Life's Better in the Summer
Jan. 28th, 2025 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capn_n_pyeYay for summer holidays, what should we do first?
We always enjoy it when Merrin and Damo come to visit, so had made sure to lock in a date well in advance. What could possibly go wrong? Hmmm, maybe the rain that should have been spread over the last month arriving all at once?
They bravely decided to come anyway and were on track to show up for lunch. Meantime, there were other shenanigans afoot. Chuckles’ shoulder has healed spectacularly and she’s back in the swing of the Coolart community garden. Once a week they do a harvest and a food donation to a food bank in Hastings, and that was the day. Everyone else in the group chat somehow magically all had Extremely Good Reasons Why They Couldn’t Do It, but Chuckles couldn’t not Do Her Bit, so somehow three mugginses in raincoats were doing a quick run down the road….
They’ve gone all fancy and have rat-proof cages on top of each of the raised beds. D’admiral and Pye’s job was to lift the cages off and then help pick.
Pye was quickly learned that the act of lifting and turning the cages directed the rain gathered on her raincoat directly into her left bra cup. This was a fun and clammy thing to learn, and her dry right boob thought it was funny. What was less funny was when they went to drive out and found that some fucker had padlocked the staff gate shut. Shit.
Chuckles and D’admiral started trying to call every ranger and contact they could, but they might have all been under water for all that helped. Meanwhile, Stinky was back at the ranch doing the guest-prep that was originally planned for a minimum of three people, all by herself (this involved frying strips of crumbed eggplant and calling it chips, it’s actually awesome actually). As the soggy trio stared at the locked gate, Merrin and Damo arrived, and heroically rescued 2/3 of the farmers…
After some more pissing around, the car was liberated, and the hard-won harvest delivered, and we finally got to have lunch. We’ve been waiting for ages to give them a key-holding magnetic goose!
Our guests had been having adventures with their still, and we had a jolly time comparing their limoncello to Nonna’s (Nonna, if you're reading this, of course yours was better!)…
… as well as positively assessing the limoncello, Damo gave his stamp of approval to Uncle Joe’s final whiskey.
Next thing we knew it was D’admiral’s birthday! We had once again failed to think of a good place for Lunch in time, so had to celebrate with sushi. Woe!
But the cheesecake made up for it…
Chuckles continued their charming tradition of giving each other Ryobi products as gifts and got D’admiral a new work horse. Dunno what was wrong with the old one, it was still almost functional, and it was only 40-something years old (hey, that’s like us!).
Meanwhile, Stinky decided that Ken the Potato had earned a rest, and tucked him into a nice pot of dirt. She considered herself pretty amusing when she cut out the photocopy she’d posted to use as a marker!
Now of course everyone will be waiting anxiously to hear about our summer jigsaw shenanigans. Pye’s first one was a Terry Pratchett/Discworld one based on Night Watch (did you know you can’t re-read a book while also doing the jigsaw at the same time? Pye checked, but forgot that audio books exist).
Then the Powder Monkey kicked into gear with the front page of The Age from the day he was born…
… not to mention pun-tastic TV and movie ones.
You may notice Moose in the corner working on his own little jigsaw – we had to get him one, so he’d stop trying to eat the pieces!
Pye got a preview of her birthday present when she couldn’t wait to put together another Discworld-themed one.
So many faces! But they were all distinctive and interesting, so it wasn’t hard. And you get to play “Ooh who’s that character, which book are they from?” which is heaps of fun. Who’s number 122?
STINKY!! So as you can see, everyone was thriving.
Aside from jigsaws, what is a summer without visitors and friends?
This lil friend was a particularly charming gentleman…
Perhaps the most important summer ritual is the group Milky Foot activity aka the Annual Slough. First we soak the feetses…
… then we put on the face masks…
Then we get the bubbles and the colouring in.
Camel’s “Real Housewives” colouring book was somehow classier than Pye’s – she’d forgotten she’d been working on the Farting Animals colouring book! Sorry, Drippo the Hippo!!
After the sitting, then we move onto the week-long Consequences phase. For best results it’s important to give your feet a good soak every day…
Robyn and the Cabin Girl both went first, and Chuckles’ feet were surprisingly slow. But when they went, boy did they go!
You could write something on those sheets, we’ve never been more impressed with anything anyone in the history of humankind has done!
