Haircut plus upselling.

I'm not really obsessed with my hair at the moment, but I have a series of thoughts.

I have never coloured my hair. I want to avoid the commitment and the upkeep. So some hairdressers, when they see my virgin hair, do this:

"This is your natural colour? It's lovely!"
(But this is just to soften me up, because it's immediately contradicted by the following...)
"Have you ever thought about highlights?"
"Or a balayage, that's where we just lighten the ends."
"You've got a lovely base colour, you could get some lovely natural highlights."
The deflection response I tried on Sunday was to have my eyes closed and say nothing more than "hmm". I know I could get highlights, but I haven't asked for them. So just "hmm". Let it end awkwardly.

I got home and looked at my plain natural unhighlighted brown hair colour and I realised I liked it. I've always said "No" to colours on principle because it's how you should respond to upselling, and I'm too indecisive to make up my mind what to do anyway, but actually I like my hair the way it is. It's some sort of rare pleasant self-aware moment, when I realise I like something about myself. It's my hair, and I like it. And I'll be going grey soon.

I make sense.

At dinner the other night, the waiter asked me if I spoke Chinese. I said to him, in Mandarin, "I speak Cantonese."

At first thought, that seems ridiculous, right? Why would I say in one dialect that I speak another? I said it in Mandarin because that's what I expect most people in Chinatown to speak nowadays, but I told him that I speak Cantonese so that he would know why my Mandarin was less than perfect (to put it nicely) and why I might say, "I don't get you." See, I do make sense.

Sweet and salty nuts.

My latest discovery courtesy of Anna. Small tub of sweet and salty nuts. 2 for $7 at Coles right now. Covered with sugar and salt. Hits the same spot as a bag of chips, but, need a lot less of them to be satisfied, so small tub of nuts better value than bag of chips and possibly healthier.

Kiroran Silk Road Uygur Restaurant.

I'm not always going to review Dixon Eat Street, but the food on Monday night was the best cheap food in the CBD, in my opinion. Caveat, Ton Ton Japanese (behind KFC on Bathurst/George) is very central and for $10 you can get a very filling bowl of rice, fried chicken and mayo. But for a proper Asian dinner with a group of people sharing dishes, pretty cheap and extremely delicious, head a bit further down to Dixon Street. It's an upstairs restaurant, shabby but comfortable. You don't go there for the decor. Go to the Korean BBQ over the street if you want decor and slippery useless chopsticks. This place is just for awesome food. Service was pretty good, and with a group of 9 the food arrival was well paced and we got some free bread. The food was generous, with spicy/salty flavours. If something is labelled "hot" it is hot. If it says "spicy" it's more sort of BBQ. They do hand made noodles, and a sort of pancake meat pie which is delicious and for $12 could feed 2 people, and tasty tasty lamb skewers, and other meats and potatoes. It's not fancy but it's the tastiest food you don't have to queue for. (Mamak, I can't be bothered with you.)

We checked out the nitrogen gelato place for dessert, and again, WOW. This is expensive ice-cream at $6 a scoop but it's a good sized scoop and it is really good.

Surprise haircut.

I ended up getting a haircut on Sunday. I just seized the moment, I was doing Jillian and thought "I'll pay someone to wash my hair after this, while I get it cut." Genius idea, going from sweaty and dirty to clean, healthy and blow-dried in one go. Maximum value. Also, I think that getting a haircut is an EXCELLENT job to do when you are tired, because you just sit there.

Tip, if you like to get a haircut with no appointment, like me, Sunday is a quieter day than Saturday, and if it's a beautiful day outside it's even quieter, so you've got excellent chances of wandering in and getting a haircut then and there in peace and quiet, with nobody but a lady getting foils and a few men getting their beards trimmed.

Stickers in the wallet

I've started keeping cute stickers of animals in my wallet. This is for when when I see friends and their kids, I can give the kid a sticker and s/he can start building a positive association with me :)

Life has too many bits.

I believe that there is a set limit on how efficient I can be. I have limited juggling abilities. Probably everybody does, but some people have super-abilities. Once I juggle some balls up in the air, others will drop to the floor and go under the bed. Currently, the balls I am succeeding with are reading the bible almost daily, exercising several times a week, not getting sick or run down, recording my spending, washing up when I run out of breakfast bowls or earlier, and regularly toothbrushing the grout in the bathroom to keep the mould down. The balls I've missed are less important anyway. It's just the housework and stuff. One day, maybe next month, I'll finish painting my chest of drawers so that I can put ALL my clothes away, I'll clean the kitchen and bathroom and mop the floors, I'll get stuck into my list of UFOs, I'll floss my teeth, I'll get a haircut, I'll take that pile of stuff to the op shop.

Argh Coles.

My Coles has rearranged all the aisles. How long will it take me to learn the new map? I don't like walking four aisles to find olives. So far, the only improvement is that now chips and confectionery are in the same aisle, not separate aisles, and it is closer to the express lanes. Which will be a whopping time saver, I'm afraid to say.

