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capn_n_pyeWanna Top Root?
Ah ha ha, a hilarious vegetable, courtesy of Stinky’s colleague! Everyone agreed it was too good to throw out, which meant this side-splitting comestible came to embody the spirit of Term Three…
We started said Term Three strongly, by completing our Coolart-themed bathroom in the loft…
… and throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into our watching-grass-grow hobby – look how the driveway is coming along!
And how splendid is this Japanese Silver Grass?!
Some might think this is a boring hobby, but they are wrong. We are very good at choosing fun hobbies. Take, for example, when we finally got the garage in such a state that we could invest in four big shelves. They were very easy to be put together, and by the fourth one we could practically do it with our eyes shut. Imagine when Pye saw the same shelf in a box at work waiting to put together – she almost assembled it out of habit!
But putting shelves together isn’t a fun hobby - deciding your new shelves look boring and they need to be painted leads to a fun hobby! Watching paint dry! We already had some green paint, so tested how the MDF behaved…
Then got a blue sample pot to see how far a litre would go…
The first layer would soak straight in, and you could literally watch it dry in minutes! Very exciting!
Once we knew how far the paint would go, we went back to Bunnings for yellow, purple and red. The lady at the paint counter shares our passion for this exceptional hobby and asked lots of questions about our project. As is our wont, our answers were upsetting to a paint professional – who needs a primer, eh? And if the first two layers soak right in, that means it won’t scratch off, right? Anyway, she brought our pots over and there was a fourth one - in a voice that said “please, you’re making me sad,” she told us it was a base coat, there was no charge and could we please just use it, hee hee hoo hoo
It was an intense period of time watching all this paint dry, but in the end we achieved our goal – creating the world’s most depressing childcare centre shelves!
Watching paint dry and grass grow are excellent additions to our yarn-based hobbies, and winter means only one thing – the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show! The last couple of times we’d been to Bendigo we hadn’t been able to go to Bendigo Pottery because of various floods and disasters. But fortune smiled!
Moose was immediately very naughty…
… and we got to watch a tempting new hobby of making wee glass beads.
After morning tea with Grandmama (for the last time, as it turns out), we went and found Robyn and the Cabin Girl who were testing out how Woven By Society’s stock sells in a regional show…
The Cabin Girl is testing the water on both knitting and crochet, and we were both very brave about not trying to sway her towards either side as we helped her find tempting starter packs. Then of course is the best part – great woolly sheep balls!
Hot on the heels of those shenanigans, Jenski became the first of us to enter her Ruth Phase, which we were bent on signalising with unusual revelry…
At the same time, we had to deal with the chronic disappointment of finding our favourite clothes shop had rudely shut without our permission!
Meanwhile, Chuckles’ long-awaited shoulder-replacement day came due. At the same time as the anaesthetist was doing their thing, the call came in that week to the day after Grandmama’s 94th birthday, she had, after much anticipation, shuffled off this mortal coil, off her tits on morphine and probably blissfully unaware of Aunt Judy by her side (may we all be so lucky). We had raced over to Somers on the expectation that D’admiral would be speeding up to Bendigo, but thanks to her timing, we could give Chuckles all our attention when they finally let her go home, and head up when the arrangements were all ready.
Sitting still is Chuckles’ worst nightmare and the minute she could she was back down the beach to investigate the state of the wintery beach.
As it happened to be the start of September, we were actually there for Father’s Day (we are usually too lazy to go over).
Chuckles loved seeing her grandchildren…
… and we enjoyed teasing Andru for having recently got the same glasses as his father.
Somers is just as cool during late-winter-that-thinks-it’s-spring as it is over summer, all blossoms and horny birds…
… and one exceptionally large carrot!
Grandmama’s funeral was set for the following Friday, so on Thursday after school we raced off to grab the 5pm ferry. Everything went according to plan, except for the bit where there was no 5:00 ferry on account of a winter maintenance program that we would have known about if we looked it up but didn’t because of course why would we need to look it up. Fie!
We sat, dejected, in the corner of the ferry terminal and marked Year 12 SACs, which turned out to be a good thing on account of the prodigious winds making it impossible to do on the boat.
Just look at some of the damage done by a week of ridiculous winds!
Nowhere near as impressive as what the MFG crew fronted up to work to find!
Tis thought that the tree was planted around 1950, but we’re not sure. It was a very polite tree, which fell when nobody was around, and hit nothing on the way down. Its body was carved up and remains on site in the form of mulch, which is fitting.
Bright and early on Friday we squished into the Golf (arranging Chuckles as comfortably as possible) and fanged it off to Bendigo. Grandmama had exactly the send-off she had hoped and planned for at St Pauls and then a private cremation at Eaglehawk (incidentally this looks to be an excellent and expansive resource for anyone looking to hide a body).
