One Foot in Front of the Other...
Jul. 14th, 2018 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capn_n_pyeWhat can be said about term two that hasn’t been said before? Eleven weeks is inhumane and no Queen’s Birthday long weekend can make up for it? Tsk, all so passe! So what was different this time?
Well, once upon a fortieth birthday some rad peeps who Stinky works with gave us tickets to a show. Whoo hoo! They sussed out with Pye what sort of timing would be good and obligingly sent us to a Saturday matinee because A) who the hell likes late nights these days, let me tell you about me rheumatism and how young folks today don’t have any respect, not like when I was young; and B) a matinee means we get to have Lunch and Go Shopping. Whoo hoo!
Thank goodness the Cabin Girl and her shipmates joined us for lunch, or we would never have learned of the existence of the Puberty Fairy.
See, this is what happens when you don’t preview a YouTube* you found before showing it to a bunch of Year 7s.
* Pye has recently heard enough people refer to YouTube videos using the indefinite article to question her very existence (“I have a great YouTube on that!” “Have you seen a YouTube about…?” “There are some great YouTubes out there!”)
Now, Priscilla Queen of the Desert is the perfect show for anyone dying to cram a crap ton of culture into their gullet. No, wait, it’s dick jokes and disco music, oh well, close enough. Stinky’s colleagues were amazing enough to get us VIP tickets (‘free’ program, drink and ice cream, yay!) as well as centred seat about four rows from the front. It made the scene with the South East Asian wife who came out singing ‘Pop Muzik’ particularly hilarious and Stinky caught a ping pong ball! There were a couple of sign language interpreters there and it was so hard to decide whether to watch them or the show, but it’s safe to say a fun time was had by all! Moose wasn’t even there, but he insisted on keeping the ping pong ball.
Speaking of ping pong, this video perfectly captures our time on Komodo.
Just like the fun time that was had when Merrin andDamo Draino moved in together! Draino got cold so went and got a hat - turns out it was his hat from our 80th! It’s actually pretty safe to say that we would both completely fail to recognise him without his rad pirate costume hat. To be on the safe side, he should never take it off again.
Another thing that happened was that Cousin Adrian and his family (which now includes a whole new human since the last time we saw them) came to visit the antipodes. It was close enough in timing to match up with him turning the dreaded F-word-number too (it was like the passing of a torch) and there was cake and wonderful dress ups and Stinky somehow found a bookmark of herself in Grade 2!
The Cabin Girl and Powder Monkey finally discovered what it’s like to be the eldest of the cousins (or to be more precise, second cousins), and it was with pride that we watched them orchestrate extended games of hide and seek and model equal-opportunity non-gender-restricted dress up fun times, take that outmoded ideas of what boys and girls should wear!
Then some fool decided that late afternoon was the best time to get a bunch of little kids to all sit still and smile for a photo at the same time… if not successful, it was at least entertaining - the screams and howls were almost operatic at times!
Speaking of drama, Moose turned 20! Chuckles spoiled him more than us and got him a new friend called Bunga. Moose was very excited to unwrap him and they really enjoyed reading his card together. Bunga is almost as big a jerk as Moose, so they are getting along just fine.
All we did was let Moose come to the pub with us, where he insisted that he get his own seat, too.
Moose figured that wasn’t enough attention (what else is new) so he insisted on more, in the form of a photo of himself for every year since he came home with us.
And then we have a new dog! His name is Roland and he’s a bit naughty. But when he came to live with us he got glittery, too! His name is Roland because he is epic and always going on quests
Then it inevitably became a competition to see who would be the last to fall off. Moose got cocky, but Bunga and Stitch conspired to kick him off. Joke was on lil stitchy Stitch when Bunga turned on him too. What a jerk!
