What, Where, When

Questions, questions, that keep rattling through the brain.

What?  A Wedding.  What type?  My dad is Greek Orthodox.  So am I, technically.  Mr Vexation though, not baptised.  And mean Greek Orthodox church won’t marry non-baptised people.  Mr Vexation’s family’s background is Presbyterian.  Uniting Church is starting to sound good, yes?  If you’re my dad, then no.  He wants a Greek wedding.  Never mind the above mentioned hiccup in that plan.  “But they don’t go to church!” he says.  I say: “Neither do we!”  Well ok, we might go at Easter, and weddings, but that’s about it.  Anyway, even Greek tradition says that the wedding happens at the groom’s church.  Which means Presbyterian.  I’m calling Uniting Church a good compromise.

Where?  Well, that is a dilemma.  Do we have it close to home in a crusty looking church, but has better parking and price?  Or do we have it in a nice church that nobody can get to because it’s in ‘The City’?  It almost seems like that’s the only two options, with nothing at all in between.  We’re going to go on a church stakeout this weekend to have a look around, because not all churches have their own websites!?  Who woulda thunk that a church wouldn’t be up (or is it down) with the new technology?

When?  Early next year.  We’re thinking March or April.  Possibly around one of the public holidays to allow people who are travelling extra time.  But there’s also Easter to consider.  And Lent.  My dad’s family (making life complicated; they’re doin it right) are good little Greek Orthodoxes and follow lent.  At least for the final week.  Which is better than the whole seven weeks.  Ack.

Who’d get married?  This is hell complicated and we’ve barely even started.

Finances are Go!

We opened a bank account today to start saving for the wedding.

Amusingly, the lady who helped us at the bank shared Mr Vexation’s family name.  It’s a pretty common one but we still had a giggle.

We have finally been able to deposit the $200 that Mr Vexation’s grandpa gave us!  I have to admit I was getting worried with Mr Vexation walking around with the pretty green notes in his wallet…

Now I have to think about how much of my $$$ will be deposited.  Hmmm….

This ain’t gonna be pretty…

We started considering an engagement party.

We’d like something small (yes, we agreed!), so we thought perhaps a do in the backyard, with a lamb on the spit – OK, you’ll understand why this is considered ’small’ soon enough, and generally just casual foodz and drinks.  That way, we save money we can then blow on the wedding

Small do, remember.

We started on the guest list.  Counting only family, that is, Mr Vexation’s sister, both our parents, Mr Vexation’s grandpa and his wife, my god parents, and our aunties, uncles and cousins (not cousins’ kids though!!), we had 100 people.

No friends.  No workmates.  No neighbours.  No young’uns (except for Mr Vexation’s nephews).  Small gathering, remember?

Now of course not everyone who’s invited will show up.  A large chunk of our families live out in the bush, farming and stuff, and wouldn’t be able to make it.  People are interstate or overseas, and probably wouldn’t make the trip just for an afternoon do.  Ok, we didn’t even include the overseas people on the original list.  Others simply won’t be able to make it, or won’t want to (losers :p).

We’ve culled down the family members to only the ones likely to be able to make it, who live in our state, but then compensated by adding friends.  We’re now at 58 people.

We’re not sure whether to keep culling, or whether it’s safe to add some of the local family back.  There’s only one toilet at Vexation Estate; are we going to have to hire more loos?  If so, where do we put them?  Do we tell people to BYO chairs?

If I’m this distressed over a small engagement party, how am I going to cope with wedding planning?

Ack!

Wow.

Was starting to wonder if this was ever going to happen, but it did.  Mr. Vexation officially became my fiance on 22 February 2009.  We kept it fairly quiet while we waited to tell family and such.

How did it happen?  We went hiking at Morialta National Park.  At the lookout overlooking what is normally the First Falls (not so much at the moment, given summer, drought etc etc), Mr Vexation got down on one knee and proposed.

Did I know it was going to happen?  I had an inkling while we were walking around, and looking out from one lookout to the one where we’d had our first kiss – cue AWWWWs – I remember thinking that would be a nice spot for Mr Vexation to propose, but hmph, like that was going to happen.  Even though he had mentioned on New Years Eve that he’d like to get engaged this year.  But while I wasn’t thinking, yup, he’s going to propose, as we got closer to the point where he did I started to wonder if he was.  Not sure why.  Something just sort of clicked into place.

We’re very excited, as one might expect.  But I foresee stress in our future.  Weddings are stressful to organise, I understand, and I’m sure we will get stressed about stuff along the way.  Good thing I have this Vexation Nation blog to vent at!

