Bills.

Yeh this is a calculator in an Offertory church collection box given to me as an ironic gesture years ago and I am collecting strange coins in it, but I might have to empty it out and send the cash as payment for the latest bills.

If it's close by, please have a look at your latest bill. Doesn't matter where it's from, cos there is some basic info that nearly all bills will include, especially if the sender fully expects to get your wonga.

I mean I am not an accounting genius, far fucking from it, but I am not in the habit of handing out cash willy-nilly for stuff not received, or stuff that I don't understand, or stuff that has not been specified. I mean I am not a genius, but that's a far cry from being some wealthy, naive, crazy person, who's best friend is a Nigerian Prince.

So when for the third time this week I got a bill, and when I say bill, this third one was actually a DEBTOR'S INVOICE, I began to wonder if in deed I was some sort of crazy person who had just forgotten to pay something important. It's possible of course what with chemo brain and all, but rack the poor old noggin as hard as I could and I just couldn't remember missing something. Ho Hum.

Then when I had a little look, there was nothing specific on the account and no date due. Now that's also pretty odd. Again, never in my life have I sent out an invoice, but if I did, I reckon I would include some of this basic info if I expected to be paid.

So I rang and tried to get a handle on what I had taken delivery of but had forgotten all about.

Yeh, there had been NO DELIVERY. I was not going nuts, I could continue to take the chemo shit without fear of going completely senile. The bill, now a DEBTOR'S INVOICE, was for stuff - still unspecified and not due for delivery until the end of January, yep it was for the Emperor's new clothes.  So you can imagine I instantly grabbed my credit card and told them that if they had a bridge for sale I would be interested in that too.


NOT.

Does this all sound like a scam to you?

The DEBTOR'S INVOICE was for $750. Now that's quite a chunk of cash I reckon. And I was left wondering who just stumps up the wonga without questioning it. I mean how lazy or ridiculously wealthy would you have to be to provide your credit card details without at least asking what it's all about?

In case you are still with me and wondering who sent the bill 3 times in a week, I will tell you, it was NOT a Nigerian Prince, and it wasn't a gypsy house painter or drive way fixer, it wasn't a telemarketer flogging funeral insurance. Nope, it was from a State Government agency, a High School. A State High School.

Proving that certainly education is not free in Queensland, and that the accounting system in place is not your bog standard, 'User pays' type of thing. This is more, 'You will probably use it at some point, months in the future, so stump up now and don't ask any questions, cos this place is so popular that if you don't like it, you can fuck off and we'll find some other schmuck to pony up the cash,' type of system.

A tiny bit of rudimentary adding up and I reckon it'll cost a least $2000 a year to go to this place. And that is not including stuff that continually rears it's head and sticks it's hand in your pockets.

This surely is not standard? How do people with no cash manage?

I spent 30 years teaching, and most of that time was in the State system. I am an absolute believer in Education for all, regardless of family circumstances. But it appears this is now some sort of pipe dream. It seems your kids get what you can afford. And it seems that schools can and in fact DO charge any damn amount, in any damn way they choose and there is nothing the local punters can do about it.

I would be jumping up and down giving myself a heart attack if I was still teaching.
 
This sense of elitism should never be part of the ethos of a State School.

Shit Parking tests metal knees.

I tried to post this last week and then learned that the photo hadn't appeared and so I reckon the story could not have made much sense. The old computer gremlins at work again huh? Anyway I think I have fixed the problem and so here it is again.

00 BED

Yep I reckon if I was a prossie, a lady of the night, or a beck and call girl,  and I wanted to advertise my wares I might get a number plate like this.

ooooooh aaaahhhh Bed baby? Now? anytime?

And if I wanted to make sure that any prospective punters could expect a classy bit of tail, then I might pop the number plate on a pricey car to let 'em know that their money would be usefully spent and if I was so inclined, I might also pop a large photo of a perfect set of teeth so that the Johns would also know that dental hygiene is important to me, or maybe a glamour shot of pert boobies, although maybe a different body part photo would be a better advertisement, but as I am not in the game I am not sure.!

I don't have a personalised plate, probably because I lack the imagination to come up with anything that would suit me everyday.

Sometimes, when some dick forces their way into my lane without a gesture of thanks or a little beep or a twinkle of the indicator, I'd like it if my car cried out, MANNERS. And sometimes when I am just tootling along in no rush, just enjoying the scenery, it'd be cool if my car could gently encourage other drivers to, Smell the Roses.

There could be all manner of sage advice that could be succinctly popped onto the plates, but they'd have to do a Bondy 007 rotation to accommodate moods and circumstances I reckon.

