Thoughts

I have started watching Sleepy Hollow (TV series).

I would quite like it, but I'm struggling to get past the main hero's ridiculous name.

Ichabod Crane. What the everloving fuck?


Other than that, life is okay. Hubby is considering taking a job that would have him move to the US for two years. I am not necessarily going to go with. I'm a bit shaky about the whole idea as I am unsure what effect this long-distance thing will have on our marriage. I've already done the long distance thing and it - quite frankly - sucked hairy dog's balls. (do dogs have hair balls? I guess they must, or why the expression?) I'm hoping it will fall through or come with untenable conditions etc. I don't want to be essentially alone in a city where I have no close friends and no family either, with just the cat for company. But moving to the US for me is fraught. I don't think I need to mention here how hard it is for a woman to get a new job once she reaches a "certain age", which I am rapidly approaching. We'll see.

Sporadic poster is sporadic.

The weather is lovely today. Probably the last nice day of autumn. We went out this morning to look at a house for rent in our area. We need more space and it certainly had that in spades (a little too much - all I could think about was how much extra furniture we'd need). And why is it that real estate agents won't give you the skinny on whether pets are allowed? "It's decided by the owner upon application" is not an answer. Why would I fill out a lot of revealing details on a sheet only to be knocked back because of one adorable cat? (though this house did have a child's sandpit out back, which we thought Barry would think the best thing ever) As rental properties go, it was pretty good. Heating, a/c in the bedroom, two bathrooms. But there was a lot of dark wood up the walls in the older part of the house, and very little in the way of carpet (which I think is essential in this climate in winter). I don't think we'll be applying for it. Though there was an established veggie patch down the back AND a lemon tree (something I badly want). It just didn't say "home" to me, and I've rented before, so it's not that, though I admit that may be part of it. 

We were, for a long time, wanting to move out of Melbourne to Woodend. A small town, lovely, just to the north west of the city. It would have been a considerable commute, which in the end, was the problem. Even though housing is much more affordable there, the savings would have been lost in time and the cost of petrol/train fares to get to work every day. *sigh* We both earn decent wages, I don't understand why we can't seem to afford a decent house in a decent suburb. Recently a three bed, one bath house on about 400 sqm went for $1,065,000 in the next suburb! I don't get it. Who pays this kind of money?

Xmas at home 2012

Xmas was pleasant enough last year but we vowed that this year we would spend it at home, just the two of us and the cat.

So many Christmases in my life I have wished for less. Less family, less conflict, less resentment and so on. Sometimes less is more.

So we slept in. Then when we got up, Hubby made himself scrambled eggs with smoked salmon while I had a slightly more reserved bagel with cream cheese.  But I felt like champagne, so champagne was had.



There was present opening, where we both thoroughly spoilt each other, plus presents from his family in England and the cat chased after his new mouse which made bird noises (confusing much?).




Then we watched some television and It’s a Wonderful Life. Required Xmas viewing IMO and after a few glasses of champagne, I may have set a record for number of tears shed during the movie.

And Santa looked on from the tree. He’s in board shorts because he’s an Aussie Santa and it’s too hot for fur-covered suits here!




We may have left it a bit late, but around midday Hubby decided it was time to cook the roast (his big breakfast might have hindered his motivation a bit there! ;) . He made my favourite – stuffed roast chicken with potatoes parsnip and carrot. The recipe he used is something I love: roast chicken with whisky spiked gravy and we used an organic free-range Barossa valley chicken, which was expensive, but possibly worth it (I’m still a little unsure whether the price differential to other organic free-range chooks of $10 was justified). While I set the table.




And this is the spread in the end.



(hubby likes to break up the chicken to serve – I personally think carving it before bringing it to the table for admiration is sacrilege! We compromised)

Now an anti-recommendation for the Scrabble Xmas crackers: There are NO JOKES in them! Appalling! Luckily we’d watched the Vicar of Dibley Xmas special the night before and I retold the jokes from there (What do you do when you see a space man? Park in it man) to good effect. Very disappointing.  Xmas REQUIRES there to be groans from lame jokes from the crackers. A couple of years ago, we even scored some that were in Chinglish which made them even more funny, but I prefer the classic groaners.

