It is holidays now.

That is all.
xxx

Found this on Pinterest. Where else?

The Christmas Stuff Up

Hello peepies.

Here's the last column of the year. Hope you enjoy.

Merry Kissimus everybody. Xxx

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick

THE CHRISTMAS STUFF UP

Christmas, my apologies, I meant to say, The Festive Season, can be a bit of a minefield. We’re not just dealing with Father Christmas and the Baby Jesus here, there are other religions and celebrations to consider too. Like Chanukah, Kwanza, Ashura, Agnostia, and a host of others. What this means is that no matter what your faith, December is a big month involving many family get-togethers and traditions.

One of these traditions includes absolutely loving spending all that time together as a family. For the first five minutes. Then wanting to slash your wrists for the rest of it.

My family is Jewish, so we don’t celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense, but we still spend the time together. We also give each of the children a stocking filled with presents, that we say came from someone called ‘Santa-Chanukah’, who, if you’ve been good (and let’s be honest even if you haven’t) comes across the lagoon on a jet ski in the middle of the night and delivers the stockings to the house where we spend Christmas. (Yes, I know, we’re going straight to hell for that one.)

But even though this is a time for giving, I don’t want to talk about the gifts today, I want to talk about the food. Like I said, I’m Jewish.

Although I’ve never actually experienced it myself, I’ve watched enough TV to know that on Christmas many people eat giant turkeys with stuffing and cranberry sauce and something called yams, and lots of brandy with a bit of Christmas Cake in it. But last Christmas I learnt about something I’d never seen before, and it quite literally blew my mind. It's called a 'Turducken'.

Basically it's a giant turkey that’s been stuffed with a duck, which is then stuffed with a chicken. Hence the name Tur-duck-en. It’s like one of those Russian babushka dolls, only made out of poultry. 

What I want to know is who sat up in bed one morning and said; 'I know, I think today I'll take a giant turkey, then I'll shove a whole duck inside it, and then I'll shove an entire chicken inside that, and then I'll stick the whole darn thing in the oven for a couple of hours while I play solitaire on the computer and smoke some crack.’

Either that or I like to imagine that maybe it was some overworked mom who invented the Turducken. I imagine that she found herself at the end of her tether after a particularly long and stressful year of being a mom. She was so overwhelmed with the decision of what to cook on Christmas - with a husband who likes turkey, a mom-in-law who likes duck and a son who likes chicken. And so on one of the twelve days of Christmas, after a couple glasses of Christmas cheer, she cracked and decided to stuff it all, quite literally, and make all three. It definitely wouldn’t be the first idea born of sheer frustration mixed with wine.

Another thought that strikes me is that if a human stuffs himself on turducken, then it's actually a human, stuffed with a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. And if that’s the case then perhaps it should be called ‘Humturducken’ instead?

Either way, merry ChristmasKwanzaaChanukahAshuraAgnostica everybody. May it be joyful and lovely, and may you not murder any family members with a blunt spoon before it’s over. And whatever you choose to eat, enjoy.  

South Africa rocks!

I repeat, South Africa rocks.

There is no other place quite like it in the world. Anywhere.

Where else would you find this kind of complete genius?

Nowhere. Only right here.

What I love is that there are options. It's simply taken for granted that with your chop you will want a dop, but the clever folks down at my local have taken it one step further by giving you a choice of dop. Would you like a Castle or an Amstel with your chop, Meneer?

How very polite.
How very clever.
How very truly, wonderfully South African.

The honeymoon phase

Morning Monday Morningers, here's yesterday's column. Hope you enjoy. It comes with all my love and a few desperate pleas for the year to end already.


A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
WHEN THE HONEYMOON’S OVER

New relationships are great. They don’t call it ‘The Honeymoon Phase’ for nothing. In the beginning the sun shines, birds tweet, nobody has morning breath and no matter what happens you can’t wipe that stupid grin off your face. That’s what happens when you’re having sex nine times a day.  

Your stomach turns into a pretzel when the phone rings. You sit in a busy restaurant and feel like you’re the only two people there. You go to a movie and leave with absolutely no recollection of the plot. And you can forget sleep in the beginning of a relationship. Not that you need it. Adrenaline and lust take its place. You look bright eyed and glowing on three or four hours a night.

Dudes, try stumbling in at three am, stinking of beer, looking for some action two years into your relationship and you’ll wake up hungover on the couch, with a crick in your neck. But do that in the beginning of the relationship and it’s considered cute and romantic. That’s because the rules of engagement are different during ‘The Honeymoon Phase’.


Honeymooning couples are easy to spot. Approach their table at a restaurant to say hi and you’ll see panic in their eyes. They’re terrified you might try join them. Whereas a ‘Post-honeymoon-couple’ will pull out a chair for you and then you’ll have to go back to their place for dessert and a game of monopoly after dinner.

The problem is that ‘Post-honeymoon-couples’ have heard all of each other’s jokes at least twice already. They’ve also ticked off all the positions in the Karma Sutra and a couple new ones they made up along the way. So they don’t need to scuttle off at every opportunity for an experimental quickie.

