Chicken Coop Disaster

The hen enclosure did not fare well in 85kmph winds yesterday.

Shredded

Of course I was out when it all happened, so the ladies took foul (heh) advantage of the situation to rape & pillage my newly replanted lettuces.

They were then placed under house arrest in their coop.

Hubs and I won't be able to even start rebuilding this mess until Sunday, so I have spent the morning devising temporary accommodation for daytime foraging.

Taa daa.

Why no, I never thought the fire-guard would be so useful

Whilst not ideal, the dog can't get in and the remains of the lettuces are safe, and they're digging in my green manure for me.

NB: When I took this photo I had managed to capture the two Australorps, but the Rhode Island Reds were still running around like... er headless chickens, but with heads.  With the assistance of the wretched bloody dog and the kids we eventually managed to catch them as well.

:)

Not a patient patient

I have spent the weekend trying to do nothing.

IT IS KILLING ME.

Take it slow??  I have gardens to dig and meals to cook and THINGS to do.

I am trying.  (Yes, yes, very trying, ha ha).  But I sit down with a cup of tea to enjoy the sunshine and immediately spot the hole in the gazebo roof where a possum swan dived off the house roof onto it, and swiftly discovered it was a Very Bad Idea.  I try to enjoy the garden, but I want to dig in the green manure, and plant the lettuces, and look at those weeds, and I need to water the peas and... and...

Breathe... Breathe...

No, its not going particularly well.

Thus far two things have helped.  The first has been the complete and immediate banning of ALL multi-tasking.  I am working very hard on doing one thing at one time, and that thing alone.  If I am putting on a load of washing then I am not stopping or allowing myself to be interrupted until the machine is gurgling away and spilling half its water onto the floor (rotten seal).

Its much much harder than it sounds.

The second thing ground me to a halt.  And it was just a trip out with the family.

You see it was a friends 40th birthday breakfast yesterday morning, and those few hours of travelling, socialising and kid-wrangling drained me to a point where I teetered once more on the edge of losing it.  You see, after we got back I decided I'd go and do something in the garden (lettuces being top of the list).  But as I started to dig, I started to panic more and more about other jobs that needed to be done.  I felt overwhelmed, exhausted and close to tears.  I decided I must be hungry, but food didn't help the utterly wretched feeling of failure and anxiety, I just couldn't shake it.

Eventually, my exasperated husband intervened (he is a brave brave man) and I got sent to bed with Time Team on the lappie, immediately passed out and woke up three hours later.  Then moped about the house being crabby until Downton Abbey, and then crawled back into bed.

Yep.  Recovery plan going well.

I do learn though, eventually.  Today has been help-yourself breakfast, lunch at Maccers, trip to the shoe shop to spend gift vouchers :), dinner from the freezer and doing nothing that required any effort when the kids were playing outside, watching tv or monopolising the computer - whereas usually I'd been tearing around cleaning things, or folding things, or cooking stuff.  The multi-tasking has been up-graded to no-tasking (or very bare minimum tasking, as any parent will know), so maybe there is hope for me yet :).

The Day My Midriff Escaped - a tale of woe

So its 3pm and I'm flitting about the car line picking up the screamies, exchanging banter with the other mums and inhaling a lot of carbon monoxide.    Miss 4 greets me in her usual way...
"Have you got a special treat??"
I respond in my usual way...
"No."
And let the screaming commence...
Eventually, after promising apple juice when we get home, we get to the car and I bundle my two tired and tearful termagants inside.
It's at that point I realise my midriff is cold. Colder than it should be. Much colder than if it was tucked into my jeans and hiding discreetly under my top.
Oh yes. My midriff has escaped.

Let me describe the horror. No. I want too. I want the internet to forever remember how attractive my midriff really is, post kids.

The scarf serving as a belt is where it should be, around the top of my hips.  But my far-too-big jeans  had sagged, and then sagged again, forming attractive flappy handfuls of fabric, held up only by the belt loops.  Mmm, pretty.

But it gets worse.

You see at the front, the sagging had caused the jeans to unzip themselves, exposing my pink dog-chewed underpants, AND (if that wasn't enough) the bow of the scarf was fetchingly supporting my post-kids jelly belly as it peered out from under my top.

I just keep telling myself that noone notice.  Because who goes around staring at other people's midriff in car line? I mean Who Does That??

