Author: koalie

The prank

The title is pompous, it sounds like it’s the prank of the year. It’s the last prank of the year, rather.

My brother asked to borrow my car from Sunday to Tuesday to drive to visit friends someplace. I wasn’t so keen on the idea. My car insurance covers me only and besides, this car is getting old and it makes a strange noise when I decelerate. It’s OK to use it for local errands. After insisting heavily that he would have to be careful and make sure to not end up in trouble, I told him he could have it.

That’s when he said he was off to spend New Year’s eve with his girlfriend. Aha! I was the only one in the family privvy to that bit of information. Also, she happens to live maybe 100 km away from where he said he’d drive. Tsk… He’s so devious!

Yesterday my mum asked me why I was not interested in going with him and I said he hadn’t offered me to join him. She had asked him if I was going with him and he had said “Nah, she said she wouldn’t like it.” Devious, I tell you.

So today he came over for lunch and I told him “you know, we think it’s better if I go with you. We can take turns driving and if there’s an incident with the car I’ll be around. And oh well, I don’t know your friends, but it’s gonna be all right”.

The look on his face was priceless. It was in between looking trapped and cornered. He eventually said, quite casually “In fact, I’ll have a nice romantic New Year’s eve dinner”.

Pre-Christmas confusion

In order to add to the confusion, I’m writing this now. (nah, it’s not on purpose, really).

On the morning on 24 December I noticed a few questionable things:

  • Why are lobsters thawing?
  • Why is my brother coming over for dinner tonight?

Later in the day I got a phone call from a friend who was in the area, and we agreed to meet in Grasse for a stroll, maybe a coffee, and generally to catch up. We had some jolly good time and when it was time to split, he said he was almost in a hurry because he had dinner at his uncle’s at 9pm and that he’d better not be late for the Christmas dinner.

This is when it all became clear. Eureka-style, but far less glorious.

Post-Christmas contemplations

A few reflections that occured to me today:

  • merry post-xmas everybody!
  • there are two windows of direct sun light in our backyard lately:
        a little bit before noon and a little bit around 3 p.m.
  • really, I’m a summer creature.
  • it’s a great loss that James Brown died yesterday.
  • the one thing I dislike about the 100 Rolling Papers dispenser
        compared to the 50 leaves one, is that when one of the stacks is empty,
        the other one has this tendency to move where the other one used to be.
        Very frustrating.
  • unsurprisingly, I’m still an ISTJ (I78 S50 T12 J56).
  • there are 120653 files in my home directory today.
  • my Mum’s chocolate mousse and coffee cake is simply *awesome*.

binary

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

01001001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101
00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011 01110011 00101110
00100000 01011001 01101111 01110101 00101100 00100000 01100011
01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101100
01101011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101101 01100101
00101110

(what I’d write on a t-shirt. Yeah, I’d wear it.)