I've had every intention of getting myself a successor to his Lordship but have been biding my time for several reasons. One was the extreme busyness of the intervening weeks, two was the expense,  three was to give myself time to decide whether I wanted to go with another Burmese, four, the choice between an adult or a kit and finally, five, to give myself time to get over the trauma.

So I'd been saying, "I'll look at getting another cat once May 10th (party) has been and gone" because there was just too much going on before then... In truth, there really was no question I'd get another Burmie, I was just so completely charmed by Chino that I wasn't able to look past them.  Which of course, introduces the issue of the expense.  A kitten would cost $500 or more, completely unjustifiable so soon after having spent that to get Chino so the next logical step was to look at getting an adult.

It seemed a female might be good, maybe a girl would be a little less likely to wander, an adult because she'd be cheaper, and maybe used to living inside. I'm not wholly keen to allow a new pet to have such free reign as Chi did, so after some bulletin board hopping it seemed that a breeding female who was a couple of years old and no longer required by the breeder and who had not lived outside might be the answer to my cat shaped vacuum.

Once our major conference had been and gone I was browsing the web, as is my habit, and thought to put in the search string 'adult rehome burmese' and stumbled across a forum offering "Princess Lulubelle" as free to a good home. I dropped the owner a line, hardly expecting a free Pedigree Burmese to be still available and to my great delight, she was!

After long introductions, the exchange of photos and stories of Chino and Lulu, and the satisfaction both that I'd be a suitable family for Lulu (on their part) and that transporting such precious cargo from Queensland to New South Wales was affordable (on my part) the process of adoption was begun.  As it happens, she's only a year old, younger than Chino was and was a precious family pet who needed a new home as her 'Mum' turned out to be serverly allergic to her.  After a little under a year of trying to moderate the symptoms it really just needed to be that Lulu went live with someone else.  So sad for Lulu's best little girl friend Jade(4) but very, very happy for me.

For various reasons it wasn't until this week that it was possible to get her here, which in the grand scheme was just perfect timing.  I've let out little squeaks around the internet that I was going to be getting a new cat but just didn't want to make it 'official' until she was actually here... not that I'm a great believer in fate or Murphy's Law... but more as a disappointment preventative if anything did go horribly wrong...

So finally, here we are, it's Wednesday May 14th and Lulu has weathered the long trek from the Sunshine Coast to the Big Smoke, still smelling of the straw used to line her travelling cage (poor little blossom must be well pleased to be out of that) and she's found the sun spot on my living room floor to have a snooze in.

She's given the flat the once over, found and used the litter tray, found the food and had a bit of a 'nom, nom, nom' snuggled me a few times and by and large made herself right at home! 

If, as I am, you're a bit of a believer in a benevolent deity, you look at situations like this and think there are just too many perfect elements to this story not to think He understands how important having a puss is to me and that all the little dreams in my heart in regards to my next puss have been neatly put in to place.

You can't ask for more than that.

(as I write this closing she's trying to climb the louvre windows... can anyone say 'deja vu'?!)

Enjoy!

It's been a month since I actually had my birthday, my 40th birthday, which I celebrated with my fabulous family in NZ, but I only celebrated it with my Australian family today due to all manner of work commitments and busyness in the intervening time.

I stood on the step looking out at everyone assembled, such a diverse group, all of them with different connections some to each other but all of them connected to me somehow and I was blown away.

I have some utterly terrific friends.

There's the Packrats and Shoo who let me have the party at their place.  Poor Shoo spent the whole day in massive pain with a back thing (waaaah not fair, universe!).   Fabulous house, nice little verandah to perform from (the party was an 'open mic' afternoon... just to give my choir a chance to sing - others participated too... was fab!).  It was utterly perfect venue, well complemented by the gorgeous afternoon!! 

There's the Captain and his two girls who charmed everybody with a rendidtion of Elevator Love (a capella, the brave little souls) which was delightful.  The Captain gave a lovely speech though he outed me as 'hormonal' at work... really, I think I'm just a stroppy bint some of the time... but maybe that's the definition of hormonal... who knows?

There's my fabulous bestest mate Kirk, the guy, and their kids who have added me to the fabric of their family.  I would be lost without them.  Kirk's my right hand in the choir and so much more.  Not enough words to describe how important they are in my world.  Not nearly enough.

There's Flash who wrote me a poem.  Not just any poem but a real live beatnik poem complete with the blowing out of a candle at the end.  (Atmospheric babe, atmospheric.)  I'll wager that it was the first ever beatnik poem whose primary subject was a geek girl... I'll wrestle him for the text of it and post it here... it really was too funny... in fact I might even record him reciting it...  Look out....

