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capn_n_pyeNow that everything’s back to normal, what bright spots are there to look forward to in the winter term?
After two years of COVID lockdowns getting in the way and then getting COVID just in time for last year’s, we finally got to go back to the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show – hooray! Delayed gratification is all well and good, but that wait was just absurd. We had another motivation too – one day Pye noticed Bendigo Art Gallery were celebrating 90 years of Women’s Weekly being all iconic and shit and had a call out on Instagram to share their photos of cakes from the cracking Children’s Birthday Cake Book (if you want to peruse the book in all its glory you can grab it here, you’re welcome).
Chuckles was an absolute Viking when it came to cakes and cranked out three a year for probably about 12 years, so Pye carefully gathered up the photos and sent them in, in the hope that one or two might make it onto the collage. The only way to find out was to go and see, so we snatched up Grandmama (who’d heard about the exhibition and thought it sounded shit but changed her mind when she found out we were pretty sure we going to be on the wall) and raced on in!
It was like reading a Where’s Wally? book, only trying to find a little version of yourself!
How successful were we? YOU TELL ME
That last one is really Andru being a cheeky little shit, but we had advanced warning that that particular photo had made it to the wall and had brought liquorice for the occasion.
Grandmama was very excited and told everyone else nearby whenever we found another one with us in it. If our maths holds, there were probably about 1000 pictures in the collage, and 10 of those were of us, so it was a real privilege that Chuckles’ rad work made up 1% of the pictures on the wall. Do you want a better look at what the original photos looked like? OF COURSE YOU DO
Chuckles’ cake work is absolutely sublime, which is both impressive and less funny that some of the abominations that other people produced! Not all of our submissions made it, which was to be expected. However, it is an absolute travesty that they left this one out:
This is the moment a two-year-old Stinky learned that the world is cruel and full of monsters, as, in an act most villainous, Andru blows out her candles. The horror! The betrayal!! The loss of innocence!
After having enjoyed the gallery and lunch with Grandmama, we raced off to get our Wool & Sheep Show on. Moose immediately got back on his shit, bless him…
… and we were relieved to find most of our favourites had survived and were back on site. Our bestie from Planet Fab was delighted to see us again, and not just because we always buy a coat from her, she said she’d be wondering where we were, bless her.
Another triumphant return to ‘normal’ was Pye’s school wangling their way into getting the Indonesian embassy in Canberra to invite our Year 11 and 12 Indo students to the Independence Day ceremony. Let’s go represent our country, kids!
The school version of Moose (as a travel mascot, not an ‘orrible baggage who needs to adjust his attitude) is Lil Iggy the wolf. Unfortunately, someone had pinched Lil Iggy from Pye’s desk at some point in the last couple of years – but fortunately, Stinky’s crochet hook was on hand. So Littlest Iggy proudly boarded the plane with us to go get his bilateral relations on! What a good little wolf!
When we go to Canberra we fly up the night before, cram everything we can into 17 August, then fly back that evening so everyone can go to school the next day (because we love not missing too many classes). So usually we hit up the War Memorial, then the National Gallery. We were a bit cocky and didn’t realise that the War Memorial was undergoing huge renovations and were limiting entry – whoops! But we still managed to make it inside and made the kids look at all the South East Asia stuff.
At the National Gallery, we challenged the kids to go find three Indonesian artworks, take a photo with them, then meet us back in an hour and a half. Pye got distracted by the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly exhibition and it was only later that she realised that 100% of the Asian art was currently packed away as part of the Gallery’s own renos. Fie!
There was a special exhibition about surviving abusive relationships and sexual assault, but for some reason none of the kids wanted to spend time in that one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is only one of the scary things to have happened at schools. Remember that time Stinky found a hell-beast on the beach and instead of burning it and banishing the demon back to hell, she took it to school, where students keep hiding it in different places around the classroom? Well, one day, a new one appeared! It took ages before Ella Banget ‘fessed up to facilitating a breeding program.
But these hell-beasts aren’t the worst thing! No, worse was the students doing a project where they drew a bunch of the staff. Stinky thinks she got off lightly…
…especially compared with the poor new boy. But they did…somehow…capture….something…
During the term we started noticing a lot of spam/phishing emails that all began the same way – they would start with “I greet you!” and then go on to say “I have bad news for you” before continuing to threaten to release your porn habits or whatever. “I greet you! I have bad news for you.” is now our favourite opening. Combine it with a devastating insult coined by one of Stinky’s Year 8s and you have comedy gold: “I greet you! I have bad news for you – you’re a piece of slut.”
While not listening to children hurl dumbarse insults at each other, we watched the major works on our little house slowly come closer to being finished. The painters (none of whom is about to win any prizes for initiative or intelligence – our favourite was the time they finished for the day and left every single external door they’d touched open, including the keys dangling out of one) eventually came and did their job. Now the old part and the new part are the same colour!
