Parcels Parcels Everywhere

It must be more than a little shitful to have a birthday close to christmas. The shops are full of stocking stuffers and who wants their stockings stuffed for their birthdays. The birthday cards take a back seat – quite literally in some shops, to the gaudy snowy Santa ones. And surely I am not on my own in that I just barely have the will and the energy to fill the Santa lists, without having to rack the old grey matter to find something birthdayified and not remotely christmasy so it is clear that you have made an effort worthy of another year. So folk who have birthdays in December are at a bit of a disadvantage I reckon.

I used to have a present cupboard where I would store things that I’d buy on speck thinking that they would be good as a parcel for someone, at sometime, but that storage facility closed up shop years ago, after I looked in and found watches and expensive stuff that I didn’t like at all, so how was I ever gonna give it away to anyone else.

I reckon the best parcel buying is done under pressure. It’s amazing just what fabulous stuff you can find when your feet are aching and your eyesight is failing and if one more chipper salesperson glances in your direction you might hit ‘em with your handie.

A couple of parcel hunting hints.

1.      Get an early start so you can find a good parking spot.

2.      Go to a Mall where there is airconditioning and coffee shops at reasonable intervals.

3.      Begin with coffee and maybe some carbs.

4.      Wear comfortable shoes and remember your glasses.

5.      Look for inspiration in odd places.

6.      Avoid ‘up-sellers’ like the plague.

7.      When your hands are full, GO HOME.

 

Simple things.

 

It’s Sunday and that means up early to wash the sheets with strong detergent and a good dose of bleach so that when they are dry all those wonderful cotton counts are crisp and cool. It also means a good long soak in the bath and a scrape of the legs so that the slipping into bed becomes a wonderful sensual experience. Oh I do love that, new sheet on truly bare leg, feeling. I might be tempted to shave my legs other than on clean sheet day, but new sheets definitely require new legs. Ahhh.

Last night we went to a party which I must admit to not being too thrilled about. I knew precisely no one. I had met a couple of ‘em once but that was it. Well about midway through the evening a woman sat next to me. She looked pretty conservative and polite and we chatted about family and careers and death as you do, and then out of nowhere she shocks me with a comment about the neighbour. Well I just roared laughing. I laughed because what she said was funny and I laughed because it was such an unexpected surprise, and I laughed because it felt so good to laugh out loud.

I might have mentioned that Zig is at the Big House here for the holidays. Now he is a real little boy. He is loud and rough and rarely anticipates accurately outcomes of actions. He runs when walking would do and shouts when a whisper would suffice. I love all that about him but when he climbs up onto my lap with a book to read, which is becoming a less and less frequent occurrence, I just wanna have a little tear up with joy. When we are out and he is not sure where to go, he grabs my hand and I love that too. What a sweet lovely little fella he is. I reckon that the useby date for all this sooky behaviour is not far away so I am planning on enjoying it while it lasts.

An empty ironing basket and a just washed floor, watching Dog run like a maniac after her bloody ball, sparkling clean and polished granite, dancing like a fool to some silly song, and singing completely out of tune to the radio in the car with the windows up and then noticing the looks of strangers in passing cars and trucks, well all this makes me smile.

I am really just a simple girl at heart.

Cards and letters are really not passé.

I reckon Christmas is about the only time I feel the need to venture into a Post Office. I do enjoy getting out my little black book – yes it actually is all that. I have had it for years and there is so much crossing out and going overs and additions of names and scratching out of names that it is definitely passed its best, but I just can’t seem to get rid of it. I could transfer all the info onto a computer file and that would make life cleaner and smarter and more organised, but then I would miss out on the pleasure of going through it every year and having a little chuckle about events and people almost forgotten. The cold face of the computer will never bring that joy. And as I sit to write my cards, I want to feel that joy.

I don’t send out hundreds of cards, just a couple of handsful, but as I write them I imagine them flying off to their destinations and then sitting on a shelf or mantle watching over the festivities. I enjoy the thinking about where they are going and the people who will rip ‘em open. I sometimes am pretty sure that the people have moved, but I send the cards anyway, in the hope that some kind soul will pass it on, if not it doesn’t matter cos I have already enjoyed the sending.

