STUFT

When you ask someone in a country town where they live they don’t give you  a street address, they give you an oral account of journey you will experience on your way to their property.  

This includes identifying every man-made landmark you are likely to pass, the condition of the road surface, names of the property owners, colour and style of their sheds and other points of special interest along the route to their house.

Street names rarely come into play and instead historical information such as the accident that happened on a particular corner back in April or position of a business that closed down five years ago are used as reference points.

This, I’m sure, is a useful way of communication amongst people who have lived in a place for 25 years and saves dealing with all the pesky technology we city folk rely on to find our way around the burbs such as maps, directory assistance and GPS.

If, however, you are not local and weren’t around when Martha’s Bistro used to on the corner just before you get the old cemetary, your pretty much fucked.

I spend my days trying to get the street address out of the people of the Lower Clarence so that I can use the technology available to me to navigate my own path to their property or business to do my job.  Desipite constantly asking the very direct question “What is your address?” I still get a five minute blow by blow account of how to get there and no actually street name or number with assurances that I will never find it if they don’t tell me how to get there.  

I guess I will never know, because right now I’m off down the road towards town so I can get to the studio that is upstairs in the Doherty Building, which is about a 100 yards right of the bakery in the main street that has a name that no one uses and instead refer to it as the ‘main street’.  It is a cream coloured building and I have to turn right at the top of the stairs.  If I can’t find it I’ve been instructed to ask someone on the street because everyone knows where it is…except me.

Let’s not pretend that this little blog of mine is anything more than a completely self-indulgent exercise in egomania on my part and an act of voyeurism by you who keep returning to read it.

Initially an outlet for my frustrations to keep me from taking up felting or the African drums while unemployed and rattling around the house alone, it is now becoming an outlet for the incredibly benign and often baseless thoughts of two women struggling to keep a loose grip on their sanity.

That having been said, my dear husband used the phrase “all over the place like a mad woman pissing” to describe my current state of mind and circumstances and unfortunately he hit the nail right on the head.

I really am all over the place like a mad woman pissing.  It’s up the walls, on the ceiling and in my own eye. I can’t see for all the mess around me and the children and Chris are standing against the walls of the room wearing spray jackets and goggles.

I have this crazy hair-brained idea you see that I can have a career of my own choosing that is challenging and of interest to me that I selected not because it was the only course I could get into at uni when I was 18, not because it has good hours that allow me to be there for the kids before and after school, not even because it is financially rewarding but because I made an informed decision as an adult that this is what I wanted to do.  It is an inconvenient choice that is placing untold burdens on my family and myself and it is taking me away from the people that are most important in my life.

It is incredibly selfish and a little unrealistic, but fuck it.  I only have one life.  My kids still love me and they know without a shadow of doubt that I love them.  As for Chris, he is a big enough man to face the challenges he has to in light of marrying a crazy woman.  

There…another self-indulgent and completely futile rant in an attempt to justify my erratic behavior and bizarre little life.  But that’s why I called the bloody thing ‘STUFT’.

Now, I have some walls to clean.

This is my anti-romance anthem.

I have a ukulele…I can’t make it sing quite the way Soko makes hers sing.

Oh Chris,  I will love you more than peanut butter, but I will never love you more than my mac computor…but since that was a gift from you, I guess you come a close second.

Perspective is the one of those things you can only give to yourself.

How you see a situation, place, time or series of events is one hundred percent your own responsibility. There is no truth aside from that which you create for yourself.

I woke up at around 2pm this afternoon from the coma I had been living in for a couple of weeks and found my perspective again.

My god I’ve been taking myself seriously.  Sometimes we are truely ridiculous how important we think our pathetic little lives are.

The catalyst for finding my perspective?

A colleague and I were sitting in the lounge room of a local author listening to him tell us about his latest book.  As he told us about his life experiences and what is was like being an author at the age of 83 he happened to mention that one of stories in his book was based on a man who used to make fishing lures from his wife’s pubic hair.

It’s not often you hear an 83 year old man talking about pubic hair and it was enough to rouse me from my coma.  It took every ounce of strength I had not to breakdown into the giggles.

At what stage does someone look at their wife’s bush and think “fish would love that”.

Allison (I’m going to Choina!) Werner

List and schedules.  Lists and schedules. 

I’m walking around the house at the moment, and I am actually consciously thinking about everything I am doing and writing a good portion of it down in my little notebook.  

I’m doing this in order to construct precise and easy-to-follow notes for Nana and Poppy.  Notes, to help them with their upcoming babysitting duties, while Adrian and I are in China for twelve days.  God bless Nana and Poppy.

