mutteringhousewife

June 13, 2015

Streets of Istanbul

You know, I thought it would feel a lot more Asian here. Who knows why, what do I know about Istanbul, except that it used to be the throbbing heart of the Holy Roman Empire, and some stuff about the Ottomans. It actually feels very European, except that everyone in the world is here. There are less covered heads than in Burwood. The traffic makes you pleased not to be driving, but all of the beeping is very polite, the beep seems to be interchangeable with the indicator, with lots of letting people in with a centimetre to spare. Cars don’t have the ubiquitous scrapes down the sides like cars in, say, Florence do, so it obviously works.

We’re staying in the old city, so our merry band of elderly military engineers and their wives with don’t care hair went on foot today to visit the Tokapi Palace, which is very spread out, apparently because the Ottomans who built it were nomadic and didn’t like to feel cooped up, and entirely populated by tourists and their guides. I should mention our guide, Sinan, because he is an absolute legend and ask for him by name if you happen to be visiting Turkey. He’s not just an experienced tour guide, his degree and Masters were in tour guiding and he is currently writing his PhD thesis on burn out in tour guides for some reason. I’m sure we won’t be contributing to that, he’s told us that we are the very first tour group he’s had with no food requests. There are nearly ninety of us, and no gluten intolerance, no allergies, no vegetarians, no paleo. That’s the military for you. I did notice that Sinan wears one of those rings with a little secret compartment that you can fit a knockout drop into, I should take bets on whom it’s for.

I won’t go into the intricacies of the Sultan’s court, I just want to give a special mention to some of the exhibits. I can’t show you photos, because “no picture”. One room was the treasury, and had some of the biggest diamonds in the world in it. One was 86 carat and, in a setting surrounded by smaller diamonds, it was the size of a small pear. There were crowns and brooches with ridiculously massive emeralds and rubies, and other slightly smaller diamonds, but still the size of a sugar cube, and all just in glass cases with one very bored looking guard, the “no picture” guy. I would assume that the glass cases are bullet proof, but it wouldn’t be Mission Impossible to break them out. Though if you were caught, there’s a tasteful little fountain in one of the gardens where they used to do all the executions that I’m sure they could put back into commission.

And I’m sorry, WordPress is being a dick about inserting photos, so you’ll have to work out which goes where.

The other place worthy of special mention was the holy relics rooms. Again, yes bulletproof looking glass, and one “no picture” chap. With not a lot of fanfare, and a fairly small queue you had a display featuring: some very fancy containers for the Prophet Mohammed’s beard clippings and one of his teeth, plus some dirt he had walked on, and a whole lot of associated kit. But not only that. A pot belonging to Abraham. Yes, that Abraham. The turban of Joseph. As in And the Technicoloured Dream Coat. A sword belonging to David. As in And Goliath. Aaaand, the staff of Moses. You know, the one that parted the Red Sea. It looked rather flimsy, actually, a bit reminiscent of bamboo. They also had an arm and a bit of skull of John the Baptist, but that guy seems to have enough bits scattered over Christendom to build an entire Baptist Church congregation. So, is it fair dinkum? I don’t even want to Google it. These guys were the Ottomans, they did ransack Egypt, which is where that stuff would have been. I dunno. The actual staff of actual Moses? Did I really see it?

We also popped into the underground Cisterns built by Justinian, and not used by the Ottomans because apparently they prefer running water, not stuff that sits around for any length of time, it’s a Muslim thing. We were a party of engineers, after all, and it was very impressive. A couple of the columns holding up the roof had leftover Roman heads of Medusa at the base to prop them up to the correct height. You think they could have at least put her the right way up. Though I guess they weren’t expecting tourists from fifteen hundred years later to be gawking at them, they were supposed to be under water.

And Travelling David Tennant got to have another much needed Turkish coffee.

Then the highly anticipated Grand Bazaar. Which was a lot less chaotic than I expected, plenty of sweets, scarves, leather, chessboards, crazy hats that I’ll have to revisit for the Horror, and carpets, obviously. I did want to buy some of those thin cotton Turkish towels that we used at the convent in Florence if you’ve been following my travels, but Sinan took us to a shop outside the Bazaar for that. Four for forty five bucks, which was very pleasing. The shops at the Bazaar seemed quite expensive, and a bit of a wander around the streets near our hotel showed us little markets just about everywhere. But there were some rather terrific looking winter coats I’ll have to pop back for if I don’t see them anywhere else. If only you didn’t have to establish a whole relationship with a shopkeeper to buy something. You know how I feel about that.

