Saturday, September 22, 2012

Away, Away

We are down south. The Surfer is participating in the Gracetown Grommets which commemorates the anniversary of the Gracetown Tragedy. His coach is not going to be there at this comp. This is probably because the coach's father was one of the nine people killed that day.

It's always very heartbreaking to roll up at Huzza's and read the memorial. You simply cannot go there without thinking about the cliff tragedy.



It's cold and rainy down in Margaret River at the moment. It's just like going back to winter. But it's lovely to put the pot belly on and drink a red wine or two.

And I feel great about being alive. I am even loving the rain.

It's been great to get away for a few days as well. It was a week of death and funeral and horrible stuff in Perth. HM's friend, (who was also The Surfer's cousin on his mother's side) passed away and all the old cronies came out of the woodwork to count how many of them had passed away. LOTS. Many of them by bad life choices. I think this is why HM makes the most of everyday.  Also think it's why he doesn't see some of those old cronies much. It must be hard to sit there and watch your friends waste their life.

So get out there and enjoy every day. I'm about to go and visit a couple of wineries I feel ... as soon as the boys get back from surfing ... ho hum. Might be going for a walk with Barnstormer instead.

Hope you're doing something good today.
xx

Friday, September 14, 2012

Spring has sprung

Spring is finally here. It's that time of the year when we can now enjoy a wine in our alfresco area. The one that has the built-in shade of the creeper that HM prunes religiously. I call him The Constant Gardener. He has a great sense of humus. Sorry. REALLY sorry.

And in the same way that winter makes  me feel like hibernating in my girl cave with a case of cab sav under ten doonas for three months, spring makes me want to empty out cupboards and drawers and PURGE. I get a major buzz from giving bags of clothes to the Good Sammy bins. Yesterday I took four huge pink garbage bags full. Oh, what a feeling.



I have also thrown out anything that I haven't worn in five years. I have always kept them, thinking that I'll get skinny enough to fit back into it, but HM says "this is never going to happen, just move on and chuck it all out". This coming from a man with a SHED FULL OF CRAP... bags of his old clothes. From the SEVENTIES. His idea is to just move it all out of the house and into the shed; that way he is not seen as a hoarder. So I got my bag of clothes that don't fit and put it in the shed. That way if I SUDDENLY LOSE TEN KILOS I can go and retrieve it...


I often wonder what the neighbours think when they see me carting bags and bags of stuff into the car. OR down to the shed. It happens a lot. And I know they are always looking out of their window. We have weird neighbours but that's another post entirely.


Then it was off to the shops with Barnstormer on a birthday gift mission for HM. Stupidly gave Barnstormer a donut with pink icing to eat early on in the scene. This resulted in her mimicking all shop assistants when the sugar kicked in about 30 minutes later. She even mimicked the Politix shop guy's extremely camp accent. Quel horreur!

He said: "Isn't she adorable?" but I could tell he was really mortified when she said: "This is fabulous, would you believe it's cotton but got lots of give because of the 10% elastane!" complete with hand on hip.



Oh and this also happened yesterday:

[While watching Bold and the Beautiful:]
Barnstormer: Why is she crying?
Me: Because Liam doesn't want to marry her anymore.
Barnstormer: Why?
Me: Because she did the wrong thing?
Barnstormer: What did she do?
Me: She went a little bit crazy and did some silly things. He doesn't love her anymore.
Barnstormer: But you're a little bit crazy a lot of the time and Daddy still loves you. 
 

And also this:
[Hammerhead arrived home from kindy with something he made in craft. It was basically a strawberry container with two corks stuck on it and a patty pan on top.]

Hammerhead: Look at this Mum, look what I made.
Me: Oh wow, what is it? It looks like a robot. Is it a robot? Or is it a monster?
Hammerhead: What? Mum, you're crazy. It's not a robot or a monster, it's a strawberry container and I glued two corks on it and this cake thing.
Me: Of course.

Now to work out what to make for HM's birthday cake...


How is your spring going? Do you have a spring in your step?

Sunday, September 9, 2012

I am Alice in Wonderland


So, I've been having some extremely hectic dreams of late. Actually I always have them. But just lately, they seem to be even more vivid and convoluted than normal.

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of - John Anster Fitzgerald, 1858

They're not nightmares and they are not usually scary, just a little bit twisted, if anything. The dreams are lucid, extremely theatrical and almost always, movie-length long. I think it must be the medication, but in all honesty, I've always been one for strange dreams, even as a child. Every dream is like Alice in Wonderland. Ones that linger with you all day. Some I NEVER ever forget. Ones that seem to go on for hours and hours. In fact, in one dream, I managed to have a five-year relationship with Owen Wilson. In this dream we met, then I met his parents, we got engaged, we had a big massive wedding (even though in my dream he was not famous). We lived in a big Vermont-style house (as if I would know what that is) and drove one of those station wagons with the wood panelling. Then once the honeymoon phase wore off, we had a baby boy (the labour was as painful in the dream as in real life), then two years later we had another baby. We even had a couple of birthday parties for the kids in there where I made the most spectacular cake that was a mini replica of an erupting volcano (?).

It was something like this.

Yes, all of this excitement happened in the comfort of my own home one night a couple of years ago, after I went to bed. Of course, I woke up very confused. VERY CONFUSED. Suddenly, five years of family memories did not really exist.

