Is that my laptop dripping?

I was going to make up for my recent blog negligence by posting something super positive. I was going to be upbeat because even though my knee is still acting like a stubborn teenager and holding a grudge against the rest of my body, my boss has very kindly allowed me to work from home. When I heard the news I could have jumped for joy. Except, of course, that I can't jump (or at least not without screaming violent profanities) so I didn't. I just basked in the knowledge that I could be comfortably drugged up (on pain killers) and writing at home.
.

I love my apartment. Even though it's small -- so small that sometimes Mark and I have to turn sideways to sidle past various objects to get where we want to go -- I wouldn't have it any other way.

At the moment the best part about my apartment is that I get to lie in bed, resting my leg, and do all of my writing and emailing from a stable (laptop) table. It's ingenious. And it turns out that when left with my laptop, complete silence and my loony thoughts, I'm actually very productive.

But today catastrophe struck. If you're wondering whether to be alarmed, yes. Do it. Be alarmed. Be very, very alarmed! "Why?" you might ask, "Why are you giving me anxiety on a Friday?" Because Mark spilled half a stein of orange juice on my netbook, that's why!

To be fair it wasn't his fault. There just wasn't enough room for his feet between the table and the chair that I'm currently using as a side table. They snagged, caused his body to wobble and the juice that he was holding to tip over, right onto the centre of my working existence.

Luckily, since I'm a very clumsy being, we always have some form of paper handy -- tissues, paper towels, toilet paper, etc -- to wipe up my mess. So it was with some swiftness and expertise that Mark demanded that I turn the laptop off, wiped it with toilet paper *and then sat it upside-down on a towel. And that's where it is now. It's stopped dripping, which I take to be a good sign, but I'm not confident that it will survive.

• The toilet paper and guilty orange juice, post accident.

In the meantime I've been relegated to my faithful old uni laptop. It's not the fastest or brightest creation, but it does have Word and can (very slowly) access the internet. So if you're reading this post, it means that it's really exerted itself. Good laptop. Well done!

So there you have it. There's not much more to this story at present. I just really needed to tell the world (meaning my three readers) about today's woeful events. Thanks for listening.

*what an inglorious way to go...

What now?

You've got me celebrity trash. After years of resisting, of not knowing (or caring) which celebrity did what to their chin and which set of "you know they're not real" boobs that chin is currently hanging out with, I've fallen into your trap. I read this story and I've become all involved in it. The sort of involvement that shows that I care. And I do. And for that I'm part embarrassed and part angry.

In my usual fashion I will explain. The story is about the trainer from The Biggest Loser, Jillian The-Only-Thing-Brawnier-Than-My-Arms-Is-My-Smile Michaels. Speaking to Woman's Health magazine she said that she doesn't ever want to get pregnant because (wait for it) she "can't handle doing that" to her body.

Okay I'll be the first to admit that the thought of a screaming baby tearing its way out of my vagina is not my idea of fun, but it's a whole lot more natural than doing 50kg weights with your nipples. Which, it seems to me, she probably does.

The article goes on to say that Jillian has battled through childhood weight issues and is terrified that she'll be fat forever if she falls pregnant. Umm...I don't even know where to begin. It seems like she honestly believes that if she falls pregnant she'll suddenly explode out to 400kgs and will never be able to lift a car using only her index finger again. I would hate to live in her brain.

It probably won't surprise you that her statement has drawn a fair bit of criticism. Apparently a fitness role model shouldn't tell people that getting pregnant is a fitness no-no. Who knew?

Don't worry, she also has some fans who support her decision to adopt. Personally I'm not sure she's got the whole idea right. She did say: "when you rescue something, it's like rescuing a part of yourself." To me it seems like she's just repeating her message: "whenever you rescue something, it's like you're rescuing your body from natural birth". Then again maybe she's talking on a deeper level. I'd like to know which part of herself she feels needs rescuing...

Now I just have two questions:

1) Can you put "I want to adopt a thin, sculpted, muscular baby because I don't want to ruin my killer abs while giving birth to one." on an adoption form and be taken seriously?

2) What kind of mother will you be if you're that into fitness? I.e. will that kid ever get to experience the glory of greasy KFC after a big night out? Because that, in my opinion, should be one of the adoption qualifiers.

Bah. I'm toasting Jillian and her commitment to herself with a large McChicken meal. Cheers!

The knee saga

I know you’ve been dying to hear it: the knee saga. That is, the process by which I went from being a perfectly happy person in a stinger suit (just look at me sitting there all toothy smiles):
To an awkwardly limping wreck at odds with the medical system.

