Double the points, double the oppression!

My son the geek says there is an explosion in the numbers of middle aged on-line gamers. Second life has had a lot of publicity and I can see the allure of a virtual world where you can be spectacularly rich or attractive or achieving. What staggers me though is something a colleague told me she is spending 2 to 3 hours a night playing. It's called HK Cafe and here are its Engrish instructions on how to play:

• Cook the food as people order as quick as possible.
• If food is not done and being drag out it has to be throw to the rubbish bin and cook again. $50 will be deducted for wastage.
• Once food is drag on the plate/bowl, you can not move them no more. If you want to change to other combination, throw the whole plate/bowl to rubbish bin and cook again.
• If people getting angry $100 will be deducted.

Is it just me or does this sound a tad demoralising? Remember the 'politics of housework'? In a 1988 article on the topic in The New Internationalist Debbie Taylor argues that 'women are trained to take care of their loved ones' and that 'domestic labour has become fused in our minds with love' which no-one wants to set a limit on, and that housework is by its very nature a Sisyphaen labour, that a 'woman's work' is literally never done.

If the food in HK cafe 'is not done' off it goes into the garbage and you start again. You don't even get the satisfaction that the family is sated until the next meal time! Once food is on the plate/bowl, 'you can not move them no more' - talk about the washing up from hell! And rubbing your diners up the wrong way costs you $100 so no scope to be a Basil Fawlty here!

Perhaps I am drawing a long bow to equate a simulated hospitality industry game with thankless domestic labour but give me Scrabble and a meal with real people in a real cafe any day!

The elusive holy grail for caffeine fanciers

Saw The Graham Norton Show last night and giggled at David Mitchell's blast against coffee obsessives. It was really funny but I thought perhaps a bit hyperbolic until I got in the lift at work this morning.

A man and woman, clearly work colleagues, were engrossed in a coffee appreciation dialogue as follows:

Petite well groomed woman (PWGW) looking up at lanky colleague holding paper cup:Where do you get your coffee?

Lanky authoritative man (LAM) nursing lidded paper cup of coffee: I go to that little place in Campbell Street, not the really trendy looking one, their coffee is undrinkable...

PWGW: Oh so, you go the place on the corner? Is their coffee good?

LAM: Yeah, the place just near the corner. The African woman who used to work there made really good coffee; there's a French guy there now and he's not quite as good.

PWGW: Really an African barista? She made good coffee then?

LAM: Well, I drink long blacks and half the time they just give you this watery stuff... See this one (inviting her to peek under the plastic lid of his cup) you can still just see the creme. On a proper long black the creme should last for at least 3 minutes, there's just a hint still there....

You get the idea - I had to alight at that point.

Just googled a few Surry Hills cafe reviews. One referred to 'Melbourne-style coffee' and another one said to try and catch a day when George was there as he was the better barista. So David Mitchell is right, almost all of middle class western society appears to be obsessed with the search for 'real' coffee and can elucidate it's quest endlessly.

For years our kids have teased us about our need to find somewhere that has 'decent' coffee whenever we're out or on holidays so mea culpa too I suppose.

So random

Hester 1996 - 2009

Life is 'like so random'. In our sorrow at losing Cassie we were taking comfort in still having Hester, our brindle staffie who was three years Cassie's junior. But as John Lennon sang shortly before the cosmos threw a bit of a surprise his and Yoko's way: 'Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans' (Beautiful Boy 1980).

This week, in a matter of 4 days, Hester went from giving us some concern about her lethargy and weight loss to joining Cassie under a shrub (a grevillea) at the end of our garden. Intestinal adenocarcinoma with lymphatic invasion. She had the good grace to go to sleep of her own accord - at about 1 am this morning. We are polaxed. Enough already.

Postscript: Got some great comments on this to my personal email here's my favourite:

Sorry about the dog, but I'm not much of a pet person. At least your life will be simpler.

