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capn_n_pyeIt has been such an eventful term, this time we have had to make a list! Consider this the contents page…
Things We Were Not Excited About:
Things We Were Tickled By:
Things We Were Very Excited About:
SECTION ONE: Things We Were Not Excited About
* Australia Fucked the Referendum
The Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum being won by the racists and bringing national shame is something we do not wish to dwell on, but it’s hard to find something that we have been less pleased about in the past year.
* The Great Debacle of the Spicy Water
Once upon a time, Stinky thought she felt a bit of a tingle when she washed her hands in the new powder room, so referred it onto the builders (Hey, should our water be spicy?), at which point the electrician shouted, “HOLY SHIT DON’T TOUCH ANY TAPS!” and called Powercor.
Powercor immediately called and shouted, “HOLY SHIT DON’T TOUCH ANY TAPS OR ANYTHING WET OR ANYTHING METAL JESUS CHRIST!” and were there within the hour.
They tested the tingly tap and found it was throwing off 7 volts (0 is ideal, 5 is the threshold for concern).
But that turned out to just be a siracha mayo level of spiciness compared with the kitchen sink at 13! Powercor had no insights into that, they just confiscated the power (literally, they took down the supply to the house) and fucked off saying CALL US WHEN U HAVE A SPARKY OKAY BYE. Luckily for us, we are inveterate collectors of things that glow and can be set fire to, so it was their turn to shine.
Even if it was a bit tiring…
And oh, my stars, were we excited or what when we realised this whimsy of a former-back-window:
was now the author of the brightest room in the house!
Looking on the bright side (including that they confiscated the cable to the house because it was super-old and then replaced it, thus saving us the cost and effort it would have taken us to have it replaced when we get solar panels installed), Stinky cheerfully took a day off and managed to get a sparky by nice and early (please note that the builder’s sparky was trying really hard to pretend it Wasn’t His Fault at this point).
The Unfortunate Sparky Who Should Not Have Answered His Phone That Day did what Powercor had advised (earthed the pipes) and then it was just a matter of waiting five hours for Powercor to get around to coming back. Feel sorry for Stinky, she couldn't do anything productive like ironing or vacuuming, but instead had to resort to that most detested pastime, report writing.
When the Powercor came back (at dusk), it turned out to be the same lads as the first time. But also, the problem was still the same, and it was now 6.30 on a Friday. They all stood around scratching themselves. Literally. Down There. It was like a Mexican wave, it just kept going around and around the lads, enthusiastically and like nobody could see them getting really deep under there.
Sarah the physics teacher from next door came over and was fascinated by the problem of the differential in voltage that was causing the spiciness in the water. We couldn’t even get mad because she and hubby Tim threw us a lifeline of a power cord over the fence so we could save the fridge and freezer (actually, Tim is so on the Neighbourhood Pulse that he was lassoing the power cord over the fence almost as Powercor cut the cable).
Meanwhile, Itchy and Scratchy figured out that it was induced load, but the continuity test was so weird they all scratched their heads (and balls) about it for ages - the difference in potential from the sink, bath and shower didn’t make any sense.
Then the Powercor Lads turned off the switches and turned them on one at a time, findings the voltage increased gradually with each switch until they figured out which circuit was adding the biggest charge and just confiscated that one in order to make it Not Their Problem Any More.
But then we couldn’t get the sparky back on the weekend (remember that bit where the builder sparky Wasn’t Responsible? And we’re too stubborn to pay another rando for a weekend call out!), so we had a couple more days in the dark before he was able to diagnose the roof with throwing off 40 volts and figure out that something was electrifying the water.
The laundry with its power board became the most popular room in the house!
The mobile network here is a joke and Pye kept unplugging the fridge to put the wifi on so she could post pictures online of Stinky’s award-wining crochet (that’s something that will appear in a later chapter). Some muppet grown-up at Stinky’s school suggested she hotspot her phone to solve the internet problem, but luckily the positive attention/dopamine from the internet stopped Stinky from stabbing her in the face.
The Unfortunate Sparky Who Should Not Have Answered His Phone That Day looked and looked but couldn’t find the problem, so has resorted to earthing the roof. The Builders Who Said It Was None Of Their Fault acknowledged (to a point) that it might have been a teeny bit of their fault, so copped the bill, which is nice.
It’s also nice that neither of us is likely to die in the shower now, but have you considered the downside? There is the skinniest of chances that we might have been bathing in spicy water the whole time we’ve been here… what if this is the secret to our youthful skin? Now they’ve ‘fixed’ it, are we going to crumble like a peach left in the sun or the portrait of Dorian Gray?? Only time will tell.
All of these doings and happenings are tied to the next chapter, that is…
* The Deadest, Flattest Rat
One day, we were going to Spotlight. Pye pulled the car out so that Stinky could get in, but then all these bugs started swarming, and Stinky was all like, “OH SHIT BEES!” But it wasn’t bees. It was blowflies. They had come pouring out after Pye had removed the car tyre from atop the fresh, squished rat. Had it been intact we probably would have managed to get it into the bin, but now it was breached and all squished and seeping into the bricks the story was very different.
The only thing for it was to make sure not to park the car on top of it again and let the birds and insects do their work. Thus, it was that when our Powercor besties were on their third and final visit, there was a very, very flat, dry rat laminated into the paving.
When they were all standing around scratching their nuts at the end, one of them accidentally almost stepped on it. Stinky warned him not to step back, on account of us being feral and there being a dead rat there. He obligingly stepped away. As we kept talking, he kind of scuffed it with his shoe and we kept chatting. Then he got a bit distracted and scuffed it again. Then he bent down and Stinky, who was witnessing this blacked out for a second. Turns out he was able to…sort of…lift it off in one piece. Being the sort of chap he was, the Powercor chap picked it up by the tail (it stuck out straight and stiff), then he giggled and ran off towards one of their two vans. Pye thought he was planting it in his mate's van to give him a cheeky surprise later because why else would you pick it up? Stinky cackled like a maniac and followed him to the truck, where she was disappointed find that he was just dumping it in a bin in the back. It was a perfect prank opportunity and he missed it!!
Nonetheless, she filled in a positive feedback card to Powercor to praise him for going above and beyond, and he’ll probably get a $200 bonus lol.
* Earthquake!
Once upon the wee small hours of a morning, it was so windy that Stinky found her new first floor room a little wibbly-wobbly and the wind whooshing trough the gutters was making an ungodly noise. Then the wind finally died down but then the wibbly-wobbly got really intense...but the wind wasn’t blowing, what was happening?
