Interest Rates Have Risen To How Much?

For really the first time since Talented Hubby and I have been married, I’m starting to get a little worried.

A ‘complimentary and friendly’ email reminder landed in Hubs’ inbox this morning informing us of our current official interest rate. Of course we aren’t blind, and the rise in rates has been ‘gradual’ (a subjective term!) so we knew already that we were paying this, but the realisation of what was actually occurring was mind-boggling.

We’re now paying a full TWO PERCENT (plus a smidgeon extra) in interest over the level we were at when we first purchased this house almost three years ago. We’re on a variable rate. We expect more damage soon. The last several months have been the worst - every month a new rate rise. I know to some degree our economy is dictated by the economies elsewhere but come on!

We were so smug when we bought this house. Talented Hubby has a wonderful, stable job with much room for advancement. We saved like our lives depended on it for an intensive period of 14 months and even surprised ourselves at how much we were able to pull together in such a short period of time. Of course, we had a clear goal in mind and we were absolutely single-focussed. We’re not the sort to hold very expensive pastimes or hobbies anyhow, but we were very concious of every dollar that filtered through our hands and - dare I say it - very proud of ourselves for realising something which had been a dream since the kids had started arriving many years before.

Our quest for a home was in part fuelled by my own childhood experience of moving every couple of years as Dad followed work. My parents once owned a small farm (more of a hobby enterprise than anything else, very small) and lost it due to the global crash in the late eighties which saw them paying SEVENTEEN PERCENT at the height of their loan. It took them a decade and a half to recover and they never owned another house until well after I’d left home. I never really felt settled. The move away from the farm years earlier had occurred in less than two days, from announcement to driving away in our precariously-loaded car. I guess it always felt as though we could up and move on at any moment.

I never wanted that for our kids. I wanted them to go to the same school from first day to last, to get grounded in a neighbourhood. To put down roots. Thus the urge to get into a Real House and out of the rent cycle.

I married a good egg though. Talented Hubby definitely has his head on straight, LOL. Me? I’ve always been a little more ‘free’ with my spending habits, a product, I think, from never having quite enough growing up. Now I don’t really feel secure unless I have a little more than enough, a little leftover. Though I’m nowhere near a spendthrift, Hubs has (on more than one occasion) been the voice of reason in our finances. The stability and future advancement of his job gives us confidence.

The rising interest rates do not.

When we first took out the loan, we nominated a weekly payment that was above the minimum payment, giving ourselves a healthy buffer. In addtion, we were manually transfering an additional, regular sum every fortnight. We gained speed in those early days. Gradually though, each new interest rate has chipped away at our buffer. With each new chunk gone, the time it takes for us to pay off the house increases. We had originally hoped to be signed and sealed by the time Boofah went to university, about 12 years in total (and just 9 years from now!) I find it very hard to imagine this happening now, although I do admit to holding onto the last shred of the dream of not having to pay university tuition AND a home loan at the same time.

In our marriage to date, I have not had to work. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for this. We live adequately on Talented Hubby’s income. Our bills are always paid, our needs always met. We spend money on leisure and fun stuff. I don’t have to itemise every grocery purchase (I probably should, mind you, but I don’t have to). Yes, Hubs would dearly love to throw down a cool couple of thousand with wild abandon on his dream SLR camera, but he would never do it. Just like I wouldn’t buy the new MacBook Air just because it can (apparently) slide into a standard yellow file envelope which is very, very cool (sigh - LOL).

But it’s not just the interest rates - absolutely everything else around me is rising in price too. Meat, dairy products, fruit and vegetables, the list goes on and on. Planning a menu - and sticking to it - are fast becomming my main concerns. I used to manage very nicely on $150 per week for groceries (don’t freak out - this is for a family of five, in Aussie prices, and it’s probably considered low, LOL) Even though we were never wild spenders, we now have to sit down and really consider the worth of an item. Even though we didn’t have extravagant tastes for things like Date Nights before, we now have to consider whether it is more worthwhile to get a meal at McDonald’s for $15 over a $40 restaurant meal. And we don’t go out that often, so a ‘real’ sit down meal is a big treat for us. It’s kind of ho-hum to be having a romantic dinner at the same place you took your kids the week before, you know?

Things are just so much more expensive these days. We cannot imagine how a newly married couple can afford to break into the housing market for the first time. One income families are becoming rarer as wives who would otherwise stay home are forced back to work. The rental market where I am has skyrocketed. There are more people than there are houses, rents are astronomical compared to what they were when we were renting and landlords are getting upwards of two dozen interested parties for each new rental that happens to come up. People are actually electing to pay MORE than the listed rental price just to secure a place. It’s ludicrous! There’s just no way we would have been able to save for our house deposit paying the rents some of our friends are paying now. No way on earth.

Overseas folk - how are rates looking in your countries? Aussies - how are you managing with the swift increase in rates and general increased prices on things like groceries?

And This Is Why I Hate Tuna

I have not eaten tuna - or any canned fish product, for that matter - in 21 years. And I have NEVER had to share my marriage with tuna. Until today.

A couple of days ago Talented Hubby shocked the life out of me by requesting I have a few cans of tuna and salmon on standby for quick work lunch fixin’s. In all the years I’ve known him - coming up to twelve this year - I have never purchased canned fish. He may as well have asked for sliced Rump o’ Hippopotamus. And there’s a very good reason for this.

When I was seven years old, I was forever scarred by a dinner-making debacle which lives on in infamy within our extended family. My mother’s sister was staying with us at our farmhouse and, being what she supposed was a good house guest, she offered to cook dinner for everyone. I had long since had a moderate dislike of all things canned fishery so you can imagine my surprise when she placed in front of me a gelatinous pile of goop.

Tuna Mornay people. TUNA!

I looked around for Mum, hoping she’d bail me out. Tuna was the one thing she never made me eat - vegetables yes, but tuna, no. Unfortunately she’d been held up doing something for my Dad and was nowhere to be seen. My Aunt, unaccustomed to a child who was not used to being bullied into eating, sat at our dining table and watched me force down each mouthful. I won’t go into details but it was a harrowing experience which did not end until three hours after everyone else had left the table. My parents had, of course, realised what was happening but for whatever reason (unapparent to my 7 year old brain at the time) had chosen to back my Aunt.

When the last mouthful had been choked down, Mean Aunt gave a satisfied “Hrrumphh!” and disappeared, presumably to bark orders at my cousins. I did what any tuna-stuffed, force-fed, green-gilled seven year old would do. I ran to cry in my bedroom.

Now, before I tell the rest of this story, I have to introduce you to my Favourite Toy of 1986: The Heart Family.

