1 of 291TTAM - Pepsi Cavoodle

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.

74 of 365TTSM - too many Anna Paquins in the Fantales

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.

73 of 365TTSM - the distance between my desk and the bin

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.

72 of 365TTSM - jelly beans

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.

71 of 365TTSM - tissue in the washing

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.

70 of 365TTSM - lack of options for silencing annoying meeting participants

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.

69 of 365TTSM - this woman at the counter at Medicare

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.

68 of 365TTSM - Having a blocked dose

67 of 365TTSM - toilet paper facing the wrong way.

I know that if I was a mature and virtuous person, this wouldn't bother me, but I find toilet paper placed this way on the holder really irritates me. My significant other doesn't seem to find this remotely annoying and, as a result, pays absolutely no attention to which way he puts the new roll on the holder. So I then need to turn it around if, as in this picture, it is facing the wrong way. I do it in other people's houses when they get it wrong, too. And in the toilets at work. And in public toilets when you don't need a skeleton key and special security code to change the toilet roll. Maybe this blog entry says a little too much about me. . .

66 of 365TTSM - trumpet flowers

These are the flowers that grow up the pergola on our back deck. Everyone who visits comments on how pretty they are. Well, I don't think they are all that pretty and they are extremely irritating in that they grow and fall all over the deck in enormous volume. There they form a carpet of orange squishiness which requires regular sweeping when I would rather be sitting on the deck having a gin and tonic or inside reading a good book. And those that don't fall on the deck attract every bee and wasp within a 5km radius and they all buzz at me disapprovingly when I go out and figure out whether it would be worth investing in a chainsaw to chop the whole thing down.

65 of 365TTSM - no photo for photoblog

Last night the internet died at our house. Which meant I couldn't upload the fabulous blog photo I took (and I even went to some effort with it yesterday, using my Canon Ixus instead of the camera on my mobile phone, and taking several shots until I got one I liked, instead of my usual sloppy "I'm very busy so that shot will have to do" approach). So, in the interests of making a blog entry every day (or as close as possible to), I'm blogging from work. But I can't upload photos from here. So today's photo is a non-photo that represents all sorts of things that shit me. And now I'm feeling hideously guily and somewhat naughty doing this in work time. And given the large amounts of unpaid overtime I do, the fact that I feel guilty about taking five minutes to blog at work also shits me.

64 of 365TTSM - bags and shoe pile grows of its own accord

There is a pile of shoes and bags on the floor and surrounding areas of my home office that seems to somehow grow of its own volition. I have no conscious recall of placing either shoes or bags in the pile. It's like they all just gather together there overnight and forget to put themselves back in the cupboard afterwards. As a result, I am left with a narrow strip of floor space through which to make my way from the door to my desk and very little scope for swinging from side to side in my chair when I need creative inspiration.

63 of 365TTSM - People who trim the edges of their fake lawn

And then leave it on the verge. Surely they could use it to mulch their fake vegetable patch.

62 of 365TTSM - Summernats

This looks like a typical peaceful late afternoon in a backyard in the inner north of Canberra. But what the photograph doesn't capture is that this scene was overlaid with the sound of burnout competitions going on at the annual Summernats event some three kilometres away. What does the word Summernats even mean? I suspect the organisers came up with it after one Jim Beam and Coke too many when they realised they couldn't spell all the words in "Misogynistic festival of engine cacophony for blokes from outer Sydney with small appendages and large, polluting cars".

61 of 365TTSM - this cat

This cat moved into our back yard a couple of months ago. I'm not a cat person. Plus it keeps trying to eat the family of magpies who frequent our yard, and of whom we are extremely fond. However, it also appears to be lacking in a family of its own and is quite skinny and kind of cute and funny in some ways. And no matter how many times I shout at it to go away, every time I go outside it rubs itself against my legs and schmoozes me. Tonight it leapt halfway up our back wall and caught and ate a moth in mid-flight. I don't want to like the cat. I don't want a cat. It should go and find someone else to adopt.

60 of 365TTSM - the loss of my dirt blindness

Until a week or so ago, I had no idea that I'd spent most of my life with dirt blindness. And then, after nearly a month of obsessively cleaning the filthiest rental property of all time after we purchased it, I developed a sudden and disturbing ability to see dirt everyone. And not only to see it, but to have an overwhelming urge to remove it. We have had a house cleaner for many years, but to be honest, I never actually saw any difference in cleanliness - I could tell the house was cleaner because it smelt cleaner. Now I see the bits of dirt. And they bother me. And the four-in-cleaner has become my new best friend.

59 of 365TTSM - I didn't get any calendars for Christmas.

This is the last page of my 2009 First Dog on the Moon Calendar. It has given me a monthly thrill with its hilarity and the ongoing adventures of Julie Bishop's zombie army. It is still on the wall because, for the first time in my adult life, Christmas has gone by and no-one gave me a calendar. For some reason, someone always gives me a calendar, but this year I've got to the 4th January and grudgingly accepted that I'll just have to go out and buy one for myself. At least they should all be discounted, given they now have four irrelevant days.

58 of 375TTSM - People who give themselves stupid haircuts

Okay, there seems to be a bit of a theme developing this week. This one is pretty self-explanatory (and I'm feeling tired and unwriterly).

57 of 365TTSM - people who give their children stupid haircuts

This is a photo taken through glass of a child of about eight with a mullethawk (cross between a mullet and a mohawk). Most adults haven't attempted the mullethawk since the early eighties, and even then it was generally only attempted by very hardcore bogans. But somehow, this child's parents thought it was a good idea to inflict this fashion disaster on their child. Tch.