Speaking of jerks, after about a year of friendship, the Undies finally vanished into the great beyond. It’s not that anyone cleaned up or anything, they must have just evaporated! We miss them :(
Another jerk was our hot water service, which, after its allocated lifespan, gave up the ghost. The first bit to go was a valve that chose to quit on a Saturday morning. Our usual plumber was in Melbourne, so we asked the internet who was the next closest, thinking that if we went local that’d be smart.
This is how we found The Tap Man.
The Tap Man is in his late fifties, is the proud owner of a curly mullet, and while patching up the valve, he did us the inestimable service of reminding us that other people exist outside of our rarefied little left-wing bubble. Stinky brought him around to look at the unit, and when Pye popped her head outside the first thing he said was, “Oh are youse two together?” Stinky pointed out that we had the same face and he was all like, “Oh you never know these days, youse might have picked each other cos you look the same!” He told us we were okay cos we weren’t lezzos and also hastened to explain many times about all the sisters he has who aren’t married, so it’s okay for us not to be married too, “as long as you’re still not lebians” (phew, what a relief!), and how you “have to be careful with what you say these days” (this is him being careful?!). Then he found out that we are teachers, and when he heard where Stinky works, he was overcome with nostalgia.
“Does June still work there? When I was young I went out with June, I should have married her! Now now get me wrong, my wife’s great, look here’s a photo, but jeeze, how about June!”
Then somehow ‘wogs’ came up, and when we carefully pointed out our family background he apologised briefly, mentioned he hadn’t had his pill to slow himself down today, then somehow cheerfully started talking about how it's 100% the woman's responsibility to make sure she doesn't get pregnant, not like what the wogs would call Australian Slut. That and the fact that he kept calling Stinky ‘possum’ meant that he was probably lucky to make it out of there alive!
The hot water service was back in action, and we resolved for some reason to get someone else to do the replacement in the next couple of weeks. But Tap Man tricked us! He didn’t charge us at all for the Saturday morning call out (minimum $300, usually), so then we were trapped by middle-class manners to allow him to finish the job. Fortunately it died for real on a school day, so neither of us was there when he came to swap them out. We were surprised to see the old unit was still in the driveway...
... but it’s okay, he left a note!
Then it was something like a month before he got around to invoicing us, how does he even stay afloat?!
Speaking of staying afloat, one fine day we jumped on the ferry to across to the Dromana Bowls Club to help celebrate the golden anniversary of our sister-in-law’s parents. The cunning plan was for D’admiral to kindly pick us up at Sorrento and save having to pay for the car to go, which meant that he was watching when the captain completely misjudged the docking angle and just smashed straight into the dock. It was quite a significant jolt - old people fell over, children started crying, the Year 12 correction Pye had meticulously arranged in order on the table went flying, as did all the carefully laid preparations for the High Tea on the High Seas. We suppose it’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often, but jeeze, you’d’ve wanted to have your handbrake on in the car, and not be on the stairs!
Once at the anniversary celebrations, Stinky felt personally attacked by this stubby holder...
… and to make herself feel better, she tricked the children into thinking that the best fun in the whole world was to ‘post’ empties through a hole in the wall into the recycling bin.
It was a lovely afternoon all-round.
In completely unrelated news, one day Pye was telling her Year 12s about how the Powder Monkey’s hilarious pun name is ‘Camel’ and that in Indonesian the word for ‘ostrich’ is ‘burung unta’ or ‘camel bird’. The same day, this image came up on one of the kid’s Facebook feed
SPOoooOOOoooOOOOKkkyyyyyyy!
Animals are pretty fun though, and every year Pye’s Year 9s go to the zoo. They had a lesson from one of the zoo’s educators in one of the shiny new education buildings which is next to the lions. Who doesn’t like lions?!
If you’re the Powder Monkey or the Cabin Girl and you don’t respond to your auntie when she sends you a photo, then what happens next is on you.
And if you still don’t answer, it really is your fault.
Metaphorically speaking, Stinky’s school is experiencing ball-tearing fun with long-overdue renovations. Try doing a listening assessment task with this out your window!