But life can’t all be sitting around marinating your extremities in acid, there are jobs to be done! Andru transformed the side of the house that used to have the clothes line on it (Stinky immediately saw the opportunity to raise more dichondra)…
… Stinky also braved her demons and we went back to Hastings’ container deposit scheme depo, site of the “Mother and daughter?” insult of Term Three. She had plenty of emotional support, and luckily the Insulter was nowhere to be seen.
When in Hastings, another highly recommended stop is Wine Lovers Warehouse, and indeed, that was our first stop after the Insult occurred. The bloke that runs the place is a very jolly chap named Dan – or, as we like to say, Cousin Dan (Dan Murphy being Uncle Dan, of course). Cousin Dan is always up for a laugh and nowadays he always wants to know where Stinky’s walking stick is and he’s very sorry that they don’t stock any sherry. Stinky thought that kind of customer service requires a positive Google review!
Stinky loves the interwebs, not least for the shopping opportunities it affords. Barely a day went past without a notification that there was a package at the post office (Stinky would like to point out that she was a mule for many people, and while the packages had her name on them, they weren’t all for her!).
One of the most exciting deliveries that didn’t have her name on them was the new TV (this, despite the fact that Stinky was the one who noticed the TV screen was faulty, so technically she broke it and therefore should be the one to replace it).
We were pretty excited when the annual calendars she puts together arrived very quickly. This meant that we didn’t have to wait very long to discover that she’d accidentally ordered calendars twice the size as usual!
It means that the moose on the cover is Actual Size!!
TWIST – we all actually like them bigger!
Big things we don’t always like are aged gum trees. Back in the old days when all the kids were all put out in the massive tent called the Cousinery (the house, of course, being the Adultery) we resented the big fat gum nuts that infested the ground, and these days D’admiral and Chuckles resent all the shit it drops in their gutters…
But then one morning this orange koala showed up, and now it’s not an issue anymore! Wow!!
Other things we found near trees included these undies…
And an ickle birds nest, just the right size for the teeniest sea urchin.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Stinky was getting into a new fibre craft – felting! Only she’s decided she’s going to call it ‘feeling’ (much in the same way the past tense of ‘fit’ is ‘fat’ and the plural of ‘moose’ is ‘meese’). Look at this concerned little bee she made, just by stabbing wool repeatedly with a needle!
The Cabin Girl was also hard at work developing her knitting skills – here she is testing out the advice “Friends don’t let friends knit drunk”.
Summery days and the bluest of skies abounded, obviously perfect weather for knitting a scarf…
Andru has a fancy new camera to capture all the fun of the sea…
Like when your niece accidentally kicks you right in the noggin!
Look at it, it’s like her foot was made to fit Pye’s head!
Acquired brain injury notwithstanding, Pye and the Powder Monkey got to work on this summer’s Very Important ScienceTM, which set out to ascertain whether Ghosts or Yonderland was the sauciest show.
We’ll have you know that the scientific research conducted by Mooseidiot and the Young Human of His Acquaintance is extremely serious and both our fans on Tumblr eagerly await his updates. One was curious to know how we determined how spicy a saucy incident was. Moose was happy to elucidate:
We applied a triangulated-consensus based approach. The Young Human, myself and an informed third party were posed each saucy moment, whereupon we secretly selected a card from 1-10 to reveal on the count of three. If the scores were divergent we negotiated an agreed score, but if they matched we'd joyously shout "CONSENSUS!", which, it must be said, proved very annoying to anyone else in the vicinity. We declare this ScientificTM cos why not
Sadly, we could not continue to corrupt the youth indefinitely, and the time came for the Powder Monkey to go home and do his holiday homework. But not before we helped Andru spend his birthday voucher at St Andrew’s brewery!
Only the classiest of clientele are allowed! We know it’s naughty to take photos of strangers in public but when we see a skullet this good, manners fly straight out the window.
It was unfortunate timing for the ship’s extended crew to leave when they did, because almost as soon as they did an ultra-rare comet showed up. Last time anyone could see it was 160,000 years ago, but comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) could not escape D’admiral’s gaze.
Once we knew where to look, we could even see it (faintly) with the naked eye (apparently when it reached its closest point to the sun, it flared up to an impressive magnitude of -3.4 — significantly brighter than Jupiter, which shines at a maximum magnitude of -2.8, which makes it one of the brightest comets witnessed in almost two decades).
