Is this not the cutest poster you have ever seen? If it only had books on there then I would snap it up in a second. For I really do love all of those things. Especially the last one :)
My manager received the following item of spam in his inbox the other day:
Subject: Order to Cyprus
Goodday Sales,
I will like to order some products in your company. But i want to know if you
do ship to Cyprus and if Visa or Master Card is accepted. Please, kindly let
me know if you can assist me with the order. And, please, do not forget to
include your web page or price list of the available items in stock in your
reply to my request.
I await your quick and pleasant reply as soon as you receive my email. And, i
will be very glad if my email is treated with a great concern.
Many Regards
He could have just ignored it but instead decided to reply. His response was:
Dear Minty
We sell water. Does Cyprus need water? It’s very heavy and Cyprus is a long way so will cost a lot to ship. It also depends on how long you need it to last. For example an average person in Sydney uses around 330 litres a day. That’s about three baths full of water. Have you ever tried to pick up a bath full of water? I tried once and I’m still having physio on my back.
I presume you would want more than a day’s worth. You can’t really live more than a few days without water so you should think seriously about more than a day, perhaps a year. I can send you detailed quote, but ballpark I reckon it would be somewhere in the region of half a million Australian dollars. Not sure what that is in Cyprus currency, but it’s quite a lot. Mastercard is fine but you might want to give the bank a heads up that a large purchase will be coming out. Hopefully they’ll up your limit.
We haven’t got great pictures of water on our website, but if you turn your tap on, ours looks pretty much the same. Ours tastes much nicer though.
Does that work for you? Let me know and I’ll get a detailed quote to you.
Andy
Do you see people? Do you see the crazies I have to work with every day?
One of my favourite places to spend a Saturday night is on the internet. It’s truly one of the most beautiful places in the world, is it not? This happy Saturday night, I’ve visited two delightful sites including:
Tomas and Jones, the blog of my adopted cousin and her gorgeous best friend. I can’t reveal their real names but I can reveal that these two are currently running a giveaway that you should check out NOW. In honour of opening their first etsy shop, the ladies are giving away one of their girls in a hoop. Tres cute!
Tomas & Jones sits in the favourites folder of my google reader because it’s one I like to read as soon as it is written. Check out their delightful post on a retro picnic where the girls wear yellow and look like the sunshine. There’s also a manekin pis necklace made from shrinkey paper that I hope they start to sell in their shop very soon. You’ll also find posts on all the good things in life – stationery, quotes, tea cups and books. Oh! And there is also a very good review of Outpost Cafe that led to my sister and I having a dee-licious breakfast when we sojourned to Melbourne in January.
Up for grabs at Tomas & Jones
Hungry Girlis one of those blogs I stumbled across at some point and now can’t remember how or why. But oh I heart this Hungry Girl so. I knew it was love when she described herself as being someone that makes up voices for her dogs! The photography is amazing! And the baking makes me want to get off the internet and get into the kitchen. If only she’d post the recipes. Sighs.
She made this cake for her Mum. I wish I was her Mum!
Be sure to check out her wedding snaps – anyone that wears red shoes and polish on her wedding day rocks in my eyes.
Rocking the red shoes!
Also this evening while in happy internet land I found this gorgeous nail polish which I simply have to find. I don’t need it and it probably won’t suit my skin colour but I have to have it.
– week day sleep overs at Kylie and Sheela’s place (even if they did let me leave for work with my cardi inside out!)
– google reader (and the 95 blogs I have in it!)
– messy hair (my only option, but still)
– glittery nail polish (on other people)
– Opalin (Ian’s world of war craft character who is a ferocious, purple cat that jumps around a lot)
– a marriage proposal on Q&A (go Sheela’s cousin!)
– overusing brackets (they rock)
– teeth turned blue from too many M &Ms
– Joshua Jackson. Oh Pacey. I suspect that I have in me a whole separate blog about you
– mustard coloured shoes
– Serendipity’s lamington icecream. As Sheels would say – Yummikins!
– discovering that random people have signed up to my blog. Hello random people! You maketh my days.
I’m disloving:
– chicken. Given that they don’t serve any obvious purpose in the ecosystem, can they please be made extinct so that I never have to see one or see someone else eating one ever again
– food poisoning (thanks to the dodgyness of a certain bird listed above)
-the water chiller thing at work. It sometimes needs to be flipped forward to dispense water and it sometimes needs to be flipped backwards to dispense water. Get your shit together water chiller thing
– people who burn toast at work and force us to evacuate via 28 flights of stairs
– the fact that I do not have a hermit crab like my nephew Drew does.
