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.

6 of 365TTSM - email frivolity leads to tuna stain

This is a picture of a tuna stain on my dress (you were warned right at the start not to expect quality photography. And photographing your own dress with a camera phone while wearing said dress is not easy. Try it.). It occurred because I was having an email chat with a work colleague several rooms away and she finished one of her emails with the words "watch this space". So I thought it would be rather amusing to spend five minutes watching the space and then emailing her back to let her know that I watched and nothing happened. I was sure she would find that hilarious. Unfortunately, I was eating a small tin of tomato and onion tuna at the time. While watching the space I wasn't watching my fork, so due to my poor hand-eye coordination, the tuna fell off the fork and onto my dress. I spent the rest of the day smelling like tuna and tomato and onion. 

5 of 365TTSM - no raisin bread

Today I went to the freezer to take out some raisin bread to turn into raisin toast to have for breakfast. And there was none in there.

4 of 365TTSM: Dash-8 luggage issue results in ugly bag purchase

Today I flew from Sydney to Canberra on a DeHavilland Dash 8 prop plane. For those unfamiliar with aeroplanology, that means a plane that doesn’t have proper jet engines, but propellers on the wings that you watch go round and round as you bump around all over the sky and try not to vomit. Because it’s so small, it also means your cabin baggage is limited to 4kg. I had my usually meticulously packed and weighed 7kg of little red suitcase luggage ready to take on a proper plane. The Dash-8 and an officious check-in person changed that plan. So I took out my laptop and the work I wanted to do on the minibus with wings, popped them into a plastic bag and checked-in my suitcase. Of course, as soon as I got through security, the sharp corner of my notebook tore through the plastic bag, so I had 25 minutes to find an alternative bag that cost lest than $800 in Sydney airport. I found the one in the photo for $20. The sad truth is that it looks better in the photo than it does in reality. My flight was then delayed for a further 45 minutes, so I took advantage of that time to flounce about with my garish tote and pretend I had just returned from a package holiday to Ibiza. If only I'd had some camel-coloured fluffy mules to go with it.

3 of 365TTSM - my camera phone won't talk to my computer

Today's picture is mostly of the elbow of the man who was sitting next to me on my flight to Sydney. As you can see, it encroaches into my side of the armrest space by about three centimetres (you can also see from the photo that he is casually reading the in-flight magazine, while I am busily reading a folder of very important work reports). This so outraged me that I turned my phone on mid-flight, risking the lives of the twenties of other passengers on the flight, to capture it for irritant photoblog posterity. His foot also crossed over the line between my plane space and his plane space on several occasions. And then, when we landed in Sydney, he STOOD UP BEFORE THEY TURNED THE SEATBELT SIGN OFF. I believe the capitalisation says all I need to say about that.

2 of 365TTSM - Baby magpie pretends to be dead

For the past couple of months, a pair of parent magpies (Maria Callas and Fat Aristotle) have been visiting our yard and turning us into their human slaves to provide them with food to feed their hungry babies. A few days ago, they started bringing their babies into the yard for a visit and to teach them how to eat bugs off the rose bush. They are very cute and funny and bossy and we like them a lot. Then, today, one of the baby magpies decided to just lie down in the dirt by a wall and pretend to be dead. I was about to burst into tears on the back deck (while also mentally planning a tastefully moving funeral with guests and finger food), when Fat Aristotle hopped over, pecked it on the head, and the naughty little bird jumped up and went back to squeeching for food. (Squeeching is the technical expression for the annoying noise made by baby magpies who are hungry.)

No.1 of 365TTSM - Take-home test

Today my take-home statistics test sucked most of the joy out of my day. It is cruel to give people a test that would take three hours in a closed exam room, but somehow expands to take up the whole weekend when that is the time available to do it. Yes, I know that if I was a highly rational, disciplined and organised person I would set up a simulated exam environment at the dining room table, start the stopwatch and just get on for it for three hours. But those sorts of organised and virtuous people create photoblogs about 365 things they're grateful for, not 365 things that shit them. They probably embrace take-home tests for the character-building discipline opportunities they offer. I, on the other hand, folded mine into a jaunty paper captain's hat and popped it on the head of my demented sock creature while singing "stick that up your regression analysis" to the tune of the Sailor's Hornpipe.

The project. . .

Many of you have probably come across the phenomenon of the 365 Reasons to be Grateful photo diary. If not, you can read about it here http://www.homehints.com.au/my+journey/1926/reading/365+reasons+to+be+grateful .
It's a lovely idea. Very virtuous. And I'm sure if I did something like that for a year, it would make me a better person and the world a nicer place. But to be perfectly honest, I just couldn't take myself that seriously for a whole 12 months and would just start to be all facetious about it after the first few weeks. So I thought I might as well just be facetious from the start and do a photo journal of one thing each day for a year that annoys me. Those little life irritations that make the world more interesting (in the way that Legionnaire's disease makes potting mix more interesting).
With the original 365 Reasons to be Grateful photo diary, the far-more-virtuous-than-me photographer found herself seeking out special things each day that prompted her to experience feelings of gratitude. Frankly, I just don't have time for that. There won't be much seeking out involved in this blog. You'll be seeing pictures of things that annoy me at my desk and in my office and over the neighbours' fence and in the bike lane.
Oh, and don't expect good pictures. Most of them will be taken with my camera phone, because that's nearby. And I'm just not a particularly good photographer anyway. But I am committed and will pursue this project assiduously for the next 365 days.
It starts tomorrow. . .