My Year of Meaningful (2011)

Photo1: Andy and Hannes in Stockholm
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(Public Apologies in advance for the next photo down. It was Daniel's sack.)



New Ideas to come

I got lazy. I didnt blog because I was petrified of having to come up with a work story worth remembering every day. I guess it just wasnt a practical way to log memories.

I've just decided to remember the office as that old 1970's style brown brick building with bad carpet (lime green and brown in my section) and cubicles that go for miles, where funny people go every day to work and where tea time is at 10:30 and coffee time is at 3:15.

Side note/final office story (skip down to black for end of office tale):
Actually, i WAS going to write about how I turned my cube into a draft-free bunker (aptly named "The Bunker". . . although I'm thinking of starting a movement to call it "The Funker") anyway I got Donal to find me a big slab of plywood, a couple weeks ago, and I put it over my desk, resting it on the right-angle where my 2 cubicle walls come together over my computer, weighting it down with paving samples of faux limestone. Essentially I have a roof over my head now, about the size of one interior door. I did it because I was starting to get really shitty about the Arctic Blast coming out of the A/C vent RIGHT ABOVE ME. My hair was literally blowing in the wind.

Our Health and Safety guy, Jim, was probably going to bollok me out as soon as he saw it, I was told. So I decided I need to make some sort of safety warning so that no one would poke their eye out (the sharp corner sticks out above my seat at about eye-level) and sue. So I hung a piece of Landscape A3 paper (creased in the middle) to hang down from the sharp corner which says: "Danger! Watch your head!" and I even drew the universal symbol for emergency (proving to Jim I do know my OHS shit). I put my hard hat on my desk as well, should anyone want to avail of it, when they enter the bunker.

Now it's cleared health and safety. . . H&S Jim even took a photo of it to send up to the Dublin office to show them what a good example I was (the warning sign and well-engineered stabilization method of a plywood slab really impressed him) and now people are just starting to take the piss. I came upstairs from tea time one day and nutty John M. had hung a sign on it that said "This Structure Has Been Condemned" with a side note about how deconstruction shall commence at such a time as Jill has been away from her desk for long enough. I have recently taken some field samples of trees and began my own rooftop garden on top of it.

So enough with the office tales for the memory books. On to bigger and better things. Stockholm was fun. We arrived at about midnight and Andy took us to his favorite bar where we met Daniel, Jon, Axel (yes, a real swedish name), Ann-Sophie, and Jens. Daniel has the biggest scrotum in the history of the world. Within 10 minutes of being introduced to him, he showed us how he could pull it up to nearly touch his belly button. I took a picture of it with a garden gnome next to it, for scale purposes.

We stayed out drinking til 3:30am, at which time the sun came up. Went back to Andy's flat and it looked like it was about 9am. The tube in S'holm is really nice. Cleaner than Melbourne's even. Drank more Starkol back at his place and finally went to bed. Sunday we boozed around the city from 5pm (after obligitory sight seeing of course) til closing time (2am?) and took a picnic of a 3Litre box of white wine + 4 pieces of bread and about 15 olives, up to the top of the local ski hill by his flat, and went crazy. The sun was up about 3:30 again, and we must have been on that damn hill til about 7. I dont know WHAT we did exactly but Andy nearly broke his legs dangling from a cable car wire, Hannes climbed up some ski-lift structure he was not supposed to, and I insisted upon dropping my pants every 5 minutes and screaming profanities at the top of my lungs. I get turrets when I get drunk I think.


Monday - or was it tuesday?At any rate, at some stage we ate heaps of sushi and greek food- my 2 favorite things you cant get in Cork. And Swedish bread (julia kaka) and gorgeous cheese. And Andy's grandma's/mom's/dad's meatballs. Also, we took a boat out into the archipeligo, saw lots of islands, loads of birch forests, and amazing landscapes. But mostly we just drank beers. It was really sad to leave andy and he was really sad to see us go. It was So depressing. He came over to Cork to visit us only about a month ago, so after not seeing him since our days in South Africa 5 yrs ago, it was really nice to see him twice in one summer. We love Andy. I wish I had a nice single girlfriend who would marry him so we would always have an excuse to see him.
Now I'm sad again. . . but at least it's recorded.
EVERYTHING IN HIS FLAT IS IKEA.