I had a quiet week at work, which was well-needed because I’ve been working very hard and doing lots of things and stuff. Friday wasn’t so quiet, because we had All Rap All The Time Afternoon, and then we had a work cocktail challenge. I led the S&M team, although we were calling ourselves the Bucaneers (we’d had a pirate-themed week, because that’s what you do when you get sent funny pictures of your cow-orks dressed up at conferences), and we made a chargrilled pineapple margarita served in a pineapple, and then a Yo Ho Ho & a Damson Plum, which I based on my McKenzie training at Cupcakes & Cocktails. Turns out that was a mistake, and our drinks didn’t win because they were “too perfect” and “well-balanced”. What a travesty! An outrage! We also got called “middle of the road” which is probably the first and only time I’ll ever be called that. Luckily, we had to finish off all the rest of the ingredients, and so a very enjoyable night was spent playing Foozeball (We’ve started a Women’s Foozeball League, because we play slower, and squeal more), and sitting on bean bags on a balcony high above Courtenay Place. I ended up smoking cigarettes because people kept giving me theirs to hold while they went in for more beer, ugh. And my phone fell out of my bra and into the toilet. Whoops! Luckily Kim has given me her old one. I ended up going home via the Hawthorn Lounge to drop off their nomination in the TAWAs, and they knew who I was and gave us a discount. I am totally the Empress of the Internet.

The next afternoon I somehow managed to drag my rather under-the-weather ass into Monterey to eat their delicious brunch and gossip with Kelly. Once again, I had TAWA-business to take care of, and once again, knowing people paid off. We sat there for a couple of hours because we weren’t allowed to get pie until I had finished the sudoku, and I was seriously impaired. It took me approximately ten minutes to check in on Foursquare using Kelly’s phone because I was such a mess. The table squeaked like a kitten under my elbow and we giggled our heads off at that, and also at my ridiculous story of hilariousness, and also many other things.

I rediscovered this week how nice it is to kiss a boy, instead of the usual girls, and now I’m hoping for a groping. Someone feel me up, please?

Saturday night I spent at Lisa’s, making cheeseburgers in my slip because it was so very hot, and watching Community. She said I overhyped ‘Modern Warfare’. I don’t know how that’s even possible. Nevertheless, it was a very pleasant way to spend the evening. And then I came home to this:

Not the best picture, but suffice to say that the table on my porch had been knocked over, and there was blood ALL OVER the steps and dripping off the wall. My first thought was that it wasn’t blood, it was plum syrup, but the smell, it was intense and disgusting and terrifying. I actually was afraid to walk into the house, wondering if someone had decided to put a hit on me or something, and then I saw the cat fur all over the the place and started to panic. Sebastian usually comes running to meet me when I’ve been out for a while, but he wasn’t there. He was nowhere in the house, and didn’t come when I called and called. I totally freaked out and started bawling. I tried to call Karen since she was the nearest, but my phone wouldn’t connect the call. I started freaking out all over Twitter instead, until I heard a mewling, and Seb was at the front door. He was covered in blood and was acting really funny, so I tried to clean up his wounds as best as possible, and tried to calm down, after crying some more in relief that he appeared to be okay. But he was way lethargic, and was hyperventilating, and there was so much blood all over the porch. Some internet checking made me terrified he was going into shock, so I decided to take him to the after-hours vet – except of course I couldn’t call them. Luckily, Daniil was online and he rang them for me, so at 2am I loaded Seb into his cat cage and drove him out to Ngauranga. Seb didn’t meow once in the car, but I was crying enough for both of us.

The vet was grumpy with me, which seems a bit ridiculous, given that’s his actual job and heaven knows I paid enough. His computer wouldn’t start properly, and he wouldn’t even look at Seb until he’d filled in the form, so I stood in reception crying, Seb breathing way too fast under my hands, hoping he wasn’t going to die while the horrible man took his time with formalities. Finally we got into the examination room, where the vet put clothes pegs on Seb’s scruff to keep him calm, and we shaved off a bit of his fur so the vet could look at his chest wound. “He brought this on himself,” said the vet, “he clearly started this fight”. His bedside manner was somewhat lacking. It was 2.30am in the morning, I was clearly extremely upset and panicked, and I did NOT need to have my cat blamed for the fight. I tried to explain how much blood there was, but the vet was all “oh, it probably looked like a lot because it might have sprayed everywhere – an artery has been nicked, but it’s probably not very much at all”. Um, I cleaned up the clots of it, buddy, yeah, there was a lot of blood. Anyway, he gave Seb a shot of painkiller, and some antibiotics, and some pills for me to give to him for a week, and I paid $249. I was supposed to keep Seb inside for 24 hours but he slipped out while I was in the bathroom. I was awake til 6am worrying. Of course he’s fine today. I am never having kids.

Today I cleaned up the spare room cos Heather’s coming to stay, yay, and made righteous mac’n cheese and fuck yeah slaw and rhubarb pie for the LoveHawks. Kim gave me a recut of my Hubris necklace and wouldn’t let me pay her for it, proving once again that I win at life sometimes with the wonderful people I have met on the internet. We watched FoxFire which was DREADFUL, and kind of awesome at the same time. Jason claims he wrote it when he was 16. I’m so glad those crazy kids have moved to my neighbourhood. I love my weekend rituals.

This week is going to be crazy. Last week I saw a huge part of my recent everything played out in a slideshow, and now on Friday is the Fifth The Annual Wellingtonista Awards. Woah! You’re coming along, right?

2. At the afterparty at the Embassy, we played Crowd Bingo. I won the most challenges I think, but I was still somewhat surprised when Kowhai jumped on my back. I made Alan listen to a thousand long stories about how everything is connected and revolves around me (the guy who won my dinosaur is I think the younger brother of the first guy that I ever said “I love you” to, albeit in a Tori Amos & Cindy Sherman-quoting email sent on Valentine’s Day in 1998. The younger brother didn’t like me at all based on IRC, because I laughed “ha ha ha” and he thought that made me really sarcastic. There were more of these types of story. Some of them involved diabetes. I’m surprised Alan put up with it all. Hadyn tried to take credit for my Crowd Bingos so I punched him. He twittered that I’d found Jim. People with iPhones all have herpes. Perhaps the greatest achievement in the bingo was Kowhai getting Ze to sign a card for Miss Fur, but we will come to that later, probably.

