Yomping into 2018

We've been IN for 8 days, and it's Sunday so that's washing the sheets day. I have no idea why I still wash sheets on a Sunday when I have 6 other perfectly good days to wash 'em but I suppose the habits of a lifetime are difficult to break. Just because I have found this washing routine I guess I can say we are getting settled. Yippee.

And it seems at the same time a blink of the eye and a very long long 8 days indeed.

Moved house, unpacked, had Christmas, found a bit of the Brisbane River for Dog to swim in, though I admit that it makes me sufficiently nervous that I leave that adventure to Stevie, cos of the City Cats whipping by and the currents and rocks and once this week there was a huge Cruise ship doing a Uee. Yep there is plenty of traffic here and it the old canal at the Big House look pretty tame in comparison.

Stevie heard from the newbies there about a plumbing issue, but apart from that we reckon they must be settling in well - I do hope that the fishie girls are doing OK.

We have trotted out to Oxford Street a couple of times. It is THE eating place in these parts. It's doggie friendly so once we left Dog at home and once we took her with us. I think she is struggling to come to terms with her new home, so we are spoiling her badly, and yesterday we found a Turkish place for lunch down the road in Hawthorne which was just yummo fab.

The local Woolworths has easy parking and we've had to pop in there a few time for groceries, and we are so spoiled for choice when it comes to morning coffee that we are yet to settle on our favourite. Laurence you are still our favourite.

Stevie has checked out 2 golf clubs and has almost settled on the prettiest even though it's a few kilometres further away.

I found a lovely doctor called Jane and that really about made my week. Yippee.

We still have no internet or pay TV because Telstra is rubbish. Now they are talking about the 8 or 9th of January, but as they have been lying to me since the 6th of December, not the same lie you understand, a different one for each of the literally dozens of people I have spoken to, I rather doubt that too. Ho Hum.

We are trying to grow some grass here at the wee house, cos the agents made a big deal of the new turf in the inventory, but I think we are flogging a dead horse. The soil is builder shit contaminated and very boggie, and I rather doubt anything is gonna grow, but watering is a pleasant way to spend time in the afternoon so fingers crossed.

It's been hotter than at the Goldie so the air con has been getting a work out, and I think the Pom is Stevie is a bit shocked, cos after all it took him a decade to get used to the heat at the beach.

We have no plans for NY eve. I reckon I will be lucky if I get to drive to the nearby hill to watch the crackers for the kids at 8.30pm, but that's the plan.

Happy New Year to all who stop by here, and I hope that 2018 is exciting and fulfilling and unexpected and entertaining for us all.

GP shopping

It's no secret that I see loads of doctors, some of 'em I like enormously and some I just rub along with cos they deliver news that is needed and their bed side manner is of little consequence, but my favourite by far is my GP Dr Jane, and sadly we have left her behind at the Goldie and I just can't see her making a house call even though she is perhaps one of the kindest smartest people you could ever hope to meet. But I had reconciled that I would continue to pop down to see her for scheduled shit and as I am almost never 'normal' sick, I reckoned I could go a long time without finding a GP up in the big smoke.

But today I woke with a bloody great blister on my arm, which only became apparent to me when I scratched the shit out of it and ooze happened. Yeh that was a bit shitty.

You see, after 10 years I had become used to the sand flies and bugs at the Big House and so we lived without screens and would just give a bit of an Aerogard spritzer before we took dog out in the twilight cos that's when the buggers were looking for blood.

But I haven't yet managed to get a working relationship with the Brisvegas buggers and they have bitten me from arsehole to breakfast, and being of little self control, I have been itching up a storm. There is something very satisfying about scratching an itch isn't there? Surely it can't just be me? So I scratch til I am raw - ah - and then it really fucking hurts. Bugger.

I had a bite on my foot that I have managed to scratch at during my sleep that has produced a big ugly sore which needs a bandaid if I choose to wear any shoes or thongs at all, so it's taking a long time to sort out, and now I have this walloper my arm. Bugger indeed.

So I reckon I need to find a doctor who will prescribe something stronger that Sting Goes or those other useless tubes of shit that the chemist sells just as sort of stocking stuffers.

So I had a look see at doctors around here, and the first one was staffed by 3 geriatric men. Now this couldn't be further from what I was looking for. Sure these fellas might be bloody marvellous, but what I wanted was a woman - younger than me, so if I do get to like her, she probably won't be dead while I am still kicking around, and that's important cos I don't want to spend precious time breaking in an another one if I can help it.

Then I happened on to a centre with a female doctor called, wait for it - JANE. I am hoping this is a good sign. And I am hoping she will send me off with more than advice and a smile. Yeh I will have to go into all the CML shit and she more than likely will never have heard of it and I will have to outline all the side effects of the meds which may or may not limit what she would like to do, but all this should be a good interview for the job. If she can get through this shit without me getting up and doing a runner then she might be a keeper.

Fingers crossed.

It's been quite the December.

Well what a really lovely christmas it has been. We've been in the new house for 8 or 9 days now. All the boxes that are gonna be opened have been opened and stuff stacked away in too few cupboards and hidieholes, and the garage looks like something that would make an entrepreneur proud, a week out from starting her online junk yard shop. The rest of the place looks like we live here cos of course some our stuff is being used to sit on and cook with - bad grammar - give me a break I am still looking for my mind and December - where the fuck did it go?

Our first night away from the Big House was blessedly QUIET. Accounts from neighbours tell us that TMR really out did themselves with noise and mess for chrissie. How very fucking kind of the fuckers. In any case I admit that I am very very very pleased to be away from it all. NO they haven't finished yet despite the holiday push - yeh we all know that was just a push of cash deep into pockets, and the schedule for work in the New Year is not a picnic either.

But we are here and the noise is NOT. Yippee.

It's a bijou stop gap between selling the Big House and buying a Brisvegas place. And the search for a new permanent home is gonna become a full time occupation cos we need to be quick and the area we want to be in is pretty small. Phill and Kirstie from Location Location Location would not be best pleased with our growing list of MUST HAVES. Ho Hum - Compromise is neither Stevie's or my middle name.

So on our way to groceries or coffee or just a general mooch about, we are looking looking looking.

And it's a bit like jury selection in all those American legal eagle movies. We both can say NO without explanation and then there are the maybes and then there are the ones we sit outside of and just dial the agent on the sign.

Choosing a house is like that. Love it, hate it, or maybe just maybe, and we are lucky cos mostly we are on the same page, and it's a job we enjoy, at moment anyway when it is all still new and exciting and there is no hint of desperation, perhaps if we are still looking in a month or so it will be less wonderful and more find it fucking NOW.

Dog has been all a bit discombobulated. Even though we have taken her on lots of holidays, she seems to know that this is different. The packing of all those boxes worried her and shoving all our stuff into a truck and unloading it here has left her in an almost constant state of anxiety. Her belly has been upset, and not just because of all the chrissie treaties and she's been sleeping like she's dosed up on Valium. She is acclimatising and is very fond of swimming in the Brisbane river, just a block away.

Stevie is busy looking for a new Golf Club and I am tending the grass which to be honest was in pretty shit condition, even though the agents found it necessary to tell me it was my responsibility to return the house all lush and green gardened. I am happy hosing and watching and hoping it will come good.

And we are all being CAREFUL not  leave a mark. This renting malarky is not easy. I wonder if I will ever get the oven clean and I wonder about the man made stone tops in the kitchen - is it ok to pop a hot something on 'em? The house is still on the market. The builders have been unable to sell it, perhaps because they are being more than a tiny bit greedy, so it suited them to rent it out for 6 months, but that's our lot. 6 months to be in and out. Yeh when I think about moving again, the foetal position is calling.

And the kids are close by. My Girl reckons it's 19 minutes on the Tom Tom, but I reckon it's closer than that, so pop ins are happening, and I love that. Yippee!

Our feet are almost up and our arses will be in chairs unless we want to be out and about, cos there is no full time job of cleaning the house and no noise to escape. Bloody blissful.