When is a clarification not a clarification?

When MaxoidDrea makes one.

“Basically, we’re not changing our EULA, which everyone agrees to when they install our games, and says that people cannot profit commercially from selling modifications of our pixel people game, but some people ignore it and do make money, and everyone should respect that.”

Umm.  Right.  So I suppose, seeing as we can ignore EULAe so easily now, EA will not mind if people go around pirating the game.  No?  Well why not change the EULA if paysites are ok?

I will not be buying The Sims 3.  There, I’ve said it.  I’m sure Mr Vexation will be overjoyed to hear it (although he may be disappointed that I’m not getting rid of The Sims 2).  And I’m not alone.  There is now an open letter and  petition which we can sign online will be printed and posted to EA on 31 March 2009.

Go!  Sign it!  Protest the lack of clarification!  Protest the leeching of chilluns pocket money by big fat greedy paysites being given the greenlight!

The Whisper of Leaves – K.S. Nikakis

The Whisper of Leaves – K.S. Nikakis

Very disappointing, but given its a debut novel I feel almost as if I should cut the author some slack.  Some of the mistakes made in the book, I can relate to when I’ve tried to write.  Such as the tendency for characters to easily guess the motives of others, despite the fact that they’ve never met, never spoken, or hell, practically forgotten that their race existed.  But people in their own ‘clan’, they can’t figure out.  Such as why a father hates his daughter.  Everyone knows he does, but noone can figure out why.  AND IT IS NEVER RESOLVED.  *grump*

Others are almost unforgivable.  Characters are one-dimensional to the point where they become caricatures.  If they’re lucky, they get two dimensions.  This character is arrogant, with precisely zero redeeming features.  This character is driven to heal others, but is reckless and often causes more trouble than she solves.  This brother (chief) is thoughtful, this brother is jealous and greedy because he’s not the chief.  I found there was only one well defined character in the whole mess.

The cover tells you that this is ‘… an enthralling story with characters you care about’.  But I can’t care about cardboard cutouts, as much as I would like to.  As for the ‘enthralling story’… well, the idea isn’t bad, I just found the writing clunky, and sometimes seemed to violate rules that I had thought any editor worth his/her salt would catch straight away.  Such as entire conversations taking place in a single paragraph, to the point where I wasn’t sure who had said what.

One last gripe (what happened to that slack I was going to give the author?).  While it can be good, in a fantasy setting, for characters to not speak like denizens of the 21st Century, there can come a point where the emphasis on the little quirks of the language becomes annoying and instead of allowing the reader to immerse in the story, throws one out to have to think about what they actually bloody well mean.

I wanted to like this book.  I’m generally a fan of fantasy, and given this is the first in a new series I was kinda looking forward to having another series to read over and over again.  Alas, this is not that series.

Just started on The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette tonight, the prologue was interesting, so I have hopes.

Reading Dangerously, First Three Books

Here are the first three books which I read ‘Dangerously’ for.  If one can really call ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ dangerous!

Confessions of a Shopaholic – Sophie Kinsella

As funny as this book can be, it made me cringe an awful lot.  I can’t bring myself to spend a lot of money, and I pay my bills on time, every time.  Sometimes I wish I could spend more on myself and be less miserly, but it seems I’m too well trained to spend without having to justify it in terms of how long it took to earn the money.  But anyway…  Spoiler ahead, if you’re worried about that sort of thing.

Every time the main character (Becky) convinces herself to buy just this one thing – because it has reward points, which is really free money, isn’t it, or because she’s been looking for zebra striped jeans for ages, or, well you get the idea – I found myself wanting to scream at her.  It didn’t help that her taste in fashion made me want to vomit.  Seriously, zebra striped jeans?  Definitely not worth the effort she goes to trying to acquire them.  I think my aforementioned stinginess made it hard for me to empathise with Becky’s problems.  And frankly, I think she gets off too easily at the end.

The other thing that got me is that Becky seems to be a lot like Bridget Jones.  Just replace cigarettes, booze and food with clothes, makeup and shoes and we have a winner.

All up, fun, but I’ve got the wrong mindset for it.  I can’t laugh along with someone in this kind of strife.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

In a word?  Heartbreaking.  The story of two women in Afghanistan and the bond that grows between them, set against nearly fifty years of Afghan history.  Trouble is, you only ever see through two characters eyes for any length of time.  And in a book in which a large chunk of it follows the rise of the Taliban, and the way they treated women, I would have liked to see a male perspective.  We hear all the time how horrible it was for women, and some of the men do nothing to improve their image, but it would have been good – or interesting at the very least – to see inside the mind of Hakim, Tariq, Jalil, or even Rasheed.

