We are past the three month mark of this project and I have been distracted from writing about it because I’ve been busy doing other things, like discovering that in certain instances that I actually like Brussels sprouts, also Brussels sprouts are called Brussels sprouts, not brussel sprouts. That one had me mouth breathing and drooling at the same time.

Let’s have a look at the first five things I had planned for my last year of being 29:

1 – Learn how to touch type: I’d actually forgotten about this one until today when I found myself agog because my iPhone was causing my web browser (the ever dependable Internet Explorer, *blank face*) do strange things and I thought to myself, ‘Gee I wish I had a better grasp of technology so I could understand what’s going on right now’ and then I realised my phone was pushing keys on my keyboard and suddenly I had a really good grasp of what was going on: I am incredibly technologically incompetent. All of this is just padding to say that I have not learnt to touch type yet.
Progress report: currently a fail, with room for improvement.

2 – Complete a 365 photography project: I lasted about a week and gave up; however in that week I took some photos I liked, so I might post them here at some point. Instead, I’m doing the #febphotoaday project, and only using my iPhone and Instagram, which has been really fun. I am such a sucker for the X-pro II and Sutro filters. Once an underexposer, always an undexposer. Here are some recent Instagram photos that weren’t for any particular project, I just liked them:

1. Porch gin/2. Waiting for a porch gin partner-in-crime/3. The infamous “I collect records because pussy hates me” sticker, from the good folk at Chunklet/4. Waiting to go to the gym/5. The entrance to GOODGOD, where my brother-in-law, Joel, held his recent 30th, an event called Pimpish Behaviour/6. Me on my way to Pimpish Behaviour, acting all pimpish/7. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right aka Stanley Cat and Wuz/8. Prada.
Progress report: Total fail, but I can live with that.

3 – Drink coffee and eat pie at an American roadside diner: Bam! I passed this one with flying colours. On our second day in LA we went to The Original Pantry Cafe on South Figueroa, and I had my first diner coffee and it was both gross and amazing. I loved Original Pantry, it was the perfect first quintessential American experience to have:

The pie had to wait until Seattle, or North Bend more specifically, where we went to Twede’s Cafe, which David Lynch used in Twin Peaks.

We ate cherry pie and it was fabulous. I took an extra slice and ate it in a creme brulee scented bath later that night in Seattle, after we’d had to suddenly switch hotels.
Progress report: A+ effort!

4 – Celebrate Halloween in the US! Yeah! Another win! Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment. We were in Salt Lake City, which I actually quite liked, were it not almost completely devoid of people. The extend of my Halloween experience was almost OD’ing on the Halloween edition Candy Corn and driving around the city trying to find even a single trick-or-treater, which I failed miserably at.
Progress report: a win, on a technicality.

5 – Shoot a gun: Done! In Vegas we shot machine guns and handguns, which I wrote about in length in this post here.

I’m not going to lie, I had mixed feelings about it and didn’t love it as much as I expected to, though I think that might have had more to do with the men supervising us than it did the physical act of shooting. I would shoot a handgun again in a heartbeat though.
Progress report: A-

So here we have a total running score of 3/30 with eight months to go!

Haha! So. I haven’t written much about The Wuz lately, mostly because even thinking about her causes my blood pressure to rise to extremely high levels and I start feeling short of breath. I’ve been pondering her a lot regardless, like would she make a better fur hat or fur collar this winter, because I’m going to turn her into one or the other of she doesn’t stop ruining my entire life.

People often ask what kind of cat The Wuz is, sometimes they ask if she is actually a cat at all, mostly because her face looks like the back end of a fur-covered bus:

She’s an Exotic Shorthair, and it wasn’t until this week that I remembered one of the defining features of the Exotic Shorthair (besides the flat face and the need for company): they are late in maturing.

They sure are, if by maturing you mean not pooping in the dining room or destroying things with huge sentimental value.

Here is what happened: The Wuz is an indoors cat and when I moved, the bathroom in the new place proved harder to ventilate than the old place and so there was a litter situation that wasn’t very nice and was causing my housemate some angst. We switched to an enclosed litter tray, which scared The Wuz. Here is a list of some of the other things that scare The Wuz:

* People walking around with their pants around their ankles (fair enough too, this scares me as well);
* Vacuum cleaners;
* Mops;
* Cat biscuits falling from the sky;
* Small children, and
* My housemate breaking chocolate up by throwing it at the wall.

So rather than poop in a scary, scary box, she started pooping in the dining room and I started getting messages from my housemate about it.