3. I told pretty much everyone that I loved them, although I’d already been twittering that all day. I told Matt Jones that I was going to marry him instead of Tom Coates. Sarah and I had it all worked out between us. We’re going to wear kaftans and and play majong. It’ll be brilliant. I made people hold my glass so I could hug people with two arms. I must in particular throw out mad love for Jeff who I hung out with for much of the night, and also for anyone who didn’t run in terror from me despite the booze and the enthusiasm I had flowing out of me like river about to burst its banks. I suspect also that my cleavage was more than terrifying, because it was a new dress (Yup! Sweaty and gross and it got worse at Vintage).

4. Vintage was hot and sweaty, but I found myself a seat and taught people how to play Front/Back. It’s a bit similar to Marry/Fuck/Kill, but simpler – you name two people, and someone has to decide which person they’d have fuck them in the ass and who they’d go down on. The first time Lisa and I played, it was Mike Patton vs Eddie Vedder. I decided I wanted Eddie to make sweet tender love to my heini, and Mike Patton to fuck my mouth as dirtily as possible. It’s a beautiful game. The funnest part was on Saturday when I asked Dylan “Good Tom/Bad Tom?” and he was too embarrassed to answer. I met some very amusing boys from Auckland and they indulged me in playing for a long time, talked to me about Marcus Lush and Newsnight and just generally kept me entertained, until they had to leave. I managed to find other friends though.

5. Me and a lady friend and two guys found ourselves with nowhere to drink after Vintage closed, so we went to Mermaids strip club. The guys paid for our entrance fee, bought us drinks and gave us laminated mermaid dollars to tuck in the thongs of the dancers. Yeah that was me, smashing the patriarchy. I talked to one of the dancers for a while, as it appeared to be her job. She didn’t take her top off and looked down on the dancers who do. I thought that was a bit weird. I couldn’t stop looking at things through a feminist window. The white bits on my dress glowed and I felt like it was 1997 and I was at a rave. She had a really nice ass, even if I’m not an ass girl, but I really wanted to see the redhaired stripper come out again. I had been drinking for 12 hours. I woke up the next afternoon and all the lights in my room were on.

6. Somehow I managed to make it out to the Cuba Street Carnivale, three colours of eyeshadow on and plastic flowers woven into my hair, It was so lovely to see Dylan again, and I love the people cheering for the wind blowing the bunting around. I don’t like Olmecha Supreme so we went and had cocktails at SFBH because sitting down is nice,and then went and watched the parade from Marion Street. It was pretty average, but there were some scantily clad ladies to oggle, which is always nice, because obviously I haven’t done enough of that lately. And then when we were waiting at the bus stop for a taxi, a guy ran past with a bagguette tucked under his arm so we were all “ahurhur hur hur” like a Frenchie.

7. Yesterday I had brunch ostentainably by myself, but Hadyn happened by, and then I saw Dylan too, and then I went and hung out with Lisa for a bit, who was still VERY VERY EXCITED that she got to meet Ze Frank at the carnival, and then there was an attempt at a nap but I was so excited that I’d get to nap that I couldn’t sleep.

8. Today I couldn’t face work, but I did three loads of washing, tidied the house, cleaned the bathroom, made cupcakes and delivered them to the lovely Mike & Deb and Tash & Ben to thank them for the awesomeness that is Webstock. The cupcakes are in boxes decorated in glitter goop that’s all smeary and dreadful but I’m hoping that they’ll thin it’s Outsider Art.

9. I am so excited about all the knowledge in my head, and I hope that it means that this year is going to be awesome. I fell from grace so hard in 2008, in so many ways. I hope I can regain some of that long lost grace. That is all.

10. Oh hai! If I met you, and you liked me, please let me a comment and we can like, hang out or something.

Air NZ says that it’s rolling out personalised entertainment in August on all Pacific flights, but they hadn’t reached our plane yet. Geez, could I sound more whiney? Seriously, outside is one of the most beautiful places ever and I’m still bitching about the flight. It’s the dread of the nearly 6 hours return. Anji was right, I think we’re going through Tonga. We had steak pies and Kapiti Ice Cream. The air hostess poured me a double vodka and soda, which washed away the sicky feeling of Lindauer at Auckland Airport. I listened to Bic Runga on my ipod and tried to sleep.

It took a while to get through customs at Apia, and then fight off taxi touts. Someone from the airport eventually told us where we needed to trade in our vouchers, so we got lei’d and clambered into a van with plastic covered seats. Who needs knees anyway? We sat for another long period, waiting for a couple from business class. Privileged douches I thought, although as it happens they took that long because of one of their bags didn’t arrive. I rescind my judgment so that I may never lose a bag. The older couple sitting in front of us started talking to the rich yuppie woman who switched on her blackberry as soon as she got in the coach (I’d turned on my phone so I could take photos because my camera was in my bag, but then I put it away because I didn’t want to be that girl. Remuera Woman decided that it was vitally important that she share her wide knowledge with Yuppie Woman, so she started telling her about how in NZ most Pacific people live in the same area, and then started going on about how unfortunate they were, blah blah very very very condescending, and her husband chimed in with “I hired one once but…” It was at that stage that I leaned over and whispered to Karen “I hear they all know each other too!” and put on my iPod so I wouldn’t have to listen any more.

Sigur Ros made a good soundtrack for the lush tropicalness of the island. It was 7 in the morning, so the roads were full of school kids in different coloured uniforms heading off to class. Every little shop advertised Beer Valima. Almost all the houses we passed were open-sided fales. It was a little weird to see things like microwaves sitting out in the open. Horses and dogs and piglets and cats and chickens roamed around like the hoodlums they are. I miss Sebastian.

