Is Honesty the Best Policy?

Yeh this is our corner, last night. Looks like work to me.

Oh yeh we have all been guilty of those little adult white lies when asked 'Does my arse look big in this?' 'How does the dinner that I have taken 3 days to cook taste? Is it OK?' 'Who was that that just let one off?'

Yeh we all muddle the truth from time to time and at least with me if I do then it's to be a bit kind. 'Oh you haven't changed a bit.' 'This dinner is delightful, I would never have thought of making a dog turd and pebble pizza - very creative.'

But I am a bad liar. I have mentioned this before. I am mostly a bad liar cos I have no capacity to remember the lies and so apart from the fact the my face goes beetroot red, the next thing that falls out of my mouth nearly always makes a mockery of the lie, so I am always caught out and that shit feeling is something that I try very hard to avoid.

Perhaps because I am such a shit teller of porkies, I just do not EXPECT folk to lie, nah, I EXPECT people to tell the truth, and I expect truths especially if I am reading shit in a flier with a Government Logo - call me naive, call me stupid, but don't call me at night cos I can't hear the phone cos of the fucking noise going on outside.

Yesterday I got an email from the Department of Transport outlining this week's road work. It arrived at 12.07pm.

I was relieved that there were NO NIGHTWORKS planned for outside our place, Yippee. Yippee Yippee. Sure there was work planned for further up the road but selfishly I realised that that wasn't going to impact here.

In any case my relief was as short lived as a person doused in petrol waving a lighted candle.

At about 7pm, a police car parked up strobing its lights and an avalanche of hostile people and huge machines arrived to create a raucous.

I nearly cried.

It is just not possible that between noon and 7 there can have been such a radical change of plan, not least because, in theory, every time there is a road closure, permits need to be applied for and granted by the police. And planning and staffing and scheduling all those fucking machines and bitumen deliveries just don't happen at a moment's notice.

I went out and asked the police body guard fella, in the employ of Georgiou, if he could turn off the strobe. He said NO. Then he thought he'd give intimidating me a go. He crowded into my space and looked over my shoulder as I took photos, under different circumstances the hot breath down my neck could have been sexy. When I moved, he moved with me, like a fucking shadow. He didn't much like it when I referred to him as a body guard with a gun, and when he lied to me about his role being traffic control and I pointed out that that was not entirely accurate, he was less enamoured again. Yeh I might actually have used the term LIE. Ooops!

The merry-go-round is playing at full speed ahead and ear bleeding volume.

The lies are being rolled out by Georgiou and TMR, and I now just want to be relocated. There is provision for people adversely effected by the noise to be housed elsewhere but I've been told there is no money for that, only by the bottom of the totem pole gal cos that's as far as I've been permitted to climb today. I don't know what sort of footwear would be required to climb that greasy pole any further, but I know I haven't got anything even close to useful enough.

I have been told and my local MP has been told that the update notice is correct for tonight. But they lie more easily than I can shovel in sugar, so I very much expect to be out there again tonight. This is NOT a Ho Hum or an Oh Well. This is a FUUUUUUUCK.

What stops TMR telling the truth?
Why do TMR have to consistently lie and evade and avoid?
Why is it that dealing with TMR is like wading through a shit mire, when as a Public Body, their activities aught to be completely transparent?

This has been going on for 18 months. No wonder I am weeping.

Waiting

Are you a good waiter?

No I don't mean one of those clever clogs with a good memory so there's no need to write down orders and who is able to pour a glass of champers from a full bottle all the while holding the bottom of said bottle with your thumb up it's what-sit. Nope those are definitely clever clever clogs, and if I wore a hat I'd take it off to them.

Nope not for me all that precision. I am always in awe of folk who can so seamlessly line plates up their arms, and the idea that I would ever be able to master the double spoon delivery of slippery shit into the exact right spot on the plate, well that's just the stuff of calm pleasant dreams, cos the reality is, is that I am more the slop it onto the plate kinda gal.

And as for their ability to smile and accept all manner of bullshit from dickhead punters all in a bid to pull the minimum wage, well I honestly do not aspire to that. I fear my tips would be few and probably my longevity in the job, limited, because my temperament or more likely just my temper would  see a stream of blue language and quite possibly a dribble of spit into food.

Nah, I would not be a good waiter, but I am pretty good at waiting.

I can while away hours reading, or surfing the old internet, or day dreaming, or people watching, or playing with dog, or watching the tellie, or sleeping while pretending to watch the tellie.

