Smokey the Magnificent

I write you all from a haze of cheem. A few weeks ago I rashly agreed to make a last-minute wedding cake for my sister’s friend, and what do I do but contract septicaebola three days before the big event. The batch of cake batter I mixed up this morning contains 1 kg butter, 6 cups of caster sugar, four blocks of chocolate and not less than four parts per million of my own personal pus, mucus and other bodily fluids. Something old, something new, something fetid, a bit of goo, as the old saying goes. I’m supposed to be making icing roses right now, but whenever I try to alight from the couch I see this

and my brain goes

and I have to pass out for a bit.

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.

Unsurprisingly, this week’s challenge is to finish the smegging baby quilt. And also to eat three lots of yoghurt, because it is good for the squish and better than my current practice of accidentally skipping breakfast six days out of seven. And to return a certain overdue library book before the bailiffs come a-knocking. And to get my Bible study homework done in good time for once. And not to die of swine flu.

I woke up today feeling surprisingly un-dead. That’s un-dead with a hyphen, meaning “didn’t die of swine flu during the night”, not undead all-one-word, meaning “heightened senses, intoxicated by the scent of blood and at one with an all-consuming darkness”, just for the record. Although that too, of course; who isn’t? Anyway I was able to do some sewing, and am pleased to report that I successfully constructed a 2-D fabric birdhouse all on my ownsome. With the little hole for the door, and everything. This quilt is proving to be a very useful training tool; I can applique like a fish now. How did the universe stagger along before the invention of double-sided interfacing?

Also, I was wondering: at a guess, how many songs do you know? Well enough to sing with, say, 80% accuracy: not just being able to hum along to the chorus. It occurs to me that counting musicals, hymns, folk songs, Christmas carols and the like I could well know upwards of a thousand. The oeuvres of the Everly Brothers and the Seekers alone make up a good few dozen, and I don’t even know all their songs. I wonder how much brain power the average joe today must use up on accidentally memorising songs: and how many of said songs he actually likes? I wonder, also, how many of said thousand songs I would be able to remember if a gangster tied me to a bridge, put a gun to the rope and told me to sing constantly for 24 hours, with no pauses and no repeats, on pain of sleeping with the fishes. Would my brain give out before my voice? Well, not currently, ’cause my voice is on the fritz due to the aforementioned swine flu. Would make an interesting film though, no? Like that one about the cellphone.. “If the signal dies, so does she”. Or not, possibly: I didn’t see it. Meryl Streep should star in it, she’s smashing. Streep. Streep streep streep. Is that her real name? “Streep Throat”, it could be called. Gosh, I’m feeling a bit ooey.

I think I’ll sit down quite calmly and blanket-stitch some wings on a fabric birdie while watching Lois and Clark.

To facilitate making significant advancements on sister-in-law’s baby quilt I decided to divide yesterday up into half-hour segments of Sewing and Not Sewing.  In theory it keeps me on-task and prevents the snortlepig from Thus far, it hasn’t been a staggering success.

Half-Hour One: Dressed me, dressed the snortlepig, did my hair. Unloaded dishwasher, made breakfast (kibbled wheat with cream and brown sugar). Made hot drink of apple cider vinegar and honey for health purpose now lost in the mists of time… either it’s good for my skin, fights cancer or assists in weight loss. I forget, but all good things, no? Went over half-hour by ten minutes due to eating breakfast.

Half-Hour Two: Arranged my box of fabric scraps in order of width; selected a bunch of 1 1/2-inch strips to use in making tiny nine-patches. Began sewing them together.

Half-Hour Three: Fed chickens. Cleaned microwave. Picked up vast quantities of mandarins from the grounds and squoze them to make jelly. Went vastly overtime because a) I just finished squeezing them when the timer went off and wanted to actually make the jelly, and b) the pig, having trotted around the garden contentedly for the entire half-hour, now decided she missed me and had to have the milks.

Half-Hour Four: Continued making nine-patches; arranged them in a 4 by 4 pattern with bigger blocks in between. Decided to carry on until the pig began to pesk, which gained me another 19 minutes (and then only because she hit her head by standing up under the table. She is a good pig. I will keep her.)

Half-Hour Five: Several hours of being distracted on the internet.

Next day: Woke up with probable swine flu.

So there you have it. I did manage to do some applique and embroidery last night, so I made some advancement; but I’m not sure I’d call it significant. Anyway it’ll all be much of a muchness when I’m lying dead in a pool of my own phlegm.

Three points yesterday. Six today… more if I can find the mop. After some thought I added “curl hair” and “clean stove” to the one-point category and “send letter and photos of the pig to Grandma” to the three-point one. I am well on the way to being solvent.

Went to mega-thrift-store SaveMart today and couldn’t find a thing, except for an extremely nice jacket that didn’t fit. It’s somewhat depressing to spend over an hour in an op shop the size of Tasmania and still come out empty-handed.

In other news, the snortlepig has reached a new level of unsanitary. Last night after choir practice she filched two sandwich cookies, un-sandwiched them, sucked them well, tossed them on the floor and then carefully stepped on the filling side of two of the cookies. The filling having adhered to her tights, she spent the next few minutes happily clunking around on the floor wearing biscuits. It was cute, but nasty.

Tonight I continued my project of educating my Small Sister in the world of film. Having restricted the viewing of us older lot to things that were Safe and Wholesome, my parents apparently forgot somewhere down the line that the younger ones hadn’t been around that time we watched The King and I in 1989. As a result, my Small Sister’s knowledge of cinema is somewhat attenuated, and as a former usherette with an almost entirely useless degree in Screen and Media, it seems my moral duty to correct this flaw. Since the matter was brought to my attention we’ve watched Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, E.T. and (tonight) Casablanca and Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Not the most representative sample of great film, but our local DVD store is rubbish. What kind of two-bit operation doesn’t have The Truman Show?

Ooh, guess what? Another of my sisters might have actual swine flu. I mean realio trulio swine flu. She was at a rave or a seance or something in London, and a waitress fell to the floor gushing blood, and as the trickle of it touched my sister’s foot she began to feel a tickle in her chest, and by the time she got home her limbs were beginning to ooze and her nose to clog. It turned out the waitress had had swine flu, but when my sister dragged her festering limbs to the emergency room to be lanced they were out of swabs and couldn’t determine whether it was real swine flu she had or the regular kind. A masked man thrust a vial of Tamiflu into her boot right before she was loaded onto the business end of a trebuchet and launched into a neighborhood of undesirables. She ended up calling me from inside a broken pipe, while she fended off the rats with her least favourite limb. As a result the reception was a little shoddy and some of the details of the above story might not be quite the thing… but it’s true about the swabs. Isn’t that bizarre? Who runs out of swabs? Kidneys, yes.