But more importantly, the insulation has changed everything. It can be 2 degrees outside and not inside! Things don’t feel clammy! Some winter nights it’s almost not necessary to pop on the electric blanket!! It almost means those monstrously wonderful crochet/knit square blankets we made aren’t necessary anymore!! And then one day D’admiral and Chuckles made a mid-week visit (which was very nice, especially because we have continued the tradition of neglecting D’admiral on Father’s Day) and in the morning before work everyone had their own bathroom and it was so civilised. And when the Cabin Girl brought the Powder Monkey and their crew to visit, we were all able to sit on chairs and fit around the table in the dining room without freezing and is this what normal houses are??
Oh, also the Cabin Girl is totally dressing up like a pirate for muck up day and we’re excited to see our costume getting another outing…
Anyhoo, builders being as they are, it took them longer than it should have to come back and collect the leftover insulation. So, it’s not just us being all snuggled in for the winter, our landlords the magpies are going to have the toastiest, warmest nests in town!!
They kept on coming back for more, they loved it! And if their children hatch out of the egg with skin conditions and complain that they itch all over, well, who can say why such a thing happened?
We’re totally going to miss the parade of lads showing up at random intervals and entertaining us with frankly baffling behaviour. Okay, so apparently if you reconnect a split system, you have to play with the oven at the same time? Sure, don’t worry about it, makes perfect sense!
Follow that up with a cheeky little skin check? Yeah, go off, love your body! You do you, boo.
Is he being a piece of slut, is that what that looks like?
On the inside of the house, we spent many a day putting our artwork back up on the walls. The window from the old powder room that we’d lovingly turned into a light box went up in almost the same geographical position it came from…
… and so did the mirror that also graced the old dunny wall. No one else is going to notice this is the case, but we think it’s neat.
Speaking of neat and tidy, we spent some time in the holidays getting quotes on solar panels. Most of them were suggesting putting them flat in the middle of the roof on the old part of the house. We were all like, “Okay yeah, but how does that work with the pitched roof?” because we know that this is what the roof looks like.
The solar people were like, “No, it’s flat?” And we’re all, “No, it’s not…?”
And that’s how we learned that when they tied the old roof to the new bit, they also made it flat.
We are very clever, it’s so amazing. To be fair, the chimney sweep we finally got to cap the now-ornamental chimney said he found it quite a confusing surprise too.
He also said we don’t have to worry about Santa not being able to get in any more, they have a special chimney sweep method for making sure it’s okay.
The term three holidays aren’t really holidays if you are a Year 12 or if you teach Year 12s, but we managed to sneak out of town for a couple of days at least. Chuckles was bang up for helping us with an aspect of the landscaping that should eventually turn our back yard from a wasteland into a nice place to be – namely, collecting a bunch of long sticks to use as a screen in front of the stormwater pump box. If you know why the plumbers put this box where they did, please write to us at Who The Fuck Knows Why They Do Anything and include a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
Chuckles had carefully scouted several easily accessible areas for us to do our collecting, so out we went with a pruning saw and a positive attitude. We like to think of it as ‘reducing fire fuel’, really, so we’re actually heroes, actually.
… except for when we got a bit carried away, whoops!
There was one hairy moment where Pye stood on a rotten log that turned out to house a bull ants’ nest and they all stormed out furiously to tell her to stop it…
… thankfully she noticed in time and leapt to safety before any made it up the legs of her pants! So, it was happily unscathed that we collected hopefully more than enough to do the job.
Simon the potential landscaper was skeptical we’d collect enough, so we had to lie them all out to prove it to him – with a helpful reference…
We and the ants weren’t the only ones hard at work – D’admiral was in the throes of constructing the orlop deck (obviously everyone knows the orlop deck is the lowest deck on a ship, as indeed this one is). He got the lion’s share done just in time for us to christen it – A+ work, will 100% sit on again.
Look at the local Eastern Rosella getting into relaxing too!
“I puts food in my mouf!” it says proudly.
The new deck needed just the right sort of seat though, and you can see above a stool made from a tractor seat. This was the safest thing we could find from the antique shop we went to – the other objects made us feel scared!
Come in, they said.
Ride the horse, they said.
It’ll be fun, they said.
NO THANK YOU, I DON’T LIKE IT.
Fortunately, it is relatively easy to outrun a hobby horse.
The weather got nicer and nicer, especially as we got to the end of our flying visit and had to go home and do Year 12 practice speaking Zooms. We considered doing them from Somers, but decided that would have been too depressing. We hope the children appreciate what we were giving up for them!
Thus is was that the term three holidays felt just as short as term three felt long, boooooo. Do we have to go back to work or can we choose to go hang out with the evil horse instead?
