She’s Apples

There are few things in life that will make me sit still and relax. Doing a single task just seems so inefficient when there are not enough hours in the day as is. I’ll knit and watch TV, I’ll paint my nails and do a crossword. I’ll bake chilli choc brownies while catching up with emails, mopping the floor and making the shopping list for the next day. Multitasking is the order of the day, all day, every day.

Except tonight.

Tonight I sat on the lino in the kitchen and watched my little crablet as he sat in the mouth of a large shell, chowing down on a sizable chunk of octopus tentacle.

I looked on, mesmerised, when he carefully extended a single pointy toe, planted its end in a lonesome piece of scallop meat and dragged the whole thing into his spiral den in one smooth practised movement.

I swallowed a little snort as he shoved as much of the octopus as he could manage underneath his little body, to the point that he looked remarkably like a very leggy chicken roosting on an ostrich egg.

I smiled like a kid at Christmas when both McShrimpy and the baby damsel motored over to the seemingly unattended piece of scallop, moved as if to liberate it, saw the crablet attached to the other end and then quickly decided that they needed to be somewhere else.

I smiled again when the shrimp found a stray chunk of dinner and reverse parked into a rocky nook to get his fill. I watched on as his stomach filled and swooshed like he had a head full of quicksilver.

After all of that, I pulled the corner off a small slice of scallop, popped my hand into the tank and offered it to my beautiful little sea star. She panicked at first and clung to the rock. Then, after I gave her a little tickle and she realised it was food, she reached out a little stubby arm and carefully took the piece of meat from my fingers.

There are some things that need your full and undivided attention, no matter how many other jobs there are to do. Feeding the inhabitants of the rock pool tank is definitely one of them.

I’m not. Although it does feel a bit like I’ve visited deadishness and then been microwaved into a state of being.

The world does not exist unless it is surrounded by one of <these> and one of </these>, and that is a rather sad thing. I think I’d forgotten just how all-consuming study can be. I didn’t say it at the time, but I certainly thought it.

How hard can it be?

Famous last thoughts I’m afraid. On top of trying to bend my brain to this new way of thinking, or indeed thinking at all, I’ve been forced to do much translation to different software programs and updating of the course material on the fly. This takes time and energy and has the unfortunate yet understandable side effect of making me rather exhausted and more than a little unpleasant to be around.

Unless you come bearing high carb foodstuffs and a hot caffeinated beverage, you are cruisin’ for a bruisin’ baby.

And really, I don’t have the energy to be beating the tripe out of unhelpful people, nor do I have time to fit such a frivolous activity into my schedule, so hop to it and bring a giant macadamia cookie and a double short black mmmkay?

I don’t mind the odd meme, but this one has been bugging me. It seems perfectly easy, all you have to do is “pick up a book on the top of your book stack, turn to page 123, read the first five sentences, then post the next three sentences”.

My book stack… riiiight.

Well, here goes nothing I guess. Prepare to be entertained.

The top of my stack is, rather unfortunately for the sake of this little exercise, occupied by a chunky library book called “How to Do Everything with HTML & XHTML”.

Browsers sometimes ignore mistakes in HTML code. You don’t have this luxury with XHTML. Your document must be well formed, which simply means it must contain no errors in syntax.

Positively scintillating, no? If that is not a cry for R&R time, I don’t know what is. I mean, I could have fibbed, maybe sorted through a few books and found the most wonderful sentences I could, but that’d be cheating. The meme police would have my hide for even thinking such a thing! No, I’m afraid I simply have to bore you to tears instead.
I tag Moondoggie, Ren (who no doubt hates these things but the thought of finding out what is in her book stash is simply too irresistible), Boneman and PSWC.

There comes a point in one’s life where the necessity for differentiation of furkids by urine scent alone is not required.

When I reach it, I’ll let you know.

*trudges off to wash her jacket*

It is in me bloody index finger, it is. Right on the centre of the pad. A teeny tiny flesh-coloured flexible glass-like sliver of scotch thistle prickle has found it’s way into my flesh and is actively seeking out nearby nerves and giving them little nerve wedgies.

*shudder*

I just tried to peg out a load of socks and undies. Opening each and every peg sent shivers down my spine. Writing tomorrow’s shopping list was waaaay more exhilarating than it should have been, and typing is making me sweat just that little bit. Don’t even get me started on clicking my mouse, ouch!!

*shiver*

I’ve prodded and gouged and soaked and salved but the sodding thing is nowhere to be found. At this point I’m considering a stiff drink and a set of bolt cutters.

*sweat*

No matter how good of an idea it seems at the time, bare-handed weeding of prickly dead things is not to be attempted. Ever ever. The worst bit is that, because of the lovely pricklies, I didn’t put it in the garbage bag. Oh no, I’m too sensible for that. I turfed it over the side fence so I can pick it up out the front tomorrow and put it directly into the bin. Agghh!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll give this one last shot before calling it quits for the night.

*faint*

Or in this case, Eileenette.

I have a space invader. Here I was, minding my own business, getting ready to upload my assignment to the college server, when all of a sudden I spotted a rogue link on my homepage!

My mind immediately went to visions of little 1337 haX0rz in darkened bedrooms, laughing their collective arses off at the success of their devious plan to thwart my assignment submission. After some thought, and reading the link text of “Eileenette - Work”, this seemed a little unlikely.

So I took a deep breath and clicked.

My new houseguest had practically wiped her feet at the door and brought a pot of my favourite homemade casserole. Not only was the link I clicked carefully placed in my existing menu, but the brand new page I’d ended up on was themed. I kid you not, good old Eileenette had looked at my index page and made hers fit my theme!

Want to know the best bit? She did it from scratch. There was no snaffling of source code for my intruder. That’ll earn an A+ for politeness right there.

Polite as she is, she has got to go.

My house.

My site.

Out. Out. OUT!

I’ve sent off a rather wordy email to the campus server gods via my perpetually frazzled teachers. Methinks someone in that department has sniffed one too many too many laser printers.

In the meantime, my new intruder-cum-friend is camped out on my virtual sofa bed surrounded by her improvements and assignments, whilst my assignments are safely stored away on my flash drive awaiting her eviction.

Of course, we are waiting on possibly ozone-affected tech monkeys who apparently wouldn’t know how to run a chook raffle, let alone sort out permissions on a student server, so she could be here a while…