My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult

I have to stop reading books that make me cry.  The first few chapters are confusing with the jumps between different timeframes, different storylines, which aren’t presented as flashbacks but as straight out chapters, and for a while I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the book out of sheer frustration.  I distinctly remember wondering why I’ve heard people rave about this book.  But about a third of the way in, it suddenly all came together and started to make sense.  And I was hooked.  The medical jargon tended to fly over my head, but that wasn’t important.  This was about a family facing an almost impossible choice: do you infringe on the rights, and possibly the life of one child just to keep another alive just a little bit longer?

Valentine’s Day

So it was V-Day yesterday.  The day of lurrrrve.

We had a pretty quiet one.  It’s a bit sad, we’ve been together for 3 years and 9 months and when it comes to these events we’re already getting to the stage where the conversation goes something like this: “So, what d’ya want for Valentine’s Day?” “Dunno, what d’you want?” “Dunno”.  And its not just V-Day which gets this treatment.  Anniversaries and Christmas are already fast going this way.

I bought Mr Vexation a frame and printed a photo of the two of us, because he was complaining he doesn’t have any pics of us up in his house.  He bought me X-Lotto tickets and booked a hot air balloon ride for the weekend after my graduation (I paid for it last year, as a voucher for our anniversary).  We still have to book accommodation for the night before because we have to be at the launch site for the balloon an hour before sunrise.  Which is some obscene time like 5:30am.  Given the time it takes to get from home to the launch site, I calculate that to get there on time, I would have to roll out of bed at about 3:30am – and in that case, why even bother going to bed at all!?

We took a trip down to Semaphore and went for a swim.  Well, kinda.  It was more splashing and kidding around in water that barely got above our waists, thanks to low tide.  You know, and taking advantage of the buoyancy (is that spelled anywhere near right?) to pretend that he was ‘rescuing’ me <Insert joke about my weight here – lol> and other silly behaviour.  Then we drove down to Largs Bay and had fish and chips for dinner.  After that, we made our way back home and watched last week’s Desperate Housewives that we hadn’t watched yet, and the final two episodes of Rome.

We didn’t win X-Lotto; the machine that printed the tickets was obviously malfunctioning.  Perhaps we should try and get a refund?

I hope everybody had a great V-Day, whether in a relationship and celebrating, out of a relationship and having anti-V-Day gatherings with other singletons, or even if you treat it as just another day.

I also thought it was timely for another La Spaghetti update:

La Spag, 12-Feb-09

Not a lot has changed.  We have the semblance of a mouth and chin, and beginning to work up to the other eye (which is on the other page of the pattern, so you can’t see it – do not adjust your monitor)

Angry.

I’m not sure I can really verbalise what I’m feeling at the moment.  Fires are burning out of control in my neighbouring state, Victoria.  Over 170 people have died, and ‘they’re’ expecting that toll to go over 200 soon, once they can get in to find them.  Whole towns have been completely wiped off the map.

And the worst part?  Some of the fires are believed to have been deliberately lit.  Angry doesn’t even cover it.  I am furious.

We’ve been in drought for over three years, so the bushland is extremely dry.  To add to it, SA and Victoria just got through one of the worst heatwaves on record (see my posts about ‘Stinking Hot’).  And now to find out that some of these fires were deliberately lit?  I’m livid.

What kind of thrill can someone get from this kind of destruction?  How can they sleep at night?  I’m not usually a vengeful kind of person, but part of me hopes that they got caught in their own destruction.  The only downside to that idea is that if it did happen, they would be mourned as ‘victims’ of the fire, rather than the perpetrators.

My thoughts and my prayers go out to the innocent victims in this crisis.

I’ve just received an email saying that Coles across Australia will be donating all profits from this Friday to the bushfire appeal.  I don’t usually shop at Coles, but I will be this week.

Other random thoughts about this:

• It’s not a natural disaster if it is man made.
• @ CNN: We call them bushfires, not wildfires.  When the US has wildfires, we call them wildfires.  Remember that there is a cultural difference.

Cool at last…

The weather finally cooled today.  It didn’t even make 25C.  This made me a happy girl, but I keep feeling surprised every time I walk outside and don’t get hot.

I actually have jeans on, and a shirt over my top, just to keep my arms warm because of the cool breeze coming in through my window.

All I can say about this is, it’s about time.   I usually don’t mind the heat but this heatwave had no relief, even at night.  I’m looking forward to being able to use my quilt tonight.  And wear pants to work!