You're in amongst the archives.
Archive Category: Trailer Life
And before breakfast I…
Friday, 30 June 2006
Decided to do a different kind of work out. We collected a trailerload of firewood a few days ago, and M chainsawed it into fire-sized bits. I decided to stack it…
…and it was pretty much as good as having a personal trainer!
Holey and windy and blah
Saturday, 1 July 2006
The weather today is probably my least favourite flavour. It’s howling with wind, but there is no rain to justify all the angst, it’s just blowing a gale. It’s not even that cold. Over at the ShedSpot at about 8am this morning, it was quite sheltered. M and I continued from yesterday, measuring and spading out 600×600mm squares that are right now being attacked by a post hole digger. Poor M. He’d already dug all these huge holes for the shed supports about two weeks ago, using nothing but a spade, a shovel, a maddock and his own grunt - but on Wednesday the site was levelled out with a whole lot of dirt, and all his holes got filled back up. Soul destroying. What’s more, the new dirt is almost all clay, and fairly undiggable - thus, the post hole digger has been hired.
I just checked the Bureau site and there is a strong wind warning for this area. I really have to start work scraping all the paint off the Sunliner, but it conflicts with my scenario of being outside with my radio, esky and armed with a scraper in the warming winter sunlight.
So here I go, experimenting with YouTube (I’ve been having lots of fun watching old Cocteau Twins video clips…)
(…if you have eyesight trouble, just click on the tiny arrow in the bottom left hand corner - I had to make it small to fit my new page design. Sigh.)
With Mozzie and I
Sunday, 2 July 2006
Last night before we turned out the light, I looked up and saw a mosquito hovering around the ceiling above our heads. I whacked and thwacked, while M tried to stay out of the way of my thrashing limbs. No joy. I lay down again and we observed the ceiling, squinting for a sign. Finally M sighed,
“It’s you he wants. Offer yourself to him.”
Doing the wallet dance
Monday, 3 July 2006
It happened last week, and it happened again this morning - as it has happened on several occasions before. M misplaced his wallet. If I was not a participant in the situation I would find it sort of cute, how each time is like the very first time. But I am a participant, and an increasingly unsupportive grumpy one.
It begins like this. He says “OK, bye!” and heads out the door. A minute later the door opens and I hear rustling. The rustling them moves from room to room (this process is quicker now we live in a four room trailer instead of a nine room Queendslander). Then the vocals kick in.
“Have you seen my wallet anywhere?”
I want to groan. I can sense that the wallet dance is looming, but try to hide it. “No. No I haven’t.”
I swear to myself that I’m not going to help him hunt for it, and snuggle further down into the bed.
His searching becomes frantic. He starts going through the laundry basket, turning out pockets, re-looking in places he’s already scoured. I can’t help myself.
“Have you tried the van?”
He tries the van. Again.
He returns empty handed.
“I remember I had it at the cafe yesterday when I paid. Maybe I dropped it in the carpark on the way to the van… It’s gone. It’s not anywhere. And now I can’t get petrol. Um… Do you have any cash?”
Of course I don’t , I never seem to have cash. So now I have to help, but in a good way. Search with my mouth shut. I heave out of bed, whack on the tracky bottoms and poke around a few places. Nothing. I pull on my boots and head out to the van. Look under the seats. In between the seats. M starts looking too. I open the side door. There’s a coat on top of his piles of mank that’s pretty much exactly the same as the one he’s wearing. I pick it up. It holds the wallet. I hand it to him and return to bed. The wallet dance stops.
I think it’s because I didn’t speak during this entire process that he didn’t organise to have lunch with me today.
UPDATE: M did return for lunch, and responded very charitably to my suggestion of having a spot where he puts his keys and wallet when he gets home. Yah!
Trailer house guests numero uno!
Saturday, 8 July 2006
The weekend began on Friday with me having vile cold and resorting to feeding our visitors potato and leek soup and beer. It seemed to work.
R came in and burrowed through the kitchen, which was excellent, as I didn’t have to tell her where anything was. She then proceeded to bake sourdough bread from sourdough culture from Bendigo via Tasmania! Astounding.
I just danced in and out of the kitchen, while R was busily organising her baking. It was either dance or impale my nostrils on a sharp implement to unblock them.
Meanwhile, Mr H. tried some cat vibrations on the cat that most people love to hate - StOC. And was emphatically ignored.
M washed up the morning after the soup extravaganza, and then made wonder-porridge.
F!@#ing Faux
Tuesday, 1 August 2006
I hate faux wood. However, in the trailer, I am surrounded by it and have learned to accept that faux wood is a part of our lives until such time as the boat is ready to move on to. The other thing that I really loathe (besides the abomination that are vertical blinds) is faux brick. Why even bother with the brick pattern? I am confounded by the lameness of it all.
Our landlord, Jim, had mentioned that he was going to get someone in to the trailer to fix up the area around the woodheater to make it a bit more fireproof. Due to the last tenant’s penchant for baking themselves like a roast dinner, the faux wood near the (real) woodheater had begun to buckle. (Or maybe - this just occurred to me - it was the faux wood responding to the nearness of REAL wood, and it realised it’s true status in life i.e. nil). So today Jim and the person he found to do the job turned up. And after buggering around for over two hours and scratching up both arms on one of my (new to me) chairs, we were left with this:
Have you ever seen faux bricks on top of faux wood? Embracing, as it were? Well now you have. And spare a thought for us tomorrow morning, when we get up, having innocently forgotten what has transpired, and are faced with the hideousity. M suggests we introduce faux cacti to the whole arrangement. I can’t decide whether to hit him or agree.
M is for Mange
Thursday, 3 August 2006
M and I actually WENT OUT the other night. To a PARTY! Yes, we took time off from the shed. But because we (well, more like just he) hadn’t socialised for so long, M’s hair had gone from short, to Greg Brady (who I just discovered is actually Barry Williams) to a kind of enraged Greg Brady with extra volume. Girls would kill for M’s hair. However, although he had many years of ‘pretty hair’ (i.e. long and shampoo commercial-lilke) he now craves only one thing. Automatic hair*. As we didn’t have time or inclination to get him to a salon or a barber, it was me, the sewing scissors and the nail scissors on the porch at dusk. He wanted me to cut it dry. I hacked away at it for about 40 minutes, hoping for the best. He was very patient, and almost invisible under the pile of brown fur that had accumulated as a result of my efforts.
“OK. Go and have a look in the bathroom mirror and see what you think.”
He disappeared into the bathroom. There was a prolonged silence. And then a wail.
“I’ve got MANGE. You’ve given me MANGE.”
“Ah - get in the shower and wash it, it’ll turn out all right.”
No one at the party suspected a thing.
———————————–
*Copyright of Small Brother
Shed life and a drop in
Saturday, 5 August 2006
Back working on the shed - it’s close, it’s very close! Today I handed large sheets of tin up to M who was perched at the top of the ladder. He would then secure it with one tech screw, while I checked it and tweaked it with the spirit level. When I wasn’t doing that I was going around the shed and putting in tech screws where we’d missed them in our hurry to get the walls on. It took quite a while.
