Nap-inducing

Yo! Either this is really boring or I am tired, because I read back over what I'd written just before and almost fell asleep.

We are having Italian-themed dinner tonight at my cousins' house to celebrate my sister's birthday and my aunt's birthday, which are on consecutive days or something. Anyway they were both this week and I get to spend the day shopping and cooking! Is like being on a very very slow episode of Top Chef.

I have made: 2 tiramisu/tiramisus/tiramisen; a yet-to-be-decorated chocolate cake, and antipasto platter. Am not sure how the tiramisen will taste because I haven't used the recipe before & the quantities seem a bit weird & I fucked up the egg whites. Hmm. Am also slightly worried about decorating the cake - I asked Kate what she'd like on it, being as it's her cake, and she said, "A dog! No, wait! I want you and me and Mum and Charlie!" She overestimates my cake-decorating skills something fierce, but let's see how it goes.

Charlie is currently outside barking like stink because I won't let him in - delicious warm chocolate cake is cooling on the bench, and I don't trust him not to leap up and grab it in his toothy jaws. I do not want to be part of a scene where I am trying to remove an entire cake from his gullet and he is gulping frantically in the other direction. Also he will be sick and I will have to make another cake. Bark bark bark bark.

I will take photos of cooking efforts and post them tomorrow.

This was originally going to be an instructive post with cleaning tips & tricks but then I realised that oh my God, booo-ring, and also they would all be made up (see 'wood polish is a con do not use it') and/or not helpful (see 'stainless steel polish is great because it's in an aerosol can and you can practice your tag on the fridge') and sometimes just plain inappropriate (see 'spit has powerful cleaning properties, just ask Hugh Hefner's shiny wang.')

So I don't have much to blog about. Saw 48hours film for the first time last night & it was awesome! Will link to it when it's been put on youtube and then you can all go and watch it.

Poking a dead raccoon is not research

And now for the news.

The News: Today I cleaned my aunt's house - the positive thing about this was that TELLUS (who you will remember is the rotund little vacuum who flung himself down the stairs last time I was there) and I are now friends, united against the ever-encroaching dust front.

Here is the not-so-positive thing.

I would like to state here that my aunt and uncle are neat, tidy and civilized people; if they weren't I still wouldn't break cleaner privilege and tell you about their mucky existence. However, I have no such loyalty to the couple who recently stayed in the guest bedroom and who apparently livened up their stay with a game of what I can only assume is called "Who Can Stick A Pubic Hair Highest On The Shower Wall?" What kind of filth wizard leaves scattered pubes at head height? Ew. And there's just no way they could have got there by accident, it must have been...some sort of contest? I just hope there was a good prize, you know, something worth being that fucking disgusting.

The weirdest thing about writing that paragraph was that it gave me an intense sense of deja vu, like I myself had played the pubes-on-wall game. Which I would like to assure you I haven't. WEIRD

In fashion news, Kate has a new hoodie. Unfortunately when she puts the hood up (which she was doing as part of an extensive visual pun in which she and I both wore hoodies with the hoods up and shouted "Neighbour Hoodies") it bears an unfortunate resemblance to...well, that other white pointy hood. In a fit of bad taste I renamed her KKKate. Then she said something really racist and I thought she was quoting a rap song but no, she was just saying something appropriately racist. (Appropriate to the hoodie, not to anything else.) Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I have not been a very good influence.

In Internet news, KKKate has been a fountain of amusement today. She looked over my shoulder while I was on twitter (yeah yeah, I know, tweeting is for vacs) and shouted WHAT IS THAT, BUTTER DOT COM? So then we looked up butter.com and it turns out it's a website about butter. I don't know what I expected, but I'm kind of disappointed. It does, however, have a useful list of 'Related Links.' Here is the list. 'Whey, Yoghurt, Buttermilk, Parmesan Cheese, Drumsticks, Cheddar Cheese." What's wrong with that? Drumsticks are pretty similar to butter if you ignore the fact that they're completely different.

In local news, here is a challenge: I have decided that the only way to win my heart is to design and build (or commission, that is fine too) a robot that makes cups of tea and steals bottles of vodka and responds to voice commands. Email is fine for the specs, but I'd like the finished product shipped to my Christchurch address.

And now, for the Informative Fact of the Day!
In Danish, the word 'gift' means either 'poison' or 'married,' depending on the context. Cool, huh? I bet you did not know that! Unless you are Xalion, who told me that, but he is too busy designing a tea-making, vodka-stealing robot to care.