Given that little embarrassment, that I had Miss 4's Kindi interview and that my husband was about to stage an intervention, I decided it was time for shopping.

Shopping is not something I view as a past-time.

The first disaster was that this year's colours are nude, pinky nude, beige and pinky beige.  All colours that make me look like a warm corpse.  I was persuaded into a puffed sleeves pinky nude thing by a desperately eager sales assistant. She actually flinched when I came out of the change room.  Yes. That bad.

So this year I shall be wearing black and longing for when the reds, dark purples and blues come back in again.  Black is fine. I picked up some nice tops and a couple of pairs of jeans, and even a jacket IN SIZE 10.

The next disaster occurred when I glanced at my watch and realised I needed to be at the Kindi interview asap.  So, still dressed in my saggy jeans, I hurtled to school and commenced a quick change in the front seat of the car, ripping off labels as I went.  Two minutes to go and I was sorted.  Looking and feeling good. I even had a real belt.

I managed to get all the lables - and didn't wander about with 12s 12s 12s 12s plastered down the back of my leg (the s stands for short-arse).  But it was as I got out of the car that the random thought 'security camera' entered my head.  Ah yes. Hello there disaster number three.  Carefully, and without turning my head (so it wouldn't see me looking) I scanned the car park and spotted it.  Just where I had a nasty feeling it would be, staring directly into the windscreen of my car with its one dead-eye.

Some things in this life are better not to know.   I have decided that there was no way I could have been filmed pulling off my top and squeezing into jeans that I have every intention of shrinking into.  No way at all. I have also decided that no one actually watches security footage and they'll have recorded over it by next week anyway.

Ah denial. Its warm in here.

sigh.

My Sacred Writing Space

Some writers refer to their writing area as their sacred space.  My writing space is sacred in that I go "OH MY GOD" every time I look at it.

Not going to plan

Bad day yesterday.  Woke up crabby - well it'd been a vile week, with massive stress due to our current lack of funds and the very painful decision that we're going to have to sell one of our cars - and yes I know you can survive with one car but living as far from public transport as we do, its going to mean life is just that little bit more difficult.

We've had another sudden hot spell, the last three days have been above 35 degrees.  The chickens had already decimated my leafy greens bed (beetroot, carrots, asian greens, turnips). So, feeling really pissed off about it all, I replanted the lot and put some chard and a few other odds and end around the outside of the bed to distract the chickens.  Six hours later the temperature had hit 37, all the new plantings were beyond dead and the chickens had got through my anti-chicken defences and laid waste to all that hard work.

Hot and crabby I decided to hide inside and read Jackie French, she always inspires me to keep going and keep trying. But not yesterday.

"March is a time of harvest," she said. Oh really, I thought.

• The sun isn't as fierce - oh yes it is
• The weather is cooling - oh no its not
• Tomatos will be glutting - I have a handful of green cherry tomatos to show for my glut
• Melon's will be ripening - I have about seven melon vines they are all dying of mildew (despite spraying with milk) and so far I have one melon about the size of an egg and two water melons about the size of peas
• Pumpkins - not a one, not a single sodding one, they've all rotted off, well the two that even started anyway
• Summer vegetables will be mature - no they won't they'll all be burnt off by the relentless sodding sun and no sodding rain that's dried out all your raised beds to the point where they can't hold water even if they want too

Yesterday I was quite prepared to cover the entire garden in concrete and paint it green.

Today the chickens have been banished to their new (nearly finished) coop.  Something has chewed through all the shadecloth I put around the bottom - already, after less than a week.  YAY.  The leafy green bed has been replanted AGAIN and is covered in wire and booby trapped with hand grenades.  Hubs and I have put in my lattice to provide a bit of privacy and grow something up (grape? kiwi? peas?).

I went around the garden and picked things to prove to myself that this is all worthwhile and I can get food out of my garden - and ended up with a small bowl of chilis and a handful of beans.  It hasn't  helped.

So I retired to the kitchen and made plum sauce, with the leftover plums frozen from spring

And got some sourdough starter started.  Which I'm thinking is going to be a very interesting experiment, in breeding new life forms in the kitchen at least.

Sigh.