And that’s the story of how Stinky Was Glad It Was An Earthquake And Not A Case For The Building Ombudsman Or The Coroner.
* Being Personally Targeted By A Name Generator
Another day, Stinky came across a comedic suggestion on how to generate your ‘ghost name’.
‘Catreeolinooeboo’ thought it a jolly jape, as did Atnoodreeew, Reeobyoonoo, Jatsminooeboo, Catmpebool. Moose enjoyed the simplicity of Mooseboo and everyone was having a marvellous time – except for Juliat. They were laughing, and she’s Juliat. Nathan W Pyle owes her a personal apology!
* Artificial ‘Intelligence’
Speaking of actions that require apology, Chuckles asked if Stinky’s photoshop magic could fix the backlight in this photo:
Alas, it was beyond her powers, so out of curiosity, she thought she’d see what AI would do about it.
Apparently its first stop was to translate it to the 17th century…
… and when asked to ‘tone the backlight down’, its next instinct was to bully Auntie Rita.
I suppose the upside is that our AI overlords are not quite clever enough to be at the takeover stage yet? Let us move on to….
SECTION TWO: Things We Were Tickled By:
* Insulation
We had spent the winter months marvelling at the difference insulation in the walls made, while vaguely worrying that we have made our giant pile of knitted and crocheted blankets surplus to requirement. As spring progressed, the weather insisted on being weird, with the occasional 32-degree day shoehorned in between a week of 12-degree days. Imagine coming home on a lovely 21-degree day to find that your loungeroom is still 14 degrees?! We had to open the window to warm the place up!
* Our brother entered his Ruth phase
Andru’s wisdom has been accumulating for 47 years – congratulations on your birthday, this makes you a Ruth!
* His Wife and Children Have Birthdays
As dictated by the passage of time, everyone else started having birthdays too! Somehow the Cabin Girl turned 18 within a month of her mother turning 50! Wow!
This convergence was celebrated with craft beer and really, really good-looking guests…
Moose was terribly excited to be able to give the Cabin Girl a card that she had made for Moose’s very own 18th birthday seven years ago, he likes to plot, does Moose!
It had been a long time between catch-ups and Stinky had also been patiently waiting to give the Powder Monkey’s mermaid tail back. He has grown just a bit since 2015, and she’d had to put a rather long extension on. Hooray!
Adele and Carlo’s children thought it was a bit of all right too…
… but it’s possible that Cousin Hannah’s husband John wore it best, according to Chloe, at least.
Carlo probably had the most fun with his kids!
A splendid time was had by all, even if Google thinks we spent four hours at a brothel.
Robyn’s real birthday got a lil festive top up when the day itself arrived…
… and the Powder Monkey was able to talk us through the genealogical discoveries he’s made, researching his family’s connection to the great houses of Europe. The things that lad can do with a whiteboard! Did you know that Anne Boleyn is the first cousin twice removed of his 11th step-great-grandmother-in-law? It’s true, check it!
We didn’t get to celebrate his 16th birthday in person, though :’(
Don’t feel too sorry for him, it was because they went to Europe. He planned it so that his birthday involved being in two countries (Denmark and Sweden) and featured lunch at the first IKEA in the world (aka The Mothership). Better than a bucket of KFC and a visit to Chadstone! His gift from us was money on the cash card which he was required to use to buy something cool from one of the many historical gift shops they would be visiting. For starters he got these olde keys:
We suggest labelling the keys things like ‘dungeon’ and ‘lobotomiser hatch’ and ‘penis exploding room’ and ‘spiders: do not use’ and then nonchalantly displaying them in every share house he lives in in the future.
* Shenanigans – Seasonal and Otherwise
It is a fact well known that Stinky loves a good prank, and when she learned that her Canadian colleague who lives a couple of streets over (and whose birthday is on 31 October) was too lazy to decorate his house for Halloween, why, that was a red rag to a bull. She went directly to Kmart to get a pumpkin and led tealights and bravely wove past the hordes of trick-or-treating children to plant it on his deck. While skulking home, we ran into a pack of Stinky’s students who asked if we were trick-or-treating.
“No!” replied Stinky. “We’re just out Tricking Mr C!”
“Oh!” cried the 12-year-old With The Jarringly Old-fashioned Name, “I know his street! Let’s go, crew!”
This had the immediate effect of luring not just that mob, but a bunch of other wild children to his door, hee hee hee.
However, we had to wait a whole week before we learned the psychological impact. He and his wife assumed that some teenaged rascals had stolen the decoration from a neighbour and planted it at their place, and were quite anxious that meant that whoever the original owner was would think that they were thieves. It was only 3/4 of the way through explaining the dilemma to Stinky (while her desk-buddy and co-conspirator openly wept with laugher) that the penny dropped – “It was YOU!”
YEP!
One day she will reap what she has sown, but in the meantime, it seems to be more about getting other people in trouble – for example, she knows that our dentist sees her walking to work every morning and Stinky has dared her to shout “SHOW US YA TEETH!” every time. She (the dentist) said that she actually thinks about it quite often, but it was only once this year that she could actually do it without accidentally harassing innocent bystanders, much to mutual delight.
*Chosen By a Baby Magpie
Did you know that after baby magpies fledge, they spend a month derping around the world while their parents keep an eye on them? We didn’t, until recently! One such lil fluffy-bummed child chose our backyard to be an idiot in – bless them!
Some of it involved them huddling on the stairs and looking thirsty, or walking around the yard pretending to be a Very Important Worm Catcher (while – and this is important – not catching any worms*).
*We know because Simon The Landscaper said that we were curiously bereft of worms (see Things We Were Very Excited About: A Silk Purse is Made From A Sow’s Ear (aka A Landscaping Miracle**))
[**although, upon reflection, Simon did say that there was a curious lack of worms, so this could explain why.]
Our favourite when the little muppet was playing on the wheelbarrow and jumped onto the wheel and was like flllppppt whoops, thunk!
He was just generally a bit of an idiot and we love him.
* Unsettling the Youth
Although one might argue we unsettle young people on a professional basis, we had a special opportunity at an early Christmas gathering with heaps of our mother’s cousins and their children. Did you know that if all the older generation gathers for a photo, you can tell their granddaughters and grandnieces that they’re looking at their future and they have a lil Zoomer existential crisis? 10/10, highly recommend.
* A Crappy Christmas Tree
The festive season was upon us and for 2023 a different sort of tree was on the cards.