Can you even imagine? My poor housemate is sensitive to smell, so the litter was bad enough, but poop in the dining room? Sweet baby cheeses.

Then it got worse.

How much worse?

A whole lot worse.

My cat (and I am referring to her through gritted teeth) ate one of my housemate’s pot plants.

And it wasn’t just any pot plant. It was a pot plant growing in a mixture of dirt and her grandmother’s ashes.

Can you even imagine? I nearly turned The Wuz into a hat on the spot. I was so mortified/horrified/frozenly apologetic. Then this morning she knocked another pot plant over. I am seriously, I can’t even, there are no words, I am just … all I can say to her is what Dad used to say to me all those years ago:

Wuz, I’m not angry, I’m very, very disappointed.

Day 1: #yourviewtoday

I spend a lot of time at my train station, heading to and from work, or from work to home to Jeff’s, to home, to work so on a day-to-day basis it’s my most consistent view of anything other than the desk I am chained to at work and I just felt this was a more interesting picture than one of all my celebrity crushes sticky-taped to my monitor, next to motivational quotes from The Hitch and Hunter S Thompson.

Sydney’s weather has been depressing the last few weeks, which also makes for a good photo, and I liked the various shades in this picture, from gun metal grey to piercing white.

Day 2: #words

This is a shot of the last essay Christopher Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair before he passed away.

I was at Sydney Airport when I heard he died. Jeff and I had just missed a plane to Melbourne and had a four hour wait until the next flight, and when I read the news, we went to the airport bar and drank cocktails and went to the Vanity Fair website and read some of his best essays and people’s tributes to him. It turned a really sad moment into something poignant and nice.

I deeply admired The Hitch, and meant to write something after his death, but nothing I could say would do him justice. I haven’t been able to read much of what he wrote during his illness, and one day I’ll read this piece, but for now I’m just happy to know it’s out there, existing.

Day 3: #hands

I’m an 80-year-old man, surprise! No, not really, but this is a fairly good indication of what’s needed to get me going every morning. The horse pill up the top is Omega, the smaller amber one is vitamin D, because like most of the population, I am deficient (see: desk job) and my scary Russian doctor is determined to change that. The tiny white pill is for my Old Man Disease aka high blood pressure and I will take one of those every day for the rest of my life and then for good measure, there are two Panadols for a delightful headache I woke up with that I suspect might have developed from my vigorous backcombing of my stupidly long hair. “Beauty” equals pain, folks.

Day 4: #astranger

Yes it’s creepy to take a photo of a stranger on a train. Is it possible to resist taking a photo of a stranger on a train when he’s wearing a patterned lime-green suit with pointy white shoes and what looked like mismatched retro football socks? No it isn’t. I suspect this George Miller lookalike is used to it though, we share a train line and I think I’ve actually taken a creepy photo of him before, wearing pony-skin boots. Some people didn’t like the idea of taking a photo of a stranger, but some people probably also didn’t spend 20 minutes negotiating with their mother yesterday for the donation of several teeth for jewellery purposes. Taking a photo of a stranger was not the strangest thing I did this week.

Day 5: #10am

I was asleep at 10am, so this is a visual representation of what that looked like, for all of you (fellow) creeps out there who have wondered. Being asleep at 10am is an insane new concept for me. First, I have frequent bad bouts of insomnia and secondly, I used to rarely relax on weekends because I am on-call so frequently. Not anymore, the life changes have started to kick in and now I’m all about only leaving bed on Sundays for brunch and phone calls.

Here ends the first batch, thanks to everyone who told me where they’re posting theirs, it’s been fun seeing what people do with the theme!

Oh lordy did I fail at the 365 (or 366 as it is this year) project. I think I lasted about seven days.

I’ve decided to do this one instead and use only my iPhone camera. Maybe by March I’ll have worked up the motivation to start carrying my DSLR everywhere.

I’ll post the results once a week or so, and please, if you’re doing it to, send me a link to where you’re posting them, because I am a sucker for other people’s photos!

When I was a bit younger, I became very obsessed with evil media barons.

It began with Kerry Packer, after I read The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer: Uncut by Paul Barry. Emotionally absent fathers! Swearing! Heart attacks! Personal gaming rooms in Vegas! It had everything. I would daydream about going toe-to-toe with Packer, that his notorious temper wouldn’t scare me and that he would be so impressed with my debating skills that he would sit me on his knee and watch as I drank a snifter of brandy and laughed. And then he would laugh. And then James would look sad.