It might not be how I would ever want to spend December again, but I am pleased.

Yippee to 2018

Moving House. - I wish I was magic.

Moving fucking house at Christmas in the heat when you quite simply have way way too much shit is just not much fun.I thought after packing way way too much shit into way way too many fucking boxes for 2 weeks might have been the worst of it, but I could not have been more wrong.

Nah the very fucking worst by far and away is trying to establish a house with some sense of the aesthetic, and with stuff stacked into places that should make life a bit easy. You know what I have discovered is that even though in very many ways Stevie and I  see eye to eye, when it comes to furniture placement and establishing places we are chalk and cheese. He wants the garage sorted and organised and I want to be able to sit in the rather bijou lounge room and not be offended by boxes and shit.

The whole house is predictably smaller. That was what we were after, but there does seem to be a bit of a chasm between what we thought we wanted and this place, but once we have sweated shit into place, I reckon it might be OK. And whilst I can't bear the chaos of shit everywhere, I am aware that this place is just a stop gap - temporary, so there must be a fine line drawn between perfect and what you can cope with. Stevie and my lines are misaligned and so it's been a little more than a little fraught.

The neighbours must be wondering who the fuck has moved in.

Monday afternoon saw the arrival of the Telstra bloke - read laziest fucker I have ever met.

Him: I can't do anything here today so I am going.
Me: I don't think so.
Him: The house is not ready and the Council needs to dig a trench.
Me: That's not what I have been told. Please do what you can.
Him: I can't do anything ( so he set up a bit of safety barrier, had a furtle, left, came back and left for good. - No phone, internet, pay TV. )
Me: Ok I get it. You want an paid early mark. On your way lazybones.

The removalists and my lovely girl were using all manner of potty language as he packed up his little bit of shit and as he laughed at us all. Welcome to the neighbourhood! Me? I was ready to have a little cry cos the ordinary tireds had slapped me about the head and every part of my body was an ache, one ache connected to next one, and unusually I was not quick to blame the meds cos I figured there was a pretty good chance I had been going hard at muscles that hadn't seen the light of day for maybe a decade. I just simply didn't have it in me to argue any more.

So still no lines installed. 3 hours on the phone in many conversations prior to Monday and an hour in the actual shop on Wednesday and still nothing. I am left wondering what fucking century it is.

Anyway a wee Vodaphone dongal thing might see us out of trouble or into it, who really knows.

And here we are 4 days from chrissie and I have not yet trawled the shops and have no food in the house and even if there was food I am not certain I would know where the shit is required to cook it or dish it up. I reckon it could well be a strange strange old day, and if was just us I don't reckon I would care too much but even though my Darling Boy must be cracking 6 foot tall, he's only 12 and so can reasonably expect a bit of fuss and a rousing HO HO HO.

I did thankfully find some knickers in a poorly labelled box at 6 am this morning and so now I can stop washing out one of the 2 pairs I could find, in the shower. Really that was too close to camping.

I am wondering if I have it in me to pop to the shops tonight at 10 ish in the hope that normal people have gone home and I can have a look see about. Time will tell.

How much shit is in the back of your cupboards?

WE just quite simply have too much shit. It has taken me 2 weeks to pack everything we own into boxes. Well almost everything. Not the paintings and not the Everest pile of shit I have thrown out, but a huge pile of stuff. And it has been a lookie lookie look see into the depths of drawers and cupboards at stuff that never sees the light of day, and naturally there is a very good reason for that - I am not much fond of that plate or bowl or picture or whatever other bit of tat it might be, but you know, 'It's too good to throw out, someone might use it, I'll take it to Life Line' - yeh right, who ever gets to that in their normal every day living?

The whole house had become like the junk drawer in the kitchen that we all have, filled with stuff we thought might come in handy at some point, but it never did.

So as we are downsizing from the bloody enormous, Big House into a regular sized house, I am gonna try a New Year's resolution for Christmas. No more buying shit without throwing out some other shit first.

And that might be achievable now cos I am not the shopper I was in my 30s and 40s. Trawling the shops doesn't bring the joy of times gone. However I will admit that it has been replaced by the internet lottery and in some ways this is worse because I almost never send shit back so it is shoved in the back of somewhere until I get over the guilt and chuck it away.

We still have more shit than enough.

 

Fingers crossed that it all fits in the trucks on Monday, and that none of the shit I actually like, gets broken in transit. Maybe I should have labelled the shit boxes with, 'If you are gonna drop something, Drop this one' . 

That would have been clever. Next time!

PC Plod is branching out.

Who among us is a mechanical engineer, or a motor enthusiast, or maybe even just someone with a keen interest in things that make a noise? Well  not me that's for sure. I don't know my arse from my elbow when it comes to anything motor driven. And I admit to being part of the throw away generation. You know, if it doesn't work throw it out and get a new one. Oh sure I'll give a broken thing a bit of a slap about and maybe turn it off and on a couple of times and maybe then drop it from a small height, but if it is still not working then it hits the wheelie bin, cos well it's bloody broken.

And I am not a tinkerer. I have never pulled a motor apart and tried to shove it back together and have never saved a thing with a broken motor so I could use it for parts. I mean how would that work anyway? A broken down sewing machine is resurrected by fitting pieces from a blender? I guess it's possible I just don't know.

And my life is not the poorer for this info void. So long as the things I want to work, actually do work then I am happy, and if there is a new toy I fancy having a go at, I'll teach myself how it works, like techno theatre stuff and sometimes a bit of film editing or maybe how to operate a new sewing machine. But I put my hand up and admit that I do not curl up on the couch and dive into an encyclopedia about motors or watch You Tube videos about how to fix ANYTHING. Sure You Tube is a fun way to spend a while and I have watched 'how to' demos but only Nigella cooking easy meringues cos well she's NIGELLA after all.

Horses for courses though. I know not many people want to spend time splashing paint onto a canvas, and playing with children leaves a lot of people cold, and most people just don't get my tapping tapping away here, so I get it that people do weird shit in their spare time.

But my weird got truly weird last night.

There are not many among us who would figure driving their wee car into position as 'Stop Right There Thank You Very Much' - are you singing? would be a good way to spend the evening. Let me paint a picture for you. My car is a wee Mazda 2. I love it cos it's small and easy to park, front in, back in, it's easy peasey. It's short and low to the ground like me and not the least bit intimidating. Suffice to say that road rage wars would never be won by a Mazda 2 driver, unless they had left it at home and were out and about in their truck. So it's not the sort of thing generally first thought of as a weapon.

But last night me and my trusty Mazda put ourselves in harms way in a protest about the fucking noise.

As if the usual noise - I can't believe I am calling it USUAL, cos let's face it there's fuck all USUAL about 100 DB puncturing the evening calm, wasn't enough, last night they thought it a good idea to rev the shit out of 3 industrial machines right outside our house.

Now if this was those fools on Top Gear or whatever it's called now BBC have stopped funding it, were lining up for a race in these machines then some revving would be in order, maybe even a few minutes of it so that the film crews could get enough footage from enough angles, but then the race would begin and the chaos would ensue and probably  one or more of the machines would end up, up-side-down in a ditch, cos it's the doing not the idling that most impresses the TV punters. And people in general I find. People prefer to see some outcome rather than just hear the noise, unless you are sitting behind the enormous amps in the cheap seats at a heavy metal concert, then the noise is all you've got.

I get it that sometimes machines need to warmed up. I get it. But how warmed up do you reckon a machine would be after 90 minutes? If footballers warmed up at top speed for 90 minutes there'd be no game. If I warmed my Mazda up for 90 minutes before taking to the road, I'd very soon run out of petrol, and if I warmed myself up for 90 minutes before going hard at something like the packing of boxes, then every single thing we own would still be in the cupboards, cos I'd be fucked and no packing at all would be done.

A 90 minute warm up? No amount of suspension of disbelief is helping me here.