I guess the Heart Family were like Barbie’s poor cousins? Anyhoo, I remember this very specific nursery set as being my most prized possession that year (actually just searching for that picture brought back lots of memories - I also had the car). I don’t know what happened to the Dad and the little boy. It’s quite sad. At any rate, there I was, feeling decidely the worse-for-wear and before I knew it, I realised I was about to experience The Second Coming of Tuna. I reached for the first thing I saw and prompty emptied the contents of my stomach. See that cute little cupboard thingy? Uh-huh.

But wait, it gets better…

At that EXACT MOMENT, my Aunt happened to walk past my bedroom window and caught me retching into the poor toy. In her house, toys were to be looked at, never played with. You can imagine her reaction when she realised this sobbing, vomiting child was defiling Something That Cost Good Money.

And this is where my Mum, hero that she was, stepped in and put Mean Aunt in her place. I was bathed, crib/bath whatsit washed and sterilised, and tucked into bed with a bucket and a sympathetic look.

And that is why I hate tuna.

One time, I walked into the Piglets’ daycare to smell a fish-type mornay being served up for the kids and literally had to return to the car and send Talented Hubby in to collect the kids. Yes, it is that bad.

Over the years, I’m almost ashamed to say, my canned fish neurosis has rubbed off onto the kids. They’ve clearly never tasted it in our home but have come across it once or twice elsewhere and have also developed a healthy (ish!) distrust of the little green cans. I’m sorry kids, really, but one thing Mama will never cook in this house is tuna.

I tell this story merely to illustrate that I should, in fact, receive Wife of the Year for today’s tuna purchase. Never mind that the canning process seals in the smell and (given that they were bought for Talented Hubby’s work lunches) I will never see the inside of the can. The picture on the can sent me right back to 1986 with my Aunt sitting across the table from me, drumming her fingers in that annoying ‘hurry the heck up’ way really impatient people have. Sigh.

It was almost comical trying to buy them actually because have you seen the canned fish section of the grocery store? When Nasty Aunt served up her mornay glop back in the mid-eighties there was probably just tuna in oil and tuna in springwater. These days there are flavours like chilli, lemongrass, smoked…good grief! I’ve never bought tuna in my life before! I had no idea what to get! I stood there dumbfounded before finally picking random cans off the shelf.

I’m just glad I don’t have to be around when he opens them.

It Felt Like Two Years

Tomorrow, the Piglets go back to school after 2 weeks of holidays. For those outside of Australia, our school year runs from late January through till around mid December and is broken up into four equal terms of around 10 weeks each. At the end of every term we have a 2 week break, and at the end of fourth term in December, the summer holidays are 6 weeks.

Anyhoo, the kids’ bags are packed, lunches have been premade (my single biggest timesaver for stress-free mornings) and I’m psyching myself up for another ten weeks of after school reader books, charts, show-and-tell, school excursions, lost canteen money, and rotten apples. This term Boofah and Miss Moo also have swimming lessons, run through the school (it’s part of the school curriculum in my state that where possible, 5 x 45-60 min swimming lessons at a local pool are run once per year. They do this over the course of one week. Some rural areas without ready access to a pool may be exempt though - I’m not entirely certain). Master J, the lucky thing, gets a weekly swimming lesson all the way through the year, as part of his special ed classroom’s curriculum. Which, I might add, is a completely brilliant program. That kid is part fish.

So I’m sitting here now twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the dryer to finish. After all, it wouldn’t be the night before a school day if I wasn’t running a load of something at 11 o’clock at night.

We have a busy week planned. Tomorrow is grocery shopping day. Usually this would not take long but I haven’t finished my menu yet so I’ll have to do that first, plus I’m hoping my sweet husband will take me on a mini drive to the butcher and fruit and veg shop. I don’t get to go there every week so I’m planning a stock-up.

Tuesday, after the Piglets are safe and sound in their classrooms, Talented Hubby and I are heading into the city where we’ll be swinging by a photography exhibition and also an iconic church. Okay, so it’s a cathedral, and our city is actually called ‘The City of Churches’ (although, I suspect the Vatican might have words to say on that one), but I’ve always wanted to have a sticky-beak in that place and have never had the opportunity until now. Hubs frequents a couple of photography websites and came across some awesome interior shots of the cathedral and got an itchin’ to duplicate (or, knowing Hubs, to better) the images. It seems that this isn’t as uncommon a request as we’d thought so depending on when it is convenient for the staff, Hubs will do his photog thing (it goes without saying that we would never impose on a service or take photos with anybody present). He’s really quite brilliant at it. No, not biased at all, LOL.

Wednesday is a potter-about-the-house kind of day and then Thursday I’ve scheduled an MDO (Mum’s Day Off) which will probably involve another trip into the city (this time for shopping of course!). Good Times.

Bloggityville Blood Drive 2008 is scheduled to start on Monday 5th May however so far it seems nobody is coming to the party! The needles really aren’t that big. Honest! If you are planning to have a go, leave a comment to this post so I know whether to put up the Mr Linky or not. If there doesn’t seem to be any takers, I may have to reschedule for later in the year. In a weird twist of fate it appears I cannot donate blood during my own blood drive. My last donation (whole blood) was in late March so the three months rule won’t be up until late June. I had hoped I might be able to give a platelet donation before then, but it doesn’t seem likely. This was always a possibility but I was always going to host the carnival anyway :)

Well, that’s the dryer done. Nighty-night Bloggityville!

Why My Toe Might Be A Casualty In The War On Clutter

Boofah, our middle child, is a little miffed at us. The poor child (his label, not ours) has had the misfortune of having to bunk up with his sister in a shared bedroom since Miss Moo was old enough to need a big bed, or roughly four years. At first it was a necessity. Our previous home was a rental with three-and-a-half bedrooms and we needed that ‘half’ room (a sunroom without a door) to store the miscellaneous baby stuff. We tried having him share with his older brother for a while but soon realised Master J really needed some space to be on his own - to reboot the system, if you like.

When we moved to this house 2 ½ years ago we made the foolish mistake of simply carting much of what we had stored in the sunroom with us. So, even though we now had a four-bedroom place, poor Boof remained sharing with his sister. He was so used to it then it barely registered but in the last year or so we’ve begun to see signs that the arrangement really should come to an end (small room, big children, many arguments - you get the idea). Plus, the room may as well have been painted Little Girl Purple. Perfect for Miss Moo, not so great for Little Man.

