I am beginning to think I am a jinx for work. The last 2 weeks when I have been working nightshift things have gone wrong with our servers. Games breaking, Cashier not working, money going missing, games missing, and today a culmination of the whole lot, websites going up and down like nobody’s business, cashier broke, the bot i use to work with is broken and wont be working till i nearly go off shift, and i need to credit people money. *screams and runs away from work*

On the bright side, my new domain (second one) is working. evillolly.net since I am known as lolly on Austnet (IRC Network) and in real life this is one of my nicks aswell. Just like Lori is a nick name for my real name! Still waiting for the domain for this blog to work. The domain will be called freakychick.net ! gotta love it.

Work sucks ass at the moment. more people complaining about things not working. I also paid for an upgrade to my Enetations commenting system, it seems to be stable recently and not disappearing as much from my blog. How nice for me. The link for Enetations is on the right, I think I spelt it wrong.

Interesting happenings in Perth today.

The ground water just north of the River in a suburb called Ashfield has been polluted with some very nasty heavy metals. Cadmium, Mercury and of course, Arsenic. There are fears that it has also leeched into the drinking water aswell, so people have been told not to use their Bores, don’t drink the water in the area at all. There is a chemical site in the same suburb which is being blamed for the mess - which has recently been purchased by another company. You can guess that they will fight the 100 million dollar clean up bill which is being talked about by the Government. They will try and claim that it wasnt them and shouldn’t be liable for the clean up. Interesting .. and really, who knows how long that water has been polluted, I guess the results will be known sooner rather than later.

This is the 3rd environmental disaster of a chemical nature in Perth in 2 years. It is concerning me about how bad the Government Separtments have or haven’t? been handling environmental problems of late, and its not just due to the Gallop Government, but also the Court Government, since this is when the problems started, and the Gallop Government has “sacked” the head of the EPA.. least I think it was that one.

I better go answer those emails ;/ *sigh*

I made the best dinner last night, and found out after I discovered my mobile and checked messages that my sister was cancelling, so all the preperations that I made were for nothing. I can’t tell you how disappointed that made me. Well I am telling you, I was DISAPPOINTED.

The food was divine - crumbed chicken breast with the most delicious salad - and I used my blender!! heh I am now a total blender convert. At first, it was just small things.. onions, seeds, and then I moved to bigger things, celery, carrot, capsicum .. food was flying everywhere around the kitchen, bits of onion, carrots, stuck to the benches like refugees from a storm and I was unstoppable. Next thing I plan to try is ice cubes! mmmmmmmmmmmmmm nice tropical fruit juices coming up!!

Blenders make kitchens a fun place to play.

I nearly died laughing when I found this link, anyone who uses Opera would know that they can’t access Microsofts MSN site, because they are deliberately sending broken links to browsers which are Opera browsers, this has been fixed now, for Version 7 browsers.,The quote from the Production Manager was a classic, “Hergee berger snooger bork” - after they released the Bork version of Opera which translates the MSN website into Swedish chef speak.

Well! hit me around the head with a wet tea towel, miracles do happen!

Looks like I won’t need to quit my job, because the CEO kinda spat it at a few people and the Wicked Bitch of the West has been relegated back to her corner and is not permitted to come out with her puppets and flying monkeys and bug us in Support ever again! *laffs like a hyena*

I am still up because I found a cool Canasta game for the computer and have been playing it after work which finished tonight at 12.00am, and its now .. oo 3.30 am.

In between emails for work I was having an interesting debate with a man called Andrew, who calls himself Andy. Not sure what I think about Andy.. reminds me of the Prince of York, being called “Randy Andy” because till he met Fergie he was doing alot of chickies!! including porn stars.. ugh! I’ll think about it. He wanted to debate with me over some things to do with the whole Iraq and US thing which was great, I must admit assuming that I wasnt good at history kinda bugged me, but then I realised I probably needed to check a few facts and I think thought I must live with my head in the sand.

Hopefully I have disabused him of those thoughts, and we can settled down to talking about bourbon.. mmmmm and the fact that Australia exports the crappiest beer in Australia, called Fosters, and lots of people all over the world buy it and drink it and seem to like it. This is concerning to me, because how bad does beer taste internationally? ! Now imagine how good the beer is that we don’t export. MmmmMmmmm.

