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Wednesday, October 28, 2015

He's Gawn!!!




So… he’s gawn.

Scotto has left the building. My husband of eleven years has nicked off to his job at the Gold Coast and I might not see him again until Christmas.

As I sat munching on my Coles three dollar salad tonight, watching Modern Family on the telly, Celine the Fox Terrier and Pablo the Chihuahua sat at the front door staring out wistfully, waiting for their Daddy to come home.

It was a bit sad. Sort of like Kramer Vs Kramer, but with no acrimonious divorce… and mangy, unattractive dogs instead of a cute, lisping kid.

Mind you, as far as the dogs are concerned Scotto has left forever. I tried my hardest to explain the situation to them but I think all they heard was MWAH MWAH MWAH MWAH MWAH.

You know what this means though. It means there’s nobody here to censor my posts. Nobody to say, “Er, Pinky, that’s just not at all funny. In fact if you post that you might need to engage a lawyer.”

Or even worse, nobody to tell me my post is as boring as reading the bloody tide table and solunar charts in the newspaper.

My Weather Report.

Today Wednesday, 28th of October of 2015, the sun rose in Townsville when Pablo the Chihuahua heard an early morning jogger outside the bedroom window and proceeded to go off his lolly, startling me from my dream about ‘What does the fox really say?’* and putting me in an instant bad mood.

Sunset was at 6:03 pm, at precisely the same time Pinky eased the lid from a chilled bottle of Chardonnay (even though she knows the stigma attached to ‘those who drink alone’) but she figures she’s not alone because of all the animals…

The moon set at 5:28 am at 283º west. Then, the moon rose at 75º east at 6:52 pm (I don’t know what the fudge that means but it’s really good there’s a moon because without one we’d be a lot floatier or heavier… I’m not sure which).

The lunar phase is a Full Moon. It’s also Halloween. Do you realise what this means for teachers? Do you realise??? The ‘Perfect Storm’ I read the other day!

It was hard at work today knowing that my day at school is probably as interesting as my life will be from now on.

I started the day with high hopes, plunging myself into an invigorating grammar lesson.

But, as usual, just when I’ve reached the pinnacle of my passionate teacher enthusiasm, right in the middle of the exhilarating moment when I’ve inspired my students with a William Wallace style oratory (on how you should double the consonant when adding a suffix to a base word if it has a short vowel… don’t worry it’s much more interesting when you hear it in real life), the bloody classroom phone rings.

It happens every time.

There’s a mad scrabble of arms and legs as the students closest to the phone (reluctantly) tear themselves away from my zealous monologue, even though there’s always an allocated phone monitor for the day.

The entire class goes silent as they watch the ‘telephone-answering prize-winner’ nodding mutely into the receiver while I look on with a frustrated frown, knowing in my heart I’ve lost the class’s attention for the rest of the grammar lesson.

The victorious student hangs up and slinks back to their seat.

“Well? Who was it?” I demand.

The student shrugs.

“Was it the office?” I badger.

“No…” he or she will whisper. “Maybe.”

“What did the person want?” I ask in controlled fury.

“I don’t know,” they twiddle their hair. “I couldn’t understand them, Mrs Poinker.”

And that’s the end of that. 


I don’t know if it was the Deputy Principal ringing to say the school’s on fire, there’s an approaching tsunami and there’s a mad gunman on the loose in the school or if it’s just the tuckshop ringing to let Phineas O’Toole know there aren’t any ham and cheese toasted sandwiches today so he’ll have to have a meat pie at morning tea.

* I had a very vivid dream last night where I was on a quest to find out what the fox does say. I know this is stupid because that song is so yesterday. What do you think it means? Is it an omen that the fox has something to say to me? Do you know a fox I can ask? Should I stop writing posts until I can get my censor back?







Sunday, October 25, 2015

Come Step Inside My Home!



Husband, Scotto, leaves on Wednesday to travel to the Gold Coast, 1433.7 kilometres away to start his new job. He was supposed to go last week but his trip was delayed.

It'll be seven weeks before I see him again and I’d planned to go on a diet, have some light plastic surgery done and surprise him with a youthful, slim wife for Christmas.

I don’t think it’s going to pan out that way however, as I already have two long lunches, at least five dinner engagements and two Christmas parties locked into my diary and he hasn’t even left yet.