Brainfried

My lordy what a day. It began sorrowfully with yet another bread disaster. Loaf on the left was the same as the last three using my new bag of defiance bread flour. Loaf on the right was made with 50/50 bread flour and lauke bread mix (which has extra yeast, bread improver and god knows what else in it).  Beats me what the problem is, but I'm going to use up the defiance flour by mixing it with other flours and not buy it again.  The bread machine hates it as well.

Having dropped my angelic children at school I met up with some of the other SAHMs (stay at home mums) and nannies in a local cafe to discuss the recent spate of parent/teacher interviews, and, much more deliciously, the fact that...

1. My daughter's kindi teacher turned up at work with a HANGOVER on Monday
2. She was dumb enough to tell one of the parents

I KNOW.

Needless to say I'm feeling that there is a situation brewing that is going to end badly.

The whole hangover thing was not helped by the fact this teacher had told most of us in our interviews that our children were average.  Yes. AVERAGE. I was actually fairly philosophical about this, Miss 5 is, well, 5 and being told that she is not going to be an A student this year didn't overly bother me.  No. What mattered to me was that she was a happy, much loved member of the class. Always first to lend a hand and keen to answer a question however randomly.  I mean, yanno, she's FIVE.

Still, listening to the other mums chatting about how much reading and writing work they do with their kids at home got under my skin.  I ended up feeling that I was letting Miss 5 down a little bit but just reading the books that come home from school and then letting her watch Superhero Squad and other drivel. So after coffee I whisked myself into Borders and bought an armload of learn-to-write books.

Then I sped home and spent a few hours polishing an assignment for Uni - oh after a brief skirmish with the snotty man in the hardware shop WHICH I WON and left with the staples I wanted and carried the bag of sugarcane mulch to the car all by myself. Rargh.

Next it was back to a cafe.  Miss 4 had Grandparents day today, and I met up with Mumndad after it was all over for a full report and restorative coffees for them.  Grandparent's Day is something of an ordeal.  If you're not being entertained by your offspring's offspring singing in French and Mandarin, then you're donating books to the library or being chatted up about making bequests.

Then home again with the kids where I presented them with their new books (got some for Miss 4 just so she wouldn't feel left out).

WELL.  They leapt upon them, loved them to bits and it was only after two hours that they started to flag with all the letter copying and matching balloons and playing spot the difference.  I started to flag after about ten minutes, but was kept on track by them both,  answering question after question and trying to explain all sorts of tricky things (like why is that fish purple?) and frankly oh my god it was exhausting.  The moment hubby arrived home I scarpered to water the garden and just give my poor overworked brain a chance to rest for a moment.

Holy hell. It was a nice afternoon, but I'm looking forward to the novelty value wearing off.  Not sure how much more of this I can take. :)

Homemaking? I does it well.

Had an absolutely frantic couple of days getting through my lists of ToDos.  I haven't made it through the whole list of course, just been doing the things that will keep this boat afloat, and me not totally embarrassed in my Uni lecture.

Of course it all hasn't gone to plan.  My most major disaster has been bread rolls.  The first batch I made were paragons of light fluffiness which I had to whack into the oven before they rose out of the pan and went everywhere.

The second batch I made yesterday were not.

They were small and bullet like and the best use we could come up with was to put them in a sock and send them into kindi with Miss 5 as a self-defence weapon. Oh kidding. We'd only send them with Miss 4.

My yeast failed.  Well okay, my yeast failed because it was a THOUSAND YEARS OLD and I should've known better. Do not use old yeast people.

My second most major disaster was the icing on the banana cake I made. Goddamm frickin too hard butter going all lumpy in the mixture and then not magically smoothing out when I put it on the cake. Goddammit.

Has enough icing sugar to taste good but.

Cakes have never been my forte and now that I live with an oven which has two settings of Too Hot and Far Too Farking Hot, most of the baking I do requires icing to cover where I cut the charred bits off.  sigh.

Third worst disaster was the casserole I made.  Dragged out the slow cooker and flung in all sorts of things from the fridge - including a little bit of leftover cooked angel-hair spaghetti.  I kind-of thought that after around nine hours of cooking that the spaghetti would've melted away, but NO. It remained and caused the children to screech WORMS, WOOOOOORRRRMMMMSSS.  And then refuse to eat anything.

