Happy little vegemite...

For those of you who haven't realised it yet, I should probably tell you that I'm Australian.  That's right, I'm a proud, dinky di Aussie.  I've played a didgeridoo (badly), sat on the steps of the Opera House, and I can understand Crocodile Dundee without the subtitles.

By the way, do you have any idea how hilarious we found it that they needed to put subtitles on the movie Crocodile Dundee?  His accent wasn't THAT thick!  Did you guys really need it?

But the truth is there really isn't that much of a difference between an Aussie and any other Western culture.  In fact, we're pretty much a mixture of American and British.  The one thing we have, though, that is uniquely ours is our food.

Not all of it of course, but there are a few things that define us.  Lamingtons, Tim Tams, Chiko Roll, Pavlova, they're all uniquely Australian.  But the one thing that's always defined us is, of course, Vegemite.

In case you don't know, Vegemite is a sandwich spread that's made from a yeast extract.  It's black, tar like, and incredibly salty.  I remember watching a video once where an American fellow described it as tasting like salt and pain.  A little melodramatic, certainly, but I can see where he was coming from.  It really is very salty.

We're usually given our first taste of Vegemite as soon as we're old enough to eat a piece of toast.  It's a bit of a rite of passage.  Because of this, we usually can't remember a time when we DIDN'T eat Vegemite, so there's no memory of the first time or of learning to love it.

I'm not sure how many of you have ever tried Vegemite, but let me just say ... it's an acquired taste.  I acknowledge that.  I've seen enough youtube videos of people from overseas trying it to realise that unless you were raised on it, you're probably not going to like it.  But personally, I have a hard time understanding how someone COULDN'T like it!

All through my childhood I had Vegemite sandwiches packed in my lunch.  Even now, as an adult, I eat Vegemite toast for breakfast more often than not.  I know a lot of things people overseas believe Australians do are just stereotypes, but take my word for it, eating Vegemite is something that we definitely do.  In fact, given its salt content, some might say we eat it too much.

But the reason I'm bringing it up is that I've decided to try a little experiment.  I'd like to see if Vegemite is really as offensive to people from overseas as I've always been led to believe.  In order to find out, I've decided to send some to three lucky readers (to be selected randomly from the comments to this post) so that they can try it for themselves and report back to us all on how they found it.

So if you'd like to join me in this highly scientific endeavour, leave a comment saying so.  I'll randomly select three lucky individuals and, after contacting you to get your postal address, I'll send you some Vegemite.  I'll be taking the names two days after posting and leave messages for those who  are chosen.

Then we'll see whether Vegemite is something only an Australian can love.

The greatest love of all...

I’m in love.

Yes, you heard correctly.  I, the most jaded person on the planet, am in love.  It’s exhilarating, terrifying, and completely inappropriate.  You see, I’m having an affair with my iPad.

What can I say, ours is a forbidden love.

I have to confess I avoided the whole iPhone/iPad kerfuffle for a very long time.  I stuck to my old mobile long after its contract ran out, doggedly insisting that I didn't need no new fangle contraption!  A good old nokia was good enough for me, thank you very much!

Me too, dude, me too...

But eventually my old phone gave up the ghost and I was forced to seek a replacement.  Of course these days it's practically impossible NOT to get a smart phone when you go looking.  When you tell the sales people that you just want a normal phone they look at you like you like you're talking Greek!  So, being the marketer's dream that I am, I allowed them to talk me into getting my first ever iPhone.

It was a flirtation, a crush.  We danced around each other, but in no way did it replace my reliable old laptop.  Still, I enjoyed it's company.  I could email with it, send long and rambling text messages (someting that my old phone would have had a coronary about) and surf the internet, all on my phone!  It was like a whole new world opened up to me, one where I could read fanfiction.net stories in bed into the wee hours of the morning.

That was about a year and a half ago, and for twelve months my iPhone and I got along beautifully.  We went everywhere together and it kept me happily amused through many a boring meeting or function.  But eventually I realised as good as we were together, it wasn't a perfect match.  There was something missing from our relationship, some spark.

