Three sleeps to go!

G'day all!

Three sleeps to what?

The Bendigo Wool Show! THE premier woolly event in Australia! The BIG one!

I am so excited! This is our Maryland, only not as big. This is our Black Sheep Gathering. This is our biggest fibre event for the whole year.

It is going to be stinking cold - prolly around 10 degrees and if we are really lucky we might get a scattering of snow and definately lots of rain and mud. Sigh. Ah well, those thrummed mittens will come in handy!

Man, it is amazing how many hits you get when a Big Name Blogger (aka Crazy Aunt Purl) links to your blog. Note how the number of hits tapers off. And not one extra comment! Ha! Just cos my blog has been VERY boring recently!


So what is a key lime? Does it look like this?


D'oh! That is a lime key!

Heh. One of the guys on the other side of the floor at work is being harrassed by an american debt collection agency. They are looking for a woman called Pauline Crosara (name changed to protect the possibly innocent). The guy they are harrassing is Paul Crosara. They are threatening him with legal action because he has not paid the debts he ran up as Pauline. Obviously Paul is doing a ripper job of hiding his true identity as Pauline - the male body type, facial appearance, hand size and male pattern balding will not fool anyone for an instant!

Plane and Brisbane tales



Bought me a new bag on Saturday night so's I had something to put my travel gear in. Ha. Dumb idea that.... It stinks of mothballs and I felt silly all the way up. Mothballs make me extremely anxious, and that is not a good thing when you are flying. Plus my taxi driver was smoking in the cab on the way to pick me up and also had a perfume dispenser. My three least favourite scents - naphthalene, perfume (almost any type) and cigarette smoke.

At the airport, I was greeted by a sign. Advertising from the company I work for. Argh! There is no escape!


The landing was a bit exciting. It was very windy in Brisvegas on Sunday. Trees were blown over and power was out to 30,000 homes. I thought we were on a rollercoaster for the landing cos we were rocking side to side and up and down on the windgusts. It was rather fun though the wing waggle was slightly distressing. I thought about being terrified but it didn't seem worthwhile so I just read my book instead. I did see quite a few people hanging on to the seat in front or their armrests but nope, we came down on the back two wheels and then the front one perfectly fine, hardly even a thump. Sheer luck? Or good piloting? Anyway, the Egret was safely landed:


My taxi driver to the Sebel was Kurdish. He is not sure about the weather in Brissie. It is too hot. He is used to snow and ice in winter (I don't think of Iraq and Turkey getting snow in winter but they do). He would like to live somewhere cooler but he is worried about schooling standards in Victoria and Tasmania. He obviously is used to cooler temperatures cos he was a definate stranger to Mr Deoderant. I thought it was me at first but nope I was fresh as a daisy despite the nervous sweats caused by the new bag. (Maybe I'll buy me a new new bag that doesn't reek. Yeah, that sounds good! And I'll return the old new bag cos it is smelly. Better clean out the bits and bobs in it first. LOL. It still looks new cos I've only used it one day. (I did buy me a new bag for $15 and it does not reek of anything but canvas, which is quite tolerable.))

I bought some raw chicken to cook for dinner on Sunday night. I opened it and didn't need to get close to it to realise that it was off. YUCK! It was two whole days before the useby so I thought it would be fine but .... I had to return it cos I am not wearing the cost of the reeky bad chicken that smelt out the barfridge in my apartment. Plus the pathetic little bar fridge let my frozen vegies defrost and I was again not game to eat them cos I have a pathetic gut that enjoys torturing me. (The girl who did the return at the supermarket said "We've had a few of these returned. Oh, I can smell it through the bags...." So if they think the chook is dodgy, why didn't they pull it off the shelves? It has obviously not been stored properly somewhere along the way.)

Sunday arvo was my only real chance to wander around and look at things. I was going to hook up with a friend but it was too hard to find the right bus and then get to the place where I'd never been and find my way to where ever we were to meet, so I pulled out. Instead I spent a nice hour wandering around the Roma St parkland after visiting the botanic gardens briefly.

Here's a few shots from my wanderings around Brissie and some shots from my apartment:




The famous sock got to check out the fern walk, much to the amazement of the older couple walking up the ramp




A stairway to knowledge:


And steps leading to nowhere.




