Fluid retention. I hate being a girl sometimes.

The last couple of days have been full of extreme contrasts. When things were good, they were very, very good, but when they were bad, they were horrid.

Good: going on a two-day belly-dancing workshop
Bad: discovering the car had been broken into as I was leaving for the workshop

Good: the thieves didn't wreck the car
Bad: they left one of the doors open and flattened the battery completely

Good: while I arrived late, I didn't miss any of the good stuff
Bad: in my rush, I left my cell phone on the front passenger seat and nearly melted it in the sun

Good: creating and choreographing our own dance routines
Bad: nearly expiring in the 95F (with high humidity) heat

Good: live drumming on the second day of the workshop
Bad: leaving my wallet and water bottle at home

Good: finishing the workshops early enough to go into the city to run errands
Bad: discovering I can't get into the city due to a parade

Good: baking the best damn chocolate chip cookies in the world
Bad: trying not to eat them all

Good: going to see Garbage play last night
Bad: being annihilated at netball last night

But highlight of the week has to go to the band that opened for Garbage, Machine Gun Fellatio. In addition to fan dancing, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and backing dancers on stilts wearing afros and 70s gear, one of the band members played at least half the set wearing nothing but a stuffed Winnie the Pooh duct-taped to his cock.

Seriously.

I'd hate to be wardrobe mistress on that tour...

*Fuck I'm Good, Just Ask Me.

We won, fifteen goals to twelve.

We didn't win on penalties. We didn't win because the umpires were being overly generous. We won because we played better than the other team. We scored more goals.

We won.

It was a tough game. Low scoring, hard defence, lots of running around and turnovers. We fought for that win. We fought hard. And we played well.

Admittedly, the other team was short a player, but they are somewhere in the middle of the table and have been playing much longer than we have.

We still can't quite believe that we did it.

But nothing comes without a price. [ladymisstree looks ruefully at the purple, swollen ring finger on her left hand: FUBAR-ed ligaments and tendons, just like before Christmas, but on the opposite hand.]

I started with a new haircut. A very girlie way to make a break from the old. Not radical, by any means, but cute and flippy (when the weather isn't really wet, in which case it's crap and floofy like right now.) Made me feel very pretty. Increased the amount of "You're looking well!" comments I've been getting of late.

It's funny, I don't know whether I've not yet lost enough weight for people to comment on it or whether they are too afraid to say anything in case I shout "What are you saying, that I was some sort of heifer from hell?!" at them if they ask me. Either way, I'm taking it as a compliment.

Every couple of months, charities leave big plastic bags in my mailbox for putting donations into. The idea is you leave the donations out for them on a particular day and they pick up the bags of stuff. Well, I had one and I had a wardrobe full of fat clothes.

Not anymore.

I threw stuff out with utter abandon. It felt good. I threw away dresses and shirts and skirts and all the things that I was never going to wear again because I'm never, ever going to fit into them again. I never want to fit into them again. Ever.

Three bags and a much-depleted wardrobe later, I looked upon my work and saw that it was good. Keeping those clothes was admitting defeat. Admitting that perhaps I might not keep the weight off and that I had better keep them to hide in.

No excuses.

The involuntary clear-out came as I was making dinner that night. I had poured rice into my rice cooker and added water when a small brown bug rose to the surface. I made a face and fished it out.

I had noticed the bugs around the place for the last couple of days, usually skittering across the kitchen bench. I thought it was one of those summer things and wasn't going to give it another thought.

Then I looked at my bag of rice.

It was CRAWLING with bugs. It was bug central. If the bugs were French, my rice was Paris.

Oh no...

I got up onto my trusty stepladder and checked the dry-goods shelf of my pantry.

If the bugs were Chinese, this shelf was Beijing.

Bugs as far as the eye could see. Bugs in my flour, my sugar, my cocoa, my pasta. Bugs in everything.

Bugs. Ewww.

I threw out everything in the cupboard. I fumigated. I fumed. I squished and swatted and cursed.

Read my lips: No more bugs!

And no more food in the cupboard. It was going to be an expensive trip to the supermarket next time.

But I made one fatal mistake. I didn't check the cereal box on the bench...

[ladymisstree silently adds cereal to her shopping list]

Anyhoo, once I had gargled with several gallons of bleach and made noises closely approximating that of an asthmatic cat with a hairball, I made an incredible discovery.