In the meantime I’m going to have to deal with the open house palaver on my own. I’ll have to wrestle the dogs all by myself and drag them to the park bench across the road while the house inspections are on. 


Pablo the Chihuhua goes off his nut barking every time he spots a random sightsee-er potential buyer walking into the house, so I have to stick him under my t-shirt in order to block his view.

The blooming, young mother to be!


It’s like being pregnant with Rosemary’s Baby.

Hey! I just realised, I haven’t shown you my house since I cleaned the last thirteen year’s blood, sweat and tears off the walls, have I? 

Okay, enjoy your annotated tour!


My bedroom. This is where all the erotic action happens. It’s where all the titillating stories originate. It’s where I type my blog posts. What...

See that vase of flowers, the cheeky throw rug and the colour co-ordinated pillows and towels? Well they’re fake. Our real estate agent, Nettie, loaned them to me and they only come out for open house. Normally there’s a naked Chihuahua and Fox Terrier languishing across the bed like a couple of Playboy centrefolds.



This is my ensuite. It’s where the kids would shimmy up the laundry shute and appear like subway rats when they needed to break into my locked bedroom (while I was out) to get money for the Mr Whippy van they'd hailed down.



This is the parent’s retreat attached to the bedroom. It’s where I kept my loose change which used to inexplicably disappear on a regular basis.



This is our theatre room where Scotto and I watch Netflix movies and drink wine on Saturday afternoons. It used to be the kid’s lounge room but we had to get rid of the old couch because a family of angry bandicoots had moved in underneath it due to the massive amount of half eaten food the kids had stuffed down the back of the pillows.



This is my kitchen. Noice, eh? The entire counter top had to be replaced a couple of years ago because Thaddeus nuked a plate of chicken and left it on the counter causing an extremely large, crop circle like scorch mark.

I cooked enough spaghetti in this kitchen to reach Italy and back. One night Thaddeus and Hagar got into a fight and a plate of said spag bol was launched as a missile. It took me three years to clean up. 



This is the space between my kitchen and the theatre room. It contains the cupboard under the stairs which we rent out to a bespectacled kid with a weird scar on his head.


The room under the stairs...


This is my dining room (centre piece courtesy of our charitable real estate agent). 





This is my laundry. It’s the access point to the laundry shute and place where naughty, barky Chihuahuas get locked up when visitors arrive. 




This is my hallway entrance. The barrier on the stairs is to prevent Chihuahuas and Fox Terriers sneaking upstairs to have unsupervised naps on my bed.



This is my ‘good’ lounge room. It’s empty because the real estate agent told us the ‘good’ couch was so unsavoury that no amount of cushions and throws would revive it and we should burn it immediately. It makes a great Saturday night dance floor after our Netflix movies have finished.




This is my outdoor area. We had a baby shower here which finished at midnight and my friend Shazzy danced on my table and cracked the marble insert a week after we’d bought the table. We sent the pregnant girl (who was the only one not intoxicated) up to the bottle-o to get more booze when we’d run out. Best baby shower ever.

Shazzy's Crack (knew I'd get her back eventually)


We had the music teacher, Kyles and her husband, Troy’s fortieth birthday party here too. My colleague, JB, snapped a palm tree in half when someone was trying to push him in the pool. Another friend fell over in my lounge room whilst doing the Nutbush and broke the wooden blinds. Ah, the memories.




We also celebrated Thaddeus, Jonah and Hagar’s 21st birthday parties here and Lulu's 18th. I'm fairly sure the neighbours will be glad to see the back of us when we sell.


This is my favourite part of the house... my hideously expensive front lawn and my arch nemesis, the flame tree.

It's always inundated with rainbow lorikeets eating the red blossoms these days. I'm trying to get one of them to poop on me because isn't that a good omen.
It might help me sell the house.

Hope you enjoyed the tour. Know anyone who wants to buy a house?

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

I Get that Sexual Feeling



I was singing my head off to “Sexual Feeling” on the radio as I drove to work this morning, when I suddenly noticed out of the corner of my eye, a large grey truck driving in the lane beside me.

I was travelling about 20 km under the speed limit (because I can’t drive fast, sing and retrieve a Nicorette from the packet in my handbag at the same time) and felt a bit wary of the big truck moving at the exact same speed on my right.

