Melbourne here I come.

These are my Dorothy shoes.

I am packing for my little visit to Melbourne, and I have had to dig deep cos my Goldie life is a very simple one filled with shorts and thongs and hats, and very occasionally a bit of a dress up but still with thongs. And that's not because I don't have proper grown up clobber, it's just that this place doesn't require it, in fact people here are so used to the casual, ok slobby, gear, that those rare times when I remember to swipe on a bit of lippy, I am accused of going on the game or perhaps attending a funeral or an Amway convention.

So I am exchanging summer stuff for wintery wet stuff and that means that I have had to dig into my London gear - boots and closed in shoes and I reckon I am gonna have to pack an umbrella too. Bugger! I am not taking the good weather with me. Funnily enough Stevie has asked me to bring some of the rain back home with me, yeh the garden here could do with a drink.

So I popped out last week and bought a new pair of black trousers and I am taking a pair of resurrected jeans and an assortment of tops and that'll do me. I am not keen on dragging a hundred weight around the airports.

And as I am packing, and counting out knicky-noos, I am shuddering at the memory of the story on the tellie last week about the current trend of people boiling up their underbits IN THE KETTLE, in the hotel rooms. Ooooo YUK. Especially ooooo YUK cos I do like to wake up with a cuppa and so I am already planning to boil the shit outta that kettle before I use it. Isn't it funny the plans we make.

I am trying to decided whether or not I am gonna be brave and try out UBER for the first time cos they have just been granted access to Melbourne Airport. But I haven't used it before cos my old phone was rubbish, and the info from the hotel is that a cab will be about 50 bucks and they had no clue about UBER although they did seem to think it would be more expensive, but that might be because they'd prefer their guest to arrive by cab. Anyway I will check it out when I get there.

And I have done a reccie to see how long it will take to walk from my place to the conference and it all sounded manageable until now when I have to factor in Melbourne rain. I am not sure I want to puddle through 20 minutes and arrive all wet and unnecessary to then sit all day in aircon listening to stuff. I will wait and see, cos the 4 seasons in one day reputation of Melbourne is well founded and it might be that I can chug along in brilliant sunshine and settle in before the rain starts.

Do you get the idea that I am excited about heading away? I certainly hope so. I love going to Melbourne. It's such a grown up place. It almost demands that you dress up and behave yourself. So I am planning on putting on proper clothes - including a bra and shoes and maybe even a bit of face paint, and eating up some delicious food and sitting and watching the beautiful people wander by, oh and if I learn some shit at the conference well that'll be a big bonus.

Botox Clinic

Live and let live I reckon. So long as it's not hurting anyone or even inconveniencing someone, then seriously I reckon you can just go your hardest. And no I am not gonna go on about the fucking expensive, non binding, postal poll about Gay Marriage, cos I just don't get the controversy about this. Yeh I know I have mentioned all this before. Nah I am talking about folk, mostly women but also men, who take their faces along for some wee injections to ease the age and make them feel better about themselves. Yeh, go your hardest I reckon.

But today rather then popping in to a candle lit, sweet smelling, calm, gentle music streaming, salon for a good needling, I found myself in my doctor's rooms along with a veritable herd of people. Dr Meena had told me to call up any time and make an emergency appointment, for the savage digging if my mind started exploding with migraines again, after we agreed to experimentally part ways last November.  I was sitting there and not getting even the least bit cross about how long it was gonna take, cos I realised that by my being, there someone else was gonna be running much later than they had planned on, cos I was a 'Fit in', so I played some games on my phone and kept my head down.

What I did quickly glean while I sat there, was that it was Botox Day. And so as folk wandered in and out, I curious about their ailments.

Dr Meena is a thorough specialist. She likes to make sure she is crossing all the Ts and dotting all the Is. But once she has decided that the Botox injections are the way to go, she goes hard and fast. Diggy diggy dig dig, and all the while she is chatting away and I am breathing like I am about to push out a 10 pounder. I bleed and she wipes up and continues to chatter and jabs in more than 30 sharps. Ouchie indeed.

It's a long way from pretty making, but hey there is not something too attractive about being head down bum up chucking into the loo, so I guess beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

But back to why the others were there.

I reckon the woman who wandered in just before me might have had an exploding head too, but from conversations earwigged, one bloke was being jabbed for help with Parkinson's disease tremors and another for Cerebral Palsy. I rather doubted that either of these people were gonna dance on outta there, but I hope that there might be an improvement at least. Are you wondering about privacy here? Me too but that's another post I reckon.

There are lots of things that are getting a bit of a Botox tickle if you ask Google. Cross eyes and even stinky BO arm pits. Bloody remarkable stuff huh?

Fingers crossed for us all, cos the needles are not for the faint hearted.

