Amphabulous moments and other people’s clutter

Well, things have improved somewhat on the clothing front. I had a lovely day of shopping with Ribs. I love shopping with her because she has fabulous taste, radar for sales, and there’s generally some element of lunchiness involved. I bought a dress for $45 that had originally been $140, and two really nice tops for $10 each (they’d originally been about $60). I particularly like the dress for its powers of invisibility. It has 3 vertical panels, the middle one is black and the two side panels are patterned and sort of disappear into the background, making the wearer look slender and ya gotta love that. Then we went to the Coffee Club and delighted ourselves by sharing a plate of nachos that neither of us could finish and just drinking water. In the old days, we would have had a plate each and I would have cleaned mine up and had an ice-chocolate drink (extra cream? Yes please!) to keep me going. It was a good day.

I picked some flowers from the garden, just because there actually were a few and I wanted to bring them inside and enjoy them. I love the smell of jonquils. I know they can be a bit ordinary and some people don’t like them at all, but I love them. I love the colour and cheerfulness of them and I love their scent. These are my earlicheers. They’re fabby double jonnies and I stuck them in the vase with some of my daisies. Plain, simple flowers. I’d love to have picked a bit of wattle to go with them too, but wattle just isn’t your vase-appreciator. It tends to just fall in little yellow clumps, so I’ve left it outside on the trees where the birds and bees can make better use of it than I.

I’ve been having lots of thoughts about the pond and the state of frogs in the pre-spring, perfect weather for tadpoles kind of days we’d been having. Thing is, there’s a frog in our pond. He’s a very happy fellow with a nice, loud croak and the lady frogs do like him, because I’ve been finding spawn down there. Spawn but no taddies.

Then one night I had this horrible thought that maybe there were taddies. Maybe there were cute, innocent little taddies being hatched out, and wriggling about and then being sucked up into the pump and minced! It gave me a nightmare and so the next morning I dashed down and shut off the pump. No more splashy little fountain sprouting, no more waterfall effect from the top pond but a week later: taddies. Bulgy little tadpoles wriggling about the place and I gave up counting after I got to 25 blobs of spawn stuck around the various plants and sticks and things in the pond. Eventually Beloved and I might figure out some way to have the pump running in some tadpole-friendly way, but for the time being I’m happy to have it as it is, all loaded with future frogs. I’m just waiting for a sunny day so that I can go down there and take some photos but at the moment we’re still in that freezing-cold weather. It’s the time of year when you go out early in the cracked-ice morning where the world is still recovering from a night of sleet and hail, and see newly dropped lambs. I look at them and ask “what on Earth were you thinking?”

Our place has currently reached a level of clutter that must bring it close to some sort of world record. Radio Boy got himself a new job and had to move from Bega to Ballarat. I got the big invitation to go to his place and help him pack up and clean the Bega house (lucky me?)

He has had a lot of fun in Bega though, and a good deal of it has involved him wearing really peculiar clothing and making a bit of a dill of himself. This particular dare had something to do with finding the most ridiculous thing he could wear in an op-shop. And of course going about the streets of Bega wearing it. He also had a session of trying to get people to toot their car horns to express delight at the Queensland rugby team (this was the morning after Queensland had beaten New South Wales in one of their traditional “State of Origin” games. Bega is in NSW.) Also a good many of these dares involved him running about in his underwear. I sometimes wonder if the dares came from listeners, or if Radio Boy just made them up himself as an excuse to run about the place in his undies. Because he would, you know.

Anyway, there was none of that while I was there, because the girl he does (did) his brekkie show with was off sick until the Friday. She had no voice whatsoever, and was desperate to get back into work so that she could say goodbye. On the final morning, though, the studio was full of balloons, and R’s voice was working again, so they did have a good sendoff for him.

In between washing walls, cleaning carpet and scrubbing the stove, I was packing. Now it’s an interesting thing about packing that when it’s my own stuff I find it really hard to do. This is because I pick something up and it reminds me of something else I was supposed to do. Or I stand there wondering if I really need to keep it. I mean really and then if I don’t need it, well should I just chuck it out, or is it good enough to hand over to the op-shop because somebody else might like it.