Is it a copper? I wondered. Is it a road rage freak and he’s stalking me because I accidentally cut him off when I was busy turning up the volume on the radio and digging between the seat for Nicorettes?

I was too nervous to look over. I thought if I ignored him he’d speed up and leave me alone. I’m just a silly old woman after all. Silly old women cut people off all the time, don’t they?

This dramatically, frightening scene carried on for a few kilometres until I finally found the courage to glance over and noticed it was merely my twenty-two year old son Hagar, grinning and frantically waving at his dim-witted mother. He was on his way to work too, bless his heart.

They seem to be playing “Sexual Feeling” a lot on the radio and it’s often the last song I hear before I trot into the school to start my torturous day.

Naturally, I have that particular song as an ear worm all day.

The school groundsmen look at me funny when I’m standing at the staff room sink, swaying my hips and singing, “Sex- su- al Feeeelin” in a sultry Contralto as I stir my cuppa.

I’ll be sitting on the loo after the first bell and singing ‘When I get that feelin, I want sexual feeling’ in loud off key tones. 


God knows what the person in the next cubicle is thinking.

I have to force myself to hum it when I’m waiting for the kids to line up to go to the library. No need for them to hear the lyrics. It would be inappropriate and I don’t need to re-read the teacher’s manual to know that.

I only know two words of the song anyway. Sek-soo-allll Feeelin...

I have to na-na-na-na-na the rest of it. This makes it worse really because I just hum to myself, then suddenly burst out with a loud and sudden, SEXUAL FEEEELIN, startling innocent bystanders.

In typical commercial radio style, they seem to play it as I’m driving home as well, and I have to be extra careful when I arrive home because I don’t want to be giving Scotto false hope or anything.

My previous ear worm was a song they constantly played by Justin Bieber which had an annoying little electronic riff in it. 

Since I never know the words to songs, I’d just walk around all day imitating the riff in a high pitched, nasal twang and irritating the shit out of everyone, a bit like Justin really.

Now I suppose you’ve reached the end of your tether with this pointless drivel and are wondering where the hell this post is going.

That, my friend, is a very good question and I know not the answer.

But when I went searching for who has actually remade this golden oldie so I could embed it in this post in order to give you all an annoying earworm, I couldn’t find it for the life of me and do you want to know why?


Because it’s not fudging sexual feeling…. It’s sexual HEALING. Two words and I couldn’t even get them right.

Do you struggle to remember song lyrics? What's your latest ear worm?





Linking up with Grace from With Some Grace for #FYBF

Monday, October 19, 2015

It's not about the Beef, it's all about the Bullshit!



I watched a Myna Bird ferociously scare an Ibis away from the cat’s food bowl yesterday. The silly cat just sat watching them both from a distance with a feeble look on her face, her whiskers trembling in vulnerable pathos. Bloody cat.

The Ibis was four times the size of the Myna Bird and the cat is bigger than both of them put together, but that diminutive bird was like a winged demon from hell, squawking and flapping its feathers at them between casual beakfuls of delicious, salmon flavoured, Fancy Feast biscuits.

This enlightening scene cemented a suspicion I’ve held for quite some time now. It’s the ashmoles (code word for arseholes) who have the loudest mouths and most aggressive, brash personalities that get to the lofty positions in this world.

Scotto and I have recently discovered the pleasures of sitting on our front patio, overlooking the river and watching the wildlife. Our real estate agent, Nettie, donated a natty little table and chairs for display purposes. 


Why, in thirteen years, it never occurred to me to install such eloquence is beyond me, but there you go. I'm an idiot.

In the last few weeks I’ve grown to really appreciate the bird life in the vicinity.

Those bastard Myna Birds are the workplace ashmoles, I'm telling you.

From my experience, the people who aren’t afraid to complain for fear of upsetting someone, the self-centred narcissistic bullies, are very often the winners in this world.

Bugger the whole ‘meek shall inherit the Earth’ stuff. Most meek and humble people I know are invisible and it’s the strident ones with the false sense of entitlement who get the most attention.

It doesn’t matter a hoot if the humble soul is a quiet achiever who doesn’t make a fuss about their personal successes; ninety per cent of the time they won’t be noticed (yep, made that statistic up).

So often, it seems to be the antagonistic bully who manages to knock all the other birds to the bottom of the cage with their hostile screeching, then rise to the top rung of the cage. 

There you have it:  Mr. Myna Fudger Bird.

