Apr 18 - Unexpected Pleasures

  I made a quick exit from Mr Smart's in the morning so that Mr Smart could sleep a little longer for a change.  Mr Smart Snr was aghast 'You haven't had any breakfast!' he called out to me from the lounge room, 'I have a muesli bar in my back pack!' I called back merrily.  He wished me a happy day at work and off I went to Preston station.  The train ride in to work was uneventful except for being stuck on the the rail bridge near Mr Smart's sisters house for five full minutes.
  When I got to Melbourne Central Station a chap was just outside the cattle gates selling Anzac Day pins.  I like to buy one each year in memory of the service of my paternal grandparents.  I plumped for the $10 model this year because it has a backing that stops it jabbing you in the flesh.
  As I sat down at my desk and got ready for the day ahead, a little blip came up on my Lync screen from Miss Mischief.  Oh no!  She had asked me to return her keys via the internal mail and I had completely forgotten and she needed them tomorrow.  I apologised profusely for my scatter brain and said I would drop them off after work.  Since I had not caught up with her for ages, I also made a suggestion of Japanese for dinner which was gladly agreed to.  It was funny to think that being such a slack, forgetful ditz turned into the unexpected pleasure of fine dining in good company.
  The day passed relatively well.  There was a cool article in the paper at lunch, the Collingwood Children's Farm has 14 new Berkshire piglets, which of course made me grin immensely!!  Must visit there soon I think!  Picnic time Mr Smart?

  In the afternoon I had another unexpected pleasure.  I had a visit from my QV predecessor, she wanted to drop me off some vouchers from her Entertainment Book that I could use at QV before they expire in June.  She and I have been friends for a while now, since before she left QV and I was training her in a few things.  We chat and play Words With Friends and she's such a lovely kind-hearted soul.  As if to prove my point, she arrived with not only the vouchers, she brought me in a cupcake all the way from Williamstown.  It was such a sweet and thoughtful gesture and I've no idea what I did to deserve such kindness but I was deeply touched that she thought to do such a lovely thing for me.  I am saving it for morning tea tomorrow.

  Thursday's food was:

• Breakfast was a 35g Carmen's yoghurt, apricot and almond muesli bar.
• Morning snack was 10g Lindt 85% Cocoa dark chocolate and two dried peach halves.
• Lunch was 300g Asian-style chicken and sweetcorn soup with two toasted slices of Bürgen wholemeal and seeds bread spread with Devondale butter.
• Afternoon snack was a Red Delicious apple, cored and sliced.
• Dinner was at Asakusa in Malvern East.  Miss Mischief and I shared a serve of eda mame (fresh soy beans boiled in salted water), then I had an entree of six pieces of crispy salmon skin roll sushi with pickled ginger, I also tried one piece of Miss Mischief's entree, asparagus tempura.  For main course I had my very favourite dish there, miso ramen, which is a soup full of wheat boodles, roasted pork, egg, bean shoots and cabbage served with a pepper shaker that you add liberally.  We were both full before dessert, but decided to have just one scoop each of one of their fabulous house-made ice creams.  We both opted for the red bean on this occasion but generally I love the black sesame one best.

  After dinner it was home and quickly to bed, leaving yet another blog unwritten.  Oh well, at least I'm getting to them now!
  Jess