We were worried that our room wouldn’t be available when we got there, but luckily, it was, and we were shown to a very very cute over-water fale, the porter hefting my 20kg suitcase on his shoulder as he pulled Karen’s along. The fale had a bathroom that took up a good quarter of the space, with open sides. Not a whole lot of privacy in the room for two people, but I guess these things happen.

I threw our welcome garlands into the ocean and pretended to be doing a maritime funeral, but my camera lense was kind of condensed from the change in temperature. We decided to go eat breakfast (waffles), sweltering in the heat, and then put our togs on for the first time. The water was absolutely magic. So warm and lovely although not all that deep. I frolicked for a very long time before I turned wrinkly, and it was time for a great airport-taint-washing-off shower, recliners on our private balcony and stupid magazines to read (I’m looking at you, Madison!) We tried to nap before lunch, and managed to doze off. I volunteered to take the single couch-bed for the night, figuring I’d sleep fine with all the tiredness and the zopiclone. That was of course before the mosquitoes showed up.

At lunch, we ordered the house ros? because it was part of our meal plan, and if you’re looking at that and it displays like an ?mlaut, it’s because I am so very fucking rock’n roll. I had a fish fry that arrived in a big grass basket, with manioka fries and breaded eggplant, while Karen had a spicy raw tuna Ahi Poke salad. Yes! Being on holiday is nice.

Because I followed my wine with a couple of Vailima beers, when we got back to our over-water fale, I was very keen to keep on drinking, or at least to satisfy a long-held wish of mine – to be swimming and drinking beer at the same time. Our room’s minibar was complimentary, but of course, there was no bottle opener. Cue much much hilarity as I struggled to open my bottle. I wish that American Will had been there to open it with his teeth, or at least pretty much all of my male friends who all smoke and open their beers with their lighters. Instead, I put on my own comedy show for Karen, when she suggested I open one beer with another. You know how at imaginary keg parties they spray all the sorority girls with beer? That was me as the bottles slightly unclipped, spraying all over my togs and into my mouth as I sucked them down. Eventually the lid came off and I trip tropped down into the water, now on low tide, to float on my back and drink beer for a couple of minutes. Of course, it was half foam by that stage, but I achieved what I wanted to achieve, and Karen took my picture.

Then we had Quiet Time in our room, lazing on the private balcony. I opened the other bottle with the aid of the closet hinge (eventually) and finished up both stupid Madison magazine and the chicklit (but good-ish) book called something like The Easy Hour. I’ve read it before if that helps explain what entertaining reading material it is. Eventually, it was some time after 4pm, so it was obviously cocktail time. We put on our togs, but there was no bartender present in the swim-up bar, so we went into the main one instead, Oh wait, but first we checked in (reception wasn’t open when we arrived) and got free maitai vouchers, which we prompted used. We sat in the bar for two cocktails, me rereading jPod and taking photos of the ladies setting up the Palm Court in magenta and purple tableclothes with some turquoise napkins – totally Pretty Pretty Pretty colours! I got all whiney as 6.30 took too long to arrive for dinner. Crazy messed-up timetables!

The restaurant was dark, but nice. I had their Samoan equivalent of prosciutto & melon – spiced beef and papaya, as well as the daily special of WAHOO! fish with spaghetti. We drank the house red wine, topped up from carafes, and it was bloody tasty.. Go the Californian Cabernet. It makes me want to book a holiday to San Fran, to stay with O + S5, but to also do a day trip wine tasting around Napa. Remind me to win lotto. What else? We went back to our room, and I took my sleeping pills. I crashed out pretty early, but woke for a long time in the middle of the night to mozzies dive-bombing my ears. Cunts! Oh, and we had a moonlight swim in the pool, with bonus full moon and a bat flying overhead. Night swimming is my most favouritist.

The second day, I decided to have the cowboy breakfast. It was pretty much bologneise that was supposed to be served over potatoes, but wasn’t. I tell you this less because I imagine that you care about what I ate, and more as a jump-off point for talking about the surprising Americanisms of Samoa. When I’ve been to Fiji, and obviously Rarotonga, New Zealand has been their main major other culture. Here however, they drive on the right side of the road (assuming that they’re sticking to their assigned lane, which wasn’t that often based on our shuttle driver, and oh yes, just like a woman from Remuera, I will decide on an entire country’s behaviour based on one person). Their chicken is American (eww?) while their Rib Eye is from New Zealand. The posh toilet block by the restaurant has flat elongated shallow toilets with a crescent-shaped seat that auto-flush, just like most public American toilets that I encountered, and airdryers with the force of a hurricane that literally (LITERALLY!) are so strong they make your hand skin ripple, like the bathrooms in an Irish pub off Times Square I was forced to take an emergency poo in after visiting Sephora (PPP link).

Oh, and most most most magnificently, in the swim-up bar in the geko-shaped pool, they give you your cocktails (when the bar is staffed, that is, and they still have to go in to the main bar to get the ingredients) in RED PLASTIC CUPS! !!! CHK CHK CHK! So much excitement. We contemplated packing the cups to bring them home, but didn’t.

Karen, meanwhile, had banana penekeke which was billed as Samoan pancakes but is mostly deep-fried bananas with maple syrup, They’re so good that I had them for breakfast today. While we were stuffing our faces, the lovely staff were moving us from our over-water Fale La into one of the Royal Villas – Vila Aili. Did I mention that I got us a $1500 upgrade for free when the Garden Suite that we wanted wasn’t available but we’d already paid for it and our meal plan? According to the Coconuts website, the over-water fale is like US $399 a night, and the Royal Villa is US $400. We paid like NZ $4400 total for five nights, five days of meal plan at NZ $75 a day (Breakfast, lunch and three-course dinner, with lunch and dinner having unlimited (ish) wine and beer), flights and taxes. I think we win. Maybe? I dunno. Well actually, I think the mosquitoes win, but fuck’em, we got plugin thingies from the gift shop, so they can fuck off and die. Oh also, the plugins have NZ plugs, but most of the plugs here are American, to return to the earlier theme.