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June 10, 2015

Departing from Gate 58

Half an hour to departure. I have deserted my children for two weeks to go to a dinner in Turkey. Oh, I'm sure they'll be fine, the grandparents are staying over and doing the extreme driving. I've left a page a day diary for them, what could possibly go wrong. All the kids have is a birthday party, a chapel service, an eisteddfod, Supanova, choirs, bands, tennis, basketball, Pirates of Penzance rehearsal, a learning showcase and about seventeen games of soccer. Plus the pool is being acid washed – not just for jeans! Apparently research shows that all of this will vastly reduce the grandparents' chances of getting Alzheimer's (thanks Kath!), so we're doing them a favour really.

I've left four kilos of chicken schnitzel in the freezer. I've also shown the kids how to defrost and cook it, they also now know the phone password for the smoke alarm monitoring service. I made four batches of biscuits over the weekend, but it was a long weekend and there was a teenage sleepover, so I had to spend yesterday evening making them again. Plus a jam slice. I made marmalade for my father in law and mixed berry jam for the Moose. I bought salami and Turkish bread for the Horror and shouted at the Muffet until she disgorged all of her dirty clothes so I could wash them. I also washed all the sheets and towels. My conscience is clear.

For the first time ever we are travelling with a tour. It's weird for us, the husband is used to doing months, sometimes years of research, torturing himself by obsessively watching Webjet to see if there's a cheaper airline than China Southern. Looking through Tripadvisor, reading travel guides, he likes to be prepared. Not this time. The dinner we're going to is the hundredth Waterloo Dinner. One hundred years ago the engineers at Anzac Cove finished building a jetty, noted that it was the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and held a dinner in a dugout to celebrate. Army engineers have celebrated the dinner ever since, in fact the husband was at a Waterloo Dinner the night before I started giving birth to the Moose. So a posse of engineers organised this tour to mark the hundredth anniversary of this dinner. Apparently the original plan was to have the dinner actually on Anzac Cove, but there's about a hundred of us going and the logistics were too much even for the engineers. So we're having it at a nearby hotel, it's for this dinner I made the necklace in the previous blog.

Don't worry, there has been some preparation. Five days of the tour will be on the battlefields, so I had to read Les Carlyon's excellent work on Gallipoli, it was a gripping read and I highly recommend it. I've also had a crack at reading a book on the history of Constantinople, but I keep falling asleep after getting through another couple of pages of the Sultan oppressing the peasants, and everyone is called Mehmet. I'll have to have another go at it on the plane.

And I've been trying to teach myself Turkish with an app called Duolingo. Sometimes I think I'm getting somewhere, most of the time I'm just depressed that there's another word I'm going to forget in an hour or two. It's not close to European languages at all, so I was starting from scratch. I'd like there to be Duolingo for tourists, I can't help but feel that knowing how to say we haven't got any elephants (Biz filler yok, actually, no I can't remember how to say that) is not going to help me very much. I do hope to run into some turtles (kaplumbaga!). But all the bits that modify words tack onto the ends, and not always predictably, and I can't hear the g with a thingo on it, and it's all a bit gruelling. I don't want to have to use tuvalet orumcek var (the toilet has a spider), I'm just hoping that lots of lutfen and tesekkurler ederim will get me sufficient brownie points to be going on with.

OK, time for boarding. I'm actually rather looking forward to just sitting, watching some movies, roughing out my numeracy lecture, doing some crochet (don't worry, the plastic hook got through the checkpoint. The different perspective that motherhood gives one. All I've got to do is think of a way of avoiding the husband draping his giant legs on me and I'll have a lovely time. Don't tell me if my children are involved in any kind of anything, I don't want to know until I'm back.

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June 8, 2015

Necklace o’ Squares

I done a necklace! I haven't done one for AGES, what with working and studying and kids managing to fit an an outrageous amount of extra curricular and making kilos of chocolate chip biscuits and moving upstairs. I'm going to a fancy military dinner next week, or possibly the week after, I really should pay more attention, and of course the outfit I plan to wear requires a rounded necklace, rather than the pendant type I tend to make.

And there it is. You'll notice that it's on my flashy new beading desk that I'm managed to clutter up extremely quickly. Yes, the renovation is finished, and you didn't hear about it because it was rather uneventful, which is excellent for living through but no good for blogging. Except for the shower screen, which I should have told you about, and the smoke detector which is too annoying for words and I'm worried that if I start writing about it I may actually set it off. And the painter's name is Silver. Either that or he's lost the battle with autocorrect.

I got terribly terribly efficient and went through all of my beading magazines and scanned all of the patterns I wanted to keep into Evernote, and I highly recommend it. You see, in my new work area, or the Lair as I like to think of it, I have ample shelf space and no desire to put anything on it. So the magazines all went out, and now I have this terrific system of filed patterns, searchable with tags and everything. When one wishes to produce a necklace based on a string of black agate squares, one merely searches the tag Square, and there's a pattern from Beadwork 2010 that fits the bill perfectly. The pattern was for the red square in the middle, but it scales down beautifully to 8mm rounds with size 15s and 1.5mm cubes to make the silver squares either side of the centre.

