Tits Out For Term Four
Jan. 2nd, 2025 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capn_n_pyeWho’s ready for genuinely exciting adventures?
BREAKING NEWS!!! In the latest (and still somewhat unsettling) trend of nostalgia being marketed to us, the interwebs told us that Adam Spencer and Wil Anderson were doing a reunion show to commemorate their time doing Triple J breakfast between 1999 and 2004 (the nostalgia aspect is particularly odd in this case because that was just ten years ago, right?). You could tell who the target audience was, because it was a 5pm show – get your performance fix, have done dinner and home by 9:30pm, what more could a middle-aged audience ask for?
Of course we played right into their hands and dashed along to the show.
While we were waiting to go into the theatre, we noticed a QR code inviting patrons to send in their questions so that later in the show they could pretend to do a phone call-in like back in the old days. You had to give your seat number so that if they picked out your question, they’d call you out to come on stage and ask it into a pretend phone. Sounds fun! But what to ask, what to ask…
“Ah ha!” cried Stinky at last, “I’ve got it!”
Oh how we chuckled, remembering the heady times in the late 90s where Stinky would sexually harass any ABC personality that stood still for five minutes. She even had a special tit-signing shirt and jacket she’d put on when she knew there was a potential victim in the future (to the point that one of our friends would start to feel socially anxious every time she saw Stinky wearing it because she was worried that it meant that shenanigans were probably looming). Look at Stinky back in the day, Adam had no idea she was 20 years old and was quite convinced he was going to get charged with something very bad!
Anyhoo, we didn’t really expect to get chosen, I mean, there must have been a lot of good questions from the 1000 or so people in the audience. But then they called Stinky’s name and seat number!
“Oh fuck,” whispered Stinky.
Off she went back stage to hang out with the producers and Rhys Muldoon of Play School and Genie From Down Under fame, desperately wondering if she was going to remember how to English or do words.
As the clock ticked down to the end of the show (they were doing another show straight after it), we became convinced that Stinky was going to be bumped. BUT NO, THERE SHE GOES!
Adam had pre-read and selected the questions, but Wil had no idea what was coming and was instantly convinced they were going to get cancelled lol, but the audience was hella into it
Stinky even had the presence of mind to pull out Sir Terry Pratchett’s comment from back when she sexually harassed him too, and asked “Do you feel a right tit?” which the audience also frothed for. Yesssss feed me the guffaws!!
Backstage, Stinky took the opportunity to apologise to Adam for her creepy impropriety, but he was like, “Ah ha ha, yeah nah, this is hilarious, as soon as I saw the question I knew it was going to be perfect to end the show!”
(Rhys Muldoon took that picture, ahhh, omg)
So Stinky has learned nothing about respecting people’s boundaries! Hooray!
The minute we got home, Stinky dug out the shirt, which everyone should be very impressed we still have, can still find, and can still fit the real estate into. Behold Adam’s two signatures, 26 years apart!
So that definitely counts as an unusual and undeniable highlight of term four, although it wasn’t really something you could talk about when asked if you did anything fun on the weekend, lol.
Other notable highlights include Stinky finding a new landmark on the way to school – not too far away from where The Undies used to be, one can now find The Knickers! Why people keep losing their undies between a highway and the train tracks is not something want to interrogate too closely, but it’s always nice to find a new friend.
Another highlight was being out and about shopping, and hearing a mother call to her son.
“Zakar! Zakar!” she called. Presumably she doesn’t speak Arabic or know words of Arabic origin that have made their way into Indonesian, or she wouldn’t have named her son “Penis”. Presumably she is also not a mind-reader, or she would have gone brain-deaf from both of us snapping our heads around to look at each other across the shop and shouting “????!??!EEAAHH??!!!!” with our faces.
And then, of course, it’s always a highlight when the Year 12s finish up. A young man from Pye’s homeroom was the funniest person on Muck Up Day, when he drove his tractor to school. There’s no rule against it, and everyone found it completely delightful (and educational – did you know that you can take a tractor on road when you’re 16?). He’d thought it all through and brought the medium-sized one, rather than the small or giant one. Pye was congratulating him once more at the Valedictory Dinner, within earshot of the photographer from the Geelong Advertiser. He agreed that it was indeed the jolliest jape of the season, so much so that it needed to be in the paper!
Pye is very proud of him, even though the headline is an annoyingly inaccurate pun, and the Addy didn’t give her credit for taking the photo.
If one were to search the bird world for highlights, one would be when D’admiral’s Bird Buddy caught this bird on its way to steal yo’ girl
The natural world is a source of endless wonder, and people from far and wide got very excited when Geelong’s botanical gardens revealed they had a real-life titan arum about to bloom. Naturally, we dashed in to investigate this Indonesian native it in its pre-bloom form…
It’s delightful to think that “going to see a special plant from far away” is an activity we have in common with the 19th century version of Victorians, but we have updated the activity to include ogling yourself on the livestream. This is also a social activity, as we saw when one of Stinky’s colleagues was there for about two seconds before his mate messaged him to say IS THAT YOU ON THE LIVESTREAM??
Under our careful and continual scrutiny, eventually it got warm enough burst open to release its pongy pong pong. Yay!
