Traditions?

There are lots of family habits which just by sheer repetition become tradition. Some of these make absolutely no sense at all like the 'tradition' that girls use the rake and the boys use the motor mower, this was my lovely Dad's sexist idea that women were good for bending over and sweeping and men were good at anything that had an engine. He and Jeremy Clarkson would have hit it off wonderfully well.

The Sunday Roast tradition in the UK which until recently, had been installed as the stuff of legend here too. I mean I see that in the UK, in the winter, if going to the local pub and sitting by the real fire and hoovering up roasted meat and all the trimmings at lunch time, which of course is in the middle of the afternoon, means that there is no cooking later on in the evening, then that's a good thing. But I think supper was always on offer and that just really delays the putting up of the feet and the veging in front of the tellie and the trying to forget about work-a-day-monday. And all too often the Sunday roast is prepared by the household cook, mostly the little woman and it's served up to the men folk as they tumble home, mostly pissed from the local and once the food is done the sober one - again usually the woman, gets to clean up all the mess cos there's work tomorrow - yeh I know, wasn't all that work too?

Steve immigrated to Oz and in best migrant form he brought with him some of his homeland traditions, and the sunday roast was one of 'em. I am the cook of the house, but if he wanted to bugger up my cheese toast sunday night tradition, and replace it with a roast dinner, then he had to learn to cook it himself, and boy did he! His roast dinner is bloody marvelous!

When I was a kid, the birthday person got to choose the menu for dinner and got the first bit of cake and was made a fuss of all day long. There were always parcels unwrapped at a silly hour on the bed. Perhaps because there were 3 kids, birthday parties were few and far between and I think that the memory of that lead me to my own tradition with my girl of a big wing ding every year. They were a long time in the planning and the cake making and the games prep and then traditionally I would be rooted by the end cos it's in the heat of February and it nearly always pissed down as a blessed relief in the afternoon. The style of the parties changed but party we did.

Today is a break in our tradition. For the first time Zig is not at home for his party. For the first time Bell and I are not being run raggered entertaining and feeding all those short people. Oh sure Bell has outdone herself making a Tardis Cake cos Dr Who is the flavour of the month, and there will no doubt be parcels when he gets home and there will be a sort of consolation dinner party at the local steaks joint tomorrow night with cake and candles and a coupla a mates, and the cakie sweeties are set for tomorrow's school visit, but I am missing the exhausting tradition and I know my Girl is sad about it too.

Change is inevitable, but sometimes it just gives me the shits.

One Person's trash is another's treasure.

As hard as it might be to believe this is the vacuum collected from the street parade.

Brisvegas it seems has a road-side collection of crap more often than you'd think is strictly necessary except that they also charge people to take their stuff to the ol' humpity bump, so I guess people just pile up their unwanted bits and pieces and wait for the notice through the post box that invites 'em to drag it all out of the dump-corner and onto the streets.

Some of these piles are so big that I am tempted to think that without the crap, people might well have spare rooms to rent out.

It is a festive time for fosicking. People mooch along and have a good nosey as they go, or they appoint spotters if they are driving.

My girl loves this time of year.

She spied 2 vacuum cleaners and dragged 'em home, only to discover they had both been raped of their power lead. BUGGER! Seems the copper in the cords might be of value. She popped 'em back out onto her pile. I suggested that Steve might be able to put in a new cord so we picked the best of the 2 and brought it back to the big house.

Steve pulled it apart. It was quite a learning experience and he could possible now be a qualified vacuum repair person. There is quite a lot of kit inside one of these machines.

We trooped off to Masters to get a replacement cord - $6 - pretty cheap for a new or newish vacuum. Yippee!

Some hours later after I ahd been in and out in and out, I was there for the final switching on. It worked. It did not sound good, infact it sounded poorly. Then there was a smell and some smoke and the smoke thickened. I panicked and pulled out the cord. The smell was strong. Yep I decided it was fucked. But Steve wanted to see what was smoking, and as he had worked out a quick way into it he pulled it apart again and turned it on. I was told if it caught fire not to throw water onto it - electrical advice and to try and smother it with a blanket. I was not best pleased to the 'elf and safety officer.

Yeh you guessed it, it burst into smoke again and this time he admitted defeat.

