The planning for Japan is coming along nicely. Today I received confirmation that we were able to book in on our preferred date for the Ghibli museum. I’m so psyched – lifesize catbus!!!! Also, I saw a picture on the Ghibli museum website of Hayao Miyazaki sitting in front of one of the robots from ‘Laputa Castle in the Sky’. Here he is:

The resolution isn’t high enough for me to tell what his expression actually is, but I’d like to think he’s delighted.

And why wouldn’t he be? Living in a country where things like what’s pictured below are just an everyday occurrence…

Some friends of mine

I just finished watching Sakuran. It was visually sumptuous – the colours, the designs, the clothes… And tomorrow, Tim and I are going to see Trina to sort the details of our Japan trip. I am so excited. It might be because this has been something I’ve dreamed of for around 15 years now.

Watching the Amazing Race the other night, and seeing the teams in Japan, in Tokyo, rushing through Shibuya… all these things that Tim and I will be doing in just over a month’s time…

Well. I can’t get ahead of myself. There’s still a few weeks to go yet, and Tim and I also have to concentrate on selling the house.

Still, it’s exciting!!!!

These are some things happening right now:

1. Tim and I are trying to sell our house
2. We leave for a two week holiday in Japan on 22 November
3. I start my new job on 23 September
4. Tim and I are supposed to be getting married on 3 July 2010
5. I should be asleep

I will readily admit that I have severely neglected this blog, but what else is new? I don’t know why I have such trouble getting motivated to write here.

I want to write so much, but after the Dey Alexander course on Friday, I sort of feel bad about waffling on and on, and making strange run-on sentences and non-existent words.

Anyway, I’m literally falling asleep here. I guess more on this at a later date.

I know I was resisting it to begin with, but I’m really liking the new wordpress update. It’s quite a bit different to the previous updates, so I can accept that they were justified in offering it so soon after the last one. However, i still maintain that fewer updates with increased functionality and useability in each one is better than hundreds of small updates with small changes that you might hardly notice.

Tonight I spent a while cleaning out our pantry. There were a fair few things that needed to be thrown out, and there was a sticky layer of soy sauce on one of the shelves (I’m still wondering how that happened. The bottle is thick glass, no cracks, not knocked over…) that had to be scrubbed at for a few minutes before it finally admitted defeat and released its hold on the laminate. I felt a sense of satisfaction once the job was done, and the shelves do look much more orderly, but I’ve got a headache throbbing behind my temples now and a queasy feeling in my stomach. I’m pretty sure it is all to do with the heat plaguing us at the moment.

Annoyingly, the airconditioner in our living area decided that it would choose today to stop de-humidifying the air. The result of this is somewhat slightly cooler, though still humid air being recylced back out through the airconditioning unit. The thing that really affects me in summer here is not so much the heat, though that is bad enough in itself, but the humidity. It’s the humidity that makes the air soupy and thick. It causes bread to mould up the day after you buy it, unless you put it in the fridge. Actually, it causes a whole lot of things to mould up in a couple of days, even a bag of lemons we had sitting on the bench. They weren’t old by any stretch of the imagination! I, for some reason, thought it might be okay to keep lemons out of the fridge.

Living in Australia in summer makes everything feel ridiculous. What I mean is, everyday things that you do every day. Things like going to work, wearing closed-in shoes, drinking coffee when it’s warm/hot, wearing business clothes… I guess the main thing that’s frustrating is the clothing thing. I feel like wearing a summer dress and haviainas, when instead I have to wear something that won’t look too out-of-place in the office. I live in fear of the airconditioner at work breaking down. When I worked at Suncorp, the airconditioner broke on one of the hottest days that year. Of course, being in a new multi-storey building meant that there was no other way to get fresh air flowing through the floor. The temperature went up to over 40 degrees celsius and still management wouldn’t let people leave. I left anyway. I don’t cope with the heat.

Australia is hot and humid. A vast majority of the country is tropical or subtropical, and even the parts of the country that are classed as having a mediterranean climate (are you KIDDING? ) can still look forward to a few days of 40+ degrees celsius each summer. I know that we were colonised by people from a colder climate, but you would think that after a few generations we’d have learnt to adapt our lifestyles accordingly. I admit that we do live differently to people in the UK, but we seem just to have chosen to do so in the dumbest possible ways. For example: spending hours and hours of our spare time in the sun.

