Kelly Holden

I was re-arranging the mess in my room (the action can't be accurately described as tidying it, as all I've really accomplished so far is putting some of it in a box), and I found a bottle of shampoo. This is actually relevant, since on Tuesday I attempted to take my last shampoo purchase back to the soap shop on the grounds it wasn't cleaning my hair, was making my dandruff worse, and didn't appear to any of the senses I tried it on to be the same substance as I was using before. After the proprietor rang her supplier and verified they hadn't changed their formula, she compared what I had to the bottles in store, and told me I was remembering it wrong and to try the next one up in price/quality if it wasn't right for my hair any more.
This bottle proves that the differences in colour, texture, and scent I remembered are real. I don't blame her, except for her unwillingness to believe that a person who has been using a shampoo every second day for over a year can remember what it looks/feels/smells like better than a person whose most intimate interaction with it is to pour it into smaller bottles for re-sale, because I think the supplier gave her the wrong stuff. She claimed she hadn't had any other complaints, but really, if I'd been using it for the first time, I wouldn't have bothered complaining, I'd have just assumed it was a crap product, maybe even concluded that it's not worth going sulphate-free, and not bothered going back. I have a lot of loyalty to the product I was trying to buy, and I don't want to stop using it, I just don't want to have wasted $7 buying a litre of useless citrus-scented gel (which is one of the reasons I like the real product: it's only $7/L, most decent shampoos are more like $7/250mL).

Oh, and I've tried the next one up in quality, and it's too moisturising for my hair, which is still nearly as oily now as when I was 16. Also, is it seriously that hard to believe I have oily hair and dandruff at the same time? The flakes might not go anywhere 'cause they're oiled down, but my scalp still definitely flakes.

Meme, taken from Bernice

You are a dog

Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can't be human. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz

Find out which ultrasonic ringtones you can hear!

Apparently I'm a bat. Who knew. (That's the highest valid one they have, the next one up is an empty sound file to catch cheaters.)

There is no coffee.

Mum's french press holds enough for 3 mugs, and there was not enough left for my cuppa when I got up, which, unless the kids have started drinking coffee, means somebody had a second cup, knowing full well that would leave me without any.

The only way we have to make coffee for one person is the drip filter, which I don't like, there is no instant in the house, and we are running low on coffee beans so I can't justify doing another pot.

*sigh*

I was hoping that Kyle and I would be able to go to Dad's together in the holidays, catch the bus up, and have Mum and Stepdad come with the trailer to pick up my furniture and stuff after I'd had some time to sort it out. Unfortunately, it turns out University of Wollongong has fuckin' weird term/holiday scheduling, while TAFE follows the state schools to the letter, so we aren't off at the same time until Summer. *headdesk*

I couldn't stay with Dad as Grandma, Aunty Roslyn, and her de facto Mauro, were staying with him, but he'd arranged a bed at a mate of his's place (that wording makes it sound like he sprung it on me when I got there, but he told me that when he asked me to go in the first place). Dad's friend was one of his boardgaming pals, and since Roslyn and Mauro play some games as well, we spend most of the weekend playing boardgames, especially Power Grid, which Kyle was rather surprised we didn't spend all weekend playing, considering who I was staying with.

Among notable instances away from the game board were the numerous times I was involved in a getting lost incident.

1. On Sunday, Roslyn, Mauro, Grandma and I went to Tuggeranong Town Centre 'the nearest major shopping centre) so I could show them where it was and they could do some grocery shopping. After they finished in Coles, Aunty Roslyn wanted to go to Woolworths because Coles's lettuce was awful, so I told them how to get there, and took Grandma and the shopping back to the car. Roslyn and Mauro got lost getting back to the car, and I was stuck in it for between half and three quarters of an hour with Grandma talking at least 19 to the dozen.


2. The next evening, I showed them the local shops, about 1km from Dad's place, and then Roslyn decided she wanted to get more coleslaw from Kingsley's (a chicken chain I've only seen in Canberra, which I've described to Mum as "like KFC but good"), where she'd got her evening meal on Saturday, when she'd arrived, so she asked me to show them how to get to the Erindale Centre, where the one she'd gone to was, and I agreed, but I didn't know for sure, and was remembering the signage being better than it was, and we missed our roundabout and nearly ended up at the Town Centre again. And her GPS thing was no help, because nobody knew the suburb name we were looking for, since apparently only the shops are called Erindale, not the area.


