March has some nerve showing its face around here again

[capn_n_pye]

Completely unrepentant for the shit it pulled last year, March showed up again - but this time it didn’t go for four months! Yay! Term one 2021 was positively action-packed compared with last year (mind you, so is watching grass grow). Some events we could do without, such as some miscreant setting fire to one of the ferals’ flats out the back and making good their escape via our driveway... … and what about this bandit ravaging D’admiral and Chuckles’ tomato crop?? Unlike March of 2020, we were at school, which meant that we could experience the joys of packed offices and kids open-mouthed sneezing. What could be worse? What about kale-flavoured cauliflower puffs? Is this a joke taken too far? Has Big Cauliflower brainwashed the snack industry? What is next?? The action continued for Pye’s friend, who had a good chuckle when she went to the podiatrist a couple of weeks after doing Milky Feet. He looked at her feet and was all like, “Oooh no Donna, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like you have a really bad fungal infection here!” and Donna was all, “AH HA HA, MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS PRODUCT!” In other random school news, Year 7s in Stinky's class have to do a little oral presentation early on in their first foray into Indonesian. In return, they get an hilarious Indonesian pun name (e.g. if their surname is 'Ball' they'll be dubbed 'Bola'). Stinky came across a young Muslim lass of Mauritian heritage. Did you know that all Catholic girls in Mauritius are christened Marie and usually go by their middle name, while Muslim girls are named Bibi and go by their middle name? Anyway, this kid's name was Zia. "That's easy!" thinks Stinky, "Zia is Italian for aunt, so I'll just call her 'aunt' in Indonesian...which is Bibi." Zia was thrilled to learn that her pun name could be her given name! Luckily the Dutch got another ‘aunty’ word into Indonesian, so she can go by 'Tante'. More excitingly, we got to enjoy a parade of birthdays which we were actually allowed to celebrate in person. There was Chuckles turning 69 (nice) D’admiral and Chuckles had both sent off for DNA analysis and the results came in just in time for birthday celebrations. No surprises that D’admiral came up pretty Anglo - except for someone back there in the family tree who definitely went on Crusade! Chuckles’ mix showed the Sicilian/Mediterranean/pirate side we were expecting, but then also looks like someone spent some time in the middle of Africa - it would be nice to think it was for altruistic purposes, but yeah nah it was probably slaves… Birthday celebrations continued apace, and we celebrated Belrog and our birthdays with giant beers and fabulous friends... And since we’re all back out in public again, we were also allowed to eat good Japanese food with this crew: Chocolate Buddha is right next door to ACMI, what could we do but go an experience excellent, interactive fun? And boy was it rad! Then the next weekend we got to go for lunch AGAIN at Wah Wah Gee. It was a delight, but can someone please remind us that the ‘Feed Me’ option might be considered self-harm? Luckily we could take our leftovers home for an entire meal the next day! We’d almost forgotten what it’s like to do fun things with fun people in fun places! The return to the New Normal has not been entirely without its roadbumps. We think perhaps this shop has forgotten some important things, like the basic use of a mask isn’t for consumption(??) Mind you, if anyone was going to try and eat a mask, it’d be this rascal. Fiona made us super-proud on her birthday, by achieving Tumblr fame. Tumblr is the anti-social social media site which all but burned down years ago, leaving just a few of us sitting in the ashes cackling and sharing cat videos. In late March, we were also cackling and sharing memes about the Ever Given’s shenanigans in the Suez Canal. Fiona shared a parody of the 'i lik the bred' meme, thinking it would be us and a few cats who would see it. Next thing you know, it’s taken off and by her birthday had cracked 13 000 notes. Now it’s pushing 14 000 and we couldn’t be prouder! Easter 2020 was the first time in many, many years that we didn’t go gallivanting during the Easter holidays. This year we got to do a bit of mini-gallivanting, starting at Greensborough with some family…. … continuing with popping down to Somers to walk on some water... The peninsula was pretty feral, what with it being a long weekend and everyone feeling the joy of being let off the chain. Rather than hide far