Archive for June, 2011
The village of squee
I really need to calm down. There is a lot of squeeing going on (and everyone knows no-one squees anymore). But, seriously, how could you not squee when you round every corner and see this…
or this…
or (squee!) this!
Am dying to write more, but off to a conference in NYC on Sunday, don’t you know (this is really an excellent excuse to not have to go back to Ikea for the mirror we left there yesterday).
A Vegemite welcome
The evidence
Just in case something terrible happens to our jar of Vegemite in transit (like the kids finish it), there will now be some on our doorstep between 4-5pm on 21 June, the first day in our apartment, care of Ocado.
Well, phew. We can all get a decent night’s sleep now. Or I could if I wasn’t sleeping on my mum’s sofa bed, having moved out of our house, which is now filled with boxes. People keep asking me ‘how many more sleeps?’. The answer is three very broken ones…
Things I won’t miss
Well, the Thing That Had to Happen has happened. As we hit the two weeks to go mark and everyone was cold-free and healthy, we knew that something had to give. Having given up both our cars, my husband thought it would come down to him having an accident on his bike as he rode to and from work (which always freaks me out). I thought it might be one of my fun bouts of recurrent pneumonia. I stopped myself before I started entertaining thoughts of the thousands of things the kids could get up to, like running with a toothbrush, falling, the toothbrush spearing through the roof of a mouth and entering the brain (I saw this on TV once and it’s haunted me ever since).
As it turns out, the Thing That Had to Happen is not bike, lung or toothbrush related at all, but Ms7′s eardrum, which ruptured on Sunday afternoon after a short ear infection. We’re now staring down the barrel of dressing changes, ENT appointments and possible surgery for a grommet so she can equalise pressure in the air.
Le sigh.
In order not to think about all this too much and to focus on the positives of leaving a country where we have brilliant medical insurance and lots of specialists my husband has known for years on hand, I started to jot down a list last night of things I won’t miss when we leave. I’m adding to it hourly, but here are my current top three:
1. Backing out onto a main road
We live on a very busy main road, though people are always surprised how quiet our house is (it goes a long way back and the double garage serves as a reasonably good buffer). It can be handy, living on a main road. It’s easy to let people know where you live (a couple doors up from the petrol station). You get home fast. Everything is close by. But I’ll tell you something — it’s a righteous pain in the arse to reverse out of your own home onto a main road at 8am. It involves a lot of synchronisation with traffic lights and idiots desperate to get out of the petrol station super-fast even though they’ve just spent ten minutes deliberating whether to get the Snickers or the Mars bar. No, I won’t miss backing out onto a main road at all and doubt I’ll ever live on a main road again.
2. Checking to see if we’ve been broken into
A couple of months back, we were broken into. I have serious doubts about the intelligence of the breaker inner as he/she entered and exited through a small window he/she pelted a boulder through (we have several doors available for ready use). Also, despite finding several nice items like Tiffany earrings and prescription pads, he/she stole only three litres of milk. To this day, every time I enter the house, the first thing I do is check to see if we’ve been broken into. I hate that.
3. The mean cat
My poor Devon Rex, Violet (well, to be truthful, she’s an annoying food whinger, laptop keyboard dancer and foot-biter), is housebound because of a mean neighbourhood cat. She learnt her lesson where the mean cat was concerned about 18 months ago when she got into a fight with it, bolted across the main road and went missing for five days. We found her after a huge letterbox drop, skinny and beat up with a mucky eye and a huge abscess on one leg. I guess she forgot that lesson, because last week she went out again and came home with scratches all over her, one of which needed DIY stitches (‘The vet? What for? We have local, we have sutures! I’ll just practise on this stuffed toy and then we’ll get started!).
Yes, the list goes on and on. There’s the shower head that makes the awful whiny noise (or maybe that’s just my unsupervised kids in the background and the shower head is completely blameless). There are the students next door who like to get their guitar out for drunken deck singalongs at 3.12am right next to my kids’ bedroom window. There’s the weird guy who roams the suburb with a pushcart full of pumpkins (well, he’s fine, but it’s extremely annoying that I’ve never found out what he’s doing).
Sure, it’s an odd way to focus on the positives, by making a long list of negatives, but it’s working for me right now, so I’m sticking to it…