But do you know what's heartening? PC PLOD, the TMR paid body guard with a gun, well when he arrived with his possie of machine drivers, who were not as you might have thought overseeing the revving of their steers,  he did so with the full weight of all his years of extra- curricular attention to the mechanations of large rolling machines. Isn't it good to know that not only are the TMR Body guards in the QPS uniforms, willing and able to issue meaningless 'Move On Orders' and organise towing of cars and threaten the arrest of law abiding people, but they also know ALL ABOUT INDUSTRIAL MACHINES. Yep Plod knew that machines had to be warmed up, and that 90 minutes was the accepted norm. Yep he knew this because he was an expert, or else some other dick on the road further away told him to say that, and he, being the gormless fuck that he is, just parroted it off.

Now if an expert wants to let me know that in fact 90 minutes is the standard time it takes for these machines to reach peak performance then  I will apologise to Plod. But it all seems unlikely especially if you consider the ambient temperature last night must have been in the high 20s - no snow possible for, oh maybe a century.

These 3 machines were all idling away, spewing out fumes and noise for an hour and half - not in an industrial zone, but in a quiet residential street. And they are all lined up again for tonight!

And if just once in more than a fucking YEAR someone from the work zone actually admitted that it was pretty extreme and unnecessary and fucking apologise, it would go a long way to soothing the irrits.

'They have work to do'
'They will be finished soon'
'There is no other way'

One more night, and as TMR pays someone to keep track of my posts I can only imagine that they will really ramp up the noise tonight as a final farewell to 'That bitch from number 11'. I truly hope that Karma bites 'em all on the arse and that at the very least they suffer permanent deafness and that no-one will ever have sex with 'em again cos they stink of diesel and the sweat produced from counting all the ill gotten cash from the public purse.

And did I mention that they opened the road yesterday? Not fucking finished by a long way, but by all means do open it. An 8 month job overruns by 5 months, and it's still not finished. Only on a government job! They must all be so fucking proud!

Christmas with a difference.

This is the full chrissie deco plan for this year.

Yep all the lovely bits that I carefully pack up each January and shove in 3 big boxes are taped up and ready for moving so about a week ago my girl presented me with these two drunken Santa salt and pepper shakers so there'd be some christmas cheer, where ever we land, even if it is wee. And on our way to coffee one morning this week or maybe last week, seriously time has been passing in a blurr, like a many many double voddies blurr, we saw these other lovely fellas at the florist and Stevie just plopped 'em on the table as a cool surprise and everyone who walked by commented on the resemblances. I am hoping that I am meant to be the red headed one although the greying beardy one is possibly the way I am feeling.

Christmas is just percolating away in the back of my head cos the front part is filled with cartons and chucking shit out. Stevie said yesterday he was gonna start calling me his little Portia. Well I heard Portia but he meant Porche and he then explained the link - Porche Boxster cos I always seem to have my head wedged in a carton. Anyway, I am hoping that by some sort of osmosis that unfortunately I do not believe in, by the 25th, I will have somehow managed to pull together a grand feast and at least some silly bits and pieces to wrap and then go the big rip. The obscene pile of brightly wrapped stuff will not be under the nonexistent tree this year. I reckon some IOUs might find their way into the custody of the gnomes and the drunken jolly Santas.

And that's OK. Cos what I am most excited about is that the kids 'll be able to pop over in the afternoon, without the stress of a drive which my girl does not enjoy, AT ALL. We can hit the pool and eat stuff and be silly and then they can trundle off home again. And everyone can sleep in their own bed and then if the kids want to pop back the next day and the next day, it's only a few minute's drive and if I want to drop something off to them or take dog for a visit to play with my Darling Boy, then it's not a whole day out and 'have I got enough petrol?' and 'I hope there is no smash on the M1 today!' 

Yeh I am getting very excited about 'going home'.

It's been 17 years since I lived in Brisvegas  and that's quite a long time, and I have been very happy laying my hat in different places for all these years, cos at heart I reckon I am truly a gypsy.

I was gonna say I love moving, but that's just bullshit. NOONE loves moving, it's a royal pain in the arse, but I do love exploring new houses and places and seeking out the best coffee and the freshest veg and the friendliest restaurants with the tastiest food, and the galleries and the theatres and, well stuff.

And all this exploring will still be necessary, even though I am going home, cos the place has sure changed. It's daunting and maybe a little tiring thinking about it all, but mostly it's exciting.

Roll on next week when the packing is finished and the boxes are delivered and our backs are to the fucking road works and we are tripping down a new street looking for a place that makes good coffee and of course is happy for Dog to sit at our feet. Yep Roll on indeed.

Moving - where's Betwitched when you need her?

Well shit, it's been more than 2 weeks of silence on here but not in my head, and of course no ceasing of the government abuse out on the fucking road - nah that's really ramped up since the government has decreed an opening grand reveal date and of course the union turds want their chrissie bonus.

The house sale went unconditional and the last 2 weeks seem to have trundled along in slow motion. Travel along the M1 to Brisvegas to view houses has been patience testing, but not as galling as being vetted by children in charge of some very dodgy houses to rent. We did get desperate after the stinky dirty one and the houseos one and the one with literally 100 steps straight up to the front door, Whew, I nearly gave that one a miss half way up. Landlords lied and changed their little minds and agents big noted themselves but we found a place, not quite where we want to be but needs must and all that.  Of course it is not without it's problems because the owners really want to sell it, not rent it, so it turned out that there is no power and no gas and not water meter and no wiring for TV or internet, and they wanted little codicils cos of dog which we just sucked up and signed. It has been a fight, and we are not in there yet, so fingers are firmly crossed.

It's difficult to find a house to rent when you have no references and no job and no interest in providing bank statements, or signing your life away and agreeing to remodel the whole house just because we have a dog, even though the mess left by the family with 3 children just simply beggared my belief.

And then there are the hours - not an exaggeration, I will never get back trying to get quotes from removalists. 

The first guy, with a long pole firmly wedged up his arse, told me that it was the most expensive time to move and we'd be lucky to have him. He was here for 2 hours and twice he launched into insurance sales speak, even though I bluntly - yeh it was as blunt as you might imagine it, told him not to bother. His quote came back and was more than 14 thousand dollars not including insurance! FUCK!

Next bloke was much more friendly and pragmatic and when he sent his quote it was about 5 grand plus a goodly sum to pack shit up.

And finally a fella I have known for a very long time quoted over the phone and I agreed and then later he popped out and had a look and we are all happily on the same page.

So I have been packing and chucking shit out. I am a good and ruthless purger. And I am a quick packer, perhaps because it is not a job I enjoy and so just want to get it over and done with as fast as I can.

I have 4 more days to shove anything we want to keep into a box and even though by far and away most of it is done, it's my experience that it's the last bits that are the most troublesome, so wish me luck.

Of course so close to chrissie means that something has had to give and sadly that is parcels and christmas foodie cheer.

I am truly hoping that the big smoke comes with 24 hour a day shopping so I might pop out at 2 am and perhaps avoid the crowds, cos that's just not something I fancy.

My eyes are drooping down lower than my boobs and my mind is so utterly frazzled that now would be an excellent time to try and sell me a bridge or a comfy looking place to sleep for about a year.

Yep that's what I fancy for chrissie, a full night of uninterrupted sleep. Ahhhh Bliss. Come on Santa do your best huh?

Mish mash

Oh my poor old head is doing somersaults. So much going on.

Harry and Meghan are engaged. Bloody pleasant news. Not surprising but smile making all the same. I hope that the wedding is a wonderful mix of royal and Hollywood. Reckon I might watch this one and hope for some shenanigans.

Don stinking roger Burke has been shamed AGAIN. I remember when this story broke the first time. Yeh it was a quiet little complaint from women and girls with not enough clout or kudos to do any harm, in an era when men were excused for being turds and bastards and power hunger shitfaces, because, oh you know they are just fellas. It is no wonder that women just sucked it up cos they weren't listened to then and are only just listened to now. I saw a saying on social media this week that went something like, 'I think people who say they don't understand why women didn't / don't come forward when these things happen, are lucky.' Yeh lucky and stupid. Bastard! 70 year old abusive turd.

