An Open Letter from a Teacher to the Parents of Primary Schoolers.

I have one and a half days left of the school year at the college I spent the last ten years teaching at.

(*Never end a sentence with a preposition!)


I just saw the grade three class I taught in my first year of teaching at the school, graduating in grade 12. Wow! What a bookend to my ten years of teaching at this school!

It’s a sentimental moment for me and as a parting gift, I want to let the parents in on some truisms…

1. We teachers genuinely like your children. Adore them actually. In point of fact, your children often appear in my dreams. I’ll say to one of them, “Hey Darius! I dreamed I was a chicken last night and you were my egg!”

Darius will eye me suspiciously and reply, “You’re really weird Mrs. Poinker.”

That will be the end of the conversation and Darius will avoid me for a week, but we really do think about your kids all the time. It’s a thing.

2. We spend a lot of our personal money on your kids. Rewards such as stickers, lollies and random prizes, such as $3 tuckshop vouchers, come out of our own pockets. Multiply that by twenty-five and it does add up. At one stage I was spending more on my students than I did on my own five kids. (I only brought up the $3 tuckshop voucher because I just remembered I owe one of the tough kids in the class a voucher and I better pay up tomorrow or I’ll find a bloodied horse torso on my pillow in the school holidays.)



3. We suck up the rewards we receive from your offhand praise.

When you, the parent, make a blasé comment that little Malvolio has begun reading fiction novels because me, the teacher, read the entire seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia, OUT LOUD, in my MOST expressive voice… after morning tea… every single day, my heart sings like the bluebirds encircling Cinderella in the Disney movie. My vision goes all cloudy and I want to hug myself.

4. We will remember your child for the rest of our lives. I taught speech and drama to hundreds of students for fifteen years before starting as a primary teacher, so all up I’ve been teaching for 25 years. I remember every single kid.

5. Teachers are humans and sometimes we have bad days, for example… I’ve just received a phone call advising me of a mammogram recall because of a suspicious shadow, or the pool man just rang to say my filter has self-immolated and it’s going to cost me $1500 minimum for repairs, or my teenage son has just written off his uninsured car and he still owes me $7000 on it but doesn’t have a proper job or any sense of obligation.

Sometimes we may raise our voice a bit louder than normal. Sometimes we might be a bit mean. But the fact is, your kids are going out into a world where their boss is going to have a bad day and kids need to learn that life is about ups and downs and they better get used to it.

6. We will look for your children in years to come. We’ll scan the newspapers to check if any of our protégés have won the Nobel Prize or won a fashion design competition or an Oscar and if they do we’ll nudge our sleepy husbands in the ribs and take full credit when we see it on the telly. We wish success for your kids just as much as you do. Really.



7. The honest thing is, we chose to be teachers. We truly love your children and have their true interests in our hearts. We’ll never forget them and we secretly hope they’ll never forget us.

8. My favourite teacher at school was my French teacher, Dr. Crispin. I loved him because he taught through anecdotes and treated his students with respect. I've always tried to be that sort of teacher.

Who was your favourite teacher and why? I'd love to hear.

My Top Tips for Smuggling Contraband

The Claw

Why is it so much more irritating and itchy when a mosquito bites you on your foot compared to other parts of your body? 

You can’t scratch it as hard and when you do you get scum under your fingernails and it tickles so you’re actually torturing yourself whilst relieving yourself. I don’t like it.

Only a few things put me in a vicious mood, for example, when I’m all dressed up and my hair blows into my lipstick, or when I spill the sugar container all over the floor and no matter how thoroughly I clean it up I can still feel it underfoot and mostly, when mosquitoes bite me on the fudging foot.

There are a lot of mozzies around because of the muggy conditions here in the dry tropics. When I say ‘dry tropics,’ I mean ‘oppressive, desert-like, apocalyptic, hell hole’.

Today, our bloody internet went down and our pool turned green which meant no swims for us and no entertainment, just sweltering in the 35 degree heat and watching the boring telly.

Why do broadcasters think all day golf is even remotely interesting television viewing?

I switched over to ‘Border Patrol’, (the most xenophobic, bogan show ever) and wondered why people who get caught by the federal police don’t watch the show to get tips on how to smuggle more effectively? The old lining on the suitcase thing is getting a bit tired and I’m sure the Feds would appreciate more of a challenge. What ARE they teaching kids in schools these days?