Security

Ever since I was a wee lass, I have always thought that if someone broke into the house while I was sleeping, I would just pretend to already be dead so they would leave me alone. Yep, this has been my defense method for as many years as I can remember. Sure that makes me a coward! Oh Well.

You know those movies where someone hides behind a dead body, or uses a dead body as a shield, or crawls under a pile of dead bodies to save themselves, well yep, that would be me. I know lots of people who look at that shit a shake their heads and make all sorts of derogatory remarks about how disgusting or lame or cowardly or pathetic, but I always think, 'That's using your brain.' cos a good dollop of self preservation is always useful.

This might be why I am such a wooooosey when it comes to watching scary shit on the tellie or at the pictures.

I have never been good at watching horror stuff and now all gore and guts has become just part and parcel of every night tellie viewing. Am I the only person who has noticed this? 'Criminal Minds' is about my limit and even then I do spend some considerable time hiding behind my hands asking Stevie if the scary bit is finished.

I remember going along to the pictures to watch a double bill, 'Misery' and 'Silence of the Lambs' with a gaggle of gals. I ended up getting such a fright that I literally fell off the chair and spent a good long time calming down while I stared at the back of the chair in front of me. Yeh I know I wouldn't fit down in the feet well anymore and even if I did, my knees wouldn't bend well enough to get down there or get back up, and maybe that's why I just don't go to horror hit at the pictures any more.

My Darling Boy was asking me about scary movies last week and I happily told him that I just don't like 'em. He and his mother find 'em FUNNY! But I just can't get passed the idea that it could all be happening to me, even the Sci-Fi weirdness, and that terror I feel is very fucking unpleasant. He went on and on about a whole bunch of movies that were either coming out or had already been released or he had watched on DVD or something, but unusually I finally had to tell him I had stopped listening, firstly cos I didn't care and secondly if I had been paying attention, I would have been shitting myself and no kid needs to watch his Ma do that!

But the point of all this is that on Saturday night when all was quiet in the house, Dog started to growl. I was bedded down for the night and didn't fancy getting up to take her out for a wee and generally she has been doing a little crying thing when nature is calling and this was a growl, a cranky sort of noise. And then there was a bark. Not a friendly, 'I am here and would enjoy it if you played a bit of ball or fed me some treaties' type of bark, but a low guttural sort of, 'Don't fuck with me' sort of bark. I opened my eyes but didn't move. I watched closely for any strange shadows flitting across the walls. She growled and barked and I lay there completely still, wide awake and waiting for someone to wander across the back deck. Yeh I pretended to be asleep, maybe dead. Maybe if someone broke in they would not look into the lounge room floor cos how often would they find some crazy old gal sleeping on the floor when a bed was available. Maybe if someone was breaking in they'd just run through the house and hopefully steal the cars.

I saw no movement and finally Dog stopped the growling and the barking. It took a while my blood pressure to return to normal and a while longer for me to think about sleeping. I wasn't game to pick up my kindle, just in case there was still someone there and they'd see the light and then they would know I was not dead.

I am not at all a scardy cat in this house, I have been here often on my own and am almost never fearful of intruders, so what was curious was that firstly I jumped to the break and enter scenario, and more importantly that my old tried and tested method of feigning deadness was automatic.

Are you a brave soul who would confront an intruder or does under the bed, breathing as lightly as your panic would allow, seem like your best option?

Perspective.

This is the view from my airbed in the lounge where I am camping while Dog is convalescing. I am thoroughly enjoying the change in perspective.

As a drawer I probably make a half decent painter. I can manage to get a bit of a sense of distance and space using colour and I know about making things far away smaller and things closer bigger, but the composition of this sort of stuff has never been my forte, and I have never been much of a planner so instead of grabbing for a pencil to do a little preliminary sketch, out come the brushes and I just get started. Yeh I have buggered up many many canvases using this avante guard method, but all is not lost cos you can just paint over it and try again. Some canvases have ended up so heavy with paint that they'd make a damn fine weapon if your thing is knocking out small children with oversized frisbees.

And as I am writing this I am reminded of an art class in perspective I was teaching some time back. It was a year 9 class and to say they didn't give a shit would have been an exaggeration, and mostly that was my fault. Firstly I had allowed them to steal all but a few of the 2 and 4 B pencils so equipment was sparse. It took a while for me to believe that they would steal from themselves, and when I finally cottoned on to it and insisted that they leave a deposit if they wanted to borrow something, it was almost too late. But the biggest problem was the boring still life shit I had set up for them to draw. I mean in retrospect, it was like I set up this weird assortment of shit as a punishment, it was too fucking hard for 'em and I was too shit to teach 'em how to go about even starting. It was a disaster. Chairs were thrown, literally, and it was mostly my fault. Yeh some of these kids were mean little fuckers, but I should have found another way. Ho hum, too late she cried.