Also I already blew the weekly budget at the supermarket and now we've run out of dishwasher powder.  Am going to steal money from my children to cover it.  I mean there are limits.

:)

They happen in threes...

OH. MY. GOD. Excuse me, but I'd just like to make the point that SOMEBODY/ANYBODY should have warned me about the things your children dream up to age you faster. I mean seriously. They know I have a High School reunion in a few weeks and after the last week of my life, any lingering smugness that I may just look just a smidge younger than I actually am (let's say 35 rather than 37 years, 9 months and 17 days) has been vaporised.

I am convinced they're doing it on purpose btw (that's trendy youff for By The Way, Diana).

Oh I shouldn't make light of it. That would make me sound like a worse mother than I actually am. You see it was horrible and serious. Miss 3.5 was bitten by a spider. Mmm. Nothing quite like having your husband tell you that your child is hysterical because she has been bitten by a spider that she is describing as black and red and has fang marks in her arm. Trust me interwebs it ages you.

We calmed her down, and whilst hubby hit google for advice, I tried to ease the story of what happened out of her. No easy feat, as anyone who has chatted to a pre-schooler will understand. She was climbing a tree in our front yard, came inside and there was a spider on her, which bit her and she knocked it onto the floor. She is was red and black, but then changed her story and said it was gold with red and black on it.

Meanwhile hubby had done a heap of research, and we knew that if Miss 3.5 had been bitten by a red-back she'd be in serious pain by this point. She clearly wasn't. We kept her calm and under close scrutiny, but once a band-aid had been applied to the bite-mark she continued as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Okay, now with a very healthy respect for creepy crawlies, but fine nonetheless.

See here she is, just fine...

Of course, having two disasters in the space of a week (see below for visit to hospital story) has led to many many people kindly pointing out that these things happen in threes.

Weeeelll - as Sam from Bewitched used to say - actually the spider thing technically could be counted as our third disaster of the week. We did have another one. A poo disaster.

A poo disaster involving my personal nemesis - the playground equipment at McDonalds.

Many of you will remember the incident at McDonalds where Miss 3.5 took off all her clothes and refused to come down from the highest heights of the McDonalds play equipment. Full horrible story here. We do not eat Maccers much, but lately hubby was lured back by the McAngus burger.

Everything was going smoothly and so when Miss 3.5 asked to go and play I only hesitated for a split second before saying okay. Well, hubby and I finished our burgers and went to get her. Grinning from ear to ear she whizzes out of the slide and into our arms. Awww. A kodak moment.

Until I glance in the direction of her trousers, and wonder out loud to hubby, "What's that coming out of the top of her pants?" Pretty much at the same moment he says, "What's that smell?"

Oh crap.

We rush her into the bathrooms, and quickly ascertain that this is one that we're not going to fix easily. We stripped off her bottom half, bundled up the clothes and threw them in the bin - trust me, you'd have done the same thing - cleaned her as best we could, wrapped her in hubby's jacket and made a run for it.

I still have the compulsive urge to wash my hands every single time I think of it.

So. One week, three disasters. I've aged.

sigh.

Urgh - Afternoon at the hospital

I've been having dramas.

Yesterday afternoon I was potting out my tomato seedlings - oh how I want to rant on about my home made potting mix with compost from the worm farm in it - but I shall restrain myself. Barely. Miss 3.5 was playing the swing. She's just learned how to swing herself without being pushed and is as pleased as punch about it all.

Well, I heard an odd thump and glance up to see her in a crumpled heap on the ground. I'd like to say I kept a calm head and walked over to see what the problem was, but no, I sprinted over there, falling over the dog, swearing and yelling at hubby not to pick her up.

She'd fallen off the swing. She was swinging very high, and when she was at full height from the ground she'd let go - It was a two metre drop and she'd landed on the back of her neck. My god. There is no reality check like seeing your child lying on the ground. Not screaming or crying, just still and pale. She didn't fully lose conciousness, but was kind-of drifting in and out for a few minutes. After about five minutes she wanted to get up. I was fussing about neck injuries, but she wouldn't stay still.

Anyway, we got her inside on the couch in front of the fire, but 45 minutes later she was still a dreadful shade of white and listless - so off to the emergency department we went.