For afters, we had a steamed pud from Burch and Purchese (rather confusingly pronounced “Purchase”), which didn’t look like much beforehand, but after two hours steaming was by far the best pud I’ve ever had (the addition of custard and cream didn’t harm it either) and there has been fights over the leftovers of that!

All that was left to do after that was to clean up and then watch more Xmas telly and pat our full bellehs. I may have fallen asleep mid-afternoon, but it had nothing to do with the port I consumed with the pud! ;)

The one with the holiday in glorious Western Australia

Ahh the sun setting in the west. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. And while I’ve been saying it for years to my hubby, this is the first time he’s acknowledged that I am right about it. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. But I wanted to start with a beautiful picture and Monkey Mia is certainly lovely.

We were essentially forced to holiday in WA because of my father’s estate. Despite insisting (and hoping desperately) that she would qualify for a loan, my sister is unable to buy Dad’s house. To be honest I’d have been shocked if she did. She’s hardly worked her whole life, instead choosing to have children and live off the govt payments. And she has a drug habit, which I hate, but have come to accept as something she’ll probably never throw. Sadly, it’s not a drug that she can really overdose on, or this would have been over one way or another years ago. She would have ODed or hit rock bottom and got clean. So instead she oscillates from user to not, according to events in her life and how much money she has.

Anyway, the sad conclusion is that the house must be sold. We’d love to keep it ourselves, but we live on the wrong coast for it to be any real use to us. A four-hour flight plus a three-hour drive does not make a weekend getaway. So we decided to spend a week of our holiday cleaning it out and preparing it for sale. We thought it would be a big job, but we were shocked at the state of it when we got there.

You see, I had told my sister that she should take her children there for a seaside holiday before it was prepped for sale. And she basically trashed the place. A three-day job turned into a five-day nightmare because of the five bags of unwashed clothing and linen she left there, the dog sh*t all over the floor (INSIDE) and the unwashed dishes (a lot of which went straight in the bin). Like everything in her life, she had a little disaster which left the dog locked in on his own for four days and when she returned to get him, she had to turn around and leave straight away without cleaning up the mess. The less said about it the better. Except that she also took a lot of the stuff that was valuable and I imagine, pawned it.

Darren was a brick through all this. It broke my heart going back there to sell the house. And going back there knowing Dad wouldn’t be sitting at his table waiting for us as well. The new Indian Ocean Drive has opened up – finally – and it was a lovely and easy drive up there. Dad spent years talking about “when the road comes through” and how much prices would go up and how much easier it would be to get there. Well it opened less than a month after he died. He never saw it.

Sunset at Jurien Bay.

I have to rave about how I love that town. Everyone was sympathetic and helpful. For city folk (which they continually called us), it was truly lovely to have people help for no other reason than to be helpful, to refer us to others if they could help more and generally be all round nice people. Also, the weather was AMAZING. It’s winter. Well, it was late Autumn at the time. And the days were sunny and 23C or more, the whole week. Thankfully. As Dad had a huge double shed full of crap and we filled two 6m skip bins of rubbish from the house and shed. And still left the shed half-filled with stuff for my sister as she feels a lot of stuff Dad had is nicer than what she currently has.

So anyway, after a week of beautiful weather while we worked until we fell over (literally), and I struggled to sleep because of the emotional stress, the weather turned on us when we finally got to drive off on our holiday.

We saw this on the way. We dream of becoming Grey Nomads before we are actually grey. I’ve been tossing up the idea of using the money from Dad’s house to make it happen – we’re both due long service leave in five years, so we can take six months without losing our jobs, which is pretty awesome.

(holiday story TBC tomorrow. I have to go to bed now)

I got in trouble from Gamiila

…so have decided it’s high time for a catchup post.

I have to admit that the main reason I haven’t been posting very much is that life has been… ordinary since my last post. I have a friend in Perth whose habit is to shut down and stop communicating when things are crappy for her (which seems to be more and more common, and I often have to reach out to make sure she’s okay). Anyway, I seem to be doing the same with my LJ. I think I have nothing to say, but the reality of it is that I (feel I) have nothing happy to say.