People from other countries seem to see us as fairly easy-going, laidback, lackadaisical characters. I’m not disputing that this is likely true, in relative terms. I think the reason for this stereotype is more because most of the time it’s too frickin hot to really have the energry to be anything but laidback. Taking an interest and caring about things uses energy, and that generates heat, and oh god if I add any more to the heat that’s currently pressing in around me I will spontaneously combust.

Is it still spontaneous if you expect it to happen?

So anyway, hopefully we will get our other airconditioner fixed tomorrow. Right now, I am cocooned in the comfortable and cool embrace of artificially chilled and de-humidified air (our airconditioner in the bedroom works, thankfully). When I step out of this room, it feels like stepping into a bathroom where someone has left the hot water running without the exhaust fan on.

Yuck.

… they do if it gets hot enough!

The origins of the celebration we now call “Christmas” are interesting and varied, but they have one thing in common – they have nothing to do with Jesus or Christianity.

Go here to read all about it. Don’t worry – it’s not a Christian-bashing thing, just an informative article about the pagan origins of what we now call “Christmas”.

… about the logic behind placing a “return to sender” sticker over the address that the mail was initally sent to… how are we supposed to know who not to send things to?

It’s especially illogical when the return to sender sticker is not one of those removeable ones, and it takes forever to carefully peel the sticker back to find the name and address underneath.

Get a clue, people!

Seeing as it’s around 10:20pm on a school night, and I don’t have the energy nor presence of mind to write a proper blog post, I thought I’d just post some random images I’ve recently been offered up by my browser’s best friend, StumbleUpon (if you join up, find me. I’m casbot): 

This last image is from Jason Chan and it’s my desktop background at work right now. It’s very soothing and calming. There’s a lot more illustration and art on Jason’s site, all wonderfully detailed and imaginative. I felt like I was stepping straight into someone else’s head.

Anyway, I’m going to go while I still can. Any minute now my forehead will be down on teh keyboard, forcing me to commit heinous typographical errors (for example “teh”).

Goodnight everyone!! x

I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite a while (along with the million other things floating around in my head at any given moment). The reason I’ve procrastinated this one, I suspect, is my own lack of knowledge as to the level of interest this topic may generate. Like it even matters, right? It’s interesting to me, and that should be enough. I’m not writing this blog for the benefit of others. All those enterprising-marketeering-blog snobs can go stuff that in their pipe and choke on it. I wish stumbleupon would stop taking me to their gross “how to get more people to your website by spamming all your friends and acquaintances!” Only they wouldn’t call it spamming, they’d call it networking. And they wouldn’t call them friends and acquaintances, they’d call them networks. 

Sorry. Cynical side of me peeked out for a moment there. People make and keep acquaintances for the sole purpose of extending their network kind of disgust me a little. How do you ever know what’s real with them? How do they ever maintain a real relationship? Isn’t it a constant question of “what else can I get from you to propel myself forward another millimetre?” 

I’m sure that the people who live their lives this way don’t even realise that’s what they’re doing. How about you stop pondering what other people can do for you, and start to simply enjoy the company of others? How about just being in the moment? How about having friends as friends, and not as rungs of a ladder that you tread on to get yourself further up in the world? 

*******

OMG I love my life. 

I love not feeling the need to constantly justify my actions, living in the moment, allowing myself freedom to feel the emotions that come naturally. I’m still careful not to hurt anyone. 

Everyone should read this book. My interest in the undead springs forth from my initial interest in a) the Black Death, and b) apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels such as “Plague” (originally “Plague 99″) by Jean Ure, and “A Wrinkle in the Skin” by John Christopher. 

My interest has just been piqued by the term ‘pedigree collapse’, when referring to genealogy. Much favoured by European royal families (see the Hapsburg jaw/lip syndrome! Also known as prognathism), and sometimes necessary after the Black Death ravaged the population of Europe so much.

The part of me that loves anthropology loves the Black Death for it’s catalytic effect on the development of Modern English, on the very social fabric apparent at the time, and on the population’s understanding of the world and their place in it. I’d love to go back in time like Kivrin in “Doomsday Book” (Connie Willis) and see the everyday lives of the different social classes. 

I’m tired. Those are good books. Read them. I’m obsessed.