Can we please talk about the amazingness of Alissa? Because I think we need to.
Quite separate from her general, all round, sort of amazingness, are some particularly amazing things that I think I need to mention.
First of all, Alissa has become the highly talented queen of craft.
Ever since she returned from her overseas sojourn earlier this year, she’s started to produce gorgeous brooches, gorgeous rings and GORGEOUS Christmas decorations.
“Is that FELT you have there?”, her luvah asks suspiciously.
“Why yes, it certainly is!”, she replies with glee. “For I have a project! I am crafting!”
At Alissa’s suggestion, we didn’t buy each other Christmas gifts last year. Instead we handmade presents. Please view exhibits A through C below. I expect that you will want to oooh and ahhh with delight.
Exhibit A
One of the best qualities about Lis is her attention to detail – look at the perfect stitching on these Christmas decorations. My grandmother would be well pleased with this handiwork.
Exhibit B
I love owls. A lot. I especially love slightly dopey looking owls. This is the cutest brooch in the whole world. I am sure of it.
Exhibit C
A ring made of flower shaped buttons! Yes! That’s right! A ring made of flower shaped buttons! Many exclamation marks!
Lis bought herself a button ring at a market in London. When I first saw it, I tried very, very, hard not to turn a delicate shade of green. It was almost a physical challenge. Lucky for me, Lis made me one of my own and I am jealous no more.
Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous Christmas presents.
Secondly, Alissa’s can describe books/movies/TV shows/music in such detail, that it feels like you’ve actually read/watched/heard it yourself.
At school, if I ever missed an episode of a show I loved, I knew I could rely on Lis for a detailed summary the next day.
Sometimes I start watching a movie and get confused. “Have I seen this before?’, I wonder. But no, it’s just that Alissa has at some point given me a detailed synopsis.
On the other hand, when I watched ‘Failure to Launch’, the whole thing seemed so familiar that I was sure it must have been a movie that Lis had told me about at some stage. I knew everything that was going to happen. Then Ian came home and said ‘Oh, that movie. Remember when we watched that a few months ago and I fell asleep because it was so boring’. But I’m digressing here.
Thirdly, Alissa also knows every actor and actress in hollywood, every writer on the face of the earth and every musician that ever was. She is also the most amazing researcher in the world. Yes she is.
If she sent ME an email that read “Do you know who that hot English chic is that I think was in The Practice but doesn’t seem to be on their website and is she the same actresss that is on Lost?”, you would get back a “Huh? I don’t know and why are you asking me”. But if I asked Alissa that question (and of course I have), the response would be more along the lines of “I think you might actually mean Rhonda Mitra from Boston Legal. Rhonda has also been in X, Y & Z. Evageline Lily is the actress from Lost and she has stared in Blah, blah and blah.”
Fourthly, she used to be a Sagittarius which is one of my favourite star signs. And now that the zodiac has changed, she’s the cool new star sign, Ophiuchus
Fifthly, she’s a librarian by trade. How cool is that?! My friends at work think that having a librarian as a friend is the cutest thing in the world. I don’t have the heart to tell them that she doesn’t actually WORK as one. They always refer to Lis as my “Librarian friend”. “Oh,you are seeing your LLIBRARIAN friend tonight”.
Sixthly (if that is actually a word), she is the fastest reader I have ever met and she reads more genres than anyone I know. She is a reading GUN! I can’t actually sit anywhere near her when she is reading because she turns the pages so fast that it makes my eyes pop out of my head and my jaw hang down in shock. It’s a terribly unattractive look.
I’ve always wondered how many books she reads in a year. And do you know what the answer is for 2010?
80. Eighty. Yes, you did read that correctly. 80 BOOKS IN 52 WEEKS. I don’t think I have done 80 of anything in 52 weeks.
And she’s not reading short books. No siree. Her favourites are high fantasy like the Wheel of Time series. These books are aout 800 pages each with type font of about 1 mm per letter.
So there she is. Alissa. If she isn’t the fastest reader in the world, well then, she’s certainly one of the most amazing people in it.
Alissa (left) with her sister Erin (who is also quite amazing)
The random musings of Neen 
