A Long Absence.

Yup, so it’s been a while.  You may have noticed that my last entry was just a Katy Perry video.  There was initially a 3000-odd word post accompanying it, inclduing an explanation for the video, but mostly about an all-girls training day that we had on the ice.  Then I deleted it my accident and got so fed up that I couldn’t be arsed rewriting it.  There is, however, a different version that I wrote for the company’s website if you are so inclined.  Just replace all instances of ‘Team G’ with ‘Team V’ (marketing didn’t like the vagina references) and try to imagine the ‘V wings’ that my boss asked if he’d earned yet.

The last few months (!) have been full of stuff and yet seemingly uneventful.  My 101 in 1001 finished recently, which probably warrants a post in itself, but I got quite a few things crossed off my list in the last couple of months.  I got my Learner’s licence (3 months till I can sit my restricted), bought a car, finished reading all of Jane Austen (especially liked Mansfield Park, watched the version that I had on DVD soon after which I wasn’t overly impressed with.  It had Billie Piper (who I usually like) as Fanny Price, but I don’t think she played her diffident enough.  Also not enough time on Fanny’s childhood.  Any recommendations for good versions?)

Without reading the list (because I CBA) I can’t think of any other major ones but will write a whole post on it, maybe with a new list, soon.

Am currently reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which The Norwegian (aka Samson) lent me aaages ago and am still only 200 (of over 500) words through.  It’s cool when Victor Hugo’s talking about Quasimodo and Esmerelda and the story’s actually happening, but then he will spend more than 30 pages describing what Paris looked like from the air in 1482, which, for me, doesn’t really add much to the story!  I feel like Alice before she falls into Wonderland: ‘And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?’ 

Oh well!  I can add it to my list when I’m finished.  I am enjoying it in general.

What I am not enjoying at the moment is the flu.  I should have known better than to spend four nights out at The Norwegian’s house last week when he had it, but the time away from Franz and hanging out with him was worth it.  We planned on going skiing but then the snowpocalypse happened and all the fields were closed.  Instead we enjoyed the sunshine that was deigning to shine on us here on the Coast (do you know how often it happens that the rest of the country is being meteorologically vomited upon, and it’s beautifully sunny here?  Not very) and went for a wander (aka epic bushbash) up the back of town one day.  There were track markers but we kept following the wrong ones, so it took us a bit longer that it otherwise might have.  The view from the top was worth it though!

It does mean time off work, though.  There hasn’t been much of that going around lately – it’s been a pretty quiet winter but because a lot of people left we’re still short-staffed.  I’m hoping to get some time off in November once all the Noobs have started so I can go and visit the fair and flattened city of Christchurch.  I managed to get a couple of extra days off last week which was good but not really enough to recharge the batteries.

Have been going to pub quiz pretty regularly this winter, with varying success. Last night was our best showing in a while – got third, mainly because the reigning champions were absent.  The time before that we came 11th out of 12 o.O

OK that’s it for now, need to empty some more space in my head.  Off skiing tomorrow for the first time since I was 15.  I’ll be quite happy if I remain unbroken by the end of it!

Au Revoir x

NFSW and Team V Day

New Stuff!

Holly’s very subtle comment about tumbleweeds brought to my attention the fact that I have not blogged in a month and a half.  So, my friends, here are some things that are new in my life:

New Phone:
My trusty, cheapo nokia has finally kicked the bucket.  I dropped it many a time, and it once had a very exciting adventure caught between my bike wheel and the bike frame, due to which it bears (bore?) a thrilling scar.  Tuesday night I dropped it for the last time and it refused to be revived.  So it’s been shipped off to Starship Children’s Hospital, who recycle/refurbish cellphones and use whatever profit as a donation to its cause (an excellent one).  Wednesday morning I got on the 2degrees website and ordered a new one, nokia again, and again the cheapest one on offer (seems to be a winning formula; certainly they’re nigh indestructible).  It arrived yesterday (Thursday), which I’m pretty stoked with, since I don’t exactly live in the most accessible corner of the world, and, through the magic of the interwebs, I’ve been able to bring my old number over to my new phone.  Sadly my contacts were irretrievable, but facebook is proving handy!