The question was where could I find that spark?  Certainly not my staid, stay-at-home laptop.  Its dependability was comforting, but the passion was definitely gone from the relationship.  No, it was time for something new.  That's when I started toying with the idea of getting an iPad.

I didn't get a free human ... gypped!

Now the thing you need to understand about me is that when I want something, I can't wait.  Instant gratification, baby!  So pretty much the day I decided I couldn't live without an iPad in my life, I trotted out and got myself one.  There was no thinking about it, no shopping around, I just walked straight into my Telstra store and asked them about their deals.  Half an hour late, I walked out with the new love of my life.

And that was the start of our whirlwind illicit romance!  If my laptop was my wife and my iPhone was my office crush, then my brand new iPad was definitely my mistress.  Suddenly things I would have previously done on the laptop, I just snuck away to my room and did them on the iPad instead.  It was new, exciting, and so so passionate.

My brother thought I was insane though.  Not because I was cheating on my laptop, oh no, he's all for having affairs with new technology, his problem was the fact that I bought the iPad 2 only a week or so before the new one came out.

Okay, fair cop.

But like I said, when I want something, I want it right away! And from what I hear, it's not like the new iPad is really that much better.  So it's got a better camera, it's not like I'm going to use the camera on it.  That's what the iPhone is for!  So it's video quality is a tad nicer, with a screen that size you're not really going to notice.  So it's faster, when you're talking about fractions of a second, it's not like it's going to make any difference to you!

Maybe I'm fooling myself.  Maybe I'm just making up excuses because, in typical Kellie fashion, I went out and impetuously bought something expensive before checking all my options (it's not the most expensive thing I've bought like that, once I bought a car in an afternoon), but I don't regret it.

If loving my iPad 2 is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

That ain't Whitney...

I love all things freaky, I must admit.  If it's even slightly creepy, weird or occult, I'm all over it!  So when I saw this video, I just knew I had to share the love with you all.  This is all sorts of awesome!

Skip forward to around fifty seconds to get to the start of the performance, and be prepared for something amazing at around the two minute twenty second mark.  Trust me, you'll thank me later.

School days, school days...

This weekend just gone was my twenty year high school reunion.  Twenty years since I walked the hallowed halls and vine draped walls of my alma mater.  And by hallowed halls and vine draped walls, I mean cement footpaths and fibro demountables. 

But even though I know twenty years is kind of a big deal in the reunion world, and even though my old classmates have been hammering on about it for months now on Facebook, I made the decision not to attend. 

Yeah, I'm one of those people.

It's not that I had an awful time in high school, in fact as far as secondary educational experiences go it was pretty okay.  I made some good friends, some not-so-good friends, learnt a lot about myself and who I wanted to be, and formed the basis for what are some of the most important friendships in my life.  Not bad, considering.

But when I saw the invitation for the reunion, it never even crossed my mind to go.  The truth is, I wasn't sure if I'd even remember most of the people there, or recognise the ones I did.  It just seemed like an exercise in masochism.  Honestly, the people from high school who I actually have an interest in seeing I already see every few weeks.

That doesn't mean I wasn't holding out to see the photos though.

As you would expect in this depraved age, the pics were up on Facebook by early the next morning, and I've got to say ... if someone hadn't gone through and very obligingly put the names on the faces, I wouldn't have had a clue who any of those people were.  Some of them looked kind of familiar, like if you walked past them in the street you might wonder if they were someone you saw in the supermarket or on the bus once, but very few of them stood out to me as instantly recognisable.

Isn't that awful!  I spent five years with these people.  Every day I dragged myself off to that institute of learning and sat in a room with at least 30 of them.  You'd think I'd remember them a little better!  But no, of the hundred or so that turned up (there were about three hundred in my class) I probably instantly recognised half a dozen of them.

But once I put names to faces, I started to remember them.  

It's weird.  They all looked so ... different.  Not surprising, I suppose, twenty years will do that to you.  I made a point of checking out all the guys I'd had crushes on back then, just to see how they'd held up over the years.  Shallow?  Of course!  But be honest, you know you'd have done it too!  For the most part they'd stood the test of time, although it did make me realise that you can never tell which kid is going to be cute when they grow up.  Seriously, some of them were complete surprises.

