Apparently I took photos once. These are from February and I just found them on my camera now. Stop judging me! It burns! Anyway, in February we paved the side courtyard. It’s fully enclosed for some reason, including mesh over the sides and top, so we call it the cat courtyard as it’s handy for locking them inside while still leaving them some outside. Previous to this paving it was completely overgrown with grass, weeds and the decapitated corpses of tiny mice. My cats are horrible and do not deserve a nice paved courtyard.
The truck arrives to bring sand. Apparently you need a lot of sand for paving. Also pavers, but we already had those. Luckily for you I am sparing all other equipment photos. Who do you think I am, pioneer woman?
HE BRINGS ME PRESENTS
YOU LEFT IT UNGUARDED
(Please ignore our ghetto cyclone mesh fencing and gravel driveway. I know the industrial look is in style, but I don’t think this is quite what they meant. Fencing quotes are on the list. It’s a long list.)
What? It’s mine now. It was unguarded. Also, apparently, delicious.
Paving complete. Sort of. Oh, so the sand goes into all those cracks? Gotcha.
Yes, we understand some sort of noisy activity is going on in our courtyard. We don’t care.
I drove home tonight through an incredibly thick sea fog. It was quite impressive, really. What sort of fog rolls in at 5pm? Don’t fogs usually come early in the morning or late at night? I think it must be a Portent. Of Doom, of course. I don’t think there are any other kinds of Portents. Perhaps next there will be a plague of frogs. Or boils. Or frogs with boils. Although I may not see them, due to the fog. Am I going around in circles? It’s the fog. I was lucky to make it home at all.
And here at home, shrouded in foggy gloom, there was a Little Dog. Actually he’s quite a Big Little Dog now. He weights 58kg, which makes him the Biggest Little Dog we’ve ever grown. And he’s doing it in fits and starts, like a teenage boy who suddenly grows out of all his clothes and eats all the Weetbix. Would you like to see him?
Well, he’s somewhere in there. Actually, he’s #5 in line. Did you guess him? And can you see why we still call him a Little Dog? This is at his breeders’ house, where we leave him to gallivant around the city/country/globe. In the lineup, his mother is #1 and his sister is next to him at #4. That puppy is no relation, but is Super Cute and when we came to pick up our dog, we almost took her home instead. Because: SUPER CUTE. But has a lot of attitude, as you might expect from one so little who can hold her own in that crowd.
What else? I woke up the other morning distressed about an eBay purchase gone wrong, and lay there fretting about what I was going to say in a sternly worded email and whether it was worth reversing the Paypal or just letting the money go. Then I woke up a little bit more and realised I had dreamt the whole thing. In my view, it was as bad as dreaming about work, then having to get up and go and do the work you were dreaming about (which has also happened, clearly). For the record, all of my eBay purchases are going swimmingly, thanks for asking.
The cats are fine and because it is colder than a witch’s tit here in Melbourne, they have taken to sleeping on the bed. With us. And because they are cats, they don’t know how to share. In fact I can probably blame my stressful eBay dream on them, because when I woke up from that I was distorted into a kind of pretzel shape due to cats pressed against me in uncomfortable positions. In addition, I was freezing because most of my top half was out from under the duvet; somehow when one of my cats curls up on the bed, he magically locks all of the bedding around him in place. There is no way you are dragging any part of that duvet out from under that cat; you’d just better hope you had enough before he got there. And you NEVER DO.
Guess what? It’s May. MAY. I don’t know where the hell this year is going. Anyway, I’ve been in New Zealand for the past three weeks, which explains my complete lack of internet-ness. The previous weeks… well, I’ve got nothing. Disappearing! It’s what we do! Anyway, now I’m back and I have some sort of hideous throat infection which has become an horrific sinus cold thing. Why am I always getting sick lately? I remember when I was never sick. Never! I took the train by god and no germs could touch me! Now, however, I have been coughing weakly and staring with great suspicion at anything which looks like food. Which is to say, anything. This has only been compounded by the smell of my kitchen, which I have not walked into for a week. You think I am joking but I am not. We came back from holiday to find the power had gone off and tripped a fuse, which meant everything had been off. Including the fridge and freezer. For a week. A WEEK. Thank god Mr T dealt with all of that because in my sickened state I couldn’t even face it. We have three fridges and two freezers and all of them were mouldy. Currently they are filled with nothing but giant mounds of baking soda and, funnily enough, ground coffee. The coffee is really doing the trick. There’s a tip for you, should you ever need to throw out $500 worth of spoiled meat. And I sincerely hope you don’t.
Little dog is back, and is… pretty big now actually. He went to his breeder’s house and played 23 hours a day with his sister and three other dogs. He’s exhausted. Also skinny, as he walks away from his bowl (an only dog, obviously) and the other four fling themselves towards the unattended food like homing missiles. Three weeks and he never learned that if he turned his back on dinner, it was NEVER THERE when he came back. The cats, on the other hand, are fat and glossy. I have no idea what they were feeding them but they are in far better condition than when we dropped them off. Sushi? Avocado oil? I should find out, they look like a shampoo ad.
WHY didn’t this post? Goddamit. I’m retrospectively dating this so that it appears on Friday. BECAUSE I CAN.
You may recall Victoria had a locust plague, which barely reached Melbourne. Here is our contribution. Mr T trapped this in a vase because “I thought you might want to see it”. I didn’t, really. But now you have to see it as well.
