Arg, I have squeezed out another coat

In the never-ending saga of painting the hall I have just done the final undercoat.  Hand me the tape and I start on enamel woodwork next week. 

Meanwhile, the contents of the hall, a surprising amount considering it is a small and almost empty room in normal circumstances, are scattered around the house, still.  My not very big bedroom has had 3 large painting boxes for months (and a wall mirror and pelmet).  My nights crackle to the sound of the cat playing under the drop sheets for her 2am frolic.

Now my ambition, and I can see this is pushing it, is to finish this year.  Meanwhile, I have at least 6 coats of 3 different paints (taping in between) left to do and the calender is fast filling up with the pre-Christmas social and school-related event frenzy, 95% of which I would skip for a cupcake.  (Mind you, this is not a small set when you think of all the things you would not do for a really good cupcake with a dreadful amount of chocolate icing.)

MMMmmmm!

Focus, woman.  Right, coats of paint.  I figure I can slip on this ambitious time frame a bit.  Two of the coats are the outside of the front door.  This does not require painting sheets and taping over the entire hall.  And in fact, the front screen door could go back on, meaning we could cool the house on warm spring nights without the little Monster and I being attacked by formations of mosquitoes.  The other two will be bite-free as long as the girl and I act as bait.

So possibly my ambition is that by Christmas I hope to have no tape, furniture back in and the house less like it has been turned upside down by a clown with a very large spoon.

I prefer my nuts deactivated and my water tappy, thanks

I have to say my general attitude to celebrity diets is, "meh!"  Mind you, the idea of eating activated almonds, alkalised water and organic spirulina is just a bit, oh, silly, really.

I can see that some people are very keen to turn their bodies from mere processing and waste disposal facilities to high-end, ultra-efficient nutrient uptake devices.  And possibly you get a reward for that.  Maybe your eyes pop open every morning with a faint pinging noise, only to leap up and do an hour of yoga, including those eye-poppingly tricky positions  with 20 minutes meditation at the end, before settling in for your organic spirulina with a slightly alkalised water with a cheery grin, a tidy waistline and a clear and alert mind.

Personally I prefer to turn off the radio when the sports starts after the main news, stumble down the corridor, spend quite a while in the first wee because the cat sits on the end of the bath for a morning tickle, then I like to stomp into the kitchen to greet the monsters and start the coffee and toast processes.  Not glamorous but I like it.  It makes the cat happy too.

You have to laugh, though ... alkalised water.  The human body is bloody keen on keeping itself at its preferred pH.  It is called human homeostasis or body pH.  Bad things happen if your pH level gets out of whack so there are a raft of mechanisms to make sure this doesn't happen from anything you pour down your throat, aside from other causes.

Scary chemistry bit

This system can be overwhelmed by say, a pint of drain cleaner, but I am pretty confident it can laugh off alkalised water.  I mean, sure, alkalised water is apparently a cure to:

• High blood pressure
• Morning sickness
• Diabetes
• Osteoporosis
• Poor blood circulation
• Hyper-acidity
• Constipation
• Diarrhea
• Common colds
• Water retention
• Muscle aches
• Hangovers
• Urea Stones
• Body odour
• Slow wound healing
• Obesity
• Chronic fatigue
• Migraine
• Gout & arthritis, and
• Gastric problems 

But then so were the patent medicines of the late Victorian era, assuming you didn't OD on the morphine in them. And frankly, people, when you see a list like that, shouldn't your bullshit filter be red-lining and making a whoop-whoop noise?

I am all for water - drink heaps of it.  From a tap.  In a glass.  Not a cure for urea stones and body odour (as far as I know), but fine, I am sure.  I am just glad to live in a place where the tap water does not make you ill.

Mind you, if you want your water to come in packaging on a long truck trip so your body can change its pH in a zillisecond, go right ahead.  I hope it is expensive.

Lets just leave the activation level of my nuts for another day.

Oops, lost a week

Well, that one whizzed by.  I have emerged from bed after a week of flu, tired, weak and in desperate need of something delicious.  Sadly the tummy is not ready for deliciousity so I shall continue with the raw veg and toast for a little longer. 

After a number of days without, I had a weak coffee with skim milk this morning.  Two things I wish to say about that.  Firstly, I can't be that much of a caffeine addict if I can go without for days simply because I couldn't get out of bed to make it (or hold it down should I attempt to sip). Definitely not an addict, haha haha ha!  Secondly, weak coffee on skim is CRAP, but it is better than no coffee at all (said in a pathetic, grateful voice).

So you see, I must be better.

Mind you, it definitely doesn't help when you are contemplating yet another slice of toast and your father describes the cheesecake he is just about to fork into for morning tea.  Bad father. Go back to your rust patch, you dessert gloater.