What else did we do yesterday? Lots of swimming in the pool, paddling and floating in the ocean. Did I tell the porn-star story about the beers already? I did. We didn’t get a bottle opener in the new room either, so there were more shenanigans. I found a handy wooden corner to pop it off, so to speak. I also popped it off when I woke up and heard Karen snoring. Very quietly, of course.

We took a stroll to along the beach to the Sinalei resort which we could see in the distance. It looked very close but took a long time to walk to on the sand, especially with my big blister caused by the arch support in my birki jandals that I’m not used to. The Sinalei beach was like Scorching Bay to Coconuts’s my little secret beaches, and there were shrieking children. We had a cocktail each at their dock-ish bar, then had a paddle. The tide had come in while we were there, so half the walk home was a wade. Exhausting. No one should have to do that much work on holiday!

That night being Saturday, they had a fire-dancing show in the restaurant, which made me think of the Patricia Grace book The Children of Champion Street in which a magical eel brings all the cultures together in Cannons Creek and they all dance their special dances. I used to work with her son and have met some of his brothers. They are all very very very attractive and look much younger than they actually are. And, a confession if you got this far – at Anya’s goodbye party at the See Dubya Eh, I pinched his bottom, and then looked away so noone knew it was me. Te hehe.

Anyways, the fire dancers were very cool, even if I had to drink kava that Karen wouldn’t take. I was supposed to say “Manuia” which made me think of Mike Brown, but of course in writing it, I realise that he has a P. But not a habit, if you know what I mean. Karen also wouldn’t get up and dance when asked. We just concentrated on our food – Karen had Tuna Tartar (with anchovies and egg yolk) and I had Oka, which is sometimes (well in Raro) known as Ika Mata, which is raw tuna soaked in lime juice and coconut cream. It is delicious. Our main course was the ever-present Cabernet and our steaks and afterwards, I had Chocolate Dream Cake full of molten chocolate fudge sauce. Holy crap it was good.

We were so stuffed we could hardly move (I’ve named my belly Brian,and Karen’s is called Andrew), so we went back to our room, drank Amarula and read each other a chapter of The Pirates! In an adventure with Napoleon by Gideon Defoe, who pretends to be related to that Cruise-oh guy. We keep getting the accents mixed up, but we’ve finally decided that the Pirate Capitan talks like a pirate, the Pirate with the Scarf (his number two) is a Scotsman with occasional lapses into Irishness, the Pirate in Green is a faaaaaaaaaabulous homosexual, the Governor of St Helena is a toffee-nosed Brit, and, surprisingly enough, Napoleon is comically French. I popped zopiclone and fell asleep by ten pm.

On Sunday morning, I had deep-fried bananas for breakfast and my first coffee in a long time. We took advantage of the high-ish tide to go snorkeling for the first time, 20 metres from our villa. Booyah! There were some rocks with isolated patches of live coral. but there were lots of fish. Schools of silvery fish, parrot fish that are more faintly coloured than in Rarotonga (EDIT: turns out they were trevalli), and really playful Pierrot fish, Or maybe clownfish. Karen and I aren’t sure (EDIT: turns out they’re Trigger Fish. Oh well!). They get all up in your face, which Karen sees as a threat (because it apparently butted her), while I feel it’s an invitation to follow. There’s a quite strong current from our beach, so a couple of times I floated down to the beach by the swimming pool, got out and walked up again. It’s like skiing, or going on a water slide with the gap in between to relax your puckered snorkel mouth.

After snorkeling and perhaps some showers from our rock tub, (insert pictures here), we went to chill out in the giant library/common space, and I found myself a marvelous Jackie Collins novel to pass the time. There were two shelves dedicated to abandoned German novels – except Karen informs me now that some of them were French and some of them were Danish. There’s also German information in the booklet in our room, so I informed her that there used to be a huge German presence in Samoa until like, 1860, or perhaps after the first world war (5th form history was a while ago) until NZ took over guardianship. “And boy, did they fuck up” says Karen (insert link to wikipedia article on killing thing here) – if I can’t find the link, it’s “that thing what Helen apologised for”. Have I mentioned lately that I love Helen? Fuck you, Code of Conduct, you’re loving the violation, you dirty bitch.

On the blackboard outside reception, we discovered that there was a bbq lunch, and we were gleeful. Did I mention already that our holiday agenda was sun, sea, drinking and eating? I was trying to come up with ‘S’ words there but failed. Karen suggested “snacking” but seriously, I’m totally limited to exactly three meals per day here. Apart from cocktails and Vailima of course. And if I happened to grab any fish. Heh. Anyways, I had ribs while Karen had some big steak of some “local” fish. It may have been groper, but apart from when I rub suntan lotion or chilled mango body butter on her, I am keeping my hands to myself. She says “the flavour certainly grabbed me though”. As would like to this dumbass Australian guy in the bar who says he’s counting our drinks, and then tonight told Karen it must be good book when she was clearly enjoying her reading. Douche. Ahhh Australians, we can hear them for miles around here. Some of them are nice enough though, like the woman in the pool who asked if it was me drinking the Catapult, and warned me it would knock me on my ass and then proceeded to fall back into the pool when trying to get out of it. They were merry and nice.

More snorkeling when the tide was higher at 4pm, more showers and pirates and hilarious beer-openings. At dinner, Karen ordered the escargot for an entree because she could, and daaaaaaaaaaamn it was fabulous, all butter and garlic and mushroomy. I had “cajun sashimi which was lightly seared tuna. It was so pink it looked like jelly, and it was delicious. Karen ate fish with papaya and I had the special of Mongolian chicken. We drank many glasses of cabernet sav (go Cali!) and afterwards lingered in the bar for more cocktails. There’s only two n the menu we haven’t had now, and we’ll take care of that tomorrow.

