Turn your back for one minute…

Over the weekend, I went to Melbourne and the mister went to visit his family who live a fair way along the Sturt Highway. He took the children and I took the plane.
Through a string of circumstances which we do not need to detail here (but just how good is it being the one totally not at fault) the fridge – the large white humming thing which, when on, keeps food fresh, but, when off for any extended length of time acts as a watermelon fermenter – was off from Friday evening until the mister’s return late yesterday afternoon.

Without fresh food of any description the day – the first of the school holidays – has been difficult. To say the least. Also, we are staying indoors, as advised by the people on the radio, because there has been an explosion at a paint factory. It’s a fair way away from us (a 10-15 minute drive at least), but, you know, better to be safe than sorry.

I have been teaching my eldest boy to knit. I will tell you more about that another day. Right now, I am too weak from hunger to type any more.

g*mbl* responsibly

At this time of the year, I do like footy tipping competitions. About half way through the season, they become a bit less compelling as I realise I can’t win. And after that, there’s too much talk by the people who take it all too serious. The ones who coulda, shoulda, woulda spend too much time making excuses and the ones who sit at the top, but could tumble any week get all defensive about but she* didn’t lodge them with the tipmeister until 5.05 on Friday and the rules clearly state…

So, since the fun bit is in picking the teams, I will – for as long as I have interest in it – be posting my picks for the week. Feel free to join in. Or not.

Week Three

Bombers

Power

Bulldogs

Dockers

Swans

Cats

Kangaroos

I will not pick between Tigers and Magpies as they are both completely untrustworthy in winning/losing terms and I will not enter into it.

*Because for some reason, having a woman at the top of the footy tipping table is still seen as something to marvel at, and too often, it seems to make the person-who-isn’t-quite-winningget a bit defensive, despite the fact that it is pretty obvious after all these years that women can win footy tipping competitions. And anyway, it is very silly indeed to take footy tipping serious, whoever is winning. Because, after all, actually playing footy and picking winners are two completely different things. Footy tipping competitions are level playing fields. You don’t actually need to know anything to pick winners – you could even spend years in New Zealand and still return to great success in a footy tipping competition.

Oh. I’m still me. And there’s washing to be done.

Even as I enter my wisdom years, I am still disappointed to wake the morning after a haircut and find that my life has not, after all, been transformed. Although, with the wisdom that I have so far accumulated, I am relieved that none of the haircuts circa 1990 did transform me into Winona Ryder*. I reckon I’d’ve been – and continue to be – happy as Annie Lennox but.

*Updated to add: I would, however, make some Faustian pact involving trading off the rest of my life to spend just three years with my name tattooed on Johnny Depp’s arm. Yes, I really would.

a question

On a scale of 1 to 10, how wrong is it to take the odd egg from the literal buckets of small but high quality eggs – including ahem lindt! numbering perhaps sixty in each bucket, there being two buckets one for each child – the neighbours gave your children after you returned from your Easter break.

1 means not at all evil.

10 means pretty evil, but obviously not approaching the level of leaving your children unattended in the car while you go into the casino to play blackjack.

Easter Sunday morning

I am not a morning person. Except, on the morning I lifted my head to see my two boys both sitting up in their beds looking through the uncurtained windows of our now bat-proof, but unlikely-to-ever-be-powered shack, windows through which I had, the night before and for several February nights, watched the waning moon rise, windows through which my boys were silently watching the sun come up over the almost-deserted bay where we have, and will, walk and fish and play and whose extremeties we will surely one day find…for that moment, while the soft round cheeks of the round-cheeked one glowed fading shades of gold, and the brown-eyed one held a pillow in his lap, for that particular moment, I was.

Those were the days

…used to be Wednesdays were as simple as double French in the mornings, triple English in the afternoons and just a bit of maths in the middle to be endured.

I’m sure it seemed much more complicated at the time. And I remember curling tongs having a significance beyond just ‘did I remember to turn them off’. But from here even the eternal embarrassment of being the fifteen year old ThirdCat doesn’t seem so bad.

Still, it’s nearly Easter. Eggs to be eaten, fish to be caught, beaches to be walked. It looks like the sun will be out, and at night, the glorious moon.

A happy tale of woe

The printer, once turned on, makes a soft, but annoying, whining sound and nothing more. No lights, no whirrs, no beeps. I have unplugged it, shifted it, hit it with varying degrees of gentleness, but all to no avail. It’s stuffed.

This limits my choice of readings to those pieces of which I have a clean and readable copy. This simplifies things to the point that I don’t have to think, and I do often like it when life works that way. When the universe says here is how it is. Hopefully, the Easter shopping will be dealt with similarly. Unlikely, I know, so I have started the shopping list.

Of course when I take the printer to the shop, they will say it’s cheaper to buy another one although I am very happy with this one, and at this stage, can’t really justify buying myself another one which also does photocopying.

In the meantime, I have been flicking through a photo album with a man who sighs and says ‘more forgetteries than memories these days’. And then he laughs and so do I, because we both like our own jokes.

Eleventh hour

I am doing a reading tomorrow night, and now I must concede that it will have to be something I’ve already read before.

I have had plenty of notice, and I really wanted to write something new, but what with one thing and another I’ve barely had a chance to clean my teeth, let alone write the piece I wanted to write.

I only know that it is about the rhythm the dishwasher stole.

Someone, give that woman the microphone. Now.

From today’s Age:

‘Nothing on air produced in Australia measures up to the standard it should be for preschoolers,” she (Dr Patricia Edgar) said.

” Play School, and this is not a popular view, I know, but it is one I deeply believe, is out of date, nostalgic chalk-and-talk television held in place by parents’ nostalgia for what they saw themselves.”

Dr Edgar also targeted programs that she said used the marketing of soft toys and fashion to pay for their production.

” Bananas in Pyjamas is merely a marketing vehicle and Hi-5 is no more a preschool program than Britney Spears with a backing group.” ‘

And as for film…don’t get me started.

PS Tho I do love Play School. Don’t get me wrong

Sinking feeling

Adelaide had changed the sheets, dusted the dresser and as the Sunday shadows grew long, she was enjoying the sound – the tinkling, crinkling, most satisfying sound – of the things in the vacuum tube. Until she realised that last was a worry doll. A Guatemalan one.

‘Oh dear,’ she thought. ‘That can’t be good.’ And in anticipation, she opened a bottle of wine. Giving it time to breathe.