Where was this when we were in the dark?! Anyway, Stinky thought it was the Jape of the Season to send a box of Christmas-themed bog roll to D’admiral and Chuckles, so it’s their problem now, too!
* An Abundance of Advent Calendars
Anyone who doesn’t love an advent calendar is a liar (although maybe not those advent calendars where the numbers are all out of order – I’m a busy person, can’t be fucking around looking for number 18!!). It began with a cheese advent calendar, then a jigsaw puzzle (where the 1000 pieces are separated into 24 boxes and you put a lil section together every day!), and then wine. Pye’s work is damn lucky she didn’t call in sick every day – what’s better than some cheese, a little tipple and a good jigsaw?
This leads us quite nicely to…
SECTION THREE: Things We Were Very Excited About
* Getting Attention For Your Crafts (Part 1: featuring A UK Celebrity)
Season 5 of BBC's Ghosts aired, and we finally got to see how the Captain died. Stinky had no choice but to make an amigurumi Havers for her amigurumi Captain – look at these lil cuties, they have magnets in them so they can hold hands!
Pye doesn’t usually bother putting things on Twitter any more (henceforth to be called ‘Xitter’, with the X being pronounced ‘sch’) but did this time. It didn’t get many likes, but one of them was from Peter Sandys-Clark who is the actor that plays Havers! That counts as 10 times a normal like!
But it gets better.
One day, The Young Fan (the daughter of one of Pye’s work friends) who made the cake that Neil Gaiman commented (that other time we got really excited about the internet) got tickets to Australian ComicCon. One of the guests was going to be Con O'Neill, who plays Izzy Hands in Our Flag Means Death. The Young Fan asked if three weeks was enough notice to make a lil crochet guy, and they and Pye immediately started breathing heavily and staring meaningfully at Stinky at the idea of putting one into his hands.
Non-craft productivity in the house hit an all-time low as Stinky crocheted like a maniac and Pye worked on the non-yarn elements. We also brainstormed what she’d say if he asked who made it – “The sister of this teacher at school who gets TV shows for me to watch and shouts at me in the yard, it’s chill though, the teacher is friends with my parents”? Anyway, wee Izzy turned out to be pretty dang cute even if we do say so ourselves.
ComicCon day finally came, and The Young Fan and her sister went in for the autograph opportunity – this was the time! She didn’t expect to get any evidence, because photos and videos weren’t allowed, but guess what, Con is a pirate who lives by his own rules!
(rather like Instagram, which is very unfriendly towards embedding videos <- click here to watch him give us attention)
IT’S IN HIS HANDS! HE NOTICED ALL THE TINY DETAILS! Look, he’s HOLDING IT…!!!
He appeared to have put it down before the panel but Stinky fixed it!
An expert in the field told us that it’s rare to get this amount of attention from a ComicCon guest - we never expected this level of gratification and we like it.
* Getting Attention For Your Crafts (Part 2: featuring A Regional Show)
Now, gentle reader, you must decide if the aforementioned is more or less exciting than this bit – Stinky’s lil crochet Ghosts being awarded second prize at the Geelong Show!
In this category you could enter up to five dolls, so we separated them by character age and the younger ones won! Hooray!! (apart from the blatant ageism – you would think that the Show demographic would skew old, but apparently not!)
Coming second is objectively funnier than coming first, but also, what’s with the ones that came first? We think the creator is on the judging committee! Imagine losing to a pack of bitches, lol!
It’s enough to knock you off your chair! (NOW it’s a show!)
Belrog and Jenski were pretty proud of the wee Ghosts…
But no one was as into it as the former student whose idea it was that Stinky should enter them into the show in the first place. Si Keju materialised out of nowhere to share the excitement!
Pye was super keen to tell everyone she knew and how it’s like in Monopoly when you can win second prize in a beauty contest. Five seconds later, Andru transfered $10 to Stinky!
Send help, up until that point, we thought we were the funniest ones
Stinky wouldn’t use it to buy herself a second-place ribbon, so Pye bought it for Moose instead…
In the end Stinky invested it – it’s important to make your money grow.
Having taken the dopamine hit, we were then allowed to explore the Show at leisure.
Can you read the tins? Which one is the Mini Twin and which one is the Jumbo Twin? Shut up, don’t answer that.
Some exhibits were more confusing than others…
NO THEY’RE NOT I’m pretty sure.
We did our best to find the cat handlers so we could follow orders, but no one would help us find them…
And we did get distracted at the sheep-peeling competition, to be fair…
All the excitement must have reduced the oxygen supply to our brains, because at one point we decided we wanted to know what a Dagwood Dog was like.
Don’t ask why, we’ve just never tried one before and if you don’t feel sick at some point are you even at the show?
It wasn’t as rank as it could have been and we would eat one again for the first time, but won’t be having a second one any time soon!
* A Baby’s Middle Name
When is a baby’s name something to get excited about? Well, we’ll tell you. For context, one of Pye’s students, Lil Stacey, who graduated 14 years ago is onto her second sprog – Jade has a new little brother!
This is obviously very nice news and Pye didn’t even notice his middle name until Stacey said…
Well if you want a good reason to make someone drive to Ferntree Gully to visit a baby, that’ll be in the top five!
* International Middle Aged Crafty Ladies Mutual Appreciation Society
Coming back to the world of the internet, there’s a crochet blog called HookedatWeiss that follows Moose on Tumblr. One day Moose’d said something about how we don’t have candy corn in Australia. HookedatWeiss saw it and decided to do something about it! It ended up taking her four tries (she lives in Alabama and only goes to town once a week) but one day a package arrived!
We were very excited to try it!
And then we were even more excited to make other people try it – the rule was you had to say what you thought the texture was going to be before you ate it and found out that you were wrong!
(spoilers: it has the texture of stale clotted cream fudge, and it’s so sweet that it somehow keeps getting sweeter after you’ve finished eating it).
Of course, we had to reciprocate – here, have some Caramello Koalas, even though you’re American and won’t be able to pronounce ‘Caramello’ properly!
Safe to say that she was just about as excited as we were!
To facilitate the exchange, we had had to admit that Moose is actually two racoons in a raincoat, which we also revealed to Degopunk on Instagram. She lives in Wyoming, and we have an established mutual appreciation society (she has custody of #1 Humphrey and Proto Trevor). Moose had complimented her drawing of Robin and a mouse and Degopunk wanted to send some stickers, bless her!
