37 posts tagged “opinion”

I have brilliant insights into life, love and the cosmos as I go about my daily chaos, but unless I scratch some cryptic, no not cryptic, very obvious message to myself I forget what it was that I was going to dazzle you all with and have a zilch memory for blogging time.

No death defying stunts this morning – thank you to all those people who expressed gratitude for my continuing survival. Very much appreciated. I have a small suspicion though that it all makes you feel better about your own lives when you read that my life is in fact the basis for the formation of the chaos theory and maybe even an argument for eugenics. Loved the fact that my demise could have been brought about by a Flamingo Flattener as so named  by gcgal . I had this vision of little pink flamingo legs sticking out beneath the carnage of me. I laugh in the face of adversity…that’s a lie. I usually perform an adversity dance something akin to a Polish Polka for at least two days. My children can confirm. Mr FD can’t as he is usually 45 polka steps ahead of me and not looking behind only onwards to more global disaster…

Crazy season at work is drawing to a close, earlier than usual. I would like to think it is because my little department is such a well oiled machine, but I think it is really just God given luck. Either way, gratefully accepted. Next crazy season Feb next year…as regular as clock work. Lots of time to plot revenge and sabotage.

Today's Basement of Discontent issue however was that at 3pm MegaMegaBoss sent out a mass email to all permanent employees calling them to a meeting in the Boadroom on Tuesday morning....mass hysteria. MegaBoss was nowhere to be seen and Boss was off site, so I had people coming to me, as next inline, asking me if they were all getting the sack and should start stockpiling one minute noodles. I was not 100% in the loop about this meeting, but have gut feeling it is about the takeover of the related work section and an overhaul of it into a new format as was told to me last week, but I couldn't say anything. It may not be that either - I may need to ask you all to mail me one minute noodles shortly. I can't help but think it was so cruel to send out a short, noninformative email on a Friday afternoon and worry people all weekend. I know it was probably due to the fact that they wanted to ensure everyone was there, but MegaBossBitch the self-proclaimed HR expert should have looked at the wording and made sure it didn't send people into a spin. Stupid people.

Midnight epiphany last night was that I started to become worried that my mother’s old photograph album, which must be about 60 years old, might have book worm. Her housekeeping, never a major strength, has slipped a tad or two in the last 20 years. Daughter 2 thought she spied some tiny weeny creepy crawly. As we have a large home library and I had not cared over the past 5 nights I decided Thursday night was my night to be concerned. So at 3 am I went downstairs and found the album and sealed it in a zip lock bag until further examination. I walked back twice to make sure the zip lock was really zip locked…and am not 100 % sure now but have to accept for now.  I was going to put it in two zip lock bags, but we only had one. I think I may have even “borrowed” it from work, as you do.

Daughter 1 off on a lunch date with her new elove friend Saturday . When they speak on the phone all I hear is lots of laughter from behind her closed door (yes you still have to speak to boys behind closed doors if you are 29 and live at home)  I think the shared sense of humor is a big plus, something missing in her other relationships. One of his first questions was whether she wanted to have children, and she does, very much, so that cleared the air on that one too. So, for the very early stages,  a couple of positives there. Mothers must just wait and see… I wont say what else we are capable of, but I hazard a guess you all know anyway! I have 3 children and I would like to play mother of the bride/groom at least once. I can be hysterical with the best of them.

Daughter 2 is very against my decision to return my hair to its grey beauty. Well, not that it has ever really been grey before, but it is now. She told me in no uncertain turns that I was not going to and if I had to dye it weekly I would. Her expression was akin, and speaking to Australians here, Aunty Jack promising to Rip Yur Bloody Arms Off!  I am at the stage of letting it fade a little with a lovely grey stripe down the part area which I try to camouflage each day with some artistic fluffing of the hair and very specific application of hair spray.  My BIL asked me the other day if I had been in a wind storm – I thought I was looking good! My sister said don’t speak to a woman like that and BIL replied That’s not a woman that’s FD. BIL’s give you no respect if they have known you since you were 13 and watched you grown up….he is 67 in October so I may have mentioned that he might need the wheel chair before dear old Mother. End of conversation. Sister, who though 8 years older, is not as grey as I, and having spent $160 on a dye job last week, which 1. she cannot afford, and 2. still looks like a bad home job, is considering following my lead. I can sense a ground swell of boomers forsaking the bottle. Come on ladies, and gentlemen too, let’s get off the bottle and face the rest of our life au natural. Hair, on head, only of course. Not the body au natural. That would lead to a major lobby group calling for euthanasia, I feel.