We often laugh at the Rainbow Lorikeets, who represent the raucous, uncouth teenagers, drunk on bottle brush nectar. 

The Rainbow Lorikeets despise the Myna Birds... but aren’t afraid of them either. They’re the happy drunks who don’t give a toss about the bullies, too busy enjoying their own social lives. Stupified in their own hedonistic ways... like footy fanatics at a Manchester United game (or fifty-five year old women whose kids have all left home).

Then, of course, there are the Pigeons. The homeless down and outs who resort to building nests in the air-conditioners because they can’t afford a tree. They're despised for their prolific tendency to breed and their unimaginative, drab fashion sense. Labelled the rats of the sky, they are the lowest on the birdie rungs.

The Ibis are the jocks. They have no brains or savvy, just really big… beaks, and a whole lot of bulk. They spend their time hanging out on powerlines and back-dooring the cat.

The plovers never shut up the fudge up. You can hear them screaming out to their babies to, “Get the fudge home you little shit! I told you to be home before dark! Get in the bath you little fudger!” 

Fiercely protective and vociferous, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a Plover though.

Occasionally Scotto and I will spot a weeny little silver sparrow on the lawn. They're harmless, bland, little critters, and it's unlikely they’ll ever make a huge mark on the world. 

But even so, they have their place in the environment.

I like to think I’m a Sparrow.

Sparrows derive power and protection in numbers. They draw contentment from being in a cluster which can be quite intimidating to some would-be predators.
The Sparrow is always busy foraging for her nests, and gathering for her young chicks. Fastidious and super productive, the Sparrow is a reminder that idle hands should be avoided in order to live a full life. 

Sparrows just keep on trying.
The trouble is though, the Common Myna is an accomplished scavenger, feeding on almost anything, even fledgling sparrows.


(If you think there's a deeper meaning behind this birdy post, you'd be right.)

Which bird do you relate to?



Silly cat doing its annoying kneading thing on my lap instead of chasing fudging Myna Birds.


Linking up with Jess from Essentially Jess for #IBOT


Friday, October 16, 2015

Warning: Do Not Put in Mouth!



Scotto had a tummy bug this week on his first few days of holiday before starting his new job on the Gold Coast.

I wouldn’t let him kiss me on the mouth all week because… well, you know... germs.

I let the dogs kiss me on the mouth but they don’t have a tummy bug. Dogs have different germs to us anyway.

Of course, if the dogs kissed Scotto on the mouth first, they weren’t allowed to kiss me, but I suppose that’s starting to get a bit icky so I’ll stop now.

There are just a few things I refuse to put in my mouth.

Here’s a list to test your boredom levels.

1. Nicorette chewing gum I dropped from my pocket on the toilet floor.

Other random dropped Nicorettes are fair game; the classroom floor, the kitchen, down the side of the couch, the car floor…. whatever. They're quite expensive you know and I don't like to waste them plus they're slippery little buggers and I'm always dropping them. 


(I’ve been chewing them for fifteen years and I can assure you they repel most germs. Even ants and cockroaches don’t eat them. I don’t really know what they put in them but I think they might be making my hair fall out and my gums disintegrate, but at least I don’t have lung cancer. 

Yes. Fifteen years is a very long time. I think Nicorette Inc should do research on me and pay me with a life time supply of Nicorettes… as a case study sort of thing).

2. Coriander. It tastes like someone melted a plastic pen under a lamp and dripped it all over a lettuce leaf.

3. Sauvignon Blanc. It’s disgusting and pathetic. Tastes like crushed flower petals (probably pansies) mixed with fairy water. Only a sook would drink it. Even if it was the only wine left on Earth I still wouldn’t drink it. Okay. Maybe I might. But I’d have to boil it down and distil it to a heavier consistency first.

4. Anything that smells funny. If I get even a slight whiff that something’s not quite right I’d rather go hungry. I wouldn’t risk it. I haven’t thrown up since 2001. That’s pretty good, huh? Not going to risk breaking that record for a measly fillet of $30 Atlantic salmon that smells strange. I’ll just be eating the chips thanks.

5. Cochineal flavoured stuff. It just tastes like stink beetles.

6. Stink beetles.

7. A meerkat. I know lambs are cute too and I don’t eat lamb either but I suspect most meerkats would be infested with worms and I wouldn’t eat anything infested with worms. Plus I've heard they eat stink beetles.