Then I moved onto Conrad Black, because let’s face it, how can you go past an evil media baron called Conrad Black. Best evil media baron name ever (if you ignore that his middle name is Moffat), plus, he was fortunate enough to be born with the rare combination of a strong brow that cast an intimidating shadow on the rest of his face, and plump lips that may or may not have provoked sexual thoughts in … a friend of mine. Yes. Additionally, Black is married to Barbara Amiel and Margaret Atwood fans will know the rumours that Zenia from The Robber Bride is apparently loosely based on Amiel! Squeal! It just gets juicer and juicer!

It was around this time I got outed as a baron obsessive, when Richard Siklos, then of The New York Times (Hi Richard!), found my old blog and wrote to me to suggest which edition of his biography of Conrad Black I might wish to buy. When I expressed concern that if he could find me, so too could Conrad Black, and maybe Conrad Black wouldn’t find my musings on his evilness and my idea for a line of breakfast cereals based on evil media barons particularly funny, Mr Siklos said, ‘Hi Julia, well, your secret is safe with me–and I’d wager that even if Black did see your post he might not be able to add you to the enemies list just now. Let me know if you have any trouble getting the book. If you become really obsessed with the subject, try to get your hands on the little-watched Canadian-UK made-for-TV movie Shades of Black …’ That’s because Conrad Black was going to jail. Yes, I was the last thing on Conrad’s mind.

Today all over the news is Australia’s own Gina Rinehart, making a move to increase her stake in Fairfax. As soon as I heard the news, my Evil Media Baron senses started to tingle and my heart had that feeling it gets on Christmas Eve, or after a few days of not taking my blood pressure medication. For the first time since I stopped being a media analyst, I bought a copy of The Australian Financial Review and there they all were, my good friends Neil Shoebridge, Alan Stokes, Tony Boyd, Sue Mitchell and Laura Tingle*

I will be keeping my eye on Rinehart, especially since The Sydney Morning Herald published Claire Martin’s picture of Rinehart throwing down the secret Evil Media Barons gang sign:

It’s a good time to be an evil media baron fan.

*None of these people are actual friends of mine, though they really do exist independent of that.

I like the idea of resolutions, except that I am notoriously bad at keeping them and notoriously dependant on time frames. No point starting a new routine on a Tuesday, when Sunday is the first day of a new week!

This year I decided to give myself January to think about what I wanted to achieve this year and I finally succumbed to the industry of motivational books with glossy covers with badly drop shadowed text and set myself achievable goals, rather than my usual ‘It’d be really rad to wake up and look like Daphne Guinness, minus the “I’ll eat when I’m dead” attitude!’. So yeah, my goal for the last two years has been to somehow wake up looking like a tiny, leather-clad Pepé Le Pew. I like to aim high.

I hate that the people who write those books are right. I’ve made an un-paid career out of mocking the earnest and overly Americanised tones of books like that. Their relentless velvet-gloved tough love reminds me of high school PE teachers. People like that hate people like me, it’s like every fit, self-motivated person received the memo that I wasn’t allowed to continue with PE in high school past a certain point because rather than doing gymnastics, I taught my friends to skank and sunbaked while having long discussion about the nature of the local music scene. Gym people look at me with a kind of sad sympathy, like they think I haven’t realised that a six-foot-something daydreamer is going to have massive co-ordination issues. Oh, I get it gym people, I got it the moment I managed to lose an iPod in a treadmill.

Yesterday I had a really interesting conversation about motivation and the areas in my life in which I have none. I always assumed that to change, or achieve goals, the idea has to be there, then the motivation and then the action and so I struggle taking action when there’s no motivation. I’d never considered that actually, the idea is there, then you start making moves to achieve it, and when you’ve taken a few steps and maybe seen some results, then the motivation comes. Thinking like that takes the pressure right off.

A few days ago I got an email in response to one I’d sent about my life post-uni and there was one line in it that really hit home: ‘I know everything seems like chaos right now – but I always felt excited by the possibilities of life when we were together’.

Suddenly I realised I don’t need to become anything, I just need to start being myself again. The myself who believed in myself (with lines like that, I’m practically qualified to write a motivational book), the myself circa 2005 who didn’t even know who The Honourable Daphne Diana Joan Suzannah Guinness was and my hair was black with a white streak not because of her, but because I told my hairdresser that I knew I could never have his white boy afro, but I’d be damned if I didn’t want her to make me look like I was going grey like Buzz Osborne of Mevins.

