Warm Fuzzies

The photo of this card is deliberately out of focus. It's a visual analogy for how it made me feel. While you may not feel the warmth from the photo, you can detect the fuzziness lol.

My day was made today by this gem that arrived by snail mail. If getting a large, coloured handwritten envelope in your mailbox when it's not even your birthday isn't exciting enough, when it contains a card such as this it gets uber good.

It's also a reminder that it's often the simplest things that have the greatest impact in terms of making a person fell valued and appreciated. Even more so when there's no agenda behind the gesture.

Many, many thanks to the person, who will remain nameless in this post, who thoughtfully created and sent this card. It certainly made me feel humble and proud. And warm and fuzzy.

The Time of Year I Love to Hate

I know it's a good thing to be able to annually purge your property of all the accumulated junk that is gathering dust and taking up space. The local inorganic collections allow us all to do this, and I have certainly taken advantage of the opportunity this year.

Like the responsible citizen I am, I follow the rules and wait until the prescribed dates to load up the grass verge with my broken and worn out large inorganic items. I do this neatly, making sure that, as is requested, everything is left tidy and compact.

But no sooner is that done than the old adage 'one man's junk is another man's treasure' comes in to play. The vultures in their people movers scour the carefully stacked piles for what they consider to be useful. In my case I could barely unload the car before someone was baring down on my castoffs. And they don't care how slowly they travel, how spontaneously they stop, or where they stop - middle of the road, across the driveway...

Certainly they give no thought to retaining any 'order' the the junk piles. By today, the third or fourth day since most of us put our 'junk' out, shrapnel is spread across the road, broken glass is scattered through the piles and the whole suburb is, quite frankly, an eyesore. (I know I am generalising here, and lumping all the pile browsers into one unsavory category, but ... if the cap fits.)

As I said, I appreciate the opportunity to get rid of unwanted junk. But I wish it'd be picked up sooner, so that our neighbourhood could be spared the embarrassment of looking as it does today.

Beware What Lies Beneath...

We all like to think we keep ourselves, our houses and our belongings clean. For me that can be an extra challenge with three long-haired, (formerly) inside dwelling dogs. I say formerly as I have been encouraged to let my 'babies' rediscover their true natures and be 'dogs' again instead, and part of this is having them spend more time outdoors being animals. But that's another story.

Having dogs and trying to keep things clean for me involves a lot of washing -  of floor coverings, dog beds and towels etc. Hence a large number of my washing machine cycles contain loads made up of those items.

I hadn't ever really given much thought to the effect this was having on my washing machine. My mother did surmise at one stage that perhaps dog hair might clog things up in the hoses, but this proved  not to be true. I certainly hadn't given any thought to what was accumulating behind the drum etc, which the ordinary person ordinarily never sees.

When you have a clean freak partner (that's a compliment honey) who knows from experience the effect washing dog stuff can have on a washing machine, and who has the expertise to dissect one to prove it, you could be in for a shock with what lies beneath.

I sure got one helluva shock. You'd presume washing machines would be clean receptacles, and I was totally grossed out to think I had been washing my clothes in what I saw, which is what you see in these photos. I'm not proud to admit it!

However I'm lead to believe that it's not only 'dog stuff' that could cause this residual build up, so my blog post is one of social responsibility; encouraging those of you who, like me, were blissfully unaware of what lurks in places you don't often see, to find yourself a handy man to show you the error of your ways. And try not to throw up as you scrub it all away...





PS Here's my new weekly haunt to take care of the doggy stuff so my newly cleaned machine remains pristine!

50 Shades of Lighten Up!

Not one to often deliberately provoke controversy me, but this post may do it.

If you have not heard of 50 Shades of Grey, you might well have been living under a rock for the past couple of months. As with anything that becomes a part of popular culture, 50 Shades has become a hot topic (lol) in many circles. And the subject of many spoofs/parodies. Many of these parodies in some way marginalise a particular group. As parodies often do.

If you are a painter, you may be offended by Selena Gomez's Fifty Shades of Blue

If you are a mother, watch out for the gross generalisations on Amazon's Mother's Day parody

And even author E. L James may take offense to this parody of herself  (my personal favourite, do watch it lol) however she probably is not getting her panties in a bunch (unlike Anastasia - Oh My!) as every bit of publicity buys her more cash for her bad writing and over-dramatized sex scenes. Which I have nearly finished reading all of.

But you know, actually just being a 'college educated woman', I could be offended by the way 'we' are portrayed by the character Anastasia in the book - all that lip biting and eye rolling, the way she drools and succumbs to Mr Grey's demands... and the expectation that all that a man has to do to a woman to evoke an earth shattering orgasm is to basically look at her. And of course 'it' happens Every. Single. Time. Several. Times. A. Day. And because she is like that surely that must mean every single woman in her demographic is like that and E.L. James is making a gross generalization? Stretching it a bit I know, but I am trying to make a point.

