Slack Bugger

Dear Diary,

It occurs to me that I've been doing a lot of posts to this journal of late which are just "check this out" type entries. In other words, content from elsewhere, and not much by way of a journal.

I shall now attempt to remedy this, at least for the next few minutes while I procrastinate about cleaning the bathroom. Hey, I have to finish my decaf turkish coffee before it gets cold.

I spent some of today (a public holiday here in Victoria) driving around the old Kodak site in Coburg. I had half an idea to buy a house there when they knock down all the factory buildings and turn it into another sub-suburb. But... It's actually in quite a miserable area, industrial on one side (no surprise there) and a whole lot of sad sad brick houses on all the other sides. Then we popped into the old Pentridge prison site, which is being rapidly transformed into a housing estate. Damn, it was so samey, so many dead ends and so many shitty new town houses. At least six of which are already for sale. I suspect that's a fore-taste of what Kodak is going to become. Might have to come up with another plan... *sigh* Although it's not like I can afford to buy a house anywhere, let alone the places I like like Northcote.

Saturday night we headed out to evildoom_bunny's place out in North Ringwood. Well, technically her place, given she spends 90% of her time here at my place :-) We watched no less than FOUR DVD's - more than I've watched in six months. And, more of a miracle, only one of them had I seen before. It was "Lilo and Stitch" (yes, the kids animation. Rent it - it's really good), followed by "Henry Rollins: Shock and Awe", "Lost in La Mancha" and "Bubba Ho-Tep". Go look 'em up on imdb if you're interested, I can't be bothered making links for them all. Rollins is amazing, I've seen and heard a lot of his material lately - including live in late Jan - and he never repeats himself! The dude is one amazing talker. Lost in La Mancha is a doco about Terry Gilliam's attempts to make a film of Don Quixote. And Bubba Ho-Tep is a low-budget film about Elvis, alive and well in a nursing home fighting an Egyptian mummy who is going around eating souls...

Saturday we had brunch with Hazel. We did some nerdy, nerdy shit. I have a little hand-held PC from work. Hazel beamed some photos from her far too sophisticated phone to it via infrared, then later I beamed 'em to my laptop. Nerdy!!! Wait till I post the pix... :-)

Friday night we went to what I believe is a new venue, the East Brunswick on Lygon street, to see Love of Diagrams. Nice to see a new music venue starting up - but damn it's too clean and damn the crowds in these places make me feel old these days. The average age is closer to evildoom_bunny's than my 34 year old arse....

Well, finished drinking my Turkish coffee, I'd better go clean the bathroom...

Paul's Breakfast

Damn, it's a wonder I'm not fatter. This is my typical breakfast when I visit a local cafe called Garths place.


It's breakfast with extra breakfast on top. The veggie breakfast, which has mushrooms and spinach, tomatoes and stuff, with bacon, cheese, avocado, pesto eggs, smoked salmon and hollandase sauce on top. Hmmmm... I'm hungry... To quote the waitress when we arrived "Oh, it's you..."

Thanks to Hazel's phone camera for the picture!

94 and Going strong

Some more stuff of little or no consequence which I've done lately that I should record.

My 94 year old grandmother had a episode of something recent - something which would be routine for the young and strong, but knocked around the old dear. She's now in some kind of rehabilitation place in East Burwood. She's been living at home literally until a couple of weeks ago, with some assistance. But she's an independent old biddy, and keeps turning people away at the door saying she doesn't need any help, thank you.

Sounds like the doctors aren't going to let her back to living alone, which is a bit sad. I can somewhat see why - she's got particularly vague, can't remember who she's seen in the last few days, asks the same questions a couple of times over, and can't walk without a frame. She did however delight us all by referring to Sara as my "lady love". Her house is not well adapted for an old lady living there - it's got the steepest driveway I've ever seen!

Anyway, we'll see what happens - I should be so with it when I'm 94. My dad has arranged a tag-team of visitors for her, it sounds like she has at least one relative visit every day.

Her dinner arrived while we were there - they feed 'em at 5PM - and she tried to give me half of it! She had some plain little sandwiches, which she insisted she didn't have space for, I had to prevent her from wrapping them in glad wrap and giving them to me. No way known I could cope with taking food from a little old lady in a hospital!

The Bathroom is Now Clean...

The bathroom is now clean. I even rinsed the collected dust off the cover for the ceiling fan! I hereby swear I'll clean the damn thing more often, before it gets a bit crusty around the edges. Does anyone know a good way of getting mold off the grouting between tiles??? And why do I have one of those u-shaped little rugs that sits in front of your loo, presumably to catch drips when one doesn't shake properly???

I'm almost Dutch!

You might recall a while back I exploring getting a Dutch passport. Or, more correctly, waiting to see if my Dutch-born mother was worthy of Dutch citizenship, and how that might roll over to her offspring.

They're a crazy bunch, the Dutch, they have a stupidly large number of rules and regulations. As someone said "The Dutch have a form for everything". Anyway, it turns out that because my mother was naturalised before she was 18, as far as the Netherlands are concerned, she's still Dutch! How does that work???

So it should be easy for her to become a dual citizen.

She asked the embassy how this affects her kids, and was told that we had to have been registered with the Dutch authorities between 1985 and 1987! Presumably there was some kind of legislative changes in both those years, one which would have helped us, and one which must have rolled it back... She's going to apply anyway, and see what happens.

It used to be that my sister and I could only even consider it if our father was Dutch, which he ain't. They changed the rules in the early eighties to either parent, but didn't make it retrospective! Misogynistic bunch...

I might have to learn Dutch, but then I might be entitled to a Dutch passport, which would mean I could easily work and travel anywhere in the EU without a visa, and presumably could also take along my "lady love" with me as my defacto or something. Europe here I come!

Man, more weird random accidents of my birth and parentage.