The state election has been and gone and the result is still unknown, but it seems the Reds 'll get back in. Shit. That means no-one will monitor the lies and power of the Transport and Main Roads (TMR) fuckheads and they will be able to continue to spend public money in any inefficient manner they choose and continue to completely disregard the health and well being of the folk paying their wages.

It's interesting how personal politics can be. We had a bloke doing some work here on Saturday. He's been here lots of times. Oh OK I'll admit it, he comes and cleans my oven cos I am just too fucking lazy to do it myself. Hate me - don't hate - doesn't matter, cos my oven is returned to showroom quality and no amount of my elbow grease is ever gonna achieve that. Anyway while he worked, we chattered away about the election. He is a swinger. He voted for the Reds this time. Mostly cos of the connection he saw between the blues and the development on the Spit. He didn't care about the development so much as the idea that the council was gonna give away public land. He reckoned he would be much more OK with the development if the land was SOLD and then the public could benefit by way of a new police helicopter or the like, and he had a point. Giving away public land is just not on. So his vote was personal, although after he heard about the TMR shit fight outside our house he did say that had he not pre voted he would have voted for the Blues, based on my story. Who knows?

A mate of mine was hoping to be pre selected for the Reds and make his run but all that turned to shit too, party politics got in the way, and so now he will wait his turn I guess, and that's a shame, cos even though he's a Red and I am a Blue, I'd vote for him in a heart beat cos he would honestly represent me regardless of colour, and surely that's how it's meant to be. And my girl voted Blue possibly for the first time in her life cos she is so pissed about what's going on outside here. The fucker responsible for the mess here got re-elected. Bugger.

And we might have sold the house without it even being on the market. There has been a daily last minute request for an extension on the date to 'go unconditional' It was supposed to be last Friday, and then it was meant to be yesterday and now maybe today. It's all a bit nerve racking cos we will need to find somewhere else to live and then pack up and move and the end game is before chrissie, so there's not much time. I think today might see an end to our patience. Watch this space.

And the painters are done and dusted. The outside looks bloody marvellous and the inside looks like everyone else's place, and we are tripping over paintings and furniture and shit, and not putting anything back in case the house really is sold, so it's a bit like living in toppsy-turvy world.

And I am off today to have a look at a couple of houses to rent in Brisvegas. I am being unusually optimistic.

Off I go. Fingers crossed.

And now my computer is shitting itself and won't let me pop in a photos. Ho Hum.

Dog Killer

Dibley Dog is fine, but my friend's dog is no longer with us because it seems someone doesn't like the mating noises of crows.

A friend of mine has or rather had a gorgeous girlie dog. She was the joy of the family, spoiled and smiled at and with. She, the dog is /was such an integral part of the family, 3 generations of humans who all loved and cuddled and walked and fed and looked out for and after her. Yep she is/was a ridiculously well loved pet.

Until last week that is.

Last week, her dad took her out into the park and she had a bit of a chomp on something as dogs do, and very soon after they got home Dog became unwell and then was sick and taken to the vet but there was so much damage to her internal organs, poisoned, that there was no hope and so Dog died and her human family are heartbroken.

Her mum is a crying mess and her dad is scouting the neighbourhood looking for clues. He has put up fliers around the park warning other folk to be careful with their dogs. Now he's gathering details, and what is dribbling in from people on all sides of the park is disturbing and angry making and Mum who is a calm easy-going woman is now ready to smack someone with a shovel.

So here's a run down on the info gathered to date.

The park has many trees - not unusual for a park here.
In the trees live a murder of crows which may or may not be going hard at it cos it's the mating season.
One of the houses that front the park is owned by a person who rents out a room on AIR B&B.
Most of the reviews for this room are favourable except for 2 which whinged about the crows noise early in the morning. BUGGER!
Neighbours have seen the house owner feeding the crows, even though other neighbours have been party to whinge sessions with her about the crows.
Crows have been dropping dead all over the park.
There are photos of the house owner scooping up dead crows and shoving 'em in HER OWN RUBBISH BIN, on rubbish day, even though there are plenty of bins in the park.
A neighbour has scooped up a dead crow and has taken it for testing which is firstly expensive and secondly pretty slow.
The police have been informed and given all this info.

All this is circumstantial of course.

A second dog has died.

I wonder if there would be some action from the police if a kid had picked up the poison bates or the dead birds.

I know the police have plenty to do, especially in Schoolie madness, so what's the solution here?

A bit of vigilante  justice doesn't seem out of place to me.

What do you reckon?

Marriage Secrets

So Queen Bessie and ol' Phillip have been hitched for 70 years. Longer than I have been alive. And that is amazing to me!

I reckon the secret might be that they live in a 100 room palace and that limits the amount of time they have to be looking at each other's face and presumably they have their own bathroom so there is no time spent smelling the other's shit - yeh I reckon even royalty shit is a bit on the nose. But they do seem to happily rock along together. They seem to share private jokes and there is a certain whiff of leaning into each other that implies to me at least that they are happy and that's important.

I reckon that there are belly laughs a plenty after Bess has gently roused on 'Ol Phil for yet another of his famous UN PC gaffs. Yeh I reckon Bess is a belly laugher. She looks like she might, not often but certainly sometimes laugh til she wees herself ever so slightly.

And I reckon that they'd have their own private signals to let each other know when they are bored out of their gourd, or a sign to say, 'For fuck sake don't put that ridiculous dead skunk hat on' and another to ask for a walloping sherry top up. Yeh after 70 years, I rather doubt they need to actually speak out loud too much to make themselves understood.

I met a fella this week who over coffee regaled Stevie and me with the woes of his marriage. And they weren't even woes really, he was just matter of fact telling us stuff. Maybe he was just filling in the silences? I don't know what prompted his sharing.

'The Wife' sleeps somewhere else. She's a Born Again Christian. They never eat dinner together. He only ever watches sport on the tellie and she watches 'all the reality TV shit', - not on the same tellie obviously. Occasionally they go for lunch together, if there is someone else eating too.

Well this doesn't sound blissful to me. If I spent my days trying to avoid being in the same room as Stevie, then I reckon it would be time to piss off or at least pitch a tent and learn how to cook over an open fire and  shit in a bucket in the front yard. I don't reckon my belly could stand the stress of turning a corner and running into the person you are doing your level best to avoid.

And I suppose it's possible that he and she have played this avoid each other game long enough to be very good at it, but that's not a skill I want to cultivate.

Can you imagine the early days of this arrangement, when irritations are major and raw and hurting and I imagine shouting is reverberating around the rooms. One person heads for a shower and the other, knowing the cleansing habits of their lifetime partner, knows just when to 'accidentally' use the hot water in the kitchen so that cold water shrinks bollocks or maybe for variation, the cold water is stolen so that third degree burns means a trip to the hospital. I mean it all seems like that movie, 'War of the Roses' and I reckon it could get brutal. The mind games alone would be exhausting.

But perhaps these 2 people have played it all to the end game and have popped out the other side with a tacit understanding of how best to rub along without killing each other and maybe even providing for the possibility of occasional joy, even it is with other people.

That's not for me, but horses and course and all that I guess.

But compared to this, Bessie and 'Ol Phil have got it all sorted huh?

I have long thought 'Ol Phil was a bit nuts, but maybe he has just become so worn in to the royal life, like an old pair of cords, with the saggy smooth fabriced bum and stretched out knees and the holes in the pockets, that he can now get away with anything at all.

And the photos of 'em both this week are rather lovely. Good on 'em.

Oh and if you thought this was gonna be one of those advice posts, well think again. I sure as shit am not an expert.

Integrity

The Painters are still in, but now they are inside, so Stevie's stress is really ramped up. He does not like people in his house, Sometimes I think he only just manages to put up with me in his house. But these fellas wore out their welcome sometime last week and now he's projecting his hatred of change onto Dog. 'She really hates change doesn't she?' But we are all sucking it and playing as nice as frayed tempers allow.