This task has had more than it’s fair share of positive kick-backs too.  I’ve thought and stopped myself from filing my address book in the cutlery drawer, and also from folding Xanthe’s bath towel and putting it, wet, in the drawer with her pyjamas.

All the information I put together will be there to help them get through this time as smoothly as possible.

It will be to help THEM. 

The kids will be fine, and in the end I will tell Mum and Dad the same thing I tell everyone that looks after our children for us…survival is the only requirement.

But, I do need to tell them that it is OK to tell Ebony to stop talking, and that this may need to be done several times in one day.  Also, that they can tell all three of them to go away, and most often, to maintain peace, they may need to go to three different rooms while they retreat to another.

It did make me chuckle though this morning as I was carrying the guinea pigs, one by one, back out to their outside hutches and Xanthe was following me all the way, in and out, managing to position herself right in the doorway every time I needed to go through it.  I thought, I need to tell Mum that she doesn’t have to put up with this, and it is OK to tell her to MOVE!

Then, I remembered the netball fakes I used to pull on Mum as she would be trying to walk down the hall in my childhood home.  She’d have folded clothes in one hand, vacuum in the other, and really was never that impressed with me trying out my netball skills on her.  I thought back to this, and realized that in actual fact she will have no problem at all in getting them out from under her feet…and if she can’t do it verbally, she can always pull a good fake and push through.

Life is operating at a hectic pace since taking on the new job and living remotely from the family.

Chris is overwhelmed with the children and I am overwhelmed trying to get my head and heart around this new occupation of mine.

There is no time spare and I’ve slipped into that place where all I seem to do is eat, sleep and work.  So I will summerise the past three days and provide details later.

In breif…

Rhys was spectacular in his school play.  My God, Chris and I were gushing about his efforts and not only did he remember his lines he was prompting the other children in his scene and helping them remember theirs.  And gorgeous?  So handsome on the stage I just couldn’t contain myself.  We have a good looking boy.  I could just eat him at the moment which is stark contrast to the more common urge to surrender him to the pound.

I hate shooting golf.  Taking photos of it that is.  It is the least visually interesting past time I can imagine and unfortunately every other weekend I have to take photos of it.  I don’t get golf.

After consuming an embarrassing quantity of Caramello Koalas in the past month I am petitioning the  Australian Nutrition Council to declare them a food group.  If only to justify my lust for them.

I did not manage to contain myself at my first staff function and successfully alienated several colleagues with my karaoke singing and improvised dance moves.

Now it’s off to work again to see if I can indeed sink any lower with my photographic efforts or if I hit rock bottom on Friday shooting a bag of fish at a fishing tournament.

I have just had an interaction with the woman with the grey bob hair at the bank.  It was a wordy and extended interaction where I was trying to understand why I would need identification to deposit money into my own bank account.  

“But I’m making a deposit,” I explained, pointing at the blue deposit slip.  

“It doesn’t matter they are uncleared funds and I must have I.D. to deposit the cheque.” said the woman with the grey bob.

“But I didn’t write the cheque, I just want to put it into my account.” I said.

“You have to have I.D.” said the woman with the grey bob.

“But the cheque is from the Reserve Bank of Australia!” I pleaded.

All of this could have been quite quickly sorted out if I had the inclination to walk back to the car and get my drivers license, however, after standing on a queue for 15 minutes watching the four staff behind the counter ignore customers while they chatted and let the woman with the grey bob hair do all the work, I wasn’t in the mood for repeating the process and getting back on the end of the line.

“Look I just want to deposit this quite secure cheque into my account.  I can give you the account number if you like, I’m sure I’ve done this before.” I said to the woman with the grey bob hair.

This led to the revalation that my account is not really an account but a virtual “sub” account that doesn’t exist in reality but is instead merely a method of money management rather than being an actual place where money can be deposited or withdrawn at will.  

How this fact has escaped me the past four years since establishing the virtual void my money is floundering in is beyond me entirely nonetheless apparently I cannot deposit a cheque into this virtual account as the bank’s policy is that you cannot deposit uncleared funds (ie a cheque) into a non existent place, even if this place does have it’s own account number.  Instead I have to deposit the money into a real bank account, which is, for all intensive purposes, exactly the same as the virtual “sub” account meaning that it also has an account number and doesn’t really exist except for in the banks computer server and then I can transfer the money into my other account when it clears.

Of course…common sense really.

What is most interesting about all this is that if you ask enough questions of the woman with the grey bob hair at my bank, she will forget about the I.D. that I “had to have” to deposit a cheque into my own bank account, she will become flustered and irritated and eventually she will just deposit the cheque without requiring the I.D. that was absolutely necessary 10 minutes prior.