Life in General

What You Will

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I received this letter from the future. It’s rather a long one so I figured it needed a title. On reading it “Brave New World” sprung to mind but that’s been taken as has “Back to the Future” and even if “How Green was My Valley” hadn’t been taken, I wouldn’t have used it. No, it needs a unique title. “Earl” fits the bill – get it, Earl, title, but “My Name is Earl” is also legally off-limits. So let’s call it “What You Will”. Here it is:

It all began in the second quad-mester of 2019. The second quad-mester used to be called autumn but seasons were banned because summer in the southern hemisphere discriminates against winter in the northern hemisphere. Anyway this was when the fascist scum Morrison called the last election. We haven’t had one since – that one was enough apparently.

Billy-boy won that election but then suffered an unfortunate accident when he stupidly tried to fake way too much sincerity, experienced a stress induced Uriah Heep attack, turned dark green (if only briefly) then black as coal (how ironic and culturally appropriating?) and kicked the proverbial. We now have the Utopia we have always dreamt of but didn’t dare to articulate before, under pain of terminal ridicule and Goebbellian censorship, except on the ABC and free to air TV channels, in Nine/Fairfax publications, on countless blogs and in the halls of every university and school in the nation. We will not be silenced any longer by the Howards and Morrisons of this world and their bastard devil’s spawn like Tony Abbott.

Person how things have changed since those dark days. Praise the Justine because everyone has a disability pension now as it was discriminatory to allow some to have one and others to not. For a couple of weeks there it was $150,000 per year until Gina’s and Andrew’s and James’ and Kevin’s money ran out. Now it’s down to $1.50 per week but we don’t actually see it as it has to be saved in a special account for the good of the collective.

Also, everyone has a right to public housing for the same reason we all have disability pensions. My mate Johnno, lucky bastard, he got Gina’s place after the billionaires were told to leave. Who knew there were so many billionaires in Australia – about three million if you include the kids. I actually knew one and didn’t even realise it. The internet guy was a billionaire, or I assume he was. I thought he just fixed things but he actually ran his own business and employed two people. I’ve no idea whether he took any Aussie dollars with him when he left but I hope he did because they’re completely useless now. Those greedy bastards deserve everything that’s coming to them wherever they go. He gave me a cheery wave as he boarded the plane and shouted “read Atlas Shrugged you moron”. Now I believe “Atlas Shrugged You Moron” is a book but I haven’t read any books. They don’t teach reading in schools anymore other than as a gender metaphor in interpretive dance.

I wonder where they did go. Not to Indonesia of course because we banned Indonesia. They light fires there and kill things to eat. And they have cars. And they’re not contributing to population control to save the planet like we are. Their population has gone up by five million in the last 12 months according to the Information Directorate In Our Town. Ours has gone down by 8 million in the same time so I ask you in (please excuse) Hockey speak, “who’s doing the heavy lifting now?”

The place has improved so much and we’ve never been happier. Justine, who’s been in charge since the revolution after the last election and had nothing to do with Bill’s accident, honest, was seen to skip (once). She threw a Birkenstock, holed a tight and cracked a smile and unfortunately her face fell off but we screwed it back on and re-inserted the lemon so everything is back to normal.

It’s a bit tricky actually finding out what’s going on in the world now. Five states are without the internet because, as I said earlier, the internet guy left. Apparently Tasmania still has it but of all of the people who’ve tried to swim across Bass Strait, none have made it back, so it’s a bit of a mystery. That running dog poopy pants Murdoch Minor doesn’t pump his propaganda into our sub-conscious anymore either. We ran him out of town on a rail and he took his 150% of the media with him. So we don’t know anything now but at least what we don’t know is pure and unadulterated.

“Unadulterated” is now the official adjective for the ABC. Strangely, many of the once familiar faces are no longer there. Okay, we haven’t had power for a while but even when we did we noticed that they disappeared from our screens about the same time as when the planes left. We assume they went to heckle and see the billionaires off the premises but they never came back. They were foot-soldiers for the revolution so surely none of them were billionaires as well?

As I mentioned, the power’s off now. My windmill won’t turn because there are three dead birds jammed in it and a meteor hit my solar panel (curse you Tony Abbott). But that’s okay because food’s really cheap so I don’t need a refrigerator. I can put caviar on my toast (if the toaster worked) because it’s as cheap as corn flakes. Justine tells us the food’s going to last at least for another month so nothing to worry about there.

