MissLeonie.com

These are butterfly bushes slowly conquering the wasteland next to my local convenience store. There are no words to describe how good it feels to get off the bus (just out of frame) after a long day and walk home past this wilderness. The building in the background is a library that, for reasons unknown although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it’s something to do with the level of literacy or interest in this neighbourhood, is never open. Initially, I wanted to upload this photo to Flickr in colour, but it didn’t work. There was too much colour. A rare, bright blue sky. Deep red brick. Purple flowers. Intensely green foliage. Somehow it obscured the structural chaos.

In the end, I realised the shapes were much more interesting. The industrial image of the library. The sprawling butterfly bushes. The sloping fence. The colour wasn’t adding to the picture, it was distracting. Now, I’m no expert in black and white, not at all, but I kind of like the look of this. There is something contradictory about displaying the chaos in easy-on-the-eyes shades of gray. And a bright pink butterfly, because I was secretly heartbroken to have to zap the purple out of the butterfly bushes.

The full version can be found on my Flickr page, or by clicking here.

The phone rings, but I’m busy on the computer and the number isn’t in my contacts list, so I decide to let it go. It tends to be my landlady roping me into things I honestly don’t have time for, and I have finally learnt my lesson. Politeness is overrated, people.

Then my phone beeps. Text message. “Hi there something with my lock I need ur help plz.” Signed, my housemate. Oh crap. I ignore a phone call for the first time in years and it’s my housemate who is trapped in his room. Nice one.

I go downstairs and ask him to pass his key under the door. The keys are on a key ring, so I end up going outside in my tracksuit bottoms and a pyjama top to take the keys he was dangling out of the window. He explains that the door locked itself as the door was shut and now it won’t open. I stick the key in the lock. The next key. The third and final key. The first key again. No luck. “Is it the silver key or one of the golden ones?” He has never actually locked his door before, so he doesn’t know. None of them will go into the lock. Damn.

I can’t get him out. He can’t get himself out. We manage to writhe open the door slightly, but part of the lock still catches and no amount of pressure applied most unceremoniously to the door makes a difference. I give up and give him our landlady’s phone number. She doesn’t pick up. I try some of the other numbers I have. Still nothing.

Just as I suggest he climbs out the window, my phone begins to ring. It’s the landlord. He suggests using a credit card, but all that does is bugger up the credit card. I ask my housemate if he wants a fork or something, and on the phone, the landlord says, “Knife!” Good idea. I grab a strong but old kitchen knife and he finally manages to force open the door.

Lessons learnt:

1. The owners of this house need to less of a cheapskate.
2. My brain doesn’t function in the morning.
3. Pick up the phone.

I’ve been tagged by Lanx to fill out this little questionnaire. Here goes!

Two names you go by:

1. Leonie (pronounced Lay-oh-nee)
2. Lee-oh-nee (in England/Australia)

(I have a serious lack of nicknames.)

Two things you are wearing right now:

1. tracksuit bottoms
2. pajama top

(Yes it’s almost 4pm, why do you ask?)

Two things you want very badly at the moment:

1. to finish my dissertation and go home
2. to go to Australia

Two things you did last night just before bed:

1. sing Happy Birthday to my mum on the phone
2. listen to Interpol

Two things you ate today:

1. a Sandwich Spread sandwich
2. I should really go and eat something else

Two people you just spoke with:

1. my mum
2. Liam

Two things you are doing tomorrow:

1. write my dissertation
2. sleep in

Two longest car rides:

1. any holiday to Spain
2. a holiday to Tuscany

Two favourite beverages:

1. lemon flavoured tea
2. honey rum

Two people I tag:

1. Mags
2. Masha

I don’t know what the protocol is as far as tagging and meme’s are concerned, but consider yourself invited if you feel like having a crack.

Don’t worry - you haven’t put your contacts in backwards, drunk too much or misplaced your glasses. The text size has just decreased a fair bit. I was getting a little sick of the humongous text, so I asked Liam to have a look at the style.css file for me. He asked why I didn’t just make a backup and mess around with it myself. Good question.