My top tips for smuggling would be:

1. Sweating is a dead giveaway. Don’t sweat.

2. Don’t stuff things up your botty or swallow things because it can explode inside you and make you sweat quite profusely alerting the authorities to some sort of mischief afoot.

3. A bunch of bananas and a bag of grapes are NOT worth a $300 fine. You can buy bananas and grapes in most countries, so why?

4. If your hands are shaking and your eyes are darting around the place, you’ll be detained for an internal examination. Try to act natural or they’ll find those bananas before you can say ‘Yes, I have no bananas in my toiletries bag.’

5. Don’t have neck tattoos because it makes you look highly suspicious. People who have neck tattoos are obviously tough, impervious to pain and wouldn’t flinch at swallowing thirty condoms full of cocaine. Plus they’re probably the type of person silly enough to do it. (No offence to anyone with a neck tattoo. Really. I think they look lovely.)



6. Smuggling drugs in lava lamps is a recognisable ploy because lava lamps went out in the eighties. So did oversized wigs.



7. Ignorance is no excuse for the law so when you fail to declare the raw fish and exotic bean sprouts in your luggage, cocking your head to one side in a fetching manner and saying, “Que?” will fail to get you out of a fine.



If I was going to smuggle anything into the country, I’d dress as an unnaturally fat nun. But I wouldn’t hide things under my voluminous habit. Oh no. I’d have Scotto dressed as an old aged, crippled, visually challenged person and I’d have all the contraband stuffed inside his artificial leg. They’d check under my habit then be so embarrassed when I came up clean, they wouldn’t dare to touch poor, blind Scotto.

Now back to those mosquitoes. Why does the foot hurt so much compared to the other bits?

Sex After Fifty

I’m fifty-five. Yeah, I know, I don’t look it or act it… but I freakin am. Jaysus! 

(I totally look it.) Fifty-five is almost fudging SIXTY.

So what happens to women as far as sex goes when they get past fifty? It’s an interesting question because ,let’s face it, we aren’t all Olivia Newton John.

(She’s my role model and I reckon she goes for it like a fudging rabbit.)

Well… this is my take anyway…

1. You’ll probably get a whole lot of extra urinary tract infections because the distance between your who’syourfather and your boombalishus becomes a lot fudging closer due to the thinning of certain infuriating soft tissues. Urinary tract infections are moderately tolerable if you're having sex in multiple positions in various dangerous locations, thirty-five times a day. 

But if you have a normal bonk once a week and you still get them... then it's a travesty.

2. Even though you’ve finally realised what pops your cork at the age of whatever, it doesn’t matter because you’ve lost the taste a bit because of other temptations such as; sleep ins, clean, unsullied sheets, and over-indulged dogs who refuse to get off the bed.

3. Sometimes it can hurt because of the friction and the thinning of the before-mentioned, infuriating soft tissues. You can grit your teeth and bear it but… God, really?

4. You’ll feel uninspired and unsexy because when you look down at the boobs which fed five ravenous babies, they’re now dangling like a pair of golf balls in football socks (the boobs not the babies) and your stomach fold is encompassing your caesarean scar. If you don’t feel sexy in yourself, then honestly... it’s all gone to hell in a washing basket.

5. The thought of the extra energy needed to get yourself in the mood and the exercise required during the ‘act’, doesn’t quite balance up with the pitiful amount of calories which will probably be burnt. Seriously? All that effort has got to have some benefit or why bother?

6. Imaginative positions such as ‘the wheelbarrow’ or the 'reverse cowboy' are completely ruled out due to back, knee, ankle, groin and jaw strains.

I could go on but I fear I may be over-sharing, and I'd hate to do that. All I can say is, enjoy it while you can and that if you don’t use it you lose it.

Interested in hearing thoughts from the over forties?

Don’t Bother with the Diet Crap!

So guys, the sheriff is back in Dodge City.

Remember how my husband, Scotto, left town to start a new job and I wasn’t going to see him again until we sold the house?

Well, we haven’t sold the house... despite dropping the price by fifty grand as a red spot special. And it was unfeasible financially for the husband to stay away… or for me to move down what with all the dogs, so... he’s back.

Sans job.

I too, will be sans job until 2017. Fortunately, we both have a combined 9 months long service leave between us, so we’ll be okay.

But the thing is, while he was away for the last month, I thought I’d surprise him with a modelesque physique when I next saw him. I thought I’d have him dribbling in lust at my Kate Moss body after weeks of self-imposed starvation and physical torture when he next saw me.

