Really, this was actually just a teaspoon during High Tea at Martha’s Pantry for Kim’s birthday.

2. A bunch of dicks and tits

cookies

I made cookies for Maddest and Baddest.

3. A cake shaped like a donut

There was a Simpsons-themed pigout session at Lim’s (that’s Laura and Tim).

4. Pulled pork burger (not pictured)

I got a little bit over-excited by the pulled pork burger at Monterey and expressed my love on the table.

5. Mussels and other amazing Malaysian food

Because of my work for Malaysia Kitchen, I got to go to lunch with a munch of food bloggers and Chef Wan, who is apparently very famous, and is also very entertaining.

6. Fancypants canapes as part of a progressive dinner

To celebrate the return of Theresa, the Mount Victoria Society had a progressive dinner. There were whores devours at mine, a BBQ at Anna Jane’s, and then amazing dessert’s at Chiara’s. Good times and no taxis needed!

6. An assortment of amazing treats including Rhubarb Gimlets for GGG

Every couple of weeks, Kim, Kate, Laura, Willow and I get together to drink gin and watch Gossip Girl. Normally Blair and Chuck are the ones we like, but we’re okay with Blumphrey, actually.

7. Deep-fried Soft Shell Crab at Kura in Auckland

Work meetings in Auckland had the additional bonus of meaning I could have dinner with Heather&Ben, Peter and Russell. Needless to say, I gave them crabs. And they loved it.

So there we were, in a room full of bajillions of people cramming our faces with the most amazing kinds of vegetables and pies ever at Mika’s thanksgiving. It turns out that she lives just around the corner from me, so when we were giving thanks (remember that amazing time I cooked my first ever turkey and it was perfect back at Garland? Holy crapula that was 11 years ago. Woah.), I mentioned that, and how I wanted to hang out with her more. It is nice having new friends. The other thing I was majorly thankful for is that my foster kitty Milo who had escaped on Monday night while I was in Auckland for work and had kittysitters showed up again last night. She is adorable. I should stop crawling into the spare bed drunkenly and hanging out with my fosterinos, because when they snuggle up I’m all like “awww, can’t I keep you?”. And I probably can’t.

I decided since Mika lives so close that I would take a hot pre-dinner snack as my contribution, and it was Thanksgiving-themed, so I came up with these Savoury Thanksgiving Tartlets:

Thanksgiving tartlet filling: roast pumpkin, craisins, feta, red onion and parsley

Other things this weekend of note included a Fatty Boom clothing swap at Emma’s. I got to hang out with Ally who I worship. In fact, just between you and me, I used to retumbl pictures of her and call her my secret internet girlfriend before we met. Now of course I’m much too shy to do that. But at least I got into her skirt, even if she was no longer in it. It was also lovely seeing Emma and Simon again, who I don’t get to hang out with nearly enough.

So yes, onwards and upwards into a week with no social events scheduled except for possibly a few drinks after work on Friday with someone I used to work with in 2006 who now works with Anji. Fingers crossed I can stick to the no socialising plan. You’re wishing me luck, right?

Mouse Rat have a song about sex hair. I have the real thing.

In fact, if you really want to see the proper damage from that one, then you need to see it from behind (lollerskates!):

As Kat said, "So, clearly he's right-handed then". Yes. And kinda pushy.

So after Xmas Party shenanigans, it was time for actual Xmas.

Instead of an Xmas tree, I put lights into the lime tree I was giving Anji

On Xmas Day, Karen and Tom came over for an international sandwich degustation. Spellcheck suggests that word should be “devastation” instead which is close to accurate.

The first sandwich course was German Hot dogs

The Framingham UNSTABLE ROSE was a perfect colour with my dress. Not that you can tell in this pic.

We finally got around to drinking the expensive champagne I gave Tom for his birthday, with ginger coconut ice cream sandwiches

BAMJI came over and gave me can of MORTAL TERROR amongst many other presents

They bought it at the Ministry of Stories, because I’d tweeted about it right when they happened to be going to Hoxton!

There was an awful lot of debris leftover after Xmas!

Thanks to fuckyeahmeangirls.tumblr.com I finally found a mantra to write on my chalkboard that I bought at Wanda Harland

Then I went away to Waiterere for five nights over New Year’s. I forgot to take my camera, so these are the only two snaps I have.

We got really dressed up on New Year's Eve.

I prepared a lot of food that the boys cooked on the bbq

And I’ll just steal one photo from Kim’s magic ones on Facebook to sum up our holiday, which was THE BEST TIME EVER:

Group shot with bonus tackle on the back lawn.

Oh wait, there’s an ANIMATED GIF! Watch my boobs bounce around as I smile and unsmile! Thanks Jason!

Things that I have been up to lately have included achieving all the things that I set out to achieve in my last journal entry. I also bought some new jeans. Excitement. I’ll write about them on PPP sometime soon. Posting to PPP is tomorrow’s ambition.

Yesterday Anna-Jane came over, and commanded me to take off my top and bra. Then she rubbed me up and down with passionfruit oil. It felt gooooooood. In exchange, I gave her a teapot and cooked her dinner – mountains of fresh salsa, guacamole, yellow rice, roast pumpkin and quesadillas with black beans, corn & zuchini in gluten-free wraps I had to go to Common Sense Organics for as a courtesy to her and Phillip.  I am the bombdiggity cook, for serious. We also drank an awful lot of mulled wine and did some gossiping.

Today I went and picked up Lisa in Newlands and we went out to Wanda Harland in Petone to meet up with Martha and have brunch at Go Bang. I wanted to buy every single thing in the shop. I met Lucy for the first time and got to have a cuddle, and my ovaries went ping ping ping. Then because it was such nice weather and we had a new early ’00s mix cd to listen to, we drove out to Eastbourne, then went and watched Almost Famous at her house, continuing the trend we’d started with Singles on Monday.

I came up with the hilarious title for this post because I wanted to talk about the commentators on Dooce telling her that her bathroom tiling was ugly, and also the amusing comments I’ve read on sites that I hate but read anyway about insecure girls who pretend to be things that they really don’t seem to be living off trust funds, but really, I need to pee and watch ‘Hush’ so I don’t think I can be bothered getting into all of that. Instead I will say that it’s Karen’s birthday tomorrow, hurrah, and so we’re going to Roxy for dinner. Before that Miss Fur and I are going to go to the zoo, if it’s sunny! Excitement. Not that I can afford it at all, but hey, that’s what credit cards are for, right? And so I’ll sign off and ask you to leave me a comment telling me what you want me to write about in the next post. Cheers!

I also had amazing gnocchi at Baobob, great homemade pizza at Lisa Fur’s, and some of the ‘Welcome Home El’ cake that I made. More tasty things in my mouth. Oh, and I had the joy of disposing of what Sebastian wanted to eat – a rat he brought in the window at 4am and was eating under my bed. I picked it up through a plastic bag, but it was warm, and may have squirmed, and I panicked and threw it out the window. Had the rat still been alive, that would have been probably the most humane thing to do anyway. Yucky.

A much more pleasant thing that happened to me this week was on Saturday when I was at Anna Jane’s she decided that she was going to give me a foot rub, and so while she was doing that I said to Phillip “you can give me a scalp massage while she’s doing that” and he actually did. I felt like a pampered princess making ‘o’ faces fit for a tabloid magazine.

And speaking of pleasant things, after she had watch me paint over dolphins (long story) tonight, Lisa and I watched Singles for like, the millionth time. I’m still in love with Campbell Scott, even if he does resemble Campbell Smith, minus the chambray shirt. I miss Jessie. Just as well that she, like KateH, are making home visits sometime this year then, huh?

Okay, so here are the things that I want to do tomorrow:

1. Decide what I’m cooking for dinner, and go to Moore Wilson’s to purchase ingredients.
2. Go to the Warehouse to look for part of my madbad costume
3. Finish the thing I was painting tonight
4. Do two loads of laundry if it’s sunny
5. Tidy my bedroom a little.
6. Cook, mull wine, enjoy the company of my friends.

That’s all achieveable too, right? Right?

The other day I didn’t get to sleep until 11. That’s 11am. Last night I was still awake and making sandwiches around 4am. When I finally do sleep, I do so until all hours of the afternoon because I don’t have a solid reason to get up in the morning. I think I might become a phone sex operator for a service in the UK or something, I might as well use my powers for good, right?

It’s been interesting though, watching twitter falling silent as first NZ and then Australia goes to sleep. I’ve learned that listening to pod casts doesn’t help me, and that there are only so many hours one can watch Whedon shows or read young adult fiction. I’ve learned that if you know you’re going to be sneaking out afterwards  because you’re not going to sleep that you should make sure that you throw all your clothes in the one place to make finding them in the dark easier. I’ve learned that the benefit of having friends on random morning shifts or up with babies is that occasionally you’ll get to pass twitters in the night and that’ll help you not feel quite as alone as watching the sun come up by yourself tends to make you feel.