The best part? It worked! I totally did this myself. (I know it’s kind of sad that it inspires such pride in me, but dude, CSS!)

PS. I’ve also added Twitter to my sidebar. I thought I’d give it a go and what do you know, it didn’t crash the site. Twitter, in case you don’t know (here’s looking at you, mum and dad), is a service that lets you send short updates of what you’re up to to the people following your twitter stream or those reading your website, in this case. They’re like mini-updates that would look too pathetic as a post on their own. It’s Facebook, without the annoying superpokes, pets and vampire kisses. I’m not sure if it’s permanent, but I’ll give it a try for now. As I said to Liam though, if I start tweeting about my breakfast - shoot me.

PPS. The http://www.missleonie.com address works again! It’ll send you here, so you can forget the German.

Currently, when I try to log into the admin page for my website, I get an ominous “Error establishing a database connection”. I hope that’s just the Internet’s way of telling me to get some work done already.

I wrote a reasonable chunk of dissertation yesterday, and some part of my brain is revolting against having to do it all over again. I sympathise with this part of my brain most emphatically, but my better judgment begs me to ignore it. My better judgment obviously isn’t very strong, because here I am, typing up a page in Word because Wordpress has shut the door.

I thought I’d show you the state my desk is currently in. A bunch of books, copied chapters, printed articles off JStor, dictionaries, a thesaurus, post-its and… booze. The bottle of honey rum is hiding behind the laptop. Rest assured, I am not an alcoholic. I just realised the bottle was only a fifth gone and it’s been here six months, in a student house. I don’t think they’ll let me graduate if it’s not gone before I move home. Plus, I felt a bit silly at the prospect of bringing a nearly full bottle of liquor back home in a few weeks. In light of limited luggage allowances, I have to drink it. Obviously. And I kept forgetting about the juice of ancient gods that is honey rum (ron miel) when it was sitting on a dresser on the other side of the room.

It’s not almost full anymore. And my dissertation file isn’t almost empty anymore. A coincidence?

I bought myself a pair of two-tone brown leather killer heels today. They are fabulous. Comfortable too. There is just one problem…

The heel on them is rather high, placing my legs at such an angle when I sit down that the bones in my arse are no longer in horizontal alignment with the seat, instead they poke into the desk chair in a most uncomfortable, diagonal fashion. These shoes give me so much extra length on my lower legs that my knees are higher than my hips and the whole thing is most unpleasant.

I could of course just take off the shoes. But they are beautiful, and new, and they will stay on my feet when I go to bed tonight. My bum hurts.

My first post on the Wordpress-powered blog contained a list of some of my least favourite things. It wasn’t by any means exhaustive, because that would be defy the genre of blogging and turn it into a novel, possibly the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but one of the things that was on there was the sadomasochistic act of tweezing one’s eyebrows. I seriously hate it. Mind you, I do understand the aesthetic perks; and from someone so clumsy she regularly hurts herself reasonably seriously and deals with it this may sound strange, but… it hurts. HURTS, you know?

I used to put it off for as long as I could, going for embarrassing semi-bushy brows in between tweezes that could be weeks apart. But not anymore! I invested in a Tweezerman tweezer the other day, and now spot well-kept brows. It is a revolution. I didn’t realise it could be so simple. That it didn’t have to inspire thoughts of never tweezing again and becoming a bushy cat lady instead.

It hurts less, and I figured I might as well yank hair out of my face in a war waged on follicles in style. Allure-approved, don’t you know?

These are the shards of my credit card.

I got a call from my mum a few days ago. The bank had sent me a letter (to my parents’ address - my mailing address in the Netherlands) to let me know that I would not be able to use my credit card since they had temporarily blocked it after discovering what they supsected to be fraud. I rang the fraud department of my bank and they listed the recent charges to my card. One after another, I said “Mhmm, yes, correct, yes, mmhmm, NO I DID NOT SPEND OVER €1400 AT AN APPLE STORE AT A MALL IN A RANDOM AMERICAN CITY! OR A SIMILAR AMOUNT AT BED, BATH & BEYOND?!”And so on, and so on. I could have been out of €5000 if my bank weren’t so on the money. The scary part is that I have no idea how whoever was trying to scam me got my credit card details.

