Post Christmas Void

I don’t understand why I’m still wanted at work. Not because I’m horrible and deserve to be fired (although sometimes I probably am) but because the task of serving oh, I don’t know, two customers per hour can be completed by just one person. Or two, if they’re kind of obtuse.

On Saturday morning I felt that I’d rather pee in my bed and sleep in it than wake up and go to work. Once I was there my resent brewed, because half of the stores inside the plaza were closed, and the other half (us included) were so deserted that I swear I saw a tumbleweed.

So I passed the day shopping. Bag and wallet from Nine West. Some make-up from the pharmacy. In fact I spent most of the day testing make-up. Some okay. Some wacky, just for fun. I think I exacerbated the already-questionable state of my skin, but you know, what else was there to do.

Today was less quiet, but there was more staff, so the net amount of tasks allocated to each person was still the same. Before Christmas, we averaged around 100 scripts per day (which by the way is about one sixth of the ex-pharmacy), and now that number has been reduced by exactly half.

There was so little to do that everyone clock-watched. I actually took out my iPod and watched House to no objections. I also watched House while entering invoices, and talked to Jez on the phone while processing a script. I pushed my luck as far as to pop out to the beauty spa at 5:30 pm. Unfortunately they didn’t have a vacancy but Mirjana said I should go tomorrow – because “Ismat will be here and it’s going to be so quiet and there’s too many staff anyway”. Her words! It was a good cue for me to ask for the entire day off but I thought I should stop pushing it. I was already wearing about twenty tester products on my face, smeared brownie icing on the dispensary bench and still had a headphone plugged into my left ear.

I’m beginning to see why people who get paid for sitting around doing nothing aren’t actually happy.

Santa Shooter Kills 8

I heard this on the radio earlier tonight. How horrible.

LOS ANGELES — A recently divorced man dressed as Santa Claus opened fire at a Christmas Eve party and then set ablaze the house of his former in-laws, killing at least eight people, police said.

Several hours later, the shooter killed himself.

The Associated Press reported late Thursday that investigators in Covina, 22 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, found eight bodies and planned to return to the scene Friday to continue looking for victims.

Bruce Pardo, 45, who is believed to have lost his job, knocked on the front door of a home owned by the parents of his ex-wife in Covina late Wednesday, said Police Chief Kim Raney.

An 8-year-old girl ran to the door to answer Pardo’s knock, police said. He shot her in the face, stepped into the house and began to fire indiscriminately with a semiautomatic handgun.

Fortunately the 8-year-old girl survived. Rest of story here.

Christmasssssss :D

What can I say about Christmas?  I feel a little obliged to mention it, despite the fact that this is my blog and as the boss of my blog I’m not really obliged to do anything. Nevertheless here’s a Christmas update. Because I care.

My ‘08 festive season was about as eventful as my ‘07 one, which is um, not very.

Week before

Sameer’s Christmas party was the funnest part, even if it wasn’t contrasted with the Greenwood dinner at Harbourside Indian which bestowed upon more than just one of us inevitable diarrhoea.

Christmas Eve

Working on Christmas Eve is as fun as sawing off your toes. The festive season unfortunately coincides with the end of this year’s Safety Net entitlements and as a result, people are either bolting into pharmacies for medications in fear of their festivities being ruined by palpitations or seizures or reflux or migraine or constipation or haemmorhage or erectile dysfunction; or because they’re going away for Christmas; or because they pay very little or nothing at all for their medications for another week.

As a result of all of this I had to hold my pee for an hour serving customers. It was not pleasant.

That night I was invited to Jez’s house for dinner with the family and friends. I planned to regift bring a 100-piece Ferrero Rocher box but forgot all about it until the afternoon. At Jez’s suggestion I stopped by at the liquor store after work and bought the most expensive bottle of Rose. Later I wished hadn’t because not only did everyone politely decline my gift, it was not-so-subtly suggested that I brought it for myself. Which I didn’t. I can’t believe I had to actually say that out loud because OF COURSE I BLOODY DIDN’T. I might be a lot of crummy things but miserly is not one of them.

Christmas Day

Jez and I went to the beach. It was my first day off in over a month. Despite previously planning to lounge around for the whole day we only stayed for a few hours. Nevertheless I was able to (slightly) tan and since then have been sneaking into the toilets every now and then to secretly admire my first ever tan line on my butt.

After a brief trip home to change, we headed out to the city for dinner. We arrived at around 10:00 pm and found every restaurant to be filled with people but closed for orders. In the end we went to Kura in Chinatown and sat adjacent to some spectacularly large Chinese girls and ate takoyaki and agadashi tofu and stuff like that. We debated camping out until the 5 am Myer sale but fatigue overruled and we went home.

When I was little, my teacher used to tell us how to write recounts. She said to make them interesting, and not to ever recite the events in a non-descriptive, chronological order like “water flowing”. I’m flowing my water now, so I think I’ll stop.

No Celebrations

Just randomly chatting to a girl I work with about Chinese New Year.

She’s Taiwanese, which technically is like, Chinese, regardless of how Jez might argue otherwise.

So she would almost definitely celebrate Chinese New Year. Except, she doesn’t.

We’re surprised, because she’s Buddhist and Chinese and I don’t think there are any Buddhist Chinese people that don’t celebrate CNY. We ask her why not and she says, “because our family doesn’t celebrate anything”.

“Christmas?” I ask, although I realise it’s kind of stupid because if they don’t celebrate CNY there’s probably not much chance for a Christian holiday.

“No.”

I’m about to ask whether they celebrate birthdays, and then decided that that’s stupid, of course they celebrate birthdays because who doesn’t, when she said, “we don’t even celebrate birthdays.”

“Why not?”