Other than the sleeping thing, and the unemployment thing, time is passing rather nicely. I mean, it would be nice to sleep properly so I could achieve more during the day, but my social circle is pleasing right now, and I have numerous events to look forward to. People are providing me with delicious food and delicious company, and that is nice. I am struggling to not spend money which is annoying now that I have so much more time in which to spend it, but I’m cooking more for myself at home which is pleasing and cost-effective. I made some killer blueberry & almond pikelets the other day, for example. And with the eating of the vegetables, and with some photos of Jon Hamm on vacation that Jezebel did warn me would tug at my ovaries came a brief day of bloodening, and I’m still glassy and stomach-crampy when I orgasm so I know that there’s another period coming soon, which means two in the space of a month, which is like, woah, that’s what normal people do. It’s somewhat pleasing to me.

I still have miles to go on tagging all my hubris entries and getting that squared away, and I need to build my portfolio site as well. But there are so many upcoming events! Flatwarmings and Word Camps and Bar Camps and Bad parties, and birthdays of Karen and so  on and so forth. Oh, and Vanuatu, in less than three weeks. That pleases me tremendously.

Sydney and FullCodePress

So, as you will no doubt recall, I tried out for Full Code Press, and didn’t make the team, so the lovely Tash suggested that I come along anyway as volunteer. It meant a flight at some ridiculous time in the morning, but also my first Koru Club experience in 15 years or so. I love Air NZ’s newish inscreen entertainment screens, especially since a flight to Sydney involves stupidly long amounts of time on the tarmac. I got to meet all the Code Blacks people that I hadn’t already met, and it made me chuckle how we all had webstock satchels.

My hotel wouldn’t let me check in early, so I went and had a walk around Darling Harbour, having breakfast, reading the (tabloidy) paper, drinking average coffee and enjoying it being t shirt weather. I went back up to the hotel and they still didn’t have a room ready, so I sat sulking in the lobby for a bit before I rode the monorail and went and got a very nice pedicure inside the mall. And then, finally, I could check in. This was my room:

The bedroom looked out into the super huge giant atrium, and the living room had these awesome nighttime views:

I like views of the city at night. I also like getting to finally have naps, and wake up and have Kate B be there, and I like going swimming with her, and then drinking wine with her and looking through her portfolio. I like that her web work is pretty much the opposite of mine, it being all advertising, all flash, whereas I am all advocating for accessibility, in theory if not quite so much in practice.

Anyways, so Kate and I sorted out our hair and jumped in a taxi to go and meet up with her friend Rob and The Mayor of Newtown, at a pub called Cooper’s that was not dissimilar to the Southern Cross with its outdoor terrace. There we compared handwriting, broke glasses and spent a very long time trying to decide where to have dinner. The Mayor’s initial suggestion of a place across the seat was vetoed by Kate on account of the bad lighting, and my criteria was that it needed to have wine. Eventually we set off for a different Vietnamese place, but it was closed, so we went to find a different one. King Street is almost exactly like K’Road, in terms of architecture and people and shops and eateries. We found a Vietnamese restaurant that may have been called Viet Maison, which had a Tiki-Bar although I didn’t see that initially, and OH MY GOD, we ate the most fantastic food – soft shell crab with garlic butter, salt & pepper eggplant, crispy pork hot pot, duck pancakes, lemongrass tofu, coconut rice, oh my god oh my god oh my god. It was so fresh and amazing. I want to eat there every day. Can’t we swap half Wellington’s Malaysian restaurants for some more Vietnamese places? Please? Kate broke another glass, and so we went to another bar called Zanzibar. The Mayor bumped into a friend of his who was in a band and owned his own tiki shack. I’d had enough wine that I was struggling to not imply that the friend was in INXS. It was 1am before I knew it. It was very much fun.

The next day was FULLCODEPRESS so I found my way down to the Conference Centre, and then into the Exhibition Centre, which is the largest building I have ever seen. It’s like, a kilometre long, at least. The FCP stuff was taking place in the middle of all the shiny technology exhibits, so it looked like this:

I hung around for a bit while they were just getting started, and was given access to the official FCP blog, and then I went and met my cousin Jacinta for lunch. She took me to a really lovely Thai place past Chinatown, and I shamed myself by being unable to finish my chili and basil tofu because it was too hot. Laaaaamer.

Another swim and a nap later, I was ready for the FCP lock-in. My role was to blog and twitter about it using the #fcp09, to talk to the nice judges, and to try and sniff out mysterious smells in the media room. It was lots of fun. I also enjoyed making Clint from Rainbow Youth dance for me. Okay, so I wasn’t really helping anyone very much at all, except in my capacity as entertainer. I still felt good about being involved. But not so good that when 2am rolled around and people started sleeping that I didn’t feel stupid for being there when I had a nice hotel across and up the road waiting for me, so I found a security guard to let me out and had a heart-pounding but brightly lit walk back.

I had wanted to get back to FCP by 11am in time for the finish, but that zopiclone, she is a hard task mistress, and it was not to be. Instead I went and ate barramundi in the sunshine. That was lovely – trying to find the FCP annoucements was not so much fun. In fact, I felt somewhat like I was in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix when he needs to get a piece of paper signed. Not a single “information” desk in all of the kilometres of building actually had the information. In fact, a couple of them gave me unformation, and sent me miles off in the wrong direction. Luckily I eventually found some of the judges, but not before I had discovered a conference called “What causes happiness?” (apparently, cupcakes for afternoon tea causes happiness) which would be a nice counterpoint to the conference I’d see the next day at the Powerhouse Museum called “Depression in older people”. Anyways. I got there just in time to hear the judging, which was really really interesting to find out what makes a site good, according to the experts. And The CodeBlacks won! Hurray us! And hurray charity, as I wrote about in my work blog. Etc. So really what I should write about now was the cat-herding required to get everyone to the Pump House for drinks, and then off to the Spanish area for dinner, but everywhere was full so we ended up in a really old Greek restaurant where the lamb was tasty but I suspect that the vegetables had been cooking probably since it opened in the olden days. People appeared to be flagging so I taxied back to my hotel, but they actually stayed up drinking until 2am. Good for them!

The next day was a nice sleep in, a leisurely checkout, then freshly squeezed juice to treat my swineflu/airconditioning flu, and i set off to the Powerhouse Museum. More walking. I was determined to get there because I’ve always been impressed with Seb Chan’s work, and I really enjoyed it, although the ghost figures it used were spooky, and there were a lot of school children loitering about. Who are they to enjoy the culture? Pah! I was hungry and their cafe was uninspiring so I walked down to the madness that is Paddy’s Market, purchased a light shade and two Chinese cigarette posters (in case we ever start an opium den in the tiki shack), and kept looking because I didn’t feel like foodcourt Asian. In fact, I walked all the way back to Darling Harbour and made my way down all the cafes, looking for a plate of fish’n chips that would be under $30. In the end, I came to a place with an adequate bbq, and beers that I guzzled down, but because I had so much time left and I didn’t want to walk anymore, i plonked my fat ass down at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe to eat a degustation plate by myself. Mmmmm. I left with a sea of brown floating around in my eyes, it was so intense. Back to my hotel to collect my bags and be collected by the shuttle driver, and into Sydney Airport. I made my way directly to the MAC counter as soon as I spotted it, where with the lady’s help I purchased a Russian Red red lipstick, but she lacked a matching liner and advised me to look at other brands. I also bought a compact of colours from their special collection that no doubt I did not need but I dearly wanted. I pulled up a seat at the bar, and strangely enough, the other NZers found me there. I watched In Bruges on the plane, and thoroughly enjoyed it, along with the pie I got. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting home to my own bed.

Cupcakes and Mini Webstock

Now I’m not sure if you remember, but after Webstock earlier this year, I made cupcakes for Tash and Ben and Mike and Deb to say thank you so much for their hard work. Well, it turned out that they liked them so much that they hired me to make 100 cupcakes for their third birthday party. Here’s a photo of how some of that looked:

Because I am slightly insane, i decided to make six flavours – vanilla w chocolate frosting, mocha, lemon & cream cheese, mixed berry & white chocolate, gluten-free chocolate and almond, and vegan pina colada. I ended up pretty much drowning in batter and my stomach hurts just thinking about the leftover icing in the fridge!

