Smokey the Magnificent

Today I spent a merry four and a half hours scrutineering NZQA exams for a boys’ high school, in return for a chunk of money that sounded generous until I was doing it. I think I strode about ten miles. I handed out innumerable tissues, prevented who knows how many acts of Dishonesty and Abetting, and earned the respect of one callow youth when I forgot my place as I was making him fill out the Toilet Roll and muttered “Sorry, I know it’s a bit fascist”.

Matters arising:

1. I’d forgotten that I quite like teenage boys; so many of them mean well. I’d been expecting a bunch of reeking, flatulent yokels - and, granted, after the first thirty minutes you could have cut the fug with a knife - but many of them looked up at me with earnest “I can’t think of the name of that author” faces, intent and free of malice, and it was sort of touching. Also, despite their no doubt numerous flaws, they were undisputably not teenage girls, and that is a virtue indeed. Which brings me to point 2:

2. I am old. Some of those young varmints were, like, ten years younger than me. A decade younger. Yet still the size of a tank. I was still a good fifteen years younger than most of the other scrutineers, some of whom had children in high school themselves; but that still left me in the oldest ten per cent of the room. I wasn’t sure if I should wear a Batman T-shirt next time to appear accessible and with-it, or just skewer a tight bun to my head with hairsticks and go with it. I do have hairsticks and don’t have a Batman T-shirt, so I might as well embrace my decreptitude. Still, though. Depressing.

3. It is a very tragic thing to watch a boy hand in his papers as soon as the first 45 minutes are up and he can legally go. A fair few of them did, either with quiet despair, or a jaded air of “I’ve put in my time, the world can ask no more of me”. I wanted to exhort them to think of the wife and chillun, and one of the scrutineers said that she always asks “Are you sure?” in meaningful tones, but I doubt it helps.

4. While stalking down the rows, I read snippets over their shoulders. It was fun. “The author creates tension by…”; “The movie “Inception” is about…”; “the key relationship in the novel”; “Finnegan’s Wake is a metaphor for…”. I wanted to stop and read on, and I suppose I could have - what could they have done? - but I refrained. Scrutineering the maths exam won’t be nearly so much fun.

5. That evening, I went to do a mystery shop at a supermarket and ran into one of the boys, who was stocking shelves and recognised me. We had a pleasant chat - he seemed sanguine about his prospects, despite only having filled in two of the four English booklets. It seemed a bit late to point out that unless he wants to stock shelves forever, he should probably attempt all four booklets. Still, he was nice.

6. Miles really ought to have a medal. He is the Best Baby Ever. I left at one and he slept until four; drank milks from a bottle like a pro, and was happily chillin’ with Helpdesk Man when I returned home at traffic-past-five, despite having suffered a slight plummet during my absence. (Helpdesk Man put him on the narrow window seat, turned to get a chair to wedge up against it, and told the snortlepig “Stay there and don’t let him fall off”. Which might have been due diligence, but the snortlepig wasn’t paying attention and drifted away, and Helpdesk Man turned back just in time to watch Miles roll over joyfully and plop to the floor. Luckily he did not land on his head but his tum, which has fewer brains.)

Helpdesk Man and I have been experiencing a bout of penury. Ever the helpful spouse, I got out Living Off the Smell of an Oily Rag in New Zealand from the library and read a bunch of thrift blogs. The results have been largely unhelpful.

I don’t know what I expected, really. There are only so many variations on the save-more spend-less theme, and I’ve been baking my own bread and using cloth nappies (not personally, you understand; for the pigs) since the dawn of time anyway. I think I was secretly hoping to find a website that suggested “Look in the linen cupboard; I popped a tenner in it last time I was around”; but nope.

Tips, I have found, can be categorised thusly:

The Privileged: “Go out for lunch instead of dinner. Share an entree. If you’re really worried about paying your beach house decorator, order water”. Any helpful suggestions to sell one’s boat or to eliminate 200 or so television channels also come under this category.

The Naive: “Maybe your mother could watch the children while you take on a part-time job”. “Try asking your landlord for a reduction in the rent”. (I’ve considered ringing mine and saying “Will you charge us half-rent if we actually keep the place clean?”; the pig sometimes bargains this way and, while it shouldn’t work, sometimes it does.) “Knit potholders to sell at craft fairs”. “Perhaps a friend will let you house-sit for a few months”. “Why not dust off that novel you’ve been working on?” “Start a blog. You can make a lot of money, like Pioneer Woman!” Etc.

The Bleedin’ Obvious: “Buy cheaper cuts of meat”. Well, by gum. You mean to say they cost less than the expensive cuts?

