Whales, Harry Potter, and winter mornings
Spent last night sobbing over the baby whale in Sydney Harbour. It got left behind when its pod swam off to their next destination. Oh gosh. It was trying to suckle on boats - it just drinks it’s mother’s milk for the first year. It’s making me cry to TYPE it 
It had to be euthanised. For some reason, lots of people dying in a plane crash just doesn’t affect me in the same way.
It is for this reason I am glad I haven’t watched television all year. Of course, M had to come home and tell me about it - I would much prefer not to have known. Consoled self by watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - and now I am up to date with the Harry films. I have to say that Order of the Phoenix was probably my most favourite of the books. Watching the latest two films is odd. For me they are like the shorthand version of the books, but I imagine they would be great if you hadn’t read them and didn’t know how much they’d had to leave out for the sake of brevity.
Here’s a photograph from this morning - currently my favourite one of M and Small Z. They are on their morning walk and M always lets Small Z smell and grab the trees…
And another shot from this morning, also taken by M on their walk…
The weather during the days is pretty crap at the moment, but the mornings and evenings just look sublime. Chilly, but picturesque.
A total crock and the Soup Nazi! No soup for you! (I ate it all.)
I forgot! One good thing that came out of our sleep school visit was this: on the way home we stopped in Dandenong for a wander to try and get over our hell day and to avoid the peak hour traffic.
“Oh,” I said, “Let’s go to Saver’s before it closes. I want to keep looking for the crock pot I will never find.”
M was utterly amenable, as he was so happy to have escaped sleep school more or less intact. “OK. Let’s go.”
We wandered in, and I held out little hope for my long wished for crock pot. And yet. When we walked up the back to the electrical goods area, there it was!! Sitting there, all orange and 1970s looking. I immediately told M that it was probably a fabulously reincarnated Saffy the Orange Cat - but instead of the settings Eat/Dribble/Purr there was Off/Low/High. They’re the same colour and everything!
I grabbed Saffy the CrockPot off that shelf so fast that I purred blurred. It is ace. It was THIRTEEN DOLLARS. Did I say it was ace? I like having its orangeness in the corner of the kitchen. My kangaroo stew kicks arse in it like never before (that pun was really actually unintended. sorry.), and I made chicken soup the other day from a proper real chicken carcass, and I have to say it was probably the best soup I ever concocted (admittedly it was with the help of the reliable Single Dad’s Cookbook but I did add my own trailer flourishes.)
This is not my decorative lace tablecloth, or my crock pot. But it’s exactly the same as mine. Woo!
Miaow! The Chicken Noodle Soup!
Put chicken carcass in excellent slow cooker/crock pot
Cover with stock (obviously not stock you have made yourself and frozen as this would be waaaay too organised. Use a cube. Use two!)
Cut up and onion and a stick or two of celery and chuck ‘em in.
And a few bay leaves.
Leave it all to cook in your excellent crock pot. I left it on low for about four hours.
Then. Tip the lot through a colander/sieve into a bowl.
Tip the liquid back into crock pot. Pick out all bits of chicken and stick them in the crock pot too.
Cut the kernels off three corn cobs. Throw them in. As much white wine as you can bear to spare (not much - we need it for sanity around here).
Put in the pasta of your choice. Mine was the one shaped like tiny stars about as big as a grain of rice. Now. Here’s the weird thing. Two hours later when we imbibed it, the soup had gone all creamy special, and there were no little pasta stars in sight. It was divine. But if you want your pasta to retain a sense of itself and not dissolve into the soup, add it nearer to the time you’re going to eat. Although it was accidental, I liked how it turned out. The corn! The corn! The corn stayed fabulous and still had texture and some bite. I was so relieved I didn’t buckle and buy a tin (I almost did, but I’m so tight that I went for the cobs - they were cheaper and didn’t have added salt and sugar).
Queen Elizabeth Centre. For us, it sucked.
The morning after Saffy went into the paddock we had to get on the road by about 7.15am to go to sleep school. In order to make it through the day, when Small Z wakes (for the final time) at about 6.30am or 7am, M will take her and I’ll get another hour or so of sleep in. It is my lifeline. And this was the second day I hadn’t had it. Ugh. I was a mess of sad eyebags.