Just as I was walking past the car I heard my phone ringing - it was Christian! He and Meegs and little Fynn dropped by (dropped by? nobody’s done that while we’ve been on shed duty - freaky) and we showed them around. It was great to show them the little trimaran moored in the creek, because the trimaran lived the first three years of its ‘being built’ life in their front garden! When we arrived back at the trailer, Fynn took one look at Jake the ostrich and insisted on getting out on the other side of the car - he was wary. Scones, beer, fish and chips and a fire - a lovely unexpected end to the day…
Cold mornings and sunset nights…
Tuesday, 8 August 2006
It was so cold this morning that I was awed. Awed until it thawed! Icy.
The evening cranked out a sunset that made up for the chill…
Weather it.
Tuesday, 15 August 2006
Today was the most divine sunny day that I’ve had since living in the trailer. Sublime. I worked the second time this week on the caravan - I’ve scraped back all of one side and removed most of the cupboard doors. More scraping, sanding and painting looms.
M was busy, taking excess tin to the tip. I helped take tools and boat building ingredients to the shed (which will be finished when we get six extra bits of tin on Thursday). Our last trip was taking Oomoo to the shed, where we are going to rehabilitate him from his trip up and down the coast. There needs to be some grinding, bogging, sanding and repainting (*groan* - it sounds just like the caravan, but it must be done). I notice, from the sidebar, that it’s a two years to the day that we bought my boat from the tip! This is what it used to look like - frightening, I know. Here’s an ‘after’ shot.
So we were hanging around the boatyard just on dusk and the light was fabulous. The tide was high and the creek was a mirror.
And if you’ve been wondering what’s become of the trimaran? It’s here!
Third visitors and Don’s Party
Friday, 18 August 2006
We were visited by Mung, Rach and two small boys. One quite a lot smaller than the other. I made potato and leek soup. They gasped appropriately at the (finished for one day Oh. My. GOD.) shed and checked out Surfarosa, who was pulled up at the dock ready to sail away in the morning. Luka (who is actually some bizaare age - three?) gasped at the crane and was somewhat wary of Jake the Ostrich, preferring to dig up our driveway, fuelled by a spoonful of soup.
M & R were on their way down the Prom to share a cabin with mates of theirs who have a kid called Atto. Atto, we were informed means…oh, I am too unmathematical to explain it, but wikipedia has got it here. It’s a kind of scientific measurement. As these people have another baby on the way, we all spent valuable time musing over other possible measurement names. M came up with Milli Bar for a girl and Hector Pascal for a boy. I came up with the unisex appellation, Fathom Furlong. [GuFFaW! - hee, hee. I laugh as I type it. Pathetic.) Anyone have any others?
After the departure of our Third Ever Guests, we headed down to Loch as we’d left our flares and petrol containers there. The father figure had been evasive when we called, and then crumbled and said we could come to dinner. What he didn’t say was that he already had guests. GROAN. It was a tableaux straight out of Don’s Party (or so M tells me - I read it too long ago to remember, and never saw the film). True to form, I drank their Coopers, M had a go at the red wine, we ate pavlova and then took off into the night, followed by the sound of the father figure swearing when he thought M hit one of his apple trees with the HiAce.
Back at the trailer the only thing missing from our provisions were our wheelchair batteries that M uses to power our marine radio and I (more importantly) use to charge up my palm pilot full of podcasts etc. The Palm Tungsten T3 is widely reviled for it’s crap battery life, and I’m violently impressed to have found a way around it. Too bad we couldn’t find the batteries. I had the bright idea of climbing the shelves in the spare room built-in to see if they were up the top, and fell spectacularly on to my tailbone - the perfect injury for a few days hard sailing.
M came running in to find me writhing on the floor, with my only coherent sentence being “don’t touch me, don’t touch me”. When we were little we used to have a picture book called Stanley and Rhoda where Rhoda would say “Don’t TOUCH it. Don’t LOOK at it.” And that’s exactly how I felt. Thus M had to do the rest of the preparation and packing (I swear, it wasn’t pre-planned).
Attack of the rug
Sunday, 24 September 2006
On Thursday, prior to the arrival of ‘holidaying’ guests (because wind gusts of over 100km an hour and driving rain just really deliver that holiday ‘zing’!) M made two important purchases. The first has been labelled a success. The second has been deemed a disaster. The happy purchase was a dense foam double mattress. If we had owned this on our six week holiday, night time would have been a far more pleasurable occasion. For one thing, I wouldn’t have had to put a folded beach towel under my hip to try and buffer my body from the ‘mattress’ base. (Mattresses, I have recently learned, are not the best item to try and be frugal about.) By the time we’d got to Brunswick Heads in NSW we had to buy a second foam mattress in the hope that putting it on top of the one we already had would improve the situation. It did for the first night, and then we sank through them both. That’s what you get for cut price spongey crap. NOT ANYMORE!! Now, as our trailer visitors snuggle on our visco-elastic deluxe, we recline on a decent buffer of dense foam which will made an excellent addition to our van, tent or caravan.
The disaster? Poor M. He bought a lovely rug that he adored. Full of thick blue wiggly bits, the lady at Dimmeys told him that it would initially shed some furry bits and then calm down. We gave it three days. It’s unbearable. The trailer, our socks, our visitors, our doormat, and eventually our cat, are covered (and have presumably ingested) seemingly endles quantities of blue FUZZ, vis…
Tomorrow we take it back to the shop, with a large fuzzball as proof. We have filled the vacuumn cleaner twice in three days. Poor blue rug, it’s just not compatible with trailer life. It has to go.
Grand Final 2006…and stuff.
Saturday, 30 September 2006
This morning I took M to the secondhand shop that Rie and I went to this time last weekend. His tail started wagging as soon as he walked through the door. We realised later that it would probably have been much more cluey NOT to go there with a pocket full of boat-shed rent. D’oh! A hundred and fifty dollars later…[groan] I had a work bench for my little back shed, M had an old Stanley plane, and we also scored a clothes basket, metal bucket, two pulleys, a brass cleat for Oomoo and two microphone stands. Yike! Oh - and I got another toolbox (as opposed to the one I got from a garage sale two weeks ago, and the plastic one from Bunnings that is stuck in the boot of the Humber which won’t open) - the best one yet.
Our second ever trailer guests (outside of family) came for Grand Final afternoon, no one but me cared about the football, so I watched the first few minutes and the last ten. Which was enough adrenaline for the day. My Mac friend Dylan jumped on my MacBook and showed me a few things, as well as laughing hysterically that I hadn’t even unpacked my little Mac remote. I tried to train him in snappy ways of searching Ebay and the excellence of Delicious. Our conversations involved much head shaking and “How can you not know that?”
Pillow talk
Saturday, 7 October 2006
A few times on these pages I have paid out on M for being a sookylala who has to take his pillow with him wherever he goes. Tonight he was reading [miaow] and came across one of these instances. He then confided that when he left home at the age of 17, he cut his favourite pillow in half so half of it could fit into his backpack and travel with him. he piggybacked it, so to speak. (I haven’t asked him whether he gave it a name, but I will save that for another time.) I, on the other hand, was brought up in a the harsh world of a British father who instructed us to roll up a jumper and deal with it. So M knows who to blame when I mock him. Ha! And speaking of all things pillow, I too have something pillowish to tell…
When we bought our stupendously expensive visco elastic mattress (our treat for two years of renovating and living somewhere that thought XXXX beer was actually a legitmate beverage and not something that you would only consume if it was the last alcoholic liquid left on earth) they threw in a stupendously expensive matching pillow.