It all began on a gorgeous, relaxing, sweltering February day while sailing the Whitsundays. I was standing on the roof of our Catamaran admiring the lack of wind and the complete stillness of the vessel (this is important to outline just how thoroughly retarded I am). Then for no reason whatsoever I decided to step down in a way that proved (if anyone had any doubts) that ankles and knees should never be forced to work against each other. That is if your foot is pointing to the right, for instance, your knee should never be straightened at the same time. Especially with a bravado that shouts “look how fantastically I’ve mastered my sea legs.”

Skip forward a couple of grinding cracks, a genuine conviction that my knee had developed a sudden obsession with Cubism (and was trying to mimic a Picasso masterpiece) and some rather forceful demands that Mark beat it back into its original shape (which luckily he refused to do) and we come to me hobbling around the boat, asking for alcohol and bumping into anything I could – regardless of whether it was actually in my way or not. If there had been a psychiatrist onboard I’m sure they would have strapped me up and put me into a padded room for my own safety. But, alas, there was not. Instead Mark’s mum sweetly rubbed VapoRub on my knee.

I won’t take you though the details of the next few days; most of the time I was in a half-drunk stupor anyway. But I will say this: it is very hard, I would even say impossible, to get into a dingy using one leg.

To save you from boredom, I’ll skip past the journey of my knee from grapefruit-sized mass back to near-normal knobbiness. I’ll just say that after a visit to emergency, a stopover at an MRI imaging centre and two sessions with a specialist (which amounted to no less than 13 hours of waiting time), it was determined in no uncertain terms that I did in fact hurt my knee.

More specifically – to quote my MRI – I have a “displaced bucket handle tear of the body and anterior horn of the medial meniscus with a displaced fragment lying medially in the intercondylar notch.”

This is a diagram of what the medical jargon means. It is actually a representation of a diagram drawn by my doctor after I made it clear that all I could see in the MRI was evidence that I got something for my $500…but not something good enough to frame.

Since the writing on my diagram didn't quite come out in the blog, I'll translate:

1. This is a healthy medial meniscus
2. This is my medial meniscus with a bucket handle tear giving me the finger before moving onto diagram 3. (My doctor's diagram wasn't flipping the bird, just in case you were wondering)
3. This is the fragment of my medial meniscus sticking its...er...nose (??) where it doesn't belong

On a related note, I also have “fissuring of the articular cartilage over the lateral patellar facet extending onto the patellar apex”…or more specifically “grade 2-3 chondromalacia of the lateral patellar facet extending onto the patellar apex”

Just to be clear, the first (bucket handle) thing is the real problem; the second thing was, according to my specialist, unlikely to have happened directly at the same time. Secretly I think it was caused by one of my ungraceful one-legged dismounts into the dingy, but I didn’t tell him that.

This is where I’m up to now. Apparently my knee will not be so kind as to grind down the offending fragment in any reasonable amount of time which means that my specialist is going to have to get in there and fix it himself. That’s right; my ridiculous clumsiness is now taking me to the operation room for an arthroscopy. You can read all about the procedure here, but since I’m guessing we all have better things to do with our time, basically it involves the good doc sticking a camera and some medical utensils into my knee and taking the fragment out.

On hearing this news I could only summon two thoughts:

1) I finally get to use my health insurance
and
2) I get to see the inside of my knee (maybe)

I can’t say that I’ve been looking forward to either, but I’m warming to the idea.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the saga of the knee.

Cover up, you're making the earth shake!

I know I’ve promised part two of our camping story, but I haven’t had time to write it yet. Sorry, I’m a busy girl with a busy lifestyle and today deadline panic took over my usual lunchtime ranting.

Instead I have a fun story for you to read. Well actually it’s only about two per cent fun and 98 per cent completely fucking insane. Pardon my French, but I’m really concerned for Tehran’s population of 12 million people.

If, like me, you have been struck down with a crazy workload and don’t have much time to spare today, I’ll give you a brief synopsis of what the story is about.

Basically some cleric has allegedly blamed women who are dressed scantily (and are therefore promiscuous) for the earthquakes in the region.

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which [consequently] increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi apparently told Iranian media.

I’m not sure how many people believe this man, but it must be some for him to have made it onto the online pages of the SMH. Then again, maybe he’s just a lunatic that the Aussie sensationalism-junkies dug up…or maybe he’s been misquoted. Who knows?

The point is that I dare hope that nobody is stupid enough to believe him. Surely they’d have to question why the rest of the world (beginning with Hugh Hefner’s residence) isn’t either under water or (at least) in ruins.