Rain enhancer.

I've discovered a thing today: listening to a recording of a rainstorm at the same time as listening to a song. Thankyou youtube.

Here is the rain video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYw7eJYadco

Here is the song where I found out about the thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSrL0jmT2HE

Weekends anywhere.

Wherever I go is where I wish I was and I didn't have to leave.

Comparison

is the thief of joy!

(Random email from a friend this week. It's a quote.)

Christmas.

"This fifty days of preparation is called in their barbarian speech the Exmas Rush."
CS Lewis *

And if only it WAS 50 days, and not 100. Yes, it is only September, and I'm sorry, but I've already bought one Christmas present and I've been thinking of others, in the name of avoiding the Exmas Rush as much as possible. But I saw a display of decorations in a cheap shop at Maroubra Junction last weekend, which made me cross, because all my earliness is being overtaken anyway. And there are ads for office Christmas parties already. And at work I have to think of Christmas card ideas now to get them printed by November, I can't escape it, so I might as well listen to Christmas carols and get into it properly.

*http://www.khad.com/post/196009755/xmas-and-christmas-a-lost-chapter-from-herodotus

Grocery adventure.

It has come into my mind that my efficiency in the area of shopping and cooking is cutting me off from a lot of tastes and experiences the supermarket has to offer. I've been thinking, one week I should do a shop and buy nothing I've ever bought before, only things I have never tried, and cook and eat them. Try cashew milk, fennel, dried eggplant chips or whatever.

I have dipped my toe in the water and tried something new with my breakfast. I have a carefully honed breakfast cereal system with 3 layers, 1: low GI, 2: fibre, 3: something pretty and flaky. I thought, why not try mixing it up, literally mix my layers, and do muesli? I bought a muesli that was too apricotish and sour, so then I padded it out with more rolled oats and I also bought a bag of kamut wheat from the health aisle. Never heard of it. It's bigger, tastier, better for you, puffed wheat. So I think I have invented a perfect muesli! meuslie plus oats plus cornflakes plus kamut. Kamut, you heard it here first. It'll be the next quinoa or chia.

What will I think of next!

Paralympics.

I watched more paralympics than olympics this year. I like the idea of sports that rely on compensatory abilities and senses. I think more of us should play those games that rely on your hearing, for example. That would be so interesting. Why not introduce that at schools? Also, I enjoy watching wheelchair sports. It's probably the scooter part of me. The wheelchair rugby final last night was like the toughest dodgem cars you've ever seen, or maybe like shopping trolleys, and it's quite easy to watch and understand because it's all big, the ball isn't among people's feet, and it's entertaining because it's fast and has crashes. It replaces lawn bowls as sport I most enjoy on TV.

Quirky vs scary.

The quirky character/detective in a TV show won't get killed. Quirky characters make me feel safe. In Criminal Minds, Spencer and Garcia will never be killed. If they were, we would all stop watching. Same with Abby in NCIS, and maybe even DiNozzo. Whereas if like an FBI suit gets killed, I'll get over it. They killed Kate, which was sad, but they wouldn't be able to kill off Abby. The quirky character is the safe place in the scary show.

The opposite is true for movies, H pointed out to me today. In movies, she said, the quirky one dies and the good-looking ones survive.

Election.

I know there are council elections this Saturday but they seem not very exciting compared to federal or state elections. Is voting even compulsory? Is it a big deal and I'm just out of it, or is it not a big deal? Anyway, since I don't have a clue I googled my area to see who was running, and I've chosen who I'll vote for, so I feel super prepared. It's quite exciting, I even had firefighters to choose from.

DESC: Dixon challenge.

Not going to always blog the food, just eat it. But I have such strong opinions this time. Miga Korean BBQ has nice chairs and decor. The cutlery is the worst I have ever used, the chopsticks were slim metal sticks that slipped all over the place and made my hand ache. I dropped one on the floor and barely caught another falling. Korean food is not my thing, I just wont go out of my way to eat it. The flavours are neither here nor there. There was a sweet chilly soft shell crab that was super sweet and super chilli. The hot pots were nice in a mild way. The $15 salad was just a pile of iceberg with a brown mayo on it, must have had a huge profit margin. The honey soy chicken with rice and the seafood pancake were probably the best, but there is nothing exclusively Korean about those, you can get them anywhere. But yes, the decor, service and atmosphere were fine. There was K-pop on TV right above our table, hypnotising. Fun fact, members of K-pop and J-pop boy bands and girl bands are contractually forbidden to date. You can use that conversational gem next time you eat in a place with Korean video hits.

We are going back to Arisun again next time, where we went a few months ago, and the memory of that chicken is so happy, so mark your diaries, Thurs 13th September is FRIED CHICKEN NIGHT.