Apr 17 - A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread, and Thou

  Well it was a bloody cold morning outside today as we ran the fire evacuation drill.  What made it seem all worthwhile though, was that we were evacuating the building containing the local childcare centre.  All the toddlers and babies had to be evacuated by the childcare workers.  The babies were brought out in 'emergency evac cots' and the toddlers were brought out clinging to lengths of blue rope.  They all sat patiently in the alleyway until the drill was complete singing 'twinkle twinkle'.  It was the most adorable drill I've ever participated in.
  The drill took us almost to lunch time and the day just flew.  I feel like I accomplished very little.  At 4pm it was time for my catch up with my boss.  Her feedback, and the feedback she's received from others in the office was very positive.  Positively glowing.  It was somewhat comforting and I felt better after I got to share my anxieties with her.  My boss is very supportive and I'm silently cursing the fact that she's only on a maternity leave contract.  I don't want a new boss, I want to keep the one I have, I like her!
  After our catch up I dashed off to Mr Smart's for the evening.  At lunch time I had grabbed the ingredients for making my zucchini, bacon and parmesan pasta sauce and I was cooking it for us this evening.  We were both hungry so I set to work straight away.  It doesn't take long to actually cook, about 10 minutes, but the prep can take 20 minutes or so as there is a lot of grating involved.
  Unfortunately this batch turned out to be not a roaring success due to overkill on the chilli front.  I like to put a sprinkling of chilli flakes in to give it a little bit of a kick but Mr Smart couldn't find any and pronounced himself all out of chilli flakes, so I used ground chilli instead.  This as it turns out was a mistake, as I'm not as good at judging quantities of ground chilli.  The nommy zucchini bacon mix was a little drowned out in this batch.  It was still edible, but I won't make it that way again!
  We curled up with dinner on the couch and watched a bit of The Project before watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones.  Finally Varys appeared, though in a minor capacity.  I was glad to see him alive and well though.  Not so lucky one of the central characters - the violence visited upon him during ending caught me off guard and Mr Smart is very lucky indeed that I have a strong stomach!
  After dinner Mr Smart wanted to get a little more study done but he had completed a first draft of his academic essay on 'Is Sherlock Holmes a good detective?' and it was ready for me to proof read.  It was a lot easier than some of the proof reading I've done for him in that I had at least read the source material for this one.  He did enlighten me on one point though, I did not realise that you are not meant to use contractions in an academic paper so I re-read the whole thing scouring it for them, he'd only missed one!
  As we got ready for bed I again earned the ire of Pizza Cat.  She was a little put out at being shut out of 'her' room for the night.  I am a sucker for her but I just couldn't take being slept on again, it was too hard on my back last time!

  Wednesday's food was:

• Two slices of toasted Bürgen wholemeal and seeds bread topped with leftover eggplant dip.
• Morning snack was a small mandarin and a 35g Carman's dark choc, cranberry and almond muesli bar.
• Lunch was a 300g Creamy pumpkin soup with two toasted slices of Bürgen wholemeal and seeds bread spread with Devondale butter.
• Afternoon snack was a Red Delicious apple, cored and sliced.
• Dinner was orrichete with my zucchini, bacon and parmesan sauce, a generous chunk of La Famiglia light garlic bread and two glasses of Fiorella moscato, followed by some green seedless grapes for dessert.

  I had a really lovely evening.  I'm rather enjoying mid-week GoT date nights.
  The title of today's blog is from a poem in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyáma.  I was reminded of it as I was thinking of how important the simple pleasures in life can be, like sharing a home-cooked meal with someone special.
  Jess

Apr 16 - A Long Day

  Tuesday was a long day.  I had a mini-success with one of my debtors so that meant a trip to the the bank.  I had a mini-success with my car park reconciliation.  I found two issues which have been present for about two years so I now can work backwards to fix it retrospectively (hell of a lot of time involved in that of course but at least it feels achievable now).  I had a mini-success with my meeting with the security staff.  I hate speaking at meetings, I never know what to say and I always fear that I'll end up looking like an idiot because of my propensity for thinking out loud.  I always just say what I'm thinking which is not always the end of my thought process and can get me into a lot of trouble.  I even had a mini-success with placating a creditor.
  Of course, none of these made me feel any better.  I still feel like I'm drowning in a sea of paperwork and that I have no idea what I'm doing, or at least do not have the remotest chance of getting it all done in the time allotted.  Tomorrow I have a catch up with my boss to get some feedback on how I'm going.  I'm hoping that it will reassure me.  I know I'm pretty hard on me, more so than any one else ever has been, so hopefully that's the only reason I'm stressing.  I expect even if the feedback is gold-coated positivity I shall still continue to stress out enormously.
  After lunch I did a little retail therapy to blow off steam.  I walked to the corner of the block to get the latest Big Issue magazine, then I went to Big W to look for new jeans and a winter coat.  I wasn't really expecting to find anything but for a mere $45 I found an attractive black and white number.  It completely covers my bum and has enough room around the neck to accommodate a nice thick scarf too when it gets really cold.  I bought the size 20 so that it fits over a jumper and also because they didn't have any 18s.  It's not often the nice clothes only come in big girl sizes!
  I worked back a few hours today, I've given up trying to get to pilates, it's just frustrating having to cancel all the time because work or the commute interferes.  It was doubly-frustrating having to cancel tonight as the working back is not even going to get me ahead, it's only going to make up for the time out of my day the fire evacuation exercise will take up.  So frustrating!