I imagine there was a lot of lying going on in that room.  I'm sure assistants became assistant managers, business workers became business owners, and disgruntled housewives became stay-at-home entrepreneurs.  Part of me would like to have been a fly on the wall just to hear some of it.  But perhaps I'm being harsh.  They all seemed to be having a good time.

I will say this though, there seems to be a disturbing trend among the male contingent of my graduating class towards wearing sweater vests.  Really guys?  You really want to go in that direction?  We're 37, not 77!  I'm not advocating mutton dressed as lamb, but there'll be plenty of time for sweater vests when you retire.

Cupcake chaos...

I'm not someone who cooks.  Generally, I prefer to leave food preparation to the professionals, thus explaining my rather impressive collection of take away menus, but lately I've found myself wanting to bake for some strange reason.

And not just bake any old thing, bake cupcakes.

I have no idea why.  It's not like me at all!  Usually if I wanted a cupcake, I'd go the bakery and buy a damned cupcake!  None of this faffing around in the kitchen, creaming butter and sugar.  And who, exactly, came up with the idea of creaming butter and sugar together?  Whoever they were, they must have been sadists!  As someone who doesn't own a food processor, that's one of the hardest things to do with a hand held electric mixer.

Whether it makes me a masochist I have no idea, but I ended up pulling out my old recipe book and finding the pages for butter cake, johnny cake, chocolate mud cake.  Pulling out all the baking "extras" like chocolate chips and chopped nuts from the back of the pantry.  Digging the icing pipe out from the cutlery drawer.

My first attempt was with the traditional vanilla butter cake recipe.  Yeah ... that one didn't turn out so good.  I'm not sure how, but what came out of the oven was more like little doughy rocks than cakes.  I didn't even bother with icing them, it would have been a waste of good sugar.

Then I tried a "Four Minute Chocolate Cake" recipe.  It wasn't strictly a cupcake recipe, but I figured that didn't matter.  Surely cake is cake, no matter what shape it's in.  It's selling point was the fact that you were supposed to just dump all the ingredients in together, no blending, creaming or folding required.  Sounded right up my alley!

But when they were done the results were strange to say the least.  They hadn't risen very much, at least not as much as the vanilla butter ones, and they were almost crystallised.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and just assume that just because the recipe says it's a one step process, doesn't necessarily mean it SHOULD be.


My third attempt, red velvet cupcakes, was much better though.  They rose beautifully, looked exactly the way they were supposed to, and tasted great.  I waited until they cooled and then iced them with a cream cheese icing and teensy little candy hearts.  They were perfect, just what I wanted.

Shame that, strictly speaking, White Wings made them and not me.

Yeah, I caved and bought a cake mix.  What can I say, I got sick of failure!  Sure it'd be nice to be able to present a tray of immaculately iced cupcakes and say "Made 'em with my own two hands", but I think I'm going to have to just accept the fact that no matter how hard I try, a $2.99 cake mix is going to still yield better results.

I guess my dreams of escaping the office life and opening a cupcake cafe were a bit premature.  Oh well, back to the drawing board.

I don't remember putting that in my will...

Like most grown ups out there, I have a will.  It's not a particularly complicated one, basically just leaving everything to whatever family member is left after my unfortunate demise, as well as a trust to my nephew.  I didn't ask the public trustee to do anything complicated, like make anyone go on a convoluted treasure hunt or spend the night in a haunted house to get my money, and given the fact that I had it rewritten at Christmas time I think I can remember the details pretty well.

So you can imagine my surprise when I received a letter from the University I graduated from thanking me for choosing to make them the beneficiary of my will.

Umm ... what the fuck?

The letter explained how grateful they were for my generous contributions, and how it would go to help future students of my alma mater by improving services and providing scholarship opportunities.

Screw that!  I had to pay my own way through thank you very much, and let me tell you what with tutorial fees, HECS fees and text book costs it wasn't cheap!  Not to mention the photocopying expenses.  Holy crap, why doesn't anyone tell  you how expensive photocopying is?  So if I had to pay, why on earth should future students get the benefit of having me pay for THEM too!

