Smokey the Magnificent

Somewhat to my astonishment, Helpdesk Man and I passed the police check for having a homestay student. The next step is to be interviewed by a nice lady called Loretta and have the student’s room inspected to make sure we aren’t planning on chucking her in a rat-infested hole in the floor. Which is a doddle in theory - well, except for the interview, which will probably prove us to be antisocial semi-loons with supralapsarian leanings - only the homestay student’s room currently contains fourteen boxes of junk left over from moving house, a large plastic bag full of used coffee grounds, and no furniture.

So I am once again scouring TradeMe. According to the terms and condishes of homestay-student-having one has to provide it with a bed with a Good Quality Mattress, a desk, a chair, a lamp, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. Privileged little blighter. I don’t even have a lamp. Anyway I was thinking of going for a vaguely shabby chic-cum-Anne of Green Gables dormer room kind of look, with a splash of French Country thrown in. Dusky pinks and greens and creams, kind of demure, an old-fashioned writing desk if I can get one, that sort of thing. We specified a girl homestay student, so hopefully the pink will not be a problem; and it’s a style I like well enough that when the room eventually becomes the snortlepig’s room, I won’t feel the need to rip it all out and start afresh. Hopefully.

Of course, the tricky bit is that one has to decorate the room before the interview, so if one fails one is not only out a supplementary source of income, but the price of a roomful of furniture. Still. We will prevail.

I had a cunning thought the other day. If I am to be making most of the snortlepig’s clothes from now on (and it seems I will, both because it amooses me and because I am Agin the clothing industry and hand-me-downs have slowed down to the merest trickle since she left the baby stage), it makes sense that they all match. Currently she has a pleasing conglomeration of handmade and bought items in varying clashing shades, and only about two tops go with two bottoms on a good day. So next time a new season hits or she grows out of things, I plan to go to Spotlight with a tiny colour palette in mind and buy five or so fabrics - a few solids, maybe some dottos or stripes and a floral - that all mix and match, and then make her clothing accordingly. It seems frugal. Plus, I can then look back fondly on her childhood photos and say “Oh yes, that was during your blue period”, and date contested family holidays by the hue of her trousies. And it’ll force me to make clothes she actually needs, as opposed to things I want to make (case in point: she is currently inundated with tops and rather lacking in bottoms).

Right. I now need to go and complete my hour of fiction writing for the week. I have successfully managed to do my hour of housework every day, even going so far as to do an extra hour the day before we went to the beach (more on that later). None of the editors I queried have gotten back to me about my print articles, though; nor have I utterly mastered the Road Code; and I totally forgot about the fiction writing thing until now. I should really use this time to work on My Novel, but I’m getting rather sick of it; perhaps I’ll start something new. We shall see.

Oh, yus. Question. If you were a nearly-two-year-old snortlepig, and it was going to be autumn/winter when you were twoish, what kind of colours would you want to wear for that season? I fancy dove-grey at the moment, but it might be a little drab for a toddler. D’you think? Dove-grey accented with blue or possibly maroon? Maybe I should save that particular combo for when she’s a sedate matron of four.

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

Yes yes, we’ve moved house, boxes everywhere, can’t find the screws, no Internet for several days, psychically distressing. I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to share is a rule of thumb you can live your life by: movie taglines are almost always improved by adding “LOL” to the end.

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM LOL.

You see?

And to further illustrate the point:

A JEDI SHALL NOT KNOW ANGER. NOR HATE. NOR LOVE LOL

A MONSTER SCIENCE CREATED - BUT COULD NOT DESTROY LOL

ON EVERY STREET ON EVERY CITY, THERE’S A NOBODY WHO DREAMS OF BEING A SOMEBODY LOL

YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY LOL

SEVEN DEADLY SINS. SEVEN WAYS TO DIE LOL

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE LOL

WHEN THERE’S NO MORE ROOM IN HELL, THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH LOL

OH YES, THERE WILL BE BLOOD LOL

HIS LOVE IS REAL. BUT HE IS NOT LOL

I rest my case.

Apparently we’re very paranoid people. I found three sicky buckets under our be. We could have all vomited at once with ease, safety and hygiene. But we never did, and now we are moving house and it is too late.

Peanut butter at one house, bread at the other, plates packed in a box… this is all very disturbing. I was at the new place today packing and shivering with cold, and it took a good twenty minutes for me to think of unpacking a sweatshirt from a box and putting it on. It felt faintly illicit, as if the new house should not be used for such profane purposes as dressing.

I also had a horrid experience last night while unpacking a box of kitchen iems. There was an enormous cockroach chilling in my brand-new mini-ramekins. It was probably from the house. That’s probably the reason the previous tenants moved out, you know. Every night, millions of tiny feet marching, marching, until the sounds of the roaches softly moving hammered themselves into their brains and caused them to gibber. Super.

Also, it is prayer meeting here tonight. I am trying to psych myself up not to apologise to people for providing only one type of homebaked cookie. Normally I would do lemon muffins as well or die in the attempt, but we’re out of sugar and flour and most of my baking stuff is elsewhither. And we have no microwave, so if anyone needs butter melted or a wheatie bag heated up or a hamster inhumanely killed they’ll just have to lump it. The situation, not the hamster. Or both; whatever.

Is there an internationally-recognised protocol on the correct place to keep the fly spray? And would you rather move into a house with roaches, or one in which the previous owner had offed herself in the laundry?

I like packing books. With the exception of the theology books I keep mine uncategorised, so stacking them in boxes reveals a delightful cross-section of personality that would probably intrigue posterity if I became a sculptor or blew up a bus or something. The Silence of the Lambs nestling next to Winnie-the-Pooh, for instance; Reader, I Married Him cheek-by-jowl with a misshelved copy of a tome boldly entitled PREDESTINATION.

Kitchen items are less fun to pack. They are asymmetrical, breakable and require much thought. How many baking dishes can I live without for the next two weeks? Will I suddenly burn with the desire for a lemon yoghurt cake if I pack my bundt tin? (I chanced it.) What about my mini-muffin tins? No, too risky, I’ll want to use up a lot of lemons before we leave, so I might make lemon muffins. Should I get rid of my dodgy-bottomed springform cake tins, even though I used the bottoms several times this month to shape pizza and pavlovas on?

Worst of all are the contents of the bathroom cupboard, which I have started packing in self-defense as the snortlepig likes to unhaul them from the cupboard anyway. I was on a skincare kick for awhile, exacerbated by a free-samples kick, which left me with dozens of sample bottles and wax strips currently made obsolete by my anti-chemical/eco/natural kick. Part of me cynically wishes to keep them for when I backslide, but the other half views them as cancer in a tube… so you see the dilemma. Had fun seeing if I could make one half of my lips bigger than the other using Sally Hansen’s Lip Inflating Cream, though. I couldn’t. They just went tingly. With the tingles of cancer.

Last night’s dinner with Helpdesk Man’s family was a success, incidentally. I made a huge basket of flatbreads and grissini which we had for starters with dukkah, pesto and olives and such foibles. Then dinner was creamy sundried tomato chicken strips on a bed of corn risotto, with roasted carrot and kumara spears cooked in brown sugar. Sister-in-law made milktart for dessert and I added pecan tartlets and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. During dessert the snortlepig disappeared and was discovered in the living room with the remains of the bread basket, diligently and enthusiastically dipping all the breads and licking them. She is a sweetcheeks.

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.

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.