“You have it B,” said M, with a loving thoughtfulness (that I now realise was pure self interest. He thought if I had a good pillow I would stop tossing and turning my was through every long, long night).
“Why, thank you M!” I said delightedly, “Don’t mind if I do.”
My head and neck were beautifully supported on my wonder-pillow for all of, oh, about six months. Then M had a sore neck and I took pity on him.
“You use my pillow M,” I offered lovingly. “You need it more than I do.”
“Why, thank you B!” he murmured, grabbing it, stuffing it under his right ear, and falling immediately into a deep visco elasticised sleep.
We lived a hobo life for a while - six weeks in the back of the van, a month or so at my dad’s place. Then we moved into the trailer and were reunited with the Mattress (who we refer to affectionately as ‘Visco’). It took a month or two for M to lose patience with my three hundred and sixty degree rolls during the night. Early last week he demanded that, as were a little bit fiscal, that we should BUY another stupendously expensive pillow and we would have one each. One free, and one bought. Of course, I am genetically programmed to economise - so I did not return to Harvey Norman, home of the Uber-Pillow. I went to my friend Ebay.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the Australian Ebay - that wasn’t going to save me any bucks, I went to the US Ebay. Our primeminister would be proud. (Notice that I don’t grant him the honour of a capital letter.) I already get all my Paula skincare stuff through US Ebay - even with shipping it’s cheaper than buying it here.
So I hunted about and there is an abundance of Uber-Pillows on Ebay. I found a very amenable pillow-seller. He said he would post my pillow to Australia for about $24US. Eight days later it was sitting in Tooradin post office, $120 cheaper than if I’d gone to Harvey Norman. I love the Internet. And although the Uber-Pillow is expensive, I justify it thus:
1) - you spend one third of your life on it,
2) - it will not lose it’s wonder factor for at least 15 years or so, and, most importantly,
3) - it will give me a better sleep and stop me windmilling.
Help me, for I am a Gherkin
Friday, 27 October 2006
Got back to the trailer last night after ten days away. Lovely M ran to the Humber with a Coopers, which he swapped me for my bags. The cats were affectionate in the “thank god you’re here” way that they are after they come back from the cattery - no matter how classy the establishment was (and let me tell you, this one was classy). The fire was lit. It was nice to be back in our own space, not withstanding the faux wood and faux brick.
Why am I a gherkin? I was convinced that we were going to have some muck up with our plane in Sydney because I had it in my head that daylight savings kicked in on 22 October. I am really not sure why. But nothing happened. However, last night I looked at my phone and then at the clock on the bookshelf and assumed M had changed the clock in anticipation of daylight savings. I whizzed into bed. It was late.
OH MY GOD it was good to get back in my own bed with my wonder-pillow. A lovely sleep. When I awoke, I reached for my phone to see what time it was. 8.59am. Woe. No time to stretch or snuggle - I strung it out for another 10 minutes and then headed for the shower. On the days I work from home, I like to shoot off an email to the office between nine and nine thirty to demonstrate my dedication.
At almost 20 past nine I’d sent off my cheery morning you-can’t-say-I’m-slacking-off-at-home email. There were groans from the bedroom a few minutes later. “What time is it?”
“About nine thirty.”
Another groan.
I was making porridge and tea when M stumbled from bed to bathroom. Back at my computer I stared at the time. It just confirmed another crap thing about my Mac - it couldn’t tell the time.
“Hey M, my laptop did it’s daylight saving thing two days early!”
I changed the settings to ‘manual’ and set the time back an hour. Looked up. Found M looking at me. He appeared perplexed - a not unusual state of affairs.
“I didn’t think I got up that late,’ he said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“It’s nine o’clock.”
“No, it’s not.”
He began showing me his phone (CDMA phones get their time from…satellites? The ether? Somewhere.), the clock on the bookshelf. My brain began to melt. I thought he was tricking me. But no. It took me about ten minutes to realise that I’d replaced the battery in my phone last night at about 11pm. It then decided it was 12 o’clock on the first of January 2000. I woke up eight minutes and fifty nine seconds later and an hour or so ahead of normal time. Ohhhhh. I am so out of whack, and by the time I sort it out, it will be Sunday - when it’s actually supposed to happen.
Does anybody else wonder whether ‘2am, Sunday 29 August’ means either very late Saturday night or super early on Monday morning? Did I say my brain was melting? Is there an Idiot’s Guide to Daylight Saving in Victoria? Can I use any more question marks?
Tuesday nights when I’m away…
Tuesday, 21 November 2006
I always tease M that when I return to the trailer on Wednesday night there is always an empty tin of tuna, an empty tin of tomatoes and either empty bottles of wine secreted in each gumboot, or six empty bottles of premium beer stashed in the bottom of the recycle box (as if I’m not going to see them there). Tonight on the phone…
“M, what did you have for dinner tonight?” I ask, expecting the two tin answer, all mixed in with pasta and beer.
“Well, I had one bit of toasted bread with butter and organic raspberry jam from Maldon on it.”
“Ah. I see. Your appetiser. And then what?”
“Well, then I had one more bit of toasted bread [??!] with butter and organic raspberry jam from Maldon on it.”
“Riiiiight.”
Inside, I was pleading with him to ask me what I’d had for dinner, forgetting, momentarily, that he’s a bloke, and that the thought wouldn’t even flicker on his cerebral horizon. I wanted to be able to say that I had scary spaghetti from my mum’s cupboard, mixed in with swiss brown mushrooms fried in garlic and olive oil with sundried tomato pesto (admittedly, it was from a jar, as I have no idea how to sun-dry a tomato. Oh. Right. Um…) stirred through it all. It was all bleating at me up from the confines of my stomach - “Tell him what you cooked for dinner, teeeeelllllll hiiiiimmmmmm.” But I didn’t. I gained some points and said;
“You know those two beers in the fridge? The ones that are mine?
[Tangent: - a strange logic exists in Trailerland. M thinks that because he is bigger than me he is automatically entitled to more beer. Despite the fact that this is patently untrue. It should be half each. HALF EACH. And I have taken to becoming more obstreperous than normal as he has five beers to my two. I usually claim the last three stubbies as MY OWN to be consumed at MY leisure. / End of Tangent]
…You can have them to go with your toast and jam dinner - it sounds like you need them more than me.”
I can feel his smile beam down the phone line. He doesn’t know that I found my mother’s bottle of Tanqueray, and her tonic, ice and lime. Ha!
Hot stuff
Sunday, 10 December 2006
Today has been gaggingly hot. We baked like chips in our trailer oven. We went to the shed to continue our present-building projects, but only lasted an hour before heading to Tooradin and whiling away an hour and a half over a sandwich, a drink and the Sunday paper. it was air-conditioned. Divine. It was, although it hardly seemed possible, even more revolting when we left. Back at the trailer-oven M wetted us both down with a water soaked towel. The two cats were sagged out, slack jawed versions of their former selves. We bathed them in buckets of water in the bath, and they were much happier. Or, Saffron was. Mow was only happier when he stayed still and couldn’t see his tail, which had lost all its fur puff in the water and resembled his greatest fear. A Black Snake. The weather finally broke. There is very little left of the slab of beer that we began on Friday. I got a slab of Haagen at Dan Murphy’s the other day - it was $29!! It lacks some personality, but is better than VB and, in my opinion, Boags Draught.
Thank GOODNESS the change has come - now I hope it rains up where the bushfires are.