It was a lovely send-off, with a lovely range of people (even if Jacinta Allan disgraced herself by not turning up – she should have done better).
We had decided – for reasons which now escape us – that there’d be nothing wrong with grabbing a budget motel in Kangaroo Flat for the night. This was in the sure and firm knowledge that Kangaroo Flat is very much the Corio or Hastings of Bendigo, as one of the patrons of the Golden Square Hotel reminded us. Here he is, around 8:30pm, having thrown up everything he’d ever eaten, clutching the earth and shouting “OH GOD”.
The Calder Family Motel gave off mad Schitt’s Creek vibes (Season One). All the other residents were very nice, and if we wanted to start another new hobby we could have joined in the local one of sitting out the front of your room smoking durries. We could appreciate this hobby vicariously from our bathroom, on account of the louvre windows not closing and gently wafting the smoke inside.
Around midnight we noticed a different smell – kind of chemically, like cleaning products but also a bit sweet? It wasn’t pot, and it wasn’t a vape. Finally, Stinky thought to google “What does meth being smoked smell like” and we’re pretty sure we had our answer. Watch us clutch our pearls in horror!
However, one thing that Kangaroo Flat has going for it is that it allows for a speedy exit out of town. Another one of Pye’s favourite hobbies (aside from the grass and paint observing) is watching the overall average speed displayed by the Golf. On a trip from Somers to G-town where it’s highway the whole way, she feels pretty chuffed if we can get the average up to 90km. But when one starts at Kangaroo Flat, you get straight on the highway, and with the Calder limit being 110km/h, we actually got it up to 100!!
This was unbearably exciting, obviously. But on the other hand, we know that it will never happen again – unless we cannot resist the siren song of the Calder Family Motel. Anyhoo, we’d had flowers sent to the church (by a local florist who knew Grandmama and was sad and honoured to be able to do them for her) that we wanted to bring back for D’admiral. Lucky for Stinky we met up again with Andru and his crew at Nonna’s in Thomastown halfway back to Somers, otherwise this would have been her for the whole trip!
We deposited D’admiral and Chuckles safely home and – having ascertained there actually was a ferry to race off to this time – fanged it back home. We would have preferred to take our time, but for some reason, Stinky wanted one day of a weekend at home before she went gallivanting off to Lombok and Sumatra with 20 kids (Pye had one more weekend up her sleeve before gallivanting off to Java with 25 kids). Packing was rather more creative than usual, on account of how we have heaps of travel stuff to go off individually, lots to take together, but not to both go off separately at the same time #FirstWorldProblems
If we had just been lazing about on our holidays like normal lazy teachers, we probably would have found the time to pop over to Somers and bully the place into order with some washing and housework, but we are very lazy. Instead, Stinky found a lovely lady called Danielle and arranged a few hours of cleaning. Having previously been unaware that we’re allowed to ask someone else to clean in exchange for a fair rate of pay, Chuckles got a taste for it and asked her back for another job. And lunch. And a visit in summer. Sorry, Danielle, you’re one of us now, there’s no escape!
Fast forward to the second week of the holidays and the trips both went well (Pye’s students proved more resilient than Stinky’s, but that’s probably just because Pye’s itinerary went for half the time and didn’t put them as far out of their comfort zones), and we both got the Year 12 teachers’ reward of facilitating exam revision during the holidays. Here is Stinky, with all the students who were keen to take advantage of speaking to a teacher who wasn’t their own ahead of the scary oral exam.
Before you could say ‘I could have been doing something more fun than that’, we were doing something more fun, namely meeting up with D’admiral and Chuckles for lunch in Queenscliff. It might have a new name, but it’s the same place we met up after Stinky’s last trip in 2019! They popped us in the drawing room, and we did our best to make the best of it.
Pye noticed the mantlepiece was a bit of fun, too…
The ferry was back on every hour, but one of the big boys is still out for maintenance, so the homeward-bound one was going to be a wee slip of a ship – though we’re sure it still welcomes safe drivers.
By the state of the sky, we thought it was best to send D’admiral and Chuckles racing off over the sea before the weather got to us. Byeee!
As the last precious hours of the holidays slipped through our fingers, we took one last opportunity to entertain ourselves. As we drove past a garden centre on the way home from Queenscliff, we saw this:
And we thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny to have our own Florence, like in Ghosts?!”
Or as Stinky’s lil crochet dudes would have it:
So anyway yeah, that’s how we ended up with this lady in our yard, called Florence Too (short for ‘We Have A Florence, Too’). We can’t wait to dress her up for Christmas and special events!
And if you ask her, she thinks that daylight savings starting and poor defenceless teachers having to go back to work is bullshit, too!