The Webstock Mini night made it all worthwhile though. It was a lovely chance to get really dressed up, hang out with my besties, try to corrupt Alan, and heckle people drunkenly via Twitter. Even if i did end up drink at the Malt House – at least they had signs up saying they were renovating the male bathrooms and were hopefully removing their incredibly misogynistic urinals.

#GOVIS09 and twicking up

That was the Tuesday. On the Wednesday I was at work until after 11pm, duvet and all, struggling to sumarise 18 months of work into one 34 minute slide presentation. According to the Twitter feedback, I did quite well (scroll down) – or here or ,here – the problems of multiple identities! Once I managed to get some proper cafenet access and had a chance to read all that, well, I was just completely blown away and may have had a little cry. I definitely had a hugely swollen head and cut’n paste the praise into an email I sent to my whole family. It was just so amazingly nice to be acknowledged for the work I do – even though, or especially because there’s like 40 days left of me working there. It’s a tiny bit of a “oh, are you sure you’re doing the right thing, SSC?” and also a “I know that I am smart and talented and can be employable”. There were drinks, and I met a stalker who brought me wine then there was dinner at Roxy. It was tasty and entertaining, even if I had to talk to Australians for ages. Oh god the pain of it all!

The next day at the conference, I felt much much more secure and safe and smug, and more people wanted to talk to me. I even started calling myself a ‘social media expert’ but you must believe that I was saying it as if I was saying “I’m Rick James, Bitch!” Nat’s closing speech was of course my favourite of them all since I missed Matt’s but his was very highly regarded too. It was fun. I learnt things.

And then there were drinks. And more drinks. And a lot of fish on sticks, and hot roast beef sandwiches, and homemade pistachio ice cream, and more drinks, And then I ended up going to Hummingbird for the Tweet Up, and then I went to China Delight for dinner with the Toms and some new friends, and then we went to Hummingbird for a drink or two more. Alisa left my old work to manage the bar there so it was nice to catch up with her.

My weekend and the future

There has been a lot of sleeping and trying to stay warm. There has been feasts at Siem Reap. There’s been a lot of twitter time. There’s been a lot of duveting. That’s really about it. Tomorrow I go for an eye example, since glasses are still subsidised at work. Then on Tuesday I’m going to EAP to plan for the future. After that, well, who knows? I could use some quiet times but I’m not seeing a whole lot of that happening any time soon. I am more confident about being hireable based on GOVIS though. Career highlights are nice.

Sleeping and so forth

It is odd to have bedded two people in such a short space of time, (although my record is still 3 in two weeks in 2003) because of the contrast between the old and the new. It’s also redonkulous that I’ve bitched and moaned about wanting to be able to actually have sleepovers, but when it comes down to it, I had to leave a warm bed and go out into the cold cold night because of how I am physically incapable of sleeping without taking zopiclone. Doing a line-by-line comparison would be amusing for me but also totally totally inappropriate, so I will just leave the public exposure of private things to the contrast between my necklaces clacking together as my head moved back and forth, and the moment of having a lover gently unclasp my necklace, which seems to be even more of an intimate act.

That made the rest of the week a little more dealable-with-able, along with sending a series of “this is why I am angry with you” emails to a series of people. And so on Friday morning I found myself up before 7am, with the shuttle picking me up at 7.20am. Golly gee, that was an early morning. Air NZ has gone all super high tech at the airport, where you check yourself in at a kiosk, print your own sticker for your bag, and just biff it on the conveyor-belt yourself. At this stage I would like to mention that the Caltex in the Newtown shops still sends an attendant out to pump your gas for you. What is happening to service in the rest of the world? Won’t someone please think of the children? Anyways. I had heaps of time so I got a coffee from Fuel and read the paper, but if I’d known that they wouldn’t give me a stamp for the coffee, I would have gone to Wishbone.

The flight itself was uneventful, and touching down in Tauranga was pretty. As soon as my taxi driver found out that I’d never been to Tauranga before, he proceeded to narrate everything, which is what I hoped for. He gave me so much information that I was constantly able to pull it out over the weekend and impress Kat & Kane, or at least make them start calling the taxi driver my boyfriend. He answered my questions about how much a taxi to the Mount would be, pointed out where the buses went from, explained that the Strand went off on Saturday nights (his words) and lifted my suitcase out of the car for me. The reception staff at the hotel were just as friendly and nice, finding me a room that was available then rather than making me wait, and asking when I’d like my complimentary drink delivered. My room on the fifth floor was absolutely lovely:

Devonport St is the main shopping street in Tauranga, apparently, so there were lots of places around. There were also lots of vacant shops, but mostly it was a pleasant little high street full of chain stores. A block over and down I found a little plaza area, and decided to eat at Bravo because they had lots of sunny outdoor tables. I had mushrooms on toast with super crispy bacon and enjoyed the sunshine. I found the city art gallery and marvelled at the collection of NZ paintings that BNZ bought during 1982-1987 before they went bankcrupt or whatever, and talked to the attendant about how patronage of the arts will no doubt suffer in this current R-Word climate. After that, I strolled around a bit more before heading back to the hotel for a lovely nap on the huge big bed. Even Damian Christie recommends the hotel, and that says a lot.

Then it was KAT TIME! She came to meet me at the hotel and I hugged her so hard I almost went all Mice & Men on her. I offered to buy her a pedicure, so we went off in search of a place that would take us. The first place we tried right across the road was busy, but the second one we found (there are nail salons EVERYWHERE in Tauranga, it’s a little weird) the woman said she could do us both at once. Oooer. So we clambered up into the massaging chairs and soaked our feet while she slid back and forth between us. I know we didn’t have appointments, but she was really rushed because as we discovered she had another client coming in, and I just don’t think we got a very good deal. I was really disappointed that we didn’t get the dead skin razored off our feet, or any kind of massage (in fact, she only rubbed lotion into one of my feet!) and the nail polish job was patchy, and since my toenails are unnaturally thick, I always put polish on their edge, but she didn’t. For $48 each, I thought it was seriously lacking (although looking at their site now, what they list is what we got). Still, I bought some bright yellow nail polish as well, and it was relaxing to have the soak and the electric massage, and that’s what I was after. Perhaps I was spoiled by my only other pedicure experience in New York. And in fact, looking at prices of other places on the net right now, maybe that’s pretty standard or actually fairly cheap. Ahh well.

So yes, anyway, Saturday. They picked me up and we went to Grindz on First Avenue for breakfast after we flagged walking up to Fifth for some sort of market. They said that the staff at Grindz can have bad attitudes, but my french toast and coffee were great, even if the toast was more eggy than I personally prefer. Plus I love that Grindz has a whole dedicated playroom for kids to keep them out of my ears. We did some shop-browsing, then jumped on a bus over to the Mount. Kane wanted to go to a particular op shop, so we went to the “bad” part of the Mt Manganui shops. It all seemed a bit sad and shut down. I tried on a thousand pairs of sunglasses, but I still can’t find any I like as much as the glasses I wear these days which I’ve had since 1999 (May 1, 1999 to be exact! Which was also the first day I told someone to their face that I loved them is how I know that for a fact) and they’re all scratched up to hell. Eventually we got to go and plonk our asses down on the beach and watch a family learn to surf. I couldn’t help but cheer every time any of them caught a wave, especially the 10 year old girl. Kat also made me laugh and cheer and clap by performing the chicken dance from Arrested Development for me and also for Lisa, except that it was too high-res to mms to her. But here it is for you. Turn your head!

And if that video doesn’t make you happy, then you are officially (OFFICIALLY!) the lamest person on the face of the planet. Now, when I twitted that I was going to Tauranga, I asked people what I should do. Almost everyone who replied told me I should go for a walk up the Mount. Here is a picture of the Mount.

Back at the hotel (my room was apparently aproximately the size of their house) there was more napping (I LOVE napping with people, I could totally be friends with Bret and Jermaine) and many episodes of The Simpsons before we strolled off to the fish dock for dinner.

When I woke up to my alarm, I looked at the time on the alarm clock that I’d also adjusted, and realised that MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A BITCH my cellphone had ALSO changed its time, and there was 25 minutes until my plane left. I grabbed all of my shit and rang a cab and dropped off my key. After waiting ten minutes for my taxi to show up, the driver tried calling the airport for me, but the flight was already gone. At the airport they offered to put me on the next flight to Auckland, but it was only going to save me $20 or so and I would have had to wait around there too, so I decided that I’d just take the next flight to Wellington – at a cost of $370 extra. I waved my arms in pretendish-fiero when I found out that at least I’d get air points for that flight so that I wouldn’t cry. I took my complimentary Herald On Sunday to a picnic table outside and waited three hours for my flight, really regretting not having taken the time to call the airport before leaving the hotel so that I could have showered and had a decent coffee and breakfast in town. Sigh. And then the fucking shuttle in Wellington went all the way around Oriental Bay and then back into Newtown while I sat there fuming and just wanting to be home and clean and with my kitty. Grrr. Bad way to end a holiday but oh man, it was a glorious time, so chilled out, relaxed and pampery. It was exactly what I needed and the perfect time to have it too. I will go back.