Not only is The Tea Party touring, they are doing a lunch time acoustic gig with signing at a music store only a block and a half from my office. Without pointing out just what I will go through to see these guys play (here, here and here), eating bugs is small potatoes. This is the sort of news that makes me run around in little circles making incredibly high-pitched noises.

Excuse me, I'm going to go berserk with glee now.

My boy thinks I'm vvvvrrrroooow. (You really need to say this out loud, like a speeding car. No, really. It's funny.)

It's always made me laugh, the noise he makes and the idea. I feel positively slothful. All I can think about are the things I still haven't done. But I sat and thought about what I did on Sunday. And, when I really thought about it, I guess I am pretty vvvvrrrroooow.

I got up around 11am, made breakfast, tidied the kitchen and watched some TV. After that, I walked down the street to do my grocery shopping (including buying nummy organically grown vegies and some fresh marlin and oysters for dinner.) I could have driven, but I needed the exercise.

I walked home, eating lunch on the way, unpacked my groceries and then hopped into the car to drive to the nearest shopping mall to pick up some books. It took three different bookstores to find what I was looking for, but I found them and drove home.

I sat and read one of the books I bought. ('Handbag Heaven' by Maggie Alderson. Laugh out loud funny.)

I stripped the bed and put new linen on it. The laundry needed doing so I separated the coloured stuff from the whites and put on the first load. My boy had bemoaned the lack of sugar cookies in his life, so I started making cookie dough. While I was making it, I was eating the dozen oysters (raw with a squeeze of lemon.) The dough went into the fridge to rest overnight.

Once I made the dough, I put the first load of laundry in the dryer and put the second one into the washing machine. Then I started cooking dinner (grilled marlin, baby potatoes, corn on the cob and snowpeas. Yum.) The dishes were washed as I used them.

Dinner was eaten in front of the TV watching one of my X-Files DVDs. The first load of washing finished drying and I put the second lot into the dryer and folded the dry stuff just before the credits. I washed up the remaining dishes.

Somewhere in here delicates were hung on a rack to dry, makeup was removed and sundry pottering about was achieved.

Compared to busy mothers and air traffic controllers, I really don't do much. It certainly doesn't feel like all that much. And I'm sure it is excruciatingly dull to read. But when you write it all down, you suddenly realise just how much stuff you do get done in a day. And a lazy day at that.

Focusing on what you have achieved is probably smarter than dwelling on what you haven't done. It's something that's keeping me going in a lot of respects, I just need to carry it across to all aspects of my life.

(For the record, the sugar cookies didn't turn out the way I wanted them too. Not to say they are inedible, my workmates think are delicious, but I'm not sending them to my boy. If anyone has an infallible sugar cookie recipe, I'd appreciate a copy sent to "me at ladymisstree dot com".)

On my trip to Las Vegas, I was staying at a hotel for a conference for a week. Long enough for me to need to do some laundry.

Things were getting pretty dire, I had almost run out of clean knickers, so I decided to get them laundered. I bagged my clothes as per the instructions in my room and left them for the laundry to take that morning, anticipating their clean return that evening.

I got back from a day-long tutorial, let myself into the room all ready to collapse on my bed when I noticed all my clothes neatly laid out over it, all clean and lovely.

All of them EXCEPT my knickers.

I searched the room frantically, looking in the drawers, the cupboards, on chairs, in the bathroom.

Not a lacy pair to be seen.

Horrified that I'd been 'snowdropped', I rang the laundry and told them my sorry tale. Frantic phone calls were made. Delivery staff were tracked down and contacted. Some time later, they called me back.

"They're in the cupboard," said the woman on the other end of the phone.

"No they're not! You think I didn't look in there?"

"On the shelf."

"What shelf?" I looked in the cupboard. I couldn't see any shelf.

I looked up.

Up THERE?

I walked up to the cupboard. I could barely reach the shelf, let alone see anything on it. I stood back a couple of feet. I still couldn't see anything. I jumped up and down in front of the cupboard, feeling like a right idiot.

There, at the back of the shelf, was a pink box.

I jumped up and down a couple more times trying to reach it.

Sigh.

I ended up pushing a chair over, climbing up and retrieving the box.

Sure enough, nestled neatly in tissue paper, were my clean knickers.

Like I said, it's a pain in the arse, some days.

But it does make me snuggle-sized.