Two kinds

There are two main types of seasonal contagion.

There’s the good kind, producing a sniffle or a cough makes you just poorly enough, and just social-pariah enough, to stay home from work. Yet brain and hands remain nimble and dextrous and you can make and do and read and drink tea. It’s a bonus day bestowed upon you by the universe. It’s a little bit awesome, even if you’ve rubbed raw the stretch of flesh betwixt nose and upper lip (the philtrum, I believe).

Then there’s the bad kind, with symptoms that leave you so wretched that you can scarcely crawl out of bed to deal with basic bodily functions which, most likely, are so perturbed by viral activity that they are more base than basic. Where you hide from the light and wimper a bit.

Guess which one I just had?

One Delorean, two Deloreans

…three Deloreans, four.

Actually, there were five all up in this parade.

Highlights from the Amtrak TravelMall catalogue

1. Orbitwheels, a “cross between a skateboard and inline skates but with more freedom and simplicity than either”.

2. Thundershirt, a tight coat for anxious dogs that works on the same principle as “swaddling an infant or people with autism”.

3. Protein Ketchup that “delivers the taste and mouthfeel you expect, with the nutrition you want”.

4. Video pen “ideal for anyone in an evidence gathering situation”.

5. Portable infrared sauna (visuals: think girl wearing tent at Occupy Melbourne, only with better lymph drainage).

6. Traveller’s bed bug thwarting sleeping cocoon with “durable polyester threads impervious to bed bugs’ teeth”. Entomological note: bed bugs don’t have teeth. But I bet traveller has a sweat problem.

7. The Hypnocube, creating an LED-charged light show extravaganza with 4,096 different colours.

Hard rubbish shopping

I put some junk out for hard rubbish collection on the weekend.

Behold what it looked like when I stacked it all neatly, then the mangled carcass after the neighbourhood vultures had shopped from it.

Hooray for the biggest unofficial street recycling party in the world!

Stinky jeans

Last night the Curmudgeon and I went to the flicks. We ate choc tops and jaffas and saw The Artist – I loved it. I was spellbound but for one thing.

About half-way through, I noticed a mild stink. A sort of unwashed persony stink. I sniffed the Curmudgeon to my right… it wasn’t him. And the pair of ladies to my left were terribly nice nice nice and unlikely to be the culprits. Which left… me. I was generating a cloud of unpleasantness, confirmed when the lights came on and I investigated further. I’m sure the nice nice nice ladies discussed the foetid person sitting next to them as they had a post-flick hot chocolate. Eek!

I was wearing my one and only pair of jeans which have been loitering in a drawer for most of summer. I suspect I wore them once then put them away for months when I should have washed them first. Oh, the shame. Today they were soaked and scrubbed and are drying in the sun and I promise I’ll never do it again.

However, the reason why I’m airing my dirty laundry on teh interwebs is because the NGV has an exhibition called Nobody was Dirty running from 10-31 March that features jeans worn and unwashed for three months. Apparently it’s to explore social norms around cleanliness and germophobic mindsets, blahdy blah.

Now, I must protest… I like cleanth, generally, but I’m not a clean freak. I consider garden dirt to be clean dirt and I consider compost under the fingernails is the mark of a great weekend rather than suboptimal personal hygiene. I buy most things secondhand and dive in skips for treasures. I fear germs not. I think the folks who fall for all the advertising propaganda about germicidal hand wash and room fresheners are nut bars. But I have a sensitive nose – at least, it’s much more sensitive than the Curmudgeon’s. And I do not like to be on either the receiving or delivery end of human-generated stink. So how could anyone wear the same pair of dacks 90 days in a row? How could they bear their own odour? Or does it get to the point where a second wave of bacterial colonisation chases off the first stench-generating germs?

When we got home last night, we startled a possum that was on our front fence. It hurled itself to the ground via the Curmugeon’s shoulders when we opened the gate, then skittled up the back of my leg. Just above my knee, it changed its mind, jumped down and climbed a nearby tree. Was it, too, repulsed by the stinky jeans?

Happy sights to see

An assortment of visual awesomeness of weeks recent:

Canine that knows how to work the dramatic lighting –

Spider that is doing an excellent impersonation of a nubbin on a twig. Only, perhaps, a poor choice of substrate –

Spotted by the Curmudgeon in a suburban shopping centre. A penguin that will test your skills indeed –

Finally, roots shooting (is that an oxymoron? Do shoots, in turn, root? I think not.) on my tomato cuttings, as per everydayinthegarden’s instructions –

So, what’s been delighting your eyeballs? Rewarding your retinas? Percolating pleasingly in your pupils?

Clouds in my coffee?

Me: There’s a uterus in my coffee.

He: That’s hysterical.

Feel like dancing

I’m doing this. Are you doing this? You should be doing this. You don’t even have to be able to whistle.

Three indispensible new phrases

1. activated pepitas – Collective term for people who consider partially-germinated pumpkin seeds a staple food item. Most of us would put things like bread, milk, sugar in that category. Not so the activated pepitas. They’re busy working out how to fix their thyroid problems by unblocking their creativity.

2. fan belt donkey – A modern-day miracle. After a great anecdote I read recently about a man who resigned himself to death after breaking down in the middle of the desert with a broken fan belt. Then, lo! A donkey strolled up with fan belts of different sizes around its neck. Turns out local miners had tamed the wild donkey and played quoits by hurling fan belts over its head.

3. a Phil Collins kind of day – in honour of the beautiful weather we’re having. No jacket required.

Scuttle mode

Around the solstice I switch to scuttle mode. No, I don’t mean I’m a ship that’s deliberately sinking (or do I? Discuss.) but that the darkth and the coldth and the dampth means I hide in bed, I scuttle around in an icy house, I scuttle to work, I scuttle home, I huddle, I retreat. It’s terribly dull. I’m sure there are Things happening out there in the rest of the world. I’m sure there are People do do Things with. But I default to scuttle. And like many scuttling things (baby turtles, cockroaches) I’m not very good at setting myself aright.

So that is why, complaining types, there have been few posts. I’ve been too busy scuttling away to do anything interesting. But soon the days will embiggen and things will improve. Meanwhile, go find yourself a nice cheery blog written by someone who lives in the northen hemisphere.