How to solve this predicament? Clean out the fourth bedroom. Months we procrastinated about doing it? Somewhere in the vicinity of 12. Every few weeks Boof will bring up the subject of The Own Bedroom That Wasn’t and make us feel like horrible parents for subjecting him to another second living in the same room as his sister. At first we reasoned that we really needed to build a shed first. We have a smallish garden shed but Talented Hubby’s eyes lit up when I tried convincing him that a larger Man Cave would be more appropriate. He could store all his Man Things where I couldn’t see them and he could do what men do in sheds - play with their toys. The expense was astronomical though, so we shelved the idea and learned to avoid Boofah when he approached us with That Look in his eye.

And then one day, we decided to just clean out the clutter. I once took a picture of the fourth bedroom at its height of ‘junk room usefulness’, thinking a before-and-after piece would make fantastic fodder for Tackle It Tuesday. Um, yeah. Three months later it was still a junk heap and every trip across the ‘floor’ was a bit like Catherine Zeta Zones’ fancy dance through the laser beams in Entrapment. Ignoring the issue seemed to work perfectly well when Boofah wasn’t making his Puss-in-Boots eyes at us, so ignore it we did.

Until today. Today is the day Talented Hubby decided to clean out the shed (necessary in order to fit the bedroom stuff in). Except he doesn’t do things by halves. He de-cluttered, de-spidered, de-bugged. Much of what we thought we didn’t have room for, we in fact did. It’s looking spic and span now but not before my little accident.

I was moving a ladder back into the shed. For the record, I did not see that my darling husband had hooked a heavy plank over one rung. The plank fell. Onto the big toe of my right foot. Now, this particular toe hasn’t had the best run of things in my lifetime. When I was two or three, I almost severed it in a broken-off long-necked beer bottle (it’s a fab story - remind me to tell you about seeing my own toe bone one day, ‘kay?) I have a scar that circles the entire toe except for a half-inch strip of skin which acted like a hinge, keeping my toe together. Not being the most co-ordinated of souls, during my lifetime I have stubbed that toe regularly and if you’ve ever bumped a scar, you know the kind of intense pain it brings.

When the plank fell on my toe this afternoon, it not only hit the scar but it also landed square on that bit of flesh right underneath your toenail. With a large amount of force. I was, uh, less than delicate in my choice of words and started crying like a baby - it hurt like the blazes. For a while we thought it was broken. Thankfully this doesn’t appear to be the case but I do suspect I’ll lose my nail in the deal. Yeowch.

And there you go. Proof that decluttering can bring pain. You’re welcome.

Oh, and P.S: The fourth bedroom is coming along nicely. Still a way to go, but gettin’ there. Boofah is understandably thrilled, LOL.

Easy Vanilla Slice For Less Than Fifty Cents Per Serve

My mother-in-law is a pretty cluey gal. Each time we visit the ‘laws I find myself poring through her old cookbooks, many of them written in her own hand. This past weekend, she pulled this recipe out of thin air and I knew I had to have it. It was originally from an old (um, sometime in the eighties? early nineties? LOL) Australian Women’s Weekly cakes and slices cookbook. MIL’s copy was falling apart at the seams, another testament to the fact that most Aussie households use their AWW cookbooks continuously. Aussies can follow the recipe exactly as they’ll be familiar with the brands. Overseas folk may have a harder time but similar products should be available. I’m also including a rough estimate of cost, although of course this would be different for those living outside of Australia.

Easy Vanilla Slice
Serves 10 (approx)

250g (a little under 9oz) packet Milk Coffee biscuits (cookies - see below for example)
300ml (10 oz) thickened cream
250ml (8½ oz) milk
100g (3½ oz) packet vanilla-flavoured instant pudding (see below for example)

Icing:
1 cup icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar)
1 teaspoon soft butter
* food colouring to suit (or you could leave it out - I will next time)
* hot water

Method:

1. Cover the base of a 23cm (9 inch) square slab pan with biscuits (cookies), plain side down. (You could any kind of sweet biscuit for this recipe but because it is such a rich dessert, plainer is probably better. Milk Coffee biscuits are very plain). You might need to break some biscuits up to fit your pan - they should completely cover the base.
2. Combine cream and milk in a large bowl. Add pudding mix and use an electric beater (or a really good arm) to beat on medium speed for 1 minute or until nice and thick.
3. Pour pudding mix over biscuit base.
4. Top with another layer of biscuits, plain side down, filling in any gaps with broken-up pieces.
5. Stick it in the fridge while you make up the icing. Just rub the butter into the icing sugar a little and then use the hot water to form a smooth paste. You want it easily spreadable. Add a couple drops of food colouring if you want.
6. Top the slice with the icing and (if you can wait that long) stick it back in the fridge to properly set overnight. It’s good to eat in about one hour though.

Cost Breakdown (in Aussie prices)

Vanilla-flavoured instant pudding - $1.11
Cream - $1.14
Milk Coffee biscuits - $1.79
Milk (1 cup) - $0.32 (approx)
Icing sugar (1 cup) - $0.40 (approx)
Butter (I used margarine), tsp - $0.03 (approx)
Food colouring - $0.05 (approx)

Total Cost - $4.84, or 48c per serve

As I said, very rich, but oh-so-decadent at the same time. You could switch things up a bit by using instant chocolate pudding mix and then drizzling melted chocolate atop white icing. Yummo!

I Think It Would Be Fairly Safe To Say...

…that 99% of my readers are female. Therefore, what I’m about to talk about will make perfect sense. If for no other reason than to serve as a source of hilarity with a side dose of ‘thank goodness it isn’t me’.

Men (man?), you’ve been warned. Look away. Look away now.

When we returned from last weekend’s trip to see the inlaws, I managed to bring back something I’ve never had before - a UTI. I don’t need to spell that out, right? We all know what I mean? Good.

Wednesday morning, our last morning at the inlaws, I woke feeling a bit ‘off’. By lunchtime, I’d been to the toilet six thousand times and had realised something was up. During the car ride home that afternoon, I felt exactly like I was sitting on a pile of thorns with a vice strapped around my bladder. Oh. My. WORD.

UTIs are a rite of passage for the female population. It’s in the manual, right? Ridiculously common. Nobody likes to talk about them though. Because they’re ‘up there’. And just generally unpleasant to think about. But in my 28 years on this planet, I’ve never had one. I battled on bravely whimperingly until this afternoon - three days of ‘ick’. It was a dumb idea to wait. Not really being wonderfully enthusiastic about antibiotics at the best of times, I figured a couple of standby home remedies would see me through. I stocked up on chocolate (duh) and tried to down a glass of what Talented Hubby unhelpfully referred to as ‘raw sewerage’ - a combination of cranberry drink, bicarb (baking) soda, water and a dash of green cordial for good measure, lending the whole concoction an endearing browny-green hue. Three sips in, I was ready to give up and embrace my new found ’sitting on razor blades’ posture for life. It wasn’t so bad if you leaned 34º to the right.