With peak hour traffic horror, we got there at about 8.30am - and Small Z should have been back in bed for a nap fifteen minutes before that. So she was already overtired. It took another hour or so for them to process us. There was only one other baby and her mum there with us - staff were off sick, so it was a slow day. I didn’t know how things were going to work, but I had read in a few places online that the Queen Elizabeth Centre used some Elizabeth Pantley methods (for those of you not in baby-land, she is the author of The No Cry Sleep Solution. I had been dabbling with the book and it’s suggestions, but M hadn’t read it.
Anyway, I did not expect to have to put Small Z, who had been up for FOUR HOURS (which was the longest she has ever been awake - two hours and a bit is her limit) in a cot in a darkened room, and leave her alone there as she ’settled herself’. Just a short tangent at this point. Small Z was rocked to sleep inside me, as I did all that walking around the back paddock for six months. She was rocked to sleep when she came into the world as a continuation of this. And she she is still being rocked (and when I say ‘rocked’ I mean wrapped up and walked up and down in our arms), but it needs to stop - because my wrist and my shoulder have said ENOUGH, and she needs to learn how to get there on her own. />end of tangent
So our baby wrangler (let’s call her, um, Deloris) told us all the things we already knew, helped me to put Small Z down in the cot. We said a firm ‘goodnight’ and left the room. Ha ha ha. Poor Z lay there for a bit, but was so out of her head with sleeplessness that she just started to scream. Deloris helped me to try the ’settling strategies’ - patting her, patting the mattress, shooshing, blah blah blah. Z yelled regardless. It was hard, and stupidly pointless, because I knew that she was absolutely not going to suddenly and miraculously realise how to get to sleep.
Both M and I didn’t last very long. I couldn’t see the point of it (I can feel you, all those people out there just shaking their heads while mumuring…”no pain, no gain”) but I know my baby. I know she has never had to get herself to sleep, and now, in a strange place and all on her own - how was that going to help her toward the holy grail? It wasn’t. Anyway, I grabbed her. She was very upset. I had to settle her in the normal way, and did not feel at all bad. Deloris thought I was a pussy. Deloris hadn’t really helped. She kept saying things like “She’s manipulating you…” and wore lots of clanking jewellery that didn’t help when she patted the mattress.
I could go on, but it has taken me a week to write this (I have backdated it to the appropriate time for historical accuracy) and, no surprise, I am too tired now to bother. Basically we had an information session, Deloris told me she would try and get me in for a five day stay, Deloris suggested that M and I needed counselling (I can only assume this was because I was at the end of my tether with no sleep, having buried Saffy the day before, M and Z were stressed and we were somewhere that was more hardcore than I’d thought - and because M was pretty underwhelmed by dear Queen Elizabeth and I’m sure we snarked at each other a few times) and that Small Z was a manipulating little thing. Yawn.
The second nap was even more disastrous and Small Z ended up beside herself. I told Deloris that thinking this approach was going to work was ridiculous, and it was stupid to even bother with trying it, particularly as we were only there for the day. Deloris pretty much wrote us off as not one of her success stories. M and I wrote very detailed feedback forms. When we got home we made a pact to stick with our No Cry Sleep Solution book. We are making a little progress, but things are still a bit of a struggle. Small Z is growing so fast, and what works one day will not work a few days later.
The follow up phone call from the Queen Elizabeth Centre was really the only other good thing about it (besides the free tea and coffee, and their excellent salad sandwiches). The lady I spoke to was far more sympathetic to our situation, and I really think that we would have got more from the whole experience if she had been our wrangler on the day. Sigh. I told her what we were doing, and she said it was great, and all we could do was stick to it and keep going. So there you go. The day after sleep school horror we had visitors, the day after that I had to work, and the day after that I had to work. By Wednesday I was so wiped out I had turned into a troll, and M had to mind Z so I could go to the osteopath and op-shop some zen into myself. I’m sick of being a grown up.
Saffron The Cat…has left the building. 1993-2008.
Saffy has been looking a bit worse for wear over the past three or four months. Of course, I have been preoccupied with Small Z and despite my best intentions, I know his love quota was substantially lower than previously. And this I can do nothing about. When we went to Phillip Island the other weekend I turned dictator and demanded that M take the cats to the cattery rather than just leaving them for two nights with piles of food and clean litter. I am so glad I did this.
