Those little letters

Dear 10th February,

You came and you went.  My birthday.  My 28th birthday.  You were fun.  Lots of fun, even!  Dinner of authentic italiano woodfire pizzas with my BFFs on Saturday night (which included THE most delish cocktail ever, one that combined frangelico, Bailey's, cream and cinnamon ::plonk::), and then a day spent with Yogi on Great Ocean Road on the birthday proper.  You proper.  Zuh?  Anyway, I didn't end up having cake which: quelle horreur!  I know, right?  Craziness.  I'll just have to make up for it somehow. And by "somehow" I mean this weekend, DUH.

Dear Self,

You haaad to do it.  You had to break your unblemished record of having been a nigh on perfect driver for 10 years.  You crashed yours and Yogi's car this morning.  Oh God, just typing it out makes it all the more humiliating and horrid.  Sure it was a minor crash/scrape but: no matter!  You were entering the city carpark and turning the steering wheel left to enter a narrow opening in the carpark after just having made a full right turn, and because you didn't have a firm grip on the wheel one of your hands slipped and in that split-second moment you hit the corner[!] of the right side of the opening, and thankfully then you straightened out the car but, lamentably, the damage had been done.  You started saying, "No, no, no-no-no, noooooooooo," and then you stopped the car and you berated yourself for what you had done, and what made it even more infuriating was the fact that you had been in no danger whatsoever and had only been going, like, 3Ks, WHAT THE HELL, and yet this happened.  A split-second moment of not gripping the wheel properly.

And then, once you'd moved the car out of the way, you couldn't put your hand brake down, the damn thing was stuck and fiddly, so you flagged down the next driver who came through that opening and you proceeded to burst into tears (OMG, stop it) while explaining to him what had happened, and then he very kindly helped you put the hand brake down, and all you really wanted to do was go home and NOT go to work, but also (and more so) CRAWL INTO A HOLE AND HIBERNATE FOR A WHILE, but that wasn't an option, so when you got into work you called Yogi from a meeting room and bawled on the phone to him, and of course he was wonderful and didn't care and comforted you because, DUH, he is the awesomest...and yeah.  In short?  You suck, suuuuuuck.  I know I shouldn't be hard on you and that I need to forgive you for this, but I'm still not over it.  Pah!  You've always been such a careful and safe driver...waaaaahhhhh.  And now we have to dip into our savings to fix this...ugh, you suck so hard, self.


(Here are a few more photos after that waaay laborious letter.  Photo grid can be enlarged!)

This is the carefree look of someone who doesn't know what it feels like to
crash the corner of a carpark opening.  Old self, I hardly knew ye!

Dear Interwebs,

Remember how in the mid- to late-90s we'd go to, like, HMV and all those similar CD stores, and hit up the CD listening booths to listen to the latest hit CDs?  Or if the CD we wanted wasn't one of the top 10 CDs, we'd bring it over to the counter and ask to listen to it?  Yeah.  Good times.  And at 30 bucks a pop, shelling out that money seemed LIKE WHOA.  I used to listen to the "limited special edition" of NSYNC's debut album (shut up), which came out a few months after I'd gotten the regular one (with my pocket money, natch), and since I couldn't justify buying it again for a few extra songs, I'd go and listen to it.  I was so cool, y'all.  Ha!

*     *     *

To the man who showed me what the epitome of a real man is; to the man who was there for me for the first almost-nine years of my life; to the man who taught me how to dive into the sea, how to do the multiplication tables flawlessly and how to love; to the man who today would have been 56; to my beloved father whom I will never stop loving with the same intensity as I did when he was alive: to him I say happy birthday, 13th Feb.  We will never stop missing you and loving you; no way, no how.