Do you want to see the Lair?

We put in an upstairs bedroom, and there was this space around the corner from the stairs and I baggsed it. Some amount of joinery later, and the kids are lucky to ever see me downstairs. To the point where the Moose has been known to email me goodnight. The curtain conceals, not a window, but an enormous amount of triangular storage space, all around the corner of the roof. It does require some stooping, but it tucks away ones various hoards of material, wool, coffee tables, craft stuff, suitcases, framing equipment, screwdriver collection and so on. IKEA has made a fortune out of me. Awesome doesn't even begin to describe it.

I don't know if I've got time to do earrings. Oh, I do have some that would match it, but they're not long and dangly and fancy. Hmm. Depends what my hair is doing that day, it's very temperamental and one never knows until one gets there.

Did I mention that the dinner is at Gallipoli? Yers. Expect to hear a bit more from me in the near future.

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February 27, 2015

The Chair Part One

Because I’m going back to work next week, and have to write some tutorials for the two hundred students I’m about to meet to stop them from tying me up, shoving me in a cupboard and running around the classroom in their underwear, because I’m starting a research project, because it’s AGM season and I have a whole lot of Treasury stuff to finish and reconcile, because I’m on the quest for the perfect bathroom mirror, because I’ve got to make a metric buttload of jam for the upcoming fete, hang on, I’ve lost track. Oh yes, I thought I’d renovate a chair.

I may have mentioned that we’re putting in an attic. We’re at that agonising point where I’m about to bid a fond farewell to the builders, but the painting isn’t finished, the wardrobe guy might be able to get drawings to me next week, the shower screen man had to go to a funeral so can’t fit me in for another fortnight and the alarm man has gone on holidays so can’t connect the smoke detector.

I’m sure we’ll move up there eventually. I plan to have a workspace in the new bit, and a new workspace needs the perfect chair. I’ve had the same chair at my desk (when I’ve had a desk, not much in the last decade) for as long as I can remember.

It was once one of a set. One of the fondest memories of my childhood is of our morbidly obese next door neighbour sitting fairly gently one on of these and smashing it to pieces. Precious moments.

Anyway at some point someone, probably my mother, painted this one white and gave it to me. It is just about due for its second paint job.

I don’t know if you’ve had a crack at this yourself. I’ve really only painted new stuff. I had a fair idea that sandpaper would be involved, any excuse to go to Bunnings really – did you know you can get these cute little pointy hand held sanders that you Velcro the sandpaper onto? A very comfortable lady’s sander you’d describe it as if you were irredeemably sexist. Excellent workout for the triceps as it turns out.

But the – how much do you sand? Just enough to rub off the stickers that tiny hands have put on there that have since become one with the paint? Get down into smoothing off the dents and chips? Half sand off the paint even though shabby chic has been and gone and I never liked it anyway?

I hoped to resolve these questions with a visit to the local paint shop, and even pick up a pot of paint so I could start Part Two. I foolishly chose one of those fancy shops which, as it turns out, are rather reluctant to sell you paint and would much rather point out very carefully how much of a feckless idiot you are for even contemplating such a project. “Do you even know what type of paint is on the chair right now?” asked the blonde assistant who, possibly from weeping out the back at man’s inhumanity to man, had a smudge of mascara under one eye, making it very difficult for me to concentrate on what she was saying. What would James Valentine’s form guide suggest in such a situation? Offer her a tissue? Come at her with a Wet Wipe? I went with what I was comfortable with, the slightly open mouthed stare. “That finish? Well, you’d need to apply this primer, then this crackle medium and a couple of layers of top coat, then sand it back, then another coat and then black wax it”. Ahahahaha. Ha. Yeah. Nah. Do they ever sell anything to anyone?

What she had convinced me of is that the paint should come off. It did appear that my mother just slapped on the one coat all those years ago, which meant that most of the paint was coming off very easily. Showing the original colour below. Originally, it had been stained a fetching olive green, not a colour you very often see in chairs any more.

This does mean that I need to let go of any idea I had of just roughly sanding it back and lacquering it. It looks like something the perpetrators of the Zombie Apocalypse would relax on after a hard day amongst the brains.

So my choices are to sand it enough to get a smooth surface, then prime it and paint it. Or sand it back enough to remove all trace of zombie and stain and lacquer it. At my advanced age I know myself well enough to realise that I’m capable of getting the larger surfaces smooth and a lot less green, but there’s no way I’m getting into those nooks and crannies even if I get involved in a whole lot more things to procrastinate about. So primer and paint it shall be.

No I don’t know what colour. Didn’t you read the title? I’m only up to Part One. I do hope there will be a Part Two, the desk I’m having put in isn’t one of those standing desks that are so very 2013. I’m going to have to wait for another burst of enthusiasm to come along.