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.

This is one of Jo’s sneaky readers who has sneaky access and did warn Jo that she might post. So, uh, I guess I’m not so sneaky? Or I’m a very very stupid sneak. Sneaker. I can’t keep a sneakret.

Etc.

ANYYYYWHO, last night I attended the 3-month anniversary of prettyprettypretty.com. There were lovely cupcakes that looked like boobs, pink wafers, pink and purple drinks, streamers, Sebastian, Jelly beans… basically so much sugar and food colouring that I may not sleep for days.

Everyone had a smashing time. Though I’m not of the girliest nature, I did use the 4 step Mary Kay hand delightfulnator which made my hands feel like they’ve never worked an honest day in their life. Though probably the girliest thing I did was giggle inanely about how prettyprettypretty Eddie Vedder is.

I came away from the night right before the karaoke… and took with me a lovely gift box with a bath bomb cupcake in it which I might feed to my flatmate if she misbehaves and a CD full of groovy tunes. AND I got a purple bottle of straightening goo from sunsilk which I have used today. Not sure at this stage how much difference it has made because I didn’t use a straightener (didn’t want to goo it up and I avoid that on a Sunday… it’s sinful and Jesus is watching).. I just used a hairdryer. To be honest, at this point, my hair feels no different but the true test will be this evening. If I have rogue curls then I’ll declare it a bust.

…

Sorry Jo. I couldn’t resist.

Case in point – the lovely Amy – formerly a Wellingtonista PAG and now a blogger in her own right – and I have started a new website about girlie things. We’ve decided to have Make(Up/Over/Under) Mondays as well when we try out new beauty products, so you should come and play with us.

In very very very exciting news, Kat and Kane are coming down on Thursday night, and we’re going to the wrestling to see “New Zealand’s Sexist Masked Man” on Friday night. I can’t wait to see them again, it’s been far too long. And I have a backlog of ‘Rock of Love’ episodes to watch with Kat, not to mention the finale tonight. Exciting! When Season II starts, I’m going to recap it like I did ‘Rockstar’. That’s how much I love it.

But I don’t love it as much as I love ‘My So-Called Life’, which I have been devouring eagerly in the privacy of my own bedroom. It still makes me cry because I can remember how strongly I identified with Angela. And how hot is Jordan Catilano? Daaaaaaaaamn! It makes sense to me now. I was watching TV the other day and decided to be mean to Smoo, so I was all po-faced “I need to tell you something” and he was like blanched, and I was like “I think I’m kind of obsessed with 30 Seconds to Mars videos” and he was very relieved and I laughed and laughed. Anyways. What I am so loving about MSCL right now is the mcguffin that is Tino. Where did Rayanne get the Chinese food from? Tino. How did they know about the Buffalo Tom (so good!) gig? Tino. Etc. And I love that you never ever actually see him.

Today I stayed at home because I have a horrible head cold, and I got my work emailed home to me, but then I fell asleep on the couch. Perhaps I’ll do some later. Right now there is a big pot of curry bubbling on the stove, but Smoo is at work, and George doesn’t want any because he’s on a health kick. That’s okay, that’s what the big freezer is for!

What else did I want to talk about? We had a wine quiz on Friday that went very well, and a Newtown pub crawl on Saturday that was low-key, but fun as well. Then dinner with the family at the Med Warehouse on Sunday. The service was atrocious, the pizza was good. There’s wrestling coming up, and Webstock Mini (yay!), and hmm, I dunno, other stuff. I need to get more work done at work, but I am keeping on top of life in general. And that is a good thing.

And now I gotta go, cos Tino’s coming over to bring me a panda.

But there was no time to fume. The Quadrant’s lobby was stark white and filled with scented candles. I rolled my bag down the long white walkway through the bar area and into a lift that had an embedded TV screen playing Juice. My room was tiny but functional. I discovered to my perverse joy later that I could sit on the toilet, blowdry my hair, drink vodka and watch TV all at the same time. What more could anyone want? A quick shower later, I was in a corporate cab from the Hyatt next door on my way to Kingsland. The sun was setting and reflected in all the shiny new architecture along Symonds Street. It was a beautiful view, but holy fuck, $18 for that distance? That amount would have got me to Greenlane in the olden days!

I grabbed two bottles of wine from Weta Wines, pleased it was still there and still open, and headed to Canton. There were still people at the table I’d booked (bastards!) so I went and stood on the street outside. Bopha came up and left to get cash and wine. Amy & Ross came along and left to get wine. Then came Martina and Heather. Robyn and Heather’s b/f Ben eventually completed our party, since Clay and Nige flaked.

I had been salivating over the prospect of dinner at Canton since I booked my tickets up to Auckland, and while the large group and noise of the place made converastion difficult, the food didn’t disappoint. As usual, I was appointed/appointed myself chief orderer, so with some deference to Martina’s vegetarianism, we had: black bean hapuku, sweet & sour pork, sizzling venison with ginger & spring onions, crispy roast pork, special black chilli chicken, sizzling vegetables and egg noodles with fried veges. YUM! Two people took doggie bags home, and with tea and dim sum and rice and corkage, we each paid $19.25. So good!

Afterwards we were going to go to Ruby for more drinks, but it was too loud, and so we settled on the Kingslander for a couple more bottles of wine. There were television screens EVERYWHERE, it was most distracting. But good to be able to converse. I like my friends. I cabbed back to the hotel eventually, and debated ordering porn from the in-house video system, just because I could, but it was $17.95 per movie, so I settled for watching Wild On: Naked instead. Genius.

The next morning, I set my alarm for 10.30 so I could wake up to meet Heather who was coming to the hotel at 11. We discovered that breakfast stopped being served at 10am, so tragedy of tragedies, we had to go straight for bubbly and cheese. As we sat in the sunny courtyard and I started to burn, we heard someone playing an electric guitar, and the sound bounced off the building next door. Given that Heather’d spotted John Toogood and Phil Knight in the lobby, we were happy to think that it was Shihad playing in our hotel, but it sounded pretty terrible, so maybe it was Grinspoon instead, who were due to be opening for Muse that night.

Once the sun got to be a bit too much, we tried to pay our bill, which took forever (the staff were friendly but not highly competant), and we got changed and went into the spa. Hurray! Yeah, a spa on a hot day after drinking caffiene and alcohol might not be the smartest idea ever, but it was loooooooovely. And then it was quite obviously time for lunch, so we strolled down to the Art Gallery, hoping to have lunch there, but found it was shut. Luckily Rueben at the New Art Gallery was open, so we parked ourselves on one of the balconies there, I had an average lamb salad, Heather had amazing french toast, and we had a totally unnecessary but very happy bottle of Deutz as well. Mmmmmm indulgence! And then just to show that we’re not totally cultureless, we went around the art gallery too. Upstairs was an exhibition called Making Worlds, which was really bloody cool. They had a seven minute animation loop called “City Glow” going on in a darkened room, which I totally could have watched all day. Although it made me feel far too Jessica Simpsony lame and pointless when I saw it was produced by Takashi Murakami and I was like “He did those brightly coloured Louis Vittion prints!”. Like I need to know that.

Eventually Heather and I parted company, and I went back to the hotel for naps and snacks, before KateH came to pick me up in the evening. We went to her beautiful house which is down by the water, and had a few drinks while we waited for the Checks and Grinspoon to get off the stage. Drive-thru burgers from Wendy’s ensured that our timing was perfect to actually get a park by the Waitakere Stadium, and we’d only missed two of Muse’s songs. We’re both so old now that we didn’t mind that at all. When did I stop queuing for things hours before they began? Was it around the same time that my knees started to go? But anyways, the gig was AMAZING. So good. When they played ‘Hysteria’, I had an auralgasm of the kind I hadn’t experienced since Dimmer. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! Totally matched up to my dirty dream that featured it prominently in it. And we saw Amanda and Darren, which was nice, and left when they turned on the lights. And then we were naughty and had an after-hours spa back at the hotel, which was fantastic for sore feet and knees, especially since it was merely lukewarm. Best Friday EVER!

