This was not helped by getting lost on the way to, and on the way back from Rosebud this morning. Small Z had a meltdown because her friends left the vegie-farm just as we arrived. With no cash. And so had to get back in the car to get some. Such is my exhaustion that I bought carrots, potatoes and brocoli at the vegie farm today…despite having bought them all at the supermarket the night before. Because we’ve got so much money to spare and are part rabbit.

I mused upon my old pink Havianas this morning – given to me by Small Brother about three or four years ago. They then broke this afternoon, irretrievably. The day overwhelmed me. The chooks didn’t lay. No eggs here, oh dear. TATINATM was getting me downier and downier

I made pesto, stewed rhubarb, was gifted an egg and thus able to make gnocchi. I could feel the day start to try and right itself into my favour. Small Brother called, with a rather stupendous birthday suggestion. The postie guy came to the door with a package from Amazon (from Small Brother to Small Z) and commented that my new hair colour looked aweseome (he’s one of few, but hey, I’m easily pleased).

Shel Silverstein. Heard of him? We hadn’t, but the two books that Small Z got today have opened our eyes to a new world of rhyming kooky goodness. Check some out.

Another attempt to improve my demeanour? The arrival of ‘Vintage Caravan’ magazine – the first of the year-long subscription that I was gifted by my very lovely (and inspired) friends. It goes well with a cup of tea.

A shot of sunshine came from M, who called me after a doctor’s appointment. Six weeks ago he was told he had very early emphysema, apparently brought on by years working in smoky pubs. We weren’t too fazed about it because it could have been worse…

Today? He was told he had been misdiagnosed – and the weight he didn’t even realise he had bearing down on him, lightened up. After all – who wants to work in dusty, fibreglassy conditions every day in general, let alone when you think you have a slowly worsening respiratory disease. SO GLAD!!

Many words other than ‘crumbs’ were on my lips when, having driven for an hour, I realised I’d left my backpack there. It was as if, having M reappear on the scene, my brain stopped working and waited for him to take over. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR. I realised it was gone when Small Z asked for my Kindle.

Cue intense sinking feeling with a chaser of despair. I called them.

“Hello, we were at your shop about an hour ago and I think I left my backpack there. I’m freaking out about it – it had everything in it.”

“Oh no!” said a woman, “I’ll go and look for it.”

She was gone for a few minutes, and then; “…sorry. I can’t see a backpack. I’ve looked under all the tables.”

I scrabbled vainly to retrieve the situation. “Um, are you ‘Crumbs’ bakery? I don’t remember there being tables. Are you in North Melbourne?”

“No! This is the Ascot Vale store!” It was like a rainbow had appeared. “I’ll just call the North Melbourne store and see if they have it.”

I sat, perspiring gently, while M continued driving along the freeway, while Small Z whimpered at potential Kindle loss in the back seat, until my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“They have it.”

Such relief. I was effusive in my thanks. Of course, not only did it have my Kindle in it, but also my BIRTHDAY iPAD [cue: strangled roaring sounds from Black Rock, from whence the iPad came]. I told them I would be back to get it in the morning.

We finally made it home. The house and garden were immaculate. M had even CLEANED OUT THE SHED. The chooks were healthy (thanks to our neighbour) and it was heavenly to be home. M had my birthday presents on the table – a new sewing machine (I hadn’t thought he had noticed the other one slowly driving me bonkers) in the shape of a Humberiffic LeMair. It only does straight stitch and zigzag, but runs like a dream. My other present was a ‘Sundaya Smart Storage System’ – translated into non-geek-speak it’s a deep cycle battery (i.e. long lasting and tougher than a car battery)…

The S4a is a plug and play wall mountable 240Wh sealed lead acid (SLA) storage system with a state of the art micro-processor based smart energy management system. The unit uses LEDs to clearly display battery state of charge and charge/discharge or rest mode. The unit is also equipped with an alarm (buzzer) to warn users when battery is 1 hour to forced disconnect.

It’s going to power my laptop and can be charged with our solar panel. I just have to wrap my head around the wiring and installation and my caravan will be SELF SUFFICIENT (as it also has a portaloo, water and gas). Yay me! Yay M!!

