Back

That's about as far as my brain can get at the moment. I have many things I'd like to post about (not least the holiday photos that haven't made it up yet) but they will have to wait one more day at least...
Journeys were all as good as they could be really and I did get some sleep on the last flight but having brought home a cold from Singapore to add to the jetlag I feel rather rotten. But ok too. It was rather a shock to arrive. With all that was going on leaving a country and getting everything home and all the rest of it I had rather failed to understand that we were actually going to arrive. I realise this makes little sense, not many of the things I have thought or felt over the last week or so have really made sense but I have reached the point of just accepting all that I feel and not attempting to analyse or process - at least not yet. I suspect (being me) that analysis will flow very readily once the time comes...
(A quick aside for those who might be tempted to make contact now we are back - both our mobiles are deceased having not been topped up for over a year. I'm sure we'll come up with a solution but it won't be for a while.)

One of the Strangest Things...

I was reading the BBC website today in a procrastinaty sort of way and ended up reading an article about Thriller's 25th birthday.
In said article (musing on the importance of Thriller the album, single, video...), it mentioned that if you went onto YouTube you could find tributes to the video from a wide range of sources - including a Bollywood version and one from 1500 inmates of a Philippines prison. What?!
Clearly, I had to go and see.
So the clip itself didn't excite me that much. They were indeed prison inmates, complete in orange uniforms, doing, as close as they could, the video for Thiller. Not the full 14 minutes version I noted but still a 4min 25sec effort.
What really grabbed my attention though was what came up in the "Related Videos" panel.
Blacked Eyed Peas by the prisoners. Numerous Sister Act songs by the prisoners. Radio GaGa by the prisoners. The Algorithm March by the prisoners (I didn't know what this was, turned out to be a record breaking attempt at it, whatever it was).
So it seems that this prison spends quite a lot of time teaching its inmates dance routines, BIG dance routines, using lots of the prisoners. Which is really quite an interesting thing. I wonder what success rates they have in terms of successful sentences (minimal violence, blackmarket etcetc) and in terms of reoffenders.
When I was working (albeit very briefly) in a prison, there was much debate between punishment and rehabilitation. One officer said to me that whichever way you veered, it made little difference: the light had to go on in the prisoners head. Until that happened (and she suggested it usually happened around the age of forty though when she started as an officer 14 years ago, it happened more around the age of thirty), there was very little difference to be seen between a rehabiliatation approach and a punishment approach in terms of the success options above - particularly reoffending.
I would expect something like the dance routine option adopted in the Philippines to assist reasonably well on the violence etc while in prison option but you aren't exactly equipping them with skills they can use on the outside to help prevent reoffending.
Perhaps they just do it for the record breaking attempts. Still, it seems to have been on CNN in the US from some of the comments and there are a lot of posts for it...perhaps it will help with the not-reoffending element when they are all offered film contracts on release.

Mo-flamin'-vember

So I think I've done amazingly well to get over half way through Movember without ranting about it...but that show of amazing restraint and will power is now over.
Yes, it is for a good cause. Yes, it is a bonding experience for men all over the country (and I'm sure they could bond with the men in Australia too). But it is an awful, awful thing for a marriage!
The problem is, as I suspect I said around this time last year, is that a mo makes Husbink look like a dirty old man or a sleezy European car sales man or...many other not so flattering things...
And it is also rather painful. Little unsuspecting me who has momentarily forgotten that the monstrosity is there accepts a little peck from Husbink only to recoil in horror: "Ow! Ow! Ow! How did you manage to stab my nose with it?!"
As well as those issues that only relate to Husbink for me, it is just a little nauseating walking round town, the gym, the supermarket, anywhere at the moment. There are VERY few people in the world that suit a moustache and yet here are all these men with squirrels/rats/slugs/whatever attached to their faces. Many of the younger men can't actually grow much of a mo anyway and so you are left with this confusion as you talk to them. "Something isn't right, this person doesn't look like they normally do...oh, I see it, that little line of fuzz on their lip, affecting their entire look..."
Still, I'm sure they all enjoy it...!?!

