Wobbygone

Wobbygone day 1
Originally uploaded by marksp54

Relaxing on the Hawkesbury River, in a holiday house, amongst the vines. We have several Shangri Las to hideaway in, all of them in the country, all of them beautiful. This one has a wooden hot tub and a fantastic garlic crusher. Other places have kangeroo mobs or trailertrash bongsmokers next door. The main thing is they are all rented and all mine for the time we are there. Caravan, tent, deck or dive.....take the kids and the man and get some fresh air x

Pessimism is a last resort

Very busy dreams last night.  Melinda (she's a fitness instructor) is baking pies. I'm not allowed to touch them. Eunice is at Coles, she walks past me, I'm near a register waiting to be served. I must also find time to enter the Moran Art Prize. The dream shows me ten artworks so beautiful, a whole body of work - pointillist, silvery, esoteric - great stuff. Tiny windows of magic light flashed at me for a second. I suppose my imagination was exhibiting what I am capable of. I drink them down fast like shots.

I wake up to fart and think on this coldest morning of the year. 'Six degrees' reported from MSP who delivers the morning cup of 'hot, steaming Joe', which it is not by the time I pull-up on one elbow. My fingers peep out from under the doona, feeling bitten, looking for pen and paper. My arse does an excellent impression of a trombone. I consider risking frostbite up to the elbow to reach the coffee before it is beyond repair.

This was to be the weekend I meant to rent a six hundred dollar snow chalet overlooking Lake Eucumbeen. Poverty, once again, has forced me to live behind my hopes. Our next fabulous weekend planned in the country of my day-dreams is Dubbo Western Plains Zoo. I shall wake up in August and think 'I dreamt of lion's roaring last night - in Gladesville'. 

It hurts. I like to concentrate on pain in the morning. By afternoon I've worked my way up to mild discontent. If I plan an outing I can enjoy slight boredom. In the evenings I turn to drink. I've decided that making money might get me truly wondrous. That way I can use it to gawp at expensive magazines, spread my legs at top-class beauty salons and ideally visit African animal resorts and centrally-heated winter cabins. I would alleviate my ennui with trips to IKEA and post large packages of gifts to my nieces instead of the piddling efforts I'm currently guilty of.

For this week's menu, in order to buy myself a book or a bra, I'll plan meals that rely heavily on noodles and vegetables. That old temptation to toilet train Chuckles returns every time I enter isle three for nappies. By the time I pay for my trolleyload I'll experience the equivalent of a tiny thrill, smug in the knowledge I can feed the family for another week, or is it just seeing a three figure number on a cash register. In my Coles dream I spot Eunice shopping, I bet she never has to count carefully for groceries. In real life I did phone her for a loan so I could rent the snow chalet. She never acknowledged the request, she did however tell me of her own plans to take her children skiing. I pray to be a considerate friend, so blog bitching about them isn't very good as they are my only readers. Names have been changed.

There is a particular time of morning, when I am due to get up, the sun enters the window, piercing my dim, sleepy world. I am not a morning person because I wake up angry, covered in sleep-mud. Writing helps me beat off depressing, rabid-dog thoughts. I have to mentally kick the little fuckers off me. Sometimes that small, happy square of sunlight drifts over me and picks me up from under my armpits and props me up on the pillows and says 'here, drink this'.

The clouds mask the sun with a grey filter, everything is not so sunny, there is no pick me up. My pen is grumpy, the coffee has gone cold. But today I remember the science, that if I lay here as usual, I know that somewhere the sun is swimming in its blue sky as usual, just behind the clouds, right there where it always is, only obscured by a passing earth mood. It will come back. I cheer myself with thoughts like 'when I am dead I will get to sleep in a bit longer'. My Auntie Christine (pictured in the 60's) died in her mid-thirties of a brain tumour, cleaning the kitchen cupboards.

Stop Scratching Skip

Oh god, 20 days since my last post. Am I suddenly unleashing the perfectionist who has been hiding somewhere? I've decided to spank her and send her back to her room. So please bear with me as I get over my blog hump and break through to the other side. I tend not to respond to compliments as well as criticism so now my mum has read my blogs and said they are lovely I'm basically cured of all attention seeking behaviour (for a while) and can just retire.

But alas, something burning at the back of my mind wants to be born, something called 'a family trip to the country', the remnants of which are still haunting me in unpacked bags strewn all over our bad carpet. My husband's incredibly reliable habit of finding a way to sabotage any attempt on my part to escape the shackles of domestic bliss worked again. I should have a sticker on my Kombi that says 'MY OTHER CAR IS A MERCEDES' (a shit one). That likes to run down its battery whilst the car doors are open to air out the mysterious source of mould.

'Lucky we have two cars darling' said I in a very good impersonation of someone with anger management classes under their belt. Perhaps all the self-help books are actually working. Or more likely I was so exhausted from packing I couldn't put up my fists. Not only was there too many things, I had also worn myself out getting the cat vaccinated and then shipped to Meadowmist boarding school for waaay bad ass cats.

VW to the rescue. South we were heading, overtaken by EVERYONE. Even really tiny little Jap Crap cars that were 20 years old. I'm starting to worry about the old girl and if she'll make it through rego. I finally won the battle of the Berry Donut Shack stopover cause I was driving. I can report they are very hot, sugary and nothing to blog about. 

I'm still scratching, you can't 

be too sure once you find one tick, there won't be more. Nurse Alison, my favourite removalist took to my neck with a pair of tweezers (that I packed) and deftly took out the the tiny bastard of page 55 on 'Family First Aid' (packed by me). The Paralysis (bush) Tick loves me. One year I had one on the labia majus and it wasn't till after a bottle of gin, a match, a wombat and some marital bonding that it was out of my life. Now on this dawn the 'weakness of the face and eyelids, then arms' alerted me to the fact that it wasn't just a hangover, certainly 'irritation at the site of the bite' (jugular) and 'breathing becomes difficult' (more of a panic reaction) - I thought it might be the mattress (holiday cabin quality), but the tingling fingers were an exciting addition to symptoms of the previous years, which I remembered well. I had a tick. I pulled out the secret weapon - homeopathic anti-insect-bite-potion.

Bream Beach is lovely. We are usually the only ones there, every winter solstice. The whales are passing on their way to Hervey Bay to birth. The sun sets early over St Georges Basin, we 

are on a small neck of land between there and Jervis Bay. The best part is we hire 6 cabins, all full of people who shall be called friends, old and young. Someone always swims, someone always sleeps, someone has firewood and nobody ever has an axe. The VW cosied up to a motorbike and the whole scene swum with kangeroo, kookaburra and possum. We burnt through 40 kgs of wood to get the fire just right for all the variety of meats. Nobody claimed the Portugese chicken which was cooked to perfection by the end of all 20 bottles of wine. It's always the Kiwis to bed last.