Entries Tagged 'Random thoughts' ↓

Hmmm, this new batch of peanut butter tastes very peanutty. Not a bad thing, I just like the sweetness it normally has. It’s the exact same stuff as we always get … perhaps it’s something to do with peanut butter going back to being made in Australia rather than China because there is a big ‘Made in Australia’ label on the front of it that I never noticed before. But I thought that was Sanitariuam, our peanut butter is Kraft.

Bring back the sugar!

Such is the wonder of technology that instead of opening the mail box after work and finding a dog-eared postcard with smudged writing and a foreign stamp that’s taken 2 weeks to travel from the other side of the world that you can open your email in the morning and find a real-time photo texted from your friend sitting on a balcony overlooking the town of Positano on the Italian east coast! Wish you were here indeed!

I don’t think I’ve ever had peanut butter cookies before – the only peanut butter baking I can remember having in recent times were the peanut butter cakes that my Orange Friend from Chicago sent me.

Until Jif turned up at work yesterday with some peanut cookies that he’d made. Yes, a boy that bakes! Oh my god YUM. I was lucky enough to get 2 today. Might have to try making some myself.

In this day and age it seems that many things, physical things, are getting smaller. Yet our passports are getting bigger. I just had to do all the witnessing and signing myself away as a bona fide passported NZ Citizen to verify that my friend was indeed who she said she was (and Jif was surprised saying he just mailed his forms to Louisiana and they mailed him back a passport, no witnesses required) and in the course of that saw her old passport. It’s smaller, thinner and softer than mine. Fits in your pocket. I’ve got one of the new ones with a fully printed inside plastic cover (i.e. no real photo, just a print) and the huge page-sized hard plastic electronic chip thing which I think acts as some kind of RF ID tag.

Hmmm, just thought it was interesting with all these tiny phones, computers, microchips, hairdryers etc coming out these days.

You know you’re spending too much time at work when … you set the delay start on the washing machine to finish its cycle at about the time you expect to be home … 10 hours … and that’s to the start of the cycle … which on European front-loaders is 1 hour 58 minutes.

I was chatting to someone a week or so ago about plans they have for moving on and saving and travelling and making changes. They’ve been doing the same thing for 2 years – just aaaaaaages to this person who is actually under 20 years old. It got me thinking that for me 2 years sometimes feels like nothing – it can fly by so quickly. Yes time flies. And why as we get older does it fly faster? I’m sure many have pondered this question. One thought I had is that once you’re ‘grown up’ you have to start making decisions for yourself and without realising it, all these decisions and getting yourself on with your life actually take up more time than you realise. When we’re young and our parents make decisions for us, all we’re doing is waiting around for what to do next – waiting for class to start, waiting for our dinner, waiting to be told to get the washing in, waiting until we can get drive, waiting until we can move out etc etc. But once all that’s happened and everything becomes our own decision, that we have to make, even if it is to get up and go to work, that it all takes up time. Hmmm, bit of rambling there!

It’s always nice even though delivered in a roundabout way to get a surprise reaction to your age. I was talking to one of the young Fuel baristas just now and as you’d expect after a discussion about hairdressers and hair colour and hair style and greying she asked how old I was.

And she said:

“Oh my God I didn’t realise you were that old.”

It’s a compliment. Honestly. Poor girl was back pedalling like crazy.

Watched a man reverse parallel park a car today with the help of his woman passenger who got out to use hand signals … quite a common scene actually … I do find it interesting that men who are supposed to be great drivers need help to park though, but then again that embarrassment is probably easier to suffer than having the woman drive everywhere. Especially if she can 10-out-of-10 reverse parallel park on either side of the road.

If you do need help from hand signals to park I definitely prefer the hands held in view of the driver or mirrors to indicate decreasing distance to a hittable object far better than the madly flapping come hither type gesture and shouting which doesn’t give you any idea of actually how close you are to the object so you take it slowly despite the  shouting by the hand-waver that you’ve got “heaps of room! Back back back!!!”  No surprise the couple using this technique today got into strife. He was surprised to nudge the car behind and she was defensive shouting “didn’t you hear me?”

Is it a plane? Is it a meteor? No it’s a big shiny new thing that will keep the Mister smiling for months and make him even more reluctant to come home at nights!

Update … moments later …

Aaaaaand the office grinds to a halt.

Is there really any need to burst into tears the minute you enter the exam room and see your dentist, whom you’ve seen regularly over many many years, even though you’re now on the coveted 18-month visit list (and the same for the hygienist which is an even harder privilege to attain) from when he first arrived at the practice and had a room out the back and now has a room with a view and his name on the building and the same assistant for many years, and really is a lovely guy who knows you hate seeing him but welcomes you with a comforting smile anyway and always comments on the orange and hardly ever gives a filling, well not for the last 4 years anyway, and when he does my god does he sweat with nerves because you’re so wound up, and the appointment is only 7 minutes long because your teeth are in excellent excellent condition?

Honestly! I’m getting worse and worse as every 18 months passes.