But wait, there was more! She drew an artist’s impression of what Moose really is! And she got ‘him’ exactly right!!
Have you ever got anything as cool in the post, I think not!
* A Silk Purse is Made From A Sow’s Ear (aka A Landscaping Miracle)
Quite literally the biggest thing we were excited about this term was right outside our back door. The muddy mess that was left behind from the ‘six month’ extension project was infinite in possibility, but we had no idea where to even begin. Enter Simon, of The Planted Space. He asked what we would like to do with it. We wailed, gnashed our teeth and admitted we had no idea.
He went home and thought about it. Then he came back and had another look.
Then he went away again and had another think and drew some pictures.
Then he came back, looked again and showed us the pictures.
We honked like seals and whacked our flippers together and said YES PLEASE. And then he came in with a competitive quote and we locked him down.
I don’t know, was the transformation worth it?
There are a lot of things that have waited a long time for this moment. The citrus trees have been waiting around 14 years for their opportunity go in the ground, and one olive tree has had to get through 24 years in a pot before finding its forever-hole!
Speaking of, do you remember that time we got 250 bricks from the former Pix Cinema?
So yeah, it got murdered back in the day, but many of us remember it, and they now have pride of place on the loft’s ‘porch’!
And see this brick?
It’s from Christ the King in Newcomb (not the school, but the church that used to be part of the school)…
It happened to live across the road from where we lived when we were little.
Probably built in the late 1970s, the church was demolished on Good Friday, 2017 (we waited breathlessly for them to have to knock it down again three days later) and Pye’s mate Donna in and grabbed us each a brick because why not? Anyway, we thought we should incorporate it into our ‘Easter Egg Lane’, so if you’re ever looking in the path and judge Simon for a dodgy brick, shut up, that’s all on us!
There were two thousand equally cool bricks from our previous paving and, as you can see, a bunch of them went back down – but what about the leftovers?
The landscaper isn’t being paid to move bricks, so it was time for us to get to work! At the same time, Cousin Aimee, her husband, his band mate and his partner (aka Burger Joint) were coming from Queensland to play the Queenscliff Music Festival and we were excited to be able to provide them a real bed each…
…AND we thought if we gave them enough beer, we could sit around on the new deck and trick all of us into helping move some bricks over the course of an afternoon. But instead it absolutely bucketed down all evening and we couldn’t exploit them at all, not one little bit!
By the time the sun bravely rose on the misty morning, they had a gig to play, so we were on our own with over a thousand bricks on our feeble, feeble hands.
Slow and steady wins the race, and over a terribly long time, 1001 one good bricks (and a bunch more shitty ones) were moved all in their new (temporary) place, ready for when we’re ready to get someone to un-munt the driveway.
Simon The Landscaping Genius was a bit frustrated at our pace – we’d pick up one brick in each hand, and once we had 10 or so in the wheelbarrow, we’d take it to the new spot and unload them. He recommended picking up six at a time (one per hand and two-a-forearm) and walking them to the new spot – thus reducing double handling. This is another reminder that tall men may as well be another species! I bet his little finger didn’t hurt for the next two days! I bet his middle finger cuticle didn’t start bleeding a bit the next afternoon! This is not to be ungrateful - he did donate half an hour of his time to helping (and so double our number of bricks in the same time), and he also agreed that he would be just as incapable of corralling (and maybe even having fun with) a Year 9 class on a Friday afternoon or sitting through a Curriculum Team meeting, as we are at shifting heavy loads. This is why we live in a community! Everyone has their strengths!
The activity had a profound psychological impact, too. Leaving work one day, Pye saw this brick on the ground and was beset with the urge to carry it somewhere else
Stinky and Chuckles both urged her to take them home, but they are bad influences who ought not be listened to.
Simon, on the other hand, had the work ethic of someone who has a really good work ethic. He and his team (of he, himself and him) started on November 3 and it was all done by November 30! Look at him go!
The stepping stones at the entrance to the veggie stockade are sandstone blocks that have been hanging around the block for probably as long as the house has been there (aka after it was hauled down from Ballarat in 1910) – Simon found them and was like, “Hmm…let me think…yeah…I know what I can do with these!” and he was SO RIGHT.
He also used a bunch of bluestone blocks that were under the house, not to get too fangirl, but the man’s a genius for thinking of something to do with things we like but can’t figure out what to do with! Woof, would you look at that as a mini-retaining wall for a sloping block!
To be honest, the majority of Simon’s Magic was wrought while we were also being royally screwed by Powercor, so the dopamine of seeing what he achieved every day not only saved our lives, but also countless others’.
Simon’s pretty proud of it too – as well he ought to be, we literally couldn’t have imagined how good he has made it! The driveway section on the right (all of which is driveable) will go all green and guess what, it turns out we like watching the grass grow!
On the same weekend after Simon finished, D’admiral and Chuckles zoomed over with a very cool Christmas present – a bench seat reconstructed by D’admiral with cast iron legs found at a Tyabb antique shop. Isn’t he clever!?
However, when someone competent in areas outside our competence comes to our house they must pay The Handyman Tax. Thus, it came about that apart from building a bench, D’admiral was tasked to help figure out how to make the pump attached to the under-deck water tank realise that the tank wasn’t actually empty. Pye had googled it and knew she just needed to prime the pump, but didn’t know how. D’admiral knew how to prime the pump but was in no way prepared to get in under the deck. So, he sat on top of the deck and gave instructions while Pye climbed through a small hatch and sat in a hole. It was not dissimilar to the scene in an early episode of BBC’s Ghosts where Alison (who can hear the Plague ghosts) relays their instructions to Mike (who has a hammer and isn’t afraid to bash things).
Anyway, look how perfectly the bench seat fits!
It snuggles nicely in front of the tea tree stockade, which is thanks to Ross letting us ‘help’ clean his bush block by using his trimmings. Speaking of, Simon chose to include a forked bit of teatree that he thought could take a stubby.
It could, but with the addition of this drain cover, it can confidently hold a champagne glass too!
If there’s bubbles about that must mean it’s Christmas! Merry Christmas, everyone, to the festive season, away!
Things We Were Not Excited About:
- Australia Fucked the Referendum
- The Great Debacle of the Spicy Water
- The Deadest, Flattest Rat
- Earthquake!