That seemed a good a reason as any to celebrate, so we took D’admiral out for a belated birthday lunch and Chuckles out for an early birthday lunch at Pier 10…
… with a slap-up cheese course back at the ranch…
That was a splendid last hurrah before we had to reluctantly drag ourselves away to see if the Spinster Pad was still there. The garden had definitely missed us and required a lot of attention, but it was fun to see how much the grass had progressed.
Speaking of growing, Sydney had got themselves a big stinky titam arum of their own. Geelong’s was obviously superior, but Sydney gave theirs a name – Putricia – AND gave her a red carpet and classical music. They are totally trying too hard, but we can’t believe that none of us thought of naming ours!!
Back in the Spinster Pad, we got a few last-minute jobs ticked off. For instance, Pye had decoupaged a shelf for Stinky’s classroom, using pages from a bunch of 1960s Indonesian books that were too cute to throw away after scanning. It was too big to fit in the car in one piece, so we snuck into the school and assembled it there – I think she came up a treat, even if she won’t be winning any prizes for classiest object.
Just in case she hadn’t got enough pickling experience over January, what with a surfeit of cucumbers and beetroot, Stinky came home to find about 25 more robust beetroot waiting in our little garden. She can put the spices together herself, but was feeling a bit lazy, so just chucked a pickling spice mix on the Click and Collect order. But they were all out! Instead of just not supplying it and giving a refund, the intrepid picker must’ve known how important it was to get the harvest pickled (the name suggests that pickers probably have a sense for pickles). So instead of a 35g bag of mixed spices, we found a paper bag with ‘pickling spices’ written on it, holding 50g of pepper, 10g of dill, 25g of mustard seeds, and 25g of organic allspice. So, for the mathematically inclined, that’s 75g more for free (worth about $10 more). This is almost as exciting as the time we ordered 200g of chicken for about $2 and the picker gave as 2kg lol. On the other hand, they did leave out the bay leaves, so maybe Stinky should demand a refund? And, in the opposite vibe of adding insult to injury, Stinky found that she already had a packet of the spice mix in the cupboard!
At some stage we had to arrive at the point where we'd run out of thrilling activities, but obviously we weren't there yet. Alas, work relentlessly stalked us - you’d think that we’d get better at coming to terms with the summer holidays coming to an end, but we actually just get worse at it every time. The neighbours said that it was the most impressive wailing and tearing at our hair and clothes that they’ve ever seen!
We always enjoy it when Merrin and Damo come to visit, so had made sure to lock in a date well in advance. What could possibly go wrong? Hmmm, maybe the rain that should have been spread over the last month arriving all at once?
They bravely decided to come anyway and were on track to show up for lunch. Meantime, there were other shenanigans afoot. Chuckles’ shoulder has healed spectacularly and she’s back in the swing of the Coolart community garden. Once a week they do a harvest and a food donation to a food bank in Hastings, and that was the day. Everyone else in the group chat somehow magically all had Extremely Good Reasons Why They Couldn’t Do It, but Chuckles couldn’t not Do Her Bit, so somehow three mugginses in raincoats were doing a quick run down the road….
They’ve gone all fancy and have rat-proof cages on top of each of the raised beds. D’admiral and Pye’s job was to lift the cages off and then help pick.
Pye was quickly learned that the act of lifting and turning the cages directed the rain gathered on her raincoat directly into her left bra cup. This was a fun and clammy thing to learn, and her dry right boob thought it was funny. What was less funny was when they went to drive out and found that some fucker had padlocked the staff gate shut. Shit.
Chuckles and D’admiral started trying to call every ranger and contact they could, but they might have all been under water for all that helped. Meanwhile, Stinky was back at the ranch doing the guest-prep that was originally planned for a minimum of three people, all by herself (this involved frying strips of crumbed eggplant and calling it chips, it’s actually awesome actually). As the soggy trio stared at the locked gate, Merrin and Damo arrived, and heroically rescued 2/3 of the farmers…
After some more pissing around, the car was liberated, and the hard-won harvest delivered, and we finally got to have lunch. We’ve been waiting for ages to give them a key-holding magnetic goose!
Our guests had been having adventures with their still, and we had a jolly time comparing their limoncello to Nonna’s (Nonna, if you're reading this, of course yours was better!)…
… as well as positively assessing the limoncello, Damo gave his stamp of approval to Uncle Joe’s final whiskey.
Next thing we knew it was D’admiral’s birthday! We had once again failed to think of a good place for Lunch in time, so had to celebrate with sushi. Woe!