Looking at it was one thing, but really what was necessary was to get back in the conservatory and have a good big whiff of it up your real-life nose holes. They only bloom for a handful of days, so we wandered straight over, Monday evening notwithstanding. We expected a queue, but can confidently say that we didn’t expect a cue that looked like THIS.
If we were actually in Indonesia, the food vans would have lined the streets, and the hawkers would have been thick on the ground to offer the patient flora-lover anything their hearts could desire (for a reasonable price). But this was Geelong, so there was one enterprising children’s entertainer waving some reptiles around, and some worried garden workers wandering around offering insect repellent. Entertainment was still on hand, however - every single child in the line had independently searched the garden’s grounds and found a stick that for each of them was the BEST STICK they’ve ever found IN THEIR LIVES.
The dogs weren’t too far behind them in the sticks-stakes, but they remained better behaved as the line crawled forward, the sun slid lower, the temperature dropped, and the rain clouds gathered. Reflecting meditatively on the sunk cost fallacy, we patiently waited our turn and eventually were once again face-to-face with the big stinky flower that was pretty much taller than us
And it only took us this long!
Maybe the years of teaching have dulled our noses, but we didn’t actually find it that pongy. Perhaps Stinky said it best in this video. Apparently it would send the stinky stink out in pulses, so perhaps we just missed it. We asked Stinky, but she claims not to have insider knowledge.
Anyway, although we thought that was a long time to wait, by the time we left the line had literally doubled in size, which is something we hadn’t considered possible. Turns out that people were coming from as far away as Adelaide just to look at it (the titan arum, that is not the line)! This is extra funny, because Geelong got their plant from Adelaide, so they could have just stayed at home and been patient for 10 years or so. Mog, one of Stinky’s students joined the line at about 8pm and definitely persevered longer than we would have, given the time and the fact that it was a school night.
The greatest thing to happen to Geelong since the last time we won the Grand Final (whenever that was) was pretty impressive, but if anyone wants to line up to look at another extraordinary plant, they can come and look at this bum our plant grew.
Moose loves it, and we suspect that he thinks he can get it pregnant, but it’s easy enough to close the door and ignore him.
Something we wouldn’t want to ignore is the Cabin Girl turning 19. This is particularly odd because she was just ten a few years ago, right? She was all out and about on the town, but we were able to join her for dinner beforehand AND meet the boyfriend Luca! Nonna Melina is quite sure that this will be the future Mr Cabin Girl, bless her, but since it’s not the 1940s, no one else is charting quite the same trajectory (although full props to the Cabin Girl if that’s what she’s up for, of course)
Speaking of Nonna, she put the call out for a pre-Christmas grandchildren gathering, and all who could answered the call!
It was going to be held in a park, but instead of averaging rain across the month like a proper November, climate change had decided to drop it all the rain, all at once. Luckily, the combined nonnas had enough years of experience to see it coming and adjust the venue accordingly.
Speaking of adjusting accordingly, you’d think a big multi-national making record profits in the face of a cost-of-living crisis could pay each sector of their workforce accordingly, but Woolies’ labour dispute with their warehouse peeps went on so long that it started to get a bit scary for Dan Murphy’s!
But at least ONE of us was right for Vegemite.
Unlike the Great COVID Toilet Paper Crisis, it was kinda fun to be able to support a labour strike by simply going to another store where everything we wanted was (metaphorically) freely available, which we’re sure had Mr Woolworths screaming, crying and throwing up. Poor baby, do better by your workers!
Before you could ask, “What else is on the telly?” ….
… it was the start of December again, and Simon The Landscaper was messaging us to wish the garden a happy birthday. Look how our little lad has grown!!
And of course since it was December, it was time to dress Florence appropriately for the season. Merry Christmas!
It had taken us less than a year to stop being excited about a grassy driveway and start being annoyed by grass you have to mow all the time that also was growing really patchily depending on daylight and rain. It was growing particularly badly where the garage stood – it doesn’t matter how much new soil we added or how well we took care of it, the ground remembers the horrors of packed earth and rats’ nests. So, would we go to the effort of killing the grassy grass and swapping it out for dichondra? You bet your watching-grass-growing-arse we would!
Nonetheless, the novelty of having our own lawnmower still hadn’t worn off. Exactly one year and one day after we got it, Pye was proudly mowing Tim the Neighbour’s nature strip, trying to repay 14 years of him taking care of ours. A strip and a half in, bitch stopped dead (the lawnmower, not Pye). She recharged the battery, investigated for obstructive gum nuts, poked and prodded, all for naught. Tim eventually got home from work, and, unable to resist the siren call of a Ryobi in distress, raced over to hazard a diagnosis. His experienced ears heard one grunkly rotation of the blades and immediately diagnosed the motor as FUKT (Pye carefully noted everything down for next time).
We had somehow managed to have neither saved a receipt nor registered the bastard, so were quite sure we were going to have to have to eat it, and pay the Stupid Tax. However, Bunnings has an astonishingly excellent returns policy. Apparently, you can show up and ask them to search their records to find your proof of purchase! If you show them vague credit card proof that you shopped when you said you did, and they can’t be bothered getting a manager to search further back than three months, you just get an amazing old man who also diagnoses it as FUKT (although he phrases it differently), finds the closest replacement and just gives it to you (I mean, they do record your ID, so don’t start up any scam-plans). The one that died isn’t in stock anymore, so we ended up with the next model up, including the bigger juicer battery – three cheers for the faulty loser!