Firstly, we have given up trying to have a baby. The pathology on the embryo that I lost in December came back really bad. Heartbreakingly. Not one, but two genetic abnormalities and the report's comment basically said it was due to maternal age. I was 40 at the time. The obstetrician told me that we could keep on trying, as the eventually one egg would be good, but she'd known couples to have 6-10 failed pregnancies like mine before finally having a healthy baby. The other choice was IVF, where they could choose a healthy embryo. Since the emotional and physical toll of both of those options are completely unappealing to me/us, and we'd really only been trying to have a baby because I was out of time, we decided to give it up and just focus on enjoying our lives as they are and stop torturing ourselves trying to have a baby (that we may not even like or enjoy having).

Life's a crapshoot and in this case I left it too late and we lost. *shrug* I was never that keen on parenthood anyway - the only time I desperately want it is when someone near to me has a little baby, and I'm well aware that those impulses are hardcoded into our makeup. :/ There is a lot less hoping and then disappointment, but I do feel a little sad every time I think about it and revisit the decision often. I guess, like a lot of missed moments in life, I'll always wonder what if...

To be honest though, the child I want is my bridesmaid Ali’s, I’m pretty sure that a child that Darren and I had would not be as clever, attractive or precocious. It would probably be ugly (neither of us are model material) and cranky (Darren has the worst temper, and I can be very reactive and stubborn), though I have no doubt it would be smart. So I’m just going to content myself with getting cuddles when I visit (while trying to avoid the head lice she proudly announced she may have) and just watching her grow. And then being glad that I’m not going to have to parent her through puberty, which is sure to be a nightmare.

Following on from this, I got a phone call a couple of weeks ago from a much-loved friend who got married a couple of months after I did. She’s ringing to tell me she’s pregnant. I knew from the moment I got the call, because we are mostly net friends and hardly ever speak on the phone, or we meet up in person. Actually, a lot of my friendships are like that these days. Anyway, her accidental pregnancy, while wonderful, is – if I’m completely honest – a bit of a blow. I know she won’t have the same problems as me as she’s ten years younger, and they’ll have a happy, healthy baby. So I’m happy for her, but it stings a little as well. I don’t think I’d be human if it didn’t.

So that’s been one of the things that I need to speak about. I went back on the Pill in March, when I turned 41. It did make things easier though as we had a holiday planned an no-one wants to greet Aunt Flo on holiday! (holiday post to follow)

Look at the size of that thing

What Cyclone Yasi (currently bearing down on the North Queensland coast) would look like if it was over the US.

I don’t know who in QLD ran over a black cat, but they’ve had some serious bad luck lately.

I never believed it could get worse.

The rain still hasn’t stopped in QLD and it’s positively biblical in some parts. The water is now threatening the state capital, Brisbane. There are 32 suburbs on flood alert.

Check out this news report: cars piling up in central Toowoomba. When I first heard there’d been flash flooding in Toowoomba, I couldn’t work out how it had happened.I’ve been there a few times, the town is at the top of a range on all sides. But there’s a hollow with a stream running through it in the middle of town and that must be where all the water thought it was going as it runs down those streets.

I just got off the phone to my cousin, who lives there and she said that while she’s high up and her family are not under threat, she’s unsure if she’ll be able to get home from work as some of the roads are already flooded. Nobody’s actually working anyway, she says, they are all looking at the news online and worrying about it. Eight are already dead, 71 are missing and it’s just going to get worse.

I’m repeating my appeal for donations to the flood victims. I suspect when this is over, over 5% of Australia’s population will be affected and god only knows what effect it’s going to have on our economy. The main export port for mining in the state is shut down, and I’m sure it won’t be the only exporter unable to get its goods out. Farmers are saying their crops are ruined (mind you, they are almost always complaining about that). My mother is fielding cancellations almost continually as no-one can get there as the main highway is flooded and we already know no-one is visiting from overseas because of the stupid high Aussie dollar. She may lose her business over this and her town is under threat from flooding as well.

I’ve come to tears over it already and no-one I know personally is affected. To say nothing of the animals, domestic and wild.