I bought new pants in, oh. January? February?

I can now remove one of those pairs without the previous ceremony of undoing them. Upon getting on the scales, the reason why is clear – I’m 10kg down.

I’m kind of pleased with that.

Yesterday had some ups and downs. Inexplicably woke up around 7, which is Too Early For Sunday. Then my laptop – faithful 2008-era macbook – died.

But, husband sourced me a replacement (techy friends are the best), I swapped out the hard drive for it’s original drive and will sell the carcass for parts, the drive is available for data restores onto my new to me machine.

Then the Zouk team from last year had a performance scheduled. We haven’t danced the routine together since Christmas. Unsurprisingly, rehearsal was less ‘rehearsal’ and more ‘oh crap no-one remembers the choreo’. Still, we rocked it, and there are some fabulous photos turning up on Facebook.

Then I went to the regular social Sunday dance. And realised that one of my regular touchpoints for “how’s my mental health” is “how willing am I to ask strange men to dance”. Brains, huh.

I got home around 11:30, exhausted, sweaty, and blissfully happy with my place in the world.

Signs this is a geeky household: birthday present = RAM and large HD for laptop, and pair of Sennheiser earbuds.

Signs this is an anachronistic household: I made kiwifruit chilli sauce, tamarillo toffee sauce, banana nut sauce, and spiced orange sauce this week. (And have four in a parcel to go down to Mum’s tomorrow.)

Signs this is winter: Tigra is sneezing. And she is ridiculously funny, because it’s “chuu!chuu!chuu!chuu!chuu!chuu!” sneezies, but still. Vet appointment required, poor wee sausage will not love me at all.

I am twenty six years old.

This is how I spent my evening.

I had a lot of Lego as a kid. My nappy bucket (having done it’s duty and been thoroughly cleansed) subsequently became the Lego bucket – fifty or sixty litres of Lego, some from kits, some in bulk, all of it well loved. At about thirteen or fourteen, when I hadn’t played with it in years, Mum suggested – completely well-meaning – that I might want to consider giving it to a couple of young lads, whose parents weren’t terribly well off. At seven and four, respectively, they’d get more use out of it than I did. I agreed, and boy oh boy, those kids were SO HAPPY. I got thanked, again and again, for about six months thereafter.

I regret getting rid of the Lego now. It made sense at the time, but I do wish we’d kept it.

One of my fondest memories of my father isn’t really based on the recollection I have from childhood, but what I remember being told about it later. I love Lego. Always have. And when I was three or four, Dad bought the Lego police station.

Now, the Lego police station in 1988 was a bit different to the Lego of today. There was a helicopter, for a start, which the modern station doesn’t have (much to my disgust). It was seriously cool. And Dad happily hauled all the parts out of the box, and started building my Lego! I toddled over to ‘help’, as small children do, and was politely told to go and help my mother.

I, being an obedient and sweet child, toddled off to Mum. When asked exactly why I was there instead of playing with ‘my’ new Lego, I innocently explained that Daddy said Mummy needed my help!

I was promptly frogmarched back to my father, who had it explained to him that it would be very nice if he would perhaps play with the Lego, with his daughter, with the Lego that he had, of course, bought FOR his daughter, hadn’t he?

I remember, from the time, the bouncing between my parents that day (mostly because OMGSQUEELEGOSQUEE); as an older child / adult I’ve come to appreciate the real humour of the incident. Poor Dad, just wanting to play with the Lego he’d really bought for himself, on the excuse of having a four year old.

As far as I’m concerned, one of the advantages of being an adult is that I’m allowed to act like a child if I want to. Tobermory and I spent a day of our honeymoon at Legoland Windsor. We elected not to go on any of the rides in the end – it was a pleasant day walking around in the sunshine, we squeed at Miniworld, and spent far too long in the Lego store.

There was a child of about six in the store while we were there. He came in, and promptly lost his tiny little mind in utter glee – “look theres the! and the! and the!!! and!!!! and look!!!!!! andtheandthis!!! and look Mum this!!!! LOOOK!!!!!!! and eee! and the eee!!! eeee loook!!!!!”

You get the drift. His parents were looking a bit shamefaced, though I don’t understand why, so I commented fairly loudly that it was lovely to see such a happy kid. Hopefully they heard.