I am an average sort of driver. I don't routinely get too stressed about speedy bully pushy fools and I don't bully or tailgate, or flip people the finger when they piss me off. I am not vindictive about letting people in and will pull over on a single lane road to let speedy gonzalies pass, mostly cos I don't like the stress of 'em being right on my bumper.

I quite like driving, and have only ever had one accident.

I was 20 and had just bought a brand new lovely blue car. It was only 2 months old and I smashed the shit out of it. I was never sure how that happened. I took responsibility for the crash, cos the bloke walloped me on the right, even though I reckon the fellow must have really been moving. Ho hum hey. My fault, thankfully there was insurance.

So one accident in nearly 40 years, that's not too bad.

But because I imagine my little Mazda 2 is the size of a tank when it comes time to park up, I am pretty careful. I will take a couple of runs at it if necessary, just to make sure that I am in the bay properly and I can reverse park if needs be, but I don't like it if someone is watching me cos I don't do well with that extra pressure.  It really is a sort of obsession and one that means that generally speaking my little girl goes unscathed by dickheads shoving open their car doors onto her. There is always room, and if there isn't any room, I drive on somewhere else. Yeh cos I think I am parking a tank, I have been known to start out shopping at one place and finish up being somewhere else. But I can always get in and out of the girl with ease.

Always that is, unless some fuck pulls up alongside and literally throws their car in with wild abandon such as would definitely please a bed partner, but definitely not please an overweight old woman with 2 fake knees.

Such was the case on Wednesday in Brisvegas. We returned to the car after a meal celebrating the Grandie Boy's Martial Art's grading, to find 00BED parked up so close that I could not open my door. I slid sidewards between the 2 cars. I backed out and tried going in the other way. I backed in and fronted in and tried hard to vapourise myself so I could float in. I worked up quite the sweat trying to get in. I swore loudly and badly and my girl went looking for the dick who had parked up with so little regard for anyone else.

People came offering assistance. People came for an incredulous look see. People came to wonder about the fat old woman with the bucket mouth. I was not very gracious, cos I was single mindedly trying to work out how to get in.

Finally, after giving the side of my car a damn fine dusting with my hitherto clean outfit, I decided to try going in from the passenger side.

Now, in my dotage, I can happily recall times in my youth when clambering all over the front seats of cars dodging steering wheels and gear sticks, lead to moments of uncomfortable joy, but those were skinny times of fully functional joints, and now are only fond memories.

I tried going in face first...Useless! So I sat and shimmied - no not in a good way. Spread-eagled, I arse planted from one seat to the other and then slowly managed to get enough bend from the metal knees to pull myself over the hand brake and the gear stick and seat belt thingy, into place. Damage to my nether regions was a risk I needed to take. I am pretty sure that the sweat thankfully added to my 'slipperbility'. I puffed and panted and people of the Panel Van, 'If the van's a rocking don't come a knocking' era, would have given my car a wide birth for fear of interrupting an intimate moment.

Finally, I tucked my side mirror in and reversed out slowly, pausing to take the photo, wishing that I had some old piece of shit car that I could have tossed willy-nilly at 00BED.

The owner didn't return.

A note was placed under the windscreen wiper. It was vehement and angry and rude and perhaps just a little shocking. I wanted to do some bad bad word name calling in red lippy all over their windscreen but my girl thought that not a good idea. I am still a little sorry that I pulled up short on that.

I kept thinking that as I am pretty cool calm and collected in a car, especially when I have precious cargo, that my reaction was quite extreme. I can only imagine what would have become of the car park had a hot head been so stupidly parked in.

It's unlikely that anyone who so completely disregards others as to park so shockingly, will give a rat's arse about the note, but I like to think that perhaps they will be encouraged to get a smaller car, and if they want to advertise their wares, then maybe they could sit on a street corner on a bed wearing a sandwich board sign saying, 'Come and get me'. Whether they mean themselves or the bed can remain delightfully vague.

I'm a City Gal...but....

I have been yodeling 'I don't want to live more than 5 miles from a Myers' for as long as I can remember. Myers being a big department store that sells everything, well not like Harrods but a lot of stuff, and the stores are only found in the city and that's where I like to live.

I like the pace and the horns blasting and the emergency vehicles screeching by. I like the grit and the anonymity, even though I always nod and say 'Good morning' to total strangers, including bus drivers and rubbish collectors. I like the cafes and restaurants and going to the pictures or the theatre or art galleries. I like being able to get around leaving the car behind, cos the public transport is cheap and cheerful. Yep I like the city.

