Things Katy does.
Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and 4
So here is where the grim regularity kicks in. Leftover pasta is freshened up with some sliced kalamata olive and pan-toasted Turkish bread with garlic butter. These were the top slices whose counterparts were consumed the preceding and following night. (Waste nothing!)
Well, this has been an awful day.
I've been ill for a month. Initially I thought it was a chest infection. I live like a hermit, so the chances I caught something contagious must be very small. Non-zero, but very small. It'll pass off soon.
It didn't pass off. Every time I think it's on the wane, it comes back with a vengeance.
Today I was so confident that I went to the Queen Victoria Market to stock up on minimum dietary requirements. I was still coughing and a bit sniffly, but otherwise feeling much better. Wearing a mask, of course. The residual coughing I could put down to wear and tear over the last month. And I'm always somewhat sniffly, due to being pale, shy, and bookish; not at all hardy and replete with stout British character.
The other day I was on the margins of a conversation about "the refugee problem", biting my tongue as one does. (Deep breath: No, it's not the people who are the problem, it's whatever is making refugees of them. You don't solve anything by shoving people into concentration camps or leaving them to perish from drowning or heat exhaustion.)
I was feeling sorry for the couple of Asian people present, but I'm afraid to say also relieved that for once I wasn't the elephant in the room. The conversation then turned to the specific difficulty of assimilating a large number of people from a different culture in a short period of time.
Again: why should this be a problem? Or more pointedly, why is the difficulty situated wholly within the incoming contingent rather than the resident population? Is building walls and turning back boats any sane sort of cure, or just a symptom of another, more serious, problem?
Three years ago I was living in the middle of nowhere, on an income which, after rent, usually left me with between a hundred and two hundred dollars a week for utility bills and groceries.
Financially, the situation has not much changed. I can be fairly certain that, until December, my income will be rent plus a hundred and forty-seven dollars a week. Bills are up, because it's so much colder in Melbourne, but rent is (for the time being) still a wee bit less than I was paying in my sunny seaside purgatory.
Of course qualitatively my life is incalculably better now. It is so much easier to be broke in inner Melbourne. Almost anything I might want to do is at or near zero-cost and within walking distance (or a $2.50 concession fare tram ride away).
Breakfast! The most unexpectedly time-consuming meal of the day. Back in a previous life, when I was the size of a house, breakfast was indistinguishable from lunch and/or dinner. The silver lining of posessing only a small fridge is that you can't prepare a huge amount of food, and consume the same unhealthy fare, in excessive quantity, for three meals a day until you run out, and then rinse and repeat. However, what I have since done is work out how to make a bowl of "Wheat Biscuits" (other generic equivalents are available) unnecessarily complicated. My meals expand in complexity to fill the available preparation time.
Previously: Day 1
When I left my last place of paid employment, I put on my sunglasses and lit the fuse of a stick of dynamite with the end of my cigar, before tossing it (the dynamite, not the cigar) over my shoulder with a cry of "See you in hell, boys!" as I stepped nonchalantly into the street.
But before that — actually for some months before that — I had the presence of mind to stockpile a few boxes of non-perishable groceries. I thought of them as a gift for future me, when times got a bit tricky, financially. I'm still working my way through that stockpile. Thanks, past me!
I once vaguely knew the headmistress of a local school who, in the midst of a lively scandal over a run of instances of bullying, declared — privately, of course — that it was all poppycock. There was absolutely no bulling at her school.
The bully never sees themselves as a bully. Nor indeed does their appreciative audience, up to and including, in some cases, the school principal (assuming they are not the individual doing the bullying at the time).
The bully is doing the Lord's work, putting the aberrant and eccentric on the path to self-improvement. Bullying is rarely premeditated; it's most often purely reflexive. "See something, say something." Also shove something, trip something, punch something in the side of the head, pull something's pants down in the middle of the playground, if necessary.
I was recently invited to take part in a study. The person doing the studying was studying people who live in apartments, and their relation to food, or their attitudes to food, or summat.
The upshot is that I've been taking a photo or three every day, to document what I do with food. Not so much the eating of it, but more the sourcing and preparing of the foody substances.
Rather than just allow such vital information to moulder away in the dusty halls of academe, I though I should also share it with the wider world. So here we go. Strap yourselves in, cats and kittens.
I was so pleased that I finally got EnergyAustralia to change the name associated with my account that I didn't pay much attention to what they had changed it to. This turns out to have been a significant blunder on my part. A couple of days ago they emailed me to say that they can't apply the usual low income concession to my next bill because the surname they had for me doesn't match the name on my government concession card.
Oh, for…! There's only five letters in my surname! How could they have managed to drop one while copying it from my birth certificate to their database?
I phone them, and then I email them. It turns out they also have an issue with my address, so can I send them some proof of my address as well? So I go looking for another utility bill with my street address on it, and that's when I discover that Greater Western Water have misspelled my first name!