I went to bed at 9pm, but was disturbed by Small DB and had a pretty crap sleep. I was at the station at 6.20am and back in North Melbourne two hours after that. From there I went into the office and worked for seven hours before getting the train home. Could have done without any of it.

Since the wean of Small DB four or five months back, I have had one reliable bra. And one not so reliable. You would assume, with the myriad of brassieres I have in the cupboard from that aforementioned unfortunate period in my life that the girls would now be in some kind of lingerie heaven. You would assume wrong. It is some kind of Machiavellian mammary melting pot.

NONE of the bras in this house fit me. The one that I have been relying upon (except on wash days) has even turned against me. I had to dig out one of those expando things – you hook ‘em on to the back and they give you an extra inch or so to corral your increasing girth. But they are fiddly. And if you lose them, you’re pretty well swinging free forever, because unless you can get yourself to a proper lingerie store, there’s no way in hell you’ll get another. I own the one, and I guard it like M is going to guard the virtue of his teenage daughters.

I was gifted some birthday money, pre-birthday (THANK YOU SO MUCH SWWNBB – I had hoped to send you a handwritten and snail-mailed letter of gratitude, but single parenting got in the way) – and on the way home on Friday I noticed that Dimmeys in Frankston was having a closing down sale. Allow me a short tangent…

When we lived, in pre-Small times, in Seddon and I was working for a women’s health organisation – I had to walk past the Footscray Dimmeys on the way to work. And thus we got stupdendously cheap doona/duvet covers, sheets, pillowcases etc as they seemed to get all the discontinued stock from various reputable manchester manufacturers… I am a bargain leech, I l-o-v-e-d scrounging through their sale tables. Stockings were cheap too – and cosmetics. Same deal when I lived near the Richmond one… /end of tangent

Today we took the train to Frankston. I took the Smalls into Dimmeys and I began my assault on their bra sale. The Smalls, for the first 25 minutes, amused themselves by touring the store while I searched valiantly through the racks for my size.

And what was that again? My one ‘reliable’ is a 10DD – with expando. I figured that equalled a 12DD. I was wrong. But being a super-sale meant that not all brands were available in all sizes. And the sizes seemed to even differ within BRANDS depending if you were going for the, say, ‘Sexy Plunge’ or the ‘Bravo’ or the ‘Seamless T-Shirt’. What I needed, obviously, was the ‘Bravo! Sexy Seamless T-Shirt Plunge’ in size ME! But it didn’t appear to be there.

I journeyed back and forth to that fucking changeroom and smooshed the girls in and out of at least fifteen. different. cups. I began with the 12DD, rapidly reversed to the 10D, moved on into my former land of the trusty 12C, was evicted into a 12B and then had a breakthrough moment. I recalled through the mists of time a lingerie-fitter lady telling me (in response to me moaning that 12C is the most common size and thus being never on sale tables) that a 14B can sometimes swing it.

I went and got a 14B. By that time I’d almost lost the plot. The Smalls were crawling underneath the door of the changeroom. The ONE changeroom in the WHOLE PLACE. I was snapping at Small Z, trying not to step on Small DB and endeavouring to manipulate myself into yet another undergarment. It felt better than most of the others. “I need to wee,” said Small DB.

OMFG. I had no choice. I put my clothes back on, threw everything I’d tried on, on to the counter, and had to walk the Smalls to the toilets that were further down the street. Cursing. Ablutions complete, I marched them straight back. Gave one the iPhone and the other on the Kindle, and went to check on things. I appear to have grown wider and the kilogram or two I may have gained has appeared as BACK FAT. How I went from a 10DD to a 14B in a day confuzzles me utterly, but where lingerie is concerned, I have given up questioning.

I was stymied by the fact that I now had far more scope, as a 14B, to plunder the sale racks – but as someone who was close to losing her mind, I feared what would happen if I tried. So I bought three of the same 14B and called it quits. It was hard!! There were $65 bras there reduced to $12!!! Sigh. Anyway, I got out with my sanity intact and technology comforted Smalls.

And now I feel like Scuppers the Sailor Dog.

