mykrocosm

Intriguing article on our love affair with cow’s milk :

http://notmilk.com/kradjian.html

It made me think about the stuff I add to my tea every day. Even if I still keep adding it… *sigh*

I’m fed up. I turned on my PC and the graphics are stuffed, again!

The title bar of every window has turned into transparent sludge.

Explorer has misplaced virtually all of its icons.

The desktop, well it’s just stuffed.

Even the header graphic of this blog cops a right bashing.

This seems to happen about this time every year… my PC hates the summer heat as much as I do.

Some good friends of ours (who you might have seen at our wedding) had their first baby last night! We went down to visit them at the hospital today, and I got to hold little Lenka. She opened her grey blue eyes, stared right into mine, and then wrinkled up her little button nose and grimaced. I think she likes me!

Less than a day old and she already had these tiny little fingernails that needed cutting - they had that little white tip at the end. But where do you find clippers that small? I guess the hospital has special tools. I certainly haven’t seen baby nail clippers at Bunnings. She had a good grip, too.

And her little feet… well! If you’ve ever had fried chicken feet for yum cha, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Those delicious, fatty wrinkled little toes you just want to slurp up and suck right off the bone!!!

Mmmm … uh, so yeah. Umm, anyway…

Welcome to the world dear little Lenka. An incredible future with many wonderful adventures lies ahead for you and your beautiful parents!

I came home from work to find :

- A poorly-feeling missus who hadn’t gone to work

- A broken, horribly groaning washing machine

- A broken glass in the kitchen

They say these things come in threes.

We brought a friend over and made some sushi for lunch, having gathered all the necessary bits from the Central Market.  Slices of Atlantic salmon, crab meat, tuna, avocado, cucumber, fried egg, and ginger along with dabs of japanese mayonnaise, wasabi and soy sauce all made their delicious way into our Californian-style rolls.

K taught us a neat new trick - you can press the roll into a tear-drop shape and make flower petals with it!

I gave my colleagues a bit of a shock this morning when I announced that having been married for less than a month, the missus and I were off to our third Marriage Counselling session today.

The real story isn’t quite so exciting - it’s simply part of Pre-Cana, which is a requirement of the Catholic Church that any couples first undertake about three to four hours of counselling to prepare them for marriage.

Yes, I know what you’re saying now, you bright spark, you! Yes we’re already married..technically. We just kind of fudged that part. Rings accidentally jumped a few fingers. And we are getting married (again, ahem) in two months time. In another country.

Historically, so Wikipedia and Google informed me, Pre-Cana tended to be heavily loaded with religious pressures. Living in sin. Abortions. The whole shebang! The web was full of stories from people who sat and suffered through every minute of their barely-relevant full-room sermons.

Well, I was to be pleasantly surprised - we chose the private counselling option, and the three sessions through Centacare were all very non-denominational and completely devoid of any religious messages. It was simply a gentle and relaxed counsellor, the two of us, a long questionnaire, and some interesting, frank and insightful discussions. The only concessions to the fact we were on Catholic ground was a couple of pamphlets that the counsellor almost apologetically gave us.

My philosophy was, since we had to do it, why not take advantage of the resources and go with the flow? The FOCCUS questionnaire that we spent the whole first session filling out turned out to be pretty accurate. It highlighted what we pretty much already knew - we were pretty attuned in how we felt about family and friends, financial matters, and our ethics, morality and values. It also identified that we needed to work on our negotiation approaches - ie. how we reach a compromise and the means we use to get there.

In the later sessions she gave us articles and parts of books which drilled into those areas. I found these reassuring - it helps to know that you’re not the only couple in the world working on these things. I quite enjoyed the whole process, and I found it endlessly fascinating how the arcane ambiguities of the human mind and the human heart could be captured and explained in a relatively logical manner.

So we concluded our last session today, got the certificate, and now we’re set. In theory. The package includes a return visit in a year’s time - it’ll be interesting to see if we retained anything we learnt

We had a picnic with a friend in the Botanic Gardens today - the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the green parrots darted between the trees. Several other groups dotted the verdant lawn enjoying the brilliant weather. A family of ducks and eight little ducklings paraded back and forth, stopping briefly at each blanket to visit and pay their polite regards before waddling off.

Nice, relaxing, I could have dozed off and napped there all afternoon.

Today I was horrified to learn that the ABC has axed one of its best shows.

One of my favourite weekly programs, The Glass House features three well known Australian comedians and guest stars who run through a whole riff of irreverent jokes and discussions on topical current affairs. While it occasionally descends into the gutter, the show moves along quickly and there’s some pretty clever writing in it.

(It should be on tonight, Wed 9:30pm, ABC, if you’re wondering what its about)

Now I’m normally pretty immune to this sort of thing from the commercial networks, but if its true that political pressure was brought to bear on our national taxpayer-funded broadcaster in order to shut this show down simply because they dared to poke fun at John Howard and George Bush then in the words of Dave Hughes, “I’m angry tonight, bloody angry.”