Today I am waiting - waiting for Stevie to get back from his current junket to NZ to watch a game of rugby and drink with his mates.

He's due in at later this afternoon.

That's quite a long wait, especially since my day started with a flying visit from Dog while it was still dark... no sleep in here... bugger.

I am doling out my little jobs so the whole day is covered.

Pick up all remaining dog shit - done

Wash hair - done

Check departure for first leg of journey - done

Calculate the time difference - oh who the fuck am I kidding, tried and failed.

Plant up last pond plant - done

Clean away all the takeaway containers and hide 'em in the wheelie bin - done

Wash up - done

Make special homecoming dinner: slow cooked lamb and beetroot - next on the list.

And then I have to get dressed - not up you understand, just dressed fit for going out in public, and that means finding a bra and perhaps swiping on some makeup - last thing before getting in the car cos it just wouldn't do to be too early and then fall asleep in front of the tellie - the drool is a makeup killer.

It's a pleasant day waiting for him to get back.

What's your Formula for Happiness

I just got back from doing battle at Bunnings and Woolies.

Sundays in the holidays, the weather's close enough to perfect so what's not to smile about huh?

Well there seemed to be something in those fucking snags today, cos there was not much smiling or joy de vivre going on there. Mums were yelling at kids who, armed with those kid sized trolleys were running a muck and ramming old people's shins - read MY SHINS - little fuckers!, and there was a fella loudly on the phone to some co-worker telling him how to up the anti on Sunday billing and feeling very proud of himself , and there was an overwhelming number of staff all mauling their way to get to ya to help out. If they were Zombies it could have been a terrifying Sci-Fi moment.

The Bunnings at Mermaid Waters must have been newly opened and everyone was trying make a good impression, except that the inescapable truth is that the store is small - well smallish, and they have still tried to shovel in all the usual shit, so the aisles are narrow and the crowded feel that sends me into panic attack mode is easily measurable. And they didn't have my solar lights and I forgot anything else I might have wanted and did a runner, rubbing my shins and hoping not to get way laid by anyone else with a double stroller or a trolley.

It is not my happy place.

So to some shopping for groceries, also not my idea of how to bring a smile to the dial, but needs must and all that. Ho Hum and outta there. Yippee.

Yep it seems today, that the warmth of my car heading home is definitely my happy place.

But I was given to thinking about what equals happiness?

It's easy to list out stuff that DOESN'T make you happy, but a negative list is not the same.

I would prefer to be moving towards a smile than avoiding a grimace.

Dog took a flying leap onto my bed this morning, she snuggled right in next to me and promptly went back to sleep. Yeh I know that it was because it was only 10 degrees and she wanted to share my body heat, but it was still smile making.

I am wearing jeans and sleeves and am not sweating up a storm - how lucky that something as simple as the weather can bring happiness?

There is food aplenty in the fridge and again tonight I do not need to actually COOK anything, even though with Stevie's return tomorrow the kitchen will need to be fired up again, I am gonna make hay while the sun shines and enjoy the empty kitchen syndrome for as long as I can. Ahhh Chicken enchiladas at nanna o'clock. Here's hoping that there's not too much onion....there's the rub with buying store made...you have no real idea what's in it, but what the hell, I'm living on the wild side and I read the small print and saw NO ONION listed, so finger's crossed.

I'm a pretty simple gal when it comes to happiness. A good long snuggle - even if it's from Dog and a chuck in the oven dinner after an early sunset, all the while wearing tracky dacks and slippers. Bloody smile making formula that!

So  what simple things make you smile?

Perfectionist?

Don't look for the flaws, just enjoy the Cousin It plant.

I am a fussy fucker, yeh a fussy complaining, notice the flaws pain in the arse. There's not much I do not notice. Reckon I have always been the same. Too often pointing out oopsies happens without thoughts of offence or consequences, 'Oh did you know your jumper is inside out?' 'You've got spinach in your teeth.' 'Are you going bald?' 'What sort of a shit hole is that? -pointing out a smallish caravan to owner or said van. and the ever present 'You missed a spot!'

Luckily,  I taught myself a bit of selective deafness while I was teaching, and it was pretty useful while raising a teenager too. Sometimes it's kinder to your blood pressure to NOT hear,'Oh for fuck sake this is boring.' or 'Shit I wish she'd just shut the fuck up' or any of the countless other bits of teen angst nonsense I have managed to ignore over the last 30 plus years.