On Monday I had French Toast for breakfast. The waitresses have started giggling at me for the amount I drink – not just the beer and wine refills but the sheer depravity of having OJ and coffee AND water at once. More snorkelling was had, and we saw starfish and real parrot fish, only they were teeny tiny, and cardinal fish, and prettiness. I’m a bit scared of snorkelling in shallow water, due to the time that I had a panic attack and got cut up real bad on the Fiji coral at Malamala Island, so I get a bit angsty here when there are large banks of rocks’n coral to drift over only two feet below you. But I know if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s floating, so it’s not so bad. And when you find a live patch of coral it makes it totally worth it. Our equipment’s really good too, no leaky masks, or old snorkels without drainage valves. I so recommend this place, like woah.

Karen did some sketches of me but I look like someone else in them. I read more fabulous Jackie Collins and did imitation pilates moves in the pool. I had a burger “all the way” at lunchtime which meant it came with mushrooms and onions and apparently three kinds of cheese. Karen had a chicken salad served in a papaya. I don’t mean to complain, but it’s a damn shame there’s no drinks served in pineapples here, although their signature cocktail does come in a ripe coconut (insert picture here). Our afternoon snorkeling was too shallow because we went too early. Also it was grey and rainy. I changed the voice of the Pirate with the Scarf into that of a Southerner, because my version of Scottish and my version of Pirate are too similar.

It poured that night, poured and poured, and we did crossword puzzles in a New Idea that someone else had haphazzardly started but really sucked at. I finished the Jackie Collins and started some terrible vampire novel that’s set in New Orleans but isn’t by Anne Rice. We finished the pirates book, although it turns out I needed Karen to tell me how it finished (Zopiclone makes me forgetful, but I always remember to take my Lexapro and my Levothyroxine in the mornings.

• The everscrumptious Miss Heather has switched over my site design for me, so bear with me while the kinks are ironed out. My semi-secret RSS feed seems to have temporarily vanished, and of course Twitter is blocked at work, so I’m not sure if that’s feeding in properly, but now at least if you run my site through a validator (don’t!) you should only get four or so errors and not sixty like the old one. Goodbye to the hump though, sadly.
• If you receive a text message from me that sounds a little strange, it’s because I no longer have an ’8′ key on my phone, so therefore I have no ‘t’, ‘u’ or ‘v’. It makes things like giving directions to Superfino read “On Ghznee s, opposie Bdg Cars, by Bicoria S”. That makes perfect sense, right? Also, do make your way to Superfino, please. We spent a very pleasant Friday night there. I recommend the Pear & Vanilla Punch especially, but not reaaaaally the Blood-Orange and Cinnamon Martini.
  

• We’ve taken to going to the Quiz at the Southern Cross on Tuesday nights. By “we” I mean sometimes some Wellingtonistas, and sometimes my sisters & Bambi. I am, just for a change, in love with the Quizmaster. You know how I fancy people who know more things about something than I do (music, depression, computers or – in the olden days – drugs), that rule of course applies to someone who has the answer sheet on quizes.
• Before you come up to the Cross for the quiz, I’d like to recommend Le Metropolitain for dinner, and I’d say that even if I hadn’t been called “Madame Jo” on the phone in a hot French accent that I discovered was attached to a hot French waiter. He brought me the wine list when I was waiting by myself instead of making me wait, and was efficient, friendly and good. Everyone’s favourite public servant blogger might not approve of their cassolet, but damn my cow face (read: beef cheeks) were tasty, and since Bambi ordered snails I got to try them for the first time. They tasted like mushrooms, while the mushrooms that they were served with tasted like garlic and cream.
  
• You might have gathered due to the increase in the number of photos that I’m displaying that I’ve taken to carrying my new camera with me everywhere. That’s because the batteries don’t fall out, and it’s got a 1 gig card in it. And I like taking photos, of course. I’ve started to take a series of portraits of people with ‘my eyes’:
  

  

  

• I’ve been watching Season One of Veronica Mars with my lovely new flatmate Kat. She guessed who the killer was correctly, which I didn’t manage to do the first time I watched it. She’s a smart one, that girl. I love watching shows with big reveals that I know are coming up with others, although her little shriek when the killer was in the back seat was nothing compared to Lisa on finding out who killed Laura Palmer. Kat’s fiance Kane is a pro-wrestler! How awesome is that? It means he has no fear of cavorting around in tights, which he demonstrated in his costume as a ballet dancer at Country Club: Back in the USSR on Saturday night.
• I haven’t downloaded my photos from Back in the USSR, but once I do, you’ll be able to see a steady progression from tipsy into disturbingly intoxicated, despite all the food – I made pierogi, and potatoes, and sausages, and Frances and Karen both brought blini, and there was caviar as well, and chips, and really disgusting solid rye bread, and kisial – which was of course vodka jelly, and Moscow Mules, and by the end of the night there was white rum as well. Some people had splendid costumes – Anji brought along a bear so I had to hump him. I also gave lap dance versions of the panda dance to the boys who were complaining about the poor service at Dream Girls that they’d got the night before. My heart bleeds for them. The party was lots and lots of fun, and I was stoked with the turn out. I gave someone a big long speech about how I am not what they need, and how they really shouldn’t fancy me. I thought it was a pretty convincing speech, and it was the right thing for me to do, so I was a little disturbed when I woke up next to the speech recipient. I would be later more disturbed to discover that somehow a glass of water had managed to get knocked into my underwear drawer, leaving me with moist panties everywhere. It was a much nicer discovery, when I finally got up at 6pm on Sunday though, to find that the whole house had been cleaned. WOO! And then last night over flat dinner I heard that people had been spraying my new Cinderella Coconut Bathroom Cleaner into their mouths as it is billed as being so very non toxic. Disturbing!