My sister is wanting to come over for dinner on monday. I like how she invited herself “Hey sis, can I come over for dinner? I want to catch up, does Monday sound good?” SURE just let me think about what I am going to cook for you. Right now.. I have no idea.

Well I do… crumbed chicken breast (crumbed with sesame seeds, sunflower seeds and poppy seeds) on a bed of assorted veges. Sounds nice. No work on Monday. Even better
[added this at 4.20am] I was reading on Cubicle Dweller’s Weblog and I found this gem. I certainly can see some applications for this idea.

I thought I would go through the blog and remove old boring links and update the look slightly, seems as tho the blog doesn’t do what other blogs do and kinda archive at the end of the month so I have up to 2 months blog stuff sitting there which can be read.. Technically I don’t mind so I won’t fuss about it too much and its relaxing after the last few nights of work that I have had.

Last night I had to work my third night of midnight till 6am. All three nights have been chaotic and very busy and in some sense quite stressful. In addition there has been alot going on politics wise with work, which I feel could impact on the jobs of the support staff here in Perth, There is the Evil Wicked Bitch of the West - who has backstabbed her way up to getting a managerial positiion in customer service.

BUT

This woman in customer services is akin to throwing babies in the water with a pirahna. She has no .. empathy. She has this bright brittle smile and officious way about her which makes my skin crawl. She had the gall to ring back one of the management team after a meeting was over and apologise because we apparently acted and sounded like a bunch of idiots. Excuse me, but if I want to apologise for being an idiot during a team meeting I’ll do it? I don’t need someone to do it for me. Which comes to my second question, what kind of manager for customer services puts down her own staff? and belittles them behind their backs.

Basically the dude and this Wicked Bitch from the West got together and conspired against the current manager. The current Manager resigned, then found she had been duped. So she’s now gone which is news to everyone and I am sure news to him. So all this happened last week.

No one in the company was told, not the technicians, not the chat leaders, not the support staff - nobody, not even the CEO. Great communication guys! The start of the fascist regime begins. I will be quitting if the Wicked Bitch from the West stays. Cos the ex-current Manager spoke to the CEO last night so something will change, don’t know what, but it has to be better than the nothing we have now. As for quitting. I have my principles, I don’t like working with unethical or immoral people, I have quit two jobs due to this, and I will do the same this time. Mum said to me when I was 17 - going into my first day of Uni. “To thyself - be true” Probably the only piece of advice that ever really counted in my adult life. I don’t mind losing/quitting jobs because of my beliefs and principles - I would hate to lose myself in a seemingly soul-less world.

Once again I am working the dead shift between 12am and 6am.

Last night I didn’t think I was going to get through it, I hadn’t been able to sleep prior to my shift starting and I was already feeling quite sleepy. So I blogged, then when the servers came back online after having a new version of the game installed, all hell broke loose. You know Murphy’s law. Anything that could go wrong, does go wrong? Murphy must have had fits of laughter at us.

Players began to trickle into the games site slowly and before we knew it, games were breaking left right and center. The poor techies were bug fixing on the run for each problem that cropped up, prizes not awarded, game screens not seen, bulk purchasing made when they didn’t want to make it, everything was missing. Then the emails started.. in dribs and drabs, but eventually, it was an avalanche. We were the titanic and we were going down faster than a two dolla hooker on a saturday night. I eventually finished work just before 7am this morning and crawled into bed at 8, after a bit of a wind down from the tension and stress i felt, the bed was a welcome place to be.

On another note - I emailed the news editor of the abc news website last week, because after the prime minister was censured and a vote of no confidence passed in the senate against him, virtually no web newspaper that was australian based had any information about it. I thought the ABC might have been censored, I never got a reply from him either… rude :-/

And how do we protect ourselves from terrorists? The terrorist handbook doesn’t do much to assuage my concerns. It doesn’t tell me why we are now on the threat list, although it doesn’t take a person much brains to see that it’s because of John Howard big noting himself and hobnobbing with the US/UK govt. and drawing attention to us. Seriously, alot countries haven’t heard of us or if they have, think we are infested by kangaroo’s and that feral drop bears savage unsuspecting tourists as they walk under gum trees. So why try and play with the big boys? Who in reality, don’t care about a small pissant country with a population less than 20 million people in it.

Kinda diverse range of topics covered today, I might later write about the wedding I went to, and the hotel etc. Since that must be commented on. War talk is boring if there is nothing else to do. I remember my Gran telling me about the blitz in London in WW2. I thought about asking her what she thought about war on Iraq today, and then remembered of course she is no longer here, but I am sure she would have said, if John Howard thinks its necessary, then its necessary. Heh.