If you didn’t know me then, I was okay. I had great eyebrows and a penchant for typing up deep and meaningful song lyrics in Courier New and sticking them above my desk, for taking Polaroids of cherry blossoms at night and for the garb of Russian Orthodox priests. I did Honours in English for no reason other than that I deeply loved my supervisor and deeply loved how it felt to exercise my brain while struggling through books with titles like Philosophy in the Feminine. I was never lazy mentally or physically. I walked 6kms almost every day, I volunteered at a shambolically run art gallery and would starve myself all day so I could go to Pizza Hut and have the buffet and cry with laughter from the sugar high on the way home. I had crazy hair, sometimes it was flaming red, short at the back, long at the front and had patches shaved almost down to the skin and when the dye would fade, I looked like an oak tree in autumn. Sometimes I went to the pub in my pyjamas, sometimes I went in a fake moustached disguise. I had a strong self of self, no matter how inexplicable that self might have been. I cared less and grinned with excitement more and nothing around me now is different, the change is all in my head.

So a few people have been asking about my plans for the year, and they are, without specifics, to try very hard not to rest on my laurels and to remember that the shell changed, but whatever is inherently “me” never really did and all of this begins on February 1.

On Wednesday night I went to Porteño for the first time.

It’s sort of like The Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld. Porteño won’t seat your party until you’re all there, and if you’re late, they’ll cancel your booking. Getting eight adults from all over Sydney to the restaurant in Sydney’s torrential rain was an exercise of epic proportion and I showed up ridiculously early and looking like a drowned rat, so I went and hid in a seedy bar with some cheap bourbon.

When we eventually all made it to Porteño, any kind of stress anyone might have had about schlepping around Sydney and ruining  their best Jessica Simpson shoes disappeared as soon as the tequila-based cocktails arrived. I am not a food buff by any measure, so I’m not going to try and do the food justice, only to say I was happy to let Matt and Jamie do most of the ordering of the food and wine and each dish was amazing.

That I loved the Polenta a la Tabla wasn’t a huge surprise, but I have to say, I never expected to lust after a brussels sprouts dish, but their Repollitos de Brusela Frito is amazing.

I’m kinda keen to go back, maybe with the parental unit.

Afterwards we went upstairs to Gardel’s Bar where almost everyone else indulged in tequila and I sat thinking about how if I was wrong about brussels sprouts, maybe I’m wrong about everything else too, also, I can see almost all the way down my shirt, is it possible there is some lost brussels sprouts down there?

Australia Day was spent mooching away from the humidity, by which I mean Jeff played Skyrim and I played Scribblenauts.

Our conversations go a little like this:

Him: Argh! I am going to cut you dragon. I am going to cut you!
Me: Hmmm. I’ve run out of farm animals to use. Oh come on, you have to be kidding me! A Komodo Dragon is a legitimate farm animal!
Him: Lydia! Get out of my way! Carry my things! Why are you carrying too many of my things! I will poison you with Dwarven arrow poison!
Me: Oh gross. I just used a blow torch on a rat and it turned into a shish kebab and the chef ate it.

This weekend Jeff and pretty much every other male I know are in Tamworth for a buck’s weekend to coincide with the Country Music Festival which I think is a great idea, I always loved being in Tamworth around festival time. We’ll never hear about it though, they’re all on a Twitter/Facebook etc blackout (though just quietly, someone broke embargo and sent me a message that said: Already proven my manliness on this trip by knowing the lyrics to ‘I Should Be So Lucky’).

I’m on-call most of the weekend, but I have a hot lady date with Mush to drink gin and vodka and watch the third Paradise Lost documentary on Saturday and I am looking forward to it mushly (see what I did there? I took an incorrectly spelt word and made it even worse by making it a play on Mush’s name!) because we know how to party hard!

Hope everyone has a most rad weekend!

On the weekend, my nephew V turned two.

Which also means it’s been two years since I had a panic attack so large that my mum was all, ‘Are you okay?’ and I was all, ‘Lucky we’re on the way to the hospital already, because I think I might be having a heart attack’. Turns out I wasn’t and after visiting the baby, who has been cute since hours after birth, I had a very nice chicken and cashew nut stir-fry, which I’m pretty sure you can’t do post-heart attack.

This is one of the first photos I took of V, when he was just a few days old and I’d just realised it’s possible to love a complete stranger:

Now Vincent is about five-foot tall and can say all our names and ‘wombat’ and ‘yo!’ and is a total camera whore. I’m not sure that his grandparents are going to love me calling him a whore, but it’s been hard to take them seriously since they started being called GG and Duffy.

