Another One Bit The Dust

Another year, that is.

Cue superficial sobs and wails as I wave goodbye to the exiting 2008 with the one clean handkerchief I own. The minute it’s out of sight (2008, not my handkerchief), I turn to 2009 with a cunning smile on my seasonally pimpled face. Christmas food does that to the skin.

“It’s gone.” I whisper conspiratorially to the year ahead, referring to the one I left behind. “Done. Finished. Kaput. Just you and me now…. let’s party.” My seductive purring is meant to get 2009 excited by the unspoken potential of what is to come.


How’s THAT for a blog-post opener, huh? HUH?? Read it and WEEP.

OK. Back to normalcy. If ever there was any.

The crumbly leftover bits of 2008 since I last blogged were pretty hectic, hence the long silence. It’s not easy for me to silent for too long- ask the Doc or LD if you don’t believe me- so it obviously was a VERY stressful couple of weeks.

First there was the Christmas Woof. For those of you who are uncool and not in the know, The Christmas Woof is a wicked device that the boyfr… sorry… MANfriend (you’re welcome, hunny) and I thought up to feed the more intelligent species during the season. Yes, dolphins and chimps are quite the smartasses, but dogs and cats come in a close second in my opinion. Slightly over 15 species ahead of man. Ptishh.

Anyway. That’s another post.

So we wanted to feed street & shelter dogs and cats for Christmas and we figured that by selling some home-made brownies, chutneys and hand-painted mugs, we’d make the money we needed for the mass furry almsgiving. We went into it with fervour and no idea of what we were getting ourselves into. Man oh man. We tried to be posh IT-savvy pundits and went to the lengths of designing a website to take orders on. We’d planned to let the orders roll in for a month and then, hoping that there would be at least 25 orders from gullible friends whose arms we could twist, we’d go into making and delivering the goods. Geez what a couple of schmucks we were. In a matter of days the orders reached about the same level as our panic when we saw the numbers. So much so that we shut the site down in a week and sold our souls to the banks to fund our ingredient shopping. Thus ensued a mad rush of baking, burns, cuts, ants, rotten pineapples, wrapping, labelling and cussing loudly at the crumbs on the carpet floor. Poor Doc. Having selected his place as the holy shrine of brownie baking and chutney making, I singlehandedly managed to turn the place upside down in a matter of two days. He still can’t walk on his floor without wincing at the sticky feel of chocolate blobs or fermented pineapple juice on his toes. And it’s been three weeks since we had the sale.

We managed to bake, bottle and paint everything up and deliver by the 22nd of December. Considering our full-time jobs, that gave us about two hours to remember we had to do our Christmas shopping. I swear, as of Christmas 2008, I’ve broken the record for fastest completion of gift-buying-and-wrapping for an army of greedy relatives. One hour, two Xmas sales and a mall. Even Santa would be impressed.

The next week was spent visiting said relatives, or as the Doc puts it ‘The generation of vipers’ and having my cheek and ass pinched by aunties and uncles respectively. Morning, noon and night. Whoever said Christmas is holiday season needs to be shot. In the balls, because no woman would ever say something that stupid.

By the time I finally got the chance to sit the damn down and put my feet up, it was the 31st. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open beyond 8pm to see the dawn of the New Year. Thank goodness for the Doc and his innovative ways of keeping me awake. *Wink wink* A movie, a Jap meal and two packets of sparklers later, here I am… on the first day of 2009.

So you see, I didn’t have time to blog.