Here she is, where she wants to be, with the girls encased in a 14B…
____________________________________________________________________

(…as opposed to ‘and there he is, where he wants to be, a sailor sailing the deep green sea.)

It will be a while before I do anything like that again.

I would have been more zen with the whole arrangement if I hadn’t had the following day, Saturday, written on the calendar for a month. It was, I admit, mentioned in an email – a few days prior, but THE CALENDAR trumps EMAIL. He never SAID anything until the night before, and then he began with: “I thought this might be a problem…”

I would have been more zen with the whole arrangement if M hadn’t decided to give the Smalls a Grand Day Out and… OK. I’m sounding savage-bitchy. Let me GIVE them the Grand Day Out, but add that the house needs to be clean and the Smalls need to have eaten something that isn’t passionfruit sorbet or two teaspoonfuls of rice and more than TWO items on the shopping list I left need to have been bought by the time I drag myself home.

Are you getting the picture, Interweb? Are you getting the picture?? So at 5.16pm I am standing on the station (after a lovely goodbye to M, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a chance to get all worked up prior to him leaving because that could have got messy… I’m not seeing him for ten days, and he’s leaving a thirtysomething year old and coming back to a FORTY-YEAR-OLD, and yunno…I’ve got a little bit of strategic forward thinking in my genetic make-up…)

So Small Z is bawling “I miss my DADDA!” and Small DB is looking like a zombie and mouthing the word, “Supermarket?” And I, running on about four hours sleep, feel like I am about to both combust and collapse. We do the supermarket. Mostly we survive. Small Z is obsessing that she’ll ‘catch’ the eczema I have on my face, and I have to explain seventeen times that she’s been born lucky in that regard. I get them fed and to bed. I clean the fucking house. I retrieve my secret bottle of white wine from where I hid it BEHIND SOMETHING in the fridge and I watch me some 30Rock. And I breathe out.

I saw a physiotherapist this morning. For three years I’ve been living here and I didn’t realise I could get access to a council subsidised treatment. WTF?! It costs NINE DOLLARS a session. And she was good. And Scottish – an added bonus

I asked the Smalls to pack their own bags before we left. Small DB needed some help and last minute additions. She had dressed like a gypsy, and Small Z was a fairy. And that was fine…

She is delicious…

I was with the physio for easily 40 minutes, and the Smalls played beautifully on the floor. It was one of those situations where the person I was seeing did not have kids of her own, so did not truly appreciate the magical nature of an almost uninterupted appointment. (I had learnt my lesson last week when I dragged them to a dietician appointment that I’d almost forgotten about…with only my phone for amusement.)

At one point Small Z said, in shocked tones, “Mama! Daisy didn’t put her knickers on. She’s wearing nothing.” I eyerolled and the physio pretended she didn’t hear. They made paper boats and drawings…it gave me confidence about our upcoming journey.

Oh – and I’ve heard it on the radio twice in the past week…an aching version of ‘Leaving On a Jetplane’ by My Morning Jacket. Check it out – it’s gorgeous…

Done without assistance, although it was on my suggestion…

I am in this half-life. I love design, new ideas, colour combinations…but I’m too tired to appreciate them. So I console myself with the writing, immersing myself in the existences of people in cyber-space. Blogging, of course, is just a selective window that people open into their lives – and that’s both good and bad. I like it when occasionally people throw off the cloaks and admit real life – like the posts on Wednesdays at Picklebums and when Rebecca at Girl’s Gone Child posted ‘Help is (not) a four letter word‘. Endless positivity and shiny happy homes end up chipping away at me after a while…which is no doubt why this post got so much attention a while ago…

I frequently find it so frustrating, as well as incomprehensible, how people have these blingy blogs where they post almost every day. Everyone has different lives, everybody manages in different ways, but sometimes it is a little demoralising. Then again – I would be (I fondly imagine) far more prolific if I didn’t have to write two full days a week to earn a crust…and be running on interrupted sleep.

