bored? well, obviously

Really, what is so interesting about weather? And what weird things are going on now?

I've decided that it's That Time Of Year again - that time of year when the sun shines like a big bowling ball and it's finally warm and picnicky and happy tree weather.
I don't know why I've decided this, because:

1. It is never warm in Ireland. Ever. In June it rains and in July there is usually one day when you can go without a jacket. Maybe.
2. It is winter here. In fact, yesterday was the 2-degree-cold Winter Solstice. It was dark by five.

this is meant to be the winter solstice.
Come on, it's kind of cool.

So, I'm not exactly sure where I was going with the whole Summer thing. Maybe because, strangely enough, it looks like summer outside. And if you wake up at eleven and walk down to the shops, you can wear sunglasses and a shirt and you really don't need a jacket.

And, because of this Winter/Summer weather (wummer? sinter?), weird stuff's been GOING ON.
(Well, it's got something to do with it)
Like this:

1. have started watching reality TV (people who are housewives and like, love it, darling, people who live on Shores, people who date footballers, people who don't date footballers, people who live on farms, people who don't live on farms...)

2. am so confused about the (cold/not cold) weather situation that I've been wearing a conglomeration of weird long-sleeved layers and grandfather jumpers and Christmas socks. Then I heard that this winter only lasts, like, a month. A month! What! What am I going to do with all the ribbed socks I've bought? Throw them away? Save them for real winter?

superfluous socks...
the worst kind of sock

3. I'm drinking Lemsip. In June. I'm drinking Lemsip in June. That is something that is just wrong.

4. I've started running. No, wait, I've started waking up and going I Think I'd Like A Run Today. I'm becoming one of those exercise people I hate.

Maybe it's time to read a self-help book or something. Maybe all this is just me with nothing to do. Or maybe I've actually crossed over into a parallel universe where the weather is weathery, the TV is real, and it looks like summer when, goddammit, it just isn't.

Bon Blog!

And here are some Things That Might Be A Little Bit Interesting:

this cutesy homemade indie mag from Australia called Frankie - there are far worse ways of spending your time than reading about Benedict Cumberbatch and people who draw for a living!

annnndd... because I have been watching so much Australian telly, and because I have realised that said Australian telly is brimmed-full with ads, I have become friendly with some of these ads, such as the ones for Kia (now I can say iPod Connectivity and Big Boot Space and Seats Eight Comfortably in a pretty authentic accent) and the one for South Australia which has this song from Into The Wild called Rise by Eddie Vedder in it. Check it out, it's like going out to the beach and, I don't know, drawing your name in the sand or something.

ufos, veggies, and getting told off by 14-year-olds

since when was not knowing your vegetables a crime? 

stupid evil pear... I'll know your code someday and then YOU WILL BE SORRY

I know lots of things. I know how many times Roger Federer has won the French Open (once). I know what a mohair jumper looks like. I know how to cook a killer carbonara and I know how to order five slices of ham from a deli in German. I know what to do with a long division sum (barely), I know a Robert Frost poem off by heart, and I know what happened in the 2006 World Cup final.

What I don't know, however, is anything about vegetables. Or fruit. Or herbs, for that matter.

this is more like my kind of checkout

And why am I telling you this? Why am I admitting my deep, dark secret? Because it has been cruelly exposed in my current job as a supermarket cashier. Little old ladies with huge bags of some unidentified leafy thing smile at me and ask me how I am. I smile back and say EH, WHAT IS THIS? Their faces fall. What am I, a cave-dweller? A philistine? Or - worse - an American? No, I'm just someone who doesn't know the difference between a head of cabbage and a head of lettuce. Or between a turnip and a swede (that's a hard one, but there's no excuse for mixing up cabbages and lettuces, no excuse AT ALL). 

What all these people don't want to realise/don't actually realise is that they have help when they buy their vegetables. They have little digital signs that say Psst! Pink Ladies!, and I'm A Broccolini, and No, Not Over There, I'm The Fennel Root You Want, and even I'm A Sweetcorn Even Though I Look Like A Leek.
I don't get help like that. When it comes to veggies, I'm all alone. 

The other day I had a particularly vile experience. Two girls came to pay for their basket of Sweets and Other Crap 14-Year-Olds Buy When They're Left In The House For The Weekend. No problem. 14-year-olds aren't going to be buying herbs are they? Or difficult-looking asparagus/bean shoot cross-breeds? Not a bit of it. 14-year-olds like twizzlers (whatever they are), sugar, gum, and coke.