But the cheesecake made up for it…
Chuckles continued their charming tradition of giving each other Ryobi products as gifts and got D’admiral a new work horse. Dunno what was wrong with the old one, it was still almost functional, and it was only 40-something years old (hey, that’s like us!).
Meanwhile, Stinky decided that Ken the Potato had earned a rest, and tucked him into a nice pot of dirt. She considered herself pretty amusing when she cut out the photocopy she’d posted to use as a marker!
Now of course everyone will be waiting anxiously to hear about our summer jigsaw shenanigans. Pye’s first one was a Terry Pratchett/Discworld one based on Night Watch (did you know you can’t re-read a book while also doing the jigsaw at the same time? Pye checked, but forgot that audio books exist).
Then the Powder Monkey kicked into gear with the front page of The Age from the day he was born…
… not to mention pun-tastic TV and movie ones.
You may notice Moose in the corner working on his own little jigsaw – we had to get him one, so he’d stop trying to eat the pieces!
Pye got a preview of her birthday present when she couldn’t wait to put together another Discworld-themed one.
So many faces! But they were all distinctive and interesting, so it wasn’t hard. And you get to play “Ooh who’s that character, which book are they from?” which is heaps of fun. Who’s number 122?
STINKY!! So as you can see, everyone was thriving.
Aside from jigsaws, what is a summer without visitors and friends?
This lil friend was a particularly charming gentleman…
Perhaps the most important summer ritual is the group Milky Foot activity aka the Annual Slough. First we soak the feetses…
… then we put on the face masks…
Then we get the bubbles and the colouring in.
Camel’s “Real Housewives” colouring book was somehow classier than Pye’s – she’d forgotten she’d been working on the Farting Animals colouring book! Sorry, Drippo the Hippo!!
After the sitting, then we move onto the week-long Consequences phase. For best results it’s important to give your feet a good soak every day…
Robyn and the Cabin Girl both went first, and Chuckles’ feet were surprisingly slow. But when they went, boy did they go!
You could write something on those sheets, we’ve never been more impressed with anything anyone in the history of humankind has done!
But life can’t all be sitting around marinating your extremities in acid, there are jobs to be done! Andru transformed the side of the house that used to have the clothes line on it (Stinky immediately saw the opportunity to raise more dichondra)…
… Stinky also braved her demons and we went back to Hastings’ container deposit scheme depo, site of the “Mother and daughter?” insult of Term Three. She had plenty of emotional support, and luckily the Insulter was nowhere to be seen.
When in Hastings, another highly recommended stop is Wine Lovers Warehouse, and indeed, that was our first stop after the Insult occurred. The bloke that runs the place is a very jolly chap named Dan – or, as we like to say, Cousin Dan (Dan Murphy being Uncle Dan, of course). Cousin Dan is always up for a laugh and nowadays he always wants to know where Stinky’s walking stick is and he’s very sorry that they don’t stock any sherry. Stinky thought that kind of customer service requires a positive Google review!
Stinky loves the interwebs, not least for the shopping opportunities it affords. Barely a day went past without a notification that there was a package at the post office (Stinky would like to point out that she was a mule for many people, and while the packages had her name on them, they weren’t all for her!).
One of the most exciting deliveries that didn’t have her name on them was the new TV (this, despite the fact that Stinky was the one who noticed the TV screen was faulty, so technically she broke it and therefore should be the one to replace it).
We were pretty excited when the annual calendars she puts together arrived very quickly. This meant that we didn’t have to wait very long to discover that she’d accidentally ordered calendars twice the size as usual!
It means that the moose on the cover is Actual Size!!
TWIST – we all actually like them bigger!
Big things we don’t always like are aged gum trees. Back in the old days when all the kids were all put out in the massive tent called the Cousinery (the house, of course, being the Adultery) we resented the big fat gum nuts that infested the ground, and these days D’admiral and Chuckles resent all the shit it drops in their gutters…
But then one morning this orange koala showed up, and now it’s not an issue anymore! Wow!!
Other things we found near trees included these undies…
And an ickle birds nest, just the right size for the teeniest sea urchin.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Stinky was getting into a new fibre craft – felting! Only she’s decided she’s going to call it ‘feeling’ (much in the same way the past tense of ‘fit’ is ‘fat’ and the plural of ‘moose’ is ‘meese’). Look at this concerned little bee she made, just by stabbing wool repeatedly with a needle!
The Cabin Girl was also hard at work developing her knitting skills – here she is testing out the advice “Friends don’t let friends knit drunk”.