There were our awesome choir members, a few missing but it was great to give them a chance to show off, and for me to do a little soloing.. (it was MY party and I sang because I WANTED to...).  What a sterling bunch of people... we just need to get a whole lot more rehearsing in and a decent repertoire so we can do a show at the end of the year.  It would be great fun...

There are the Dgroup girls - Kafx who I work with and who squeals lovingly at me often, and the others who I've really only been getting to know this year, and who I want to spend a whole lot more time with, what fab chicks!!  (PIA, going to fortnightly hang-outs was inspired!).

The food was plentiful, the tiny bass amp that 'the guy' bought along was more than enough to amplify us, (thank goodness i didn't hire one in) and people stayed all afternoon, no one was in any great hurry to leave.  So we must have got something right!

There are so may others I could mention, I'd be here (in bed!) all day, there were about 40 people there.  But to top it all off Coldie called me up as I was packing the last of the stuff into the car and invited me out to a movie, just so I wasn't going home to hang out in an empty (very untidy) house after leaving the afternoon on such a high!  Thoughtful, huh??  We saw Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and were charmed by it.  Cute story, set beautifully in the 1940's such fabulous style!  The perfect end to an absolultely fabulous day.

Remember Me?  I used to live here.   Lately I'm not sure where I am but here are a few random tidbits so you don't get too hungry for lack of attention.

~~~~~

I'm having a (delayed) birthday party Saturday (actual event was back in April) and have been taking a leaf out of the 'it will be alright on the day' school of party planning.  Also have notes in the margin of the 'order everything online' chapter and am fully immersed in the 'cross your fingers and hope for the best' epilogue.

Which is just fine if all you want to do is throw a couple of salads (as made by someone else) on the table, switch on the bbq for everyone to cook their own meat and basically just loll around and enjoy everybody's company.  My kind of party... schmooze and cruise, no need to impress, decorations not required etc...

BUT

If you have this harebrained idea to get people up and entertaining the troops you perhaps ought to have read the 'plan ahead and get organized' prologue of the party planning manual and nodded even to the 'if anything can go wrong it probably will' chapter.  I have this on inside authority because it's t-minus 36 hours and I'm still without a PA system. 

THANK GOD I have a mac and a usb input machine thingummy because at a pinch we can plug a mic and a piano into those and then even into a dodgy stereo and get some approximation of amplified sound...  (or hire something... which isn't exactly fulfilling the 'keep it under budget' requirements.)

Either way I'm still holding myself to the 'for God's sake, don't panic' sub-title of the 'So you want to plan a party - what were you thinking?' addendum.

(Fi, you know that if you were coming you could bring the SingStar and I'd be having NONE of these problems... I'm just saying...)

~~~~~

I have been writing to a [probably not yellow] submarine.  Or more precisely to an American Sailor who lives one one.

It's a story that's begging for a whole convoluted yarn I could string you along with but really, I'm just too tired to make something up.  Before you ask it's not a romantic kind of writing, more like a pen pals kind of correspondence that has now been going on for more than 6 years. 

Pretty amazing really.  I never ever had a pen pal that lasted that long before.

That is all.  I just wanted to write some approximation of the phrase "I'm writing to an American Sailor on a Submarine and he's writing back." 

Just because I could.

~~~~

Just to prove how geeky I am I now read Wil Wheaton's blog.  He's a geek/nerd writer and if you're any kind of Sci Fi watcher he played Wesley Crusher on one of the Star Trek shows.  His blog's about as geeky as John Mayer's is cool.

Which for this chick is actually pretty cool (I mean geeky, I mean cool).  Oh, you know what I mean.

~~~~

1. Please... a baby doll dress, cute [tiny] shoes AND a black thick woollen winter tea cosy hat?  What were you thinking?
2. I'm now no longer a menace on the road and it only cost me $1100 to make it so.
3. I am continuously at the mercy of well meaning idiots... I would like to reach out to them... with a baseball bat... hard... probably more than once, even.
4. It's approaching that time of the month... yes, this could be a factor in the baseball bat impulse.
5. Soup night.  Tomato.  How long is the grace period on expired sour cream do you think?  If I'm not twittering tomorrow you'll know it wasn't 3 days...
6. My house still smells like last night's curry.
7. Cooked 3 nights in a row.  It used to be that cooking all week was a record... 3 DAYS?  I need help.
8. Potatoes won't bugger up tomato soup, they may even save it.
9. Only took my family 5 days to acknowledge my graduation... with the exception of Mum (aww, bless).  I definitely live too far away; either that or my achievements are considered insignificant... I'm opting for the former.
10. I find getting to the root of what someone needs from me next to impossible.  Dee 101.  Need a hug?  Good practice to say "Dee, I need a hug, would you be so kind?" Easy.  Does compute.  Other less direct means may yield mixed results.