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February 12, 2015

Six shades of Grey

I did think I’d have a lot more to tell you about renovating. I’ve put off renovating our house for years for a number of reasons – should we just go zen and chuck everything out and make the kids all sleep in the same bedroom? Would we ever get anything past the local council who likes to think of our suburb as a museum which shouldn’t have garages because when the houses were built there were no cars? But the main reason was the experiences of my friends who have been through a renovation themselves. One had to fire a builder half way through and have much of the work redone. One almost made it through to the end before having a minor nervous breakdown. One said it was worse than having cancer, and she’s had cancer. Twice.

But the kids are starting to take up a lot of space, and I’m studying and working and trying to do both without actually having a desk or a spot to put one and it was time. And apart from the council being predictably ridiculous and taking six months to approve something perfectly straightforward, it has been smooth as. I am going to write the project managers a glowing recommendation to put on their website. We’re nearly finished, my hallway no longer looks like this:

Well, actually, it does a bit, only with stairs and the odd plasterer. There is still quite a bit of tidying up to do. Which I’m sure will take eternal weeks before we can move up there and never come down. But I’m at the point where I have to choose stuff. Toilet, taps, tiles, paint colours, carpet. Ugh. How can anyone have a strong opinion about a toilet? Here’s the one I chose.

I did rather enjoy watching a selection of tradesmen deciding exactly where in the bathroom it should be located by drawing a circle on the ground, then squatting over it. They were a bit concerned about knee room, it is a tiny bathroom. Talk about attention to detail. Also, quad strength.

Anyway, I shall tell you about tiles. You go to a tile shop. They have a dizzying array of tiles. But you must always choose something whitish for the walls and something brown on the ground. I’m not sure why they bother having the rest of them, fills up the space, I guess. The first time I went in the sales assistant spent a long time agonising over the comparison between a large white wall tile and another large white wall tile that looked identical to me. Then showed me what must surely be the most boring brown tile on the face of the earth. I almost couldn’t look at it. I asked to look at something else and she again showed me what appeared to be the identical tile, only a bit more matte. I muttered some excuse about having to go and stab myself in the eye and fled.

I did, dear reader, venture back to that tile shop, because whores must have their trinkets and time was a ticking. I drew a far more vibrant shop assistant this time. Possibly too vibrant. She kept dragging me by the arm to look at more large white wall tiles, and you know how I feel about that kind of thing. Then when I managed to say “uh..” she’d shriek “you’re right! Come over here, you must look at this, you’ll love it!”. You know, don’t you, that I ended up with a large white wall tile and a brown floor tile, after quite a lot more dragging and shrieking. But they weren’t quite as boring as they could have been.

I should add, as a coda to that story, that tiles for quite a tiny bathroom will only just fit into the back of a Subaru station wagon.

At a rough calculation, they weighed four hundred kilos. “You dribe carepul, you too low” was the helpful advice the storeman at the tile shop gave me. He was quite right, I’m fortunate to still have an exhaust pipe. Lucky I had the Muffet to help me lug them into the house, grrl power.

And similarly with carpets. I actually wanted a green carpet, but was politely informed by the carpet lady that that was toasted insanity. Or words to that effect. To give her credit, she was right. The lighter green ones, when flung onto the daylit floor all looked the colour of something that may have come out of your nose. The mid greens looked disturbingly like astroturf. She only had plush in dark green, and while I loved the colour, it looked as though every bit of fluff and dandruff that had ever floated in the door had chosen to settle on that beautiful green square. Again, do they only keep them in stock to service the mentally disturbed of the Inner West? Or as some kind of solemn object lesson? But you’ll be pleased to know that there were choices other than brown. There was also grey.

I took home six different squares of grey carpet, having culled the selection down from well over ten. I’d gone into the shop imagining I’d get a wool carpet, because you know, natural good, plastic evil. I was quickly talked out of that. Our new bedroom has three skylights in it and apparently the new nylon carpets never ever ever fade, but wool will. And you go and try it, even the trés expensive wool feels scratchy and produces volumes of fluff, but the nylon is very cuddly indeed. I did say to the lady that I obviously wouldn’t be sitting on it, but that was a lie. The family overwhelmingly voted for the darkest grey, so the next stage was to pet test it.

No visible pet hair and any drool wiped right off. So that’s that done. Hang on, my phone’s ringing.

“Hello, this is Giselle from Carpets R Us. We’re out of stock of your carpet and it will be four months before new stock comes in from the outer asteroid belt. Would you like to come in and make another choice?”

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January 29, 2015

A Moment’s Peace

I may have mentioned my youngest son, I like to think of him as the Horror from Outer Space. My mother-in-law describes him as a dear little fellow, but he is the kind of child who is best in small doses. And I’ve just had two months of him. And today he went back to school.

