NaNoWriMo

It's NaNoWriMo time again! And I have zero good ideas.  So that's a bit of a pickle.  50,000 words of nothingness.  Can't wait to read it...

Traffic Light Plus Red Means Stop

It's been a while since I checked the ACT road rules.  I do this from time to time to make sure crazy stuff isn't going down that I should know about, like it's suddenly law to rotate anti-clockwise on a roundabout.  These types of rule changes probably happen all the time.

The last time I visited the ACT Government's heaving, bossy pdf on the laws of the road was when I was querying a ticket that I received due to illegal parking in a parking bay.  They were right so I didn't fight.  Ooh, that rhymes.  But like so many other epic poets, I am in no mood to rhyme.

Has anyone noticed the great abundance of douchebags in Canberra who think the process of stopping at a red traffic light has somehow morphed into an option, rather than a specific fucking directive?  Last weekend I nearly got wiped out at an intersection because some loser in a green Ford couldn't be bothered waiting his turn.  Fair dinkum, I am so over dickheads.

Never mind the actual road rules; the last time I checked my common sense rule book of stuff-morons-don't-know, the signal denoting a red light meant stop. Just STOP. It wasn't a guideline. It wasn't a suggestion. It meant stop your fucking car in a fully halted fashion. Has this fairly logical rule changed?

I suppose learning how to drive a car on a road without causing minor/major collateral damage and killing yourself/everyone else can be quite a challenge for Canberra's wannabe Michael Schumachers, who are blissfully unaware that they are without the flashy, curvy Red Ferrari (Red Ferrari always gets capitalised in my world), any hint of skill or talent, and that actions have consequences.

I guess I can see the ambiguities in the regulations surrounding the mysterious red traffic lights.  I mean red is fairly open to interpretation.  It's just such a wishy washy colour, isn't it?  Does it mean stop, does it mean go?  It's all so confusing.  For stupid people.

Now while I like to believe that I have my vehicular basics down pat, I still don't know who goes first in an intersection with two oncoming cars when you both want to turn right.

Dragons!

In the spirit of blogging about everything except what I had for dinner last night (pumpkin soup), here's another exciting entree to my blogpost platter.

Let's talk about dragons.  Apart from the fact that they are just flying lizards who more often that not breathe heat, fire and possibly volcanic lava, what's not to love about dragons?  Who doesn't love a mobile oven that's on the blink?

I'm personally not a fan of dragons, but that's because they usually arise in those long tedious sci-fi books involving epic journeys with rings and wizards.  Life hard's enough without going on a fictitious, suicidal mission with a bunch of hobbits and Orlando Bloom. 

The hobbits have given me a terrible headache.

Popping a dragon in your storyline seems like an easy out to me.  Oh no, how is the hero going to escape? Oh, it's okay, he has a fire-breathing dragon buddy that conveniently negates every other problem that he comes across.

I write of dragons today because I just went on one last week.  A dragon boat actually.  I was a little disappointed that my dragon boat didn't look anything like a dragon, rather an elongated canoe, but no matter.

It was a first training session for a corporate charity challenge, raising money for a breast cancer initiative called Dragons Abreast, and and it was so fun.  Dragon boating is fairly technical, and you get completely saturated with blue-green algae bloom-infused Lake Burley Griffin water, but it's all fun.  So fun. That is all for now.

So I accidently drugged myself...

Oh, birthdays. Milestone birthdays. How fun are they? So fun. I’ve just hit one. I’m not going to say which one and you’re not going to ask me. Actually I’d like to hit this birthday milestone in the face.

Your birthday is the one day of the year when you gratefully receive a card from a person professing to be your friend that includes a so-called humourous reference to how freakin’ old you are. This can go on for days and days. Such fun for everyone except the birthday man.

For my birthday this year I popped down to my local beach, that place where water and sand are magically transformed into a petri dish of potential staph infections. Oh, and I also accidently drugged myself.

I was going to be sharing the driving, but for half of the trip I would play passenger, which is often a problem because I get carsick. Not vomiting carsick, thank goodness, but awfully nauseous nonetheless. Some people have real problems in their life; this is mine.

I feel for those people I see on the side of the road throwing up, but they perhaps shouldn’t have eaten that slice of pepperoni pizza or drank that can of coke before their journey. One has to prepare when one gets carsick. Before I go on a long drive I prep myself just like a heavy weight boxer, except without all the carbs and starving and skipping and whatever. So possibly nothing like that.

I usually take Travelcalm before I depart for the open roads, which is super-duper at kicking carsickness in the bum. When I say I usually take it, I mean I generally forget a lot, which is why I don’t ingest sugar, fat,  milk or anything else that will ride my stomach like a roller coaster beforehand. I bet you’re saying to yourself, “hey idiot, why don’t you leave the Travelcalm in the glove compartment of your car?”, and to that I say, “that’s probably a good idea. Thanks!”

So on this occasion, I get to my travel buddy's house and realise I am devoid of any type of nausea killers. I wasn’t about to be nauseous on my birthday, damn it, so I went to the local drug store to purchase some of the good stuff.

Travelcalm wasn’t available, so I just grabbed some different ones. They’re all the same, aren’t they? No, no they’re not.

Did the pharmacist tell me that they are ideally ingested the night before, may cause stupidly intense drowsiness, and that it is best to stay out of strong sunlight? I don’t believe that happened at all. Given I was going to the beach that day and hanging out in the sun, that information would have been helpful.

She didn’t say any of that. She asked me if I had taken it before and I said I had taken Travelcalm. End of conversation. This little tablet was nothing like Travelcalm. The one time I don’t read the instructions for use is my bloody birthday.

You know the rest. After an hour I could barely keep my eyes open, so no driving for me. About four hours after I swallowed that thing I was practically crawling on my hands and knees at the beach, unable to walk any further or keep my eyes open because of the light. What the fuck is in those things? On the plus side, I was too drugged to feel queasy.