In my mind I am a perfectionist, but my nowadays reality is that if I was only gonna settle for for completely bloody perfect, I would never haul arse out of the chair. It wouldn't be worth the expenditure of calories, cos I reckon my days of chasing that Holy Grail are sadly long gone.

Now I am just happy with near enough.

I can sweep the floor in about 45 minutes and it takes Stevie a full day to push the broom, cos he shifts every bit of furniture and doesn't leave one strand of dog hair anywhere. But I reckon to have collected some of the dust and fur is better than none at all, so WINNER!

And I am sorry to say that it's the same in the garden. The Kids and I put in a couple of huge days and shovelled and planted and surveyed and stuff, well all right My Girl did all that while I pointed and washed shit, and the results are fab.

After the clearing and before the planting

After!

 But we didn't quite get finished, so I headed out again this morning to finish up.

I wonder if anyone ever thinks their garden is finished?

I dug up dead shit and planted new stuff and then had a bit of a prune deciding that the full bin was an indication of job done, and then pulled some weeds from the side garden. Sometimes distinguishing weeds from purposely planted grass stuff is not easy and in any case I just wanted it to be better than it was, not perfect. There is just not strength enough for all that palaver. The garden is now not weed free, but it's better now than before. Yippee!

Yep near enough is now good enough, ahhh Breathe.....ahhhh.

Maybe tomorrow I'll go to Bunnings for some solar lights so I can see the loveliness at night too, and I still need another big pot for one last plant for the pond....see the garden is never gonna be finished. Oh Well.

How about you - does your yearning for perfection hinder making a start?

Women's Literature - Marian Keyes

I do love getting my nose stuck in a book, and the Kindle has allowed me to be ridiculously lazy about it all. I can be lounging in the bath amid the coconut oil slick and oatmeal sludge and finish a book and go straight into shopping mode and before I can reach to top up the hot water, there's a lovely new book all ready to jump into.

Now I will admit that I sometimes miss that 'new book' smell, but I don't miss the weight of 'em or the pages falling out of 'em cos I've folded 'em in half too many times too roughly, and I really don't miss trying to find space on the crammed shelves to house 'em, or the extra packing boxes required to move 'em all from one places to another or just to lug 'em to the Op shops.

And I read all sorts of stuff - autobiographies, crime -who dunits, legal stuff, love stories, period dramas, political satires. Well anything really, and once I start a book I am loath to call it a day before I get to the end. If it starts out badly I just keep reading in the sometimes vain hope that it will improve. Sometimes the wait is LONG.

But the thing about the Kindle store is that it offers you titles it thinks you might like and if like me you have read a couple by the same author, then it's hard for the wee computer to let you forget about 'em, and so book lists grow like topsy.

I have read a good few  books by Marian Keyes, so when 'The Charming Man' was recommended by the little person in my machine, I stumped up the cash and am now mid way through it.

I like the diversity of Ms Keyes women, well, I think mostly they are white middle class Irish Lassies, but they have different personalities and their predicaments are relatable, to me at least, and the stories are wound around female relationships and their usual modern day urban dramas, sometimes involving men, and sometimes pondering where to go for a good hair cut.

Her books have been very easy reads, but this one I am struggling with for a couple of reasons.

The chapters roll along directed by different characters and I guess Ms Keyes was having a little experiment with using different writing styles, cos one of the character's ramblings appear in broken sentences, with so many words missing that I am spending a great deal of my time with my imaginary teacher's red pen, filling in all the blanks, and I don't enjoy this sort of reading. Yeh I left all that marking crap behind me some years ago. If I hadn't found that the next character spoke in full grammatically correct sentences I was gonna have to give the book a miss, but as luck would have it, only one of the women are driving me mad - I know - it's not a long road.

But the biggest problem for me is that the driving force behind the story is that these women have been flung together because of their shared misadventures with some bloke. Yep he is the driving force behind the whole damn thing. Is this Women's Literature?

Up until now I have enjoyed the female-centric nature of Ms Keyes' books. I have enjoyed the unravelling of their relationships and the knitting of new ones. Now I'd just like this fella to face smash a bus so the women can get on with other stuff, but as I am only a third of the way through it, I suppose he is gonna continue to lord it over 'em all for a good while yet. SHIT.

What are you reading at the moment?

