So anyway…

Wow. Never look at your own jewellery with a high-powered jeweller’s loupe. It’s pretty scary. My beloved princess cut diamond has some flaws I never knew were there, yikes! There’s a really noticible black (carbon) flaw on one side, and another side there’s a cloudy yellowish flaw…. I mean, I knew the stone had some visible flaws (heck, the biggest of them is visible to the naked eye), but YIKES!
Mind you, the stone stone is still quite lovely and the ring is fine, and you really do have to look pretty closely to see the flaws (and know what you’re looking for) and for some of them, you need a 20x jeweller’s loupe, so it’s okay.
Just a word of advice, I guess you could say. Never look at your own jewellery with a jeweller’s loupe. There are things you probably just don’t want to know (just like the knowledge that your bed is full of bed mites, your body is covered with bacteria, and your intestines are lined with e. coli, which you would die without but which can kill you if you actually were to injest it…).

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A survey has found that drivers of 4×4 motor cars in London are four times as likely to drive while using a cellphone without a hands-free kit, than drivers of other motor vehicles. They are also more likely to ignore laws requiring occupants to wear a seatbelt. The survey was conducted by three researchers based at Imperial College and was designed specifically to seek out any patterns in driving habits between 4×4 owners and normal car drivers.

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I’m doing a gemology course. I can feel a new passion coming on. I’ve always had a tendency to get really “into” stuff, and gems are really fascinating. I could see myself becoming a collector, actually.
Just what we need… another expensive hobby wherein I accumulate more and more stuff just for the sake of it…

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Happy winter solstice. Yes, winter. I’m in the Southern Hemisphere, remember? And if you’re in the Northern one, well, happy summer solstice. You enjoy the nice, long, hot day while I’m here freezing my well-padded backside off in Melbourne and I’ll do the reverse for you in six months. That is, I’ll enjoy the long, hot day and you can freeze. Not in Melbourne, of course, because then you’d be in summer, too.
Anyway.

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WARNING! WARNING! Time waster (in the best possible way) and may induce considerable laughter! You’ll need Quicktime and the sound on to enjoy the show with zefrank, oh, and you’ll need to be someone who’s not too easily offended by strong language and occasional mature themes and sexual references. (Lucky for me, I’ve got the sound going through a headset so I can listen all I want without the kids hearing it!)

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Over the years, Mark Brown searched for Ms. Right in all the usual places: at parties, work functions and the occasional singles bar. He ended up meeting her inside a videogame.
[...]
The pair is among those who have fallen in love while playing so-called massively multiplayer online games, known as MMOGs. In them, enthusiasts spend hours killing monsters and completing quests in ever-changing virtual worlds.
(The thing that gets me is how surprised the Wall Street Journal seems to be about people meeting online, falling in love, and getting married. Hello! Where’ve they been for the past ten years?!)

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I was the right age to be a punk. I wasn’t one, but I could have been. I wondered for a long time why I hadn’t gotten into it, because I do, in fact, like American punk (big fan of The Ramones, for example). But while I did occasionally wear safety pins in my ears (just because), I wonder why I never turned into a punk girl, when it really would have suited me. All the rebellion and such, and my mother would have gone insane if I’d gotten a green mohawk…

I realized in later years that I didn’t go for the punk culture because I wanted to be sexy and cute, and punk girls were only sexy and cute to punk boys. I wanted to be sexy and cute to a more mainstream audience (and I was, too).

Anyway, I’ve been very much admiring the Green Day songs I’ve heard from the American Idiot album. Really nice arrangements, and definitely worth listening to. I commented a couple of times that we should get the album. So Andrew got it for me for Mother’s Day (for my birthday he got me Eagles Farewell I).

I’m finally really sitting down and listening to the album (okay, it’s a CD, but it’s still an album, dammit!). One of the songs moved me enough to post it in my recovery-related journal. A few of the lines inspired me enough to use them as a sigline on one of the boards I frequent.

This is a good album. Extremely coherent, excellent arrangements, and the drumlines in a couple of the songs really seriously rock. Very impressed. No wonder it won a Grammy Award for Rock Album of the Year.

She’s a rebel,
She’s a saint,
She’s the salt of the earth,
And she’s dangerous,
She’s a rebel,
Vigilante,
Missing link on the brink,
Of destruction

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A woman angry that her new puppy had died pushed her way into a dog breeder’s home and repeatedly hit her on the head with the dead Chihuahua, authorities said.
(And, yes, my sometimes twisted sense of humour comes into play here, as I recall the Dr Demento classic, Dead Puppies

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My Dear
Your Kind Attention
the best i found
you are the one and only
the love of your life is waiting for you
Much much happier today

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Today is an anniversary for two completely different and unrelated things.
In 2000, I started keeping a weblog. This weblog. I did it manually at first, and then switched to Blogger and then to Greymatter, and then to Movable Type, which I’m still using to this day. So, six years I’ve been wasting time and bandwidth here (although the archives don’t go back that far; I couldn’t be bothered to change them all over).
The other anniversary is from 1996. It was on the sixth of June 1996 that I suddenly realized quite to my shock that I was in love with Andrew. I’d known him for a couple of years and we were friends, but it suddenly just hit me. Wham. In love. Quite shocked, I was.
I told Andrew about it, and he was… condescending. Kind, sweet, but he basically told me I’d get over it.
Two weeks or so later, it hit him, too. (Bit like the flu, when I describe it that way…)
Well, ten years later here we are. Still in love. It’s not the same heart-thumping, dizzy-making stuff it used to be, but that’s okay. I’d never get anything done if I was busy staring at Andrew with puppy dog eyes all the time (and we’d never get out of bed, which is probably too much information, eh?). I still have my moments when I look at him and think, “Gosh, I love him.” When he catches me looking at him that way he smiles and says, “You’ve got it bad.”
Which, of course, is exactly what I say to him when I catch him looking at me that way…

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