I am thinking now of a Springsteen song in which he described making love to a red haired woman. He made it very clear and went into some depth at the concert making sure we understood that it 1. was his wife he was singing about and 2. that it wasn’t the hair on her head he was referring too. We wont go there, shall we?

I am going to sleep for 37 hours tomorrow and not rise until lunch time ... just in time to wave off Daughter 1 on her e-date. Then I may go back to bed again. Mr FD arrived home tonight - said hello and settled down to watch Friday night football.  Isn't marriage grand?   I know he is just waiting for me to fall alseep and then he will come up all full of chatter and wake me up with some crazy remark about tiger penis soup or something. It is how he gets HIS big jollies.

Another day, another $1.50.

I had a near, near death experience this morning driving to work. A semi trailer truck loaded with a small earth mover and other construction equipment entered the round about just ahead of me and started to turn right up the hill, the same way I was going. I heard the truck make an odd noise and so I stopped my car on the roundabout. The truck shuddered and then started to slide back a little, obviously unable to gain traction in the wet. It was coming my way so I slammed the car into reverse and started to reverse as much as I could, which wasn’t far, thanks to the idiot behind me who could have moved back but didn’t. I don’t now if they were slow to react, or a  #$%^$#%#* pig,  but they sat there while my life looked as though it was being potentially drastically shortened.

Thanks to the good driving skills of the truck driver his vehicle missed the front of mine by a sand grain. No exaggeration or being over emotional here, it was what it was.  For a second I thought my fifteen minutes of fame had arrived “READ ALL ABOUT IT! WOMAN FLATTENED BENEATH EARTH MOVER”.  Shaken and stirred.

MegaBoss was required to do a financial transaction yesterday. It is a transaction that she is responsible for 3 times a year. She has done it since 2005 so should have a pretty good grip on how, what, why etc. From her emailed questions yesterday it became very obvious that she had totally lost the plot and couldn’t remember a single thing about the process. I kept very quiet. Her emails went to a wider circle showing her total lack of knowledge and as she asked more questions she looked sillier and sillier. Finally, today, for the sake of others, I quietly reminded her of the tasks she had to do and how the process worked. What goes around comes around and revenge is sweet. I may rot in hell but I have had a moment. Is it mean to hope for more?

Daughter 2 is being given an all expenses paid weekend away for two by her firm for a job well done thank you. She is taking her sister and she chose Melbourne, because her sister has never been there. They are getting air fares,  theatre tickets, dinner at Neil Perry’s Rockpool restaurant, and staying at a very expensive inner city hotel. Daughter 2 is grateful but she has paid for it in toil and trouble. Daughter 1 is over the moon because she gets the goodies for being nothing more than her sister’s complaining post when she is tired and over worked. I am just happy for both of them. They go weekend after next, if firm doesn’t work Daughter 2 into the ground before then… a 13 hour day is a short day. Lucky I didn't get squashed it would have spoiled their weekend...maybe not....

Think I may be inheriting Daughter 1's cold. Even Brisbane has been cold the last couple of days, though I suspect Mr Snowy may be closer to experiencing his name at the moment in his cold city. Rain and cold doesn't usually bother me but today I have been feeling icy all day and I suspect it is part of getting ill. Bah humbug. Hope I am wrong.

Mr FD is back tomorrow - last night of bed freedom. Though if the cold weather keeps up a bed warmer might be handy! A man does have some uses! (That's a joke, gentlemen). Has anyone else noticed how it is ok for women to crack a joke about men, but men have a very fine line about the jokes they can make about women? Gender issues....I don't think we have got the balance right yet, and maybe never will. Got to keep trying though.

                                                                                                    Goodnight.

