Arrrrgh I have just been doing the bills — actually doing them, not just paying what needs to be paid and moving on, but actually adding everything up and figuring out how much everything costs, and it is making me feel a bit depressed. I have come to the conclusion that we eat too much. [...]
Something truly dreadful has happened. I have learned to like Turkish Delight. I know. I know. I am the worst of Yankee turncoats, enjoying a foul perfume-flavored Australian confection. I don’t know how it happened! I’m so ashamed, I don’t even know what to say! Anyway. Another Saturday. Went bike-hunting briefly this morning (that is, [...]
So when Calliope’s hand was burned, it was all wrapped up. On State of Origin night we went over to L. & C.’s place to hang out with them and Big A. and another friend, and C. thought it would be hilarious to turn Calliope into a little pirate. He unwound a coat hanger and [...]
So I was looking at my Pumas while I was gluing them together, and I found a tag right on the inside of the tongue which reads: NOT FLAMEPROOF EQUIPPED Shucks! Too bad I didn’t read that one before toasting my feet on the fireplace! Tried to find a replacement at the Puma outlet store [...]
I almost forgot! Yesterday I received in the mail a letter inviting me to an Australian Citizenship Ceremony. Mike got one too. The ceremony is set for August 27th in the evening. After the ceremony is done, both he and I will officially be Australian. !!!!!!!! Bizarre. Moreover, when I got home from work today, [...]
Even though I was always pretty good at computer games I suck, suck, suck at console games. I remember trying to play Tekken with Sasha back at MIT… he was so good, I was so bad! I don’t tie my wrists together Wii boxing any more but I still flail ridiculously… good thing Wii’s are [...]
I don’t understand how it’s possible to lose this much blood and still be standing. I am feeling really freaked out by it. I hate, hate the smell of blood. It always somehow reminds me of when Muta tried to commit suicide and for days I could not, could not get the smell of blood [...]
It has been a tiring week. Now the weekend is half over, and I’m already fully ready to go back to work… I have developed a strong and maybe pathetic love for my job which is somewhat heavily based on the fact that, when I’m at work, I don’t have to hang out with Calliope. [...]
So we are having an outreach concert at church in a few weeks. I was lunatic enough to volunteer to play a violin solo (well with piano accompaniment) even though I have not picked up my violin in approximately 1.5 years. I do NOT know what I was thinking. Gaaaaah. Anyway, that is not what [...]
It’s been a pretty nice weekend. Saturday we ditched Calliope at her adopted grandma’s house and took a day off. We’d planned to go trail biking — haven’t gone since before I got pregnant, and I miss it! — but Mike was still sick so we didn’t. Instead, we went to Bulimba (which despite the [...]
Since I am the only kirilisa in existence, if you Google kirilisa, you get far too many potentially embarrassing things. Mainly really dumb posts I put on PHP/Java/sax/gardening/gaming forums. What cracks me up is that on Google’s page 3, there is a link to the long ago frangipani fiasco, where I asked a dumb question [...]
So I accidentally melted my Pumas by toasting my feet on the wood heater. It hasn’t been a good week for wood heater accidents hey… I love Pumas. And now, my first pair were lost to the cat pee fiasco and now this second pair is lost to my desire to have really, really hot [...]
So yesterday, Mike had a cold, and Calliope still had a bit of a cold and a rash, so he volunteered to stay home with her while I went to work, since Tuesday is one of my work days. I hadn’t even been gone an hour when he let her crawl up to the wood [...]
So can someone please tell me why I still have a hole in my stomach? Calliope was born 7 months ago (tomorrow!). I thought that the whole stomach muscles not being together thing was supposed to ameliorate itself. But mine has not. I tried to take a picture that does it justice, but I couldn’t [...]
I am in a phenomenally bad mood today. Don’t even ask me why. I can’t begin to explain. Actually, that isn’t wholly true. I am in a phenomenally bad mood because lots of little things are getting to me (the little things are always worse for my temper than the big ones!), but those little [...]
So we have decided to spend this entire week –starting last Friday evening — speaking German. For practice. Mike speaks German pretty well, and I speak it pretty badly. But it’s always been something I wanted to do better, and given that in boondocks Brisbane there really isn’t anywhere to take German classes, this is [...]
