Smokey the Magnificent

Do you know, I learned something interesting on Monday. Helpdesk Man and I were chillin’ at a hardware store - he wanted sandpaper, no idea why, probably for his face - and I took the opportunity to get a spare car key cut, for reasons that should be obvious. The chap doing it was a strange mixture of offensive and helpful - he was the chap I saw at 38 weeks pregnant with the snortlepig, who stared at my squish and said “When are you due?” and I said “Two weeks” and he said “You’ll probably put on all your weight in the last two weeks”, so I’ve never much liked him - and in between hurling vague insults in my direction, he proffered an int’resting factoid.

Apparently with older cars, the keys have a code engraved on them. So if you write the code down and keep it in a safe place, like a deep crevice on your head, then when you lose your key you can simply ring up and say “I’d like an A3036 for a 2004 Nissan”, and they’ll be “Righty” (or in the case of this chap, prolly more like “Righty, tard”), and cut you one from code, without having to have the original.

Which is in itself quite cunning. But what it really means is that if you fancy your friend’s oldish car, all you have to do is briefly borrow her car keys on a pretext such as a magic trick or lottery scratchy; note down the code, and Bob’s your uncle. This makes the world seem a scarier and more exciting place. Don’t you think?

It also brings to mind an entrepreneurial venture I never got off the ground, but to which I would very much like to devote my passions in my declining years: mystery thieving. Don’t you think it could work? Companies worried about their security could call me up, and we would arrange the terms of the deal: I get to make one trip during the peak business hour of the day, and must attempt to steal one item of clothing from the changing rooms, a small electronic device and a Toblerone. In addition to my large, smallish fee, I get to keep whatever I can successfully squirrel out of the store - thus investing both me and the store with motive, upping the stakes and generally adding piquancy to everybody’s day. Different shops could have different rules, of course; for jewellery stores I might be permitted the floor plans and the assistance of a small, nervous Irish genius to handle the security alarms, whereas for a mega-chain department store I might be required to exhibit a lowish level of cunning and leave the store tags hanging out from under my sweater. As they wished; the customer is always right. Anyway it would be vastly amoosing, and unlike mystery shopping, which is mostly a sham and a chiz, might do some actual good in the world; plus, this being New Zealand, I probably wouldn’t even get shot at. What do you think?

You know how sometimes you do something faintly adult and magnificent and are like “Hah, universe, I’m on top of you”, and the universe steeples its fingers? That happened to me today. I woke up feeling comapratively unpregnant, made a to-do list as long as your face and spent a profitable morning defrosting the freezer, making pizza dough and custard from scratch, doing my Spanish practice and singing practice, and other marvellous things. To be sure, I then had to go have a lie down for three-some hours, but even those were not a total waste, as I read the last half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and did my Hypnobabies practice. A good day.

When I awoke at seven, I decided to be yet more magnificent and whip by the supermarket and the library, picking up ingredients for a wedding cake I have to make this week and dropping off overdue books, respectively. Helpdesk Man and the snortlepig were out for dinner, so I bade an airy farewell to Flatmate Man and roared off in a driver’s-licence-having, responsible-citizen way. I whipped through the supermarket shopping with aplomb and a list, stowed the goods in the boot, and had forty minutes to spare before the library shut at 8:30.

Unfortunately parking in town is something of a closed book to me. I circled around the library block looking hopefully for spaces, but despite it being after hours on a Monday night there were none. Then I caught sight of an underground parking garage, and in a burst of bravery thought “Yes; I will do this thing”. So I swung in, undeterred by the fact that I nearly had to dislocate my arm in order to reach the little ticket thingy, and was gratified to note that there were many free spaces indeed - nearly all of them, in fact. It was then I felt a nagging hunch that the sign outside had said “Closes at 8″; if true, this would mean I had spent a precious dollar on a mere flying tour of the facilities, and would still have to park elsewhere. So I hastily grabbed my library books, locked the car and headed up to the entrance to look at the sign. “Closes at 8″, it did indeed say. So I grumbled back with my load of books to the car, only to discover that I had locked my keys in it.