Unfortunately the pharmacists all left when Justine threatened to end their monopoly so the drugs ran out six months ago. Fortunately, as I mentioned before, there’s been an extremely responsible reduction in our population so the planet can be saved. This means we don’t need as many drugs (or as much food for that matter) as we did before, so win-win. The latest government forecast has the population reducing even more dramatically in coming months which is fantastic and a testament to environmentally responsible totalitarianism. Shame on you Abbott you fascist pig for encouraging the nuclear family and responsible family planning. Nuclear – I ask you?

It’s amazing how much we’re saving on food and drugs (if we had any) and power (if we had any) by responsibly allowing the population to once again reach equilibrium with our incredibly fragile environment. It’s so good to see the rainforest reclaiming the CBD. Another high rise, those phallic symbols of the capitalist scum, just fell over. Good; that’s more building material for those who have the absolute right to public housing but don’t actually have a public house because there aren’t enough after the May razing got out of hand during the celebration of Democratic People’s Freedom Day. We’re intending to pull down more of these huge apartment buildings to provide even more material to build even more public housing. Next job – find some builders. There’s no problem finding wrecking crews and it stands to reason that if you can pull it down you should be able to put it back up again so that’s another box ticked.

This is too easy. Have to go now; the Population Enhancement Transgression  Association is coming through the window.

The Hollies – a Tribute to Time Served

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The child bride and I took off for the Gold Coast on Thursday. The last time we went, to see Status Quo (reported on here), we hadn’t planned the most efficient route and therefore encountered about 47 red lights. This time we did it right which is just as well because the CB drove. I’ve been feeling like death warmed up since Wednesday or as an old boss of mine used to say “half fucked and let go”.

But I wasn’t going to let that prevent us from seeing the Hollies so, as I said, the CB drove. Now I’m not going to comment on her driving because we are safely back at home now. Suffice to say, I don’t tail-gate, I don’t lane-hop and I manage to keep my road rage more or less under control. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, as a great philosopher once said.

We’ve been lucky enough to see most of our musical heroes from our yoof so while it was great to see the Hollies last night, I’m sure there’ll be other opportunities because they tour relentlessly. They are probably the longest surviving band in history having performed and toured every year since the formative year of 1962 and the eventual settlement of most of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame line-up in 1963. Bobby Elliot and Tony Hicks have been with the band since 1963 – no hiatuses (hiati?), no taking a year off to pursue individual projects. Now that’s stamina. Actually, we may not get to see them here again because as you can calculate, those two are getting on a bit.

After performing Bus Stop, Carrie Anne, He Ain’t Heavy etc etc etc for all of those years you’d expect them to be pretty tight. Of the other four band members, two have been there almost 30 years and the other two 15 years. So they are able to reproduce that typical sound. Peter Howarth, the lead singer said some heckler in the audience at a previous concert yelled out “I didn’t expect you to be this good”. That sound was honed back in the 60’s with some rather accomplished session musicians – how about Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Elton John.

And when they came on stage at the start, they were all dressed in white shirt, black tie, black trousers and shiny black shoes. The drummer had his top button undone and his tie was all over the place but that’s drummers for you. I haven’t seen performance uniforms like that since I went to see the Halle Orchestra in Manchester in 1973.

The crowd was the Status Quo crowd and the Eagles crowd – SKI’s (spending the kid’s inheritance), COB’s (cashed up bogans), GLAM’s (greying, leisured, affluent, married) and GOFER’s (genial old farts enjoying retirement). We were six rows from the front so I’m speculating on those who were behind up but I’m pretty confident in my CUOA (compulsive use of acronyms).

So as I said, I’ve not been well, in fact I’m not well now so this post is not quite as hilariously funny and irreverent as previous ones. The concert was a welcome distraction but I hit the wall a few hours later and woke up at 4.30am thinking I was sleeping on the inside of a water bed. Hopefully a course of antibiotics will do the trick. Personally, I think it was the mouthful of bacteria I experienced during a tooth extraction two weeks ago. Maybe the course of antibiotics that followed didn’t complete the job. Let’s hope (well you don’t have to but I certainly do) this course does the trick.

It’s all I can do to tap on these keys at the moment but it just goes to show – if the desire and incentive are there, adrenaline will get you though.