Eventually, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I tried - on a Friday afternoon no less - to get an appointment with my wonderful (female) doctor. Now, I don’t know if this is true the world over, but the Law of Medical Unavailability here in Australia states that no doctor within a thirty mile radius will have any slots open at the time of greatest need, which will inevitably be either Friday afternoon at 4:45pm or at any time Saturday or Sunday. There are clinics which are open Saturday mornings, but they are usually booked solid and I wasn’t exactly fancying the idea of another night being unable to sleep on my stomach. I didn’t have a hope of getting in to see Perfect Doctor, who was all tapped out well into May (the downside of having such a brilliant lady doctor is that every other woman in six suburbs is on her books). I tried Talented Hubby’s clinic - they don’t take new patients on the weekend (huh?). I was left with the after-hours clinic.

Let me tell you a little bit about the after-hours clinic. The saddest, sorriest folk stumble into that place and collapse into the uncomfortable chairs with identical looks of pure desperation on their faces. The regular doctors have shut up shop for the day and ducking into the emergency room is a little extreme for a cough so this is their last option. Most of them look - and feel - completely miserable. It’s not a place you want to be.

I should have worked out by now that this week wasn’t going to be my luckiest, and even more so when it took me twenty minutes to get through to their switchboard late this afternoon. But I naively assumed I was due some grace and that I’d be in and out quickly, lovely drugs in hand and visions of unimpeded peeing dancing through my gleeful little head.

I was so very wrong.

My appointment was for 7:30. You have to understand, UTIs aren’t the most comfy conditions at the best of times, so movement - including dressing to go out (I’ve been in sweats all day) - was horrendous on many levels. I put on a shoe, then had to go pee. I put on the other shoe - pee. I brushed my hair, grabbed my keys, found my purse - pee, pee, pee. You get the idea. Actually getting out to the car and then exiting again once we’d reached the clinic was no better. I sat down to wait, obviously needing to ‘go’ again, but reasoning that I’d have to give a sample - oh joy - soon anyway, so I’d best hold on. At 7:45 the pressure was building. At 8:04 I was boring holes in the back of the receptionist’s head with my eyes. By 8:07 I was trying to fashion a weapon out of discarded magazines. 8:16…8:22…8:34… I finally stood up, came to the very rapid conclusion that I absolutely must get to a toilet in about 2.7 seconds, and hobbled my way over to the desk to let the blissfully unaware receptionist know where I was headed in case my name was called.

“Oh sweetie! I forgot to tell you! You were meant to give a sample forty minutes ago!” she smiles sweetly, unaware that I was fighting a losing battle both with my urge to go potty and to inflict pain on anyone with a normal peeing ability.

Necessary voiding later (gosh, it’s embarrassing cradling the little yellow-lidded pot in a room full of people!) I finally got in to see the doctor. It was now 8:45 and all the chemists (drugstores) in my area close at 9:00. As soon as I walked into her office I let loose with a torrent of self-diagnosis - to which she mercifully agreed - and she gave me a prescription for some antibiotics. I waited for over an hour with a near-exploding bladder to see someone for twelve-point-two seconds. Sigh.

I did get my script filled - just in the nick of time. I’m also all stocked up on this wonderful (yuk) alkalinizer powder that I’m meant to drink to make the, um, ‘product’ less acidic and therefore hurt less. It’s only marginally better than the home remedy cocktail and it still tastes like chalk. Aughh.

So my advice to all of you is this. Never, EVER underestimate the ability to pee without pain. It’s one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity, LOL.

Road Trip!

If I was an organized person - and I think we’ve established by now that I am not - then I would have stuck a few posts in the bank for this weekend.

That’s right - we’re heading out of town. Don’t rob us. We don’t like that.

The laptop is coming with us, but the inlaws do not have broadband or any kind of reasonable download limit with their dial up and so no internet for me :( Which is probably a good thing, in a way. I might actually be forced to, you know, go for a walk or something, LOL.

We should return Tuesday or Wednesday. Until then, enjoy your weekend and beginning of next week!

What Do YOU Do In Bed?

How much importance do you place on sleep? I mean this in all seriousness because last night I actually slept for a whole seven-and-a-bit hours which is two hours more than I usually allow myself. And when I say *I* allow myself, what I really mean is, what Bloggityville will allow me to have.

Blogging/reading other blogs is a sickess, folks. If you’re one of the twelve people who don’t currently have a blog of your own, run! RUN AWAY FROM THE LIGHT!

I, however, am a lost cause. I will be blogging when I’m ninety.

But back to the point.

Sleep. It’s such an afterthought, isn’t it? We all have the best of intentions when it comes to getting enough sleep, but most of us fall short. I woke up this morning a whole lot more rested than usual and just generally more enthusiastic about life. This didn’t translate into actually achieving a whole lot mind you, but babysteps…

How much is an ideal night’s sleep for you? I don’t know about anyone else, but I often find it worse to oversleep, the three times of the year that actually happens (birthday, Mother’s Day and a spare!) Because my body is so used to 5 or 6 hours, eight hours can sometimes be too much all at once. I would love to be sleeping that long, consistently, but I’d have to build up to it or I’d walk around feeling like a truck ran over me all day long.

Our school days start at 7am when Master J wanders into our bedroom to make sure a parent wakes up with enough time to feed and clothe him before the taxi arrives at 7:45. We, on the other hand, set the alarm for 6:45 and then hit snooze - purely to take the ‘edge’ off waking up - because we know J wakes up far earlier than we do and his stomach is a powerful internal reasoning device. This way we have a three-pronged approach to starting our day - initial alarm, snooze button and hungry child. The latter totally trumps both of the others by the way. He’ll keep coming in to rouse us every 4 minutes until we finally get our butts out of bed. Oh, but when I say ‘we’, I almost always mean ‘me’. Talented Hubby never has any trouble getting a full eight hours every single night because I’m the sucker that lets him do it, LOL.