However that's not the only sort of perspective I have been pondering. The view from my temporary camp in the lounge room is marvellously odd and interesting. I guess most of us wake up in the same bed most of the time and look about and so all the details have been well observed. The crack in the plaster, the paint chips here and there and the fading of the carpet. I am pretty sure most of us could wander around the bedroom in the dark without fear of dented shins or broken toes. Ah the familiarity of it all.

But this last week the lounge room is transformed into a wee bedsit at night, thanks to a very comfy airbed, courtesy of my camping girl. It's a long, long, fucking long way down to that air bed. I have just about perfected the ease down into a little roll over to get in and my core muscles, which I thought had long since left the building, are getting a bit of a work out, as I drag myself to the sitting position and then pull my legs up and roll over onto my knees and then once in position as if I am giving some kid a horsey ride, I manage to wedge my toes under the mattress and push myself up leading with my arse, into that downward facing dog thing, before I finally become vertical. The getting down is much easier than the getting up - sounds like a fine Rap tune huh? I am pleased Stevie has not seen fit to video this effort and pop it on you tube.

Yep the getting up is the down side of this arrangement. Each night, I am limiting the number of times I haul arse up and so desperate have I been for the loo on occasion that woe-be-tide anyone between me and the potty. If running cross legged was an Olympic Sport, I could now be a contender.

There are no curtains or blinds downstairs and so I am awake with the sun and even that has been a revelation. It is wonderfully quiet, if you don't count Dog farting and scratching and chewing up the plastic rungs of her playpen. And I am really enjoying the view from the floor.

Oh sure I will be happy to get back into my bed, but for the short term the change in perspective is the bonus bit part of poor old Dog's misery.

There that's just how close I am to Dog...yep the farting is becoming a problem.

Bring on the Botox

These are the mind sapping alternatives to Botox. Back to the Jabs next week.

Almost exactly 3 years ago I wrote of trooping off for the many jabs of Botox to turn the tap off on the almost constant migraines.

I wriggled my toes and crossed my fingers and for the next 2 years I was migraine free. Yippee shouted from the roof tops barely begins to describe how fucking exciting that was. The success rate is about 70% and Dr Meena scores an impressive 90% but that's because she vets patients so thoroughly. Good on her I reckon, NOW. At the time I thought it was all a royal pain in the arse.

Anyway last November we both decided that maybe I should try going cold turkey on the Botox and see how things panned out. I figured that eventually surely you must get to an age where the migraines just leave the building, and I already had enough shit going on with the CML and all.

So we hugged it out and she said that if the fuckers returned I should just ring up and say it's an emergency and she'd fit me in. All our fingers were crossed.

Sadly about 2 months ago, as a little aside when at Dr Jane's, I mentioned the headaches and she said, 'Get thee back to Meena.' I was resistant. I had decided that the aches were side effects of the meds for the Leukaemia. Jane got up me and said that I couldn't always blame everything on the meds and in any case I had had the migraines long before the mutants arrived.

She was right of course. But I was still not racing back into the needles.

She has since said the same to Stevie and me, more than once. He's been on and on about it too. Resistance was useless.

The migraines are fucking back, not as bad as in their hey day but I have now been chewing up over the counter pain meds all day every day for more than a month. Fuck it! What a rattler!

I made an emergency appointment with Meena so instead of seeing me in November I am off for the Jabs next Wednesday. And that won't be a minute too soon. I have twice tried the pummeling of the neck and shoulders and that has just left me bruised and a little weepy and have now hoovered up all the pain meds except for the class A stuff which can continue to gather dust in the drawer, cos I reckon I could become a stumbling mess taking that shit at night, especially while I am sleeping on the air bed in the lounge looking after Dog. I could easily see getting confused and trying to join her in the playpen. Let's face confusion is not a foreign concept these days.

I don't know why the Botox works, but it certainly seems to.

Roll on Wednesday.

Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink

A notice was popped into the letter box yesterday warning that the water would be turned off between 9am and 2pm today. They are doing, oh who the fuck knows really, it has all become white noise to me. Anyway I thought it best to be at least a little prepared and given the all day race to the loo that goes on here, the flushing of the toilet has become my priority.

So I filled the bath last night so I could just scoop out the water and chuck it down the loo. Good thinking huh Batman? Except that when I went to check out my handy work this morning, all the water had drained out through the ill-fitting plug in the plug hole. BUGGER! so I have filled it again and wonder how long it will take for it to be empty. In the short term it works like a treat, do your business and then fill the red bowl and chuck it down the big white bus and voila, all gone! Yippee.

But it has lead us to think about how we use water. There are little tubs of water all around the house. When Stevie finished his fibre filled cereal this morning, I suggested being very conservative with the rinsing of the bowl and spoon before placing virtually clean in the disher. So we used a glass to scoop out some water from the sink and washed it into the half sink and called it done. So the water in the sink is 'not contaminated' Oh dear I reckon it's gonna be a long day with the whole germy germy issue I have.

