i feel like a playboy bunny that has been picked out of the mansion and now has to find a new place to live. oh, hold on .... that was a movie i saw tonight. 4/10.

although, i do actually feel a bit like that. tomorrow my secondment ends. and even though i have been tempted to turn to prayer to make this day come more quickly, tonight i got yelled at over the phone because obviously i'm on call 24/7 and it made me feel a little retarded and like i needed to stick around to redeem myself. plus i got a present and a card so sweet that made me want to cry. being kicked out of the mansion is making me all emotional.

don't cry for me though. because i'm making plans to go to miami in november. to art deco it up with the cuban hotties and hulk hogan.

hello all you hulkamaniacs out there. are you living by the three demandments? if not i'm gonna bring my atomic leg drop and make you hurt just like you were rowdy roddy piper and it was 1989 all over again.

actually, that picture of hulk has helped no end. i'm down right chirpy again. which hopefully means i'm ready to start on my ambitious craft project: making a dress out of my business cards. if it takes more than ten minutes though i cannot guarantee it will hold my attention. wish me luck.

i am in melbourne about to be professionally developed. i had to fill out a form about why i am here. luckily they had the option of "i wanted to get away and experience new things". ie shopping at IKEA.

IKEA was both better and worse than i imagined. because of course i'd never been. i will have real difficulities getting my suitcase packed with all the ribba photoframes i bought. my companion thought they could fit a whole table in their suitcase. luckily we were such novices we didn't understand the writing down the numbers for aisle etc... so we couldn't find it.

right now i'm about to be called for breakfast. this place has twenty four hour cakes. so why would i ever need cereal i wonder? oh well, this is the price of being professional.

so when i'm doing exciting stuff i don't blog. when i spent four hours watching grey's anatomy, however, i'm all over the blogosphere telling everyone about it.

go figure.

anyway, i'm clearly back from vietnam. this is a photo in hanoi. the only place i was cold in vietnam. everywhere else i was so hot i thought i might expire. so it was just as well we were living the high life with swimming pools. returning home was not as cool as i'd hoped. but there were advantages, like my own bed. and cheese.

oh and i have a new job. you might be all like: didn't you just get a new job. and yes, but this is a different one. one i didn't apply for. again, go figure. but i'm embracing it with open arms. after all it means i'm now only seconds away from strongerlight during the working day, and that i get to walk around with a security card WITH MY PHOTO ON IT. life ambition achieved.

one last thing. i hosted a party last night. you might have known about it, in which case you were probably there and are still buzzing from how awesome it was. if you didn't know about it, i blame myself. i was patchy at best on the invites. but all you need to know is that it was a talent quest and it ruled. there were three categories: performance, baking and visual arts. and many more winners. plus my own entry, a lip synch to hayley mills and hayley mills in the Parent Trap, received honourable mention from the judges who were ENTIRELY UNPROMPTED TO DO SO. i'm thinking of taking my act on the road.

that is probably it. there are other events, such as my inability to sleep, which i will probably blog about later. along with how insomnia is not cured by watching episodes of 90210, but it sure is made more awesome by them. for now, i should attempt sleep. i have a big day tomorrow. what with the new job and all.

so yeah, i got my promotion. the eye makeup overload worked. and i'm celebrating with a day off. and listening to some justin timberlake ballad. at home. on a wednesday. bliss. i have the front door open too. for ciruclation. but the neighbourhood cats think it is open for them. i am not a cat person.

because dogs rule, and cats drool.

last night, also in job celebration mode, my ma and pa made dinner. and i found my diary from 1991. i think i was religi-curious at the time. because i ended each entry with god bless. or maybe i was just afraid of death. i seem to remember being preoccupied from ages eight to thirteen with dying. i mean, hello i thought i had aids cos i slept in the same bed as my brother once when we were at my aunt's place. and you got aids from sleeping with people apparently. friggen euphemism.

anyway, it seemed my greatest loves - apart from baby jesus - were bike pants, babydoll tops and calling other girls fat sluts. i must have just learned the word slut. i seemed to relish its use.

the diary also has insight into my grandfather's dementia. and talks about the greatest dog of all time, izzy. who was the most beautiful thing you ever saw. and who would sleep on our bed if any of us had been crying. which according to my diary i did a lot.

in other childish things, i watched hairspray (the recent one) the other day. i went to the original with my dad and brother when it first came out. which now i think about it was a bit random. but whatever. my dad loves elvis, he probably had been told the movie was a 60s nostalgia piece. which it sort of is. SORT OF.

anyway i have strong preference for the original one. as much as anything, it gave us ricki lake. but the best thing about the new version is this song....




and maybe zac. but this song in particular because, at the risk of scaring potential suitors off, it is me all over baby. one nudge: and i'm planning the wedding.

god help anyone who nudges me on valentines day. which is tomorrow. and oh my god i just remembered i wont be at work. what if flowers get delivered???? note to self: email someone at work and get them to pick them up for you. i haven't even made any VD cards this year. i have no idea what i have been wasting my time on, if not making VD cards. maybe i'll do happy leap year cards instead this year.

anyway, i'm going off to pack now. for dorkland. where i will be until sunday. alone. so i will probably be playing a lot of scrabulous. excellent.

here are my tips for job interviews:

• pop a breath mint before hand
• take a pen and paper and write down their questions as you go, and as you're answering pretend to tick off the points you wanted to make (people are sheep, if you look like you think you've answered the question, they might too. especially if they have stopped listening)
• remove your chipped black nail polish the night before. noone wants to hire someone who looks like a lazy goth.
• eyemakeup - no amount is too much
• make your panel laugh. which is not necessarily difficult. the hard part is figuring out if it is with or at you.
• avoid making miss world statements akin to wanting world peace as a result of your appointment.
• pause before answering questions to give the appearance that you are thinking about the answer, even if you only have one example left and you were planning to use it regardless of the question.