Well I scan down the blog and notice that two of my 3 pics don’t come up. I am bugged about it, but not to the point where I care enough to find out why. Since there is no logical reason why it won’t work, all the html code is the same. However I do feel inspired to share this link here. A rather amusing piece of satire if I do say so myself.

Since I am now doing the nightshift thing (starts in 5 minutes) I sit in front of this infernal machine thinking about what I am going to do with it today. Lots of loud music to start with, and blogging I think - in between I’ll answer emails from desperadoes wanting to waste their money playing games which will do nothing for them at all. Bit like the pokies really. *update* The sites down for an hour so I have some time to kill. I am in blogging heaven. The challenge for me today is can i stay awake for another 6 hours? we shall see!

Things to note about Adelaide. Yes they are a city of churches, however, they are also a city of pubs, pokies and cemetaries. For some reason, they like advertising the cemetaries on TV. Which, seems ghoulish, when you listen to the garden varieties.. spiritual, practical.. to the romantic [picture young blonde female laying some red roses on someone's grave]. That to me seemed wrong. They have hills like Perth, but they are larger and more spectacular, and look totally awesome during sunset. The tram to Glenelg was great, but I did notice one thing which seemed odd, they have a perfectly good electric tram system, which runs well etc blah blah, but their rail system, is all diesel trains. Something Perth got rid of about 12 years ago.

The flight over was good, my first plane trip since I was about 5 years old. It could have been better, if the lady in the seat next to me hadn’t been so talkative and was telling me about all sorts of crashes involving aircraft that she has seen or heard about from friends. Including the one about the guy who crashed his crop duster and was ripped apart and his family found his undies hanging in a tree. She found that vaguely amusing and was chuckling away to herself, and I found that I needed a sip of water for my suddenly dry mouth, as I looked out the window at the tiny trees and expanse of fields below as we winged it across WA to Adelaide.

Adelaide driving leaves alot to be desired. I was subconciously screaming BRAKE everytime my friend Marsha approached corners, before braking at the last minute and swinging into the road like a demented woman. The hills of Adelaide have alot of narrow roads, in which its ok to drive around at 80kph whilst tailgating the car in front. Oh and S bends are called S BENDS for a reason, this means not driving through the middle of them. My friend Nigel who picked me up the next day commented about Adelaide drivers being rude as he cut off cars in a effort to get from one side of the freeway to the other so that he could turn right. Someone needs to explain to Adelaide drivers you don’t increase your speed when faced with traffic lights which are red, you need to slow down - less chance of whiplash injuries when braking. [cue: Tism: Greg the Stop Sign!]

Adelaide has alot to show.. its a flat city, with virtually no high rise buildings at all, the bridges are not that spectacular, the houses, and neighbourhoods kinda look like the outer suburbs of Perth, even the snobby section of Adelaide, with its German influenced steep roof designs.. lovely, and point for when those snow storms come pelting down.. *cough*. I noticed aswell new buildings are brick veneer. Older buildings are double brick, which is standard in Perth, however, it seems as tho everything in Adelaide is single brick, and apparently its like that every where else in the country except for of course, Perth. Can someone tell me why Perth is double bricked and everywhere else is single? thanks The city is also dirty. Rubbish around the place, tired, worn out, with Glenelg’s freo look spoilt totally by the mass buildings along the beach giving the gold coast feel.

As my sightseeing day came to an end, I ventured into the museum to look for a peice of Adelaide I could take with me, as a souvenir as I do in all places, and was confronted by lots of non Adelaide stuff. Things from Perth, Sydney, and other counties. I asked the lady if she could possibly find me something in her shop which was unique to South Australia and there we found it, a small piece of blue rock local to adelaide, some coppoer mixture and I have no idea what it was called either but hey, its from Adelaide.

So now I have successfully filled almost an hour or blogging. time for me to shower, then look at emails that I have been getting but too slack to do anything about. I might talk later about the reason I went to Adelaide, which was the wedding.

Its been a while since my last entry due to mourning reasons, work and of course my trip to Adelaide which was, in a word - excellent. I will be doing a write up of what I did there I have it all in my note pad, but for the moment, I need to comment on something significant.

Pro’s and Con’s for going to war with the US without UN backing.