Anyway, of more concern is that Tehran which is home to some 12 million citizens is, according to seismologists, doomed. To quote the SMH journalist it “straddles scores of fault lines, including one more than 80 kilometres long” and hasn’t gone through a major earthquake for some 180 years. That’s gotta spell trouble.

The SMH journalist managed to squeeze some other bits of largely unrelated info into his story – allegations to do with the legitimacy of the election, for one. But I guess what has stayed with me is that even the president (legitimate or not) admitted that five million people should leave to make the city less crowded…what of the other seven million? I just hope they cover up…

Camping weekend: Part one

I’ll fill you in on the details later. Like maybe when I’m not at work and not sweating about the visit to the knee specialist this afternoon. Maybe when I get back from the specialist at 9pm after yet another ridiculous wait. Then again I’ll probably have to sell my laptop and most of my furniture and clothes to pay for further medical assistance, which means that I won’t have the means to update you and who wants to write naked anyway? Not me. I like to be fully clad. So enjoy part one and I’ll fill you in on the details later.

Like every good camping trip, ours began with a list. Usually I’m the list maker in our partnership, but seeing as I’d had a rather busy week, Mark decided to take over responsibility and write out every item we would need for our two-day getaway.

I think the list speaks for itself:

Mark’s camping list:
- 2 sleeping bags, pillows, blanket
- Tent
- Foam matts

- Toilet paper
- Candles and stand for candles (so that they don’t set anything, like for example Mark’s pillow, on fire)

- Lighter, matches
- Torches
- Towels (this also implied: toothpaste, toothbrushes and soap)

- Mosquito spray
- Sun cream

- Drinking water (we got six litres)
- Apple juice
- Orange juice
- Ice
- Alcohol, wine – vodka
(He’d be damned if we came out this experience thirsty!)

- Food
- Biscuits, chips, lollies for Agnes (because Agnes can turn into a cranky bitch without her intake of sugar).
- Plates and cutlery, can be plastic, cups
(If not plastic, they could be titanium. We’re lenient like that. But the cutlery and cups were plastic. We forgot plates. )

Things that weren’t on the list but Mark prepared earlier:
- 1 giant, don’t-mess-with-me knife (which, he explained, was just in case we needed to stab a psychotic killer. There’s no phone reception in the bush, you know.)
- A series of maps printed from Google. (Printed on such a scale that only a couple of roads had names and the rest was guess work. Needless to say, we saw quite a bit of Kandos, which is a lovely mid-western NSW town which surprisingly has its own Wikipedia page. This leads me to believe that either people are really impressed with its cement production or more than one soul has gotten lost on its streets.)

Things that weren’t on the list (but for the most part were supplied by my parents, who we visited on the way):
- Chairs (yes, I know that’s not rough-n-tough-ing it, but both my knee and I are grateful that we didn’t have to stand the whole time).
- Paper towels and other things needed to clean the tent once we had packed it up.
- Sausages (who goes camping with the sole mission of building a fire, gets that fire going and then has nothing to roast on it? Mark and I, that’s who. But, for anyone who’s interested, smoked and charred baguette doesn’t taste half bad).
- Plates.

Overall I think we did well. Watch this space for part two.

I adore Chester!

That is what I named my boyfriend’s back-of-throat laugh. If you think that seems like a strange thing to do, you probably don’t know me very well and you definitely haven’t heard Mark laugh. And I mean really laugh. You see, Mark’s laughs could be classified as a separate language system and studied. The boy doesn’t mess about.

His laugh spectrum begins with his “polite” laugh, in which he expels air in neat, nerdy “ha ha” soundwaves. When this intensifies, becomes louder and is interspaced with deep breaths – “ha ha ha (pause) ha ha (pause) ha ha” – it means he’s really laughing from the heart.

The final level – which also often involves a rocking motion – sees the adoption of a whole new breathing technique. In this the “ha ha” expulsions are followed by a regular pattern of loud inhalations that sound a bit like a squirrel choking on a woodpecker.

Mark also likes to experiment with his nostrils and throat to vary the severity and meaning of his laughs.

This is how Chester comes about. I’m still not sure how he does it, but when Mark finds something particularly amusing (usually himself), he signifies it by letting out a ticking kind of sound at the back of his throat. I don’t know how to describe it, because it’s just one of those things you have to experience for yourself (like the purring of a cat or Channel 10 news presenters trying to sound empathetic). Personally I adore it. That’s why I’ve named it Chester. And that’s my story for today.

Obsessed!

I just found a restaurant that I may have to find time to be truly obsessed with. It’s so fantastically cool that I wish I could have babies with it and fill Sydney with other equally-cool (though maybe a little bit more deranged) places.