Where do I go on my feed-reader when I’m lying there at night, the Smalls breathing quietly, gently frying my eyeballs in the light of my phone? Usually to Edenland, Sleepless Nights, askmoxie, renegade mama, Whiskey In My Sippy Cup, owlet, Imagine Lovely, Little Earth Stories…and Clover Lane. That’s just some of them… And I haven’t mentioned the non-kid focussed ones that I dip into…

While typing about the interweb – I will mention that I have fallen out of love with delicious. My affair has been a long one, but the redesign, the logging in, the time it took for them to get an app together – all equal one thing. A big, fat Y-A-W-N. I have ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY bookmarks on delicious (here’s my tag-cloud).

Yes. The site introduced me to tagging as a concept. And it was good. But I am unrepentant and am now outsourcing my brain to Evernote – something I’m growing to love the more I use it. It is on my laptop, in the ether and on my iPhone. I continue to debate, however, whether I will pull in the 1,650 links I have sitting in my delicious account or whether I’ll just start fresh…

The reason that I haven’t proceeded? It’s embarrassing. People like Karen and Anne Marie will undoubtedly roll their eyes – but I am a knitting novice. It wasn’t until I put them all through a hot wash to felt them…and NOTHING HAPPENED…that I realised that my grandma never used WOOL!! She only ever used acrylic. I don’t know why – I can only attempt to guess that it had something to do with the fact that I, and two other members of my family, are highly irritated by wool and can’t wear it…

Gah. So I’ve given up on my nostalgia-laden woolly blanket. ‘Acrylic blanket’ just doesn’t work for me somehow. I did felt some old jumpers I’d collected to make warm-baby-trousers and it worked quite well. The only problem being that whenever I do anything but a straightforward ‘normal’ wash – the washing machine leaks all over the floor…

From now on I will be pouring boiling water of prospective felt and doing it that way instead. It saves on mopping. I hope to begin a little blanket experiment with my bits and pieces, and wait patiently for my op-shops to have their ‘fill a bag for $5′ deal soon so I can grab some more pure wool sweaters. (Yes, I can use ‘jumpers’ and ‘sweaters’ interchangeably due to my mixed parentage. Just so you know.)

I’m cat-sitting in a secret location. M is looking after the Smalls – his second night ever of being a Single Dadda. Circumstances are less than ideal – Small DB began limping today and I took her to the doctor. He suggested x-rays and a second opinion. Since then, M has found a lump on her foot…so we are going to watch and wait a day or two (which is also what the doctor recommended, before launching into anything medical).

Meanwhile, I sit here, in front of the fire. A full and happy cat is on the lounge. And I’m A-L-O-N-E. Naturally I over-planned the CONSTELLATION of things I might achieve in my alone-time. Learning to crochet (I brought along my kit and have OPENED it), beginning to watch series five of 30Rock (having finished series four a few years ago and having had no closure ever since), updating my blog (while cloaking my whereabouts), planning my career in cat-sitting espionage, cooking up some red lentil dhal…

But the fire is warm, there is nothing demanding my attention but some red wine and some just-cooked rhubarb…so the hot water bottle, the Kindle and I might have an early, easy night – if the cat allows it.

However, by the second day they were a bit stir-crazy. The sun was out and I gave them each a bucket. We wandered out of our front gate and tried to find lots of different leaves. We walked up and down the nearby road and (as the buckets were little) came home with much loot.

Small DB has done a lot of bead-threading in her time, using wire. Today I introduced her to a needle and thread. The needle was quite big and quite blunt, and she appreciated being ‘big’ enough to use it. She started slowly and was soon threading leaves on to her cotton like a champ…

(Look at her little curly excellence…she is so delicious…)

Small Z was keen to see the things she had found under her microscope. I remain SO happy with our choice of birthday present for her. It lives on the table next to where she eats every day and so never falls out of favour. New things are always being examined…

(Note the new $2 clock I got a few days ago for telling-the-time practice – it took me ages to realise we don’t have a clock with actual numbers on it hanging around. Well, one that’s working…)

After her examinations, Small Z did some threading of her loot as well. She is becoming more confident with her needle and thread after doing her first term of hand-sewing classes (that she adores). I have bought her a sewing box on eBay (- it cost ONE DOLLAR!) and I plan to stock it with bits and pieces before I give it to her…it’s very cool…

Here is Small DB with her finished ‘Autumn dangle’…