KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

I got my first pay from my new job about a month ago and to celebrate I treated the Phamly to gifts for taking care of me while I was unemployed. Dad Pham is going to get some cashola for a trip to Melbourne in September for Mum Pham's one year passing Buddhist ceremony (he doesn't know this yet and doesn't read the internet so don't tell him - it's a surprise!), Big Brother Pham and Sister-Not-In-Law Pham got the kitchen shelf they wanted for their new house and Little Sissy Pham got a(n expensive) blood test and Disney car eyes for Oscar (her car) to match Luigi (my car). Then I bought myself a kick-ass new stereo for my bedroom because I'd left my Melbourne stereo to a friend.
It's a Sharp CDSW440NH and even though it comes with a CD player, radio, auxiliary inputs, tape deck (what the?) and has the cleanest, crispest, boomiest sound I've ever heard from a mini hifi system, all you need to know is that the speakers light up blue when the bass goes boom ba doom boom! I LOVE it SO much. The only trouble was when I first brought it home and plugged it in,  it kept flashing the blue light in off/stand-by mode. I was afraid it would become the flashing lights of doom and bringing back my insomnia.

Or I just sit in my room typing out blog posts and listening to sweet, sweet music on my new mini-hifi system. (If you look closely at the pic below, you can see Little Sissy Pham and I being blasted in our happy faces by The Black Keys on the radio.)

• it's okay to blog as a hobby (phew, because if I try to turn this into a career I'd be back on the dole in two seconds)
• the best blogs aren't about quantity (number of posts or readers),  they're about the quality (having a unique voice and point of view)
• you do it for the love of it.

I particularly like her last point. I love having a creative writing outlet. I think I'm super-lucky to be working with words in my current day job but it's nice to have a little space to call my own where I can make the rules, set the style and write whatever I want to write (as long as I don't hurt anybody, that's the first rule of Pham Club).

Mum Pham had a particular thing about my lips. Little Sissy Pham, being born with Dad Pham's colouring has a naturally dark pink tint to her lips. I, having Mum's pale complexion, have a naturally blue/green tint to my lips.

In my current incarnation as a suburban Brisbanian, lipstick is too much for the office (I'm not in fashion land anymore, Toto) but plain lip balms leave me looking like the living dead. The solution came from Nivea's lip care range - the new tinted 'Fruity Shine' in pink guava is the perfect shade of pink for my complexion. I've had red tinted lip balms before - possibly Bonne Belle? Can't quite recall which brand because it was years ago and the bright red tint looks clownish on me while great on most of my caucasian friends.
If you've read my guide to lip balms you'd know Maybelline Baby Lips is my all time fave lip balm. While they do have a tinted Baby Lips range, it's sadly not available in Australia that I can find. The only reason I know they exist is because they popped up in this make up video Aussie model Bridget Malcolm posted on Facebook. Thanks social media for letting me know about yet another thing I can't get, use, eat, drink, wear or sit on in Australia.

For those of you who won't care, I finally found a favicon to match my blog.  Favicons is short for favourites icon in the way blog is short for weblog but only a dork would know that so, quickly, erase this sentence from memory after reading. Erased? What? Nothing.

A favicon is the little website icon you see in browser's address bar or before the page title in the tab or, like duh, in the favourites menu or bar. I used to have a scrabble letter P for Phamly because, in case I hadn't told you twice already, which I did - Little Sissy Pham and I are obsessed with Zynga word games.

Anyhoo, the scrabble P never did sit right with my blog because scrabble implies intelligence, being well-read, having a great vocab and impeccable spelling. None of which is relevant to this blog whatsoever! So last Sunday, while I was waiting for my 'retro-future' silver nails to dry (quoting editor colleagues who are intelligent, well-read, have great vocabs and impeccable spelling here), I trawled the internet for a favicon that suits my blog.
I, of course, found it in the nerd department. The favicon I've picked is 'logic not' - you know, from when your math/science teacher explained/bored you with the AND, OR, NOR, snore partially overlapped circles? These circles are venn diagrams - you may want to erase this dork fact sentence from your memory too.

This favicon makes perfect sense for my blog because my blog makes no sense at all. I write about whatever I feel like. I make big bold statements that are completely untrue or partially made up on the spot, but because I use my grown up voice people 'respact mah authoritay' when really I have just made them that little bit dumber for having believed me. Even the 'dynamic' navigation I've picked for this blog is illogical and pretty much designed to discourage people from actually reading any of my posts. Logic not favicon = perfect!

Drinking tea in Brisbane is like a test of your faith and commitment to the hot beverage. In other parts of the world, namely Melbourne, where the weather attempts to refrigerate an entire city, it makes more sense to drink cups of tea to warm yourself. Brisbane is more like running out of ice cubes then licking frost in the freezer kind of weather.

Apart from tights and jeggings, another way to avoid wearing real pants is leggings. Not all people can get away with wearing leggings as pants and I pray I’m not one of them because I do wear leggings as pants quite often (under long tops that cover me bum, please note – I never had a svelte 16 year old girl’s body even when I was 16).

My favourite pair of leggings is the Shiny Night Fever in Black by American Apparel, which I’ve had for about two years now. They’re nicely broken in but have not gone thin and flimsy like other brands I’ve tried. Unfortunately, the above pic is the only photo I can find that shows me wearing them and I am waaaay too sleepy to put them on for a photo session. I should actually be in bed already - it's a school night! I wear them ALL the time so it's strange there aren't more photos. I guess I should appreciate the fact my friends would rather take photos of my face than my butt, even though there's not much different between the two. Growing up, my siblings didn't call me BFCBC (big fat chubby bum cheek) face for nothing!
The Night Fever Black colourway sells out all the time and I'm not sure if it's in production anymore but I also have and recommend the Boa Black. If you're into coloured tights there is a plethora of different styles, colourways and fabrics to choose from so give yourselves a good hour to trawl their website if you want to go to there.

And remember, kids, say no to pants!