On Wednesday M made an appointment for Saf to go to the vet. He was breathing sort of weirdly and seemed very off colour. The appointment was for 9am the next day. That night, M brought Saffy inside. He couldn’t use his back legs He lay on the floor. M implored me to give him all the love I could. I patted him into the ground, gave him water, stroked his orange furriness and sent health vibes into his little head.
An hour or two later he got up, moved nearer to the fire. We heaved a sigh of relief and went to bed. In the morning, he seemed to still be quite bit better, but Z and I piled into the car with M because I wanted to know what exactly was going on. I had a bad feeling, but not a doomladen one - according to my calculations, Saffy still had a couple of lives yet.
The vet spent so long listening to his stethescope, moving it around, listening, moving it around. I could tell it wasn’t good. He patted Saffy and told him what a good cat he was. Saff purred like a loon, but his purring had a different sound. His lungs were full of fluid - he had been having a hard time getting enough breath. I got the vet to test his urine to make sure it wasn’t kidney failure - which has always been my fear. His kidneys were still functioning.
Basically, there seemed to be no name for what he had. Things were giving out inside him. He was given an intramuscular injection to try and clear the fluid - and he didn’t like that at all. I sympathised - those injections are the worst. I was given pills for him - four a day. The vet tried twice to give him a few before we left - and that indicates what a bugger he’s always been about taking pills. We were told that it was important for him not to be stressed, as then he would breathe harder, which stressed his heart…lungs…etcetera
Giving him the pills was a disaster. It totally stressed him out. I got a few down him, and made a decision. The vet had said that he might stabilise, but would not get better. The sun was shining, and it was a beautiful day. He was not too bad, wasn’t in pain, and was still purring and finding sunny spots to sit in outside. I decided that I did not want him to crawl under the house and not be able to get out. I didn’t want him to get worse, and have pain and unhappiness. He had a KICKARSE cat life, was loved by many housemates and visitors, and pissed a lot of people off (that’s for you, Small Brother)…including me and M.
I tried one more time to give him his medication that night. No dice. That night, he moved from near the fire and we found him half sleeping on the floor at the end of my bed. Still mobile, still savvy, but not great. The next morning I called the vet and made an appointment for that afternoon. Making an appointment for your pet to die isn’t a great feeling, and I’ll be happy if I don’t have to go there ever again.
It was another sunny lovely day. I took Saffy for a walk in my arms, showed him the back paddock, took him under the trees and around the outside of the trailer. I took pictures of him sitting in the sun under the banksia tree. He was happy. He was warm. Small Z went down for a nap, and Saf and I sat in the rocking chair inside with a glass of red wine. There was a lot of patting, and I was trying to stay very relaxed, because I didn’t want to worry him. I think I succeeded.
M came home and took some more pictures, and we all got back in the car. Saf had gone willingly into his travel box - he has never minded the car too much - I used to take him with me to garage sales around St Kilda and he would sleep on the armrest in the Humber. It was a different vet, but it was the one that I have a lot of respect for. He said he had reviewed Saffy’s file and that he thought that my decision was the right one to have made. We patted Saf, who purred and purred, and he explained what would happen.
I told M and Small Z to leave, mostly because I didn’t want Saf upset by any shouting that Small Z might do. The vet-I-like found a vein in Saffy’s leg. Saf hissed at him like a grumpy trooper. And then the Saffiness left his eyes and he was all soft orange fur. It was quicker than I would have ever thought. The vet nurse plied me with tissues, as I patted my lovely cat. They took his little body out the back and put it in an environmentally friendly plastic bag that would decompose with him.
I walked out into the main part of the surgery. I don’t know what I looked like, but the other people that were in there all stopped and went silent. M gave me a hug. We got back in the car with Saf, and set off for Loch, where dad had dug a cat shaped hole near some other family cats in the back paddock. Small Z was fractious in the car, and it was like some sort of road trip black comedy as I swung between sobbing and mustering up fake jubilance to sing along to The Salteens to distract her.
At Loch I put the Saffy bag down into the bottom of the hole. Dad, M and I threw in a handful of dry catfood each, which I know he would have appreciated, and we all had a small glass of port. I filled the hole in. A little while later a rainbow appeared, and the hippy in me felt a bit better.