Since my full-time job of restaurant writer requires me to be sane, I’m going to use this blog as an outlet to tell you about it in my own crazy, erratic, “ummm…I’m not sure that she’s even talking in coherent sentences anymore” kind of way.

The place is called LL Wine and Dine and I’m sorely disappointed that while other people have already managed to become regulars, I only just discovered it. It actually opened eleven weeks ago – right around the time that I could still walk without a ridiculously subtle limp (the one that makes people think I was just born ungraceful and wearing cheap, flat shoes).

Anyway, since I haven’t actually tried the food yet, I’m just going to tell you about how very aesthetically-orgasmic it is. But before I do that – porn wall and all – I have to retell its history because it’s pretty amusing.

The history

So picture this: three young lads, who happen to be brothers, decide to turn an abandoned adult bookstore into a funky new Potts Point (read Kings Cross) restaurant. Okay, so already you have to imagine that this is quite a task. There are all sorts of unsavoury parts of adult bookstores (especially ones that have been around for forty or so years, as this one had been) that you wouldn’t want to mix with food. So you have to sympathise with Tim, Chris and Matthew when they discovered that the place had an even more nefarious background than they first imagined.

This didn’t come to light in one, calm conversation with a previous owner – it was a gradual discovery during which they uncovered hydraulic doors, secret passageways and false exits. “What kind of porn needs those sorts of security measures?” you wonder “does the public need safeguarding? Does it feature Tony Abbott?” As it turns out, the bookstore served as a front for an illegal casino for quite some time. So no, it wasn’t quite so bad.

You’d think that having found this out, the brothers could go on with their lives in a happy, informed kind of way. But there was also the question of why so many condoms and other odd items were strewed about the place. Cutting a long story short, once the casino had been raided and the owner sold it, his replacement turned it into a swingers’ club (which eventually also got raided).

But the largest discovery – and I’m talking volume – was a secret attic filled with 35 garbage bags of old-school porn. There was enough material to bury the front part of the restaurant in two inches of boobs. In an instant the brothers were faced with a teenage boy’s ultimate fantasy and a responsible adult’s worst nightmare: What to do with all this porn?

Rather industriously, they decided to use the more quaint pages as wallpaper in the restaurant’s passageway (and give the rest away). And just so you don’t miss it, they mounted a bright red “ECSTACY” sign* right above it.

Looking at the wall is a bit like smoking a spliff in Amsterdam – you know you’re allowed, you know it’s not a big deal but you feel like there’s a giant red sign (in this case a rather suggestive one) flashing above your head alerting the world – and your mother – of your indecent behaviour. And yet you stop and search the various faces to see whether you can recognise any of them. That is until you realise that by now they’re old enough to be your mother, then some paranoid thoughts enter your mind and you decide that you don’t want to see anybody you know in that light, so you move on…

The restaurant
Aside from the wall which I’ve made quite a big deal out of, sorry (it’s not that big and I’m not that perverted), the rest of the restaurant is all class. The front bar has a certain old-world quality that comes with classic leather bar stools, polished wooden counters and shelves of alcohol. From there a corridor leads patrons from the bar, past the aforementioned wall and to the dining area. It is meant to make you feel like you’re going from the bar, through a laneway and into another bar. And, strangely, it does.

The back end of LL is split into three rooms:

The downstairs lounge simmers with red banquettes, white pillows with black embroidery that somehow seems suggestive (even though it’s not), round cocktail tables and warm-toned brocade ottomans. It’s a very Kings Cross-appropriate place to drink a cocktail.

The upstairs dining room is intimate, moody and very cool. So cool that at first you’re not sure whether you’re actually cool enough to hang around it, but then when you sit at one of its dark brown tables, you realise that it’s not about you at all. And that makes you feel cool.

The middle section shamelessly stares into the dining and lounge rooms like a true voyeur. Although it – and its modern Japanese screen feature wall – somehow manage to stay super classy.

A bit about the food

Okay, I haven’t tried the food or cocktails yet (but trust me I’m busily clearing my schedule to make it happen). So, just for the curious, I will say that the cuisine is modern Asian, prepared by chef Jin Kung (who has done stints at various good restaurants) and is a fusion of Chinese dishes with Thai and Japanese ideas.

Personally I’m looking forward to a chilli and coconut martini and some black tea and star anise smoked duck breast pancakes with house soy bean sauce and spring onion. I will update you on my experience. Let me know if you want to join me in my quest and become equally obsessed.

*the original name – and sign – of the bookstore.

Photography courtesy of Caroline McCredie

And now I'm on a horse!

Mark's friend found this commercial and I've been laughing at it ever since. Enjoy:



For more entertainment check out this video.