Kersti's Corner

eTatters

Well eTatters was down for quite a while - turns out to be a hardware failure, which is kind of tricky to fix but no doubt Alan and Gary will work their magic. But since the site was down I decided to take another look into moving it - I do love the software that we're using, but it is costly and to be honest the group just doesn't bring in quite the level of funding needed for it.

So I've found ning, and moved the group to http://etatters.ning.com - hopefully everyone will come over soon as it looks like a great site, although could do with some improvements...

Birthday

I hijacked a Christmas party today and turned it into a birthday party for me!

A few of the other Aussies from work and I were headed out for some dinner and I also invited Suzie, Lissi, Kate & Annika and of course Christian. All up there were about 16 people there so it turned out to be quite fun. Went to Thai Orchid  which always has good food (not outstanding, but good).

What a great way to start off my Christmas holidays...

Durham

Friday night saw Christian and I hopping onto a Ryanair flight to Newcastle in England. We got to the airport and picked up a hire car (Audi A4) and I drove us down to Durham.

I've always wanted to see Durham, ever since I found out that Melbourne's St Patrick's organ was restored there because it's the best place in the world at doing organs. The Cathedral is supposed to be beautiful too. And I wasn't disappointed at all. The Cathedral itself is just across a small bit of grass from Durham Castle. The town too is gorgeous, little streets and the fabulous river...

We stayed in a twin dorm room at the university as Christian will be there for a few days after I go home to attend a conference.

I introduced Christian to caching, and in doing so saw the Angel of the North.

On Sunday we went to Evensong in the Cathedral - it was lovely, and we sat up in the quoir which was cool. Never thought I'd ever see myself doing that!

Pictures will be here shortly...

I swear I did it first!!!!

Don't you just hate it when you come up with a fabulous idea and someone else steals it? Even more annoying is when they then jump back in time 6 months and make it look like they had the idea first.

That happened to me with the After Party Shoe - a cute little pair of flat shoes that you can fold up and stick in your handbag so that you can walk home without killing your feet or damaging your Jimmy Choos.

http://www.redfootrevolution.co.uk

A Raclette Party

We had a raclette party at our place last night, although I wasn't feeling well so I didn't take any photos. Raclette is a type of cheese from Switzerland that is prepared with vegetables on a special raclette grill. The grill heats numerous small pans in which each guest melts the raclette with vegetables and other toppings of his or her choice. All the host needs to do is supply the equipment and prepped cheese and vegetables. Then everyone can relax with a beverage of choice while their individual raclette pans cook. It couldn't get any easier!

We had small potatoes cooked in their jackets, plenty of cheese, some bacon and cured meat, brocolli, prawns, sun-dried tomatoes, sweetcorn, olives and artichokes to make our little meals out of. There was plenty of wine and sparkling. The cheese is delicious and we tried it with the traditional cheese as well as some goats cheese and sheep cheese and overall it was a lot of fun to have a raclette party.

There's even an Australian website devoted to the art of raclette - http://www.raclette.com.au/

Bugger!

A few years ago I had a rather convoluted and drawn out root canal involving specialists and much trauma and through the process discovered my allergy to gold...

Anyway, the tooth has from time to time been a bit achey and my dentist in Ireland said he wasn't happy with some shadowing under it on my x-rays but that it could be fine for many years.

Well, Sod's law says that's never going to be the case and sure enough my tooth started to really ache a couple of months ago - needed painkillers to cope with it as it was keeping me awake at night. I took the painkillers and otherwise ignored it as any good scared-of-the-dentist person would do. But my tooth was not to be ignored, a small lump appeared on the gum so I took the hint and took myself to the dentist.

Anyway, dentist sent me to an orthodontist who took more x-rays and pronounced that my original root canal treatment was perfect - great news! However, that means there's nothing that can be done, the whole lot has to come out...

So today it was back to my normal dentist who took out the tooth. He pumped me so full of anesthetic that I didn't even notice that the tooth had come out at all - I was quite confused as to why he would be putting in stitches before he'd taken the tooth out! The least traumatic tooth extraction I've ever had (except for my wisdom teeth, but then I was knocked out cold for those)

On my way back to work an elderly gentleman at the train station asked me what was wrong. Apparently I had a bit of blood on my lip and chin, so once he'd convinced himself that I really had just been to the dentist he whipped out a perfectly folded handkerchief and wiped my mouth for me.

The drugs are starting to wear off now - I'm sure that it's going to hurt like hell for a while. So now I'm sitting at work with a half-smile and feeling very very sorry for myself!