- Being Personally Targeted By A Name Generator
- Artificial ‘Intelligence’
Things We Were Tickled By:
- Insulation in Your Walls (and Visitors Have Beds)
- Our Brother Entered His Ruth Phase
- His Wife and Children Have Birthdays
- Shenanigans – Seasonal and Otherwise
- Chosen By A Baby Magpie
- Unsettling the Youth
- A Very Crappy Christmas Tree
- An Abundance of Advent Calendars
Things We Were Very Excited About:
- Getting Attention For Your Crafts (featuring UK Celebrities and a Regional Show)
- A Baby’s Middle Name
- International Middle-Aged Crafty Ladies Mutual Appreciation Society
- A Silk Purse is Made From A Sow’s Ear (aka A Landscaping Miracle)
SECTION ONE: Things We Were Not Excited About
* Australia Fucked the Referendum
The Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum being won by the racists and bringing national shame is something we do not wish to dwell on, but it’s hard to find something that we have been less pleased about in the past year.
* The Great Debacle of the Spicy Water
Once upon a time, Stinky thought she felt a bit of a tingle when she washed her hands in the new powder room, so referred it onto the builders (Hey, should our water be spicy?), at which point the electrician shouted, “HOLY SHIT DON’T TOUCH ANY TAPS!” and called Powercor.
Powercor immediately called and shouted, “HOLY SHIT DON’T TOUCH ANY TAPS OR ANYTHING WET OR ANYTHING METAL JESUS CHRIST!” and were there within the hour.
They tested the tingly tap and found it was throwing off 7 volts (0 is ideal, 5 is the threshold for concern).
But that turned out to just be a siracha mayo level of spiciness compared with the kitchen sink at 13! Powercor had no insights into that, they just confiscated the power (literally, they took down the supply to the house) and fucked off saying CALL US WHEN U HAVE A SPARKY OKAY BYE. Luckily for us, we are inveterate collectors of things that glow and can be set fire to, so it was their turn to shine.
Even if it was a bit tiring…
And oh, my stars, were we excited or what when we realised this whimsy of a former-back-window:
was now the author of the brightest room in the house!
Looking on the bright side (including that they confiscated the cable to the house because it was super-old and then replaced it, thus saving us the cost and effort it would have taken us to have it replaced when we get solar panels installed), Stinky cheerfully took a day off and managed to get a sparky by nice and early (please note that the builder’s sparky was trying really hard to pretend it Wasn’t His Fault at this point).
The Unfortunate Sparky Who Should Not Have Answered His Phone That Day did what Powercor had advised (earthed the pipes) and then it was just a matter of waiting five hours for Powercor to get around to coming back. Feel sorry for Stinky, she couldn't do anything productive like ironing or vacuuming, but instead had to resort to that most detested pastime, report writing.
When the Powercor came back (at dusk), it turned out to be the same lads as the first time. But also, the problem was still the same, and it was now 6.30 on a Friday. They all stood around scratching themselves. Literally. Down There. It was like a Mexican wave, it just kept going around and around the lads, enthusiastically and like nobody could see them getting really deep under there.
Sarah the physics teacher from next door came over and was fascinated by the problem of the differential in voltage that was causing the spiciness in the water. We couldn’t even get mad because she and hubby Tim threw us a lifeline of a power cord over the fence so we could save the fridge and freezer (actually, Tim is so on the Neighbourhood Pulse that he was lassoing the power cord over the fence almost as Powercor cut the cable).
Meanwhile, Itchy and Scratchy figured out that it was induced load, but the continuity test was so weird they all scratched their heads (and balls) about it for ages - the difference in potential from the sink, bath and shower didn’t make any sense.
Then the Powercor Lads turned off the switches and turned them on one at a time, findings the voltage increased gradually with each switch until they figured out which circuit was adding the biggest charge and just confiscated that one in order to make it Not Their Problem Any More.
But then we couldn’t get the sparky back on the weekend (remember that bit where the builder sparky Wasn’t Responsible? And we’re too stubborn to pay another rando for a weekend call out!), so we had a couple more days in the dark before he was able to diagnose the roof with throwing off 40 volts and figure out that something was electrifying the water.
The laundry with its power board became the most popular room in the house!
The mobile network here is a joke and Pye kept unplugging the fridge to put the wifi on so she could post pictures online of Stinky’s award-wining crochet (that’s something that will appear in a later chapter). Some muppet grown-up at Stinky’s school suggested she hotspot her phone to solve the internet problem, but luckily the positive attention/dopamine from the internet stopped Stinky from stabbing her in the face.
The Unfortunate Sparky Who Should Not Have Answered His Phone That Day looked and looked but couldn’t find the problem, so has resorted to earthing the roof. The Builders Who Said It Was None Of Their Fault acknowledged (to a point) that it might have been a teeny bit of their fault, so copped the bill, which is nice.
It’s also nice that neither of us is likely to die in the shower now, but have you considered the downside? There is the skinniest of chances that we might have been bathing in spicy water the whole time we’ve been here… what if this is the secret to our youthful skin? Now they’ve ‘fixed’ it, are we going to crumble like a peach left in the sun or the portrait of Dorian Gray?? Only time will tell.
All of these doings and happenings are tied to the next chapter, that is…
* The Deadest, Flattest Rat
One day, we were going to Spotlight. Pye pulled the car out so that Stinky could get in, but then all these bugs started swarming, and Stinky was all like, “OH SHIT BEES!” But it wasn’t bees. It was blowflies. They had come pouring out after Pye had removed the car tyre from atop the fresh, squished rat. Had it been intact we probably would have managed to get it into the bin, but now it was breached and all squished and seeping into the bricks the story was very different.
The only thing for it was to make sure not to park the car on top of it again and let the birds and insects do their work. Thus, it was that when our Powercor besties were on their third and final visit, there was a very, very flat, dry rat laminated into the paving.
When they were all standing around scratching their nuts at the end, one of them accidentally almost stepped on it. Stinky warned him not to step back, on account of us being feral and there being a dead rat there. He obligingly stepped away. As we kept talking, he kind of scuffed it with his shoe and we kept chatting. Then he got a bit distracted and scuffed it again. Then he bent down and Stinky, who was witnessing this blacked out for a second. Turns out he was able to…sort of…lift it off in one piece. Being the sort of chap he was, the Powercor chap picked it up by the tail (it stuck out straight and stiff), then he giggled and ran off towards one of their two vans. Pye thought he was planting it in his mate's van to give him a cheeky surprise later because why else would you pick it up? Stinky cackled like a maniac and followed him to the truck, where she was disappointed find that he was just dumping it in a bin in the back. It was a perfect prank opportunity and he missed it!!
