Smokey the Magnificent

Those of my Gentle Readers who have pull with the Almighty might want to make mention of my dear sister-in-law, who is 41+3 pregnant and scheduled for an induction on Sunday, which she does not want. I’m encouraging her to bully her midwife into letting her do frequent non-stress tests and biophysical profiles instead of automatic induction, as there doesn’t seem to be any indication of post-maturity; but you can never tell with midwives. Tricksy bunch. So if she could have the baby on her own before Sunday, that would be super. Kthx.

Anyway, while she remains conveniently baby-free I’m taking her mind off it by letting her help me cater for a dinner for her and her parents tonight. Aren’t I nice? Helpdesk Man was supposed to invite his parents over for supper so we could give his mother her birthday present (you know, supper, tea and a biscuit); but hailing from strange and exotic climes as he does, he misinterpreted and invited them for dinner instead (you know, a sit-down meal with food). So sister-in-law and I have a day in which to prepare a birthday feast for six. Woot.

Had a productive day yesterday, at least. The snortlepig, with whom I have frequent battles royale regarding the pulling of books out of the bookshelf, turned her talents to good use and helped me pack the lower three shelves’ worth of books into boxes. Packed some hooks off the wall, shelves, decorative mugs and extra glasses… the house is going to look pretty bare for the next few weeks. Then last night Dad helped me pick up a desk we’d bought off TradeMe. Helpdesk Man and I also managed to scrounge enough boxes from Liquorland to pack an army, at the expense of looking like raging lushes.

1. The landlord informs us he would rather our chickens didn’t grace his premises with their presence. I cannot in fairness blame him, as things that have been graced with the chickens’ presence tend to require a lot of hot water afterwards. And it wouldn’t have been a problem, as my chicken-loving and benevolent mother had agreed to take them on. Unfortunately, the master of the house vetoed them. He has a Thing about chickens; attacked by one in ‘Nam, possibly. So. Anyone want two decorative but highly useless chickens and a none-too-resplendent hutch? They have started laying again, but only at a rather pitiful freelance rate.

2. Still enjoying the X-Files, but now we’ve cut back on night-time sci-fi watching a flaw in the show becomes apparent. Not written for dinnertime viewing. Every night I tenderly construct a nutritious, tasty meal… well, OK, last night we had wedges, but they were homemade and fried in chicken fat, so it wasn’t a dead loss… anyway, a meal of some description… and just as I am lifting a pleasing forkful to my lips I see Scully flashing a torch about and saying “Mulder” in a very calm voice. And sure enough, I chomp down on the sight of somebody’s severed head. Or a being which could be an alien-human hybrid, a genetic mutation or a being of supernatural origin - we don’t know, but we do know it has suppurating flesh and is eating its own forearm. Or a goat that has decomposed with preternatural rapidity after being exposed to John Travolta. Whatever. Nasty stuff. If this keeps up I shall become immensely slender. And yes, the episode with the chicken processing plant and the ritual cannibalism has so far been the worst, but we’re only on Season 4.

3. We have no money. Which is a bit of a pesk.

4. Last time I hennaed my hair I missed a patch of roots nor- nor- west on my crown, so now when I wear certain hairstyles it looks like I have been afflicted with some sort of localised fungus. ‘Spose I could go with it and call it funguspunk, though. I might do that. Hennaing is a pain.

5. I cannot for the life of me work out how old Dana Scully is meant to be. Anyone know? Season 4? She could be anywhere from 25 to 50.

Well, duh. To do a third of the things required to move house.

I’ve made a list, three pages long and counting, of tasks ranging from “scrape paint off the bathroom floor” to “check if Tia Maria has gone off and throw out bottle if so”. Actually Helpdesk Man has to do the Tia Maria thing, all alcohol tastes like the sputum of Satan to me, wouldn’t know if it was good or bad. Does Tia Maria even go bad? Anyway. I was going to give myself Points for each task, but alas - the spirit is willing, but the funds are gone. All my Suite101 money has been amassed into the common fund, like a pure riverlet being swallowed by the roaring ocean. Bear in mind that analogy says more about the size of the riverlet than the ocean. But still though. Frivolous spending is on hold for the time being. Just as well I got that fabric before we found the house, no? :p Then again, I suppose I could still amass the points and hope my Suite income will start skyrocketing enough for me to make good on the debt one day. It’d certainly make moving house seem cheerier.

I’ll probably have to spend a good chunk of tomorrow taking the snortlepig back to the doctor, too. The nail failed to make its appearance, so she’ll need another X-ray to see what it’s up to. (Probably been assimilated, which means it will take only the mildest of electric shocks to transform her into Iron Pig, snortliest superdude of them all. Good reason not to get a trampoline, at least until she’s past the terrible twos.)

Oh yeah, and… anyone want to help us move house? *beams* Not this week, obviously. When the time comes. Sure you do. You promised you would, at Lent.

It is dis one. (Drat. Classified just expired.)