The Goldie is not the city tho. Oh sure it has it's pluses. It has a Myer right by the beach and there are certainly plenty of police sirens screaming towards Surfers Paradise on weekend evenings but the place is really only a biggish country town.

There is no argument that there is an awful lot more going on at the Goldie than in many places, say WOOLI for example.

Wooli is about 50 km east of Grafton in NSW, and is just a tiny spec of houses along one rather narrow road drawn down an isthmus of land which runs precariously between a creek and the Pacific Ocean. The public transport here consists of the courtesy bus to the bowls club which makes damn fine slurppy cosmopolitans and serves up some Chinese fare that must be bought only by locals cos the menu was so weird and there were no prices listed.  We didn't try it, just not brave enough I'm afraid and they don't like dogs. I guess they just don't fancy the idea of bowling around a big old turd. I understand that.

There is a pub, where we were allowed to sneak Dog for a fab dinner and there's a caravan park and a wonderful little coffee shop and a service station which doubles as a ' where's the chocolate' store, and quite a large Deep Sea Rescue place, with lots of boats and stuff, and there was an oyster bar place that Stevie would have liked to have tried but it closed at 5pm so no dinner there then.

And that was it.

There was this finger line of houses and bugger all else. Lots of the houses are holiday rentals and so were empty, and I wonder if this gives the locals the shits.

We stayed in the second last house in Wooli.

The back yard was the ocean and the front yard was the creek.

It was bloody beautiful.

We drove around a bit and saw some country side, Kangaroos and a couple of Emus and rural stuff like cows and horses and open space and bushland which we didn't yomp through, because, well SNAKES and ticks and grasshoppers and birds and shit like that. I mean I might have been wearing my farmer Joe hat, but I sure as shit wasn't going country feral.

We got a bit lost and the sat nav turned into a wandering arrow as the maps became hazy and we found some lovely little places and a vehicular ferry that took us free of charge across the mighty Clarence River. We discovered that even the week out from their big festival of the Jacarandas, Grafton town was closed up tighter than a nun's what'sit on a Saturday afternoon, and we found the beach. Everywhere we went we found the beach.

We drove to Coff's Harbour which is a much bigger little town than I thought it would be and we found the beach. Bloody lovely. And we popped back out to the coast from the highway and we found more beaches and headlands and coastal walks. Bloody lovely.

But the best beach was our back yard.

I imagine the generous council had stumped up for these benches along the dune ridge just so the locals could sit and watch the day go by. Best bit of council spending EVER!

Dog loved it, I loved it, Stevie loved it although he doesn't enjoy the sandy foot shit as much as me or Dog.

We ate in and played card games and watched the biggest fuck off tellie I have ever seen, seriously we were so close you could see actor nose hair and I am not sure that's much of a recommendation.

And we listened to the waves. Ahh.

It doesn't sound like a wonderful time for a city gal, but I would go back in a heart beat, no not for ever, but for another visit. Sitting having my morning cuppa on the bench seat, looking for whales and watching the dumpers roll in, ah I can feel the heart rate dropping just thinking of it.

The World Must be a Scary Place.

As a teacher I have been yelled at, sworn at, punched, and had furniture thrown at me, all by teenagers, many bigger and stronger than me, and don't even get me started on the shit I have endured from the kids' parents, adults who aught to have known better, but who were clearly the tree from whence the children fell. Yeh all a bit ho hum, and that was part of the job, not the best bit, but still, a part of the job, and generally if you hung in there the real problem would surface like a bloated body in the swamp and then solutions could be found.

But it seems pretty clear to me that if I was actually still in the classroom today, when a kid goes off like a rocket, I would be empowered by the Boss Gods, to put my hand up and say, 'If you go off again, I will terminate this class, as I do not have to put up with this.'

I can just see it now! perhaps 20 times a day, sticking my hand up and reciting a little catch phrase, and all would be well. Or if I wanted to finish early, all I'd have to do is wind up a couple of kids in say the yr 9 vocational English class to the point where they'd whisper, 'Shit' and then I could scarper, cos no-one can be expected to put up with that sort of shit, ever!

So what it means is that insurance companies and super funds and government agencies and quangos and utility companies and banks and telcos can all, without fear, keep sending wrath cooking shit in the post, or emails, and then encourage 'customers' to call premium rate numbers to ask what the fuck is going on. Yep they no longer need to fear that the shit that they send or the procedures they put in place, will make people cross enough to swear or heaven forbid raise their voices, cos if they even think that's gonna happen they can just trill off their little phrase about, 'terminating this call' and they can go onto the next one. It makes fuck all difference after all cos they have no interest in providing customer service, cos they get paid regardless.