Action stations

I love knitting. So therapeutic and yet still "achieving"!
The other day, Husbink was tidying the kitchen and I wanted to keep chatting to him but couldn't really help (due to the shape of our kitchen) so figured I might as well get a bit of knitting done while chatting. So I tucked the ball of wool into my pocket and stood in the kitchen, knitting and chatting. Husbink laughed at me. Which I expected and probably deserved.
A little while later, I did need to do something but didn't want to put my knitting down so tucked the needles into my other pocket, wool stretched across my front. I was wearing cargo(ish) trousers...and Husbink dubbed me All Action Knitting Barbie.
He's called me many things over the last few years but that one is pretty special...

Frightening Times

The other week I went to the supermarket, as I do most weeks.

On my shopping list was loo roll. I wasn't feeling desperately well and so was trying to get the shopping done as quickly as possible, thus grabbing and running as quickly as I could. When I got to the loo roll aisle, I saw that a brand we sometimes use had a 3 4-packs for $5 deal so hurredly grabbed the three packs and left. The only factor taken into consideration was whether they were scented - and to ensure that I picked the unscented variety (really, what purpose does scented loo roll serve in the world? other than to make me feel slightly nauseated when I catch a wiff of it?). So my three unscented four packs went into the trolley and off I went. No problem. Until I opened one of the packets this week and found that the loo roll was decorated.

Like this:

They are possibly the freakiest sheep I've ever seen. And the cows aren't great either. I had to assure Husbink that I did not intentionally choose this loo roll in case he thought less of me because of it.

Really, there are enough alarming, scary, upsetting things in the world without being faced with these guys every time I go to the toilet. Only three more rolls to go... I haven't dared check what the other packs contain!

Something is wrong...

For years, since about the age of 8, I've been a tea drinker. It's not that I haven't dabbled in other hot beverages - I've been quite committed to hot blackcurrant at times, the occasional hot chocolate and so on. But for the last few years, since uni really, I have been a very dedicated tea drinker. Those of you who know me will already know that my tea drinking is a little "different" (weak and black) but it is still tea!
But this last week or so I've been getting bored of tea. I've not really been enjoying my morning cup of tea, sometimes I've even skipped it, and I've certainly not put the kettle on again for seconds.
But what is really, really odd is that I've been craving coffee instead... I've sometimes dallied with liking coffee in the past but have mostly been put off by it not liking me. (I would expand to double my normal size within a few minutes of drinking it...people would ask when the baby was due...) In the UK I could ONLY drink coffee from Costa - Starbucks, Nero anywhere else and boom, blowing up like a balloon.
But here, I have been slowly discovering, I can drink coffee. And Husbink got an exciting new coffee pot thing last week that makes really nice coffee. And a zizzer so there can be frothy milk too. And now I'm wanting coffee. Which is just very much not me (I think le welsh will confirm). I'm wondering what aliens abducted me without my knowledge...

Memory

I have been reminded just now, by Rosanna's post of perhaps one of the oddest but loveliest while sad nights I've spent in a youth hostel.
It was September 11th (you know, the first one, the one that gained it the meaning). We were in a room that was really just a room in a house, just outside the family's dining room. We were on the West coast of Canada. Vancouver I think but a long way out of town. We'd been woken up at some point that morning but the son of the house banging on the door and telling us we had to put the telly on. And the day had been "odd" from there on...
There were four of us in the room, me and my travelling partner (I think I've previously called her Anne on here), a woman, I don't remember where she was from - Eastern Europe maybe and quite a quiet chappy, again I don't remember where from, perhaps south America. Anyway, after we'd all watched the TV for a couple of hours, it was time to try to do something with the day so Anne and I went out. We already knew it was the european woman's birthday and we felt we had to do something about it, after all her birthday would always be associated with that date from then on.
We'd already bought each other fluffy moose (we were in Canada) and I think we decided to furnish her with a similar fluffy moose.
The day was all very disorienting. But that night, we were all back in the dorm, quite early, all not quite sure how we felt.
And it all got very silly. We lay there that night, lights out, no one able to sleep, debating what noise moose make. And demonstrating. Heaps of madness. Bonding.
We all went our separate ways the next morning with no contact details, no thought we'd ever get in touch again. Just a strange day that we will all remember.