So back in May when mrtee came to visit, he was supposed to bring me some Tootsie rolls, since you can’t get em here. But he forgot. So I guilt-tripped him until he promised to send me some… then I received a package from him which was filled, inexplicably, with cement colorant. Took me a [...]
For a while now I’ve been doing all my blog updates on my website, kirilisa.com, not on LJ. I found this WordPress plugin, LivePress, which cross-posts your WP posts to LJ. Very nice. I also just recently found a really awesome WordPress theme: Viewport by Paul Bennett. It effectively makes your WordPress blog into a [...]
So baby is really trying to fast-forward her life. She’s learned to stand up herself this week (by pulling up on things) and now that she can stand up she’s already trying to walk, and to get rid of the hands. Seriously. She likes to lounge there by the sofa, only one hand lightly on [...]
So here’s to my last week as a completely stay-at-home mother before I go back to work next week! Only two days per, though. So still more than half stay-at-home. I think I’m going to like this. Let’s hope Calliope likes it too. Over the weekend we went flea-marketing to get Calliope a bookcase. Found [...]
It’s my birthday. I’m 32. Doesn’t that sound old??? Just got back from another gig at Music Kafe. This time Calliope got to stay with her stand-in grandma instead of coming with us. It was a nice break. I think I need a louder mouthpiece. I blow so hard at these things, trying to be [...]
So today baby did a real old-fashioned crawl for the first time (in my observation, anyway). She’s been pretty mobile for close to a month now, but mostly via a very sloppy method involving a lot of flailing arms and legs and not that much straight forward motion. But today she actually did a proper [...]
So Calliope is 6 months old now, as I think I’ve said. That means, she has been in my life, one way or the other, for 15 months now: since two March’s ago. I guess I feel like it’s time for an assessment of the whole crazy ride. The first three months of pregnancy were [...]
So tomorrow we are going on a grand adventure… wood collecting! Our wood heater has been fantastic. Really awesome. [I will in fact post pictures of the whole fiasco sometime.] We got a cubic metre of wood from a wood guy, and we have already gone through half of it.. in only about 3 weeks! [...]
Can someone please take pity on me and tell me what kind of an animal this is??? Current Mood: confused
So, Calliope is 6 months old now (today! in fact) and I am going to go back to work. I always meant to start going back to work after 6 months, and, well, it’s already… now. Of course, it will only be for 2 days/week. Even before we left for Switzerland I was working only [...]
The other day I introduced Calliope to cheese. She’s a good baby: she eats everything I put in front of her, which at this point is a lot: rice, oats, squash, peas, beans, spinach, carrots, potato, yam, chicken, beef, lamb, yogurt, pear, apple, banana, blueberry, and spelt rusks. Anyway, I’ve been feeding her a mixture [...]
This puzzle I saw in a Mensa kids’ book is really irritating me. Can someone please explain to me what my problem is? Why is my answer 9, and theirs 39?? Using the numbers 0 – 7 inclusive, how many different ways are there to add three numbers together to make a total of 8? [...]
I’m wearing my pregnancy jeans today. Yeah, the jeans I got in Zürich H&M, which aren’t maternity jeans, but were just normal stylin’ jeans 2 sizes too large and which I wore EVERY SINGLE DAY from September til Calliope was born the first week of December, and thereafter too. They’re nice jeans, actually. I don’t [...]
So, yeah, we didn’t climb Mt. Barney. Drove the hour down to Beaudesert at 6 in the morning and ended up having breakfast at McDonalds with L. et al while staring out the window at the pouring rain!! Hung out for a while and then headed back north. It made mrtee happy, though, because then [...]
We’re meant to climb Mt. Barney tomorrow, for my friend L.’s 30th birthday celebration. I have to admit I’m a bit apprehensive. I’ve climbed Mt. Barney twice before, and it was no big deal, especially for a seasoned NOLS veteran like myself but this time it’s a bit different. While maybe not a “mountain” mountain, [...]
I’ve been so busy, both with valid and invalid things. Yeeargh. I just managed to successfully break all of my websites and then fix them again: well, fix all of them except 2. Haven’t had the chance to fix the others yet. In the past two weeks, what has happened: 0. I paid $2500 to [...]
