fekkin' shit scared...

this morning, within a few minutes of locking my front door. I went tumbling down my front staircase.

And ooh oww... if I had a digital camera i would take a picture of my horrifically PURPLE AND BLACK ass and post it in all it's glory.

I mean fuck, what a great start to the day.

So I decided it was about time, with my jarred body to head down to the spinal care place and get myself checked out. My RSI seems to have travelled since my last job and is affecting me off and on... more on lately, considering this is the second time I've stacked it in as many weeks. My balance is off.

And after seeing the look on Mr Spinal Care's face... I'm considerably worried. I was immediately sent for more x-rays but wont know what they mean until i go back to see him and have it explained. (i have refrained from ripping open the envelope in fear).

My grandmother who passed away earlier this year had some osteo problems I'm pretty sure, and I'm really really hoping I haven't got something similar. However, that look on the doc's face didnt bring me any comfort.

I know something is wrong...

On a lighter note... here's some pics from America....
shortly...

xJ

random blogginess...

Point 1: cooking is no fun unless you make a mess...

I'm actually quite content with life at the moment... quite amazing compared to this time last year.

Apart from a few minor obstacles; namely:

1) the fact that I've taken up smoking again (easily beaten once i make the decision to can it again)
and 2) wanting to lose ten kilos (happily on its way)
oh and 3) not having a man around who's handsome and likes me, but that's really by the by. My time will come.

I love this city. I'm always meeting fresh faces and finding new places to play. And I'll conquer it yet and get my b-grade celebrity status back up to b-grade somehow.

And once I've done that i'll become complacent and bored again and probably want to move to somewhere even bigger.... I vote New York, because I heart it. Every day in that city is an adventure.



Point 2: weird things about America...

I noticed at pedestrian crossings there is really nothing to notify the vision impaired that they can cross the street. In Australia for example, the red man blips slowly until you can cross, then speeds up when the green man appears, letting you know it's okay to cross.

American's drive very fast (yes Mikey, this means you)

What's with the 1c pieces and $1 bills? And no different coloured money??! At least when I open my purse in Australia I can see what I've got without too much effort instead of rummaging through notes and ending up with a gazillion one dollar bills!!

Generally stuff costs the same, except cosmetics are so cheap. I'm talking Shisheido here. I priced some in Brisbane the other day and what was $20USD was at least $40AUD!!

Gay!
Totally Gay!
Liberace Gay!!

xxJ

the most un-fun city in america...

i think is Downtown Los Angeles.

After being in New York with the hustle and bustle, and sometimes the quietness of Soho or Grenwich Village... I kind of got used to being in a busy city.

LA Downtown is boring.

The Museum of Contemporary Art was closed yesterday (when i had money) and advertised as being free on Thursdays, so what happens when I get there... oh yeh it's free between 5 + 8pm. Bah! AND there's a basquiat exhibit on, but I need my money to pay the shuttle dude to get back to LAX.

Sauntered up to Hollywood Blvd to check out the sites, and visted the Entertainment museum. Universal Studios or anything else was way out of my price range.

I don't know, apart from being smoggy, it's hot and there's not many places to sit or much shade around here. I don't mind the heat, but i like to be able to find a park bench without too much effort.

So all in all, LA Central is a boring piece of shit.

My flight leaves in 5 hours from LAX back through Auckland and then onto Brisneyland.

I've had a really great time... yes you sleep when you're dead... and here's where I insert the thankyous.

Mikey mike for letting me sleep on his couch, use his computer, and making him shop in Soho.
The delectible Amanda in Denver, for wanting me to stay, saying she'll miss me, and being a girlfriend i could bitch with, or look at boys with.
Jason... for being delightful, blaming me for him getting drunk on his birthday, and showing me a good time...
Diane from New York, for the company, and the other Jason as well.
Mikey's parents for feeding me and taking me to the baseball, and generally being nice.

And the fine people of the US who have been pleasant, answered all my questions, told me I was brave for travelling alone and laughed at me saying 'heaps' or 'reckon' way too much.