I’ve been living on 800 calories a day and power walking for an hour a day at 5am before work.

Every damn day.

In the meantime, he’s been skyping me as his cheesy pizza sits heating in the oven, or his 500gram steak sizzles on the stove with garlic bread on the side with a family block of chocolate set aside for before bed, tucked into his pillow case.

When I finally saw my husband today, after an entire month of estrangement and deprivation on my part, he laughingly joked, “Don’t look at my big gut, Pinky. I might have put on a kilo.”

I replied politely, “What gut, silly? You don’t look any different to me sweetheart.”

Then he replied with the most soul destroying words I’ve ever heard.

“Neither do you, sweetie!”

FUDGE THE FUDGING UNIVERSE!



(Sorry for swearing.)

What the hell? Are you like me and are just starting to think, I'm just going to let it all go to hell in a hand basket?

When Did You Lose Your Confidence?

If you were born in the sixties or seventies, you’d remember when local television shows broadcasted afternoon shows where they’d invite the local, feral children to appear on the telly with a glamorous hostess and the mandatory clown and do pretty boring things in the name of entertainment.

Our local television station (situated on top of a mountain) had one such show and somehow when I was seven years old and my sister, Sam, was four, my parents managed to get us on to the show.

I remember I was a ball of excitement all the way up the mountain that day. I was about to meet Sam the Clown and Rosemary, the famous and glamorous hostess.

The journey back down the mountain after the show was a different story. 

Nobody spoke. So deeply ashamed of my attention-seeking performance, my mother sat with her teeth clenched in humiliation, not able to acknowledge her eldest daughter after her abominable display of exhibitionism.

That’s how I remember it anyway.

We were given goody bags with coke bottles and chips and stuff, but they tasted bitter with my mother’s eyes boring resentfully into my forehead as I tentatively consumed them when we arrived back home.

“You were a disgrace, Pinky!” I remember her saying. “Why did you have to be such a loud mouth, show off?”

The next day, as we were lining up outside my grade two classroom, one of my young peers commented, “I saw you on the telly last night. My mum said you looked like a cheeky brat.”

My teacher, Miss Callaghan (a pious bitch who had a brown perm and a dour expression) nodded in agreement. 

The jury was out. I’d been a tarnish on the honour of all seven year olds in the city and brought shame on my family and the population of the town.

I don’t really know what I did. Probably talked too much… maybe tried to steal the scene… perhaps slapped the clown...

I was SEVEN!

Anyway, after that experience I sort of went into a shell. If the world didn’t like me then I’d just enjoy me by myself, I thought.

Of course, my parents deny any of this happened... but I remember. It's like a deep festering wound.

This is why, as a teacher of young kids, I never trample on the cheeky, quirky loud mouths. I applaud over-confident little kids. I treasure eccentricity.

True confidence and originality is a rare commodity.

Give me the naughty kids any day.



When was your confidence stifled?

Are You a Hypochondriac?

Scotto and I have a standard thing where, if we have a sudden pain or sharp twinge, we just say to each other, “Don’t worry about it. It’s probably just a nerve”.

For example, my thumb will start to randomly twitch.

“Parkinsons!” I’ll gasp, my face white with fear.

And Scotto will say: “It’s probably just a nerve. Either that or you drank too much last night. You’ll be right.”

One side of my face will go numb and I can only talk from the left side of my mouth whilst dribbling profusely: “Stroke!” I’ll slur.

“It’s a nerve.” Scotto will scoff. “Don’t be a sook. Here, have a wine.”

My left leg falls off and I go blind in one eye: “It’s only a nerve,” he’ll admonish. "You’ll be better tomorrow. Come on hop-a-long. Let’s go to the pub."

All joking aside, I’m sort of known as Dr. Poinker at work.

When I say ‘sort of’ I mean I’m not.

But I should be because I know lots of stuff most non-medical people don’t on account of being a hypochondriac. I can diagnose everyone’s maladies from pernicious anaemia to a carbuncle on the ankle. GPs hate my guts.

It started way before the Internet too. I had a medical encyclopaedia I read as fastidiously as one might read a copy of An Idiot’s Guide to Writing Inane Blog Posts.

So I was excited last night when I did one of those Facebook quizzes that tested medical knowledge. Twelve questions it promised, but it lied. There were fifty questions. FIFTY! But once I got started I couldn’t stop and I knew from my maniacal tallying, I got 46 out of 50 correct and I wanted to skite about it on Facebook.