The Frankly Sad: “To save on water, stand in the shower and turn it on for 10 seconds to wet yourself; better yet, dampen up by using the dregs of water from glasses people have left lying around the lounge. Turn shower off. Tip a packet of Borax over your head and rub in vigorously; this way if you lie around the kitchen at night you can also deter roaches. Borax doesn’t clean body odour very effectively, so you’ll need to use a little elbow grease, but that’s okay; it will save that costly gym membership! Turn the shower on again for 20 seconds to wash off the blood and Borax. If you keep a bucket over the plughole, you can use the runoff as a nutritious soup. Turn the shower off again. Using this method, my husband was able to save 60 gallons of water a day, before he shot himself.”

I also found a tip by a woman who swore you could make stew by putting boiling water, chopped veggies and bits of meat into a thermos. I doubt it.

The Vaguely Illegal: These tips involve saving pennies at the expense of by-laws or one’s fellow-man: in other words, cheating. One should, apparently, check the stamps on all one’s mail, so that if the cancellation stamp missed its mark, one can cackle with glee and go write a letter to one’s aunt, on The Man. Similar tips include dumpster diving (which I would totally do, incidentally); selling home-baked goods in defiance of food health and safety laws; pretending to one’s electricity provider that a rival electricity provider offered one a better deal, and if the first electricity provider does not top that deal one will pack one’s toaster and be gone; and contesting perfectly valid speeding tickets.

The Stanky: I probably shouldn’t get too precious about these ones, because let’s face it, I do use homemade deodorant and haven’t looked shampoo in the face in years. But I did come across one tip in which a lady told us how she collects roadkill, places it on a rack in her yard with a tray underneath, and as the maggots drop off, feeds them to her chickens. And well, for the record, I don’t do that.

The Brag: These are not in fact tips. These are unreproducible, jealousy-inducing anecdotes about someone’s sweet haul from the thrift store/dump/wealthy neighbor. “I enter competitions, and the other day I won $500 worth of free skincare products just by writing a sonnet to the T-zone”. “I found a $50 bill in the carpark”. “Today in the Salvation Army I found a set of limited-edition Disneyland teaspoons, a Moby wrap that was only slightly puked on, and a ten-dollar bill in the pocket of an old fur coat”. “I attended a taxidermy closing-down auction and got all my Christmas presents for a steal”.

The Ideological: Sometimes the tips themselves aren’t bad, but one is left with the distinct impression that the tipster isn’t so much wanting to save you money as make you a better person. “I became a vegetarian for financial reasons and my colon has never been lither. Best of all, I’m not participating in the brutal slaughter of our cloven-footed friends; their blood does not spurt in my dreams. You too can be murder-free for the price of a cube of tofurkey”. “Cloth diapering isn’t just better for my wallet; every child in disposables creates a pile of dirty nappies as tall as the Empire State Building, which will stand tall long after his meagre achievements have been forgotten and his phthlate-ridden corpse has festered under a parking lot”. “I started eating only rice on Mondays to empathise with the plight of the Haitians. Not only do I save a ton, but it gives me a spiritual connection to these people who I bet you don’t care about, because you don’t eat rice on Mondays. Do you? Do you care about the Haitians? Say it with RICE!”

There are doubtless other categories. After perusing these for a few days, we were still not rich. I decided to write my own list of frugality tips. Of course, just like building your own home (which the Oily Rag book blithely suggests you do if you are, and I quote, “handy with a hammer”), it turns out it’s not as easy as it looks. After much thought, I have come up with only one tip, and I give it to you now.

CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT: Arson.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Donations gratefully accepted.

For many months now it has been my intention to donate my still-tepid corpse, when the time is right, to Medical Science. I assume Medical Science wants it; if not, into the bayou I go, wrapped in a Persian rug. Anyway, the thought of being probed by callous first-year medical students doesn’t really make my week, but until now I have borne up under the consoling reflection that when the time comes, I shall be serene about the matter.

But this morning, lying in bed with the snortlepig jumping repeatedly on my spleen*, I came up with a happy thought that makes me positively itch for death. I will be the BEST CADAVER EVER. Med students, twenty years down the line, will chuckle over me - they’ll probably nickname me something, like Grace Kelly or Miss World, doubtless - and recount ‘twixt a smile and a tear how I single-cold-handedly got them through a punishing internship and out into the world of chiropractic psychobotany.