Rainy, showery, I felt damp all day. I like the rain. I wanted to go home and nestle into my bed and maybe after I had slept 12 years I might have read a book or 3, while small servants I don’t possess brought me tea and cake. I was trapped, damp and mouldy in the Basement of Discontent though, making my list of people to hit with a stick on my last day, longer and longer. Some friends are on the list now…they will have to do much to get off it. I am upsizing the stick too. Now I will have to use two hands to swing it.  Seafood and corn chowder cup-a-soup didn’t really ease the itch to run out the door, screaming, like Mr Rochester’s discarded and inconvenient wife.

How many books about humans and their relationship with their dogs does the world need? Marley and Me has a lot to answer for. You know what everyone needs? A back fence and a good neighbour. Remember the old days when your mother stood at the fence gossiping to the woman on the other side? That is what everyone is missing. A gossip pal! Hence why we spend time reading books about dogs and buying birkin bags,  and gasp, horror, blogging…our neat little isolation has brought us low. Except in the case of blogging, because lets face it, if I am doing it, it must be a superior art form. Comment closed.

Boss is back. He actually came back on Tuesday, his scheduled day which threw all the pundits off. We were betting on Thursday at the earliest. He separated from his wife earlier in the year, but thinks none of us know. Hunney, you don’t have lease papers going through the office fax if you want to keep things private. Anyway he talks freely to “outsiders” about it, but not to his office buddies. How can this be? Does he think we are gossips or something?  When he speaks to people he talks in a very loud voice, well actually, his voice is pretty boomer most of the time. If he is having a private conversation he sometimes shuts his door. It makes no difference as we can hear his voice through the closed door, and of course the closed door just makes everyone curious and listen harder…. Wife decided motherhood and particularly wifedom was asking too much of her so she asked him to leave. Being married to Boss would be like being married to a hyperactive 10 year old so I can sort of understand her position.   As he was the parent who appeared to be the primary care provider for the 2 children, little bit sad for them that Dad is no longer resident. Mum wanted to find herself and make jewelry from kitchen articles and she got 15  minutes of fame because she made jewelry from kitchen articles, not so much because she made jewelry, but it was enough to swell the ego….and you would already know all this if you stood at my back fence.  

When I was a little baby boomer we had a neighbor who would make morning tea for my mother and hand it to her over the fence on a tray with a tray mat and all, on the days my mother did the laundry. In those days mothers did laundry (washing, it was then) on a Monday and as they all had either coppers to boil it in, or wringer machines, it took them all day. Neighbor was also the lady who introduced me to the library, so my mother and I have a lot to thank her for.

Daughter 2 sent me a cryptic email mid afternoon : “so far today I have worn 4 different pairs of shoes, and that's not counting my slippers”.  Glad she is keeping in touch. The multishoes are a mystery yet to be solved though.

                                                                                   THE END 

The High Court overturned some of the New South Wales government’s legislation regarding annoying and harassing the World Youth Day pilgrims. Now, one can annoy, but not harass.

Mr FD said that the High Court is enshrining my approach to marriage as civil law. Annoy but do not harass! I thought I harassed him fairly well, so I don’t  know whether to be relieved that he didn’t consider I harassed, or disappointed that my efforts were obviously failing so badly.

The Flamingo Dancer is perplexed….time for tea.

Where are my 15 minutes of fame? Nothing in my life, so far, could be considered 15 minutes of fame, so I would like mine, soon. It had better not be related to pain, suffering or my demise though, or I will be really annoyed. No headlines that read “Postmaternal woman impaled on Parliament House spire after albatross swoops down and carries her off !” No if it bleeds it leads headlines thanks. I do not count our wedding photograph appearing in the local community newspaper either – that would not have equaled 15 minutes of fame before they wrapped the garbage in it. Real fame, 15 minutes. Thank you, thank you Flamingo Dancer has left the building.

Daughter 1 went on school camp this week. Her father drove her to school. I was a wreck and near to tears as my girl packed up. Would she remember everything she needed for the week? I kept double checking the list as they loaded everything into the car. “Have you got your food? A pillow? How about your towel? Do you think you should take an umbrella ( I made her take mine)?”  Daughter turned to me and said “Mum, I am the teacher. People entrust their children to me. I can cope. Calm down.”  Her statement did nothing to comfort me….not sure if I would entrust my child to her…. Once a mother, always a mother.

