Well I suppose there are worse things to be told than:
Mary, you are a Visionary Philosopher.

This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways.

But it say my IQ was a little lower than that test with the clinical psychologist when I was 14. Maybe I have killed off some brain cells.

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I am going to have to seriously rethink my wardrobe. Why did I ever give away my chanel dress (sure I couldn't fit into it but I can always diet more).

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Its the kind of story that warms the cockles of Mel's heart.

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I don’t want to talk about how old I am
Penelope Cruz is younger than me! However, I am surprised by the various people who have sent me birthday greetings. I am quite touched. And I also think Joanne should be celebrating today by having a baby, which is also quite nice.

I’d much rather talk about Pansycon. Tuesday evening is Las Vegas night on tv. First CSI, then Las Vegas. I am enjoying Las Vegas, much more than I expected. Though it did prompt the H to ask me last night if I lose all rational thought when my plane touches down. I told him no. Because I lose all rational thought the moment the plane takes to the air. But he doesn’t need to know all about the fun, the excitement, the glitz and the glamour that is Pansycon. I also have a photo on my fridge from the very first Pansycon, us at Treasure Island waiting for the pirates to do battle and ships to sink. Yes, we were drinking. Actually though, didn’t drink a great deal on that trip. Felt ill for a bit of it. Mel was doing the serious meds. Drank much more in later years. Ah, the wonderful chocolate martinis creation at the Hilton. The champagne at Bellagio and Napolean’s. Apple martinis in the Luxor lounge. I am ready to go back today. Even if I haven’t got my fake tan or wardrobe into shape.

We drove to the first Pansycon. And as I repeatedly say, I like the drive. I like going through Barstow (seemed to have driven through Barstow a lot growing up—was always fascinated by the McDonald’s in a train car) and maybe stopping at the In and Out (which was an integral part of my university years). The only problem I see with the drive is well, Mel and I don’t have the same taste in music. She doesn’t like jazz and if left to her own devices will play lots and lots of Bing Crosby. Whereas I think the drive calls for a bit of X, maybe some Lucinda Williams and then from the mountains on it should be Frank, and Dean and maybe just a smidgeon of Sammy (but under no circumstances should there be any candy man) and well, I still have hopes of seeing our boy Tom in Vegas some day. And unlike, Mel, I was never into Duran Duran. The Clash? Yes. Simon LeBon Bon aka the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man, no.

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Someday I will explore at length the links between Vegas, Pansycon and the Renaissance Faire. Until then I just think about Dru after seeing this.

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The Perfect drink before 9 am does not contain alcohol.
I am surprised by this but after serious, rigorous, scientific trials concluded this morning I can reveal that the perfect drink this early in the morning contains chocolate and caffeine. It is a mocha.

I think this puts my desire for a horse drawn carriage at my funeral into perspective.

I know, I know it is all terribly self-referential. But I must admit I love my sister site. I love being able to log on and get yet another glimpse of where mel is at. I love reading new words from her. I could live without the bulimia stories but that is more the ‘I wish she wasn’t doing that’ instead of the ‘I wish she wouldn’t tell me.’ And well, if I am honest, I could never get myself to throw up and there has been at least one occasion when I have tried really, really hard to go down that pathway.

But she blogs about Ginger-ale! I wish I could remember the 10 justifications for ginger-ale. If we did that today, we would blog each and every one of them. And I seem to remember that they were great justifications. Just for the record, ginger-ale came out of the first pansycon. The justifications occurred on the drive back. Next year we flew. I have words to write about that.

And she blogs about Vegas. Her take, isn’t my take. But oh, I can just remember how disappointing the Rio Buffet was. Especially as we had to wander through Harrah’s and the car park to even find where the free shuttle bus left from (hence the need for the pods). The long wait for the bus, the worry that fights were going to break out over the bus (which was beautifully air-conditioned). Ah, the memories. I can’t get enough of this site.