The emergency staff at Hornsby Hospital were awesome. They kept her under observation for four hours, checking her eyes and whatnot regularly, but as time went on it was clear she was improving. Her colour came back and her main complaint was that she was hungry - as they wouldn't let her eat or drink. She'd been complaining about a headache and chest pain to me, though she wouldn't admit it to the nurses - so I was so glad to be there, just in case something developed.

After hubby fed Miss 5 he brought her down and we ended up in the pedes ward with both girls tucked up in the bed together and us sitting and watching the goings on in an emergency ward on a Wednesday night. This kid, I'd say 13 or 14, in the bed next to us had come in, barely able to breathe with asthma and had not improved so they'd decided to put in a drip to get more steroids into him, but his parents weren't there. Where were they? Gone out to dinner - I ask you. Suddenly it felt like I wasn't doing such a bad job after all.

They discharged us at about 9.30pm, and we all came home and had a feast of warm milk and peanut butter sandwiches and then fell into bed. When I woke up this morning everyone was in bed with me and I hadn't even been disturbed when they arrived!!

Miss 3.5 is doing well this morning. She's insisted on going to pre-school, but we're picking her up in an hour as she really should be at home.

I'm not one for moralising or pontificating on about the things our children teach us about the world and ourselves. So let's just say that I've realised I'd rather have a child that thought my cooking was "disgusting" than no child at all. :)

New Lappy

It has been pointed out to me that perhaps the rest of the internet is not as thrilled by pictures of lettuces as I am. sniff. I find this extremely difficult to believe. Extremely. Next you'll be telling me that photographs of my clean laundry pile, or before and after shots of my desk when I'm in tidying mode are equally mundane. Pfffft. As if.

So, you have suffered with me through the loss of lappy. Well, disaster upon disaster and the billion year old computer that I was using to replace lappy had spat the sodding dummy as well. Bastard. Hubby is still job-hunting and finances are tighter than a rodents behind around here. The plan had been to hold off on buying anything except take-away food, ice-cream, chocolate, alcohol, waygu beef and gadgets that fit into the cigarette lighter of the car etc... until hubby was once more gainfully employed. BUT, faced with the prospect of sharing hubby's half-size laptop that is still not quite right after he poured a cup of coffee into it, we realised that a new laptop for me was going to be less expensive than a divorce and the resulting counselling bills for the children.

So, I am now in possession of a MacBook. Yes. Not only is it a new lappy, but we've gone to a Mac. Why? Actually I have no idea why. The discussion about what to buy went kind-of like this... (kind of)

Me: Stupid bloody f*king bloody wretched half-assed bloody machine

Hubby: I think its borked

Me: Har, har, har. Also, don't mess with me, I'm doing re-writes and PMT is approaching along with a full moon...

Hubby: No, seriously, its borked.

Me: Did you know Bron keeps misreading borked for corked and having a drink when I write in on the blog? I'm going to have to start timing putting up my posts better (not at 6am). OMG THE BLOG THE BLOG. Will I ever be able to update it again? (this is where I went from denial to er nial, or something. Hmm. That sounded funnier in my head).

Hubby: Calm down

Me: No, waaah, pass me chocolate, waaah.

Hubby: You are on a diet

Me: AND SCREW WEIGHTWATCHERS - this is a disaster. You get extra points for disasters. I read it somewhere.

Hubby: Its time for a new laptop

Me: (Calming quickly) What sort of laptop?

Hubby: Well you could get a Dell, or another Benq

Me: Do they come in purple?

Hubby: Er

Me: If you were me what sort of computer would you get yourself?

Hubby: Well a Macbook, without question, they are the best.

Me: So that's not good enough for me? Hmm?

Small bickering session ensues with hubby getting defensive and me taunting him about walking so easily into that one - I mean you've been married to me for six years now love, and that was a seriously amateur mistake.

So, I have my macbook. Its very lovely, but not having really used a mac properly since around 1987, I'm not yet up to warp speed. Also its quite easy to delete things on a mac. Who knew if you put the shortcut for the program in the trash it deleted the whole thing and then your husband had to be all 'ner ner nee ner ner' before he reinstalled it. Ahem.

On a serious note...

Writers; twice in the last month I've nearly lost access to all my work. However I use http://www.getdropbox.com to automatically back up all my work to the internet. It is FREE and EASY and has saved my sanity, my marriage etc... Use it to back up your precious manuscripts. That is all.