Anyhoo, that's all from me, and that's all from him (the invisible delightful imaginary boyfriend i have - wha'?).

See some of y'all very soon, and see others of you when I'm looking at you!

xxJ

Ok, just HAD to add this in...

in the recent flux of 'The Hoff' memorabilia... here's the link Aiva in Sydney sent me...

hours of entertainment!!

Pachoff

Nyuk.

xJ

Trav Nash demands...

more information on the mystery boy...

Well you ain't getting it, so you can just kiss my curvy ass!!

I did, however, add in some shopping links and site links for some of the things I did in New York... so that'll have to do in the tantalising of tastebuds for now!!!

xxJ

mmmm THAT guy...

i really want to write about 'that guy' but unfortunately i cannot...

but in case you decide to read, oh mysterious man, thankyou... and i'll see you in Thailand for new years ;)

xJ

back in Denver...

after about 6 hours in transit...

i heart new york, i heart new york a whole bunch.

i feel like I did a lot, and yet didn't in the 4 days we were there.

I met a nice chick Diane at this bar on west 46th st who happens to have a friend on the gold coast, and will be coming down in February. so that's going to be pretty cool. She has my e-mail so hopefully will be able to come visit me when she's here.

Saw a very small portion of Central Park today. Beautiful, but way too huge to walk all the way through in the little time I had left. Went back to Berghovf and bought some cosmetics.

Freaked out when I couldn't find my CD player when I got to the airport... thought the bellboys at the hotel had stolen it, and even made a call... but lo and behold i have now found it.

The Sex + The City tour was way fun. Got some good shopping in and saw a lot of the city by going on it as well.

Went back to Pat Fields (the costume designer for the show) shop the following day hoping to pick up something memorable from there too, in the end talked myself out of it. Tried a wacky pink top on that looked better on the hanger than on me.

I went into Dolce + Gabana down in Soho thinking maybe I could afford even one piece of memorabilia. think again julie, think again.

Went into the really muhassive Toys R Us on time square... there is a ferris wheel in the middle of it. What else, oh i think i found my new favourite store in Sephora... but unfortunately there aren't any in Aus. As far as I know anyway. I guess there could be one down in Sydney.

Weekends in New York, and in particular Times Square are NUTS. Enjoyed much more the 'tranquility' of the area surrounding Christopher Street.

The site of the WTC disaster... I have to say, i had a cry when I was there, and shot up a prayer, which i dont do very often these days, that the souls lost there are in a better place than here. That's not to say the world in which we live in isn't an amazing place, but I sometimes wish everyone could be safe and warm all the time.

Also, I'm going to have to go into massive exercise and eating right overload after this trip... I think I got fatter!!

bah humbug!!

xJ

New York, New York

it's a hell of a town...

what have i done since i have been here...

found some amazing shopping...
been to the site where the twin towers were...
sat on carrie bradshaws front doorstep...
had 'breakfast at tiffanys' (without the breakfast part)...
been up the empire state building at night...
and generally freaked out about how frikken huge this place is...

but i heart new york, and it seems a bunch of other people do too...

xJ

Oh... the DAYTIME...

Went to lunch with Amanda on 16th + Lawrence to a place called the Cheesecake Factory... which not only had cheesecake (which we didn't eat) but enormous, and i mean ENOOOOOOOOOOOOOORMOUS (or in polly's language MUHASSIVE) lunches.

Then I strutted the mall and bought the cutest pair of shoes (Fiona you are going to be sOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo jealous) and a Denver T-Shirt.

We then went to TWIST + SHOUT records and I bought:

MIA - Arular
RJD2 - The Horror
Verve - Unmixed 3 compilation (nothing to do with the British 'Verve')

some bandaids with pirate flags, monkey faces and some lip gloss that says 'making out is yucky' which i thought was funny....

that's about it.

Oh and I now own a Colorado Rockies visor and Pol's going to give me grief because I tease her about the fact she'll get a sunburnt head by wearing a visor... but it was just so cute I couldn't resist.

meow meow.
xJ

Colorado Rockies

Just went to my first American sporting event, the Colorado Rockies vs the Philadelphia Phillies (what an original name!)

