All is calm ...

Greetings, all.  Merry Christmas!  I hope you have had, are having, or do have (trying to account for all time zones) a wonderful, happy day.  It's nearly evening here and I am stuffed to the point of discomfort, but had a lovely afternoon with my family, eating Italian food and drinking Japanese beer (odd combination, I know, although my favourite beer is Peroni Leggera, which is totally fab for a low carb beer and therefore practically a health drink).  I love driving around on Christmas day ... the roads are so empty it's almost surreal, and I like seeing people going into, or coming out of, houses laden with gifts (the people, not the houses).  And much as I love the warm weather, I would love to experience a white Christmas someday.  Incidentally, I only just found out this week that Bing Crosby is (was) in fact a white man.  For some reason I think that my ridiculous mind somehow merged BB King and Bill Cosby to make me think that Bing looked more like BB, so I was very surprised to be watching a morning talk show the other day whilst eating my breakfast and seeing a clip for "White Christmas."  I was all "well, how about that" through a mouthful of cereal.  Learn something new every day, hey.

Anyway, here are some photos from my day and then I am running off to pack!  I have no idea if I will have easy internet access whilst in Tasmania and so may or may not be around for the next week and a half or so.  If not, have a happy new year! and I'll see you in 2010 :)  Otherwise, I'll be around to bother you some more with assorted tales and photographs before the year is out!  I am so ridiculously excited about my little trip ... the chance to do nothing or anything, take photographs and actually relax for the first time in a long time.  I'm totally going with the hot rocks massage, by the way, so will duly report back (hopefully it will be nothing like this experience).


xo!

.still a photogenic little bastard, boo!.

.nonna.

.mum.

.my uncle and dad ... trying to prove that they have the same squint, groan.

.my aunt and uncle.

What's brown and sticky?*

My Brown Snake Paranoia has officially reached ridiculous heights.  This morning the air conditioning in my office was so cold (grr) that I opened my windows to let some warmth in as it was something like 35 degrees outside.  But then I thought OMG, will the snake come in through the window?  After a quick office poll it was determined that everyone had NFI as to whether snakes can climb walls, so I turned to trusty Google, as you do.  And you know what?  It turns out that they freakin' can!  Admittedly they can't climb smooth surfaces, but brick walls?  No problem!  So I spent all morning jumping at every little rustling noise.  Which turned out to be a lot of jumping, as it was quite windy out.

And then, after much merciless teasing in the coffee queue about how snakes love red Volkswagen Golfs and can climb in through engines and air vents, I was walking very carefully back to my building, scanning the landscape for fangsters, and spied a giant snake lying in the grass.  I thought - Jesus! - and immediately veered off in the opposite direction, taking the long way back to my office and then rushing in to breathlessly announce that I had just seen the "mother snake of the baby snake" and it was "huuuge" (not unlike someone recounting the story of having caught a giant fish - "it was THIS big!" *spread hands approximately one meter apart*).  This had the obvious effect of freaking everyone else out, only um I then drove past the spot on my way back from lunch and, er, saw that it was actually a big stick lying on the ground.  Lol!  I then had the embarrassment of reporting my slight error back to my colleagues and there was much relief to be had that we weren't going to be accosted by a giant snake in the carpark, just the baby one that I saw yesterday.  Lesser of two evils and all.

Anyway I am feeling pretty good this afternoon as work has shut down until 4 January 2010, hooray! and I plan on doing nothing work-related until then unless it is Incredibly Necessary.  Off to Tasmania on Saturday which should be good (photography, whee!), although people seem to look at me funny when I tell them where I am going.  Frankly I don't even particularly care, I'm just happy to get away and if I am bored senseless then so be it - it's going to be better than the last few months!  Maybe my brain will stop hurting ;)

Oh and here is a moderately Christmas-themed shot from last year (because I have nothing from this year) so that my blog isn't totally devoid of sparkly things ...

* A stick, of course :P  Or, in my case, a faux snake, lol.

Snakes alive!

Holy moly.  Yesterday, I saw a snake at work (I don't work in a zoo, so this is not normal).  And not just some random happy snake that happened to be slithering on by, but a poisonous brown snake that can kill you with a single bite (in the absence of any medical attention, I'm assuming).  I really don't work in the city anymore (it takes the woman three and a half years and a Death Snake Sighting to realise this).

I was standing out the front of my building talking to a colleague when another of our colleagues rocked up in the carpark and began to peer at something in the grass across the way.  We were all "hey, what'cha lookin' at?" and he said "a snake!"  For reasons that I still do not understand, I said "oh, I have never seen a snake out and about before, let me take a look!" and dragged my colleague over to see.  And then was so totally freaked out at the sight of this *ahem*baby* brown snake slithering through the grass, across the pedestrian crossing (he's no dumbass, clearly) and into the garden bed parallel to the walkway that I cross every single day that I couldn't at all focus on the ensuing conversation and kept glancing around nervously to make sure the damn thing wasn't going to sneak up on me and sink its venomous fangs into my bare little ankles.  Needless to say, my colleagues (both male), thought this was just soo ... ooo funny, but they would, given that they were wearing enclosed shoes and pants as opposed to my sandals and skirt.  And it was even funnier when I believed, for the splittest (not a word, I know) of seconds, their story about how snakes can slither up trees and fling themselves onto unsuspecting passers-by (passers-under?).  And uproarious was the fact that I refused to then walk past the garden bed to get back to my building but instead gave the entire area a very wide berth and took the Super Long Way to my office by going around the back of the building and sticking to concrete and bitumen.  I don't know, can you outrun a snake with intent?  Certainly not in heels (me, not the snake), I wouldn't think.  Am wearing flats today but remain unconvinced of my athletic ability when pitted against a snake.