Ah ha ha, a hilarious vegetable, courtesy of Stinky’s colleague! Everyone agreed it was too good to throw out, which meant this side-splitting comestible came to embody the spirit of Term Three…
We started said Term Three strongly, by completing our Coolart-themed bathroom in the loft…
… and throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into our watching-grass-grow hobby – look how the driveway is coming along!
And how splendid is this Japanese Silver Grass?!
Some might think this is a boring hobby, but they are wrong. We are very good at choosing fun hobbies. Take, for example, when we finally got the garage in such a state that we could invest in four big shelves. They were very easy to be put together, and by the fourth one we could practically do it with our eyes shut. Imagine when Pye saw the same shelf in a box at work waiting to put together – she almost assembled it out of habit!
But putting shelves together isn’t a fun hobby - deciding your new shelves look boring and they need to be painted leads to a fun hobby! Watching paint dry! We already had some green paint, so tested how the MDF behaved…
Then got a blue sample pot to see how far a litre would go…
The first layer would soak straight in, and you could literally watch it dry in minutes! Very exciting!
Once we knew how far the paint would go, we went back to Bunnings for yellow, purple and red. The lady at the paint counter shares our passion for this exceptional hobby and asked lots of questions about our project. As is our wont, our answers were upsetting to a paint professional – who needs a primer, eh? And if the first two layers soak right in, that means it won’t scratch off, right? Anyway, she brought our pots over and there was a fourth one - in a voice that said “please, you’re making me sad,” she told us it was a base coat, there was no charge and could we please just use it, hee hee hoo hoo
It was an intense period of time watching all this paint dry, but in the end we achieved our goal – creating the world’s most depressing childcare centre shelves!
Watching paint dry and grass grow are excellent additions to our yarn-based hobbies, and winter means only one thing – the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show! The last couple of times we’d been to Bendigo we hadn’t been able to go to Bendigo Pottery because of various floods and disasters. But fortune smiled!
Moose was immediately very naughty…
… and we got to watch a tempting new hobby of making wee glass beads.
After morning tea with Grandmama (for the last time, as it turns out), we went and found Robyn and the Cabin Girl who were testing out how Woven By Society’s stock sells in a regional show…
The Cabin Girl is testing the water on both knitting and crochet, and we were both very brave about not trying to sway her towards either side as we helped her find tempting starter packs. Then of course is the best part – great woolly sheep balls!
Hot on the heels of those shenanigans, Jenski became the first of us to enter her Ruth Phase, which we were bent on signalising with unusual revelry…
At the same time, we had to deal with the chronic disappointment of finding our favourite clothes shop had rudely shut without our permission!
Meanwhile, Chuckles’ long-awaited shoulder-replacement day came due. At the same time as the anaesthetist was doing their thing, the call came in that week to the day after Grandmama’s 94th birthday, she had, after much anticipation, shuffled off this mortal coil, off her tits on morphine and probably blissfully unaware of Aunt Judy by her side (may we all be so lucky). We had raced over to Somers on the expectation that D’admiral would be speeding up to Bendigo, but thanks to her timing, we could give Chuckles all our attention when they finally let her go home, and head up when the arrangements were all ready.
Sitting still is Chuckles’ worst nightmare and the minute she could she was back down the beach to investigate the state of the wintery beach.
As it happened to be the start of September, we were actually there for Father’s Day (we are usually too lazy to go over).
Chuckles loved seeing her grandchildren…
… and we enjoyed teasing Andru for having recently got the same glasses as his father.
Somers is just as cool during late-winter-that-thinks-it’s-spring as it is over summer, all blossoms and horny birds…
… and one exceptionally large carrot!
Grandmama’s funeral was set for the following Friday, so on Thursday after school we raced off to grab the 5pm ferry. Everything went according to plan, except for the bit where there was no 5:00 ferry on account of a winter maintenance program that we would have known about if we looked it up but didn’t because of course why would we need to look it up. Fie!
We sat, dejected, in the corner of the ferry terminal and marked Year 12 SACs, which turned out to be a good thing on account of the prodigious winds making it impossible to do on the boat.
Just look at some of the damage done by a week of ridiculous winds!
Nowhere near as impressive as what the MFG crew fronted up to work to find!
Tis thought that the tree was planted around 1950, but we’re not sure. It was a very polite tree, which fell when nobody was around, and hit nothing on the way down. Its body was carved up and remains on site in the form of mulch, which is fitting.
Bright and early on Friday we squished into the Golf (arranging Chuckles as comfortably as possible) and fanged it off to Bendigo. Grandmama had exactly the send-off she had hoped and planned for at St Pauls and then a private cremation at Eaglehawk (incidentally this looks to be an excellent and expansive resource for anyone looking to hide a body).
