The day the doorknob broke and we couldn't fix it so we chopped the door down with a mattock

Or, the blog post title with the biggest spoiler of all time.

Last week's blog post was sparked by Jessie having tonsillitis, Buzz having asymptomatosis and me having asymptomatata.  ONE of those people kissed Rex and passed it on.  It was the only person who was truly infectious and by the end of the week, tiny Rex had a husky voice, pain on sneezing, a roasting fever and diarrhoea.  Diagnosis: Tonsillitis.

On Sunday after church, we all tried for a rest.  Poor Rex was feverish but still up for a good sleep, and I tried for one too.  Woody interrupted me right up until five minutes before Rex woke up, so my sleep was poor.  But when I finally heard my baby boy crying his husky, pained cry, Woody had fallen asleep to enjoy the rest he'd robbed from me, and I graciously allowed him to live.

Jessie came to me and whispered, "Rex is crying."  I knew this.  I asked her to ask Daddy kindly if he might get Rex but Daddy was very busy killing bad guys with Buzz (I'm still working out if I should be worried when my moral-policeman-seven-year-old-son gleefully shouts things like, "I've lost the cops!!") so Rex continued to cry.

I staggered down the hallway to rescue him, turned the handle of his door and barrelled in.  Specifically, I barrelled into the door.  I smashed my head into it, and momentarily worried about my sanity.  I turned the knob properly the next time, and again smacked my face into the still-closed door.

Certain about my sanity now (Diagnosis: Stupid) I tried the knob the other way.  And the first way.  And the other way.  At some point, I realised the door wasn't opening and I yelled to Mr de Elba mid-slaughter, "Can you come and tell me if I'm not properly awake or if Rex's door won't open?"

He came, and tried the doorknob many times.  In the words of a tradesman who once did work for us:  "Diagnosis: Buggered."

So while Rex cried his poor little lungs out, we grabbed my screwdriver set and took off the screws holding the knob onto the door.  We fiddled with the mechanism.  We turned the square sticky-outy thing that works the openy-closey mechanism: no luck.  We tried to access parts further down the workings to retract the little tongue-thing from the hole-in-the-other-side thing: no luck.  We kicked the door: no luck.

Now at this point, if time hadn't been an issue, we could have called my Mum, who is Tinkerbell Incarnate.  She tinkers with stuff and it falls into place.  We could have called Justadad, the husband of my friend Justamum, who knows how things work.  We could have researched doorknob problems, we could have gone out and bought some magical tools, we could have asked the tradesman who is coming soon to work on some other doors around the house.

But it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and poor feverish Rex had screamed hard for 20 minutes so he was about to burst into flames.  We'd exhausted all the options at our disposal so there was only one option left.  It was drastic, it was destructive, and it was a whole heap of fun.

Mr de Elba chopped the door down with a mattock.

The door was cheap and the knob was rubbish, and recently Mr de Elba has been so busy at work that a bit of door-chopping was a rather welcome and therapeutic distraction.  Also, he'd just been killing bad guys so he was in the mood.

I wasn't joking.

Buzz LOVED it.  Jessie cried loudly and shouted, "Will the police have to come and see what we've done to the door?  Will we get in trouble from The Police?!?" and generally lost her head.  Woody slept through the whole thing in the next room, and Rex cried and cried.

Finally, the hole was big enough for me to crawl through and I went in to rescue my baby who had wriggled himself into a painful position all smashed up against the bars of the cot.  I handed him out to his Daddy who had lovingly chopped his door down with a mattock.

I did this for you, my son.

The cleanup was extensive.  The picture above shows only half of the final destruction, and only a quarter of the final mess.  A wheelie bin was actually brought into the house for the cleanup, the whole area was vacuumed twice with a Dyson (using both the Contact Head and the Turbo-brush) during which one of Woody's socks was sucked up (I can recommend the Dyson's suction ability, by the way) and now there is only one more thing to be done.

Buy a new door.

And a really good quality doorknob.

And get it from the shop to our house.

Somehow.

And install it.

Somehow.

-------------
Addendum: Although the Dyson is very good, the door was spread far and wide.  We are still finding bits of door in unlikely places.

Sound bytes from today

Today was a student-free day, so I had all the children at home with me while Mr de Elba was back at work changing the world.  Now I am just curious about the deep-thinkers on Facebook who put statuses like this up on Friday afternoon - and I may be paraphrasing a little but the essence was:

OMG I'm so super-excited lol, it's a LONG WEEKEND LOL!!!!!!!!!!

I would like to ask them what brand of sedative they use on their children? Where can you buy it?  Would they consider using it on themselves before Facebooking about the next student-free day?  Just asking.

As a free gift to them, I will donate a few moments from today so that they may thoroughly enjoy the richness of my student-free day, along with their own.

