I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Look what the courier-fairy dropped off to me? I'm going to be reviewing Greggs for my blog - now I have enough caffeine to never need sleep again! So much productivity is lost between 2am and 7.30am when I'm flitting through a couple of REM cycles!  Why, that's 38.5 hours per week spent lying on my back with my eyes closed, when I can be churning out websites like Thneeds!

Thneeds Thneeds are what everyone needs!

Okay, I may have had too much caffeine this evening. 

Aww, the PR people even sent out my caffeine fix in a white gift bag with big red ribbon.  It's the kind of personal touch I don't mind strangers giving me. ;)

I going to try not to drink it all before the weekend - we have family coming up from the 'Naki who I'm sure would be more than happy to put their two cents in regarding the Greggs revamp. (By the way, I'm not normally a Greggs drinker at all, but... I'm liking this stuff! This is not the review though, so I shall shut up.)

Then again, I have a website to try and complete this week, so there's no promises there.  "Keep your family close, but your Espresso Roast closer."

With that in mind, I better get back into it. Though first, I need another cuppa...

I seem to have this "thing" about zombies.

New car! We were hoping to get something that could drive over lava and plough through a zombie mob without being rolled, but we've settled for a nice practical 8-seater soccer-mum mobile... :P

Is this a people-mover? Hell yes! This will move people right out of our path, left right and center. Especially with the addition of bull bars ;)  It's big, but not so big as to topple over in a strong wind, and the undead aren't smart enough to roll it, right? And if we get the windscreen cover with our insurance, we'll be protected for when the Infected crack it with those severed limbs they like to swing about.

I'm cautiously satisfied that this is all we need to survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

Crossing a river of lava - not so confident.  According to Dante's Peak, we'd need a heavy duty pick up truck to pull that one off...

But, when you think of which disaster scenario is more likely in Auckland - Volcanic Erruption or Zombie Outbreak - I think we'll do just fine with the choice we've made.

And if repayments become a struggle and we're forced to downgrade from three-bedroom rental to cardboard box, there's quite a bit of space with the back seats folded down into the floor. Plenty of room to freedom camp for the rest of our lives - yee-ha!

I think... I think my blog is moving...

I have not had much time to blog these days. In fact, I have barely blogged since January when I began creating graphics in exchange for the cash that funds our additional groceries (you know, the additional groceries we need by the weekend, after we've already spent our budget on the week's first wave of groceries, followed closely by 'money the teen needs for stuff like the school bus' and 'petrol to raise the gauge to empty').

And it sucks. It sucks because there is many a time when I want to blog, but I also need to finish a graphic job I've been commissioned to do. So when I weigh up financial gain against prosical soul purging (prosical? I made up that word. I couldn't think of the right word.) ... well... financial gain tends to win time and time again.

By the way - and this is completely off topic from my original topic - but no one even tried to guess what the fecal-looking matter was that was photographed upon a piece of toast in my last post. I am so so sad about that. That photo was my ultimate April Fools prank (April Fools day is 365 days a year in our household).  And I thought an open-ended question upon the lines of "guess what the poo-looking stuff on my toast is!" would generate feedback of some kind... :P

I did wonder if I'd offended people with my take on, eh, photographic art. But then I realised, Silly Callie. The scant few who read this blog never even saw the photo - they stopped reading when the opening paragraph suggested chilli sausage and labour would not make for a very ladylike combination!

Tree gum.

It was knobbly brown tree gum photographed on top of that piece of toast. We discovered it when geo-caching with friends at a nearby reserve. The Lily Bug ran towards me screaming "hold this poo mum!" and I nearly died. After finally being convinced it was tree gum, I collected up as much as I could find, to use in pranks on the family members. I'm incredibly mature like that.

 This photo contains no fecal matter at all. Though with a stormwater pipe running directly into Narrow Neck beach, I cannot offer a guarantee.

Anyway, back to the original point of this long-winded post...