I wondered if it was possible to suggest to the council that they provide a couple of stickers, saying 'This is fucked' 'This is fixable' 'This is perfectly good I just don't want it anymore' That way people who want to nick the cords might leave well alone the things that are still in working order and time might not be wasted trying to fix that which is truly buggered.

As it was a toss up between playing with the electrics or gardening, Steve was not unhappy with his afternoon. He'd rather do just about anything than be on the dumb end of the ruler in the garden with me.

Kindles - Have you got one?

I read a lot, in the bath, waiting for a movie, chowing down on a scone and coffee afternoon tea, in bed, on public transport - well for full disclosure I should say on planes cos I am not enough of a public transport traveler for it to be a significant reading time. The buses here on the Goldie are irregular at best and too bloody expensive, and even though I do like the trams here, they aren't useful except for being a little joy ride. If I was in Brisvegas I would use the ferries all the time, but then that is just a fab way of getting around that I would be too busy looking around to want to dive into a book.

I like biographies and autobiographies, even though there is a problem with how the photos translate on the Kindle. I like mysteries and comedies and legal eagle stories, and just on that topic I am very pleased to have caught up on the whole story of 'Suits' and am now waiting to watch each update on a thursday evening. It's been around for quite a time and I am pleased that I have now a convert.

Usually the Kindle is perfect. It slides inconspicuously into my handie and it weighs less than a paper back. It comes with it's own back lighting so you can just close it up when you are done for the night instead of having to struggle up to turn off the light, and if you are feeling really truly lazy you can wedge it open and just fling a finger at it to turn a page. It certainly does not require breaking a sweat in these stinking evenings. Ordering books is simple and instant and sometimes I am cheeky and go into a bookstore and have a good look around and text myself the names of books that grab me and then go home and order 'em.

The trouble is that A. sometimes there is fine print which should be read, but which I never ever bother with, especially if I think I am getting a bargain, like a book is a big old freebie! If it sounds good and it's not gonna require a card swipe, well what's not to love? and B. Sometimes the format of the hard copy book is not even close to translated on the Kindle.

My latest book just finished and enjoyed well enough, suffered both A and B.

I snavelled it up for nothing and read it like a demon, even though understanding was complicated by time and place jumping with no notice. There were lots of characters and complications and all too often I had read a couple of paras before I cottoned that the last bit was the last bit and this was the new bit and then had to go back a couple of paras to get the idea. I am not sure why some sort of spacing wasn't possible, I imagine that a hard copy would have signified these changes by some scroll marking or a new page, and if I had stopped every time and wrote to the publisher about the typos and grammatical errors, I would still be reading the first part of the story.

Yeh that was the second problem. The story was chopped in half and if I wanted to find out how it ended, I had to buy part 2. I was not happy being held for ransom. I would have happily paid for the whole thing. When I read the synopsis it grabbed me and I would have had it. But I thought about it for a couple of days before I bit the bullet, because of the shitty format and the errors and because of the trickery.

I didn't see anything about the first bit being only a bit - well half really, but it might have been there in the fine print.

'The Second Amendment' by John Matthews is a thinly disguised discussion about how to change the Gun Laws in the USA. It's full of characters - both shady and and ruthless and smart and patriotic and it refers to what I imagine are actual Constitutional dilemmas.

Yes I would recommend this book but perhaps it might be better to borrow it from a Library - yeh what an old fashioned idea, or maybe buy it from a second handie if you stumble over it, cos I don't think it translates well on Kindle.

Birthdays, Growing up, but where has my mind gone?

It's the little fella's birthday this weekend, and for the first time in his life, his father is giving the party.  My gorgeous girl and I are feeling more than a little sad about it all, cos we are missing out on it and even though we have sorted to have a little dinner party with just a couple of his mates next Monday night, and Mum will still be sculpting a cake according to his specifications,  and we will of course still be taking treaties up to the school so he can be the stuff of kids' attention for at least as long as the sugar lasts, it is the end of an era.

He is off to High school next year and there will be no treaties day then. So this year is the last one. The last time when he is a little fella. Next year he might well be too big to allow an in public cuddle from Mummy or Ma and I just bet he will be too big and too cool for smooches and  games of 'Tickle me' will be a thing of history. I am planning to enjoy this last little bit of little fella-dom.