  Tuesday's food was:

• Two slices of toasted Bürgen wholemeal and seeds bread spread with Nutino chocolate-hazelnut spread.
• Morning snack was a ripe William Bartlett pear.
• Lunch was a 300g Red Thai Chicken soup with two slices of toasted Bürgen wholemeal and seeds bread spread with Devondale butter and cut into soldiers.
• Afternoon snacks were a small unripeish banana, a mandarin and 5g Lindt 85% Cocoa dark chocolate.
• Dinner was beef yakiniku with rice from Hanaichi, a cheap and very popular Japanese eatery at QV.

  As you can tell, I am also frustrated that work is eating into blog writing time.  This may result in a few shortish blogs from here on in.  I intend to write one blog per day until the end of June (which will make it one full year) but from there I will be re-assessing my level of commitment to it.  Everything takes time time time and it's unfortunately a commodity in which I am unfortunately increasingly lacking.  Any ideas for fixing this state of affairs will be gratefully received.
  Jess

Apr 15 - Argh!

Where my work day begins and ends.

  I quite like the commute most days, but now that daylight savings is over it does tend to be a bit dark and cold by the time I get home.  I got to the train station tonight at 6:35pm and just missed a good express train home.  The next one was only 6 minutes away though, so no biggy I thought to myself.  It is good living on a busy train line.
  The train got in to Springvale at 7:19pm, just in time to allow me to watch my bus sail past.  The next one was 11 minutes.  Argh!  A "first world problem" to be sure, but it was cold and dark and I don't have a winter coat yet.  I am definitely going to need one this winter!  I've lost nearly 28kg of insulating blubber after all, and I'm catching public transport which always leaves you standing about in the cold for at least brief periods of time.
  The one good thing I've noticed about coming home late on public transport is that there still seems to be a lot of other commuters, so I feel quite safe.  Tonight there was a young man in a Coles uniform waiting for the bus with me and we shared one of those little 'mini friendships' that you can only have in those brief moments two paths cross.
  Of course it was almost 8:00pm when I alighted the bus.  The proximity of the Kebab Joint made it too great a temptation tonight.  I tried something new, their gozleme.  It was nice and nicer still dipped into the eggplant dip, but it was a bit far away from things I'm trying to eat (meaning it was too difficult to convince myself that it had any health-giving properties) so I most likely won't have it again.

  Work today was frustrating and I am feeling really rather overwhelmed.  I know I can be my own harshest critic, but there just don't seem to be enough hours in the day to fit everything in let alone sit quietly and slowly absorb the information I need in order to do things properly.  At the moment I am just dealing with spot fires.  Whoever yells loudest gets seen to first.  I don't like working that way.  I know it's only temporary while things get sorted out, and I know it will get better.  I know both of these things in my logical brain but the rest of me is running around in circles screaming.