We are very happy and excited to be in the Ryobi garden tools family and we only keep getting in deeper! D’admiral and Chuckles have wonderful Geelong friends they still like to see, and we were delighted to be able to provide a literal bed for the night while they did so (one year-ish on from the extension, this is still a novelty). Who’d’ve thunk it would have also occasioned early Christmas pressies?
We recall once upon a time Chuckles being of the opinion that only people who were feeble or weren’t good enough at sweeping needed a leaf blower – but then she tried out a blower and was like, “OMG EVERYONE NEEDS A BLOWER!!” She is of course right both times, but is empirically more right the second time!
Chuckles had accurately discerned the particularly unruly and awful nature of the trees in our front yard and nature strip - one of which drops all its leaves in autumn and the other which dumps its shitty gumnuts and chunky-ass leaves any day the temperature hits 24 degrees. These bastards had an ongoing impact on the deck, driveway, and everything else in between… BUT NOT ANYMORE!!
D’admiral had insisted on generously adding the chonkier, longer-lasting battery – little did he know that barely a week later a faulty lawnmower upgrade would have resulted in us scoring a second big boi battery ah ha ha, yay, now we have two, we can mow and blow for everrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
The only thing that could tear us away from the blower was to go out for lunch, which was going to happen locally but evolved into being on the Bellarine Peninsula, which morphed into Queenscliff, which is very convenient for those who live on the other peninsula.
Blue skies! Boatses!
Thorsty doggos! SchlerppslchppppP!!
A potato!!
Wait, why is there a potato?
WELL, I’M GLAD YOU’VE ASKED. Once upon a time, Chuckles couldn’t help harvest the Coolart Community Garden’s bounty, on account of having a Brand New Shoulder and Taking Such Good Care Of It that her doctors were like “WAIT, HOW ARE YOU ABLE TO PUT YOUR ARM UP THAT HIGH SO SOON AFTER YOUR OP?!” Anyway, the Community part of the Garden still shared the harvest, and having gratefully taken in the crop, she and D’admiral had dashed forthwith to G-town. Upon arrival at our shores, they’d realised a lil potato had slipped past their notice and had STOWED AWAY. What other choice did they have but to bestow said lil potato upon us as a bonus pre-Christmas gift?! Of course they were right!
Stinky named the potato ‘Ken’.
“Hee hee,” said Pye, “‘Ken’, as in short for ‘Kentang’ – that’s ‘potato’ in Indonesian, very droll!”
“No…?” replied Stinky in puzzlement, “It’s short for ‘Kentut’, or course???”
“Kentut… as in… Indonesian for ‘fart’?” ask Pye.
“OH HELL YEAH!!” shouted Moose, breaking into the conversation uninvited, as he always does.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single potato in the possession of us, must be in want of adventures. And therefore, who are we to deny poor Ken?
On the way home from lunch we went to Spotlight, where Ken got to meet all sort of Christmassy tat that he had an eye for!
Then the next day Ken had a marvellous day out at Stinky’s school! This intrepid potato got an orang utan to teach him out to use a dictionary (the girls call the orangutan George and made him a vest – and with that same zest for life, they took good care of Ken)!
He shared what he’d learned with the class!
He played with things he found in the room!
He had a snack!
He photocopied his bum (i.e., all of him), and then caused Stinky to post said photocopy to D’admiral and Chuckles sans explanation, which we all found unbearably exciting.
Then he went to Pye’s school! He was supposed to get a first aid qualification, but Pye was so caught up in the ennui which is the end of the school year after you’ve buggered off the Catholic kids (who’ve paid more to be there so spend less time at school than their state-school compatriots) that she didn’t bother planning on showing up to work early enough to remember to get the potato out, so selfishly rushed off to learn how to save lives without poor old Ken. But in her defence, she tried to make it up for him afterwards! She went out to visit a statue. Hello, Mr of Loyola, why are you worth looking at?
Oh ho, I see! You cradle Kentut so gently! I should never have doubted.
Of course, Ken’s adventures didn’t end there! He prepared to give a great big speech about potato rights, in the hopes that a huge audience would turn up later…
… and just in case he got the crowd he hoped for, he thought he should be ready to entertain them, so he practised playing chopsticks on the piano and smashing out jams on a gamelan instrument. This was particularly impressive, because Ken doesn’t actually have fingers.
When he got tired, he had a nice read in the library, and then tried his potato-y hand keeping goal in a game of soccer against all the kids that were still at school at the time…
… but Kentut still pulled his weight and got some work done!
But then out of the corner of one of his (many) eyes, Ken spotted his spiritual home!
Kentut the Potato was very tempted to stay but Moose wishes all people (and potatoes) present to remember that the best place to be is by his side, and Ken had to concede that this is true.