Apropos of nothing, there is a (conspicuous?) lack of Christmassy posts of my blog, I know, but this is due largely to the fact that work has been hell for the last couple of months and I have never felt less Christmassy in my life, although I am more than happy to read the festive posts of others and live vicariously.  Tomorrow will be the usual family gathering with excessive amounts of fabulous food, and I was very relieved to discover last night that I will not have to work over the Christmas/New Year break so my li'l trip to Tasmania is safe.  Am setting aside some time this afternoon to choose day spa treatments :)  Can anyone recommend (or otherwise) that thing they do with the hot rocks??  It's not anything that has ever appealed to me in the past but I am so stressed out lately that I will try anything!

Happy Monday

One of my work colleagues always shuffles into work in an exaggeratedly downtrodden way on Mondays, pauses at my office door and intones "Happy Monday," in response to which I always do a little cheerleader-y double fist pump into the air and say "yay!  Monday!"  I don't think that I will ever tire of this exchange, lol.

In any event, here is a happy song for your Happy Monday.  I heard it on the radio on the way home and loved it straight away.  The lyrics are so cute!  'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs ... from ten thousand lightning bugs ... as they tried to teach me how to dance ... (of course it was probably released ages ago and you all know it already! so apologies if I am telling you nothing new).

Hope it makes you smile! :)

A mish-mashy post

So today marks the seven-year anniversary of my (maternal) grandfather passing away.  I can't believe it has been seven years already - I remember it as though it was yesterday.  It was such an oppressively hot summer's day.  I received the phone call while I was at work because the rest of my family was overseas.  I remember catching the train home in a daze, putting on a denim skirt and light blue tank top, driving to the nursing home, walking down that corridor with the shiny floor tiles that I had walked so many times before, going into his room, seeing the empty bed which, by that time, had been neatly made up.  They had put his belongings into a garbage bag for me to collect, and as I carried it back to the car, I wondered: is this all there is in the end?  An empty bed and your belongings thrown into a garbage bag?  The bag felt so light it was surprising ... it seemed to me that it should have felt much heavier for some reason, as though the lack of weight somehow undermined my grandfather's existence.  I had to plan the funeral while my family tried to get a flight back from Rome, coming up with wording for funeral announcements and choosing flowers.  What do you say?  Who cares about the flowers?  Going through my grandparents' papers trying to find details of their burial plot, dissolving in tears on the floor of their apartment.  I dropped about five kilos in a week, I was so strung out.

At his funeral I simply stood in church (Russian Orthodox are big fans of the standing) holding a candle and staring at a spot on the floor with tears streaming down my face.  I missed him so much then and I still do.  He was a wonderful, beautiful man.  So very calm and down to earth ... a great foil for my strict grandmother ;)  In the afternoons he would get out his big, heavy, portable radio that was encased in brown leather and listen to the Russian news whilst sitting in his big armchair.  I remember him wearing his black Buddy Holly-style glasses and reading the paper.  He always put honey in his tea, the silver teaspoon clinking against the sides of the mug as he stirred.  He drove a giant, green Ford that didn't have power steering and he always had the funniest, crankiest sayings when the traffic was crap.  My family and I used to live next door to my grandparents and most afternoons they would sit on their front porch waiting for me to come home from uni or work so that they could say hello before going inside for dinner.

In the last few years of his life, my grandfather lost most of his vision and developed dementia, which was unspeakably awful.  It's like watching a person get erased before your very eyes ... struggling to remember ... his frustration was palpable.  It made my grandmother nuts, because she was the person he forgot the most.  Imagine that - you spend your entire life with someone only to have them look at you with suspicion and ask: who are you?  I really, really wish that I had been into photography when he and my grandmother were still alive so that I had taken more pictures of them, but most of the photos I have are from when I was younger.

Here is a photo of my grandparents on their wedding day ... aren't they just so lovely? (sorry about the quality - is a photo of a photo because I don't have a scanner):

And here is a photo of my grandfather holding me when I was but a wee thing with a big round head, lol.  Now I am just a big thing with a big round head ;)

Anyway that's all I really wanted to say.  It's weighing really heavily on me this year for some reason.  Wish I could have one of his big bear hugs right now :(

In other news, my bestie was lovely enough to take me out for brunch today! so that was nice.  We then took a little (pfft) drive to Manly to try to find a bicycle for his wifey's Christmas present, and as luck would have it, the place we went to had this bike, which has been out of stock everywhere for, like, ever, and now I have fallen in love with it all over again.  It looks so very very awesome in real life although for whatever reason the price has increased by around $150, which is a little unfortunate.  So we're going to smurf around and see if we can get a bulk discount! (well, if two=bulk, which it probably does not).

Oh and I also discovered that the iPhone is not too bad for photos!

Hope you're all well and having a great weekend :)

Pale. Interesting. Love!

I came across Pale and Interesting in a magazine today and instantly luurved their beautiful home decor, furniture and accessories.  Their look book is super inspirational, although whenever I see displays of this kind, I can't help but wonder how much dust these things collect ;)  They're still gorgeous, though!

Doesn't this antique leather armchair look just so ridiculously comfy?  The perfect place to curl up with a good book or magazine by the window ...

... and I like this antique ladder towel rail, too ...

If I wasn't such a Total Plant Killer, these metal provencal planters would be ideal for the garden ...

... but maybe I should just stick to caring for cut flowers in glass bottles instead :)

{all images: Pale and Interesting}

Il mercato

. Venice . Rome .

. Rome .

. Arezzo .

. Venice .

. Rome . Florence .

. Rome . Florence .

. Venice .