Relax...Ah

Dog is an excellent Relaxer.

She climbs up onto any damn couch she likes and doesn't give a rats' arse if she is wet or dirty, she plops herself down and is out to it in seconds.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time on the couch lately and she just bloody loves that. She climbs up over the top of me and snuggles in and does not move until it's time to eat or shit or bark at something or someone outside. If I have the temerity to move, cos I have to pee, or drink or take drugs, well she doesn't really care, cos she just stretches out and takes up as much room as she can. If I want to get back on the couch, then there is quite a lot of shoving and pushing and moaning - mine not hers. Sometimes I need to turf her off altogether so I can make some room and then she just pops back up and is out to it again in a heartbeat. Lucky sod.

But I admit that I have given myself permission to have a bit of a relax while I am shingling about. The washing has mounted up and only today I have attacked the growing mountain of 'infected towels' Food has been a bit of a 'who gives a shit' issue, and unless the shower has been loudly shouting at me, I have managed to ignore it too. Yesterday, I think for the first time in my life, I turned a piece of clothing inside out, cos I fancied a clean side next to my skin and there was not another singlet in the drawer...now that's a minging little admission huh?

We are both running out of clothes and the ironing basket is growing like a bacteria in a warm environment, and so yesterday when by a fabulous bit of serendipity, I spied a flier from Julie who is looking for cleaning work,( ironing was in the small print) I thought all my christmases had come at once.

I called her and she is coming tomorrow to tackle that ugly sucker.

Yippee!

Except that I am not at all sure what I should do with myself while she slaves away. 

That is not a relaxing thought.

But the idea that the mountain will be morphed into a neat hanging lot certainly is.

So Yippee again. Come on down Julie.  

Dali - Time slinky

No I am not in some sort of crazy time wrinkle back to the early 1990s when I was studying Art at Kelvin Grove, and No this is not a dissertation about the artworks of this somewhat strange character, but the last couple of weeks have slid away in such a surreal fashion that my mind is drawn back to him.

For a while I was fascinated, almost obsessed, but I don't want to discuss the drugs or mental diseases which might have propelled his hands to scoop up his mustache in such a way as to interfere with his view of the world, or to guide his hand to draw and paint and build his wonderfully mad or intuitive or purposefully vague and controversial pieces.

Nope, as I am clawing my way out of the drugs and the pain and the blistering festering mess of the last 2 weeks I am reminded of his fascination with melting clocks.

Cos that's how I feel time has gone the last 2 weeks.

It has slipped by and melted away.

Apart from last Tuesday when I definitely needed to be in Brisvegas I have not pushed too hard to do anything or be anywhere or see anyone, and you know what? The world has rocked along quite nicely without me interfering.

Bugger! And there was me kidding myself that I am indispensable.

For a time anal sod like me, to have lost a couple of weeks that is quite something.

And the real bugger of it is that whilst we say 'lost a couple of weeks', well that implies that you might stumble over 'em while you are rooting around in the bottom of your wardrobe looking for your slippers cos the nights have finally become a little cooler. Yeh it implies that if you find 'em wedged in an old recipe book, that you can just get 'em out and smooth 'em down and then they are good to go. 

But sadly they are are already gone, like a fart in a highwind.

And really the last 2 weeks have been so shitful that even if I could get 'em back, I wouldn't fucken thank you for 'em.

I am very pleased that the Shingles train didn't pull in to this station while we were away. Now wouldn't that have just been shitty? And I am pleased that the weather has turned cooler so that the festering mess has not had to deal with waterfalls of sweat - where's the antibiotic cream when you need it? and I am pleased that I have enough fat clothes to hide the swinging titties whilst bras are out of the question. And I am very pleased that Steve is hanging in there, cos truly he must be bored out of his fucking gourd wondering if today is the day he needs to call the ambos and have me committed. 

Yep the very idea that Dali is where my mind has ended up during all this shit, is an indication of what a precarious grasp I have had on things.

Onward and upwards.... I bloody hope so!

Fucking Shingles!!

Well I'll be fucked! Forums and Dr Google and I are dead right.

Dr Jane texted this morning - (6 am - what a woman she is huh?) and said that she got the pathology back confirming that I had Shingles. She took a little blister bit while I was there on Monday, and sent it off, even though she didn't think it was anything too much to worry about. I guess she listened to

me more than I thought.

So there are some anti viral drugs you can take that are pretty effective in killing off the spotty pain in the arse - or chest of ribs or where ever they happen to pop up. And now I am even more rattly than before. I am tempted to think that I am a few days behind on the popping of the pills cos they are most useful if taken before the third day of the symptons, but I am giving it a go anyway, cos the pain is pretty shitful and I am hopeful - Optimistic with reason - definition courtesy of Micheal J Fox.