Pull the Other One

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The child bride has just finished a tooth straightening exercise with our dentist. It was only one tooth plus a minor renovation of those either side so we only needed to take a second mortgage on the house and sell our granddaughter to people smugglers to pay for it. Her completion neatly coincided with my horrendous tooth ache – the first toothache I’ve had since 1989. That one resulted in a root canal procedure, a technique first perfected by the Spanish Inquisition.

How do dentists do that? The last time I went to the dentist was a decade ago. More fool me, you say but in my defence, I have pretty healthy teeth although the one gradually turning black, which is front and centre (I think that’s the correct anatomical term) after said root canal would suggest otherwise. I haven’t been for years but as soon as the CB’s work is finished, mine begins – weird. And I haven’t actually seen anyone else in the surgery when I’ve had cause to pay a visit. Maybe that means dentists are good time managers compared with doctors who are the worst time managers in the world. I doubt the President of the United States would get in on time when he reports to his local GP. Or maybe the CB and I are sufficient to prop up the dentist’s lavish lifestyle and pay for his investment properties.

What was left of the aching tooth, after two pieces had broken off while eating (and been swallowed) in previous years, was removed. It was that or another root canal job. Prior to removal and after much poking around I was overwhelmed by an awful smell. I think dog shit is the worse smell on the planet but this was close. And it came from my mouth. So it seems I had the part of an exploratory root canal that involves the flushing out of a miniature balloon full of the sort of bacteria you could clear a football stadium with.

That was step one in a process that will take the best part of this year such are the cracks and gaps and ageing fillings scattered through my mouth. I know I said I had reasonably healthy teeth and it’s true but any dentist worth his amalgam is going to find a litany of problematical situations requiring rectification. And thus it is so.

So today was two fillings at the very back. I yearned to have that vast Julia Roberts mouth because….. well, we’ll leave it there.

Now local anaesthetic is all very well but two things. Most people would agree that the dentist’s drill makes the most frightening noise ever and I think you could put your house on that. There’s the small one that makes the weeeeeezing, Nazgul in the distance sound and the coarse one which makes the rumbling, crunching sound. And the local anaesthetic doesn’t extend to all of the surrounding teeth so I swear some of them were throbbing in sympathy. Incidentally, the coarse rumbling drill alerted me to the fact that my mouth has perfect acoustics. I’m sure Monty Python could work with that. But no, when the rumbling drill got into a certain position I could instantly hear a 747 taking off.  It was the closest I’ve ever come to levitation.

So me and my teeth (and gums – apparently they’re important too) have started a journey which will take us…..well I’m not sure. I guess preventative maintenance will eliminate the possibility of a weekend of toothache, the cure for which, in the first 24 hours is not pain killers but cold beer, and lots of it. It’s pain killers and lots of them in the second 24 hours.

 

Skin in the Game – Part 2

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It seems the bloody spec on the base of my left thumb was a basal cell carcinoma. I say “was” as it is no longer attached to me. It may still “be” but when the pathology lab has finished with it, it will most definitely “be” a “was”.

Hopefully what was removed yesterday will be the end of it, at least for the immediate left thumb area otherwise it will eventually resemble a target as ever increasing rings of me are removed. The first excision was about half the size of my little finger nail. That proved insufficient as the little bastard was sending out scouting parties. Yesterday’s effort (removed by a plastic surgeon) was the size of a 10 cent piece. If she didn’t get it all this time because this little carcinoma was particularly adventurous then next time I imagine we may be looking at something resembling the size of a squash ball.

The upshot of this was that I no longer have the use of my left arm. Only temporarily of course but as this picture indicates, I’ll have a very smelly arm by the time that lot’s removed.

arm

That seeming over-reaction is to keep a skin graft in place. A similarly sized piece of me was removed from my upper inner arm and sewn onto my thumb.

The upside is that there is a five day cricket test match between India and Australia underway and the most energy I am allowed to expend is waving the remote in the general direction of the TV. And picking up a glass. With my right hand. And thankfully wine bottles have screw caps. Well Australian wine bottles do. That Portuguese number which was in our admirable liquid based Advent Calendar had a cork in it so I had to prevail on the child bride to do the honours. We’re dreamin’ of a white and red and bubbly Christmas.

If I don’t get back to you before the 25th, have a good one.

