Chapter 35 - The Front Fell Off

In which our her ..  "Oh, look! A balloon!"

So yesterday:  Woke up, brekkie of egg and vegemite and cheese sandwich and a banana, grocery shop, bit of drawing pictures, nachos for lunch, some more mandarins after that.  Something, something, bit of packing away of all the nonsense that was strewn about the floor (that was a group effort).  You'll be happy to hear that #1 and #2 have watched "The Princess Bride" like four times since Saturday evening.  So far I've gotten them onto both Doctor Who and The Princess Bride.  I think my work here is done.

Anyway.  Then we went down to Nana & Grandpa's house for afternoon tea with the neighbours to celebrate Sarah's birthday.  I gave #3 a piggy back down, and as we approached the house Nana was hanging balloons by the front door, and #3 said "Oh no look! Balloons!".  I don't know why she said "Oh no", because she loves balloons.  Maybe she didn't. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.  Oh well.  It was a good time.  There was cheese and crackers and chips and chocolate cupcakes and choc-chip muffins.  I also made another interesting discovery to add to Christine's Australian Culinary Odyssey: Fairy Bread.  Observe:

It's white bread with sprinkles.  Possibly butter or something as well to hold the sprinkles on.  It's a staple of kids' parties here.  They can be coloured sprinkles or chocolate or whatever, apparently.  It's good stuff.

And also, as promised, I finally remembered to take a pic of Nana & Grandpa's amazingly coincidental door jam keeper opener boot remover thingy:

I kid you not.  Of all the families in all of Australia to live with, what are the chances their grandparents have one of these too?

So we returned to the house after a couple hours, and I dealt with my washing, and had some tasty potato and leek soup that Sarah had made earlier, and then got ready to go out, because I was going to see The Great Gatsby with a couple of guys.  Not the same couple of guys that convinced me it was a good idea to see The Hangover Part III, though.  Luckily.  (Talk about a waste of time.  Blurg.)  Anyway.  This was the back-up plan for Friday, when there wasn't time for the movie.  They were two new friends of mine from the Skeptics Club.  Glen, who's also in engineering and his lifetime goal is to go to space, and Christian, who is trying to find himself.  (In the blog, I mean.)  He was disappointed that he hasn't shown up yet.  So there he is.  He decided it was a good idea to go the the cinema in Robina, which is far if you're driving, sort of, but only like 10 minutes by train, so we had a train adventure to get there.

But wait.  I'm getting ahead of myself.  As I was getting ready to leave on my bike #3 came into the garage eating something and asking where I was going.  I didn't really pay attention to what she was eating because I was trying to get my bike lights sorted out and stuff.  She was telling me about it, though, and she said something about "it got some cheese inside it", but again I didn't give it much thought.  Like a minute later I happened to actually look, and what she had was a Mini Babybell, with the wax still on, and a bite out of it, and she was chewing on something, which I quickly realised was wax.  So I showed her how to unwrap it properly, and convinced her it was a good idea to spit out the wax in her mouth.  I don't know if she swallowed any.  Hopefully not, I guess?  I don't know what happens when people eat cheese wax.  Hopefully it just passes through.

Anyway.  Then I took off.  I tried to switch into 3rd gear in the front, but the chain started slipping furiously.  Like, it would engage for a bit then slip, like half the sprocket had no teeth or something.  It was dark, though, and I didn't want to stop and mess around with it, so I just continued in 2nd.  When I got down to the straight flat part by the shopping centre I had another go at 3rd, and the same slipping thing happened, but this time I could kind of look at what was going on.  There's a bit, at the front, that keeps the chain from going over the edge when it's in 3rd.  On my bike it's made of plastic.  And apparently it was cracked.  And then it fell off.  In bits. As I was riding and trying to figure out what was going on.  So there you go.  The front fell off.  Now I can't use 3rd gear, because the chain just tips over the edge, and the bike looks like this:

When I got home later I just took off all the remaining pieces with a screwdriver because they were all loose and making clicky noises, and when I'm riding with clicky noises I always think my bike's about to fall apart.

So now back to the movie.  Christian met me at the station, because he just lives not too far away.  Then we trained it down to Robina.  We sat backward on the train, and I couldn't tell we were moving backward, which I thought was because it was dark out, but he said it was because I'd gone down a hill recently, so my sense of things was all messed up, but after the movie when I'd been sitting still for a while and then if we sat backward again I'd definitely notice it.  We did, after, and I didn't.  I don't think.

Anyway.  The cinema in Robina is very nice, but it's also expensive, and you have to specify which seat you want, which I've never encountered in a movie theatre before.  It was a bit weird cuz the boys had bought their tickets online and already picked their seats, but then when I got mine at the box office the girl had to rearrange theirs so we were all together.  So my review of The Great Gatsby is that I didn't like it.  It had all the normal magic of a Baz Lurhmann film, but I didn't like the story.  I can see why you didn't like the book, Annie.  I don't think I'll bother reading it now.  But I blame F. Scott Fitzgerald for that, not Baz Lurhmann.  My personal opinion is that unhappy endings can take a flying leap.

Glen had met us at Robina Station and driven us to the cinema, then back to the station after.  We missed one train because we were talking about interesting things like space elevators and Doctor Who and how to find out where and when exams were.  Eventually we got on the home-bound train, then back to Helensvale, then I got my bike, and we headed to the ATM so Christian could get some cab fare.  On the way back to the taxi stand there was a random balloon stuck under a bit of shrubbery and I was seriously like "Oooh look! A balloon!", at which point I kind of chuckled to myself because it was not the first time I'd been distracted by an actual balloon.  I started telling Christian about Tony's thing about thinking Therese is all easily distracted, and then there was that one time there was actually balloons, and it was hilarious, but then I got distracted and didn't finish.  Which I think rather proves the point, doesn't it.

On my way home I collected the bits of bike that had fallen off earlier, and put them in the bin at home with the other pieces that I removed with a screw driver.  Then I was hungry, so I had some WeatBix with honey, then shower and bed and too tired to write anything and was asleep in like five minutes and slept till like noon.  It was good.  But my back still hurts from that little trampoline stunt, and I felt like I could have slept all day.

Also, now I have "Killer Queen" stuck in my head because in The Great Gatsby they were drinking Moet champagne.