So I have got to imagine that something truly horrible must have happened, and not as an isolated event, horrible, terrible things must have happened to call centre operators so now they are allowed to just hang up. And not just allowed to hang up, they are encouraged to do so after sprooking their little one liners.

So what devastating things could have befallen our fearless, now fearsome folk on the phones. Well I guess someone could have hung up on them loudly, although that really hasn't happened in the last decade cos in the digital era, it's not possible to slam of the old plastic receiver onto the phone ( this was excruciating and exhilarating depending on which end you were on ) - yeh back in the old days, when there was some interest in solving a problem or easing a complaint, that slamming clunk would have meant trouble cos that would have been one pissed off customer who might be immediately walking their business elsewhere. Yeh the boss would not be happy about the customer hang ups, follow ups would happen, and apologies would be offered and businesses would grow.

So there might have been a hang up or 2, or as happened, every day when I worked the phones with my mate Rosie, we'd be told to 'Fuck Off'. I suppose it was lucky that we were a couple of teflon gals cos instead of needing stress leave and psychiatric attention, we'd laugh it off and count 'em up. I reckon that 24 might have been the winning score in a 6 hour shift.

What truly dreadful thing must have happened that has lead to this 'Terminate the call' crappola? Perhaps it's the 'elf and safety police' just making sure they all stay in a job, so people are employed to write the 'terminate the call' dialogue, and then trainers need to be employed to teach the phone operators how to best deliver this speech, and of course then there would need to be counselors on hand or at least on  speed dial for when things get really out of hand. Yeh I can see how the unions would be tickled pink with themselves to have engineered all these other roles, it's just a shame that from a customer perspective, there is less and less service.  

I was gonna outline the events leading up to me hearing 'the speech' today but I am pretty sure that we have all heard it before and the organisations are, let's face interchangeable. I didn't swear, I have learnt my lesson on that one, but I did raise my voice, mostly because I imagined that PAUL was hard of hearing cos it was that or he was just thick as shit.

Ho fucking hum!

'Inferno'

Do you like a bit of Tom Hanks?

Do you like to reminisce about travels to Venice or Florence or Istanbul?

Would you very much love to go to these places for the first time or again?

Well 'Inferno' might just be the movie for you.

From all accounts, and by that I mean a bloke that Stevie plays golf with, who read a review somewhere, the movie is shit and you should not waste your money on it, but as is often the case, I disagree.

We recorded the first 2 Prof Langdon stories on the tellie recently cos we knew this movie was a coming and so we were sort of ready for the puzzles and the twists. Some of the dialogue is a bit oopsie, but not too much, and certainly you get the drift very quickly of what the hell - Dante reference just to be a smart arse, is going on, in fact I reckon it might be easier to get into this story than the others.

I did quite a bit of hiding behind my hands, even though there was a voice in my head saying that things were more than likely gonna work out ok. After all OK is a relative term.

Anyway I was pleased to have stumped up the cash to see it. It's been a pretty big day as I get sorted for going away so I did rather think that I might have had a little zzzzz off if things went pair shaped, but I didn't nod off even for a second, and god knows I have slept through plenty of movies and the odd play too, so it can't have been too bad.

If like us you have caught up on the old movies then expect to see Tom Hanks looking more grandpa than professor, cos he has aged a bit, but his acting is a good as ever. Laconic I reckon is a good description.

Pop along if you like, but if you come down on the side of the critic who panned it, please don't ask me for a refund. It's all fair in love and war remember.

Imagination

What a random collection of books on this page? Top right is the book my friend Pinky Poinker wrote and it's worth a look for a giggle. Dawn French has never written anything that I haven't loved, Lauren Bacal - what a woman!

I downloaded and read, 'The Girl On a Train' when it first appeared on the best seller list. Now that's not how I fell upon it cos I am not privy to all that hoopla, so I must have seen something about it on social media, and as I nearly always have my nose stuck in a book and because it is so ridiculously easy to get a book delivered to your Kindle, I ordered it and then there it was waiting for me to imagine.

Anyway, I just fell into the chapters. The characters and the places all appeared in my head and I was too often a big old scaredy-cat, pleased to be able to close up the Kindle and put it all away before the nightmares stampeded into my head, cos god knows I already have enough trouble sleeping. The 'Who Dun-it' was pretty long and drawn out, perhaps mostly cos likable characters are a bit light on the ground. Yep I enjoyed the read, and I loved the way my imagination ran rampant. I feel more than a little sorry for those literal, black and white, real or fake folk.