In my experience honeymoon periods vary. I once had one that lasted four days and six hours, which was how long it took me to discover that the douchebag actually had a wife.


I asked a couple of girlfriends and we all agreed (certainly not the most scientific method in the world, but it works for us) that on average, the standard honeymoon period lasts anything from four to six months. Just long enough to wake up next to each other grumpy a couple of times and experience one of you with the flu. Let’s face it, once you’ve washed his jocks and met his family, it’s hard to stay completely dewy-eyed. Reality has to kick in at some point. 


But there are a few upsides to making it out the other side of The Honeymoon Phase and into The Settling Into The Relationship Phase in one piece. For starters you can finally get some sleep, and you no longer walk like a cowboy all the time. You also don’t have to shave your legs as often and you get to actually spend time with other people, like friends and family. Because during the honeymoon phase, all time not spent at work or on the toilet, is spent together, or at least on the phone together.

Post honeymoon you also get to wear your favourite, most comfortable old t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms to bed. Don’t get me wrong, sexy lingerie is great, and it certainly does the job, but sometimes you just want to make it through a full night without being strangled by a G-string or suffocated by a bustier. So The Honeymoon Phase is a great place to visit, but I’m not so sure I’d want to live there.

Still on the hamster wheel.

Tis the end of the year.
It's all downhill from here.

Slowly, slowly things are starting to calm down to a mild panic.

There is just the last of the deadlines to go and then we'll be free, free to drink, and chill and sleep late and eat and party, and read and and and and... for a couple of days, then it's back to the hamster wheel.

But before then, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to show you something funny.

ffffound here.

But wait, is it real?
is it taxidermied?
who did this?
And I want their job. Where the fuck did they find the time?

Right, back to work, it's not holidays yet, we can't all laze around and spend all day making teeny tiny little teddy bears for our pet rodents.

What we need now

So it’s an arb Wednesday in December after a fuckoff long year.

And so I believe this is all you need:

Well actually, I know for a fact that it’s all I need, as far as what you need goes, I’m just speculating here. 

The not so secret Bill

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
THE SECRECY BILL

There has been much talk about The Secrecy Bill lately. I knew a secrecy Bill once. He and I had been dating for two weeks before I discovered he had a wife and three children.

So it is with all my past dubious experiences with men in mind, (too many to list here, this is a column after all, not War and Peace) that I can honestly say that I’m all for truthfulness and transparency, particularly in the media, and most definitely in the dating world.

However, my desire for transparency is often put to the test on the dating website that I frequent. I recently started chatting to a very charming gentleman. However by the end of our first online conversation, on the very first day of making his acquaintance, he'd let me know that he was completely broke and starting over after a messy divorce, that he had no car, and that he had major back issues from an old surfing accident that required a number of surgeries every year just to keep him comfortably upright. He also revealed that his cat was diabetic and required a series of carefully-timed shots every day, oh and that his brother was currently in hospital.

Truthfully, it was a lovely, open, honest conversation. But somehow it kind of left me wondering if perhaps he hadn’t been a little too open and honest. I hadn’t even met the guy in real life yet, and after just a couple of hours I already knew what he’d had for breakfast that morning, and that if I had to get into a relationship with him there would be very little wild sex, and quite a bit of medical admin, caring and lifting to do in my foreseeable future.

So while transparency is a must for me in any relationship, perhaps it’s simply a matter of timing. Maybe when it comes to dating, we should consider an Ever-So-Slightly-Extended-Secrecy Bill.

I’m not saying wait seventeen years before you tell your girlfriend you’re a cross dresser (and here I mean a man who wears women’s clothing, not someone who gets grumpy when they have to put on pants).  I just think that maybe some of our secrets are best left for a second or third date, and perhaps our other even deeper darker ones should be left for that moment when your partner is so hopelessly irrevocably in love with you, that the fact that you have incurably smelly feet, or impossibly bad cooking skills, or six exes who have all died in house fires, is overlook-able.

That’s why babies are so well designed, if parents didn’t already love them so completely and unconditionally from the very second they popped out of the womb, there would be no way on earth those already exhausted folks would put up with the endless dirty nappies and constant middle of the night crying. That’s clever design we can learn from, people. Fall in love first, reveal massive production flaws second. 

I know this sounds like I’m advocating secrets, lies and half-truths in dating, but really I’m not. Please feel free to be open, honest and transparent about every dark, dingy, scary nook and cranny of your life, but maybe we should meet first.

i haves teh book

My friend, and world-famous blogger, Cape Town Girl (see I too can name drop like @AspasiaKarras) just tweeted this picture of her cub, reading my book. Well okay, maybe he's not reading it right at this point, but he was on page 74, just before she convinced him to throw on some blue steel for the camera.

Anyway, it was more cuteness than one person could bear, so i'm sharing it with you, in order to dilute the cuteness so it doesn't explode the world.

That's one cat who knows which way is up!