I must admit to feeling pretty chuffed with myself for the clever diagnosis.

I was clutching at straws for an explanation for the all but, invisible symptoms.

I was about to forgive the world for deciding that I was a class A hypochondriac.

I had begun to wonder if in deed I was just imagining this shit.... and to think some people put their imaginations to such good uses like writing wonderful fiction or painting or entertaining or dreaming up Santa or fairies.

So it was back to Dr Google to see if I could find any consensus about how long I am gonna be getting around wobbly titted, and tilting to the right to take the pressure off and yawning at 8.30 in the morning until I lever myself into bed at some child bedtime o'clock, and the news is not good. It seems that I am contagious until the blisters crust over - doesn't that just sound delightful? - be ok if I was making some bread or trying for some 'crunch' to add to some whizz bang meal on Masterchef, but not so much when discussing the lumpy red shit on my belly.

No-one on Google wants to punt on a time frame for the blisters, though I just can't imagine that it can be very long, cos otherwise someone would have invented an 'old person's blister pad cover thing' cos it's is mostly old people who get Shingles and bless 'em, someone has kindly thought to invent old people's nappies and a stair-chair lift thing and now little house lifts for the non-claustrophobic so why not a blister liquid catcher? The blisters can't last long can they, cos the drug companies would not miss out on making something to help a chronic long weep that could earn 'em a motza.

But the pain it seems is a different issue altogether. Google says it is possible - I hope not fucking LIKELY, that the pain can hang around for months...Shit there's a chance at that rate, that I will develop into a first class fucking whinger. If whinging was to be included in the upcoming Olympics, I could be Australia's representative with a very real chance of winning gold.

But the whinging doesn't achieve much. It sure as shit doesn't make me feel any better and Stevie doesn't need any reminders about the fact that I am less than peachy, cos he has eyes as well as ears and can see for himself - poor bastard, at least I only need to feel it, I don't have to see it too - yep I am avoiding the mirrors.

I remember having Chicken Pox when I was a kid. I had all those peskie childhood diseases cos I was kicking my toes and running barefoot long before there was any such thing as the gold class vaccines of today. The Pox was horrendous! It's the only one of these shitful diseases that I can vividly recall and as Shingles is the same virus that subsequently took up residence in my spine, and has just lazed around doing bugger all, for all these fucking years, and has now decided to leap out just to be the cherry on my day, it should be no surprise that Shingles is no picnic either.

But it sounds like it should be. Pox sounds pretty shitful but not Shingles...
Shingle bells shingle bells...lucky I am only singing in my head.
Shingle roofs
Fruit Tingle shingles.
Shingle singles
Shingle dingles
It all sounds so friendly and cute, shame it ain't so.

Yeh it's good to be right about it, and know that 'this too will pass' but if the Shingle fairies swept in during the night to take it all back, I would not be unhappy.

Dr Google

Dr Ooogle Mc Google.

I reckon real doctors must just about spit bile when a patient says, 'Oh I googled it.'

I ran this line passed Dr Jane today and told her that I reckon I have Shingles.

I have this shitful pain around my ribs on the right side from almost the centre front to almost the centre back. It feels like someone has given me a damn fine open palmed slap. There is no mark and the stinging doesn't stop, and of course no one has actually given me a slap, though it wouldn't surprise me to find out that Jane would have rather liked to.

So I have been on CML forums and have been chatting to people messing with this shit, mostly in the UK, (just an aside - I am very fucking glad I am here not there!) and it is surprising and a bit startling and sometimes a bit scary to chat to people with the same disease. But it is also intriguing and thought provoking.

It seems to me, a fool with an internet connection, that there might well be a correlation between Bone Marrow harvesting and on going hip pain. The number of folk who mention this is a lot. I wonder if doctors read these forums?

Dr Jane is a very fine doctor and an even better human being. Actually I am certain that she wasn't shitty about me googling the symptons, and she was pleased that I popped in for her to have a look see. I suppose it only becomes a problem when people start to self diagnose and medicate.

Anyway she doesn't think I have Shingles - not enough symptons and even though there are stats which show that people on Dasatinib sometimes get Shingles in the first 6 months, she thinks it's some errant nerve spasm, maybe coming from my back...And that just leads me to sigh a great big fucking ho hum, cos there is nothing to do but wait it out, except that I can take pain meds at night which will allow sleep but will also bung up the bowel...yippee fucking ki yay.

Anyway I see that there is a danger in doing the Doctor Google.