8. Even if I was guaranteed the meerkat wasn’t infested with worms I still wouldn’t eat one because they are family oriented and I'm all for the family thing. 

Note: I didn’t write ‘orientated’ because that’s an unnecessary syllable which is becoming more and more predominentated.

9. Finally, I would never let a dreaded donut enter my rosebud lips. 

Especially a donut with a hair in it. There, I’ve said it. The thought of a hair in my mouth is the singular greatest fear in my life. I bit into one such pastry in Tijuana once and discovered to my dismay, a thick curly, black, greasy hair in my sugared donut. I shudder to wonder from whence it came. 
Is whence a word? (It must be because there are no squiggly lines underneath it.) Seriously though, how disgusting? It was too long for an arm hair and too short and coarse for a head hair so where the fudge did it come from? A stink beetle- eating meerkat?


What won’t you put in your mouth? Don’t be rude!

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Uprooting Your Life at Fifty Plus



Our house went up for auction last night. It was passed in. I sort of suspected that might happen. Before they began the auction the real estate company showed a PowerPoint presentation of the house with a John Laws type professional voiceover in the background and I teared up a bit seeing the old boiler up on the screen.

I felt nostalgic. My sentimentality dried up as quickly as a piece of uncovered camembert in the fridge though, when I realised the fudging open houses were going to have to continue. More fake flower arranging...

I could never be an auctioneer. I’d get too cranky when nobody was bidding. I’d crack a mental, push the lectern over and stomp out in a furious rage, screaming, “Why the hell did you all bother to come then you bloody time wasters! Go home and get back to your scrapbooking!”

I would be a terrible auctioneer really.

I’d be like Basil Fawlty.


Your bid is what????


It was bad enough being a vendor. I sat with my squinty eyes boring a hole in the back of the head of the guy sitting in front of me, willing him to make a bid. It was all I could do to stop myself jabbing him in the back with my pointy finger and hissing, “Go on you fool. Bid! What are you waiting for you giant sod?”

Everyone is telling us what a bad market it is at the moment and I’m starting to believe them.

Scotto leaves for the Gold Coast to start his new job next Thursday and the earliest I’ll see him after that is in early December. That’s if the house sells. The other possibility is I’ll be stuck here trying to sell the house into the new year. Bollocks!

If I didn’t own so many dogs I could go down and we could rent somewhere and rent this house in the interim, you do realise that don’t you. But no landlord with any brains will rent to us with our menagerie; pestilence and disease ridden critters that they are.

Of course I could send them all to live on a farm somewhere...

Sunning themselves....


Only kidding. 

How could I part with these annoying little shits? I couldn’t. 

It would be like giving my children away. Weird when you think I’m actually giving my real children away. But those children are all adults now and I’m sure they’ll infiltrate my new abode in the big smoke at their earliest convenience.

Besides, my real children don’t get so excited to see me when I arrive home that they wee all over me when I walk in the door.

That’s true love.

Still, I am glad Scotto doesn’t do that.


P.S. My ear is still clogged up with wax, I'm still deaf and now I’m trying the ear drops.

Have you ever been to an auction? Did you bid? Would you bother going if you weren't going to bid?


Monday, October 12, 2015

Alternative Medicine or Bullshit?



I have a new Quantam physics theory: Everything takes 20 minutes, everything costs $1000 dollars, and everything has at least 500 calories. Think about it. It’s bloody true.

Because of all the expenses that’ve been occurring lately to do with the sale of my house, I’ve begun to become what some people might affectionately refer to as a tight wad.

I’ve been in a frugal mood lately, not wanting to spend money after all the house improvement expenses and I’ve been avoiding a visit to the doctor (even though the doctor is free).

I’ve gone deaf again you see. Every couple of years my ultra-fine ear canals fill up with sweet smelling wax and I go pretty much stone cold deaf. I can hear an individual voice when everything else around me is silent, but if there’s any background noise it’s like trying to hear with a jumbo jet landing a few metres away.

It’s reached crisis point because if my Chihuahua barks, my head spins out. It’s the same when my raucous friend, Kyles laughs in my ear or if I come across a shrieking toddler in the grocery store. A certain pitch sends me into spasms of vertigo.

Today, I ricocheted off the baked bean display when a three year old threw a tantrum and I accidentally took down an old lady on a walker with me.

