Memory lane

So while I was back in the Bay for the weekend, I took the opportunity to go through all my old childhood junk that Mum hadn’t yet thrown away.
And lo and behold if I didn’t find the best box of treasure ever, namely a shoebox of my old mixed tapes.
Having inherited a love of music from my Dad I was one of those people who listened to everyone and everything, and constantly had a recording tape quivering on pause so that if I heard a song on the radio I liked, I could leap on it and record it. I would also spend hours, seriously hours in my room, compiling my favourite songs of the moment and working out which order they should go in. I would then listen to these tapes until they either fell apart, or I made a new one. Then I finally got a CD player and stopped making them, which is actually kind of sad.
So it was completely bizarre to find this dusty old box, with these familiar friends inside. Luckily I had a 3.5 hour trip ahead of me back to Tauranga where I could blast these babies on my really awesome bottom-of-the-line car stereo.
It was the funnest trip I have done in some time. The first tape I found was one I had done when I was 15, and the most horrible child in existence (in my mother’s opinion, and mine in hindsight) and I hated the world and the world hated me. The first song was Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. Okay, pretty stock standard you say. We then moved on to Plush by Stone Temple Pilots. Soma by Smashing Pumpkins. Oceans by Pearl Jam. How these songs must have spoken to me. I have never laughed so hard in my life as each song came on, picturing myself obsessively learning every word (I still knew them all) or what my mother must have thought, waving her off in the car they had bought her, the whitest chick on the block, off to her private school with “BURN YOUR WICKED GARDEN DOWN” blaring from the stereo. It’s still making me giggle. I knew more about blunts and j’s and sparking an owl from Cypress Hill than I did from real life…I never even saw pot until University (and then I did not inhale, Mum).
The next tape was one I did while studying for exams in seventh form. I had read that classical music made you learn faster, so I got hold of Mum’s Best Classical Album in the World……..EEEEVVVVEEEEERRRR!!! and made a tape. Possibly, I should have actually not spent the hours making the tape, and instead used them to study, but hey I still passed. I had completely forgotten that I had taken this tape over to England with me after exams, and used the end of it to record the first UK songs I liked. So at the end of Bolero by Ravel, we get Your Woman by White Town, and Remember Me by Blue Boy. Always a nice transition. I remember getting to England and waking in my unfamiliar room in the middle of the night and noticing the previous Gap student had left a small tape player behind, so I switched it on, and it was tuned to Radio 1. Having read about this British institution many times it was so surreal to wake up after a horror flight, in the middle of England, listening to Radio 1. Listening to that tape brought that feeling of displacement and surreality right back.
The last tape I had time for was one I did in my first year at Uni. I didn’t know it at the time but I was suffering from depression, and boy any Psych who listened to that tape would have picked it a mile away. Carnival by Natalie Merchant. Fade Into You by Mazzy Star. Fire on Babylon by Sinead O’Connor. It’s no wonder I was munching Prozac by the end of that year (saved my life, seriously). I have about 30 other tapes to go through, some from 1991 when I was 12 years old, so will be full of Color Me Badd and Maxi Priest. I can’t wait.

A Day at the Races

Have you ever woken up on a beautiful Spring morning, and been so excited about the day ahead, that you actually danced around the kitchen? No? Yeah….um me neither.
No seriously, that’s what I was like on Saturday….a great day of catching up with old friends ahead, a cute new dress to wear, fake tan on that hadn’t streaked or turned me tangerine, PLUS a list of picks to bet that were sure to make me a millionaire.
The girls all looked amazing and the boys were looking sharp. I seriously like a man in a suit. Luckily I work around them all day which is good times indeed.

So we managed to get through many many bottles of champers and savvy, all the while having serious, deep and meaningful discussions of who’d had the craziest one night stand and which Dr Hook song was really the soundtrack to our teenage years. (Cover of the Rolling Stone won that one).

I bet money on horses and lost most of it…..until super horse Patrick charged up the home straight winning me an entire $50.00. This is the most I have ever won at the races so I mentioned my winnings to approximately two hundred people, who all indulged me by saying I should have gone into Punter of the Year. I fully agreed, but entries were closed.

The day ended with a big party back at a friends house where we all put on a hat, grabbed a kitchen utensil for a mike and danced around to Living on a Prayer. Ah good times. Luckily I have no photos of that.
The next day started out brilliantly with the All Blacks losing (!!!!!!!) to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys that are the French….can you believe it. The whole country certainly can’t. The best joke I have heard so far regarding the situation is: what’s the difference between the All Blacks and Viagara? Viagara at least guarantees you a Semi. And with that…. I bid you adieu.

Catch up

So today I am still recovering from a very busy weekend – with the added issue of the clocks going forward an hour meaning I am very snoozy this week.

The housewarming went really really well – please see my pics on Facebook – my stupid computer won’t let me upload them to here. I got home early on Friday and cleaned the house till 11:30 at night. It looked IMMACULATE. I was very proud. Of course, ten minutes into the party there were chips and bottles and glass rings and tomato sauce handprints on everything, but not being a Monica, it didn’t bother me. What did bother me was that it was Tuesday night before I could be bothered cleaning it up, after the house had acquired an interesting aroma of stale beer and chop fat. Tut tut my mother says.
So we had lots of beers and wines and sausages, and the back yard got an enthusiastic cricket work out. Lots of people brought their kids so it was a nice family day.

THEN later on the baby-free ones headed into town, where we went to a pub quiz. Our team was definitely the most annoying, and loudest, and drunkest, but still we won. It was weird. I think we were at that stage where you’re supremely confident about everything you do. No wonder people think they’re alright to drive – I probably would have sworn I had the skills to land a plane. However, I remembered that dyspepsia was heartburn, and that Johann Strauss wrote the Blue Danube, and we won. First prize though, was 4 of the most hideous wooden statues I have ever seen – you know like those Indonesian god statues? They also had a mop of red plastic hair – like Red from Fraggle Rock - to add to their aesthetic. Whatever happened to a bar tab I say – anyway we left them there and no doubt some eejit took them home to make their garden look even worse, right next to the plastic flamingoes. If you’re saying, hey, I have some of those statues, please, take my advice and burn them, they’re awful.

After the pub quiz it was all about drinking as much as we could so we went and partied in Tauranga till 2am. It was fun! Not so fun was waking up the next day, realising I was still drunk, and waiting in fear for the hangover to kick in (right around 1pm).

So that was my weekend – good times indeed – and another enormous weekend on the way with the Kelt Capital Races in Hastings on. I just went and bought a fascinator to wear with my LBD and yellow shoes, and some new bright red polish from Creative (Wild Fire, if you’re interested). We’re heading to a very posh tent where the bubbles are free and the horses beautiful, and I am guaranteed to lose at least $50 on the betting, but I know I’ll have a super duper day. Normally I would catch up with my parents at the same time, but at this moment in time they are swanning around Europe on their way to the Rugby World Cup final, which the All Blacks will be in, and win. My step-dad is a rugby fanatic (hey, he’s male and a Kiwi) so it’ll be a trip of a lifetime for him.

Anyhoodle – off to have a coffee with my sister and Amelie – see you next week with pics of the horses and hot guys in suits!

Aims