It was all agreed on a gentlemen's handshake. The boss sent a quote, we agreed it and I don't think any cash has passed between parties yet, but coffees have been drunk and silly stories exchange and there is no worry about being diddled and Stevie is pretty sure he'll get the job he wants cos he's on 'em like shit on an army blanket.

So we are all just cracking on, and hopefully by the end of the week the walls will be painted, no-one will have a flat nose and we'll have the house back to ourselves, blessed be. Ahh.

But yesterday our Sunday was disturbed, our loose schedule of doing fuck all turned upside down. Because a couple of real estate folk wandered on in - ok I knew they were coming because they had harangued me most of Saturday. The house is NOT on the market but if you give an agent a sniff, even only one nostril's worth, then there is just no getting rid of 'em.

So they trooped in with a bunch of people and then as they were all leaving a young fella said loudly that he was gonna make an offer? Really? He went off to their office and then I did what I do almost every Sunday afternoon and that is sank into the bath. I didn't expect anyone to be coming back with paper work to buy The Bug House after a 15 minute inspection on a Sunday afternoon. I know people have all sorts of cash stuffed into their pillow cases and frozen in ice cream tubs in the second freezer, along with some whole fishes and an assortment of body parts from thumbs to scalps, but I just didn't think any of this sounded likely.

The money on offer was too little by a good long way and the story about the contract and the finance and the time frame wandered around like a drunk fella at the end of a long night at the B and S Ball.

I was in the bath and felt bad that I had left Stevie to it, nah not really the bubbles were lovely and the book exciting,  and he is more patient with the bullshit, until he isn't then he really isn't patient at all. Finally he flung 'em outta the place and set to cooking his roast dinner - all part of the Sunday ritual.

Predictably there was a call back offering more money but still not enough and the conditions had wavered about like the arms of a faulty windmill in a cyclone. He was watching Saturday's rugby game and wanted rid of 'em so was Pommie rude not Aussie girl rude, but they did not call back.

What did give me the shits, was that they told us to stop the painting, that it was no longer necessary, except that no contracts were agreed and in any case, WE HAD AN AGREEMENT WITH THE PAINTERS.. How easy was it for the agents just to fuck over the painters?

I mean what did they really expect? That we'd cut the painters loose and stiff 'em for their cash all on the off chance that we believed that they were being truthful?

I don't know how anyone who would suggest that could ever be trusted.

Falling down the Rabbit Hole

I'm Late, I'm Late for a very important date.... Hardly it's NOVEMBER!

It's the middle of November. Nah I am not sure of the date cos it doesn't matter, but after more than a week of playing find a room where there is no painter perving in the window I needed to get out yesterday. Oh and I know the painters are too busy cutting in and slopping paint about to care who is inside, but I feel like a fish in a bowl. Heaven help me next week when they set to changing the inside of the place. Breathe Breathe breathe.....

So I popped out to the shops yesterday.

Shopping is something I used to treat as an Olympic event. I could go all day and it didn't matter how obscure an item I was looking for, I could always find it, and them some other stuff too of course. No point going home until you literally could not carry another shopping bag.

But now I can hardly be bothered.

Well for a start, I need to pop on a bra, ugh! and make sure that my hair looks OK coming and going and sometimes even pop on a bit of lippy. Yeh that's the effort I make to go out in public these days, bra, spit flick the hair and some lippy, my lovely Nanna would be appalled. Going to town when I was a kid was all about the good shoes and pretty dress and it was planned like a military operation. Now so long as I have got my thongs on I am good to go.

So off I went. I wanted to get a couple of those pool chair lounge things that seem to blow up by whipping them around your head. Yeh they are probably not as efficient as I think, but I figured they'd be fun around the pool over Christmas with the kids. Ahh and so down the Rabbit hole I went.

The middle of November and already with the decos up and the santa shirts and the ho ho fucking ho.

I am not baahumbug about chrissie. I like it. But it's in fucking December.

So after a bit of crowd pushing, I settled in for a snack over looking Santa's grotto. It was about 11am I guess and the big red coated fella wasn't there yet, must have been caught up in all that sleigh traffic in the sky, but there was a line up out the door of people wanting to get their santa photos done, I guess so they could have 'em up on the fridge curling away until what June next year? Or maybe this is a new way of getting kids to behave. Stick that Santa pic on the fridge and every time it looks like there is gonna be a melt down, the parent just points and says ''Naughty kids get coal'

The kids were all getting grumpy and I could understand that. The kids who are employed to take the money and make the kids smile were all too busy to give a shit about the kids waiting. There was fluffing to be done and phones to be checked after all.

And then I saw the jolly old soul dash out of a Myer and head for the lift. I waited for the Ho Ho Hos. NOTHING! Some elf must have been holding the lift for him so he was on a mission. And then I watched his GRAND ARRIVAL. Well it was more a push and a shove through the crowd of kids. There was still no HO HO HOs. He got to his seat and the first person in line dumped their baby on his lap and so the flashing of the credit cards began.

And had it been the 24th of December and this poor Santa had been peed on and spewed on and sneezed on and roused at by parents of kids who won't smile cos they are literally scared out of their wits, well I could understand him being a bit shirty. But this is only the beginning. I can only imagine what he's gonna be like in a month and half. Shit I am glad not to have to go anywhere near him.

Online shopping is looking better and better. Bare feet, messy hair and boobs swinging in the breeze.... bloody marvellous.

Goodbye to Colour

I don't reckon anyone coming to the house would be surprised to hear that I like a bit of colour. And blessed be so does Stevie.

When we were building this Big House, cos all the rooms are big and the ceilings are really tall we decided to be brave about the colour. We wanted to have just exactly what we wanted to have, and why not, it's unlikely we are ever gonna build anothery. So I set about designing the colours for the painters. They were thankfully very patient fellas, cos I decided just to make things tricky to use 3 different shades of the one colour for most of the walls, the brightest walls getting the darkest paint and the darkest rooms like the bathroom the lightest. It took a long time to decide and draw up the schedule and then they dutifully set about it.

And then I set my mind to adding some splashes. This is what really excited both of us. Stevie is colour blind, so I got paint pots and painted squares until he saw one that he liked. You see noone can tell what colour he thinks something is so we just kept changing things up until he found one he liked. They are pretty bold, and I like it.

This whole painting places all white just doesn't sit well with me. I reckon it lacks courage and imagination and effort.

However, as we have tried to sell the Big House for a month or 2 every year for the passed 3 years and we might try again next year, we got an Estate agent in for some advice. We told her to tell us why she thinks the house has not sold before and to be blunt.

Well all I can say is be careful what you wish for.

'You've got the colours all wrong, and people hate polished concrete floors and the carpet in the bedrooms is hideous.' and she nearly passed out in horror as she looked in the family bathroom, 'That is just sooo very wrong.' and she clung to the door jambs to steady herself.

Well fuck it. She also went on about how useless the kitchen was and how the pool needs to be 'softened'.

Fuck it indeed.

Well as luck would have it we have the painters in doing the outside of the place. I have probably gone wrong again and have picked dark grey and white. Oh well.

But after some consideration and that old definition of insanity - doing the same thing time and again and expecting a different outcome, we have bitten the bullet and decided to paint out all of my favourite coloured walls inside. Not to white, cos I just couldn't stand that but to the palest of the Ice colours on the rest of the walls. Goodbye teal, goodbye sea blue, goodbye Bell's purple, yep goodbye all the lovely. Oh well. Let's wait and see how it looks - just like every other house here on the Goldie I reckon but maybe that's what it takes to sell a house here. Oh well.

She did like my garden so I guess I did something right. Oh well. But the painters are going a bit hard at that too cos, yeh I know, they've got to get to the walls.

