Lessons in Life

Two weeks in and this is what I have learnt so far:

Rookie mistake #1

If you smell a bad odour and ask your child “can I change your nappy?” and she shakes her head, LISTEN TO HER.

Rookie mistake #2

If you smell a bad odour and ask your child “can I change your nappy?” and she shakes her head and you ignore her and you find that flight 439 to poo-ville has not yet landed, as expected, but is still in mid-flight, replace the nappy immediately and return your child to the upright position. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to remove the nappy. Therapy is expensive.

Rookie mistake #3

Nappy rash is not fatal. You do not need to dial the emergency services, call the National Health Service advice line, visit the out of hours medical centre, consult your GP and purchase the entire contents of the baby section of the pharmacy. One of the above will do.

Rookie mistake # 4

You CANNOT just pop into a shop, holding her hand. You must, at all times, have a restraining device such as a stroller, a shopping trolley seat, or a lion cage purchased second hand from a circus and preferably on wheels that you can drag through the store. In this way you will not have to have a conversation with a sales assistant about the merits of various brands of soap powder in aisle 5 with one foot pressed firmly on the chest of your squirming daughter or with her clamped between your ankles while she alternately screams and giggles.

But the learning is not all one sided here. We are teaching each other things. Mummy is teaching Anna to count to ten and Anna is teaching mummy to count to ten before she screams …

And then she gives me a sloppy little open-mouthed kiss and suddenly it’s all worth it.

:)

Pushing my buttons

The Drudester has been shopping at White Trash World.
OK, the actual name of the shop is 'The Pound Shop', and it proudly advertises that everything in it costs a pound.
The Drudester came back with a remote control which cost him eight pounds.
Clearly everything in the shop costs a pound - to make. Everything in the shop in total I believe.

"It's a TV, DVD, Video and Satellite remote all in one!" he exclaimed excitedly to me. Which explains why the bloody thing is so big. It has 73 supersize buttons, each the size of my head.

You can imagine my delight at being the proud owner of a remote control the size of a football field. It is so big it couldn't fit in the car and we had to have it delivered to our house by truck. The 2 burly drivers bravely carried the thing into our house, struggling under the impossible load. After the one who fainted from exhaustion came around, and one who got a hernia stopped screaming, they sped off in cloud of dust I believe in the direction of the nearest Accident and Emergency.

It was only by turning the remote on its side and shunting and shoving that they had manage to fit it through the lounge room door. It now covers the entire carpet space on the floor. When you want to change channel, you have to stand on the couch cowering against the wall behind the mountainous remote and launch an assault on the east face. (I now understand why it is called a remote - because you are so far away from the bloody buttons!) You must rock-climb up the side of it, making sure you don't tear the fabric of the couch with your ramekins as you push off, and on arriving on the savannah-esque summit, select a button and jump up and down on it, taking care not to bump your head on the ceiling.

Nevertheless, I must confess that I have found it a very useful thing to have.
Not because it is more convenient because it is not. Before I had to use three remote controls, now I have to use four.
And not because it is multifunctional because it's not. After a brief examination I smugly pointed out to the Drudester that the thing does not even have a button for stop. Or eject. He said noone ever uses those buttons anyway ...
And not because it has made more enjoyable one of my favourite games ("hide the remote from the Drudester and watch him tear out his hair in frustration while I feign innocence") because it has decidedly decreased my pleasure in that sport.

No, its use became apparent over the 3 days I watched the Drudester trying to program it to synch with our el cheapo supermarket DVD and hand-me-down older brother's video player.

Cheap shitty gimick remote control - eight pounds.
Hours of fun laughing at the Drudester's frustration - Priceless.

My Lord – Why Have You Forsaken Me?

I have sad news to report.
But first I must set the scene.

Flashback to the year 1976. I was a young, bright-eyed 7 year old kid absorbed by Saturday morning telly on the black and white box. We had only 2 telly channels in Tassie at that time – the ABC and Channel 6. I eschewed the light-weight fluff of the ABC, whose shows centred around a bear with no knickers on and a puppet with a pencil up his nose, in favour of the realism of Channel 6 and one program in particular – HR Puff ‘n’ Stuff.

