Sheeple

I went shopping today for some clothes for my kids. I often go clothes shopping and more often than not I come home without buying anything. I’ve been wanting to buy some clothes for my nine year old daughter but each time I’ve taken a look around the junior clothes section of various stores, I’ve left empty-handed and disgusted. The clothes these days which are meant  to be worn by little girls are tacky, slutty and designed to be out of fashion within three weeks. What happened to nice, classic, pretty clothes for young girls? Why is the fashion industry intent on providing street walker style outfits for youngsters? What is this world coming to? Why am I channeling my grandmother?! I must be getting old or something…

Anyway, as I was saying, I went clothes shopping. After a recent growth spurt, my fifteen year old son has very few clothes left that fit him. I took him shopping a few months ago and he screwed up his nose and shook his head at just about everything on the clothes racks. Eventually he left with just two t-shirts and a pair of shorts – hardly a full wardrobe (plus a portable speaker system which took up more than half the budget I’d allocated for his clothes – how’d he swing that?!). So I thought I’d buy him a couple more t-shirts at least today, but the memory of his specific standards meant that I was passing over decent t-shirts too.

Well, the whole point of this post is to talk about how gullible people can be. Today I saw numerous expensive t-shirts emblazened with advertising from various famous corporations. Now I know for a fact that advertising is expensive. If you want to advertise on television you’re talking thousands of dollars for a mere thirty second spot. Try advertising your yard sale in a local paper and even then you have to shell out quite a few dollars for a measly quarter inch space. Advertising costs A LOT, and yet here are these big companies designing t-shirts with their logos on the front, charging $49.95 for the privilege of wearing them, and people are actually buying the things!

Company executives must rub their hands in Scrooge-ish glee every time they see the screen print of the latest ad on a new t-shirt design.  Since when did we all become such dumb, unthinking trend-seekers that we actually pay money for the privilege of walking around advertising some big already-mega rich corporation’s product? Do we really want to fit in that much that we can be pushed into paying for Coca Cola, or Nintendo, or Twilight’s advertising by becoming walking billboards? Gawd people are stupid. If you have to follow trends and have such little confidence in your own unique worth that you have to be up with the latest fads, step back and think for a moment what the instigators of those fads are doing to you. They’re not making you trendy or fashionable – they’re making you a deluded sucker who is helping to pay their advertising bill.

In reality, your need to follow fashion with the rest of the sheeple is making rich companies even more money than they already know what to do with, while the simple truth is, you’re down $49.95 for a crappy t-shirt with an advertisement on it.  Would you pay fifty bucks to have your neighbour’s yard sale ad printed on the front of your shirt?  No?  I didn’t think so.

PS… If you’re still unconvinced and you REALLY want to wear what will be the epitome of fashion (I swear – one day), then I can sell you a really spiffy wafflelogue.com t-shirt for a bargain $49.99.  Let me go find my Hobbytex – I’ll be right back!

Today I reformated my laptop and it is nice and squeaky-clean. On the inside anyway. The keyboard still has it’s fair share of chocolate and cherry turnover crumbs stuck amongst the keys. That’ll have to be tomorrow’s job. I had to reformat because something sinister had managed to get into my system and cause the left click key to cark itself. I couldn’t even click on the start button any more.

I quite like reformating. It’s a bit like spring-cleaning. You grit your teeth, um and ah and finally toss out some old thing you’ve been hanging on to forever but haven’t touched in ages. It feels awful the moment you are chucking it, but once it’s gone, and you realise the world hasn’t imploded without it, it’s quite cathartic.

And so it is with getting rid of all those files you stick away ‘just in case’. I always create a tidy folder because I hate icons on my desktop, and I shove everything in the tidy folder. I have no idea why I kept half the crud I had in there. But, anyway, it’s gone now, and I’m feeling quite pleased with myself about the big clean out. If only I could start on my wardrobe…

So now, as I said, I have a squeaky clean laptop, but there’s one problem. I have so many passwords, which were all saved on the computer before I wiped it, and now I’m having trouble remembering them. I’ve been pulling my hair out going through all the possible combinations I might have (cleverly) used in the past – all the way back to the kind of passwords I used when I was a naive internet virgin. (Passwords like ‘123abc’ or ‘Lucy’). Not a lot of luck, although I was able to remember the password to this site (obviously). One day I shall invent a password so clever that even I will remember it.

This is a story my dad told us when we were kids.  Somehow, I don’t think it’s true, but ah well, it does explain things…

Once upon a time there was an important meeting held at the council hall for all dogs to attend.  Dogs turned up from all over the world, and on arriving at the conference they were asked to take off their butts and  hang them on a peg in the foyer.  The meeting was halfway through when the building’s fire alarm suddenly went off.  Blind panic ensued, and the dogs raced out of the building, quickly grabbing any butt they could find as they passed through the foyer.

Once they were all safely out, they began to realise that they didn’t have their own butt.  From that time onwards, whenever a dog meets another dog, he checks to see if that dog is wearing his original, wayward behind.

The End (hey, that’s a pun!)

One could be forgiven for thinking Armageddon had come to our city this week.  A huge dust storm cast Brisbane in a weird orange glow and coated everything with a layer of red.  The dust apparently came from western New South Wales.  Here’s a picture of what our street usually looks like (on a Thursday – bin day!)…

And this is what it looked like all day during the dust storm…

Apparently there’s another one coming tomorrow.  I was driving along this morning under blue skies, but above the horizon in the distance I could see a definite line of the dust haze which is probably the encroaching dust storm.

Bribie Island aka 'Bribery' Island

Maddy is going to Bribie Island with her uncle Dave this weekend, and is all excited. She said to Ben “Ben! I need a suitcase to take to Bribery Island!”

So he gave her a knapsack to take to ‘Bribery’ Island, and she began to look through her drawers in her bedroom for clothes to take.

“Hmmm…” she said to herself, “Some of these clothes I got years ago but they still fit because I’m so small… I’ll take that as a compliment to myself!”

No thanks

My life is so boring and every day is much like the other, to the extent where I open my eyes in the morning and think to myself  ‘Groundhog Day!’  But Groundhog Day really took a turn for the worse last night.  I’d been up playing online poker in the hope that I’d push myself over the one million chip mark.  I’d had to hold my eyes open with matchsticks for the last two hours as each time my chip count was just short of the million target I’d set myself before I went to bed.  Finally, at 2am I made it past a million, and promptly closed my laptop and staggered into bed.

Our bedroom resembled a homeless shelter – Brenna, Maddy and the two dogs were all sleeping on a pile of blankets on the floor in our room after hearing a scary story earlier.  Bobbie was the only one to wake as I crept into the room – it was quite cute – Banjo had his leg over Bobbie as though he was cuddling him like a teddy bear.

I crawled into bed, turned off the lamp, struggled with my usual insomnia despite being bone weary, and eventually started to drift off to sleep.  I was awoken by a strange sound, and my foggy mind tried to make sense of the sound which I can’t even begin to describe.  I finally realised it was the damn dog vomiting.  I sprang up, switched on the lamp, to find Bobbie vomiting on the floor.  Brenna woke up and cleaned it up, and we all went back to bed.  I couldn’t sleep though so fetched my laptop and spent another couple of hours working.

So, finally, around 5am, I decided I’d better get at least a couple hours sleep, and closed the laptop up.  I lay there  for a half hour or so before I started drifting off – only to hear the vomiting noise from hell again.  Didn’t this just happen?! Springing into action, this time it was Banjo – a much bigger dog so potentially a much bigger mess.  He vomited next to my side of the bed (I spotted grass and a big stone in his puke – what on earth does that dog eat!), and Maddy’s carpet copped another lot.

Groundhog day – two lots of dropping off to sleep, two lots of vomiting just as I’d finally  fallen asleep.  The dogs are perfectly fine now – I don’t know what had gotten into them.

I just spent the evening making a new template for Maddy’s blog. She chose the picture and I built the template around it. I think it turned out pretty cute. I really enjoyed doing it – I’d love to do some more and work on a portfolio and perhaps do this for a living.

I spent the day uploading old travel pics and making pages here. I found an old disk I’d saved my photos on from a trip to the UK in 2003, and there’s some nice ones on there. The disk is very scratched though so I thought I’d better upload and save them somewhere, so you can see them here in the June/July 2003 archives. I’m not quite finished yet (I took hundreds of pics!) but hopefully I’ll get the rest of them saved here in the next couple of days.

OMG what a pallaver! We bought Banjo a special lead thing which goes over the muzzle and is supposed to control his head – he hated it. Between Ben and I, it took us ten minutes of wrestling with Banjo just to get the thing on. Ben took Banjo up and down the alleyway next to our house, and Banjo struggled with the muzzle the entire time. He managed to pull it off a number of times, and refused to budge. Ben tried to drag on the lead and the whole thing, much to Banjo’s happiness, came right off. Banjo was able to twist his head around and tried to chew on the straps which came from the muzzle part – doubt if they’re going to last long.

So I got my exercise just trying to put the stupid thing on the dog. I’m not sure what the next stage will be. Just thinking about it is exhausting!

It’s Saturday morning, the kids are at their dad’s place. I had a sleep in, and woke up at 9am. I lay in bed thinking about my life. I’ve fallen into such a rut. I’m overweight, uninspired; I feel as though I’m me living inside someone else’s body. Every day is the same…some time ago I lost ‘me’, my excitement for life. I’ve been spending years just trying to get through each day, and spending alot of it asleep to pass the hours.

So I was lying there today thinking this has got to stop, and the only one who’s going to do it is me. So I’m off to the shops to buy a dog harness and I’m going to take the dog for a walk. See that cartoon picture of the dog up there in the top of this website? That’s supposed to be Banjo, our black labrador. Well, picture him at least twice that big compared to me. He’s huge and very strong. The plan had been to take him for walks for me to get fit again. I only took him out once – he pulled me down the driveway like I was on skis. I managed to pull him back inside and haven’t dared take him out walking since. The neighbourhood here is not conducive to dog walking – there are too many dogs out on the streets that have escaped from their yards. Dogs in Australia don’t seem to be all that well socialised. As soon as they see another dog they think it’s an invitation to fight. Walking along with your dog on a leash is all fine and well until you come across a stray pit bull who wants to eat your pooch for lunch. It’s pretty scary. Banjo is huge, but a big old softie. I have no idea how he’d go if another dog had a go at him.

Anyway, I’m off to buy him a harness because apparently big dogs are easier to control with them. Then I’m going to take him for a walk. This may be the last post I ever make hehe…