Excuse Me While I Run And Hide

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The CB retired from teaching recently. I’ve been running my own business from home for a few years so this was the first time we had been thrust together all day every day, well most days, for……ever. As a consequence I felt it incumbent on me to give her (and females generally) some advice as to how this might work and what my future expectations would be……ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Men know why I am bent double laughing hysterically.

To try to disguise the fact it’s me speaking, I occasionally lapse into the third person. This isn’t me being pretentious, it’s my instinctive defence mechanism kicking in. Notwithstanding, here goes:

1. Working – Now that you’ve retired you will only be expected to undertake paid employment for two days a week. Beer doesn’t grow on trees you know.

2. House Work – That house ain’t going to clean itself my dear. Whilst your husband may be able to fly the space shuttle (in theory) don’t for a second expect him to understand the intricacies of a clothes cleaning implement unless it comprises a rock and a river. The same applies for that crushed wine glass shard sucking machine and the “hose in a box” that blasts shrivelled mushrooms out of pizza boxes but makes the boxes very soggy in the process. Remember your life-long aversion to lawn mowers? Chickens are on their way home to sleep as we speak.

3. Clothing – My expectations as to what you wear around the house are few. As has been the case since the dawn of time, the outside layer is irrelevant to all people except other women. And here’s a secret – no one cares if your arse looks big in it. Men are infinitely more concerned with whether other bits look big in it but you i.e. women generally, never ask that question, do you.

4. Underclothing – Now we’re talking. We know the transition from frilly and filmy to industrial strength has been happening by stealth for years but this need not happen. He does still have a pulse you know.

5. Sport – Now that you have more time on your hands you’ll be required to indulge your partner with feigned interest in pretty much every sport imaginable. The indifference of previous years, excused through pressures of work will no longer be tolerated. But keep the questions to a bare minimum. You may even learn to love the UFC. What’s not to like about two cute, diminutive, young ladies beating ten types of tripe out of each other. You could be sitting with your man right now (in between fetching the beers, sandwiches etc) watching two very average West Australian batsmen break every record in the book against the Worst Indies at the spiritual home of world cricket – Blundstone Arena, Hobart, as happened a couple of years ago.

6. Drinking – You’re still allowed to drink. This was going to be at number 1 but I wanted to make you sweat.

7. Children – You’ll like this one (and what’s not to like about the others so far). Now’s the time when your cash hoovers are replaced by a second generation of cash hoovers. The best part is that they now live somewhere else so you can hide when you see them coming up the driveway.

8. Food Preparation – Your devotion to the kitchen is very much appreciated. No, really. Now if you could only look a bit more like Nigella when you do it. But forget about the accompanying commentary.

9. Music – We know the transition from Barry Manilow to Celtic Punk has been problematic but rest assured, you’ll be humming Kiss Me I’m Shitfaced in the car before you know it. Despite the dominance of the airwaves by wimpy trousers like One Deflection and Taylor’s Wiffed (whoever they are), there is still a vast underground world of hard partying, mysoginistic, drug fuelled thrashers for your viewing and participatory pleasure. Accompanying Not Garfunkel’s next world tour should give you a taste of this enchanting world.

10. Retirement – Enjoy it. You’ve earned it.

Thus endeth my suicide note.

Ringing in the Years

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I’m not a complete tech dinosaur – I know enough to get by. But I do remember when the first electronic calculator appeared – still don’t know how that liquid crystal display works. And when I first worked in an open plan office at a mine, there was one phone for everybody. My first job in the commercial world was eased by the use of telex then faxes and if you were extremely lucky you had a computer terminal on your desk linked to a main frame computer in another building. And it spoke a language called Fortran or something. Some of us even remember that there were floppies before there were flashes. Fast forward to now and the smart phone era and it’s time to upgrade.

It was inevitable I guess. My iPhone was built during the Triassic period (see reference to dinosaurs above) and powered by cow dung and hamsters and needed gunpowder to take photos. On Wednesday the CB’s iPhone decided it was a two year old toddler so threw itself on the ground and refused to function under any circumstances. It did the equivalent of locking itself in the bathroom and flushing the key. So it was time to upgrade our communications capability from the 21st century equivalent of smoke signals to something akin to the pony express.