from the madding crowd, we flung ourselves wantonly into Flinders on Easter Monday - it wasn’t a cry for help, rather we had a limited time to see the pop-up gallery of a neighbour, with his art from Curious Voyages. That took all of ten minutes, so to make the trip worthwhile, we wandered around some of the shops. Woe be upon us, we stumbled into Arleston Antiques, with all manner of excellent props (even if people in the past had ridiculously small heads) … We were unwilling to drop $450 on a too-small-but-rad hat, and were ready to go when we saw a very beautiful Georgian mahogany tilt top table. And when we say Georgian, we don’t mean no regent king, we mean the batshit crazy George III, and the table was from around 1780. We stroked it longingly for awhile, but were (uncharacteristically) restrained enough to not slam down a credit card and shout WE’LL TAKE IT. Instead, we popped into Flinders Pub for lunch, because all great decisions are made with alcohol. We actually thought about it for a couple of days, and did some research to find that the price they were asking for it was really, really reasonable. So what could we do, except return to Flinders and shout OKAY WE’LL TAKE IT NOW. They were weirdly sad about getting a fistful of cash, and it turned out that

1. They’ve discounted everything because they’re looking to retire, and
2. The table was on their ‘if it doesn’t sell, we’re going to keep it’ list.

Whoopsies! We thought we’d wrap it up in a blanket and take it home on the spot, but they wanted to clean it up a bunch, so they took it to D’admiral and Chuckles’ place a few days later. Just look at that modern art, look at it! When not ruining retirees dreams, we popped down to Flinders Pier to look at a shit boat... ...and pick up some mussels. For the first time ever, we found out that mussels sometimes come with bonus crabs - and boy did this lot have crabs! We wish we’d noticed before we all cronched down at least two each of the little buggers, but I suppose it’s just extra protein... Anyhoo, we’d had such success at the tiny little antique shop in Flinders that we got a taste for it, so we took ourselves to the Tyabb Packing House. They have not been feeding their dinosaurs an appropriate diet. The room the dinosaur was in was definitely a weird and hard-to-look-at space, even without Pye finding a piano to add to the atmosphere...

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Stinky chanced upon a c1860 photo album, and, recognising a cursed object when she saw one, she bought it. After it came home, she found that Grandmama had a box of family photos to archive, including pieces of an album of similar age. Stinky clearly had no choice but to choose the best of the family photos to photoshop Mooseidiot (esq) into to fill in the gaps in the cursed object. Encouraged and abetted by Pye, there are now 22 Moose’d photos within. Sorry not sorry, future historians. Here are some bigger pictures, because lol it’s just so funny! L-R Annie Pearce (nee Greenwood); Alec Dalziel, Rita Dalziel (Melross), Effie, Dorris More; G'Grandparents Dalziel and 'Girlie'; Olly and Clarry Evans; Great Grandma - Uncle Jack Scouller's Family; Scottish Scoullers; Uncle Perce While not defiling history and confusing hypothetical future people, we crammed in as much quality Somers time as we could. D’admiral spent more time than he expected fetching his newspaper down from the roof (note: do not ask Chuckles to chuck the paper up onto the deck)... … and we had an adventure walking to Bushrangers Bay (spoilers: there are no bushrangers still there, bah) and thence to Cape Schank. On the way there, both Stinky and Chuckles became irrationally angry about this stupid tree, looking like an icypole and being all stupid-looking: Fuck this tree Once we were off, we were barely 20cm down the path when we came across a couple of little tackers and their wildly optimistic mother who’d decided marching the kids several kilometres was going to go smoothly. The slightly larger child was gleefully collecting fallen banksia flowers, and so Chuckles showed him how to strip the outside bits to find the velvety insides. We went about our walk, enjoying the scenery which is lovely for the casual bushwalker but would have been demoralising for early explorers trespassers lol. The mid-way reward is a very lovely beach at Bushrangers Bay, with waves that definitely want to kill you (in lieu of any actual bushrangers)... Who would have thunk that after all that time had passed that a lil nugget would barrel up to Chuckles, all excited, shouting, “I FINISHED IT!!!!!” and