The cat lay on the parsnips and leeks

My husband has a veggie garden.  It is primarily for the production of tomatoes and zucchinis (T&Zs).  We love T&Zs though things get a little torrid in a heatwave.  In one particularly bad year, after the 20th kilo of Tommy Toes came in to the kitchen, I ordered the husband to pull out the plants.  The larger tomatoes were coming in by then and those little devils were driving me crazy.

I have a book of collected T&Z recipes, each recipe using at least a kilo of either or both.  In a hot week I have a lot more than 7 kg of each to dispose of.  Chutney, anyone?  Alternately, I have spread a wave of culinary mystery around work as I give people yellow bobbly zucchinis shaped like a slumped pear with the instructions that you can fry em or stuff em and bake em and they taste like peanuts.*You might be able to steam them but I suspect wet, peanutty sludge would result.

Ye gads - are they aliens?

Then there was last year's pumpkin crop.  It was a wet year and aside from the twenty-five 2 kg doobies we ate over winter, there was a rogue Queensland Blue that self-seeded in a fertile spot beside the vegie patch.  It roamed around the garden for months leaving 12 kg rocks of pumpkiny goodness as it went  Now if you cut a kilo off a 12 kg monster and use it in a soup, you have 11 kgs of pumpkin to go.  This takes up the entire milk shelf in the fridge.  No milk.  Further, do you think you can use it up the rest in a week before it goes funny?

We gazed at the beasts drying in a row under the clothes line and made the big decision.  I called a food charity to come and get 60 kg of pumpkin.  They seemed pleased about it.  Good luck with that.  Delicious to eat but try an axe.

Being spring, the garden has just been planted with a range of things.  It has a net to discourage the birds from pecking up seedlings and stealing the worms.  The net also keeps the cabbage moths from laying eggs so the seedlings aren't decimated by green caterpillars.

If we had a serious bird or possum problem the net would not really help but the mulberry tree is a sacrificial anode for the vegies and raspberries.  You do get a fair bit of sloppy pink poo about though.  It goes through a digestive tract pretty quickly, a mulberry diet.

Now the cat has a special skill.  She can lift things and sneak under.  This can make walking around the house at night tricky as she may well be skulking under a rug.  Needless to say, her adept little paws have no problem with with a light net.  She likes to lay.  The seedlings are tiny.  Poor husband.

Cat practicing stealth

*Technically a yellow crookneck bush squash.

Bullshit filter maintenance

I have worked out a fatal flaw in blogging about the contents of your skull.  You can inadvertently tell your husband more than he needs to know about your thought processes.

For example, the other night I was persistently questioning him about printer head cleaning.  I was not just being annoying - I was testing to see how far he would go before his manly pride collapsed and he admitted he had no idea how to clean them.  At the time he just thought I was tired and overly dogmatic.  In fact I exercising my bullshit filter to keep it in form and to see how long he would string along with nonsensical crap before he squeezed his ignorance out between gritted teeth.

If I hadn't blogged about it he would not have known that I approach his techno-babble with a touch of scepticism.  He just assumed he was getting away with it, or that I cared so little about things that go beep, I could not be arsed even considering whether he was talking rubbish.

I suspect that part of the problem is that I am at home with the children.  I used to work in public policy, a line of work where your whole day could be spent playing round upon round of "spot the bullshit" with triple points when you caught your Minister at it.  (Though you lose a point if you could reasonably attribute the rubbish to the narcissistic self-delusion so common in politicians.)

This is not to say that the girls don't give me a workout.  They are liable to lie their little bottoms off on a range of topics, a number of which involve hygiene or lack thereof.  You can, for example, reasonably entertain suspicions of a lack of stock rotation when you do two days worth of washing and it involves no socks from one girl an no underpants from the other.  This is a sure sign the grotty little monsters are in three day old pants and socks and several rounds of fibbing have taken place. Though missing items from the wash can also mean that there are manky heaps of washing lying under beds or in the bookshelves, neatly interleaved between the books because that was quicker by at least 3 seconds than taking it to the laundry basket during the last you-can-watch-TV-when-your-room-is-clean clean.

But this is just casual, everyday, I-prefer-a-stinky-bottom lying.  The other sort of lie that children specialise in is where they make an initial statement they know is false, but then after 10 minutes screaming about it, they have rewritten events in their mind and they are now sure it is entirely true.  This one commonly emerges while one girl is doing a time-out for whacking her sister.

I think the problem is that neither my husband's lies of manly delusion, or the girl's lies of convenience or lies of the heart really tax my capacities to any extent.  Tedious, yes.  Tricky, no.

I suspect I need to get back to a job that involves considering the extent of lies as part of the work.   After all, as long as they keep their smelly bits away from me, the girls probably will survive their disgusting habits.

And it will certainly help my marriage if my husband doesn't realise the range of topics I switch on the bullshit filter for when we talk about things.