After several minutes of basically saying “Is it” at the world, I decided to dash to the library and ask if I could use their phone. The librarian found my predicament highly amusing, but the lady on the other end of the number kindly provided on the carpark sign had clearly been dead for a while, and only suggested I pop back and ask the advice of the security guard. This I did, and just in time too, as he was locking up. (I was delayed, incidentally, by trying to call home four times to see if Flatmate Man could drive Helpdesk Man and his spare key to meet me. He did not answer. It turned out he was watching a video game show with his headphones on. Some people’s children.) Said security guard proved to be kind-hearted, but - literally and figuratively - toothless. Even though we walked all around the car and looked solemnly at it and said “Yup” in a hopeful way to each other, there was nothing for it but to leave it there until morning. The security guard informed me that it would be as safe as houses and nobody could possibly make off with it, which would have been more convincing if he hadn’t just tried all his keys in the lock with the disappointed comment “That’s funny, usually you wiggle any key in there for a bit and it just pops right open”. He also kindly informed me that the buses were still running, wished me well, and we parted on cordial terms.

Unfortunately, after dragging my pregnant self across several city blocks and risking Crimes of Violence, it transpired that the buses were not in fact running at all. So I then had to walk back to the other end of town (pausing, I admit, for a Starbucks strawberries-and-cream frappuccino to soothe my ruffled feathers - six dollars eighty, if you don’t mind!) and loiter outside the taxi stand. This I did for ten minutes before venturing inside the Irish pub to ask the Irish barman if any taxis were planning to grace its presence that night; upon which he shouted something unintelligible and Irish at me and I slunk back outside again. After another fifteen minutes I tried the other pub across the road, which was not Irish and let me use its phone, only whenever I tried to call a taxi or indeed anyone else it beeped at me frantically; so, not wanting to out myself as the kind of barely hominid milk-fed gimp who not only locks her keys in her car but can’t operate a telephone, I abandoned it and slunk outside yet again; at which point, fortunately, a taxi showed up just as I was about to hurl myself underneath it. He took me home, where the household conspicuously failed to greet me with cries of “Yay!” and “We were so worried, have you fallen prey to Crimes of Violence?” and “The freezer looks so nice and clean”.

I have two things to say about all this.

Firstly, I once got a perfect score on my English SATs. I feel this needs to be said. Perfect, people. 800. You can’t get any higher.

Secondly, on a scale of one to cheem, in what condition do you think the milk in the boot will be when I collect it tomorrow morning?

Today was my, ahem, third driving test. To spare you any suspense, I passed; and just as well, because the whole experience is very demoralising to my inner calm, and I think another few goes would have given me a gastric ulcer. Crikey. I was initially pleased to see that my instructor was not the same lady with whom I’d bumped the car in the parking lot; it was, instead, a kindly-looking older man with a Scottish accent, and I warmed to him instantly, thinking he would be fatherly and approving.

He was not. At the beginning of the test I did a few silly things out of abject terror, and each time he barked at me “Wanna tell me why you did THAT? That’s not correct driving, SMOKEY, and if you don’t drive correctly I’m not gonna pass you!”. And I was all “Dude, you’re harshing my mellow”, but by the third outburst I was convinced I’d failed already, which oddly enough cheered me up a little; it seemed that the universe was humming along on its accustomed path and all was well. So I tootled contentedly through the rest of the test, even going so far as to answer back when he snapped that my overcautious gap selection could have made me a hazard to cars behind me, if there had been cars behind me. (Me: “True, but I knew there weren’t any cars behind me, and this is an 80k zone, so it seemed sensible to be cautious”. He: grim silence, probably taking pleasure in picturing the car crashing into a flaming fireball of death.) And at the end of the test, instead of relieving my nerves with a simple yea or nay, he worked through a laundry list of my driving defects - which oddly, were entirely different to the defects mentioned by the other instructor - I’m not sure if that’s good or bad - and ended by grudgingly admitting “Well, you did pass…”; clearly implying that left to his druthers, he’d have had me sterilised and shipped off to the Americas for the good of society, but his hands were tied. At any rate, he successfully managed to suck any sense of accomplishment out of the occasion, leaving me even more depressed than the time I failed.

Smegger.

And did he even ask after the baby? He did not. Wouldn’t have killed him.

Essentially, I should feel like this:

but as it is, I feel like this:

and that is all I have to say about that.