Going back to school raised mixed emotions in him. On the one hand, he adores his school. On the other hand, a whole lot of new stuff. His school is all organised and had an introduction to your class morning last December, so he’s met his teacher and knows who is in his class (she’s new to the school and they seem to have given her all of the problem children). But will she like him? Will she make him sit next to someone he doesn’t like? Will she listen to his strenuous objections if this is the case? What kind of punishment will be handed out for strenuously objecting and will it make strenuously objecting worth it or not? Will these punishments be cumulative or will each objection start from a clean slate?

These concerns cause him to wake up before six which gave him plenty of time to start airing them. I get up early anyway, from natural inclination and also because builders start meandering through the hall a touch before seven and I like to be washed and clad before that happens. I thought a bath might be a soothing way to start the day, but the Horror never has any qualms about following me in there. “I wonder if she’ll start off with a timetable? Mr Pollard didn’t last year, but he did after four or five days because everyone wanted him to.” “I’m sure there’ll be some timetable,” I reassure him. They have language lessons, art lessons, music lessons, sports lessons with other teachers, that’s not going to be spontaneous. “Yes, but is she going to tell us? How far in advance? Will it be on the website or will she write it on the board?” “You know what? You’ll find out soon. Do you think you could go and polish your shoes and leave me in peace to have my bath?”.

Well, that worked for about thirty seconds. “Look, are these polished enough? I think they’re a bit tight. But I don’t mind wearing them for a few more weeks.” I avoid shoe shopping with the Horror, he has some kind of condition that invariably causes him to be thrown out of shoe shops. “Why are you spraying me with water?” I ask in my mildest tone. “Oh, sorry, I’m just making sure my hair looks very neat, I want to make the best impression. I’ve packed my lunch, I’ve got a carrot, an apple and a bread roll. I’ve also got my pencil case and an exercise book and my iPad, I think most people will forget to bring their iPads, but I’ve remembered. Do you think there’s anything else?” “No, that sounds fine,” I say. “Well, I’ve got my lunch, my pencil case and my iPad. I think there should be something else, don’t you think there should be something else?” “How about your sunhat?” “I KNEW IT!!!”. Well, that got rid of him for another thirty seconds. “Hey, do you think we could go to school now? We could wait in the coffee shop for school to open”. The gates weren’t due to open for over an hour and it takes us ten minutes to get there. I remain calm. “Get out,” I say calmly. “Get out now”.

After my bath I put him to work finding the Muffet’s school badges that she removed from her uniform approximately nine weeks ago and hasn’t seen since. I’m not sure how throwing boxes and hitting his sister with an exact replica of Voldemort’s wand was helping, but it kept him out of my hair for a bit (we didn’t find the badges). We did end up leaving early because he actually started ricocheting off the walls. I managed to talk them into a first day of school photo

Note the merry band of builders in the background, warming up for a jolly day of tossing old roof tiles from a great height into their truck. Their accuracy is impressive. If they were any other ethnicity than Aussie they’d be singing some rhythmic tile tossing song, but instead they’re not listening to an easy listening radio station.

Anyway, the car trip consisted of the Horror’s speech getting faster and faster and shriller and shriller, punctuated by his sister throwing drink bottles at him and the Moose trying to stop him from talking by reaching around from behind and pulling his cheeks back towards his ears. It’s a miracle we ever get anywhere alive. I eject him at school in the middle of a high pitched musing on the best spots to sit in the playground and which ones would now be vacated by last year’s departing sixth grade, interspersed with a discourse on whether you could really call an open box a locker if it didn’t even have a door, yet general usage referred to it as such. I could still see his mouth moving as he walked through the gate. I’m completely sure he will be fine and will have an awesome day. I’d better make sure there is substantial afternoon tea.

So after I get rid of the other two I am child free. I also don’t start work for another month and have only a few footling committee bits and pieces that need my attention. What I would normally do now is get a giant takeaway coffee, take it home, then lie on the loungeroom floor for a bit. But this is what my loungeroom floor currently looks like.

Actually quite a bit more like a bomb site than usual. So I treated myself to breakfast at my current favourite local, Single Rosetta.

The butter could have been less stony cold and there could have been more of a sourdough tang in the fruit toast, but I am fussy about my fruit toast. And the coffee was excellent. There was a terribly pretentious magazine for me to read, printed on matte paper with lots of tiny interviews with bands that I’m not sure actually exist, and little musings on how nice it is to have breakfast, and isn’t it rotten when all of your friends want to go to a noisy pub that only serves free range chips and beer made in their sink and you just want to lie on your vintage couch that you found in the Mosman cleanup in your hemp pyjamas and hate watch American Idol. It was very serene.

But now I’m back to reality, and I think my ears have stopped ringing. I shall attend to my housewifely duties, dust the plaster off the kitten and go and choose some bathroom tiles. And then I shall be ready to hear all about the first day of school.