The next morning was Saturday, and I slept in, loving the bed, before I decided it was time to drag my ass out into the streets. I strolled down to Gloria to have breakfast, where my French toast wasn’t as good as Heather’s, but the coffees were nice and I read the paper cover to cover. Then I got on the link bus to go to the museum, but I started feeling all nostalgic and weird, because of all the memories of the route (which are detailed in ‘Link’ in 101 Stories that I want to tell you of course) and so I decided to just stay on the bus and go all the way around the city. Well, I got off briefly in Ponsonby to buy vodka and bread, but you know what I mean.

Finally it was time for me to meet Martina and David and also Karl at the Queen Street bus stop to go to the Lynfield YMCA for the wrestling. Oh yes. I went west, life is peaceful there. I went west, people had terrible hair. The ride on the 257 was pretty full of nostalgia too, given the two flats I lived in on/off Dominion Road. It was also interesting hearing other people’s stories, like where they lost their virginities. And drinking vodka from a ginger ale bottle made me feel like a fourteen year old again, and who doesn’t like that? We got to Lynfield with some time to spare, so we hunted out food for the boys, and I sang the YMCA song a lot with the actions, and we took this photo in front of the vets. And now I might just revert into a photo montage to sum up the awesomeness of the wrestling, and my brand new boyfriend with a spectacular ginger mullet.

After a cold long wait for the bus, we all started falling asleep on the back seat. Nevertheless, Martina and David came back to my hotel room for a while, and helped me polish off the remaining food and vodka, and I stayed up late watching E! again. Good times.

On Sunday I was expecting to have brunch with Bopha and Clayton, but she was stuck out west somewhere, and Clayton made other plans, so after checking out at 12 and leaving my suitcase with reception, I returned to Gloria to have a very very long breakfast by myself with the Sunday Star Times. Finally it was getting near time to find myself an airport bus, so I went to get my suitcase, and I asked them where the airport bus stop was, and they told me down on Symonds Street. So I rolled my case up to a stop in the hot hot sun, but couldn’t find any markings on it to indicate that the airport bus might stop there. I rang Maxx, and they gave me the number for the airport bus company, and I couldn’t find a human, but it did mention the route, listing the Hyatt which was right next to the Quadrant, so disgruntledly I rolled back up to the Hyatt, and the doorman told me the stop was right in front of the Quadrant. Cheers clever desk staff! So I was hot and stinky and smelly then, and worried that I might not make it to the airport in time, when a shuttle pulled up in front of me and told me he’d drive me to the airport for $15, the same as the bus, since he was going that way anyway. Yay! That shuttle totally redeemed the shuttle in. And so that was the end of my time in Auckland. Very good fun indeed.

• 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!

Karen’s Dhal

First, assemble your ingredients:

I like to use as many vegetables as possible at once. It makes me feel better when I eat cheese for dinner for the rest of the week!

Finely dice a couple of onions, some garlic and a thumb-sized bit of ginger, and fry with some mustard seeds and garam masala. Add in a 2 cans of tomatoes, and 2 cups of red lentils, and a can of coconut cream.

In this picture, you can see I’m using one cup of red lentils and one cup of yellow lentils. I’m still not sure how I feel about this variation though

Bring to the boil, then turn down and simmer for around half an hour, adding water or stock as needed to keep it soupy, then add some almond pieces and chopped fresh coriander. You can also add canned chickpeas, diced carrots, celery, kumara, and anything else that strikes your fancy. Enjoy!

And if real Chinese people from China like it, it must be good, authentic, and tasty, right? I decided to test it out for myself, having previously only tried takeaways that suffered from long delays before we got to eat them, which is hardly a sporting chance.

So after the Beckon VIP night, I grabbed my constant restaurant buddy/sister Karen, as well as the Wellingtonista’s Hadyn and the delightful Amy and set out to give it a go.

The menu is long – not cripplingly so, but enough that it’s easy to select one of each animal with different kinds of sauce. Collaborative ordering had us getting roast duck, Orange Beef, fish fillets with spicy sauce and chicken with ginger and spring onions, as well as rice, tea, vegetarian wontons and spring rolls, two Chinese beers and a cranberry juice.

I can’t say enough good things about the lovely woman who was serving us. She was friendly, helpful and really genuine-seeming. Lisa says that she knows her frequent customers’ names, and makes assumptions about their relationships. Brilliant. I love that in a place.

The atmosphere was fairly standard, pretty bland but that’s what you can expect.

So that leaves the food. How was it?

Well, I should probably say I have very Western tastes when it comes to Chinese food. I might avoid ordering Butter Chicken in Indian restaurants, but I do love me some Sweet’n Sour Pork. Therefore I was very very happy with the Orange Beef, which was battered and deep fried, served with a tangy sauce flecked with diced chillies, and holy crap, it was good. What appeared on first glance to be cellophane turned out to be shredded deep-fried spinach, and that was very very tasty too.

The filling in the vegetarian wontons was disappointing – I couldn’t tell if it was egg or tofu, but either way, it wasn’t my most favourite thing ever, but the spring rolls were crispy and yum.

The roast duck was exactly as it sounds – a plate of chunks of roast duck with crispy skin, served on canned pineapple. One of these days, I’m going to invent a boneless duck, because I am incredibly lazy. Or perhaps I’ll go back to Beijing Restaurant in Newtown for their shredded duck pancakes. You know, one or the other, whichever seems easiest at the time.

Meanwhile the fish and the chicken were quite bland, and suffered from too much cornflour goop sauce, while the rice was mushy and seemed more Japanese than Chinese.

If I went back, which I probably would, based on the awesomeness of the beef and the spring rolls, and how we hardly even had to turn over the lid of our tea pot to get more hot water (there’s a trick for you!), I would stick to the classic Westernised dishes and would no doubt be rewarded for that.

The bill came to $101.50 which was very reasonable, given that we couldn’t finish all the food.

On Monday night we had a flat dinner and I made a fucking awesome roast beef. Then because Bart had found a video that his social group had traded around themselves in 1996, I undid all the feminist thinking that I’d been doing since a post by Tze Ming on Public Address made me realise that I need to do more to reinforce feminist thought – so I bought Bitch magazine – by watching German porn with the boys while Lani did the dishes. It was amusing but also really sad. There was a woman dancing in the video who had breast implants the size of her head, and she just looked like a freak. I know that there are some porn stars who make a lot of money and have a lot of power in the industry, but this woman didn’t seem to be one of them. She was just an object of ridicule and that made me really sad.

On a more upbeat note, Bowling League on Tuesdays is still fun. Surprisingly, I don’t think that the Bowlingtonista are going to win the league, but damn we’re pretty. And it’s so much fun to get to hang out with BFF Martha while the men do the hard work.

On Wednesday I went to a wine night at the boatshed called ‘Meet Your Maker’. There were stalls there from various “unique and boutique” winemakers from the Wairarapa, and everything was free to try. I took a series of very detailed notes that included the following dialouge about a Hudson Sav:

Me: it tastes like silver in the mouth
Daddy: No it doesn’t.
Me: Well I think it tastes Metallicy, and Nothing Else Matters.

On Friday night I went home after work and napped on the couch, before driving in to town to pick up Miss Lisa and Karen, and see Jimmy and Miss Jessie at Dimmer. It didn’t feel quite as sexylicious as last time, but when they played the long, thrusting ‘Seed’ I still wanted to touch myself inappropriately, but settled for stroking myself behind my ears, as that is somewhat less inappropriate.

Saturday was a very amusing night. I had drinks at home with Lani and her friend Nikki who is staying, and then we went to a party in Kelburn. Nikki and I amused ourselves taking photos with someone else’s camera that had be left lying on the TV. Then I spilt red wine on the carpet so we ran away and I watched very guiltily as someone else cleaned it up. I am not normally the type of person who doesn’t clean up after themselves, but I was all like “they’ve got a white carpet! It’s their fault! Everyone always spills stuff on MY carpet…” So of course I was unimpressed with myself for that crappy attitude, and when I found myself in a bathroom queue with the girl who’d cleaned it up I apologised and confessed. She came up to me later to say it was awesome of me to confess, and so Nikki and Lani decided that she was a lesbian and was totally in to me. I was like “ummm, I don’t get that vibe at all”, but I think we all know that I have little to no female gaydar. I still went and tried to talk to her later (because if she was a lesbian obviously she’d fancy me, right?) but I was saved from myself by the need to take photos with someone dressed as a reindeer. Then we went into town, and despite all my protestations, I found myself at Coyote. Shudder. I hate Courtenay Place on weekend nights, I really do. The music was bad, the crowd was bad, and yet I stayed and constantly had a drink in my hand, and I’m not sure how that happened. At one stage a guy came up to me and was all “oh, you are so beautiful, can I get a kiss?” and I was like huh? But I gave him a kiss on the cheek, and he turned his head and asked for another one, so I did, but then he was going to go for a pash, and I was like “hey buddy, you know nothing about me! You don’t know my hobbies or my interests, how can you want to kiss me?” and he was like “what?” and I was all “I mean, for all you know, I could be a member of the Hitler Youth” and he was like “I don’t know what that is” and I was like “I’m a white supremicist!” and he ran away and I laughed and laughed and laughed. And felt like Lily Allen. “I’ve got herpes!” Because after all, my Matariki resolution (along with doing something that will earn me a slow clap) is to wake up with someone and want them to be there, and sifty guys in sifty bars will not help me accomplish that. After that we finally left Coyote for the best kebabs EVAH from Hadi Gari, and then people were going to queue to get into GoGo and I was like “umm, nahuh, there is no way I’m going to wait to get into that crappy place” so I went home with Lani.