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I’ve debated off and on most of the morning whether to include my morning rant or not and well, I have to. If only because my attempt to link between the comment about Gordon and a newspaper article on house prices has not worked. And the html code is in there. I’ve looked. I can see. Anyway, what I really want to rant about is The Guardian and its subscription new digital service which just annoys me in so many ways. I read The Guardian. I read The Observer. I blog because of those damn lefty papers. In yesterdays’ Observer Music magazine, the record doctor went to work on Diarmuid Gavin. I love Diarmuid. I might even let him lose on my garden though it would probably mean losing my turf, my purple rocks, and who knows what he would do with all my little flowers. However, I have to disagree with the man. He thinks Shane MacGowan is god. He’s wrong. Elvis Costello is god. Shane, though talented, has the worst teeth in the world and makes my liver hurt just when I think about him. But I can’t link to the article! I can’t link to the Gordon Brown article! I can no longer see what websites The Guardian recommends every week.

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I know I am becoming middle-aged

It’s Monday again. On the plus side, the sun is shining. Next weekend is a three-day weekend and I feel (at the moment) on top of my work. On the negative side? Left the sunglasses at home (where the sun isn’t shining), my teeth hurt (dentist appointment this week) and I am sure I have far too much to do that I have just conveniently blocked out of my mind.

Drank the £30 bottle of wine last night. It was good, not as good as the opus one I had years ago and I am not sure it was worth £30 and I am sure it wasn’t worth £62, its original price. Weather was good so we did a lot of gardening. I can’t believe I blog about my garden. The turf looks fantastic. I have big ideas about herbs and purple slate and got my first unwrapped birthday gift, a miniature lilac bush. I am not that excited about it. But the red palm tree, which is a fantastic plant. I am still hopeful that the birthday fairy is bringing me either garden furniture or a water feature. I hope I am not disappointed.

I also hope Gordon is right.

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I think this is a fine result.

My inner child is ten years old!

The adult world is pretty irrelevant to me. Whether
I'm off on my bicycle (or pony) exploring, lost
in a good book, or giggling with my best
friend, I live in a world apart, one full of
adventure and wonder and other stuff adults
don't understand.


How Old is Your Inner Child?
brought to you by Quizilla

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Where is Mel?

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Dreaming about Summer Holiday Plans
I get through much of the bad weather during the spring by simply closing my eyes and pretending I am not in Belfast (extremely close to a call centre) but am actually having drinks, outside at either a Mexican restaurant in the valley or at the lakeside at the Bellagio. Sure it may be cold, wet and windy here but in my mind I am sipping bellinis and contemplating shopping at Tiffany’s.
Which was pretty much Pansycon II—The Jubilee Tour: Never Mind the Pillocks. After the first Pansycon, Mel found this site, Wagerworks, which let you play games and gather points, which translated, in our case, to two free nights at the Bellagio. The site no longer works that way. Which is a pity. And it took an awful lot of on-line gaming to get those 100,000 points. An awful lot of gaming. A lot of monkeys swinging through trees. More video poker than should be healthy. As my husband pointed out, I should have just paid for the room! But I also maxed out the first credit card I tried to use in Tiffany’s so I still feel that all those hours of playing were worth something.

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I guess The Guardian doesn't agree with me.

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If it’s Wednesday…I have to talk about CSI. It’s just the way of the world. And well, the whole how does my office resemble the crime lab in Las Vegas debate continues on. General consensus is that my attempts to link my director with Gil is either the wine talking or I have been smoking that cut-rate crack cocaine (which, historically, often seemed to be peddled from the parking lot of this store). Not only that, but I, it seems, do not resemble Catherine.

The perceived wisdom is: “***** is just not quirky enough for Gil Grissom - perhaps Gil's Methodist lay preaching, geography teaching brother???

No - I don't see you as a Catherine either - I don't think anyone in here is a Catherine. There are a few Grissoms and Sarahs though - possibly a few Nicks too. Catherine is the coolest character in the show - as well as having the best CSI rear to admire!!”

Somehow I think it is not only my derrierre that lets me down. Could also be the lack of past experience as a stripper. Or the cocaine habit. And we did conclude I was too quirky to be Sarah and have settled on being Greg. I’ve got the dyed hair (and it is known to be spiked) and the odd mixture of geek hobbies and strange acquaintances. And I’d like to think I specialise in having information that though useful, no one can quite understand why or how I came to possess it.

I also think Norn Iron should become the Vegas of Europe. Build giant casinos, perhaps based on American locations, and legalise gambling. Then the dreadful weather wouldn’t matter. People would be too mesmerised by the slot machines going bling, bling, bling.