Jessie: [says something]
Buzz: [copies Jessie]
Jessie: [says something else]
Buzz: [copies Jessie again]
Jessie: MU-U-UM!  Buzz is copying me!
Woody [from another room]: Buzz is copying me!
Jessie: MU-U-UM!  Woody's copying me!
Woody [wicked giggle]: Woody's copying me!
Me: I'm going into the woods to hide.

 

Me, driving: Now Rex, don't cry when I drive over the bumps...
Jessie and Woody in unison: Bums!
Me, to Rex: Sometimes cars just have to go over bumps.
Jessie and Woody: Bums! 
Me: I said "bumps."
Jessie and Woody: Bums!
Me: You guys are from a different planet. 

You're welcome.

2012 Camp Bus Story

"Rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr!"

That's the sound a bus makes when it's got a flat battery.

When a bus goes "rurr-rurr-rurr" in an unfamiliar place at 9:00pm in the cold, wet weather and the bus is filled with tired, frightened children, the "rurr-rurr-rurr" sounds a little more sinister than I can make it look on the screen.

Mr de Elba, Justamum and I had taken seven children to have a fabulous night ice-skating and tobogganing, and we'd stopped at McDonalds to get 30c cones for the children on the way home.  We clambered back on the bus to make the 20-minute drive back home when the "rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr" changed our night from Fabulous to Potentially-Very-Bad-Indeed.

Mr de Elba kept his cool as he turned the ignition key again and again, but the bus didn't give any hope of spluttering to life.  One by one the children sobered as they realised what Justamum and I had realised in the darkness of the bus: we were stuck.  Justamum and I said little prayers while the girls cried and the boys prophesied doom.

Baby Rex decided he was hungry but he didn't want my milk, an impossible scenario he sometimes presents me with.  He alternated crying with screaming and I took him up the back seat of the bus, as if that would somehow minimise the noise for the other passengers.

As I sat there offering milk that was somehow offensive to a person smaller than my arm, I considered our options.

How to start the bus? No idea.

How to evacuate the children while someone cleverer than I worked out how to start the bus? Ah, there were several options there, each more unsatisfactory than the last.

I could call my Dad to drive our car (complete with baby seat for Rex and boosters for the others) to pick us up and take us home ... but he didn't have our house or car keys.

I could call Crazy Sister's husband who had the benefit of living close to where we broke down.  But he would have had to make several 40-minute round trips to take us all, and didn't have the requisite child restraints in his car.

Also, when I invited Crazy Sister ice-skating, she said with her characteristic charm that it sounded "damn nasty" and that she "just spent what feels like most of this year waiting for winter to finish."  Dragging a Crazy Family member out into "damn nasty" weather that felt a little like the winter that had finally just finished seemed defeatist at best and humiliating at worst, so I abandoned that idea.

The third option was "Panic Now."  But by that stage, we were too tired. Instead, we and the children said, "Dear God, we pray the bus can start, amen."

I hadn't noticed that a kind bloke with a really nice new ute had asked if he could give us a tow, so we could try a rolling start.  Mr de Elba had to back the bus up by allowing it to roll backwards down a slight incline.  My job, since Rex and I were sitting in the back row, was to tell him when to stop so that he didn't smash the car parked 10 metres behind us.  That was when I started to sweat a little.  "Panic Now" seemed a good option.

We rolled backwards without incident, the tow cable was attached, and we were slowly towed out of the carpark.  Then we started going faster to get up a fair speed before trying a rolling start.

"Rurr-rurr-rurr!"  No luck.

They tried again in a different gear.  Rolling slowly, rolling faster, rurr-rurr-rurr, no luck again.

A third try - much the same.

Fourth try, and they went much faster.  It was then I realised how difficult it must be to concentrate on getting up enough speed to start the bus while watching the ute's brake lights so that you could stop the bus quickly enough on the wet road so that you didn't smash into the back of the Good Samaritan who was trying to help you.

Then all of a sudden: BRAKELIGHTS-EMERGENCYSTOP-SKIIIIIIIIIID-stopjustintime!

We'd just avoided rear-ending a really nice, new, expensive ute with a really old, unreliable, shuddery bus.  "Panic Now" was instigated.

My choice would have been to pull out then.  No more tries, no more potential rear-ending of the Good Samaritan for his kindness.  However Mr de Elba decided to give it one more shot.

Rolling slowly, rolling faster, rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr, splutter, cough, START!  It had worked!  We were running again, and as often happens in these situations, the Good Samaritan congratulated us, we thanked him profusely, he said goodbye and then he disappeared into the night.

"Thankyou God, the bus has started!" we said together.  Girls stopped crying, boys were perhaps a little sad that the eventual doom didn't transpire because it seemed to have been quite an adventurous possibility, baby Rex had cried himself out and fell asleep slumped across my arms, and Justamum and I laughed silently in the darkness.  Because what else could you do, really?

