I've been such an evil moody bitch lately, so I apologise. The Doubt™ that Rory and Bill speak of seems to hit me every 2 or 3 days, not months as Rory mentioned. Lately I am on this mad rollercoaster when one minute I think yay, you're not so bad, you're doing great in life... then a moment later I am insane with doubt and angry at myself and thinking everything I do is utterly stupid and believing that everyone in the world thinks so too. I've always been an up and down kind of person but it's become really, truly pathetic lately and I keep insisting on ranting in here when it happens. So. Very sorry.

Ooh er... I've been deemed "barely readable" and given 5 out of 8 Donalds over at Blog You!

Kermit once asked, why are there so many songs about rainbows? Well Rainbow Connection is the only bloody song about rainbows I know. Oh, then there's Somewhere Over The Rainbow. That's two. But two does not make many if you ask me. You're full of shit, Kermit!

Some of my favourite autumn pics so far:

My lil sister Hollie. I love this shot coz it shows her shyness and also coz you can see Harry's nose in the bottom right corner.

On a tree outside my house.

Harry trying to destroy his leash.

Happy Birthday to the Artist Mysteriously Known As Sam, one of my favourite Canadians. The only Canadian I know that can fly a plane. The only Canadian I know who will be collecting your census form. Canadian ladies, if he knocks on your door, why not invite him in for a cuppa tea? Or a good shagging? It's his birthday, after all!

It Looks Like You're Trying To Write A Song - funny stuff from Jacuzzi Jeb.

Hot damn! He had a dodgy 70s moustache and everything!

I'm going to be late for work today because I'm waiting here for the electrician to arrive to fix the exhaust fan in our bathroom.

Hmmmmm. Sounds like a porn movie plot if I ever heard one.

Speaking of porn, I have a good porn name. You know that old thing where you take the name of the first pet you had and the first street you lived on? Ginger the Cat and Rivers Road gives me the ultra foxy porn name of Ginger Rivers. What's yours?

Canberra's ABC-TV news service will be back on air thanks to a $1.8 million injection of funds in next week's federal Budget. Allegedly.

What a crock! There's not enough Canberra news to sustain a 30 minute bulletin. The commerical stations find it hard enough with copious ad breaks. I actually think they are personally responsible for much of ACT crime, simply because they're so desperate for news they have to make some of their own.

Incidentally, I ran into the Prime Local News anchor on my way out of the gym last night. She'd just been to yoga, I'd just been discovering muscles I never knew existed on the cross trainer. She couldn't work out how to open the doors.

"You have to press the red button," I said helpfully.

"Oh thankyou! This door is like The Idiot Test!" she gushed.

"And you just failed miserably, you silly little turd", I may or may not have replied.

Is it a crime to desire a job with less accountability? I'm beginning to think I have no ambition at all. I have no desire to learn anything more about this internet shit. I don't want to become the resident usability accessibility impossibility expert or whatever crap it was I was just asked to become, I don't know because I tuned out after the first half an hour. Some parts of the job I could do with my eyes closed, other parts baffle and terrify me. The one constant is the feeling that this is not for me.

But what is for me? I don't bloody know! I feel like I have the capacity to be good at something, but I have no idea what. I failed miserably as a journalist, and now failing at web chick. I'm not worried about being a disappointment to my parents anymore, as I was after I failed to set the news world on fire. Now I just feel like a thumping huge disappointment to myself.

It's so pathetic to have such lofty expectations of oneself but have no direction whatsoever towards achieving anything.

Today marks one year since Rhiannon arrived back home from her American jaunt, bringing with her among other thoughtful gifts, a big mother bottle of Ralph Lauren Romance eau de lovely perfume for her favourite big sister (me). While in the following year I have smelled absolutely divine, I have not flung my legs round the waist of a well-chisled man as he gazed adoringly into my mud-pie eyes, nor had one drop to his knees to kiss my lovely belly, as illustrated here in the RL advertising campaign. On some level I guess I thought my delicate fragrance would have incited such romantic behaviour. I haven't even had some grotty VB-scented geezer try to cop a feel in a pub. What is wrong with me? I'm sending back the half empty bottle! It's a dud, Ralph! A dud, I tells ya!

I'm rapidly heading toward insanity. Had an Ooh Er Angry Redhead Moment™ today:

BOSS 1:  Look at this invoice for Client X, it's $7000!
BOSS 2:  How could it be 7 grand? How could have you taken that long to do it? It's only content! HTML is piss easy!
SHAUNY:  OH I KNOW! Why don't you bring in the trained monkeys and just send me home?!?!

Hey! Fran chops bows off her bras too! She told me so. And you all thought I was some kind of fruit loop!

Dee is a bow-chopper too! They're all coming out of the closet now!