On the weekend, I enlisted the help of Scotto to assist me in the satanistic ritual of ear candling. Everyone (Kyles), assured me it wouldn’t hurt and that the natural warmth of the burning candle poking out of my ear hole would draw out copious amounts of pumpkin-like clogging wax from my acoustic meatus (ear hole).


Human Torch!


“Are you supposed to have black smoke coming out of your ear?” yawned a bored Scotto as he sat ensuring I didn’t set my hair on fire (again).

“I don’t know,” I answered, spluttering in the smoke. “It’s not hurting so I suppose it’s okay.”

But I discovered later that black smoke is definitely not supposed to come out of one’s ear and that it meant that one did not have the candle poked anywhere near enough deeply poked into one’s ear. So of course it didn’t work in the slightest.

I tried dripping hydrogen peroxide down my ear after that. “It will gurgle and bubble for a minute and the all the wax will effuse like lava from your shell-like ear onto a tissue” the google site exclaimed.

Yeah… well it didn’t. 


Ear candling= ten dollars. Hydrogen Peroxide and cotton balls = eight dollars.

Doctor= free.

Why didn’t I just go to the fudging doctor in the first place?

Apart from the cost there’s also the fear factor. When you have your ear syringed it’s akin to having someone sticking a fire hose up your nose and pushing on the full power except that it’s in your ear which is slightly closer to your brain. It feels as if your brains are going to blow out of the other side of your head.



So now I don’t know what to do. Stay deaf? Or risk having my brains blown out my opposing ear. 

It would probably be like just a teaspoonful of chopped mince that came out anyway. I probably wouldn’t even miss it really.

Any secret remedies?

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Who's Been Bonking on My Front Lawn?



If you drive past my house at 6:00pm on any day of the week, you’ll spy a cranky-looking Pinky, positioned on the front lawn, with a hose in her hand, watering her decidedly pricey lawn as if she were Marie Antoinette tending the royal gardens at Versailles.

With water restrictions in place we’re only permitted to have the sprinklers on twice a week and the brand new turf is crisping up in the sun like kale under a grill.

I’ll tell you one thing; if that grass dies I’m going with it. I’d take a fudging bullet for that grass.

I stalk around the perimeter with a magnifying glass searching like Inspector Clouseau for tell-tale brown bits. 'No blade of grass will perish under my watch,' I mutter under my rasping breath.

Lately, I’ve discovered unusual droppings all over the lawn.

“Scotto!” I shrieked out in urgent panicked tones the other day. “The fudging wallabies are coming up from the river and eating my hideously expensive grass! Do something Scotto!”
So Scotto immediately emailed our expert grass man, Buffalo Bill.

“Dear Bill, What can we do to stop the pesky varmints from eating up Pinky’s life savings? Please help!”

“Can’t think of anything off the top of my head,” Buffalo Bill answered. “You could try a 22.”

I did think about it for a moment, but then I realised I haven’t killed a warm blooded creature in my entire life and don’t want to start now. 


There was a mouse once which I thought was dead and threw in the bin, but it miraculously came back to life and it wasn’t me who accidentally stood on it in the first place, anyway.

I feel guilty when I spray cockroaches and watch them lurching around with nerve damage until the pitiful insects finally flop upside down with their legs spasmodically twitching in the air.

I could never shoot a cute, furry little Australian marsupial… even if the fudging little bastards are eating my children’s inheritance.

Scotto googled it and one site suggested spreading blood and bone all over the lawn because wallabies don’t like it. 

Sponsorship welcomed...


Probably because the blood and bone is made from ground up kangaroo and wallaby that someone shot with a 22.

Ah, the circle of life, eh.

There are a lot of wallabies hopping around our suburb at the moment (breeding season I suppose) and on Saturday we drove past a dead one on the side of the street. It had presumably been hit by a car and looked rather stiff.

“We should pick it up, take it home and put it up on a spike… as a warning to the others,” Scotto suggested.

“How about not,” I replied, noticing the flies swarming around it. “It appears to be quite rigid and inflexible. I don’t think we’d fit the tail in. Besides, we live in North Queensland, not downtown Westeros.”

I can just imagine what’s been happening on my lawn just before dawn every morning. 

