Why oh why did I not take a picture of last nights dinner? I am drooling into my keyboard as I type…
The obvious reason is that it was way too yummy to even pause and get the camera. M’s mother lent us an indoor bbq thingo and we had seared prawns and mackerel with steamed vegetables in satay sauce. To die for. Our house guests excelled themselves yesterday (their first day) when they asked if there was anything they could do (poor naive creatures). M immediately and shamelessly suggested that if they wanted to pull down the ruin of the old shed out the back that they should feel free. Now we have no shed. It was kind of like one of those DIY show moments when I walked out the back and looked at where the shed was and instead saw a neat pile of wood and corrugated iron. They also discovered a nest of cane toads- ugh. They have been proliferating for the past two days – until then I’d only seen one in the last four months. In the past two nights I have seen about ten – they are very cocky and don’t move when you shine the torch on them. I have a horror of them and walk out to feed the cats by stamping my feet very hard on every step to make them hop away – and I can hear them scuffling off to hide. Yuck.

For those people who aren’t familiar with cane toads;

They are also highly toxic and we have already heard of people who have lost their pets who have licked one. The Queenslanders we know encourage you to stamp on them on sight, but I can’t. I need to employ a toad stamper as I’m scared some little ones might get into the cat home – the cats would love to play with anything that hopped.

It is v.windy today, which is casting a pall on my plan to have my first proper swim of the season – the others went for a dip last night, but I didn’t go. Bother.

Coffee. I would say, without too much prejudice, that Melbourne is the coffee capital of Australia. I don’t even drink the stuff, but I do find myself buying M cappuccinos often enough to have an opinion. Up here, a cappuccino can be priced anywhere up to $3.90 – for some reason I only recall paying about $2.50 in Melbourne. Odd. We have discovered somewhere that sells $2 ones, but it’s a pub, with a limited ambience. Yesterday we took Dave and Ellise to the place of my date (which now feels startlingly long ago) – and in extreme contrast to the very pretty surroundings, the food and drinks were b-a-d. Bad to the point where the chocolate sauce on Dave’s chocolate and pecan pie turned out to actually be Worchestershire. *gag* The coffees were not good and my scone…well I’m not sure how you can go wrong with a scone, but I needed mega jam and cream to force it down. It wasn’t really a scone, it was kind of a practice-scone that you throw away and learn from. (And would that be scone as rhyming with ‘on’ or scone as rhyming with ‘cone’? Just to stir up the natives ;o)

Price differences between places are weird. Today’s weather is weird. It looks Melbournesque, though it’s still T-shirt weather, but it’s windy as a bastard, and they actually just put a storm warning out on the 6pm news for the South East Queensland area – here! Have brought the cats inside to visit for the first time – this weather will be a definite test of the strength of the cathome!

Had to say goodbye to the lovely Ellise this morning – she departed a few days earlier than previously planned so she can spend some time with her Year 12 students who are having pre-exam freakouts. It’s going to be strange here without the freckle – she cooked up a storm – it was so nice for me to have a girly-friend to hang with. M is obviously top-of-the-pile but there is just certain things about Secret Women’s Business that even he can’t replicate with a power tool.

Woe is me. I have just had the most delightful email from my friend C which tells of a recent outing had by The Ladies Who Lunch – a loose conglomeration of women for whom a long and largely alcoholic lunch is an annual occurence. And guess what. I’m in Queensland so I missed out. I am assaulted by wild depression, enhanced by constantly having to update and rework this BLOODY poster I’m doing for my boss, and alleviated by the arrival of my Masters In Writing certificate that just arrived by registered post. (Up here, registered post means that the little white car that delivers the mail will lean on it’s horn until you prevail on handyman/boyfriend to run out to the gate as you are still pyjama-clad.)