A.W.O.L
Friday, 29 December 2006
Having survived Christmas, and, startlingly, Boxing Day, I am now ensconced in trailer life with three more people than normal. We value them exceedingly, as they not only brought many gourmet trimmings with them, but also captured the only keg in the village and installed it on our porch. Last night we played relationship threatening games of Pictionary, where M straddled me in guise of conveying the word ‘Donkey’. I continue to plot my revenge. Today I went out at Woolamai on my board with my other faux surfer friends, M and Gib Jnr (we all have trailer names). It was then that I recalled that I hate learning to surf in anything but perfecto conditions. I’m not going into the details of the rip I tried to challenge, or the cute lifesaver guy that came over for a chat, but I will point out AGAIN that I have the upper body strength of overcooked tagliatelle which renders me pathetic in any but the most serendipitous wave formations. I was happy to extract myself in one piece…
Now back safely in trailer land, we have erected our own beer tent - a big market umbrella draped in fly nettings and positioned to catch the evening sun. The keg is cold, the boys are sunburnt and there is a free range chicken in the oven for those who aren’t vegetarian. Summer is getting down to business.
New Year’s Eve 2006
Sunday, 31 December 2006
It began under a mosquito screened umbrella out the back. All class.
The morning after…
Monday, 1 January 2007
It began with a laden table and a couple of welcome blow-ins. It ended at 4am with people taking photos of their nostrils.
And very early on, the keg was drained. We estimated that it had contained about 102 pints.
There was general surprise that the hangovers weren’t more severe. Opinions of “How many charades can we fit into the last ten minutes of the year?” were mixed and thankfully blurry.
Life for Sale on Ebay
Monday, 5 February 2007
I am a little slow on the uptake at present and bidding for this guy’s life has already finished, but it is still up on ebay, so if you haven’t seen it, check it out. It is all over the Internet, but has only just made it to my slowly frying brain. It’s going to be 38 hideous degrees. I have already gone down to the servo and bought two bags of ice.
I have no idea why I bought two bags as there is nowhere to put them. Thus far I have managed to stuff a bit of it into my evaporative cooler, some into our tiny fridge freezed, a bit into my little esky, and the rest is sitting in a bucket in the bath. Sigh. Today I’m supposed to be doing a bit of work, and also have to wipe macbook1 and the hard drive of my ThinkPad (RIP). Because I really feel like taking apart my other computer and plugging this bloody hard drive in. NOT.
Blowing in the WIND. Moo.
Monday, 12 February 2007
This wind is making me THIRSTY. Actually, after my efforts on Saturday night, water is still my drink of choice. But when they issue severe weather warnings and coastal wind warnings around here, we get every last bit of it. The wind just hammers across the surround flatness, and then goes SPLAT against the trailer. All the hanging potplats are just completely weary, and I am cranky. Casually employed and cranky.
I don’t object to the casual employment. I prefer more money to sick leave. BUT just at the moment, so soon after Christmas, I am getting a little bit sick of my plans to do an extra days work from home each week to give myself two weeks off at the end of March. Gah. Maybe I should just do the extra days all crammed into the next week or two and suffer the pain. Meanwhile, the wind has ripped the caravan tarpaulin down the middle. As a devout believer in gaffer tape, I tried to fix it thusly - but the wonder of gaffer was swiftly dealt with by… even more high powered wind.
Surely I can harness the bloody stuff to my advantage somehow? Although, as a renter, I can’t just remove the trailer from the electricity grid and attach it to my little fan that I’ll just leave out in the back garden. Mostly because there is a power point outside which appears to run the electric fences on the property, which keeps the cows from taking over the world. Actually - I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing.
The hotness.
Friday, 16 February 2007
I have the hotness. Working from trailer. Ice in mouth. Feet in bucket of water. Fan on. Evaporative cooler on. Finally completed first file of the day. Now will V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y make self sandwich and rewarding non-alcoholic Bloody Mary. Am thanking god am not cat. Hotter tomorrow and Sunday. Plan is to be towed behind boat on rope for approximately 48 hours. Wearing Eau du AntiShark. Stupid weather.
Update. 2 Minutes Later: just got up to make the lunch. Opened door. God knows how long I sat here ignorant to brand new cool breeze. Grrr. Turned around to come back inside and reeled at the sauna within. Gah.
Update. 30 Minutes Later: Was too hopeful. Am consoling self with suggestion of M to wet t-shirt, wring out and wear it in front of fan. And he’s not here, if that’s what you’re thinking.
The hotness that is still hot
Sunday, 18 February 2007
These are words that M only dreams of hearing from my pearly lips. They are;
Thank GOD for the BOAT!!
On both Saturday and Sunday it was 38°C - which translates to over 100°F. On the Saturday, we were lucky to have arranged a night away on Boat with Dr Grass and his daughter Al. Al turned 18 back in September and M and I bought her a fishing kit, which, with all the schoolies, Meredith, Falls Festival and other vital events, had not yet seen any action.
Before we departed, M and I had one of those seminal garage sale experiences, where we were so thrilled at some of the items that we found that we spent money that we should be saving for our M got a fabulous grinder for $30, we got two metal painting ladders for $6 each (for the next house we find to do up), an old amplifier to power some speakers we’ve got hanging about ($10) and we bought my dad a gate. It really doesn’t translate the thrillingness when I type it at you, but it was exciting.
It was so lovely to head out to sea. The tide was high (though it was a very low high tide, only about 2.25 metres) and we did wonder whether we would make it out of the creek into the bay. Cannons Creek was dotted with jelly fish, but there were people swimming - that’s how hot it was. M had refined our shadecloth idea, and had rigged it up so it covered the cockpit and there was enough wind to just sail under the jib alone,
We were aiming for Tortoise Head. We stopped to say hello to a slippery little seal that was playing around near a marker. And then it was just too much for me to cope with. I made a sort of swing rope in between the outrigger and the main hull, and to everybodys horror, jumped overboard. It was sublime. It has always been an issue for me, trying to get back onboard from the sea, due to my non-existent upper body strength. But my rope swing also worked as a step up on to the outrigger. Yah!
We stopped off at various spots so the others could do some fishing. There were some spectacular fish getaways. The first fish (of the three Al nearly hauled aboard) looked like a particularly feral goldfish. M landed a very presentable flathead. Later on, both he and Dr Grass caught little gummy shark things, which I made them throw back because they were too pretty to grace our frypan, and deserved a few more years at sea.
After a late dinner, we sat up playing Euchre. The others saw some sort of amazing falling star, which passed me by. Then M and I got our guests to play our little electronic 20 Questions game, and took great delight in seeing them look at it as if it was possessed by the devil, when it correctly guessed that they had been thinking of… a shoelace.
M woke up before dawn and had us motoring back close to Cannons Creek, in response to the weather forecast, which had changed to a 30 knot northerly which, when it kicked in, would be coming straight at us. Once we got near enough to the channel, we anchored, and did some more fishing - but once the wind arrived, we snuck back down the creek and pulled in for a dip at Cannons Creek and had lunch aboard. Never underestimate the value of inviting someone who works in a delicatessen to come for a sail - they bring fabulous snacks.