Of course Moose really likes to have Ken around because he listens to Moose boasting about everything and doesn’t interrupt with stories of his own. Kentut was equally patient with us as he waited for everyone to finish up with work for the year, so they could get down to Christmas partying.
He enjoyed catching up in the city for dumplings…
… and was just as surprised as us when Davros appeared at our door, having come all the way from the UK and fresh from visiting his sister in Portarlington. Merry Christmas to us!
One of our favourite Christmas traditions isn’t even one of ours – it’s not even from our hemisphere! This may seem the same as many mainstream Christmas tradions, but see, in Sweden, there’s a little town called Gävle. They have a tradition of putting up a giant straw Yule goat every year and then they try and protect it while everyone else enthusiastically tries to destroy it. If you would like a good chuckle, check out the Gävle Goat, or Gävlebocken Wikipedia page, to see what happened to it in your favourite years (we like the time it got kicked to death, but we also enjoy when it’s traditionally burned). Just like the stinky flower, you can monitor its progress with the live cam, which adds to our Very Exciting Hobbies. Burning it down is illegal, despite the fact that nobody should go to jail for objectively funny crimes. Last year was one out of the box – nobody expected it to be pecked to death by jackdaws over December!
As far as we know, no jackdaws were prosecuted or jailed. And so it was, with Moose’s encouragement, Stinky made a Gävlebocken. The little crochetty ghosts were very interested to come and look at it…
…even though they were a bit worried that the ghigeon (ghost pigeon) was going to peck it to pieces!
Because Robin had a better idea…
Apart from Mary (who was, as we all know, burned at the stake), everyone was 100% on board, to the extent that we’re worried now that we might lose the house to tiny arsonists.
Humphrey’s head said no, but his body said yes.
So yeah…there’s a burning yule goat in the Spinstar Pad now! CHRISTMAS!
Unfortunately, the real gävlebocken made it to the new year unscathed – we will take this as a bad omen, because all signs suggest that we have displeased the Powers and there are a lot of cranky gods to be appeased these days.
Meanwhile, Kentut had some Christmas trauma to deal with – how would you like it if your cousins were being peeled?
Admittedly your reaction could be different depending on how much you like your cousins, but in this case poor little Ken learned quite a life story. Leaving him to his trauma, we sailed on to the part of Christmas that used to be the province of parents staying up late on Christmas Eve to swear and sweat and put “Santa’s” presents together before the blessed little miracles emerged in the morning, rubbing the boogers from their eyes. Now days we just do things like give D’admiral and Chuckles’ their new office chair in the sublime confidence that we could have it put together before lunch.
This was when we learned that sparkling wine makes Pye QUITE STUPID at understanding instructions, but a lunch break and a shiraz makes her smart again! Quick, someone needs to inform the CSIRO!
Then it happened again when D’admiral and Chuckles’ gave each other an electric lawnmower!
Assembly on this one was easier, so Stinky didn’t have to help, which was good, because she was long overdue for some Quality Box Time.
Chuckles also agreed that Quality Box Time was a good idea…
…and it certainly made dismantling the box easier at the end.
Moose was terribly spoiled!
His new dinosaur friend hangs out with him all day, doodle waggling in the light. Oh penus, we’re really in it now!
Christmas day was very polite with the weather…
…whereas Boxing Day was disgustingly hot (so hot that the day after was a full 18 degrees cooler, that is ridiculous). Weather notwithstanding, Boxing Day – or Second Christmas as it should be known – was most pleasant…
…and loved our fabulous new hats that Fiona made!
They all belong to Stinky now! Oh, what a mad hatter.
Oh Stinky was such a sight in all those hats that when she went outside, this idiot panicked and tried to run through the wall, like he thought himself a ghost. Alas for him, he remained squishily corporeal and he just donked his blunt head into the colourbond. He was fine, okay, he just looked embarrassed and hid behind a pot plant to collect himself.
Speaking of idiots, the idiot birds (also known as red capped plovers) have uncharacteristically managed to hatch a couple of their eggs, and then also not lose their children. Well done!
They chose a better spot this time, and the little idiot baby floofs look like blowing leaves with they run around. A+ camouflage shenanigans, but why do they have to make it so hard for us to find them (could be very selfish of them, stay tuned for a decision).
When not squinting after baby birds, we dashed away to enjoy New Year's Eve on distant shores, as is our wont. Pye was actually super-brave to do so, because it meant she had to take a break from a glorious jigsaw and it was entirely possible that our parents could be attacked by pirates.
Florence got herself NYE ready…
And she wasn’t the only one! Perhaps G-town was getting excited about the festive season, or perhaps the sky was haunted?
Pye tried to capture the phenomenon, then low-flying bats kept fwomping past… so… haunted it is!
Meanwhile, we learned that back at Somers, Ken – who had eschewed our company for more mature and erudite company (and who can blame him) – was having the best goddamn New Year’s Eve of his life with Nonna!!
And then he made himself one of Chuckles’ Christmas decorations!
What a happy and lucky potato, and how lucky were we, having a lovely and chill New Year’s Eve hanging out with the bats, watching fireworks from the middle of the road with the sneaky Davros who popped back again from visiting his sister (bonus!).
So that was that, we all bid farewell to 2024 and hopefully went for a good long nap. Why not head back to Somers to really get our holidays on? Whooo!