A brave young woman that I barely know announced on her mother's Facebook page this morning that her mum had died. I had known her mother for a long time and had sent her many irreverent messages before and especially during her 4 year illness.

I reckon if Dr Google had been consulted she might well have diagnosed my friend as being a pregnant chimpanzee, with 3 legs, a snotty nose and a bad dose of thrush. Instead she died from Melanoma cancer.

Let's not fuck with this! It is a savage shitful fucking disease and if you are tempted to think that taping a bit of potato peel over an ugly spot is gonna make the difference, then I am here to tell you you are delusional and you should get thee to the nut house pronto.


It is not anyone's favourite thing to do - sitting around at a doctor's waiting room with the out of focus tellie droning on and the decades old magazines, and the suspect upholstery on the chairs and I could just go on and on about how shitful the whole experience is, but I reckon we should all just suck it up from time to time and shake hands with a real doctor and give the old Google a boot up the bum.

'I am not gonna steal this!'

It's Golf Day so a day all to myself to do whatever I fancy.

The sky is blue and I am not sweating up an ocean and Dog is settled and seems to be of the belief that she is not going to be permanently abandoned so all was well for popping out for a couple of whiles and have a poke around at the local shops.

Firstly I went to the hairdresser wholesalers to see if they had something with which I could paint my hair purple. On holidays, perhaps over a glass or 2 too many, Stevie revealed that he missed the purple hair I had when we first met.... This has played on my mind since.

You see I have been growing out what hair is still clinging on and I am bemused and more than a little interested to see what colour is REAL. It has been soo very long - decades in fact, and it is a revelation to see greys and blonde bits and mousy brown stuff, but clearly my inspection is driven by curiousity and Stevie just gets to look at the very slow progress and the shitful re-growth and the faded red brown other bits and the errant left over perm curls. I guess in an honest boozey moment he was letting me know that I have looked better.

But still I didn't want to waste the effort to date in the re-emerging old real stuff, so I wanted to get something that would wash out sort of soonish, but sadly the girls didn't think any such stuff existed, not in purple anyway, so that was a disappointment. I might have been able to colour it all a shit sort of brown, but that just didn't appeal. I am gonna have to go back to Annbrit and see what she can recommend. So that was a fail...Shit!

Then I popped into the kitchen shop. I love having a good look around in this place cos they have all sorts of nick-knacks that may or may not prove useful.

I thought about glasses but didn't like any, and then remembered about  a strainer that I had seen in a designer shop in bright colours. It was sort of square and stood up and was made of silicon I think but it had a big handle. Very useful I thought - but not to be found in this place.

I picked up a couple of oven mits, mostly because they are what I have here at home and I gave Belly some great things I bought in the French shop in Sydney- now closed, but Zig burnt his hand recently getting something out of the oven so I thought these might be safer for him and not useless for Belly either.

So I am carrying them around and then I spied an enamel pizza tray. We have a pizza stone, that is so minging with grease and shit that every time I use it, I wonder if this will be the day we end up with some horrendous disease. So now I am carrying the oven mitts and a pizza tray - not what I would call a terrible burden.

At the back of the store is a sort of anti -room. I just didn't know how ANTI it was . There was no door and no sign saying to fuck off so I was about to step in, when a young bloke in shorts and a faded shirt yelled at me that I was not allowed in there. I was startled. I might have said something about the need for a sign and I possibly mentioned that his seemed like a nazi overkill reaction.

I continued having a poke around while I carried my stuff. The faded shirt kept a close eye on me. He followed me and either he was turned on by an aging bird with bad regrowth, or he was concerned about me nicking shit.

Finally he could stand it no longer and from some distance he called out that I could leave my items at the front desk while I finished looking around.

Well what the very fuck??

I turned to him and said in an equally loud voice, ' I am not gonna steal this you know!'

I finished my browsing and carried my shit up to the front desk where I happily paid for it and left. I don't fancy going back there, but I also didn't want to leave the stuff behind - nose and face and all that.

There was a story this week on the news about a woman who worked at Coles as night filler manager. A couple of young girls had come into the store and were plainly stealing shit. She questioned them they pushed her into a display of stuff and then she grabbed 'em.

For her efforts in trying to prevent store losses, she was fired.

Maybe today, this young bloke decided to question the thief stereotype. Perhaps he decided that it wasn't just young girls who wanted to nick stuff. Perhaps he decided to be a one boy posse dedicated to rousting old folk who were keen to shove a colander where the sun don't shine.

Or maybe he really does have a thing for grannies and I have missed my opportunity to cougar up my Saturday... Maybe.... Bugger!

How Long is Long Enough?

No, I am not gonna have a go at 50 Shades of rooting around.... those archive files are about slammed shut, and I am not at all sure that I have the ability to translate what makes me smile that sly smile into written down stuff.

