read write run

You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve written blogs in my head over the past however many days it’s been. So many great thoughts, and all I could come up with for a title was that.

This morning as I was getting breakfast ready, Beloved was looking at me, just looking at me with this funny smile on his face. When I asked what he was thinking about, he said how much weight I’d lost and that I do look thinner, especically my bum. Honestly, the man is made from solid gold.

Hasn’t been a great week for me, mood-wise. Last weekend was the writing group’s retreat which I of course did not go on and it was tempting to mope (especially since the retreats had been my idea in the first place.) So on Friday, as I was having a bit of a sook about it all, Beloved said I should come into town and meet him for lunch. Melbourne is a wonderful city, full of fabulous little arcades tucked away all over the place, and we had lunch at this nice little Italian place, but after lunch. Oh wow. After lunch: Koko Black.

I LOVE Koko Black. That’s a chili hot chocolate right there, and although the photo isn’t the best resolution or focus, up real close you can see these little orange dots floating in the bubbles of chocolate and they are pure chili. Just the best, hottest thing on a cold Melbourne day. And yes, we did have a serve of wonderful choccies to go with the drinks because, well, because you just do, don’t you?

Now I know that out of pure dedication to knowledge you will want to know more, so here’s a link to the website. Oh yes, it’s well worth a visit, but the shop is even more worth a visit.

Well, after all of that chocolatiness, Beloved had to go back to work for the afternoon and I had a bit more of a wander around the city. I had to pick up my old iPod, which had got itself a battery transplant. The man at the battery shop was hilarious. I asked how much for a new battery for my phone as well. ‘Twenty dollars for you.’ And how much for one of those nifty iPod pouches? ‘Ten dollars for you.’ I wondered how much if it hadn’t been me, but it was cute and funny and I did get a new battery for my phone, but not a pouch for my pod because they were the wrong size for my geriatric old nano.

Then there were clothes shops. I love looking at the shops. Seven Angels, which I’m sure I remember from when I was a kid (well, a 20-something kid) and could walk into places like that and put on fairy clothes that fitted me. Instead I just looked. And looked. And dreamed. Then I found another shop, a factory outlet with clothes I really liked and dammit I have lost weight and I can sometimes pick up stuff from the “normal” sizes and I really, really wanted the jumper that was made of something so soft that I wanted it against my skin for the rest of my life and I wanted the dress with the cats on it and they were size XL, I checked on the label and I am size XL and they were cheap and I took them to the counter.

‘Did you try them on?’ the lady said.

‘No.’

‘You should try them on. The…neck is…big.’

So I tried them on. Sort of. It was kind of the lady not to just say “you delusional old trout, there’s no way you’re going to squeeze your lardy, porky arse into these, these have been made for normal human beings”. I hate mirrors. I hate what I saw in that tiny little dressing room – arms like marble slabs of salted meat. Honestly, half the girls I work with have thighs that are slimmer than my arms. The bulging fat belly and saggy, droopy arse. I know how hard I have worked and the pain I have honestly gone through to get this far, but at moments like this it seems so utterly futile. I gathered up the angel soft jumper and totally cute kitty dress and left them on the counter. The lady was not there to see me go. It was nice of her to spare me the humiliation.

The weekend was a frenzy of Doing Stuff. Upstairs there are 2 bedrooms. Poss has sort of taken over Radio Boy’s room, with Mum’s old double bed there which she shared with BF, and a trestle table loaded with 2 sewing machines and an overlocker, plus stuff that Radio Boy couldn’t possibly bear to part with but wasn’t interested enough to take with him. Things like old school books.

Well, I got in there and cleaned and I chucked stuff out. I seriously chucked stuff out, but also put stuff into plastic boxes. Plastic boxes are an absolute boon at this place. I packed up Radio Boy’s old single bed, too. And I washed and swept and tidied and moved the bookshelves so that at the end of it, the room contained one double bed, one old kitchen table moved from the kitchen, and one single mattress, laid on its side so that it wouldn’t take up too much space. The shelves had just Poss’s stuff on them and the sewing machines were all on the table.

