It hasn’t been a very good weekend.

Yesterday Mike had to work all morning (Saturday! hmmph) and I was in German class. After, fought through tons of traffic to pick him up and race off to a friend’s wedding because he was the sound man for it. I’m truly happy for our friend and her new husband, but I really, really, really do not like weddings. While I somewhat enjoy the ceremony, hearing two people promise their lives to one another, all the hype that is around weddings has kind of permanently turned me off to them: moreover, the receptions afterwards always make me flustered and uncomfortable.

Was feeling a bit crappy later in the day, I figured due to tiredness and too much driving and too many people and a dress that squeezed my middle too much. At eveningtime got a major headache which promised to turn into vertigo so I went to bed at 8:30pm. Unfortunately for me, I woke up a bit after 9 feeling deathly ill and made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up – ALL over the bathroom floor, walls, my own feet, you name it. Problem was, I was so dizzy and disoriented when I tried to hit the light switch I hit the fan instead and by that time it was too late to hunt for the light switch again, so I missed! What a nightmare. I haven’t thrown up anywhere inappropriate since I was 9 years old, literally.

I considered calling Zaubi (also sleeping) to help me but felt ashamed of such a horrible mess, so I cleaned it up myself. I can now tell you from personal experience that there is little worse than feeling vertigous and horribly nauseated and trying to clean up abundant vomit. Yuuuuugh! How do mothers do it?? I can’t believe Zaubi didn’t wake up during all the commotion.

Spent the rest of the night staggering to the bathroom every hour to choke up — nothing. Closed the bedroom door so I wouldn’t disturb Zaubi and camped out in the living room. Elma sat peacefully there with me, purring quietly, and that was a real comfort.

Zaubi realized I wasn’t in bed with him at about 5AM, and came out to share the sofa with me – I told him not to, but he insisted! By that point my stomach had stabalized so I managed to get a couple hours sleep, though I woke up sick with dehyration and limp as a noodle.

We had a gig today too! I NEVER miss gigs! And it was in a park in Bulimba, which I generally like. So Zaubi went off to it by himself and left me feeling morose, feverish, and queasy, ensconced on my sofa with my book and 2L of Coke. Tried to drink some ginger ale, which was my mother always gave us when we were small and sick, but the Australian ginger ale is truly bizarre – a bright virulent orange, and containing no ginger. Go figure.

It’s a beautiful weekend too, would have been perfect for going outside and planting stuff and so on and so forth. Oh well. Hopefully I shall be better by tomorrow.

Facebook SpeedDate is absolutely haunting me. WHY does it keep showing up in my applications??!!!

I never signed up for it in the first place, I removed it the first time several months ago, and yet it came back!

I just removed it again, and on my list of ‘recently used’ apps I noticied it listed other apps which I have certainly not used. Is all it takes to have FB apps start sending you annoying notifications for someone else to "invite" you? Even if you refuse/ignore the invite?

Driving me nuts. Honestly!

So I spent close to an hour last night at 1AM Skyping different US gov’t departments to ask my citizenship question. First I called the Dept of Citizenship & Immigration, where I spoke to an incredibly bored & morose individual who had no answer to my questions (though trying to figure it out did seem to perk him up a little).

Then I call the Department of State and talked to a very nice Southern lady who didn’t know. It was really weird to be talking on the phone to Americans. They sounded so very… American.

Then I called the Department of State travel sector and spent a long and completely unproductive time talking to a semi-annoyed woman who could not answer any of my questions and kept a) repeating what it said on this page which I had already looked at and which doesn’t answer my question (unfortunate that in the English language, the word ‘may’ can either mean ‘possibly’ OR ‘allowed to’) or b) contradicting herself, until I finally gave up and went to bed.

Then an anonymous LJer posted me this link here! Which pretty much answers my question, and I don’t know why I didn’t find it myself when I was searching the travel.state.gov site (maybe because it seems to be on page 778?) Anyway, as far as I can tell, though I’m not too good with legalistic language, I can keep my citizenship unless I explicitly choose to give it up, which I don’t. Hurray!

Today I went to my second-to-last Saturday morning German class and then Zaubi and I bought a pack of mentos and a Diet Coke. We want to try our own exploding experiments a la The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiements (though perhaps not on such a grand scale).

Today got off to a fantastically bad start, but ended up very nice. It got up to such a bad start, in fact, that Zaubi and I both took it off work as a vacation day — we’d planned to take off tomorrow, after the large amount both of us have been working back over the last few weeks, but after the morning decided we’d better take it today instead.

It was a nice day. Practiced sax for a couple hours, then took the sax in for a free checkup by the guy that did the overhaul a few months ago. He fixed a minor leak where one of the pads hadn’t set right. Bought groceries, cooked a bit, read, went to home group in the evening. Nothing really notable, just another day.

Every day I have with Zaubi is a gift.

There are a couple things that I used to like before I came to Australia, that now I rather intensely dislike.

1) Opera
2) Bagpipes
3) Irish dancing

There are two classical music stations in Brisbane (as far as I know) and BOTH of them obsessively play opera, day in, day out. I used to not mind it, and even liked some Domingo, etc. etc. but now I am so SICK of hearing high-pitched excessively vibrato-ed opera singers whenever I turn on the classical station, that I think I never want to hear opera again.

Moreover, Brisbane is overrun with bagpipes and Irish dancing. Usually in close concert. I remember the first time I saw Irish dancers, at Fanuiel Hall in Boston (ah! place of mrtee’s torpor-inducing brownies!), on a chilly damp evening in early spring. I was fascinated, I thought it was the coolest-looking dancing I’d ever seen. Now — after being innundated with them at ever festival, parade, holiday, or event that I have been at, no matter what occasion, I feel my teeth gritting together when the kids arrive with their horrible fake curls bouncing. Irish dancers are everywhere. Christmas events, Brisbane German Club Oktoberfest, some of our own park gigs, even. Szplug!

Ditto bagpipes. Every parade. Every event. Some of our gigs. The monotonous nasal drone permeates til you want to squash it silly. (Kilts & woolly socks are cute though. Too bad Zaubi’s not Scottish. He has just the right broad shoulders and lanky stature to go well with a kilt.  I can just see him with his adorable fuzzy legs sticking out of the bottom. Teehee!)

Why am I talking about this?! Bed.