The letter then went on, in what I can only describe as a fit of outrageous audacity, to say that seeing as I was considering forking over my life savings at my death, how about I consider giving some of it right now.  I couldn't believe it!  They thought (however erroneously) that I was choosing to give them all my money when I died, but rather than being grateful for the gift they actually had the nerve to say, "Yeah, we don't feel like waiting that long, and a hitman costs too much ... could you just give it to us now?"

Gobsmacked doesn't even begin to describe my reaction.  How does one even respond to something like this?  Part of me was tempted to grab the copy of my will I left in my family's safe and just double check that I didn't actually leave it all to the University.  Who knows, it was an early morning meeting with the public trustee, maybe in a fit of sleep and caffeine deprivation I accidentally said "Leave everything to the University that charged me an arm and a leg to get a degree that I'll probably never use".

But no, today I received an email from the University, apologising for the letter.  Apparently they sent a whole slew of them out to the wrong people, and now are trying to do damage control.  The email said that they were very sorry, and they hoped it wouldn't discourage me from considering them in my will in the future.

So let me get this right, University.  You want me to leave all my worldly possessions (and my superannuation account) to you in my will, so you can then send me regular letters begging me to give you more money before I croak?

Umm ... yeah, I don't think I'll be doing that.

Does this post make my bum look big...

The other day a friend asked me if a skirt she was wearing made her bum look big.  Yeah, I know what the guys in the audience are thinking.  Trick question!  But no, it wasn't.  She asked, and I told her that yes, it did make her bum look big.  Then I told her that the A-line skirt would be a better choice with the blouse she was wearing if she was trying to avoid that.  She agreed with  me and decided to change into the other skirt.

Another friend happened to be with us, a guy, and he was horrified.  Not by the fact that I'd apparently broken the cardinal rule of how to answer the "Does my but look big" question ... but by the fact that I didn't get my head ripped off for my troubles.

It took us a while to explain the reason to him, which I'm now going to explain to you.  You see, the reason I could get away with being so grossly insulting, and I'm aware of the sexism involved in this, is because I'm a girl.

Yep, if asked, girls can tell other girls that their butts look big.  This only works though if you're asked, not if you just volunteer the information out of thin air.  I know, it's completely unfair, but there you go.  I see so many poor guys out there being verbally eviscerated by their wives/girlfriends, when all it would take is a pre-prepared answer and a bit of quick thinking to save their hides.

But in an effort to help the gentlemen out there avoid the pitfalls of this veritable verbal minefield, I've decided to grace you all with "Kellie's Guide to Answering The Tough Questions".  (Disclaimer:  This guide in no way guarantees that you will be able to answer the tough questions.  In fact, in all likelihood all you'll do is just get yourself in deeper trouble.)

Does my bum look big in this?

Gentlemen, the answer to this should be an immediate and resounding no!  If she wanted the truth, she would ask a female friend.  If she's asking you, she wants reassurance that you still find her as sylph like as you ever did.  

I don't care if it looks like she rammed a Christmas turkey into a condom, you tell her that she looks all sorts of lovely and let it go at that!

Do you notice anything new?

This is always a hard one.  It could be a new hair cut, it could be new shoes, it could be she had the kitchen lino replaced.  Really, it's a crap shoot.  

My best suggestion for this is to say "I thought there was something different, but I wasn't sure.  Whatever it is, you look great!"  It allows her to feel like you complimented her, while also inviting her to answer the question for you.  Again, it's a gamble, but it's the best chance you're going to get.

What are you thinking?

A lot of guys I know have told me that this one always annoys the shit out of them.  Why on earth do we want to know what they're thinking?  Well, to be completely honest, what she's really asking is are you thinking of HER.

If you don't want to answer honestly (and seriously, if you answer is something like "your sister in a bikini" then you DON'T want to answer honestly), try something simple but cute.  My recommendation would be "I was thinking about where I want to take you next time we both have a day off.  What do you think of a picnic?"

And yes, then you do have to take her on a picnic.  Suck it up, cupcake.

But there is one question, ladies and gentlemen, that one can never answer correctly.  No matter what you say, responding to "So, have you stopped beating your partner" will never make you look good.