New Bogan Shoes!

I live in a beachside country town. It's full of bogans* who have moved from the city, but it's a picturesque tree-hugging town that is still cheap to live in compared to the capital city.

*bogans = chavs, losers, rednecks, skanks etc.

So I need beachy bogany shoes to fit in with the locals. What is better than a pair of Crocs?? Here in Australia we pretty much only get the standard really awful kind of Crocs and the rather hideously coloured schemed Crocs thongs (flip-flops). I'm talking hot pink and lime green. Noice.

So I turned to Amazon.com for help. The Australian $ is at an all-time high at the moment, around AUD$1 to US$1.10. The usual rate is around US65c to the AUD$1. I hate to say this, but I LOVE the global economic crisis! <3 <3 <3



Anyway, my Crocs arrived today, and they're sweet as. All the local bogans will be so jealous!

I'm not stupid!

I do an admin role for my job. It's rather cushy for the amount of money I am paid, but it has its moments where it's go go go go go go go and the pressure almost gets too much. Fortunately those times don't happen too often, and fortunately I love the challenges they bring.

What is getting my goat at the moment is that there is a member of the "family" (see an earlier post) who has an ego the size of China, and assumes just because my team and I work in admin that we are unskilled and completely stupid. He has been trying to get a major part of my job taken away from me and it be given to one of his sycophants as he is a "techie" and knows everything.

A large chunk of my role involves the coordination, design and publication of our Intranet for my whole division. We have a very restricted by style and difficult to use system that throws up bizarre faults randomly that are difficult to fix. There is no official documentation on how to fix them, it's something you have to figure out yourself or ask someone else how to fix.

The "family" man is trying to take this job from me, and to get his Project Manager "techie" to do it. All. By means of bullying me into giving in, and by getting another "family" member to pull some illegal strings by means of access to the whole division's directory instead of just the sub-directory he's been authorised to have.

I raised the issues with my boss, who seems to live in some kind of vague bubble. She said to me "he wants him to do it, because he found out he's a bit of a techie", and promised to speak to the "family" member, but it may be diffucult due to political reasons and I might end up losing.

What gets me, is that I have explained to my boss MANY times that I have a rather strong IT background. I have trained in and worked for many years writing code and maintaining a rather massive computer database for my old workplace that to this day is still used by some pretty important people to get some pretty important statistics. I have studied computer programming and worked as a programmer for 4 years. I have certificates that make me qualified as a computer network designer & administrator (not that I've actually done this as a job though, it was a course requirement). I am also a qualified high-level web designer as well. In essence, people, I am a fully qualified NERD! I gave up my IT life due to strange events at that time in my life, and the fact the really cushy job came up that paid twice the rate I was getting as a programmer. (What would YOU do??!)

This "techie" has a personal interest in playing around with computers. That is all. He has no formal qualifications, and no technical experience in an IT field.

Yet for some reason my qualifications don't count for anything, and I'm not sure my vague boss actually believes I have them. I am seen as a stupid admin officer, only there to buy stationery and do a few other things I guess.

I did something very strange today, and took a photocopy of my qualification certificates and pinned them to my desk partition wall, hoping that maybe someone might notice them. I know it's really REALLY wanky, but I am at my wits end.

Shopping for Jeans

I'm gonna say it and it might shock you, I'm female and I hate clothes & food shopping. I am abnormal.

I like shopping for things. For necklaces, furniture, kitchen appliances & knick knacks, pet accessories. I love shopping for anything except clothes and food.

When it comes to looking at clothes and admiring shoes, I love them I do. Totally and completely love them. My avatar is a pink shoe for a reason. I love pretty shoes, and I love pretty clothes. Yet I never buy them. I hate trying them on, as I hate mirrors and the lighting. I also have very wide yet normal sized feet which makes it almost impossible to buy fancy, pretty shoes.

Today I went to the shops to buy three main items: a new pair of jeans that don't fall down whenever I bend over. (Too big, not too small). Swimwear for an upcoming holiday to the beach, and food for my kitchen. I came home with a bunch of Dutch carrots for my birds, 3 packets of chips and a tub of margarine.

I hate jeans shops because if jeans fit around my thighs they're way way too big for my waist. Or they're too small, too big, wrong shape, too flared, too long, too dark, too light.... gahh. I hate trying on 49 pair of jeans to find one pair that are just 'okay'.

I have short legs, so short that short leg jeans are still usually too long (if you can find them) and regular length legs should be on a 6.5 foot stick-figure model. They also believe that if you're short with slightly bigger than average thighs or backside (i'm just saying) you must therefore have an ENORMOUS stomach, and so the waistband is around 3 sizes too big, and the style means that a belt just looks stupid.

So I didn't bother, because it's a public holiday and I didn't need that kind of stress ruining my day. I went into Big W (kind of like a small Walmart here in Australia) and bought myself 10 pair of socks, 4 pair of undies and a new winter nighty with a cute cranky cow on it.

If only we could walk around in cute nightwear, I'd be right. I like shopping for that. Just not jeans.

Easter Chocolate

I did better this year on the Easter chocolate front than last year. I got one big bunny; 4 handmade chocolates from my nephew in a box with a fluffy yellow chicken on the top with a flower and a card..... and a handful of random chocolate eggs from people at work.

It beats last year when I was not given a single egg. It was a sad era for my stomach, but just lovely for my thighs.

I'm not the kind of person who can have chocolate sitting there for hours or days or weeks in front of me. If I have any kind of chocolate I have to rid the world of it.

That is why I am going to test my "won't" power on the big bunny. (The rest of the chocolate is long gone!). Let's see how many hours/days/weeks I can hold off eating it.