Well I must say I kinda liked it. Saw a couple of home runs.

We saw the game at Corrs Stadium which is in Downtown Denver.

Ok and 'downtown' in this country, pretty much means CBD.

Off to New York tomorrow. Wooooooo! Sex + The City Bus Tour, here I come!!! YEH BABY! Yeh, heh!!

Stuff, things.
xJ

Breckenridge, CO + Sing Sing

Yesterday Mike and I trekked up to Breckenridge, about 11000 ft up into the Rocky Mountains. The original purpose of this trek was to make me take this toboggan thing down the hillside, but when i saw how bit it was, and that I would be controlling the brakes, i kind of poosed on it!!
So we took the 'super chair' up the mountain side to look at the view, and for me to take some happy snaps. We were practically on the Continental Divide, if that means anything to anyone...

Last night we met Amanda at SING SING and had a great time heckling and being heckled. With $2 beers, handsome bartenders and some hilarious renditions of different tunes, we had a ball. The basic idea is that these two guys sit opposite each other on stage, both with pianos and take requests from the audience... which they'll rock out or ham up depending how they feel about the song of course.

The piano players names were John and Ron, and I liked them. They didn't know my Smokey Robinson song though. bum to them! But they were very sweet so I gave them a squeeze when we left.

Oh, found a better link.... SING SING

Bye for now.
xJ

Black Hawk, Colorado

Due to the fact that we canned the Vegas idea, we went and spent the afternoon in (white-bred, hick... i'm kidding) mountain town BLACK HAWK to hit the casino's.

Because you can only gamble in certain states, or in certain areas we went up there.

Drove through Boulder to have a looksey as well, and it was pretty nice. Really green.

Pissed down with rain today so we avoided toboganning down the hills but will try for that tomorrow, as well as visiting the Stanley Hotel where they filmed the movie THE SHINING.

And off to a DUELLING PIANO bar called Sing Sing tomorrow night also.

Goodnight Australia!
Love your guts!
xJ

Parker, Colorado

Went up to Parker last night to Mike's folks place who had cooked an insane amount of steak for us (i think my stomach is still suffering).

Seems quite beautiful. Directly opposite their house was this enormous lake. There was a dear up in the back yard.

Then I made Mikey watch 'i heart huckabees' which I originally watched only a few weeks back with the lovely Jenn... but didn't write about it I don't think.

Anyway, I think it's one of my new favourite movies.

Trust the blanket!

We're off to Denver zoo shortly to see sum aMiNals. Then Amanda and jason are coming for dinner. Should be a nice day.

We canned the Vegas idea because it's just too far. :(
Leave for New York friday morning, my friend Annie is there at the moment too, so I called her last night, she freaked out, and we're going to mess things up, adelaide-style!!
xJ

first american drinking binge...

and possibly more to come.

hey it was jasons birthday, and he felt old. so we got him insanely drunk and made random girls in the bar give him kisses becos it was his birthday.

i met a nice chick called amanda. i think i'm cooking her dinner in a few days.

vodka is not my friend.
but white sambuca is.
cute little bar we went to but neither mike or i remember what it's called. it's probable we have brain damage or memory loss though.

even though i made a spectacular breakfast at 1:00 (pm that is)!

So we're mooching til we go to Mikes folks for dinner.
we might go see some baseball tomorrow or something.

meow meow.
xJ
ps. apparently when you say "Schapelle" (or rather Chapelle) in america, it means something totally different... it means "I'm Rick James, Bitch!"

note to self: fill in the blanks later

thoughts and observations...

first impression of LA... "check out this smog! i would really like to be able to SEE the mountains properly!"