How? Before Helpdesk Man drops me off in the in-tray, I have asked him to fill me up with charms. (If I sense impending death I’ll do it myself, swallowing a miniature silver poodle or ballerina every hour or so so they are evenly spaced throughout my digestive tract, and stuffing a few in my ears and so on for good measure.) I’ll be like a Christmas cake! Dissecting me will be not a duty, but a pleasure - and a spirit of friendly rivalry between my gurneymates will prevail as to who can collect the most charms. They’ll probably wear them pinned to their lab coats.

Or, I could do it with pennies. You know how when you hire a housecleaner, you hide pennies around the house and if she finds the whole dollar and returns it like a biddable wee thing, you hire her?** Same principle. Only, being a bit of a smegger, I might hide only 98 cents, so that the week before finals residents are sneaking in, frantically pawing through my brainial matter in Aspergic desperation to find the final tuppence.

So there you go. Even in death, I will be making the world a better place, one incision at a time. I look forward to it with great anticipation.

*No biggie. I have an auxiliary spleen.

**I have never done this thing.

It is Tuesday morning, and The Canadian remains unmulched. Aren’t you proud? I had Mother’s billets over last night for dinner - also Canadian, as it turned out - and we waxed very merry and all was well. One of the girls gained my approval by being properly sensible of the perfections of the snortlepig - in fact, she was pretty enthusiastic about everything. Apparently, not only is my lasagna better than her momma made and my butterscotch chiffon mousse the best thing she’d ever tasted, but Helpdesk Man and I are the perfect couple. Which, uh, we don’t get told a lot… at least not in a good way. So there that is.

Today I plan to spend playing catchup with the housework. Having an extra person in the house kinda throws me off, which is unfortunate. So when this pig wakes up I’ll finish cleaning the stove, hang out the washing, vacuum and try to nip down to the shops between squalls of rain.

Yesterday the billets came over and helped paint the sewing room… or junk room, as it should more precisely be called. We only got one coat done, but it already looks considerable brighter. It’ll do my psyche no end of good to be able to keep my sewing machine out all the time without cluttering up the kitchen table.

In other news, we have a camera! My photography skills are non-existant, as this blog so amply demonstrates; but with a more-than-six-pixel camera they may improve.

So, tell me. If you could have any job in the world, what would it be? I mean a job that actually exists (ie. not “chocolate taster at the Cadbury factory” - unless that does exist, but I doubt it); and a job category rather than a person (ie. you can’t just say you want to be Bill Gates, although I hope my Gentle Readers wouldn’t dream of wanting to be him). Helpdesk Man, when asked this question, immediately said “Graphic designer”, which happens to be exactly what he’s starting up a business doing. And while that gives me a warm glow and all, I had to question his imagination. Wouldn’t he rather be the swordfighting consultant for movies, I asked? He wasn’t sure. But anyway, I can hardly complain, given that my own choices were eqully second-guessy. They included:

• Travel writing, my initial response. But on the other hand, it’s not a career which meshes well with a snortlepig. I’d always be wanting to take Helpdesk Man and the pig along, or feeling guilty about leaving the former at the mercy of the latter.. and the chances are high that I wouldn’t last ten minutes on foreign soil. I’d lose my toothbrush or my sense of direction or my life or summat.
• Designing theme parks. Which I would very much enjoy, I think. Only I have no engineering or draughtsmanship experience, and not a very practical mind. Plus, the first yobbo to kill himself by attempting to leap from a moving roller-coaster to the Ferris wheel would unleash crushing guilt upon me, not to mention the scorn of public opinion and a hefty lawsuit. And then the Dead Frogs haunted house ride would get clogged up by someone’s vomit, and the hedge maze would become littered with Coke bottles and lose its woodland charm, and I’d end up hating the human race and wearing a dingy red bathrobe, rolling cigarettes with crabbed hands in a tower. And I’m not sure that’s healthy.
• Being a midwife. Which again, I’d enjoy… but out of all the careers in the world? Not really. Not when it would involve staying up all night, a fet I’ve never successfully managed to accomplish. Pretty near, the time we saw the midnight showing of Return of the King; but not quite. And again, too much potential for crushing guilt, the sc. of pub. op. and a h. laws.
• Writing fiction. Possibly the strongest contender thus far, with the caveat that said fiction be successful. Doable from home, own boss, no capital, and the potential for travel and glamour should things pan out - and of course, the prospect of being able to say to people in singles bars, “Oh, I’m a writer”. Too many careers have been chosen without due deference to this criterion, and the world has suffered accordingly.

But then, being a movie reviewer would have its charms. As would working in the movies, as a director or writer or something I mean, not the Best Boy Grip. And I’ve always fancied being a clockmaker or a jeweller. Or a chocolatier. Even being a really top-notch waiter in a v. swanky establishment sort of appeals, but I do not have the moustache for it.

Yourselves?