But it might be exactly these folk who drive the making of best sellers into movies, long before the readers' memories are even slightly dimmed.

There has been quite a lot in social media this week about how terribly plain Emily Blunt is in the movie, and given that she played a tortured alcoholic that shouldn't be too much of a shock. She did a good job living up to my imagination. All the crap written criticising  Ms Blunt's appearance seemed to be off on an irrelevant tangent but that's just my opinion.

The cast did a pretty good job but if I have any complaint it might be that everything unfolded too quickly and so the tension was a bit lost. Of course it is entirely possible that having read the book, there was just never gonna be too many surprises, well none in fact. I mean what the fuck did I expect really? 

So truth be told, I was happier and more frightened and upset and worried and relieved when I read the book than when I watched the movie, but if you haven't read the book, pop into the pictures to have a little look see and let me know what you think. 

It is probably always wise to see the movie before you read a book, especially if you have a vivid imagination cos then you can sit back, self satisfied in the knowledge that what played out in your head was better than in the movie and therefore you should make a bee line for Hollywood and take up directing - well maybe not?

Squealing

When was the last time you squealed like a piss poor girlie actor in B Grade movie? You know, that hand over your mouth and a throat scoring scream with an after taste of adrenaline?

I reckon that most of the time I am not a girlie girlie. I didn't like playing with dolls tho I did enjoy designing clothes and chopping off the hair of any Barbie that came too close, and if I was given the choice between tea parties and rough housing in a field, then the great outdoors was always a winner. I happily - well not really happily, but needs must and all that, climbed onto my roof and slopped shit around to cure leaks and prepared and laid many many square metres of paving. I have never shied away from doing the 'Boy's' jobs cos well for most of my adult life I was the bloke as well as the girlie.

I am not notably afraid of too much stuff though I will admit that I spend quite a lot of time watching 'Criminal Minds' from behind my hands or with my eyes closed. Redback spiders are no match for a pair of thongs slapped together to smear those bastards, but I am not fond of snakes. In fact I am probably OK with just about anything, anything that is, that is in full view. I don't like the creeping up on ya shit, cos that does scare the crap outta me.

Last night I made my way upstairs for a shower. It was dark. I saw a fat shadow skitter across the wall high up near the ceiling and knew that it was just a friendly old gecko.  I am not afraid of of these fellas. They do a damn fine job of chomping up most of those annoying little buggers - mozzies and midges I mean, cos even a gecko is no match for those religion touting fools who sometimes knock. The Big House is home to a good number of gecko families who sing loudly to let us know that they are at work.

Having said all that, I do like to know where they are, so I turned a light on so he knew where I was, and I stood back and let him scurry, along one wall, across the top of my door, and along the top of the wall coming back towards me, and then I reckon the poor fella saw me and shit himself and lost traction on the wall and fell with a loud splat onto the floor.

The noise scared me. I squealed like a child. Stevie's legs did that cartoon running action. He yelled. I laughed. He thought there must have been an intruder in the house. We were all relieved when the intruder was just a lovely gecko. The 'squeal taste' took longer to abate, especially when I went into the bathroom to be confronted by the giant black brown moth who has been living there for a while now.  Of course it does no harm but I would so like it to find somewhere else to live and to that end I had left all the windows opened in the morning so it could fly out into the big wide world. It clearly likes my room. Ho Hum.  But I didn't want it flying at me in all my nakedity and do any more scaring. It sat high on the wall and I kept an eye on it and then forgot about it. Who the fuck knows where it is now. Ho hum.

There is a limit to how much adrenaline can be processed in a day.

And it seems that I am more flight than fight these days. Well that might well have always been the case. I am remembering a wet, towel clad, skinny woman racing out into the street to ask the delivery man dropping something next door, if he could come and help me with a ..... wait for it....a grasshopper! IN MY BEDROOM!  Yeh, well it was the size of a small bird! Anyway I reckon he figured all his chrismases had come at once until that was, I showed him to the bedroom, pointed to the hopper bastard and then hid behind the door, I mean I was a lunatic about the insect, but certainly loud enough to bark instructions through a bit of wood.

Well the grasshopper didn't like the look of the guy apparently and so hopped behind the wardrobe. Matey boy thought he'd call it a day, until I yelled to move the wardrobe and kill that sucker. He was trying to catch it and let it free outside. I am yelling like a towel draped banshee, 'Kill it. Kill it.' He finally did get a hold of the fucker and then he and the hopper scurried away, both very happy to have made their escape from the nut house.

Oh and I don't like birds, they scare me too. Oh shit it seems I am not the Zena warrior I'd like to be. Bugger!