Blogging

Because it would seem I very much like the sound of my fingers typing...

You don't even realise...

Having the right music for the shower is easily as important as having the right music for a party or a roadtrip.

It's also much easier, because unless your life is much spicier than mine, there's noone else in the shower to go "naw, I don't like this one, can we put on something else?"

In the spirit, as well as the usuals (save a horse ride a cowboy, yellow, don't look back in anger, as good as I once was) I've also included John Lennon's Happy Christmas and the version of All I want for Christmas is You from the Love Actually soundtrack.

Aaarrrg....nevermind.

Oh no! Only 4% internet remaining!

Oh wait, it resets in 48 hours. And 4% is still over 3gig.

Phew...

Cause it's so much more than just a Christmas song...

John Lennon's Happy Christmas

The only Christmas song I listen to in months other than December.

Being Awesome

Tonight's was one hell of an achievement.

I wasted 2 hours with Bejewelled, but still managed to piece a medium sized quilt top.

I'm so awesome.

It's all about context. And maths.

With 8 days to go, I have only 15% of my internet left.

But what's this? I have 50 gig a month, which means I have 8 gig left.

Hooray!

This bit from the end of Hogfather...

Susan has just saved the Hogfather from the Auditors. Now she and her grandfather, Death (He's in the allcaps) are heading home for Hogswatchnight.

'Thank you. Now... tell me...'

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?

'Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?'

NO.

'Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact.'

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

She turned on him.

'It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!'

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

'Really? Then what would have happened, pray?'

A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

They walked in silence for a moment.

'Ah,' said Susan dully. 'Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that.'

I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.

'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.'

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-'

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

'So we can believe the big ones?'

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

'They're not the same at all!'

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

'Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point---'

MY POINT EXACTLY.

She tried to assemble her thoughts.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON'T TRY TO TELL ME THAT'S RIGHT.

'Yes, but people don't think about that,' said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed...

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE'S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A... A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

'Talent?'

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

'You make us sound mad,' said Susan. A nice warm bed...

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? said Death, helping her up on to Binky.

'These mountains,' said Susan, as the horse rose. 'Are they real mountains, or some sort of shadows?'

YES.

Susan knew that was all she was going to get.

oooh, pretty...

When I'm watching a movie on my laptop and the screen goes black, I can see my favourite-est quilt reflected in the screen.

For those of you who don't know it's the brown, blue and orange mingle quilt, and it hangs on the wall above my bed. And it's beautiful and crinkly and I love it.

Sparkly things and cats...

We're decorating the Christmas tree. I'm not really feeling it, but it's very funny seeing Honeycat with the tinsel... I don't know if she's ever done Christmas before...

Snh Snh Snh...

Endosperm.

Snh Snh Snh. (That's the sound of childish sniggering.)

It sounds dirty but it isn't.

It's like when you're using the DVD player, and it says "Root Menu"

Snh Snh Snh.

Finally...

It took most of the day, and a $300+ hit to my bank balance, but my Christmas shopping is unofficially* finished.

One of these years I'm gunna follow through on my threat to not do Christmas the next year.

*unofficially because there's still Secret Santa on Dad's side ($20 budget) but I don't know who I'm giving to yet, and I still need to make Esther and Bob their jellyblob toys.

USB Flash drives

Not as cool as TransFlash, but still pretty cool.

And there are more ports for them.

But you can get USB adapters for your TransFlash.

So yay. For both of them.

Success!

I'd say my success rate with indicating is now up to around 95%. Which seems pretty good for 2 weeks of driving.

Windscreen wiper success is closer to 60% though. Even less if you include selecting the right speed, or rear wipe instead of spray. Those two bring it down to about 20% success. If it's just started raining and our lights are flashing aimlessly, I may actually just be trying to clear my windscreen.

Still, I'm proud of myself for being able to indicate. Even when I'm not trying to.

Twist upward, becuase if you twist downward, stuff squirts out...

Taylor is my first car with a rear windscreen wiper, and I like to think of it as a handy means of waving hello to the cars behind me.

Tonight's weather.

On the drive into work, the sun was shining and there were fluffy white clouds. An hour or so later, black clouds arrived from the north, and the thunder and lightning started. Then came the rain, serious summer storm rain, with drops big enough to fill a shotglass* falling out of the sky for a good half hour. Then it eased up a bit (but not much), and the sun set behind the black clouds, turning the sky a fiery orange in the south west, while the rest of the sky was black.

Welcome back Summer. It's been too long...

*I can't actually prove this, but the drops on one guys shirt right when it started were about 2 inches across.

Even at $12.99 a kilo....

I love plums.

And there's a tree on the roadside in front of our house covered in them.

Next month when they are ripened I suspect I will be doing the "I've had enough plums for the rest of my life" thing.

Until this time next year.

Plums are yum.

Rarer than, like, really big diamonds...

Any episode of Chuck where you get to the end and don't immediately need to start watching the next one.