Nonetheless, she filled in a positive feedback card to Powercor to praise him for going above and beyond, and he’ll probably get a $200 bonus lol.
* Earthquake!
Once upon the wee small hours of a morning, it was so windy that Stinky found her new first floor room a little wibbly-wobbly and the wind whooshing trough the gutters was making an ungodly noise. Then the wind finally died down but then the wibbly-wobbly got really intense...but the wind wasn’t blowing, what was happening?
And that’s the story of how Stinky Was Glad It Was An Earthquake And Not A Case For The Building Ombudsman Or The Coroner.
* Being Personally Targeted By A Name Generator
Another day, Stinky came across a comedic suggestion on how to generate your ‘ghost name’.
‘Catreeolinooeboo’ thought it a jolly jape, as did Atnoodreeew, Reeobyoonoo, Jatsminooeboo, Catmpebool. Moose enjoyed the simplicity of Mooseboo and everyone was having a marvellous time – except for Juliat. They were laughing, and she’s Juliat. Nathan W Pyle owes her a personal apology!
* Artificial ‘Intelligence’
Speaking of actions that require apology, Chuckles asked if Stinky’s photoshop magic could fix the backlight in this photo:
Alas, it was beyond her powers, so out of curiosity, she thought she’d see what AI would do about it.
Apparently its first stop was to translate it to the 17th century…
… and when asked to ‘tone the backlight down’, its next instinct was to bully Auntie Rita.
I suppose the upside is that our AI overlords are not quite clever enough to be at the takeover stage yet? Let us move on to….
SECTION TWO: Things We Were Tickled By:
* Insulation
We had spent the winter months marvelling at the difference insulation in the walls made, while vaguely worrying that we have made our giant pile of knitted and crocheted blankets surplus to requirement. As spring progressed, the weather insisted on being weird, with the occasional 32-degree day shoehorned in between a week of 12-degree days. Imagine coming home on a lovely 21-degree day to find that your loungeroom is still 14 degrees?! We had to open the window to warm the place up!
* Our brother entered his Ruth phase
Andru’s wisdom has been accumulating for 47 years – congratulations on your birthday, this makes you a Ruth!
* His Wife and Children Have Birthdays
As dictated by the passage of time, everyone else started having birthdays too! Somehow the Cabin Girl turned 18 within a month of her mother turning 50! Wow!
This convergence was celebrated with craft beer and really, really good-looking guests…
Moose was terribly excited to be able to give the Cabin Girl a card that she had made for Moose’s very own 18th birthday seven years ago, he likes to plot, does Moose!
It had been a long time between catch-ups and Stinky had also been patiently waiting to give the Powder Monkey’s mermaid tail back. He has grown just a bit since 2015, and she’d had to put a rather long extension on. Hooray!
Adele and Carlo’s children thought it was a bit of all right too…
… but it’s possible that Cousin Hannah’s husband John wore it best, according to Chloe, at least.
Carlo probably had the most fun with his kids!
A splendid time was had by all, even if Google thinks we spent four hours at a brothel.
Robyn’s real birthday got a lil festive top up when the day itself arrived…
… and the Powder Monkey was able to talk us through the genealogical discoveries he’s made, researching his family’s connection to the great houses of Europe. The things that lad can do with a whiteboard! Did you know that Anne Boleyn is the first cousin twice removed of his 11th step-great-grandmother-in-law? It’s true, check it!
We didn’t get to celebrate his 16th birthday in person, though :’(
Don’t feel too sorry for him, it was because they went to Europe. He planned it so that his birthday involved being in two countries (Denmark and Sweden) and featured lunch at the first IKEA in the world (aka The Mothership). Better than a bucket of KFC and a visit to Chadstone! His gift from us was money on the cash card which he was required to use to buy something cool from one of the many historical gift shops they would be visiting. For starters he got these olde keys:
We suggest labelling the keys things like ‘dungeon’ and ‘lobotomiser hatch’ and ‘penis exploding room’ and ‘spiders: do not use’ and then nonchalantly displaying them in every share house he lives in in the future.
* Shenanigans – Seasonal and Otherwise
It is a fact well known that Stinky loves a good prank, and when she learned that her Canadian colleague who lives a couple of streets over (and whose birthday is on 31 October) was too lazy to decorate his house for Halloween, why, that was a red rag to a bull. She went directly to Kmart to get a pumpkin and led tealights and bravely wove past the hordes of trick-or-treating children to plant it on his deck. While skulking home, we ran into a pack of Stinky’s students who asked if we were trick-or-treating.
“No!” replied Stinky. “We’re just out Tricking Mr C!”
“Oh!” cried the 12-year-old With The Jarringly Old-fashioned Name, “I know his street! Let’s go, crew!”
This had the immediate effect of luring not just that mob, but a bunch of other wild children to his door, hee hee hee.
However, we had to wait a whole week before we learned the psychological impact. He and his wife assumed that some teenaged rascals had stolen the decoration from a neighbour and planted it at their place, and were quite anxious that meant that whoever the original owner was would think that they were thieves. It was only 3/4 of the way through explaining the dilemma to Stinky (while her desk-buddy and co-conspirator openly wept with laugher) that the penny dropped – “It was YOU!”
YEP!
One day she will reap what she has sown, but in the meantime, it seems to be more about getting other people in trouble – for example, she knows that our dentist sees her walking to work every morning and Stinky has dared her to shout “SHOW US YA TEETH!” every time. She (the dentist) said that she actually thinks about it quite often, but it was only once this year that she could actually do it without accidentally harassing innocent bystanders, much to mutual delight.
*Chosen By a Baby Magpie
Did you know that after baby magpies fledge, they spend a month derping around the world while their parents keep an eye on them? We didn’t, until recently! One such lil fluffy-bummed child chose our backyard to be an idiot in – bless them!
Some of it involved them huddling on the stairs and looking thirsty, or walking around the yard pretending to be a Very Important Worm Catcher (while – and this is important – not catching any worms*).
*We know because Simon The Landscaper said that we were curiously bereft of worms (see Things We Were Very Excited About: A Silk Purse is Made From A Sow’s Ear (aka A Landscaping Miracle**))
[**although, upon reflection, Simon did say that there was a curious lack of worms, so this could explain why.]
Our favourite when the little muppet was playing on the wheelbarrow and jumped onto the wheel and was like flllppppt whoops, thunk!
He was just generally a bit of an idiot and we love him.
