My love of Richard Glover is legendary, I’m such a fan that my love extends to all things around him. I’ve loved his wife Debra Oswald since I heard her interview with Richard Fidler and obviously I love her because of Offspring. But not content to stop there I have also developed a serious crush on one of Glover’s radio producers, Emma Crowe.

Emma has appeared “in person” on Richard’s show and it was hard not to fall in love with her and the infectious way she told a story. In fact I once wrote an email to Richard to ask him what happened to Emma at her school reunion because I had heard her speak about it on radio the previous week and was actually hanging to find out how it went! Then I was lucky enough to publish some of Emma’s work on Mamamia and so we got to know each other. [Read more…]

Tonight when I barked at my husband for the second time in an hour he sent me this text

I realised, when I sent a  tweet saying “I am so tense I am almost choking on tooth powder created from grinding my own teeth”, that he was right. I needed little boxes. Mostly I need the boxes whinge about my day – so here goes

I woke up at 2am. Not the normal waking-up-to-do-a-wee-at-2am-because-I-drank-a-bottle-of-water kind of wake up. But a proper full on I-am-awake wake-up.  I am living in my sister’s house because MY HOUSE IS STILL NOT READY so going to the kitchen to make a cup of tea wasn’t really on. Nor was switching on the light or howling loudly in frustration. So I played on my phone till 4 am, at which stage I fell into the deepest sleep possible making me very angry when my alarm went off at 5:30am.

At 7am my son informed me that I had forgotten to get him cups for his school project. Yes, apparently it was my job to remember and shop for his assignment (which I will need to tell you about in another blog post). So, being the ever-dutiful mother I went to Coles at 7:15 am.

At 7:45 his friend rang the door bell to come and collect him – that little piece of information telling me his friend was coming over had never made its way to me so clearly he wasn’t ready and I had to shuffle the friend, his mum and their dog out of the house because my sister’s family were still asleep.

At 8:10 Little Pencil realised he was going to be late for school so begged me to take him there although my sister lives so close to the school that getting in the car actually takes more time than walking to the school but he was stressed and so I took him. We got there 15 seconds later and he realised he had left all the stuff I had schlepped to get from Coles at the crack of dawn.  I went back to the school.

I tried to do some work. I was probably tetchy and painful and then I wrote a post that included pictures of Little Pencil as a newborn and I cried most of the morning.  Read the post here

At lunch time I had to meet my brother-in-law to take him shopping. Committed readers will know brother-in-law Pencil suffers from schizophrenia so the shopping journey is sometimes a little fraught… not going to say anymore about that. But, when I took him home there was a truck parked outside his place blocking the road. The back door swung open and there were rows and rows of dead pigs hanging on hooks. Picture how you would react if you saw dead people hanging on hooks in the back of a track – that’s how I react to seeing dead animals.
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The truck blocked my way and the driver was aggressive and hideous, as you would be if you drove dead pigs around for a living, and I had to shout at him with my aggressive South African accent to get into his truck and move. No one feels better after shouting at someone. #truestory  I can still see those pigs hanging in the back of the truck. And it fills one of my boxes of anger with deep sadness.

After dropping off my brother-in-law who had told me a lot of stuff that I couldn’t even pretend to understand, I rushed off to the new house to try and do a load of laundry because we are living out of bags and everything is dirty. I have no idea how to use the ridiculously fancy washing machine (which came with the house)  so I pushed a few buttons and hoped for the best. Apparently hoping for the best does not come with a time frame so I had to leave while the washing was still happening.

Went back to my sister’s house, fought with Little Pencil about homework, gave my sister a lift to the city, raced back home to nag Little Pencil to get ready for Tae Kwondo only to realise that his Tae Kwondo uniform was at the new house. Got around the block on the way to get said uniform when Little Pencil realised he had not sent his homework to his dad to print (have I mentioned that we are not living in any form of order?)  We drove back home and then started again.

When we got to the new house I went to retrieve the washing from the machine feeling rather smug that I had got it all done when I opened the door of the machine to the realisation that I had washed my brand new very dark jeans with everything else including Little Pencil’s blue school shirt. Only problem is that the blue school shirt was white when it got thrown into the machine.

Dropped Little Pencil at Tae Kwondo and got bitten by a mosquito IN MY OWN CAR but I soldiered on and raced home to get some work done.

Mr Pencil came home after picking up Little Pencil at 7:30 and suggested we go get some dinner because I had forgotten about that little detail. He sent Little Pencil to shower and change and that’s when I remembered that I had taken ALL of Little Pencil’s clothes to the new house. All of them. Including his pyjamas,

Look it doesn’t get much better after that but I can’t complain much more because I am exhausted and stressed about not having a proper home and I am in terrible pain from gnawing on my own teeth. Tomorrow is another day.