Gone are the days when this little gesture an inexpensive. It is now just stupid money to send a tiny something anywhere let alone to the other side of the world, but I reckon that as there is pleasure in the sending and I hope in the receiving that at least I am getting double bunger for my bucks.

This year I included an ‘Annual Epistle’. A lot has happened and I didn’t really fancy writing the same dreary shit out more than once so I succumbed to the temptation to use that cold computer to make my life just that bit easier.

Years ago as a young woman I had a cousin who would send a ledger of annual events to everyone she could think of at Christmas time. I stopped reading the shit very early on. I couldn’t imagine why she thought anyone would be interested in how she broke a nail or why the paint was peeling off the front gate. The letter would go on for page after bloody page of boring irrelevant tedious yes even MUNDANE shit. The memory of how the family laughed at her behind her back is strong. Even my lovely old Nanna would get a fit of the giggles (not in a good way) as she read it and she knew most of the people who were mentioned. It seemed like an attempt to get the last word in on any dispute and disguise it amid all the other banality.

Anyway I think I have been loath to include this sort of thing because this memory is so strong.

I hope that the silly cards make up for the computer geekiness.

Off now to mortgage something to pay for the stamps.

Competition’s not a dirty word.

 

Zig’s swimming ‘Carnival’ was on today. Well that’s what I would have called it. But in the modern style of let there not be any winners and therefore no losers, now it’s called a Swimming Fun Day.

Yeh there are Races, the guy on the loud speaker slipped a couple of times and called ‘em such, and if you have a race then everyone knows that someone wins and someone loses. The kids are 8 years old and that is not a euphemism for stupid. The winners high fived and the losers were consoled. Winners are grinners but the parents who came to watch were encouraged to cheer loudest for the losers. The winners were not named and famed, nor were the losers named and shamed. They were all treated the same.

Well how bloody tedious! The kids all know who won, the parents all know who won. Why those kids can’t be congratulated is beyond me. Why we have to bow down and praise the almighty mediocre is beyond me. When shit performances are praised as wonderful and average performances are called ‘Awesome’, how we inspire kids to true greatness is beyond me.

Except that it doesn’t matter how adults describe this stuff, kids just know. Winners know they won and their mates know who won, and kids who come last know that the bloody ‘Fun Day’ will be over soon enough and they can move on to something else that they might be good at.

I have bragged about Zig being a clever little bloke before. I do not brag about him being a terrific swimmer. But he is smart enough to know that if he goes in the last couple of races for each event he will in all likelihood win or come second, so I can send photos and videos and say he came first in the backstroke and be proud that he has worked out the system.

Censorship sucks

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There’s a very left wing women’ magazine online that I have been reading and commenting on since it started some years ago. I reckon the addition of the occasional right winged argument is good for a bit of balance, but I don’t write as often as I have opinions, cos really that would be boring for the other women who seem to want their views reproduced as often as possible, by as many hairy armpitted  feministos as possible.

But recently there was an article about apologies. The crux of it was agitating for a long list of things that the current government has done which require an admission of guilt and a big red face. They ran pictures of people who had wronged ‘us all’ and the readership went to town adding to the list of woes.

I was in the midst of the shit with Belly and Centacare so I wrote that I wanted an apology from the people there. I named the office at Stones Corner Brisbane and as Centacare is a Catholic driven enterprise  I had a little go about the do gooder christians as well.

I'd like to hear more than just bloody 'sorry' from Centacare at Stones Corner for their bullying and lying and shouting at my daughter all the while telling a tertiary educated woman that she should feel lucky to be sloughing out bins with bleach and industrial hoses. I'd like them to take their catholic care package which seems to entitle them to cast all manner of aspersions on the parenting ways of a single woman and shove it where the don't shine.

I clicked on the post button and my message became the latest banner remark looping across the page. It was definitely published.

A day or so later I checked in to see if I had finally got on board with the lefties, but I found that my message had been deleted. This was very strange. I thought I had joined the throng of government haters and that there would have been women lined up to agree with me and encourage me in my fight. Instead there was just silence.

I wrote a quick note to Wendy Harmer the owner / editor and asked why the message had been deleted, but I have not heard back.