* Unsettling the Youth
Although one might argue we unsettle young people on a professional basis, we had a special opportunity at an early Christmas gathering with heaps of our mother’s cousins and their children. Did you know that if all the older generation gathers for a photo, you can tell their granddaughters and grandnieces that they’re looking at their future and they have a lil Zoomer existential crisis? 10/10, highly recommend.
* A Crappy Christmas Tree
The festive season was upon us and for 2023 a different sort of tree was on the cards.
Where was this when we were in the dark?! Anyway, Stinky thought it was the Jape of the Season to send a box of Christmas-themed bog roll to D’admiral and Chuckles, so it’s their problem now, too!
* An Abundance of Advent Calendars
Anyone who doesn’t love an advent calendar is a liar (although maybe not those advent calendars where the numbers are all out of order – I’m a busy person, can’t be fucking around looking for number 18!!). It began with a cheese advent calendar, then a jigsaw puzzle (where the 1000 pieces are separated into 24 boxes and you put a lil section together every day!), and then wine. Pye’s work is damn lucky she didn’t call in sick every day – what’s better than some cheese, a little tipple and a good jigsaw?
This leads us quite nicely to…
SECTION THREE: Things We Were Very Excited About
* Getting Attention For Your Crafts (Part 1: featuring A UK Celebrity)
Season 5 of BBC's Ghosts aired, and we finally got to see how the Captain died. Stinky had no choice but to make an amigurumi Havers for her amigurumi Captain – look at these lil cuties, they have magnets in them so they can hold hands!
Pye doesn’t usually bother putting things on Twitter any more (henceforth to be called ‘Xitter’, with the X being pronounced ‘sch’) but did this time. It didn’t get many likes, but one of them was from Peter Sandys-Clark who is the actor that plays Havers! That counts as 10 times a normal like!
But it gets better.
One day, The Young Fan (the daughter of one of Pye’s work friends) who made the cake that Neil Gaiman commented (that other time we got really excited about the internet) got tickets to Australian ComicCon. One of the guests was going to be Con O'Neill, who plays Izzy Hands in Our Flag Means Death. The Young Fan asked if three weeks was enough notice to make a lil crochet guy, and they and Pye immediately started breathing heavily and staring meaningfully at Stinky at the idea of putting one into his hands.
Non-craft productivity in the house hit an all-time low as Stinky crocheted like a maniac and Pye worked on the non-yarn elements. We also brainstormed what she’d say if he asked who made it – “The sister of this teacher at school who gets TV shows for me to watch and shouts at me in the yard, it’s chill though, the teacher is friends with my parents”? Anyway, wee Izzy turned out to be pretty dang cute even if we do say so ourselves.
ComicCon day finally came, and The Young Fan and her sister went in for the autograph opportunity – this was the time! She didn’t expect to get any evidence, because photos and videos weren’t allowed, but guess what, Con is a pirate who lives by his own rules!
(rather like Instagram, which is very unfriendly towards embedding videos <- click here to watch him give us attention)
IT’S IN HIS HANDS! HE NOTICED ALL THE TINY DETAILS! Look, he’s HOLDING IT…!!!
He appeared to have put it down before the panel but Stinky fixed it!
An expert in the field told us that it’s rare to get this amount of attention from a ComicCon guest - we never expected this level of gratification and we like it.
* Getting Attention For Your Crafts (Part 2: featuring A Regional Show)
Now, gentle reader, you must decide if the aforementioned is more or less exciting than this bit – Stinky’s lil crochet Ghosts being awarded second prize at the Geelong Show!
In this category you could enter up to five dolls, so we separated them by character age and the younger ones won! Hooray!! (apart from the blatant ageism – you would think that the Show demographic would skew old, but apparently not!)
Coming second is objectively funnier than coming first, but also, what’s with the ones that came first? We think the creator is on the judging committee! Imagine losing to a pack of bitches, lol!
It’s enough to knock you off your chair! (NOW it’s a show!)
Belrog and Jenski were pretty proud of the wee Ghosts…
But no one was as into it as the former student whose idea it was that Stinky should enter them into the show in the first place. Si Keju materialised out of nowhere to share the excitement!
Pye was super keen to tell everyone she knew and how it’s like in Monopoly when you can win second prize in a beauty contest. Five seconds later, Andru transfered $10 to Stinky!
Send help, up until that point, we thought we were the funniest ones
Stinky wouldn’t use it to buy herself a second-place ribbon, so Pye bought it for Moose instead…
In the end Stinky invested it – it’s important to make your money grow.
Having taken the dopamine hit, we were then allowed to explore the Show at leisure.
Can you read the tins? Which one is the Mini Twin and which one is the Jumbo Twin? Shut up, don’t answer that.
Some exhibits were more confusing than others…
NO THEY’RE NOT I’m pretty sure.
We did our best to find the cat handlers so we could follow orders, but no one would help us find them…
And we did get distracted at the sheep-peeling competition, to be fair…
All the excitement must have reduced the oxygen supply to our brains, because at one point we decided we wanted to know what a Dagwood Dog was like.
Don’t ask why, we’ve just never tried one before and if you don’t feel sick at some point are you even at the show?
It wasn’t as rank as it could have been and we would eat one again for the first time, but won’t be having a second one any time soon!
* A Baby’s Middle Name
When is a baby’s name something to get excited about? Well, we’ll tell you. For context, one of Pye’s students, Lil Stacey, who graduated 14 years ago is onto her second sprog – Jade has a new little brother!
This is obviously very nice news and Pye didn’t even notice his middle name until Stacey said…
Well if you want a good reason to make someone drive to Ferntree Gully to visit a baby, that’ll be in the top five!
* International Middle Aged Crafty Ladies Mutual Appreciation Society
Coming back to the world of the internet, there’s a crochet blog called HookedatWeiss that follows Moose on Tumblr. One day Moose’d said something about how we don’t have candy corn in Australia. HookedatWeiss saw it and decided to do something about it! It ended up taking her four tries (she lives in Alabama and only goes to town once a week) but one day a package arrived!
We were very excited to try it!
And then we were even more excited to make other people try it – the rule was you had to say what you thought the texture was going to be before you ate it and found out that you were wrong!
(spoilers: it has the texture of stale clotted cream fudge, and it’s so sweet that it somehow keeps getting sweeter after you’ve finished eating it).
Of course, we had to reciprocate – here, have some Caramello Koalas, even though you’re American and won’t be able to pronounce ‘Caramello’ properly!
Safe to say that she was just about as excited as we were!