What I am wondering is how long do you sit by the phone waiting for someone to ring you back?

We can all recall waiting for that special hot fella to call and then when he did, you'd speak in code so your parentals didn't know what you were on about - oh surely that wasn't only me? The house phone - the ONLY phone, was in the lounge room right next to where they sat watching the tellie. Discretion and a lot of whispering was the order of the day. And if I was the one making the call, there'd have been a flurry for change and a quick prayer to the telecom gods that the local phone booth had not been too badly vandalised.

Phone calls used to be all just a little exciting. Cos I remember very clearly living without a phone in the house as a kid, and then we had one! Bloody marvelous! And when I got married at the ripe old age of 19, we didn't have cash enough for a phone and had to troop up to the public phone booth to organise parties or job interviews or let the parents know we were still alive.

The calls were few and far between, cos back when Donald Trumpeter was but a wee irritating off key recorder, it was expensive, and people still liked to look each other in the eye and smile and laugh out loud instead of  all this LOLing.

This must be quite the revelation to the Text Generation.

Back in the day, phones were answered and calls were returned cos that was just good manners. Sure people were not nearly as contactable and the number of calls far fewer so the pressure to chat and return calls was less.

Today with texts and emails and calls and facie and Instagram and all that stuff, it is no surprise that return communication is slower. People are far busier getting no further along.

But knowing this doesn't make me any more patient.

It gives me the shits when people don't call back in a timely fashion.

Yep today I am waiting for a call back.

And whilst I want to go off like a rocket, when you are after a bit of a favour, it's just more diplomatic to suck it up and resist the urge to launch into a tirade about manners and etiquette. But still I am waiting and it gives me the screaming irrits.

So I rang her back and she's still not happy to pick up the phone...another message left with the PA. Ho fucking HUM.

How long is long enough for you?

'There's no place like home.'

Nearly 3 weeks on the road and seriously I need to have a bit of a feet up afternoon. Yeh it's pathetic I know. But a little Nanna Nap is in order and if it lasted all afternoon I wouldn't be too terribly sad.

No time for resting yesterday as it was straight into my car and off to Brisvegas to see the 'kids'. Seems like every week I don't see him, the grandie boy grows a good few inches. Shit, 3 weeks ago, his shoes fitted him and so did his pants and shirts and now for the first time he has grown out of a pair of shoes before they have shit themselves over boys' stuff like handball and chucking the old body around on the concrete. Yep he has a pretty decent pair of black leather snearkery school shoes circa $130, going begging, except that in typical boy / adolescent / man fashion they are more than a little whiffy and I rather think that new laces could be in order.

So shoes and clothes are the order of the day. I wonder if mothers of all year 6 boys are trying to eeek out the usefulness of the school shirts until the end of the year so that the expense of uniforms can be left until high school.

Washing is almost all sorted here in the Big House. It is amazing how stuff that fits neatly into 2 not very big cases can explode to Himalayan proportions just by undoing the zipper. The old machine that saves me from slapping shit on a rock has been working overtime and might well also be in need of an NN ( Nanna nap)

One thing that I really missed while away, was .... wait for it..... green vegetables.

Yeh we had salad, but I don't reckon lettuce is a vegetable... How can it be if it's true that it uses up more calories to chew it than there is in it? That is sort just like eating air.  And one night I ordered some Broccoli stuff, but when it arrived it looked like shaved stalks and some other stuff that I couldn't identify. The green was overpowered by the white of the stalk innards and I always cut that crap off and bin it, and the other stuff really tasted a bit like shit - well alright my memory of the shit taste is gone if it ever was, so I am only imagining, but I am sure you get the idea. And Steve ordered vegies and got a pile of eggplant - oooooh VERY YUKKY in deed. Steam mixed veg consisted mostly of cauliflower and I only like that with lashings of cheese sauce or pummeled in a soup with bacon and leeks. Veggies have been light on.

So tonight we are having chicken pasta with mushrooms and loaded with leeks and broccoli and peas. It should be green enough to bring cheers from the leprechauns in the garden, and then tomorrow I will have to face the grocery shop for the first time in a month, but needs must and all that. It really could have been done today, but I used Dog as an excuse, saying that it wasn't right to leave her on her own, when we had just got home. Any excuse is a good one if it means a grocery procrastination.

Coming home is always joyful. Sinking into my chair that is Sue-arse molded and sipping on water with scoops of ice that are magically made, not hard fought and loaded into a plastic bag, and showering in plenty of space, and snuggling with Dog, and checking out my garden....yep it sure is good to be home.

What do you miss mostly when you go away?