Food tech had to move for the first time in over forty years, which was a huge amount of fun for all involved. Stinky is particularly impressed with the souvenirs she was given, but doesn’t understand what they are trying to say.
All that moving and packing can be a bit of prick. Speaking of pricks, check out the rad doona cover that Pye found, just for Stinky!
While on the topic of being prickly, we felt very prickly indeed when we turned up to help assess at the finals of the Sayembara Lisan (Indonesian speaking competition). Pye had run the G-town regional competition, with almost 300 students slated to compete, and let me tell you, it was no small task. The main organisers had said that teachers sending finalists had to come and help assess at Melbourne Uni on a Saturday, so we both faithfully RSVP’d to say that we’d be there. So come the special Saturday, we took our hangovers on the train and girded our loins for Doing Our Bit and Contributing. Imagine, then, our feelings when we went to sign in and the organiser popped up and was all like, “Ooh sorry, sorry! We have many! I was confused by people wanting to turn up at different times and we have enough Europeans and so sorry! Sorry!” Eventually we realised that that meant that we weren’t needed to help assess, and though we may be good enough to run the biggest regional competition for them, we were apparently too white to be any good at the finals, and also it was too much to expect that we could have been told in advance that we were surplus to requirements. Basking in the glow of seething rage at having been thoroughly disrespected, we took our Saturday back with a quick nostalgic tour of our haunts around uni, went shopping, then went home and put a giant black texta line through the name of the one who wronged us.
The pictures above used to be a patch of azaleas with a bench in it, where we used to meet at Melbourne Uni in the mid-late-90s. This was pre-common use of mobile phones, so we would hang out there for a while, gather a bunch of like-minded friends, before rolling off to the pub. If you were late, it was okay - there was a vine nearby that a note would be pinned on for late-comers, directing them to the appropriate watering hole. It was like Burke and Wills’ Dig Tree, but we stuffed up less and no one died. To be fair, it was invariably The Clyde we would head to, so perhaps it was less vital to survival than the dig tree.
By the time Queen’s Birthday rolled around we were mostly calm again - as was the weather. Check out how attractive D’admiral and Chuckles’ backyard is during winter!
Although there wasn’t quite as much seagrass to roll around in as usual.
We enjoyed popping into Coolart to meet the artist in residence, and she was pretty keen for the kids to help contribute into a group project by writing about how they felt about birds and nature. Bless Stinky’s cotton socks, she wanted to help too!
We don’t really know what happened as we wandered around the wetlands, maybe something about kids getting a hold of the camera?
Given the lack of The Original Undies, we found it almost unbearably exciting that the Knickers were still alive and well.
Sidenote: Stinky has been going nuts scanning negatives and found this photo from 2000:
So astonishingly, it turns out that taking pictures of abandoned smalls is actually part of who we are! It’s probably down to how Stinky is prone to taking random photos of the things that she comes across while walking. Here is a standard street view on her way to school:
What a lovely, normal day...WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?
I would not like to be around when the recycling truck comes and it attacks!
Eleven-week terms are definitely cruel and unusual, so we were more than ready for a rest when the holidays eventually limped into view. We did a quick dash back down to D’admiral and Chuckles’ for wintery fun times and a brief opportunity to try and seed the new swear word that one of Pye’s students put out there this term (the swear is ‘fish nipples’ and it really works - try snarling it out, pretending that you’ve stubbed your toe! Use it at parties and at work! See which of your friends, family and colleagues will be the first one to point out that fish don’t have nipples because they’re not mammals - there will 100% be one, and chances are it’ll be a white dude who’ll start with “Well, actually, you do know that…”).
Stinky came bearing gifts of a variety of citrus scrumped from her colleague’s new house one street over (every time she takes the bins in for him she ravages a tree, and one time a neighbour thought she was so suspicious they called the cops). She sure does like her citrus, that one!