For those of you unfamiliar with the program it was a gritty real-life drama of an elderly cross-dressing transgender woman named Witchypoo and her torment at the hands of the asexual young mannequin named Jimmy. As could be seen by the gonad-crushing pants he wore, Jimmy had no genitals, preferring instead to hold his phallus in his hand and call it his “flute”. Witchypoo was forever trying to get her hands on Jimmy’s “flute”, the symbol of masculinity that would finally resolve her sexual confusion.
Luckily, we never got to see Jimmy blowing his flute …

One episode in particular I remember vividly. In order to get her Witchypaws on said flute, our struggling heroine entered the local talent competition in disguise, knowing that Jimmy would also enter cos the poncey little show off could never resist the lure of bright lights and makeup.

From the minute she started to sing, I was mesmerised. With my exceptional musical talents and innate sense of theatrics I knew that Witchypoo’s act was extraordinary. The tone, the projection, the warbly bit you do at the end of a long note – she had it all. But by far the best part of the performance was the words of the song which were so poignant I remember them to this day:
“Oranges boranges, who says, oranges boranges, who says, oranges boranges, who says there ain’t no rhyme for oranges?”

Flash forward to 2006 and I am wandering along the street with my husband and my arms full of groceries.
And suddenly I see it.
I am stupefied and dumbfounded. I drop my groceries in a heap on the pavement and shriek “NOOOOOOO!” to the heartless sky encircling my now pointless existence. My head spins and my eyes bleed tears of despair as they focus on the name of the Real Estate Agents in front of me:
Roland Gorringe’s Real Estate.

OH MY GOD! There IS a rhyme for oranges!
The next thing they’ll be telling me is that C is NOT for Cookies and that’s NOT good enough for me!

Was everything I was ever told a lie?
Is there any real truth in the world?
Could anyone else possibly understand the despair I feel?
I am so alone.

Flights of Fancy

There are good things and bad things about being married to a musician.

The advantages are that the Drudester does the housework and I get breakfast in bed almost every morning. The Drudester, who has never had an office job in his life, believes that working in an office is reely reely hard and I shouldn’t exhaust myself with all that cooking and cleaning stuff. (Where did he get that idea? Gosh, I really don’t know…)

The major disadvantage to being married to someone who spends his life fingering cat gut is that his grip on reality is less than firm.

Four weeks ago he wanted us to buy a run down place in England, fix it up and sell it on for a mint. I just nodded and smiled. I didn’t mention that renovations on our bomb site bathroom have been motionless for 2 months, and that if our track record was anything to go by, it would take us exactly 177 years 9 months and 13 days to fix up an entire house, not including the garden.

Three weeks ago he wanted to buy some land in Australia and build an eco-house from scratch. I smiled and nodded. Two weeks ago he wanted to go on a mega-cross-county adventure like cycling from England to Australia (after which we would, presumably commence the building of the aforementioned eco-house). I smiled and pointed out that there were only 3 things he had to get over to achieve this one:
1. Several impenetrable mountain ranges;
2. An ocean or two;
3. My dead body.

Last week he wanted to move to France.
“But honey, how are you going to get work – you can’t speak French” I pointed out. I have tell you that the Drudester is no linguist. He believes the Arabic greeting “Salam Alaikum” translates as “Would you like some salad”.
“I can speak French” he said.
“How do you say ‘I play the guitar’ in French?” I queried.
“Easy” was his reply “Je suis le guitar”.
I smiled and nodded. Great, I am certain he will get a lot of work by walking into bars and saying “I am the guitar”.

But wherever we live it seems we won’t be alone. Previously he has suggested buying a pig for the backyard (or the back garden as they apparently say over here) and last week he got carried away at an auction and bid on a horse.
Unsuccessfully. Luckily.
I’m not sure if either the pig or the horse were meant to join us on our journeys …

On the bright side, I am not concerned at all about the Drudester having a midlife crisis. I figure that if he does, he’ll probably go completely straight and try to get an office job.
And the only thing I’ll have to worry about then will be, who’ll make the breakfast?