I'd have liked to have disappeared and come back when it's all done. It's a bit like cooking up a storm and leaving all the shit about. I really fancy just coming in for a feed, except that she critisised the kitchen too so it'd be a shocker to know that any food preparation is possible in there.

Oh well. Change is hard for us old gals.

 

Mussels

Mussels, mmmm you either love or hate 'em.

Or else you could be like me and just need to be in the mood for 'em.

Very often at cafes and restaurants they are served with a tomato and chili broth and that doesn't suit me, but when we see 'em with a cream and white wine sauce, if the mood is grabbing me, then we dig in.

I love to eat 'em with lashings of fresh crunchy bread dipped, ok sometimes double dipped into the broth. Stevie doesn't mind. I like knowing that if they are closed they are probably gonna make you sick so don't force 'em open cos there will be repercussions - all those men in Hollywood take note! So they are sort of foolproof.

I found a recipe and have set to occasionally cooking up a pot full.

It always causes some stress, cos I don't remember the recipe, except that it's pretty easy and very quick, so rather than look it up again and save the rising bile, I just make it up anew every time.

But essentially it's a very good knob of butter in a big pot and saute off some leeks or onions, finely chopped, then add a clove of crushed garlic and a generous splodge of nice white wine. Let that simmer til most of the smell of the wine is gone - just a minute or 2, add some chicken stock some cream and the de-bearded mussels. Pop the lid on and occasionally pick up the whole pot and give it a good swish around until the shells open - only a few minutes, and as the shells open they release all their sea water yumminess so no extra salt is needed. As soon as the shells open sit and eat.

Over cooked mussels are just plain nasty.

We had a hankering for my mussels last night.

Finding the bloody things took an age popping into different shops, but finally we sourced some, even though I admit to being a little suspicious about 'em, cos instead of fresh closed up jobbies I had always bought in the passed, these were vacuum packed pasteurised fellas. Now pasteurised means heated doesn't it? And I knew that it didn't take much heat to cook these guys, so I was concerned about dishing up overcooked lumps in a fine broth, but we pushed on, well actually we settled on 'em cos we were over trawling around looking for the usual stuff.

The broth was a winner and the dipping of the bread was yummo, but as I expected these 'elf and safety' pasteurised green lip mussels were rubbery hard lumps that were so unpalatable that even Dog rejected 'em.

Bugger!

Weddings

No this is not what I am wearing. Breathe a sigh of relief NOW

Yippee. I am off to the wedding of a fabulous young woman this weekend. She is one of my girl's nearest and dearest and they have gotten up to a great deal of mischief and adventure in their years together.

She's had a baby and was in a big confuddle about what to do with him after the ceremony cos everyone had been told 'no babies or children', the expense was all getting out of hand. Anyway she figured she needed to lead by example but she wanted her little fella there for some of the pics. I have spent time wondering why she needed to worry so, even on her big day, but she has been on the receiving end of all sorts of shit about who's been invited and who hasn't and why kids can't come, and is she gonna organise babysitting - what a fucking cheek that one was huh? It should be just about what the couple want and everyone else can go suck a big one, but it is not turning out to be that way.

In any case, now I am the lucky one. Cos I get to go and watch this lovely woman who has grown up almost before my eyes, and her fella, get married and then after the photos, I am being entrusted with their precious boy, so the big people can go about having a damn fine knees up.

The little fella and I are gonna keep each other company and maybe share a pizza - he's only 6 months old so I guess he won't be tucking in too hard, and then I imagine he will have a bit of a sleep. But if he doesn't sleep and even if he throws a big old wobbly cos he's got the shits up with being dragged away from the festivities it'll be ok, cos I am happy to give him a cuddle and go for a bush walkabout and keep him as entertained as a 6 month old can be.

My Girl is pleased that she is all frocked up and organised right down to her accessories and has her 'Plus 1' promising to be on time.

2 years ago when we were back in the UK, I was so pleased to be invited to another lovely woman's big day, and big it certainly was. Poms do this early afternoon start, and then food and then kick on until the wee hours, exactly like 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'. They have staying power those Poms. People get mullered and dance, and I am only guessing now, but mischief is probably made under the tables close to knock off time. 

And lots of guests stayed overnight at the reception place and it just made me feel old feeling like shit the next morning at breakfast, looking at all these fresh faced things tucking into their bacon and eggs. Of course they could well have still been a little maggoty and I had jumped forward to hungover. Anyway spending a couple of days celebrating the nuptials was fab, and in the modern day when there are fewer fewer people bothering with the rings, I reckon that a celebration is in order.

Wish me luck on babysitting duty cos it has been a bloody long time since I held a little one, or changed a nappy, but I am betting that it's like riding a bike. Finger's crossed.

To Fire or Be Fired, That's my question.

There are just never enough holes in the road especially when you can bill the tax payer for the use of a machine and a shift full of union workers. Let's have another hole whether the project needs one or not. More than a year in and the initial due date is just a distant memory, but still holes are being dug. Maybe they really are digging for diamonds. 

I have been fired twice in my life. Once when I was maybe 15, working at Coles or Woolies, I don't remember which. I was a checkout chick, and this was back in the day when every price had to be crunched into the register and all the groceries had to be pulled towards you by dragging a timber frame thing along the counter. Yeh I am that fucking old. So one day a clever clogs loaded her shit in so that I ended up with meat blood on my fingers and rather than transfer all that onto her new tea towels, I just asked her how much they were. Well bugger me, she lied, I believed her, and she got away with it, but my manager was not happy so I was sent to the deli where I spent time with my arms up the elbows in coleslaw until I was sacked for not coming in one Easter, when I just assumed they would have been closed. Fair enough, they had given me a chance and I buggered up again so offskie it was.

The other time I was at a Tyre shop. It was fucking filthy with a sawdust outhouse for a dunny. It flooded every time a dog peed too hard and the forecourt where the fellas fitted the tyres was a dirt track. So my job was to answer the phone, deal with customers, take the money, check inventories, and clean the place up. I set to it with all the energy of a 20 year old recent graduate who couldn't get a job teaching cos she wasn't a single man. Soon enough the office and the serving area was sparkling clean and I learned a lot about tyres. To the day, 6 months later, I was sacked, no reason given. It turned out that they had taken money from the government in some sort of employment scam and after 6 months the government money dried up so I was offskie again. Yeh this doesn't sound honest to me either, but whenever there is government money involved, I don't reckon corruption is far away. Ho hum.

I sucked it up after the deli sacking and I admit that I was pissed about the tyre place, but in comparison to sacking someone, being sacked is a skate.

I was responsible for a fella failing in his last year's teaching prac session. He was an older guy, who didn't take kindly to female instruction from a younger person. He was doing teaching cos he wanted the money and the holidays and those are good reasons, but for the money and the holidays there is an expectation that you work hard, you know your shit, you arrive on time and you comply with the usual procedural paper work even if it's banal and a little pointless. This guy knew NOTHING and refused to learn anything, he arrived late and never showed his lesson preparation. He had no interest in the kids or any ability to engage them. He refused to attempt any of the strategies I suggested. He just sat there with these kids and was an oxygen thief in the room. He'd done this for 3 years - no problem!

He was with me for 6 weeks. It was my job to teach him how to teach, but he just never showed any willing. In the end I failed him and that meant he failed the whole course. He was not happy. The Uni was not happy. I was not happy, but do you know who would have been happy? All the kids he never got to teach, they'd have been happy.

It was a nightmare failing him. I was scrutinised and made to justify myself. It was a very awkward time and I guess the awkward shitty time might have been what sometimes prompted conceded passes to be awarded rather failures. It would have been a lot easier. Not right but easier.

A lovely woman was falling apart in front of her classes. I was her faculty head. The Principal decided that I needed to do the dirty and I was told to record and gather data and notes of her failings in order for the school to sack her.

I sat in on her classes and noted that she was often late, sometimes didn't arrive at all, she taught the year 9s the year 8 course and the year 8s completed the same unit again and again on a loop. I tried to help. She and I were friends. But it all came to nought because it became very clear very quickly that she was failing the kids.