Although I am clearly not the only one with this thinking, cos the warning note gave us some advice about how to deal with a dry day. Things like being careful about lifting too heavy buckets and only flush via a bucket when 'absolutely necessary', is that Council for Yellow - Mellow, but flush those turds? were outlined, and their final suggestion was to use anti-bacterial hand sanitizer for hand washing. Now I would need to have raced to the shops to get some of this shit in, cos we haven't got any and it seems that the writer of the letter presumes that all households have it, so just use it huh? Maybe I am not that germ phobic after all. Does everyone have a little supply of anti -bac hand sanitizer? I must do better.

And then I made sure that there was plenty of drinking water cos that's what I do all day and that's why sorting a loo flush was important.

The kettle is full so a cuppa is possible and just for good measure the laundry sink is full, though for what I don't know cos it is definitely not contamination free, cos I didn't scrub it when I filled it last night at silly o'clock. But there's water there and I thought, if necessary, we could decant it into the kettle and boil it to get rid of the detergent and bleach residue. I rather hope we don't get that desperate. And I filled a tub and popped it on the other downstairs loo. Again, why I am not at all sure.

Stevie filled 2 enormous buckets and they are standing guard at the front door.

I am pleased that I got the washing done yesterday and because there was a wee storm in the early hours, there is no need to think about feeding the plants.

So apart from drinking and flushing and cleaning, I wonder what else we might use water for that I have overlooked. Hopefully not much.

I am wondering how folk manage on tank only water. They must count every drop and if they came to visit they would tear out hair watching our cavalier usage. Unlimited water supply is just a given, until it's not.

Here's another reason why I am a city girl. One that I have rarely considered.

Yep, no more than 5 minutes from a Myers and constant running water please.

 

Clumsy Chaos

I wouldn't say that I am typically clumsy. I can generally manage to haul arse about the place striding one foot in front of the other, without stumbling into furniture or falling head over tit. I can carry more stuff than would be strictly necessary to avoid making 2 trips. This drives Stevie mad cos he hovers and waits till the mountain of ill-matched shit goes tumbling out of my arms. But I am nearly always steady as she goes. I don't routinely cut myself with sharp knives and whilst I still have the scars on my left pointy pointy finger from when I was 20, learning to use a saw and I slipped - Yeh blood fountained outta that one, I am pretty safe with tools and sharpies.

But I have this theory that the wake from clumsy errors is in direct proportion to your ability to rectify any mess or disaster.

For example, if you are having a chipper smiley day and you drop a plate as you dance it out of the disher. Yeh it smashes, but you just turn the radio up louder and continue to sing as you sweep up the debris.

If all is good in your world, and you drop you keys down a drain grate, you smugly McGiver a hook from an old coat hanger and scoop 'em out, no harm done.

However, if you are a little under the weather and drop your sock under the bed, you might well sink onto the carpet and have a good old sob, after all it WAS YOUR FAVOURITE SOCK!

Or if you haven't slept well for a few nights and you break a glass, firstly it will always be a precious glass that your Nanna left you, that she drank from at her wedding in 1901, and secondly it will shatter into so many pieces that the floor looks like a sand pit.

So today after sleeping with Dog in the lounge room since Thursday, I am a bit weepy tired.

I was using the last little bit of joy I had, to cook up some filling for some wee party parcels that were a hit a few weeks ago. The cooking was done and I was up to cleaning away. Yippee.

The salt and pepper grinders were the last part of the tidying.

They stood there and just mocked me. Bastards!

They fit easily into one hand. I have carried them like that hundreds of times, maybe millions.

I casually swung 'em back to float 'em into their spot in the herbie cupboard and suddenly the fucking pepper grinder just jumped out of my hand and threw itself hard onto the concrete floor. Fucker!

It smashed into a gazzillion pieces and of course pepper corns went fucking everywhere.

I needed to get the dust pan from the garage and I worried that Dog, who has been allowed to sit out of her playpen today after her trip to the vet to have all her bandages removed, would wander over and spike herself, I was as quick as I could be - not very I'm afraid.

And then I set to cleaning it all up. Who would believe just how far shards of glass can fly?

I didn't fancy being head down bum up even once. And this was a head down bum up many times job. I swept and shovelled and then when I thought I was done, I saw a bit more of a glint a bit further away so I started again. Shit. Wet paper towels finished the job, I hope.

Stevie is never barefoot, but the Aussie girl in me sees my naked feet yomping about quite frequently and so I guess if I haven't been as thorough as I should have been, either Dog or I will be bleeding sometime soon.

Bugger. I don't fancy cleaning that up.