56 of 365TTSM - people who put their rubbish in my skip.

Who would have thought that something as simple as a skip would provide such good blog fodder.  I liked our last skip so much I ordered another one, which we managed to fill up with all sorts of renovation rubbish yesterday. But when we went out this morning, there was a bag of rubbish that hadn't originated with us. It was a green rubbish bag full of manky jackets. I could probably just tolerate someone else's funky rubbish in our skip, but this stuff was decidedly uncool. At the very least, they could have tied up the bag so I didn't have to see its contents. Yick.

55 of 365TTSM - masking tape

You'd think by now someone would have invented an easy removal masking tape. They haven't. Instead, this stuff had the tips of my fingers sticking together as I tried to remove it from the windows and every so often a line of it would flick back and adhere to the back of my hand, giving me a quick, cheap and easy hand wax. When I pulled out my phone to take this photo, my finger adhered to it briefly.

54 of 365TTSM - vanishing salespeople

This was the powertools helpdesk at the hardware shop this morning. Just minutes before this photo was taken, it was attended by several people. Then my significant other and I had a question we needed to ask about a power tool and they all mysteriously vanished. We saw several in the distance and as we walked towards them, they all seemed to somehow move further away from us. Several times we turned to speak to one we saw out of the corner of our eyes, only for it to turn out to be an apparent trick of the light. Finally, by each of us walking in opposite directions of a circle, we managed to trap one between us. By his greying hair and look of general experience, we considered we'd made a pretty good catch. "Does this router have a half inch collet?" we asked. "I don't know," he replied. We gave up and bought it anyway.

53 of 365TTSM - skip amnesia

A few weeks ago we ordered a skip for our renovation rubbish (see 36 of 365TTSM). It has been sitting full at the front of our house for a couple of weeks now, so I decided I'd better ring the skip company to come and pick it up. Unfortunately, it has been sitting at our house for so long that I couldn't remember which skip company had provided it. So I asked my significant other. "I can't remember," he said, "but the name will be on the skip". Bzzzt - wrong! So I looked for the receipt I'd received when I paid for it, which would have the company's name on it. Bzzzt - wrong again! All it contained was the scrawl of a mysterious man named Jim, who appeared to have no surname and not particularly neat handwriting. Finally, I resorted to leaving vague and confused voicemail messages with the two companies whose names I found in the yellow pages who seemed most familiar. One of them must have been right, because several hours later I went outside and the skip had vanished. Either that or we've been the victim of skip thieves. . .

52 of 365TTSM - smoke alarm that can't tell the difference between life-threatening inferno and two slices of toast.

This is the smoke alarm that went off this morning during the toasting of two slices of bread. TWO SLICES OF BREAD! And only cooked to marginally beyond warm bread. After that little ear-shaking episode, it wasn't the only slightly oversensitive thing in the house.

51 of 365TTSM - stuff that's too big to fit in the car

Today we bought a sheet of splashback material and when we got it to the car, discovered it was too big to fit. So we went back into the shop and bought a scoring knife with the intent of cutting it down to size. The scoring knife didn't work all that well, so we went back into the shop and bought a hacksaw. When we were about three quarters of the way through cutting it with the hacksaw, the blade broke. By then we were too embarrassed to go back into the shop to buy a new blade, so we got through the last section with the broken bit of blade and a bit of swearing. Then we could fit it in the car, but had to sit squished down into our seats all the way home so we didn't bump our heads on it.

50 of 365TTSM - abnormally large spiders leaping about when they should be sleeping.

I normally like spiders. I didn't used to. I used to think the only good spider was a spider that had been sucked up by a vacuum cleaner and chased down with half a can of insect killer. However, as I gradually came to know more about these fascinating creatures, I developed a certain fondness for them and now often follow them around with a camera to compare the different body markings of, in particular, different varieties of hunstman spiders (which usually results in them feeling very uncomfortable and leaving our house much more rapidly than they used to when I was afraid of them and just screeched amusingly in their general direction). However, when they grow to the abnormally large size of the one in this photo and then leap all about the place on the front door when I arrive home from a dinner that involved perhaps one glass of wine too many, I lose the love a bit. This is not the sort of adrenaline rush I need at nearly 11pm. This spider should have been curled up asleep in a neat little comfy crevice somewhere, not leaping about on my door, dammit.