The wallabies have been spreading the word that “number 29 has the newest, juiciest buffalo on the street” so they’ve been gathering at my place, enjoying an erotic shagathon, relishing a scrumptious munch of the finest buffalo in the suburb and then taking their morning constitution at leisure on my grass.

I’m surprised they haven’t knocked on the door and asked if they can borrow some mood music, candles and a fudging cigarette.

Any suggestions for getting rid of pesky varmints?

Mexican Wallaby sleeping in my bed!

Linking up with Grace from With Some Grace for #FYBF

and of course Maxabella from Maxabella Loves! for Weekend Rewind.

Monday, October 5, 2015

I'm Barking Mad!


Barking Collar


Since cleaning our house in preparation for the open house presentations, Scotto and I have pretty much been living in two rooms. I asked my 19 year old daughter, Lulu, to move to her father’s house across town, so it’s just been the two of us here and we don’t make much mess.

It’s very quiet.

I felt those inevitable, aching, maternal pangs on Saturday and sent my five kids a text telling them how much I love them and enquired after their health. 


Only one child replied and that’s only because he needed to borrow money. Apparently, the two eldest are on a week’s holiday in Bali.

I had no idea.

The kids weren’t the only victims in the purgative process of making our house socially acceptable. I had Borat the German Shepherd shaved (almost bald) because he sheds so much hair. Each morning, I was cleaning up enough fur to make another dog.

We had the Dog Whisperer come and shave him. He was embarrassed at first and hid behind the air conditioner so we couldn’t see him. Borat that is, not the dog whisperer.



Borat has caused quite a lot of consternation in our lives with his incessant barking. When he was a puppy we had a trainer come and teach him not to bark but it didn’t work.

After neighbours complained to the council, we were forced to buy a barking collar or we could’ve been ordered to get rid of him. The collar delivers an electric zap if he barks more than once. It cuts out if he goes off his nut, so if there’s something to really bark about then he can still warn us.

Unfortunately Borat has learned to count. He’s realised that if he only barks once then stops for a few seconds, he can keep barking in an erratic, water-torture-like fashion, for hours on end. 

After a while of listening to his aggravating woof, woof, woof, woofing, I just want to run downstairs and throttle the bloody life out of him.

He also somehow taught himself to bark without vibrating his vocal cords so the collar didn’t detect he was barking.

No wonder they use this breed in the police force.

“This’ll sort him out,” a stoic Scotto declared yesterday, holding up a new collar he’d purchased from the pet shop.

It’s a collar that contains a microphone and if Borat barks, it sprays out a shot of citronella. Dogs hate the smell of citronella apparently. Now I can tell how much the little shit has been barking by how citrusy the back yard smells.

So far it seems to be working. But even so… I’m sure the neighbours will have a party when we eventually sell and move. “There goes the neighbourhood riff raff!” they’ll cheer as they pop the champagne corks and hold up their rude fingers.

Yesterday at the open house, we sat across the road on a park bench with our dogs and surreptitiously watched people going in to inspect our house. I spotted a family with three little kids and I suddenly found myself crying. I remember when mine were little like that. It’s weird to think of another family growing up in the walls of my house.

The cat is still an issue for when we move. She’s thirteen years old and frankly I doubt she’d enjoy a 1433 km (15 hour) journey in a crate, in the back of a car, with a couple of slavering dogs breathing in her face. Our real estate agent keeps jokingly telling prospective buyers that the cat comes with the house. I suspect it might be putting them off.

We have our auction in a couple of weeks and we’ve decided to go. Can you imagine the two of us giggling down the back of the room and trying not to put a bid in, accidentally or otherwise? Scotto is moving down to the Gold Coast in three weeks to start his new job and I’ll be following him as soon as the house sells. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.

I really hope someone buys it soon because I can’t stand this clean living any more. I need to go back to my filthy habits and slothful ways.

On a final note, while I was stalking my kid’s Facebook pages (because I was missing them) I found this photo of Hagar’s Chihuahua (my first grand child) in the back of his manly ute.


Hunting Dog


Before you contact the authorities, it was a joke and they would never let him ride in the back. How fudging cute is he though?

Graduation from Puppy School photo!


Oh and one more thing. The first year Scotto moved to my home town our football team were in the grand finals. Unfortunately they lost that year. Ten years later they finally made it in to the grand final again and won it yesterday!

What a great bookend to his time here. Go North Queensland Cowboys!