It strikes me as very odd that this magazine, touted to give women a voice would so openly censor its readers’ comments. I mean some of what I have read has made me cringe, but I would never suggest that the comments be removed, freedom of thought and opinion and expression and all that. I am left wondering if mine is not the lone righty shout. Maybe there are many who share with me a sense that the government does not owe me a living, but their comments have been similarly wiped away.

In any case, censorship sucks!! I’m just saying.

 

 

Ahead of his time.

Well I really needed to crack on with Zig’s  little Santa list. It appears that the thing he wants is not available in Oz yet.... Begs the question really about how he even knows it exits.

Anyway there are a number of sites in OZ which will facilitate the delivery of the ‘things’, after sourcing it from either the USA or the UK, but they would not give any indication that it would be here in time, instead they were positively pessimistic about it getting a seat on Santa’s sleigh.

So I went back to John Lewis online where I have been known to do the odd bit of shopping while in London and bugger me, there it was in their toy section. It is all ordered and paid for and on its way, and even after paying them 25 pounds to deliver it, and working out the exchange rate – yeh Steve was working the calculator over my shoulder, it was just a little cheaper than going with the local company.

I am always surprised that buying online here is so much more difficult. We bought everything online in London, appliances, lights, clothes, groceries, even literally the kitchen sink. Often there was no overt delivery charge, I imagine it was just sort of tagged onto the total before a price was given. John Lewis would deliver for nothing to your house or the closest Waitrose store, as they had really embraced the online shopping thing. In fact they had gone so far as to have their department stores set up as displays for what was possible online. I went in once to buy a couple of coffee mugs that were online and I thought that as I was passing I would just go in and grab ‘em, but they were ONLY available online.

I reckon Aussies might be a bit cynical about buying that thing in the brown paper bag. We like to see things and feel and smell ‘em, and let’s face it, it is a pain in the bum thinking about sending stuff back that doesn’t fit of is just plain ugly in the flesh. I have bought lots of stuff online and only ever have I sent one thing back, and that was mostly cos it was expensive and the people I spoke to were a bit shitful. Generally if the stuff is no good, I just hide it away or give it away. And it’s easy here to shop, generally the parking is no trouble and there is so little traffic and when you get home you just park in your garage and walk the stuff straight into your house. In London I would drive through the shitful traffic and spend ages looking for a park, pay an exorbitant fee and then rush in grab the stuff and drive home to park god knows how far from my front door. Instead I could tap away and wait for somebody to troop the stuff up my stairs while I watched the tellie. Lovely!

It’s all about the local culture I guess.

Anyway combining the Aussie ‘never say die spirit’ and the online tapping to Blighty, means that Ziggy is sorted!!

One down and it was a tricky one. Yippee.

 

 

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

 

December 1 and there is just no more escaping it, it’s time to get a bit sorted for the ‘season’. We are home this summer so that means we are lucky enough to spend time with the delightful Zig while his Mum is off toiling at the mines, no not literally, and then we get to watch him and her open up some parcels in person, so much better than by skype.

But first of course it is necessary to buy said parcels and that means heading out to the shops into the tinsel and plastic and the cues for Santa photos. I did a quick little reccie yesterday and was disappointed to come away empty handed. The beauty of kids writing their wish list to Santa, especially these days, is that the requests are pretty specific, so if you can find it then it’s YIPPEE, but if not then you are bollocksed.

Thanks to Carol I now have a website which might very well mean that I truly do not leave this office.

We are house swapping with Carol and Richard over the holidays. They are coming to enjoy the thrills of suburbia, with pool skimming and garden hosing and dog walking and fish feeding, and we are going to do nothing except enjoy being tourists in the big smoke. Sounds like a fair exchange to me!

So this week I am going to christmasify  the house for Zig and Carol and Richard. This means that all the bits and pieces we have bought over the years get an outing. I reckon it might be Steve’s favourite time of the year cos he really does like a bit of kitsch and I let him go nuts for Santa. We have stuff we found in Prague last xmas that will be seeing its very first noel. I am having trouble remembering what we picked from those wonderful markets, but I know where the box is.

So I am feeling a little more glee than grouch, and just in time too, cos there is a great deal to do and organise before I get to put my pretty painted toes up on my city break.