Once we got back to land, the heat was pretty bad, but almost bearable. Al was kind enough to remove the dead mouse from where the cats had thoughtfully left it in the middle of the rug in the trailer, while I averted my eyes and organised iced water for everyone. After our fishing friends had departed, the heat of the day really kicked in, and it was revolting. We had to put Saffy in the bathtub and douse him in cold water three times, while Mow (who’s excess of fur somehow seemed to keep him cool?) remained inscrutable as ever, if just a bit more floppy.
M read his book, positioned between the craptastic evaporative cooler and the fan. I, wearing shorts and a singlet, just left them on as I got in and out of the shower, laid in the bath, and then finally just curled up on a wet towel on the floor with another one on my head. And waited for the cool change that they had promised. It took about five hours. Ack. All I wanted was ice, as we had foolishly tipped it all into the evaporative cooler, but there was no was that either of us was going outside to get in a non-air conditioned car to go and get some.
The relief, when the change came, was so great, that it was like I’d been injected with adrenaline. Moments before, I had been prone and bemoaning, but with the southerly breeze I came back to life and we went and bought some Coopers Stout to celebrate. We watched the end of Sideways - which I had thought was going to be better than it was.
Micro-break
Thursday, 22 February 2007
I don’t really consider myself a latte sipping city slicker with no real appreciation of rural life. After all, I do live in a trailer on an agistment property. But I just went to take a break from the computer, for some reason getting tired of typing the words ‘debridement’, ‘laparotomies’, ‘fractured acetabulum’ and ‘asystolic’, and began dragging the rubbish bin down the very long driveway. I met my landlord about halfway down, doing the same thing. I didn’t catch up to him until we were on our way back.
I told him I’d been cleaning out the back shed, and that I had somehow put the screen door on the back room, but that it was very probably upside down. He told me that he’d had to sell his cows because there was nothing for them to eat, and that Matilda the horse would be being leased to go somewhere and be a racehorse. Then he mentioned that his old dog had died. Well, I think he used the words ‘put to sleep’. And I commiserated and said how sad it was (while inwardly thinking that it really was sad, but that now Saffy would have no object to do furious cat rowboat paws at).
I asked him what vet he used. He looked at me in such a way, that I was glad I recently went blonde, even if it is a weird-arse shade of footballers wife blonde.
“Vet?” he said. “We don’t go to a vet. Costs too much money. I’ve got a mate, who’s got a [made a gun shape with his hand] and that was it.”
I put my hands up to ward off the image. “Argh! Don’t tell me that stuff!! What was wrong with him, or did he just get way too old?”
“Well, he was just having trouble getting around, and the little kids are used to playing all over him, and I was worried that on of them might lean on him the wrong way, and…”
“Right.”
“I’ll come and have a look at that door tomorrow.”
I thanked him, but said that I’d wedged it in, and it was fine, because I don’t need to open it. I walked down the rest of the driveway to the trailer, musing on shot dogs. I told Saffy, who is probably almost older than the dog, what had happened, but he just wanted dinner, and wouldn’t listen.
Planter box
Friday, 2 March 2007
Both annoying, and gross
Wednesday, 7 March 2007
M, fuelled by only two Coopers Sparkling Ales, just tried type on my keyboard with his manly part. I can offer no explanation for this. I managed to drive him back to his seat with the strength of my horrified gaze. I think I’m supposed to be flattered?
Visiting the colonies
Sunday, 11 March 2007
Small Brother arrived looking far more put together than me (up at 4am), my mother and my sister. We had loitered at the international arrival doors for a good half hour, comparing eye bags.
“I don’t know that he’ll see us,” I said. “Everyone’s turning the other way when they come out.”
“Oh, that’s OK,” said our mother, “I’ll just yell out when he comes through the door.”
My sister and I exchanged hunted glances.
A couple of people came through the doors who belonged to some other people standing nearby. The people did silent excited gasps and pointed enthusiastically to the end of the fenced off area. The arrivees waved back, equally thrilled and made their way in the appropriate direction.
“See that?” I said to my mother. “That’s happiness Australian-style. We could do that too!”
She withered me with a practiced American stare.
Shortly afterward Small Brother sauntered through the doors looking oddly buff for someone who lives in a congested, polluted metropolis.
“ARGH!” screamed my mother, “OVER HERE!”
My sister and I moonwalked behind her, dropping back a few feet as she raced to the end of the barrier.
Same old…
Wednesday, 4 April 2007
Returned from marathon sailing and city culture submersion yesterday afternoon, after one night extra at sea due to a combination of planning and tide readings that did not take the stupid end of daylight savings [sob] into account. Cats were collected, and although fatter, appeared well. The same could be said for M and I, mostly.
Returned to trailer and flagellated self due to mismanagement of water timer programming, resulting in death of nearly all our plants. Gah. We were further stabbed by the reality of life back on land by the immediate dysfunction of the van alternator, which looked as if it was only held in place by sheer willpower. However, after some loads of washing, uber healthy dinner (after the transgressions of the previous three nights) and some birthday Oomoo red wine, our situation felt much improved.
Got up this morning and barely felt a flicker, as I morphed back into Typing Girl. Comforting self that I am better off than Small Brother who has probably just flown into London at about 5am, and has only had time to slap himself awake before getting to work at 9am. Good luck! (And yes, M did cellar the wine you gave him - for a whole five days. It is now cellared internally.)
Happy Birthday to ME!!
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
A splendid day! I am THIRTY-FOUR bazillion years old!! Of course, I didn’t worry about that until about 2.55pm, which is when I was actually born. I woke up, and M made me tea and porridge - pointing out our polished-for-the-birthday appliances:
Note the birthday shrine and the gorgeous roses from my mum, who also made me a cake - and not only that, but entrusted me with her Tupperware cake traveller on pain of being written from the Will if anything happened to it.
Then I began tearing open delicately removing the wrapping from this excellent looking book, and a lovely necklace and swag of magazines - and of course the impeccable card from my five-year-old friend Jack. And then in no particular order I got a fabbo Coty vintage cosmetics case that I’d had my eye on (since the hinges of my current one did not survive three weeks at sea), an fabulous InEssence travel vapouriser/oil/candles set, and voucher to the Paperback Bookshop. And then I got to M’s gifties. And oh, did he win some serious points!
I love it when I am a victim of successful subterfuge. It’s very satisfying being successfully deceived for good and not evil. Thus, I had been gagging to get a tour T-shirt when we went to see Wilco play a few weeks ago. M got up a few times before the show started, saying that his dinner had upset his stomach. The first time he left, I had a sly girlish hope that he was going to come back with a T-shirt for me as a surprise, but he just came back with a I-have-a-petal-stomach face, and when he dashed off for the second time I thought no more of it. But he secretly hid the following under his jacket, and now it’s MINE!
All wrapped up in freak cat paper. The next present blew my tiny brain. I schlep around the place with my old Palm T3 with a 512MB card in it, and I have to put on only four or five Harry Potter mp3 files at a time, and it’s battery life is crap. Imagine my wonder when I totally unexpectedly unwrapped a…
Tres EXCELLENT!!! I was so horrified and overwhelmed by the wonder of the present that I took ages to get it out of the v.sexy box. No more endless transfer of files to my Palm! I can listen to the next two Harry Potter books read by the imitable Stephen Fry and they only take up about five percent of my Pod!!! *squeaks*
So now the bed was demented with wrapping paper, and cats that thought they should be on the wrapping paper;
Note the faux wood walls - M and I were hysterical that this time last year we were homeless, but awoke in the Hydro Majestic in the Blue Mountains and this year we live in trailerland. Ha!