BREAKING NEWS!!! In the latest (and still somewhat unsettling) trend of nostalgia being marketed to us, the interwebs told us that Adam Spencer and Wil Anderson were doing a reunion show to commemorate their time doing Triple J breakfast between 1999 and 2004 (the nostalgia aspect is particularly odd in this case because that was just ten years ago, right?). You could tell who the target audience was, because it was a 5pm show – get your performance fix, have done dinner and home by 9:30pm, what more could a middle-aged audience ask for?
Of course we played right into their hands and dashed along to the show.
While we were waiting to go into the theatre, we noticed a QR code inviting patrons to send in their questions so that later in the show they could pretend to do a phone call-in like back in the old days. You had to give your seat number so that if they picked out your question, they’d call you out to come on stage and ask it into a pretend phone. Sounds fun! But what to ask, what to ask…
“Ah ha!” cried Stinky at last, “I’ve got it!”
Oh how we chuckled, remembering the heady times in the late 90s where Stinky would sexually harass any ABC personality that stood still for five minutes. She even had a special tit-signing shirt and jacket she’d put on when she knew there was a potential victim in the future (to the point that one of our friends would start to feel socially anxious every time she saw Stinky wearing it because she was worried that it meant that shenanigans were probably looming). Look at Stinky back in the day, Adam had no idea she was 20 years old and was quite convinced he was going to get charged with something very bad!
Anyhoo, we didn’t really expect to get chosen, I mean, there must have been a lot of good questions from the 1000 or so people in the audience. But then they called Stinky’s name and seat number!
“Oh fuck,” whispered Stinky.
Off she went back stage to hang out with the producers and Rhys Muldoon of Play School and Genie From Down Under fame, desperately wondering if she was going to remember how to English or do words.
As the clock ticked down to the end of the show (they were doing another show straight after it), we became convinced that Stinky was going to be bumped. BUT NO, THERE SHE GOES!
Adam had pre-read and selected the questions, but Wil had no idea what was coming and was instantly convinced they were going to get cancelled lol, but the audience was hella into it
Stinky even had the presence of mind to pull out Sir Terry Pratchett’s comment from back when she sexually harassed him too, and asked “Do you feel a right tit?” which the audience also frothed for. Yesssss feed me the guffaws!!
Backstage, Stinky took the opportunity to apologise to Adam for her creepy impropriety, but he was like, “Ah ha ha, yeah nah, this is hilarious, as soon as I saw the question I knew it was going to be perfect to end the show!”
(Rhys Muldoon took that picture, ahhh, omg)
So Stinky has learned nothing about respecting people’s boundaries! Hooray!
The minute we got home, Stinky dug out the shirt, which everyone should be very impressed we still have, can still find, and can still fit the real estate into. Behold Adam’s two signatures, 26 years apart!
So that definitely counts as an unusual and undeniable highlight of term four, although it wasn’t really something you could talk about when asked if you did anything fun on the weekend, lol.
Other notable highlights include Stinky finding a new landmark on the way to school – not too far away from where The Undies used to be, one can now find The Knickers! Why people keep losing their undies between a highway and the train tracks is not something want to interrogate too closely, but it’s always nice to find a new friend.
Another highlight was being out and about shopping, and hearing a mother call to her son.
“Zakar! Zakar!” she called. Presumably she doesn’t speak Arabic or know words of Arabic origin that have made their way into Indonesian, or she wouldn’t have named her son “Penis”. Presumably she is also not a mind-reader, or she would have gone brain-deaf from both of us snapping our heads around to look at each other across the shop and shouting “????!??!EEAAHH??!!!!” with our faces.
And then, of course, it’s always a highlight when the Year 12s finish up. A young man from Pye’s homeroom was the funniest person on Muck Up Day, when he drove his tractor to school. There’s no rule against it, and everyone found it completely delightful (and educational – did you know that you can take a tractor on road when you’re 16?). He’d thought it all through and brought the medium-sized one, rather than the small or giant one. Pye was congratulating him once more at the Valedictory Dinner, within earshot of the photographer from the Geelong Advertiser. He agreed that it was indeed the jolliest jape of the season, so much so that it needed to be in the paper!
Pye is very proud of him, even though the headline is an annoyingly inaccurate pun, and the Addy didn’t give her credit for taking the photo.
If one were to search the bird world for highlights, one would be when D’admiral’s Bird Buddy caught this bird on its way to steal yo’ girl
The natural world is a source of endless wonder, and people from far and wide got very excited when Geelong’s botanical gardens revealed they had a real-life titan arum about to bloom. Naturally, we dashed in to investigate this Indonesian native it in its pre-bloom form…
It’s delightful to think that “going to see a special plant from far away” is an activity we have in common with the 19th century version of Victorians, but we have updated the activity to include ogling yourself on the livestream. This is also a social activity, as we saw when one of Stinky’s colleagues was there for about two seconds before his mate messaged him to say IS THAT YOU ON THE LIVESTREAM??
Under our careful and continual scrutiny, eventually it got warm enough burst open to release its pongy pong pong. Yay!