Cons:
invite other countries to entertain a first strike policy for defending themselves against.. “enemies” (Pakistan/india/North Korea/China/Israel etc)
create terrorist targets out of countries who are in the coalition of the willing (Australia)
lots of war crimes with no trial at the end cuz George Said So.
no checks and balances. How far is too far?
disorganised aid distribution to injured people
to defend your own country against attack = war crime in US/George lingo

Pros:
Yeeehaw! oil! Oil!! OIL!!! (can be heard from some texan oil barons with the surname of Bush)
Saddam is killed
rebuild iraq US style.

Question is, like everything else that the US government has touched for the last 30 years in international politics, do they have the balls to stick with it all the way to the end? or will they just back off and leave it to moulder once they have their new oil contracts. Thus creating another vacuum for the revolutionaries and dissillusioned like Afghanistan in the 80’s.

Why the US Govt is so cool
George likes his Axis of Evil
We got hit by some nasty aeroplanes
We saved the world in world war 2
You’re either with us or against us (well.. duh)
Old Europe!!
Osama bin Laden mentioned Iraq = instant terrorist link
Nice photo’s of some buildings somewhere in a desert
No one else except the US is allow to own Weapons of Mass Destruction

Please note: I have some great friends who are American - This is not an Anti US blurb. I don’t have a problem with Americans as individuals, just the few who voted in the current Bush regime to make it safer for the world. Lets think about the results of war. Which is what I did when I was in Adelaide.

Whilst in Adelaide I found the most exquisite and saddening war memorial, built to honour those lost in World War 1. When you walked inside the memorial you found panels of names, lining the walls.

and below, find the front view, Angel with people at its feet, arms raise in supplication.

This is the view from behind, angel taking a person up to heaven obviously.

Staring at this memorial made me realise that more will be created with this war, more names added to the list, more names to mourn, lifes extinguished like the flame from a candle. If we have to have war, lets do it right, get the UN involved, because anything else will just opening pandora’s box and we don’t know what will happen next. The current US administration is in danger of becoming the Evil Empire of the 21st Century.

My Gran
2/12/1917 - 28/1/2003

My gran sang twinkle twinkle little star to me when i was staying at her place when i was five, and she got me up in the middle of the night so i could go to the bathroom. I met her when i was 5. I went for a holiday to meet my relatives from Perth. i used to watch sale of the century with her, and then go to bed and wake up at 6am to watch the cartoons. I found a Pam Ayres poetry book, and read that too. That’s when i discovered poetry. Gran used to read it to me aswell. Gran cooked silverside (corned beef) with potatoes, shepherds pie, chops, quiche, and made the best trifle, and bread and butter pudding. Gran helped me with my spelling homework, and some maths, and made cheese toasties for afternoon snacks or lunch. Gran made me my blue dress with white flowers. Gran gave me my first vase, my first silver cross, she even gave me some clothing which i wore at my year 12 end of year day, 70’s disco revival (flares and a pea green long collared shirt). I used to play with all her things, the peacock and thai dancers she got whilst travelling, the wooden vase, the cardboard dollhouse that she made. Gran sang the welsh national anthem to me once in welsh. Gran told me about her life in cardiff, and then how she survived the blitz in world war 2. She told me about the baby she lost in the middle of the blitz to pneumonia. Gran called me her darling girl and always had a beautiful smile which always seemed like it was just for me. Gran let me stay at her place for a week or so whilst i studied for my TEE. I discovered alot of things then, that we liked watching the same TV shows and that gran liked going to bed late and waking up late. We watched the cricket and the football together, and never argued about politics. Gran took me around with her on her hospital rounds when she was doing her volunteer work for the women auxilary giving out library books to people who were sick. I have a very nice collection of reader’s digests now. Gran held my hand at christmas time and told me she loved me, and i told her i loved her too. Gran held my hands in the hospital in her last hours and i sang to her. All the old favourites, everything that school had taught me when i was singing in the choir, everything i had learnt since i had begun to sing. I told gran i loved her. I thanked her for being in my life, for giving me the love of books i have, for my smile, my eyes, my voice. I told her i loved her.

God give me the strength and the courage to get through today, as i meet with the rest of my family, my aunties and cousins and uncles, in one place to mourn the one person who gave us life, and went through so much to make sure that they survived. I have spent so much time repressing my emotions, its going to be hard to see and deal with everyone elses, let alone my own.