Summery days and the bluest of skies abounded, obviously perfect weather for knitting a scarf…
Andru has a fancy new camera to capture all the fun of the sea…
Like when your niece accidentally kicks you right in the noggin!
Look at it, it’s like her foot was made to fit Pye’s head!
Acquired brain injury notwithstanding, Pye and the Powder Monkey got to work on this summer’s Very Important ScienceTM, which set out to ascertain whether Ghosts or Yonderland was the sauciest show.
We’ll have you know that the scientific research conducted by Mooseidiot and the Young Human of His Acquaintance is extremely serious and both our fans on Tumblr eagerly await his updates. One was curious to know how we determined how spicy a saucy incident was. Moose was happy to elucidate:
We applied a triangulated-consensus based approach. The Young Human, myself and an informed third party were posed each saucy moment, whereupon we secretly selected a card from 1-10 to reveal on the count of three. If the scores were divergent we negotiated an agreed score, but if they matched we'd joyously shout "CONSENSUS!", which, it must be said, proved very annoying to anyone else in the vicinity. We declare this ScientificTM cos why not
Sadly, we could not continue to corrupt the youth indefinitely, and the time came for the Powder Monkey to go home and do his holiday homework. But not before we helped Andru spend his birthday voucher at St Andrew’s brewery!
Only the classiest of clientele are allowed! We know it’s naughty to take photos of strangers in public but when we see a skullet this good, manners fly straight out the window.
It was unfortunate timing for the ship’s extended crew to leave when they did, because almost as soon as they did an ultra-rare comet showed up. Last time anyone could see it was 160,000 years ago, but comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) could not escape D’admiral’s gaze.
Once we knew where to look, we could even see it (faintly) with the naked eye (apparently when it reached its closest point to the sun, it flared up to an impressive magnitude of -3.4 — significantly brighter than Jupiter, which shines at a maximum magnitude of -2.8, which makes it one of the brightest comets witnessed in almost two decades).
That seemed a good a reason as any to celebrate, so we took D’admiral out for a belated birthday lunch and Chuckles out for an early birthday lunch at Pier 10…
… with a slap-up cheese course back at the ranch…
That was a splendid last hurrah before we had to reluctantly drag ourselves away to see if the Spinster Pad was still there. The garden had definitely missed us and required a lot of attention, but it was fun to see how much the grass had progressed.
Speaking of growing, Sydney had got themselves a big stinky titam arum of their own. Geelong’s was obviously superior, but Sydney gave theirs a name – Putricia – AND gave her a red carpet and classical music. They are totally trying too hard, but we can’t believe that none of us thought of naming ours!!
Back in the Spinster Pad, we got a few last-minute jobs ticked off. For instance, Pye had decoupaged a shelf for Stinky’s classroom, using pages from a bunch of 1960s Indonesian books that were too cute to throw away after scanning. It was too big to fit in the car in one piece, so we snuck into the school and assembled it there – I think she came up a treat, even if she won’t be winning any prizes for classiest object.
Just in case she hadn’t got enough pickling experience over January, what with a surfeit of cucumbers and beetroot, Stinky came home to find about 25 more robust beetroot waiting in our little garden. She can put the spices together herself, but was feeling a bit lazy, so just chucked a pickling spice mix on the Click and Collect order. But they were all out! Instead of just not supplying it and giving a refund, the intrepid picker must’ve known how important it was to get the harvest pickled (the name suggests that pickers probably have a sense for pickles). So instead of a 35g bag of mixed spices, we found a paper bag with ‘pickling spices’ written on it, holding 50g of pepper, 10g of dill, 25g of mustard seeds, and 25g of organic allspice. So, for the mathematically inclined, that’s 75g more for free (worth about $10 more). This is almost as exciting as the time we ordered 200g of chicken for about $2 and the picker gave as 2kg lol. On the other hand, they did leave out the bay leaves, so maybe Stinky should demand a refund? And, in the opposite vibe of adding insult to injury, Stinky found that she already had a packet of the spice mix in the cupboard!
At some stage we had to arrive at the point where we'd run out of thrilling activities, but obviously we weren't there yet. Alas, work relentlessly stalked us - you’d think that we’d get better at coming to terms with the summer holidays coming to an end, but we actually just get worse at it every time. The neighbours said that it was the most impressive wailing and tearing at our hair and clothes that they’ve ever seen!
