i called it a 'cherry ripe' cake, ie coconut, chocolate and cherries - my mum loves bounty and cherry ripe. when i was a kid and my brothers or dad would take orders for treats from the milk bar, mum used to always ask for cherry ripes, and i thought she was crazy. my theory back then was 'bigger is better', so i never understood why, given the run of the local corner shop, mum would always pick the skinniest of all the chocolate bars (i always went for picnic bars, funny feet or sunny boys). now that i'm older, i finally get it... anyway, despite early stressing, the cake turned out quite alright. it was a square coconut layer cake, sandwiched with chocolate icing and pitted black cherries; chocolate poco sticks stood all the way around the cake, and the top was shiny with dark chocolate ganache, with fresh cherries with the stalks still in round the edges and in a little pyramid in the middle. my nephew took one look at the cake and said it looked like 'a cherry temple'. my mum loved it! (yay!)
last week, i had some headshots taken for penguin. a mate of mine, scott, is a photographer (conveniently, his partner yuki is a make-up artist), so we went to their place after work on thursday. i love the pictures, even though i generally quite dislike being photographed - scott did a great job! out of the near one hundred and fifty shots (thank god for digital cameras), i picked four i really like. one of them will be staring out of a book sleeve next year sometime. surreal!