This week I am all about being aware of my body. Partly this is because I’m about to get my first period since like, April, and I’m crampy as fuck, especially in the o moment, and my boobs are insanely sore. Stupid fucking cold weather. In better in touch with my body news, I can feel my stomach muscles! Apparently there’s muscles in there. Who knew? I mean, obviously you can’t see them, and it’s not like the blubber’s going to stop jiggling any time soon, but I can feel something working when I do my sit-ups or leg lifts or remember to lean back when I’m doing lat pull-downs. I’m astonished. It’s a good feeling. And now I will shut up about this crap after I remind myself that I’m starting boxing tomorrow and I really need to get a fucking sports bra like six months ago. Stupid small boob-to-back ratio.

Things that I have done recently included having martinis with some of the fine people from the Wellingtonista. It was terribly civilised, proper and grown up. I also traded 101 Stories with Martha for something from Babylicious which is Aotearoa-made baby clothes. It was all very civilised and grown-up, which was lovely, but when I snuck out to join my cows and ex cows at the Poon I was like “Phew, now I can say ‘vagina’ again lots”, and two ladies sitting on the balcony gave me dirty looks as they left. Hah! We then tried to have dinner at Sweet Mother’s Kitchen but it was fuuuuuuuuuull so we ended up at Boulot, you know, just for a change, prompting much discussion about how weird it was to be there before midnight. The pizza was as always still good though, but there was something weird going on with me because I stopped drinking around 10pm and was almost falling out of my chair with tiredness by midnight. Very very unlike me. As a postscript, I had lunch at Sweet Mother’s yesterday and they have fish tacos. Heh heh heh. I had beef ones though that were rather tasty, and I think the place has a lot of potential.

Saturday meant a cocktail party for my workmate’s Hens’ Party, thankfully sans stripper. It was held at the house of one of my company directors, who happens to my workmate’s mother, and everyone had to bring a bottle that was assigned to them. I stepped up to the blender and made many fantastic concoctions, including my first ever mojitos, not in the blender. Maybe I should become a bartender when I grow up. Or perhaps a mixologist.

Before I went to the cocktail party, I spent a very enjoyable day sorting through my newer CDs to decide which ones I wanted to keep (not many of them), then eating a leisurely breakfast with the paper at Coco, and then browsing Real Groovy for hours as they figured out my trades. For $2.75 out of pocket I bought Funeral new on CD for Karen (to go with Birds as her birthday present, although after I bought Birds I realised I had to keep it for myself because it had a DVD and Karen doesn’t have a TV, but luckily I was furnished with another copy, thanks doll), and then on vinyl I bought Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights new, and Beth Orton’s Central Reservation which is curiously spread across two records, but is nice to listen to while doing the semi daily yoga-ish stretches and it doesn’t remind me of 2000 anymore which is super good, and The Dark Side of the Moon and one of the Tour of Duty soundtracks. I <3 the trade-in, although that was like 16 CDs worth. I guess you get what you pay for. Or what you don't, in this case.

On Sunday we went to Capitol for Karen's birthday dinner. The girl serving us wasn't as fantastic as the usual staff, but the food was still all very good and I was well happy with the Jim Barry shiraz that we had after a pretty bland Mt Nelson sav. It turned out that the witloof in the chorizo, almond and witloof salad was really really bitter. I didn't see that one coming! Because apparently I am an idiot.

Last night we had flat dinner, although the idea of sitting around the dining room table was nixed in favour of sitting around the lounge table on account of that being where the heater was at. I thought the weather had got all nice and mild, but man I was wrong wrong wrong. Then the boys went and got out Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and it was just as good second time around. Movies that have their characters arguing with each other about adverbs while trying to solve crime and accidently killing people make me hot.

Today at work I am doing more phone support for this website that I now work on quite a lot, which in a “the internet is too small” twist, this young lady does as well, except from the other end. I’m also writing lists of things that I need to do but can’t really be bothered doing, and I’m trying to stay away from TWOP forums so that I don’t get any spoilers on tonight’s episode of Rockstar: Supernova. You can tell that it’s okay to be into Rockstar because Russell Brown said so. Sort of. And on that note, it’s time for me to go and get back to work. Awesome. But I will see you on Saturday, right? RIGHT?

On Friday, Miss Fur came and joined me and a workmate and an ex workmate for a couple of quiet drinks at the Poon, and that’s not even a euphemism. They really were quiet drinks, and we left by 8pmish to go back to her house to watch my friend Nigel & co win the 48 Hour Film Festival. Haha, now I sound like Russell with the name-dropping to show how down with the kids I am, except that I did actually go to Uni with Nige. You might remember my story of how my 18th birthday party was ruined by him and Brad and Trudie telling me I was dumb for drinking and smoking? Good times. The best part about them winning was that their movie was actually the best. I laughed myself stupid. And then we ummmm watched something else? Listened to records? I’m having a total mind blank.

On Saturday bright and earlyish, I picked up Anji and Karen and we headed up to Ngaio to decorate the house for Daddy’s party. Of course, before we could start decorating, we had to find the house first. My parents have A LOT of crap. We discussed ways in which we could thin it out, perhaps by taking one object every time we go visit and throwing it away. I need their house to become minimalist so that I can raise my brood of four children in it. But eventually we had a Quiet Meadow room as well as a lounge draped ridiculously in mosquito netting and streamers, with paper picket fences taped to the windows and other goodness around. We went home for a quick nap, and then I got all dressed up like a milk maid and returned. Daddy’s friends are weird. They didn’t want our horny monkeys, pink elephants, moscow mules, brown cows and fluffy ducks. They were all about the moderate drinking of wine. Fluffy ducks are crazy-tasting, by the way. Crazy but tasty. I continued to make drinks anyway. And serve our animal-themed food. And laugh when my Mummy kept turning up the stereo and someone kept turning it down. But eventually we had a boogie anyway. Neil’s friends sat on the floor and watched. There were two members of parliament present. Unsurprisingly, the Labour one was nice. The National MP, meanwhile, said to Anji that he didn’t believe OOS was real. Fucking awesome. I can’t wait til everyone in National takes their own advice and moves to Australia. We had some quality family time at the end of the party, and Mum danced like Axl Rose. It was pretty awesome. But I had too much sugar and couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, and when I finally did, right before 5am, I got woken up pretty much straight away by Smoo who didn’t have his key, and then when I went back to sleep after that Sebastian woke me up. Needless to say, I slept in past 2pm on Sunday.