Saffy came from the Lost Dogs Home in North Melbourne. He was six weeks old, and feisty. He lived with me in St Kilda, East St Kilda, North Caulfield, East St Kilda, Windsor, Loch, Seddon, Hervey Bay in Queensland, Hampton, for six weeks in L’s backyard, Loch and finally here in TrailerLand. He adapted to everywhere. I wrote a song about him years ago, the first time we lived in Loch, and I’ll post it here when I dig it up, because it describes him just how he was. I miss him. I REALLY miss him. A little cat shaped part of my heart is broken.
My friend Phillip. The island.
Went away on Friday down to Phillip Island to stay with D&E&Small E in a house that belongs to D’s aunty. It was GOOD to get away from Trailerland for a bit. Even though I left my bank card in a cafe in Koo Wee Rup…
We got down there early and I cooked up kangaroo stew while M and Small Z had a snooze, and then had a snooze myself. It was excellent to spend some time catching up with our friends, who have a far more hectic life than we do - and it was particularly good to get the two babes together. They were very cute. Small E is just that bit (one month) older and stronger than Small Z - and very much a BOY.
Small Z gave as good as she got, and there was some dummy stealing (even though she won’t use one, she still wanted his) and eye gouging (Small E had a go) and both of them did some river-dancing in the Jolly Jumper - with Small E really going through his paces and kicking a ball back and forth. You can tell his mum is a dance teacher!
Of course I wish that it could have been a week instead of just two nights [sigh]. By mid morning Sunday I was beginning to worry about the two days of work I had to cram into that night and the following day. Thus, we ducked out of a coffee in Rhyll (a sad thing) and went home via my dad’s place, where we got some lunch and picked up one of the highchairs that we have had donated to us. A highchair!? Bizarre, or what!?
While we were there, my father took it upon himself to take Small Z off my hands. “How nice,” I thought, as he took her to the window at the end of the kitchen, “They’re bonding. Cute.” Things were fairly quiet there, near the window. In retrospect, I realise it was rather TOO quiet. Ten minutes later, when they came back near the fire, Small Z’s face was covered in dirt. And her tongue was black. He had given her an unwashed potato to gum on. And let her chew up a piece of paper with black ink all over it.
I jumped up and down, and M bit his lip. No one else thought it was wrong. FREAKS. I am happy for Small Z to ingest dirt, sand, and general trailer-mank with the best of them, once she is under her own steam and discovering the world. But now - at six months old - and only having tasted bits of apple and sweet potato outside of her breastmilk existence, I was thoroughly horrified. My dad remains unrepentant, but M and I? We quietly plot our revenge…
Google maps. ARGH!!!
Twice this week Google Maps (GM) stole chunks of my life. The first was when I drove to get my new headset for MacSpeech. GM told me to go this utterly bizarre route - which I did, because I thought it probably new better than me about the messy tangle of highways and freeways near to where I needed to go.
Turns out I could have just left our driveway, turned left, turned right and arrived there about half and hour later. Instead I cruised areas hitherto unknown to me and somehow ended up near Noble Park. Which was not at all Noble by the time I reached it, and I saw no park. About a billion u-turns later, I extricated us to the proper road. Sigh. On the way back (the quick and non-GM way) Small Z and I jumped out and investigated Dandenong. Wow! It’s like a cooler, trashier, seedier, more multicultural version of Footscray. Small Z and I cruised amongst people of many races, investigated Dimmeys, found a European deli, a couple of fish shops and earned some points with M by getting him some empty ice-cream containers from Dairy Bell. Thanks, Dairy Bell!
We liked it so much we went back on Tuesday and conquered Savers. But I digress. Today we tried to go to a different pool for baby-swimming. It seems we live smack bang in between two pools - and I wanted to find out which was nearer. Thanks to GM I am still none the wiser. I searched for the address. GM ‘found it’. Unfortunately I failed to notice the tiny grey writing that said it was it was ‘just an approximate’ of the address. ARGH!! ARGH!!! ARGH!!!!
Then, of course, as I desperately didn’t want it to be my fault for relying again on el stupido GM, I decided to blame M as he had usefully taken the street directory out of the car, leaving myself and Small Z to drive guided by little more than frail hopes and a stray seagull that we would find the pool in time to actually get in it.