Looking at it was one thing, but really what was necessary was to get back in the conservatory and have a good big whiff of it up your real-life nose holes. They only bloom for a handful of days, so we wandered straight over, Monday evening notwithstanding. We expected a queue, but can confidently say that we didn’t expect a cue that looked like THIS.
If we were actually in Indonesia, the food vans would have lined the streets, and the hawkers would have been thick on the ground to offer the patient flora-lover anything their hearts could desire (for a reasonable price). But this was Geelong, so there was one enterprising children’s entertainer waving some reptiles around, and some worried garden workers wandering around offering insect repellent. Entertainment was still on hand, however - every single child in the line had independently searched the garden’s grounds and found a stick that for each of them was the BEST STICK they’ve ever found IN THEIR LIVES.
The dogs weren’t too far behind them in the sticks-stakes, but they remained better behaved as the line crawled forward, the sun slid lower, the temperature dropped, and the rain clouds gathered. Reflecting meditatively on the sunk cost fallacy, we patiently waited our turn and eventually were once again face-to-face with the big stinky flower that was pretty much taller than us
And it only took us this long!
Maybe the years of teaching have dulled our noses, but we didn’t actually find it that pongy. Perhaps Stinky said it best in this video. Apparently it would send the stinky stink out in pulses, so perhaps we just missed it. We asked Stinky, but she claims not to have insider knowledge.
Anyway, although we thought that was a long time to wait, by the time we left the line had literally doubled in size, which is something we hadn’t considered possible. Turns out that people were coming from as far away as Adelaide just to look at it (the titan arum, that is not the line)! This is extra funny, because Geelong got their plant from Adelaide, so they could have just stayed at home and been patient for 10 years or so. Mog, one of Stinky’s students joined the line at about 8pm and definitely persevered longer than we would have, given the time and the fact that it was a school night.
The greatest thing to happen to Geelong since the last time we won the Grand Final (whenever that was) was pretty impressive, but if anyone wants to line up to look at another extraordinary plant, they can come and look at this bum our plant grew.
Moose loves it, and we suspect that he thinks he can get it pregnant, but it’s easy enough to close the door and ignore him.
Something we wouldn’t want to ignore is the Cabin Girl turning 19. This is particularly odd because she was just ten a few years ago, right? She was all out and about on the town, but we were able to join her for dinner beforehand AND meet the boyfriend Luca! Nonna Melina is quite sure that this will be the future Mr Cabin Girl, bless her, but since it’s not the 1940s, no one else is charting quite the same trajectory (although full props to the Cabin Girl if that’s what she’s up for, of course)
Speaking of Nonna, she put the call out for a pre-Christmas grandchildren gathering, and all who could answered the call!
It was going to be held in a park, but instead of averaging rain across the month like a proper November, climate change had decided to drop it all the rain, all at once. Luckily, the combined nonnas had enough years of experience to see it coming and adjust the venue accordingly.
Speaking of adjusting accordingly, you’d think a big multi-national making record profits in the face of a cost-of-living crisis could pay each sector of their workforce accordingly, but Woolies’ labour dispute with their warehouse peeps went on so long that it started to get a bit scary for Dan Murphy’s!
But at least ONE of us was right for Vegemite.
Unlike the Great COVID Toilet Paper Crisis, it was kinda fun to be able to support a labour strike by simply going to another store where everything we wanted was (metaphorically) freely available, which we’re sure had Mr Woolworths screaming, crying and throwing up. Poor baby, do better by your workers!
Before you could ask, “What else is on the telly?” ….
… it was the start of December again, and Simon The Landscaper was messaging us to wish the garden a happy birthday. Look how our little lad has grown!!
And of course since it was December, it was time to dress Florence appropriately for the season. Merry Christmas!
It had taken us less than a year to stop being excited about a grassy driveway and start being annoyed by grass you have to mow all the time that also was growing really patchily depending on daylight and rain. It was growing particularly badly where the garage stood – it doesn’t matter how much new soil we added or how well we took care of it, the ground remembers the horrors of packed earth and rats’ nests. So, would we go to the effort of killing the grassy grass and swapping it out for dichondra? You bet your watching-grass-growing-arse we would!
Nonetheless, the novelty of having our own lawnmower still hadn’t worn off. Exactly one year and one day after we got it, Pye was proudly mowing Tim the Neighbour’s nature strip, trying to repay 14 years of him taking care of ours. A strip and a half in, bitch stopped dead (the lawnmower, not Pye). She recharged the battery, investigated for obstructive gum nuts, poked and prodded, all for naught. Tim eventually got home from work, and, unable to resist the siren call of a Ryobi in distress, raced over to hazard a diagnosis. His experienced ears heard one grunkly rotation of the blades and immediately diagnosed the motor as FUKT (Pye carefully noted everything down for next time).
We had somehow managed to have neither saved a receipt nor registered the bastard, so were quite sure we were going to have to have to eat it, and pay the Stupid Tax. However, Bunnings has an astonishingly excellent returns policy. Apparently, you can show up and ask them to search their records to find your proof of purchase! If you show them vague credit card proof that you shopped when you said you did, and they can’t be bothered getting a manager to search further back than three months, you just get an amazing old man who also diagnoses it as FUKT (although he phrases it differently), finds the closest replacement and just gives it to you (I mean, they do record your ID, so don’t start up any scam-plans). The one that died isn’t in stock anymore, so we ended up with the next model up, including the bigger juicer battery – three cheers for the faulty loser!