Did I actually do anything else on Sunday? I don’t think I did. Apart from go to see City of God at the private screening, and make a string of hilarious puns about how much phelgm I have (“If I was a painter, I’d be a phelgmish impressionist. If I was a cricketer, I’d be Stephen Phelgming…”). I don’t understand how I’m not already married when I’m this funny and witty. Annnnnnnnnnnd then we got home at 12am from that, and I changed my sheets, and put in some ear drops and finished my Q and all of a sudden it was 2am. How did that happen? Also, I went to listen to The Wall which you will of course remember that Lisa Fur gave me on vinyl, but it appears that Real Groovy fucked up and gave me two sides 3 and 4 instead of a 1 & 2. No one out there wants to trade do they?

TOnight I was supposed to go to Stitch & Bitch that Martha organised, but I found more appealing the thought of coming home to do some amatuer yoga type stretching to follow up on my half-assed effort at the gym today (it was busy! And the first time I’d been in ten days cos of the coughing out my lungs! Give me a break!) and put on my new pale pink with skull & cross bones on pyjamas and watch TV instead. And so that is what I have done. And now I might return to this desperate trash. Now that Jon Safran has finished, I have been somewhat sucked in to Grey’s. Of course, I’m just doing it to bond with Jessie. Naturally.

ACCOMODATION
We stayed at a place called Club Fiji, which was nearish Nadi Airport, but had the added distinction of actually being on a beach. Sure, Nadi Bay was really shallow, and when the tide was out the sea was miles and miles and miles away, but it wasn’t too bad to look at. The pool was salt water, which was nice, and there were sun loungers all around, and lots of pretty thatched permanent umbrellas everywhere to sit under, and palm trees and flowers and it was just lovely. Our bure was the futherest away from everything, which meant big long walks to and from the bar & pool, but that’s okay. It was a really nice bure too – wood floors and wood lourves, a big high ceiling, a mosquito net over the double bed which lovely Kate let me have, and a little frige that we filled to the brim. The bathroom was quite spacious too. One night there was a three inch spider in it, so I screamed, but Katie bravely put it outside. I was quite suprised at her coolness in the battle.

The man in the other half of our bure wasn’t quite so cool, however. Oh no. In fact, he told us to turn off our music at 5pm because he was trying to nap (wanker!) and then came and yelled at us when we came back from dinner at 11.30pm (slightly more justified – he should have knocked on the door and been more polite, however). We hypothesized like mad about him, since he appeared to be by himself, before deciding that he had been jilted at the altar and had decided to come on his honeymoon by himself. The fact that a security guard told us that he’d complained another night about the fact that we were LAUGHING, (because how dare we enjoy ourselves on holiday?) seemed to solidify this theory. When we had to get up at 7am to go on a day cruise, I walked ahead of Kate, and he came out and hurled buckets and buckets of abuse at her, saying that we sounded like a pack of drunken hippos, and that she was a fat piece of shit (I don’t know if you’ve seen Kate, but suffice to say that she really isn’t) and that he recommended that she didn’t eat for a year. After that we told the reception staff that we wanted to change rooms, but we didn’t get around to it. We just stalked the guy at the restaurant instead, making loud remarks about how hippos come in herds, not packs. If he’d said something to me instead of Kate, i was going to play Good Cop, and invite him in for a drink and a hug, but he didn’t.

AIRPORTS
I hate airports. Especially if they’re not airconditioned. Or your parents (apparently) think you’re coming back the next day and no one is answering their phone and you are outside in the freezing Wellington wind and you don’t have any house keys and you’re supposed to be at Jessie’s party soon and it’s so cold and your flight was so delayed and you’d already waited for hours the night before at Auckland Airport for a bus and oh I just hate you airports. I’m always crying at you.

BOATS
I was thinking last night that before I went to Fiji I hadn’t been on a boat since January 2nd, 1998 (post The Gathering), but that’s not true cos I went on a ferry between Russell and Paihia, and also on the Hokianga ferry, but we took a lot of boats in Fiji. We went on a Sunset Cruise which we thought would be a big boat, but it was just a rowboat with an outboard motor that we had to cross the sandflats to get to, carrying glasses of wine, and then the guy asked us if he could go faster, and it was great but all the wine flew out of our glasses. Then there was a catamaran out to South Seas Island, and a little boat to get to the island & the submariney boat, and a smaller boat to get to Malamala and their little boat and that’s about it. Well, it certainly felt nautical to me. This is a boring thread.

BOYS
It seems that there is some appreciation for the curves in Fiji – or perhaps because of the heat I was wearing lower cut tops than usual and it would have been the same in NZ. But I’m not sure. One night Kate and I were sitting out on the porch of our bure having a drink, talking shit about the next door neighbour and just generally enjoying ourselves. Kate went inside to pee, or get more drinks, or cheese, or something, when along came the security guard. No, he wasn’t there to tell us to shut up, he just wanted to hang out. Okay. So we made chit chat, and blah blah blah, and Kate came back out again, and we talked some more and then he was boring us and we wanted him to leave but by that stage he was already sitting on the steps of our bure smoking. Since Kate and I had already discussed whether or not we were going to go to mysterious Hell bar that only appeared at night and blasted out bangra til all hours, we asked him if there were any good places we should go to if we were going to go out in Nadi. He was like “you want to go to nightclubs? I know some good places. I’ll take you out tomorrow because I finish my shift at 10pm, so you can get some dinner and I will meet you here”. We were like “oh okay, that sounds okay” before he was all “but you can’t let my bosses know, we’ll have to go secretly, blah blah blah” and “my friend is a taxi driver, I’ll get him to take us” and it just seemed a little more dodgy. And he was staring in the bad way, not the good way. After he finally left, we decided we’d wait and see if we were still keen to go out the next night. After an early morning and a long day on South Seas Island, we decided that no, we weren’t particularly keen to go out, and so we debated all the ways that we could get out of going out – like pretending to be sick, or hiding, or going out by ourselves. He was waiting in the dark for us to walk past though, so we just said we were too tired and he said maybe another night, he’d get his friend to take us out and join us when we finished at 1am. Well, we certainly weren’t very keen to be passed around like that, so in order to get out of it, on another night, we got a guy from the bar to walk us back to our room….

