This is Pepsi the Cavoodle. She stays with us when her family goes on holiday to places that are not suitable for cavoodles. She is a very funny dog. In this photo, she has just finished attacking a small Tasmanian tiger. When we have been away from the house during the day, she makes strange squealy noises and does a minimum of five laps of crazy runs around the house when we return home. She is scared of cats.
You may have noticed that the theme of my blog has changed. However, that is the only thing that has changed. You can still expect the same poor quality photos and rushed narrative you have become accustomed to. In recognition of the changed theme, I have also changed my standard font from Verdana to Georgia. Ghandi said "be the change you want to see in the world". I want to see all blog fonts changed.
The current sweet of choice in our workplace lolly jar is Fantales. I love Fantales. You get a sugar hit and a trivia hit at the same time. However, today I ate a total of five Fantales, and three of the wrappers featured Anna Paquin. THREE OUT OF FIVE!! Now, I loved little Anna in The Piano and I'm sure she's done lots of interesting work since them, and I find her cello-playing vegetarianism very virtuous, but I don't want to read about it three times in one day. Lift your game, Fantales company.
At some time in the relatively recent history of my workplace, a decision was made that no employee may have a bin at his or her desk. Instead, there are strategically placed flip-top bins around the floor that allow everyone to share a bit of a bin. The original decision caused much angst about the place, to the point that some people now hide their own teensy bins inside their desk drawers and filing cabinets. I don't engage in such workplace deceit (mainly because my drawers and filing cabinets are full of paperwork that probably could be thrown out, but which I couldn't be bothered taking to the bin). In fact, I actually support the theory of no desk-side bins. However, the practice really shits me. As can be seen from the picture, the communal bin is approximately three metres from my desk. That means I don't get any meaningful exercise when I get up and walk to it, but I do get work disruption whenever I do. On a normal workday, that is not an enormous problem, but today I had hayfever and was blowing my nose on a fairly regular basis. I was then left with the choice of getting up and walking to the bin to dispose of a tissue every 10 minutes, or letting a pile of them accumulate on my desk. While the latter is a good way of dissuading people from entering my office when I'd rather be left alone, it doesn't make for a particular pleasant work environment. In the end, I found a spare plastic container lying around, threw out some of my paperwork, and turned it into a hidden bin in my filing cabinet.
Jelly beans are evil. This is a well known fact. Several weeks ago, we received 12 litres of jelly beans as as result of buying lots of paint during our renovation phase. We gave quite a few away, but still had one unopened tin. I had been ignoring it extremely well until I was trying to study today. Every time I began to immerse myself in governance theory and legal frameworks, I'd hear a small voice emanating from the jelly bean tin. For some strange reason it had a Mexican accent. "Go on - just one leetle handful won't do you any harm," it whispered. Eventually I had a handful just to shut it up. But for some reason, my random handful only had red and yellow jellybeans in it. And because of the Law of Jellybeans, I couldn't swap any of them for any other colours. So I had to eat them all and then get another handful. And that one had a greater variety of colours, but no purple ones. "Go on, you need a purple one," the little Mexican jelly bean voice urged me. And so it went. Now I am sitting here on the verge of a diabetic coma, hallucinating from excessive intake of artificial colours and feeling the urge to make a tiny jelly-bean sized sombrero and poncho.
Lately a lot of tissues have been ending up being washed along with the clothes in our washing machine. I can't figure out how this is happening. I'm sure I check all the pockets. The only explanation I can come up with is that I have been cursed by some sort of tissue demon (let's face it, if there was a God of Tissues, she would probably be pretty pissed off that our primary use of her product is to blow our noses in them). As a result, my husband's favourite dark blue running t-shirt turned out dark blue with little white papery bits all over it. Sure, I probably should have washed the whole load again, but decided it would be easier to just hang it out and leave it all on the line until next time it rains, when all the bits should wash off. Given our current drought-like state, the t-shirt might not be doing any running for a while.
Today I attended a meeting designed to find solutions to a range of business issues. There was one participant who whined for almost an hour and a half about her particular problems and how they were completely unsolvable. At one stage I felt like screaming at her: "Three million people are killed, injured or homeless in Haiti, Copenhagen was an unmitigated disaster, women are persecuted for wanting to be educated in Afghanistan, and you're whining about the fact that you can't manage your contractors. If you want to carp and moan about trivial and inconsequential things, write a blog like the rest of us!!!". Of course, I wasn't brave enough to do that, so I instead fantasised about stabbing her through the eye with the pen in the picture. That was quite enjoyable.
Today I needed to complete a transaction at Medicare, so at lunchtime I went to our local shopfront. By the time I took this photo, I had been waiting for my number (A129) to be called for about 30 minutes. That was okay. I expect to wait when I attend such places during the lunch hour, and I certainly wasn't the only person having to wait. But then I saw the woman in the picture come and take her number (J856) and she was called to the counter within SECONDS! And so I immediately came to the conclusion that there is some conspiracy whereby certain people have a special access code that they put into the ticket machine that gives them preferential treatment. Maybe she's a current or former employee of Medicare. Maybe she's a member of the government. Maybe she's boffing Medicare's CEO. Whatever the case, her speedy transaction bothered me.