I hear you blogosphere... I asked myself the same question in the early stages of owning a Twitter account... Can I just say, that was in Feb 07?  I've had an account that long making me a bit of an early-ish adopter maybe... but not early appreciator... (tis a werd?) I actually really only started using it properly this month.

So, what is it? 

Twitter is micro-blogging tool for keeping up with people in real-time. It's based on the simple question "What are you doing now?" and it works like this.

• I create a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com
• I invite friends to follow me on Twitter
• I choose people to follow on Twitter
• Whenever the spirit moves me, I tell Twitter what I'm doing, thinking etc in 140 characters or less and Twitter tells all my followers.
• Whenever the people I'm following update with a new 'Tweet' I get the message in any of my chosen tools for keeping up to date (more about that further down the page).

Twitter can inform for me in a gazillion ways.  It can SMS my posse with my my update (depends on how they've got Twitter set up) and I can get SMS from any of my posse.  I haven't got into this side of it because I can't figure out if it costs me money...

It can be added into my Facebook account and be used to look after my status updates.  THIS is the primary reason I started getting in to Twitter.  I LOVE Facebook status updates - and being able to update Facebook, without being IN Facebook seemed a very good idea... especially as Facebook is blocked at work for most of the day...

Having Twitter meant that I could update the blog with status updates!  Whee... little tiny bits of 'what am I doing' at Singular Scene without having to make a new post.  I know... a little bit tragic... but fun nonetheless... the technique of doing this involves getting the 'add twitter to your website' code from my twitter account and pasting it into my blog templates.  It also required a bit of css coding to make it look like the rest of the blog... I'll post more on that over at the Web Princess Blog... (remind me to tell you about the Web Princess Blog...)

I also have a Firefox add-in (seriously, get Firefox) called TwitterFox that sits in the status bar at the bottom of my browser which keeps a counter of current Tweets I can check out at any time and on which I can click to add a Tweet of my own and given that, when you know how much time I spend in front of my computer you'll understand why I don't really need to update Twitter from my phone...

Basically, it's another form of blogging that's a bit less word intensive and a bit more immediate.  It has proven useful for one particular man as it helped keep him out of an Egyptian jail! recently.  The rest of the time it keeps your friends and relations up to date with the inanities and enormities of your existence with very little effort required on your part.

And on that point alone it could be a curse or a blessing... So tell me, do you Twitter?

Ba-dum Tish!

Ian, Yay, Semele and I, met up for a somewhat annual Anzac Day (ish) wibmeet at the Wok Bar today.

It really is lovely to sit at a restaurant on the deck with the sea breeze keeping the air fresh on such a lovely autumn afternoon, even lovelier to do so in such good company! No shortage of things to talk about and at least one outlandish topic of conversation, this pretty normal for us. This time around it was the suggestion of a new ministry, an Orthodox/Pentecostal fellowship headed up by Ian, I think I'll be called in for Pentecostalising such a congregation... could be fun...

We finished of our lunch (3 pad thais - pads thai? and a Vietnamese beef salad - followed by fried icecream for 2 and death by chocolate and warm iced chocolate for others) with fortune cookies... I believe the others will post the contents of theirs... mine was ... "Be on alert for a new opportunity" It sounds very like a prophecy I had once (oops, that Pentecostalism just slipped out... ) I'll let you know if anything comes of it!!

All in all it's been a fabulous week/weekend with one thing and another... still, I'm looking forward to the day off tomorrow and a the chance to relax a little... it's been full speed ahead for quite some time!

I'm  pretty satisfied with my results, 2 credits, 4 distinctions and 2 high distinctions with an average of 80%, and I'm really pleased to have achieved the work required and say I've done my degree but I have to confess I thought I'd be more excited...

Maybe I'm just too egalitarian to think that a degree puts one person ahead of another...  Maybe I'm less interested in the outcome than the process of learning... and maybe my ambivalence is making you wonder why I bothered in the first place.

I bothered at all because a) because I could, b) because if I didn't I would have gone out of my tree LONG ago out of sheer boredom, c) because having now got a degree I'm eligible to pass on some that knowledge to others as a tutor and d) because I can go on to further study in some other areas I'm interested in, and maybe even at such exalted palaces as The University of Sydney rather than a Divinity College.

I'm under a bit of pressure from PIA to do my Masters.  I scoff at the prospect most of the time but I'm actually not opposed to the idea... however, should I actually decide to do it...  I won't be doing Theological Study - I've given God enough grief...

...and I don't want to push him over the edge to a heart attack...

Have a great week.  See you after 1.  Conference. 2. Anzac Day. 3. Graduation. 4. Wibmeet. 5. All of the above...