After two years of COVID lockdowns getting in the way and then getting COVID just in time for last year’s, we finally got to go back to the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show – hooray! Delayed gratification is all well and good, but that wait was just absurd. We had another motivation too – one day Pye noticed Bendigo Art Gallery were celebrating 90 years of Women’s Weekly being all iconic and shit and had a call out on Instagram to share their photos of cakes from the cracking Children’s Birthday Cake Book (if you want to peruse the book in all its glory you can grab it here, you’re welcome).
Chuckles was an absolute Viking when it came to cakes and cranked out three a year for probably about 12 years, so Pye carefully gathered up the photos and sent them in, in the hope that one or two might make it onto the collage. The only way to find out was to go and see, so we snatched up Grandmama (who’d heard about the exhibition and thought it sounded shit but changed her mind when she found out we were pretty sure we going to be on the wall) and raced on in!
It was like reading a Where’s Wally? book, only trying to find a little version of yourself!
How successful were we? YOU TELL ME
That last one is really Andru being a cheeky little shit, but we had advanced warning that that particular photo had made it to the wall and had brought liquorice for the occasion.
Grandmama was very excited and told everyone else nearby whenever we found another one with us in it. If our maths holds, there were probably about 1000 pictures in the collage, and 10 of those were of us, so it was a real privilege that Chuckles’ rad work made up 1% of the pictures on the wall. Do you want a better look at what the original photos looked like? OF COURSE YOU DO
Chuckles’ cake work is absolutely sublime, which is both impressive and less funny that some of the abominations that other people produced! Not all of our submissions made it, which was to be expected. However, it is an absolute travesty that they left this one out:
This is the moment a two-year-old Stinky learned that the world is cruel and full of monsters, as, in an act most villainous, Andru blows out her candles. The horror! The betrayal!! The loss of innocence!
After having enjoyed the gallery and lunch with Grandmama, we raced off to get our Wool & Sheep Show on. Moose immediately got back on his shit, bless him…
… and we were relieved to find most of our favourites had survived and were back on site. Our bestie from Planet Fab was delighted to see us again, and not just because we always buy a coat from her, she said she’d be wondering where we were, bless her.
Another triumphant return to ‘normal’ was Pye’s school wangling their way into getting the Indonesian embassy in Canberra to invite our Year 11 and 12 Indo students to the Independence Day ceremony. Let’s go represent our country, kids!
The school version of Moose (as a travel mascot, not an ‘orrible baggage who needs to adjust his attitude) is Lil Iggy the wolf. Unfortunately, someone had pinched Lil Iggy from Pye’s desk at some point in the last couple of years – but fortunately, Stinky’s crochet hook was on hand. So Littlest Iggy proudly boarded the plane with us to go get his bilateral relations on! What a good little wolf!
When we go to Canberra we fly up the night before, cram everything we can into 17 August, then fly back that evening so everyone can go to school the next day (because we love not missing too many classes). So usually we hit up the War Memorial, then the National Gallery. We were a bit cocky and didn’t realise that the War Memorial was undergoing huge renovations and were limiting entry – whoops! But we still managed to make it inside and made the kids look at all the South East Asia stuff.
At the National Gallery, we challenged the kids to go find three Indonesian artworks, take a photo with them, then meet us back in an hour and a half. Pye got distracted by the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly exhibition and it was only later that she realised that 100% of the Asian art was currently packed away as part of the Gallery’s own renos. Fie!
There was a special exhibition about surviving abusive relationships and sexual assault, but for some reason none of the kids wanted to spend time in that one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is only one of the scary things to have happened at schools. Remember that time Stinky found a hell-beast on the beach and instead of burning it and banishing the demon back to hell, she took it to school, where students keep hiding it in different places around the classroom? Well, one day, a new one appeared! It took ages before Ella Banget ‘fessed up to facilitating a breeding program.
But these hell-beasts aren’t the worst thing! No, worse was the students doing a project where they drew a bunch of the staff. Stinky thinks she got off lightly…
…especially compared with the poor new boy. But they did…somehow…capture….something…
During the term we started noticing a lot of spam/phishing emails that all began the same way – they would start with “I greet you!” and then go on to say “I have bad news for you” before continuing to threaten to release your porn habits or whatever. “I greet you! I have bad news for you.” is now our favourite opening. Combine it with a devastating insult coined by one of Stinky’s Year 8s and you have comedy gold: “I greet you! I have bad news for you – you’re a piece of slut.”
While not listening to children hurl dumbarse insults at each other, we watched the major works on our little house slowly come closer to being finished. The painters (none of whom is about to win any prizes for initiative or intelligence – our favourite was the time they finished for the day and left every single external door they’d touched open, including the keys dangling out of one) eventually came and did their job. Now the old part and the new part are the same colour!
