Bill's Guided Tour

 

Watching a cheeky-drinkie-pooed-up Bill Murray on this little film just made us a lot more pissed off with ourselves for not having been quick enough to snap up tickets to the screening of Moonrise Kingdom at the upcoming Sydney Film Festival. Bah. It's a long wait from now until the end of August when the film goes on general release here in Australia. It sure sucks to be us. Boo.

Telnyashka!

I added two Russian words to my vocabulary over the weekend. Telnyashka. And khlopok (хлопок on the care label). Thanks to this original Russian Navy stripey top I found in an army surplus store! In a soft fine cotton jersey. I love it when I learn new things from shopping, an activity that is still perceived by some (my father is one of them!) as bimbo-astic.

My father would also be the first to point out, if he can only see my big stack of stripey things, that I do not need another. I thought so too - I have a selection in various shapes and sizes, from boxy to drapey to skinny, to wear with different bottoms - until the very sad recent closure of Remo General Store. I love all my stripey pals but the ones from Remo, super-boxy in a heavyweight cotton jersey, are my favourite. For their perfect-to-me shape/cut/style and durability. Now that I know they are irreplaceable, the search for a new #1 has begun. And the only way to know if the newbies make the grade is to take them home and wear-and-wash them. Heaps.

This new telnyashka? It's nicely oversized (the store only stocks one size) but the softness of the fabric makes it drapey and not boxy? And I'm looking for boxy! However, all's not lost. I've got a new stripey thing in a new silhouette! Woo! And you can expect more stripey thing-testing posts. 

A Little Bit Like Whistling While You Work...And Play

A wise-ish wakeboarding buddy once said to me, while our pals were squabbling over which CD to play on the boat's souped-up stereo, that if I'm doing what I love, I'll definitely hear music in my head. True that! I've not noticed how my head automatically soundtrack my life until that day. And there's something "playing" - sometimes loud, sometimes silently - most of the time so I guess I must enjoy most of the things that I do day in and day out.

The title music from the 1970 film Bombay Talkie (also used recently by Wes Anderson on The Darjeeling Limited soundtrack) has been going round and round in my head for weeks. At work and at play. And it reminded me of Mathar, a tune recorded by The Dave Pike Set in the 60s, that soundtracked quite a period of my life in the 90s after it's been remixed by people by like Primal Scream and Richard Fearless.

I know my activities today will still be accompanied by the Bombay Talkie tune (it's a hard one to get rid off!). I hope your head will be soundtracking your day too because it means you're doing what you love and having a bloody good time!    

More Fun With Packaging

These home-baked biscuits in home-made packaging were given to pals (also our new neighbours!) Ms Carpet and K-Pop. I really do like packaging things. One of my many dream jobs is to be sitting at a massive bench, equipped with all the right tools, playing with all the paper and cardboard in the world and wrapping and boxing stuff up all nice all day. Does such a position exist?

I like looking at this old book (so old that the neon orange cover has faded and the white pages are yellowing around the edges)...

...and imagining a life of making one-off bespoke boxes and packaging for clients with special needs, like a milliner creating hats for people for special occasions. It would be so darn swell, wouldn't it?

Or, I was thinking, I can embark on one of those crazy make-a-thing-a-day projects. There are more than 300 templates for boxes in the book. Enough for a whole year of box-building! We shall see...  

Let's Talk Caramel Corn (Part 10)

We popped into an Asian grocer, one that we don't go to as often as our usual one, over the weekend and found that they stock a wider range of Caramel Corn! Wooo!

The pink Sakura (cherry blossom) is a flavour that I've been curious about for ages! From what I could gather on the Japanglish Tohato website (which I check regularly for new flavours), it's meant to taste like a sweet red bean paste rice cake wrapped in salty cherry leaves. Exciting, huh? The actual pale pink corn puffs didn't taste anything like that - more bitter almond-y than red bean-y and not at all salty - but it's still Caramel-y Corn-y delicious.

And that bigger bag?! It was squeal-o-rama time when I saw it sitting above the small packs on the shelf! It's another one that I've only read about on the Tohato site. Five times the size of the regular corn puff = five times the fun! And it really was! Bigger than the size of my thumb! And we lucked out with a Mont Blanc-flavoured one! You know that super old-school piped chestnut puree dessert? Tohato got the flavour right with this one. Whoopeedoo!