well, i just got back home after a rewarding day in the verandah offices, and a refreshing evening at my new(ish) local, the bedford hotel. 'why is is so?' i imagine myself hearing you ask - well, let's break it down.
firstly, my day at verandah. as you may be aware (from past postings and the like), i am part of the editorial team for deakin's own literary journal, verandah 20. 'why the sudden proliferation of linkage?', i imagine myself hearing you ask. well, this is because i would like to think, that if you take anything at all away from reading this post, you take away the fact that verandah 20 is open for submissions. i have a hinkling(sic) that many of you blog-reader-writer types out there in the vast blogosphere are more than a tad creative, so here's an outlet. submit away - please do - you don't have to be a deakin student, you don't have to be published - heck, you could be anyone from anywhere with a talent to share - submissions are open till the last day of may. it would be great to see this year's verandah have a whole scope of artforms, from a whole range of people. all the rules and stuff are on the verandah homepage, so feel free to visit it and download the submission form to your heart's content. anyway - getting back to the point, which (if i remember it correctly) was, 'why was my day at the verandah offices so fulfilling?'. well, this is because today, i, with the artistic and excellent assistance from fellow verandah 20 editor, kate, put together our o-week showbag inserts. and they look great. they are due on friday, so i hope the ball we got rolling today stays on course and gets a steee-rike! on friday. amen.
as for the refreshing evening - well, what more can i say, apart from 30+ temperatures spent largely on public transport, + cold beer and air conditioning = one happy shalini. amenagain. have a happy and sunburn-free australia day, everyone - and don't forget to check out the verandah 20 website.

today i had my first formal driving lesson. at 31 years old. i was a little nervous, so it doesn't help that we live quite close to a major-ish road, so we spent the lesson doing blockies in the back streets at twenty kilometers per hour... i know, i've left it till so late but i'm glad i've finally made myself do it. i have to get my p's before july cause that's when my learners expires! i know, it's pretty slack of me to have sat on my learners for so long, but as far as getting my license goes, i never said i was anything other than a slackarse. here's hoping my new-driver's nerves don't last too long. in other news, i've been busy clearing and planting things recently, both physically and metaphorically. i sprayed weed 'n feed on this huge mass of potato-viney weirdness in our backyard and it seems to be fading away. as the poison took effect and the mass of bushes started dying, it lost is sponginess and began and shrinking back to the ground. toys that the kids next door would have missed months ago have started appearing in amongst the twisted leafy-ness; so far i have found one spiderman, two crazy bounce balls and one christmas tree baubly-decoration thing. i've also found brick edging underneath it that was obviously meant to be a boundary marker between garden and lawn. one of these weekends soon, i will find myself and old-school iron rake and clear the vines away, then re-plant my chilly tree into the ground, maybe get a good clump of lemongrass going (there is nothing like fresh lemongrass tea - it used to grow wild around our house in fiji, and i always knew it as 'fiji chai'. it's only when i moved to melbourne that i found out that lemongrass was its actual name). i'd also like to nick some rosemary out of dad's garden - he's got masses of it. i've never been a veggie-patch kinda girl, but i think that's changing, which is nice. i wouldn't mind home-grown tomatoes.

we just came back from watching 'the incredibles' for a second time... i love that movie. the first time we saw it, there were a heap of kids in the cinema audience. this time, there was one kid in our row, and some guy with a huge laugh down near the front somewhere - i must admit i enjoyed being in the audience more this time around. it was quite hilarious to hear the guy cracking up all the time - the tone of his laughter had a hint of 'i can't believe i'm laughing this loud, i'm sorry everyone, but this is really funny' to it, which just made everyone else laugh, too. the kid in our row, though not as vocal as the guy down the front, managed to bring the house down with one perfectly timed interjection. it was a moment of high tension in the final third of the film; mr and mrs incredible are arguing - mrs incredible is pushing mr incredible on a point, and he is obviously hiding something. she pushes and pushes, and he finally blurts out what he is feeling. they stare at each other in silence for a second, before diving in to a passionate kiss. at the moment of the kiss, this kid in our row, clearly suffering from a 'did i say that out loud?' moment, like when the music stops mid-conversation at a nightclub and you're left screaming in a dead quiet room, practically yells 'oh, JEE-sus!'... it was hilarious! i can almost hear him with his mates down at the skate park tomorrow, going 'yeah, it was a good movie, but there was way too much kissing in it'. hmm. my last entry was also about the movies... do you get the feeling that someone could be procrastinating *just* a little?