Eating my words

I have been reading the dictionary.
Yes, life in Seaford is that exciting.

The purpose of the exercise was to see if, technically speaking, the Drudester actually eats. My theory was that he did not eat because eating involves chewing and tasting.
But apparently I was wrong.

According to Yahoo dictionary “to eat” means the following:
- To take into the body by the mouth for digestion or absorption;
- To destroy, ravage, or use up by or as if by ingesting;
- To bother or annoy (eg “what’s eating him?”);
- To perform oral sex on.

I can confirm that the Drudester definitely does 3 out of 4 of the above to his food.
Actually, come to think of it and the way he eats an icecream cone, it could be 4 out of 4.

The Drudester “eats” like he has a personal vendetta against every morsal on his plate, and they must all die, die, die. The moment the plate is placed on the table is like the starter’s gun. His sole purpose is then to stab as many pieces of food or to load as much as food as possible on his overladen fork and shovel it into his mouth, load after load after load, like a perpetual suburban Guiness Book of Records contestant. Breathing is a violation of the rules, as is using your taste buds or letting food touch any part of the mouth cavity as it is catapulted down the gullet. And although is not a technical violation, talking is frowned upon, unless you can multitask without dropping speed. In what can be seen as a mixed blessing for our relationship, the Drudester has managed to master that skill.

“What does your food taste like?” I once asked the Drudester, interested to discover what salad plus quiche plus rice plus garlic bread tasted like in the same mouthful. Was it an explosion of different tastes around the mouth, or was it one strong taste with subtle undercurrents of others?
“I dunno” he replied through a full mouth. “Food”.
I observed Neanderthal man in silence for a while. Stab, stab, stab, shovel, stab, stab, stab, shovel, stab, stab, stab, shovel. After a few minutes the Drudester displayed a mouthful of pasta, chocolate, salad, chips, cheese, icecream, pizza, toast and a hotdog as he concluded the issue.
“I know you are laughing at me” he said “But I will rise above it”.
Yeah, I thought, and stab it from a great height with a reeelly long fork …

It happens to us all …

I had a revelation today.
It occurred somewhere between the time that I noticed that the Drudester’s hair is getting thinner and when I was standing in front of the mirror tweezering out my grey hairs.
It was a shock when it hit me, but it is undeniable - the Drudester and I are turning into our parents! After a whole 10 weeks of marriage we are already an old married couple. If you don’t believe me, here are some of the signs:

1. We went shopping at the supermarket. And the Drudester bought a pair of gloves to do DIY work in. And I bought a rolling pin to make pasta. In the old days we didn’t know where the supermarket was. And the only reason we would have bought a pair of gloves was for use as a sex toy. Ditto the rolling pin.
2. Way back when, our major exercise was rolling joints and drinking pints, often at the same time. And we did it discussing music, politics, society, and how we were gonna change the world, man! Now, we go for walks in the evenings and comment on the state of other people’s gardens.
3. We have traded-in the shitheap of a car for a nice family sedan with airbags and lots of boot space. Actually we haven’t so much traded it in as begged a wrecking company to take it off our hands. After it broke down on the highway. After the engine seized. After we forgot to put water in it. Even though we knew it was leaking. In the old days, memory loss was a result of drug use, not dementia.
4. We go to car boot sales and school fetes and get excited when we find the video of Bridget Jones’ Diary selling for 50 pence. Ok this one hasn’t changed much. We’ve always been as tight as a nun’s cupcake.
5. When we lived together in the early nineties, when the Drudester was a rock guitarist, we used to blast Metallica out of the stereo at 4am and headbang around the living room. And stuff the neighbours. And their newborn baby. And their aging grandmother. Now, out of consideration, we let the neighbours know our plans with regard to our property. And the Drudester proudly invited her nextdoor in to see our half-finished bathroom, apologising for any inconvenience he causes by the noise of his soft tinkling twiddly diddly jazz guitar playing.
6. We are doing DIY home renovations with the ultimate aim of improving the value of our property. For each of us, a decade plus ago, Do It Yourself had a whole different meaning.
7. Now: We are trying to have a baby. Then: we were trying not to have a baby.