Hey, I wrote a long poem on the death of our canary in 1970. It does hurt. And if it doesn't, it should.

Right Neighbourly

There was a very assertive rap at the door this morning. At first I thought it was our neighbour from across the road seeking redress for my perfunctory call on them of the previous afternoon complaining about their kids’ pranks. (More about that later).

But no, it was two Jehovah’s witnesses with accents like the restaurateur in ‘Lady and the Tramp’. Their conservative suits and the copies of The Watchtower they flourished gave them away before the older of the two told us that he had ‘a vair-ee e-special a-message’ for us. I was sitting at the table eating my cereal, my unruly slept-on new hairstyle protruding maniacally from my skull (more about that later) and my husband made it to the door before me. Before the ‘vair-ee e-special a-message’ could be delivered he informed our visitors that we were a household of atheists. ‘You donor looka like atheists’ replied Jehovah’s Witness senior just before wishing us a ‘nice-a day’ as the door swung closed on him, his colleague and their publications.

What do atheists look like? we wondered. Admittedly I look nothing like Julianne Moore or Uma Thurman, two of the more prominent contemporary female atheists (more’s the pity). My spouse does however share facial hairstyle preferences with Hemingway and Darwin! Perhaps he just meant we didn’t have obvious horns or cloven hooves!

I am a person who earns her living in the world of personal development. I usually pride myself on taking a win-win approach to conflict resolution and not subduing the other party with bombast. What price my principles? The detonation of six ‘fart bombs’ on our front veranda it would seem! The little wretches over the road have been regularly setting off these putrid things outside our front door for the past two weeks. Usually I’ve only heard about it after I got home from work and although we’d started collecting the wrappers as evidence I was never home to catch them in the act. Our son had, and chased them for a block a few days ago. On Friday the little imps failed to connect the presence of my car in our driveway with my presence in the house. Early afternoon came the ‘pop’ sound that my kids tell me heralds the emission of the rotten egg gas and then the farty discharge itself. White splashes on our tiles also accompanied the eruption.

I sped across the street fuelled by indignation, knocked very hard and repeatedly on their door and when it opened, blurted out ‘Can you tell your kids to stop letting off joke shop fart bombs on our veranda? Once we might consider a joke but not six times!’ The poor woman’s smiling face crumpled and she said ‘Yes, yes, I’ll tell them’ and went in. I heard her ‘balling them out’ seconds later. My kids were delighted and suggested that I do present as a tad formidable in full flight. Perhaps I can harness this righteous fury to help in the battle against global warming or whaling ‘for research purposes’ next.

Oh, the haircut. I have thin greying hair and a fat face. I do not have anyone giving my tresses the daily attention that Julia Gillard and Juanita Phillips so clearly enjoy. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve decided that a short layer cut is the only practical coiffure for me. Last week I succumbed to delusion again and asked to have it left longer, in a sort’ve bob. (My fantasy is to have hair like Betty Churcher). No amount of fiddling and ‘product’ replicates the way it looked when I left the salon and after sleep I resemble Larry Fine (of the Three Stooges). Vanity, vanity all is vanity! More on foil foibles and the politics of greying in a future blog posting!

Snorty little secret

A few weeks before poor old Cass went for her big sleep I went for a sleep study. My family has commented on my snoring over the past 18 months, I wake several times a night, hardly ever feel rested in the mornings and take every opportunity to have an early night or an afternoon nap. I mentioned this to my GP and she wrote me a referral. The study involved an overnight stay at a sleep laboratory, the Woolcock Centre, Glebe. I chose a Friday night because I expected to feel pretty washed out the next day and didn't want to have to front up to work. As the doctor I saw today maintained I slept for 6 hours (not the 2 it felt like) that may have been a self fulfilling prophecy.