  Monday's food was:

• Breakfast was a 35g Carmen's dark choc blueberry and almond muesli bar and a 35g Carmen's yoghurt apricot and almond muesli bar.
• Lunch was a 300g Indian Masala Dahl skinny soup with two slices of toasted Bürgen wholemeal and seeds bread spread with Devondale butter followed by some green grapes.
• Afternoon snacks were an unripe banana and a nashi pear.
• Dinner was a cheese and parsley gozleme and a half a tub of eggplant dip (like tzatziki but with eggplant).
• Dessert was a 40g Cadbury dark Bubbly bar.

 

  Even though I was feeling better this morning too, I still remembered to ring the doctor.  I'm sure Granny C at least will be pleased to read that I've made an appointment for first thing next Monday morning to discuss the ongoing vertigo problems.
  Jess

Apr 14 - Lazy Day

  I woke up a few times in the morning as little feet thundered up and down the corridor.  I managed to get back to sleep until about 8am I think.  I got up and wandered down to the living room to find Mr Smart's sister and nephew nestled in the bean bag watching Ice Age 4: Continental Drift.  No wonder he had quietened down.  Bribery and corruption!
  Mr Smart woke not long after me and we headed back to his place for a quiet day.  Him studying, me catching up on reading.  We'd not been back long when I decided to go for a little walk and get a few errands done.  I'd been lying down reading and I sat up and, Bam! Vertigo sucks.  It wasn't terribly bad, so I still managed a careful walk to do my errands.
  On my return I retreated back to the comfort of Mr Smart's quilts with Pizza Cat by my side and got lost in my book until lunch.  Mr Smart Snr made a delicious Sunday roast for lunch.  It was a real treat for me, and probably my first roast in about six months or more.  After lunch I retreated to bed again and read my book until I nodded off for a nap.  Pizza Cat is a remarkably loyal companion when you are warm and pat her in your sleep.
  I woke from my brief nap to the sound of the front door.  Mr Smart's mother had arrived and today I was officially meeting her.  It went relatively well I think.  I asked about her goat curry recipe and she invited me to visit to learn how to make it.  I might take her up on that at some stage as I find it a lot easier to learn cooking techniques by watching and trying them.
  She had noticed a garage sale down the street.  I had noticed it too earlier, but didn't feel up to it then.  I felt a little better after my nap so we wandered down there together to check it out.  They had records!  I got two, one for me and one for Dad.  And I got a book called A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life which is subtitled How to live creatively with collections, clutter, work, kids, pets, art, etc... and stop worrying about everything being perfectly in its place.  Not worrying about it is definitely an alternative to doing anything about it.  To round my purchases off to a flat $20 I also got the lady to throw in this cute little owl figure.  He's actually a jar which means he qualifies as storage, not clutter.... sure, that works.
  After our little garage sale jaunt, Mr Smart's mother went home and I had another teensy nap then read some more and watched an episode of Doctor Who and read some more.  All of this whiling away of time was done with dual purpose.  Number one, I needed to relax and feel better so that I could eventually get home safely and number two, the Central Coast Mariners vs. Melbourne Victory semi-final.  Regrettably, the result did not go the way we'd hoped.  So we commiserated with an Indian takeaway for dinner. 

  Sunday's food was:

• Breakfast was a Nespresso Dulsão do Brasil pod coffee and a yoghurt and apricot slice.
• Lunch was a delicious pork roast with crackling, apple sauce, green beans, sweet potato, potato, pumpkin, parsnip and gravy followed by a five square strip of Whittaker's 72% Cocoa dark chocolate.

• Dinner was from Maharaja Tandoori Cuisine.  We had an entree of Tangri Kabab with salad which is chicken drumstics roasted in the tandoor after being marinated overnight in yoghurt and spices followed by a main course of Chicken Bhuna atop Jeera rice with a spinach wrap in place of roti.