i can't tell you if these tips work or not. because i haven't heard back from my panel. which is probably not strange since the interview finished at four pm today. i guess i will keep you posted. another tip, which is i think probably best avoided, this morning i realised i look like my mother.


i was just taking my morning selfie, as you do, and lo! i look like my mother in the photos from when i was just born. goddamned nose.

anyway on the topic of selfies, TRAGEDY! this week's fashion challenge was tragically cut short by the scattering of my beads all over the kitchen floor after an altercation between the beads and a door knob. but short as it is, below i present:

fashion challenge!!!!! part iv

week four: candy beads

history of the necklace: i bought this on my sister's wedding day. she was being a semi bridezilla. as in she decided about three hours before her wedding ceremony to go shoe shopping. i blogged about it at the time. but left out the part where i left her and her other bridesmaid and bought this necklace.

it went with the shoes i had bought. plus looked like lollies. who could resist? although really i often wished i had because it is really long and i had nowhere to put it.

day one: purple rain

i thought what would work with such a colourful necklace was to pick the general hue (a pinky purple) as a key piece of the outfit and then have the rest of my outfit as plain as poss. cardi from veronika maine (my fave piece of the summer), top from world season 08, and skirt from the internets. all up cost around $170.

i enjoyed wearing this outfit. mostly cos i enjoyed wearing the necklace. here i am first thing in the morning. overjoyed.

although truth be known i was listening to robert palmer on chelsea clinton so that may explain the smile as well.

i really would have struggled finding another outfit to wear with this necklace. i once had a wardrobe dominated by pink clothes. currently i own one top that is vaguely pink, but actually it is more purple.

the problem with the necklace breaking is that i didn't get to give it away. and pay it forward or whatever. luckily i recovered most of the bigger beads from the kitchen floor. so i may make a bead art work. or just throw them out. i haven't decided yet.

i have an eyelash in my eye. i rub it and rub it but surprisingly this course of action just makes things worse.

i walked to the supermarket before with the affected eye winking all the way. i probably have a series of boyfs now, who think they were getting the glad eye. for various reasons, they were not.

anyway, i think the main cause of the eyelash issue is that i overdid the eye makeup this morning. because i had a meeting with my minister. not in the religious sense, but in the Minister of the Crown sense. and i thought i'd make a bit of an extra effort to look awesome. anyway, backfire.

and it is such a shame too. because at the moment at work i'm trying to dress more amazingly than normal. because i'm applying for a job. and according to urban legend (and jan from the office (USA)) you dress for the job you want not the job you're in.

the job i want IS the job i'm in. but whatevs. plus, unprompted, someone told me i put the rest of my work to shame with my exceptional fashion sense. she could just have been trying to build bridges and breakdown walls, given the day before we'd had a disagreement. i tell you, i'm a tiger in the workplace. you're lucky you don't work with me.

anyway, i've thanks to google i have looked at what other people wear to interviews. this guy was my fave.

he is such an inspiration. actually, the t.shirts i ordered my brother and brother in law from threadless have FINALLY arrived. i only ordered them in the first week of december. anyway, one of them asks: what would macgyver do. maybe i should wear it to my interview. great talking point.

although by then i may have rubbed my eye so much i'm blind. that would be an alternative talking point.

cripes. eyelashes are tiny but mighty painful. note to self: cut down on the glittery eye liner. sigh.

when i was about five i wanted to be a hairdresser. i had all the designs and would style my mother's hair when it was still wet.


she was the hottest mother in island bay as a result. obviously.


then my career ambitions moved on. like just about every kid i knew i wanted to be a vet. the big question was whether i wanted to be an SPCA vet or a zoo vet. but since they were both in newtown i figured i could do both. puppies and otters. my dream combo.


something happened, i studied bureaucracy and whatnot and now i spend my days dreaming of my weekends. or at least i do on weeks like this.


while my job is a bit sux at times, this is not the reason for my weekend dreaming. rather, this weekend i get to return to my roots and hairdress it up. because on sunday night i'm chief babysitter of the most handsome man in the universe. and when his parents aren't around i can finally put product in his hair so the mohawk can last longer than the thirty seconds that this one lasted for.



hurrah for weekends.

when i was in fifth form i had all these great theories about studying for school certificate. mostly these theories involved drawing diagrams in felt tip pens. and blue tac. so i could stick the diagrams all over the house including the bathroom and the hallway. and on the fridge (although i used magnets rather than blue tac for that).

this was a hot tip from a study guru that my school had employed to help us prepare for our first set of external exams. he made use medidate and think of a nice calm place. i just thought of green.

he also taught us we can do anything if we just believe. the key to this was affirmation statements and mind maps. however, he emphasised form over function. so when i got into my history exam, i could recall my diagram, as i still can now...

however, any substance or any understanding of why these words were important or how they tied together was lost. or rather, not lost (because i was too concerned with neat handwriting to actually bothered trying to understand these things) just never there.

anyway, it was a harsh lesson. when i got the results i lay in bed listening to pearl jam's black on rotate. the disappointment at getting two Bs barely prepared me for nearly failing calculus two years later. but my point is that once i was so concerned with form i forgot that you need to actually do the work before you could cram for an exam and demonstrate that not only did you do the work but you understood it.

which highlights how i've moved on. tonight i can't bring myself to prepare for an interview because i'm like: i know all this stuff, i've done everything possible, i know this intimately. why bother drafting answers to the questions so that i can sound rehearsed? plus i have more gilmore girls to watch. and also no felt pens or blue tac so even if i wanted to, i have no tools of preparation.