I have to finish now. There’s a renovation program on the telly I want to watch. Then I’ll have a nice cuppa and the Drudester and I will go for a walk, followed by an early night.
But on the upside, we may have a bit of a fool around. If we remember how.

A not-so-vicious cycle

I have spent the morning avoiding poo.
I recall that in the haze of surreal lovey-doviness that was our engagement I agreed to go cycling with the Drudester. Since then I have tried to convince him that I did not, in fact, say “I will try cycling” and that what I actually said was “I am prepared to mount a cycle on the condition that a) it has an engine or b) it is a tandem and you are at the front doing the grunt work”. Funnily enough the Drudester has not bought that and has held me to my word.
So this morning I finally submitted to his entreaties to try cycling.
The Drudester has a slight advantage over me in the cycle stakes, in that he has cycled from the West coast of Australia to the East coast (across what he calls the Nolaboa and what we Ozzies call the Naaarlaboor).
And he has cycled across America.
Coast to coast.
Twice.
I, on the other hand, have ridden the stationary bike at the gym.
Once.
Eight years ago.
Apart from that, my previous cycling experience is limited to careening down our precipitous driveway when I was 10, failing to break, becoming airborne and landing in the gorse bushes halfway down the embankment opposite our house.
Actually I can’t remember if that happened to me. It either happened to me (in which case it was tragic) or my brother (in which case it was hilarious). Either way, the event obviously scarred me for life and had a profound and need I say detrimental impact on my desire to cycle.
That would explain why, when living in Austria a number of years ago, where everyone cycles, my then-boyfriend and I were the only 2 lifeforms in the whole country who stubbornly refused to cycle. Oh no, we were waaaay too cool to be one of those helmet-wearing, garter-legged cycling nerds. Instead, we bought rollerblades, maaaan. And we sure looked cool, gliding smoothly around the streets of city we lived in.
Or at least, we would have looked cool, if the city hadn’t been entirely comprised of cobblestone streets.
So anyway, the Drudester and I hired me a bike and we went cycling. We cycled along a paved path which winds lazily between green meadows and hills and deposits itself softly at the seafront. It was picture postcard perfect.
Well, it would have been. Except that there used to be cows in those beautiful green meadows. And they had certainly passed that way very recently, given the presence of the little parcels of steaming love that littered the pathway. By the time we were halfway along it, the pathway had become a poo obstacle course.
Weaving to the left and the right, it was an enormous effort not to lose my balance and land in the dung. But what was harder was to restrain myself from “accidentally” bumping the Drudester off his prized touring bike to end up face-first in it, Laurel and Hardy style.
The alternative to poo dodging was to ride through the poo. However this produced 2 unpleasant results: 1) The front bike tyre gets turdy and 2) (which was unforseen) the back tyre when passing through poo will actually flick the poo up and catapault it towards the direction of the rider’s head. This would tend to happen most often when the rear mudguard was absent or incorrectly affixed. Hire bikes rarely have correctly fitting mudguards.
Luckily the Drudester, being an old hand at all things bikey, had noticed prior to our departure that my mudguard was not on properly and had fixed it for me. I love him.
So we successfully avoided the cowpats, and took an alternate grassy route along the river back. And as I was riding along on that beautiful sunny Sunday morning with my husband cycling behind me I thought to myself, this is one of the happiest days of my life.
So I very much enjoyed my cycling experience.
But don’t tell the Drudester ...