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I usually feel I need more structure in my life.
And more discipline, that goes without saying. So, starting this week, I am trying to inject a bit of structure and schedule into this blog (that's why I blog, so I don't have to actually do anything in my life). Today is favorite blog day!
I will admit I am torn over who should be the first featured blog. Should be the other Kate and Pansy site? Or should it be the inspiration behind it all? Pansy, you are going to have to wait. The blog that started it all for me is Slugger O'Toole which I happened upon after reading an article in the Guardian. It soon became required reading and I can even justify that reading it is doing my job (Imagination is such fun). I also like to think that I helped steer Belfast Gonzo to the site and look at what happened there. That I am also responsible in so many ways for Yank in Ulster, is an entirely different story and will be told another Tuesday. Anyway, go read Slugger. It can be oh so incestuous but isn't that what life in ol Norn Iron is all about?

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Why isn't this me?

Quite possibly because I haven't been to a bookie's in years.

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And Today’s Drink Is…I am feeling a bit bolder and perhaps a bit limited by html these days. Don’t have the blog I want but then again, I am not putting that much effort into it and well I don’t really understand all the technical stuff (and to think I learned to program in Fortran IV). But the most important thing is that it is Monday and as it is the beginning of the day and the week, we need a drink. Following on the celebrations over the lawn, the drink of the day is champagne. Now, there was supposed to be a link from the last post to Tesco’s Vintage Champagne but it got lost. After all my hard work tracking such a link down. Almost, but not quite has me reaching for the vodka bottle. But that will be another post, another day.

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It's a rhetorical question.
I am struggling to decide if me and the H are complete idiots or just wilfully naive. Well, the turf is down. It took two days. We finished in the rain. It was in so many ways so much worse than painting the house. I remember as we struggled through the first four rooms and hallway so that it could be done before the carpet and we wondered if maybe paying someone to do it wouldn't have been money well spent. Now, I wonder why didn't anyone mention that a) turf was so heavy. b) laying turf was hard work. c) we were idiots. Why not hire professionals? And it rained. Heavily. There was a lot of mud. H said it was like being in a four hour ruck. I don't know what that means. But the grass is down. And then we drank.

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Today is Friday
Well, not really but tomorrow I am having 294 rolls of turf delivered and that means I will be out on the patio supervising its rolling out. I don't know if I will get a chance to blog and more importantly, I won't be going into the office so Easter Friday then becomes part of my three day weekend!

It also means I wil lbe barbequeing around the beginning of June and that of course means, margaritas. That is of course a slightly fancier one then is usually served in the house, but I am in a weekend kind of mood. You are all invited. Turn right at the building site. It's the first inhabited house.

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I need to work more.
I didn't cheat which is why I was so close on some of the answers (so very close).
The Friday afternoon quiz (as I won't be in work tomorrow, it's Friday now.

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Who knew Easter had so many days?
Okay, as it may now be readily apparent to my audience of three (and I know exactly who you all are), I am one of those Americans who has relocated to the British Ilses or the Western Ilses or well, we won't have that semantic discussion now. Needless to say, I am almost always culturally adrift and I like it! Sometime I will list all the nifty cliches and figures of speech I have picked up in this part of the world but for now I'd like to talk a bit about holidays.
One of the reasons I live in windswept, damp County Antrim and not Los Angeles County is the amount of time my employer is willing to pay me for when I don't actually work. Weep, all you American readers! Weep and despair. I have, however, had to get used to an entirely different holiday schedule. Out are the favorites of Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. No missing colleague gone to Shul for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hosanna. Mother's Day in an entirely different month. I am still amazed though, that somehow, the powers that be, society and/or builders have turned Easter into a whole week. It's now Easter Wednesday. I was prepared for Easter Monday when I arrived here so many years ago. I learned to accept Easter Tuesday several years ago when I was trying to buy a house and discovered nothing and I mean nothing open on that day. But today, no cars on the road. Of course that doesn't stop the drivers here from killing themselves. That puts the death toll for this week of Easter of holidays currently at 8 and we aren't even at Easter Friday, let alone Easter Saturday. I suppose the moral of it all is that to eat all that chocolate, you need a lot of days.