I will try.... but I'm sure it will be gone by tomorrow night. heh

Easter Time TV

It was commented yesterday by none other than my mother that "once upon a time all Easter you would get religious programming/movies on tv, and now you're not likely to find anything". She couldn't figure out why.

I can tell you why... all 'old' religious movies regarding Easter have bad acting, even worse sets and terribly inaccurate wardrobes for the eras. The actors/actresses are blonde/brown haired, blue eyed and have very pale white skin. Hardly the physical characteristics of the people of those parts of the world! The portrayed storylines are boring. The only good thing about them are some actors like Yul Brynner. He's very cool, but that's another story. (Don't smoke, whatever you do, DOOOOON'T Smoooooooke!)

It's not the stories, it's that to the modern era audience they're just boring as anything. They also tend to show at Easter religious movies such as "The Ten Commandments" (a great film of its time, just more terrible acting and terrible sets that are becoming more and more obvious as the years go by and tech advances.). Why show this now? It's not in the least bit an Easter story. It's about Moses doing his destined thing way way before Jesus came onto the Earth.

I saw on the tv guide the movie "Barabbas" was showing today. Who picked this brown piece of joy? It was filmed in 1961, and IMDB describes the plot as "Barabbas, the criminal that Pontius Pilate induced the populace to vote to set free, so that Christ could be crucified, is haunted by the ghost of the prophet for the rest of his life". Hrm. Yes, I guess it's on the right topic, but really?? Who made a movie out of this??! Did people of this era really speak so slowly and formally, and did they have no sense of humour whatsoever??!

As much as I do appreciate the sentiment of showing these shows, I can totally see why kids prefer stories about the Easter Bunny and Ben 10 or Barney saving the Easter Bunny or such rubbish. The acting is better. The puppets are better. The songs are better! The plots are better!

I think the answer is to reshoot the proper Biblical stories using modern day technology, CGI, fabulous yet realistic to the times sets, and actors who actually can act their way out of a paper bag. (ie: NOT Nicole Kidman. She's terrible without all the Botox, let alone with it!). This way these great stories might not be lost on the current technological generation. Whether they choose to believe in it or not.

Lounge-less

I have been waiting since January 13 for my new leather lounge I ordered to arrive. Is this too long?

What, did they have to wait for the cows to be born, to grow up, then harvest the leather (in a manner I'd rather not think about)? The cotton for the stitching to be picked and processed? The trees used for the legs to grow before they could chop the wood? The polyester removed from the polyester plants in the fields to grow to be able to get the stuffing for the seating?

So far it's taken the gestational period of a goat.

If it takes as long as an elephant, I might complain. *sigh*

Why would you say that?

There is some weird stuff going down at work. For legal reasons (and because I would like to keep my job) I can't say where I work or really tell you too much about it. However, what I can say is that at my work we seem to have two main groups of people. The "family", whose members are a kind of Mafia type group who get places by bullying others and by sucking up and batting their eyelids the right direction. (Both male and female there); and the "2nd cousins" who are loosely associated with the "family" by way of sucking up, but will never quite be taken into the fold. [And yes, we do use inverted commas to refer to them. I'm not just being typographically annoying.]

Then there's the rest of us. We don't even have a fancy name for ourselves. We work hard. We work bloody hard and get no recognition for it. Members of the "family" take the credit for our work and if we dare complain about it, we get demoted or given the worst possible tasks or evicted from the area. I've seen plenty of good people refuse to give into the "family" and get booted out of the organisation. When you're part of a group of roughly 15,000 people, that sadly doesn't get noticed.

We have a new girl in our area who came from the very top of the organisation, the bigwigs area. The moment she stepped into the area she found out about the "family". Unfortunately she's extremely vocal and negative about the long lunches from 11am until the next day, unfair overtime privileges, and has recently been added to their blacklist.

This afternoon she said to me quite frankly 'have you noticed that it's all the pretty girls who are in the "family"?'. She said it 3 times in the next 2 or 3 minutes.

I didn't know what to say. She's not ugly by any means. She has the most gorgeously clear skin I have ever seen, actually. Was she telling me that *I* am ugly, straight to my face? I do admittedly have some rather unusual and unbecoming facial expressions (I have been told that since the day I was born and it's bugged the crap out of me, but I was born with this face and there's not much I can do about it).....but was she looking for me to say to her "no no, you're really pretty"?

I KNOW I am on the outside of the "family" group, because I will never give up my integrity and become part of the "family" to progress when I do not deserve it, but was she actually saying to my face that I am not pretty, or am I just overly paranoid?

It's annoying me. We now have a 5 day weekend and I am going to stew on this. I know I shouldn't, but I am. I did a spot of retail therapy tonight to try to shake it off. It didn't work. I went to McDonalds and ate a rather thigh-enlarging calorific comforting meal and that didn't work either.

Hrmm.

I never thought I'd be back blogging

I quit blogging a few years ago, mostly because too many people I know in real life discovered it and started making me feel bad about it. It was a successful blog too, with lots of followers who liked my humour. It was hard to let go, but I had to. I had to reinvent myself after a lot of very weird things happened in my life at the time. I might get into what those weird things were, I might not. We'll see!

Well, I still have too many things going through my head which I can't post on Facebook (due to reasons as above) and well, I'm back. And I'm not telling any of my real life friends about this place.

I think blogging is rather weird to be honest, I mean, who the hell in the world wants to know my twisted innermost thoughts? Why would anyone care? I'm one of a couple of billion people on this planet, and quite insignificant when you look at it that way. But one person can be found (I mean, a piece of mail can find me on this planet!) and one person can make a difference. It might be a very very small difference to some random person out there. You never know.

Anyway, I'm back. I'm also a bit scared to be back and opening up my head to the world, but here I am. If i get no readers, so be it. At least my head is clear :)