Chuckles also likes her citrus, and we soon learned about a native Australian lime that has cute little caviar sized bits that you can put in champagne for a delicious flavour sensation.
Dining at the best BnB in town is always delightful, we just wish the pasta could have been more fresh...
Moose was thoughtful enough to bring the other half of his birthday mousse to share with those he deemed worthy (even though sharing is quite difficult for him, it doesn’t come naturally)...
He was in a very generous, sharey mood, though, because he also let us all have a look at his pirate activity book!
And do you know, he hadn’t filled in the pirate doodle page?! Tsk, for shame! It’s okay, the kids had his back.
When not doodling on stuff, we toyed with a little bit of science, because we’re not afraid to look silly and investigate how sound works….
(Tie a couple of bits of string to a metal coat hanger, wrap the string around your fingers, stick your fingers in your ears and donk the coat hanger against a hard surface for SCIENCE!).
Victoria chucked on an 18 degree winter’s day, which is probably ruinous for the planet as a whole, but made it exceedingly pleasant on the beach, even if the kids were too chicken to go for a swim. Unlike Queen’s Birthday, the sea had thrown up sculptural amounts of sea grass...
Which means one thing… SEAWEED ANGELS!!
HOORAY!!
Then when the Powder Monkey started to investigate something in the sand, his Nonna realised he didn’t know how to squat properly, so instantly laid on a master-course.
Stinky made everyone stay there for at least the same length of time as one of Andre the Giant’s farts.
Look, just enjoy the view of the sea trying to build up more seagrass, okay?
As we are wont to do, we ended up back at Coolart. Hurrah!!!
Hurray, hooray, callooh callay!!
The art is still pretty good...
… possibly even better than the last time!
The crew couldn’t stay for long, on account of being Canberra-bound, so it was only a short window of opportunity to infect them with bad habits. Being a terrible influence on the children accomplished, we flung ourselves wantonly into one of the peninsula's many fine dining establishments. D’admiral and Chuckles surprised us with a visit to Jackalope’s Rare Hare winery, the Hot Place to Be right now. Everyone else was driven by Chuckles, while Pye went by rabbit-antelope hybrid, getting crapped out at the front door.
These two behaved themselves (most of the time)....
…. and the food was definitely very, very nummy.
We’d been arguing about whose turn it was to pay, and Chuckles was being very insistent, but rules don’t apply to mavericks, so while she was nudging D’admiral and telling him to pretend to go to the loo and sneakily pay, Stinky was chortling like a pirate because she’d already done the same thing two minutes before. Bill shock, ha ha ha!
Boy, was she mad! But not as mad as this mad-ass thingy near their toilets - we didn’t know whether to find it luxurious or terrifying!
We were obliged to go for another walk, just to get over the whole experience. We lost D’admiral at the sheep-shed, no idea where he ended up, although Chuckles said she could see him just fine…? #camouflaged
Coolart insisted on being pretty and not raining on us. A couple of wallabies wandered by, but refused to hang around long enough to take selfies, bah.
We dashed back home so as to have no excuse not to rewrite a new VCE Indo curriculum (gawd, the current curriculum has only been in place since 2006, why does VCAA have to rush change?!), quite forgetting another holiday project, ie, creating an almost-life-size cut out of Jokowi, the Indonesian president (for now). We couldn’t bear to throw out the giant piece of cardboard our plumber friend left his note on, and what better use than this? We still needed to cut it out properly, but in the meantime had been entertaining ourselves by putting it in each others bedrooms to startle the shit out of each other.
Pye had propped him up just inside the front door before we left, because everyone knows that it would be fricken hilarious that anyone peeking in through the door-glass would think that it was a real person. We’ve no doubt that it was, but Pye wishes she’d remembered that she she’d done it, because she skittered sideways, absolutely packing-dacks when she came back home, opened the front door and there was someone behind it. Self-burn! Those are rare!!