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December 1, 2014

The Most Comfortable Chair in the World

Floriade wasn't quite what I expected it to be. Yes, there were tulips. Also pansies and decorative herbs and that's where I run out of floral vocabulary, so various other flowers, possibly including lilies.

There was a smidgeon of art, like the abandoned car complete with creepy scarecrow passengers covered in foliage. Garden gnomes which the public could paint for a moderate fee. Some of the flower beds were arranged to make amusing shapes and pictures. But you had to take the word of the signage, you could only see this artistry from above. And the only way to get above was to get on the Ferris Wheel, for which there was a hefty line and those things freak me out anyway, just doesn't seem natural. So what did I expect? I dunno, perhaps a little less in the way of bare paddock. Maybe some signage telling us what the flowers actually were so I could make my blog post more informative.

But there were also little sprinklings of market stalls and we happened upon the stall for the World's Most Comfortable Chair right at about the time when we all felt that a nice sit was just what we could do with. Of course I didn't sit in them, I perched on an iron bench far enough away from the rest of my loved ones that I could pretend I had nothing to do with them. But they sat there long enough that they got sucked in by the spiel of mesmeric James, and the comfort of the chair, and we ended up buying one.

Days turned into nights, the weeks and months passed, the renovation FINALLY got underway, we got a kitten, and still no Most Comfortable Chair. Had we been had? I was finally persuaded by my most persistent child, the Horror from Outer Space, to hunt for the receipt AND I found it. I gave them a call. “Floriade?” they said. “Was it James?” they said. “Huh. I'll call you back” they said. The long and the short of it was the James had forgotten us. It arrived two days later. Flat packed.

Look, I'm usually pretty good with a flat pack, I know now to allow extra time for assembling things inside out and not to curse too much while disassembling it, at least the first time. But this thing was all ropes and the worst set of instructions I've seen that wasn't obviously a bot translation from the Chinese. “Attach with included hardware”, I mean really. You might as well just say “you're on your own, sucker”. Even the photo of the assembled Comfortable Chair was slightly out of focus, and about five centimetres square.

The main problem was that the holes in the frame for the ropes to go through were slightly too snug for the ropes to go through. Muffet was at her most helpful. “Burn the ends of the rope to melt them”. Which is not bad advice really, except that the ropes are about two centimetres thick and I'm a bit short of flamethrowers. As a side note, safety matches have got far too safe. I want the option of matches that light up with such a flare that you drop the first one in fright and set fire to your socks. Non-safety matches, if you will. I ended up using some duct tape that I found in the bushes, dropped by the roof vacuuming man who had lost the will to go on after encountering a century's worth of rat carcasses in the chimney.

See what a lot of help I get?

I did get it up in the end. It's suspended from a chain I threw over the roof beam, which seemed like a fairly secure way to hang it. But then I've watched the Horror sit in it, and he's a young man who can't just sit. He swings it and wriggles and rocks it backwards and forwards and I'm a bit concerned that the chain is going to chainsaw its way through the beam.

But I have to admit. It is very comfortable.

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November 28, 2014

Clearing the Decks

Yes, hasn’t it been a while. And I want to get on and tell you all about why half of our roof is in a skip bin in the driveway and there’s a man up there under the tarpaulin who looks like he should be pulling soy chai lattes in Surry Hills rather than up in my roof with a team of unexpectedly well groomed henchmen. But before I do that, I feel that I should mention a few of the circumstances that have prevented me from blathering at you in my accustomed manner.

1. Work. Yes, that’s right. I’ve been kind of pretending to work for quite a while now, popping in to sprinkle some scientific knowledge on a bunch of fledgling primary teachers once or twice a week. But I got a bit over excited and was teaching two six week courses plus a thirteen weeker which saw me teaching four days a week and my dears, I don’t know how you non housewives do anything other than work, pop into the supermarket on your way home and do a load of washing at 10 at night. On top of that was a rather frantic week and a half in which I marked sixty reading logs, sixty ePortfolios, eight twenty page units of work, sixty Sociology exams and eighty Science 1 exams. And look at what I had to put up with.

I mean, really. By the end of it I had petrified into a lumpy C shape, it took me days to be able to stand up straight again.

2. Study. My boss suggested that as I had a job of sorts teaching university students, it might be rather topping if I actually had some education qualifications. Accordingly I enrolled myself into a Graduate Certificate of University Teaching. This semester’s work has included quite a lot of crapping on about stuff that has happened at work. Or, as they put it, “reflecting on your teaching practice”. It’s kind of exactly the same as blogging only with an actual point and without most of the whimsy. Some may have sneaked in, I don’t know. I could have plonked it up here, but how many of you really want to know about the value of unintended learning outcomes and how to assess them? Yes, I thought so.