3. On Monday, which was still part of my weekend but Dad and his mate were both back at work, I did a bit of shopping, and I got a bit lost in the Canberra Centre, which was ginormous, and I only went there because I couldn't find what I wanted in Woden Town Centre. It didn't help that instead of maps, they had interactive touch screens to tell you where to go, and the first one I found was broken. And then, after I finally worked out where to go, I got lost inside Borders bookshop, and I hadn't even known we had those in Australia.

As he was putting me on the bus to come home, Dad's mate told me to put Kyle in my suitcase next time I came.

Mum had asked Stepdad to pick me up from the bus stop in town when I got back on Tuesday, and he'd agreed, then accepted overtime, and tried to tell Mum he'd get me afterwards(!), so Mum rang Aunty Beth, who accepted eagerly, 'cause Uncle John's stuck at home after his carpal tunnel surgery and apparently getting on her nerves.

Happy Birthday for yesterday, Dad.

I was messing around on wikipedia, and I discovered they had an article called Australian English Phonology. First thought was "oh, cool, *read, read, read*. Hey, I use the 'a' and 'ah' (/æ/ and /aː / in the IPA) sounds like an Adelaidean. Wait, of course I do, that's where I learned to talk."

Then I got to the bottom and found that AuEng was the only dialect-specific English Phonology article, the other two English Phonology articles being 'Old' and 'Modern'. It's a teensy bit othering, because even though I do know Aussie English probably is pronounced differently enough from US and UK English to require a separate article, 1) it has the implication that Australian English isn't Modern English (two other languages have a separate phonology article for a major dialect, but for those the main article is called 'Standard', not 'Modern'), and 2) US and UK English were apparently considered alike enough to lump, yet Australian English wasn't.

I bought my bus tickets to go to Canberra for the sorta-weekend before Dad's 50th birthday, and it came out to virtually $AU100 return. To spend three days there (well, 5 calender days, but I arrive at evening meal time, and leave at the crack of dawn, so functionally it's three).

So ... apparently Ralph Magazine has named Julia Gillard the 2nd sexiest woman in Australia. Granted, our Deputy Prime Minister isn't an unattractive woman, but she's 46 for pete's sakes, that's not the kind of age range in which mainstream softcore usually makes a habit of promoting the sex-object potential of women. Weird.

Rather US-centric economic privilege meme. Italics are my comments.
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Some lowlife stole all but one of the computers from Leah's classroom over the weekend.

Went to go have a cuppa coffee this morning, and I took a sip, and realised two things: 1) it was cold and 2) it wasn't coffee flavoured. Turned out I'd filled my mug up with plain milk instead of coffee.

Also, I owe three people questions for the 'comment and get 5 questions' meme, but I haven't got around to it yet.

It's been raining a bit.
The water is threatening to come in the back door.
( cut for big photo )
Other photos of the flooding in my Flickr account (along with some other complete randomness)

Meme from RazothRedfire
The rules:
1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favourite song,your favourite kind of sandwich, or maybe your favourite game. Any remark,meaningless or not. Or, you know -- indicate you want the 5 questions. In fact any comment you leave to this will get questions. Even if that comment is "No."
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. Or piss you off. Or see how creative you can be. If I'm lucky all 3 in 1 go.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else questions in your own post.
5. When others respond with a comment, you will ask them five questions.
6. It spawns. Again
( Read more... )

So, I went to have peanut butter toast as a evening snack, but I took a bite and it tasted wrong and yuck and blargh. Actually, my first thought was cod-liver oil. Anyway, Kyle willingly ate the rest, and admitted that it tasted a bit not quite right, but not dreadful. My first thought was to blame kerosene still on my hands from treating the children for lice (again! That's something like the 4th time this year, hence resorting to kerosene), but eventually Kyle and I figured out the peanut butter was starting to turn rancid. The container was rather large, and only just opened, and its best before date is over a month away. It might be some time before it's bad enough to put the rest of the family off it, thanks to my insanely sensitive sense of taste, and I can't work out if that's fortunately or unfortunately.

Not so long ago, a fabric/craft/haberdashery chain called Spotlight* opened a store in Nowra. Prior to that, Nowra had had a handful of small businesses in the same field, but they all closed down pretty quickly, though Mum tells me at least one of them would have closed anyway because of the owner's health. So, anyway, we were left with a fabric/craft/haberdashery monopoly, though thankfully a fairly benign one: no price raises or anything, and a bigger range.

And then there was a storm, in November I think. The building Spotlight was in was fairly old, and had had problems with its roof before Spotlight. Their entire stock was water-damaged, and they still haven't re-opened the whole store, only the little party supplies section on the upper ground floor. There doesn't even seem to be an estimate for reopening.