So, yeah, that driving test. Well, the good news is that until the last ten seconds of the test I had 91%, and had in fact passed. The bad news is that while parking at the conclusion of the test, I panicked and kindasortaslightly bumped the car next to me, which is a thing I never do; whereupon the tester muttered a world-weary expletive and said “Come inside, we need to have a little chat”. (The car was fine, by the way. There was a young lady in it who found the incident amoosing, and was fortunately able to reassure the tester that the scratches above the wheel had been there earlier and were not made by me.) Anyway. Some other bod had cancelled his appointment for next Wednesday, so I shall get to take it again fairly soon; but still though. And the particularly peeving part is that she nearly didn’t let me take the test at all, again, because our registration card thingy was out of date; I explained that we’d updated it but the new one hadn’t arrived yet, and showed her the receipt, but she hmmed and hawwed and eventually oosed back into the AA to print out a new one; but it was a close thing. Also, apparently I coast too much. And I think I was a bit jerkier than usual with my gear changes, again on account of Nerves; not that she was going to fail me for that, though. 91%, as I say. So there it is.

Let us talk of happier things. Did you know a study has shown that women with D-cup or larger breasts are on average 10 IQ points smarter than women with A- or B-cups? This intrigues me. I read it in a book. Also, I am shortly about to make mango sorbet. And yesterday I finished knitting the back piece of a wraparound kimono-type top for the Auxiliary Pig. Also, the snortlepig calls me “flatcheeks”.

I was going to put up a photo of a spectacular car crash, just to put things in perspective, but on reflection it seems a tad tasteless. So here’s a tortoise instead.I bet he wouldn’t bump the sides of another tortoise while parking, even if very nervous. And yet, certain subspecies of the species are endangered. So it just goes to show.

Tomorrow is my driving test, again. In retrospect the delay may have been a Good Thing, as I think my driving has improved meanwhile; but still. If I do not pass this time - and especially if my car decides to blow another bulb on the way to the test, or start listing to port (they check for that - vehicle posture, it’s called), I shall be most put out. It bust a brake light the other day, but fortunately the bulb I got for the indicator light was in a pack of two, so I was able to replace it with grace and ease - or at least, to watch with grace and ease while my father-in-law did it. I’m thinking of buying a spare packet of bulbs to take to the test, just in case, but it seems needlessly paranoid - but then, so did checking all the lights to begin with, and look how that turned out.

Anyhoo.

In the meantime, I have been a moderately industrious Smokey, feeble constitution notwithstanding. I have baked me a pie, and knitted me a hat (using the Magic Loop method, which took me seven goes to conquer, and I’m still a touch iffy as to how I did it, but still though); I have cut out many pattern pieces for tiny rompers and shirts for the Auxiliary Boy Person Pig; and I have started making a smashing mei tai, which will have a detachable pocket thing on the front in which I can put my keys and a spare nappy and so on, thus transforming Auxiliary Pig into a combination pig-handbag, and possibly an accessory as well if he turns out to be cute in the face. It was hard to tell on the ultrasound, what with the hollow alien eye socket thing going on and all. It’s just as well babies don’t have teeth or they’d look incredibly creepy on ultrasound; and as it is, have you seen those 3D ones? Grotesque. Most off-putting.

What else have I done? Ooh, I saw The King’s Speech, which is absolutely smashing, for trues. It made me weep on several occasions, although as Helpdesk Man unkindly pointed out, this is not in itself a guarantee of actual poignancy. It was super, though, anyway; and prompted me to Google several members of the Royal Family in whom I had until now had little interest. I didn’t realise George VI’s wife was the Queen Mother - she was smashing (in the movie, I mean. Helena Bonham-Carter. Is it just me, or has she been doing the supportive-wife role a lot lately?). And Edward and Wallis Simpson, who I’d always vaguely thought of as romantic sweetcheekses, were actually bally rotters, as indeed the movie portrayed them. Probable Nazi sympathisers, and generally considered to be parasites on decent society. A bit disillusioning after his lovely abdication speech, but it just goes to show.

Who wants to start a viral campaign with me for Luna Lovegood to host the next Academy Awards?

1. Passing or failing a driving test are not the only two options. One can also work oneself up into a fever pitch of nerves for half an hour, loitering around the AA building reading “Tips for Passing Your Driving Test” in a frenzied panic and sucking on glucose sweets in order to prevent oneself passing out, only to find out that one’s left rear indicator light is out and the only skill one will get to demonstrate for the grey-haired matriarch is opening one’s car door. One must then pay a hefty fee to rebook the test for the nearest possible date, which is two weeks in the future.

2. According to second-wave feminist Germaine Greer in her classic polemic The Female Eunuch, one has, and I quote, “a long way to go, baby” if one reacts with disgust or horror to the idea of drinking one’s own menstrual blood.

3.  The bit of a sari which goes over one shoulder is called the pallu, and can be used for covering one’s head, holding hot dishes, wiping a baby’s nose and sundry other helpful activities. One can even knot one’s keys up in the end that dangles down one’s back.

4. Spare ribs can actually taste pretty good if you marinate them in honey, soy, balsamic vinegar and other nice things and slow-cook them.

5. Glass chopping boards look arty and do not transfer the dank stench of garlic to dark chocolate when you chop it up for a cake, but they blunt your knives and are dangerously slippery.

6. Most of the times honey is mentioned in the Bible, it does not refer to honey from bees but to date honey, which is made (I think) by squooshing them.

7. No culinary heights I ever attain are likely to garner me as much adulation as I get when I mix garlic with butter. This disturbs me.

8. If you write an article about using catnip as a hair conditioner, seven months later a woman who has also written an article on the subject will fire off numerous angry emails to the administrator of your site accusing you of plagiarism; and by numerous I mean “every couple of hours”. Not only will this rankle for professional reasons, but it will remind you sadly that your own experiments with catnip rinses neither produced a luxuriant shine nor cured your split ends, but turned your hair into a lank, greasy mess, leaving you with an almost-full bag of catnip that mow constitutes a disposal problem in a neighborhood inundated with cats.

9. Pet shops sell fish called penguin tetras, which are like neon tetras only a) much less pretty, b) more expensive and c) not at all reminiscent of penguins. I do not know why. Have they ever sold one?

10. Burning a dead Christmas tree is fun! The needles all light up and send flames shooting for the sky, or rather the (live, planted) tree in the way of it; and then, after a few nerve-wrackiug moments, it subsides and leaves a a mere charred shell, which would probably be poignant if you weren’t in a hurry to cook sausages over it.

Life goes on. I still find myself getting dizzy and having to sit down every time I stand up. Doctors are flummoxed. It isn’t low blood pressure and it isn’t anaemia, or hypothyroidism, or gestational diabetes, or indeed poor potassium levels. I had ‘em checked. So I have been informed that it’s probably hormone-related and may or may not last for the entire nine months, but that if I continue to feel worse I should get checked out for mono and/or hepatitis C. Also, while the second trimester has not delivered the relief it oughta, it has endowed me with intermittent heartburn and pelvic girdle pain. So there’s that.

In other, potentially more cheerful news, I am today sitting my restricted driver’s licence test. It is manly of me to admit it, as the custom among my family is to pretend one isn’t going to do it until one has passed, only to admit years later, once the sting has gone, that it was on the second try; but this is a weaselly attitude, and unworthy of a Smokey. If I fail, as is very possible, I shall darn well blog about it, and revel in the condolences of my friends (many of whom failed themselves the first time, and they’re much more savvy than me; so there you go. Of course, they were mostly like fifteen when they did it, which I am conspicuously not; but still though.) Plus, I need my father to drive me to the test.

Asking friends and family for advice on how to pass has proven to be an interesting exercise.

FRIEND WHO TEACHES BURLESQUE: Wear a low-cut top. Show a bit of leg. That worked for me.

LAID-BACK FRIEND WHO MEDITATES: Oh, you’ll be fine.

FRIEND WITH WHOM I DROVE ONE TIME, HAD TO PARALLEL PARK WITH REAL CARS FOR THE FIRST TIME, AND SHE SQUEAKED A LOT AND MUTTERED THINGS: [Don't know, too scared to ask]

FATHER: Oh, it all depends on who you get. There are some real rotters in the business; they fail you for anything. In Australia they always fail you the first time on principle. Just don’t take it personally. [This is, of course, a man who considered it his fatherly duty to tell me before the births of my little sisters that Mum might die in childbirth; before anybody had surgery, that they might die on the table; before my wedding, that most marriages end in divorce; before I had the snortlepig, that a lot of marriages break up after the birth of a baby; before Helpdesk Man started working from home, that most home businesses fail; and so on. It is his way.]

PREGNANT SISTER-IN-LAW: You should try some Hypnobabies techniques to relax you. Just don’t fall asleep.

FATHER-IN-LAW WHO MOSTLY TAUGHT ME HOW TO DRIVE: [doubtfully] Well, you’ve come a long way.

MOTHER: [tactful silence]

EHOW: Even if you’re not a makeup person, it’s vital to wear some matt foundation and a bit of lippy for your photo, or you’ll look washed out.You don’t want to cringe every time you pull your licence out to buy beer.

HELPDESK MAN: Honestly, stop being so negative! This is the problem with you, you never think you can do anything! If I thought like that, do you think I’d have started my successful home business, Information Highwayman? [He talks in hyperlinks. He really does.]

SNORTLEPIG: OOH, Mummy going for a DRIVING lesson! So clever! I come too?

The weather has turned pleasing of late, which as usual incites me to listen to 60s music (sort of a Pavlov’s dog thing from my teenage years). In doing so this year, via YouTube, I discovered this little gem:

It pleases me, as songs about gallows trees usually do. Except for “Strange Fruit”, which I heard in Introduction to Western Music, and which gave me the screaming heeby-jeebies, in sharp distinction to the rest of the class, which sent me to sleep. I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to schedule the class in a warm, subterranean classroom from 2-4PM on Thursdays and then play soothing music at the students for the full two hours. And the guilt was tremendous, because I liked and approved of the lecturer and meant no disrespect. I hope he has got over it tolerably well.

For the past two weeks I have been having driving lessons on a near-daily basis. It is very exciting. Parallel parking and reversing are still my nemeses, but I am gradually improving at hill starts and in a distressingly recent revelation, learned that changing the gear doesn’t actually kick in until you release the clutch. This is a Good Thing to Know. My father-in-law, who is teaching me due to the fact that Mother refuses to get in a car with me and Father only survives on the road by the grace of the Almighty (as don’t we all, theologically speaking, but you’d have to see him change lanes to understand), informs me that this is a dangerous time for me, when I will be tested by the Dark Side of the Force. He has therefore taken it upon himself to impress upon me the deadly nature of the vehicle I drive, which can be a little unnerving while sitting in the driver’s seat. It seems he has personally witnessed a statistically aberrant number of fatal crashes. Such a comfort.

What I ended up doing was making this tomato sauce, which was vaguely exciting; inventing a recipe for coconut chocolate chip meringues, which was fun; cleaning the kitchen, which was neither; and eating a big ol’ bowl of pasta with the snortlepig while we watched The Princess and the Frog. Again.

So. If your firstborn child had to get twenty-to-life in the clink for something, would you rather it were insider trading or arson? Discuss.

It occurs to me that I tend to leave things hanging on this blog. So, to recap:

• I finished knitting the pig’s scarf. I have also knitted, but not yet sewn up, two wristlets and a headband. The latter I may end up ripping out (or “frogging”, as they call it in the biz - why, I do not know), because my sister sniggered at it and I have been plagued with doubts ever since. It was supposed to be English … something… stitch… lacy, innit, but it has Lumps in it. And I suspect if I end up putting it on the pig I will wince at the photos in coming years.
• Driving lessons seem to have kind of temporarily dried up. I’m not sure why, but it wasn’t due to anything exciting.
• I successfully filled the snortlepig up with the correct amounts of fish, liver etc last week, and have made a meal plan for this week as well. To make things even more exciting, Helpdesk Man’s lack of steady income has caused us to retrench, slimming the grocery store budget down to svelte and cheeseless proportions. I have rationed Helpdesk Man’s chocolate, and were it not for Easter he may have already gone on a rampage.

I think I peaked early. Two lessons on I seem to choke more often than glide, growl where I should purr and freeze up with terror at intersections. Oh well. My father-in-law told me at the first lesson that new drivers usually come to a point of getting worse before they get better, so perhaps I am just precocious. At any rate I have now successfully reversed twice and executed a couple of extremely cautious three-point turns.

In happier news, my knitting is coming along. The wristlets which I demoted to dishcloths I ended up ripping out several times, and am more or less committed now to making a wee scarflet for the snortlepig - the kind that fastens with a button. I decided to do the wholething in Continental knit stitch in order to master it - it is boring, but virtuous.

Right now, though, I’ve set it aside for more pressing projects. During the last few days summer has slunk away, and it turns out the snortlepig no longer fits into any of her nice warm clothes. So I am on a long sleeved top-making mish this week, using the fabrics I bought at Spotlight recently and some vintage-ish patterns from Mother. The first one will be a tasteful grey panelled number that I’m adapting from a dress pattern - which, being vintagey, is extremely brief to begin with, so shortening it is pretty easy. It does, however, require facing my two nemeses, sleeves and buttonholes. (Zippers are my third nemesis. Taxes are my fourth. I’m also not keen on right-hand turns. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.)