After my feet have hit the floor, my mornings currently look something like this:

• Breakfast for awake children
• Finish packing the lunchboxes (I seriously do not know how I would manage having to actually make sandwiches in the mornings. I make/set out everything I need the night before, wrapping and refrigerating the necessary bits, and in the morning I dump it all in a lunchbox and ta-da).
• Supervise dressing.
• Help with shoes and socks.
• Supervise Do kids’ teeth-brushing.
• Panic when I realise it is now 7:47 and the taxi is probably already waiting in our driveway.
• Wave goodbye to Master J and apologise to our taxi driver for being late out…again.
• Spend five minutes breathing, something I usually don’t get the time to do until then. Oh, and I pee. See previous reason.
• Re-wake Miss Moo, who has usually ignored my wake up call in the first place. Make her breakfast
• Shoes, teeth for Boofah while Miss Moo s l o w l y eats her breakfast. That child is strange. She does not like toast and turns her nose up at most cereals which don’t feature a cartoon character (of which I refuse to buy more than, oh, seven boxes a week) so she will almost always have bread with peanut butter. Woe betide the unsuspecting soul who actually toasts her bread (Nana’s been caught out a couple of times!) My child eats sandwiches for breakfast. I guess it could be worse really. Sigh.
• If I’m really lucky I will have time for a cup of tea right about now. I won’t have time to drink the whole thing, but the three sips I do manage taste like (liquid) manna from heaven.
• Then rush, rush, rush to get Boof and Miss Moo, not to mention myself, completely ready to walk out the door. On my schedule, I have departure time set at 8:40. I have not made 8:40 since sometime last year, and that was because we needed to be at school early for one of them to go on an excursion, the bus driver being a cantankerous old fuddy who threatened to leave without any child who showed up late. Every other day, we bolt out the door closer to 8:55. The bell rings at 9 and we live 6 minutes walk away. It’s a good day when we make it to school before the bell rather than after it. You would think living so close would mean we’d be early. Not so. It’s a false sense of security.
• I stay in Miss Moo’s classroom (depending on the day) for reading and then when I get home, sometime around 9:30, I finally get some breakfast of my own and move on with my day.

All that nifty stuff that is listed on my Basic Daily Plan under my Morning Routine - the unloading dishwasher, putting on a load of laundry etc? Never gets done. Could you just imagine how productive I could be if I just stuck to my own schedule? Wow. If I actually rose at 6 I might even be able to have some breakfast and quiet time before the children are awake. What a novel concept!

That theory has one major flaw. I’m not a morning person. I hate waking up. The deliciousness of waking up but knowing you don’t actually have to get out of bed for a while is a blessing that is lost on me completely. I’ve forgotten what it is like to wake up naturally! Did you know you can have complete dreams, with backstory and character development, in the six minutes between alarm bleeps? You totally can. When you’re having such a vivid, schizophrenic dreaming session it’s a little hard to jump up and greet the day with sunshine and brightness. And I know what you’re thinking. Why not just get up the first time the alarm sounds? Refer to the first line of this paragraph again! LOL.

If I was waking at 6:00, and aiming to get eight hours a night, I’d have to eventually be going to bed at 10:00. I just don’t see that happening. For starters, the nightly movie isn’t even finished by then! All the really good series don’t start until 9:30. But I can do 11:00. I can handle 11:00. I am on fire for 11:00!

Getting to bed by 11pm is my new goal. This past week alone - and this is not uncommon, I’m ashamed to admit - I had two nights when I went to bed later than 2:00am. Eeeek! People were never designed to survive on 4 hours sleep a night!

I know myself well enough to know getting up at 6:00 will feel like I’m dying right through to about, oh, 9:30 when I can finally stop and rest. However! If you take another peak at that schedule of mine, you’ll see I already have a Project Time (90 mins) scheduled in the afternoon. I’m glad I did this, because for the first few weeks I can use this as napping time before the Piglets get home. And then later, when I’m used to the system, that hour and a half can revert back to its original purpose, which is to give me time to pick up various household and personal projects. It’s my rest time. If I’m to get to bed at 11:00 then there’s a whole bunch of stuff I’m going to have to get done a lot earlier in the evenings. Sometimes I don’t even start my Evening Routine until after that!

Over to you - what are your sleep habits (be honest!) and how do you think they affect how you function the next day?

P.S. You may have noticed a recent lack of images - photos, graphics etc - at the tops of my posts. Mostly, this is because I’m lazy and unless it is absolutely necessary to the telling of the story I’m beginning to avoid including pretty pictures just for the sake of having something colourful above my words. Is this bothering anyone? Anyone actually missing the ‘pretties’? LOL.

I Am Really Spontaneous

Folks, I survived the night without my man. Actually I had all sorts of fun making ‘bedclothes angels’ for about two minutes and then I curled up in the fetal position and wished fervently for morning. It must have worked, because the next thing I knew I had a small child appear bedside to rouse me. And in the morning even. With no references to a ‘wee’ little incident. Bonus.

I am trying to keep busy this week. I went shopping this morning for those jeans and for various items of feminine undergarments and came home with a haircut and a stack of Blockbuster’s finest instead. Quite honestly, a brilliant way to spend the day. Without the soul-destroying experience of wrestling my rear end into a pair of jeans whose tag reads several sizes more than it did ten years ago.

I’ll tell you, having a haircut for the first time in two years does wonders for the persistent headache that has lurked around for a the last couple of weeks. Now I understand why. My Mama Ponytail was literally dragging my head backward off my neck.

The hairdresser asked the obligatories - how short, what style, did you wash your hair this morning. I hadn’t even planned on cutting my hair at all today (I had washed my hair though) but I happened to walk past the salon and that pesky little Spontaneity Fairy sprinkled some of that dust of hers. Before I knew it I was asking if they had time to do a cut without an appointment. I reasoned that if God, in all his infinite wisdom, had a particular connection with my middle-of-the-back, thick-as-horse-hair locks, then He would definitely made His preference known by rendering the hair stylists unavailable.

He did not. Clearly God thought it was time I stopped clogging up the shower drain too.

Usually when I head to the salon - and I say that like I go every 6 weeks, ha! - it’s a theatrical, orchestrated event. It must be thoroughly planned and researched, online style photos printed and tucked neatly in my purse, long-hair-lovin’ husband distracted with lots of….um….Skittles (yeah, that’ll do it. Nobody will ever suspect the real weapon of choice, right? Good job Lizzie, you should be in the international espionage business).

I was flying by the seat of my pants folks. I left it all in the hands of the stylist. I figured that even if she fudged up royally then it would still be an improvement. Have you ever gone two years without a haircut? No trim, no hair colour, NO HAIR PRODUCTS OF ANY TYPE? It’s not a pretty picture. My hair grows as far outward in thickness as it grows downward. Braiding my hair gives me a rock-solid ‘rope’ about three clear inches in diameter. Uh-huh. So I gestured vaguely in the direction of my shoulders and before I could blink seven inches of my hair disappeared. I’m not one for the geometric look so even if I’d completely choked at this point, there was no turning back.

