Looooooooooong weekend!

HURRAH! Nothing better than a long weekend, except a super-dupery no-more-job-interviews-in-my-immediate-future long weekend! I didn't realise how unrelaxed I was until the point at which I suddenly relaxed properly :D

To celebrate my returned to relaxedness, Mr Bon, Tess and I headed out to a free PIAF event - an open-air screening of Asterix and the Vikings just down the road from us.

It turned out to be a hugely popular event, so all the good seating areas were taken, but we were happy enough at the back anyway. Until the person next to us lit up. So we moved... and again, a person next to us lit up. We moved again, and when someone lit up, we figured we probably couldn't find a smoke free spot - which turned out to be a good thing.

Earlier in the evening I had celebrated my newly-developed maternal instincts - I remembered the insect repellent! It's only a herbal based hippie sort of brand, but it's always worked pretty well in the past. So we're sitting there, not bothered by insects, but figuring we should put some repellent on before they appear. I go first, and all of a sudden - massive cloud of flying insects all over me! At this stage they weren't touching Mr Bon, but as soon as he put some repellent on, he too was surrounded by the little suckers.

Amazing. We have found the only brand of insect repellent in the HISTORY of insect repellent, that is absolutely irresistible to to these particular flying midgie moth things! We then engaged in a sort of frenzied slapping dance, presumably at least mildly irritating to the people around us, while surreptitiously trying to see if we're the only ones being surrounded by the flying things. Mr Bon also swore they didn't bite, but something was biting the backs of my legs.

At this point the lady nearby (who we had grumbled at for smoking) offered us her insect repellent. Lovely smoking lady! Many apologies for grumbling about your smoking, although it's still quite, quite unpleasant. Eventually the insects mostly moved on, and we managed to enjoy the evening. The view wasn't great, but it's not like it was a movie we were dying to see anyway! Tess had a lovely time, and got pats from a little girl at the end :)

Aside from that we're having a lovely, LAZY long weekend. Yesterday I finished reading Thereby Hangs a Tail, and I thought I might just give you a teaser - a paragraph that gave me the giggles:

"Know what's interesting?" Bernie said as we drove away.

I sure did: bacon was interesting, also Frisbees, socks on the laundry room floor, squirrels trying to sneak across the front yard, the hunting show on ESPN2, a certain she-bark that came across the canyon from time to time - where did it end?

Love this author! Spencer Quinn. Very pleased to read that a book 3 is planned: "To Fetch a Thief"

One more highlight for the weekend - Bob is famous!

Some advice for the interwebs

I've finally gotten around to enabling Google Analytics for Three Tomatoes Short. Mostly because I was inspired by this thread on Dooce.com's community page, about the humorous search terms people use to reach your site.

So here's my first search term:

how to get just rolled out of bed hair

I thought I might provide some advice to my style-challenged visitor. Listen carefully now.

JUST. ROLL. OUT. OF. BED.

It's pretty easy :D

Mystery citrus...

Well, for once there are developments in the garden to report on :)

First, the mystery citrus. We have a citrus in the garden which I've assumed for years is an out of control root stock - I've never seen it so much as flower, and it's covered in nasty spikes. It's also got a very "meh" structure, but maybe that's just because it never gets pruned :D

The other day I happened to be passing this tree, and lo and behold! Fruits!

Today I brought one inside and cut it open. It smells citrusy, and tastes a little sour, but I think it isn't actually ripe yet - it's rock hard. Maybe a lime?? Can anyone tell me if it sounds like a kind of lime tree, what with the spikes and all? I did have a plan a while ago to graft some native citrus on to this tree, but I discovered it's actually much easier to get hold of a pre-grafted native citrus then it is to get your hands on some material for grafting. So this tree was slated to be pulled out and replaced eventually. I guess we'll just keep watching these fruits and see what happens.

We've also had a bit of a gardening busy-bee today - my dad came over with the trailer and we collected a trailer load of mulch. The mulching is aaaaaaaaalmost done now, just a few bits left - maybe next weekend if it's not too hot, we could finish it off. While he was here he also helped us put the shade sail back up (it had detatched itself somehow), and did some weeding. The best thing though, was out the front. We've had a pile of woodchip mulch on the front verge for SO LONG - I actually use it to identify the house when someone's visiting - "it's the one with the mulch lump" - and friends periodically ask us if it's still there. Well now it ISN'T! Dad had enormous fun using his big beefy car to push the pile over, and then he and Mr Bon got stuck in spreading it all out. It's still not going to win the best kept verge on the street prize, but at least it's a bit less embarrassing!