Thankyou for being there...

My electric blanket.

I take it for granted, but I do love it.

So very, very much.

Hypotheticals Redux.

Tonight at work I changed my mind as to where the in-store spontaneous combustion will occur.

It's definitely gunna be Register 16's overheating computer. I may not be able to actually physically smell it burning, but I can psychically sense it overheating. I've lost two cars and a laptop to the problem. I can feel it happening.

I have a special power. It's not a very useful one, but aren't you all jealous anyway?

Bargains

Like when you go to Spotlight with a Spend $100 get $40 off voucher to bulk buy yourself some batting, and you find out that it's already 20% off...

(which by the way equates to 8 metres for about $60... A bit over $7.50 a metre)

Nature's slurpie.

Partly frozen apple juice.

Thankyou Telstra...

My internet ran out 2 hours ago (while I was at work) and web browsing speeds have slowed down accordingly, but I'm still downloading at 600+kBps.

Oh Crap...

I just snorted when I laughed. I'm liking how much I didn't like it.

Yay me!

Yum!

Wendy's mint madness icecream is the only icecream I've ever encountered that tastes just as good with that half-melted-then-refrozen crystallisation on the top, which is completely capable of ruining most icecreams.

I will be having more later.

Being a pathetic weepy loser...

Okay, so I don't actually like being a pathetic weepy loser, but having made the decision to give whatever I'm up to my all, I must confess this: I own at being a pathetic weepy loser. And owning at things is awesome.

Nice and easy...

The Select All and Mark As Read buttons in Hotmail.

Very handy when you've accidentally set yourself up for many many facebook notifications.

It's all good till you breathe wrong...

Icecream and Milo.

But keep a glass of water handy for the inevitable dreaded Milo cough.

So my sister comes out of the shower...

"I don't mean to alarm anyone, but I may have slashed my beaver"

Funniest too-much-information ever.

Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad...

Life goals are important. But sometimes, little goals are better.

I'm gunna learn all the proper words to Copperhead Road. No more mumbling half of them.

Yay Self Improvement.

mmm... squishy soles...

New socks.

Hmpfh.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but I'm really liking not liking people. Instead of just going with everyone else and being all chummy, I'm willing to admit that I don't like a particular person. They are whiny and annoying and useless and not nearly as good at their job as they think they are, and they shit me.

Boo-yah.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not...

Even when everyone else is asleep in bed, not caring whether or not I make it home safe, Honeycat will always come out to meet the car.

Little sweetheart.

Undies

Although I'm a firm believer that one can never have too many undies, it is however possible to have enough undies.

24 (new) pairs (shown here) is just enough. 

Maybe. 

Unless there's an emergency of some kind.

Maybe I should go buy some more. They're only $7 for a pack of three.

Hullo, everybody!

People you meet on the internet.

Hi people!

Forward Thinking...

Even though I can't eat more than 2/3rds of a box of Pommes, I always put the whole box in anyway. That way, when I forget they're in the oven and come back to the kitchen an hour later, there'll usually be a few in the middle that haven't yet transformed into small lumps of charcoal.

Hurrah Positivity!

I'm so full of internet....

In spite of being a whopping 4% ahead of schedule, I still have 13gig of internet left to use over the next 10 days. My only definite downloading is 2 episodes of Castle and 1 of Psych. And the usual usgage too, obviously, but for 10 days, that's maybe probably less than a gig.

Stress less, Me. You'll be fine.

Thanks, I'll take 10...

99 cents per metre flannelette.

But possibly I like it too much?

Vistaprint.com.au

Where all the money I save by cutting back on fabric purchases, I spend on funky personalised crap that makes me and my friends smile. But hey, a bumper sticker, 25 magnets and 2 self inking stamps for $20 isn't bad. Last week I got 100 full colour postcards, 25 magnets (different to today's) and another stamp for $14.

I've had worse/more pointless/more expensive addictions.

New (Old) Software

My laptop tends to run about 30 degrees (and these are the big Australian degrees) hotter when I'm playing any video or audio file. Even just music. 

So hurrah for Media Player Classic. Now I can play whatever (including DVDs) with a temp rise of about 4 degrees. This thing uses less than 3% of my processor, and about 9meg of RAM.

I'm in love.

Hypotheticals.

At work tonight:

What's the most fire-prone area of the store?

Aisle 14 has matches, firelighters, barbequeue briquettes, candles and fertiliser.

Which aisle would be the most likely to spontaneously combust?

Aisle 12 has batteries and electrical appliances.

Which aisles would be best and worst in case of fire?

At first we thought Aisle 6 would be good because it's juice on one side and softdrink at the other, but then we worried that the heat would pressurise the cans of soft drink and cause them to rupture, and we would end up with nasty shrapnel wounds. We eventually decided we would hide in the big freezer out the back. Worst Aisle was a tie between 14 and 12 (as above) and also 9, because flour tends to explode too.