Happy Australia Day!
Wednesday is a very strange day to have a public holiday. NOT that I’m complaining.
Here is a caterpillar. I know, right? Is it not big? Is it not brown? Does it not have big pretend-yellow eyes on its bum? I don’t know whether it’s poisonous to touch, but I still feel all righserq3409tulr
Confusion reigns! We currently have one (1) dog. Our friends also have one (1) dog, specifically a puppy. We imported it from New Zealand for them. It’s just the sort of people we are.
This is the puppy. She is deceptively still in this photo, and is chewing nothing. This happens seldom. Let’s just say my puppy has been a low-maintenance joy in comparison. She’s lovely though. Lucky for her.
We swim together!
The water looks terrible here; it’s filled with silt from the recent storms and rain flooding into the bay.
I climb rocks!
This is a very different beach, down past Lakes Entrance in Victoria; we camped here for New Years. Well, not JUST here. A little bit further inland, funnily enough.
OK let’s just post some photos, slowly easing back in. Gentle, now. Eeeeasy does it. Don’t startle the WordPress.
I am a big dog now.
I got neutered. See?
This is like one of those optical illusion photos – you have to squint and sort of cross your eyes to see what’s going on. Unless you are familiar with how dogs sleep, then it will make perfect sense to you.
Happy New Year internet! Cue tiny glittery trumpets, and party hats, and party poppers with streamers (and may I say that last New Years Eve, someone set one of those off right in my face. This year they were setting off marine flares. I kept my distance.) I do have lots of photos of my entirely too short summer camping getaway(s), but as aforementioned I have an iPhone and as of about 20 minutes ago I now know how to take screenshots. Cue the text messages between me (walking through Costco, stung with the consumer desire to BUY THINGS ANY THINGS NEW THINGS, and emailing photos of said things to Mr. T); and Mr T (at home in a slightly more rational state of mind). Note Mr. T had previously looked at watches at Costco, so that comment is not entirely out of context.
And this right here sums up our entire relationship.
I should note that for full context (and slightly more value from this blog entry) you have to have seen The Castle. And not just to make sense of this exchange; but because it’s genius. The movie, not the exchange. That’s pretty pedestrian really.
…. This is going to be one of those things that’s only funny to me, isn’t it? Oh well. As usual, I amuse myself. Dog photos on the way, promise!
I never know what to do after a long absence. Sidle back into the room and hope you don’t notice? Give long and bewildering explanations? I think I’ll just launch right into a stream-of-consciousness rant. Then you’ll feel right at home.
The little dog is fine, and has been de-knackered. Yep, it was time for him to lose his bollocks. He was sad. He also had to wear a giant cone which caused much hilarity. Not so much for him, but for us. I actually did wear the cone, and it’s quite echoey in there. Also you can’t reach your face, like to scratch it or put chocolate in your piehole, which makes you feel like you have tiny tyrannosaurus rex arms. You also can’t chew on the stitches in your testicles, which is not usually a problem for me but was something which the little dog was very intent on doing.
I got an iPhone for work. My boss has been trying to press an iPhone on me for at least a year now, so that I will have all-hours access to email. For this exact reason, I have dodged an iPhone for that length of time. However I was not able to get out of the latest round of upgrades, so I have an iPhone. I love it. Apart from the work emails, which HOLY GOD STOP EMAILING ME. I email people 2 hours ahead and 4 hours behind me (not the same people, clearly) (TIIIME TRAVEL) so it never stops. But apart from that, it’s all good. Anyway, I had the phone for less than a week and Mr T opened up our bedroom curtains, which overlook the back yard. And stood there. “What?” I said, and saw… my phone lying on the concrete. THE HELL. It was fine, a few scuffed corners not withstanding (a nice buff with a nail buffer thing sorted that out) but obviously I went in search of the little dog. Who I found further down the yard, on the lawn, chewing on the lovely wool felt case I had bought for the phone. BAD DOG. Although I do like the way he just discards the phone on the way down, intent on the nice snuggly case. All of this to say: I have a new phone and a bad dog with no bollocks.
Apart from that, nothing else is happening. Apart from this ad here, which is currently playing at the rate of twice per ad break during the stellar movie Bad Santa:
Now I like this song, so I hum tunelessly along when it is on. And Mr T and I have taken to having discussions about what would happen if we owned the product being advertised; to wit, a web enabled printer that you can send photos to directly. “Oh, darling, someone is sending us a photograph! How lovely! What is it?…. why, it’s ANOTHER PHOTO of someone’s genitalia. I believe this is from David. How thoughtful!” I don’t know about your house, but in ours, any ink and photo paper would be sadly wasted on blurry close-ups of our hilarious friends’ nether regions. Perhaps we’re not really the target market.
Reading:
Stephen King, "Everything's Eventual". I found this abandoned in a suitcase.
Listening:
The snores of the Little Dog, who sadly seems just as loud and snorty at night as the Brown Dog.
Watching:
Endless episodes of UFC, which is some sort of fighting... thing. Do not want.
Eating:
I'm having a bit of an avocado binge. The Little Dog likes them too.
Liking:
Renovations! Apart from the cost of said renovations. Let's not think about that part.
Pondering:
If there is dirty washing in the basket, the cats ignore it... but if it is CLEAN, one of them has made a nest in there within 10 minutes. Five minutes, if it's black clothes.
