When I get nervous, my bladder turns into this pathetic little weakling and whimpers, "Empty me!". But my sister insisted that I did not have time to run upstairs to the loo and make it back before Miss Helen's Call was due (sis said the sound of my unfit lungs heaving down the phone line would not be too becoming).

So whilst sitting frantically crossing my legs waiting for the phone to ring, I had the misfortune of seeing Channel 10's shoddy piece of Friday night fodder, Russell Crowe: Behind The Gladiator. Behind the gladiator was one Molly Meldrum, doing his indeciphable mumbling and arse kissing routine. It was painful to watch. Almost as painful as the sound of Mr Crowe's band, 30 Odd Foot Pile Of Steaming Dog Turds. Imagine if you will the tunelessness of my mother singing along to Stairway To Heaven in the car, and combine it with the soaring axe-wielding talents of a spotty 15 year old who only knows two chords. Please stick to the acting, Russie babes.

The radio thing was great fun. Thanks! :) OH and they played Gomez! Thankyou for pandering to my ridiculous obsessions!

Go forth to the talking blog bigfatradio this eve to hear yours truly slobbering nervously down my phone line on the divine Miss Helen's show. Tune in about 8.40pm AEST.

Or 3.40AM if you're in Phoenix, San Francisco or Seattle.

Or 4.40AM in Guatemala.

6.40AM in Montreal, New York, Toronto or Havana.

11.40PM in London, Dublin or Edinburgh.

12.40PM in Paris or Barcelona.

5.40PM in Bangkok.

6.40PM in Perth.

8.10PM in Adelaide.

9.40PM in Vladivostok.

I would just like to add that I think Guatemala is the freaking best name for a place since Budgewoi. It just rolls off the tongue. Guatemala. Guaaaaaaaaaatemaaaaaaaala. Yeah baby.

My dreams have been very geeky lately. Last night I dreamed my employers were taken over by this fascist multinational conglomerate. We had to wear uniforms and sit in those little chairs like in kindergarten. We were all miserable and my boss couldn't believe he'd sold his precious baby company to such evil people. We sat around whining and eating chocolate pudding laced with vodka. Mmmm vodka.

Anyway, there was a teacher named Helga who was teaching us French. She made me stand up and conjugate the verb vouloir. Just as I did, my Palm started beeping. It was like that War, What Is It Good For? episode of Seinfeld, except instead of a crappy organiser this was a Palm computer with a built-in mobile phone and television! No matter what button I pressed it would not stop, it just kept bleeping away to the sickly theme song from Neighbours. Finally, Miss Helga sat down on the Palm and it stopped. I wonder if she ended up with Barry Crocker crooning out of her arse? Either way, freaky dream.

I don't know how I can possibly phrase this nicely, so I won't even try. I ran over a cat last night.

I had just picked up my sister from the Alliance Francaise where she had her French class, and was putting along the road, doing about 40 in a 60 zone, jabbering away about verbs and vocab and our mutual inability to retain information, when the black cat streaked out in front of us.

It didn't sound pretty. I can best describe it as: crunch crunch BANG squish.

Stupid me just kept driving, not even registering what happened until my sister tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I believe you just flattened that cat."

"OH MY FUCKING GOD I FLATTENED A CAT!"

"You better go back and see if you killed it."

"KILLED it? Oh god! I killed it! That could be someone's pet!"

"Yeah you better go back and see if it's okay, we'll have to take it to a vet and see if it's wearing a tag"

"Oh fuck! What if it's someone's pet? What if someone bowled over my Harry like that!? Oh please please god let it be some mangy koala-eating feral cat that won't be missed."

I felt so guilty I felt I was about to throw up (my usual reaction to extreme guilt). We turned around and picked our way along the road, all the way back up to the Alliance back towards the University, but no luck! We could not see a mangled moggie anywhere! I don't know what the hell happened to it. Either the noise sounded worse than it actually was and the cat survived, or it had been rapidly reincarnated.

I was near hysterical by this time, mostly because I consider myself to be something of an animal lover, after all I am one who leaves abusive post-it notes for people who leave their dogs locked in cars.

After reassuring me that I would not be arrested for hit-and-run of a cat, my beautifully calm-in-a-crisis sister suggested we find a well-lit place to check over the car to make sure the cat was not splattered all over it.

(Her reasoning for this was that once our mother hit a rabbit when driving home from visiting me in Canberra. Mumsy thought she'd missed until she arrived back home and saw its lifeless remains hanging by the fluffy little tail from the front bumper bar. She would have given it a decent burial only the neighbours dog nicked off with the carcass before she could get to it)

So the first well-lit place I could find was the Drive-Thru at Braddon McDonalds. I stopped in the middle of the lane and Rhiannon hopped out, crawling around the car and peering underneath it.