Some nights are quieter than others. I like these nights.

External Hard Drives.

I have two, with a total space of 1.08T

That doesn't feel like enough though, since the 320G one is completely full and the 750G one is about a third full, and my laptop is literally overflowing.

50G a month in downloads is starting to show it's evil side.

Also, I have about 12 hours of downloaded TV shows still to watch. And 3 seasons of Burn Notice on DVD too. And I still have more in my to-get list.

But the thing I like about my to-get list these days, is that I'm not waiting because I don't have the inernets. I'm waiting because I don't have the time. And I don't mind that.

Bread

The flat stuff. Or the square stuff. Especially the round crunchy stuff. But not in bed. In bed you want the flat stuff. It doesn't leave crumbs.

Mmm, Consistency...

Who doesn't love a standardised file naming system? How could you not?

It's a bugger of a job though. I've given up hope on my mp3s (there's just too many), but my TV shows are coming along excellently.

Speed!

167kB/s average speed for tonight's episode of Psych.

LOLbubbles...

Finding out that your ex got fat. Fatter, actually.

Don't I know you from somewhere?

The "Hey, it's that guy/chick" game you can play when watching pretty much any American TV show.

For instance, episode 8 season 1 of Chuck - That guy from Alias (he was the little tech guy) and the chick from The OC, who then went on to date that guy from Star Wars.

Fun game.

Some of my Co-Workers.

Tegan, my fellow Psych, and Castle, and Big Bang Theory lover. This time tomorrow night I will be downloading the new episode of Psych, and this time the night after she will be watching it (I'm giving it to her on Friday)

Amanda, who knows all the obscure country songs I reference.

Janelle, who gave her son his middle name (Xander) in honor of a Buffy character (I called my ferret Liam cause it was Angel's name before he got turned into a vampire.)

8.30pm

Going to bed at a reasonable hour. Or I suppose, a "differently unreasonable" hour.

I still didn't get out of bed till 12 though, so I don't think it really worked.

This is new...

Dawn. It's nice. I'm celebrating with strawberries. Also nice.

Like watching TV with people funnier than you are...

DVD commentaries. Preferably with more than one commentator. White Collar is good with 3 people but Psych has anywhere between 5 and 10, and that's great.

European cars...

This is probably the same with American cars, but they're just not as cool.

Anyway, the thing I'm liking is how the indicator is on the left hand side of the steering wheel. I indicate with my left pinky. This makes me cooler and more classy than everyone who doesn't.

My awesome sunglasses help too.

Iceberg.

Lettuce is like delicious solid water. I think when it costs four of five dollars it's a bit of a rip-off, but it must be in season at the moment, because it's only $1.50 at Woolies at the moment. 

I bought two.

Country Music. And other kiinds too.

Right now I'm liking many things. I'm liking any song by the band Dragon, since my voice seems to be very good at it at karaoke. I'm liking Love Today, by Mika, since, although it is difficult, it is fun. I'm liking Beer for my Horses, by Toby Keith, since it got Casey behind the mic for 30 seconds.

I'm liking The Angry American by Toby Keith because Casey likes it so much, but I'm liking Alan Jackson's Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning) even more. Because I like that very much, but I don't know why. And a like you cant explain, is a good like indeed.

Nighttime driving

Driving at night with the music so loud it drowns out your thoughts. I love this so much I'm considering going back into town for country karaoke, just so that I can listen to the end of Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve.

Sleeping

Not getting out of bed till 2pm. Love it.

It's like a machine...

Our washing machine has a "rinse and spin" option, which takes about 5 minutes. Once you've made a quilt, and you wanna do a test wash to make sure it holds up and doesn't shrink horribly, a minimum 30 minute wait on the actual wash cycle is just too long. 5 minutes is much better. I like the rinse and spin.

Sweet Aussie Dollar

When I go on eBay, and look at the things I'm watching, the ones that are located in America have two prices. The first is what Americans pay, the second is what I pay. My number is smaller.

Cheese. In Black Wax.

Cheese rocks. Margaret River Original Club Cheddar. I normally prefer a hard cheese, but this is hella good.

Green

This morning, I'm liking how green it looks outside. It's the end of spring here in Australia, but it's been a very wet season, and the grass and the trees are all such a lush, rich colour. And the dew sparkles in the sunlight as the leaves rustle in the breeze, and other such poetry. But that's not the best bit. The best bit is the fact the so much of the natural world just happens to be my favourite colour. How awesome is that?.

Welcome...

...To Stuff I'm Liking. A new blog I had to make because I like to make stuff everyday, and I hadn't made anything else.

Anyway. My name is Sara. I like stuff.

You know why I like stuff? Because it's awesome.

You know what I'm liking right now? I'm liking the fact that Target had Season 1 of White Collar on DVD for $25, but it was $50 at Kmart and $40 at Sanity. And you know what I'm especially liking? The fact that I bought it at Target.

That, is awesome.