A couple of vegetables

It’s Sunday morning at 11am and the Drudester is refusing to get his arse out of bed. He has insisted on lying around watching an enthralling programme about nerds and old people and their gardens. Ho hum.
The interviewees are (slowly) explaining the unparralelled delights of parsnips and rhubarb. I think. I can’t quite understand either because their accents are thicker than their coke-bottle glasses or because their dentures keep slipping out and getting tangled up in their words.
One old man was saying “I’ve been planting potatoes for 50 years. In 1967 I planted pink eyes, but then in 1972 I started planting green eyes. In 1985 I tried brown eyes, but the drought wiped them out. So in 1996 I planted yellow with purple spots eyes, but they didn’t grow so well ‘cos of the locust plague and the wrath of god”.
Uh huh. Really? Fascinating. Snore.
Another old dear was explaining how she uses her carrots. “I use them in stews mainly. Sometimes I boil them and sometimes I even steam them. And occasionally I use them as dildos”.
Ok, maybe I made that last bit up.
Finally, after many polite, eloquent and reasonable requests from me (which may, or may not have included me accusing the Drudester of being an old fart) the Drudester wounded me deeply by likened me to an old bag. He then gave me a charming view of his hairy white backside as he changed the TV channel. We are now watching a fascinating religious current affairs program (no, unfortunately I didn’t make that one up).
I’ve decided to leave the Drudester in bed watching old-people TV. I’m off to the kitchen to find the carrots …

Coming at it from another angle

The Drudester and I are trying to make a baby. I have figured out when we should be doing it, and have informed him of the dates. He approached me in the afternoon yesterday and asked me “would you like to try to make a baby now” in much the same way as he asks me “would you like a cup tea?”. I assented and we assembled in the bedroom where we efficiently disrobed. As his enjoyment is paramount in such circumstances I asked him “what position would you like?” in much the same way I ask him “would you like a biscuit with your tea?”. He pondered for a while and then arranged me to his liking. He fulfilled his obligations and received congratulations from me. I have sent him a Thank You card to express my appreciation for his contribution to the event. He has written back providing his available dates and times for the forthcoming week, should I require his services.
We've decided to rethink our approach to this. For some reason, the baby-making lark is not as much fun as we thought it would be ...

The Deed is Done!

The Audi pulls up to the church. The driver gets out and pulls the top of the car down. The photographer comes around to the passenger side. “Where is your fiancé?” he asks in confusion. “I dunno” I say, peering around the church yard from my position in the car. “He’s around here somewhere”. How the bloody hell should I know where he is, I arrived last. I am, after all, the bride.

And then the Drudester comes striding around the corner looking gorgeous in a grey suit and open-necked white shirt and sunnies. He takes my hand, tells me I look stunning and leads me towards the churchyard.

“I have good news and bad news babe” he says. “The bad news is that I showed the celebrant the beautiful ceremony that you spent ages writing and put your heart and soul into. And he can’t read English. So we can’t use it”. I’m disappointed but I suck it up. No point crying over spilt milk or illiterate Greek wedding celebrants.

“But the good news” says the Drudester excitedly, leading me past the church yard “is that I’ve moved everything up to the top of the mountain – we’re gonna have the ceremony up there!!!”.

Oh goody.

I point out to the Drudester that getting to the top of the mountain will be somewhat difficult, given that I am wearing a tight-fitting pencil dress made of shot silk. And that I am also wearing 6-inch stilettos. And that the photographer has a broken leg.

But the celebrant, the table, the cake, the flowers, everything and everyone is basically up on top of the mountain. So I have 2 choices – throw a massive tanty and demand that everything be brought down. Or climb.

It’s a tough call, but I opt for the latter.

So we schlep to the top of the mountain and meet the celebrant. He appears to have stepped of the set of a 70’s sitcom. He’s wearing a white suit and pointy white shoes and his hair has been especially greased for the occasion. He takes his documents from a briefcase that looks exactly like the one your dad used to take to work when you were 5.

He unites Unroo and Shway in holy matrimony in a ceremony neither of us understands, because it is in Greek and some strange language occasionally resembling English. It goes as follows:

“The marriage that joins you, obligates your chances to be the same and your life to be faced on equal base of the matters which will appear in your common life as husband and wife and generally in all difficulties in life”.

Eh?

The Drudester and I say “I do” at what we think are the appropriate moments.
And that’s it.
We’re married!!!!