waving a banksia flower friend?! That’s our Chuckles, collecting hearts and souls wherever she goes! Stinky’s still out there collecting pictures of undies, imagine how excited she was when we came upon the first pair of the year! She was so excited she expired and Pye had to be in the photo! When not finding discarded clothing, we found ourselves doing a spot of shopping. Frankston might have the best TK Maxx we’ve been to, but it also has the absolute worst Spotlight. What the actual hell is going on here? I mean, it’s clearly not fresh fruit and that bite mark looks too big for a child (?!) It’s like some people should never have been let back out into public! A much better pastime would have been for them to pick through a bunch of newspaper clippings from between 1934-39 that were in the Grandmama box. The one featuring social news about what Hitler was up to in April 1939 was fairly interesting! And where was this shit when we were all in lockdown, eh?? We wouldn’t have needed to go into lockdown at all if only we’d followed this advice: It turns out that 1930s people were absolutely obsessed with not being able to shit… … as well as being stinky BO bandits with no friends! There were also TITS! And terrible advice: No sir, I will not. It’s best just to be safe and eat a bunch of Vegemite, it seems. And of course good advice about cheese is always welcome. Chock full of holiday spirit and before you could say ‘Get out of my house’, we were headed back to G-Town. We got excited about training exercises the ferry was doing with the police and were looking forward to the helicopter dumping cops on our deck. Imagine our disappointment when they chased down the other ferry! Boooooo! If that were not exciting enough, we continue our season of ‘is it going to be 30 degrees or 13 degrees?’ with a surprise hailstorm. It took its job seriously! Of course Stinky had just planted out some seedlings, but on the plus side they don’t need watering after this. The other garden denizens had various reactions to the event. I’m cold I have treasure that will last forever! We think this is the only thing that could control the pumpkins taking over the backyard (look at the hail-kissed babies!)... ...even if the local magpies got all judgy about it. Speaking of hanging around the house, for anyone wondering how the thrilling ride of extension planning is going, we have some progress - council approval and no objections, woo! Getting half way through the holidays without another lockdown made us confident enough to take advantage of the very thoughtful birthday gift from Donna and Norma. See, they know we like caculents, so they got us entry vouchers for Cactus Country. The only downside? It’s about 50 minutes north of Shepparton! The upside? Highways let you get an average speed of 100km/h. It took two hours to gain that average, but we nailed it! (This is also an indication of what a three and a half hour trip does to your perception of what is interesting). Cactus Country has leaned into cheesy fonts and cultural appropriations, but we did get to start with a beer, so that was nice. The resident artist has really added to the ambiance... ...and it’s fun for the whole family. There were acres of cactus, just waiting for us to explore... Pye had to stay on the Orange Trail... ...and these things never go out of fashion. Moose was delighted to be back out on the road again and getting lots of attention. He made loads of new friends! … although he complained that his new chair was uncomfortable... … and that his friend who he named Yorick was a shit conversationalist. But no matter how you frame it, he had fun! What do you expect, the little rascal likes hanging out with pricks! He likes it so much that he jumped head first into these ones. Moose, no! Who would have known what he’d get up to if he were allowed to hang out with this prick?! Speaking of pricks… hurr hurr hurr hurr hurr... Then he got distracted and chased (but could not catch) this tiny dude who was chock-full of attitude. Stinky was very pleased to have an opportunity to play with her SLR camera. Look at the close up on these ones which come with teeny tiny pineapples! We don’t know what’s going on here, but we’re into it. NEMO?? Are the caculents ever changing? Yes! Is it hard to decide which photos are our favourites? Yes! Does that mean we’re going to put a whole lot in here? Have you met us? Is that enough? Nope! What about now? Ah ha ha ha - no. Don’t stop me now... I’m not out of control, you’re out of control! And do we like taking close up photos of caculents? YES! SO MANY CLOSE UPS WHEN WILL