have i become someone’s browser’s default homepage? the viewing pattern logged by my stats application seems to indicate so. who are you, mysterious denizen of IP address 211.31.1.x?
the next best thing to being unemployed is being a freelancer at the end of a bunch of projects, where you can take half a day off and sit in the bastion of tranquility in the middle of the city — the tea centre [specialists in tea of fine quality] — sipping iced tea and nibbling on one of those dipped-in-chocolate, shortbread-and-jam sandwich biscuits, in the company of …mmm… jake gyllenhaal. alas, it is only 2D jake on the cover of glossy airfreight GQ, so it turns out that the biscuit is much more enticing company.
when you buy loose leaf tea at the tea centre, the always smiley girls behind the counter measure it out of very large tins off the wall-to-wall shelving. if you are unsure, or confused, they are happy to shake the tin before lifting the lid just in front of your nose. inhale. if it is the stockholm blend, which is black tea with orange peel, vanilla pieces, apricot flavour, safflowers, calendula blossoms and rose petals, you will be overcome by the need to buy a packet. the shop girl will scoop the desired quantity into a blue or red cellophane-covered foil bag, sealed with one of those bendy wire thingys so that you can open it easily for another smell on the bus home.
i don’t normally like fruity or flowery teas (and tisanes? pah!) but the vanilla (i guess) makes this smell like magic cake. magic! cake!
oh it’s winter. the sky is clear blue and there are birds chirping outside. if my washing machine wasn’t broken i could be putting a load on and then spending the rest of the day smelling clean laundry ripening in the sun. the repairman is coming today “after twelve”, which i got the friendly service desk lady to narrow down to “anywhere between twelve and three”. sigh.
yesterday i queued for half an hour at medicare to claim $100, and then queued again (20 minutes) at medibank for another $100. i was just down the street from krispy kreme, but when i walked past all casual-like, the line was out the door and onto the street, and i just didn’;t think i could queue anymore, not even for donuts.
instead a brisk stroll brought me to il gianfornaio, where a slice of mushroom pizza was had, and two sicilian canoli packaged up to go: one with a dark chocolate custard and the other with fruit-and-chocolate-studded sweet ricotta. there was also a bottle of fanta, the remains of which i have just realised are still sitting in my mr friendly backpack next to my foot, instead of in the fridge for later.
[ puts fanta in fridge ]
so, the new fanta label says “now with 5% fruit”. mysteriously there is not too discernable a difference in the taste of fruitless fanta and what is now described as a “fruit drink”. i suppose it’s 5%… what? healthier? i definitely didn’t feel as ill as i normally do after drinking a bottle of fanta, but i suspect that has more to do with me just drinking a quarter of it.
i am rambling. why am i rambling? sleep deprivation?; maybe i need some juice. or fanta.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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:
when a salmon dies, does it know that it will be wrapped in a strip of prosciutto and roasted and served up alongside a pile of sauteed vegetables? will it take its revenge by cunningly concealing a larger than expected bit of cracked black pepper, so that midbite, a boy with a slightly cracked but otherwise intact tooth will hear a loud crack in his head, wash his mouth clear with a swig of pink grapefruit fizzy, and discover that said tooth is now a third smaller than it used to be?
—
while i’m here, and while zucchini are like, $1.99 for a bundle of seven or eight, i could tell you to sautee some bacon, onion, garlic and cubed-up zucchini. add chicken stock and simmer. blenderise most of it and simmer a bit more. sprinkle with toasted flaked almonds. think about doing the same with a head of broccoli. mmm… green(ish) soups.
best monday ever
anzac day continues…
a cross-continental conversation with nellie
nellie: um. are you working?
bowb: umm. sort of, but not really. it’s a public holiday!
n: oh! is it anzac day?
b: eh! yah! how did you know?
n: because it’s a biscuit!
b: ummm. yesss. but there isn’t like, oreo day…
n: hngh. you can keep oreo day.
b: … and there isn’t tim tam day…
n: but there should be!
and with that the twinkies were off for three, count ’em, three hours. the phone company should start paying *us* money.
what to do after a marathon phone session, with ear hot and hand cramped into craw, than finish up my goddamn business activity statement, make a bacon, avocado and chutney (pear and fig) roll and walk briskly up to oxford street where the cinema is already quite packed with a holiday crowd ready to see “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.
when joel says “i love you” to his last remaining fading memory of clementine, oh it brung a twinge to my nose.
and then, another brisk walk to pellagio providore for a litre of pink grapefruit fizzy and two bits of $4 (each!) turkish delight studded with pistachios and covered in white chocolate (sometimes if you’re lucky, pink chocolate. today i am unlucky, but only just), and then on to infinity sourdough bakery for a walnut sourdough loaf swaddled in tissue like baby jesus.
sadly the only thing awaiting me after another powerwalk into the city, is a queue at kinko’s while the toner is replaced in two photocopiers, and then once i am at the machine, another queue to get some paper for the machine. so. it takes half an hour to photocopy one double-sided business activity statement form.
happily what awaits me on returning home is a boy on the sofa who is quite agreeable to the idea of me buying him end-of-school-holiday dinner in the malaysian restaurant up the street. not only is there a flavoursome mee siam with an egg boiled for so long it has a grey circle around the yolk, there is also ice kacang with bits of jackfruit hidden in the bottom.
except for kinko’s, best monday ever.