One of our other holiday projects was to continue to spend thoughtful birthday vouchers (including a 90 minute spa treatment, whoo!), and we close now with a historical-place-marker photo of what we spent [part of] the Bunnings haul on. Finally, the Good Ship Waratah has its own waratah tree!
Get growing, little dude, represent! We’ll water you with our tears as we go back to work.
Well, once upon a fortieth birthday some rad peeps who Stinky works with gave us tickets to a show. Whoo hoo! They sussed out with Pye what sort of timing would be good and obligingly sent us to a Saturday matinee because A) who the hell likes late nights these days, let me tell you about me rheumatism and how young folks today don’t have any respect, not like when I was young; and B) a matinee means we get to have Lunch and Go Shopping. Whoo hoo!
Thank goodness the Cabin Girl and her shipmates joined us for lunch, or we would never have learned of the existence of the Puberty Fairy.
See, this is what happens when you don’t preview a YouTube* you found before showing it to a bunch of Year 7s.
* Pye has recently heard enough people refer to YouTube videos using the indefinite article to question her very existence (“I have a great YouTube on that!” “Have you seen a YouTube about…?” “There are some great YouTubes out there!”)
Now, Priscilla Queen of the Desert is the perfect show for anyone dying to cram a crap ton of culture into their gullet. No, wait, it’s dick jokes and disco music, oh well, close enough. Stinky’s colleagues were amazing enough to get us VIP tickets (‘free’ program, drink and ice cream, yay!) as well as centred seat about four rows from the front. It made the scene with the South East Asian wife who came out singing ‘Pop Muzik’ particularly hilarious and Stinky caught a ping pong ball! There were a couple of sign language interpreters there and it was so hard to decide whether to watch them or the show, but it’s safe to say a fun time was had by all! Moose wasn’t even there, but he insisted on keeping the ping pong ball.
Speaking of ping pong, this video perfectly captures our time on Komodo.
Just like the fun time that was had when Merrin and
Another thing that happened was that Cousin Adrian and his family (which now includes a whole new human since the last time we saw them) came to visit the antipodes. It was close enough in timing to match up with him turning the dreaded F-word-number too (it was like the passing of a torch) and there was cake and wonderful dress ups and Stinky somehow found a bookmark of herself in Grade 2!
The Cabin Girl and Powder Monkey finally discovered what it’s like to be the eldest of the cousins (or to be more precise, second cousins), and it was with pride that we watched them orchestrate extended games of hide and seek and model equal-opportunity non-gender-restricted dress up fun times, take that outmoded ideas of what boys and girls should wear!
Then some fool decided that late afternoon was the best time to get a bunch of little kids to all sit still and smile for a photo at the same time… if not successful, it was at least entertaining - the screams and howls were almost operatic at times!
Speaking of drama, Moose turned 20! Chuckles spoiled him more than us and got him a new friend called Bunga. Moose was very excited to unwrap him and they really enjoyed reading his card together. Bunga is almost as big a jerk as Moose, so they are getting along just fine.
All we did was let Moose come to the pub with us, where he insisted that he get his own seat, too.
Moose figured that wasn’t enough attention (what else is new) so he insisted on more, in the form of a photo of himself for every year since he came home with us.
And then we have a new dog! His name is Roland and he’s a bit naughty. But when he came to live with us he got glittery, too! His name is Roland because he is epic and always going on quests
Then it inevitably became a competition to see who would be the last to fall off. Moose got cocky, but Bunga and Stitch conspired to kick him off. Joke was on lil stitchy Stitch when Bunga turned on him too. What a jerk!
Speaking of jerks, after about a year of friendship, the Undies finally vanished into the great beyond. It’s not that anyone cleaned up or anything, they must have just evaporated! We miss them :(
Another jerk was our hot water service, which, after its allocated lifespan, gave up the ghost. The first bit to go was a valve that chose to quit on a Saturday morning. Our usual plumber was in Melbourne, so we asked the internet who was the next closest, thinking that if we went local that’d be smart.