But when I went to get my results I had to submit my email address and I thought, ‘Get fudged! I don’t want to be spammed with your stupid emails.’

So then I tried to leave a nasty comment on the link but it put me in a never ending loop and I was left frustrated and probably hacked by Russian bots during the process.

NB: Not to pick on the Russians. It might have been anyone really but I doubt anyone reads my blog in Russia so they’re fair game.

If you do happen to be Russian and you read this blog, I must add that I really loved Olga Korbut, that gymnast in the 70s but I do wonder why you sent that poor little mongrel dog into space in 1957 and left it to endlessly orbit the galaxy. Not that I hold a grudge about it because I do love Tchaikovsky and Vodka.

R.I.P. Laika. 

If my dogs were sent into space I reckon I’d still be able to hear them barking as they orbited Earth in the space machine. The greenhouse gasses would be exponentially enhanced by the permeating cloud of citrus spray from their barking collars. I’m sure a few local animal management officers would be more than glad to see them on a direct trajectory to Mars, not to mention the neighbours.

They’d have to cut off their oxygen supply in the end, I suppose.

Just like I’m about to do to my German Shepherd if he doesn’t shut the hell up.


Sorry to be harping on about my barking dogs but it’s driving me loony. Anything driving you loony lately?

Magic Mushrooms

I was watering the lawn at dusk the other day and I noticed a large, brown, gleaming, elongated lump on my precious buffalo grass. Outraged, and assuming it was the calling card of an early morning walker’s dog, which’d furtively pooped on my grass while I was still snoring, I swore loudly and aimed a sharp jet of water on it. I expected it to break apart and dissolve but it didn’t.

It remained solid but a weird cloud of red dust sprayed up and out of it.

I gave it another shot with the hose and it happened again. I was a bit afraid of it by now and tiptoed closer. I suspected it might be an extra-terrestrial egg or something and a ten legged squid-like creature was going to burst out and attach itself to my throat or invade one of my orifices only to lay more eggs inside me and emerge from my nose at an inopportune moment. Each time I squirted it, more red dust would mist up in the air.

I was on the phone to my father at the time and he didn’t offer any helpful suggestions. In fact, I think he assumed I was just being silly and it really was dog poop.

The next morning when I was on my way to work I checked it out and by that time, it was surrounded by huge, white mushrooms. By the afternoon all the mushrooms had transformed into the dog turd, brown things and I couldn’t water the lawn because they were all spraying red spores everywhere.

I don’t like mushrooms. I like the white ones you buy in Coles fried up with butter, but I can’t stand the ones that grow in the garden because I’m afraid I’ll accidentally eat one. (It’s the same as how I don’t like heights because I always think I might accidentally jump off the cliff or the fifty storey balcony or something.)

Plus I think fungi is ugly (See photo above).

Even when I buy the mushrooms from Coles I’m always wondering if an East Asian Death Cap or a False Champignon managed to sneak past the quality controllers. I still eat them but I always monitor myself for symptoms for a few hours afterwards.

Ian, the mower man, came and murdered all the fungi with his Victa Mustang, thank God.

I don’t know why they were there in the first place. It’s not like we’ve had any rain. Maybe I’m spending too much time watering the garden.

I suppose this type of post is why nobody seems to be reading my blog anymore.



Sigh…

Any idea what was breeding on my lawn????

The Things Your Kids Tell Their Teachers

On Monday mornings when the kids come in to class I ask them all, one at a time, to tell me one thing they did on the weekend.

I can see they’re all busting a gut to talk and it cuts down the chatter a bit later on when they have to do actual work.

Most of the things they tell me are complete rubbish.

"Tell me what you did on the weekend, Cornelius,” I’ll ask, as he waves his arm in the air with the exuberance of a performing seal hyped up on Cocopops.

“I went to England,” he crows, turning around in his seat to see who he’s impressed with his cosmopolitan news.

“You went to England for the weekend? That’s a long way to go,” I reply, sighing inwardly because it’s not the first time he’s told me this. “Did you go on a plane or a ship, Cornelius?”

He cocks his head to one side as if I’m an idiot. “No. Dad drove us and my brother cut his foot on a can and had to get stitches.” They love the gory stuff.

“Did you actually go to England or Ingham?” I ask.