3. Kitten. I did think that once I got a kitten I’d start blogging about that, but when it actually happened it turned out to be vastly entertaining to watch and really very dull to write about, so I spared you. “oh, look, he tried to jump on the lounge and missed!”, “see, the dog is running away from him!”, “oh, sweet, he has a dead spider stuck to his chin!”. You get the idea. I couldn’t do it to you. Yes, you can have a picture.

4. Baking frenzy. Once I actually finished work I had to catch up with my baking. The poor children were reduced to eating fruit! So in this last week I’ve made chocolate chip biscuits, peanut brittle, chocolate brownies, caramel icecream, ginger biscuits, a batch of yoghurt, bread rolls, orange and poppyseed friands and my first fruitcake, which is almost gone. I am again ready to fill lunchboxes and entertain guests. The housewife is back.

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August 9, 2014

The Big Rehearsal

Possibly the most ambitious thing we've ever undertaken, our choir is performing a work at the Sydney Town Hall tomorrow written by our very own conductor. Now, when someone you know quite well goes and writes a massive piece of music, one tends to gnaw at the under lip a little, reserving judgement. I think all of us in the choir did a little until we started to get to know the piece. Much to our extreme amount of relief, the thing is fabulous and we're very much looking forward to singing it tomorrow. Which meant today was the Big Rehearsal.

The piece is a War Requiem, officially endorsed as a Centenary of ANZAC event. It's based on some fairly painstaking research done on the letters written by soldiers to their mothers during the First World War and gives a hint at the horror of war in the actual words of soldiers and the anguish of their mothers at home. Pretty intense. The last bit has the ANZAC Ode set to music and I could only get through it today without having to put my head between my knees by concentrating very hard on the cable knit of the cardigan one of the second violins was wearing. I wonder if she'll be wearing it in the performance?

Obviously, we've been learning it for ages, but today was the first time we got the choir, the guest choir, the children's choir, the soloists and the orchestra together. So today was really the first time we've heard it properly. Gosh it's good.

A word about the orchestra. When we decided to do this thing, about eighteen months ago (though it has been simmering in his fevered brain for much longer than that) it had quite a modest orchestra. But as it became real and started taking shape, our conductor kept getting an itch to add new instruments. Not little ones, like recorders or penny whistles or kazoos. A harp. More bassoons. A celeste (we talked him out of a real one). Every time he adds another one we on the committee smile a tight lipped smile and write a frantic letter to another government to send more money. Fortunately there were quite a few countries involved in the First World War, those who've donated can be found in the program, which you can purchase at the door when you turn up tomorrow.

I arrived at the rehearsal late (Muffet's netball, they lost 13-7) to find the hall locked. A fellow alto happened to be outside too and being more forthcoming than me, like most of the human race, rapped smartly on the door which ended up with us being let in by Ataturk. Not in spirit form, the lovely chap singing him. We are very fortunate in our soloists, especially the emergency tenor. We have a lovely Turkish soprano who sings very expressively, risking knocking her music off the stand with her gorgeous balletic hands. The other soprano sings (beautifully) with her arms firmly crossed across her ribs, as if worried her spleen is going to leap out and join the clarinet section. And this is what we do with basses who don't behave themselves.

We have a large percussion section this time, including a giant bass drum whose job it is to be distant gunfire and shelling. We're going to put him essentially under the stage, which means that, as our conductor put it so delicately, the sound will be coming up through our underpants. The trombones, whose music seems to consist of a series of 32 bar rests, gave themselves an early lunchtime and waded out of a pool of their own saliva. I can't believe they don't bring dropcloths. Or a bucket.

Our conductor knows us well, and hasn't given us too many tricky bits. We were having a bit of trouble with the timing of a cry of “Mother!” So our conductor demonstrated it by punching a tenor (I wish he'd lay off the tenors, they're fragile and a scarce commodity) and getting him to say “Ouch!”, it was very effective and we've got it right ever since. I was describing this technique to the Horror from Outer Space (he has a professional interest, he's in a percussion group that often has timing issues). He wanted to know why on earth anyone would be singing “Mother!”. I said “if you were a soldier scared on the battlefield with shots being fired all around you, who would you call out to?”. He looked at me in amazement. “Batman, of course. He'd be much more likely to save you than your mother”.

It's been a jolly fine rehearsal, we've all worked out how to stick out fingers in our ears while not dropping our music for the bit with whistles. The emergency trumpet has had a show off, playing the Last Post at triple speed, which was simultaneously very funny and kind of offensive to those of us with military ties, I was very conflicted. I was soothed by the familiar sound of musical rehearsals everywhere, that of the regular clatter of a 2B pencil hitting the ground.