While they were busy working on the verge, I pulled out all the huge dead weeds growing along the front of the picket fence. Maybe when the weather's a bit cooler and wetter, I'll plant my potted kangaroo paws out there, although I'd need to do stacks of soil improvement first.

And in some final, almost-plant related news, I got myself some solar powered greenery for my desk at work :D

Things Bonnie Likes, #1

Ugh. I'd love to be able to say that I haven't posted in AGES because I've been so busy doing things, but I can't. In fact, I've been so busy doing nothing, that I've had nothing at all interesting to post about. The dishwasher is back in action, which is fantastic news for my shoulders, but not especially interesting to the interwebs.

So, in the absence of stuff I've done, here is Stuff I Like.

Better Off Ted

Better Off Ted is a US show, which hasn't been shown on Free-To-Air Australian TV yet, but Season One is available on DVD. I'd love to brighten the post up with a Better Off Ted photo, but I can't find one which I can legally reproduce.

Better Off Ted feels to me a bit like Yes Minister meets corporate America. The character development is really well done. Here's one of my favourite quotes, thanks to WikiQuotes:

Sorry, Ted. The company feels that if we ease up because someone dies, it will only encourage other people to die.

Teehee.

Hopefully I will actually *do* something soon, and hence have something to post about. I did just get Thereby Hangs A Tail in the mail, so at least I have something to read in the absence of productive activity.

If there were more hours in the day

Today, for the first time in ages, we got a nice cool day (max 26 degrees) AND I was able to take the day off work. Woohoo! It was going to be a massive extravaganza of gardening productivity! Sensibly I didn't tell anyone that, because a) the weather forecast would have changed to 40 degrees, and b) I know myself well enough to know that it wasn't actually going to be *that* productive.

So..

• My car got serviced (see earlier rant about appalling comment from the Assistant Service Manager)
• attended a one hour webinar called "Managing anxiety - creating calm", which was awesome
• treated all the drains with bokashi juice
• harvested some figs
• emptied the bokashi bucket into the compost tumbler
• gave the vegie bed a little TLC, did some weeding
• did the monthly greywater maintenance
• fed the worms

Wow.. it actually looks like quite a lot when you list it out like that. I felt like I should've done more gardening, but it was still very sunny outside despite the mild temperature - in the afternoon I came inside and finally watched Razzle Dazzle.

Anyway, that's not that interesting - but thinking about what I wanted to get done, got me thinking about what I would like to do each day, in an ideal world.

1. 20 - 40 minutes of meditation
2. Some reading
3. Something productive in the garden
4. Something off the chore list
5. Something productive for my One Big Chore (currently job application - later will be house planning)
6. Some Wii Yoga
7. A nice walk with the dog
8. A quick once-over tidy up of the house
9. 10 or 11 hours of sleep

And that list suddenly looks quite small now that I write it out! A bit of a struggle to fit all that around a full day at work, though. I did catch the train for the first time in ages on Tuesday, and that was fantastic - the exercise, the reading, the complete lack of road rage. Hopefully the weather will stay cool and I'll stay relatively healthy, and I'll be able to keep taking the train to work.

OMGWTF?!

What the heck. I am having the WEIRDEST week. First the institutionalised sexism in that religious event I won't be mentioning, and now this...

I've just dropped my car off at Toyota for a service. All good, nice friendly man behind the desk. Then he says we just have to go and look over the car to note down scratches etc, no problem. I point out the only one I've noticed (which, incidentally, was there when I bought the car second-hand). So he looks over the rest of the car, and says:

"I'm impressed - that's not many scratches for a woman driver."

Let me just give you a second for that to sink in.

EXCUSE ME?!?! Unfortunately I had no cutting reply, because my brain just froze and went "OH HOLY JEEEEEBUS, DID HE ACTUALLY JUST SAY THAT?!"

All I could manage was to laugh and reply that it wasn't too late for me to take my custom elsewhere.

Now, I'm sure this guy isn't the total jerk he sounded - probably just a nice guy with a bad case of foot in mouth disease. Whatever - even if you're thinking that sentence in your head, what part of your brain tells you that it's in any way OK to say it out loud?!

I could rant for a while longer, but I'm saving it up to email someone at Toyota - complaints department, management, whatever email address I can find. Although I will wait until my car is safely back home :D

Ugh. I've been planning a post for this evening, which I'll hopefully still get to, but I just couldn't hold this in. My mind is still boggling.