I know he means, Ingham (a small town 100 kilometres up the road from here because... somehow I just know).

“England,” he repeats emphatically.

“Was it snowing?” I ask in a droll, jaded voice.

“No, Mrs Poinker,” he says with a puzzled expression. “But Dad caught a really big fish!”

“And what did you do on the weekend, Calpurnia?” I ask a little girl in the front row who’s stabbing holes in her rubber with a pencil. I can see she’s cut her own fringe again, this time it’s so short I suspect she took to it with a razor.

“I went killing crocodiles with Dad,” she says in a matter of fact tone. “There’s a big croc on the banks of the creek near our house. It ate a man last week, so Dad said we had to kill it.”

‘Funny,’ I think. ‘I haven’t seen any reports of a man being eaten by a crocodile in this vicinity lately.’

“It’s illegal to kill crocodiles!” Malvolio interrupts. “They’re protectorated!”

“That’s true, Calpurnia,” I say, whilst frowning at Malvolio for his rude interuption and thinking about how I should book in for a Botox injection between my eyebrows before Christmas and wondering if the clinic has any ‘teacher specials’ available for the holiday season.

“And what did you get up to this weekend, Malvolio?” I enquire, knowing full well what his answer will be.

“I went on Mortal Kombat all weekend!” he exclaims. “I killed six thousand monsters and maimed thirty thousand soldiers. My name is KillDeathBlood 1973 and I’m a legend!”



Now that I can believe.

What tall stories did your kids tell at school?

Linking up with Grace at With Some Grace for #FYBF

Barking Crazy

My dogs have been particularly naughty since Scotto went away. I think they’re feeling extra protective of me because they seem to be barking at everything that moves. Either that or they’ve realised the true master of the house has absconded from the nut house and now the inmates are free to run wild.

I was compelled to go and buy yet another citronella barking collar (for the Chihuahua this time). I felt a rush of excitement and anticipation when I was buying it at the pet shop and couldn’t help giggling when I told the girl behind the counter, “This is going to give that little bastard a shock. I’ll show that Mexican son of a biartch.”

“Would you like to buy some calming vitamins for him?” she asked.

“Sure!” I replied, riding high on the euphoric thought that I’d solved my problem. “Anything’s worth a try.”

It was with great disappointment when I later watched Pablo enjoying a raucous and unnecessarily lengthy, barking binge, the citronella spray almost obscuring his small, muscular body, but the said spray having absolutely no effect on the tenacity of his riotous efforts.

Adding to my consternation, all the ‘calming’ vitamins managed to do was make the Chihuahua and the German Shepherd sick up. It was quite horrible.

I put a sheet up on the fence to stop the German Shepherd from seeing movement outside (a leaf blowing in the wind can trigger his incessant woofing) and I barricaded all the windows to prevent the Chihuahua from seeing the German Shepherd.

Unfortunately it appears that dogs have a good sense of hearing and can’t really see that well anyway.

Does anyone know if they make ear plugs for dogs?

In desperation I searched the Internet for a miracle solution… or just some doggy earplugs really.

I found a video which demonstrated a method of doggy ear massage and a five hour music video especially designed to calm dogs down. What kind of nit wit put that on the World Wide Web? What kind of nit wit would play it to their dog?

Anyway, the Chihuahua hated the ear massage and the music almost sent me mental and elicited no visible response from the dogs.

Apparently you should never yell at your dog for barking because they think you’re barking along with them. So all the time I’ve been screaming, “Shut the fudge up you fudging stupid animals!” They think I’ve been yelling out, “Get off the stinking lawn you mongrel Labrador, how dare you walk past my house! I want to bite you with my teeth!”

Another website advised to calmly call the dog over when it’s barking, make it sit quietly and give it a treat. (I’ve been using this technique as I’m writing my post and so far the Chihuahua has had thirty-eight treats. I don’t think he gets it.)

So… back to the ear plugs. You won’t believe it but you can actually buy Mutt Muffs from the United States! According to the website they have ‘ inner sound-deadening foam with the same density found in pilots' high-end headsets’.

And they come in pink.

I’m going to order a dozen.

And I’m going to be the one wearing them.


Any suggestions to stop barking, apart from euthanasia? (Don’t worry I’ve thought about it.)

P.S. I just found out why the dogs have been barking for the last half hour non stop. Someone had been knocking on the door attempting to deliver some flowers Scotto had ordered for me in the top photo. Lol.

Have you let yourself go during your marriage?