Safe in this knowledge, I was happily scanning through boiled sweets and rubbery dolphins and sugared fish and ready-made pizzas when I saw the unthinkable. I saw the UFOS.

Unidentifiable Fruity Objects. 

WHAT'S THIS? I ask, about a squashed, dry purple thing. 

The girls looked at one another before one said, in a, may I say, utterly disparaging tone, A PASSIONFRUIT?, barely hastening to add YOU IDIOT after it.
Then there were the weird-shaped lemons.
WHAT ARE THESE? I asked again, hoping for a somewhat warmer response.
Are you serious? IT'S A YELLOW SQUASH. Pan-faces. Expressionless, like little middle-school judges. For the record, I have NO IDEA what they were planning on doing to that 'yellow squash' (probably just some made-up Australian thing), but I fear for the poor thing.

is this the lettuce?

.... or is this? Not so easy now, eh?

 By the time they left, with their incorrectly scanned watermelon (stupid thing comes under WATERMELON and not, as I previously believed, MELON, WATER), the only thing going through their heads was, undoubtably, Who is this kid?

I was wondering the same thing. Who is this kid? Who am I? Well, before today, I was someone who thought they knew their parsnips from their peppers, their passionfruits from their beetroot (look the same! No kidding!), their star fruits from their yellow squashes.
Not anymore. Now I was just some rookie checkout girl. And it didn't feel good. It didn't feel good at all.

As if not recognising fruit and veg and herbs wasn't bad enough (smelling a bag to check that it really was basil raised more than a few eyebrows), I also don't know the codes. You know, the ones the suave checkout chick types in with her perfectly manicured finger when you plonk down a load of carrots (carrots: 24), bananas (17), or pears (66 or loads of other unknown numbers. I thought there was only one kind of pear. Wrong again, Shona). Endless sets of 57, 103 (broccoli? God I'm getting good!), 60, 218... (No! Broccoli 107! God DAMN IT! What's 103 then? Leeks?)

I think I should get back to enjoying my time off, to be honest. Next week I'll be back on till, failing to recognise coriander, mixing up ironbarks and butternuts, desperately looking for MELON, WATER, and charging someone $12 for two carrots just out of spite.

I have power too, you know.

OTHER MADE-UP NAMES FOR FRUIT-RELATED ITEMS
zucchini - what the hell happened to a good old courgette?
eggplant - this has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with eggs, or indeed plants. At least aubergine is a colour
capsicum - ? pepper not good enough for you?
rock melon - why does a regular melon deserve a stupid name? Because it looks like a rock? Not buying it, Australia, not buying it
lebanese cucumber - otherwise known as a smallish cucumber
50 types of apple - can't they just all be the same price? No? Unfair world

Bon Blog! (non appetite!)

summer days: accomplishments (part one)

what I've actually been doing in these wintry-sunny climes

not so sunny June: it rained here yesterday... all day 

Since I've been here (a week and a half, now that you ask), I've discovered many things about myself. Not in an Eat, Pray, Love way, or even a Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants way (don't have shared pants/sisterhood, unless you count the pyjama bottoms my friend left in my other friend's flat that everyone wears. Especially me. Why bring pants when you can use pants FOR FREE?).

who doesn't want them?

Anyway. Here's a little bit of what I call What I Did For The First Time On My Working Holiday (bad title)
Behold!

1. went on a plane on my own! (twice)

2. cooked my first fried egg! (and it was good, too)

3. ate dinner with a fork and spoon! (Australians love their spoons, they do)

no room for knives at this table

5. worked at a till! (NOT my best work, dare I say. Turns out I'm not-so-adept at remembering codes for potatoes and runner beans, or packing bags with milk and sugar. But I am good at remembering the banana code: 17, and don't you forget it)

6. used Skype! ('used' = overstatement)

7. bought something in sports shop that wasn't for school! (it was for work)

8. blogged twice in one day! (sorry)

9. went to a Food and Wine festival where there wasn't any food! (but there was plenty of wine)

More updates on WIDFTFTOMWH (definitely need to rethink that) next week/whenever

Bon Blog!

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somewhere out there... but not on Facebook

my unsupportive family, and watch out, there's a Facebook under the bed

you have absolutely no messages... or views

Spoiler Alert: RANT. Proceed with Caution. 
Do I wish that more people read my blog? Yes. Do I promote it to anyone I know? No.
Am beginning to think this is maybe not the best way to go about Blogging. Other people with blogs TELL OTHER PEOPLE about them.
Better. But now I'm in Australia I'm hardly going to ring up everyone I know and say Listen, Read My Blog Bitch, Read It Now! And I'm too self-conscious to establish Somewhere Boring with its own custom made Facebook page. (Stupid shy blog.)
I have gone as far as linking it to people on my Facebook, though, so I'm not a total lost cause, right? WRONG. Linking is not the same as doing something productive. Harumph.