I plugged in the IPod to charge it up and Dad and T came over for a cup of birthday tea - I scored the first series of At Home With the Braithwaites and a contribution of funds towards the Auslan course I’m keen to do. I got a Happy Birthday text from my old friend Bridget, whose birthday was yesterday, which was an excellent surprise. M and I then set off - he chauffered me in the Humber - to the Merricks General Store for a splendiforous lunch.
I extravagantly ordered House made gnocchi in a light blue cheese, spinach and chardonnay cream sauce with toasted pinenuts and Grana Padano which I topped off with a glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and finishing with a chunk of Turkish Delight and a piece of my favourite pistachio, cherry and cranberry nougat.
Did I have to include a blow by blow description of the food? Absolutely. It was divine. We went for a noodly drive to Balnarring Beach, and then checked the post box on the way home. Didn’t get home until after 4pm and just kicked back for the rest of the day, biding our time until candles and cake!! I can’t remember the last time I’ve had the combination of a Melbourne birthday and T-shirt weather! My trailer birthday, while different to last year’s in Katoomba, was kickass!
Last Weekend
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
Oh, it has been tiny and quiet here at [miaow] of late. Last weekend we had two different visitors. R stayed over on Saturday night, visiting us in her tour of Everybody while her partner (and cook) is overseas. She’d only cooked once since he’d gone, and had successfully given herself food poisoning. She and I listened to M, as he ranted about working on the caravan and repeatedly burning my effigy in the process. More on that later.
Our Sunday visitors, Mr H and 5-year-old Jack, ate soup and sandwiches in the garden with us. They had visited M in his Shed last week and I knew M had shown Jack some power tools.
“Hey Jack!” I chirped, “I heard you went and saw M’s shed last week, and the big boat! Did you really get to play with some Power Tools!?”
“Yes,” said Jack, in a conversational tone, “And I had a donut, and some biscuits and…”
His eyes swivelled to the TimTams that I’d left on the bench, and I hastily stuffed them in the cupboard.
“Can I have some more lemonade?”
“Well, you drank that first lot pretty quickly, are you still thirsty?”
He nodded, with big cowlike eyes. He has unreasonably long eyelashes.
“Then you can have some water.” ARGH!! I had just channelled my mother. I looked around furtively - no one seemed to have heard.
“No thank you,” he sighed.
Later that afternoon, M began bemoaning the state of his hair. He had passed the Greg Brady and had gone directly to gollywog.
I went to the cupboard and extracted the vintage hair clippers I’d bought late last year. They are so cool. But when I’d brought them home and showed M, he screamed “They cut dead people’s hair! Look, there’s still dead people hair on them!!” [sigh] so I stashed them in preparation for his inevitable moment of weakness. And so it was that 20 minutes later, Mr H was standing feyly in the back garden, making gentle swipes at the gollywog, while we all pointed and laughed.
And then…
Monday, 2 July 2007
After posting my clogged nose misery I woke up with what appear to be HIVES (not the band, the affliction) over various parts of me. They have taken a liking to my lip, thus:
Hideous. Can’t figure out what caused it, and was horrified by the infinite variation of what I’ve eaten over the past few days when we wrote it all down. Have been prescribed a tube of Celestone cream, but it doesn’t seem to do a lot. I wake up with not many (apart from the trout pout) and then they begin popping back up. ARGH!!!!!! Must try not to itch. Must try to think them away with force of will. Must try not to itch.
High tide in the back paddock
Thursday, 12 July 2007
Buckled under the combined pressure…
Thursday, 19 July 2007
In a small effort toward explaining the quiet state of [miaow], you may observe the following:
In the beginning there was:
And then there was:
Together, the Bun and the Oven conspired to dupe M and I into a soporific state and hypnotise us. “Join us, join us,” they wheedled as we slept, innocent and unknowing. My birthday brought with it more than a video iPod. And three months later we saw this (and named it, temporarily, The PartyPie).
…so now you know 
- and I’ll start posting more, and will endeavour NOT to swamp [miaow] with PartyPie centric monologues. Even with one in me, there’s only so much baby I am willing to inflict on you
Pedal Pusher - Trailer style
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Kept meaning to post a picture of my $10 exercise bike up here. It’s called the Slenderline. It’s the perfect size for my tiny study, and I can ride it and observe Matilda the prospective race horse, Uni the white unicorn-esque ponything and Buns the black rabbit. Most new exercise bikes have electronics with which you can program in resistance, but not the Slenderline. It has a big screw that you turn, which lowers a bit of black rubber on to the wheel, making it harder to pedal. For someone that drives a Humber, this is startlingly advanced.
Disco Trailer
Friday, 17 August 2007
As well as the worlds most ambitious grocery shopping expedition, we also purchased a mirror ball to lift the tone of the trailer. I’m sure it will comfort M while I am away this weekend at somewhere called Mount Camel. (I am getting a lift there, so the details are negligible. I am armed with faux champagne and a lot of hard cheese.)
Advance bonus for wheels
Friday, 24 August 2007
Where was M last night? Oh, he was travelling interstate on an intrepid adventure. Supping oysters in Hobart in fact. Did we know, at the start of the week, that this would be the case? No we did not. We did not know this until Tuesday, when I booked him a $90 ticket to fly there to check out and hopefully snaffle a… A what?
A new catamaran?
An egglike caravan of wondrous dimensions?
Another black rabbit?
Or D, none of the above?
It was none of the above. The impending arrival of PartyPie on the scene had given us pause to think about whether we should resurrect our f@#king excellent $900 HiAce van that has done so well for us. It was going to cost more than $500 to try and fix its dead cylinder and although we had happily driven for years, shielded from the road by a thin veneer of paint held together by rust, we thought that PartyPie might be less than impressed with the arrangement. So.
While Vanee sits unused [sob] and still starting first go [sob sob] we have been using a combination of my mum’s car (she’s away for three months) and the Humber - which has a new carby, but really needs the good love of a Humber whisperer, as it’s running a bit fast. Vanee was really M’s set of wheels. A motorised mankfest of fibreglass dust, icecream wrappers, bits of dead safety glasses and the occasional stiff discarded sock. I thought this was just reserved for Vanee. I was wrong. It’s pretty much reserved for any car M drives. (Sorry mum. Can you feel him frowning as he reads this - everyone?) Mr H drove one of our current vehicles on the weekend and said, I quote, that it was ‘like driving an archaeological dig’.
This is going to change. (Well, actually, it already has. I cleaned out and vacuumed both cars yesterday as M was safely out of reach on the other side of Bass Strait. Lucky for HIM.) Because we have just got ourselves A BRAND NEW MOTOR!! I mean, in as far as it has never been ours before - because it’s not like we buy anything new!! Especially when old is better. M and I have both been musing on a Vanee replacement, and have been fixated on old diesel Mercedes’. We’ve watched them appear, and disappear, on ebay. We’ve spoken to a guy who was selling one in Queensland. We’ve ummed, and aaahed. The 300D was our model of choice.