This is how we found The Tap Man.
The Tap Man is in his late fifties, is the proud owner of a curly mullet, and while patching up the valve, he did us the inestimable service of reminding us that other people exist outside of our rarefied little left-wing bubble. Stinky brought him around to look at the unit, and when Pye popped her head outside the first thing he said was, “Oh are youse two together?” Stinky pointed out that we had the same face and he was all like, “Oh you never know these days, youse might have picked each other cos you look the same!” He told us we were okay cos we weren’t lezzos and also hastened to explain many times about all the sisters he has who aren’t married, so it’s okay for us not to be married too, “as long as you’re still not lebians” (phew, what a relief!), and how you “have to be careful with what you say these days” (this is him being careful?!). Then he found out that we are teachers, and when he heard where Stinky works, he was overcome with nostalgia.
“Does June still work there? When I was young I went out with June, I should have married her! Now now get me wrong, my wife’s great, look here’s a photo, but jeeze, how about June!”
Then somehow ‘wogs’ came up, and when we carefully pointed out our family background he apologised briefly, mentioned he hadn’t had his pill to slow himself down today, then somehow cheerfully started talking about how it's 100% the woman's responsibility to make sure she doesn't get pregnant, not like what the wogs would call Australian Slut. That and the fact that he kept calling Stinky ‘possum’ meant that he was probably lucky to make it out of there alive!
The hot water service was back in action, and we resolved for some reason to get someone else to do the replacement in the next couple of weeks. But Tap Man tricked us! He didn’t charge us at all for the Saturday morning call out (minimum $300, usually), so then we were trapped by middle-class manners to allow him to finish the job. Fortunately it died for real on a school day, so neither of us was there when he came to swap them out. We were surprised to see the old unit was still in the driveway...
... but it’s okay, he left a note!
Then it was something like a month before he got around to invoicing us, how does he even stay afloat?!
Speaking of staying afloat, one fine day we jumped on the ferry to across to the Dromana Bowls Club to help celebrate the golden anniversary of our sister-in-law’s parents. The cunning plan was for D’admiral to kindly pick us up at Sorrento and save having to pay for the car to go, which meant that he was watching when the captain completely misjudged the docking angle and just smashed straight into the dock. It was quite a significant jolt - old people fell over, children started crying, the Year 12 correction Pye had meticulously arranged in order on the table went flying, as did all the carefully laid preparations for the High Tea on the High Seas. We suppose it’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often, but jeeze, you’d’ve wanted to have your handbrake on in the car, and not be on the stairs!
Once at the anniversary celebrations, Stinky felt personally attacked by this stubby holder...
… and to make herself feel better, she tricked the children into thinking that the best fun in the whole world was to ‘post’ empties through a hole in the wall into the recycling bin.
It was a lovely afternoon all-round.
In completely unrelated news, one day Pye was telling her Year 12s about how the Powder Monkey’s hilarious pun name is ‘Camel’ and that in Indonesian the word for ‘ostrich’ is ‘burung unta’ or ‘camel bird’. The same day, this image came up on one of the kid’s Facebook feed
SPOoooOOOoooOOOOKkkyyyyyyy!
Animals are pretty fun though, and every year Pye’s Year 9s go to the zoo. They had a lesson from one of the zoo’s educators in one of the shiny new education buildings which is next to the lions. Who doesn’t like lions?!
If you’re the Powder Monkey or the Cabin Girl and you don’t respond to your auntie when she sends you a photo, then what happens next is on you.
And if you still don’t answer, it really is your fault.
Metaphorically speaking, Stinky’s school is experiencing ball-tearing fun with long-overdue renovations. Try doing a listening assessment task with this out your window!
Food tech had to move for the first time in over forty years, which was a huge amount of fun for all involved. Stinky is particularly impressed with the souvenirs she was given, but doesn’t understand what they are trying to say.
All that moving and packing can be a bit of prick. Speaking of pricks, check out the rad doona cover that Pye found, just for Stinky!
