I had a great weekend and I hope you did too.
I feel a bit guilty saying that when the evening news is a 60-minute horror story, the United States is transforming into a real-life chapter of The Handmaid’s Tale and an IT glitch has caused complete chaos across the world.
(I am fascinated that the glitch is being compared to the Y2K bug that was expected to wreak havoc with computer systems at the turn of the millennium … remember that fizzer? A security consultant called Troy Hunt predicted on Friday that the glitch ‘will be the largest IT outage in history’ in a social media post. He added: ‘This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.’ Blimey, can’t wait to see the fallout from this one continue to unfold.)
Fortunately indulgent items could still be secured at the shops so I could sit in my sister’s spa drinking bubbles and eating oysters on Friday night.
On Saturday I went for a walk with two friends and had a lovely Japanese lunch with a third friend, before driving up to DD’s place for a double date with his neighbours Benny and Eliza.
They are a smidge younger than us – Eliza’s mum is the same age as DD – but it never stops us having bulk fun.
Eliza’s brain catherine wheels around like mine. DD and Benny struggled to get a word in as we sat at Restaurant Lovat sipping pomegranate margaritas, then dining on blue-eyed cod with cauliflower three ways, pan-fried gnocchi, raisins, pine nuts & brown butter (yep we all ordered exactly the same main) and sharing a dessert that featured molten chocolate pudding, honeycomb crumbs and salted caramel ice cream.
So. Good.
Pity I only took photos of the food and not us.
My brain sparked and fizzed all weekend, but my body took a much-needed break from the computer.
On Saturday I walked the dogs, then we headed to Relish in North Avalon for the British Brekkie special, a delicious bowl of homemade baked beans with sausages and two poached eggs on top.
I kept meaning to head home afterwards, but I was far too cosy on the sofa with DD looking at our phones, the Sunday newspapers and the tellie together while the dogs snoozed beside us.
I finally rallied for the return journey at about 6pm.
As I drove home I contemplated the good and bad about having a catherine wheel brain.
The good is that ideas constantly explode inside me and spike my dopamine levels. The bad – depending on who I am talking to – is that I am hopeless at having linear conversations – my mind resists thinking one step at a time, instead my thoughts constantly jump ahead, dart sideways or leap back to make connections.
“Try and keep up” I joked to DD when he first met me and it’s become a pet phrase that we use when one of us has a mental jump on the other or is first with the news.
I find it very hard to slow the barrage of thoughts and chill out. I don’t have massages or facials because they feel like I am wasting time. I don’t get my hair blow-dried at the hairdresser for a similar reason. As for blow-drying it at home, NEVER. My make-up routine is equally slap and dash.
And I am totally hopeless at following step-by-step instructions, which was reinforced recently while I was making DD’s IKEA whisky cabinet … instructions are soooo dull. I just want to get on with it.
I could also do without my brain waking me at 3am this morning to let me know it had been busy prepping for an argument I will be having with someone at work today. While it had come up with some excellent points, what I really needed was sleep.
When you have a catherine wheel brain you constantly run the risk of being like the opening credits of “Rake” because it’s a little exhausting …
But on a good day the fizzing and whizzing is such a natural high.
Song of the day: Split Enz “One step ahead”
housegoeshome 
on this rock, the biggest threat to humanity is a computer hack or glitch?……we’re doomed.
Y2K was a “fizzer” because 100s of thousands of people around the world worked very hard to make sure nothing went wrong. The fix was simple but had it been left there would have been a disaster to make the recent outage look miniscule. How do I know? Because I was one of those people. I was sent to the private hospitals and pathology labs in Tamworth, Armidale, Port Macquarie and Newcastle to test every single computer and server at those places, record the outcome and install an update if it was needed (it was. I didn’t come across one that was ready). This was repeated across the country (every area was assigned at least one person, and in many cases a team), and across the globe. Private companies, government departments, everything was tested and upgraded so that the rest of you could think “what a fizzer”. Just because disaster didn’t strike doesn’t mean there wasn’t a real threat. It just means that for once, governments and private companies listened and acted, but only because their wallets were on the line. Pity there’s no similar urgency about, say, climate change, where the disproportionately huge and short term wallets of large polluters are dictating inaction.
That’s so fascinating, I didn’t realise you’d done that work. The climate change stuff is terrifying me, it is so achingly obvious that we’ve screwed things up.
We have been screwed over by polluters and politicians for short term profits. It’s infuriating, terrifying and disgraceful.
Agree. And the stuff that’s coming out of the US in terms of companies being intimidated into dropping their sustainability targets is so distressing