While in the process of setting up my Infinite Monkey Design website, I've realised that rather than register yet another domain name (I have three already. Greedy pig I am.) it would make more sense to shift infinitemonkey.co.nz off blogger.com and on to my own webhost, which will revert this blog back to being infinitemonkeynz.blogspot.com. Unless I can redirect the subdomain blog.infinitemonkey.co.nz to my blogspot url.

Whichever option I go with in the next few days, I'm not sure if this blog's rss feed will become broken once the URLs change. So the gist of this ramble is, if you never have an update from me ever again, my switching about has likely disabled my rss feed, in which case please go directly to infinitemonkeynz.blogspot.com (or blog.infinitemonkey.co.nz).

Because... Seriously... Oh invisible and most likely non-existent readers... You don't want to miss out on my next blog post that's all written up and ready to post. 

It's all about perenial tears.

I've never had one, just for the record. But my next blog post is going to be all about them and you don't want to miss something like that, right?


RIGHT???!!!??

The Sun Did Not Shine, It Was Too Wet To Play...

 Hey, why do I get the feeling I've used that line as a title before? Oops. Well moving along...

Even by my own night-owlish standards, being awake at 2.20am is quite possibly one of the most stupidist ideas I've had in a while.

Well, it's not like I planned it. It just so happened that I've found a lot of entrepreneurial inspiration today, and you know... one coffee led to another...

Today (well, yesterday now, if you want to get technical. But let's not.) I made a somewhat random decision to make a facebook page to promote the dabbling I've done in Photoshop over the past several years, in order to hopefully propagate some kind of financial gain. Eventually.

It began when I created a quick banner for my FB profile page (I'm so loving the new Timeline layout for allowing me to apply a small scrap of individuality to my profile page!) One or two people inquired about the banner, and before I knew it I was designing a business logo for the ever-so-clever Claire from FinndieLoo. Claire's enthusiasm for her home-based business was infectious, and soon I had created my own Infinite Monkey Design. Thanks to Claire's pluggage, I've already had a couple of inquiries regarding business logos and site design!

So, that is my great excitement for the year to date!

Meanwhile... What did the children do while their mother was tapping away on the keyboard and pottering about in Photoshop for a good part of the day?

First of all, it was raining outside so we put up some umbrellas.

And then, we played with trains.

We got hungry. So we sacrificed the freshly cooked batch of playdough to the Gods of Magical But Inedible Food. (Lawn clippings are also an essential to this concoction.)

I'm still not entirely sure if I'll ever get all the floury goop out of the carpet...

Then it was time to set tents and tunnels up in the middle of the lounge. It was mum's theory that the children would amuse themselves with these tents and tunnels long enough for her to finish doing stuff on the computer. (Pfft. By the time mum finished snapping photos, they were ready to use mum as a jungle gym. While she tried to finish doing stuff on the computer.)

Cooking time again. Green pikelets with nutella. Because we're healthy like that. (And that probably explains why everyone in this house is just a little on the chubby side - except the Teen, who is a coathanger.)

It was still raining. Why? Because it's summer. And apparently in summer, it rains ALL. THE. TIME. (And according to the weather people, we're meant to be stuck with this gloriously dismal weather until March?!?!)

After a day of being cooped up inside the house doing nothing, it was time to play outside. This is what the Lily Bug decided, despite the rain. In fact, she put on her raincoat poncho thingie and stood underneath the dribbly waterfall that flows from the blocked gutter outside the kitchen window.

And that was our day.

Why are you interested in reading any of this? I'm sure you're not. I'm sure that if you have read this far, you're probably trying to figure out how to reclaim the minute or so that I've just stolen from you.

But I'm sitting here at 2.43am writing this all out anyway, because I drank just enough coffee to keep me awake long enough to look at Content Management Systems, but too much coffee to be able to concentrate on anything other than the inane ramblings of the chattering monkeys inside my head. Thus, I am no fat use to anyone.

But I am going to look further into Joomla  tomorrow-ish.

Goodnight!