Then the exciting stuff. Beloved and I went and bought flooring for the attic-space. Yeah, it has a name now. I always wanted to live in an attic when i was a kid. One of those attics with the little pointy windows where the first rays of the sun shine in, early on summer’s mornings. Where you lie awake on summer nights with the windows open to the sound of cricket and the crystal brilliance of the stars shining through. Where you hide under your blanket against the whistle of the wind on a cold winter night, and get up in the grey gloom of the day to see that there’s a crust of snow on the window-sill and the tiny footprints of birds dotted in the pure white that’s silently spread itself all across the roof of the house below you.

A secret, wonderful spot where you write in your diary every night and feed crumbs to a pigeon or a mouse that comes to visit you in your loneliness. A place of quiet contemplation where dreams of wonder and magic take shape.

Yeah, well, our attic is going to be nothing like that. No windows, no mice or pigeons (unless the cats are very bad), no wonder or magic, just my simple dreams of tidiness coming true. We got two big long boards to be the floor of the laundry half of the attic space, and then just need to get two slightly shorter boards to be the floor of the pantry half of the attic space. Those boards were heavy and it took quite a bit of work getting them up there. I couldn’t even help Beloved get the heavier one onto the trolley at the shop, we had to ask one of the shop men to help instead.

Luckily when we got home, Poss and BF were still there. They live a rather nomadic existence between our place and his parents’ place. It’s part of the reason why I wanted to clean up Radio Boy’s room, so that they would have a bit more space to call their own here. They do seem to prefer it at BF’s parents’ place though,  I guess because it’s closer to TAFE for Poss. At least I hope that’s the only reason.

Anyway, it was good having the extra pairs of hands to help, because those boards had to be manouvered through the laundry door and up between the rafters/floor joists and there’s no way I could have done that. Not even slightly. Thanks to BF’s musclepower though, it got done.

Yeah, baby, it got done! Beloved, squatting on top of the clothes dryer lifted it up and BF pushed and Poss guided and dammit, I stood there and did the vitally important part of taking photos!

Don’t look too closely at the laundry walls, you’ll see if you do that the hot water tap for the washing machine is broken and there’s some appaling stain on the wall where an aerosol can exploded and left a horrible rust mark. I only thought it, but it was Beloved who admitted this work will never be over because we’ll have to renovate the laundry next. I NEVER SAID IT (I only thought it.)

But next on the list is to get the other half of that floor into place and put in some stairs. Beloved has also had the utterly brilliant and totally cute idea of turning the attic door into a bookshelf so that in true gothic style we can have a secret room. He’s even going to figure out how to turn a book into a latch. I totally love this idea.

Meantime, all of those plastic boxes with Radio Boy’s stuff in them are now residing in the new hemi-attic. And in his old room, beside the table bearing two sewing machines and an overlocker, there is now space to locate Poss’s utterly scary industrial sewing machine, which is presently in the loungeroom.

There’s still more tidying up to be done in Radio Boy’s old room. And patching. Much patching. I’m not even going to describe my feelings, after the hours I spent working on that room helping with the plastering and renovating and doing pretty much all of the painting, to find that Radio Boy likes to keep his posters nice and secure by hammering 3″ nails into the wall. And he had a lot of posters and stuff on his walls. CDs and records and chains and pictures of cats and plastic skeletons all nailed nicely into place. Sheeeeeesh! And I remember the way my dad nearly murdlized me for sticking up a poster with a bit of sticky tape (and it was important. I HAD to have that poster of the captain of my footy team on my wall).

Anyway, things are good. The rest of the floor, the door, the plastering. I’ll be the painter on this job, and then the shelves and things in the pantry. I don’t know what we’re going to do about a floor covering in there. At this stage, I’m just happy that it’s not a dirt floor. Really.

But a place for everything. That’s what I want. That’s what I want to see. That’s what I yearn for. Did you know that clutter can be physically distressing? It sure is for me. I was the kind of kid who had her school books so totally organised, I could find which out of 5 identical exericse books I needed simply by knowing what order they were in. I never had to lift the lid of my desk.

Yeah. I know. You don’t have to say it. But it’s just the way I am.

Now I’m having a quiet and happy daydream about how awesome it’s going to be to have my Christmas things all stored neatly away in the attic.

mmmmmmm