Can I just state now for the record that I love Jo Eaton? I’m sure I can. Yay, it’s so good to have that off my chest. She’s started a journal too, so I can live voyeristically through that. I’m not going to give you the direct link, but her homepage is here. Now that I have that off my chest, I can tell you about my day.

I was working in the Bakehouse Gallery all day. I sold one mug. Ooooh it’s a hive of activity that place. Actually, it sorta is, cos I must have answered at least twenty phone calls. It’s a shame that so few people come in – it really is a cool shop. But actually, I didn’t care, cos Jo came in and that’s all that matters. We were sitting yacking for aaaages (she said she likes to listen to my stories – someone must be paying her) and I was telling her all about the party that’s tommorrow night, High Jinks in Hamilton… otherwise refered to as the Rumble. She was like “I wish I could witness it” so, like on the spur of the moment, I invited her to come along. God knows why she’d want to meet my ‘friends’ other than she’s heard too much about them, but she said yes. She’s a braver lass than me, that’s for sure. Her mother was only going to let her go if Jo retrieved her precious stainless steel teaspoon from the Treehouse Cafe – luckily Jo did this, and escaped the Title Ultimatum. Does that make sense? To clarify, the title of this entry is the quote Jo’s mother gave her. But Jo got the teaspoon, so it’s sweetassbro.

So yeaaaaah, that’s going to be so cool. We’re going to Paeroa and stuff on the way, and we’re going to take billions of touristy photos – triffic! I so love being a tourist. Posing in front of the giant L&P bottle, and also possibly taking photos for my new web page, which is going to be hosted on Vision. Did I mention that? No, I don’t think I did. They like me, they really like me – or my writing anyways, so my application was successful. Wahooo. And people actually get rejected from it too. Warm fuzzy glows all round.

In the evening Karen came over for dinner – well, fish and chips anyways, and to watch Xena. I so love that show. Such class! To think I nearly got thrown out of a Film&TV tutorial for saying it was serious New Zealand drama. I know someone who’s going to be on it (you know who you are) – I’m so proud! Karen had the audacity to say on the way home that I had an overinflated ego AND a lack of self esteem – then she topped that up with “you just don’t want to hear the truth”. Bitch! That’s the last time I bake HER brownies. It’s okay, I know she was just doing honest teasing, like I always tease her.

Okay, and Memory for the day…… Jo goes to me today all worried like when I was talking about ASIJ “What did they do to you there?”. Ummmmm good question. I guess nothing’s good when you’re 10-14 anyways, and you live in a foreign country without your sisters, and you have no friends and you can’t fit back into the culture you came from. There was an actual psychiatrical term for me back then “third culture kid”. Rock on. I wanna be labeled with that tape stuff you can type onto. You’ve gotta know what I mean, cos I can’t think of the word.

One GOOD thing about childhood though, but this was pre-Japan, was “Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter” by Astrid Lindgren. She was the chick that wrote the Pippi Longstocking books, but this is a thousand times cooler. It’s about a girl who lives in woods inhabited with all sorts of gobliny things like Harpies and Grey dwarves, with a Romeo + Juliet esque plot, because her best friend Birk is the son of the sworn enemey of Ronia’s dad. Of course, they’re only eleven, so it’s really innocent, and it’s just beautiful. I found it on the bookshelf, and re-devoured it. It was always one of my favourite books, and rereading it was like discovering it all over. There was a really good film of it made in Swedish too. It makes me almost want to have kids so that I can share the book with them. So many of the games I used to play as a kid, and the stories I wrote were based on it. I used to be such the little tom boy, climbing every tree, having forts in lots of my neighbours gardens and stuff like that. I’m really lucky ‘cos our section backs onto lots and lots of square kilometres of Native Forest – there’s a jungle in my garden. I wish I was young again – I had so many adventures.

Ah well, tommorrow’s another adventure. Watch this space to find out how Hammy went!

xoxoxox