Bad Hair Day

CLICK ME TO MAKE ME NORMAL SIZED!

Waiting for Spiderman.

I am scared of spiders setting up home in my nostrils while I sleep, which is why I have been sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor in the non-Bat Cave bedroom for about 2 weeks now.
Part of our ceiling has decided to make a run for it this last month and is slowly coming away from the rest of the ceiling.
This means there’s about a one inch gap that goes directly into the roof space.
You know what lives in the roof space? Spiders. Spiders live in the roof space. Did you guess spiders?
Shortly after I discovered the gap in the ceiling, I discovered the spiders traipsing through it.
I’m not phobic of them; I would just prefer that they not crawl on my face.
Husband called the nice real estate people and they said that they would send a man to look at the spiderhole.
I thought the Spiderman would come fairly quickly since, you know, there are spiders coming through my roof, but no.  He’s apparently a very busy Spiderman.
He’s probably running around New York City kissing girls upside down and other weird shit like that while I’m sleeping on the floor.
He came to look at the spiderhole one day, but I didn’t see him. Presumably he swung in on a web, stuck to the ceiling and put his face near the hole to see in. Possibly he heard me coming home and scuttled in under the fridge so I wouldn’t see him. You know how spiders are. They’re shy little creatures until they bite you in the eyeball.
He’s due back to fix the spiderhole soon. As early as tomorrow I’m told. I hope he’s happy to seal his furry little 8 legged brethren back into the roof space so they can no longer come through and try to mate with my eyelashes because while husband seems to be enjoying it, like it’s a camping holiday, it also seems as though I’m camping which is probably why I hate it so much.
I’m pretty much ready to move back in to The Spiderman Room regardless of my tiny arachnid friends. I’m tired and sore and I have weird dreams. Perhaps I’ve already been bitten by one of them and this I’m experiencing the radioactive blood change over? I hope not because I look terrible in Lycra.

Nan

My Nan passed away earlier this year.
I grew up surrounded by her love and strength and buttered toast fingers.
This weekend just gone, she would have turned 91. I have missed her every day since she's been gone, so I thought I would put up something that I wrote for her and read at her funeral, though if you were there, doubtless you wouldn't have been able to understand me through all the crying.

To Nan,

I want people to know how wonderful you were, how brave, how strong. I want you to know how much I loved you, how much I still love you even now that you’re gone. I respected and admired you so much.

You used to mind me when Mum went out.
You taught me to always sift flour twice when making cakes. I’m too lazy to do that. Maybe that’s why your cakes always turned out better than mine.
You made me scrambled eggs for tea when I was sick.
You listened to my new CD’s with me and pretended you liked them.
You made the best sponge cake out of any of us so we all gave up trying.
You and I used to go to church with Mum. I remember one Sunday we went and you scratched your leg for the whole hour because you felt tickly... even when we got up to get communion. On the way to the car you realised the thing that was tickling you was a grasshopper that had gotten tangled in your petticoat. You set it free and laughed.
We used to play games together until I moved away. You tried to teach me poker, but I could never remember the rules. You used to bet with Anticols and their wrappers, which were worth less. We would play dominos for hours and you never once let me win, because there was no lesson in that. Since you, I’ve never found anyone that could beat me at it.
I’ll never know how you fit such spirit into your small frame. You saw so much, lost so many. Friends, brothers, sisters, your husband, your daughter, but were still the kindest and most patient person I knew.
I’m sorry I wasn’t with you more towards the end, Nan. I let other things get in the way. But I always loved you. Will always love you, and will forever carry a part of you in my heart.

Rest in peace.



Queen of CBF

I do 99% of all the cooking in our house. I’m not complaining about it, I love it. I love to cook and I love to bake. My Grandma is an amazing cook and my Mum can decorate a cake like nobody’s business, so I guess I picked it up from them. My Nan made the best sponge cake in the world and no one can prove differently. I have recipes from my great great grandmother that would stun your tastebuds. They were and still are hardworking women who cook with care and devotion.
I never had a bought cake for my birthdays. My Mum would stay up all hours of the day and night crafting her wonderful creations and my Grandma is notorious for over catering every event and making it all from scratch. Packet cakes were a thing of myth and legend in our house.
While the food we ate was not necessarily gourmet or in line to win any pressure tests in the Master Chef kitchen, it was good food. Proper food made with love and care and potatoes.
Cooking for your loved ones is in my blood. I mean there’s not as much space, what with all the alcohol and stuff, but it squeezes in.
All of that being said, I have lazy weeks. I feel I’m entitled. I work full time, and I have hobbies and, you know... interests and stuff. They take up time. Sometimes, I declare myself the Queen of Can’t Be Fucked, and it’s on those nights when I’m cooking dinner that I find myself thinking of all the things I would rather be eating.

Thing I cooked: Slow cooked char siu pork.

Thing I would have rather eaten: Cereal.
Cereal in the morning is boring. There are 4000 things better to eat in the morning than cereal. But, cereal at night? GENIUS!  I love cereal at night! There is nothing tastier. It’s so easy and convenient! No bowl? No milk? No worries! Grab the box, park yourself on the sofa, and stuff handfuls of it into your mouth.

Thing I cooked: Crispy skin chicken with yellow noodle.

Thing I would have rather eaten: Popcorn.
Oh popcorn, there are no words to describe how much I love your crunchy buttery salty flavours of joy. I love you at the movies, I love you at home, and sometimes I love you in the middle of the night on the way back from the toilet. I especially love you as a meal replacement. When Husband was away on his snow trip, I ate popcorn for dinner 2 nights in a row and was so content, I went to bed with a huge fake butter smeared smile.

Thing I made: Vietnamese caramel chicken.