Where did it all begin
I know, I know, its supposed to be a blog about Kate and Pansy and do you hear anything about it? No. Instead too much time is being spent on real life. Well, I say enough of this and lets peel back the mists of time and remember the very first Pansycon in 2000. It was held in the tropical Treasure Island with its pirate theme. In real life I was depressed, Mel was on all sorts of meds. In fantasy land, I hatched a major scheme involving the pillock. Strangely enough, when walking past Ceasars (that place should have its own UN seat, does it need to be so big?), Kate and Pansy did think up the vision of the Las Vegas Monorail. Of course the original vision called for individual pods that shot from one end to another and just randomly deposited people in front of various emporiums of gambling. This may explain why we are in no way benefiting financially from the new all singing all advertising monorail opening soon at a casino near you. Want to know more about the pillock? Buy me a drink. I'll have a beer. And you will need to buy lots.

Pansycon I didn't really have a hook or a title. It did start the commemorative t-shirt business with the still stylish 'I am the physical manifesting of the empowered goddess' shirt with the standpoint crest. A slogan I try to live up to every single day. Perhaps we need to get the pillock to do some work on that crest.

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Normally I don't drink gin. I am a vodka kind of girl. And well whiskey. And of course, tequila. Let's be honest, I'll drink just about anything but with gin bing pretty low on the list. But it is a nice quiet morning. I am feeling spring in the air and well, though I have been known to have a whiskey before breakfast, today I just feel more civilised. So if you are buying, today I will have a gin fizz.

Didn't win the lottery at the weekend. Of course, I didn't buy a ticket. That could be the fatal flaw in my plan to have enough money that work could just become a hobby. One I could abandon at will. Like so many other things I start and stop. And it might have been my weekend as I was struck by an almighty coincidence. I grew up in a small town. Admittedly, it wasn't quite as small and remote as Trona, but it was small enough. I hated it. This could explain why I now live
thousands of miles away, seperated by a great big ocean, on a different continent, in a different country with an entirely different culture. I like it like this. However, Saturday, we went to a kid's birthday party and met another couple. American. Which in this place stands out. Turns out that the last place they lived stateside, was you bet, my old stomping grounds. They had much fonded memories of the place than me. I am still a bit freaked out by the whole thing though.

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I admit I have a CSI problem

Welcome back to the bar! Today's drink is a corpse reviver. I've never actually had one but I did try very hard to order one a couple of years ago at Pansycon II. We were staying in the Bellagio for the Jubilee Tour and it was on the room service menu but I being the cheapskate I am, refuse to pay rooom serice prices. So we went down to the bar and tried to get one but all the barkeeps claimed to have never heard of it and couldn't make it. You didn't get service like that when Steve Wynn ran the place!

Anyway, yes I went out last night. And yes I stayed out later than expected (and got the last train home) and yes, I had more glasses of wine than originally planned. That's my explanation of why I had an argument with Greenwood when I got home over whether or not I was Gil Grissom. I maintained I was Catherine but he was having none of that. I do think that my boss bears a resemblance to Gil but maybe that is the wine still talking.

And none of this explains why a colleague gave me a bottle of gin yesterday. I am beginning to wonder about the impression I make on people.

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Okay, depending on the status of stand-by flights, Pansycon IV will be held this year August 22-27 at the beautiful Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in fabulous Las Vegas. Las Vegas is the traditional site for all previous Pansycons because only it has the necessary facilities. Soon you can here all about why Las Vegas and indeed where the previous Pansycons have been held. Maybe there will even be a gift shop offering the must-have fashion item of 2004, the Pansycon IV t-shirt! Of course, I am still awaiting my Pansycon III T-shirt, let alone the souvenir nose-piercing!

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This is where I confess I am feeling my age. It isn't just the complaining about the cost of underground tickets these days or not being able to understand why anyone would want to pierce their belly button (and hey I like jewellry!) but it is that a great deal of technology I don't quite understand. If I am honest, I never really did understand Fortran or Pascal or how do use all the buttons on the vcr or even what where the right settings to have on an equalizer (I never really quite understood why you needed an equalizer). Maybe it isn't my age, maybe I am just not disciplined enough to try and learn how to do anything properly (like sailing or yoga or salsa dancing). What it all means is I am rather clueless when it comes to this blog thing. And for the life of me I can't figure out how to get my links on the right hand side to work. And I would like to link to other blogs. Whether they want me to link to them is of course, an entirely different matter.

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I don't know why you are reading this. I really don't. But as you are curious and you are here now, my drink today will be a vodka collins. This is a blog really all about Pansycom and in particular the upcoming Pansycom IV. Not been to Pansycom? You don't know what you are missing. But I hope to fill you in on that in the days, weeks, months to come.

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