While on the topic of being prickly, we felt very prickly indeed when we turned up to help assess at the finals of the Sayembara Lisan (Indonesian speaking competition). Pye had run the G-town regional competition, with almost 300 students slated to compete, and let me tell you, it was no small task. The main organisers had said that teachers sending finalists had to come and help assess at Melbourne Uni on a Saturday, so we both faithfully RSVP’d to say that we’d be there. So come the special Saturday, we took our hangovers on the train and girded our loins for Doing Our Bit and Contributing. Imagine, then, our feelings when we went to sign in and the organiser popped up and was all like, “Ooh sorry, sorry! We have many! I was confused by people wanting to turn up at different times and we have enough Europeans and so sorry! Sorry!” Eventually we realised that that meant that we weren’t needed to help assess, and though we may be good enough to run the biggest regional competition for them, we were apparently too white to be any good at the finals, and also it was too much to expect that we could have been told in advance that we were surplus to requirements. Basking in the glow of seething rage at having been thoroughly disrespected, we took our Saturday back with a quick nostalgic tour of our haunts around uni, went shopping, then went home and put a giant black texta line through the name of the one who wronged us.
The pictures above used to be a patch of azaleas with a bench in it, where we used to meet at Melbourne Uni in the mid-late-90s. This was pre-common use of mobile phones, so we would hang out there for a while, gather a bunch of like-minded friends, before rolling off to the pub. If you were late, it was okay - there was a vine nearby that a note would be pinned on for late-comers, directing them to the appropriate watering hole. It was like Burke and Wills’ Dig Tree, but we stuffed up less and no one died. To be fair, it was invariably The Clyde we would head to, so perhaps it was less vital to survival than the dig tree.
By the time Queen’s Birthday rolled around we were mostly calm again - as was the weather. Check out how attractive D’admiral and Chuckles’ backyard is during winter!
Although there wasn’t quite as much seagrass to roll around in as usual.
We enjoyed popping into Coolart to meet the artist in residence, and she was pretty keen for the kids to help contribute into a group project by writing about how they felt about birds and nature. Bless Stinky’s cotton socks, she wanted to help too!
We don’t really know what happened as we wandered around the wetlands, maybe something about kids getting a hold of the camera?
Given the lack of The Original Undies, we found it almost unbearably exciting that the Knickers were still alive and well.
Sidenote: Stinky has been going nuts scanning negatives and found this photo from 2000:
So astonishingly, it turns out that taking pictures of abandoned smalls is actually part of who we are! It’s probably down to how Stinky is prone to taking random photos of the things that she comes across while walking. Here is a standard street view on her way to school:
What a lovely, normal day...WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?
I would not like to be around when the recycling truck comes and it attacks!
Eleven-week terms are definitely cruel and unusual, so we were more than ready for a rest when the holidays eventually limped into view. We did a quick dash back down to D’admiral and Chuckles’ for wintery fun times and a brief opportunity to try and seed the new swear word that one of Pye’s students put out there this term (the swear is ‘fish nipples’ and it really works - try snarling it out, pretending that you’ve stubbed your toe! Use it at parties and at work! See which of your friends, family and colleagues will be the first one to point out that fish don’t have nipples because they’re not mammals - there will 100% be one, and chances are it’ll be a white dude who’ll start with “Well, actually, you do know that…”).
Stinky came bearing gifts of a variety of citrus scrumped from her colleague’s new house one street over (every time she takes the bins in for him she ravages a tree, and one time a neighbour thought she was so suspicious they called the cops). She sure does like her citrus, that one!
Chuckles also likes her citrus, and we soon learned about a native Australian lime that has cute little caviar sized bits that you can put in champagne for a delicious flavour sensation.
Dining at the best BnB in town is always delightful, we just wish the pasta could have been more fresh...
