we're all making our own sense of things
Because of reasons*, it has taken me all day (on and off) to get the pinky beecroft and the white russians album from emusic onto my mp3 player.
And now that I have Senor Beecroft crooning Call Me through my headphones, can I just say that it has been worth Every. Single. Second.
Call me.
Do I ever wish.
….
*the most obvious of which being that I am a 39 year old woman and not a nine year old boy
You would think that in a day which has included such phrases as ‘please don’t put that money in my ear’ and ‘no, I don’t want a turn with your glow-in-the-dark snot’ and ‘yes, I do so have superpowers I just don’t feel like flying right now’, ‘cornice trough’ might have found its turn.
But no.
Lessons from my day:
if you find a 4 hour, unticketed, close-to-where-you-need-to-go park that seems too good to be true, it probably is;
no matter how long you stand in front of non-automatic doors they will not open themselves;
people who have been doing the same boring job for at least twenty years are bored and do not feel like helping you;
cornice trough is not easily dropped into a conversation;
you know when I was bleating about always coming second – yeah, well, coming second is better than not being placed – I tell you, these last two months I have had more rejections than I can count, though given current circumstances they don’t worry me all that much;
banks will think nothing of dishonouring your cheques even if you have been a customer of theirs for over twenty years, and they will charge you $30 for the privilege;
you can be too polite.
Also, today my grandfather is 92. I gave him Haigh’s ginger chocolates (dark and light – 100 grams of each) which leads me to another lesson – no matter how much you tell yourself you won’t be buying a chocolate frog for yourself, you will.
I love the internet so much that if I were less monogomous, I would marry it. Look what I found.
I used to stand in the shadows of my bedroom and look across the hall to watch Dallas. My mum never said a word about it, but a lot of the time, the loungeroom door would gently close just to the point where I could no longer see the televison. Then, me and my friends discovered that you could hear our local television station on the radio. I have no idea how or why this happened, but it did, and I would huddle under my quilt with my radio tuned, lusting after Patrick Duffy’s chest and Victoria Principal’s thighs.
My mum was a very intelligent woman, but it’s her we can thank for my love of trashy television.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more West Wing to watch. I’m up to the place of the significant death (I’m sure you all already know who and how, but just in case you don’t, I’ll be coy) so I’m going to skip a few episodes.
Partly because of this:
and partly because of this:
but mostly on account of the daily sight of this
and this
and this
I am increasingly desperate for our bedroom (the master bedroom as it would be labelled if we were to have an open inspection) to be painted. I’m sure you can see the problem. And if you can’t, well, I really don’t mean to be rude, but your taste is in your arse, because that paintjob is shit.
Four years we’ve been living here and facing, as I have, the sight of that faux-Michelangelo, I think we should all be thankful that I have retained my good humour to the extent to that I have.
For a range of reasons, many of which will be obvious to the casual observer of our lives, and some of which will not, neither the mister nor I have got around to painting the room ourselves. Nor are we likely to in the foreseeable future. This is not laziness as other unfinished jobs or the unreplaced blown lightglobes are. We both like painting and have done a great deal of it in our lives. Let’s just label it the vicissitudes of life, shall we?
Anyhoo, I have made a momentous decision, and decided that we shall pay someone to do the painting for us. I have obtained a quote of around $1,600.
I know that I should obtain another quote or two, but between you and me and the internet, I couldn’t be fucked. It’s not obtaining the quote that’s the problem so much as the follow up phone calls and the ducking and weaving out of the way of the person or persons whose quote one has rejected.
So, I thought I’d ask you. Does $1,600 sound like a reasonable figure? It’s a largish room, and the quote includes the paint as well as the time to do some minor repairs to the ceiling. It is about $500 more than I was anticipating (and I thought I was being generous), but then, I still think that you can buy a coffee for $1.50 and a bush biscuit for five cents.
I know you already know this, but the new 90210 is a bit shit.
I was particularly excited about the promised Linda Gray moment, who, I think we can agree, is about the best thing to come out of the eighties. It was a disappointingly fleeting moment though. Available on youtube here, but not worth embedding, even if you do know how to embed which, we all know, I now do.
Still, I think I’ll watch 90210 until it’s cancelled. Which should mean I only waste another one or two hours of my life.
Anyway, what are you doing reading this rubbish? I’m sure you’ve got dishes to finish.
So, in answer to your question, yes, I would highly recommend the new David Sedaris collection. These last few hours, it has been making me laugh. This is no mean feat, given that I am tired beyond belief and sad beyond comprehension.
When I had a mum and a dad we never used to celebrate the days of mothers and fathers, dismissing them as commercial crap. But of course I used to ring my mum and my dad to let them know why I wasn’t ringing them or sending them a card or cooking them a meal of roasted meat.
Do you know what I think is really lovely? The messages on my phone last night and today from my friends and from the friends of my mum and dad to let them know they’re thinking of me. If they had asked me about it earlier in the week, I would have said (and believed), ‘father’s day? I’ll be fine, hadn’t even realised it was on’. Friends do rock, do they not?
Sometimes, I find poetry in the washing, sometimes love. I even found a scorpion once. But today, as I walked from the newly-filled washing line, through the kitchen, down the hall and into the room with the pile of things which smell nice, but need to be put away, all I could think was: ‘the washing never fucking ends’.
You know, I do wish I had a little something to go with this cup of tea.
So, yeah, trip to the day spa cancelled on account of one (very) sick boy and, therefore, high probability of second sick boy (and won’t that be fun, what with the drama queen tendencies and all), so cancelled while there’s still twenty four hours notice.
This being August, we shouldn’t be surprised.
On the upside, it’s been very lovely late-winter weather. The kind of days where, if you get your washing out early enough, you can bring it back inside dry and smelling of the sun.