 

  I eventually made it home ok to my somewhat neglected house guest.  I was probably still a bit vague though. This vertigo crap is really getting on my nerves so it's time for me to do a bit more follow up with the doctor.  Surely if it was just an inner ear infection it would've cleared up by now?  It's been three weeks and I'm still getting bouts of it.
.  I spent the remainder of the evening wrestling with reinstalling my printer/scanner which had decided to stop working in my absence.  A frustration, but I triumphed in the end.
  Jess

Apr 13 - Blog-Writing & Babysitting

  I was up early on Saturday morning, partially due to the early departure of Captain Cupcake and Leuitenant Petit Four but mainly because I knew I had an annoying chore to take care of.  Since July 2012, I have had an outstanding debt with my doctor's office which I had been extremely slack about paying it for a number of reasons including:
  a) I believe they should've bulk-billed that particular appointment so I was pissed off about the unexpected and unwelcome additional expense
  b) they have yet to join the 21st century and refuse to let me pay in any way other than in person or by cheque (seriously, who has a bloody cheque book these days?) and
  c) they also make paying in person difficult by being open only when I'm working and on three hours on a Saturday morning when I'd rather be in bed.
  But of course the nasty letter eventually came and it was my word against theirs so I sucked it up and went in.  I also had to return a book I'd been lent by the doctor so I got that ticked off the list too.  I am now doctor shopping.  I've had enough of that practice and my old doctor has pretty much retired so there's nothing keeping me there.  The current staff certainly haven't impressed me with their medical knowledge by recommending I read books that have been scientifically debunked.
  I grabbed a few things from local shops for my brunch and headed back home to tick off the next annoying task. I spent a total of 37 minutes on the phone to Optus in order to claw back the $125 they had recently overcharged me.  Mr Smart joked that it was a good job that earned me that in just 37 minutes, but I didn't quite see it that way.  It actually cost me 37 minutes of my own time just to claw back my own money that they'd effectively stolen from me via their incompetence.
  The customer service agent was at least pleasant and helpful and fixed the error and as a result of my interaction with him they will no doubt send me a survey asking me if I was happy with his service.  Now as I see it, that's a fundamental flaw in their feedback process because Yes! I was happy that he fixed my problem, but No! I am not a happy little Optusmite because they caused the issue in the first place.  No matter how helpful he was I still should not have needed to make that damn call in the first place!!
  After that was all sorted though, I fixed myself a nice lunch and sat down to write three blogs (much as I'm doing now but I think you'll have to wait another day for the other two).  That took up pretty much the remainder of my day at home and I finished just in time to pack my overnight bag and head off to Mr Smart's sister's house.  Tonight we were babysitting his adorable nephew!
  Mr Smart's nephew is two and a half and so very cute.  I crumble at his every lip tremble so I'm hopeless at telling him no.  Fortunately Mr Smart is unaffected by his 'Jess-is-a-pushover' face so he still has to behave himself.  Luckily he's also a really good kid.  He likes digital cameras, because you can see the photo straight away.  As a result I have a lot of pictures of toy cars on my camera for today.  Black ones, blue ones, buses, front-end loaders, orange ones and yellow ones.
  He also thinks the popping noise Mr Smart makes with his lips is pretty neat (like Donkey in Shrek 2 during the 'Are we there yet?' scene).  In fact, once Mr Smart and I started making the popping sound in unison it sent him squealing with delight and insisting on more.  After the novelty of that wore off he dragged out his box of Duplo and we played with that.  Mr Smart managed to make a Duplo basketball court and the three of us 'shot hoops' until it was bed time.

  It took Mr Smart reading a fair few story books, but eventually his nephew settled down in bed.  He chattered away to himself for a while but eventually he drifted off leaving Mr Smart and I to watch a movie.  We watched Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a movie based on the novel by Patrick Süskind.  I loved the book, and for once was very impressed with it's film adaptation.  I think it helped that I had read the book, but I was really pleased with how they'd done it.  It was a movie I'd been wanting to see for a long time so I was super pleased that I loved it.
  After the movie there was only an hour to wait until the midnight kick off of the Reading v. Liverpool match.  I made it to half time, just barely, before I gave up and went to bed.  I'm not sure if Mr Smart thought me a stout little trooper or a masochist for trying to stay up for it, but either way there was no denying that sleep was coming for me.  I don't even remember my head hitting the pillow.