49 of 365TTSM - committing to blog every day for a year

It's 7.10pm. I've had two glasses of champagne. There is fresh Tasmanian crayfish on the table. And I need to write my freaking blog, when there has been nothing to shit me all day. I've had a fabulous day with lovely people, managing to avoid any mention of the word Christmas while still enjoying lots of good food, wine and company. And still the blog screen is calling. That shits me.

48 of 365TTSM - book pile size and holiday length don't match.

This is my pile of holiday reading. So far I am about a quarter of the way through it. But I am about three quarters of the way through my holiday. Something doesn't add up. . .

47 of 365TTSM - kettles that take a very long time to boil

This is our renovation kettle. It was very cheap and was bought with the express purpose of allowing us to make cups of team while renovating our investment property, which is located several thousand kilometres from our usual house and its accompanying super-schmick, super-fast, stylishly chrome-like kettle. The renovation kettle is not super fast. During the time it takes to boil, I usually have time to change my mind five or six times about the sort of tea I would like, and sometimes to paint a room or two while I'm at it. 

46 of 365TTSM - Shops playing contemporary Christmas carols

This is a ceiling speaker in a shop I was in this morning. It was playing contemporary Christmas carols.  The song I was treated to was by a singer whose career highpoint was, I suspect, having his music played in downmarket shops over Christmas. As lyrically meaningful as an episode of A Current Affair, it had a line that said something like "did Mary ever guess her son would become the leader of a nation?" Well, I'm an atheist and even I know Jesus never did any nation leadership. Irritating and inaccurate. Resisting the urge to rip the speaker from the ceiling and shout hysterically "I hate Christmas and all its musical accoutrements!!", I quietly bought my bathroom cleaner and left.

45 of 365TTSM - that this should make me love my insurance company

You would think that being greeted by a scene like this in your bathroom first thing in the morning would provide amply opportunities for irritation. But no, the plumber was prompt and helpful, the insurance company was prompt and helpful and the whole situation will be tidied up and on its way to being an amusing dinner party story in no time at all. The thing that shits me about the whole episode is that I now love my insurance company in a slightly obsessive manner. I feel extreme brand loyalty and want to pay them large premiums for ever. All because they were nice and efficient and solved my problem quickly and painlessly, dammit.

44 of 365TTSM - paint rollers that don't roll

There were two things that irritated me more than the paint roller in this picture today, but I was unable to take photos of them, so you get a picture of the stupid paint roller that I bought especially to paint the ceiling in the smelly room. The rolling bit wouldn't actually roll and then when I thumped it on the ground in the hope that violence towards it would make it perform, the end of it fell off and I probably lost all chance of it working. Just for the record, the two things that irritated me more than the paint roller were a black cat who stalked our resident backyard bluetongue and former tenants who left the walk-in wardrobe smelling suspiciously of faecal matter. Enough said.

43 of 365TTSM - big dopy blowfly

I really dislike big round slow-buzzing flies. Especially when they congregate. For some reason I think of them as corpse flies, and after three days of 15-hour days of non-stop painting, I begin to imagine there are bodies hidden in the very thick walls of our new house. I may have inhaled too many paint fumes (which may also explain today's very arty, blurred photograph).

42 of 365TTSM - People who blog about their children

Today I was looking for an excuse to avoid doing more painting for a while and decided to ensconce myself more fully into the world of blogging by clicking on the "view next blog" link at the top of the page. And what I discovered was that just about everyone else in the world appears to blog about their children. I'm not interested in the children of complete strangers. I don't care how many words they know, how many toys they own, the behaviour of their digestive systems or whether they have strange rashes on their foreheads. I just sort of figured that the only people who would want to look at pictures of other people's children are family, friends and paedophiles, so why not change your privacy settings to just let friends and family into the viewing realm, eh? And that way, other blog browsers can read about things they really find interesting, like whatever is irritating me on any particular day of the year. Because people find that just fascinating.