Socially Inept

I seem to have lost my social skills over the last few days. I can't quite put my finger on exactly what has gone wrong but every time I leave a social setting I just have the distinct feeling that I've been really weird.
Last night, we had people over, as we do every Thursday, for bible study. And at the end of the evening, I got the distinct impression they wanted to run away and hide! I'm not *just* being paranoid, I had been acting really quite oddly all evening.
And today I met a good friend for a cafe moment (not a McCafe moment) and was clearly being odd as she asked several times if all was well... I think I became more normal as time went on but really not great!
But at least I have an evening on my own...I can't scare anyone else...or perhaps I will just hone my weirdy weirdy skills so by the time I'm next in public I can really work the weirdness!

Blogging in my head

Over the past week while I have been quiet on here, I have written heaps of blogs in my head. They were incredibly entertaining, showing masterful wit, inspiring, heart warming pieces. Of course, you'll have to take my word for it because I never got the chance to write them down and one by one they were driven from my mind...
Ah well. I've finished at the prison now. I've got a cold. (But not as badly as many people round here have had it.) Generally I feel a bit mushy.
And I'm looking through pictures on facebook of a friend's wedding. Well, I guess a friend of a friend. We were in the same "group" at school but were never quite friends in our own right. It is odd looking through the pics in that whole "here are people I was friends with now I'm not really and yet there they all are" way. Which is something that facebook does a lot. Shows me heaps of people that were at one point important in my life to varying degrees and yet now I have nothing to do with them except this little facebook string. Mostly this just produces an "oh right" kind of feeling in me. It is nice to see what people are up to, that they are doing well, whatever, but that is about as far as it goes. I'm not really saddened that we aren't friends any more and thus I'm not jubilant that we have this way of becoming friends again. But I'm not horrified either.
But there are one or two that this fake contact with really saddens me. The friends that I never understood why we lost touch anyway. Facebook doesn't seem to have provided the way back in those cases. Yes, we are "friends" according to facebook but there is no renewed communication or any other sign of actual friends. And it makes me feel really yucky though I'm not sure I can describe it any more eloquently than "yucky". Certainly a little sad and a little confused but also just a mush of undefined memories that come up with thinking about these people. And as they are mainly teenage memories there is a whole heap fo angsty yuck that I haven't really felt in years.
There is a plus side, there are a few people who I'd lost touch with through no good reason that facebook has made a difference too. A couple of friends who really are friends again now and that is great. And a couple of people that I hadn't lost touch with but we hadn't found the best way to communicate over all these thousands of kilometres and facebook seems to have provided that method.
In other news, we had a lunar eclipse last night. Except it was very cloudy. Hey ho.

Returning to the human race

It may surprise you from the title to find that this post has nothing to do with my continued recovery from surgery.
Instead, I am thinking of the final Harry Potter book that has absorbed my life for the last few days... (Before I go any further absolutely NO PLOT SPOILERS are contained in this post. I am going to say nothing of what I even thought of the book.)
So since Saturday morning, I have not been on the internet (excepting checking my emails - and even then some of them I decided not to open until I'd finished the book). I did not want to see a THING about the ending (or anything that happened along the way). BBC website - out. Facebook - out. Blogs - out. When HP6 came out, I didn't get to read it for a couple of weeks for one reason and another. Husbink read it before me and wasn't very good at hiding his distress at parts of it. I did however have a guardian at work who stopped anyone from talking about it in my presence which was very handy! But the impact of it was rather lost on me having seen others reactions even if they hadn't told me details.
This time I was determined to get through it as fast as possible so that I heard nothing at all about deaths or anything else from the media.
I was even afraid to go out on Saturday night in case someone in the group that we were saying thought it funny to "share" on the subject...
A trace obsessive?