Holding pattern

I’ve moved into my garrett. I do love it, though it is very squooshy. The dog likes it.
My computer keeps telling me that my disk is nearly full. Given the events of last time, I know that I shoud be taking this more seriously than I am.

Our boys are allowed two hours of computer time on the weekend (altogether not two hours each). We have been shaped. These last two are directly related. I’m trying to refuse to go to unlimited broadband.

There is much more interesting stuff involving domestic conflict directly related to the Christmas Pageant, the moustache and the iceberg roses and I will tell you more about all that later, but for now, I really must work.

If, unlike me, you would like to offer the mister some support in his fundraising efforts, let me know and I’ll email you the link where you can make online donations. Honestly!

And finally: at the suggestion of fern: anyone want to buy an iceberg rose bush (there’s six in all, I think)?

Feng shui amongst other things

Somewhere not far from where I sleep is an apple. I suspect it is a half-eaten one. Certainly, it is more than just the core.

Do you remember the 70s Green Apple? Shampoo, laundry liquid, the powder other people’s mothers sprinkled on their carpets before they vacuumed.

This isn’t like that. You would not bottle this smell, artificially infuse it into things.

You would not advertise this smell.

I fall asleep vaguely aware that the apple is near. I wish it weren’t there in the way that I wish the week’s newspapers had not sprawled from my bed to the door, that my list of un-read books were stabler than it looks, that my glass of water were fresh.

The apple flavours my dreams which are, nonetheless, of enormous waves which carry without swamping me; of elevators taking me high and low; of children who purr.

I wake. The apple’s smell gives shape to my days. Before I have finished drying myself I am thinking of the lunchbox which didn’t get emptied last night and of the washing which needs to be done (this being Friday).

I would find it. Or at least I would look for the apple and it’s half-exposed core.

I would look, if, when I flicked the switch, it did not – even after two weeks – make me think ‘oh, someone really should fix that’.

nothing you really need to know

So this evening I am going to cook myself a couple of vegetarian sausages (they need to get eaten and there’s nothing else to eat) then sit and watch The Librarians (and it had better be good) and resist the urge to keep going back to the mirror to look at what is quite possibly the best haircut I ever got. And can I just say…the colour…worth every cent (of which there are many to choose).

Mum said littlest boy when I collected him this afternoon your hair is ALL different and you look beautiful. And he had that look on his face – the one he does with the cheeks – so of course when he said can you just read me this before we go I did, even though I really don’t like hanging around at that time of the day because the children seem to be very loud and they kind of cling to you, and it’s not that I don’t like children, it’s just that they don’t seem to be at their best at that time of day.

and again

That question about the bone worked so well – thanks all, it really helped, because it all made sense – I thought I’d try another one. I mean, I’ve been asking it ever since I started blogging but thought I’d make it explicit just for now.

What should I do with my life? And how do you get rid of that vague feeling which descends from time to time – you know, the one that leaves you thinking ‘well, yes, that’s true, and yet…’. Do I just need to wait until I reach 41?

You could have knocked me over with a feather, but not an egg

So I’m at this party, where I haven’t met anyone except my host, but as the conversations turn, I discover that I’m talking to the sister-in-law of the people who used to own the house I now own (Her: so what do you use that upstairs room for? Me: I just got a window installed, and any day we’ll get my desk moved up there and it will be my garret. Her: Oh.), so you could say my night was very Adelaide except that on the way there, someone threw an egg at my car.

circa 1984

Today littlest boy and I have been air guitaring to Born in the USA. I’m so getting the new Bruce Springsteen album. As you can probably tell, I’ve never been on the cutting edge music-wise. I mean, I desperately wanted to be a post-punk Gothic, but I grew up in the country, and it was a bit hard to be post- something that hadn’t even arrived. So for me, it was a pretty straight diet of Eurythmics (I wanted to be Annie Lennox so much that I’m still dye-ing my hair red), INXS, Prince, the Cars, Midnight Oil, Hoodoo Gurus, Pretenders…that type of thing. And Bruce Springsteen.

And every now and then I do like to get them out again. And sometimes I buy the CDs of the cassettes and albums I used to have. It would be cheaper to listen to MMM I suppose (I can’t bear to tell you how much I paid for my Frankie Goes to Hollywood CD), and if I ever write that I’m listening to D*re Straights or J*hn C*ugar Melon-Camp do come and shoot me. If you need to catch a plane the mister will reimburse you.

Perhaps it’s this return to 1984, but I’ve been thinking of asking the house down the street whether I could get a cutting or two of their geraniums. Or maybe it’s the limewash blue and pink I’ve been splashing around the back yard. It’s making me think of terracotta pots and plants with primary-coloured flowers. I said to the mister as I was scrubbing the backyard walls on the weekend ‘I’m Frida Kahlo and you’re Diego Rivera’. He doesn’t want to play. He says ‘I’m happy to steal their colours, but why would we want their lives’. Sometimes you really can tell that I’m humanities and he’s science.

And I bet he would’ve played if I’d said ‘I’ll be Frida and you can be Trotsky’.