Why in hell do you insist on putting those silly teeny tiny bows on them? You know, in the middle. A pointless little decoration that announces "Here Is My Cleavage". It serves no purpose at all! One spent $60 on foxy bra yesterday only to get home and realise there was a stupid bow on it. And you've even put them on sports bras! A sport bra is an instrument designed purely to hold down the girls and prevent them from slapping one in the face while one is gallumphing along at the gym. Well I for one am not going to stand for such senseless adornment! I'm snipping them all off! CHOP CHOP CHOP.

Some statistical information about my work week thus far:

5 calls to the Help Desk
4 times Help Desk hold music was Run To Me by the Bee Gees
1 time Help Desk hold music was How Do You Mend A Broken Heart by the Bee Gees
3 red gala apples eaten
3 monitors that have ceased working in my presence
14 inches of screen in the shitty monitor I am now forced to use due to above
800 x 600 shitty resolution of above screen
2 times I accidentally stapled my finger
6 attempts at starting a report but read weblogs instead
3 out of 100 tissues left in box of Aloe Vera Kleenex
4 re-installations of Macromedia UltraDev before someone believed me that my puter was ill
3 hours computerless while puter was rebuilt
750ml orange juice drank
43 records entered into our invoicing system before I realised I didn't put them in under my name, rather same of someone away on holidays
3 number of times I said "you bloody moron!" after above occurred
1 printer that ran out of toner just as I queued up 30 page document for printing
1 times I ran away from said printer and hid in the loos til someone else discovered problem and changed cartridge.

The Lounge Saga has finally ended: my sister tracked down someone who was willing to cart the rotten bastards away for $50, along with the remains of the butchered table, vinyl chairs, and an old mop. Our front yard no longer looks like a ghetto. But there's a nice big bare patch in the middle where the lounges were and autumn began around them. Shaped like a heart, too. Purty.

An unusual sight outside my work building this afternoon: a vintage car broken down on Northbourne Avenue. Where are they going to find parts for that?!

London this, London that, protests, violence, blah blah blah. Why is noone reporting the real action of May Day? Canberra is where it was at. I saw at least two dozen people in beanies and cosy jumpers shuffling down Northbourne Avenue yesterday with carefully lettered posters. It was out of control! And the media was all over them! I think I spotted a photographer running alongside the protesters. Then again it looked like one of those little disposable cameras, so I don't know what news organisation they could have been representing. But I did see a car from Channel Ten News drive past about an hour later.

Every day my heart weeps for Orphan Annie. I watch her out the window each day and feel a little twinge of sympathy.

She's not the Orphan Annie, rather a uni student with similar hairstyle for whom I lack the imagination to coin a more original alias. The first time I saw her sprinting out of Fenner Hall with scarf, trendy satchel and precision-faded jeans, I thought she had on a little woolly red hat. But I soon realised that, good god, it was actually her hair.

When I was young, my mother had my red locks butchered into an angry red helmet. She thought it looked cute. But all the other girls in my kindergarten had long ponytails and pretty ribbons! All I had was a rotten little ball of red. My chronic lack of self-esteem was cemented at this tender age. I would growl contemptously at my reflection in the bathroom mirror each morning. I'd mash my hair down flat to try and make it look longer. I'd kick and scream before every trip to the hairdressers. I became convinced my hair deficiency was the reason why a particularly lovely boy would never catch and kiss me when we played Catch And Kiss in the playground.

(granted, 15 years later I found out he was gay, but when I was in kindergarten, gay still meant happy and I lacked gaiety because of his cruel indifference to me)

Anyway, being a redhead can be traumatic: people expect you to be feisty, you look crap in pink, you continually have to scream "CARROT TOPS ARE ACTUALLY GREEN!" in feeble defence, it's hard to find a lipstick that doesn't make you look like a hooker, you can't blend in with a crowd, people expect you to go off like a firecracker between the sheets, if you raise your voice there's a chorus of "Ooh er! Angry redhead!", and complete strangers ask you if you are red "down there".

(incidentally, I know when people are going to ask That Question before they even say it. One lunchtime in about Year 9 I was minding my own business when I was accosted by a number of guys, slyly scuffing their sneakers on the pavement and wearing the smuggest of grins.

"Hey Shauna, we were just wondering…"

"IT'S RED GODDAMMIT!" I yelled. "Shall I pluck out a sample for you? Or should I just drop my dacks in the middle of the basketball court SO YOU CAN ALL HAVE A GAWK!?!")

"Well, that could work."

"GET FAAAARRRRRRRRRRRKED!"

"Ooh er! Angry redhead!")

Orphan Annie has it worse, in my opinion, coz not only does she have the red hair, she's got that impossibly wiry steel-wool hair that can only be tamed by cropping it as close to the skull as possible.

(we had a term for people with such hair my high school, and that was of course, "Pube Head". I could have given OA this nickname but I like to think my nicknames have matured a little since my high school days)

She could be quite content with her hair, for all I know. The steely texture may appeal to her. She may like the wash-and-go convenience of the cut. Or perhaps she's bitter and twisted because people up-end her to scrub dirty saucepans with her head.