Aaaargh, I am so frustrated. It’s been a rather horrid week. I lost my wallet at IKEA, Mike completely ignored my very first Mother’s Day (I’m not that into these holidays, but even so, it hurt to see everyone walking around with cards and flowers), a torrential downpour happened while we still had the hole [...]
I am a SUPER COOL mother. You know why? I just bought my baby her own domain name — two of them, in fact. I’m sure she won’t want them for about 10 years, but aren’t I cool anyway?? Life has been busy these past 2 weeks. So much going on. Played another gig again [...]
I forgot to mention, in my last post, that another thing about staying home is that an ice cream truck comes by a few times a week. It’s not the kind of ice cream truck you see at the beach in the summer, filled with popsicles for the kids. This one is a hard core [...]
Yesterday night after my second gig (which was cool, though not as cool as the one Saturday night — the venue wasn’t as neat for this one, though the acoustics were better, and there weren’t very many people there, but what do you expect on a rainy Sunday late afternoon? Brunch would have been better, [...]
The gig was awesome. It was so much fun! It was also Mike’s birthday yesterday, so I got 9 of our friends together for dessert at 16th on Park dessert cafe which was decadently good. And then 5 of them also came along to the gig and stuck around for the first two sets. I [...]
I just had a really horrible thought. What if, when Calliope is a little older, she insists on having VEGEMITE in our pantry????!!!! Mike thinks that we should shave Calliope’s head. According to his mother, lots of mothers she knows do it, because then supposedly the baby’s hair grows back thick and lush. is this [...]
Went to the servo today and saw a warning plaque stuck on the pump, among many others, that said MUST KEEP FEET ON GROUND WHILE FUELING. Where else, pray tell, would they be??? I find it massively frustrating that Australian wall power outlets are never near the floor, they are always at least a foot [...]
I have been feeling pretty crappy lately. I don’t know why. Even though I’ve been going to bed generally “early”, that is, before midnight, and sometimes as early as 11, and getting up at 7.30am, I feel completely exhausted. Granted, every single night I wake up automatically at 4am, even though Calliope has been sleeping [...]
Got a letter from the Australian Department of Immigration today. And so did Mike. Our citizenship appointments and tests are scheduled for the morning of April 29th. And Calliope is included, as I wrote before. That was fast! It makes it so that we will have the appointment and should be well aware of if [...]
I just can’t get over how much virtual/real money I am making by selling virtual objects in Second life. It really cracks me up. I log onto Second Life a few times per year only: maybe twice a year I spend about a week of heavy Second Life usage while I build new virtual items [...]
Freakin’ Elma peed in my Pumas. I loved those Pumas. I let her in for a bit because she seemed lonely: she was sitting on the couch being well-behaved. Then as soon as I looked away for a moment, she vanished, then suddenly came charging back in a weird fashion. So I put her back [...]
So this has been a notable week in several different ways. Calliope turned 4 months old yesterday. This has still been the longest 4 months of my life Calliope got her first illness: a cold. She’s still recovering. It gave some stressful nights because she was kind of struggling to breathe (and making the most [...]
How is it that the fee for getting an Aussie visa for a dependent child costs an order of magnitude more than the fee for and adult becoming an Australian citizen? Yes. The fee to apply/become an Aussie citizen is $260 (and dependent children are included on the adult’s form FOR FREE) while the fee [...]
Add it to the dead list as of this evening: the barbecue. Aaargh! Why?? Today I went to KMart to buy a (sigh) replacement vacuum cleaner. While I was there, I thought I’d trot over to the baby section to pick up a BPA-free bottle. There was a whole big rack full of bottles and [...]
So in the past, say, two weeks, what else has broken and/or been replaced? 1) ADSL modem 2) kitchen water filter (believe me, you do not want to drink Brisbane water) 3) vacuum cleaner Sigh! When will it end? Clyde, the washing machine, and the dryer are the only things at this point that haven’t [...]
Well, the firmware upgrade didn’t fix things. So I broke down and bought a new modem from Dynalink, this time with inbuilt wireless. Just received and installed it a few hours ago — internet hasn’t cut out even once yet (hurray!!) and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. On the whirlpool forums everyone said great things [...]