It was a lovely send-off, with a lovely range of people (even if Jacinta Allan disgraced herself by not turning up – she should have done better).
We had decided – for reasons which now escape us – that there’d be nothing wrong with grabbing a budget motel in Kangaroo Flat for the night. This was in the sure and firm knowledge that Kangaroo Flat is very much the Corio or Hastings of Bendigo, as one of the patrons of the Golden Square Hotel reminded us. Here he is, around 8:30pm, having thrown up everything he’d ever eaten, clutching the earth and shouting “OH GOD”.
The Calder Family Motel gave off mad Schitt’s Creek vibes (Season One). All the other residents were very nice, and if we wanted to start another new hobby we could have joined in the local one of sitting out the front of your room smoking durries. We could appreciate this hobby vicariously from our bathroom, on account of the louvre windows not closing and gently wafting the smoke inside.
Around midnight we noticed a different smell – kind of chemically, like cleaning products but also a bit sweet? It wasn’t pot, and it wasn’t a vape. Finally, Stinky thought to google “What does meth being smoked smell like” and we’re pretty sure we had our answer. Watch us clutch our pearls in horror!
However, one thing that Kangaroo Flat has going for it is that it allows for a speedy exit out of town. Another one of Pye’s favourite hobbies (aside from the grass and paint observing) is watching the overall average speed displayed by the Golf. On a trip from Somers to G-town where it’s highway the whole way, she feels pretty chuffed if we can get the average up to 90km. But when one starts at Kangaroo Flat, you get straight on the highway, and with the Calder limit being 110km/h, we actually got it up to 100!!
This was unbearably exciting, obviously. But on the other hand, we know that it will never happen again – unless we cannot resist the siren song of the Calder Family Motel. Anyhoo, we’d had flowers sent to the church (by a local florist who knew Grandmama and was sad and honoured to be able to do them for her) that we wanted to bring back for D’admiral. Lucky for Stinky we met up again with Andru and his crew at Nonna’s in Thomastown halfway back to Somers, otherwise this would have been her for the whole trip!
We deposited D’admiral and Chuckles safely home and – having ascertained there actually was a ferry to race off to this time – fanged it back home. We would have preferred to take our time, but for some reason, Stinky wanted one day of a weekend at home before she went gallivanting off to Lombok and Sumatra with 20 kids (Pye had one more weekend up her sleeve before gallivanting off to Java with 25 kids). Packing was rather more creative than usual, on account of how we have heaps of travel stuff to go off individually, lots to take together, but not to both go off separately at the same time #FirstWorldProblems
If we had just been lazing about on our holidays like normal lazy teachers, we probably would have found the time to pop over to Somers and bully the place into order with some washing and housework, but we are very lazy. Instead, Stinky found a lovely lady called Danielle and arranged a few hours of cleaning. Having previously been unaware that we’re allowed to ask someone else to clean in exchange for a fair rate of pay, Chuckles got a taste for it and asked her back for another job. And lunch. And a visit in summer. Sorry, Danielle, you’re one of us now, there’s no escape!
Fast forward to the second week of the holidays and the trips both went well (Pye’s students proved more resilient than Stinky’s, but that’s probably just because Pye’s itinerary went for half the time and didn’t put them as far out of their comfort zones), and we both got the Year 12 teachers’ reward of facilitating exam revision during the holidays. Here is Stinky, with all the students who were keen to take advantage of speaking to a teacher who wasn’t their own ahead of the scary oral exam.
Before you could say ‘I could have been doing something more fun than that’, we were doing something more fun, namely meeting up with D’admiral and Chuckles for lunch in Queenscliff. It might have a new name, but it’s the same place we met up after Stinky’s last trip in 2019! They popped us in the drawing room, and we did our best to make the best of it.
Pye noticed the mantlepiece was a bit of fun, too…
The ferry was back on every hour, but one of the big boys is still out for maintenance, so the homeward-bound one was going to be a wee slip of a ship – though we’re sure it still welcomes safe drivers.
By the state of the sky, we thought it was best to send D’admiral and Chuckles racing off over the sea before the weather got to us. Byeee!
As the last precious hours of the holidays slipped through our fingers, we took one last opportunity to entertain ourselves. As we drove past a garden centre on the way home from Queenscliff, we saw this:
And we thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny to have our own Florence, like in Ghosts?!”
Or as Stinky’s lil crochet dudes would have it:
So anyway yeah, that’s how we ended up with this lady in our yard, called Florence Too (short for ‘We Have A Florence, Too’). We can’t wait to dress her up for Christmas and special events!
And if you ask her, she thinks that daylight savings starting and poor defenceless teachers having to go back to work is bullshit, too!
