dogpossum

“tarrah!” instead of seeya
“never!” instead of you’re kidding?
“mate” instead of… mate.

well, i arrived here in the uk yesterday at about 6:20am, after hours and hours on the plane (24 or so). i slept about6 hours on the last leg, came here to a wonderful, sunny day, and fell asleep at 2pm, ostensibly for a quick nap. 12 hours later i wake up. and i go back to sleep. and i get up again at 6am.
aw yeah.
that sleep is some good shit. woke up feeling awesomely good.
and launched my attack on cardiff. i still feel good, but now i’m pretty tired.

wales totally rocks. and i STILL totally love the welsh.
today i’ve had a great many conversations with strangers, most of whome have tried to help me a lot. and i LIKE it.

tomorrow i take on the castle. and then the breacon beacons. and then … hm. more welsh stuff.

yay wales!

ok, so i’m a complete tight-arse. too tight to pay for a hair cut or colour. so i cut my own hair (very excellently, with more enthusiasm than… well, anything other than randomness). and i get The Squeeze to colour it.
now, i’d thought his inability to get it right last time was just inexperience. so i figured i’d give him another go.

sunday afternoon, i’m half covered in bright red colour and he mentions that his colour blindness means that he can’t really tell which bits of my hair he’d coloured already. it seems he was just ‘getting it all wet’, or ‘colouring in the blonde/light bits’.

right.

so i did the front bit again myself. who knows what the back looks like. who cares. but the front is still crappy.

lesson: colour blindess has wider consequences than those particular to the realm of website design.

so now doc flower says it’s not asthma. if it was, i’d have made a postitive response to the steroids.
oh well.
now she thinks it’s a post-viral cough. right. ok

i’ve decided to just pretend it’s not there, and to go on about my business as usual. i’ve had enough of being ill. i’ll think about it when i get back.

today i went to buy some sexy athletic shoes. no joy. they’re all baby blue or white, which i’m not comfortable with. so i’m delaying.
meanwhile, i need to redo the front bit of my hair. and watch more Buffy!

well, i’m still coughing my lungs up, but dr flowers says it’s nasty asthma, provoked by the chest cold thing. so i’m on a millon different inhalers, and had a few days on steroids.
i’ve not noticed any vast improvements, but we’ll see what she says tomorrow.

i leave day after tomorrow, so i’ve been fussing over travel things. all i’ve got left to do is get some travellers cheques/cash in foreign money and a uk/sweden adaptor my electrical goodies and possibly check out some sandshoes. the sandshoes are a luxery.
then out i’m flying! meanwhile, i’ve neglected this blog for freeswingpress, which is going well, aside from some minor technical issues on the main index. ho hum. the lovely marcus is assisting me in what is proving to be the Most Annoying Bug Ever.

my next challenge is to make it so that the search on fsp only searches fsp entries, rather than the dogpossum ones as well. right. i’ll get onto that right now.

heh.

i’ve had my interest peaked by the whole same sex marriage thing. i’m wondering exactly what the legal definition of a defacto marriage is.
so i’ve checked out some online sources. including this one.

it’s too hard to find out. but i remmeber centerlink’s definition was quite precise, and really quite broad. so as to limit their responsibility to provide financial support, i reckon… more research is in order.

i’m busy busy with my other online project, Free Swing Press at the moment, so i’m not posting here regularly. hopefully my new skills, gained from fsp, will benefit this site. go have a look and tell me what you think…

The Squeeze and i do own www.freeswingpress.org, but i think it needs to be sorted out… which i’ll do asap. hmf.

otherwise, i’m still ill. got a horrid chesty cough, am run-down, weak as a kitten and not terribly well generally. oh well.
the trip is totally planned, i can fit my shit in the back pack The Squeeze’s sister kindly lent me, and i’m all sorted for accomodation with the 7 sets of people i’ll be staying with. only one more to sort. but i’ll do that from the uk. it’s all looking aok. now, if only i could shake this goddamn coldy fluey thing… doctor flowers will sort it on friday. you’ll see.

Continue reading “more dancers!”

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i’m feeling terribly clever. this photo’s of two friends from dancing (crinnie and brannigan’s law), which The Squeeze took at the mlx. i’ve actually done some fiddling with the original in photoshop, which looked like this.

i must credit the photographer: well done Dave Cheney. i’d send you to his site, but it’s bung.
seems every hardcore IT nerd i know has a crappy or defunct website.

but i adore this pic. it’s just a wonderful moment in the swingout – right there, somewhere round 1 and 2 or 7 and 8, where crinnie’s pulling out her gorgeous swivel and b.l. is pulling it right out.
i love the way they’re oriented towards the camera with their bodies, but looking at each other. i like the way b.l.’s eyeline suggests he’s checking out crinnie’s awesome shit. and look at those fabulous big arms!
i also like it that they’re sweaty and look like they’ve been working. this isn’t some poncy staged shot.
the fact that b.l. is in sharper focus draws our attention to his face, and then this draws our attention back to crinnie with his eye-line.
i also like the way their clothes are coordinated.

oh, aren’t lindy hoppers clever and pretty?

well, i can’t keep away from it. i just keep going back. and she’s so rewarding. she writes frequently. she writes about personal, private things (which, in the spirit of big brother, i adore). she’s so painfully… painfully… you know, painful. it’s nice to read through her blog and suddenly feel a whole lot better about myself. i mean, she’s a total fashion victim, she has no clue about academic politics, she’s loathed by half the cultural studies nerds in australia and mistrusted by the rest and she has these hopeless crushes.

i haven’t had a crush in ages. crushes also came up on swingtalk again recently.
but i can’t really contribute. i get briefly passionate fits of admiration and hero worship occasionally, usually for middle-aged women with abominable dress sense and stunning vocabularies, but not real, honest-to-betsy crushes. i had a disturbing dream about a dear friend recently, but that’s not the same thing. that’s just disturbing (goddamn unconscious – what are you trying to tell me?).

but this chick has like three crushes on the boil. and text messaging plays a role in her love life. i don’t own a mobile, nor do i wish to, so i can’t understand this text message romance thingy. i don’t want a mobile – i like to be Unavailable. i’m more of an email girl. or an IM girl.
but it seems the Young People have integrated mobile phones indelibly into their social lives.
sigh.
i remember the days of phone cards and home cards (or whatever they’re called).

but this chick. i can’t stop reading her blog. so long as she doesn’t talk about her academic work, it’s ok reading. but i want to punch her in the head when she brings up university stuff.
let’s hope she gets bullied at the cssa conference…

but you know, i feel sorry for her. maybe i’d even like her if i knew her more? i’d certainly feel it was my duty to enlighten her re politics and, well, using her brain if i was her friend.
but i don’t have the energy for her particular brand of tragic, almost pathetic -ness. i do feel sorry for her when she goes on about her weight or how she feels she’s unattractive or ugle or whatever. that’s sad. and i want her to feel better about that stuff. but i also want her to start feeling bad about her abysmally crap knowledge of her field. honestly, she should be ashamed.