Yesterday I got up half an hour before my family were due for an afternoon tea to break in my cake-plate. It was so very civilised! I provided mini afghans and feta & spinach savouries, Mummy & Daddy baked mini scones and brought cream & jam, Anji brought coffee and shortbread, and Karen made chicken, almond and watercress sandwiches. We used fancy china and a good time was had by all. And we also finalised our plans to go to Rarotonga for Daddy’s 60th birthday and now Mum’s booked the flights. Because my job doesn’t finish until June 29, I’m going a week later than them all, and am consequently paying significantly more for the flights, damn it all. But still, Rarotonga, hurrah! We’re hopefully renting a four-bedroom house with a pool as well, so that should be nice.

Tonight instead of doing the whole flat dinner thing, which I really can’t afford to produce any more, I’m just going to make dessert crepes so we can eat the maple syrup that Lani brought back from Canadia. What’s that all aboot eh?

Aha ha ha ha ha. Yes, that’s right, I created a whole Country Club theme just so that I could tell you that very lame joke.

But before there was Brazil there was driving out to the airport in the crazy wind to pick up KateH on Friday night, and then cooking her rare sirloin steak sandwiches in fresh french bread with tamarillo chutney and caramalised onions, and then being picked up by our (and everyone’s!) chauffer for the night, the everylovely Miss Lisa who took us to San Fran to see Sam Flynn Scott play with Lawrence Arabia. They sounded good, but I was tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired and coming down with a nasty sore throat and cough. Katie meanwhile had enough energy to get up and sing on stage.

The next morning she and I went and had brunch at Elements before picking up more party supplies, and she vacuumed while I made Brazilian rice and finished off the feijoada. Then we jumped on my bed (Smoo declined our invitation to join us – wtf?) to listen to the Wellingtonista on Public Address Radio, which you can download here and I giggled at the fact that I got bleeped once but I mostly sounded fairly articulate. The mp3′s not online yet, but I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up. I think that we sounded like pretty smart, on-to-it people, and that’s good, because that’s who we are. And I sounded less nasally and cackly than I expected to.

After that it was nap time before finishing off preparations and heading off to pick up Lisa and Jimmy. I was planning on dressing up all fancy in my hott green dress, and fishnet stockings, and my 4.5 inch wedges, but by the time I’d found my suspenders I’d lost my stockings, and given how low cut the dress is, I thought it was also a bit short (boobs or legs, not both, after all. Not that I’d normally go for legs, until I get to the bit where I write about my day today) so I wore jeans underneath, and didn’t risk breaking my ankle on my shoes. One day I’ll find an occasion to actually wear them. Honest. Maybe when I act out a Tori Amos lyric with someone sometime – “he liked my shoes / I kept them on”. Speaking of Tori Amos, I discovered that someone most unexpected is really in to her music, but I will keep his secret. I was very very surprised though. Anyways.

Brazil turned out to be really good. Caipirinhias are a fantastic drink, especially mixed with copious quantities of cerveza. Rice’n beans is tasty, and Jimmy had made some fantastic sweets that went along with his fact that Nestle stole all the cocoa in Brazil in the 1940s and imported mass amounts of condensed milk instead. Who knew that Nestle could be so tasty and so evil at the same time (well, me, since I’m currently writign a piece on Fair Trade – and calling it Free Trade 70% of the time. Whoops)? I had bought planes, trains & automobile lollies to illustrate my facts about Brazil’s capital Brasilia having been laid out in the shape of an aeroplane and built from scratch in 1960, and also the fact that someone else snaffled, that 40% of Brazilian cars run on ethanol made from corn. I also found tasty ranch-flavoured corn kernels in the scoopermarket bins that went with the theme very well. We didn’t get around to eating fried bananas, but I did scoop out a pineapple that Karen had brought along and serve communal pina coladas in it. In fact, as the night wore on – and oh lordy, did it wear on – many, many more cocktails were served up in that same pineapple and delivered to the boys who were outside playing “soccer” and to the girls sitting civilly on the couches using many many words starting with ‘C’ for some reason. I tried to pressure people into joining the Wellingtonista Bowling League, and since everyone except Barbara, Jack and Nicole were Country Club veterans, there were many facts to be shared. Blair showed up with his iPod so we could listen to CSS and Sepultura instead of our very inauthentic attempts at Brazillian music (One Million Dollars), but no sambaing was done.

Instead the night wound down around 4am with some highly amusing and rather disturbing antics that involved a lot of mocking, bluff-calling and toe-sucking. When are people going to learn that I will always call their bluff? And when I laugh at changes in morality, I am taking the piss out of myself, as I watch myself acting out in jest parts of actions that I’d used in previous lifetimes but then in a serious capacity. This is what happened in that bathroom. This is what happened after the Placebo concert. This is what happened when you so conveniently happened to leave your laptop at my apartment and came back to pick it up at 3am. This is what happened when the boy I was hooking up with at the wedding wouldn’t come home with me so I decided to substitute you instead. And it makes me laugh, and I will always, always go for the cheap laugh.

Sunday was very slow. I went for coffees and the paper and sat and read it on the front steps in the sun while the house was cleaned up behind me, hurrah! Brad came over and did the dishes on Monday as well, so it was like, easiest party evah! We watched a million episodes of The Simpsons off the hard drive and it made me remember how horrible the time around New Year’s was for me. Shirley came down visiting from Palmy in the evening, and we all went and had dinner at Cambodinia in Kilbernie (it’s Cambodian, in case you couldn’t tell), because I wanted something more interesting than the very bland Nahkon Thai in Hataitai. Then we played DVD Cluedo and I went and finished reading the Anthony McCarthen book that I think is called The Death of a Superhero but I’m not entirely sure. If only there was some system of tubes that I could type into that could deliverme the answer…

On Monday I was still coughing up my lungs – assuming that my lungs were dry like wheatbix, so I didn’t go to work. Instead I lay on the couch and napped on and off and moaned with sickness. Brad came home and cooked us dinner and I thought about breaking Katie’s legs so she couldn’t leave but instead I took her to the airport. Today to work I wore my new green dress from Torrid with my new black opaque tights and boots. The dress is, like all my torrid dresses, too short to wear over bare legs (but not bear legs), but I thought it would be fine with the tights since there was no chance of my vajayjay showing. I was super paranoid about the dress coming up, and the tights rolling down – although being footless helped them keep their crotch in the right place – but I like the way it made it look like I had legs a million years long as I strode purposefully down Lambton Quay to meet Jessie for lunch at Kapai. We walked down to the waterfront and sat and shot the shit, and watched the Water Whirler whirl. Good times. Tomorrow I have the day off, hurrah!

Luckily I have a darling friend who carries her camera almost everywhere with her, so I can steal her photos and say “this is what I was doing around midnight on Friday night”:
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Yes, that’s right, I was encouraging boys to jump off the plank with me. Lisa also took a photo of me, but come on, you think I’m going to put a photo of me in my togs online when it’s quite possibly the least flattering but most awesome shot ever? I even jumped off the plank a second time in order to facilitate that photo, because it turned out the tide was high enough that the bottom rung of the ladder was under water so I could actually climb out and back up again. Lisa made a new friend while Dyl and I swam, in the form of some random emo guy who wandered down to the lower dock where she was and stood there smoking cigarettes, it was a little strange.