Apology to anyone suffering mortgage stress, but the people that named Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be shot – not just for bad management. Those names doomed those institutions from the start! They sound like apple pie makers.  Bad, bad, bad. Guess they wont be getting those big bonuses this year – or will they? Bringing a company to its knees appears to still bring some execs mega bonuses it seems. Sad world.

I love the fact that I can buy cherries just about year round now. They may cost a small fortune at times, but if I have a serious craving, then most weeks, I can buy a few lovely little cherries at the supermarket. No matter the price, I always tell myself that they are better value than buying chocolate. Except I buy chocolate too…

Role reversal. Mr FD took some fish and chips over to his parents at the weekend. We figure that at 90 and 85 if they want fatty unhealthy food, let them. What joy can you have at 90? Very little it seems. The calamari rings halted both of them. Teeth problems, or rather lack of teeth was the problem. Mr FD had to cut the calamari up into tiny pieces for them to gum down. LOOK AFTER YOU TEETH or you too will be gumming mush. Remember we are all living to be 102!

Catholic World Youth Day kicks off in Sydney today. Pictures of the Pope everywhere, even flashed onto one of the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge at night. Do you think he ever gets up in the morning and says “What outfit will I go with this morning? The white frock or the white frock? White skull cap or scarlet? I feel wild today, let’s go scarlet.”  A world youth day with an 81 year old headliner….hmmmm

I saw a book today How to deal with Email Overload . If I haven't got time to read my emails how the heck am I going to find time to read a whole book. I didn't open the book, it probably just has a picture of the Delete button!

Isn’t it funny how some people can tell you that you laugh like a hyena and that they would rather be friends with Charles Manson than break bread with you, and you take not the slightest bit of offence. On the other hand, some people cannot drop so much as an eyelash in your direction and you want to parboil them before having their body torn apart by four wild horses.

Or is that just me?

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have named their daughter, Sunday. The office wits have been joking all day that when Sunday misbehaves Nicole and Keith will be able to scream, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday!” (someone should apologize to U2).

I inverted the world last night. I had cold feet so I wore a pair of old Christmas socks to bed. No Australian is going to wear Christmas socks in the middle of our summer heat (though I know Cat http://cat573.vox.com/ likes to flash them with thongs [flip flops] )!  Maybe why they are old and barely worn! The tinsel thread was quite exciting… a sleep on the wild side. Before I was a married Flamingo Dancer and I had cold feet I would wear an old pair of my brother’s army socks to bed. He was in the cadets at high school and so I scored a couple pairs of his socks and a cloth army hat which I thought was so cool I wore it EVERYWHERE for a few months….as you do when you are 14 and trying to establish your identity. Many years later my eldest daughter found it and she wore if for a few months also. I suspect it is still in the back of her cupboard. More a comment on our closets, than any real sentiment for the hat.

MegaBoss reversed a very insignificant decision I had made today. MY decision, people! I let him off lightly and only imagined him spontaneously combusting and his ashes being swept up by a street sweeper. I could have vexed him with boils, incarceration with his crazy mama, and loss of his manhood first, but restrained myself. I will reserve that for an important infraction of my command position.

Is it true that spontaneous combustion, as much as we fear it and wish it upon MegaBosses, may in fact be a myth? It has served me long and well as a method of final annihilation. I will be sad if it is a myth. Perhaps it is best if I labor in mismythperception.  I think I threw out my voodoo doll.

I have worked in a number of libraries and I have found that on the whole they are peopled by strange and bizarre peoples. I perhaps included by some! Most of them not patrons, I beg your pardon, clients. As a workplace libraries are looked upon as a quiet place of refuge for the work torn individual, many of whom are fleeing workplace conflict and world weary seek to hide in libraries as a release from their torment.  It does not take long for the individual’s new workmates to realize that many of the issues that the newbie has encountered in the big world may in fact be due to the newbie his/her self. An HR person once told me that studies have been done that report that libraries are some of the most conflict torn workplaces there are. In other words before you flee your work issues for paradise, make sure you aren’t bringing muddy boots into that paradise. Don’t mess up the carpet.

