…so yeah, I was a pretty ordinary maths student at high school. I rarely failed, but I scraped by by memorising just two formulae and using them for EVERY calculus or Trig problem (I’m deadly serious). It worked because we always got marks for “showing our working” i.e. you could get a couple of marks just by correctly plugging numbers into any old formula. Please don’t leak this to my new boss – the Head of the School of Maths & Stats.
Also, while on the topic of Yippee, Baba and I celebrated our 6th anniversary on Sunday. We went to Billy Kwong for dinner. It’s an upmarket Chinese/fusion joint up the road and really a bit mediocre, despite having made quite a name for its self. The signature crispy skinned roast duck with mandarin was a genuine highlight and at $42 it would want to be!! That brings me to the main problem with the joint – it’s all just a bit overpriced. The biggest insult was being charged $12 for Chinese tea. Being a Chinese restaurant, when our first (small) pot of tea was empty, I put the lid on skew whiff to indicate “more hot water please”. They brought a new pot and new cups and added an extra $3 a head to the bill. $3 a head admittedly isn’t a lot of money, but it’s all about the impression and principle.
…you both wake up on a Saturday morning and decide quite independently of each other that a picnic in the blue mountains might be nice. So on Saturday I rented a car and we drove up to Katoomba to have a picnic in a random park in Leura, look at the three sisters, and wonder around the town (baba was hoping to find a tarot reader or psychic to predict his fortune…I seem to remember Katoomba being a bit more boho than it is nowadays…mind you there was no shortage of young women with hairy legs, stripy stockings, pierced noses and beanies. I digress). We took the scenic cliff drive and baba even managed a 5 minute walk (on a concrete path mind) to a lookout near Katoomba falls. Of course he complained it was too cold, too windy, too many trees and barely looked at the view before wanting to head back to the car. Chai on the other hand loved it. He was a very happy puppy all day, romping around much more than his usual shy self. I think Chai takes after me in being more of a mountain person than an ocean type. On Sunday morning we drove down to the beach and Chai looked pretty miserable. That might have had something to do with all the other big scary dogs around.
In other news, I have two job interviews this week. Wish me luck.
A couple of nights ago I dreamt of snow falling – bit odd in a temperate climate like Sydney’s. Then last night I dreamt of rain falling and pooling into puddles. All this precipitation piqued my curiosity, so I googled (not my favourite verb…capitalism gone silly when a company name becomes a verb. Then I suppose it’s nothing new; we’ve been hoovering rugs for decades. I’m sure others will come to mind) “dream interpretation”. My very thorough search (i.e. the first site that came up on the list) said snow indicates unexpressed emotion whereas rain symbolises warm fuzzy things like love, forgiveness, fortune and spititual ideas.
- cue twilight zone music -
The day after dreaming of snow, not knowing the “meaning” of the dream, I decided on a whim to have some flowers delivered to baba at work – no particular reason, just to say “I love you”. They had the desired effect, we both felt warm and fuzzy like young lovers again while we rearranged the flowers together and had take away pizza for dinner. That night I dreamt of rain.
Something in it?? Or just dreaming of precipitation because I needed to have a wee perhaps?
…umm, let’s see. Since my last post I’ve turned 31 (thanks to the cousin and aunty I haven’t seen for 20 years for being the only people to post me birthday cards, thanks also to baba for booking a table for 12 courses and matching wines at Galileo at mates rates), caught a cold, and applied for a couple of new jobs at the university. One of the jobs is in the Maths department – despite the fact that I’m almost completely innumerate. The other job is in the resource centre for Indigenous students – despite the face that I’m a whitefella. Word on the street though is that I’m in with a half decent chance for both positons.
The posterior is almost better. There’s still a scar where the cut was and red dots where the stitches were, but the pain is subsiding day by day.
One quirky fact: In my worek team (of predominantly menopausal women – one of the reasons I’m looking for a new job) 5 of us had birthdays on consecutive days i.e. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th of May. That’s more than half of the team all born in the same week. We were commenting on the number of Taureans in the office. One jester piped up and said “yeah, there’s a lot of bullshit in this office!” That cracked me up.
Another quirky fact: I went into the gay bookshop up the road looking for a book on keeping long lasting relationships fresh and vibrant. (It’s our 6th anniversary in a couple of weeks) You know the kind of book, self help with boxes to tick and surveys to fill in to determine the way partners communicate and express their love for each other and how to build on that to “bring back that lovin’ feeling”. There were walls of bad gay fiction. Squillions of Lesbian-feminist-hairy legged-socialist-politico rants, lots of smutty fridge magnets and birthday cards, several shelves dedicated to the gay karma-sutra, almost as much pace given over to gay religion and spirituality (I’m reading a good biography at the moment incidentally about an ex-happy clapper loopy pentecostal Evangelist who was outed and chucked out of the church and is now trying to build bridges between that extreme fringe of the god-botheres and the shirt-lifters “how VERY dare you!!” – tell me if you get the reference….) where was I..oh that’s right, I was on my hands and knees looking at the one shelf, about three feet long, at floor level which had a couple of dusty books with tacky front covers which dealt with gay relationships. Three quarters of those were for lesbians with babies, the other 25% were very thin books indeed and spent equal amounts of pages dealing with finding Mr Right, Keeping Mr Right and how to cope with breaking up with Mr Right. I walked out empty handed. It’s not that baba and I are having a relationship crisis or anything; quite the opposite, it’s all a bit too comfortable and grandparenty – hence my failed mission to find a helpful book. I guess we’ll just buy each other flowers a bit more often.
A final special shout out to C-mum who turned 28 (again) yesterday.