Mum and Dad rented a place on the Central Coast and we all met up there and had a little party for V in the only way my family can, by which I mean Mum cut herself snipping ribbon for the balloons so the balloons had blood on them and then the guest of honour was late, but unlike Christmas, didn’t throw tantrums when we held him down and forced him to open amazing presents. We also had champagne to toast my sister Mary’s recent win of the Rusty Wrench award at the 2012 Linux Conference. There was some frantic Googling on the morning of the party while I tried to explain to the parental unit what open source is and why this was a big deal. I settled with ‘Open source is going to take over the world and Mary won the award based on the votes of 19,726 of her peers and they carried her into a stadium on a golden couch, held aloft by four of their strongest geeks, who were also painted gold. And wearing loincloths. And there was a dragon, except now I might be talking about Skyrim’.

This is V’s “cake” which he shared with Duffy. My dad has turned really strange since receiving a grandchild. He’s gone and gotten himself feelings and he shares them with people and V is his most favourite person on the face to the earth and V’s finally getting over his fear of having a grandfather who’s something like 11 foot tall, so they are well on their way to having a total bromance going on.

Here he is with his favourite play equipment: Uncle Joel aka Yo!

There was present giving:

There was cam-whoring. So much cam-whoring. Kid knows how to work it:

There was playgrounding:

There was bubbling:

It was a great day and I hope two is as rad for V as zero and one were and may this new year of his life be filled with pigeons and dogs and wombats.

I lucked out when it came to brothers-in-law. They’re both very different men, but they’re both quirky, interesting people who make my sisters happy (respectively, there’s no wife-swapping going on that I know about, but then again, I’m usually the last person to know anything in our family).

This is my little/big brother-in-law, Joel. He’s ‘little’ because he’s shorter than me and married to my younger sister, Steph. He is ‘big’ because he’s older than I am (and yeah that makes him a total cradle-snatcher, gross). He is one of the founders of Umbrella, who manage bands like Cloud Control and he’s part of the Naughty Rappers Collective. We share a love of odd sunglasses, phat beats, touches of urban cowboy (not the touches of urban cowboys, I mean like the fashion concept) and exploding fist bumps.

He is also relentlessly positive and really gets into hobbies, like craft beer making. Sometimes his relentless wit and charm make me feel a little like vomiting on him, just to see what he’d do.

Mostly I don’t because he’s a good boy and nothing gets the smell of vomit out of a 100% cotton plaid button-up urban cowboy shirt.

I am now firmly ensconced in my new place, getting used to having to wear pants again so as not to blind my housemate. I found these really amazing men’s sleep shorts. They’re super soft and roomy, so you can sleep at all kinds of crazy angles without getting your shorts in a knot and waking up with numb nether regions! The cotton feels like a groin hug.

I got these shoes at Nordstrom in Seattle. It was a pretty amazing experience. When you find shoes you want, you take them to a woman who has a microphone and then she calls out your location and a stupidly attractive man comes and finds the size you want, while you sit there wondering why no-one told them you’re not the queen, you’re just a serf. These shoes have a signature on the bottom, which my brain immediately translated to something fancy and European. Turns out they’re Jessica Simpson shoes. I don’t even care that once I had PMS and mentally wrote her husband a letter about how sorry I was that she left him, these shoes are so comfortable that I’m totally Team Jessica now.

One of the best things in the world is the new food court in Pitt Street, which is up a secret escalator Jeff taught me about and we go there and have Charlie & Co. burgers. They are stupidly good burgers and I highly recommend the parmesan and truffle fries too. Then I recommend you go to the gym. Haha! No I don’t, silly! I recommend you go home and drink vanilla Kahlúa …

… WITH A GIANT ICECUBE!

Sydney has been moody recently. We haven’t had a very warm summer for a start, but there have been some days nice enough to wander down to the Quay at lunch and do some reading:

(This was The Marriage Plot which I was initially totally engrossed in, but the ending was, sadly, really weak)

Next thing you know, it’s raining sideways so heavily it’s pretty much impossible to go outside:

Complimentary colours:

1. I buy cheap headphones so I have to replace them all the time. The pink ones are the worst I’ve ever bought and lasted a day. The purple ones are the best. I’m attracted to colourful or sparkling things just like your average friendly neighbourhood unicorn is.
2. A new series of designs for a few well-known books. I love how the designers matched the colours to themes in the book, in this case, the red of the Handmaid’s habits. I think I might have to buy this edition, I love the red-tipped pages.
3. The ceiling of World Square.
4. A strawberry blend juice from Chat Thai. It was pretty amazing, the perfect compliment to a chicken and cashew nut stir-fry *cough*