Modem firmware upgrade will HOPEFULLY result in modem acting like normal modem and staying connected for more than 2 minutes at a time. Making the MTU settings of the modem and wireless router match fixed the Linux-is-unable-to-post-anything-to-internet problem, but the continual disconnects and suddenly nonexistent DNS problems persist. Sigh. None of the publicly released firmware [...]
My internet keeps randomly going out every 10 minutes or so. Even though I am now wired directly into the DSL modem. Why? Why? Given that more than 50% of the time when I’m on the computer, I am writing code and therefor am SSHed into some server very far away, this is driving me [...]
This afternoon after skating I dropped quickly into the music shop in the CBD to try to find a midi/usb cable. They had one, but it cost $90. Shocking! On my way out, I wandered into the piano section. I couldn’t resist. Someday perhaps I will have a piano again… Anyway, I tested out a [...]
I do love Saturdays. Got up this morning, made a good breakfast, did a couple hours of work, and then we went out rollerblading along Coronation Drive and Southbank. It was a beautiful day. We parked on a side street somewhere, put on our blades, and off we went, Calliope in her pram. We took [...]
Now that the baby is in some kind of schedule I think I have got to get myself into one. I never bothered before, but now… there are just too many things to do and not enough time to do them all! Generally I feed her at 7.30, 11.30, 3-3.30, 6-6.30 and 9.30-10.30 and she [...]
Calliope has gotten to have so much personality. She’s 14 weeks old today. She can roll over both directions now and is constantly moving about in her crib and getting her feet stuck between the bars. She sleeps on her face, which makes me a bit uneasy. And… she has learned to suck her thumb. [...]
Upgrading Ubuntu to 9.10 has not solved my mysterious network problems. I don’t know what to do. Every time I submit an online form in ANY browser under Ubuntu, it hangs the browser for 5 minutes or so and then times out. [Oddly, if I submit a form with only about 1 word in it, [...]
So, I have found a new band! (Or rather, a new band has found me, is probably more accurate.) Which is excellent, as I have been rejected (!) from rejoining my old band… So a week after we got back home to Oz, we dropped in to our old band briefly to see how things [...]
There is one thing that continually comes up that really bugs me. And that is? The stupid fonts that captcha graphics use. Honestly. Captchas are everywhere nowadays, and inevitably they utilize some graphic that has a bunch of severely skewed and demented looking letters on it. I’m not a robot, I’m a human being: yet [...]
So while in NOLA we rented the movie Whip It, which I thought was just awesome. I bet I’d be great at roller derby. I wish they wore roller blades, not roller skates, but still. What a fantastic sport. Anyway, watching that movie kind of rewoke all my old skate-yearning. Of course, I always played [...]
Last night our old sax quartet from last year got together. We’d really been looking forward to starting up again now that we’re home, but the lead alto just got a job in Cairns and is leaving today, and the bari has been having neck pain so he isn’t playing at the moment. Still, it [...]
One thing I really love about Brisbane (this part of Australia, that is) is the colors. On a sunny day, the sky is unbelievably blue, the clouds unbelievably white, the grass and trees unbelievably green, from a deep green to the yellow-green of new growth. Other places, of course, can boast skies as blue and [...]
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[...] forums. What cracks me up is that on Google’s pa
by Kirilisa's Den of Mischief » Blog Archive » History, bad week on Lizards and frangipani -
[...] love Pumas. And now, my first pair were lost to the ca
by Kirilisa's Den of Mischief » Blog Archive » Puma flambé on Darn cat -
Did your mother make these cookies? I think I may have eate
by elisha morrison on Recipes -
About the funny Swiss spelling. It is Allemanisch, a languag
by daniel on Nothing too interesting -
Hi Majofa,
I couldn't replicate the problem (I was emaili
by Elise on Frontpage Manager -
Hi Jonathan,
I will definitely make it a toggle option on
by Elise on Frontpage Manager -
I am having the same problem, so I had to revert to version
by Majofa on Frontpage Manager -
-Made it so that the post category is not displayed in the t
by Jonathan on Frontpage Manager -
I upgraded to version 1.1. but my category pages were no lon
by Danny on Frontpage Manager -
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted
by physician assistant on Immigration problems
