Arles and Pets

I am not really very good with animals. I think a part of that is being allergic to some of them. But equally another part is not having very much exposure to animals. So while I appreciate them, I am often awkward around them.

In the photo above I am reaching down to pet a cat in Arles. Arles is a country town with a population of about 50,000 in the South of France.

My husband took this photo of me and - apart from it being mostly a photo of my backside - I think it is a great photo. The composition and structure is excellent.

But you should know that in this photo where I am reaching down to pet a cat - that is purely a pose. I did not actually touch the cat.

Happy Birthday Jesus!

Merry Christmas everyone!

I hope you are all having a great day celebrating with your friends and family!

Card ratio

I send Christmas cards to my friends and family each year.

And each year I notice that the ratio of sent to received cards is not exactly even.

Last year I received about one for every two cards I sent. This year I sent 17 and received 7. The ratio doesn't seem to be improving - does it?

But don't worry, I will carry on....

Sigh...

http://tcns.blogspot.com/2008/12/damn-chains.html

Photo of the red shoes

Cuckoo, Cuckoo!

My goodness....what was that noise?

Oh, it was just my cuckoo clock.

When I was in Switzerland earlier in the year I bought a cuckoo clock. It has taken us a while but it is now on our wall and I love it.

But let me tell you every time the little cuckoo pops out and sings "cuckoo, cuckoo" it scares the hell out of me!

Red shoes

I bought a pair of red shoes a few weeks ago. They are gorgeous! I am completely besotted with them. And they seem to draw a lot of attention from other women.

A lot of my friends, family and work colleagues commented that they are "nice" or "cute", which is lovely.

Some random strangers have made slightly stranger less lovely comments - the best of which were:

"isn't it only clowns and hookers who wear red shoes?"

"I love your red shoes, you could be Dorothy from the wizard of oz, there is no place like home" - this was made by worse by the fact that she did actions with her feet - tapping the heels of her shoes together as she said "there is no place like home".

Random House Publishing

A strangest thing happened to me yesterday.

A parcel was delivered to my door that I was not expecting. Tom found it and called out to let me know that it had arrived. "What did you order" he asked. I thought about it for a moment, racking my brain to think of any recent ebay or phone purchases. I buy a lot of things on the net or over the phone and have them posted home. It is not unusual for packages to arrive at our house but I could not think of anything I had bought recently.

So I took the package inside and opened it. The package was from Dymocks (the bookstore) and in it was a book.

It is a book I have never seen before, by an author I have never heard of.

Also, I have never ordered anything from Dymocks. So how on earth did they get my name and address details? And why did they send me this book?

Apart from a GPO Box in Sydney there were no contact details on the package, so I may never know what the story behind this random gift is.

But I am going to read the book. It looks ok and it would be awful to waste it.

Water anyone?

I used to drink a lot of cordial. In the last year I have stopped. I have always known that I should drink water and not cordial but I never really liked the taste of water. It tasted bland and yuck - nothing compared to the sugary goodness of orange cordial (my favorite).

When I first did weight watchers I swapped from regular cordial to diet cordial to save on the calories and sugar. That was fine and I got accustomed to the taste very quickly.

Recently I have been reading about how bad artificial sweeter is for you. And I know that pretty much everything is bad for you in some way or other but does make sense that a synthetic product designed to mimic the sensation of sweetness without the kilojoules would be bad.

I thought about going back to regular cordial but I didn't want to add the calories back to my diet. I couldn't decide which type of cordial to buy; diet or regular. And because I couldn't decide I didn't buy anything. So I started drinking water.

And do you know what I discovered? Water actually tastes good. It was just that my taste buds were all stuffed up from drinking too many sugary drinks and didn't like the water. Now they are retrained not to expect sugar the seem to quite like water.

Water anyone?

Council pick up

The local council is currently having a pick up in my area.

What does this mean for me?
That my entire suburb looks like a dump while people pile mounds of junk they don't want on the footpath for collection. It is very ugly and untidy.

Did I participate?
Yes. I put out one old table. That is all. Not twelve old mattresses and all the old clothes that I have been going to give to charity - like one household I drove past.

Funniest thing
I was amused by my neighbor who put out an old cane old lounge suit only to have it taken by a passer-by within minutes of hitting the footpath. She was happy it was going to a good home but not so happy that the people who took it had left a really ugly lounge suit in its place. Obviously they have only room for one couch and hers was better that the other one they had picked up.