And as we drove home in the dark wet night, we wondered what the ending of this story would be - the story whose beginning involved being stranded with a flat battery outside McDonalds late at night and whose middle involved driving that very bus packed with 20 excited teenagers three hours to the beach for a week-long camp.

Woody had no such qualms.  He sat happily beside me saying over and over again, "Fank God da bus has start."

Inflexible Cutoffs Don't Impress Me Much

If our baby is born in the next 7.5 hours, he'll start school in 2017. If not, he'll start school in 2018. How weird is that? I've decided to let God decide which outcome is best. In practical terms, this means the Castor Oil can stay in the cupboard. However I did put clean sheets on the bed, which is tantamount to a DIY Induction: Murphy's Law Style. (Not that my waters have ever broken at home by surprise in the middle of the night. There's a first time for everything though.)

Update

Still pregnant.  Nothing to report.

Fortunately- Unfortunately

I made a new blog!

Fortunately, it was easy.

Unfortunately, I don't have the brain space to bring my old posts over just yet.

Fortunately, I have detailed instructions on how to do it.

Unfortunately, my blog is worse than useless until I do.

Fortunately, I don't care.

Unfortunately, tonight I broke it and can't get into it anymore.

The end.

Blogger and trousers: hate both

I just can't write any new blog posts.  This new Blogger template hurts my brain and although I have run out of loyalty for Blogger, I don't have the wherewithal to jump ship quite yet.  I do remember staying up late every single night messing around with my blog after Woody was born so maybe in a few months I'll sit here and figure out Wordpress with one hand while I have a baby snoozing in the other.

In the meantime, I'll tell you this one thing.

I Hate Pants. ("Trousers" if you're from the UK.) Specifically: wearing them. They hurt and it's an effort to wear them, but nobody appreciates it. Nobody says, "Hey, I notice you're wearing pants, and I know how much you hate it. I'd just like to thank you for overcoming your loathing of pants and wearing them today." Seriously, If you know me in real life, next time you see me, thank me for wearing pants. I need the encouragement.

That is all.

A Bad Bandicoot Situation

I don't know how else to say this, so I'll just say it.

Bullseye likes killing bandicoots.  Little rat bandicoots that obviously live in the forest out the back.  I think they are the pest bandicoots that are a problem in Asia and India, but whatever their status in Australia, they must be living in plague proportions in the forest, because there certainly seem to be many which venture into our yard at night.  Don't they learn their lesson, after losing to Bullseye?  Well, yes, one can assume that each individual bandicoot does learn its lesson about trespassing in our yard, but by then it is tragically too late.

I hate her killing bandicoots.  I disciplined her severely the first few times she did it, then I found a few dead rats around the place and praised her for killing those, then I got about as confused as she obviously was, and now I don't know what to do.

Well, there is one good solution and the best price I have found on the internet is $21.60.

Just for overnight wear in bandicoot season.  She has forfeited the right to go muzzle-free, I think.

Grandma disagrees.  She is a soft-touch, even when shovelling remains of  dead bandicoots into their resting places because Mr de Elba is at work from too-early til too-late, and I refuse to do the job.  "Oh no, you don't want to put a muzzle on her," says Grandma.

"Yes I do," I say.  And I figure that once Grandma shovels her first maggot-ridden, greatly-decomposed, mostly-melted bandicoot which has putrified after not being discovered during an extended rainy period, she may agree.

Lame is the new black

Bullseye was sequestered from the family last night.  We had a makeshift gate blocking off part of the yard because we wanted her to stay there for a few days for long involved reasons that don't matter here.  She didn't like being further from her people, but I planned to take her for a walk (her favourite thing) every morning of her isolation, and we played with her all yesterday, throwing the ball for her to fetch (her second favourite thing) and slipping her treats whenever we passed (her third favourite thing.)

Last night, a few hours into her incarceration, I saw her at the back door.  She had escaped from her fence and come to join us and this made me feel sorry for her, but not enough to give up and let her back with us just yet.  I put her back in her fenced area where I'd put her kennel, sleeping mat, and food and water bowls and told her I would be back to walk her early in the morning.

Poor Bullseye.  As I lay in bed later, I heard it begin to rain.  I worried that she might find that particularly depressing, but assumed she would recover from that as soon as she heard me coming with her lead to walk her in the morning.  I went to sleep and didn't think much more about her.

I woke up early in the morning and went out to her, thinking she might be at the gate already, but she wasn't.  She is a deep sleeper and she's not really a Morning Dog, so sometimes the waking and stretching takes a little time.  When I rattled her lead, she woke up and poked her head out of the kennel.

Instead of her usual leg-extending morning stretch, she staggered out of her kennel and fumbled towards me.  Thinking she must have been wrenched from a deep dream, I told her to take it easy until she'd properly woken up.  But the next few metres of staggering told me she wasn't okay.  She was lame.