Feelin' Kinda Smurfy

Okay, so dying my hair blue wasn't one of my smartest ideas. Though, couldn't be worse than the mohawk of '99, the Accidental Mullet of '93, or the I Ran Away From Home Now No One Will Recognise Me Undercut of '91.

... I think ...

Callie Logic dictates that if you're feeling kinda old and haggard and full of promises and dreams unfullfilled; dye your hair Smurfy Blue. It will make you feel younger, and it will make children laugh. At you or with you? What does it matter.

Do I wish I'd worn gloves during application? Yes. *facepalm*

Do I wish I'd gone through this makeover after the upcoming Kindy Christmas party and young child's birthday party? Absolutely. Someone is bound to ask if I juggle. For a living.

In other news... Where can I find advent calenders? The Teen has been moaning and whinging for days that she has never ever had an advent calender (though I argue she did have one once upon a time, a long long time ago - and I believe she may have eaten all the chocolate in one sitting. Or maybe that was me?) Of course, just my luck that when I finally venture out to the dreaded mall to buy three of them (what's the harm in starting late in the month?) they're all gone.

Once again I have proven to be a total let down - filled with promises and dreams unfulfilled. The hair colour didn't save me from that after all. (Aww don't worry, I'm not going all sad and Emo - I write this in mirth. Mirth I tell you! Maybe I should just do a lil sticky-out-tongue face? :P)

In one of those instances where you make a mistake and try to fix it...

... By making a bigger mistake.

  Let's start in the vague direction of the beginning.

I've always been fairly blase about my hair. Bleach it, dye it blue, shave it into a mohawk, chop it with my eyes closed... Hair is just hair. It grows back. Eventually.

 Though in saying this, it's been a few years since I've done anything more extreme than hack at it with a razor. I'm slowing down with age and *cough cough* maturity.

Since allowing the lad to shave my hair to a #5 a few months back, and enduring several weeks of being mistaken for one of the Top Twins (or so I imagine)  it's slowly slowly grown back to the point where I realise my unkept mop is now comparable to that of Donald Trump.

It's depressing, but true. Ask Google.

So I decided a couple of weeks ago to finally mix up the streaking kit that has sat at the top of the kitchen cupboard for four or so years, and stick it all through my hair. Just for something different.

As I half-way expected with stripping out dark dye, Super Blonde actually became Super Ginga.
 

Bleaching my hair was a mistake.

And I decided to fix it

So I bleached it again. On the assumption that it would go really blonde.

I found the thought of having blonde hair to be kind of appealing. A stark contrast to the blacks and blues and purples and (more of late) purple-red and red-browns that I'm used to. But hey, I'm too old for fun colours... Blonde could be a pleasant change. Sure, I might feel a bit like a traitor to my own self - like I'm conforming to society's expectations of what a good responsible parent is supposed to look like - but I decided I'm finally ready to give  'normal' hair a go.

As I mixed up my bottle of Schwarzkopf Nordic Super Duper You Asked For It And Now You've Got It Blonde I looked at the gorgeous blonde with the flowing locks pictured on the front of the box and said to myself "I'm gonna magically transform into YOU soon!"

Of course, I'm well acquainted with Murphy's Law.

Yes. I have transformed.

Into a radioactive lemon.

See?

            
                                                                                      So, I guess bleaching my hair again was a mistake.

But truly, I think I can fix it this time.

I realise now that the best thing I can do is to revisit the Fudge Paintbox colours of my early 20's and throw some Blue Velvet through it. Or maybe a nice chilli red (think Sydney from episode 1 of Alias).

It's going to work. It's going to be awesome this time.

Other parents will shun me even more so than usual, and as an added bonus... The kids at kindy are gonna think I'm the coolest clown ever!

Stay tuned...

Oh, and before I go I'm going to link you (oh invisible and non-existent readers) to what is perhaps the perfect though horrifically bad  teeny-bopper pop punk/whatever theme-song to this post. I challenge you to survive it for longer than 21 seconds: