Smokey the Magnificent

1. I have discovered a new breakfast: Greek-style yoghurt mixed with a little cream and holier-than-thou Anathoth seventy-four-strawberries-to-the-inch jam. It’s verrah nice.

2. A few weeks ago I made a list of all the things we need for the new house, including bookshelves, a single bed, a desk, several chests of drawers and a hutch dresser. Panicked, Helpdesk Man went on TradeMe and bought a projector and a fedora.

3.Yesterday practically my only mother left for the other side of the world after having lunch with me and the snortlepig. It was unrelated, though. She’s probably at Singapore airport right now (and when I say “probably”, bear in mind that geography was never my strong point and she could be anywhere from Auckland to London, not discounting the bottom of the Seine).

4. Helpdesk Man and I had a lovers’ quarrel yesterday due to him being a friggin’ tard. You may help us settle it in my favour. Is a goose more similar to a duck than a fox is to a dog? Answer carefully. To foster impartiality I will not reveal on which side of the question my loyalties lie, only pointing out that good grief, foxes dig burrows and leap!

5. A wily reader will note I have not updated my Challenge progress from last week. It was… passable. “Lacked Vigour”, I would have scrawled on it in red pen if I were the teacher. But I did write several articles (no queries, though) and do a fair few houseworky things. My raised bed is now snugly full of earth - and if the weather clears up, I’ll plant spring onions and carrots in it today - and I’m slowly filling the half-wine-casks with garden mix.

6. I am making a baby quilt. It was going to be a very simple affair, 5-inch squares of pink and leftover brown from my patchwork skirt. But when I did that I wasn’t too thrilled with the colours, and my squares lacked the gridlike precision every other quilter on the Internet seems effortlessly able to accomplish |)how, people, HOW?). So I thought I’d disguise both aspects by covering the thing in appliqued leaves and Suffolk puff flowers. So far the effect is pleasing, but it has tranformed the project from  a quick whip-it-up-in-a-spare-morning affair to a fairly labour-intensive gig. And the woman in question tends to have her babies a few weeks early; so. Wish me luck and expedient blanket-stitching.

7. Two words that should be banned from the English language? Manky and sook. It is a little-known fact that Anakin Skywalker may never have turmed to the Dark Side had Obi-Wan not happened upon him after the death of his mother and sarcastically enquired “Having a bit of a sook?”

Yesterday’s Challenge tasks:

• Write one article a day.

Yup. Did. A review for Untrained Housewife of “The Gift of the Christmas Cookie”, a book that tried far too hard. I know now why reviewers are tempted to give good reviews to items they get for free; it seems very unchivalrous to look gift swag in the mouth. But there you go. The book was weedy.

• Do one thing every day to make the new house look more homelike

I got rid of a bunch of packing boxes (thank you Freecycle), and potted up a bunch of seeds. The pig emptid out the pot containing my nasturtium seeds and the packet of snow pea seeds, and tromped for some time on the resulting pile. Very homelike.

• Do one organisational thing a day

Forwarded mail for previous tenants. I’m going to spend my life doing this.

Everything else

Nuh-uh. I was going to henna my hair, but the lady came to pick up the boxes at 7 and I didn’t feel I could carry off the encounter with green eyebrows and a plastic bag on my head. I will do it tonight, or even this afternoon if the pig allows it. Too long have I hidden my roots under a hat, in direct contradiction to Scripture.

Today I took the piggie into town, always a fraught manoeuvre these days as our pram is on the fritz. She tends to conk out halfway home and have to be carried, while I clutch my purchases in my other arm and feel my arms slowly slip from their sockets. Still, we needed to return a library book. And while at the library I did something daring. I’ve been complaining lately about not knowing any good contemporary authors. Mostly being a classics girl, I haven’t read much recent literature more arcane than Harry Potter. And given that I don’t know the scene, I’m not even sure where to start - mostly I pick up books on the grounds that I saw the movie, or heard that author referenced by another author, or heard someone talk about it. But I never pick up books cold, on the grounds that the title looks interesting. Do people ever really do that? I don’t. But anyway… today I did. In fact, three of the books I chose simply because the snortlepig picked them randomly out of the bookshelf and the dust jackets looked OK.

We will see how it goes. If I were a braver man I’d just start at the As in the fiction section and read my way right through, figuring that if someone liked it enough to publish it it probably wasn’t absolute trash. I’m not currently quite that brave (or well-endowed with spare time), but this is a start. I feel v daring.