41 of 365TTSM - crazy volume control button on cheap radio

This is my renovation radio. It's a pretty good radio. It was the cheapest one I could find that would provide me with music and cricket scores while hopefully surviving sanding dust and paint spills during my month of renovation adventures. However, it has a button instead of a dial for volume control, which is the first thing that shits me a little bit. But the thing that shits me the most is that it turns its own volume back up whenever I turn it down. It doesn't do it in a sudden and obvious way, just sneaks it back up so that the volume pretty much stays at one constant volume all the time. As a result, I need to control volume by moving the radio or myself. If it is too loud, I move it a couple of rooms away. If a song comes on that I really like, I move closer to the radio and shake my booty until it's over, thereby losing valuable renovating time.

40 of 365TTSM - painting coveralls that let paint through

This is a large paint stain on one of my many pairs of favourite Kathmandu trousers (I liked them so much I bought several pairs). The paint stain occurred THROUGH the painting coveralls I was wearing. I would assume that if I bought something designed to be worn while painting, that one of its purposes would be to ensure that paint DID NOT GET THROUGH ONTO MY TROUSERS. But instead I spent 15 hours looking like a nuclear waste disposal expert and getting quite hot and still ended up with paint on my trousers. Ripped off again.

39 of 365TTSM - Flies with no sense of self-preservation

Today I put masking tape on all the windows in preparation for painting tomorrow. As I tried to put the masking tape on one window, two little flies kept flying underneath it. As a vegetarian and general non-animal killer, I tried to gently shoo them away, but they seemed to have a bizarre attraction to the masking tape. Eventually, they both got their little feet stuck to it, so I tried to delicately flick them off. Unfortunately, that resulted in the flies flicking away without several of their legs. I was then faced with the enormous ethical dilemma of whether their suffering would be minimised by me squashing them quickly, or whether they were likely to still have some quality of life with only two out of six legs, in which case killing them would be wrong. In addition, I was a little bit annoyed about having fly legs stuck to my masking tape. As I tried to decide whether to kill them or not, I wondered whether they would be ostracised by their fellow flies for their disability, or whether they would be surrounded by a supportive community who would help them find meaning in adversity. Were they in any pain? If they were in pain, should I kill them or see if I could give them some paracetamol or gin? While I was grappling with my ethical dilemma, the semi-legless flies flew off somewhere and I couldn't find them again.

38 of 365TTSM - expanding foam (it's a love/hate thing)

I love expanding foam. It cures no end of renovation ills. It will fill any gap and sets like rock. You can chip it up with a chainsaw. I once saw a documentary about an entire house built of expanding foam. However, it really annoys me when people who own houses before I do think it's a similarly good idea. Because it usually means they've taken a quick and dirty approach to renovation. And when used in places like under a laundry trough, as in the photo, it provides lots of little curvy hollows for ancient bits of detergent and lint to bond and set up home together, and they're really hard to clean. Even my good friend Ms Bleach struggled a bit with this.

37 of 365TTSM - the boat

Our new house in Hobart is accessible via a very narrow street (a fairly common phenomenon in the old parts of Hobart). Someone who lives in the very narrow part of the street has decided it's a good idea to keep their boat parked on said street. So every time we need to drive along the street, we have to drive very slowly and carefully past the boat, which takes up an unreasonably large amount of street space. Now, I could somewhat accept the boat-parking and its accompanying inconvenience if it seemed the boat's owner loved his or her boat with a passion and took it out to enjoy the Derwent on a regular basis - even more so if they did something noble like photographing penguins or endangered sea creatures, as opposed to catching and killing fish. However, the boat trailer is resting on bricks that look like they haven't moved for several years and the boat is now full of a thriving community of local spiders (one of whom probably has a little spider boat that is blocking someone's web accessway and really pissing off all the other spiders). My message to the boat's owner is: "Get over the dream. You're never going to have time to go boating. Sell it and put the money towards buying a Smart car or a bicycle or SOME OTHER FORM OF TRANSPORT THAT DOESN'T REALLY ANNOY YOUR NEIGHBOURS!!!!".

36 of 365TTSM - The skip

Yesterday I rang up and ordered a four cubic metre skip to be delivered at 9am today. This is the two cubic metre skip that arrived at 2.30pm. The delivery man was annoyingly chirpy and cheerful.