I digress. The Ladies Who Lunch bloody excelled themselves in my absence *sob* Their lunch went so well and for so long that it then morphed into dinner! I quote:

The ‘Lunch’ actually went for eight and a half hours, in which time (I must quote again):

Goddamnit! What am I doing up here?! Oh. Trying to make money on a house. That’s right. Now which would I rather have if I got hit by a bus tomorrow – a hangover from the longest, most gossipy lunch this year, or a house in Queensland that I have to wait until June 2004 to sell? Grrr.

Just because I have an acre and a half, why do junk mailers assume I’m a farmer?

On a better note, M’s mum got me new jammies!

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A lovely day was had yesterday – though I didn’t win a cent. I got my sister to put two little bets on a couple of horses that one of her housing clients had tipped. They didn’t feature. Strangely enough, it was the first v.beautiful day that I’ve seen since hitting Melbourne.

Had a lovely lunch at the G.R’s place – which looks more pretty every time I visit (new enormo fridge and new enormo couch) – the lunch was sublime, interupted only by Beanbag the dog, who found himself somewhat constipated and ran around the table squealing and then did what can only be called an ‘ejector poo’ which thankfully everyone managed to duck.
Speaking of the ejector poo, I awoke to the sound of Rachael repeating ‘oh my god, oh my god’ – apparently the baby had managed to coat his entire body in scary liquid baby-poo; there are times when, as a house guest, you know that it is best to stay in your room.

My sister was evil enough to leave half a jar of the stuff (think ‘lemon butter’ and you’ll understand what I’m on about) in my refrigerator (that word looks violently misspelled, but I just checked, and it’s not). I am a slave to it. I put it on toast in the morning and it’s like eating cheesecake. I put it on a biscuit just a moment ago and almost drowned in my own drool. Maybe it will make up for the demise of ‘during the day tea-drinking’ (it makes me sweat).

Oh. Another thing. The DIY Blog that I contribute to has been nominated in the Best Group Blog category for the 2003 Weblog Awards…so if you feel like voting *raises eyebrows suggestively*…

Must make grovelling apologies to M’s mother, who I cried laughing at today when she used the word ‘beeve’ in conversation. Admittedly she did at first use it in reference to bees, but then corrected herself and went on about beef. I was weeping. But she was right. D’oh.

Dictionary.com – 1 entry found for beeve.
\Beeve\, n. [Formed from beeves, pl. of beef.] A beef; a beef creature.

Attended the 9:40am screening of LOTR III yesterday morning – turned up with whining six-year-old…sorry, boyfriend, and seconds to spare. We had front row seats. Now I don’t really care about where I sit in the cinema. The more brilliant the movie, the less I care about my position, because I just want to see it!! M, on the other hand, was begging to be slapped, talking about how he was going to leave and get a coffee while I saw the movie etc. etc. No wonder I was a good babysitter all those years ago. I just half-smiled in an enigmatic fashion and thought of Aragorn. I find it works wonders. So the movie was great – can’t wait for the day when somewhere like the Westgarth or the Astor (these are Melbourne references…I suppose my Sydney reference would be the Valhalla?) screen the trilogy in a single sitting, pausing only for the occasional choc-top. Bliss..

On the topic of the impending vision of NYE, I have to confess…I thoroughly despise NYE and have found it a consistent bloody let down. So tonight, we have left it too late to go and party for $60 a head on Fraser Island, we don’t want to hang with the neighbours, or crash M’s mothers National Seniors Party (I’m not joking – she’s having at least 15 of them over to her house to party around the pool)…no. I have gone out, bought a dozen New Zealand oysters, each almost larger than my head, prawns, vodka, midori, pineapple and cranberry juice, plus the best olives in the world (that for reasons unknown do not have a website dedicated to them, though I am going to try and rectify this by setting up a fan site) and I am going to wear many different dresses, whilst M works the blender, designing different mutations of Illusions as we count down the hours….
PARTEEEEEE.

And…(this addressed to my bro in London when he gets back to work and starts dropping into [miaow] ) – don’t even think of telling me that I’m a lame old loser with no life, because when you have the choice of Hervey Bay or your own private exclusive party….I think I’ve made a wise choice, so you can just shut it.