PS I just spotted a cockroach near my bed.

 

The other day during on of our more scintillating conversations (where more means less) my very close friend Kerri Sackville and I were discussing the relative sizes of our inboxes (where inboxes means the boxes where our email arrive – sorry to disappoint).

Kerri won that conversation because her box was bigger than mine (where box still means email depository) but I got a highly commended because of the contents of my email.  (By the way Kerri was, until the point that she read this post, completely unaware we were having a competition – she probably doesn’t even realise we are competing for best text messages either yet).

My inbox in not huge because I am fastidious and anal and keep it small and manageable and very good looking.  Also because I mostly communicate via Twitter, Facebook and Skype

But in order to keep this tiny, neat little box I have had to institute a hierarchy of emails so that I know how to deal with them as the come in.  They are (in very strict order)

1. Your parcel has been dispatched
2. Anything friendly or personal
3. The meeting has been cancelled
4. Thank you for submitting that piece we adore it

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5. You have been paid
6. Your order has been processed
7. Something to do with the building process we are about to embark on. I never understand them but I am quite happy to receive them I believe somewhat erroneously that  it takes me that much closer to the process being over
8. School emails – usually about a billion a week alerting me to anything from lice to menu changes at the canteen
9. Group activity email – usually sent by one of my son’s friends parents who want to attend an event en masse. I wanted to put this at number 11 but in the interest of my son having a good social life I didn’t
10. Everything I have ever subscribed to – still not sure why I do that
11. Nigerians and Russians proposing to me
12. Nigerians offering me money
13. PR companies being paid to promote a product asking me to promote it on my blog or on Facebook/Twitter for free.
14. Please pay this bill

I actually delete most of them but I file everything related to number 7 because my husband is more fastidious than I am and he might one day ask me what the builder said about the structural beam on the 6 June 2014.   I will find that filed in it’s own special folder titled “stuff I hate  – renovations”.

 

Tomorrow is my birthday, I am fast approaching very old in years but not maturity. This whole ageing thing has led to a lot of thinking and reflecting on past birthdays.

Turns out that my memory is not that great because I can’t even remember what I did on last year’s birthday. I am sure there was cake involved. There wont be cake this year *sobs about diabetes diagnosis and the sudden dearth of cake in my life*

I remember a few birthdays from my past – notably the one where I was around 8 and a magician came to our home and made a bunny appear out of a hat which was an incredible trick. Until the family dog ate the bunny. That was not as much fun. And to be honest that could have been one of my sister’s birthdays – they all seem to blend.

I remember the cake my mother made me one year for my pre-school party. It was a house with a roof made out of flakes and I swear there was smoke coming from the chimney. There were windows made of foil and lollies everywhere and now I am grown up I have diabetes. No, I am not bitter.

I remember very little of my teenage birthdays.  Probably better that way, my teenage years were a bloody miserable debacle.

But trying to go back in time without getting too deep has unearthed so many other “trivial” memories of my youth. Memories that could possible be imagined as a montage of my childhood without too much of the grit – I will spare you that for another time (read: never)

• I remember the days before hair conditioner was invented and we sprayed our hair with No More Tangles before picking the knots apart by hand at great pain
• I remember cutting tin foil shapes to burn into our skin in the sun after we had lathered ourselves with pure coconut oil. There was no SPF when I was growing up
• I remember when my father first got a computer at his office and it had its own room which was set to a perfect temperature rather like a wine fridge. This room was just to the left of the telex machine
• I remember the days before seat belts
• I remember my father listening to the stock exchange prices over the radio
• I remember getting my change at the corner store in chewing gum (Chappies for the South African readers playing along at home)
• I remember wearing leg warmers without any attempt at being ironic
• I remember my father crying when my parents got divorced
• I remember when you could buy candles that weren’t scented
• I remember drive-in movies and being secreted away in the boot of the car just before we drove in because you paid per person and I can only guess that my parents were trying to save money
• I remember the emptiness of Sunday nights
• I remember reading Beano and Beezer annuals
• I remember being scared of the playground at school
• I remember recording songs onto a tape cassette from the radio to make my own mixed tapes or even my own radio station complete with ads narrated by my sister and me
• I remember believing in fairies
• I remember playing with the chord of the home phone and winding it around my fingers, I remember the engaged signal and waiting at home for an important call
• I remember being scared the Russians had stolen my mother and replaced her with someone who hated me
• I remember eating sherbet out of matchbox with teeny tiny little spoons
• I remember lying on the slastow next to the pool
• I remember walking back home from the shop one day. One specific day that won’t leave my head
• I remember when TV was introduced to South Africa where I grew up. Am hour in English and an hour in Afrikaans. And the test pattern the rest of the day
• I remember getting my first doona. It was a huge novelty. My dad came home with one and we each got a turn to try it, it was like a cloud of softness.
• I remember playing elastics
• I remember my first day of primary school
• I remember being scared that I would die before I got to year 6
• I remember learning running writing
• I remember the smell of new dolls at the toy shop
• I remember that my mother got remarried although when I look at the photos of the wedding I don’t remember being there
• I remember trying to black out the teenage years. It worked.
• I remember the garden at my grandparent’s apartment was full of cats
• I remember the best fudge in the world
• I remember silly putty

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Hopefully I will remember all this and more as I grow older.

