Please satisfy my curiosity.
If you’re a reader of this blog, either regular or not, have you visited me via a feed reader or by other means.
Just drop me a comment to let me know. Please, I won’t sleep if you don’t.
Last Friday the business’s building next door was painted on the outside.
Saturday morning it had graffiti on it. I also had graffiti on my fence which is right next door to this building.
Over the weekend I meant to pick up a can of silver spray paint to paint over it because I didn’t like it. If it was a palatable picture I would quite gladly leave it up, but someone’s tag done in black doesn’t interest me at all.
Suffice to say I didn’t get around to buying the paint and having a little spray myself.
Monday evening I arrived home from work and it was gone. Wow, I thought, someone has painted over it for me. I also noticed the graffiti was gone from next door.
I looked more closely at my fence on Tuesday morning and saw that it had been cleaned off, not painted over as I’d initially thought.
So, thanks to whoever cleaned up my fence – a big thankyou. It’s so nice to have this done that I was a bit choked up that someone would bother.
Round the traps in the last week.
Yesterday we hopped in the car and drove up the hills to Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens. I never knew until recently that there were even gardens there for the public to enjoy so I thought it would be a good time before winter sets in too much.
I’d hoped to see some autumn colour before all the leaves fall off the trees and I wasn’t disappointed. These trees with the red leaves were pretty much the last deciduous trees with any leaves on at all.
JJ had me going all over the place up and down very steep paths and for the most part I obliged knowing that the exercise was doing me some good.
I can feel the results of that exercise today. One of the paths he led me down was a little bit steep and a little bit muddy. I constantly had to tell him to stop running because I had visions of him going ass-up on a gravel path and injuring himself, or falling down some steep hill.
I’d packed a picnic so we found a park bench to sit on and eat it after we’d warmed up sufficiently to sit still for a short time. On this tree JJ saw an inscription but I was more interested in these eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it before.
Not long before we left the clouds dropped even lower and brought some light drizzle with them. We ended up back in the car calling a nearby friend and dropped in there to have a cup of warm tea by the fire.
If we do another winter trip to these gardens I’ll prepare better with warmer clothes and wet weather gear and food in our tummies beforehand. Having said that, we both enjoyed it, but we could have enjoyed it more and for longer.
We have started what I want to continue to be a tradition in our household on Friday nights.
Friday is the one day of the working week that I have off, therefore I am available to pick my son up from school on Friday afternoons. He’s been at school for nearly one year now and we’ve never done anything concrete on Friday afternoons.
Because I pick him up and we get home about 3.30pm I’ve got at least two hours extra to do stuff that I don’t have on the days I work. This allows us to come back home, have a snack, I look at his spelling test results – he’s doing pretty well by the way – and I try to elicit information about the school day from him. It’s like pulling teeth from a hen mostly but I do get some snippets. Today he had a disco so he showed me his dance moves.
Friday nights has become our nachos night and because I prepare the bean mix beforehand I don’t have to do much to throw the nachos together. I don’t know if most people make it with meat but I make it with red kidney beans. It’s delicious, economical and easy. Here I’ve got it with avocado, but in addition to that some sour cream or even natural yoghurt is great.
Therefore, because the dinner is pretty much ready and I’ve arrived home earlier than normal, I can spend some extra time with JJ. Lately we’ve started playing games to spend this time together, and to fill in some time before dinner and we’re both really enjoying it.
Trouble is one of our favourites. In the last month or so, probably since we started playing more on Friday nights, I’ve noticed that JJ has become more strategic in how he plays. He used to get a piece out on the board and stick with that one until it was home and he got another one out, even if he threw a 6 in the meantime (you have to roll a 6 to get your piece into play). Now he usually takes a piece out whenever he gets a 6. Also after he rolls he sees if he can land on me to put me back at the start. We’re pretty even at winning now.