She was sacked. And soon after we heard that she had early onset galloping (I made that up - it's not a medical term) Alzheimer's. She was not well. We should have helped her more, but we did the right thing getting her out of the classroom. It was a terrible time, cos I felt guilty cos I knew her and liked her, but the kids deserved better.

I think it's very hard to sack someone today, what with 3 written warnings and the unions carrying on. And I reckon that's why there are so few jobs and so many contracts. It has to be at least in part because at the end of the contract, the worker can legally be waved goodbye.

But sackings are necessary. If a job is not being done well shouldn't someone be held responsible? Unless of course the fuck up is a part of the government quagmire, in which case it is all about sliding blame and hiding responsibility and camouflaging corruption and playing dumb. Accountability requires integrity and neither of those attributes seem to be part of government job criteria or tenders. If the government used the money they spent covering their arses and making good government funded fuck ups, we would all be far better off.

Halloween

It's no secret that I go up to Brisvegas very week. The kids and I share a meal and more often than not a sing-along and a bit of a dance and oftentimes a tickle fest and roars of laughter and many cuddles,  and then we head off to WAAA ( better known as Taekwondo) where my girl and I revel in just how bloody marvellous the little big fella is becoming.

But this week it's Halloween and that's a big deal at their place but not at mine, so I suggested that I come up a different night and their little faces fell. Sadness wafted around 'em, and I thought all those bloody spirits I don't believe in were coming to whisk me away to the bah-humbug, anti-Halloween land.

When my girl was wee, there was no Ghost night. It just wasn't a 'thing'. And it simply boggles my mind that in 30 years Halloween has not just been taken up by the crazy witchy witchies from Macbeth, but by all and sundry. It is quite the community event in their area. Families dress up and trawl the streets in search of the best wrapped lollies and there is the odd garden decorated for oooohs and ahhhs.

This year the kids have decided to decorate and try to scare the shit of people. SO they have costumes and it is all quite the bit of urban theatre, what with Zig working out the best vantage point for his entrance and Bell working on becoming a moving-at-the-minute statue. Well bugger me if they didn't have a role planned for me. Oh sure there will be the obligatory cauldron of lollies and overseeing that has been my job in years gone by. Yep I am a qualified Trick or Treat decider. But this year the cauldron will be a booby trap, cos it's my job to sit on the balcony above it and launch water balloons at the kids who dare to put their hands out.

Yep, it's my job to wet people after Zig and Belly have done their best to make 'em pee their pants.

Never one to settle for ordinary, Zig suggested we put red food colouring in the water so it looked like blood. I am glad I decided to be a party to all the crazyness so I could at least say an emphatic NO to that. All these fine and dandy costumes and carefully applied makeup, being destroyed by the errant landing of water bombs is one thing, but being stained red, might not have left the parents well pleased.

So I have got my arsenal of water bombs ready to go and a few monster eyes for treaties and I will sit on the balcony dress in black and cackle like a witch as I lob the bombs. Yeh It's making me smile now that I have got my head around it.

And I am not expecting trouble cos let's face it, most of the costumes are home made and it'll be nearly 30 degrees so a bit of a shower will be a pleasant relief after all the up hill and down dale yomping.

I am taking my bubble machine and nothing can be bad if there are enough bubbles.

Sophie and Stu

This may seem like a strange image, but all will become clear. Well maybe.

I have stuck my hand up and admitted to being a TV tragic before. And I might have let slip in passing that my guilty secret of late has been watching recorded episodes of Sophie Monk in the Bachelorette. Well as soon as Stu stepped off that helicopter as intruder number 3 or 4 or whatever, I was pretty sure he was gonna be 'the one'.

The thing is though, I didn't really care. I wasn't invested in the reality or otherwise of it all but I did spend some time questioning the motives of all of the players. In any case choose Sophie did and Stu was her pick.

I have seen only one interview with them both since the big announcement and seriously I just found it all more than a little cringe worthy. I mean people just spat out questions about wealth and sex and stuff that wouldn't be asked of even close friends and even thought I know they put their hands up for all this scrutiny, for reasons that just seriously boggle my mind, I still reckon they must be entitled to at least a modicum of 'That's not your business'.

And so today, not 2 days after their big announcement, some body language expert has supposedly had a look see at some photos and has declared the romance dead and buried.

No I didn't read the article and so didn't see the photos. But I will say that some days in hazy flattering light with a smeary lens, I can look like someone I recognise from younger years and other days, seriously the photos look like someone who by all rights should be long long in the ground. The point is, photos lie. People lie. Reality TV is full of lies and gossipy shit on social media or in shit rag publications are just full of lies.

Whether Sophie and Stu have been holed up in hotel rooms breaking headboards and chewing up room service sangas or whether they have not seen each other since or if they have seen each other but only over a bit of arvo-tea with some Earl Grey and a scone, well I just don't give a shit.

It was on the tellie and now it's done.

Now I have turned my attention to a certain auction. Again I don't care WHO wins, I am curious about just how many people can be crammed into a room or be kept on hold who have 3 million dollars to spend on a house where the neighbours' conversations will be audible enough to make 'em part of your extended family. 15 million for 5 extremely cosy houses. That seems unlikely to me, but then it is REALITY TELLIE.

I love New Stuff

The friendly folk across the canal are in the middle of their house extension. Well I say in the middle of cos even though it doesn't look much yet, there has been quite a lot of work in preparation and then of course there has been a bit of the wet stuff which has held 'em up.

But today was cause for great excitement cos all the frames, well I don't know if ALL of the frames are up but a good lot of 'em I reckon, went up and all of a sudden the house is taking shape. The photo doesn't give a real sense of scale, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that the ceilings are gonna be wonderfully tall, unless the builders are all midgets cos I have been measuring in relation to their heights.

The bloke there has been working up a sweat along with his other tradies. He must be so thrilled with the progress.

I remember when we were building here, it seemed that nothing was happening and then all of a sudden there was the first floor and then nothing and then there was the second floor. When my grandie boy was very small he'd stay over once a week and he and I'd go to the beach and learn to swim and then head to the big House for morning tea with Pa and go for a bit of an explore. We'd climb the ladder and romp around on the first floor, stepping out his bedroom and looking at the view (me) and chatting to the builders (him)

People reckon that building your own house is about as stressful as it gets, and I can see that, cos there are so many choices and decisions. Stevie kept a firm grasp on all the details, he knew dimensions of stuff to the millimetre and the composition of every little thing. Bloody clever fella.

I swanned in and cleaned a little although to be fair Stevie had a firm grasp on the broom, but I could see if something was a little crooked or not quite centered, and was girlie enough for the fellas to fix stuff without too many grumbles, well except for the roofing bloke who was the cause of the temporary deafness of a whole siteful of blokes cos my language was so buckety in a call to him, that the fellas didn't know where to look. This was quite early on so maybe they were pleasant to me after that, cos they didn't want to be on the receiving end of my ire.

I undercoated and painted the manageable walls and rooms while the fellas popped off for a well earned beer and sometimes I would just sit around and enjoy the space. I had no trouble imagining the finished product well before the walls were all lined.

Anyway I have just been feeling a little nostalgic watching the building go up across the way.

Oh I have been busy with some painting.

Yep it's been a good day.

Who are you gonna call?

Imagine a quiet night in on a Sunday. Your hubby has cooked a delicious roast dinner and the table is set and the wine is poured and then all hell breaks loose. What would you do?

Yes it's be ok to turn off all the lights and have a little curtain twitch to see if Armageddon is marching down the road.

Yes it'd be OK to close all your windows and doors and turn you own music up a notch, sit your arse down and tuck in.

Yes it's be OK to assume that the noise will stop soon.

Yes it would be OK to call the police especially as the noise is coming from a party house a street and a canal away and they have been at this before and the only thing that stops 'em is the flash of the police car lights.