35 of 365TTSM - cleaning

I have spent the past three days cleaning. If I was the sort of person who wrote a blog about 365 things to be grateful for instead of 365 things that shit me, I would find all sorts of positives in having to scrub the walls of an eight-bedroom house in preparation for cleaning them. Positives like it gives me a chance to meditate on the nature of transformation, or that I am probably getting fit and healthy from 11 hours a day of scrubbing THC-infused grime from walls. But frankly, I just find it mind-numbingly tedious and suspect that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the carpets of this house (with apologies to Shaekespeare) and I'd have heaps more fun demolishing the kitchens. So in a fit of pique I cast aside the cleaning equipment and broke some stuff instead. That was fun.

34 of 365TTSM - people who stick glowy stars to ceilings

Today I removed dozens of little sticky stars from the ceiling of the main bedroom of the house we are renovating. I believe they are meant to glow in the dark and the former tenants probably peered up at them through the smoke haze (we know there was a lot of smoke haze because it left the walls all covered in a thin veneer of nicotine-stained grime that I spent EIGHT HOURS SCRUBBING OFF) and imagined themselves in an open field somewhere, peering at the sparkly stars in space. I wonder why they didn't, you know, GO INTO THE BACK YARD AND LOOK AT SOME REAL STARS and leave my freaking future ceiling alone so I didn't have to waste my time scraping their stupid little glowy stars off when I could have been using a wrecking bar to demolish the kitchen instead.

33 of 365TTSM - teaspoons that melt in hot liquid

Today we bought some plastic teaspoons so my partner in renovation could have sugar in his coffee when we took a break from sanding to have a cuppa. When I used one to stir his coffee, it went soft and squishy and changed shape and colour (the front spoon in the picture). Obviously, it was not meant to be used in hot water. TEAspoon. Tea is hot. Spoon melts in hot liquid. I don't understand.

32 of 365TTSM - Shenandoah

This is the Shenandoah, a three-masted schooner out of Southampton, dating from 1902, currently docked at Elizabeth Street pier in Hobart. The photograph doesn't capture how achingly beautiful this boat is. Not only are her lines representative of design perfection, everything about her is immaculately maintained. Today several young men were varnishing her already shining rails. Her decks are made of teak and her pulley blocks are some other sort of stunning timber, so polished that they wouldn't look out of place in one of the timber galleries on Salamanca. So why does she shit me? Because when I stand on the dock admiring her, I start to romanticise a potential future of sailing the oceans of the world on a vessel with sails and what a jolly fine life that would be. And on the basis of that I will accept the next invitation I receive to go sailing with a Hobartian. And it won't be until I'm well out in the Derwent that I will remember that I have the sailing stomach of a young midshipman Hornblower  and spend the entire event vomiting and remembering that it doesn't matter how beautiful they are - boats are evil.

31 of 365TTSM - Aurora Energy

Today we arrived in Tasmania to spend a month renovating a house we have bought here. So we decided we needed electricity for that month (power tools being an important part of the renovation experience) and rang Aurora, the local electricity supplier, to see about getting a pay as you go card. Fortunately, we had been previous Aurora customers, so thought it should be pretty easy. After all, it wasn't like we were wanting to use lots of electricity and run up a debt, we just wanted a pay as you go card so we could actually pay for our electricity BEFORE using it. So, the three conversations I had with various customer service officers, amalgamated into one for blog brevity and coming in at the point where things went strange, went something like this (noting that these conversations took place in my mobile phone in the car):
Customer service officer: Oh, that's a different driver's licence number to the one you gave us last time.
Me: Yes, that's because I live in another state now.
CSO: Well, we'll need you to fax us a copy of your current licence so we can verify your identity.
Me: I am in a car. I don't have a fax. Can't I just tell you my licence number?
CSO: No, we have to see it.
Me: Well, can you tell me where you have a shopfront and I'll bring it in and show someone, because that's easier for me.
CSO: No, we don't have shopfronts. You'll have to fax it.
Me: But you don't know what I look like. You've only spoken to me on the phone. How would you know it was actually me on the licence.
CSO: (long silence) You'll have to fax it.
Me: I don't have a fax. Who still uses faxes?
CSO: You can go to a post office and do it.
Me: (Defeated) Thank-you. I will go and visit the post office's museum of 20th century technology and fax you a copy of my drivers licence.
CSO: I'll just give you our fax number.