Is this not a sight to make you cross your legs and hope for a more welcome sight (ie women only toilets?)


It might be hard to keep your resolve when you see these fountains weeing madly like a pack of little boys seeing how far they can pee only about 30 feet away:




Sunrise at 6:30am - it looked like some form of fabulous aurora but Brisvegas is waaay too far north for that to happen.


Knitting was done. The socks and I had a passionate interlude watching the Colonial House on Sunday night, then on Monday night we watched highlights of the cricket after Mythbusters. The socks got very excited by seeing the Aussies whup the Poms' butts - they got up on the coffee table to get a better view. See?

Note the socks are on two circs. I stuff up every now and then but it is mostly plain sailing.

The Vogue jacket front showed somewhat more restraint and took it easy on the couch.


The trip back. Ah the trip back.

We had to wait for a while in the queue for take off. The plane taking off immediately before us was an F1-11. One of the flight crew told us about it, saying all aviation buffs might be interested but we had to wait for a good five minutes (two planes landed) before we heard it heating up its jet engines. Then it started roaring so loudly that I couldn't hear our own plane's racket (it stopped all conversations on the plane) and finally the afterburners came on and it shot off down the runway in an orgy of white/purple/orange flames. I think half the plane was watching. I certainly was. I am not a plane buff but I like them.

I hoped that my pilot didn't decide he was in an F1-11 too. F1-11s may be old fighters but jeez, they whup a 737's butt!

All of the kids bar one baby were put in the back of the plane. I have obviously reverted to childhood cos they were right behind me. I have never seen so many kids in a plane before, except for school trips. There were about 12 of them. Amazing. And the little boy who had been loudly whinging in the airport terminal about wanting to go to Melbourne did not raise one peep about "are we there yet" until we were taxiing very slowly to the terminal in Melbourne. Very good of him!

Mental note number 1. Do not, repeat NOT, drink most of a 500ml bottle of gatorade before you get on the plane, no matter how thirsty you are. Guarding against dehydration on planes is good but bursting your bladder because the two guys beside you have fallen asleep is BAD. Capital
letters BAD.

Half an hour into the flight, I knew I was in strife. I had the window seat. Two guys were between me and the aisle and they had fallen asleep. I wriggled, I moved around in my seat a lot, I undid my seat belt (hooray! No longer that little added pressure on my bladder), I wriggled, I
contemplated launching myself across the pair of them... then the dinner trolley showed up and mr aisle man woke up and stood up so that I could launch myself (carefully, nursing a bulging bladder) over Mr middle man.

I tell you what, relief was ne'er so sweet. It also was a new world record in length of time to emptying - it must've been backing up to my kidneys (v. bad - don't want no steenky kidney infections).

Mr middle man next to me bore a striking resemblance to the new Doctor Who. Uncanny. He had that same sort of long face and receding hairline, but he did not have the accent. I liked him automatically. Isn't it sucky how if you meet someone who reminds you of someone you know (or in this case like on a tv show or a movie), you like them? eg I see guys walking down the street who remind me of my brother and I like them. (I've just realised - this doesn't tend to happen with women who remind me of someone on tv or in a movie - maybe because I consider most of those women to be artifical constructs and so far gone along the celebrity path that I ignore them.) Mr middle man was amazed when he woke up and discovered that I was not sitting next to him - how did I get out?

In contrast to the flight up, the flight down was extremely boring. A bit of turbulence here and there but nothing really. The cloud cover was continuous - I never saw a gap. How am I to practice my navigation by landmarks if I can't see the ground? The landing was somewhat of a body slam though - no obvious reason. The kids behind me squeaked like stuck piglets. Bang! Eeeek!

Ok, that's me done for the time being!

anon!

Comments

  1. glad you're back safe and sound and with easy access to the bathroom!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, what a trip. It sounds eventful. Or you're just really good at remembering details! I think it's both!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11:07 am

    Brisbane is beautiful! And for me as an Angeleno, that weather would have been uncomfortably cold. But our blood is thin! The colors of your socks are lovely, too. And I KNOW you are just waiting to go WILD at the fiber festival (now I can't remember the name! Have fun!

    ReplyDelete

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