Now we just have to…

• try to coerce some poor homestay student into staying with us
• break the news to our current landlords, who were hoping we wouldn’t need to move until nearly November
• switch over Internet
• redirect our mail
• pack up all our belongings, decluttering as needed
• buy (preferably through bartering loaves of bread or Helpdesk Man’s soul or summat, being a bit strapped for cash) a mattress, some bookshelves, a desk lamp, two desks, three chests of drawers and a drier in order to accomodate our new arrangements and the homestay student
• come up with the dosh for 3 week’s bond plus 1 week’s rent (see above and cash-strappedness)
• clean the house
• scrape paint off various windows and floors from dodgy paint jobs
• get someone in to clean the carpet to erase the presence of the snortlepig
• find someone to babysit the chickens, as Mother (who kindly agreed to adopt them if the landlord didn’t fancy the idea, which he doesn’t) is away for moving week
• empty the garage, oh my

and… am I missing anything? All before October 2.

But still. A house. Yay. Better than a dose of swine flu, I always say… with conviction and fervor these days, as it happens.

Alert readers will notice I have been absent for this blog for some days. No, I did not leave it for a huskier, more masculine blog: nor did I rush away to commit seppuku after failing to complete my Challenge. It was worse than that.

Whether the swine flu finally caught up with me or I inadvertently consumed a gallon of ebola-infested suppurating roadkill, I do not know. Maybe I was just plain smote. At any rate I have spent the past three days in hellish misery - the likes of which, save for childbirth, I have never endured before. The kind of sickness where you lie in bed uncontrollably shivering and wanting to cry tears of weakness and despair, except a small desolate part of you can’t summon the oomph. The kind of sickness where even as your lips crack and bleed with dehydration, the thought of a sip of water makes your stomach revolt. The kind of sickness where about two hours in you start to think “Enough already! I get the point!” but it doesn’t stop, and you start to look longingly back on your healthy days wondering why you did not sacrifice goats every morning in gratitude for a watertight digestive system and bones that didn’t vibrate. The kind that makes you curl into a hollow ball of nihilism when your snortlepig (having just learned to climb onto the bed unaided) rouses you from a feverish sleep  in order to have the milks for the eighteenth time that hour, and in the process sits on your head. The kind, I might add, that makes you wish to sue for divorce when your husband decides to leave the baby with you all evening in order to attend an extra-long practice with his marvy young vocal collective, may their larynxes swell to the size of gophers.

Speak to me not of thumbscrews and boilings in hot oil: few have suffered as I have. And I am known for my staunchness, truly. (No, really. Ask my midwife. According to her I didn’t scream at all, just made “a few slight groans”. That’s not how I remember it, but I attribute it to the whole forgetting-the-pains-of-childbirth gene mutating in myself to a forgetting-one’s-own-staunchness gene. Must be it. Did I bring up childbirth again? Sorry. I’ve spent the last three days in company of a hot wheatie bag, and the smell brings back memories. I hope my sister-in-law doesn’t read this blog, incidentally: she’s 40+5 as we speak. Sister-in-law, if you are reading this blog, pay no heed. Labour is like a fun-filled walk in a magical forest where the trees grow caramels. K? But don’t have the baby for a few days yet, I’m probably still infectious.)

I might also be a tad delirious. Anyhoo. To be strictly accurate, I didn’t spend today in hellish misery. Today I mostly lay in bed reading the end of a Terry Pratchett and an entire Maeve Binchy, which was well-written but depressing. Yesterday was the hellish-misery day, and even then, the morning wasn’t too bad. See, Mum had been planning to take me to a craft fair, and such is my devotion to Fibre Arts that I struggled out of bed and went. It was good, even if the fabrics seemed more psychedelic to me than to the average viewer. I spent a hefty chunk of my Points money on cream, pink and green dusky vintage-type cottons and flannels to make quilts for the snortlepig - better yet, I still liked them when I looked at them this morning with less bleary eyes.

Anyway. I’m looking up cheerleading stunts on YouTube. I’m not sure why, but it’s impressive.

Yesterday I prepared for moving house by cleaning under the spare bed and donating a bunch of old nappies to the op shop, thus clearing out half my glory box. Today I’m planning to go through clothes and toys in an effort to donate a bunch more stuff; and, following the suggestion of a woman on MDC, start packing some non-seasonal clothes. Which is tricky given the weird weather we’ve been having lately, but I’m sure there’s something I can put in a box. My Eowyn costume, for instance.

• Going into town for a cafe lunch, watching a movie with a large popcorn combo, and taking a taxi home
• Having a semi-luxurious massage
• Visiting the circus with one’s family
• Buying a couple of seasons of Buffy on DVD and watching some of the special features

Ways In Which I  Spent Three Hours and Eighty Dollars Today

• Obtaining an X-ray of a nail chillin’ in the snortlepig’s small intestine

…is to do at least one thing every day that will make moving house easier when the fateful day comes. I was thinking of cleaning under the spare bed today, for example: the snortlepig hid a potato under there some weeks ago and I’m curious to see how it’s coming along.

