We'll Always Have Acapulco

Some weeks ago, for some reason I don't quite understand, I found myself staying up until midnight writing some ridiculous poem about not going to Acapulco.

I've misplaced it, or I would replicate it here, but it was the kind of thing one writes when one is over-tired and should be sleeping. It's also the sort of thing you end up looking at the next day and thinking:

"Yes, but what does it mean?"

The title of the poem was We'll Always Have Acapulco, and the body of it was some bizarre nonsense along the lines of:

We never made it to Acapulco
Because we never planned to go...

And, quite frankly, it all got weird from there. I've always been a fan of poets like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, who had a lovely talent for complete nonsense, but I'm sure they at least "got" their own poems.

I think it was something about regretting the things you didn't do, or not regretting the things you didn't do, or something like that. Not having regrets because you didn't do something you might have regretted? Whatever.

All I know is that I distinctly remember writing it, and it's in my handwriting, but when I looked at it later I had a bit of a "What the...?" moment.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason I've never been drunk.

Well, that, and the fact that when I'm perfectly sober I think riding a unicycle is a good idea...

Dinner

Or, Virtue Rewarded*

I found a can-opener straight away tonight. I just opened the dreaded utensils drawer, and it was right there! I was so happy I didn't even bother looking for a better can opener, even though this was one of those horrible things that take the whole top off and make you spill some of the liquid whenever you use them.

There were bound to have been more can-openers of various colours and designs in that drawer - there seemed to have been multiple versions of everything that wasn't a vegetable peeler - but I decided to quit while I was ahead.

I was actually feeling quite smug about how successfully I managed to cook dinner without even coming close to cutting off my own arm, but then as I was dishing out the food I realised I had forgotten to add the beans - which made my "Sausage, Bean and Corn Casserole" a little incomplete.

Ah, well. Such is life.

I caught a glimpse of the "other cat" tonight, which means he's not dead. I find that comforting.


*For further illumination on this subtitle, you should refer to another post, written by another me.

Dinner

Or, There are no good solutions

For those of you who read this blog but haven't spoken to me in person lately, I'm currently house sitting for a friend.

My primary duties are to a) not burn down the house, and b) keep the cats alive. Ordinarily, I would probably feel fairly confident at succeeding in these two tasks. At present, though I'm not taking any bets. I think it's a wonder that I haven't cut of my own arm with a box of cling-wrap yet.

At the moment, it's a toss-up as to who dies of starvation first - the cat who hasn't eaten anything (that I've observed) over the past two days, or me. One of the cats has no problems with my being here, and is quite happy to eat what I put on the floor. The other seems to be trying to hide in whatever cupboard I didn't check last, and freaks out slightly whenever he notices I'm not one of his people. Hence, he catches sight of me and bolts, and does not seem to care for whatever food I may offer. Heck, he even turned up his nose at fresh chicken!

Which leads me to tonight's dinner, and the fact that I almost gave up on having it about four or five times in the course of the evening.

I had this plan, see, I would go to the shop on the way home and buy the ingredients for something I could cook tonight which would give me left-overs for the next couple of nights. Along with the tuna casserole I managed to cook last night (after some trials and tribulation), that would mean I had all meals set until Saturday.

Something simple, something quick, something reasonably good for me - a chicken and vegetable stirfry with sauce and rice. What could possibly go wrong? I was so sure that this would be an easy meal to cook that I didn't even bother starting to get everything ready until 7pm. Heck, this sort of thing takes fifteen minutes to prepare and about as long to cook, right?

The Vegetable Peeler

The first thing I did was start cutting up the vegetables... sort of. The first vegetable I put my hand on was a carrot. It was the only vegetable I had to peel, but I find the skin of carrots to be a bit bitter, so I always peel them if I can. I went looking for the vegetable peeler. And I kept looking for the vegetable peeler.

You'd think something like this would be fairly easy to locate, but, no, for some reason the Hoopers prefer to have their pizza cutters and melon ballers in easy reach, but not the vegetable peeler. I looked through every drawer two or three times before picking the most likely drawer and practically pulling every item out one at a time.

I found about four or five bottle openers. I found three graters (including a ridiculously tiny one which must surely have been for purely decorative purposes). I found dozens of things for cutting vegetables into shapes. I found biscuit cutters. I found basting brushes and spatulas. I found funny little plastic thingies designed to keep your plastic bags shut. I found several ice-cream scoops. I found a number of things I didn't recognise and couldn't fathom the purpose of. When I found the little brass hammer that looked like something a cobbler would have in his workshop, I almost gave up there and then.