Why? Because it’s known to be freakishly reliable, safe, simple to work on and best of all… it’s diesel! And we plan to run it on biofuel, with the eventual intention being to run it on SVO - straight vegie oil. But they are kind of hard to come by in Melbourne, and I wanted the older, more funky version. M, meanwhile, was starting to get so keen on the idea that he was starting not to care hugely about what it looked like, so LONG AS IT WAS DIESEL. I found the compromise in the trading post on Monday. It’s a station wagon (ideal for carrying surfboards, sleeping in the back of, rescuing Large Items from hard rubbish), it’s a Mercedes 300TD (the ‘t’ is for touring and the ‘d’ is for diesel) and… it cost marginally less than the baby bonus.
Ha! We didn’t care that it was in Tasmania. What’s the ferry for, after all, if not for bringing back things that won’t fit on a plane? We were lucky enough to have my dad give us an advance on the PartyPie Government Donation, and I booked all M’s travel arrangements on Tuesday with the power of t’internet. From all reports, the car is a winner. Somewhat short on ambience and cutting edge funkification, but it is going to be taking over from a HiAce van, so it’s not like we’re moving from a Humber to a Holden. It is, in fact, like we are moving from a HiAce to a longer, more German, lower roofed van… that looks like this:
It arrived!
Saturday, 25 August 2007
M arrived fresh off the boat in our new wheels this morning. A couple of people asked me if the car in the previous post was the one we bought - yes, they are one and the same. Here it is out the front of the trailer near our trusty HiAce. It sounds like a tractor, and drives like bubble with its lovely power steering. It seems to be in fantastic condition. From his travels so far, M has calculated that driving fast and furiously we get ten kilometres from a litre of diesel, and therefore roughly 700 kilometres from our 70 litre tank. Far more economical than the Datsun 280ZX we’ve been tooling around in. I’m not sure how it compares to the Humber.
Pseudo whinger
Thursday, 20 September 2007
The last few days have sucked. (I later realised that they were little fairy flossy pretend versions of the real thing. But that’s saved up for later.) Silly little things like lack of sleep, coldsore, bad hair and sore back. And stuff like my mother getting back after three months away and having the first thing she says to me be “What’s the story with my car?” and me realising that M and I? We were bad car borrowers. We were even worse car borrowers, because we briefly thought we were good car borrowers. But we suck. We did not put the sunvisor back up when it fell off. Somehow some epoxy ended up on the passenger seat cover. So as well as the other money that borrowing the car cost us (fixing the parts that broke while it was in our command) we now feel compelled to spring for new seat covers, or our karma will never be clean.
Our case is not helped by the fact that my sister borrowed my mum’s squeeze’s car and returned it waxed, polished, massaged with the hands of Swedish virgin gymnasts with some boutique label beer in the back prettily wrapped in ribbon - just in case M and I hadn’t fully realised the crapness of our behaviour. Well, now it’s here on the internet for everyone to know, and ruefully shake their heads over. Note to World: Don’t lend us your cars. I cannot make it any sadder or plainer.
Trailer Grand Final - Classy stuff!
Saturday, 29 September 2007
Check out the footwear. We slurped Grand Ridge beer, and ate chocolate cake, florentines and popcorn. Go Geelong!
Prune juice. Remedy or ruse?
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
M and my friend E are the people in my life that muse upon poo. E will relate enthusiastically about the time she nearly blocked a Sydney toilet with the worlds most unflushable borry stonker, while M can sit playing the guitar for hours working the word ‘poo’ into every song. It was not something I really participated in until now, and obviously, I went immediately to E for advice.
“Prune juice,” she told me, “Half a glass with some hot water in it and a squeeze of lemon.”
“Ah ha!” I thought, “Another way for me to try and eat fruit. Good.”
M, sick of my whinging, went out to the supermarket in his beloved new set of wheels and came back with six one litre bottles of 100% prune juice. I looked at them, and they sat there complacently. Similar to what was happening with my internal organs. Personally I didn’t think half a glass of this stuff was going to get my problem anywhere near fixed, so I tossed back two glasses… and then spent the night with my insides feeling like some gaseous mud swamp. And that was it.
Yesterday, M had some prune juice with his breakfast, and returned twelve hours later looking hunted.
“I think you’re right,” he said [how I love hearing that phrase]. “I was using power tools and had my mask and headphones on, but I could tell that the prune juice had got to me, because I could feel my butt making sharp guttural barking noises. About ten minutes later I stopped work, took off my mask and almost passed out from the swamp smell.”
I was rolling on the floor. “But DID YOU POO?”
He looked thoughtful. “No, no I didn’t. My butt just started acting like some choked up outboard motor.”
I forgave him the the inevitable boat analogy [excuse me for the pun] and delicately indicated that this, indeed, was what had happened to me. Although my butt was a Tohatsu 2.5 horsepower, while his sounded more like a Yahmaha 40. Regardless of this, it seems that E has a special relationship with the juice of the prune that others are sadly unable to replicate. And so it’s back to lots of water and some black coffee.
Post-holiday malaise
Sunday, 28 October 2007
We got home after midnight and were somewhat comforted by returning to our own bed, but very little else. Waking up in TrailerTown was a rather large letdown from our last nine days of lushly subtropical holidayesque lives.
For one thing, it seems to have been very hot in our absence, with most of the grass a depressing shade of brown. The other thing was the extreme windiness. I know I often complain that I live in Kansas, but today was beyond a joke. It was impossible to go outside, and fairly difficult to even think. We went and picked up the cats from the cattery, returned home and decided to spend the rest of this blighted day watching dvds. Not something that has ever happened before.
Of course, withering sun and sailbusting winds weren’t enough to convey that our holiday was well and truly over. No. We had to go with some biblical hail. Serious hail. The kind of hail that had M shrieking for blankets to embalm the new car and protect it from the wrath of the skies. He turned into BUCKETHEAD-MAN! Defender of his true love. The German Vehicle!
All was serene…
Thursday, 1 November 2007
Too serene, as it turned out. I was working from home, and punctuating the day with the domesticities that a lack of concentration seems to aid and abet. Went out to hang out the washing. The lack of wind was extremely soothing. The sun was out. Both cats were asleep under a nearby tree, Buns was sprawled in a shady spot and Blossom the Aged Pony was lying down in the far paddock. The other horses mused among the grass.
First of all, the lack of wind for which I was so grateful meant that every mosquito and its extended family in the area gathered around my head and divebombed every exposed bit of flesh, so the remainder of my time at the washing line was punctuated by squeals. I had thought of going back inside to get my camera to take a few pictures of the various animals in their states of languor.
In some ways it was good that I was thwarted in this by the mozzie attacks. I decided, instead, to visit M at the shed and take him some lunch. I was just getting in the car when a woman who had been feeding her horse (we have a few horses agisted here, as well as the few that belong to our landlord) pulled up in her car. She looked awkward. There were mozzies massing around her head.
“Um. The owner doesn’t seem to be around, and…well. We just went to say hello to Blossom…”
Ah, I thought, someone else appreciating the combination of animals and tranquility.
“…and she’s lying on the ground with one leg in the air. She’s Not Moving.” She looked at me apologetically. “I’ve got my daughter with me and I didn’t want to go any closer.”
I did a small I-don’t-cope-with-dead-things shudder and averted my eyes from where they had strayed to the distant sight of what I had thought was a bucolic Blossom.
“Um.”
“Sorry. I thought I should tell someone. But I’ve really got to get going!” She ended with a yelp as she was pursued by about a million seething insects to the front seat of her car.