Disneyland... "this place would cost a tonne if you brought your whole family..." - but ok let me actually write something about disneyland now that I finally have access to a computer...
I was unsure as to whether or not i was going to go because of how i feel about certain issues to do with the company, but it was right there... so I went. And I spent 12 hours there. Count them, twelve! They have a subsidiary park called Disneys California Adventure which is right across the walkway, and 'Downtown Disney' - free to anyone with cafe's, shops blah blah blah.

My favourite things:
California Adventure - Soarin' Over... (or something like that) - Anyway, this virtual plane flight where your lifted up in your seat and taken on this beautiful plane flight. If you fly over sea, you smell the ocean, if you fly over the Californian Orange Groves, you smell oranges. Amazing, and well worth the wait. Also, California Screamin' which was this sick rollercoaster. I (and the dude next to me) whooped our way through it, I wanted to go back again but kind of wanted to make sure I did as much as I could... the dude, however, jumped over the fence and rejoined the line!! hehe.
Oh and The Bugs Live 3D Movie and the Muppets one too.

Disneyland - Haunted Mansion was wicked... Indiana Jones was great too. It's a small world just weirded me out... and I am thinking 'wheres australia?' til we turn this corner and theres a large pink kangaroo with green flowers on it, two koala bears, one blue and one pink, and a little aboriginal boy with a sash around his waist (since when?) holding what SEEMED to resemble a kangaroo!! I mean most of the other countries had people playing traditional music or something. THey could have had a band with a dude with a box-bass thingy (you know, box at the bottom, broom stick coming out the middle, string attached) and someone else playing the bottle top broomstick thingo. Now I know these have technical names, but buggered if I can remember them right now.
Splash Mountain I think was the most overrated, all day there were HUGE lines to it, so I wandered past last thing... and though it was good, I'd rather the half-underground train rollercoaster that I went on!! Or the Buzz Lightyear interactive shoot em up ride, or the Star Wars based, Star Tours! I mean shit, OVER-RATED BABY!

random strange things:
dude on the highway in LA, in a maroon BUICK with the numberplate "Mr Disco" - go you good thing! HA HA HA (Still makes me laugh)

US customs wasnt quite as stressful as i'd expected to be honest... was weirder flying domestic yesterday when they put you in this weird cubicle thing like a phone booth and puff you with air, then electronically screen a sample of the 'dust' (i guess) inside your carry-ons to check for bombing. The guy was very friendly though.

Having a pilot smart enough to wait for an electrical storm to pass, whilst other planes took off right in that direction. Flying over clouds at night is beautiful by the way.

I'm in Denver now, mooching around at Mikey's waiting for him to return from San Francisco. Should be in a few hours time, it's so hot and we'll both be pretty tired, i might suggest a trip to the supermarket and a large bout of mooching, til we decided whether or not to drive to Vegas baby, ye-heh.

And no, Shazzy, Fiona, and everyone else expecting miracles... we're not marrying each other whilst we're there!!

Though I do like Mikey's folks.

xJ

land of the free, home of the brave?

in less than 72 hours I'll be on a muhassive (thanks pol) plane from Brisneyland to LA, via Auckland.

LA kind of freaks me out considering i'll be there on my own for a few days, but really, i'm not likely to walk down any dark alleys alone at night, and i'm not silly.

I've wanted to do this trip to the states for a while, and now it's finally here i'm not as butterflies in my stomach like as i thought i'd be (wait til tuesday night, i wont sleep when i need to and i'll feel like death for the flight).

I'll be travelling to LA, Vegas, Denver and New York. I've booked most of my internal flights and hotels n stuff, and the sex and the city bus tour in new york, but apart from that i'm kind of going to wing it. I mean I'd rather ask a random local on the street what the favourite thing about their city is... and go and have a look.
There are some things i've noted like a couple of Radio + TV museums (for those who know i was a veteran of community radio station three d in adelaide, clocking up 10 years on air in 2004).

Hmm, stuff. anyhoo i intend to blog my way thru the US, so watch this space.
xxJ

a strange thing happened to me last night...

i don't quite know what time it was... shortly after 9:30 i suppose, when there was a knock at the door.

i checked out the window to see who it was and a young aboriginal lady was standing on my front stoop. So i opened the door and said hello.

she said she had been to the local aboriginal health place to find a place to sleep, and they said they were only providing services for intoxicated people *weird*
I said I couldnt help her, because i was going out. Which wasn't entirely true, but I wasnt yet sure what she was asking me.