But when I’m doing someone else’s moving, I just don’t care. Everything from new DVDs to old lolly wrappers went into those bags and boxes. It just wan’t my problem. I was like a machine of packing stuff, and when I got bored or tired, I gave myself time off and I sat down and read Garry Disher’s latest detective novel, Blood Moon. I love reading his Challis and Destry books. Aside from being brilliantly well-written, they are set not far from where I live, and I get a buzz out of it when he mentions places I know well. We had moved all of the furniture off the carpet so that I could give it a good going-over with the shampoo-machine and of course, once it was wet I couldn’t go walking over it. So I sat on the sofa, which was on the verandah, and drank a cup of tea and read my book. The weather was warm and the traffic was bearable and the tea was very good. I ate too much Bega and Tilba cheese and I put my feet up in the warm of the afternoon. Just so that you know there were some benefits to going all the way to Bega for the week.

Beloved got our car fitted with a tow-bar. He took a couple of days off work and drove up on Thursday with his brother’s trailer. He gaped in dismay when he saw the rooms full of stuff that Radio Boy needed to shift.

But we had a pleasant day saying goodbye to Bega on Friday. I bought some nice tea from a little market and asked Beloved (very nicely) if we could have one of the cute puppies for sale (he said “no”) and took more photos. The sky got all cloudy and we wanted rain because we need it so badly, but we didn’t want rain because it sucks badly enough moving house in the rain when you are just going two suburby away, but it sucks almightily moving house when you are going 700 or so km. We got plastic boxes to pack stuff into and Beloved fretted and fretted about where we might find a Tardis to transport everything back home. There was no possible way that two cars plus Bro-in-law’s little trailer were going to do the job. Saturday morning it was getting totally ridiculous. The internet was still active, so I logged on and looked for a trialer hire place. It turned out that the petrol station just across the road from the radio station did do trailers for one-way hire, even though when Radio Boy had asked them the week previously, they said they didn’t. it was a new scheme for them and I think I was their first customer to do it. So there we were, with a decent sized cage trailer hooked to our car, and bro-in-law’s little trailer hitched up to Radio Boy’s car. (Did I mention who paid for all this stuff?)

Our poor car. It looked as though that tow-bar was going to scrape on every ant it encountered, it was so close to the ground. It’s honestly a wonder that the front wheels were still making contact. By the time we got going on Saturday, it was after 2:00 and I honestly thought we weren’t going to be home until about 3 a.m., which is optimistic compared with Beloved, who was convinced that the car was going to die on the first incline it encountered.

As for Radio Boy, well, he had to share the front seat with Sophie the cat, who wasn’t even in a proper cat cage. And has never been inside a car in her life. Things turned out a whole lot better than expected though. We were home just after 11 p.m. and aside from one small incident where Sophie thought she might like to take over the driving just a little bit, all went well. The traffic was fairly light, so we didn’t inconvenience too many people with our slowness up hills, and even the weather stayed mild and non-rainy (always a bonus when you’re transporting a mattress in an open cage.)

So there we were. Home with another houseful of stuff to somehow cram in. Radio Boy insisted it would all be fine because he’d spent the week playing Tetris. H’m. I’m still not sure how you Tetris 5 cats to get along. So far, Sophie has been living in Radio Boy’s old bedroom (now also known as Poss and BF’s room) which his just as well because Mr Black wants to murder her. Dior hates all of the other cats and wants to bash them up (even though she is the smallest) but I do know that she secretly admires Mr Black because he’s even more evil than she is. Tubby cat has given up and spends most of his time in the outside basket, and Tiger is working on her ninja skills of invisibility. The dog is frankly appalled.

Just had to take a breather there from all the moving by sharing a few more memories of Bega. I do love the flowering quinces (or are they japonicas? I’m sure Mum always called them japonicas).

Along with the very classy sign from the flower shop.

So here we are with rooms full of Radio Boy’s stuff and an extra cat. This is along with Poss (who has only 2 contact days at TAFE this semester) and BF (who seems to be between contracts at the moment.) The other thing is Mum has all these friends who keep offering her furniture, and she asks me and I can’t say “no” because I have this image of how it would look and anyway, it’s, you know, free (or at least cheap) and so I have all these extra tables and chairs and bookshelves and beds (not to mention the garage full of Poss and BF’s stuff that’s at Mum’s place. Her punishment!)

Anyway, the good news is that Radio Boy started his new job today, and he got the unit that he wanted. He showed it to me on the website last week and particularly liked it because it has an archway. Very retro, he tells me. Very seventies. I have never lived in a house with an archway, but there you go. He had this ambition. He saw the place yesterday and put his name down. I got the call this morning, Radio Boy all excited that they have approved him as a new tenant and he could move in on Saturday week when the owners have finished painting.

I am very excited on his behalf, and delighted to say that I will not be helping him move because it’s the Melbourne Writers’ Festival next weekend and I have tickets for Friday, Saturday and Sunday and that is how I’m going to spend my time.

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