Nine

Thursday marked nine years that Dan and I have been “together”.

I hate words like “relationship”, “boyfriend”, “girlfriend” and “partner”.

Whatever we’ve been, we’ve been for nine years.

NINE!

On Thursday night, Dan arrived home with a single, pink rose:

Then, as we were leaving to go out for dinner, Dan presented me with nine pink roses:

Nine! Pink! Roses!

We had dinner in Newtown, we went to Better Read Than Dead to check out their book porn, we had mint slice and lemon, lime and bitters gelato. We played Words With Friends against each other, we generally pfaffed around.

It was us.

That’s not graffiti. THIS is graffiti

I don’t make a secret of my fascination with street art. Or graffiti, if you wish.

Not tagging, where idiots practice writing their initials or their tag or childhood drawings of Snoopy.

Living in the inner-west, there’s a LOT of all of the above. But it’s the street art that I love. And so much of is stunning. There’s even a genuine Banksy stencil in Enmore.

We have an external wall that has been painted many times by a local guy. Don’t know his name, but every now and again he comes by and asks if he and his mates can re-do the space. They supply the spray cans, we provide the canvas. By us giving them permission, they’re not breaking any laws. We love talking to them as we come and go and while the smell of paint is gross, I like that we’re giving them a creative outlet.

But lately there’s been a hint of a turf war around Enmore. Nasty messages being left on walls that have had hours… days… spent on them. Creating something visually beautiful, often thought-provoking or funny.

This is the latest:

Technically the cat one is older, but it’s the same sentiment as all the new messages. Writing nasty shit like this just goes against the ethos of street art and street artists. This is tagging in its ugliest form.

Not noice.

January in 31 pics

We’re 1/12th in!

1. 1/365, 2. 3/365: Me + Miss Chloe, 3. 2/365: I’m gonna vom, 4. 4/365: shabby me + shabby loungeroom, 5. 5/365: lookin’ spesh while playing with new phone, 6. 6/365: taking it all off, 7. 7/365: new hair, 8. 8/365: FAIL, 9. 9/365: me + Nephew Noah at Australian Jamboree Visitors’ Day, 10. 10/365: wearing my threadless dooce tee, 11. 11/365: bitchin’ stitchin’ reading, 12. 12/365: back on the (elliptical) wagon, 13. 13/365: me + bear’s bum, 14. 14/365: by the glow of the widescreen monitor, 15. 15/365: sooky la la, 16. 16/365: me + Saturday night porn, 17. 17/365: Pls don’t make me go back to work tomorrow :(, 18. 18/365: don’t go back to work mama, 19. 19/365: menial desk tasks are sending me cuckoo, 20. 20/365: happy reunion with Suzie the Singer, 21. 21/365: being patriotic, 22. 22/365: friday night laziness, 23. 23/365: morning hair and fresh apple juice, 24. 24/365: me + cupcake, 25. 25/365: unimaginative pic, sorry, 26. 26/365: end of aus day, 27. 27/365: mmm, lamington, 28. 28/365: what coke reduction?, 29. 29/265: bear loves bedtime, 30. 30/365: mmm, fresh oj, 31. 31/365: by the light of f.lux

Zomg HE is coming to Australia!!!11!!11 (featuring Obama porn)

It was in the newspapers today, so it must be true. Squee!!!

I’m gunning for hanging out at the airport or, really, wherever he’ll be if he comes to Sydney.

Squee!!

Warning: here is some of my favourite Obama porn from Flickr

All rejuvenated for twenty-ten

Having close to four week off work over chrissy and it still took me until February to get my 2010 update for Rah!Creative online:

Whatcha think?

I’ve moved away from the WordPress install I used last year and now I’m back to good ol’ fashioned HTML.

I’ve kept it fairly simple and experimented with the 960 rule for this one.

I’ve spent hours at my desktop, getting intimate with Dreamweaver, Topstyle, Notepad ++, Photoshop, Illustrator, html/css validators, Firefox, Chrome, IE6 and IE8.

But now I’m done!

Relief.

Make me money confident!

Tomorrow marks the beginning of #febusave, ANZ’s campaign to help chicks be better savers and be more confident with the moola.

And I have to confess, when I heard about it all from Leigh, I felt like that the whole campaign was being put on especially to help ME out.

It’s true!

While I am SO. MUCH. BETTER. with money now than I was ten years ago, I’m still pretty shithouse.

In my first proper job after finishing school (as in, the one where I couldn’t wear jeans to the office), I was getting paid monthly and ended up opening a second transaction account to separate my pay into two halves. That’s how bad I was. And that’s when I was living at home and would scab money from the mothership.

So it goes without saying that I’ve joined the #febusave movement and proudly hung up the little button over there on my side bar. Being a “blog ambassador” sounds so official, I might get it on a business card.

Here’s some official tidbits provided by ANZ and their Women & Money Confidence Report; I can relate to each and every dot point, some from my past, some from RIGHT NOW ZOMG I HAVE NO MONEY SKILLZ:

• 52% of women claimed they know they should have a financial plan or budget in place but keep putting it off.
• Less than one third of women surveyed said they were very confident about managing everyday finances.
• Only one in ten women are very confident in managing their investments, financial planning and superannuation.
• 45% said they had saved less than they planned to over the previous 12 months.
• 2.76 million women (41%) are saving no regular amount monthly
• Top reasons were too many bills, not disciplined to follow a budget, too busy, so put it off
• More than half (58%) of adult women in Australia have less than $5,000 in savings with 33% having less than a $1,000
• 1 in 3 women believe they wouldn’t last longer than a month if they lost their job tomorrow
• 1 in 4 women are not at all confident about their future financial security, claiming they live pay to pay with little savings

Scary shite, huh? o.O

One of the kick-starts to #febusave was to pledge to give up driving to work/buying treats/buying coffee and well, I’m not exactly willing to give up my car/coke/v for an entire month. Reduction I could do, but going cold turkey? Nuh-uh.

BUT! For the last 4 months or so I’ve fallen right off my budget wagon, with no regular saving or anything like that.

So I’ve re-jigged my colour-coded budget spreadsheet in GoogleDocs for 2010 and re-started auto-transfers of funds to my various debts and savings accounts.

Let’s see where Feburary and #febusave takes us, shall we?