Cartoons

Strange piccie but it might make sense as you read along.

I am pretty sure that My Girl has quite the number of whinges about her teenage years and maybe even some from before that, and maybe the complaints about her baby years are the ones that even today she has not been able to reconcile. Yeh I was one of those mothers who rang the other parents to make sure arrangements were all above board and I was the mother who'd tear arse around and honk loudly on the horn and then storm in and drag her out of places she was not supposed to be, and I was the mother who unashamedly manipulated to ensure the tiniest bit of modesty in an era when less was definitely the preferred way to go, and I was the mother giving all the girls a lift to wherever and all the way there, there'd be a lyrical barking of the rules about drinks and drugs and watching out for each other.

I was quite the embarrassment. Oh Well.

But the home rules were not always rational and reasoned.

You see, lean in cos I have to whisper cos it seems that it is almost akin to child abuse, yeh that's right, I was THE royal pain in the arse mum, cos there was a NO CARTOONS rule in our place. The remote made very short work of even the briefest ad for some moving drawing shit. I was quite obsessed about NOT seeing any of it.  It is quite possible that she has never got over it. But I just fucking hated 'em so they were a no-no, not in the house and certainly not at the pictures.

However Grandma is more pliable - ok I admit it, she's just a bloody push over. Anything My Darling Boy wants he can have.

So the holidays movie selection was entirely in his hands, and we trotted off today to see 'Despicable Me 3'. This was his choice. I thought he might like sit next to a snoring old gal while she slept through 'Transformers' or 'Spiderman', but the cartoon was his call.

And it must be said that 2017 animation is a far cry from all that 60's crap which may well have not been as shit as I remember. In any case, we enjoyed the movie.

It didn't take long to work out what might have happened in the first 2 instalments,

And I will admit that I even enjoyed the art work and the story rocked along at a pace. Yep it was good, far better than I thought it was gonna be.

Of course there were kids talking and kicking the back of my chair and some dick woman who was so engrossed with the movie, or maybe she had earplugs in? but incredibly she failed to hear her Mob going nuts, the first time and the second time and it wasn't until I turned around and stared daggers at her that she cottoned on to it and reached into her bag to turn the damn thing off, on the third ring a ding.

It was a lovely date day and if I can now just forget that in the pocket of his coat he has a tooth wrapped in the cinema ticket, the tooth that fell out midway through the movie....oooh yuk! then I can sit back and smile.

Winter gardening

Whew!, Where did those 24 little hours go ?

Kids arrived early, yippee.

Coffees and then lunch and Dog play and then into the garden.

My wee Fit Bit has been counting steps since my birthday and no I have not managed the recommended 10000. Usually I wander about 4000 to 6000 on a very busy day, and sometimes if I am buggered I am lucky to stretch to 2000, but yesterday I clocked up 8400 steps - 25% more than my best days. Well good on me huh? Except that I was rooooooted, and truth be told I did very little in the garden cos my Green Fingered Girl, took charge and lugged shit and re-potted shit and lugged it all back and then tidied up. She worked like a dog, while Dog kept well clear cos she feared getting in the way of the master.

Today we are gonna go at it again. I hope I survive.

Then we all took 2 hours to make Chicken Parmigiana. What a marathon! Special cheesy potatoes just in case there wasn't enough grease and calories in the slabs of crumbed delight, and we even made the tomato sauce from scratch too, bloody delicious. I reckon we all learnt a thing or 2. Did you know that when you crumb something it's best to leave it rest before you cook it so the crumbs have time to stick together? I have not ever crumbed anything so that was quite the revelation. It was all delicious although if I am honest, I might save the Parmi joy for trips to the pub, cos it's a messy time consuming exercise and whilst what we made was very much tastier than any I have eaten out, I don't think it's worth the trouble or the anxiety.

And then to bed. Ahhh Blessed relief.

My Fit Bit if also monitoring my sleep patterns.

It's quite interesting.

Yes I already knew I dragged my tired arse up to pee during the night. And I am sometimes awake and restless even when not peeing, I mean there's all those woes of the world that need solving isn't there?

But last night the awake restless time hit an all time high. 9 times so says the Fitty Bitty. Fucking hell! How many woes can there possibly be? What can cause that sort of disruption and consequent eyes on stalks fatigue this morning? What could it possibly be?

Yep it was more fucking road works, all fucking night and I reckon the timing of my wakefulness would correspond neatly with the noisiest bits of the work.