Our waiter at dinner the first night very coconspiritoratorly asked us if we smoked, and I thought he was after a lighter, but then apparently he said somethign about Bob Marley, and I was like “ooooh. No.” but he kept asking, like he wanted to sell us weed, and then he kept touching me, always patting me or stroking me from then onwards and it seemed like he’d go for wherever my sunburn dejour was. I don’t like being touched so much, dammit!

One night we were sitting at the bar having a drink when three local boys asked us to play pool with them. Being obliging young ladies, we said yes, and so we ended up playing two games against them. One of them decided that the best way to pick me up was to talk about how fat I was, first touching my upper arms and saying “powerful muscles!” and then when they asked us if we smoked (dude, what the fuck is it with everyone trying to sell us pot?) and I said no, he was like “oh, I thought you were so fat because you smoked so much”. I was like “I think you’re the rudest boy I’ve ever met. I didn’t say anything about how bad your skin was, you know, where are your manners?” He didn’t get it. Turns out they didn’t get a lot of things. When they kept trying to force their beer on us, telling us how great Fiji Draught was, we asked if they worked for the brewery, or if they were doing viral marketing. They didn’t get it. The guy that was trying to pick Kate up apparentlyl taught web programming, so she told him that I edited websites. He asked me what I did, so I said that I wrote the content for the site. He didn’t understand what content was, and asked me if I wrote in php. It’s nice to know that programmers universally don’t realise that websites actually have to have content! The other guy that was trying for me, who kept touching me got really nasty and competitive when he thought he was losing, while the guy with the bad skin got really bitter that I was playing with his friend. We had to call it a night right about then. They were just toooooo pushy.

Another night at the bar we were talking to everyone there, including Marilyn from Blehiem who we’d got to know on South Seas Island (her and her husband had been coming to Club Fiji for twelve years, twice a year – they took one holiday together and one holiday apart each), and a couple of expats. One of them said he was developing a new resort, and he said he could get us tickets to go out there. Well, yeah, we’re oppotunistic, so we did talk to him for a long time. We got to talking about the upcoming election, and he said he wasn’t voting, so I (of course) went off on a speil about how you’ve got to believe in something and stand up for it (but only if it’s something that I believe in, of course!) and we got on to the civil unions bill – which he thought was wrong. Homos are unnatural. But lesbians are okay – are you guys lesbians? He asked about three times. I told him the say thing every time, that I wasn’t gay with Kate, but yes, sometimes I like women. And then we went into a loooooooooooong speil about how it was perfectly natural. His arguement of course came down to “anal sex with men is gross”. I felt a little bad saying in front of the bartender “so when you’re with a woman, all you ever do is put your penis in her vagina and that’s your whole relationship there?” I think he was too drunk at that stage to get it. He started going on about the bible, so Kate asked him to quote specific passages that spoke out against homosexuality, and I was waiting for him to say Levidicus, but oh no, he didn’t even know that, so we told him that there wasn’t a single mention of it in the bible but boy that was a nice shirt he was wearing of mixed thread. Then Kate said “I’m a scientist…” (which anyone who’s ever heard the story of how outrageously angry she got when we were playing headbands and she was Einstein and when she found out she yelled “BUT YOU SAID I WASN’T AUSTRALIAN!” and we were like …………… until Simon said “are you thinking of Young Einstein?” should know means that she is full of crap, but I was too drunk to hear her say that bit) and launched into a story about how in Africa, there’s been studies done that show there are gay lions who are totally welcomed, because they don’t represent a threat to the leader’s authority, but they help to protect the female lions. Hey, it seemed plausabile at the time, the guy totally believed her – probably partly because he was still hoping we were lesbians together with him. In retrospect, if Kate ever tells that story about the lions again, I told her she should said it’s been written about in a book called Gay Pride. I am hilarious. Anyways, eventually the bar closed, and we realised that the creepy security guard – who had periodically been asking Kate where I was would be lurking around our room wanting to go out with us. We asked the guy to walk us back to our room, and his eyes went !!!!!!!!, so when we got back to our room I said “you do realise we’re not going to have sex with you, right?” and he said “do you have anything to drink?” and then peed in the bushes while Kate went back to reception to get them to unlock our room cos we’d lost our key (inside, we’d left our room open but housekeeping must have locked it). Charmer. Eventually I got bored, and he hadn’t given us tickets, so I went to bed. He asked Kate to go for a moonlight walk on the beach, but strangely she declined, so he finally left. I hope that our gay lions have changed his outlook on life.

COMEDY DUO

Apparently Kate’s dad has suggested that her and I together are a comedy duo. Once she told me that, it was a phrase that I heard many times in my head, when Kate’s suitcase weighed 30kg at check-in, or when we lost our room key, or when we couldn’t get out of the water on Malamala Island because of the undertown and slippery sand, or when we got caught up in hammocks etc…. Possibly the biggest mistake this comedy duo made was to try to walk through the field between our resort and the next. It was dark, deep and full of infectious mosquitos, ditches and streams. No snakes though.

FLIGHTS
The flight to Fiji was much more spacious than I thought it would be. I loved the tan fake leather seats. We asked if we could be upgraded, and they checked, but apparently it was full. The continental breakfast was quite good. I didn’t have champagne. The movie was Lemony Snickett so I didn’t watch it. The flight back was much more squishy. I drank some wine. The movie had Vin Diseal and kids in it. What was Lorelei thinking?

FOOD
I ate a lot of rib eye. The food was mostly decidedly average, but the steak was good.

INJURIES