Author: ThirdCat

Any minute now, I’ll do something productive with my day

There’s a lot to do in Adelaide at the moment.

You could bore yourself to death listening to the local ABC in the afternoons (I don’t mean to be rude, but honestly, if I have to hear one more time about how there’s no manners like there used to be etc etc etc).

You could enter the community ideas competition to tell people what aorta be doing in Tarndanyangga (dudes, just add more detergent to the fountain more often, that’s always good for a laugh – it’s called the Three River fountain, I’d forgotten that I knew that).

Tonight, you could got to a meeting out at the dogs in Angle Park and learn how to join a greyhound syndicate. If you were so inclined.

You could go down to the Showgrounds and watch the Pig Hall being demolished and collect some memorabilia from Centennial Hall (Beatles floorboard or 1500 watt globe) . You could go to the zoo and look at the place where they’re going to put a new entrance to get you to see the new pandas. You could take a tour of the Treasury tunnels for History Week (actually, I’m supremely annoyed with myself for missing this).

Or, you could sit at your desk, refreshing bloglines and clicking Get Mail.

Theatre with child

The thing I liked about Nyet Nyet’s picnic was that it didn’t compromise. It didn’t lose the perspective (I know I’m supposed to say lens right there) it came from. Well, as far as I could tell it didn’t compromise. From the lens I was using. White, middle-class eyes. Oh look, and I found something to back me up here.

It was pretty scary. I wondered at times whether I really approved of myself letting (making?) my children sit there. Particularly at the one or two points where my eldest boy was petrified. And who wouldn’t be petrified? I mean look at them. Snuff puppets are enormous. Huuuuge. You’re seven years old, you’re in a big dark cavern of a space and the mother bunyip looms over you. That mother bunyip was, without exaggeration, as tall as a not small house. Taller than our house for sure.

And not to mention the towering man with his head caught on fire staggering about the auditorium and roaring a gutteral roar. A lot of the children (including, I think, my youngest) revelled in the frightening, in the way that people do on the Ghost Train or a rollercoaster. Screaming exaggerated screams as the bunyip loomed overheard.

If Dreamtime stories are supposed to act as a cautionary tales, well, in our house it’s worked. I’m pretty confident my kids won’t be getting too close to the campfire that’s for sure.

Through it all, my boys were on high alert. ‘They could come out from any of those corners, Mum’. ‘I didn’t see where that other bunyip went, did you?’ ‘Is there anything else in that lagoon?’

Bunyips? We believe.

But there were fart jokes too. And poo. What makes fart jokes so funny? I just can’t see it.

When it was finished, I let my boy peek behind the curtain to see the lifeless bunyip. Pretty sure it didn’t look lifeless to him. Pretty sure it looked like it had one eye open. Always.

But like I said to him that night when we were snuggled up together in bed (don’t leave until I’m asleep, okay?) if you can handle Ben10* then you’re up for a bit of Dreamtime.

*Watched it on holiday with his Granny – according to the mister, if I’d seen it, I would have been disapproving. Sometimes I wonder: is that my job? To disapprove.

books




books

Originally uploaded by adelaide writer

The dust on my books is depressing me. Their disorder is distressing me. They are horizontal, vertical, diagonal. They are in wobbly piles all over the house. Next to my bed, the fridge, the television, my favourite chair. The new bookcase, delivered only yesterday, is full.

The edges of their classification have long ago blurred. Time was, you could see the fiction, non-fiction line. You knew where to go for Australian history, Russian history, Spanish history. Australian literature. Magical realists. Playscripts. All alphabetical by author. Of course.

It was great.

I am going to order my books by colour. Spine colour. It will be an undemanding order and will require little maintenance. I will not grade the shades of orange or black. I will not concern myself with their size.

The only exception will be the books which I brought home from my grandfather’s. They are sitting together on the top shelves of my new bookshelf. I am their guardian but it would not be right to subsume them into my collection. The subsumption would be an untimely assumption.

What should I do with the piles of Australian Book Reviews? Throw them out? But they’re so interesting to flick through every now and then. Here. Put them in this box and put this box in the studio to be reopened again the next time I try to bring order to my life. What about this patchy collection of New Yorkers and this incomplete set of Overlands? I don’t know. Are you going to read them again? Probably not. Do you like having them? Not when they get dusty and disorderly like this. Then throw them out.

I can’t.

Don’t get me started on the children’s books. They have a lot more books than I realised. Did I buy them all? I must have though I don’t know when. At Christmas time, and birthdays. But there’s more books here than that. They are unwieldy things in all manner of awkward sizes. And so, this afternoon, I have given them three homes. This shelf in the study for the large picture books and those two bottom shelves on that bookcase in their room. The very bottom shelf for smaller picture books, and the one above for the growing collection of novels. There’s four homes if you count the space I made in the cupboard for the board books. Next to the bag with grow suits and singlets.

Time goes.

Here is the box of books I am throwing into the recycling bin and here is the box I am giving away.

When this job is done I will be able to read my books again. It’s going to be great.

Lunchtime in Adelaide

I was going to sit down and watch Days of our Lives while I ate my cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch (not toasted today) when I remembered that I’m boycotting Channel 9 until they do something meaningful about Sam Newman and The Footy Show and it’s frightening attitude to women. So I’ll watch Judge Judy instead.

Effective activism? We has it.

He’s chewed the new grapevine, but not the iceberg roses

So, we’re calling in the ‘we come to you’ dog trainers. It’s all very middle class working families, isn’t it? But as the mister said ‘you’ve got a station wagon and a beagle…if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…’. I guess the only thing I would’ve added was the pink pashmina (currently draped around my shoulders in a most becoming fashion).

Mother’s Day

A long time ago, I wrote this short piece about Mother’s Day. It’s not the world’s best piece of writing, but I still feel that way.

Like a great number of people, I don’t go much for the commercialism of Mother’s Day, but I like that my boys made me cards and put on a music performance for me this morning.

My youngest boy also gave me a box which he made at school. He had already eaten whatever  it was that was supposed to have been inside. It was a coffee cup made of lollies – with a biscuit for the saucer, a marshmallow, and what sounds like it might have been a freckle. I love freckles. Apparently, ‘the box is the best bit’ anyway. Plus ‘it’s still got shredded paper’ inside.

And now, I’m off to sit outside in the sun and drink my coffee and read a book for an hour or so.