“Because my mum says it’s nothing to celebrate. Giving birth was painful and a risk to her life and she says why celebrate the day on which she could have died.”

That sound just now was my jaw hitting the floor.

“But she got you, so it’s all worth it in the end.” Mirjana says.

“She doesn’t think it’s a happy thing, because it was so painful.”

I tune out because I’m having difficulty acknowledging that a mother can be so heartless, and then I hear her say, “my parents are much nicer after becoming Buddhist.”

I want to ask exactly how could they have been less nice than mourning the birth of their own daughter but instead I hold my tongue and feel an unexpected lot of affection for my parents who celebrate my entire birth month.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Tale

Ingredients:

• 1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
• 1/2 cup plain flour
• 1 cup toasted macadamia nuts, chopped
• 185 g butter, melted
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla essence
• 200 g dark chocolate, chopped

Method:

1. Combine sugars, flours and nuts in a large bowl

I haven’t cooked for a very long time and tonight realised how very similar it is to dispensing lab.

2. Add butter, egg, egg yolk and vanilla essence, and mix to a soft dough

Melted butter is like magic. One second I had this bowl full of cakey stuff and yolk and the next second it has turned into something so delectable looking and delicious smelling it was hard not to eat it there and then.

The dough was extremely soft. Very greasy, which was probably to be expected given the amount of butter it contained. It felt like thick caramel, which was also probably to be expected given the amount of brown sugar.

It was kind of like an emulsion.

3. Stir in chocolate

Chopping chocolate was fun, and my fingers got all sticky from the bits that melted from all the friction. I tried to stir the chopped chocolate into the dough with a wooden spoon but the mixture was so thick that my arms hurt. So I thought I’d get some hands-on action by kneading. Bad idea. There was a reason they said to STIR the dough and that reason was that it clings to your fingers for dear life and there is no way to get rid of it. I ended up with clumps and clumps of dough on my hands that won’t fall back into the bowl, even when I used my fingers in a very spatula-like way to scrape the clumps together. Again, dispensing.

Now it resembled some kind of paste.

4. Place rounded tablespoons of mixture about 6 cm apart on lightly greased oven trays

5. Bake in a moderate oven for about 15 minutes or until browned lightly

I had just one oven tray to work with, so I could only make 6 cookies at a time. This turned out to be a very good thing because the first 6 turned out to be monstrous.

I lined the tray with baking paper and started scooping tablespoonfuls of dough onto it. I flattened out the dough into patties with the diameter of a small coaster and as directed placed them 6 cm apart from each other.

It turned out, however, that 6 cm was far from enough. Because of the high amount of raising flour, the cookies grew to more than four times their original size, and my first batch of six ended up being just one giant baking-tray-sized cookie.

I thought it was funny that the instructions said “or until browned lightly” because the dough was very much brown to begin with.

After 15 minutes I scraped out my giant cookie. It instantly crumbled into bits but I managed to pile the pieces onto a plate and carry it upstairs for my parents to taste. They weren’t very enthusiastic. Despite the fact that the cookies were soft and moist and chewy and chocolatey they resembled something between caked dirt and bark.

Second batch. I was careful this time to make smaller and thicker patties, and spaced them out as far away from each other as I could on the baking tray. The results were much more pleasant. They actually resembled cookies! Excited, I took two upstairs to my parents and they declared it “pretty good”.

Encouraged by the success, I continued. The third batch was a semi-failure because I overestimated my the heat-tolerance of my fingers. There were no oven gloves in sight so I used a thin hand-towel to wrap around the tray as I took it out of the oven. It took three seconds to transfer the tray to the bench but almost immediately after lifting the tray, the heat permeated through the towel onto my hands. I thought I’d rather sizzle than drop my cookies so I held on for that extra two seconds and threw the tray onto the counter. My fingers throbbed with the effort and worse, the clumsy movement caused a glass of water to tumble onto the cookies and drenching them. My precious desserts were instantly soaked and I had to throw them away.

The fourth batch of cookies were kind of wrinkly and looked like six angry old men’s faces staring up at me, accusing me of trying to bake them alive.

Fifth and sixth were truly successful, and it will be these that I bring to Jez and work tomorrow. I’m a little embarrassed because my plate of ugly cookies is much bigger than my plate of presentable ones.

Kris Kringle

I received for KK tonight a collection of PostSecrets by Frank Warren. It turned out that Martin really did pick my name and spent $50 on my present and despite the change of budget to $20 said that he would have bought it anyway. I’m very very touched. :)

I think someone (probably Martin, actually) has shown me Frank Warren’s blog before. A lot of the secrets are very cute but some are heart-wrenching. See above image. I flipped through the beginning at Sameer’s and later found that Martin inserted between random pages his own “secrets”, how cute is that! One of them was “I’m not gay” but I already sort of knew.

I have to get up for work in about 5 hours. Might be a good idea to go to bed.

Big big thanks to Martin Damon. <3

Daisy is a Slut

I can’t stand Daisy in Mario Kart or Super Mario. And before I move along I’ll admit very loose usage of the term “slut”.

She gloats! Whereas other characters’ little victory-sounds are somewhat neutral, e.g. Yoshi who goes “ya-hoo!” and Dry Bones who goes “ga-buh-buh-buh”, Daisy does this really annoying “THAT’S RIGHT!“. Read “IN YOUR FACE!“. I want to punch her.

I’ve just realised two things.

1. I have a lot of irrational anger

2. I might be crazy

Mad or not, I can’t stand this little floozy in her heinous orange ensemble. She’d throw a turtle shell at me and whizz past while I tumble over myself yelling THAT’S RIGHT and I’d turn off my DS and start again. I’ve even tried to play using her character but I ended up losing on purpose just to see her stuck-up arse in last place.