Now at this point, the fact that she'd never been sequestered from her people before matched up pretty neatly in my mind with the fact that she'd never been lame before.  I remembered how she'd been so desperate to rejoin us that she's escaped the night before, and I remembered my concern about her mental health once it started raining.

A big psychosomatic sook causing her legs to cease working, I thought.

We gave her a nice place to rest, plenty of water to drink, and lots of love for the next few hours.  But instead of getting better, she started getting worse.

It was then that we suspected that she may have a paralysis tick, and the rest of the day proved that she did.  Adding humiliation to insult, the vet shaved her from head to tail in order to find the tick that had attached to her neck under her collar region.  Tonight she is recovering in hospital and we are all feeling a little easier about the poor little hound.

But is it any surprise to you that Little Miss Jessie, she of the never-ending drama, awoke from her nap this afternoon moaning and complaining and grumbling, "Oh no!  I'm lame!  My legs don't work!"

She has been clambering about on her knees, grabbing furniture and walls for support and asking to be lifted up onto chairs because of her lameness (when she remembers she is supposed to be lame, that is.)

It seems that Lame is the New Black.

It started off quite cute, but now it's getting on our nerves.  What are the chances that next season, Mute is the New Black?

Crustacean: 1 - Jessie: nil.

On the final morning of our time at the Sunshine Coast, Jessie begged me to have one more swim at the beach.  We had bought a Skim Disk the day before and she didn't want to leave without testing it out.  Although the final morning of a beach holiday is a tricky time to get wet and sandy, I decided to take her and Woody for one last visit to the beach before we packed and went home.

Things went wrong before we'd even decided where to set our towels and bags.  We were walking over the sand towards the flagged area when Jessie saw an interesting shell.  She had been collecting shells all week and carrying them around, worrying when she couldn't find her collections and getting cross when her brothers touched them.  So when she saw that she had stepped on a very large smooth shell half-buried in the sand, she bent to pick it up.

It bit her.

On the thumb.

Reportedly quite hard.

The 4-inch-wide crab, for that is what it was, grabbed her tiny thumb in its pincers, gave her a cautionary nip, and scuttled off across the sand trying to find somewhere to hide.

Jessie lost her mind.

"TAKE ME HOME RIGHT NOW!" she screamed.  "I HATE THE BEACH!  I NEVER WANT TO COME BACK HERE IN MY WHOLE LIFE!!!"

Her eyes were dilated wide with fear and her little heart was pounding beneath her swimming shirt as she let out a series of panicked screams and started an odd skipping dance across the sand, trying to make the least contact with what she believed must have been the wildly crab-infested sand.

Woody, who shares a special bond with Jessie, saw the panicked crab racing away and heard his sister's screams of panic.  Believing that this was The Done Thing in such situations, he followed suit.

So together, they lost their collective minds.

"IT BIT ME!  IT BIT ME!  IT BIT ME!" they both screamed, skipping around me in random circles.  First Jessie and then Woody decided that they needed to get their feet as far away from the sand as possible, so they started climbing my body like a ladder, begging and pleading to be taken home and never forced to return to such a dangerous place.

Poor Jessie was absolutely terrified so I had been placating her since the ordeal started, telling her that the crab had just given her a pinch and there was no blood and no actual injury, and that the crab had got a terrible fright because he got stepped on ... but it was no use.  My soothing words were falling on deaf ears and Jessie as Woody kept up their screaming protests.

Now I am sorry about this, but at this point, I started to laugh. Perhaps the funniest part of all this was that Woody was copying everything Jessie did and repeating everything she screamed although he hadn't had any contact with the crab himself.

Perhaps it was the fact that if Jessie could stop going crazy for a moment, she would hear what I was saying and realise she didn't have to continue going crazy.  Perhaps it was that two children were climbing my body like a ladder, or maybe I was slightly hysterical myself.

Perhaps it was just that after a whole week of us pleading with her not to collect shells, it appeared that a random crustacean was going to have more luck getting through to her than two grown adults.

Whatever the reason, I started to laugh the sort of laugh that keeps going even when your lungs are empty and tears are pouring down your face.  I sat on the sand with two small children clinging to me screaming, "IT BIT ME!  TAKE ME HOME NOW!  I HATE THE BEACH!" and I laughed like a fool.

Then I noticed that although there were only a few families on the beach at this time, they were all looking at us.  Let them look, I thought.

Our new Skim Disk was the perfect thing to take Jessie's and Woody's minds off the abuses rendered by the crab and I spent a blissful hour pulling first one then the other child along, sliding along the sand and then hydroplaning in the shallow water.  The morning grew warmer and the sun started beating down stronger and hotter, so by mid-morning we packed up and headed towards the car.

Then it started again.

"THERE ARE CRABBIES (seriously - 'crabbies'?) IN THE SAND!  CARRY ME!  THEY WILL BITE MY TOES! LIFT ME UP! CRABBIES!" Jessie and Woody screamed as I lugged towels, bags and a Skim Disk towards the carpark.