“No worries,” I said, waving forlornly. I drove the red car down the driveway and stopped outside the landlord’s house. Walked the front door. Heard the unmistakable crunching of gravel and ran back to stop the car disappearing down the driveway. Yanked on the handbrake. Went back to the front door, hoping that Small Brother in London had not just awoken with an odd car-related twitch that something had nearly gone amiss.
After living here for almost 18 months I met the landlord’s wife. She was very nice, and said she would steel herself to go and look at Blossom - they’d got Blossom for their daughter when she turned one. Their daughter is now 27.
When I got home a few hours later, our landlord was digging a horse shaped hole in the paddock. I didn’t watch. RIP Blossom 
News of Trailer homicide shocks Australia.
Friday, 2 November 2007
Last month I gave L a fridge magnet with a 1950s man and wife on it. The man was looking into an open refrigerator with obvious puzzlement, and the caption read something like; Another case of male refrigerator blindness. It’s my assertion that this blindness is not confined to the fridge. I feel comfortable that I am not alone in suggesting this.
M exists in such a vortex of domestic organisational despair that occasionally I can take no more. I buy him multitudinous amounts of clothes from op-shops to wear while working on the boat. He wears them once and then divests them as they are itchy and need washing. Overalls? Far too practical. Why wear them when one can have so much more fun whinging and itching? Last night he came home with a head full of fibreglass dust. I gently suggested headgear.
He whimpers that he has no socks. I buy him bulk amounts of cheap socks, which are deemed floppy, and then get him several pairs of Explorer socks in apology. In my family Explorer socks have always been held in high esteem. I think I can honestly type that both my parents probably own Explorer socks that they have had for, oooh, ten years? Seriously. They are hard wearing socks. But, as with most things (such as lifetime guarantees) M takes this as a personal challenge. He didn’t want to stomp around on the boat in shoes, but did he buy booties or soft slippers? No, he just wore the socks. They are now indiscernible clumps hardened by epoxy resin and a myriad of indefinable shed mank. All. Of. Them.
This morning M had to go to the dentist for the final bit of his root canal. I heard him begin the search through his cupboard for something non-boat to wear. Three weeks ago I did something that I had never done before and rearranged his cupboard into some semblance of order - purely so I didn’t have to cope with his ongoing angst of not being able to find anything in something that made a rubbish tip look like a well-designed flow chart. I heard the search begin and squashed myself further down in bed.
It was no use.
“Have you seen my Show Me The Monkey t-shirt?”
“Yes. I washed it.”
“It’s gone. So is my red one. Maybe I left them in New South Wales.”
Maybe I should have left you in NSW, I thought, uncharitably.
“No,” I said, “I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere.”
An exasperated sigh, as the t-shirt had not appeared as if by magic. In tones of finality. “No. It’s gone. What am I going to wear? Where are my t-shirts?”
I did one of those deep cleansing breaths that I read about in birthing books. “If you want to go and have some breakfast, I will find the Show Me The Monkey t-shirt.”
This was deemed far too patronising and I got glared at. I tried a different tack. “Look in the bucket of clean clothes, there’s a blue t-shirt in there.”
He wore the blue t-shirt. After more general unhappiness, he had breakfast and finally left, while I lay there hoping that the dentist would slip and accidentally prod the part of his brain that makes him so very unbearable. I lay there for a bit longer in case he came back. When the coast was clear, I got my camera and went to his cupboard. I touched nothing before taking this picture.
After this I went a little bit insane. I went and hauled out M’s dirty clothes basket that he had, for god knows what reason, put in the carport. I tipped it out. There were about five pairs of trousers, four shirts, five t-shirts, four jumpers, about a billion of things that had once been socks, and a couple of pairs of undies. I tipped them on to the porch and spent several long minutes stamping furiously and screaming at the sky.
I fed as many things as I could into the washing machine, which sighed as I closed its door. Then the phone rang. It was M. I told him to be very very careful what he said to me. I asked, with legitimate interest, if the denist had hurt him. I told him to be very very careful when driving home, as I wanted to be the orchestrator of his demise and didn’t want him taken out by some runaway truck. And now? I wait.
Mondanities
Monday, 5 November 2007
Monday. A day off. Nowhere to go and no one to see. Heavenly. M, meanwhile, had gotten up at 6am and was attacking the day like a pitbull. However, as this was the one day after five previous days that had held various commitments, I took to the roads and went… well I went grocery shopping. But still, I went to a different supermarket and on the way went to an op-shop that I usually don’t get to.
I scored a couple of pillowcases and an apron with v.cool fabric for my future craft-making J-inspired endeavours, a bag of cushion stuffing, a retro outdoor spongy chair cover (I’ll have to post a picture of it to display it’s full hilarity value) and… a thing that I have mused over in other more high-brow antiquey shops – Pyrex glass stove top coffee percolator thingy with everything intact – for five whole dollars! Yay me.
Later on at the supermarket (I had intended to go to the excellent Tyabb organic grocery story, but couldn’t find it) I saw this tea on special that I’ve always coveted but have been too tightarsed to buy – infuser stick tea!
And there endeth my Monday mundanities. They were good.
The cramps
Saturday, 17 November 2007
M has been being a very supportive and useful member of Trailerland. Which is why, the other morning when he rolled over in bed and enquired sweetly as to whether I had slept well (because I have an alien in me that has just topped two kilograms in weight - of course I am sleeping like the proverbial. NOT.) he did not expect the conversation to proceed quite so abruptly. Instead of a warm sleepy murmur, he got:
“GRAB MY FOOT, GRAB MY FOOT! GRAB. MY. FOOT.”
“Wha…”
I waved it dangerously near his face. (I may be a Minke whale, but they can move fast when needed.) “Grab it!! GRAB it!! CRAMP! CRAMP!!”
M grabbed the foot and poked it hopefully.
“PULL MY TOES BACK.”
“Like this?”
“HARDER. HARDER. OK. Do my toes still look all deformed?”
“Um…”
“Don’t answer that. Pull them back one more time. Thank you. Oh my god. It’s gone.”
I subsided back into my extensive collection of pillows and M lay stunned, shaking his head gently and pondering the ceiling. I think both of us were thinking the same thing… “This stuff will all go away in a month and a half. Right? Right?“
The vote is in. The potato salad waits.
Saturday, 24 November 2007
I have voted. I filled out all SIXTY-EIGHT boxes of that senate form (after some encouragement from M, who was equally diligent). Now it is up to the rest of the country to Do The Right Thing, while I make the world’s biggest potato salad and some lethal and not-so-lethal punch for the Trailer BBQ we are having later this afternoon to celebrate the imminent arrival of Kevin (although I dreamily fantasise about some freakish occurrence involving Bob Brown and his sudden ascendancy to complete power…).
Celebrations also ensue to catch up with people who we might see before the imminent arrival of PartyPie. I really do want to be able welcome PartyPie into a country whose leader I don’t find a complete embarrassment - however I have to admit, that from my current position of name fixated carrier-of-nameless-foetus, the name ‘Kevin’ doesn’t totally ring my bell in the charisma stakes, ‘Howard’ is damned forever, and ‘Bob’ makes me think of the psycho from Twin Peaks.
OK. To the salad! (Pictures to follow.)
Kevin 07 BBQ
Sunday, 25 November 2007
We thought we’d help Kevin along by having an election BBQ yesterday - the Trailer’s biggest gathering to date. It was also a kind of pre-Christmas mingle to see everyone while we are still pre-