Tough Love

Whenever parents smack their children they always say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”  Having never been a parent, I always considered this statement bullshit.

Today I think I can understand.  Sometime last night our naughty Boy Dog tipped over the rubbish bin, scattered its contents across the house and then peed on said contents.  I was already in a bad mood because I was running late for work, so I was supremely displeased to discover that the downstairs resembled a landfill.  

Ordinarily Boy Dog’s punishment for this offence is to be banished to the courtyard until I leave for work.  However, while I was cleaning up and ranting like a lunatic (what must the neighbours have thought?), boy dog peed on the clean laundry in our bedroom!  This called for a more drastic punishment. 

I decided to lock him outside for the whole day.  This may not sound too harsh but I should explain that my doggies are pampered house dogs.  They sleep in our bed and spend their days lounging on the sofa.  Girl Dog hates rain and Boy Dog is terrified of the wind.  They are wusses and we spoil them rotten.  But Boy Dog needs a little tough love, right?  When I left for work he was pressed against the dog door feeling sorry for himself.  I could hear his cries as I slammed the front door.

Any other day I wouldn’t feel too guilty about leaving him in the yard but my co-worker informed me that Sydney is expecting 50mm of rain this afternoon.  There’s no shelter in the back yard and he’ll get soaked.

It hasn’t started raining yet but already the guilt is killing me.  But while I’m ringing my hands and gritting my teeth, he’s probably having a grand ole’ time.  I imagine he’s barking at cats and birds or soaking up heat from the bricks, like a lizard.  This probably does hurt me more than him…until it starts pouring.

I’ve decided that at the first drop of rain I’m racing home and letting him in.  I’m just no good at tough love.

I’m Not Dead

After a lengthy blogging hiatus, I’m back and more married than ever before.  More posts to come when I get around to cataloguing the best summer in the history of ever.

No TV and no beer makes SloSydney something something…

Go crazy?

Actually far from it.  The TV is out for repairs and our TV-free evenings have been delightful.  We been cooking dinner together. Well, the fiance cooks while I keep him company.  We eat the dining room table and talk about our day instead of at the coffee table in front of the TV.  I’ve even gotten some studying done!

But tonight the fiance went out of town for work and won’t be home until late.  Usually I’d take advantage of his absence and watch something he would never watch, like Ghost Whisperer, a guilty pleasure of mine.  But without the TV I’m a bit bored and kind of lonely.  I think I’ll go up to bed, cuddle with the dogs and get stuck into a Maeve Binchy book.

I dont’ know where the damn remote is!

The fiance’s work has been a circus lately and he’s been taking that stress home with him.  He’s been snippy, unresponsive and annoyed.  His attitude over the weekend was less than desirable, but I’d chalked it up to job stress and had given him a free pass…until last night.

Yesterday I cleaned our bedroom from top to bottom.  In my cleaning frenzy, the DVD remote went missing.  He wanted to watch a DVD and got angry because it wouldn’t work without the remote.  We looked everywhere for it to no avail.  Then the blame game started.  I wasn’t going to take the blame for something I didn’t do and he wanted somebody to blame.  So the hunt for the remote turned into a full-on fight.  After I tired of the innaneness of it all we got into be and read our respective books in silence, wondering when the other was going to apologize. 

The first rule of marriage is: never go to bed angry.  In the four years we’ve been together, last night was the first time we’ve ever gone to bed without making up.  It was awful.  He fell asleep and I stayed up waiting for him to apologise.  When his eyes remained closed, I gave up.  We both tossed and turned all night.  No reaching out to touch each other in lapses of sleep, no cuddling, no touching feet.

This morning he gave a half-hearted apology which I accepted, also half-heartedly.  As I was gathering my gym clothes, I uncovered the damn remote.  It had been at the foot of the bed the whole time!

After lunch the lady at reception called me to the front.  Something was there for me.  I wondered what it could be.

At the reception desk was an arrangement of roses and lilies, just for me.  What for?  Very late birthday present?  Flowers from my parents for no particular reason?  Thank you from a customer?  I was baffled. 

It all made sense when I opened the card.  It read:

Thank you for finding the remote.

Dogs!

I am so in love with my doggies.  I’ll write more about them someday but until then, here are some photos.  Girl Dog is on the left and Boy Dog is on the right.

 

 

Melbourne, Part I. Shopping!

Melbourne was lovely.  Not quite the romantic weekend away we hoped for, but we had a fantastic time. 

I arrived Wednesday night and had an uneventful evening in a crappy hotel room in the middle of nowhere.  Thursday I finished work early and had time to do a bit of shopping.  After driving around a bit and getting hopelessly lost, I happened upon Chapel Street.  How fortuitous!  For the shops that is, not my bank balance. 

Chapel street has the best shopping I’ve seen in Australia.  It has all my favourite shops, cute boutiques and tasty looking cafes and restaurants.

First item on the shopping list: jeans.  My favourite pair of jeanshave finally become too obscene to wear in public.  Trying on jeans is always a depressing experience.  It’s almost as bad as bathing suit shopping but slightly better because I can’t see cellulite when I’ve got jeans on.   Usually I bring a friend along with me for moral support, but in the absence of any girlfriends I recruited the poor sales assistant.  He was a willowy young hipster with fopish hair, skinny jeans and bright pink nails.  Is it wrong to be envious of an 18 year old boy’s nail polish?  He was patient and complimentary while I squeezed into pair after pair of unflattering and ill-fitting sausage casings…er, pairs of jeans.  After nearly an hour, I found a satisfactory pair.  Yay!