Our path took us right by the lifeguard's hut.  As we got closer, the noise of the crying and screaming brought the lifeguard to the window.  He may well have assumed that my children had been badly stung all over their bodies by bluebottles or had perhaps lost some limbs to sharks.

"Uh - the little one got nipped on the thumb by a crab.  Thought it was a shell.  No skin broken.  Just ... a bit of drama," I sheepishly admitted as we trudged by.

As I packed children and accessories into the car, I thought about our much-anticipated beach holiday coming up after Christmas.  Will Jessie remember about the crab, and will she agree to try the beach again?  And more interestingly: will she ever collect any more shells?

As I drove off, I predicted that seashells might be safe from Jessie in the future.

The post I never got around to writing

(...and it's too late now.)

Oh!  My gentle readers!  I have been SO sick!  It was like ElbaPlague2009, but Mr de Elba and the children didn't get (quite) as sick as they did then, I got much worse, and the whole thing has dragged on much longer.  At least Buzz Lightyear didn't get vomited into.

All week, I was composing a blog post in my mind, mainly apologising for missing Swift Jan's splendid Birthday Party last Saturday.  But alas, I spent the whole week groaning or sleeping and the blog post never came to be.

I remember I planned to get someone to take a photo of me sleeping, while wearing my giant Cat-In-The-Hat hat.

I also planned to write something in anapaestic tetrameter about the sorry state of everyone's health.

I was going to mention the medicine shelf in my fridge.

And I was going to say something about this:

Something like
"Come and behold our dosing devices:
All sorts of shapes and various sizes!"

And yet, it never happened.  The upshot:
• Sick
• Sleeping
• Many medicines
• Various dosing devices.

Hope that will suffice.

Anapaestic Tetrameter

Flying in the face of my new resolution never to write another blog post apologising for not having blogged enough, I just wanted to tell you that I've got a few projects on at the moment, all from different categories of Things-To-Do, and it's taking all my brain space. 

For example,

• I have several reports to write at work, and having got to the blind-panic stage, I am setting aside all my child-free hours to go into work and sit there to do them, rather than trying to force myself to do them at home (laughing in own face at the thought)
• I have to do my BAS which I was putting off until I worked out what to do with the fact that I have accidentally claimed for the same expense twice in the same quarter, and it needs to be fixed
• I have six baskets of laundry to fold.  Unfolded laundry, I am certain, contributes to a large percentage of emotional difficulties among women my age.  We should all get together and do a study.
• I am presenting a segment at our church's women's conference next weekend, and I have decided (because it's SO much easier this way) that instead of me waffling on aimlessly, I should present the segment in anapaestic tetrameter.  This means it should be a little like Dr Seuss.  I am buried in a strange but satisfying world of 'feet' and syllables and words that don't fit and words that don't rhyme.  Trying to weave the best words together into the best pattern is so artistically gratifying.

I'm not really getting around to these important (and increasingly urgent) jobs simply because of CKMT, as I'm sure you'll all understand. I still think often how great it would be to have those t-shirts made up, but I won't put it onto the end of the above list of things to do or I may go mad.

Mice

The piano tuner came last week.  After spending an hour tuning my sister's piano, he turned up at my house and left again after only 10 minutes.  Trouble.

My main problem had been 'sticky keys' - where the little hammers don't return to their places after hitting the strings, meaning that next time you hit the key, the hammer can't get enough of a wind-up to hit the string again.  Usually this is caused by damp weather, but this time I wasn't so sure. 

The problem had started well before our wet summer, and it hasn't improved at all since it's become drier.  This time, the problem was so bad that more than two-thirds of the keys were suffering.  After playing a few bars, only random notes were able to sound and on lifting the lid and looking inside the piano, I could see up to 20 hammers sitting too far forward, not in their correct positions.  I was curious to see what the tuner could do.

The piano tuner had a quick look inside and said those lovely words: "You've had a mouse."

This blog post would be much more interesting if I'd got my camera out and taken some photos at that point.

To identify a mouse problem inside a piano, the Average Joe would probably look for mouse droppings.  The gifted piano tuner notices that the little tapes on most of the 88 keys that provide part of the tension needed to help the hammers return to their places were bitten clean off and had completely disappeared.

He took the guts of my piano away in his car with a promise that when he returned to place the fixed piano guts back inside the piano, we'd probably find all the little tapes made into a nest in the bottom of the keybed.  Which, of course, we did.

Again, that story would have been so much better if I'd got my camera out and taken a photo.

No Lollies Please, We're Sick

Late last month, I told you about the disaster that occurred when a well-meaning pharmacy assistant offered Jessie and Woody some lollipops.  Your responses empowered me.