"Nope, no pussycat." she declared. "Oh hang on, let me check the roof!"

I think she was thoroughly enjoying my discomfort. We looked for a broken body, some blood and guts, but there was nothing. Not even a little trace of fur left behind. Somehow the cat must have survived.

We sat in the car park, furiously gulping down watery Fanta, the sugar calming my nerves.

"Well you're lucky it ran to the side of your car, and not out in front of it. It would have been bad luck!" smirked my sister.

"Oh yeah! That was my plan all along! 'OH NO, black cat! I better MOW IT DOWN IN COLD BLOOD lest I have myself some bad luck!'"

I'm so sorry lil pussycat :(

I'm taking Golden Boy™ out to get his air conditioning fixed next week. The shoddy guy who sold me the car a few months back tried to pull the wool over my eyes, but my dad insisted that he fix it for free since it only went bung a week after I bought the car, in winter no less.

The shoddy guys name just happened to be Terry. Could there be a more dodgy name? All he needed was a pair of check pants and a straw hat and he'd look like the consumate car salesman.

It's funny how we tend to associate certain names with certain occupations or personalities. Just the sound of their name conjuers up an image of a certain kind of person. For me, most of these were forged by incidents in high school or by crap relationships. Hehe. So if your name appears on the list below, don't go taking offence now. It's just how the name thing happened for me.

JASON, JUSTIN, DANE -- class delinquents

NEVILLE, BARRY, CYRIL -- stuffy old farts on a local council

NATALIE, NIKKI, TANYA, TINA -- bitches in high school with too much eyeliner

BILL, MERV, SYD -- farmers

DAVE -- plumbers

DAVE -- guys at the bar that won't leave you alone

DAVE -- public servants

DAVE -- anyone really. Dave's are very versatile.

KERRY, SUSAN, BRYAN -- primary school teachers

KAREN, ANGELA, RACHELLE, NARELLE, MICHELLE -- small town hairdressers

PHILLIPE, ANTON, DELILAH -- big city hairdressers... ooops, stylists

SHAUNA -- girl on fruitless search for weblog content

Has anyone got some name associations they want to share?

Farting can be cute, but not when you email a dozen co-workers about it by mistake! AAAARGH! I went to send an email to some colleagues, asking for some feedback for a pilot site here at work. Using the stinky Lotus Notes I highlighted the text and went to Create URL Link. Instead of using the highlighted text to make the link, it used the link to Andre's FART STORY that I had highlighted an hour ago for my previous blog entry!

I did not realise this for a good 15 minutes til I got an email: "Shauna, there is something SERIOUSLY WRONG with that Rural Health URL!"

Oh dear. I called the emailler up and did some frantic apologising but luckily she had a sense of humour. My face is red. Even worse there is a link next to the sordid stinky tale that says "Why porn is (sorta) good for kids"!

So... there goes my reputation of dedicated, serious, hard-working Shauny! All down the tubes with a click of the mouse! Aaargh!

I died and went to musical heaven last night, kiddies. But being the annoying little bugger that I am, I have drifted back down on a #9 cloud to tell you all about it.

IT WAS BLOODY FANTASTIC!!!!

I think the Gomez show may have surpassed Radiohead as my favourite gig of all time. It was just so damn special. But I know there is nothing so quite annoying as someone prattling on about a show that you did not attend so I'll restrain my over-excitable self.

I can't believe I made it to Sydney and back without either myself or my car falling apart. Woohoo. It was nice to hang out in the big city for awhile, although I always feel so grotty afterwards. It's like this thin layer of grime settles over me, and no amount of scrubbing in Sydney water can rid me of the feeling. I've decided the city is just a place I want to visit, as opposed to live in.

So while I go bathe in the crystal clear goodness of Canberra water, you can all go have a looky at my superb photos that I took at the show. Despite knocking down a bunch of kiddies to barge my way closer to the stage, my camera shake was so bad it rated on the Richter Scale. Tragic stuff. But go look all the same.

I got an email from the lovely folks at Chaosmusic today, kindly informing me that I could get a whopping 10% discount on Slim Dusty's brand new 100th album, Looking Forward, Looking Back. I've done some counting and I have ordered a shameful 25 CD's from you guys in the past 6 months, you recognise me as a regular shopper of sorts, but Slim Dusty? Did ya really think I'd be interested?

Can you imagine clocking up a century of albums? How the hell did ol' Slim manage such a prolific output? I really think he just releases The Pub With No Beer over and over again, just shuffles round the words a bit. Or maybe he released a whole heap of remixes, or dodgy covers of Beatles' songs, or a few polka albums that he's trying to keep quiet about.

Here's Slim's extensive discography. Beware of excessive capital letters. Now excuse me while I get down and boogie to my Road To Gundagai Mofo Sheep Shearer Death Metal Dub '99 Remix. Or something.