Finally, after more than fifteen minutes of searching, I found the vegetable peeler - right at the back of the drawer, under two garlic presses and a tea-strainer.

I think I made a complete mess of the drawer.

I don't care.

After that, the chopping of vegetables and cutting of meat seemed to go off fairly smoothly. I thought the dinner wouldn't be that far away. I was wrong.

The Electric Stove

Now, I'm not a big fan of electric cook-tops. I've grown up cooking with gas, and I just can't judge electric. I never know which are the fast elements and how long it takes them to heat up or cool down... Now, with gas, you can actually see the flame, so you know exactly how hot things should be.

I completely misjudged this stove. I had the rice cooking too quickly (even though it was on the lowest setting) and the chicken not cooking quickly enough (even thought it was on the highest. If I was smart, I would have worked out that I needed to swap the pots so that they were on the better elements for what I wanted. I wasn't smart.

Instead, I panicked, and decided to chuck the vegetables in with the chicken even thought it wasn't cooked enough, just to get them started before the rice went "too far".

Do you ever have one of those days when there are no good solutions? Everything you do to try to make something better ends up making it worse? Well, everything I did to try to make the chicken cook faster made it less likely to cook properly at all. Everything I did to slow down the rice just made it more of a gluggy mess.

Finally, after almost an hour of trying to figure all this stuff out, I decided the only course of action was the nuke the whole thing and hope for the best. So, my stirfry became a microwaved casserole and my rice became... porridge.

There were a few times when I thought I was likely to loose control of the situation entirely and have a whole kitchen to clean up, but finally, after 8:30pm, and without too much mess, I sat down to my honey and sesame chicken casserole and rice porridge.

And, guess what? I've got plenty of left-overs for the next few nights' dinners.

*sigh* It's a good thing I like rice porridge, eh?

German and French

When I was a kid, I really wanted to learn German.

I borrowed "learn German" books from the library, and picked up an old 1960s German course book from a second hand store. I diligently read the first couple of lessons in that book, feeling so very proud of myself when I could "read" those dinky little passages of text they have at the end of each chapter (something about a boy and his dog going to the park).

But, if I have one character flaw that has haunted me for as long as I can remember, it's my inability to finish anything that doesn't come with a due date. In the absence of some external force saying: "Continue to read this book until some good can come of it - the outcomes of which will be measured on this specific and clearly defined date", I just sort of let everything slide.

Thus, I never really got as far as the numbers, no matter how many times I borrowed a book on the subject from a library, or looked at that old course book. I looked at that old course book a fair bit, over the years, as I ended up using it to prop up a piece of furniture after a foot broke off. I'd like to see you do that with an electronic book.

Anyway, I managed to distract myself with other languages with which I never really did anything. A brief infatuation with Spanish caused me to learn enough of the third most spoken language in the world to say "Hola! Habla Español?", which is about as useful as a cheeseburger to a drowning elephant in the grand scheme of things.

Then it was Indonesian in high school - not because I actually wanted to learn Indonesian, but because it was offered opposite Geography, and sounded more interesting. Personally, I thought Indonesian was a bit of a waste of my time, due to the fact that it is only spoken in Indonesia. Very handy if one was planning to visit Indonesia, but it won't give you any kind of advantage in Vladivostok, will it? And, quite frankly, I've always been more likely to visit Vladivostok than Indonesia. Obviously, I should have taken Geography.

It was also during these years that I started watching French In Action on ABC on a semi-regular basis. They repeated it a few times, and I never quite caught the whole series, but the language kind of spoke to me. So much so, that I ended up putting myself through an Elementary French evening course at the university when I was in Year 11.

Now, I didn't follow up on that with Intermediate and Advanced courses, which I should have. I also didn't take any French subjects at university (although I was thinking about it) because I was focused on the English and Theatre subjects I needed for my course. I regret both of those things, because it would have been the ideal time to actually get some real language skills. Instead, most of what I learnt from that short course and the French in Action programme atrophied and fell out of my brain.

That said, I think my vague interest in French coincided with just the right period of synapse development in my brain, because there's something about French that feels like a comfortable pair of shoes. I can't communicate in the language in any way, shape or form, but I can read some basic bits - I picked up a feel for how English and French dance with each other so I can sometimes work out what the French text is getting at.

Also, some of the phrases from the show are burned into my brain so that, to this day, when I don't like something I have to fight the urge to declare: "Je détester ce!" - something which I have no doubt spelt badly as I actually have no idea how to write it. I also have a weird tendency to occasionally say "Salut!" instead of "hello", which usually just confuses whoever actually notices what I say. Thankfully, most people don't.

The crazy-annoying thing is that French and Indonesian managed to get into my brain when the getting was easy, and now when I'm trying to learn another language, I find that they're getting in the way. I'll try to think of the Russian for "hello", but the French will come to me. I'll try to count in Estonian, but realise that I've managed to switch to Indonesian part-way through.

I hope, one day, to go back to French and learn it well-ish. In the meantime, I've actually come full circle, and now I'm back to German again. I've decided that I should try to have a "useful" European language under my belt before considering moving to Europe, and my brief fling in Estonia has convinced me that German is probably the best one to go with.

I'm back to borrowing "introduction to German" books out of the library, and I'm planning on starting a Diploma in Languages next year with a German major. I'm still trundling ahead with Estonian, and I haven't completely given up on Russian, but I think German will probably be my primary language focus once I get started.

Just so long as someone gives me a due date...

Contributing something useful

I was wrapping some of my mother's birthday presents today when --

Well, let's put that into a more accurate perspective. I was intending to wrap some of my mother's birthday presents today, working on the assumption that we had wrapping paper in the house. It turns out that we have quite a lot of wrapping paper in the house, but it's all decidedly "Christmas" or "Congratulations!" themed. Really obviously so. You couldn't pretend it was birthday-present wrapping paper if you tried.

So, I rustled up some brown paper and started to do my old "brown paper packages tied up with coloured string" thing (it could be lazy and boring if it wasn't referential, inter-textual and quasi-chic). It turns out I also didn't have much by the way of coloured string, and it was all going to look really boring.

After wrapping the first one, I surveyed my rather poor options when this thought suddenly came to me:

If Nana was here, she'd tell you to grab her purse and walk up the street to the news agent to buy some decent wrapping paper.

So that's exactly what I did. Her purse was still where it's been for the last five or so years, and was chock full of coins she hadn't spent (or we hadn't spent for her) before she died. I grabbed it, walked up the road and off-loaded some loose change on four rolls of colourful, birthday themed wrapping paper.

It was a strange sensation, really. Over the last few years she has told me, on countless occasions, to grab her purse and walk up the road to by something or other. Traipsing up the street in the middle of the day with my grandmother's purse was something I used to do on a semi-regular basis before she went to hospital that last time.

I think it made her happy, yet strangely we had a thing about not letting her pay for things if we could do it for her. Not letting her pay was one way we showed our care for her... But thinking about it today, I realise we were just stopping her from showing her care for us.

My grandmother did things for us throughout her whole life. Practical, useful things, like cooking and doing the dishes and stuff like that. As she got older, we started doing those things for her. By the time she reached the stage where my mother moved in with her, there was very little she did while any of her kids were around - my mother and uncle did everything they could for her, and when I moved back home I joined in.

From being the person who is always doing something, always providing something, she became someone who contributed very little, and I think she felt that. For a while, she still tried to contribute something. In the mornings my mother would usually go to work just as Nana and I were getting up, so I'd make the two of us breakfast before I went to work. She used to tell me to leave the dishes for her, and I would. I knew, on a certain level, that doing the breakfast dishes (all four of them) and feeding the dogs lunch was her way to still contribute. My mother wasn't happy with this, though. She always frowned at me when she found out Nana had done the breakfast dishes again.

Eventually, she couldn't do them any more. I'd do the dishes in the morning, and my uncle would come over to feed the dogs. All she'd do was sit. But, occasionally, she'd tell her granddaughter to take her purse and buy something. Something for lunch. Something for the house. Something for someone's birthday. She never really cared what you bought with her money. When you'd bring it home to show her, she was almost completely disinterested. It wasn't the thing that mattered, you see, it was the fact that she had contributed it.

Far too often, we stopped her from doing that. At one point, she wanted us to buy a new freezer with her money, and we more or less decided we could keep going with the old freezer until after she died. Our reasoning (although I didn't entirely agree with it) was that she should have her own things around her as much as possible - we shouldn't move into her house and replace everything. But, looking back on it now, I think it would have made her happy if we had bought a freezer with her money. I think she would have liked to be able to walk past it and know it was something she contributed.

Back in her prime, a birthday in the family would be her thing to do, if you know what I mean? She'd co-ordinate the present buying and wrapping, she'd do the cooking, she'd host the dinner, she'd do the washing up... By the end, she didn't do a thing, really. And, what she tried to do, we'd take away and do "for" her. In the end, we were so busy trying to take care of her that we took away everything she could do to take care of us. That must have been so hard for her.

If I had thought about it, if I had acted on gut instinct instead of trying to do what a good granddaughter should do for her ailing grandmother, I would have asked her for more things. I would have asked her for little things that she could just give me - like coins for buying drinks, and I would have asked her if I could borrow things so that I could thank her for the loan later when I returned them.

How hard would it have been to say, "Nana, can I borrow some money to buy some stuff for work? I'll pay you pack after I've had a chance to get to the bank..."

Maybe it would have made her feel better. More like she was taking care or me. I don't know.

What I do know, deep down inside, is that it would have made her very happy to know I walked up the street today with her purse and bought some wrapping paper for my mother's birthday presents. My grandmother contributed something useful for her kids. That's something she definitely would have wanted.

Hmmm...

Google knows where I am.

That's not entirely surprising, I suppose. Even though I put my time-zone down as "Brisbane" and usually nominate that as my location for reasons of obfuscation, I do mention the town in which I actually reside from time to time, and my IP address should be easy enough to track.

However, whenever I see an ad on one of these Google applications that's specifically targeting me based on my location, I feel nervous.

Wishin' and Hopin'

I've decided this is what I want for my birthday next year:



I've wanted a penny farthing for years. I've wanted this one in particular ever since I found the website back in 2005. I think, for my 30th birthday, I can splurge and buy myself something massive and pointless.

I hereby forgo any other birthday presents in favour of donations to the penny farthing cause.

A Hell of a Good Man...

I once had a very disturbing conversation with a young woman at my old church. She was a few years younger than me (I expect she still is), and one of those friendly acquaintances you tend to pick up who aren't exactly BFFs, but you'd happily have lunch with them or invite them to your birthday party.

Anyway, in the course of the conversation she worked out that I was single, at which point she immediately offered to set me up with a guy she knew.

Now, I had, on previous occasions, met the fellow in question, and I had found him to be the kind of person you nod to, before turning to talk to someone you actually like. I wouldn't actively avoid him, but five minutes of polite conversation would be about as much as either of us would really get out of the other before completely exhausting our reason for being in the same room.

I thought it was an awfully strange suggestion on her part, as she would surely know me well enough to know I wouldn't get along well with him.

I politely told her I wasn't interested, and then attempted to change the subject. Not to be deterred, she immediately suggested another guy - one even less suited to me than the first. In doing so, she also made it clear that her main criteria for attempting to make the match was the fact that "he's single".

Yes, that was her sole consideration.

Somehow, in her universe, the idea of finding someone attractive, interesting or sympathetic (in the older sense of the word) had no relevance. It didn't matter if you shared no interests, had wildly differing opinions on most things and didn't find each other appealing in the least. You're single, he's single, what's the problem?

I was on the verge of explaining to her that there was a little more involved in finding a "match" than just grabbing the nearest available man on offer, but one look at her face told me it would be a waste of time. She was a "simple" girl - in that she was naive and uncomplicated - and it was easy to see she was like that because she wouldn't understand such complexities, even if she could.

Besides, it was an attitude that was somewhat endemic among the "youth" in that church: Better to have someone than no one at all.

At least, that's how I saw it, being outside the "intense set". I don't think I was too far wrong, given that at least four marriages in that set never made it past two years. That was one of the reasons why I don't go to that church any more. I didn't think the youth had the healthiest approach to life, and I didn't think the "mature adults" were paying enough attention, or making the effort to try to steer them right. But, that's another story.

It was sometime later that I bought a Circe Link CD "Moody Girl", including the song "Hell of a Good Man", which seemed a much healthier way of looking at the whole "boy-meets-girl" scenario, and I wished I could ram it in the ears of some of my young friends at that church:

It takes a hell of a good man/ to be better than/ no man at all...

It's something I think applies to a lot of things in life: Don't settle for something that isn't what you want just because you haven't found what you want yet.

And that's my profound thought for today.