Hopefully I will forget all that I omitted to include this time.

Over the past week or so I have come to see the very visible difference between living in your house and showing off your house to prospective buyers while living in it.

The house needs to look at its most appealing, surfaces must be clear and there needs to be wide open spaces so that the hordes of people that come to see the house have somewhere to stand without blocking the way for the waiting hordes to come in. There also has to be no sign of actual living.

We are very lucky because our house is beautiful but boy have their been a few things I have had to get used to.
[Read more…]

I really love my house. And so does everybody else who comes to visit (although maybe they ‘re just being polite when they say that).  Even though I loved it when we first moved in, we renovated about three years ago and I adored it even more.  We chose the tiles that we liked, built the shelves that we loved, chose the fixtures that suited us perfectly, the colours that made us relaxed, the carpets that padded our feet and the walls that housed our every day adventures.

About a year ago we started to get itchy feet.  As my husband says (way too often) we always seem to want just that bit more than we already have. We did not love the street we lived in, we wanted just a little bit more space, somewhere Little Pencil could hang with his friends without being in our faces, somewhere we could park our cars where they wouldn’t get covered in bird poo, somewhere we could retreat to – I really wanted my sleeping space distinctly different to our living space.

I realise that I sound like a brat and that these are very first world problems. Everything I say in this post is tinged with a bit of guilt at how much I have when other people have so little and also a huge amount of gratitude for what I do have.  So back to the house….
[Read more…]

It’s been a long time since I last updated my blog and there’s a very good reason for that –  I no longer know how to write because I can’t think.

I am in Vegas, I’ve just been to San Francisco and besides the fact that I have not yet adjusted to the time change (I am sure that will happen as soon as I step back on to Australian soil) my thinking brain been so tortured that it has decided to abandon me all together.

What’s happened is that all the thoughts I have been having conflict so completely with each other that I have just decided to switch off. Allow me to explain some of these thoughts so that you can see where I am coming from

• “I miss my son more than I ever thought possible and every fibre of my being wants to be in the same room, never mind country, as he is right now” conflicting with “How cool is it to be on holiday without a child and absolutely no responsibilities, this may be the most awesome holiday ever”
• “I cannot sleep if my dog is not curled up at my feet” conflicting with “Oh Lord, it’s so nice to be able to stretch out my legs and not worry about the dog at the bottom of the bed”
• “The poverty and homelessness in San Francisco is completely heartbreaking, there has to be something that can be done for these apparently mentally ill and drug addicted people with not a hope in the world” conflicting with “oooh look a huge Westfield with designer shops inside, I must see what they have for me to buy”
• “I cannot eat cheesecake for lunch” conflicting with “Just LOOK at that cheesecake, you will never see another cheesecake like that for as long as you live”
• “I do not need another drop more of makeup ever again in my life” conflicting with ”Let me just run inside this Sephora and see what it looks like from the inside” which quickly converts to “oooh this is new and I know it will definitely work, I better take two in case I can never get it again and I better take it in more than one colour just in case”
• “I cannot look at another slot machine” conflicting with “just one more chance on this machine, then this one, then this one, then this one, then this one….”
• “How can they build this ridiculous ode to money, alcohol, gambling and gaudiness in the middle of the desert?” conflicting with “This is the most amazing place I have ever seen in my whole life, I just want to take the whole thing in”
• “I am tired and I need to sleep” conflicting with “You’re in Vegas baby!”
• “Everyone is so friendly and willing to help, it’s such a pleasure” conflicted with “these people are not earning enough money they need the tips, I feel so terribly sad for them, I hope they have nice homes to go to”
• “There are people starving and here are literally thousands of people throwing their money away in casinos” conflicting with “I bloody love the thrill of gambling”
• “I should read the news, I have no idea what is going on in the world” conflicting with “It is so blissful to live in ignorance”
• “I must update my blog” conflicting with “it’s okay if you take a break for 10 days your audience (code for family) will forgive you”

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So there you have it – I am either having the most amazing time possible or I am fretting about the state of the world. Situation normal.

How are things going for you?