To facilitate the exchange, we had had to admit that Moose is actually two racoons in a raincoat, which we also revealed to Degopunk on Instagram. She lives in Wyoming, and we have an established mutual appreciation society (she has custody of #1 Humphrey and Proto Trevor). Moose had complimented her drawing of Robin and a mouse and Degopunk wanted to send some stickers, bless her!
But wait, there was more! She drew an artist’s impression of what Moose really is! And she got ‘him’ exactly right!!
Have you ever got anything as cool in the post, I think not!
* A Silk Purse is Made From A Sow’s Ear (aka A Landscaping Miracle)
Quite literally the biggest thing we were excited about this term was right outside our back door. The muddy mess that was left behind from the ‘six month’ extension project was infinite in possibility, but we had no idea where to even begin. Enter Simon, of The Planted Space. He asked what we would like to do with it. We wailed, gnashed our teeth and admitted we had no idea.
He went home and thought about it. Then he came back and had another look.
Then he went away again and had another think and drew some pictures.
Then he came back, looked again and showed us the pictures.
We honked like seals and whacked our flippers together and said YES PLEASE. And then he came in with a competitive quote and we locked him down.
I don’t know, was the transformation worth it?
There are a lot of things that have waited a long time for this moment. The citrus trees have been waiting around 14 years for their opportunity go in the ground, and one olive tree has had to get through 24 years in a pot before finding its forever-hole!
Speaking of, do you remember that time we got 250 bricks from the former Pix Cinema?
So yeah, it got murdered back in the day, but many of us remember it, and they now have pride of place on the loft’s ‘porch’!
And see this brick?
It’s from Christ the King in Newcomb (not the school, but the church that used to be part of the school)…
It happened to live across the road from where we lived when we were little.
Probably built in the late 1970s, the church was demolished on Good Friday, 2017 (we waited breathlessly for them to have to knock it down again three days later) and Pye’s mate Donna in and grabbed us each a brick because why not? Anyway, we thought we should incorporate it into our ‘Easter Egg Lane’, so if you’re ever looking in the path and judge Simon for a dodgy brick, shut up, that’s all on us!
There were two thousand equally cool bricks from our previous paving and, as you can see, a bunch of them went back down – but what about the leftovers?
The landscaper isn’t being paid to move bricks, so it was time for us to get to work! At the same time, Cousin Aimee, her husband, his band mate and his partner (aka Burger Joint) were coming from Queensland to play the Queenscliff Music Festival and we were excited to be able to provide them a real bed each…
…AND we thought if we gave them enough beer, we could sit around on the new deck and trick all of us into helping move some bricks over the course of an afternoon. But instead it absolutely bucketed down all evening and we couldn’t exploit them at all, not one little bit!
By the time the sun bravely rose on the misty morning, they had a gig to play, so we were on our own with over a thousand bricks on our feeble, feeble hands.
Slow and steady wins the race, and over a terribly long time, 1001 one good bricks (and a bunch more shitty ones) were moved all in their new (temporary) place, ready for when we’re ready to get someone to un-munt the driveway.
Simon The Landscaping Genius was a bit frustrated at our pace – we’d pick up one brick in each hand, and once we had 10 or so in the wheelbarrow, we’d take it to the new spot and unload them. He recommended picking up six at a time (one per hand and two-a-forearm) and walking them to the new spot – thus reducing double handling. This is another reminder that tall men may as well be another species! I bet his little finger didn’t hurt for the next two days! I bet his middle finger cuticle didn’t start bleeding a bit the next afternoon! This is not to be ungrateful - he did donate half an hour of his time to helping (and so double our number of bricks in the same time), and he also agreed that he would be just as incapable of corralling (and maybe even having fun with) a Year 9 class on a Friday afternoon or sitting through a Curriculum Team meeting, as we are at shifting heavy loads. This is why we live in a community! Everyone has their strengths!
The activity had a profound psychological impact, too. Leaving work one day, Pye saw this brick on the ground and was beset with the urge to carry it somewhere else
Stinky and Chuckles both urged her to take them home, but they are bad influences who ought not be listened to.
Simon, on the other hand, had the work ethic of someone who has a really good work ethic. He and his team (of he, himself and him) started on November 3 and it was all done by November 30! Look at him go!
The stepping stones at the entrance to the veggie stockade are sandstone blocks that have been hanging around the block for probably as long as the house has been there (aka after it was hauled down from Ballarat in 1910) – Simon found them and was like, “Hmm…let me think…yeah…I know what I can do with these!” and he was SO RIGHT.
He also used a bunch of bluestone blocks that were under the house, not to get too fangirl, but the man’s a genius for thinking of something to do with things we like but can’t figure out what to do with! Woof, would you look at that as a mini-retaining wall for a sloping block!
To be honest, the majority of Simon’s Magic was wrought while we were also being royally screwed by Powercor, so the dopamine of seeing what he achieved every day not only saved our lives, but also countless others’.
Simon’s pretty proud of it too – as well he ought to be, we literally couldn’t have imagined how good he has made it! The driveway section on the right (all of which is driveable) will go all green and guess what, it turns out we like watching the grass grow!
On the same weekend after Simon finished, D’admiral and Chuckles zoomed over with a very cool Christmas present – a bench seat reconstructed by D’admiral with cast iron legs found at a Tyabb antique shop. Isn’t he clever!?
However, when someone competent in areas outside our competence comes to our house they must pay The Handyman Tax. Thus, it came about that apart from building a bench, D’admiral was tasked to help figure out how to make the pump attached to the under-deck water tank realise that the tank wasn’t actually empty. Pye had googled it and knew she just needed to prime the pump, but didn’t know how. D’admiral knew how to prime the pump but was in no way prepared to get in under the deck. So, he sat on top of the deck and gave instructions while Pye climbed through a small hatch and sat in a hole. It was not dissimilar to the scene in an early episode of BBC’s Ghosts where Alison (who can hear the Plague ghosts) relays their instructions to Mike (who has a hammer and isn’t afraid to bash things).
Anyway, look how perfectly the bench seat fits!
It snuggles nicely in front of the tea tree stockade, which is thanks to Ross letting us ‘help’ clean his bush block by using his trimmings. Speaking of, Simon chose to include a forked bit of teatree that he thought could take a stubby.
It could, but with the addition of this drain cover, it can confidently hold a champagne glass too!
If there’s bubbles about that must mean it’s Christmas! Merry Christmas, everyone, to the festive season, away!