Right. By a minor miracle the pig’s asleep without me, so I’d better go slap some henna on my head and make a milktart.

Yawn. Moop. Well, we are finally more or less absolutely moved in. Pretty much. Kinda. A woman off Freecycle is coming to collect the empty likker boxes for her house-move tonight, which will make the kitchen look considerably more respectable. And I have been seasonably afflicted, as usual, with veggie gardening fervor, so the back entrance to the house is littered with wee pots and dribbles of potting mix exhumed from them by the snortlepig, who is apparently anti-veggies.

More impressively, we have a raised bed. Slightly raised, anyway. More of a token raise than a legitimately rheumatism-saving waist-high raise; but a raise nevertheless. It was a bit of a mission , nevertheless. The raised beds on TradeMe go for ridiculously inflated prices, and after seeing a few dead simple four-plank affairs go for over $100 my Scottish blood revolted and I said to myself, How hard can it be? Which is a thing one should not say. So I called upon my mother to take me to Bunnings, which sold cutesy little prepackaged veggie-bed-building kits with planks and nails and the like for $129. Puh-leeze, thunk I, and trotted off to the loose lumber. Four planks of that turned out to be going for a good $50, which by that stage I was meekly prepared to accept; but my mother is made of sterner stuff. “Dreamin’”, quoth she and drove me to a place I had previously only known as a legend: Demolition Traders.

What I knew is that it used to be Mum’s favourite shop and you could buy old French doors there. What I didn’t know is that it’s essentially a decayed urban Disneyland - a tumbleweed-blown, dusty Main Street USA and the perfect setting, if anyone’s interested, for a student horror film. It isn’t a shop at all, it’s an enormous lot filled with old houses transported onto the site - some of which were cannibalised from other old houses - and filled wit bits of yet more houses. One is filled, as Mother predicted, with French doors; another with bathtubs standing up against the walls like a hotel for hygienic vampires; another with amputated taps. One warehouse was full of whole kitchens, extracted neatly from houses and standing around just  chillin’. And just to add a ghoulish Western B movie effect to the place, the legitimate goods for sale are intermixed with ancient carriage parts and wagon wheels, as well as seats made out of bathtubs a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s totally uber, and if I were left there alone after dark I’d very quickly end up gibbering in a warehouse, probably under the rowing boat named Titanic.

Anyway, an old chap eventually emerged from the gloom to help us sort through the piles of old weatherboards and such, while the pig courted tetanus playing amongst the gravel and rusty nails. To our request for H3 treated timber he snorted derisively and pointed us to H4 - apparently H3 rots like tissue paper when placed in contact with soil, and whose advice had we been taking? (Dad’s. Never trust an infralapsarian in the matter of treated timber.) A slightly younger and less picturesque individual cut the timber for us and manned the EFTPOS machine, clearly resenting us as lightweights who weren’t planning on hauling away any kitchens in our teeth. Nevertheless: wood obtained. $30. My ancestors would be proud, in a “Couldst thee not have cut it thyself from yon kindly greenwood, feeble wench?” kind of way.

Making the bed was likewise a heavier task than expected. I gave it my best effort with a hammer and galvanised steel nails, moving from one plank to the next to avoid the fingers of the snortlepig, who kept trying to hold the nails as I pounded ‘em. (She also had the disconcerting habit of waiting until I had nailed them in to - I thought - a considerable depth, and then casually reaching across and plucking them from the wood. That dude has fingers like biceps.) I got a few in straight, but the vast majority buckled and wilted and had to be extracted by Helpdesk Man. Fortunately he was so repulsed by my incompetence that he finished the bed himself, thus demonstrating that he is surprisingly manly. I want him to build a pergola next.

Anyway, the raised bed is now wobbling danergously on the back lawn waiting for a trailerful of dirt to stabilise and strengthen it. At least, that is what I’m hoping it will do. As it happens, however, we are now too broke to afford dirt (poetic, no?); so I’m making do in the meantime with $6 worth of supermarket potting mix and some seeds scrounged off a friend. Life remains snortly.

In other news, I am abandoning the Points system. My Suite101 earnings have better things to do for the foreseeable future, such as buying chests of drawers and bookshelves and stuff; and my tally marks got lost in the move. Instead this week’s Challenge will be as follows:

• Henna hair
• Write one article a day
• Query one article a day
• Do one thing every day to make the new house look more homelike
• Do one organisational thing a day
• Do Bible study homework
• Do singing group practice