Today it was a different illness, a different medication, a different pharmacy, even a different variety of highly-coloured confectionary, but exactly the same situation.  Two garishly purple jelly beans were offered as Woody struggled to get out of my arms and remove all the stock from the ankle-height (!) shelves in the pharmacy while barking a horribly croupy cough that made him sound a little like a demented seal.

This time, thanks to my wonderful readers, I WAS READY!

"Oh, no thanks!" I politely asserted, "they're sick and they really shouldn't be having ..." etc.

The pharmacy assistant looked shocked and chastened.  She did the only thing that she could think of in the heat of the moment - she popped the jelly beans into her own mouth (yurk.)

Victory was mine!  For ten seconds.  Then.

"I'm not sick!!" hissed a scandalised voice in my ear.  "She should give one to me, and not one to Woody because he's sick!"

Complaints in a similar vein assailed me as I paid and hauled everyone back to the car.  Jessie's pleas were falling on deaf ears so she pulled out all the stops, most likely learned from some animated kids movie: "I'm warning you!"

"That's fine, warn me all you like," I countered.  "But I am now on a mission to teach pharmacy ladies that it's probably a bad idea to bribe strangers' children with sugar and then act like they're huge heroes for making them happy.  [Grumble-grumble] ... darn sugar peddlars ... [grumble grumble.]"

As you can see, I have read your wonderful comments and assimilated them into my being.

But, sugary lollies being the short-term emptiness they are, the complaints were quickly forgotten and the huge fuss died down to nothing.  However, since then, the phrase "I'm warning you!" has been pulled out a few more times and I think I might now have to do something about that.

Kindy Pickup

Yesterday's kindy pickup was completely shambolic.  It had rained quite heavily a few times during the day and the world was very wet.  I sighed as I unclicked Buzz and Woody and led them in through the two (Two?? Two!!) child-proof gates and into Jessie's kindy.  I knew that Woody would be very difficult to detach from the joys and wonders of kindy once we were finished collecting Jessie and all her stuff.

Once we'd collected Jessie, I got busy signing her out and locating her two lost hats while holding her one unlost but dripping wet hat and her sandy shoes apart from the rest of her stuff, all while trying to insert three plastic boxes and one drink bottle into her lunch bag and zipping some newsletters into her backpack.

While I was doing this, another Mum alerted me to the fact that Woody was jumping in ankle-deep puddles and was soaked to the bone from the waist down.  Sigh.  Noted.  Cheers.

Once I'd put Jessie's backpack on her back and her lunch bag in her hand and urged her and Buzz to walk towards the first of the two child-proof gates, I grabbed Woody and held his squirming body as tightly as I could without getting too wet myself.  He threw a massive tantrum, and slipped out of my grasp.

An Unhelpful Dad tried to come to my aid.  He held the second of the two gates open for us, and to make him feel like he was helping, I opened the first gate and asked Buzz to hold it open for us.  I scooped screaming Woody up again and got through both gates, along with Jessie and all her stuff.

By this stage, Buzz was unsure if the Unhelpful Dad was COMING or GOING, so he continued to hold the first gate open for him in case the man was COMING.  The man, who was in fact GOING, only much slower than he'd planned, tried to ask Buzz to shut the first gate and walk through the second gate so the Unhelpful Dad could shut the second gate and actually GO.  Unfortunately, being both Unhelpful and a Man, the Unhelpful Dad didn't exactly use the medium of oral language to communicate this, instead grabbing poor Buzz's shirt and pulling him through the gates.

By this stage, Woody had wriggled from my grasp and had slipped back inside.

Once again he was in the ankle-deep puddle, only this time he was in Tantrum Position.  I tried to get him from Tantrum Position to Standing Position by pulling one arm upwards.  I don't like pulling or picking up kids by one or even both arms because I don't think their little shoulder joints or muscles can properly support their weight, however the Unhelpful Dad had no such qualms.  He grabbed Woody's other arm and lifted him high over the puddles.  Woody dangled like that for a few metres until I decided I could do without the Unhelpful Dad's unique style of 'help' and swooped forward to grab Woody like a barrel under my free arm.  The Unhelpful Dad let go of poor Woody's arm.

Once we reached the car, I stripped Woody down to his nappy which smelled too bad to be removed meaning stinky wetness seeped into his carseat on the trip home, lost one of his brand new socks on its first wearing, and started clicking three wet and muddy children into their carseats.

During this whole fiasco, the Unhelpful Dad (who didn't know my name) had called me "Mum."  He referred to me as "Mum" to my kids, he called me "Mum" to my face, and by the end I had one extremely confused four year old.

"Is that man your ...?" she struggled for the right relationship word, then tried a different approach.  "Are you that man's MUM?" she asked, amazed.

I knew he was listening, so I mumbled something about how the man knew I was Buzz, Jessie and Woody's Mum, so that's what he called me.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd answered, "No, I am that man's casualty."