Snip, snip, snip. For almost an hour. Eventually some sort of layering was worked in near the ends, which about skim my shoulders now. The thinning scissors were used indiscriminately, and they got a workout. I lost half the length of my hair and half the bulk. My God, it felt good. It’s so l i g h t. And unlike every other haircut of my memory (all four of them), I actually think the stylist did a good job. So good in fact that I’m returning for a ‘quick touch up’ in the morning. The cut itself is brilliant. The layering eliminates The Triangle of Hair Death, always an issue with a mane as thick as mine. It’s just a tad too long. I know. I’m going shorter. Clearly, my faculties aren’t completely in order yet. Strike while the ’salon euphoria’ is still raging through the bloodstream - it’s easier to ignore the cost of the cut when you can see how cute you look.

And of course, it helps that I didn’t have to face The Glare tonight. Men are funny creatures, aren’t they? They get attached to the strangest things, like video games, old tshirts, any item of furniture they made with their own two hands (no matter how decrepit the item looks after 15 years), and women’s hair. Every other place on your body? No hair. The hair on your head? As long as humanly possible. I remember sitting down to breastfeed (yeah, men like those too) our daughter many years ago, with a preschooler Master J sitting at my feet staring wide-eyed at Sesame Street. A lady came on to sing the “Sing, Sing a Song” song (say that ten times fast) and she had hair to the backs of her knees. Talented Hubby happened to walk through the lounge at that exact moment on his way to complete some form of manly chore (probably building another piece of furniture) and he literally stopped dead in his tracks, riveted to the screen. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Elmo who had him enthralled. The swaying of her hair had him hypnotized.

I briefed him about the haircut over the phone tonight. He took it surprisingly well. He will now have time to digest the information fully although he does suspect I had it planned this way for weeks. It’s not true! I really didn’t have an appointment!

(Mwah ha ha ha…)

Unfortunately for you guys, I cannot take a picture of the said haircut for two reasons. First, I’m completely inept at taking pictures of the back of my head. You might inadvertently get a shot of my backside and trust me, you don’t want that. And second, Hubs took the camera with him this week. But when he gets back, he can take the shots for me.

If he’s still talking to me.

Where are those Skittles? LOL.

He Was Just Here A Second Ago...

This would be the week to get organised, if I was so inclined.

Unfortunately, I am not. Well not yet anyway. I’m hoping that inspiration will strike.

For the first time in years Talented Hubby has gone on a trip without us. He left today, after a rigorous round of paintball with his work colleagues (which probably meant he drove the highway with blue paint in his hair and scared small children and dogs). Actually, paintball would have been awesome, and I’m jealous.

But he’s gone. Until Friday. Today is Monday. That’s (*counts on fingers*) four whole sleeps. It’s not like I’m not used to the two of us passing like ships through the night - the perils of a shiftworking spouse - but it’s kind of freakin’ me out to think that I’m home ‘alone’ for the next four days. As in, I’m the last line of defence. It’s up to me to ring for the fire brigade/kill the spiders/beat back any intruders. Actually I have that last one covered. I have a big ol’ thumpin’ stick right next to the bed. And I’ll sleep with my mobile phone. I muted the keytones so the robbers won’t know I’m frantically texting my husband. Can’t call the police you see - the bad guys would hear my voice.

See? Totally have this alone thing covered.

But given that I am sans-Hubs this week, it really would stand to reason that it would be the perfect time to declutter his side of the wardrobe. Or go through the boxes of high school memorabilia he keeps dragging from house to house. Re-set his home page (to Lizzie’s Home, of course! Well, that or My Little Pony, LOL). Watch chick flicks every single night with some sort of delicious alcoholic liqueur a glass of diet coke in one hand and a piece of mudcake carrot sticks and salsa in the other. I’m totally hitting Blockbuster tomorrow. Suggestions welcome. For the film or for the snacks.

Plans for the week ahead: shopping (new jeans, oh joy of joys, sigh), taking the bus to the city for the simple pleasures of drinking overpriced coffee and people watching (last time I saw a young lad who, having probably lost a dare, was walking the length of the mall in pink lycra hot pants…and nothing else), eating lunch somewhere that does not serve kids meals, and cooking as little as humanely possible.

And possibly, if I can get my act together, doing a little cleaning. Or, you know, watching another movie.

Kicking Back On A Saturday Morning

It’s been a long while since I’ve had to keep the kids’ noise level down to that which only dogs can hear, but today is that day. Talented Hubby worked until 4am last night. This is unusual in his job at the moment, but I remember The Old Days Of The Nightshift with fear and trembling and I’d really, really hoped I’d never have to do that again. I hate nightshift.

For starters, I have difficulty sleeping when Hubs isn’t around. I’ve examined this and have come to the conclusion I kinda like the guy and must miss his body heat, or you know, the solidness of his body or something. The worst part of nightshift though, must be having to keep the Piglets down to a dull roar the next morning when Hubs is sleeping the shift off. He couldn’t have timed this odd little shift for a weekday when the kids are in school, could he? Nope, it’s smack on the weekend, when the kids are here to be loud all day long. See? Nightshift is horrible.

Thankfully this is only for one more night and then we go back to our regularly scheduled program. Hallelujah!

This head cold is another thing I’m having trouble with right now. Did I mention I’m rarely sick? When it hits (I might get a cold once every couple of years, whereas Hubs probably three or four times a season, LOL) I go down like a sack of spuds. I tried to nap yesterday afternoon but in a cruel twist of fate could not fall asleep and I was so tired I wore my pyjama top to do the school pick-up. Don’t panic ladies - it was just a t-shirt and fleece sweater, indistinguishable as bedclothes to the naked eye, LOL - and it was a momentary infraction. I ‘woke up’ (waking up usually means you’ve been sleeping to begin with) from my nap five minutes before I had to leave the house and I looked down at myself and thought hey, I. Just. Don’t. Care. Today.

To sweeten the deal, I’ve had a very persistent (and more than a little annoying) headache for the last couple of days. I’m thinking it must be connected to the cold in some way because I can feel the pressure in my sinuses when I’m in the throes of mucousy despair so it’s an easy jump. I used to get headaches a whole lot and about four months ago took a step backwards in regards to pain relief. I was getting far too reliant on a particular brand of painkiller. Interestingly enough, after two or three days of one of the worst headaches in the known universe, for the most part they disappeared. Red flag, red flag! I did a bit of research and came across a couple of interesting facts. There were known cases of severe health issues associated with this particular pain pill. And my own personal conclusion - completely non-medical I should point out - was that it was entirely possible the pills themselves were giving me headaches. The cycle would go something like: get headache, take a pill, feel nothing for a few hours (the desired effect), get headache, take pill, feel nothing (*I should pause here to add that I never exceeded the maximum dose in a day, ever). When you know that you’re ‘it’ in terms of keeping the house running smoothly, you tend to go for the quick fixes. It occured to me, after I’d stopped taking them, that all those headaches may not have been independent symptoms at all, but rather withdrawals from the pain pills themselves! I have never been so glad I gave them up. So I urge you, if you’re taking any kind of non-prescribed pain medication regularly, even if you’re coming in well under the maximum daily dose, consider having a trial without them. The first few days could be brutal, I’ll give you that, but it’s worth it to get the ickies out of your body.

