I’ve been pretty busy this week, in a kind of lazy kind of a way.
On Monday I took the kids to the zoo. Heaps of fun. Heaps of animals. I couldn’t help but notice one curious family, some of whom were dressed rather oddly for the zoo on a summer’s day, I thought. To be precise, the three young women in the family were all wearing heels, hot pants and boob tubes. Looked quite odd exploring the rugged Australian wilderness in the kangaroo and emu exhibit. Okay, so maybe they were going out partying later, but personally I’d have taken the time to change.
On the way back home, my sunglasses broke. My good sunglasses. My precious Raybans. Snapped in half. Bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger. They cost a small fortune. Looking around the Rayban web site, it looks like the warranty for USians is only for a year, and these are probably about 4 or 5 years old. I’ll be checking the small print on my paper warranty carefully, let me assure you, but I’m probably out of luck.
On Friday night I was vacuuming, and found a lizard in the livingroom. Probably about 8-9cm long including the tail. It was really hard to see – it blended right in with the carpet, kind of diarrhoea-coloured. It freaked me right out, because I nearly vacuumed it up. In fact, I believe my exact words to a friend on ICQ were: "FUCK! I’m vacuuming and there’s a fucking lizard in my house! Fucking hell! What do I do?!" As you can tell from this, I’ve decided I hate creepy-crawlies in my house. I herded it outdoors with a broom.
(Why does the spell checker totally fail to help me spell a word like diarrhoea? It’s the kind of word most of us use only occasionally, and it’s so awkwardly spelt that it’s precisely when we really need spell checkers to work well. It couldn’t offer any useful suggestions based on my best guesses at how to spell it. I couldn’t find it in the paper dictionary. I rang my ex-wife, who usually knows such things, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I eventually tried Google, which pointed me to the US spelling, from which I was able to find the Australian spelling back in the paper dictionary. It shouldn’t have to be that hard.)
On Saturday I staged my long-awaited clear out of the kids’ room. I found a small mountain of shoes in the cupboard. It was like cleaning out Imelda Marcos’s place. Probably about a dozen pairs of Isaac’s old shoes that I’d set aside with the idea of giving them to Jeremy when he was big enough for them. Except that I’d subsequently forgotten all about it, and Jeremy is now too big for them. Most of them weren’t very nice looking anyway – worn and dirty. So I chucked most of them out, saving a few good shoes to give to someone with a smaller kid.
And now it’s Sunday, and I’m sitting here, sweltering in the heat of Melbourne’s first proper summer day of the year.