We are very happy and excited to be in the Ryobi garden tools family and we only keep getting in deeper! D’admiral and Chuckles have wonderful Geelong friends they still like to see, and we were delighted to be able to provide a literal bed for the night while they did so (one year-ish on from the extension, this is still a novelty). Who’d’ve thunk it would have also occasioned early Christmas pressies?
We recall once upon a time Chuckles being of the opinion that only people who were feeble or weren’t good enough at sweeping needed a leaf blower – but then she tried out a blower and was like, “OMG EVERYONE NEEDS A BLOWER!!” She is of course right both times, but is empirically more right the second time!
Chuckles had accurately discerned the particularly unruly and awful nature of the trees in our front yard and nature strip - one of which drops all its leaves in autumn and the other which dumps its shitty gumnuts and chunky-ass leaves any day the temperature hits 24 degrees. These bastards had an ongoing impact on the deck, driveway, and everything else in between… BUT NOT ANYMORE!!
D’admiral had insisted on generously adding the chonkier, longer-lasting battery – little did he know that barely a week later a faulty lawnmower upgrade would have resulted in us scoring a second big boi battery ah ha ha, yay, now we have two, we can mow and blow for everrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
The only thing that could tear us away from the blower was to go out for lunch, which was going to happen locally but evolved into being on the Bellarine Peninsula, which morphed into Queenscliff, which is very convenient for those who live on the other peninsula.
Blue skies! Boatses!
Thorsty doggos! SchlerppslchppppP!!
A potato!!
Wait, why is there a potato?
WELL, I’M GLAD YOU’VE ASKED. Once upon a time, Chuckles couldn’t help harvest the Coolart Community Garden’s bounty, on account of having a Brand New Shoulder and Taking Such Good Care Of It that her doctors were like “WAIT, HOW ARE YOU ABLE TO PUT YOUR ARM UP THAT HIGH SO SOON AFTER YOUR OP?!” Anyway, the Community part of the Garden still shared the harvest, and having gratefully taken in the crop, she and D’admiral had dashed forthwith to G-town. Upon arrival at our shores, they’d realised a lil potato had slipped past their notice and had STOWED AWAY. What other choice did they have but to bestow said lil potato upon us as a bonus pre-Christmas gift?! Of course they were right!
Stinky named the potato ‘Ken’.
“Hee hee,” said Pye, “‘Ken’, as in short for ‘Kentang’ – that’s ‘potato’ in Indonesian, very droll!”
“No…?” replied Stinky in puzzlement, “It’s short for ‘Kentut’, or course???”
“Kentut… as in… Indonesian for ‘fart’?” ask Pye.
“OH HELL YEAH!!” shouted Moose, breaking into the conversation uninvited, as he always does.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single potato in the possession of us, must be in want of adventures. And therefore, who are we to deny poor Ken?
On the way home from lunch we went to Spotlight, where Ken got to meet all sort of Christmassy tat that he had an eye for!
Then the next day Ken had a marvellous day out at Stinky’s school! This intrepid potato got an orang utan to teach him out to use a dictionary (the girls call the orangutan George and made him a vest – and with that same zest for life, they took good care of Ken)!
He shared what he’d learned with the class!
He played with things he found in the room!
He had a snack!
He photocopied his bum (i.e., all of him), and then caused Stinky to post said photocopy to D’admiral and Chuckles sans explanation, which we all found unbearably exciting.
Then he went to Pye’s school! He was supposed to get a first aid qualification, but Pye was so caught up in the ennui which is the end of the school year after you’ve buggered off the Catholic kids (who’ve paid more to be there so spend less time at school than their state-school compatriots) that she didn’t bother planning on showing up to work early enough to remember to get the potato out, so selfishly rushed off to learn how to save lives without poor old Ken. But in her defence, she tried to make it up for him afterwards! She went out to visit a statue. Hello, Mr of Loyola, why are you worth looking at?
Oh ho, I see! You cradle Kentut so gently! I should never have doubted.
Of course, Ken’s adventures didn’t end there! He prepared to give a great big speech about potato rights, in the hopes that a huge audience would turn up later…
… and just in case he got the crowd he hoped for, he thought he should be ready to entertain them, so he practised playing chopsticks on the piano and smashing out jams on a gamelan instrument. This was particularly impressive, because Ken doesn’t actually have fingers.
When he got tired, he had a nice read in the library, and then tried his potato-y hand keeping goal in a game of soccer against all the kids that were still at school at the time…
… but Kentut still pulled his weight and got some work done!
But then out of the corner of one of his (many) eyes, Ken spotted his spiritual home!
Kentut the Potato was very tempted to stay but Moose wishes all people (and potatoes) present to remember that the best place to be is by his side, and Ken had to concede that this is true.
Of course Moose really likes to have Ken around because he listens to Moose boasting about everything and doesn’t interrupt with stories of his own. Kentut was equally patient with us as he waited for everyone to finish up with work for the year, so they could get down to Christmas partying.