She said that she had found a place to sleep and maybe could she borrow a blanket, and she would return it in the morning, as she was going home to cairns. i asked her what made her come to brisbane, she said there'd been some trouble and that she thought she'd just get away for a bit, but it was a mistake and so she was going back home.
I dont really have much in the way of blankets and stuff, but i said hang on and gave her the big purple rug off of my loungeroom floor. she mentioned several times that she would put it on the door step this morning.
i was going to give her this other blanket that wasn't quite as sentimental, but it wouldnt have kept her warm at all.
thing is, this purple blanket with it's tattered corner and that's constantly sitting on my lounge floor, is a blanket my parents bought when they had their first apartment. It cost a lot of money back then, and it's kind of sentimental just cos we've had it forever.

But I gave up my purple blanket with the thought that it would keep someone else warm.

The girl asked if she could pinch a couple of cigarette butts out of my ashtray, i said dont be silly and went to get a few for her. So i sat on the step and had a chat with someone i'd never met for about 10 minutes or so.... til she said, thanks for this, my names deliah and again that she'd return the blanket, and went off into the darkness.

I felt... well I dont really know what i felt, but i felt í'd found out enough in those brief moments to trust there'd be a purple blanket on my front porch when i woke up... by 7:50 this morning when i left for work, she still hadn't returned.

I mean I kind of hope it's there when I get home, but even if it's not, I hope it kept her warm.

xJ

stuck because of a storm...

stuck at work half an hour past my normal working hour because ex-neighbourino's are stuck in traffic with my broom broom...

was interested to find this today on the news site about SAVING WATER...

Go you South Aussies, go!

It kind of doesn't surprise me though, considering we've been stuck at the bottom of the Murray for so long, with strange drought-like weather, and the cotton farmers in New South Wales using so much water.

I remember as kids bucketing the water from the bath onto the garden. My dad then bought a bigger water tank and linked up a couple pipes to the house... one to the laundry sink, and one to the bath, so we'd use less water.

I often talk about the issue with Daddio and his main point is 'well if they made all NEW houses have certain environmentally sound items in them, we wouldn't have so much of a problem'. At least in this way, people would learn to conserve water from day-dot. And in schools it needs to be taught in a way that kids will remember and want to learn the values of conserving water, energy and other elements of the environment.

There have been floods up in Queensland over the past 48 hours, and it occurs to me that people probably forget to do stuff like keep gutters clean and streets free of debris because it hasn't rained for so long...

Am off to America in exactly 20 days. Exciting, scary, and exciting again! I'll be in LA, Vegas, Colorado and New York. Mike-licious will be accompanying me on most of the journey and letting me stay in his new bachelor pad *meow*. I look forward to spending time with him, seeing the Yankees hopefully kick some butt, and going on the Sex + The City Bus Tour!!

wooo!!
Happy sailing!
xJ

i wish to declare my love...

for a certain australian comedian...

adam hills i love you.

he is lovely, his comedy picks you up, he has a lot of interesting information in that brain of his, he will heckle people who talk on their mobile mid-show ("you ignorant slapper") and always looks spunky.
and in case you didnt notice, spicks and specks is a triumph.

i also saw the Tripod kids last weekend, twice in fact. they were excited to get a copy of silly radio antics from last years fringe. Scod played a solo show at Ric's on Saturday arvo so we went to watch.

meeeoooowww.
xJ

come on people...

now, shine on ya brother
everybody get together
try to love one another right now...

i'd advise to always read your employment contracts thoroughly... today i discovered i was required to give four weeks notice instead of two, which almost screwed my chances at a new job.

This said, all is fine and dandy in new job town and I shall be commencing there sometime in july.
woo!!

AND I STILL GET TO GO TO AMERICA...
xJ