Thing I would have rather of eaten: An entire loaf of garlic bread.
There are instructions on garlic bread packets. They tell you that you can cook it in the oven or in the microwave. In the oven? For 15 minutes? Bitch, please. That shit is going in the microwave for a minute on high. I will then tear into the scalding first piece and burn my tongue. I will continue eating until the garlic butter can no longer be mistaken for anything other than frozen. Back in the microwave it goes while I hover near the door jiggling in anticipation. Also, it’s Italian. That makes it automatically fancy.

Thing I made: Wantons

Thing I would have rather eaten: Corn chips or pretty much anything that can go straight from the packet and into my open mouth.
Things that can be transferred from packet to mouth with no effing about have got to be the God of lazy foods. Open the packet, pour into mouth. It shits all over hand folding 40 fucking dumplings to impress dinner guests. Next time I have people over, everyone is getting a large bag of some form of crisp. If I like them, they’ll get Red Rock Deli. If I don’t like them, they get Homebrand. You want an entree? Here’s a fun sized bag of Twisties. Knock yourself out.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s dinner time and there’s a PopTart with my name on it.

Guilty Shame Spiral

I feel guilty about a lot of things.
Husband attributes this to my family’s Catholicness. Catholics are like the Olympic gold medallists of guilt. And not the Winter Olympics either, the real Olympics.
He seems to find it amusing as he does not possess such an emotion.
Let me give you an example... We will have something delicious. Husband will want my delicious thing. He will ask if he can have it. I will say no. Husband will sit in silence and wait. I will begin to feel guilt. I will feel anger at feeling guilt. Then I will feel shame. Then I will give Husband the thing he wanted.

Husband will be gleeful and will laugh at me. He will point and emphatically declare “It’s because you’re CATHOLIC!” I will feel a sense of loss of my delicious thing.
The guilt is not limited to Husband and delicious things though.
I feel guilty about drinking anything fizzy before midday. I think my Grandma instilled that rule in my head, and now, 6 years after I moved out of home, I will still feel guilty for wanting Coke Zero before lunch.

I feel guilty about calling in sick to work, even when I’m legitimately sick. Especially when I’m legitimately sick... I agonise over the decision. Then I have to ask Husband what he thinks I should do. He usually tells me to go to work. So I struggle around the house, flopping from one room to another trying to get ready until I feel so awful all I can do is lay on the floor. Then I get all torn up inside and have to debate the issue a thousand times again in my head. Logically I know it’s not the end of the world, but my conscience seems to think it is.

I feel guilty about buying anything that’s just for me. If it can’t be used for the house or if Husband can’t share it, down the spiral I go.

I feel guilty about not holding the lift doors open for people even if they’re really far away and I’m running late.

The guilt doesn’t go away within the day though. Sometimes not even in the week... Sometimes it lives in my soul for close to two decades.
When I was a little girl, I was playing out the front of my house. I found a little worm and I put him on my hand. I held him there, and he bit me. I pulled him off and threw him into the gutter and sort of stomped on him. He started to bleed. I felt so bad. My grandfather explained to me that he was a leech and that it wasn’t his blood I was seeing. It was most likely my own.

To this day I think about that little leech and wonder where he went after he got hosed away. Maybe he was a Catholic leech. Maybe he feels guilty about biting me and is wondering where I am today and what happened to me. Probably not though, because leeches are almost certainly smarter than that.

I have a strange memory.

I can be counted on to forget anything that may be relevant to my job and in high school I was never able to remember anything that related to my subjects.
I once turned up to an HSC exam holding only a pen and said “Community and Family Studies? I do that? Shit. Well... What’s it on?”
Ask me to recall the name of the Premier of Victoria and at best you’ll get a confused face and perhaps a mumbled “Errr... Bob Carr?”
But then, there are song lyrics and random trivia facts. You want to know all of the words to an Abba song? I’m your girl. You’re confused about the second verse in the Puretones 1998 hit, Addicted to Bass? No need for Wikipedia, just give me a call.
It’s practically a fucking superpower.
This seems strange to anyone who has known my relatives for any length of time. My Grandma is kind of infamous within the family for getting song lyrics wrong. You know the line in I Will Survive, where Gloria Gaynor belts out “Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?” For a solid section of time my Grandma thought it was “Weren’t you the one who tried to rape me with your eyes?”
Now, I’ve never been one to stand in the way of a good eye fuck, but I could never work out if that was what she meant or if she thought they would somehow detach their eyeballs from their optic nerve and try to penetrate someone with them.
There was a song released in 1980 that said “Oh Vienna...” and for a while my lovely Grandma thought it was “Old Piano.” Now, lest you think my Grandma is old and deaf and senile, when Ultravox released Vienna, she was only 36.
You can see why it’s so astounding that not only do I get the lyrics right, but I can somehow store them in my brain, sometimes laying dormant for a decade, and then pull them out and start singing them like it’s still the year 2000 and Faith Hill is coaching her boyfriend on basic respiratory technique.
And believe me; you want me on your trivia team. It won me a hat on my honeymoon. What is an Alligator Pear? Which country produces Panama Hats? How many calories do you consume while licking a stamp? Put down your iPhone, people, I’m here to save the day.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t sleep on a mountain of encyclopaedias, like mythical dragons sleep on huge treasure piles. I don’t get up at 3am to log onto the net and click through 47 pages of OMG Facts either. Well, not often...
There’s just something in my brain that retains all sorts of useless information about the bathing habits of Gypsies.
I don’t know why that is, but perhaps it will save me from some embarrassing social faux pas when next I meet a Romany woman standing downstream from a horse.  

Pancetta is just snobby bacon. It's snacon.

Sometimes I draw things for no reason.