You can use the 'sign in' option.   For the first time you'll have to select the 'sign up' option and put in all your details and basically sign in to be a member on this site.  I'll approve you as a commenter and next time you come back it should remember you and you won't need to put details in in future!

If you don't wish to sign up to this site then you can sign in anonymously, by which you do your usual name, email, and site info, click remember me and comment as you've always done...

The other business of OpenID and so on is a bit of a mystery to me... I'll figure that out in due course and let you know how it works...

Oh, and if when you've signed in to comments and you're good to go and you want your own little photo/avatar to show up next to your comments you need to go to http://en.gravatar.com/ with your pic in your hand and sign up for your globally recognized avatar... THEN... whenever you sign in with the email address you used to sign up to gravatar it will appear in the comments here (or any other gravatar enabled site)... (oh, and if you have a gravatar that isn't showing up you might want to check which email address you're using to sign in here...).

So, there you go... Singular Scene Commenting 101! Now that you know how... why not show me some comment love!!!

Actually I remember it I just don't remember when it WAS.  But it was an uncomfortable encounter (for me) as the topic of conversation tended towards just how in lerv he was and how fabulous internet dating is! 

Tough to take when he'd been the object of my affection for far to long to be considered sensible... (yes, the phrase 'he's just not that into you' was applicable).

In any case, I've moved on, so too has he... moved on to matrimony and I think I'd seen him 1x in the last 18 months.  I'd only heard vaguely that he was married but it has since been confirmed that a wedding did indeed take place.  Brilliant, jolly good show, old chap.

Not bitter.

Nuh ah...

Anyway, since I moved to my wee garden flat I've been in vaguely the same suburb as he had, to my knowledge, been living so I was surprised we'd never bumped into each other.

(You know what's coming, right?)

That was until about 2 weeks ago.

Turns out he's living less than a block from my place.  Turns out we can still find plenty to talk about, rugby, work, church etc.  Turns out he STILL looks you in the eye when he talks to you, like you're the ONLY person in the room/on the sidewalk, turns out he still has the bluest eyes you ever saw.

Turns out I don't fancy him any more*.

Phew...

So I'm compromising.  Which is a little dicey... there isn't supposed to be any compromise in Jesus.  At least there has been a lot of 'black and white' in my background... so if this post finishes before it is.. well... finished... you know I've crossed some line and have been struck by a massive lightning bolt or something... 

Anyway, back to John... could be anyone but isn't ... it's this John.

I came across a post from his blog on one of my daily reads, and now he's one of my daily reads...  I'm impressed by him.  He's always been one of my favourite songwriters, now he's one of my favourite bloggers.  He did freak me out a bit by dating Jessica Simpson... proof positive that even really creative intelligent people  do REALLY STUPID things... but he's probably grown up a bit since then...

He sings this.[Link to iTunes]

Take all of your wasted honor.
Every little past frustration.
Take all of your so called problems,
Better put 'em in quotations.

Say what you need to say (x8)

Walkin' like a one man army,
Fightin' with the shadows in your head.
Livin' up the same old moment
Knowin' you'd be better off instead

If you could only...Say what you need to say (x8)

Have no fear for givin' in.
Have no fear for giving over.

You better know that in the end
It's better to say too much, than never to say what you need to say again.

Even if your hands are shaking,
And your faith is broken.
Even as the eyes are closin',
Do it with a heart wide open.

(A Wide Heart)

Say what you need to say (x7)

Say what you need to, Say what you need to...

Say what you need to say.

It's my new favourite song.

My world is teetering.  You've probably guessed that if you read this often enough.  I'm not sure what it's on the edge of.  I'm not sure if it's the whole turning 40 thing.  I'm not sure if it's time to leave work. I'm not sure if it's time to leave Australia, I'm not sure if I've given up hope of ever seeing the motherhood dream come to pass. I'm not sure.

I'm just not sure.

I don't like how this place feels.  I should be talking to Jesus about it.

But I'm listening to John instead.

Dear Lord but that I could get it to look like this myself...

Do you like the new me?  In truth the latest incarnation of me probably ought to be more sophisitcated given my maturing years ,but this little lady was just too 'me' to leave langushing in my files... the Mac, the sofa, the brunette... sadly the diminutive stature isn't quite 'true to form', ah well, you can't have it all... I wish I could say I drew her but I suck at drawing and I'd bought her at istock to use in my birthday party invitations... I found something else that suited those better but I couldn't bear not to use this illo somewhere else... here seemed a fitting place...

There are a few changes that will creep in in the next few days... I've got to get my flickr button back in, among other things... but for now relax, enjoy the new atmosphere at SS.  And let me know if having the comments links at the top of the entry is a pain in the proverbial... I'll move those entry details if they're inconveniently placed to the general consensus...