Besides Facebook and All That, the funny thing is, I told my family about it. Now, you would think that of all the people in the universe, they would at least be curious. Nope. Not a bit of it. I emailed my mom the other day with a casual Oh, By The Way, Check Out My Blog. She didn't check it out. All my views that day were from the United States and, unless she's leading some kind of double life, I'm pretty sure she's not in Seattle or something. If she had a blog, I'd read it. God.
Maybe I should publish my diary online: OMG today Dom and Ella broke up! Feeling SAD.
Maybe not.

Back to the days of talking to myself in a rash and inexplicable manner. Back to the drawing board. You're right, it is a bit sad talking to nobody. But Facebook is a big, scary machine that demands its own capital letter before it allows itself to be recognized by my computer's dictionary. I can't deal with that sort of thing. The name of this place doesn't even have a capital letter. But maybe I'll get some gumption somewhere and get Facebooking (yes, yes, the capital letter's there. Sheesh.)
Maybe one day I'll do it, before I've resorted to radio broadcasts, newspaper ads, or, god forbid, flyers with pictures of tumbleweed on them.

(Then again, I could try putting ads in the newspaper. 'WANTED: READERS'. Now that's what I call a good idea.)

the swot, the slacker, and some bad exams

The usual suspects of the exam hall, all compared to the master of brain-related exploits, the Brain from Pinky and the Brain

The more familiar you become with exam halls, the more familiar you become with those that lie within. And who are they? The swot, the overconfident one, and, everyone's favourite, the slacker. Bon appetite.

1. The One Who Thinks They Know Everything

thinks is the Brain. Is not the Brain.

Before:
Ugh. Met her at the start of my first exam. She was chattering away at full speed to a group of vaguely interested onlookers about how she 'read this great book about ha ha Chaucer ha ha'.
This is NOT FUNNY. What is funny about that? We all read a great book about Chaucer. It was on our bloody course.

What not to say: The above two sentences.

During:
You can just see her. Scribbling notes down like the new time. Asking for more paper. Looking anxiously around. Fixing her nails. Going to the bathroom. Asking questions that go unanswered. Taking off her jumper. Putting it on. Scratching her leg. Drinking water. Eating.
Distracting it may be, but it is a bit of a funny meltdown.

After:
Comes out laughing. Chats about how she 'didn't know it but answered it anyway' (followed by an expectant look: what do you want, a round of applause?) then sweeps off to go and get coffee before the next exam.

See Also: don't bother, this one's in a league of her own

2. The One Who 'Doesn't Know Anything' But Actually Knows Everything

is actually the Brain

Before:
'Stressing' about how he doesn't know anything, peering out over his perfectly-ordered folder.
Seriously, he says, I know nothing!

What not to say: 'I know nothing!' - you'll only encourage him.

During:
Scribbling like a madman, scratching tiny, beautiful words into the yellow paper with his one pen. Finishes 10 minutes before the end and spends that time LOOKING OVER IT.
(Who does that?)

After:
Quietly agreeing with everyone who tells him they failed. Definitely, he says, didn't know anything.
But we know. Oh, we know. We see that twinkle in his wily eyes. We know that he knows, well, everything.

See also: the Eager Beaver, the Perfectionist, the Overconfident Achiever


3. The One Who Actually Doesn't Know Anything

is nothing like the Brain

Before:
She's late. She doesn't have her student card but evades a fine like all good slackers.

During:
Writes idly, like she's doing a crossword (I don't think she knows what a crossword is, though). Draws on her arm and is given out to by the supervisor. Goes to the bathroom every 15 minutes before leaving after an hour.

After:
Probably spent the last hour of the exam outside smoking. Because that's where she is when everyone else comes out. Overheard talking about 'some Medieval shit' to a cool friend.

See also: The 'Why Not?' Repeat Student, The Too Cool For School Kid

I haven't planned ahead enough to tell you what I'll be writing about next, but meantime look at these:

http://funnyexam.com/ - as seen on the Graham Norton show and including such gems as this:

And catch up with the Brain again: 

http://www.warnervideo.com/pinkyandthebrain/

Bon Blog!