In animal news (totally a legitimate news category), yesterday I saw a 7-legged spider. I was removing it from the shower at the time (it was terrorising Kate and it appears that of late I have become spider-vanquisher), and as it flung itself onto my hand (why do they do that) I noticed it was missing one of its two front legs! Because of this I thought it deserved to be lowered gently onto a tomato plant, rather than squished into oblivion. This story does not have a moral except maybe that 'otherly abled' arachnids get a better deal than 'otherly abled' people, as far as being spared a gruesome death goes. But I don't think that's a very good moral.

Speaking of poor morals (that is called a Segue, which is not news), I discovered today yet another case of my cellphone's 'predictive txt' feature having weird predilections towards unsuitable words. I was trying to type 'I'll leave you a plate of turkey,' but ended up almost sending 'I'll leave you a slave of turkey.' Other unfortunate things my phone likes to say are 'That's an unusual pervert' and 'Happy Farter.' God damn it, phone, you make me be's worse than I already be's. Should I ever want to request an Easter plate, I had better remember to do it from a different phone.

Underground Strikethrough News: Where Is The Trust? Readers Still Check for Hidden Strikethrough

Brace yourself, Shirley*

*this post gets coarser & coarser as it goes along

Well, the toilet fish went well! (Good start eh.) No-one pooped on the fish, which is what I was secretly hoping would happen, but it was a good prank nonetheless. I bought a whole fish from the supermarket last night, which is something I have never done before. I was also buying wine, and the checkout person was all "Can I see some ID?" and I said "For the fish!?" and laughed out of all proportion to the humour of the situation. I wonder what she thought I was going to do with my evening? What would you think, if someone bought a bottle of wine and a whole fish at 10pm?

I got up Very Early and snuck the fish into the toilet. There it was, peering up fishily from the bowl. Ha ha ha.

Then Mum got up and went into the bathroom (this was the bit where I hoped she wouldn't see the fish until it was too late, but oh well). "Girls! There a terakihi in the toilet!" I was pretty impressed that she knew what kind of fish it was given that most of its bottom half was poked round the U-bend, but I guess that some people just know these things.

My, how we roared!

To wrap up the story, the fish has now been thrown out, although we did leave it swimming in the bowl for most of the morning and go in from time to time and laugh at it.

I spent the entire afternoon cleaning my aunt's house. This took four hours because not only is their house enormous, it is full of crap objects d'art, all of which need to be moved and dusted under (apparently.) My general philosophy about cleaning is 'but it's only going to get dirty again,' especially when it comes to things like The Toilet (which is actually not so bad to clean once you've gotten past the whole other-people's-butts-go-here thing (many mentions of toilets in my blog today)), but then my aunt was paying me.

It was actually not so bad, apart from the vacuum cleaner, which was called TELLUS (as in, 'tell us about the vacuuming, Ally') and pure straight hated me. There's not much more to it except that at one point I was trying to cut corners be efficient and the vacuum cleaner fell down the stairs and the lid came off and its insides went everywhere. In hindsight it was probably my fault but at the time I blamed TELLUS and called it a 'dirt-suckin' motherfucker' and then cracked myself up because I accidentally rapped.

Unsurprisingly, the bathrooms are the worst things to clean (apart from stairs that are covered in vacuum vomit). Toilet Duck is a wonderful product, but I was slightly disappointed that a little duck in a racing car didn't actually come out of the nozzle of the bottle (I love that word, nozzle) and screech round the bowl making awful puns about skidmarks like on the ads. He just sat on the rim and looked at me reproachfully, then bummed a cigarette and left.

It is also not fun when you forget to sweep before you mop (because your head is full of raps about appliances (the genre is called Troncore and I will pioneer it, right after I'm done with Communist Pop)) and the floor becomes covered in wet dirt.

Also, buffing taps is, in my expert opinion, a lot like giving somebody a hand-job. (Expert at buffing taps, obviously, not the other thing.) The hand action is pretty much exactly the same (I am adding 'tap buffing experience' to my FindSomeone profile as we speak), and they're both entertaining for about the first 10 seconds as you note the impact your actions are having, but then you get bored and think, 'Why am I doing this ridiculous thing? Oh that's right, I am getting paid.'

<(")>

I also accidentally spilled stainless steel polish all over my arm, which is now BUFFED TO A LUSTROUS SHINE.

I'm sorry, that whole post would've been better off staying inside my head but oh well, that's what blogs are for.