I am amused therefore, at the outcry of a little literary parody doing the rounds here in Auckland/NZ. I have included it as an image below. Yes, I can see how this South Auckland parody (which I read on one sight was originally about another Auckland suburb, Avondale, a.k.a "A-von-da-lay") can be seen racially offensive. But it's also bloody funny. Lighten up people. About 50 shades should do it. 

No Like, No Pay! - Yeah, Right!

Another Venetian tale, although this one is not so ambiguous as to whether it was 'worth it' or not.
Shane's ambition on our one Italian stop, was to sample an excellent, authentic Italian pizza. Made by an authentic Italian. I had done some searching prior to leaving NZ and had identified an area away from the usual tourist haunts that recommended we would find exactly that. Unfortunately the iPhone GPS was not playing nicely as we navigated through the back streets, and we kept losing our way.
Hungry tums and hot feet therefore took us back to a place slightly off the beaten track, though still quite touristy looking, which we had passed earlier. Ristorante 1251. A guy had been vocally advertising a mantra of "You no like-a the pizza you no pay". We took a seat not anticipating that this would be a reality for us.
I was a piglet and ordered two courses, starting with a mozzarella and tomato salad, which despite being a little under-seasoned, was quite refreshing and delivered what it said on the packet. When Shane's pizza arrived - funghi with additional olives - it was sans olives so went back to the kitchen. It reappeared with a few cold olives scattered on the top. He ate in silence, leaving the majority of his pizza uneaten on the plate.
Meanwhile the order for my seafood dish had not gone through. I eventually realised this when it had not turned up and alerted the waiter -  foolishly as it turned out as it coincided with the realization that the funghi pizza was not good, and I wished I had just stuck with the salad.
The waiter cleared, enquired after the uneaten pizza, and was told it was 'not nice'. When he returned with the bill, the pizza was charged for. What happened to "You no like-a the pizza you no pay?", we asked.
Exit the meek waiter, enter the firey chef/owner or whoever. What ensued was a barrage of shouted insults from this dude, including his insistence that all his pizzas were excellent, and a good amount of punctuated finger pointing at Shane accompanied by "I no like you! I no like you!"
Well we didn't like him either. And we don't recommend any visitors to Venice eat at Ristorante 1251

PS Ristorante 1251, in a digital age beware the pissed off customer. This is not the only place I have expressed my displeasure!

Ascertaining 'worth'

Well it has sure been a long while between posts - a two week break overseas and the obligatory recovery time will do that for you, but will also provide topic fodder for a few posts to come. Unlike my brother, (link to his travel blog here) who is currently on a 7 week excursion in Europe with his wife, I did not blog whilst I was away - I only had my cell phone and not a lot of data or downtime. Retrospective blogging therefore means that posts will not be chronological in terms of the experiences we had. To give context to the posts I will briefly define the 'we' as being myself and my new best friend Shane lol. A man from my past who has now become my future *collective sigh*.
It was a brilliant, spontaneous holiday, and we packed A LOT into the brief time we had. This meant we did not necessarily do the standard tourist things, but in Venice, we did.

A couple in love in Venice can't NOT go on a gondola ride, can they? A quiet, romantic glide through the back canals of this amazingly unique city? We had already meandered the streets by foot as we made our way randomly from the train station to the Piazza San Marco in the morning, and I had loved the authenticity we found away from the tourist mayhem of the Rialto Bridge area and St Marks Square. The gondola ride was much like that, but with the perspective of being on the canals. Our gondolier offered us the occasional snippet of commentary, but I don't think we were particularly interested; after all the walking we'd done I think we were both glad of the chance to sit down and relax!

So we can tick "Gondola Ride through Venice" off our 'list'; although I had ridden a gondola on my last visit to Venice some 15 years ago, it was with a bunch of fellow Contiki tourists, not with my 'fellow'. But an expensive tick it was. NZD $120 was the 'city price' for this supposedly 40 minute ride; that's some hourly rate! Was it worth it? Of course it was. What price do you place on experience and memories, huh? (Even if it's just to recall how ridiculously overpriced it was lol)

June's Book Done and Dusted

Well it's had a lot of hype and press surrounding it so what's a girl to do but read it?  Tagged as 'Mommy Porn', "Fifty Shades of Grey" by E. L. James is described as a romance/suspense/erotica novel. Well yes, it's all that. Not the most cerebral read in the world, certainly explicit in terms of its sexual content, but to be honest, all that bedroom/ red-room-of-pain stuff gets rather passe after a few chapters.

The writing is bland and the plot is thin. The characters are pretty one dimensional with repetitively annoying behaviours (all that lip biting and eye rolling). Despite other friends rollicking through the whole series in under two weeks, it has taken me almost a month to get through the first book. Those who know what's happening in my own life currently may say there's an explanation for that, but I did expect it to be more engaging than it was. 

So am I going to bother with the next two. Of course I am!

I had been warned that the ending of book one was designed to make you want to start book two immediately. Well mine's packed away for a long plane trip, so I will just have to wait till I get seated to find out what happens next... and actually, I can wait.