30 of 365TTSM - rego sticker keeps curling up

It has been extremely hard to find something that fits in the "things that shit me" category today. I've only been on leave for 24 hours and already I have a lightness of heart and spring in my step that doesn't bode well for pursuing this blog theme for the next month. However, I will persist, because I have made a commitment to a year of irritant pictures. This picture is the current view from our car window as we sit in the queue waiting to board the Spirit of Tasmania. The queue doesn't shit me at all, because I'm sitting here feeling very tech-savvy blogging in the passenger seat and anticipating the glass of Jantsz awaiting me in the restaurant shortly. The thing that shits me is the car registration sticker in the bottom left hand corner of the picture. It has been curling off for several weeks and I have pressed it back down roughly a dozen times. I do it quite firmly and smartly, and it sticks flat for about 30 seconds, and then slowly curls up again, in a somewhat snarky manner. But it only shits me a little bit.

29 of 365TTSM - I just know I've forgotten something

This is the bag I am packing to go on holiday tomorrow. What shits me about it is that despite writing a very long list of all the things I need to include, and checking it twice, I just know I've forgotten something. But I don't know what I've forgotten. To make up for the fact that I know I've forgotten something, I've added several random extra things that I know I won't need and which will start to shit me as soon as I begin living out of my suitcase. I know that I will remember the thing I have forgotten when we reach that point in our travels where we are borderline between being close enough to turn back and so far away that turning back would be a major inconvenience. By the time I argue with myself the merits of turning back vs continuing on, we will be past the point of no return and I'll need to buy a new one of the thing I've forgotten, which will turn out to be one of those things that I only ever use on holiday, so it will then spend the rest of the year put away in a safe place so that I won't ever see it, and as a result will forget it next time I go on holiday.

28 of 365TTSM - Telstra was the best option and the salesperson was nice

I tend to view Telstra as the evil empire and am quite proud of the fact that I have no accounts with them. But today I needed to get some pre-paid wireless broadband in order to keep blogging when we head down to Tasmania for a month. My research suggested that only Optus or Telstra would (possibly) have the required coverage. So I went to the Optus shop. I asked the shop assistant if I would get good coverage in Hobart. Her reply: "Ummm. . .I went down to Tasmania on holiday once and I couldn't get very good reception, but I didn't go to Hobart, but you could go home and look on the internet and see if we have coverage there and then come back and buy a pre-paid wireless pack if we do." (Seriously!!). So I bitterly trudged to the Telstra shop. Where a charming and delightful young man was immensely helpful and asked friendly but unintrusive questions as he told me what I needed to know, while also sharing a little bit of his life story. Telstra people aren't supposed to be NICE. It felt so wrong, but I'm sure I'll lose the love when my $30 pre-paidness runs on in the first couple of days. . .

27 of 365 TTSM - caffeinated energy drinks

I think caffeinated energy drinks epitomise food and drink evil, so it shits me that I have resorted to having two a day while red-lining on sleep deprivation this week. They give me shaky hands and occasional heart palpitations, and not particularly loud noises make me jump. I imagine this is what methamphetamine feels like to people who normally consume caffeine. But I am getting heaps of work done. Very quickly. Last night I dreamt that I decided to take cocaine, which suggests that at a subconscious level I equate caffeine with a class A narcotic. Maybe I should become a Mormon. . .

26 of 365TTSM - Dog is not very cuddly any more.

This is our dog. He died just over a year ago. It still feels wrong to open the front door when I get home from work and have no dog waiting to say hello. On the plus side, he can now sit on the table, which he wasn't allowed to do when he was alive. Sometimes I sit with him on my lap, but his urn is really not very cuddly. We keep meaning to take him to Tasmania with us and scatter him at his favourite former walking spot, but we keep putting it off. Partly because the lid of the urn is glued on very solidly and I feel bad about the fact that I'll have to smash it to get him out. Jeff has suggested we could glue him to a skateboard and take him for walks, but I'm worried the skateboard might tip over and he'd smash.