Off we went to the internet to try to find a plan less complex than the theory of relativity and locate phones that……make phone calls, gasp!! We decided on 21st century iPhone 6S’s. I know, I know. This is like buying a Zephyr 6 to replace a Model T Ford. Admirable in 1960 but hardly cutting edge in 20… (what year is it again?). Then it was off to the shopping mall to confront a bouncing, toothy 20 something in the Tech shop who knew everything about stuff and proceeded to explain all about zzzzzzz.

We eventually left after very patient, very polite Katie explained a whole lot of something or other to us which I suspect had nothing to do with making phone calls.

So to home. Much more important things were beckoning – the sun was over the yardarm and it was Friday afternoon. Then Prodigal Son spent an hour transferring my contacts and emails from my aforementioned steam driven device to the new one, because these things are so user friendly if you are Steve Jobs.

I can now do things that defy description. It can tell me my location which will be very useful when I don’t know where I am. It will tell me that I am, in fact, here. I can do a university course, learn a musical instrument – I stumbled on a piano keyboard but have no idea how to relocate it. It makes noises that a movie studio would be proud of although it doesn’t seem keen to let me use my old ring tone – Rocks Off by the Rolling Stones. I can watch movies because a 5 inch panorama is as good as it gets (if you’re an ant).

Whatever. Our phone numbers and email address are unchanged.

Skin in the Game

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There’s a lady in this world who has repeatedly saved my life. I’m not talking about my wife, my mother, my daughter or my granddaughter who are all a very large part of my world or various girlfriends (numbers 1, 2 and 3 in particular – christened thusly by the child bride in fact, and girlfriends of the purely platonic type I might add). I’m not talking about a religious icon or a sporting legend or a racehorse, none of whom/which have risen to sufficient heights of achievement to even raise my heart rate. To be fair though, if Monica Bellucci could play rugby, she’d be up there.

No, I’m talking about my dermatologist. I visited her again yesterday and left with a bloodied right leg, a bloodied left hand and a slightly bloody left arm. But first we have to backtrack a little. Actually, I wish it was a little but it’s actually a lot. I was born in the UK some decades back and it was immediately obvious that there is Viking in my ancestry – my red hair and fair complexion are dead (if you’ll pardon the expression) giveaways. Many years later this particular heritage also manifested itself via Dupuytren’s Contracture which is sometimes called Viking’s Disease amongst other things. Another lady specialist who fixed this up for me only saved my left hand from becoming a permanent heavy metal horns symbol and thereby preserving my (marginal) ability to play the guitar. But Mr Dupuytren’s another story. Back to my skin.

Leaving the UK to live in Australia when I was eight was a blessing in disguise (which my mother still hasn’t seen through) from every angle except for, in my case, the sun. Don’t get me wrong – I love the sun, not least for the fact that it keeps us alive and will continue to do so for another 4 billion years give or take unless the most recent 12 year time frame for irreversible climatic catastrophe and atmospheric mayhem predicted by the IPCC and supported by those doyens of atmospheric physics, left wing journalists and humanities students, comes to pass. All of the others haven’t so their odds of getting it right are increasing even if temperatures and sea levels aren’t moving other than by utterly normal fluctuations. The sun is only my enemy when I expose my extremely combustible skin to it which makes me sound rather vampirish. Thankfully that particular quirk of my genome hasn’t kicked in yet because I prefer sleeping at night rather than swooping on unsuspecting bare necked tottie.

As kids we weren’t aware of the long term effects of extended sun exposure so we grimaced through the sunburn, peeled off the dead skin, took our shirts off and did it all again. It’s not my fault if in neighbourhood football games I was always picked on the “skins” team and never the “shirts”. I still remember lying face down on a bed in my mother’s aunt’s ramshackle house in the then sleepy village of Byron Bay, with blisters all over my back and a plague of insects swarming through the house. The next day we had to tie my mother to a tree to stop her hitchhiking to Brisbane Airport to escape from this Stephen King nightmare and back to the civilisation of Timperley, Cheshire, England.

I survived however but just as the Soviets supposedly planted sleeper cells in the US during the cold war, I had my own sleeper cells which decades later have been waking up. And this is where my life-saver lady comes in. She wasn’t the first to stick a scalpel into me but certainly the most frequent over recent years. After my GP at the time tired of squirting liquid nitrogen at various blemishes on my person, he referred me to a specialist dermatologist who soon after went off to do research and gave me to an associate, the aforementioned lady. I have been to see her many times over many years and I never escape from her surgery unscathed. She is always scraping, digging or cutting, hence the reference to bloodied appendages, above. I’m a bleeder, what can I say.