yesterday, in the course of a girly catch-up day spent with a friend i hadn't seen in a while, i finally saw bridget jones: the edge of reason at the cinemas. i had been mildly interested in seeing it since it came out, but my friend and i had a standing commitment - we had seen the first briget flick together, and it had been decided back then that we were going to see the second together. apart from the film being rather crappy (i.e. picking all the scenes that worked in the first film and re-hashing them for the second, the rather ill-realised and thus quite unconvincing lesbian crush), there was one rather disturbing development that came of the viewing: i think i may be falling out of love with colin firth. i know! 'how could you forsake mr. darcy?' i hear you cry... well, i think i have a perfectly valid response. the thing is, instead of leaving the possibilities up to my imagination as always has been the case with darcy, unfortunately there were scenes in this film that provided glimpses of his bare chest. and unfortunately, the view really wasn't that inspirational (sorry, colin). also, since we were seeing the film at a cinema europa, we were closer to the screen, and... well... i found the way he holds his mouth when he's tongue-tied (read: any time he's not actually talking) irritatingly muppet-esque. apart from the whole colin thing, i found the movie quite bland. i was also a little offended by the thai prison scenes - talk about trivialisation (is that even a word?) - and all the scenes set in the beautiful thai seascape made me sad. i sat there wondering if those places even existed any more.
a couple of weeks ago, i finally had the chance to watch the christmas specials of the legendary bbc comedy, the office. i missed them when they were on the telly, and a mate of ours has the whole dvd set. anyway, i will not spoil it just incase anyone reading this hasn't seen it themselves, but i will say one thing - i cried the first time i saw it, and again when we watched it a second time. and my new girl-crush is lucy davis, the gorgeous doe-eyed girl who plays dawn tinsley. now my viewing of the bbc pride and prejudice dvds are doubly satisfying; not only do i get to fawn over a mega-cute lucy davis (she plays mariah lucas in p&p), i get to go all gooey over colin firth as he should be seen - maddeningly, irresitibly conceited; frustratingly emotionally constipated; and apart from the occasional wet shirt, fully clothed, thank you very much.

ah, feel the love... thank you for all the excellent feedback and words of encouragement, my beautiful friends - you all rock. and thank you also to the first handful of members to my new email list (by the way, if you've tried the link in the email and it didn't work, try the links on this page, or just delete the hyphen at the very end of the url, and hit enter again). as far as i can tell, signing up for the kai-india email list will be a spam-free event - apart from my repeated efforts to flog my book, once it's out, that is! though fear not - i will not send you mail which causes you to doubt your prescription drug requirements, your financial needs, or the size of your appendage. in more irrelevant news, i have finally trained myself to see those magic eye 3-d pictures. hitherto deemed an absolute waste of time (i was one of those people who stood outside granny may's when they first came out, , staring furiously for about fifteen seconds before declaring it all to be 'a load of crap', then storming off to look at the 'real 3-d' puppies and kittens instead). now i am so good at it that the darn images seem to jump straight out of the page... oh, for a magic-eye picture in framed shop-window display renaissance, so i may re-visit the shopping mall, and whatever shop took the baton from the granny may's chain of stores... that i might stroll casually past and spot the secret image without even stopping... that i might casually proclaim, 'it's a boat! a BOAT! can't you see it? it's right there!!'

i've been thinkng about re-designing this site for a while, and today it just happened. please excuse the clutter round here as i tidy things up - spring clean time i think, time for a fresh start. i've been in a similar mode in my actual house. lounge room is in a shambles at the moment but the kitchen is looking great. mark and i found some cheap vinyl tiles at our recently discovered *local* warehouse store - which i am quite pleased about. i'm a sucker for discount shopping, especially for around-the-house things. the warehouse rocks. i used to love trawling through the morrabbin and cranbourne stores whenever we found ourselves in the area, but i'm happy to report that the footscray store is massive, and very well organised. the other two have the tendency to get quite chaotic sometimes.
anyway, back to the website. i've gone for a cleaner, leaner, easier to maintain look this time around. i was getting frustrated with all the tricky code on the other one. i had this idea about using bindis or tikkas for the nav images. so i woke up this morning, washed the dishes, and sat down at the laptop - and now, about twelve hours later (including multiple toilet breaks, and some time to cook dinner), i have designed my new site. i even made the images myself. i feel very satisfied and accomplished, though i am afraid i will stay up all night tinkering with it if i don't make myself go to bed. ah, well. we'll see how we go.
ps let me know what you reckon of the new look!
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update - i have now completely finished the re-design, and am also in the process of putting together an email list to post updates out to. there is a link at the bottom of the page you can follow to sign up if you like :)

it's probably been the longest break between postings for me, but lately i haven't felt much like broadcasting my self-obssessed smart-arseyness out to a world which currently has so many other things to take care of. when i'm doing other stuff, it's all good, but the minute i sit down alone and quiet, all i can think about are all the people whose lives have been changed forever by the tsunamis. i read somewhere that the quake was so big that it had actually shifted the earth on its axis, causing a slight change in timezones and pretty much changing the face of the planet forever; i heard a news snippet that said that so many children had been lost that it would probably take a generation for the affected populations to recover.
i feel a little guilty because initially, i didn't even know the tsunamis had happened. the lot of us - both my brothers, sister in law and nephews, mark and i - spent from christmas day till the 28th at my parents' place; with so many distractions under one roof, we didn't turn the telly on the whole time, until the evening of the 27th. i am going to donate to the appeals, and am happy when i hear news reports marvelling at the level of support being donated by the australian public. the closest i can come to understanding this whole thing is this experience: once when we were at the beach, the waves were really quite big and rough. i was trying to get out to where the rest of my group was, because it was calmer there where the waves were forming. i panicked a little as one big wave came toward me and i jumped instead of ducking. it picked me up and dumped me. i was being thrown around like crazy, my arms and legs were flailing around and i couldn't tell which way was up. then i heard a distinct 'pop' sound, which soon later i found was the sound of my left shoulder dislocating. since the tsunamis i've just kept thinking about that incident over and over, remembering what the water sounded like, and how helpless i felt. but as freaked out as i was, i didn't panic too much because i knew my feet would touch the ground eventually, that i'd find myself on the beach. i hope all the souls taken by the water are at peace and in a better place. it's a sad, sad way to farewell 2004.
i wish you all a positive new year. i hope that the challenges you face are surmountable, and that your experiences are enriching and rewarding. learn from your losses, celebrate your victories, and share your rewards. freely.