  Saturday's food was:

• Brunch was two multigrain bread rolls, fresh from the bakery, with each containing one slice of Bega So Light tasty cheese, 30g double-smoked ham, half a Doncaster tomato, some baby cos lettuce and about a teaspoon of Heinz Light Salad Cream.  Accompanying these rolls was two small bunches of organic black grapes.  They were delicious, and well worth buying.
• Dinner was pizza, homemade for by Mr Smart's lovely brother-in-law.  A flat bread base, topped with tomato paste, fresh mushrooms, hot salami, olives and two kinds of cheese.  I ate three quarters of my pizza so that I could justify having...
• Dessert!  A small bowlful of Connoisseur chocolate honey nougat ice cream.

  Not a bad day all up.  I got to eat some tasty treats but kept it fairly moderate portion wise.  I got a few nagging and annoying tasks ticked off my list and most importantly, I got to have fun playing Duplo with two wonderful boys.
  Jess

Apr 12 - The NeverEnding Story

  In all the kerfuffle between Mr Smart and I, I very nearly forgot that I was hosting an interstate guest this weekend.  Captain Cupcake had asked me several weeks ago if I could host a friend of hers from Sydney coming down for Supanova in Melbourne this weekend.  Luckily Captain Cupcake had texted me on Thursday and reminded me and I had time to get myself organised for it mentally.
  So it was that about lunchtime I got a text which said "Hi! It's your friendly random person who will be staying at your house!" and so it was that Lieutenant Petit Four arrived into my world.  We arranged to meet when I finished work and headed home together in my car.  It was a bit disconcerting to see a lot of myself in her, at least myself at that age (21).  Not disconcerting in an unpleasant way, she's a lovely person, but just in that when you subject yourself to a lot of self-examination in a short time frame you become a bit hyper-sensitive to it so the similarities kind of leaped out at me from this new person.
  We got back to my place having suffered through the Friday night Monash Freeway crawl relatively unscathed, and Captain Cupcake arrived shortly after.  We headed out to the Kebab Joint for a quick dinner before heading off to The Astor!  It seemed a perfect fit, that with two ladies so determined to seek out pop culture that we see a pop culture classic - newly digitally remastered, The NeverEnding Story.
  We met up with TwoWrongs and a couple of his friends and all went in.  We initially forwent snacks as by the time we arrived the line at the candy bar was immense.  I will remember that for next time and show up a little earlier.  Though I did eventually find myself the happy possessor of a choc top when Captain Cupcake and Lieutenant Petit Four snuck out during the movie to grab drinks, popcorn and other such snacks.
  It was awesome rewatching the movie after all these years.  I had not seen it for so long I'd forgotten nearly everything about it!  The characters were still familiar, but I still got surprised and it was different watching it through adult eyes.  The whole cinema full of movie-goers vocally cringed and chuckled nervously when Falkor creepily told Atreyu "I like children".  The film has definitely dated, but it was still a really fun movie to watch.
  After the movie we headed home so that the two ladies could get at least a little sleep before heading off to the expo early in the morning.  I think I probably fell asleep before either of them.  This week has been exhausting.

  Friday's food was:

• Breakfast was a 35g Carmen's dark choc, cranberry and almond muesli bar followed by a 35g Carmen's yoghurt, apricot and almond muesli bar.
• Lunch was Breadtop.  I'm not going to always win the battle to walk past it, today was one of those days.  I had a delicious little mini burger, a chicken and pesto naan bread, a mini ebi bun (prawn), a sausage donut and a red bean and walnut filo.  It was all scrummy and came in under $10 which is the other reason they are so hard to go past.
• A lamb kebab with cheese from the Kebab Joint.
• Movie snack was a vanilla choc top.

  I'm so glad it's the weekend.  I'm looking forward to getting a few things at home sorted out and just relaxing.  After this week, it'll be good to just try and chill out a bit.
  Jess