25 of 365TTSM - non-vegetarians eat all the vegetarian food

This was the last piece of vegetarian pizza at the banquet lunch I attended today. There were about 10 people and eight different dishes - two of which were vegetarian. There was one vegetarian at the table (that would be me), so imagine my shock when I looked up to see this last lonely bit of vege pizza left, when I had only eaten one piece. Oddly, there was rather a lot of the non-vegetarian pizza and pasta left. Okay, non-vegetarian people - the token items of vegetarian food in a banquet meal are not there for you to have a novelty culinary experience ("oooh - food that doesn't contain dead animals - I must try some!"). They are there for us who do not eat meat to, you know, EAT FOR LUNCH. 

24 of 365TTSM - letter from bank won't fold into paper crane properly

Today I received a letter from my bank offering me a special opportunity to increase the limit on my credit card. I have been with the same bank for about 15 years and have never accepted an offer to increase the limit on my credit card. But still they keep offering. So I decided that instead of letting the letter shit me, I would turn it into something beautiful. I found this website to teach me how to make an origami crane: http://monkey.org/~aidan/origami/crane/crane1.html . I followed all the instructions, but somehow still came up with something that looks like an obese paper chook with a very small head. Stupid origami.

23 of 365TTSM - recalcitrant husband doesn't read my blog

This is my husband in his office. He is a very lovely husband and I love him very much. However, as you may or may not be able to tell from my usual very high quality photograph, he has a computer screen in front of him and the content on the computer screen IS NOT MY BLOG. I don't think he has once read my blog since I started writing it, even though I dedicate up to 10 minutes of my life to it every day and regularly wander around saying things like "oh, I got some very nice comments about my blog from my large array of followers today". Last night we were having dinner with some friends and I casually mentioned that I write a blog called 365 Things That Shit Me, which they found utterly fascinating. 
"I haven't featured on it yet. Heh heh heh," he said. 
Yes, well who's heh heh heh-ing now, eh? I am, that's who. Because he has featured in my blog and he will never, ever know. Heh heh heh.

22 of 365TTSM - zip broke on my Oroton handbag

Today I went to do up the zip on my favourite Oroton handbag and the zip tag just broke right off. Just snapped, like a cheap Chinese rip-off, not like the genuine article that is less than two years old. It was a gift from people I like very much, so its zip breakingness is terribly inconsiderate. Now I have to grab hold of the zip stub to open and close it and risk chipping a finger nail every time I do it. The other thing that irritated me today is how fat and white my hand looks in this photo. It looks like the sort of hand that alternates between patting a pudgy-faced cat and transporting petit fours between a box and my mouth. I think I need a new camera phone.

21 of 365TTSM - someone stole my curry

I have a Sri Lankan friend at work. She makes excellent curries. Every so often she decides I am not eating particularly well and brings me in a lentil curry for my lunch, which she did earlier in the week. Today I found myself being both hungry and with some time to eat lunch in tandem and so went to the fridge to get my curry - and it was gone (see curryless fridge in photo)!! Someone stole my lentil curry!! While I like to think that it was taken by someone who had a sudden enlightened conversion to vegetarianism and couldn't find anything else to eat (which I would be okay with, because their kleptomaniacy would be cancelled out by their contribution to reducing their carbon footprint), I suspect they may have been attracted to the shiny new Tupperware container it was in. So I went to the vending machine and bought a packet of Twisties for lunch. It was only half full.

20 of 365TTSM - morning traffic

Today I got a lift to work because I left my bike at the office last night. It was a slower and more irritating way to travel. But I did get to sing along with the radio. For a looooong time.

19 of 365TTSM - the owner of this bike

For the past year and a half, I have been riding my bike to work and parking it in this bike space. I ride it there and park in that space all through the year, not just the summer. Sometimes, on minus five degree mornings, I struggle to make my frozen fingers wrap my bike lock around the bike bar. I've been through a lot in that space. So, a few weeks ago, when the warm weather started and the fair weather cyclists began riding to work, I was a little miffed to discover the pictured bike parked in my bike space. But I breathed in the anger and breathed out calm acceptance of other cyclists and made my way to the showers. . .where I discovered that the rider of said bike was USING MY SECTION OF THE BATHROOM. It's the same section I use every day because it's close to the mirror and the paper towel dispenser that I need to use through the winter when the extreme cold makes my nose run. And she was just calmly standing near my part of the pannier bench, USING MY MIRROR TO DO HER HAIR WITH A HAIR STRAIGHTENER!! And then she had the gall to smile at me and say good morning. So now we play a cunning game of cat and mouse (well, okay, maybe I'm the only one of the two of us who is actually aware we are playing it) to see who can get to work first to get to the parking space and bathroom space first. She may have won today, but we have plenty of time. . .