As it happened, we made it, and had a good splash around for about twenty minutes. I dunked Small Z, who remained unperturbed, surfacing without having stopped her race for the big yellow floating duck she had her eye on. We were the only ones there, so it all felt quite palatial. After some supermarket shopping we arrived home, to find that M had made the most fabulous apple pie out of the current Delicious magazine (thank you, J&I) - which vaporised the street directory angst. Custard powder in pastry - who knew!? (You did, didn’t you, Jen…)
Botannical walking, coffee gold and local misunderstandings
An exhaustingly drawn out night last night. I had stayed up until 9.30pm (oh god, that is so pathetic - don’t think I don’t know that my life has warped out of recognition) and had absent mindedly drunk almost all of a stubby of Coopers Sparkling Ale. We went out around midday yesterday to get our pictures taken for cloth nappy pimping posterity for the City of Casey, and then went for a bit walk in the Berwick Botanical Gardens.
Mostly, my experience of botanical gardens has been the one in Melbourne, which, I realised yesterday, are very old school - with plaques under almost all of the plants with their normal and Latin names. It’s also laid out quite formally. Not Berwick. The gardens are on the site of an old quarry, and quite a few of the tracks could be mistaken for gravel roads. We only saw one plant plaque - until we found the rose garden - where all the roses were very much asleep, but had names like Mister Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Iceberg, Clementine - but my absolute favourite was Ita Buttrose ITA BUTT-ROSE. I went hysterical for about five minutes, with PartyPie in the sling sleeping stoutly through my paroxysms.
Then we went out for lunch to a cafe that I’d been meaning to go to for ages - it was my last hope for Berwick. Last time I thought I’d found a great cafe there (in the old primary school buildings, opposite the park - a lovely setting) the size of the serves demonstrated a commitment to minimalism that did not stretch to their pricing. However, this little joint in the middle of an arcade served M the best coffee he’d had in a while - we both snarfed through a foccacia each, and then M polished off another coffee and I ate CAKE. Rapturously.
A bit more walking. Found Small Z another great beanie (as her visit to Binginwarri showed, she cannot have too many) in the op-shop, and then we went to the ‘recycled boutique’ where one of the ladies ooohed and aaahed over how much she had grown - we had taken her in there when she was about a month old and changed her in the back room under her watchful eighty-year-old eye. That was back when we didn’t really know how to do it… Then I introduced M to a place that could have been designed for us - a chemist WITH A CAFE! I love chemist shops (US readers - read ‘drugstore’) - I love their sale tables, their skincare products, their jellylbeans and their mounds of unnecessary baby crud.
I wandered around, taking all this in (with Small Z still sling sleeping) while M added to his ever increasing caffeine content in the cafe at the back. Fabulous! (We are short for fun out here in the sticks.) Stuffed baby, still asleep, into the car (huzzah!) and drove home via the doctors and post office. Why? Because I had to ask my doctor to write a letter to say I can’t fly so that the aeroplane company that I will never use again (that would be JETSTAR) will reimburse the money for our flights. The flights they would not let us reschedule (at any cost).
So I got to stand there in the little local post office while the postmaster (a name I don’t get to type very often) faxed the letter which basically said I was suffering post natal depression (my doctor was kind enough to write this after I told her on the phone that I could not fly to NSW as my sleep deprivation made the thought impossible, as did the state of my bank account). And now the entire local community thinks I had a ‘difficult birth’ and am stuck in a trench of post natal depression, neither of which are true.
Upon weighing it up I decided that saving over $300 is worth the misunderstanding and silent sympathetic looks in the supermarket. And now I have come to the main point of post. This morning, after breakfast, M looked at me consideringly and said;
“You know, you were really great to hang out with…yesterday.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I was ‘great to hang out with…yesterday’? What’s wrong with me today? I’ve barely been up an hour!.”
He scrambled to tell me that he had merely got his intonation wrong, and that he had meant to say;
“You know, you were GREAT to hang out with yesterday.”
Of course, then he couldn’t leave it alone and became increasingly creative.
“How about ‘You WERE great to hang out with yesterday’? Like you used to be great, but not anymore. Or, ‘YOU were great to hang out with yesterday.’ Like everyone else sucked?”
DISCLAIMER: Due to the fact that it has taken me three days to finish, the whole point of the post now kind of lacks that special zing. But the thought was there at its inception. Somewhere.