So, the headache. It is here. And though I have been taking a much less powerful pain pill to keep it ‘under the surface’, it’s not really working. I believe some good old fashioned remedies are in order. Such as hot chocolate, quilt, Blockbuster, snacks and box of tissues (for the movie, not the cold). Ahhhhhhh.

That’s totally going to work, right?

Plans for today: The official excuse is that I can’t run any mechanicals until Hubs is up at lunchtime. No washing machine, dishwasher or, um, leaf-blower (because that is totally how I clear crumbs off our dining table). The stereo is out because they kind of work by noise, and normally I’d throw on the iPod and ignore the rest of the world while I scrub away but that would not be the sign of a responsible adult would it? Eventually the kids would get hungry. They’re needy like that.

I will probably sort laundry and line up loads ready to go. Clear a bookshelf in our office area. Bang my head against a brick wall when the kids won’t heed my ‘BE QUIET!!!!!’ shrieking whisper for the eventy-eighth time. Good times.

Hope your Saturday is as productive as mine!

Flashback Friday ~ Maroon Was Never My Colour

Once, about a million and a half years ago, I wore a funky maroon visor and worked at McDonald’s. If you were passing through my town toward the end of 1995, hi! That was my pre-Hubs, pre-Piglets, pre-cavernous stretch marks self who served you. I probably fluffed your order. I did that alot. I’m sorry.

When plans to build a McDonald’s in my small rural town first surfaced, it was huge news. It was going to be built on the main highway through town and a Maccas in town meant two things. First, more folks stopping on their way through to Other Places and second, a licence to print money for the franchise owners. KFC had already paved the way a couple of years prior to even bigger fanfare but Maccas was advertising for junior crew members. Being of newly employable age, I signed up. As did every other teenager in town. In an area as small as ours, there weren’t all that many jobs going for young people and there was precious little else to do, so we all rejoiced, flattened our cowlicks (not that I’d know anything about that of course) and turned up for orientation. Training meant a few Sundays of work experience at the next nearest McD’s two-and-a-half hours away. Deciding how rural you are by your proximity to a McDonald’s restaurant is totally a legitimate measurement, by the way.

Now let me just say this. Working at McDonald’s looked all shiny and new and wonderful at first, kind of like that feeling you got as a kid when staring at the Ultimate Toy of the Universe in the toy store window. You think it’s going to be fantastic, then when you get it home and rip the packaging off, you realise its not all that its cracked up to be. It didn’t take long for the novelty of a paying job to wear off.

For starters, the veritable avalanche of teenagers on the books usually meant that shifts were limited. Because I was still at school I was even more restricted, as my parents and I came to an arrangement which included no late nights, and weekend work only at a pinch. I needed to study, they told me. Pfft! I didn’t need school, I was earning REAL money! Here’s why that idea went down the toilet.

I was lucky to get one three hour shift per fortnight. I was paid $4.94 per hour (low in Australia at the time - casual rate juniors at other jobs might have gotten $10+ per hour). Let me add that up for you. $4.94 x 3 = about ¾ of a CD. And there were no iPods back then. I know, I find it shocking myself. One of life’s greatest disappointments was working for a month (a whopping 2 shifts) to buy some rockin’ tunes only to find out you hated all but 2 songs on the disc.

However, I perservered, as did most of the other frustrated teens. We were all aching to make Manager, which rumour had it you could achieve with 12 months of continuous indebted servitude sunny-side-up employment. Those guys (most of whom were only a year or two older than the rest of us) had it made. They wore a plain blue shirt instead of the maroon pinstripe monstrosities the regular crew members were forced to wear, and they only had to wear their visors when they were actually serving, which was almost never. Most of the time they marched around looking important and carrying the key that would ‘unlock’ the police discount feature on the register. Oh, the power! Oh, the intrigue! Oh, to never have to do ‘the pit’ (toilet cleaning duty) ever again! Managers were guaranteed at least three shifts a week and - gasp! - a payrise to $8.72 an hour. Can you imagine? One whole CD a week? And if you wound up not liking it, you could just buy another the following week!

(And yes, I really did measure income in possible-CD-buying-ability. To be honest, I still do it now, LOL)

I never made it to Manager. After five or six months and the grand total of perhaps a dozen shifts, I quit to concentrate on 12th grade at the insistence of my parents. Years passed, I met Hubs (who incidentally had lived in this same town for two years during this same time frame and we’d never ‘met’, though it was highly likely I served him), we moved, had babies. But we still have family in the area, so every couple of years we find ourselves back at this same Mickey Dee’s counter, this time ordering an expensive family meal including Happy Meals instead of the ol’ half price employee food (ah, to have the metabolism of a 15 year old again…sigh). We listen to the kids argue over who gets the Roadrunner and who gets the Coyote. Someone usually pokes someone else in the eye with a straw. And we’re the family - every shift has one - who manages to spill a drink with a ’spread zone’ large enough to require a crew member to come out with a mop and bucket. But every now and then I’ll catch the eye of an employee - thank goodness the poor dears moved to navy uniforms! - and smile in sympathy. And when our order gets mixed up and we end up without our barbecue sauce - clearly an integral part of any McDonald’s experience - I choose to ignore the infraction. Because I’m totally gracious like that :P

Talented Hubby just shakes his head. What would he know?

He was just a KFC boy.

They Say The Mud Is Good For Your Skin

Okay, so I have this feeling of heaviness in my heart tonight. It could be the rich Italian soup I had for dinner giving me heartburn, or it could also have been the double episode of Ghost Whisperer I just finished watching. That show alternatively makes me want to hug my Piglets tighter or, you know, move to a quaint little town where (clearly) the entire population walks past the fountain in the centre of town seventeen times a day.

But none of that tonight. No, tonight we are going to change the subject. Hey, look over there! Something shiny!

Today I am somewhat jealous of an old school friend of mine who is, as we speak, in Port Douglas, Australia on the first leg of her honeymoon after getting married last weekend. Yes, I said first leg. As in, number one out of three. She’s in Sydney for a few days after this and then a ten day cruise to Vanuatu. Kind of beats our honeymoon - we took our two kids and went on a driving holiday around our state, visiting relatives. Par-tay!