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Over to you: Please detail your opinion on the law that precludes me from leaving Buzz and Woody safely in their carseats while I do a three-minute dash into the immediately-adjacent kindy to grab Jessie and her stuff, unencumbered.

Running Away From Home

My sister has blogged recently about Harpo running away from home.  This reminded me of the time I ran away from home back when we lived in a tiny 2-bedroom weatherboard home in a small country town in Queensland.

I was about seven years old.  On the day in question, I was greatly disenfranchised by a recent parental oppression and I was angrier than usual - a tiny black thundercloud, tightly coiled and ready to unleash an as yet unthought-of explosion of fury over all who had so grievously wronged me.

I finally straightened my rage-twisted thoughts out long enough to form a cunning plan.  I would run away from home.  That would make them all sorry.

I marched straight out of the driveway and stood on the footpath.  I considered storming off up the street towards the town.  I considered stomping off the other way, towards the school.  Neither option seemed particularly safe, but my wrath boiled on and demanded an outlet.

Momentarily abandoning my plan to run away from home, I devised a master plan so cunning that you may be surprised to know that such a brilliant plan came from one so young.

I decided to sell the house.

Sure, they could send me to my room, but I could sell the house out from under them.

Storming back into the house I found a piece of cardboard, some sticky tape and a black marker.  With the marker I scrawled the words, "FOR SALE" on the card and stomped into the back yard where I found a small eight-inch wooden stake.  I used the sticky tape to stick the card onto the dirt-encrusted stake, and strode out the front again to find a good place to position the sign.

I quickly found that the ground was too hard to drive the stake in, and moved my project to the gravel driveway.  The gravel was too shallow and loose, and after balancing it vertically in a small pile of gravel for a minute, I watched as the sign itself gave up on the sale and fell down flat in the driveway.

I stood back for a minute and waited for a buyer who would come and purchase the house.  I imagined how gratifyingly remorseful my parents would be regarding their callous behaviour towards me, tearfully apologising as they carried their belongings outside in large cardboard boxes as I stood by unforgiving.  "Well Mum you should have thought of that before you told me to go to my room."

After two or three minutes it became apparent that it wasn't a seller's market, and I trudged disconsolately back to the house.  The house remained unsold and I had failed at my one and only attempt at running away from home.

To this day, I have never again tried to run away from home, or sell a house without a Real Estate Agent's license.  Which is probably for the best.

So far I have blogged ...

... every single day this month! This is a record! And it's all thanks to youtube.

That's cheating, isn't it?

Yasi has done its worst.  So far there are no reports of loss of life or serious injuries, but the damage is extensive.  As always, updates can be found on ABC News and The Courier Mail.

Yes, things are quite extreme in Australia right now!  It is normal for us to experience bushfires, floods and tropical cyclones at this time of year, but the weather patterns this year have been quite extreme.  I only know one family living in Far North Queensland, so as I traipse through my pleasant sunny days in the south-east corner, I think of them and wait for an email to say they are okay.  I don't expect to hear from them for a while though - communications are quite extensively damaged up north.

Disasters. We has them.

To my lovely readers from across the sea,

You have probably heard about the floods we've had in Queensland.

Did you hear that there were floods in Victoria as well?  And what about the bushfires in Western Australia?

The bits that weren't affected by all that continued with a heatwave.

And now, there are about 60 minutes until a giant tropical cyclone hits our coast.  Its name makes it sound like 5 giant dice are sitting offshore waiting to roll over the north-east part of the continent...

Not actually Tropical Cyclone Yahtzee, although I think that about 50 times a day.  Cyclone Yasi, which promises to be bigger than anything we have seen in our lifetimes. 

In the next 24 hours or so, our news sites will keep you updated.  ABC News, The Courier Mail.

This is a little graphic that compares the cyclone we are expecting with the devastating Cyclones Tracy (1974) and Larry (2006) and also Hurricane Katrina (2005) which was undoubtedly the largest, although Yasi is expected to deliver faster wind speeds and heavier rainfall.

So if you're a praying person, would you mind getting your praying gear out for the people of Far North Queensland over the next few hours?  It will be a long and scary night for them.

It shouldn't happen

A week of weird things that shouldn't happen.



First: The Devastating

Entire towns shouldn't be washed away.  People shouldn't be left homeless, and families shouldn't be torn apart.

Mothers shouldn't have to wake up and remember with a shock that they are childless, widowed and homeless.  Teenagers shouldn't have to live indefinitely with relatives, having been recently orphaned.

People shouldn't have to live in evacuation centres with nothing but the clothes they wear.  They especially shouldn't have to do it as a single parent with five children, the youngest one week old.

People shouldn't have to start again from scratch, with no help from insurance companies who quibble about whether it was"flooding," "flash flooding" or "storm water damage."  Farmers shouldn't have to endure million-dollar losses after the recent years of crippling drought.