But more importantly, the insulation has changed everything. It can be 2 degrees outside and not inside! Things don’t feel clammy! Some winter nights it’s almost not necessary to pop on the electric blanket!! It almost means those monstrously wonderful crochet/knit square blankets we made aren’t necessary anymore!! And then one day D’admiral and Chuckles made a mid-week visit (which was very nice, especially because we have continued the tradition of neglecting D’admiral on Father’s Day) and in the morning before work everyone had their own bathroom and it was so civilised. And when the Cabin Girl brought the Powder Monkey and their crew to visit, we were all able to sit on chairs and fit around the table in the dining room without freezing and is this what normal houses are??
Oh, also the Cabin Girl is totally dressing up like a pirate for muck up day and we’re excited to see our costume getting another outing…
Anyhoo, builders being as they are, it took them longer than it should have to come back and collect the leftover insulation. So, it’s not just us being all snuggled in for the winter, our landlords the magpies are going to have the toastiest, warmest nests in town!!
They kept on coming back for more, they loved it! And if their children hatch out of the egg with skin conditions and complain that they itch all over, well, who can say why such a thing happened?
We’re totally going to miss the parade of lads showing up at random intervals and entertaining us with frankly baffling behaviour. Okay, so apparently if you reconnect a split system, you have to play with the oven at the same time? Sure, don’t worry about it, makes perfect sense!
Follow that up with a cheeky little skin check? Yeah, go off, love your body! You do you, boo.
Is he being a piece of slut, is that what that looks like?
On the inside of the house, we spent many a day putting our artwork back up on the walls. The window from the old powder room that we’d lovingly turned into a light box went up in almost the same geographical position it came from…
… and so did the mirror that also graced the old dunny wall. No one else is going to notice this is the case, but we think it’s neat.
Speaking of neat and tidy, we spent some time in the holidays getting quotes on solar panels. Most of them were suggesting putting them flat in the middle of the roof on the old part of the house. We were all like, “Okay yeah, but how does that work with the pitched roof?” because we know that this is what the roof looks like.
The solar people were like, “No, it’s flat?” And we’re all, “No, it’s not…?”
And that’s how we learned that when they tied the old roof to the new bit, they also made it flat.
We are very clever, it’s so amazing. To be fair, the chimney sweep we finally got to cap the now-ornamental chimney said he found it quite a confusing surprise too.
He also said we don’t have to worry about Santa not being able to get in any more, they have a special chimney sweep method for making sure it’s okay.
The term three holidays aren’t really holidays if you are a Year 12 or if you teach Year 12s, but we managed to sneak out of town for a couple of days at least. Chuckles was bang up for helping us with an aspect of the landscaping that should eventually turn our back yard from a wasteland into a nice place to be – namely, collecting a bunch of long sticks to use as a screen in front of the stormwater pump box. If you know why the plumbers put this box where they did, please write to us at Who The Fuck Knows Why They Do Anything and include a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
Chuckles had carefully scouted several easily accessible areas for us to do our collecting, so out we went with a pruning saw and a positive attitude. We like to think of it as ‘reducing fire fuel’, really, so we’re actually heroes, actually.
… except for when we got a bit carried away, whoops!
There was one hairy moment where Pye stood on a rotten log that turned out to house a bull ants’ nest and they all stormed out furiously to tell her to stop it…
… thankfully she noticed in time and leapt to safety before any made it up the legs of her pants! So, it was happily unscathed that we collected hopefully more than enough to do the job.
Simon the potential landscaper was skeptical we’d collect enough, so we had to lie them all out to prove it to him – with a helpful reference…
We and the ants weren’t the only ones hard at work – D’admiral was in the throes of constructing the orlop deck (obviously everyone knows the orlop deck is the lowest deck on a ship, as indeed this one is). He got the lion’s share done just in time for us to christen it – A+ work, will 100% sit on again.
Look at the local Eastern Rosella getting into relaxing too!
“I puts food in my mouf!” it says proudly.
The new deck needed just the right sort of seat though, and you can see above a stool made from a tractor seat. This was the safest thing we could find from the antique shop we went to – the other objects made us feel scared!
Come in, they said.
Ride the horse, they said.
It’ll be fun, they said.
NO THANK YOU, I DON’T LIKE IT.
Fortunately, it is relatively easy to outrun a hobby horse.
The weather got nicer and nicer, especially as we got to the end of our flying visit and had to go home and do Year 12 practice speaking Zooms. We considered doing them from Somers, but decided that would have been too depressing. We hope the children appreciate what we were giving up for them!
Thus is was that the term three holidays felt just as short as term three felt long, boooooo. Do we have to go back to work or can we choose to go hang out with the evil horse instead?