Onto the second item on the list: stockings.  Tights serve double duty by keeping my legs warm and hiding the forest that I cultivate on my legs during the winter.  All of the shops seemed to only carry footless tights so I ended up at Allanah Hill, where I knew I could find tights.  If I could afford to, I would wear only Allanah Hill.  Alas, my money goes to unfashionable things like the mortgage and food.  I browsed the shop looking longingly at $600 coats, $300 sweaters and…what’s this?  A handbag.  Cute!  And it’s not outrageously expensive?  And It’s $100 off?  And it’s an additional 20% off?!?  My lucky day!  So, needless to say, I got a new handbag.

All in all it was a successful shopping adventure.  I came away with what I needed and nothing I didn’t.  Good thing I don’t live near Chapel street.  I’d be stylish but flat broke.

Oh…That’s the Chest Cavity

The fiance is a fantastic cook, but when it comes to cooking things unfamiliar to him he’s woefully inept.  Once when I was sick I asked him to make some hard boiled eggs.  As somebody who hates eggs he was confounded. 

“How do I make hard boiled eggs?” he queried. 

“Um…put an egg in boiling water for a while.”

After the eggs had boiled away for a while he drained the water.  “Now what?” he asked. 

“Now you just remove the shell,” I replied.  Duh. 

“But won’t they run all over the place?”

“No you idiot.  You just hard boiled them.”

“Oh, is that what I’ve just done?”  Ha!  I still give him a hard time about that.

Tonight he ventured into the realm of poultry again, making his first roast chicken.  I observed him in the kitchen looking puzzled.  He grumbled, “there’s no way all this stuffing is going to fit in there.”

:pause:

“Oh…that’s the chest cavity.  I was trying to stuff the chicken’s butt!”  Turns out he was trying to stuff the neck.  Which makes me wonder if he was planning on tying the wings together to cover the neck hole.  How does one confuse a neck hole with a butt hole?  Thankfully his knowledge of the female body is far better than his knowlege of chicken anatomy!

Quick trip to Melbourne

I’m off to Melbourne for work tomorrow.  Actually, I’m going down to play but managed to fit work in and get the company to pay for the flight.  Clever eh?  The fiance is going down for work on Friday.  I had to go down for work eventually so we coordinated out trips so that we could spend the weekend there together.

This is our first weekend away since the last time we went to Melbourne…two years ago.  It’s no wonder I have tons of vacation time saved up.  All the more vacation time for the honeymoon!

The plan is to meet up with friends on Friday and stay at their place.  They moved to Melbourne a couple years ago and we don’t see them nearly enough.  Luckily they live not too far from the office so I get to see them every time I go there for work.  They have a gorgeous little girl and another baby on the way.

Then we have Saturday aaaaaaaallllllll to ourselves.  The only thing we have planned is an early dinner at Movida and drinks at the Melbourne Supper Club later in the evening.  We’re staying at the Grand Hyatt and I plan on taking at least two baths during our stay.

I don’t know what to do with the rest of our time.  Any suggestions?

Halfway there!

I just got the results back from this semester’s uni class.  I am now halfway done with my Masters degree!! Wooo!!!

Two years down, two more to go.  A friend asked:

Halfway through a masters…Is that like being halfway through the desert?  Or halfway through a hangover?

Yeah, kind of.  I’m learning a lot and am focusing more on gaining knowledge than getting good grades, which coming from somebody who grades were very important to is a huge paradigm shift.  But as one of my co-workers says:

50% is a pass.  51% is a waste of time.

A bit of that attitude has rubbed off on me, but I ended up getting a distinction this time around.  Yay!

Curses!

Bah!  So I joined a gym about three months ago in an effort to get fit, be healthy and tone up.  Of course part me has succumbed to I-have-to-look-good-in-my-wedding-dress-itus, but really I just miss working out during the winter.  When the weather is nice I run nearly every day.  But during the winter months I park my ass on the sofa, eat chips, and grow cellulite.  Sexy.

When I joined the gym they weighed me.  I hadn’t been on a scale for about four years, so imagine my surprise when I realised that I’d put on about 15 pounds since then!  I blame the fiance’s awesome cooking.  I’m sure my lack of physical activity has nothing to do with my weight gain.

So I’ve been visiting the gym religiously lately doing spin classes, body pump, weights, and cardio.  I figured all this work would pay off in the form of a lower body fat percentage, if not weight loss.

Yesterday I asked them to weigh me again to see if I’d made any progress.  Not only had I PUT ON nearly 2kg, but my body fat percentage has INCREASED by 1 percent!  WTF?!?  The girl weighing me tried to make me feel better by saying that drinking a lot of water skews the results.  And I did drink 2 litres of water about fifteen minutes prior to being weighed.  But STILL! 

So how did I cope with this news?  By going home and baking chocloate chip cookies, of course!

Update:  After a weekend full of beer, pizza, tapas, wine, and pancakes, I lost 2 kg.  How is that possible?  I’m so confused.

P.S.  I saw Fiona, the lovely contestant from the first season of one of my favourite shows: Australia’s ‘The Biggest Loser’.  She was taking a tour of the gym and she looks awesome.  She was always one of my favourites.  The trainers were all very excited and a bit starstruck.  Go Fiona!