And a lot more things that shouldn't happen.



Next: The Ordinary

My dear garden probably shouldn't have had this much water tear through it.

Air conditioning units probably shouldn't have this much water inside them.

Woody probably shouldn't keep going to my pantry and getting jars and tins out one by one to put on the kitchen table saying, "Dere! (clap clap clap!)"

Jessie probably shouldn't sleep in this position:

Jessie probably shouldn't put her shirt half-off before falling asleep either.

Journalists probably shouldn't make errors like spelling "choir" as "quire":

But that's all nothing compared to my first list.

Viral

 If you are planning to be in the right place at the right time during an unprecedented wide-scale natural disaster, to film on your iPhone what you expect to be arguably the most horrifying and riveting footage taken of the disaster in your area, to upload it to youtube and then arrange for it to go viral in an extremely short space of time, here are a few handy points to keep in mind as you prepare. 

I shall compile them in the form of a script for appropriate dialogue that you and your work colleague should rehearse meticulously before the natural disaster hits.  This dialogue should be performed during the filming of the disaster, and should deflect most of the potential criticism that could be leveled at you by trolls in the comments section.

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A: Oh, look, it's really coming now!  There is no way anyone would have predicted the water would have come up this high, or this quickly!  This is a one-in-100-years flood!  Unfortunately these cars are going to be engulfed in the water.

B: Why yes.  I should point out that many of the car owners have been warned and taken their cars and gone home now.  The rest of the people standing around watching aren't moving to rescue any cars, so I wonder who belongs to the rest of them?

A: I have no idea.  They could be working in any of the buildings in the city, and we have no way of tracking them down.

B: What a shame.  It is also the commuter carpark for the bus station adjacent to this building, meaning that it is probable that a few of the car owners have parked here and taken a bus to other rural towns for any number of days.

A: That's true.  We've done all we can, now we just have to stay put.  We can't go down and move the other cars ourselves.

B: This carpark has been used for many years without any sort of flooding like this.  The car owners could never have foreseen this happening when they parked this morning.  Nobody in their right mind could say they were foolish to park there.

A: You are so right.  We've never seen this sort of flooding here, ever! 

B: You can say that again.  Oh, look!  The water is so brown!  That's because these are flood waters, and they have come from heavy rains picking up dirt as they travel.

A: I heard that when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the water was clearer.  Is that because it was sea water?

B: Why yes it was, and therefore it was bound to appear clearer than these flash flood waters inland.

A: Oh, look at that guy.  He is brave to try to save his 4x4, but he's judged that he will get it away safely.  He's a big boy and can make his own decisions.

B: Look what he is doing now.  He is locking his hubs to engage 4WD.

A: Yes he is.  How clever of you to know that, despite the fact you are not familiar with 4 wheel drive vehicles.

B:  Thankyou.

A: This is flooding on a massive scale.  There is no way that you could fake this.  I mean, imagine how impossible it would be to arrange a deluge of megalitres of brown water to cascade down here and to find some cars to float down in it, film it, 'photoshop' it, and upload it to youtube while simultaneously arranging for the world's media to report on it immediately.

B: You could always use chocolate milk instead of brown water.

A: True.  That would make it easier.

B: You would have to be sure when you distributed it that people knew it happened in Australia.  You know how confused people get between Australia and Austria.

A: There is a chance that mentioning that we are in Australia might spark a heated and highly irrational argument regarding the relative disadvantages of the USA and Australia, and offer an opportunity for a minority of Canadians to say that both countries pale behind the brilliance of Canada.  But I will take that risk.  Oh, look, a floating industrial waste bin.  It would be so natural for me to chuckle a bit at this point, but I will be very careful not to do so, for fear of watchers assuming I was taking this lightly.

B: Oh no.  At this point, we already know of the devastation in other parts of the city and surrounding areas, and are fully aware of the loss of homes, material possessions and human life.  Chuckling in amazement at this immense flood would obviously be indicating a callous disdain for the suffering of others.

A: And while we're speaking about not showing disdain, I should ask you - while we've been filming this, have any of the cars floating by had people inside them who subsequently went on to perish in the waters?

B: Obviously not.  Clearly all these cars but one were from this carpark, unable to be saved because they were empty - vacant of people, people who could have driven them away had they been in them.  I also can confirm that the future will show that none of these cars will be found to have bodies in them.  I should point that out for any concerned youtube watchers, after this video is uploaded and goes viral.

A: Alright, now the flood waters have subsided I will clean up what has happened here.  It's only fair, after I have filmed this.  It will demonstrate that I am a decent human being.

B: Wonderful.  I shall film you.  Stand over there and throw his piece of wet paper into the bin that has been washed up here.

('A' goes on to clean up 75% of the state.)

- - - - - - - -

Following these points may deflect the worst of the irrational and hateful criticism directed at you from internet trolls.  Then again, it may not.