He enjoyed catching up in the city for dumplings…
… and was just as surprised as us when Davros appeared at our door, having come all the way from the UK and fresh from visiting his sister in Portarlington. Merry Christmas to us!
One of our favourite Christmas traditions isn’t even one of ours – it’s not even from our hemisphere! This may seem the same as many mainstream Christmas tradions, but see, in Sweden, there’s a little town called Gävle. They have a tradition of putting up a giant straw Yule goat every year and then they try and protect it while everyone else enthusiastically tries to destroy it. If you would like a good chuckle, check out the Gävle Goat, or Gävlebocken Wikipedia page, to see what happened to it in your favourite years (we like the time it got kicked to death, but we also enjoy when it’s traditionally burned). Just like the stinky flower, you can monitor its progress with the live cam, which adds to our Very Exciting Hobbies. Burning it down is illegal, despite the fact that nobody should go to jail for objectively funny crimes. Last year was one out of the box – nobody expected it to be pecked to death by jackdaws over December!
As far as we know, no jackdaws were prosecuted or jailed. And so it was, with Moose’s encouragement, Stinky made a Gävlebocken. The little crochetty ghosts were very interested to come and look at it…
…even though they were a bit worried that the ghigeon (ghost pigeon) was going to peck it to pieces!
Because Robin had a better idea…
Apart from Mary (who was, as we all know, burned at the stake), everyone was 100% on board, to the extent that we’re worried now that we might lose the house to tiny arsonists.
Humphrey’s head said no, but his body said yes.
So yeah…there’s a burning yule goat in the Spinstar Pad now! CHRISTMAS!
Unfortunately, the real gävlebocken made it to the new year unscathed – we will take this as a bad omen, because all signs suggest that we have displeased the Powers and there are a lot of cranky gods to be appeased these days.
Meanwhile, Kentut had some Christmas trauma to deal with – how would you like it if your cousins were being peeled?
Admittedly your reaction could be different depending on how much you like your cousins, but in this case poor little Ken learned quite a life story. Leaving him to his trauma, we sailed on to the part of Christmas that used to be the province of parents staying up late on Christmas Eve to swear and sweat and put “Santa’s” presents together before the blessed little miracles emerged in the morning, rubbing the boogers from their eyes. Now days we just do things like give D’admiral and Chuckles’ their new office chair in the sublime confidence that we could have it put together before lunch.
This was when we learned that sparkling wine makes Pye QUITE STUPID at understanding instructions, but a lunch break and a shiraz makes her smart again! Quick, someone needs to inform the CSIRO!
Then it happened again when D’admiral and Chuckles’ gave each other an electric lawnmower!
Assembly on this one was easier, so Stinky didn’t have to help, which was good, because she was long overdue for some Quality Box Time.
Chuckles also agreed that Quality Box Time was a good idea…
…and it certainly made dismantling the box easier at the end.
Moose was terribly spoiled!
His new dinosaur friend hangs out with him all day, doodle waggling in the light. Oh penus, we’re really in it now!
Christmas day was very polite with the weather…
…whereas Boxing Day was disgustingly hot (so hot that the day after was a full 18 degrees cooler, that is ridiculous). Weather notwithstanding, Boxing Day – or Second Christmas as it should be known – was most pleasant…
…and loved our fabulous new hats that Fiona made!
They all belong to Stinky now! Oh, what a mad hatter.
Oh Stinky was such a sight in all those hats that when she went outside, this idiot panicked and tried to run through the wall, like he thought himself a ghost. Alas for him, he remained squishily corporeal and he just donked his blunt head into the colourbond. He was fine, okay, he just looked embarrassed and hid behind a pot plant to collect himself.
Speaking of idiots, the idiot birds (also known as red capped plovers) have uncharacteristically managed to hatch a couple of their eggs, and then also not lose their children. Well done!
They chose a better spot this time, and the little idiot baby floofs look like blowing leaves with they run around. A+ camouflage shenanigans, but why do they have to make it so hard for us to find them (could be very selfish of them, stay tuned for a decision).
When not squinting after baby birds, we dashed away to enjoy New Year's Eve on distant shores, as is our wont. Pye was actually super-brave to do so, because it meant she had to take a break from a glorious jigsaw and it was entirely possible that our parents could be attacked by pirates.
Florence got herself NYE ready…
And she wasn’t the only one! Perhaps G-town was getting excited about the festive season, or perhaps the sky was haunted?
Pye tried to capture the phenomenon, then low-flying bats kept fwomping past… so… haunted it is!
Meanwhile, we learned that back at Somers, Ken – who had eschewed our company for more mature and erudite company (and who can blame him) – was having the best goddamn New Year’s Eve of his life with Nonna!!
And then he made himself one of Chuckles’ Christmas decorations!
What a happy and lucky potato, and how lucky were we, having a lovely and chill New Year’s Eve hanging out with the bats, watching fireworks from the middle of the road with the sneaky Davros who popped back again from visiting his sister (bonus!).
So that was that, we all bid farewell to 2024 and hopefully went for a good long nap. Why not head back to Somers to really get our holidays on? Whooo!