Moose was thoughtful enough to bring the other half of his birthday mousse to share with those he deemed worthy (even though sharing is quite difficult for him, it doesn’t come naturally)...
He was in a very generous, sharey mood, though, because he also let us all have a look at his pirate activity book!
And do you know, he hadn’t filled in the pirate doodle page?! Tsk, for shame! It’s okay, the kids had his back.
When not doodling on stuff, we toyed with a little bit of science, because we’re not afraid to look silly and investigate how sound works….
(Tie a couple of bits of string to a metal coat hanger, wrap the string around your fingers, stick your fingers in your ears and donk the coat hanger against a hard surface for SCIENCE!).
Victoria chucked on an 18 degree winter’s day, which is probably ruinous for the planet as a whole, but made it exceedingly pleasant on the beach, even if the kids were too chicken to go for a swim. Unlike Queen’s Birthday, the sea had thrown up sculptural amounts of sea grass...
Which means one thing… SEAWEED ANGELS!!
HOORAY!!
Then when the Powder Monkey started to investigate something in the sand, his Nonna realised he didn’t know how to squat properly, so instantly laid on a master-course.
Stinky made everyone stay there for at least the same length of time as one of Andre the Giant’s farts.
Look, just enjoy the view of the sea trying to build up more seagrass, okay?
As we are wont to do, we ended up back at Coolart. Hurrah!!!
Hurray, hooray, callooh callay!!
The art is still pretty good...
… possibly even better than the last time!
The crew couldn’t stay for long, on account of being Canberra-bound, so it was only a short window of opportunity to infect them with bad habits. Being a terrible influence on the children accomplished, we flung ourselves wantonly into one of the peninsula's many fine dining establishments. D’admiral and Chuckles surprised us with a visit to Jackalope’s Rare Hare winery, the Hot Place to Be right now. Everyone else was driven by Chuckles, while Pye went by rabbit-antelope hybrid, getting crapped out at the front door.
These two behaved themselves (most of the time)....
…. and the food was definitely very, very nummy.
We’d been arguing about whose turn it was to pay, and Chuckles was being very insistent, but rules don’t apply to mavericks, so while she was nudging D’admiral and telling him to pretend to go to the loo and sneakily pay, Stinky was chortling like a pirate because she’d already done the same thing two minutes before. Bill shock, ha ha ha!
Boy, was she mad! But not as mad as this mad-ass thingy near their toilets - we didn’t know whether to find it luxurious or terrifying!
We were obliged to go for another walk, just to get over the whole experience. We lost D’admiral at the sheep-shed, no idea where he ended up, although Chuckles said she could see him just fine…? #camouflaged
Coolart insisted on being pretty and not raining on us. A couple of wallabies wandered by, but refused to hang around long enough to take selfies, bah.
We dashed back home so as to have no excuse not to rewrite a new VCE Indo curriculum (gawd, the current curriculum has only been in place since 2006, why does VCAA have to rush change?!), quite forgetting another holiday project, ie, creating an almost-life-size cut out of Jokowi, the Indonesian president (for now). We couldn’t bear to throw out the giant piece of cardboard our plumber friend left his note on, and what better use than this? We still needed to cut it out properly, but in the meantime had been entertaining ourselves by putting it in each others bedrooms to startle the shit out of each other.
Pye had propped him up just inside the front door before we left, because everyone knows that it would be fricken hilarious that anyone peeking in through the door-glass would think that it was a real person. We’ve no doubt that it was, but Pye wishes she’d remembered that she she’d done it, because she skittered sideways, absolutely packing-dacks when she came back home, opened the front door and there was someone behind it. Self-burn! Those are rare!!
One of our other holiday projects was to continue to spend thoughtful birthday vouchers (including a 90 minute spa treatment, whoo!), and we close now with a historical-place-marker photo of what we spent [part of] the Bunnings haul on. Finally, the Good Ship Waratah has its own waratah tree!
Get growing, little dude, represent! We’ll water you with our tears as we go back to work.