Earlier we’d been at Tupelo, and there was a boy who rubbed me up the wrong way with some of his comments about how when he found out a guy at his work was gay he was very not keen to go to the bathroom at the same time. I was like “Do you think I’m hitting on you right now?” and he was like “Huh?” and I was like, “well, I like boys, so obviously I want to fuck you right now, right?” and my friend started cracking up because he could see that his friend was going to dig himself deeper and deeper. I was kind of bored, so I really dived right in with the logic. He tried to excuse himself with a “but in the bathroom there are penises” and I was all “well I like girls but when I’m at the gym, I’m not all “oooh I can see your vagina, I am so aroused right now”" and he tried the “well after I found out I still talked to him, I still invited him to parties” and I was like “OH MY GOD! i take it all back. You found out he was gay and yet you still treated him like a human being. You deserve a fucking medal, buddy”. Then Dave started playing porn on his laptop and when I got up, I leant on the far end of the table, and the other end came flying up and beer went all over his lap, and so he ran away. I would feel worse about it, because I really really hadn’t meant to spill the beer – but the total and utter glee and smiles on Lisa’s face when she came into the bathroom to high-five me made me so happy that I don’t feel as bad about it as I should. My other lesson from the night is that you shouldn’t let the new waitress at Harem try to make you cocktails because they will taste like Raro.

I was going to make Saturday Jo Day, but then I had leftover pizza to eat from Wednesday and Scar tissue to read (I’m no RHCP fan, but you know how I do so love the rockstar bio), so I didn’t go out for brunch. Instead, because Lani’s golf game got cancelled, I went out to PIRATE MINI GOLF with her since it was such a gorgeous day. We thought about waking up Smoo to make him come with us, but I don’t think he would have appreciated that. I ended up beating Lani by two points, because I got a hole-in-one on the second-to-last hole which she took six to get. Hurrah! I took lots of photos, but on my disposable camera, which is weeeeeeeeeeeeird because you can’t see what you’re doing! It’s like, all random luck! Strange! It was like using a rotary telephone. Then we went to Kaizen at Pataka Museum for coffee, and planned out our herb garden. But it was so fucking hot that we went to Lyall Bay instead of the garden centre, and I floated on the very very calm ocean until I touched a jellyfish and felt icky.

Back at home we decided to have a blind tasting session of the four kinds of Coruba Gold RTDs that I’d received a coupon for in the mail (see, there are some rewards for suggesting the most awesome Pirate Party that $50,000 would buy even if you didn’t get anyone to vote for it). The ginger ale was the most drinkable, and the energy drink was disguuuuuuuuuusting. But we wrote very wanky wine-style notes on each, which I’d replicate here if it didn’t involve getting up to find the piece of paper. As Lani got drunker, she became more and more convinced that Coruba should hire us to work for them. She also became more and more Adam Ant that we needed to play Cluedo. Since there were only two of us, because we’d ascertained that Smoo wasn’t actually still sleeping, we couldkn’t play her new video version, but at her insistence I slipped the magnetic travel version into my handbag when we set off for a party on Webb st her workmate was having.

I didn’t find the party very interesting, but there was very tasty caramel slice. Lani tried to pressgang everyone into playing Cluedo, and eventually we found a couple of willing Americans. Turns out it was Mrs. Peacock in the lounge with the dagger. Who knew? Lani did. We left the party, and debated going to Havana, but decided that what we really wanted to do was go home and have an encore of dinner (spaghetti with garlic, chilli and parsley) and watch Buffy. I should stress that it was her idea, not mine!

Today I woke up at 10.30am and spent two hours finishing off Scar Tissue before heading in to town for a slightly disappointing brunch at Ernesto consisting of fennel & carrot gluten-free toast, hash browns, bacon, mushrooms and black beans. I had to ask for butter for the toast, the hash browns were a little gluggy and the beans weren’t all that warm, but the coffee was great. I know they can do better, so hopefully it was just a once-off kitchen lapse. Then I went to Plastic Box (heh) for crates to tidy up our hallway with, and ended up spending $100 on a CD rack. But it is the KING of CD racks, let me assure you. It’s more like a full-on bookshelf. All my CDs will fit on it, and they’ll look all pretty and neat rahter than being scattered around in various vessels as they are now, and there’s room to grow, and oh, I just know that if my CDs are all neat and ordered and arranged to perfection then people will like me better and I will regain the control over my life that I felt has slipped a bit this week. And so of course then I went to Real Groovy to spend some vouchers. I was very very tempted to buy The Gossip, partly because of the awesomeness of the cover artwork, and partly because I like to think that I look like Beth Ditto does in the ‘Standing in the way of control’ video when I’m dancing, although I’m sure I don’t. But in the end, I got what I’d gone in for – the new Bloc Party, and the Cold War Kids, and also I found a really cheap American Music Club, all on CD and not vinyl, for a change. And I asked at the counter after the new Arcade Fire, and they told me how awesome it was and then ran all over the shop trying to find it, and eventually they did, and I was like, hurrah!

I was supposed to go to the garden centre with Lani then, but I felt very very Uggggggggh all of a sudden, so I ran (drove) to the ocean instead to try and shake it out. Lyall Bay was very shallow today, but the waves were big (and filled with black-legged jellyfish, dammit) so I got some good dunks. Then I floated for a while and eventually realised I was out of my depth and paniced briefly, and swam against the current back to where I could stand. That actually made me happy, that the survival instinct still kicked in even though the noise in my head was rising up and up and up and I don’t know why. I mean yes, I’m mango like crazy so surely I will bleed soon, and there’d been an unsettling email thing that’s been all sorted out now, and I realised that I hadn’t taken my pill, but bleh, not fun. So it was nice to come home and sit on the front steps with Lani and trim back old herbs and hope that they’ll grow and grow and grow. We’ve talked about starting a worm farm too. I kind of wonder why she’s so happy to make so many plans with me, like what do I have to offer her as a friend, and I’m thinking that about other people too, why do they put up with me, what can i do for them, and so on and so forth. This is also about how I haven’t been to counselling in almost three weeks, and so I haven’t sat down and provided clear examples (it’s the essay writer in me) of ways that I make other people feel good. But I can think of some of them, honest. Drinking two nights in a row – even if I didn’t get drunk (there’s that Citalapram drink tolerance kicking in) is not a good idea, I suspect.

Anyways, onwards and upwards. Tomorrow I’m cooking a roast and we’re having people over for DVD Cluedo. On the weekend I’m going away for a romantic weekend with my parents (insert hand/fist slapping motion here, suggesting that the family who lays together stays together), and then the weekend after that is a Wellingtonista get-together with secret plans and clever tricks. And somewhere in between I might get to clean the house. Maybe. OooH! I think Lani has tennis on Tuesday night and Smoo’ll probably be working so that’ll be clean time for me. What a thing to get excited about…

Edit: I must also add that right after I saw Rockstar: Supernova’s new ‘Head Spin’ video on TV (and Gilby’s guitar-playing sucks more than the original), I got a text from Annabel telling me that she just saw Lukas having his hair cut in Newmarket. Hahaha! Awesome.

After work on Tuesday, Karen and I went to jump into the ocean by the lagoon. Something went wrong with the way I was holding my head as I jumped off the plank though, and as I plunged into the water I felt as if I was receiving an enema through my nose. Not a pleasant feeling at all, I tell you. In fact, it made my throat and ears ache, and made me feel really sick. Add to that the teenage boys yelling “stingray!” at each other, and then the something solid that brushed my hand that made me swim and hide behind Kar, and when she saw a jellyfish I was well ready to get out. So I texted the divine Miss Fur and she came to pick me up and we went to the fish’n chip shop in Lyall Bay then drove out of the sun to go eat on the pier by my secret beach.

On Thursday Anji and I went to a pilates class at our gym for the first time. It seemed easy enough while we were doing it, although I got trembling holding my left leg in the air for so long, but afterwards, my abs were screaming. Oh yes, I apparently have abs. And for the rest of that night and all of Friday I felt like I was wearing a corset, I was so aware of them. I drove out to the airport to pick up Lani and three of her giggling friends who are staying with us, and then Lisa came to get me again for the Julia Deans (that’s her from Fur Patrol for those of you not in the know) solo accoustic gig at Happy. We got there shortly after 9pm, and were told it wasn’t on til 10 so we went to Karen’s house and made fun of her for a while before going back. Man oh man was I tired. Ryan Prebble didn’t start playing until after 11, and even though I’m sure he’s a lovely man and that some people were into his music, I started having fantasies about his guitar strings breaking as he was twanging them so hard and cutting him and him bleeding out and dying on stage so that Julia could start sooner. And then the taste in my mouth let me know that I’d actually fallen asleep for half a minute. But when Julia finally started singing, ti was all worthwhile. She did lots and lots of new stuff, no old Fur Patrol, and ‘Freak show’ and wow, her voice sure is stunning. The annoying part was that someone had brought along a baby, who cried. What the fuck? Yes, the baby was wearing ear muffs, and yes, apparently the mother was known to Julia who stopped and said “I know it’s not the volume cos that baby’s been to Shihad gigs!” but hi, you are not Gywneth, and this is not Live8 (and no one should ever aspire to be Gywneth anyways, because dude, could you pick a more bland milksoppy role model? Maybe Andie Mcdowell. But still.). I can put up with screaming kids at the beach because I suppose I do swim by the kids’ playground so I’m asking for it, but I don’t care if Happy was the first smokefree bar and it was fairly quiet, children are totally inappropriate in that context. Yes sir. But yes, apart from that, good times. I thought about how I can totally see the way I’m replacing you in the role that you used to have, and how even though I know what I’m doing is dumb it’s going to happen anyway, but meh, maybe I will go with this week’s counselling work whereby instead of being all “I should be doing this or that” or whatever, I can be all “I am making a choice to do blah blah blah”. I totally dig on how she gets my semantical issues.