They say that dreams are made up of the debris in our minds that collect during the day. OR at least I think I read that somewhere. That being the case, I do not know where the Owen Wilson dream came from. He is NOT the man of my dreams and it wasn't like we'd even recently watched a movie with him in it. He does not even feature in my Top Ten People who I would like to be with if I wasn't with HM. And now I can't watch ANYTHING with him in it without reliving all of that dream and thinking about what nice parents he had and wondering how OUR kids are going. One was called Rusty. And did he remember to put the car in for a service?

She is SUCH a nag. I wish she'd stop hassling me ...
I don't even know her, I never had a car with wood panelling.

Almost every night I dream. And they are always these long epic dreams. The sort of dreams Cate Blanchett might star in. There is always some kind of task that needs to be carried out, and in some cases I wake up mid-task so there is no resolution. I feel strangely ripped off and all day I wonder if I could go back to sleep quickly for the ending.

Psyches Dream by Josephine Wall

HM thinks my insane dreaming is possibly a result of me being something of a movie buff. Others say it is my vivid imagination. I feel I have to tell HM about my dreams so that I can get him to understand why it takes SO SO long for me in the mornings to get it together. I have to separate the dream from the reality.

And HM has no real experience of dreaming. He dreams, but it is forgotten before he wakes up and he may remember one thing only, if anything at all. I had a dream last night, he will announce. "Oh what happened? Tell me all about it?" [I am SO excited for him ... but it is always shortlived].

HM's dream: I fell into a swimming pool. 

That's IT. 
No other details.

In my dream it would be like this: We were at this dark castle, it was in the middle of the desert, everyone had a white four wheel drive, and I seemed to be wearing some kind of Elizabethan costume. Sometime after the main meal of Tripe we were all lounging around outside. And I slipped and fell into this huge swimming pool that seemed to come from nowhere in the yard of the castle. It couldn't be seen before and there were hundreds of people standing around all watching me fall in, and they were wearing masks; it was some kind of  masquerade party. And other people then jumped into the pool and some of them turned into mermaids and grew tails. Then all of a sudden the swimming pool water drained out of the pool and it revealed a secret code that was written on the floor of the pool, and there was a trap door on the side of the wall. The door opened and Frodo burst through it. But then he wasn't really Frodo and later on in the dream he morphed into the Year 5 teacher at Hammerhead's school. And he wanted everyone to follow him through the trap door to the "ship" but we can't get out of the pool because the floor of the pool has turned into quicksand and we are sinking and no one seems to be able to pull us out as we are sinking too fast and their arms aren't long enough and we end up pulling more people in with us  ... and so it goes on. Curiouser and curiouser.

It should be stated at this point, that I am not a reader of fantasy fiction  and I haven't even seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I am not into sci-fi or fantasy at all.  Absolutely nothing against this genre, I simply am not clever or abstract enough to understand the plot of the books and movies of this style. I can handle David Lynch though. In fact, he could easily be the scriptwriter of my dreams.



One other curious thing: I have this ability in my dreams to come up with one liners that only that character/person would be capable of. The other night I dreamed that HM's long-dead friend was actually alive and  knocked on our door dressed in a stolen policeman's uniform. There was all this dialogue in the dream which I was late able to regurgitate. When I woke up, I told HM exactly what happened and what was said in the dream. He said that is word-for-word what his friend would say. That ONLY he would say. He had a VERY DISTINCT sense of humour. So somehow in my dream, I was able to dream up stuff that someone else may have said. Maybe if I have a dream with Einstein in it, he could potentially explain to me a new theory that I could then develop. DREAM ON ...



Do you have strange dreams like me? Tell me about the weirdest one, if you can remember it.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

In the endless sea

I'm lost in a sea of blogs. I really started blogging at the wrong time. I should have started it years ago but didn't because I knew I'd get lost in it and I didn't have the time. And as predicted, now that I have started it, I am getting very, very lost in it AND I DON'T HAVE THE TIME.

Au secours © Rene Maltete

I'm not getting lost in my own blog, mind. I can churn out a (some would say) way-too-long post with barely ten minutes on the clock. Then I shamelessly rip off pics from Google images carefully source and credit a few relevant images and voila, Bob's your aunty's live-in lover.


NO, what is happening is that I am getting lost in everyone else's blog. Everyday I find a new one that piques my interest. Some I am completely addicted to and of course I have to read back on all the years I've missed! Some I like to check every now and then. Some I read and think "goodness me, this person is like my own voice talking". I have a twin. I have several twins. So much so it's scary.



In my travels on the interwebs I have noticed that MANY, MANY parental bloggers seemed to have the same motivations when it came to starting their blog as I did. They wanted to keep their sanity. It's definitely been some sort of therapy. When I look back to what I wrote at the beginning, I know I feel much better than those horrid days.


I love blogging for the creative release as well. I am a frustrated [read: self-taught] web designer and I like to tinker on the net. I love fiddling about with codes. I get a little buzz when I change something in java script. It's not my day job but I do have the patience for it. HM is often amazed at my patience for all things technological. He thinks I would choose my laptop over him if it came to it. He might even be right.
So have YOU got a favourite blog you like to haunt? Or have you got your own blog that I haven't yet discovered. Any kind of blog. IF either, please leave me a comment below with the link!