Before I left work on the night of the study I mentioned where I was going and a colleague said she ought to go to a sleep lab, that she knew she stopped breathing several times a night and was too scared to have a day time snooze in case she did so permanently. I immediately felt like a complete alarmist as my symptoms are trivial compared to hers. I had to check in at 7 pm - not enough time to go home and cook dinner first so I convinced my husband and daughter it would be nice to have a meal in Glebe. We cut it fine and I had some trouble getting access to the Woolcock Centre carpark, so we opted for a restaurant a few doors away.

The dashing waiter (he had a waxed moustache and new romantic ringlets a la Adam Ant) asked why we needed to be out in a hurry and I told him what I was doing. 'Why?' he enquired 'I snore' I replied. 'In that case, I should book in' he said as he topped up my merlot ('to help you sleep') and confided that he snores so badly his wife regularly exiles him to the couch.

At 7.10 my family farewelled me as if I was about to undergo serious surgery not sit in an Ikea style visitors' lounge sipping green tea until a delightful Indian research student ushered me to a comfortable bedroom (with en suite) to start the first phase of my wiring up. Mohatma (I'll call her that to protect her identity and because I can't recall her actual name) could not have been clearer, more considerate or thorough. After attaching the first set of wires she suggested I might like to go and relax in the lounge. Glancing at my tendril exuding reflection in the mirror I said it might be hard for me to relax in a public setting looking as I did. We were all in the same boat Mohatma said, so there was no need to feel self consciousness. Off I boldly went. During my 3/4 hour in front of the huge plasma screen watching an SBS doco on Robert J Oppenheimer only 2 of the other 'inmates' scurried in and hurriedly departed. Clearly looking like a pasty complexioned, pyjama -clad android in the repair shop themselves or thinking I was one does inhibit social interaction!

At about 8.45 Mohatma summoned me for my final wiring. It was basically as depicted here but a bit more intrusive as I also had electrodes gummed onto my scalp and taped to my arms and legs, belts around my chest and midriff and a peg thing on one finger of my left hand. My hair was definitely a tad mussed up too - not like this guy's smooth coiff.

At 9.50, when I was all plugged in, Mohatama went to the observation room down the corridor to check she was getting readings. She asked me to raise first one leg then the other, each of my arms in turn, to look up, down, right and left and to blink, then, apparently satisfied, she popped back to bid me good night and explain that the microphone in the room would pick up any calls for assistance during the night.

When I called out 3 times seeking permission to swap the peg thingy from my pinkie (where it was pinching) to my middle finger and was unheeded, I took the initiative and swapped it myself. Luckily nothing else required their intervention overnight. I managed to avoid a visit to the loo (which would have required some unplugging) but did need to take ibuprofen for back pain (that mattress really agreed with me though, I woke up twinge free, must check what it was). I was woken up promptly at 6 from what I thought was my only episode of deep sleep. As I was unaware of any snoring and my mouth felt decidedly undrooly I felt I had spent quite an atypical night and that they would learn nothing or I would be pronounced just a bit restless or stressed.

After being sprayed with delightful jets of tepid water to un-gum my attachments I was allowed a shower and was released. By 7 I was on the road home. I noticed how many denizens of Glebe were already up and about at dawn. Perhaps they have trouble sleeping?

Well today I got to hear the results of the study and got a diagnosis of mild sleep apnoea. No mouthgards or breathing apparatus recommended at this stage but my weight and alcohol consumption definitely under scrutiny. I don't know if I was in denial before or hoped for a 'magic bullet', but I feel rather despondent. Perhaps that's why people endure appalling quality sleep and don't get the study done. They won't have to confront their unhealthy habits!

If the mere mention of what I was doing elicited poor sleep confessions from 2 people (and I've since heard more sleep stories), how many people have a snorty little secret I wonder?

Postscript: the stories keep on coming. One friend literally did not sleep a wink for his sleep study but then dozed off after he was told he could leave and was woken by the cleaners that afternoon! Another is on her second breathing machine and has slept with a mask for years! It seems people talk about almost anything else they do in bed but their sleep habits are taboo!