Because Lani’s friends were sleeping in the lounge when I got home I couldn’t have my usual unwinding time with the television when I got home, so I couldn’t get to sleep for ages so Friday morning I was dreadfully dreadfully tired, but hopped up on excitement about the forthcoming weekend. After work I went to the ministry social club drinks where Lani introduced me to her friends – many of whom know my father, and I laughed at where a couple of the boys apparently thought my eyes were. I suppose the Mary-Kate and Ashley locket I was wearing that Martha made me buy at Craftwerk did help to draw the eye down to Mary-Kate and Ashley, which was of course totally the point. But it made me feel appreciated. Yes. I only stayed for one glass of wine though, because I ahd to go home to eagerly await the arrival of KateH and Shirley, hurrah! We had a couple of bottles of bubby while doing much gossip catch-up, and it was lovely. A couple of times I felt a bit weird, because I always used to be better friends with both of them than they were with each other, but of course now I live in Wellington and they don’t, so they have all these stories about people I don’t really know and tales to tell about nights together and I was just like “waah, left out”. But Shirley has just moved to Palmy now to finish her grad dip, so the balance will be restored again. Muahaha. We’d planned to go out to dinner but instead I fished bolognaise out of the freezer while they went for more wine. Then we went to Fia’s birthday party, and I didn’t check the address so we wandered around the top of Ghuznee St for ages trying to find a number that didn’t exist, being invited to student parties playing Metallica before I checked my phone and saw I had two digits wrong. So we got there in the end. Mostly I just talked to Karl and Amber, and laughed at the very very drunk very very young lady who tried to hit on both Shirley and KateH because she was missing her girlfriend. When we were in the taxi home I rang Lisa and decided to go to her house to panda-dance, so the girls went home to watch taped Daily Shows which Shirley didn’t like and is therefore off my weddding guest list.

It was a Saturday the next day, strangely enough, but much like last weekend when I didn’t get to sleep in because I went to the Petone fair with Shayne and Lani to see the wonderful Sue and Martha, I had to get up early to make the most of the day. This meant Shirley, KateH and I taking the bus in to the Cuba St Carnival, leaving like before 11am! I know right, haaaaaaaaaardcore. We were as awake as lemurs. Even though I’m sure it got much more crowded as the day went along, Cuba St was buzzing, and I was so fucking proud to be a Wellingtonian. I was also stoked that all of my “I am the boss of the weather and it will be sunny tomorrow!” blustering had paid off and it was still and baking. We wandered around for an hour or so, People’s Coffee from Plum in hand (I actually don’t really like it. Stink), and KateH bought a top, I found a hat that actually fit my huge head in Frutti so I bought that, and Shirley got a hat too. We also popped into Slowboat to see Ev, and now she probably thinks I am insane. Nevermind. Then it was just after 12 and we’d seen everything so I decided we should go home to get my car and go to my secret beach. So we did. KateH and Shirls were all “oooh eeek arrrgh too cold!” so they sat on the beach and read “Next (heh), while I had a bloody nice swim.

Lani and her friends were on salad duty, which cut down on my prep work for Country Club: Australia rather substantially. I went to the supermarket for beer (VB) and assorted snarlers and charcoal and ice and so on and so forth while Shirley and KateH did the dishes. We made dips, filled up a tub with ice and beer and then I turned our washing line into a pavilion in the style of Spiceworld (remember? In the grounds of the big old spooky house and they’re all wearing different coloured bathrobes, sucking chuppa chups and planning how to set up Debra and Clifford) with the help of a large couch cover, some pegs, some lime green netting curtains and assorted mattresses, pillows and lanterns. It looked bloody marvellous by the time I was done, even if it didn’t provide quite as much shade as I’d hoped. The absolutely fantastic Jimmy turned up and for a very long time it looked like he was going to be the only boy there, so he had to Make Fire by himself, although I stood around and fetched beer. Luckily Dave showed up to be manly with him. I had a period of total Hostess Anxiety because the bbq was going slowly so we thought we might have to cook some things indoors, and I didn’t know what, or when or how, and Lani’s friends were in the house so I thought if we took the food outside they might not get anything, and my friends Anne and Frances were in the kitchen preparing respectfully shrimp and falafel and I wanted to talk to everyone at once and make sure that everythign was going okay and the ghetto blaster on the stairs kept skipping on the mix CD Lisa brought (AC/DC and Powderfinger and Icehouse and Midnight Oil and the Vines and Jebidiah etc) aaaaaaaaargh freak out! So I made a choice to just sit down and have another beer. And things got much easier from then on in. I grilled some venison burgers indoors and the shrimp and falafel were fried, and people ate, and the boys tended the bbq most faithfully and more people came adn the sun went down, and ahhhh bliss. Lisa left for a while to go see the Phoenix Foundation play, and Lani and her friends took off, so it was just my posse hanging out. Instead of eating the pavlova I’d bought to be controversial, we toasted marshmallows and pears over the coals and the sugar cominded with the mango margaritas once the beer ran out made me incredibly fucking hypo. I jumped around and danced in the garden to CDs that reminded me of Volcanic and also the Pulp Fiction soundtrack that soundtracked my first-ever pash, and was just very very amped to go back into town to meet up with Shirls and KateH who’d left earlier and see the Battacuda Sound System, or whatever the correct spelling is.

We managed to squeeze six of us into Miss Lisa’s car so we could drop Frances home, and so Kar and Dyl and I were dropped off by Manners Mall to head up to Swan Lane to the big stage and crowds. I was still VERY VERY HYPER and yes, I am writing much like I was talking and jittering. It was fun. While we were waiting for the band to start the boy from the Great Blend showed up, so we chatted for a bit and it was nice to see that contrary to the stoogling results I’d turned up, he is actually just a secret ginga. Heh. Battacuda were SO MUCH FUN! I danced like a crazy person and so my calves are still aching today, because apparently dancing on concrete is not as soft and accomodating as you might think it could be. If you were stupid. I was all very hyped up so we went to Havana after, and danced some more. KateH and Shirley went home but Dyl was all let’s stay out! so I did, and then after one more drink both him and Kar were like “tired now, let’s go” and I was like you guys are DICKS. But there was a taxi right outside the door, and so that was handy. I told Karen to remember it was a black’n gold one, and texted her when I got home fine. I wasn’t that drunk, but I’m trying to form good habits in case of insane drunkenness at a later date. Ahh taking care of myself, nice work.

When I woke up on Sunday I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, what with the calves, and the pimple just inside my nose, and the cut on my foot and the scratches from Sebby who was a little unnerved by the masses of people at the BBQ – so much so that he almost didn’t want to eat steak – but he dragged it away to eat in private and emerged much calmer – and all, but I still managed to get showered and dressed and to take the girls to the Maranui Surf Cafe for breakfast. We had to wait for aaaaaaaaaaaaages to get a table and then for our food but it was well worth it because dude, Wellington is so fucking rad. I dropped KateH in town after that and said sad goodbyes to Shirley who had to return to Palmy for her first day of school today. I spent the afternoon lying in the pavillion reading Prep (so good! although I expected more sex and panties from a book set in a boarding school) and then bonding with my couch and HDD once the wind got too strong. I did a mountain of dishes and threw away salads and prawn heads, but cleanup wasn’t too bad thanks to the wonders of disposable plates. I discovered that Smoo wasn’t actually dead in a gutter but had instead gone to Hammy with Bart for the weekend. When they got back they came over to bbq up the leftovers. But it turns out that Jimmy is teh BBQ King and they can’t even touch him. Much like Hammer. While Bart trying to catch flaming pieces of paper with his bare hands was somewhat entertaining, we resorted to cooking on the stove instead. Smoo ate about a thousand chops, so KateH and I were looking forward to seeing Bart polish off a whole pavlova, but that didn’t happen, sadly. So there is still some passionfruit pav with Kiwiberries (so weird!) in our fridge if you are hungry. Okay? Okay.

Today I got up early to take KateH to the airport, but she fetched me coffee while I was in the shower so I love her for that. And that’s about all I have to say for now, I think.