Monday, May 11, 2009

Distractions and cane toad worries

I'm in the downward slide to my annual leave - only two more days of work before Little One and I board a Qantas plane for Sydney. Needless to say, this has turned work into a distraction. And so many things have to be organised.
So this morning I e-mailed the IT guys to please-oh-please-oh-please take my e-mail address off the many lists it is on. We have an extremely limited e-mail capacity at the newspaper establishment for which I work, so the usual dirge of incoming press releases, invitations, news alerts etc clogs up one's inbox quicker than The Hoff's fanbase can pack out a rock concert venue in Germany. Left untouched for a month, I think I might be looking at spam jam of immense proportions. So I am being diligent and warding this off.
On the news front - it's all been about Zuma and his new cabinet. Like cane toads in Australia, they are puh-lentiful. I spent most of Sunday frantically researching them so we could run a bright little informative piece on each one. It was not a difficult task - just painstaking and time consuming. Until such time as our internet servers decided that the government website - our main source of this information on the new faces appointed to lead us - was suddenly banned due to breaches of the company's no pornography rule. "Your attempt to access this website has been recorded" was the snooty message that came up as the page went blank. So - another issue for the techies to sort out today.
On the sidelines I have been frantically exploring the problematic cane toad issue in Australia. I have so far managed to ascertain that Sydney, Tasmania, Kangaroo Valley and Cowra are currently frog-free areas, so those parts of the holiday are no longer a worry. But news from the Brisbane relatives has not been so positive. Apparently they do have cane toads. But according to my aunt, the people in her neck of the woods generally don't follow FrogWatch's (a real organisation, I swear) recommendations that they catch these toads, smear them with haemorrhoid cream, pop them in the freezer and then later liquidise them into a toad juice that makes for delightful liquid fertiliser (not kidding, see previous posts for the lowdown). They don't even follow the second best option of hitting them with a bat, and instead stalk them with golf clubs. Or else they spray them with Dettol, which is poisonous to them and causes them to shrivel up and die.
So after receiving this news I have been looking into several self-help options to deal with my frog phobia and have been trying out a bit of DIY cognitive behavioural therapy and some neuro linguistic programming.
But my efforts are somewhat hampered by the merciless and ongoing terrorist acts by my colleague EvilIncarnate. This weekend she was away, so I had a bit of peace. However, she was back today. She sent me an e-mail entitled "2 days to go". I foolishly opened the attachment. If I was asthmatic, I would have had an attack. If I had epilepsy, I would have had a seizure!
Not so?


3 comments:

  1. Oh she is SO cruel!
    I am so jealous of you going on leave... even though I had a divine 3 week holiday in December, I could so do with another one!

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  2. Enjoy your holiday a lot. You wont even see a frog, promise!

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  3. Thanks SO much guys! I plan to have a blast. I shall keep you guys posted on what transpires in Aus and what I think of the Aussie newspapers and how they match up to Jozi news!

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