It's no secret that I have been having an on going battle with the Broadbeach Police. I have been arrested twice and threatened and bullied and it will shock no-one that my details are registered with them, so you can just imagine what their reaction might be if I ring 'em to get some help. Yeh not good. This is not a wild guess or mad paranoia, cos I have tried once before and their reaction was such that I vowed not to ever bother again. I reckon my number is recognised and when I called 'em they just put me through to someone who offered no help whatsoever. Me calling the Broadbeach Police is as futile as whitewashing your fence in a hailstorm.

So Stevie called 'em last night.

Useless. They put him through to the 131444 number. Police Link. This might be something new.

If you ring 131444 you are answered by a lovely calm woman called Geraldine or Beatrice or something. She's sitting in some call centre in Brisbane. I don't think she is a copper, but she might be. She takes your details and asks if you are in any danger. If the answer is NO then I guess your request for help goes to the bottom of the pile, or is used to wipe a bum hole or maybe it's folded and folded and folded to be used to stabilse uneven table legs. Who knows what really happens.

What doesn't happen is a cop car being dispatched to shut down the noise.

So I rang 000 and they got the shits up cos it wasn't an emergency so guess what, they put me through to 131444. She took all my details and guess what happened next? NOTHING.

So 2 hours passed and Stevie rang again and I rang again and guess what happened next? NOTHING.

Stevie finally gave Broadbeach Police another go and told 'em he was gonna go around there and tell 'em to shut the fuck up all by himself. And guess what happened next? The fucking police finally did their job. And the the noise stopped.

It's a mystery as to why it takes more than 3 hours to get any police action, unless of course you are standing peacefully protesting about industrial road noise then the coppers arrive literally in minutes, like it's a murder scene or a war zone. I'd include a harmless bit of domestic violence in my list here, except that when I told Gertrude that I had heard 'FUCK OFF YOU CUNT' being yelled out and supposed that things were not wonderfully happy and genial, it made no damn difference to organising a call out at all. Yes I did hear that yelled out, if I was gonna make something up it quite possibly would have been worse.

I think that to get actual police attention in a timely manner you'd have to be a TMR employee ringing about a fat old woman taking photos, or be able to describe in detail the stabbing death in progress of, well maybe of a police officer. An average Joe Mary just wouldn't cut the mustard.

Do you remember hearing as a child that if you need help ask a Police officer? Yeh I know I have also waved that myth around with my Grandie when he was little. Sadly I am pretty sure he doesn't believe a word of it anymore.

Who can you call if you need help.... Ghostbusters?

Gambling

My lovely Dad would bet on just about anything. I have very strong memories of Saturday afternoons pussy footing about cos he had his ear stuck to the old hand held radio cheering on his horses, and of course his mood soared with wins and I suppose plummeted with the inevitable losses but I don't recall seeing that. His wins were legendary.

One afternoon he came home and for full disclosure I should mention that he'd had a few, but as a salve to the old woman, he gave her literally fists full of cash. This was back in the day when folding money in Oz was actually made of paper. Anyway they had a row, possibly about the state he was in and she got the shits up and tore every bill into tiny pieces. I'd have been impressed with her ire if in the next heart beat she was not set up on the dining table with a mountain of money bits and some sticky tape. She worked for hours doing that money jigsaw, and then she'd have pocketed the thousands. He didn't care about the money he cared about the winning.

Well except that the walk up flat that was our Goldie Getaway, which is now being replaced by 3 sky high towers at Broadbeach, was paid for with betting winnings. He seemed to be pretty lucky pretty often.

And as gambling became more run-of-the-mill, his smile widened. He'd buy lotto and keno and 'scratchies' and would be party to footy pools and The Dogs as well as his beloved horses. The horses were always his favourite, not 'The Melbourne Cup' though cos that was 'just for mugs'.

He started working as a bookies helper when he was a boy - always excellent with numbers, and then there was the trooping up to the TAB to place his bets and then with technology came his TAB phone betting account, and if he was alive today, no doubt he'd have every fucking betting App on his smart phone.

And so we get to my point.

Have you seen the ad on the tellie for NED? It's some betting App. I don't know how it works and don't care to know, especially as the ad shows a bunch of low-life scumbags lying and lazying about  a building site while the poor bastard paying them wanders around trying to work out why they are all idle except for their fingers on their phones. The turds play a game of 'There's a hole in my bucket dear Liza dear Liza,' blaming someone else for their lack of a start.

The ad just gives me the screaming irrits.

Under what sort of moral umbrella is it OK to scunge off the boss and lie to them and then gamble away the money you have just pilfered from them? At least we are saved from the usual bullshit slogan 'Gamble Responsibly' at the end of the ad, or maybe it is there but I am just too red in the face shouting at the tellie to hear it.

After a week of watching fuck all progress on the road, all I can think is that TMR workers all have this App and they spend their days taking the piss out of the tax payers who are ponying up their wages.

Europe here we come!

It's taken a while and it's a while til we head off, but we have got our tickets sorted and so at the end of May 2018 we will be jetting off for 6 weeks.

Many many bloody many calls and I have secured 2 return business tickets on points, on the days we wanted to go, with the connections which will see us just about running to make connections in Singapore. Yippee. No shit flights and no crappy connections in places no-one wants to go. Yippee indeed.

I have used points before. We went to Cairns one year and the flights and the car hire and the accommodation were all paid for on points. And I have gone shopping for shit that no-one really wants, but this is the first time I have used 'em all up in one foul hit, so please excuse me for feeling a little, well OK more than a little, nervous about it all.

Booking stuff on points is not for the feint hearted. You have to be considerably more than a little bloody minded and my advice would be to use the phone not the internet, cos the calls are recorded so what one person has promised has to be honoured, unless they have said you can have the plane when you are finished flying and that your pudding will be your body weight in chocolate mouse. But days of travel and confirmations versus waitlisted are honoured or at least that's my experience with SINGAPORE AIRLINES. Sure it has been a month of toing and froing but we are sorted. They are good people. They ring back when they say they are going to and they listen to call recordings to establish what has and hasn't be promised and then they issue the tickets, all confirmed.

So now the exciting part of the planning happens.

We will of course spend a week of so in London so Stevie can drink up with his mates, and we'll be there for the last week too, doing a deja vu, but the middle 4 weeks we are gonna do a train trip to wherever we fancy. AHHH!

I do love a train ride, and some of the journeys we are looking at sound bloody fantastic. One through the Alps, in some old train following slowly behind a goat herder - I might have made that bit up, clinging to the edge of the earth, makes Stevie almost shit his pants just thinking about it, but I reckon it sounds too good to miss, so it's on our list even if he has to spend the day wearing an eye mask and listening to Enya.

We are not drivers. Oh sure we drive. I know the M1 to Brisvegas ridiculously well, but driving is a means to an end. It brings no joy whatsoever, and whoever is driving gets to see bitumen and that's about all, so the train allows both of us to have a good look about even if Stevie will have to occasionally close his eyes.

Coincidentally most of the towns that are on our lists are 4 and a half hours apart - not the Alps train, - that's more like 10 hours. Stevie reckons that's a long time to be clinching his sphincter so we may break it up and stay overnight in a mountain village. Very nice too.

We haven't got a firm plan yet and maybe we wont have one even when we board the Eurostar and head for Germany, cos with smart phones and 4 and a half hours, planning will be possible on the run, well on our bums anyway. So we plan to start in Hamburg or maybe Hannover and end up in Rome and whatever else we see will be a big old bonus.

We lost a train once going from Budapest to Zagreb. It's a bit of a long story but anything other than loosing a whole train and our bags will be a bonus. The beers with the gun totting soldiers at the arse end of buggery in Eastern Europe and later the cackle of the farmers, remarkably assembled with our bags, all standing by the tracks in the middle of nowhere, where the train, full of chickens and truly wash deprived locals made an unscheduled stop, so the farmer strangers could return privileged stuff to strangers, remains an image in my mind, much more vivid than anything I have ever seen or posted on social media.

Yep that's the sort of adventure possible on a train.