I’ve had a large, local reaction. No, I haven’t been running laps on my front lawn in my undies and titillating the neighbours.

I’ve had a large, local reaction to the wasp that decided it didn’t like the cut of my jib on Thursday. There’s a big, red, hot lump on my elbow. 

Celine the fox terrier came over and sniffed it a moment ago and whined something that sounded a lot like the word, ‘aaaampuuuutaaaaate’.

Dogs know these things. They can sniff out cancerous tumours and everything.

"Don't say I didn't warn you!"

It’s okay though, it’s my left arm. How much do you think an arm weighs? (I was just thinking it’d be a very quick way to lose a couple of kilos.)

Despite the vicious wasp assault, I’ve maintained my 5am starts and walks but decided to err on the side of caution and walk along the street instead of the foliage-lined river path. It’s not as picturesque but I don’t have to be as vigilant about looking out for snakes and spiteful wasps.

I showed my elbow to Scotto on Skype but the redness didn’t show up enough on the washed out screen to elicit much sympathy. 

Please don't focus on the enormous bat wing hanging under my arm.
It's hormonal. A hormonal bat wing.

Agreeing to communicate with Scotto via Skype was not something that came easily to me. The thought of chatting to him on the telephone in sexy, appealing, dulcet tones, but with no makeup on, greasy skin, unwashed/combed hair and wearing a stained, ripped t-shirt whilst picking my nose or flicking through a magazine, seemed like the ideal long distance relationship mode of communication to me. 

What you can’t see can’t hurt you and all that. But I missed seeing his big, boofy head and finally acquiesced to a face to face.

I suppose I’ve let myself ‘go’ a bit over the last ten years (since getting married) and in this past ten days, sans husband, my physical appearance has deteriorated exponentially. I’ve enjoyed lolling around in baggy shorts and going braless in tent-like t-shirts on the weekends.

My friend and real estate agent, Nettie, and I went for a coffee and a walk around the shops yesterday after the open house. She was dressed in a neat little pencil skirt, a white silk blouse and heels and I looked like a recently electrocuted homeless person who’d just crawled out of her sleeping bag.

I picked a dress off the rack in one of the boutiques.

“This is nice,” I said hopefully, feeling around for the price tag.

“It’s a sack, Pinky!” Nettie scoffed. “It has no waist. Besides I hate those high necklines.”

“But this style hides a big belly and the neckline protects your upper chest from the sun,” I stammered.

“Bugger the sun,” Nettie pooh-poohed me. “I think a bit of décolletage needs to be on show.”

I looked down at the floor in shame and spied her perfectly groomed, pink toenails under the sparkling straps of her pretty sandals, then glanced across to the gnarled bunion poking out the side of my rubber thong.

My toenails were so long they could Julienne a carrot and they were a dull grey colour with one black, crusty pinky-toe.

Nettie is an eligible single lady, you see. She still makes an effort. Women who get pedicures take care of themselves, unlike dirty-toed, old cows like me.

Sigh. I want a pedicure now but I think my bunion precludes me from even entering one of those nail salons. The young girls would shriek, ‘Pariah!’ and push me out the door. If they happened to notice the carbuncle wasp bite on my elbow they’d call the health authorities for sure.

Anyway, Scotto can’t see my feet on Skype.

I’ve decided what I’ll do next time I Skype Scotto, is smear Vaseline all over the camera lens on my laptop (I was about to smear it all over the screen but then I realised it wouldn’t work).

I’ll turn the lights off and wear a hat to cover my unwashed hair. That should create a dewy, mysterious look.



Any other smoke and mirror tips?

Anus Horribilus

Last night, it suddenly occurred to me I should set the alarm for 5am and go for an early walk the following day. 

It was the very first pebble in an horrific landslide of biblical proportions when the alarm went off this morning.

I’d organised everything I’d need the night before; keys, phone and runners with socks tucked in and neatly placed on the stairs. All I had to do was scull a coffee. 

On my way down the driveway, I fed the whining cat and picked the newspaper up from the lawn before setting forth on my journey.

About halfway through my walk, I reached into my pocket for my phone to check the time… no phone… but it didn’t worry me because I assumed I’d merely left it at home.

It didn’t worry me anywhere near as much as the fudging swarm of wasps I walked into. I should have known when the elderly gentleman walking about twenty yards ahead of me began flailing his arms around demonically and performing wobbly pirouettes... but I just thought he was being silly or doing some Eastern meditation thing.