I should point out, as a disclaimer, that we had originally planned to elope to Bali twelve months prior and had even arranged the dress, rings and legal paperwork, but after seeing the state of Kuta beach, in all its wet glory, we diplomatically elected to postpone the nuptials. The decision was made while sitting in an Indonesian McDonald’s, to be exact. And then we felt so guilty about thwarting the plans of our contact/driver/embassy helper person - whose fee was about $40 AUD but amounted to two months income for their family - that we hired him to drive us through the inland areas around Ubud, stopping off at this amazing Asian restaurant built off the side of a cliff. We ate on the open balcony, vivid flashbacks of every news segment we’d ever seen about collapsing platforms playing on a reel in our heads while we chomped down our twentieth plate of Nasi Goreng since arriving. The clifftop balcony looked out over a (long disused, thankfully) volcano crater. We were so high up there we were able to look down onto a few clouds. So all in all, the experience of an awesome meal in a breathtaking location trumped getting married amid mud and loud tourists. And they gave us wet towels when we arrived. They’re meant to cool you down but have you ever taken a 5 months pregnant, perpetually hot-flushing-and-now-in-an-especially-sticky-climate woman to a restaurant where you eat while experiencing the dizzying affects of vertigo? Yeah, neither had Talented Hubby. We both looked bewilderedly at the attendants for one or two or three hundred seconds until one of them mimed how to use it. We are klassy like that.

We travelled to Bali in March 2000. Before 9/11, before the Bali bombings which, 2 ½ years after we graced the rice paddies, killed 88 Australians at the site of one of our favourite drinking spots while we were there. Being that I was pregnant (are you doing the math? Stop now, your head will explode trying to keep up, trust me), I distinctly remember not being allowed to chug down a comically large beer stein full of some type of iconic Balinese cocktail with the other members of our group. I had a Coke. It even came in these quaint little glass bottles over there, the likes of which I hadn’t seen back home since, like, 1984 or something.

The food - oh good grief, the food! I’d just risen over that hump that is the first trimester queasies and was ravenously hungry all the time (which also explains why Boofah eats the way he does now). We had Nasi Goreng at almost every meal, frequented the same awesome little hole-in-the-wall (literally) restaurants several times and loved every single second of it. We would eat until we were stuffed, walk out of there only having paid about $7 AUD for two people, including drinks, and waddle back to our hotel to collapse in a carb coma (the rice, people. Rice everywhere. Yum) The only things I was forbidden to eat was any fruit that couldn’t be peeled first (so, no apples, but bananas were okay) and anything sold by a roadside vendor (which I wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole even had I not been pregnant. Mmmmm, deep fried chicken foot anyone? Yeah, didn’t think so) Oh, and the water. We had to use bottled water for everything, including to rinse our toothbrushes.

We stayed for ten days, 11 nights for a grand total of - get this - $811 AUD each, including flights and daily breakfasts. Admittedly, this was budget accomodation, but it had both air conditioning and a pool, absolute essentials for a mother-to-be in an equatorial country, thankyouverymuch. In the couple of years prior to our travels there had been some political unrest in East Timor, not all that far away, and as a result, travel to Bali and the surrounds became drastically cheaper. We spent the first 7 days aclimatising (and learning how to say ‘no’ to the street sellers in Indonesian) and it was another two days after that before we felt comfortable haggling for prices. I remember having a wonderful conversation with a miniscule Indonesian shop owner one day after she’d noticed I was sporting a baby bump. She had two children at home, and another on the way. She wasn’t as far along as me, she told me in her halted English. Either that or she was calling me fat. I grinned anyway and she rubbed my belly. Buddism is big in Indonesia, apparently.

The smell of the incense from the daily offerings the Indonesians leave outside of their homes and businesses is something that sticks with you forever. Even now, if I smell something even remotely familiar, I’m right there on Paddies Lane again, up to my knees in mud (it rained every single day we were there. It was so hot we didn’t care), trying to remember where the nearest Matahari’s department store is again.

It is sad to think of how the Bali Bombings in October 2002 changed the feel of the place. We obviously had no clue what was about to unfold while we were there and looking back into those pre-September 11 days it is easy to see how naive we really were. Tourism is what keeps the Balinese going. No tourists for a time after the bombings meant little or no income and so many Indonesian families suffered. Thankfully the lifeblood began to return to the place and tourists - most of them Aussie - began to return. There was (still is) a definite sense of ‘they won’t scare us away!’

Even though it has been a full eight years, I often find myself thinking back to that time. Even though the wedding idea fizzled I still consider Bali to be where we took our ‘honeymoon’ - we just mixed things up by taking it a full year before our actual vows. We eventually married quite close to home and followed up the next morning with hotcakes at McDonald’s and our now infamous Post Wedding Road Trip ’01.

So Kellie, as you’re kicking back these next few weeks of post-wedding excitement, sipping a cocktail by the pool on the deck of your sparkly cruise liner, ridiculously pre-children non-stretchmarked body soaking up the rays, I wish you the very best for the future you and Kevin hold.

After all, you could be sitting on perilously swaying balcony hanging over a cavernous abyss trying hard not to choke on your rice as you hyperventilate (*wink*)

How To Tell When You're Sick ~ Part One

Blehhh, cough, schnoffle, pfft…

I’m rarely sick. I was blessed with a great constitution, the kind that would have seen me scoff with mirth at silly little Marianne Dashwood’s sojourn in the cold, wet, English countryside had I lived in that century. You know, the little stroll that almost killed her.

Pride comes before the fall folks. Pride comes before the fall.

Today I spent ten minutes trying to wrestle a rogue pillow into its pillowcase only to discover (after I’d screamed in frustration at the lack of energy/co-ordination that this darn cold has seen fit to bestow upon me) that I was trying to stuff it in the sewn-up end.

Uh-huh. I sure did.

I managed to get the top two corners of the fitted sheet onto the bed only to find my energy had fizzled by the time I reached the other end - so I just threw the quilt over the top and called it quits.

My remedy for such malaise?

When I was in the supermarket I spied one of those sneaky impulse-buying devices. You know, when they place the displays of chocolate next to the registers because they know that at any point in time, approximately one-fourth of all women shoppers will make a snap decision based purely on hormones. Or a head cold.

Today, I was that woman. It was totally a Tim Tam day.

And now I’m going to kick back with a cup of tea and one of those lovely morsels of All That Is Good In This World and pretend the steam from my beverage isn’t melting the mucous in my nose.

*Sniff*

Blue Day

I meant to post a long and ultimately insightful monologue about, uh, the mortgage crisis or something but I’m in the depths of a serious funk here. The writing mojo is coming back, slowly, but this is something different. I guess I’m just having a low day.

And I’ve caught a cold. Most of March was enveloped in a record-breaking heatwave and I celebrate by catching a cold. Just wonderful.

I’m off to crawl into bed. At least my pillow loves me.