So, Tobes and I spent about, oh, forty five minutes in the store. We came home with the Police station, the current one. It won’t be the same as the one I remember, but I’m pleased to have it.

And, uh, we bought the Fire Station too. It just didn’t all fit in the luggage. My mother in law is posting the rest home.

I am starting to get wound up about the wedding, now. It’s less than a month away, we fly out in less than three weeks, two of the things we’re arranging ourselves still aren’t done (although they’re doable) and it struck me yesterday that I had NO IDEA what had been decided by the inlaws about the wedding / reception. Like, how are Tobermory and I getting to the ceremony? Do they have dancing planned at the reception or not? I sent an email to my lovely mother in law going “augh, help” and, bless her, I got a long lovely email back, reassuring me that no, I was not nagging, I was entirely reasonably asking questions, here is lots of information.

Unlike my dearly beloved, I don’t deal terribly well with The Great Unknown, and as this trip is basically all about the great unknown – flying for the first time to a strange country, meeting approximately seventy people I’ve never seen before and will probably never see again, etc etc… yeah, I think I’m allowed to be mildly wound up.

On the plus side, we’re already married legally, so whatever happens on the day of the wedding, we’ll be just fine.

Boomer is definitely on the mend. He escaped from his confinement today, via a route that involved some tricky balance work and a push through a rose bush, so clearly he’s on the mend. Both cats, rather than being given the run of the courtyard, are now confined fully indoors for the next ~36 hours, until the vet’s deadline of “no outside until after Easter” is met.

So, yes, house arrest in place for kitties again. It is, admittedly, tempting to knock both cats on the head, especially at approximately 5am when they decide “Hey! Let’s run around like idiots and make a heap of noise, dig industriously in the litter box, tug on the curtains, dig at the doorway and irritate the shit out of the only human who wakes up [me] because we can’t get out!”, but it’s wonderful to know our wee lad is going to be OK.

 
This photo was taken just after Boomer got up, stretched, lay down, discovered to his surprise that the tigers’ rear paw was approximately where he’d intended to place his bottom, got up again, looked at it vaguely, and wriggled around to cuddle the paw instead.

Tigra often nestles on the other side. There’s a nice little sunny nook there, between Tiger / couch / window / curtain, which apparently soaks up sun. If we’ve lost her, it’s about the first place to check.

The photos were taken using Hipstamatic on the iPhone. I’m a complete sucker for gadgets and applications like that, I find them immensely entertaining to play with, although I am entirely well aware that far better effects could be achieved with a better camera and some post-processing in Photoshop or similar. Still, what else are toys for if not to play with them?

I was discussing the stereotype of clueless technicians at work earlier this week. The young guy had one of our … less polite… callers on the line, and he’d been dealing with the assumption since minute one that he was clueless. It’s possibly the most difficult thing we have to deal with, in tech support – knowing that so many people have terrible experiences with call centres, and they will automatically ASSUME that we are idiots too. He had a good rant and rave, we had a bitch session about the clueless employees and employers that make our jobs harder, and carried on.

That conversation came back to me this afternoon.

Our Orcon connection fell over. We have both phone and ADSL through them. There’s a terrible stereotype regarding first-line ISP technicians, particularly the ones at NZ Telecom, who, in every single interaction I have ever had with them, are terrible. (The phone techs haven’t been so bad, but their ISP support…)

So, I rung up, spoke to a very pleasant chap allegedly called Frank, realised I could not remember our telephone number and apologised for not having this obvious piece of information on hand (he laughed). Explained we had neither telephone nor Internet, and that as I was on-call this weekend I’d like to know if it’s an outage or something – not that my being on-call is in any way their problem, but if the Internets return, I don’t have to go to the office. He popped me on hold while line testing*.

Apparently something-something-reset-something-exchange-something, which I frankly didn’t catch because I was so astonished that the phone and internet both magically worked again, without my having to go through all the rigmarole of “yes, it’s not my equipment, yes, I’ve tried three different telephones in all the ports in the house, yes, I’ve restarted the router, no, it’s not my home network”. Bad Mahal, no biscuit, you assumed the stereotype would apply..

Hooray for ISP technicians who are actually good at their jobs! Hooray Orcon for hiring these people! Hooray internet!

* Amazingly, the hold music wasn’t terribly shitty either!