The only thing I can think of is that it has something to do with Mobileworld, my mobile network. I used to do topups online, and noticed one day that I had been charged five times £10 (I later noticed that it had happened before as well, another £20). I rung the company, they asked me to send a copy of my credit card statement to verify that I had indeed been charged - the transactions had failed online and were listed as declined, so I never received airtime. I was supposed to receive an email back, which never happened. I’d called again the day before this whole credit card tango, asked what was going on, demanded a confirmation of sorts. The next day, I’d still not heard anything from crappy Mobileworld, but I had heard about this sudden surge of huge of transactions. What a coincidence. I called again, got quite upset with them, and explained that I could also go to the police for fraud. Even without the credit card business, the 70 pounds they owe me and are consistently failing to repay is enough.

Thank Christ my bank employ some savvy people. Thank Christ I have a low limit on my credit card. None of the transactions were successful, because the fraudulent scum were too greedy and went over the limit. Phew. Never a dull moment!

€1400 at Bed, Bath and Beyond? Just how dirty can you be?

I’m going to introduce this post by saying that I am extremely angry right now, and completely morally appalled, as well as sick to my stomach. This post will no doubt offend, but you know what? It can’t be more offensive than what’s happened to Stan Storimans, so you can deal with it.

Russia, today you lose the war of lies and the right to complain about unfair portrayal in the world media. You killed a Dutch cameraman, just doing his job. Do you think that’s just another rumour, another prejudiced lie? Have a look at the photo below the cut. You couldn’t talk yourself out of this one with all the deceitful tongues in the world.

He wasn’t in South-Ossetia, or Abkhazia. He was in Gori, Georgia, and your weapons killed him. You killed someone who was in Georgia trying to tell the world what was really going on, showing the world what he could see. He can’t do that anymore, because of you. You’ll have to make do with whatever media portrayal you receive now.

You are no longer just in South Ossetia or Abkhazia on a fake peace-keeping mission. You have crossed even further borders and are bombing and attacking Georgian towns like a big bully. Every promise you made “We are just here to keep the peace!” “We respect the integrity of the Georgian borders” “We are only helping out in South Ossetia” “Oh, and Abkhazi” “Oh, scratch that, we are invading a foreign country and we’re not going home until the Georgian army are back in their barracks.” - every promise you made you’ve broken subsequently. You betrayed the trust of those journalists trying to do everyone a favour by reporting the truth to the world. They thought they were safe, because you said they would be, because you said you would not invade Georgia, or bomb it. Why should anyone trust a word you say anymore? You have just proven everything, every judgment you deemed unfair and assumptuous. You’ve proven it all.

Tell me, can you look at the photo below (under the cut because it’s very disturbing) and tell me you are just and righteous? Does it break your heart and make you feel nauseous like it does with me? This is the (near) dead camera man, in the back of a car. This is his colleague, the presenter, clinging on to a dead man’s arm in a state of complete shock. Covered in blood. Traumatised. (more…)

And now for something completely different!

It’s also a subjective matter, but at least no one’s dying.

I bought myself Chloé’s new perfume! I bumped into one of those paper samples in magazines and fell in love with the scent. Embarrassing rubbing of the magazine against my wrists ensued, and by the end of the day, I was in love. Sometimes a girl just has to splurge. The next day, I set out to use a tester at the shops and let the actual scent develop on my skin for a while.

It’s rosy, but not overwhelmingly, nauseatingly so. It’s very light and delicate, but it still lasts forever. It’s loooovely.

I was asked to try Sarah Jessica Parker’s new Covet scent as well. One sniff of those perfume tester paper strips the promotion lady was holding and I’d made up my mind. Covet is not for me. Not at all.

Isn’t it amazing how instinctual our response to scents is?