ragingyoghurt » 2004

Monthly Archives: May 2004

it’s just that, the more hours i spend in front of mr computer doing actual werk, the less hours extra i want to spend sitting here writing. in addition, the volume of werk has an adverse effect on the type of adventures available to me.

want stories about me chasing up quotes from printers? it can cost between $300 to put a logo on 500 envelopes, and $1200. when you do show up at the $300 printer’s premises after not hearing back from them regarding your questions about supplying artwork or payment, you will discover that their system can only accept eps files (but will be updated really soon to take pdfs too!), and their press can’t print anything closer than 10mm from the edge. your client will not be too upset by this development, but he will ask that you make msword templates of envelope and letterhead so he can print them out as required. ugh, msword.

wurd.

fortunately there will still be days (a day) when you can disentangle from the mouse cable, and find yourself in granville sitting in a lebanese chicken shop by the train station, across the table from lena, overseeing a plate of half a grilled chicken, a dish of garlic puree, a dish of pickles, a shallow bowl of tabouli, a basket of flatbread and a little mound of chicken-salted chips, and everything will be eaten. after, she will take you on a tour of the main drag, including a stop at silly willy’s, a $2 shop where you can get a pack of twelve multicoloured dishwashing sponges for… $2. and abla’s, for a sitdown, a plate of sweet cheese and a cup of tea.

i believe i came away all culturally ignorant at abla’s, walking along the counter of treats, pointing at each tray and asking the busy yet patient lady on the other side, “what’s that?… and um… what’s that?”. still, it yielded me a plastic platter (wih cut glass aspirations) of an assortment of pistachio pastries and a large custard-in-honeyed-filo contraption. it was meant to last for days, or, at least two days, but the boy ate his share before nightfall and the custard thing became school lunch the next day. a granville excursion is on the cards; the counter across the room had the rum babas and the chocolate cream cakes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 May 2004 at 8:19 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, grumble, lunch, werk

a public service announcement: krispy kreme doughnuts opens its first city store at wynyard, 7am on tuesday. first person in line gets a year’s supply of donuts. um. doughnuts.

a direct result of the impending opening as well as the enormous sugar-encrusted pastry wrapped in clingfilm and labelled “polish donut” i saw in a continental deli in randwick, was this dream i had two nights ago:

i was at a very large table in a hotel breakfast room watching my father have his morning coffee before he rushed off to a seminar. the coffee arrived at the table with an enormous sugar-encrusted donut. strewn across the table were the remains of breakfasts abandoned by other customers. these were all ornate silver trays, oval, about two feet long, bearing the crumbs and unfinished portions of a great variety of sugar-encrusted donuts. i walked my father to the lecture theatre, and it was clear that i would be returning to the breakfast room to have myself a tray of donuts too.

“and then i woke up, and it was all a dream.”

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 May 2004 at 10:49 am

permalink | filed under cake, misc

last night, after a large bowl of moonfish and calamari (and eggplant, zucchini, tomato, white bean, olive and parsley) stew on couscous —

no picture because i was so hungry it went just like that WHOOSH , and i only regretted the inhalation of dinner after it was all gone and i struggled, sitting straight, lying flat, perched cross-legged on a large cushion on the floor, pacing, pacing, to let the food find a balance in my bloated self

— we sat (or perched or paced) and watched a documentary called “why planes fall”, which included snippets of a play in which actors in the roles of cockpit crew recited actual lines recorded on doomed planes’ blackboxes as they hurtled from the sky. i thought maybe it would make me never want to get on a plane again, but instead it was very reassuring. who woulda thought that something goes awry only once every one million flights, but there you go.

i have a cousin who is a commercial airline pilot, and we always suspected that he got into it so he’d have an excuse to wear aviator sunglasses.

the ~~one thing~~ two things i miss about airline travel is are emerging from the aeroplane and finding myself in new york, and airline food.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 May 2004 at 7:29 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, tv

i ate this recently: a beautiful pink heart-shaped lamington, twice the price of normal brown block-shaped lamingtons because it was made for mother’s day. surely this is the best mother’s day product ever. beats the ugg boots, the cosmetic gift sets, the DVDs of “something’s gotta give”, the discounted kitchen appliances…

actually i came thisclose to getting the braun blender with the glass jug and five speeds including one labelled with “icon of bowl of soup”, which would be perfect for the impending broccoli soup experiment. but instead came away with special mother’s day priced “lost in translation” DVD. woo!

trivial, soup-related distractions aside, i think i’m finally getting back into the merry swing of werk, four, maybe five months after returning from overseas. the last few weeks have been spent tweaking logos: working out kerning in extremely small increments, debating whether a milky chocolate brown is better than a rich coffee brown, nudging a graphic representation of a fig around a box trying to make it look less turd-like and more fig-like (unrelated to previously mentioned brown issue), wondering if 5pt type is too small…

oh it’s been fun! and now the anticipation of getting it all back from the printers. crisp letterheads and lush, environmentally unfriendly, matt-celloglazed business cards. so i was quite horrified when amongst the penis enlargements (so many penis enlargements!) and cheap software i was offered in my inbox, there was this handy service. shudder, and sigh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 May 2004 at 5:00 pm

permalink | filed under cake, shoping, werk

sometimes i just fall off the blogging train, and even though it’s just a week, it feels like much longer. it’s not that there’s been no good eating… there was, for example, the first spag bol i ever made which began with a large onion sauteed in a mound of sambal terasi. not so authentic, but damn it was flavoursome, and there was enough to last an extra four (pregressively smaller) meals. the best part was i didn’t even have to touch the meat. just sliced the top of the pack open with a knife and prodded (with said knife) the block of mince into the pot.

and then last night there was the roast pumpkin, fetta and sage pizza that showed up at the door just in time to distract us from the nightly news footage of those photographs of the beaming brown-haired american girl soldier pointing at iraqi prisoners’ genitals. home delivery rocks.

it’s not that no adventures have been had. last week i got to go to kinko’s three times! once, a print job that should have taken ten minutes evolved into an hour-long saga with a hapless employee who was really the wavery-voiced teenage boy who works at all the fast food restaurants on “the simpsons”.

and the last couple of days i’ve spent scanning a stack of faint yet grubby colour pencil drawings for a book(let) of work by newly-arrived-in-australia teenagers. the fun, she does not end.

and just for the record, well, there’s this:

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 May 2004 at 10:01 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, werk

Monthly Archives: May 2004

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