The birthday chronicles

Thanks everyone for wishing me a happy birthday! This year I decided to take my birthday off - I don't know why I haven't done it before, probably because even if I was at work, work used to be pretty chill in the vee pee ess. Now I just want to avoid any chance that I might be asked to stay late on my birthday because it feels like it would be depressing.

So far, so good!! Long weekends are always nice, but I think the nice thing with birthdays is that it gives you an excuse to treat yourself more than you normally would on any other long weekend. I've turned one day in a multi-day festival (lol). Yes it is very narcissist but then this whole blog is about me. So here are some of the happy events from the past few days:

"A red sun rises. Blood has been spilt this night." - Legolas

In which Alice watches the extended LOTR and Hobbit over an entire week.

We started watching some LOTR for fun last weekend and then I just kept going, even after Brendan went to bed and stopped caring about hobbits. My insights from watching it again are:

• Being immortal would make you so apathetic about most things and have an unreasonable fear or aversion to death when in reality your life is just one long stretch of ennui (so is it really better?). In that way, elves are so annoying. It is difficult to make them care about anything but themselves and they also don't see that human mortality is both is yes a curse, but also a blessing.
• Aragorn, son of Arathorn *fangirls*
• When Gimli first appeared, we started calling him Gimli, son of Groin. That is not an insight, I just thought it was funny.
• Legolas basically speaks in verse and he's just so beautiful to look at. But he's really buff and ragey in the Hobbit which kind of ruins his character. Maybe if they were going for emo teenage elf vibes. He just goes on killing rampages and his love triangle with Tauriel and Kili is weird. I wish they could've introduced a female character without writing her into a love triangle. Maybe they should've just given Galadriel a greater role.
• Power and money corrupts - unless if you're Aragorn, who is just the perfect hero (the only disappointing thing is that his character doesn't really grow because he's so perfect already), or a homebody like Bilbo where your greatest ambition is to sit in an armchair and crochet doilies while safeguarding your mother's crockery. I think Tolkien was trying to say something about greatness vs power....hmm I did type a few more lines but I think I need to philosophise about this more before I can articulate. Later!

Wunder undies

In which Brendan's undies go walkabout.

One day, as Brendan's undie was drying on our balcony, it decided to detach and escape into the tree in the backyard of our neighbours below. I told Brendan he better fetch it before:

1. Our neighbours see it first.
2. It decides to drop out of the tree into the garden of our next-door neighbours who have a daughter, so finding a pair of undies in their garden would probably make them think there's a weird ham sup lo in the apartment building they live next to, which they've already tried very hard to protect themselves against by pretty much making their house look like a guarded prison from the outside.

I laughed at the thought of other people thinking Brendan was a ham sup lo. Anyway, he went downstairs and managed to convince our neighbours below to let him into the yard without revealing that the item of clothing he was fetching was a pair of undies.

"Can you please change this chart"

In which my boss' boss tries to tell me it's ok to leave some changes to a slide deck till tomorrow because he forgot that I was going to be on leave and my manager bluntly tells him that it's not ok because I won't be there and can't do it.

Kapow! Actually I would've spoken up, but it's just nice when someone does it for you in a very direct and almost aggressive way...and then watch my bossboss feel awkward (he is a good guy, and I could tell he felt sorry for something that wasn't really his fault) (but that's the thing about consulting, you're always making people work late and most of the time it isn't your fault) (come to think of it, I did make him work late once so we can call this even). Anyway, couldn't escape the office without one last, late night! Well it wasn't that late, Brendan came into the city after to pick me up and we went for dinner at 8...

"I want to go to more places like this!" - Brendan

In which Alice convinces Brendan to come into the city for dinner so she can eat at the basement restaurant underneath her work building which actually has some really good food even if she has to pay for it herself and can't bill it to a client.

Just kidding, I never bill anything to a client, mostly because I am scared of making an expense claim because the cost of navigating the system, doing the admin and then being invariably audited outweighs the reimbursement I'll get. My dream is that I'll eat with colleagues who are like "yeah I'll handle the bill and just claim it". DREAM. I don't have to pay AND I don't have to make the expense claim.

The basement restaurant is called Dessous, and the food was very delicious and revitalising after a day of dragging shapes on a slide. I had made a very derp slide that day because my capacity to care was waning. We had:

• some pickled mussels with some really nice sauce served with some really nice potato crisps
• a soy custard thing with crunchy school prawns on top and a ginger sauce
• lobster donuts with XO sauce
• grilled cuttlefish with sambal
• dashi baked rice (SO GOOOOOOOD)
• milk tea parfait with warm tapioca pearls and strawberries

"Should I get the Rubenstein or the Home Alone?" - Brendan

In which we drive to Fitzroy, the suburb of rich leftist intellectuals (as opposed to where we live, which is the suburb of rich conservative corporates), and miss out on all the fancy Lune croissants because we slept too late but then get toasted sandwiches from Smith & Deli that I've wanted to try for a long time and yep it pretty much made up for Brendan not being able to try Tommy's banh-mi croissant.

But it's not like I care (that much) because I'd already tried the banh-mi croissant from the Lune downstairs from where I work.

Yes I'm a horrible person.

"Is that Melbourne-money thing still valid?" - Alice

In which we go to Tipo for dinner because midweek dinners are the best time to go to fancy, high-demand places and not have to wait so long, and because isn't that Melbourne restaurant cash-back thing still on?

Yessssss!! Brendan and I finally made it to Tipo tonight! We had one failed attempt a few weeks ago where we were seated outdoors and then this ripper construction truck just started revving up like no tomorrow - drilling through what sounded like solid concrete, and even the waiter was like "yeah you should leave, I wouldn't blame you".

I had a super seafoody sea urchin risotto with finger lime and Brendan had an even yummier casarecce dish with some kind of preserved pork meat, smoked egg yolk and something else (whatever, anything if it tastes that good). And then a delicious panna cotta with rhubarb and hazelnut crumble and a very dark tiramisu. SO GOOD.

MORE TOMORROW