Occasionally, if the cutting part is a bit tricky, she’ll send me to a plastic surgeon. Here was me thinking plastic surgeons were only there to straighten actress’s noses or make their tits bigger. But no. One did a job on me that required a degree in ear lobe origami. Another did a much more basic job on my back that left a 50mm scar. This and other rather smaller scars randomly scattered over my torso and appendages proved quite an attraction for one of the theatre nurses. The conversation went something like this:

Nurse – Another scar eh?

Me – Yeah, looks like it. Still it won’t be lonely.

Nurse – No but there’s nothing wrong with a few scars.

Me – Come again?

Nurse – Yeah, scars are sexy. Girls like a few scars on a bloke.

Me – Doctor, can we get moving here.

The point is, had those sleeper cells been allowed to wake up, scratch their balls, have a few beers and generally hung out, they would have eventually morphed into something infinitely uglier and much more dangerous. So the trick is to eliminate the cancerous bastards before they even know their short life’s objective which it to make my life shorter. And my guardian angel has been doing just that for years now. Had I adopted the same attitude as a number of people I’ve known or known about who couldn’t really have cared less until it was too late, I’d be a footnote in history.

The good news is that after reaching peak extraction a few years ago, we’re now down to the residuals. Anything that looks ever so slightly suspicious is ruthlessly dispatched to the pathology lab minus its previous mode of transport i.e. me. Three monthly checkups inevitably resulted in surgical follow-up. But eventually three months became six and yesterday I was told we are almost at the twelve month stage. She’s a lovely young lady to whom I literally owe my life and while I would like to think there will come a time when I don’t have to see her again, there won’t.

Grabbing Pussies (with predictable results)

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Annual vet day for the cats is a hoot – we have to cram one in each of those cat boxes in the picture below.

Getting them in there is something to behold. First you have to get them used to it so we take the roof off and start putting their food into the bottom half of the box weeks before, then after a while put the top half on so they are used to going inside to eat.

This morning, vet day, they are in for a surprise. The food goes in followed initially by half a cat. We sneak up behind them I grab Eddy and the CB grabs Kaos and we try to shove the other half in. All biting, scratching, spitting hell breaks loose. Not helping is Charlie the small white dog (our incredible barking sheep) leaping about like a demented pogo stick. Two shredded arms later Eddy’s in. Kaos goes marginally more quietly.

Before being loaded into the car both of them try to tunnel their way out. Eddy succeeds in forcing the door open but Eddy is not very smart. Instead of getting under the bed or on top of one of our very high cupboards, I find him sitting near the box contemplating what he just escaped from (death row I expect he thinks). So I grab him and shove him back in. Once again it’s like trying to jam razor blade laced toothpaste back into the tube while riding a roller coaster.

They are now safely on their way in the secure custody of the child bride. Kaos will come back shaved for summer, looking like the Lion King in ugg boots, and not speak to us for weeks – nothing holds a grudge like a disgruntled cat. Instead of cat crap on our rug every three or four days, we can expect a daily dose for a while. Eddy, with the memory of a goldfish will be back to normal after his first feed. Meanwhile Charlie, who minutes ago was running the length and breadth of the house at mach 2 for no apparent reason is asleep on the floor next to me. Peace reigns.

Vet Day 17-12-13

Marriage Musings

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The child bride and I and assorted friends and relatives went to a local courthouse yesterday to watch one of my brothers get married…..again. Now I always thought the marriage ceremony ended with “I now pronounce you husband and wife”. I guess it was because we were in a courthouse that the celebrant turned to my brother and said “I hereby sentence you to life in marriage”. And it’s the only sentence in the civil or criminal code from which you can earn early release for bad behaviour.

His first marriage lasted 30 years and his second 98 days. Based on that trajectory his third would have lasted about 12 minutes. Fortunately a genie granted him three wishes and he got the third one right.

Not everyone deserves “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence – I’m looking at you Billy Ray Cyrus for inflicting “Achy Breaky Heart” on an unwitting populace. But my brother does having survived imprisonment for longer than your average murderer with sanity relatively intact.