Now, Mum needs things to make Bug's school uniform, as her first day at school is in just over a week, and Mum has nowhere to buy them, short of taking a shopping trip up the coast like we did before Christmas. I think she's considering a day out in Kiama, as that has craft shops and is generally touristy.

*Raz may remember a conversation at Get Lazy with Ponycat about Robbie-chair fabric she'd seen in her local Spotlight.

I just ended up trying to explain "tits or GTFO" to my mother. I'm leaving the net online from now on, no matter how much I think I pwned.


In other news, Mum bought a really old second cookbook at the charity booksale at the band hall this morning, and I was looking through it, and it kept labelling high-carb, not-especially-high-fat recipes as 'not for slimmers', while not including this disclaimer on the recipe with a cup of sour cream in it. Mum also picked up a book by an author she really likes but who is really hard to find, then got it home and found out it was the 2nd in a trilogy. I picked up a whole bunch of CDs (mostly singles) for 50c each, and a Muddle-Headed Wombat book I'd never seen before.

I got some bras I'd on had on lay-by (non-Aussie = layaway) since October out yesterday. It would appear Knickerboxers doesn't have a set lay-by period, which is good because it did actually take me that long to get them paid off. I really should have bundled the one they had in stock and the two I ordered as separate lay-bys.

The kids were playing Cinderella this morning, and Leah was Cinderella (the other two playing whatever supporting role was required), and when she exited the ball and 'left her slipper' she actually ran to their bedroom, grabbed a shoe, and threw it back down the hall to the kitchen. Which it then turned out she'd outgrown when she went to put it on to prove she was the girl the prince liked.

*sigh* lies within lies.
Kyle and went to see Golden Compass with our cousins. We told Mum they were going to see Alien vs Predator, and I was going to see Enchanted. She said not to tell stepdad, so when he asked I told him we were going to see National Treasure, then had to scuttle downstairs to find Kyle and tell him what I'd told Stepdad. I told our cousins on the phone not to say we were seeing GC, to say what I told Mum. Thankfully, the actual movie didn't even end up being mentioned. But still, I got to see it, though I would have prefered to have the book fresher in my mind, it's been so long since I read it.
They showed up here like 2 hours before the movie actually started, so we went and bought junk food, then hung around in Junction Street Mall being mildly laddish to kill time.
On the way to town they took the long way, so I had to give them directions on the way to bring me home (Kyle's going to stay at with them at Nanna's for a day or two, so they only had to bring me home), and I ended up bringing up the embarrassing incident some years ago when I got a Belconnen (north end of Canberra) girl lost trying to drive me home to Tuggeranong (south end of Canberra) one morning.

Day four of Christmas concert madness. In less than an hour, we'll have to head back to town for the evening performance of the kids' dance school's Christmas concert. This, as I said, is day four, concert season started on Wednesday night with the school concert, continued Thursday night with the dress rehearsal and last night with the first performance, and again this morning with the matinee. Thankfully this will be it, last year they had a performance at church on the Sunday as well. Bug's lack of attention to the dance was very cute the first year she did it, when she was the youngest in the 'babies' class, but it looked really bad this year, now she's the biggest in the class and still getting thoroughly lost.

We tried to see the Geminids last night, but the only person who actually saw one was Kyle, and Mum and I really had to go to bed because of the concert. I awoke wheezy and crampy, oh joy, but two cups of coffee and some paracetamol fixed that eventually.

Howard paints harmful Labor-Greens axis
( reproduced under cut )

And they expect that to scare me? Federal Labor doesn't think gay marriage is a good thing. The current federal government fought the ACT government's attempts to do what they thought was right by queer folk. SRS isn't covered by Medicare, apparently, yet sex on the birth certificate can only be changed if the trans person gets it, and hormone therapy for trans folk isn't covered by the PBS until after surgery. I apparently could get a breast reduction on Medicare, yet a transbloke's chest surgery would have to be paid for himself, despite the fact I'm fairly sure a little bit of back pain is much easier to deal with than being a man with boobs would be.

I doubt even an actual Labor-Greens coalition will make this country as little-l liberal* as I want it to be, so STFU Mr Howard, I'm still not voting for you.
(Not that it will really make much difference, seeing as Gilmore's a Liberal safe-seat, and most of the locals seem to adore Joanna Gash, our federal member.)



* Also, I'm damn pissed the construction "little-l liberal" is necessary.