My lovely and I are gonna go and enroll him in his high school tomorrow, although I cannot remember exactly what is involved. I enrolled Belly in 4 different schools, but senility has set in and I have no recollection of what is involved. I reckon that proof of address will be needed cos the closest school, is by happy coincidence a real goodie, and is bound to be oversubscribed so some proof will be needed and as an old teacher I reckon it would be useful to bring along his last school report, so the high school will have some clue about what to expect from him. But really I am just making this up. I can't remember the process at all. He is excited about going to high school and so it will be cool to be able to let him know he is all set to go as part of his birthday parcels.

We all enjoyed the air con at Carindale shopping  centre last Tuesday and to keep us busy while we waited for it to be dinner time, we trooped along and Zig modeled next to any item which he thought might make a fine pressie. I was spoiled for choice! And because my mind is going the way of all sad limp organics, I took photos of everything on my phone. Yippee, cos that means that tomorrow when we go looking for the LIST, we can follow the photo cues, and end up with some great loot, and enjoy the air-con again.

Birthdays are a big deal in our family. It's all about the effort and thought and the cake must not just look good, it must be yummy, lucky that Belly is a master! So even though we are a bit locked out of the fun on the actual day this year., we are gonna make up for it when we all get together for some loud craziness and lots of food and plenty of candles and oodles of sugar.

Roll on the last year of the little fella, I'm gonna enjoy it all

Did you study science?

I have it, seems always been an arty farty with a maths rising, which means that the arts have always been my passion even though I have studied more than my share of mathematics and until I turned 40, when I decided out loud that I would never do maths again,  I was pretty good at it. Yeh I will put up half a finger and admit that still if needs must and all that, I can usually find the right answer, I just routinely choose not to bother.

But science is another kettle of fish altogether. I got to the ripe old age of 15 and celebrated that my last ever science class was well and truly behind me. I rejoiced that never again would I be faced with a rat pegged out on a board or a bunch of chemical shit that could potential blow up the desk, and the only reason I would ever have to look up into the night sky was to wonder if the moonlight was too bright to hide the making out going on at the back of the garden.

Yeh I hated science. Or maybe for full disclosure, I was not keen on the fella teaching it, perhaps because he was having something of a sordid affair with my best friend, but that's a whole other story.

In a sideways, sort of sly sneaky chinese water drip torture way, some science snuck in while I was looking at geomorphology and weather and climate and vegetation, but I pretended that that really didn't count, and when I was teaching all that stuff it was not easy to generate a great deal of enthusiasm for it. I was much more entertaining discussing the human geography issues than the environmental ones.

But I have recently been lamenting my lack of biology studies.

My fish, my girls, live in a fab pond, and they have grown to be bigguns over the years. No not big enough to sling on the BBQ wrapped in foil and stuffed with leeks and butter, but they are pretty big. The trouble is they do shit like mad and all this stink is supposed to be absorbed by the plants I have growing in the pond, except that I am not a gardener and the bloody things keep dying, so the shit builds up. Sometimes it is a bit on the nose.

So my mate at the fish shop said to put in some blue chocolate things every now and then and that maybe some snails would be good cos they eat up all the poo. Snails are cheap and you don't get too attached to 'em. The life cycle of mine seems to be, live in the pond, eat fish shit, get bigger, and then die and then I think the girls might have a go cos I find the empty shells and fling 'em onto the garden cos the calcium might be good for the plants...is that right?

But recently there have been these bunches of white splodge on the pond edge and on some of the plant leaves. Now my first thought was that they were the eggs of some awful insect and I was about to squash the shit out of those suckers, when I wondered if they might not be from the snails. Onto google and because I am a scientific idiot, I have found it hard to find out what the hell's going on. The closest I have been able to find today is that land snails are hermaphrodites, but fresh water ones need nookey to make eggs and that these eggs take about 4 weeks to turn into little snails which by the sounds of it, won't survive the girls, cos they are born with no shells. I guess my excitement about never having to buy snails again was premature.

I guess the real point is that even though I have not studied science per-say, just day to day living with occasionally removing your head from your arse, some science sort of tumbles in there.

Is there anything that you stubbornly refused to know about but now wish you hadn't? 

Finding your inner child.

