(no subject)
Apr. 23rd, 2007 11:20 pmDonna solved my doldrums by picking me up and including me in her shopping trip. I solved her doldrums by admitting a terrible need for hot chips. Both of us are six inches fatter and a lot more contented. My cupboard is full and I am no longer contemplating how to shop without putting my neck out again.
We discussed the Great Chip Butty Discussion that is engrossing one of my circles. She doesn't know chip butties from her Sydney days, but she knew them from New Zealand as chip sandwiches: white bread, butter and hot potato chips. Now I have a very silly urge to get a world map and stick pins on it for the number of people who eat chip butties in a given place. The North American part of the Great Chip Butty Discussion was the best. It was a delightfully colourful reaction. Lots of interesting language was used.
We didn't eat chip butties tonight, for the record. We ate a combination of my comfort food and Donna's. Since I was a kid, a meal of chicken and chips (rotisseried chicken) has been my solace and my delight. My family ate fish and chips, you see, and I can't eat the fish. Donna needed gravy with her chips. Neither of us needed chocolate, which was odd.
I haven't done much work since then, but I'm much less worried about life. I've been reading the book Sherwood Smith put online for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day and I can't possibly work till I finish it, because the book won't let me. I get this with all her writing and should know better to think I can just read a chapter to see what it's like and then get back to work.
I thought of putting something of my own up, but confidence failed. The whole idea of the event is to have publication-worthy work up online, free, and all the publication-worthy work I have right now is out there being examined by various souls. All except a couple of short stories, and I still haven't worked out what to do with them - they keep telling me they belong in a novel, you see. And I keep telling them I'm writing a different novel and they can stop bugging me. And really, life's not good when your fiction becomes uppity.
The best I can do is direct you to a couple of pieces of frivolity I put online a while back. I wrote them twenty years ago, which explains a lot. The joke about PhDs, for instance, was not my own, but my father's. He used my rather solid work on the past and history in chansons de geste, romances and chronicles from 1050-1300 to minimise the amount of morphine he had to take when he was dying of cancer. He reckoned my impenetrable prose was a great pain reliever. So this was written in late 1986 or early 1987 and this was written while listening to Lauris Elms rehearse, about a year earlier. I was a much nicer person back then. That doesn't make my early writing less embarrassing, just less revealing of my present self.
PS Did you know that this is the eleventh most-linked blog in the ACT? My other blog has the third most links. It is also in the top hundred in the country on three different lists (my favourite is here for obvious reasons), at numbers 40, 52 and 56. Sometimes the logic of blogging statistics defeats me, but they're always amusing. They're especially amusing when you think of how many people have just read my thoughts on hot chips.
PPS My pasts are all coming back to haunt me. An email has just pinged its arrival. It's the first campaign launch announcement for the forthcoming political season. As launches go, it's cool. Jeannie Lewis and Margret Roadnight launching the Greens Federal Election campaign at Tilley's. Cost: $35. They promise Surprises. 12 May. Be there or be insufficiently leftward leaning. Or be like me and eschew party affiliations.
I'm going to tell one of my sisters about it. She may have to get upset at me for not going, since she adores both of these women. It's worth going for the music. It's worth going just for Tilley's and the sheer buzz of the thing. It's worth going because Kerrie Tucker hasn't managed anything quite this spectacular before and this means we're in for a doozy of an election year. I can't go - no transport. So my lack of party affiliatedness holds for a while longer unless a friend has always yearned to hear Jeannie Lewis.
PPPS Sometimes I get the feeling that my life is not normal.
We discussed the Great Chip Butty Discussion that is engrossing one of my circles. She doesn't know chip butties from her Sydney days, but she knew them from New Zealand as chip sandwiches: white bread, butter and hot potato chips. Now I have a very silly urge to get a world map and stick pins on it for the number of people who eat chip butties in a given place. The North American part of the Great Chip Butty Discussion was the best. It was a delightfully colourful reaction. Lots of interesting language was used.
We didn't eat chip butties tonight, for the record. We ate a combination of my comfort food and Donna's. Since I was a kid, a meal of chicken and chips (rotisseried chicken) has been my solace and my delight. My family ate fish and chips, you see, and I can't eat the fish. Donna needed gravy with her chips. Neither of us needed chocolate, which was odd.
I haven't done much work since then, but I'm much less worried about life. I've been reading the book Sherwood Smith put online for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day and I can't possibly work till I finish it, because the book won't let me. I get this with all her writing and should know better to think I can just read a chapter to see what it's like and then get back to work.
I thought of putting something of my own up, but confidence failed. The whole idea of the event is to have publication-worthy work up online, free, and all the publication-worthy work I have right now is out there being examined by various souls. All except a couple of short stories, and I still haven't worked out what to do with them - they keep telling me they belong in a novel, you see. And I keep telling them I'm writing a different novel and they can stop bugging me. And really, life's not good when your fiction becomes uppity.
The best I can do is direct you to a couple of pieces of frivolity I put online a while back. I wrote them twenty years ago, which explains a lot. The joke about PhDs, for instance, was not my own, but my father's. He used my rather solid work on the past and history in chansons de geste, romances and chronicles from 1050-1300 to minimise the amount of morphine he had to take when he was dying of cancer. He reckoned my impenetrable prose was a great pain reliever. So this was written in late 1986 or early 1987 and this was written while listening to Lauris Elms rehearse, about a year earlier. I was a much nicer person back then. That doesn't make my early writing less embarrassing, just less revealing of my present self.
PS Did you know that this is the eleventh most-linked blog in the ACT? My other blog has the third most links. It is also in the top hundred in the country on three different lists (my favourite is here for obvious reasons), at numbers 40, 52 and 56. Sometimes the logic of blogging statistics defeats me, but they're always amusing. They're especially amusing when you think of how many people have just read my thoughts on hot chips.
PPS My pasts are all coming back to haunt me. An email has just pinged its arrival. It's the first campaign launch announcement for the forthcoming political season. As launches go, it's cool. Jeannie Lewis and Margret Roadnight launching the Greens Federal Election campaign at Tilley's. Cost: $35. They promise Surprises. 12 May. Be there or be insufficiently leftward leaning. Or be like me and eschew party affiliations.
I'm going to tell one of my sisters about it. She may have to get upset at me for not going, since she adores both of these women. It's worth going for the music. It's worth going just for Tilley's and the sheer buzz of the thing. It's worth going because Kerrie Tucker hasn't managed anything quite this spectacular before and this means we're in for a doozy of an election year. I can't go - no transport. So my lack of party affiliatedness holds for a while longer unless a friend has always yearned to hear Jeannie Lewis.
PPPS Sometimes I get the feeling that my life is not normal.