Today we took the snortlepig to the zoo. She enjoyed it, although not (as one might expect) because of the animals. She pretty much ignored the monkeys, gave the reptiles a funny look and was only vaguely interested in the ostriches. She did, however, light up when we came to the tapirs. “DU-CKEE!” she cried, and sure enough, there was some exotic kind of goose. Never mind that it was camouflaged in the grass in middle distance and two tapirs the size of buses were lying at her feet in full view - the snortlepig has only mastered the word “DU-CKEE” in the last few days, and apparently intends to make full use of it. So she strode around the zoo searching for duckies, and in between amused herself with the other great highlight of the trip: gravel paths.

That’s my mother-in-law. I cropped her head out not because of malice, but for privacy reasons. (She’s wanted for arson in several burroughs. No, not really. At least, not to my knowledge. It hasn’t come up.)

I tried to get an arty snortlepig-with-kune-kune-pigs shot, but it was tricky; she wanted to climb in with the pigs and had to be restrained. So this is the best we got:

Well, yes, if you count house-hunting as productive. And personally I can think of few things more soul-gratingly fruitless.

What is it, for example, with people who lie about the state of their house on the phone? I’ve taken to being staunch!, direct! and no-nonsense! in an effort to sift the wheat from the chaff, and I’m constantly being sabotaged by optimists. “Tell me about your kitchen,” I say. “We’re looking for a house with a nice big kitchen. We don’t want a house with a small kitchen, and - ” light laugh - “some of the houses I’ve seen have had kitchens with just one small bench. That is too small for us. How big is your kitchen?”

Pause on the other end of the line while the house-owner scratches his nose thoughtfully. After the first three dozen of these calls you can begin to hear the wheels turning in his head. How can I make it sound bigger? he thinks. If I could just get them in the house, maybe the splendor of the seventies carpet would dazzle them and they wouldn’t notice! Maybe if I threw another bucket of water on the bathroom wall it would create an optical illusion and cause the kitchen space to expand! Maybe a few more benches will magically sprout from the floor while they’re driving here! At any rate, I must not let this woman know the size of the kitchen. Because although she thinks she wants a house with a big kitchen, what she really wants is my dank flea-ridden hovel out in the wops with the tetanus-inducing broken railing and the pit bull next door. And if she could only lay her eyes on the glory of the peeling paint and non-functional backyard pool, she would know this. In the meantime, I must protect her from the truth.

“Aww, yeah?” he says hopefully. “It’s not a bad kitchen. We just repainted the bedr-”

“So, one bench, two benches?” I press, inexorably, ruthlessly, like a shark.

“Aww - ” He becomes suddenly vague. Coy, even: as if his native tongue is Swahili and “two benches” translates to some personal question about his charitable giving. “It’s pretty big, yeah.” He gains confidence, possibly remembering a cubit foot of space under the sink. “It’s got - yeah, you’d have to see the layout. Come by and take a look at it.”

“Are you sure?” I say. “Because let me tell you, mister, I have no car and it will take me three hours in total to walk with the pram in the scorching heat to your home, which we nearly passed on in the first place because it was eighteen miles from town at the bottom of a ‘gator-infested bayou. The only reason, in fact, we would consider living next to the sewage plant is if the house itself were impeccable beyond reproach, with - and I stress - a really nice big kitchen. Because that’s what we want. A big kitchen. The sort of kitchen that makes guests walk in and go “Ooh, I like your nice big kitchen”. The sort where if said guests were asked on a game show “Name the size of Smokey the Magnificent’s kitchen”, they wouldn’t hem and haw and call a friend. They’d say “Oh, she has a big kitchen”. That’s the kind of kitchen I expect to find in your house. A big one. A nice one. And if, upon rafting up to your front door with my shoe leather worn down to parchment, I find you skulking about in a kitchen large enough to comfortably make a piece of toast and no more, I will not be held accountable for my actions - and they will be bloody. So in view of this information, is there anything you could like to clarify about the size or state of your kitchen before I hang up the phone?”

I don’t say that, actually. It wouldn’t be seemly. Instead I utter a vaguely threatening “OK, well, that sounds good, see you soon” and hang up meekly. Two hours later, with flies sucking the sweat from my shirt and the snortlepig covered in newts, we show up at the house. And in fact, I do not find the owner of the house skulking in the kitchen. The owner of the house has deemed it to be the better part of valor to scarper, and made off. It doesn’t matter. As I knew upon entering the dank and greasy street ten minutes ago, I didn’t want the house. But for the sake of things I peer through the fly-specked lace curtains and see the kitchen. It is comprised of a single bench, taken up almost entirely by sink, and a small jutting promonotory to one side of a remarkably convenient width for balancing a Saltine. The whole affair is painted sea green, and someone appears to have been sick in the microwave. As I stare glumly at the chaos, the windowsill comes off in my hand.

Repeat until filled with a sick depair admixed with psychopathic rage, and you have a fairly good picture of my week.