18 of 365TTSM - Drippy shower

This is our shower. It has been dripping for three years. During that time we have broken two tap wrenches trying to fix it. To give up and call a plumber would be an admission of failure. I keep the bathroom door closed all the time so the constant dripping doesn't remind me that I am an environmental vandal and probably personally responsible for the parlous state of Canberra's water supply. 

17 of 365TTSM - our office vending machine and skimped on Twisties

Today's photo represents a whole range of things that shit me. The first is our office vending machine. It does not contain a single item of food that could be considered remotely healthy. I usually avoid using it (well, except for chocolate, but that doesn't count, because that doesn't fit into the usual food spectrum of health to unhealthy - it is special) by filling one of my desk drawers with virtuous food to satisfy my "I'd rather eat than work right now" cravings. However, because I am going on leave in two weeks, I haven't re-stocked it and have been getting through my day on a diet of overwork, green tea, extra minty chewing gum and a chaser of general bitterness (and an occasional dash to the cafe down the street for a banana or a sandwich. And lots of the chocolate. Which doesn't count). However, today the overwork only carried me through until about 3pm and it was pouring with rain outside, so I decided to give the vending machine a go. The really evil thing about vending machines is that they only display the front of packets, so I can't obsessively peruse the ingredients list of everything and give them an adjusted aggregate rating based on a combination of total calories, fat content, the chance of them sending me into a diabetic coma and the level of energy consumed in creating them. So I decided that as Twisties are made from a combination of corn and industrial chemicals, they were in roughly the same food group as vegetables. Then, when I got back to my desk and opened the packet, it was LESS THAN HALF FULL OF ACTUAL TWISTIES. The photograph was taken before the removal of any Twisties. Just because they contain all the nutritional goodness of floor scrapings from the cage of a cosmetic company's lab rat doesn't mean I don't want to consume half as many of them as I was expecting the packet to contain. I suspect that somewhere, a Twisties executive is spending a VERY large performance bonus. . .

16 of 365TTSM - Celery, not Neil.

Tonight's thing that shits me was going to be my friend Neil, who knows that I have a blog but refuses to read it, and makes slightly snooty comments about it. I even had a really great picture of Neil making a disapproving face that make his mouth look like a cat's bottom. However, I made a decision at the start of this blog that if I ever included a picture of any of my friends, I would include one of those little black rectangles over their eyes in order to protect their privacy. And when I imported Neil's pic into iPhoto I couldn't figure out how to do the little black rectangle. Normally I would ask my lovely and far-more-technically-able-than-I husband to do it for me (in my very special and quite endearing whiny voice) but he has decided that sleeping is a higher priority than doctoring photos for my blog. So my photo is of celery instead, or I will miss my daily deadline, even though Neil irritated me far more than the pack of celery I bought that had lovely celery on top and dodgy, insipid, anaemic celery underneath, so that only about 23% of the whole pack of celery was of a suitable crudite standard.

15 of 365TTSM - watermelon

If you buy about a dozen watermelons and put them all in the back of your car and then drive down a not particularly steep hill, all of the watermelons will roll towards the front of the car and thwock into the back of your seat, before piling up on the floor behind your seat. If there is anything breakable on the floor behind the seat, it will be crushed.

14 of 365TTSM - three-ring binders

Today I walked all the way up to the stationery room to get a binder to put my weekend reading in so I could keep it all together in my panniers on the ride home. I grabbed one from the binder pile and took it back to my office. When I opened it in my office - lo! - it was only suitable for paper with three holes punched in it. I only own a two-hole punch. I don't think I've ever even seen a three-hole punch. I stared at it aimlessly for several seconds, then picked it up, walked back to the stationery room, and swapped it for one suitable for two-hole paper.