IT STOP (spoilers: not yet) Someone should make fabric with all these patterns omg quick! Thoroughly caculented out, we got back on the road to spend the night in Echuca (chosen because it is just way less depressing than Shepperton lol). We had some digs overlooking the Campaspe River, which was infested with arsehole birds. Moose was enchanted. Apparently these fuckers like to stand in front of cars and not move, and foreign tourists hold up traffic by being unwilling to risk running them over. It had honestly never occurred to either of us to give way to a bird in the street, but now we were also kind of beset with the urge to see how far we could punt one. Of course we didn’t, but that’s what makes us good people - anyone can go through life simply not thinking of terrible things, it takes real fortitude to think of bad stuff and then choose not to do it *nods sagely* Something we found frightening about Echuca was the ghost horses - there was a carriage which was only ever visible when it apparated the end of our street. Spoooooooooky! Pye thought she saw it down in the historic port bit, but there’s no proof and it just doesn’t seem very likely. Moose thought the signs around the joint were pretty funny, because he’s a bit of a pervert... We made sure to stand beside a giant log and take a photo, because we learned 36 years ago that is what must be done when visiting the Murray River. Okay so that one from 1985 was actually in Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement, but shhh shut up. Moose liked exploring the historic port and finding birb friends (even if he did harbour deep concerns about whether they were depicted as actual size). And we found a cafe just for Stinky, even if it wasn’t open when we needed it. Most of the stuff in the historic port area made sense (except for maybe the chronic lack of acknowledgement of Indigenous history), but then we found this photography business. We totally understand the ‘dress up in ye olde clothes’ aspect of photography, but one of these things is not like the other. What is the market for this and how is it so common that it’s so high up on their advertising??? Thankfully, there is plenty to look at that doesn’t involve putting on a gimp costume. There are things to play with that illustrate the history of transporting goods by river and rail... … and another one of these babies, whoooo! We don’t know who this is designed for - a small child and a tall parent? Stinky had to jump to get her face in the space, so all you small children and short adults can go and play on other things, this one is not for you! After a morning of galloping around admiring the history of colonisation and deforestation we headed south to Bendigo to take Grandmama out to lunch. The fantastic driving average we achieved on the way north went out the window with roadworks and much time sitting still - maybe we cracked 60km/h (so upsetting!). What with lockdowns and so on it had been simply ages since we had seen Grandmama in real life - why is the universe set on slowing us down?! Still, there is no rest for the wicked, and we raced home to do something we’d been meaning to do for ages - that is, pop up some fence extenders to make it slightly less easy for the ferals out the back from scarpering out through our place. Whooo! We’d asked for agreement from the neighbours who we don’t like after they’d sold but before they moved, but then it took so long to get around to having the elements delivered that the new family had arrived. We only realised this when Pye couldn’t screw in the last bit of the panel because our garage was in the way and had to go and ask if she could do it from their side. Thank goodness she did! We had been accidentally gaslighting our new neighbours - they’d got the keys in the morning, went out in the middle of the day and came home to be all like, “Were… those there before…?” Poor things would probably have deemed it a passive aggressive anti-welcome had we not been able to explain! Never mind, Stinky brought them a welcome pumpkin and everything should be okay from now on. What’s not okay is how long it took for the Powder Monkey to share a photo of the best place on earth: We got a flying visit from D’admiral and Chuckles (party animals) and our new (old) Georgian table. Moose was very excited to be able to share his cursed album with other people... And Pye was very excited to be acknowledged in wine... Before you could say “Where did the time go?”, the holidays were at an end. Unlike 2020, this term (probably) won’t be spent at home, so we assume that 2021 is an improvement!