Whoa.

Frickin' heck, I've got so many plans at the moment, I'm like... a plan monster, or something.  It's the first proper-nice day of the spring season today, and with remarkable good planning, I'm not at work... nice to be doing something right.  Mum and Dad are down in Wellington tomorrow, so it will be sweet to see them (and sweet to have all the frickin' cleaning out of the way... *sigh* I know they don't care, but I do it anyway), and we're going to the World of Wearable Arts show on Sunday, which I'm so looking forward to it's not even funny.  Plus I'm trying to write my letter for library school next year, which is into something like it's eighth draft... and so I'm ignoring it for a little while, just to get my mojo back on it.

Oh yeah, the baby shower!  Damn, it was so good, I am King Organised, nothing was a total failure (read that as: nothing failed so badly that I couldn't fix it), the new Mama was completely surprised (muahaha), and I've had several really nice emails from guests saying how much they enjoyed themselves... sweet!  It was actually surprising easy, in the end of it - I think that the most stressful bit was having a bunch of people that I didn't really know very well coming over to my house.  You just never know what you'll be inviting through the front door.  Still, we didn't have any chronic undressers or kleptomaniacs (yes, I have been rereading 'Choke' by Chuck Palahniuk - how did you guess?)  All the baking was an unmitigated success too - no reports of food poisoning, which is just fab.

I think that I'm most proud of my pistachio macaroons, because I'd never made them before, and I'm now cautiously optimistic that I've conquered my brain-block against egg white baking... but I'm gonna make a sponge or a pav or something before I get too excited on that front.  They were so good - I actually liked them better without the ganache in the middle, but that's just because I'm not really a sweet tooth kind of lady.  But there were also cupcakes (der, of course there were, I'm kind of bored of baking them to be honest, but now it's getting to be something that people expect), savoury junk (wee tomato and olive tart things, thyme and gruyere gougeres, just to be fancy), and a fantastic chocolate and raspberry cake that the fine lady helping me organise made... it was so awesome.  *drool*



On the music front, I'm listening to Rammstein's new album Liebe ist fur alle da, which is pretty damn good, it's a lot more subtle than their first one, I think.  I'm also giving the Deftones Diamond Eyes more of a spin - I got it when it came out holding my breath that it wasn't going to be another Saturday Night Wrist, for all that that's a wicked title, the album left me cold, and Diamond Eyes is slooooowly growing on me.  But I have a horrible idea that I may have outgrown the Deftones.  Which is sad really, because I count them (along with Rage Against the Machine, Pulp, Radiohead, Beck and System of a Down) as sort of my growing up music.  You know, you get to the stage where you start becoming aware of the music that your peers are listening to, your buddies start recommending you stuff, and it's being made currently (that's why I don't count the Sex Pistols in that list, or any of the old school bands that I love).  Man, I still remember hearing Loser on the radio and practically peeing myself, it was so rad.  Mind you, you have to be careful with radio stuff, or at least, I used to have to be careful since I don't listen to the radio anymore, because it only gives you a really narrow view on an artist - the first song I heard by QotSA was Feel Good Hit of the Summer, which didn't exactly blow me away (and they're like, my favourite band, the Stephen King of my ears).  But that's why it's so great to go hang out in record stores, because you can listen to all sorts of weird shit for free, and the nice people behind the desk will tell you what's playing (cool shops can be also good like that too) - hence being introduced to Cibo Matto, Jacques Dutronc, Mastodon, Earl Greyhound).  Just thinking about RatM, I think I must be one of a very select group to have read Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth  just because it was on one of their album covers... yes, I am a big crazy nerd.

Wow, that was a rant... I guess I just dig music... Heh.

Um, in reading news, I'm reading The Bielski Brothers, which is the story of real-life brothers who during the Second World War saved a whole bunch of people (hello?  Like, over a thousand!  No mean feat), by hiding them in a huge forest.  I'm not doing it justice, it's a kick ass story, and these dudes were hard core.  But it's one of those rare books where you could almost just watch the movie (Defiance, with James Bond, I mean Daniel Craig in it), because currently the book hasn't told me anything that that movie didn't.  It's so my favourite war movie to date (apart from Inglorious Basterds, but that's not exactly a true story), mainly because it's all about Jews kicking ass and taking names, not waiting around wringing their hands like so many of the other war movies have it.  Also, I just got out Children of Dune from the library today, along with Persepolis and John Constantine: Hellraiser, the 'Staring at the Walls' issue, which I read in the sun this afternoon.  Holidays rule!