New House:
I am beyond stoked with this development.  You may remember me mentioning that my flatmate Lochie moved out in early March.  She was probably the ideal first flattie – sure she didn’t clean very often, but she kept things my level of tidy, cooked, did the dishes, vacuumed when it was needed, and was around just the right amount for my social/loner balance.  Plus she’s one of my best friends, so it was pretty easy to forgive her for anything that might have bugged me (and the same for her, I guess!), and we were each other’s ‘person’, I guess, when we were having a shit time.
After she moved out, I had about a month of living in my house by myself, which coincided with the advent of me Having A Boyfriend.  Long story short, I got pretty used to having the place to myself.
Enter new flatmate.  There were actually two of my friends who wanted the other room, but I got brainwashed by my boss (who has something against Friend A, for no reason I can discern) into choosing Friend B, who my intuition was already telling me was not the right choice.
Friend A is lovely.  She is kind, and generous, and really sweet in general.  She is also incredibly messy, very rarely takes initiative to do anything in the cleaning genre, and has a boyfriend who is Obnoxious in Large Doses.  And he is Always.  At.  My.  House.  Despite living right next door.  Both of them also have the same days off as me, so basically I never got any space to myself, which is pretty necessary to me staying sane.
When my friend Mara left work, her house was left empty, and I asked my boss if I could move in.  It took him a while, but on Tuesday he told me I could.  Wednesday I moved in.  It’s a one-bedroom place, so I have nothing to fear in terms of potential flatmates.  Downstairs is living kitchen bathroom, upstairs mezzanine-type thing is bedroom.  Is amazing.
Thursday I went to town with Nigella and bought Things For My House.  Between me and the house, I already had most stuff, but a notable exception was plates and bowls, which I found on special at the Warehouse.  Also topped up my food (since I can actually fit stuff in my freezer now – no ice build-up due to people leaving the door open, and half of my fridge no longer freezes whatever’s in it) and – magic buy of the day – a chest of drawers from a second-hand shop for $25.  They need sanding because they have apparently been owned by a small child at some point, but otherwise they’re pretty perfect.  I am nesting, and I am loving it.

New Boyfriend:
Only joking!  Samson and I are all good.
Possibly even disgustingly cute (or so I’m told).  We had one conversation the other week where he thought he was being told off (he wasn’t), but that’s about it in terms of conflict.  Did I mention we go to Shakespeare Reading Group?  There’s a few of us (S and I are the youngest by at least ten years) who meet once a month or so and read a Shakespeare play.  We did Troilus and Cressida last time, and he and I got to play the titular characters.  This meant we got to fall in love, then I got swapped for another prisoner by my countrymen, then cheated on him with a soldier, then he got to call me a whore.  All in all it was a good night!
I do think he needs a new blog name though.  I came up with Samson one day when he was sitting around with his shirt off and he has a wee bit of a beard going on and he looked a bit biblical, so I picked Samson, but I’ve gone off it.  Any suggestions?  Holly, I’m looking at you here

News:
* Team V has shrunk alarmingly in recent weeks.  We had eight members back in April, now we have four.  The most recent departure was Juno (although she is coming back for the summer), whose leaving date was a well-kept secret.  Already wasn’t having a good day that day, and it threw me off balance a little bit, but Samson helped me out with my trip and all was fine.  I went to her boot and told her she was amazing.  She told me I was too, but this was after the boot and quite a bit more beer besides lol.
* Girls’ trip to Wanaka for skiing next month.  Am looking ridiculously forward to it, despite the fact that I haven’t skied since I was about 15 and I wasn’t that great at it then either!
* Team V training day on Tuesday.  One of the bosses is taking us four for training.  I think Juno might have pushed for this, the boys get pushed forward for training all the time, but us girls kind of get patted on the head and given the slow groups, with not much emphasis on upping our Grade level.  So we’re flying in to the Heli-hike site, doing route-selection and hazard-elimination training, and walking back down the glacier through two icefalls.  The only thing that could make this better is if Juno was the one training us!

Wet Days and Boots

Once again it seems to have been AGES since I’ve blogged!  In my defence, I have been around at home very little lately, and also the vodafone server appears to have moved again, because my little spot in the loungeroom that used to get pretty good reception now gets pretty average reception, so I usually get frustrated with teh interwebs before I get a chance to post a blog entry.

Anyway, enough with the excuses!

Since I last blogged I have been up to Hokitika/Greymouth twice, two weeks in a row.  Two Wednesdays ago I went up for the day with Samson and another workmate who needed us to look after his little girl while he went to an appointment.  She wasn’t sure about me to begin with but on the car ride up she kept randomly looking at me and cracking up laughing, which made me crack up laughing, so the boys in the front thought we were both slightly mad.  Was a pretty easy babysitting experience – only took half an hour or so, so we took her to the playground and mucked around on the slides etc.

Then went adventuring in Greymouth for a bit – I attempted to sit my Learner’s Licence, which was a bit of a fail since I forgot to bring any ID with me.  I did however buy some new saucepans and a vacuum cleaner, which I was quite excited about!  I am apparently becoming quite domestic.

Last week I went up to Hokitika on Monday for my stepsister’s 21st.  I got a forced day off (at my work if client numbers are down you sometimes get extra random days off work – unpaid so some people hate them but I’m not bothered) on Monday, but my weekend’s not until Wednesday, and I’d had time off denied for the 21st, so I went up anyway and called in sick on Tuesday, which I actually didn’t feel as guilty about as I thought I would!  It was probably my first sick day since December anyway.

It was a pretty low-key 21st – the whanau (dad, stepmum, other stepsister, stepsister’s dad and stepmum, and her fiance) went for a walk and lunch, then had a nice dinner at a restaurant.  I missed the birthday breakfast coz I only came up on the bus in the morning but that’s generally the most festive part of a birthday at their house.

Hung out there for Tuesday and Wednesday too, and spent some time at my oldest friend’s house with her and one of her little girls (the other one was at preschool).

Wednesday night I got a ride back home with my flatmate and her boyfriend (my next door neighbour) who had been in Greymouth for the day.  We were about 25 minutes from home when the car started to die, and my flatmate lost control and almost drove into a fence – corrected to land us in a ditch, luckily upright!  Her boyfriend and I pushed it out and it lasted about another 4 or 5 km, so we parked it by the roadside and started walking – we were about 6km from where some of our workmates live.  We’d only been walking for about 5 minutes though when Samson and another workmate rocked up – they’d been away for the weekend and I’d wondered if they’d be along soon, since I knew they were due back around that time.  So they towed the car back home – the lights died on the car and my neighbour said it was possibly the most terrifying driving experience he’d ever had – he couldn’t see anything most of the way!  So that was an interesting night.

The last week has been notable for the number of Boots that have occurred.  I have mentioned this awesome tradition before, but as a reminder – when someone leaves my workplace, they have to scull a boot full of alcohol.  Usually beer, but sometimes a random mixture of what everyone else is drinking, and sometimes they add spirits too.  There have been three of these events in the last week, which is kind of sad, because all three people who have left are pretty awesome.  One of the reception girls has left too (her partner is one of the guides who left), who’s a good friend of mine, and who I will miss a lot.  Ressies don’t have to do a boot, but we had a girls’ night on Sunday.  All of Team V (girl guides), most of the reception staff, and a couple of other girls came along, all brought dessert and wine, and had a pretty amazing night.  My neighbour tried to crash early on and steal dessert, but I tackled him and Juno grabbed the desserts out of his reach.  Girl Power!    We all scored each other’s desserts and tallied up the votes.  I came last with my Banoffee Pie, because two of the girls hate bananas (one of them thinks they’re ‘wrong’ lol).  First place went to Juno, who had brought fruit salad – I think we were all glad of an island of healthiness among the puddings and eclairs!  We tucked the guest of honour into bed at about 12.30, after possibly a little too much wine on her part.  There’d only been 4 of us for the last couple of hours, and we broke out the Spice Girls, etc on my laptop and danced.  I believe there are some quite awesome photos and videos in existence

Her partner did his boot on Tuesday night.  It was pretty horrible – I felt too ill to watch the end of it because (if you aren’t too squeamish, highlight the next bit, but be warned, it’s pretty gross!) he’d actually vomited into the boot at some point during the proceedings and was drinking a horrible mixture of that and beer – I have a pretty strong stomach but that was just disgusting.

I went to bed pretty early that night since I was ridiculously tired – I had a big day on the ice on Sunday and still hadn’t recovered.  It rained a whole heap on Saturday and the glacier was pretty slick (rain melts the surface layer of crunchy ice and makes steps disappear).  I was on a Full Day trip and ended up with the last group (usually the least confident and slower people), including two kids.  It’s pretty unusual to have kids on a full day, especially on a day like Sunday, but my senior guide that day has enormous faith in my guiding abilities and likes to give me the most difficult groups he can.  Kids, because they are smaller, have less traction on the ice since they don’t have the weight to really stomp down on the ice.  The groups in front of me didn’t cut much, and I took the wrong turn at some point and ended up taking the more difficult track that the first three groups had taken.  So I pretty much had to cut every step we took and hardly spoke to my group at all, which I hate!

Had a pretty relaxing day yesterday though – stayed in bed until 2pm, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before in my life, and hung out with Samson watching movies.

And now it’s my Sunday and I’m going to do some cleaning and potentially some napping.  Yay!

First post in ages!

I seem to have been quite busy lately, but haven’t really been doing much!

Spent three days in Wanaka and Queenstown – shopping, pedal boating, drinking chilli hot chocolate, luging, etc.  Was pretty awesome.

Went to visit my dad up the road a couple of weekends ago.  Except he decided to go sailing lol so I hung out with my stepmum and stepsister instead.

Last weekend I went to Greymouth one day with a couple of mates – Warehouse, Subway, KFC, amazing!  Bought a few things that I needed since my flattie moved out (she kind of moved out in stages – woke up one morning and tried to make a cup of tea, only to discover there was no longer a kettle lol), and a few things I didn’t need

The next day I went up to Hokitika with some other friends – went to visit a friend who all of us know in different ways, to see her new house.  Had kumara chips at the takeaway and fruit/frozen yoghurt stuff that is amazing.  Also bought chilli chocolate fudge.  nomnomnonmnomnom.

Somewhere in there I also baked pies.  Went to supermarket to get supplies and discovered dvd of Sweeney Todd on sale.  Yelled down an aisle to my friend ‘we can watch Sweeney Todd and make pies and pretend the pies have people in them!’.  Greatly disturbed man in the aisle between us.

Have also been hanging out with Samson a lot (funnily enough!) and we tend to watch movies.  We’ve decided the fairest way to decide what to watch is turn about, but we have reasonably similar taste anyway lol.  Eg.  He picked Juno, which I hadn’t seen but had meant to.  He still hasn’t seen the Princess Bride though…. I may need to work on that!

Yesterday a whole bunch of us (there’s 6 of us who have the same days off and tend to hang out quite a bit, plus Samson who has Wednesdays in common with us) ended up at my friend’s house playing Cranium (after swimming at the lake, where one slightly inebriated friend decided his alte-ego was Safety Sam and borrowed a bumbag and stuffed it with tampons, cotton buds, condoms, matches, a tape measure, and women’s deoderant, then went swimming wearing that, a straw hat, his shoes, and a zebra-striped flotation device.  Was entertaining!), eating awesome food and wearing onesies (well, I was wearing a onesie, and so was Nigella, whose house it was).  Cranium is hilarious.  We have decided to make it a weekly event.

And that’s…. kind of been it!  Not especially exciting or newsworthy, which is mainly why I haven’t blogged much! 

And now I am off to Nigella’s house to bake.  Ka kite ano!

So.

Co-sleeping Friend is now boyfriend.  Am still not entirely sure how it happened lol but congratulations to all of you who ‘totally saw this coming’

After some deliberation I have decided that his blog name will be Samson.  Feel free to make up your own reasons for why.

And that’s all I’m going to write for now because he’s made noises about trying to find this blog!

Theories* and Opinions**.

* My mother’s   **Yours (please)

So the first half of this post is mostly for Holly, because I couldn’t be arsed trying to fit it into a text.

I was talking to my mum on the phone the other day and she asked me what I’d been up to.  This is usually where I say ‘oh, not much, just work’, and let her keep talking while I try to figure out what’s happening on Shortland Street (she ALWAYS rings during Shortland Street, which I do not understand since she’s watched it alongside me for most of my life).  This time I decided I would actually take her at her word, and told her about the whole Juno saga.

My mum is quite funny.  She’s not homophobic, but she has some interesting theories on the subject.  I think she’s kind of a NIMBY (not in my backyard) mum when it comes to this stuff.  When I first told her I was ‘somewhere in the middle’ (of the Kinsey Scale) she theorised that because my dad wasn’t the strongest figure in my life, and she was the ‘dominant parent’, that had something to do with it (the context was that a relative had recently told her mother that she might be gay; similarly her mother is the ‘dominant parent’).

I think this is bollocks.  Even if parental roles had anything to do with it, wouldn’t a less dominant father make me more likely to want a strong male in my life?

The other night she added a couple of theories to the list.  One I’d heard before: that people turned to people of the same sex because of bad experiences/lack of luck with the opposite sex.  I guess in some cases this might be true, but is definitely not for me.  Also it’s kind of a dangerous canard, implying that it’s a choice for all people.  It also brings to mind a line I heard once from a (lesbian) stand-up comedian, upon being being told that she was only a lesbian because she couldn’t get a man ‘Yes, because women are KNOWN for being the fussy ones!’  Mostly irrelevant, but it made me LOL.

The other one still confuses me, so it probably won’t be that eloquent.  Apparently because I don’t have older sisters, I fixate on other women as role models, and have taken it further than just regular role models because it’s not a natural state to me…. I think this is what she was trying to say anyway.  Again, I think this is bollocks.  I had plenty of female role models growing up.  My mum, for one.  Also multiple close family friends that I looked up to.  And there is a definite difference between chicks that I just think are awesome, and girls that I’m attracted to (ditto for boys, although for both there are usually overlaps).  Eg. Bones vs. Angela, Stephen Fry vs. TK from Shortland St.

I love my mum, but sometimes she says some weird shit!  So, your opinions? (Holly, does that make sense?)

Actually, that is not the thing that I was really after opinions for (although your thoughts are welcome).

Possum.  If you remember, he is the one I kissed at New Years (and on one other occasion).  I mentioned him in an earlier blog post too (he’s the one who got hotter coz he did astrophysics papers).  I like this guy, and apparently he likes me too (via his friend and my friend.  Secretly I am still at high school), but I don’t know how much, or rather in what way.  Or something!

Then there’s the Juno factor.  The way I like Possum is different from how I like Juno.  I can talk to him (but still a little nervous!), and we have a bit in common.  But it’s not the ‘omg’ thing.  Which I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or not.

So at a party recently (before the Confession lol) I ended up telling two of Possum’s flatmates about the whole Juno thing.  One of whom told Possum that I liked someone else (but not who) and that he didn’t have a chance with me.  Then the whole recent events thing happened and it’s just got kind of awkward with Possum.  And I think I should talk to him.  To be fair, I have made an effort (ok a really pathetic one – I left a note in his locker telling him I wanted to talk to him about Things.  I told you I was in high school!) but I left the ball in his court and he never hit it back to me.  (bad metaphor, sorry!)

So, I want to talk to him, but I don’t know quite what to say.  Is it fair on either of us to try to be anything more than friends when a) I’m really not sure what’s going on in my head, b) I have a ridiculous crush on someone else, and a girl at that (especially since most of work knows, which I guess could be kind of emasculatiing for him).

I AM CONFUSED.  Halp.  Thoughts welcome.

Oh and then there is the added awesomeness where I am quite-good friends with one of his BFFs (mutual infatuation with Juno, and similar interests), to the point where we co-slept (as in, actually slept, nothing else) recently and maybe he has said something to Possum about it and it has been construed as Something Else and ARGH!  FML.