Marriage is a wonderful institution it has to be said and everyone deserves a piece of it. But at the end of the day, it is still an institution and some people are quite reasonably reluctant to enter its enticing portals. I’ve been married for centuries and love it and I’m going to leave it there because the child bride reads this blog occasionally. Any sort of innocent commentary on a social compact that comes with reams of fine print is bound to attract conflicting views and generate a range of emotions so all I’ll say to everyone is “happy families”.

I can’t resist finishing on a note which links the name of this blog and the subject at hand. A woman and a man are sitting together sipping drinks when the wife says “I love you.” The husband says “Is that you or the wine talking?” She says “It’s me talking….to the wine.”

A Cautionary Christmas Tale

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My Facebook page was hacked yesterday. I have no idea why anyone would want to do such a thing although they did manage to imply that I recommended a certain type of face moisturiser. It wasn’t even my favourite brand sweetie. Anyway, since I was on FB and had a few minutes to spare, I went looking for something from the past to put here, having just reminisced about our blockbusting, stadium filling (if Coldplay can do it, anyone can) musical combo. I found this Christmas story from a few years back and here it is for your reading pleasure.

So that’s the Christmas Eve job list done and dusted.
– Two dead trees near the dam chain-sawed and disposed of. Ahead of the Season of Goodwill, all latent aggression dispersed.
– New plants and herbs watered – a stinking hot day today so they need it. Who’d be a lettuce in Queensland in summer.
– Vine infesting one of our hedges chopped and poisoned. Not funny climbing into a hedge of grevilleas. Arms look like I’ve been sparring with the cats.
– BBQ moved from the shed to the deck in preparation for tomorrow. Managed to prevent it escaping down the driveway and finishing up in the next post code.
– Full gas bottle attached to same.
– Additional tables moved from shed to deck (after checking for red-back spiders, hiding snakes etc).
– Fridges stocked to the gunwales – experience tells us that when this family has a “do” the gunwales aren’t high enough.
– Tinselly stuff hung round the deck. Tinselly stuff picked up and re-hung after breeze proved too strong for blue-tack. Tinselly stuff picked up again, screwed up and shoved back in box to be re-hung when the breeze dies down a bit.
And the final chore:
Step 1 – remove beer from fridge
Step 2 – take beer to pool and put next to edge of pool
Step 3 – dive into pool, swim to other end then return
Step 4 – drink beer
Step 5 – repeat steps 3 and 4 ad nauseum
Note – Step 3 not compulsory.

A few hours later……..

Well, what an eventful Christmas Eve. Completed the beer ritual mentioned above then escorted the child bride round the estate while partaking of a glass of bubbles (origin New Zealand, but not to worry). Koalas successfully located and all well with the world. Graduated from bubbles to red (and in the CB’s case white) wine and settled down to watch the Royal Variety Performance. Recognized Dame Edna, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jimmy Carr. The rest were plastic people presumably from some talent show. Then it was time for bed – we didn’t want Santa to turn up and here’s us still awake. So hit the shower at 11.00pm.

We have a small foot rest in our shower which, as the name suggests, you rest your foot on when washing it. So I put my foot on it as I have done most days of the 7 years we’ve been here. It takes a little weight but obviously you don’t transfer the whole ponderous bulk to this one small foot rest or you are inviting trouble. Anyway, it collapsed and I hit the floor of the shower. As I lay there mentally reviewing the potential damage from top to bottom, I realised that the absence of bones protruding through skin was due to the fact I was quite relaxed. So I gingerly stood up and realised I’d been lying on a bed of ceramic shrapnel.

All was okay though except for my red left arm. It hadn’t been red that I’d noticed when I got in the shower but there it was leaking vital bodily fluids onto the floor of the shower. Bummer. Anyway, the CB did a wonderful job patching up my arm (too pissed to drive to hospital and not serious enough to bother the ambulance) which has a number of rather nasty gashes in it. Nothing she can do for the shoulder which feels like it hit the ground first but even though it’s on the right side, won’t prevent the important events of the day. So first port of call this morning is the emergency room at Prince Charles Hospital to get stitched up then back here prior to the commencement of festivities which I might add, will not be affected by this unfortunate occurrence.

12 stitches from a babe of a doctor who looks like she is on her way home from a Christmas Eve party and a tetanus shot later and normal programming is resumed. Liquid painkillers beckon.