Just not axs-sept-ib-all!

I was walking through Steven's Green on Sunday when I witnessed a woman dealing with a difficult child. The child, about 4 years old, clearly was tired and not wanting to go home or sit in the pram. Mum (yes, an assumption I know) was frazzled from shopping and having trouble trying to pick up the child and put him in the pram while dealing with too all the shopping bags.

So child would be put in the pram and child would get out of the pram, craying rather uncontrollably. Mum would drop the shopping, pick up the child and put him back in the pram. Each time she put him in she did it with more and more force and I admit that I was feeling extremely uncomfortable watching this.

After the third or forth time she slammed the child into the pram and slapped it - well, that was too much for the man sitting on a nearby bench - he approached her and told her to back off and leave the child alone. Her response was to scream at him and hit out again, he grabbed her by the arm but she pulled free and ran off with the pram, screaming obsenities which he returned.

Years ago everyone would have turned a blind eye to this sort of thing no matter how uncomfortable it made them feel. I felt that I wanted to step in, but didn't quite feel comfortable intruding - but I'm so very glad that someone else there did feel comfortable standing up for a four-year old.

Confusing!

Today I watched a German program on the French Revolution with an English voice-over. All the re-enactments were in German, very confusing!

Personal Shopping

I've been interviewing with a couple of financial companies over the last couple of weeks for roles, the interviews have been going well and I've made it through to the second round on both so far.

That's great - except that I have nothing to wear! I have three quite traditional suits, one is definitely a winter suit and it's been far too hot for it. Another is really starting to look very tired, not surprising since I've had it for about 5 years now. The third is currently in the dry cleaners and has already made it to the interviews I've done so far. Time for a new suit.

I popped into Brown Thomas last week to look for a new suit. After an hour or so of looking I was... shock and horror... getting bored. So I decided to see if BT has a personal shopping service. I went down to the information desk to ask about it.

The women's wear person was on a break so the men's wear guy came to see me - he shook my hand and explained how it all works. He said that it's a totally free service and there's absolutely no obligation. Then the women's wear girl came back so  I had a quick meeting with her where I described what I was looking for and gave her my size. She booked me if for Thursday afternoon.

Thursday came around and I went to the personal shopping suite. There was a large room with racks at one end and huge three way mirrors and a couple of lounge chairs. Sharon had a half dozen suits ready for me to try on in the huge changing area. I tried a couple on and we discussed what I did and didn't like about them. We also discussed budget. She then disappeared (brought me some tea) and went to find more.

Over the course of the next hour I tried on about 30 suits all up. Included were suits from Vivienne Westwood and Paul Smith - one of the Paul Smith suits was navy pinstriping with skin tight pants, very 60's - all it needed was the winkle-picker shoes! Surprisingly it looked awesome on me :) Showed off my figure perfectly, but was perhaps a little out there for the average financial institution.

In the end I decided on a Moschino Cheap and Chic suit in brown. It's got all sorts of tweed and pinstriping type panels, so the unusual type detailing that I love. It comes with a pencil skirt - they didn't have my size in skirt so they brought in the company tailor who pinned up a larger one and will size it down to fit me perfectly at no extra cost. The jacket is shown in the picture here.

As I was finishing up with the tailor Sharon brought in about 20 pairs of jeans for the next client - what a fabulous idea! I'd recommend personal shopping if you have something quite definite in mind to buy. I'm sure I'll be using the service again too!

Dublin Bus Scam

Dublin Buses run a no-change system. Every time you get on the bus you have to give them the exact fare. Apparently if you give too much your ticket will say how much over you've paid and you can claim a refund for it.

Well, it doesn't quite work like that. In reality you have to ask the driver for your refund ticket which is printed out as extra. They don't automatically give it to you. Also, the sections are not clear and certainly not mapped so there's not really any way of knowing how much you should pay. I've been charged €1 and also €1.40 for the same journey and there's no point arguing with the driver - they want to move on and you're holding them up.

Anyway, if you do manage to get a refund ticket you "simply" take it to the Bus depot to get your refund - but there's only one bus depot that will do that and to be honest who can be bothered for the odd 10 cents here and there? I've always felt that it was a great scam and it seems that I'm right.

Dublin Bus have reported an average of €1.9m annually in uncollected fare refunds. That's one hell of a lot of money that they're making simply from being difficult! Oh for an Oyster Card system such as they use in London - now that's the way to do it!