We've all stocked up on our lozenges of choice, I favour Butter Menthols, while those around me are going for traditional Fishermen's Friend to ward off the nasty cough that appears to be going around. I've ironed my white shirt and found my musical socks for tomorrow. I hope the poor conductor has found someone to massage his cramping conducting hands and that everyone has a good night's sleep and remembers to bring their music tomorrow. All you have to do is come and hear us. Tickets are on sale at the door of Sydney Town Hall from a bit after 1pm with the thing slated to kick off at 3. Come along and be part of a World Premiere! It'll be tops, promise.

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July 5, 2014

Watching the Soccer

A rare childfree weekend, rather unfortunately timed in the middle of the exciting bit of the World Cup. And an opportunity to go and watch my dear husband play soccer his very self. No really, having spent decades doing this, here's what you do.

You need a folding chair. You need an extra jacket because you'll never be as cold as you'll be watching soccer, even if the sun is out. You'll need a hat with a visor, that winter sun will give you even more eye wrinkles. And you'll need a fair bit of entertainment, you'll be there for a good two hours and some of it, if you'll credit it, isn't terribly enthralling.

I've brought my constant companion, my iPad mini. My plan is to revise the marks and comments I've given to student presentations through the week, start marking the written unit plans that have started to come in, look over a module or two of the course I'm supposed to be studying. I've already had a chat with the Moose in Greece, but as soon as I offered to turn on the camera so he could watch his father play soccer he had to go and have breakfast. In reality I'll probably play a bit of Farmville and hang out on Twitter.

I've also brought my knitting bag with a selection of wool. I have forgotten the circular needles I bought against the advice of the lady in the knitting shop who said it was perfectly simple to knit a beanie on a set of six double ended needles. Or eight, I forget. Either way, I won't be teaching myself to use them this afternoon, but I do have a crochet hook, I could start another beret.

Yes, I suppose I should be watching the soccer. But here's what I can see right now.

I've been here for more than half an hour and all I've seen is a lot of stretching and about a kilometre of strapping tape applied. Also heard quite a bit a sage advice given, kick the ball to the feet, pass it around, remember to have a shot. Most of these guys have been playing for about forty years, you think they would have got the hang of that kind of thing by now.

If we win this game and every other game, we're guaranteed to be top of the table. Our fate is entirely in our own hands says the husband, ignoring a lifetime of experience of how soccer works.

The husband is playing injured. He was contemplating not playing at all, that's how injured he is. He said his hamstring should be Ok so long as he doesn't sprint. Have a guess what he's been doing. Go on, you never will. I keep expecting his leg to split open and spill its contents on the ground. Then it will match the front of his other leg where he's actually torn one of the quadricep muscles off the bone, causing it bunch up and look like a tumour. Play a team sport, it's good for your health.

Actually, it's very pleasant, sitting comfortably by the Cooks River as the shadows lengthen on a perfect winter afternoon.

Opposition keeper just jiggled slowly past me to gather in the ball. I suppose you don't get much exercise being keeper, and if you carry a bit of extra weight, you're just blocking that bit more of the goal. It makes sense.

Opposition score. Probably because husband has very sensibly taken himself off, they just can't cope without him. Having seen so much World Cup I kind of feel like I need to see the replay.

A bit of aggressive play up front by a petite man in a ponytail who makes a living, I'm reliably informed, repairing woodwind instruments. Tensions are running high in the top end of our team. Some language unsuitable for the kiddies. It does sometimes bring out the caveman in the most mild mannered. But they did almost get a goal several times, it was quite exciting.

Put your name on the ball. Another classic from the lexicon. Drop! Drop! Boys, lets start enjoying it, lets get hungry. Space! Man on, one of the first ones I learnt. Up the line. Pressure. Who's got the far post?

Half time and its one nil, but not our way. As always, a scrum of little boys appears from nowhere to play penalties in the now vacant goal. The shadows have lengthened past me, causing me to zip up my polar fleece. I may be compelled to go for a brisk walk. Around the field of course, wouldn't want to miss anything.

A few free kicks being awarded, not malicious I don't think, but the brains underneath those grey heads are moving considerably faster than the camphorated legs. One of our players advises everyone to refrain from Doing a Suarez, causing general merriment. Especially as it really hasn't been that kind of game, I've at no point felt that this one will end up with the police being called. Some cross words, certainly.

There's a body on the field. I wonder if they have stretchers? He's close enough to the side to be dragged off by the ankles. Ah no, an application of the magic water and he's back in action.

Uh oh, husband's putting himself back on, but they need a bit of speed up front. Oh noes, another goal has been scored, and also not by us. Our backs have slowed considerably. Annnnnnd it's the final whistle. “Ah, f… you”, says one of our team, warmly embracing an opposition scorer. Well, that's nice, all friends at the end. I didn't get any knitting done after all, but a deeply pleasant afternoon nonetheless. Do I see beer being handed around? Excuse me for a moment.

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