Tonight he wanted to play Snap. He got his Snap cards out and we played one game very quickly where I won. I thought I’d let him win his next game but he saw right through me and even said that he could tell I was trying to let him win. My boy is getting smart. Or he’s always been smart, he’s just showing me more. He told me he started letting me win so the game would continue for longer.
It made me think of a recent parent/teacher interview where his teacher said that he was no academic. I didn’t take offense because I don’t think he will be an academic sort. I think he’s smart though, just not in a book kind of way. I think he’s smart in a I know what you’re thinking and how to read you kind of way which will stand him in very good stead.
Whenever I do pick him up from after school care he is more often than not playing a card game of some description and it is teaching him to listen to rules and to take turns.
I’ll soon get sick of Trouble and Snap, so we’ll have to find some other games to play on our Friday nights. I think a good way of doing that is going to garage sales to find games to keep our new Friday night game tradition continuing.
I don’t know if non-mother is a word, but it’s the most succinct way I could think of describing it.
On Wednesday night I left JJ with my nephew and went out with three girlfriends to go to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Beforehand we ate out at a restaurant. A proper one with attentive waiters and cloth napkins and yummy red wine. It’s such a rare treat these days to go out to a restaurant. If I go out to dinner with JJ it’s usually somewhere that serves fish and chips like a pub or a cafe and it’s somewhere that isn’t too fancy.
We saw Tina C with her show I’m a Little Bit Country, I’m a Little Bit Aboriginal. I didn’t have much idea of what to expect apart from some country and western music which I’m not really into but she sounded entertaining. Toward the beginning of the show she said she’d love to hug everyone in the – fairly large – audience but couldn’t possibly. Therefore she’d hug one person and that person would have to hug five more and so on until the whole audience was done. We were sitting towards the back and my theory was that people wouldn’t get that far but they did.
I’m not really into doing things like this and I don’t know why as it’s quite harmless. I got one or two hugs from a couple of blokes but didn’t run around dispensing my hugs. I thought it was a bit of a time waster but we decided afterwards that it was a good ice breaker (a bit like being in some sort of workshop) and it was confronting which was what the whole show was about really.
She didn’t sing as much as I thought she might but she was very funny and on the ball in regards to our politics and the Aboriginal stolen generation. Her guest, Auriel Andrews, used to be on the Reg Lindsay show which I remember from when I was a kid and had completely forgotten about until she mentioned it.
My only real gripe was the room was really stuffy and it was hard to get comfortable. I noticed a few audience members fanning themselves so it wasn’t just me.
Then yesterday, instead of going into the office as per normal, I went to Melbourne with work. Just for one day. I had to do some motherly duties like organise JJ to be dropped off at school and then picked up just incase my plane was late, but for the rest of the day I felt non-motherish because I was out of my routine and doing something a bit different.
Mind you, when I got home I was completely tired and uninspired so I scraped together some food to eat. My nephew was supposed to cook (he cooks once a week) but said he wasn’t feeling too good. He still managed to eat some leftover soup and use the internet for a couple of hours. Hmmmm.
It’s definitely back to being a mum now. My house is a pigsty from severe non-attentiveness during my very short non-mother phase.
Luvmutt approached me a while back, after we crossed paths in a blog writing project, to feature Monty on their website Luvmutt.
"My name is Monty and I’m a collie mix from Adelaide, South Australia. I
came to my new family after my old family couldn’t take care of me
anymore. I’m very loyal and protective, and I’m always with
my people. But I get scared when they go in the ocean, so I just stand
at the shoreline and bark at them. I also like to pull socks off
people’s feet for fun."
I could have also told them that when we were at a friends the other night she was allowed to sleep inside. She was let out in the morning and couldn’t see me so she tried to get up to window height so that she could see me and make sure I hadn’t left her behind. Because it had been raining overnight, her paws were muddy and she left evidence on tables, chairs and a portion of lower roof just to get a glimpse of me. She soooo thinks she is human.
I could also tell them that now it’s a bit colder she won’t sleep in the back (colder) room. She likes to come into the warmer lounge room, and I let her.