Sand sculptures on display at Surfers Paradise.

It really wasn't the day for it, but we trooped off into town to have a little look at this year's sand sculptures. They really are bloody fabulous! We parked up and wandered past the tourist shit shops and dodged all the touts and got to the iconic sign at the beach and opted for a left turn. The displays are impressive. 

But, then the heat just seemed to slap us about the face and I turned beetroot. Steve reckons I was completely a-glow. So the rest of the sculptures had to wait for another day and we went in search of a coffee, but there was a pre-requisite of pumping air-con. 

It was like a case of Goldilocks, 'this one is too hot, this one's too crowded, and this one looks a bit shit'. But we found our way back to Max Benners, which without even the slightest hint of scientific research, I found to be the coldest along the highway and the various arcades.

So like little Miss Muffet I sat on my big fat bum under the cranked up air con vents that were seriously spilling out the chill and we chomped our way through some very chocolatey and I am sure low calorie, waffles smothered in melted choc and ice cream. The coffees were hardly important after that lot! But they were OK.

There's also a pop-up photographic exhibition which seemed to be like a treasure hunt. We successfully rumbled a couple of galleries and some of the photos really appealed. There are also inflatable fishy things hanging out of random buildings which are ok, but I felt that they looked a bit faded.

But really it was just too bloody hot, so it was home to the pool.

When is it gonna be winter?

Bugger.

This little fella is a snail in my fish pond and he moves faster than Oz Post and his shit eating makes more sense than government bureaucracy

Not unusually, I have jumped the gun with the Blogger Game. Yeh I am nuts about time and punctuality to the point where I reckon I might well make the leap into the coffin before my last breath leaks out, cos I really hate being LATE. But truth be told I wondered about how to 'play the game', and rather than spend the time required to work it out, I decided that I would make up some rules of my own, except that I do actually fancy playing along with some other folk just for a change. So I am gonna give this A to Z challenge thing a go in APRIL, along with all the other folk playing.

So back to the time obsession thing.

The poison I am taking as I have mentioned before, needs to come via a bunch of paper shufflers in Tasmania and there is or at least there was a turn around time or about 10 days, from when the specialist writes the request and pops it in the fucking post box, until it gets delivered and processed and then the approval is popped back in another fucking post box in Tasmania and then gets dropped off here on the Goldie.

Except that fucking AUSTRALIA POST's New Year's resolution was that they promised to take even fucking longer to deliver a letter and it's gonna charge - well I am not positive, but almost twice the price I think for that shitful service. So now there is a turnaround time of more than 3 weeks!

The trouble is that the order cannot leave the Doctor's office until the last script is filled and that gives only 30 pills' time for the script to be double posted and then filled.

As if being unwell is not stressful enough, now I am counting how many pills I have left and am crossing off the days on the calendar waiting for the fucking bureaucracy and Oz Post to get their shits together.

Fucking hell! Why is all this necessary?

Why is it that it is legal to buy a house, or make a will, or get divorced via email, but the provision of proof of the need for a prescription needs to be posted snail mail? Really what the fuck is that about?

I have twice now written to the Federal Health Minister for an explanation, and thus far, I have had a phone call from a public servant and 2 letters from public servants outlining the system. Yes that would be the self same system that I have outlined and and am living through. Yeh that's the one I KNOW about.

Noone it seems, least of all Ms Ley the Minister in charge and I am clearly using the term loosely, is able to comprehend the nuance of my emails. They don't see the difference between a DESCRIPTION of the system and an EXPLANATION for the system. Or perhaps they do, but they just enjoy the game, the jerking around, perpetuating their piss-off factor.

Anyway the game is that I have 7 pills left and I spoke to the doctor this morning and he said that Tasmania received his request on the 11th of Feb and after it's approved, and attached to the snail's back it will take another 11 days to get here. Yeh that's getting right down to the wire!

And here's me, the crazy loon who never keeps anyone waiting, who will sit in my car for 30 minutes or longer if I have added in traffic considerations, rather than be late to ANYTHING. Yeh, me who always runs early, now I am counting down pills and days like some shit sort of ancient abacus.

So yes I am happy to wait until April to play the A to Z game now I know the rules, I am less fucking happy about having to play the poison shit Oz Post game.


What games give you the shits?