One of the little fudgers stung me on the elbow and I spent the rest of the walk waiting for an anaphylactic attack to strike.

I looked for my phone just before I was ready to leave for work but horror of horrors, it was nowhere to be seen. I ran out on to the front lawn and scoured the area where I’d bent over to feed the cat and pick up the newspaper, thinking it might have fallen out of my pocket. God forbid it should have absconded on my walk! 

In a panic I sent a FB message to Shazzy and Kazzy to ring me urgently so I could find it via my earholes. 

The silence was deafening. I searched everywhere at least five times.

“Was it locked” asked Kyles when I saw her at work. 

“No,” I gulped. "Can you lock a phone?"

“Well you better ring the provider and cancel it, Pinky,” she warned. “Who’s your provider? Telstra?”

“No,” I stammered. “I think it’s the other one.”

“Optus?"

I nodded in a feeble fashion.

Kyles sent Scotto (on the Gold Coast), a text asking him to block the phone for me. God forbid some grubby fingered person should run up a massive bill on my (unlocked) phone. 

He was straight on it. 

Turns out my provider is Virgin. Who knew?

It’s funny how when you lose something you suddenly realise how deeply attached to it you are. At morning tea, I watched everyone brandishing their phones around with gay abandon. Tears welled up in my eyes and sad music played in my head. ‘Treasure what you have guys’, I thought, ‘because you never know when it will be cruelly taken from you’.

Anyway, I found the stupid thing when I arrived home, tucked in the bowels of the couch where my flabby bottom had sat while I drank my coffee and the phone had slipped out of my back pocket…

There. That’s why it was an anus horribilus not an annus horribilus.

But then the worst of the day was yet to come. I had to administer Celine, the fox terrier’s bi-weekly menopause tablet. It’s usually Scotto’s job but he ain’t here no more. It took me five (toothy-bitey) attempts to realise I needed to put it in a lump of butter or she was either going to bite my finger off or begin to levitate and spew pea green bile all over me whilst screaming profanities.

How was your day? Ever lose your phone?

Halloween Wine!

My little sister, Sam.

I went to my sister’s place for a tiny, Halloween drink last night (how much does my sister look like me when wearing a black wig and dressed as a witch, eh?).

I ran into my good friend Sinead there and I asked her (her being a food and beverage manager and all) why all of a sudden, bottles of wine don’t have that disappointing hollow in the bottom anymore.

It’s a punt.

That’s what it’s actually called… it’s not just a silly euphemism I made up.

The punt is quite disappointing in the respect that you think you still have a full glass of wine left in the bottle, when in reality you only have a dribble.

Only serious wine drinkers will appreciate this.

Anyway, Sinead told me that it was there because it was so that waiters could stick their thumbs into the bottom of the bottle so they can pour it without interfering with the temperature of the sacred liquid and also so that Portensio Pretentious can sniff the wine to check it’s ‘not of rotten corkage’.

But since corks have gone by the wayside, the whole business of hollow bottomed wine bottles has become passé.

Then, Sinead performed a fantastic (bitter and twisted hospitality-worker-type) impersonation of bogan wine drinkers swirling the $10 bottle of house wine they’ve ordered, pretending they know all about wine.

She also told me a story about how a very elderly geezer, came into her restaurant accompanied by a deliciously youthful and attractive (but scatter-brained) ingénue.

When Sinead explained to the odd couple that the restaurant was not charging corkage now because, ‘No wine bottles have corks anymore’, the pretty damsel piped up with, “Well, that’s no good! They should charge a screwing fee!”

Sinead said it was all she could do to avoid meaningful eye contact with the old geezer.

The point of this, is that Sinead was feeding me a bunch of codswallop, as usual. The hollow in the bottom of the bottle is there to give the architecture of the glass bottle strength and prevent a build-up of pressure. It’s also there to disperse the sediment, and hinder it from rising up when poured.

Only cheap wine lacks a punt. Like… the stuff I buy.

My other point is this. Don’t ever take what people tell you as being the truth (especially those in the hospitality industry). People make up facts 72% of the time. If you want the real truth go to Yahoo answers and your mind will be blown apart.

My other, other point is this… don’t be a pretentious dick in front of anyone in the hospitality industry because they will be going back and dining off stories about you for years to come.


Question? Do you look like your sibling? Feel free to put photos in the comments.

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?

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?

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

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