13 of 365TTSM - dress is a food magnet

It was 38 degrees here today. So it was another chance to wear my favourite blue dress (which you may recall from 6 of 365TTSM) and enjoy tropical fruit. So I decided to eat half a mango (very neatly with a spoon, with little cubes cut in it to aid neatness of eating) while taking a break from writing an essay, and watching a documentary on how the world is going to end and we're all going to die. Well, I was quite concerned about the whole world ending scenario until a piece of mango somehow managed to leap from the plate on my lap to the front of my dress. Now I'll need to wash it and expose myself to the nagging washing machine bleep again (8 of 365TTSM). It's tough about the imminent end of our comfortable western lives, but I've got more irritating issues to deal with.

12 of 365TTSM - floppy hair

This section of my hair keeps flopping in my eyes. I have a very expensive haircut - I don't expect bits of it to move of its own accord and flop in my eyes. I don't have time to flick aside floppy hair. But the alternative is to peer coyly through it with a vacuous expression a la Princess Diana. And I'm not tall enough, blonde enough, young enough or pretty enough to get away with that. Tomorrow the hair flop goes.

11 of 365TTSM - panniers won't empty themselves

These are my bike panniers. They are very useful and can fit a power suit, several pairs of ridiculous high heels, an Oroton handbag, a range of accessories, my breakfast, files from work and a laptop. They even have shoulder straps so I can lug all that stuff around relatively easily when they're not on the bike. But every evening I get home from work and drop them on the floor somewhere in the house. And every night, without fail, when I wander back past later, they are still there and haven't had their contents unpacked and neatly put away somewhere. I give them until right up until I go to bed to empty themselves, but they just won't do it. So then I do it myself when I'm overtired and grumpy. Hmph.

10 of 365TTSM - cars that park in the bike lane

This is one of the roads that I ride along on my way home from work. The rather unattractive car in the picture was parked in the bike lane. That's the dark green strip you can see that is supposed to provide a safe haven for those of us who get around by pedal power. As you can see from the conveniently positioned cyclist in the photo, when there is a car in the bike lane, bikes are forced into the car lane. When you are encased in lycra and polystyrene and car drivers are encased in 1300kg* of glass and metal, this makes you feel a little vulnerable. Now, I do understand that occasionally cars need to double park to quickly drop someone off or pick someone up during a busy time of day, and they may inadvertently encroach on the bike lane in so doing. However, in this case, there was ample parking space in the actual car parking space!!! I mean, I'm not the world's most accomplished parallel parker, but at least I generally manage to get more than 90% of the car into the parking space and not hanging out into the road. Tch. 
*1300kg is the actual weight of the car in the picture. I know that because I looked it up on the internet, not because I ride with a set of car scales in my panniers.

9 of 365TTSM - green Falcons

This green Ford Falcon was at the Lake George rest stop when we took a break while out cycling this morning. The front of it is cut off because I was trying to take a photo of it while looking like I was taking a photo of the hill behind it, as I didn't want the driver to come and ask me why I was taking a photo of his car because then I may have gone into a spiel about how much green Falcons shit me and the driver was much bigger than I am and he was in a V8 and I was riding 7kg of carbon fibre and wearing lycra with a bit of foam on my head. 

So what's wrong with green Falcons? Well green, especially this particular shade of emerald green, is the colour of rain forests and tree pythons and the environmental movement and Kermit the frog. None of these things have anything in common with cars (you will recall that Kermit rides a bicycle). Sure, there are plenty of worse cars than Ford Falcons. Like F250s. And Hummers. And 1975 Trabants. But the bottom line is that just about any car in this shade of green creates a visual and mental dissonance that makes my brain hurt. When our world leaders meet in Copenhagen in December, I think that in addition to setting some emissions targets that show how ridiculous our proposed CPRS is, they should also pass an international law banning the use of this shade of green for any vehicles except pedal cars and the Fiat Punto.

8 of 365TTSM - washing machine is excessively bleepy

This is our washing machine. It's a very good washing machine. I know that because when we bought it, I checked out many independent reviews to compare energy efficiency, water efficiency and value for money. It was ranked first in its class by Choice. But what none of the reviews mentioned was that when it finishes a load, it has a nag beep that tells you over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that the load has finished and it really would appreciate it if you stop whatever you're doing RIGHT NOW and hang out the washing. Why don't washing machines come with mute buttons?

7 of 365TTSM - Magpie Maria Callas poos on the outside furniture.

And after we'd provided food for her, her partner, and her three children.