I watched the Andrew Denton interview with White House Correspondent Helen Thomas last night. I want to have coffee, lunch and dinner with that woman. I googled her and found that she was born in 1920. I hope I am so rampant when I am 88! Mr FD and I cheered when Denton asked her which Presidents she thought had been corrupted by power and she answered “the present one”. Go Helen!  Classy chick.

Mr FD drove 90 minutes across town this morning for a meeting that in fact is scheduled for Friday. Not the first time. No doubt by Friday he will be too busy to go and cancel. I would laugh if I wasn’t married to him…hell I laugh at him anyway (mainly in private and at length, after shaking my head disdainfully). A friend, upon meeting Mr FD for the first time, commented that he looked nothing like she had expected. I said that he had changed since we married…he was taller back then. I may have cut him down to size.

Mr FD is off on a road trip next week and Daughter 1 is assigned to help supervise a school camp so it will just be Son and I at home. As Son and I have a grunt and feed relationship it is akin to being home alone. I am so excited. I am at heart, and everywhere else, an introvert, so alone time is very precious to me. Love my family, but my ultimate fantasy is not Mr FD and I dressed as a wookie and a naughty nun but it is me blissfully alone. Not talking alone all the time. I think even from my writing it is rather self evident that I am prone to the odd conversation, emphasis perhaps too heavily on the odd, or two. Just five days, or a week. This will be 5 days and as close as I am going to get to being alone for a very long time. I am a happy little Flamingo Dancer. I may take flight. Or not.

A client from the Arab Emirates rang Mr FD’s office yesterday. Twice. Someone hung up on them twice thinking that they were telemarketers. Expecting a fatwah, or jihad shortly.

For Australia, today the sun set six more minutes above the horizon than it did on June 21. I blew the extra daylight. I should have been out dancing in the setting rays of sunshine but instead I sat reading a magazine waiting for my hairdresser to finish with the customer before me, who arrived late and therefore made me late. I have made the decision to stop dying my hair and let the grey show. Hairdresser looked at my very obvious grey roots and declared that I would have the "really nice" grey hair so was enthusiastic about me "doing it". I will try and not dye the regrowth between now and next hair cut and then have some highlights to help meld it all together. Highlights for a month or three and as my hair grows so quickly I should be able to do shampoo ads for grey hair by Christmas. Tired of all the hair dye and retouching. I need more freedom less stress so going au natural. If it is too much of a shock I can always take to the bottle again!

Tomorrow is Wednesday - Hump Day. Week is almost over. Happy Dance.

Is it possible to have everything?

I have been thinking about this all evening. To have everything in life is what we all strive for isn't it? But is it at all possible? Would we even know what "everything" was and when we had achieved it, if we did? Is there a moment in life when you can sit back and say "Yeah, I have everything".

I don't think it is part of human nature to let us rest at some point and say yes this is it, I want for no more. We always want more. If only we had  a good job, if only we had a partner, if only we had the big house, if only we had children, if only, if only..we keep adding to our list.

And everytime we choose another thing to make our life perfect another thing gets lost along the way. More money - work harder, less time for family and friends; have children less time for career, less time for self; bigger house, bigger debt; and no matter what we have someone is always going to have more. We never notice those that have less.

What is everything? Is it material things? Spiritual things? Animal, mineral or hoax? What are we buying into? Is more actually more, or is more, actually less?

I don't have an answer, but I have noticed that the various times during my life when I have realised that I have had it all, is usually just after I have lost something important ... my health, my Dad ... the things that no amount of money or success can ever replace and were mine, for free,  all along.

You really don't know what you've got until it's gone.....

We are apparently pessimistic about our future. A poll has officially declared that we hold a dismal outlook for our immediate future.

Daily we are assailed with climate change stories of woe. Just tonight I have heard that the ice caps will be gone shortly, that we are probably too late to save the Great Barrier Reef and the Kakadu Rainforest, and possibly our Murray-Darling River system may be beyond resuscitation.

I have also been told to expect that the oil will be $150 a barrel sooner rather than later, and that new green energies are going to add huge amounts to my cost of living. We aren't go to have enough food for everyone and what there is is going to cost more money as well.

As an aging baby boomer who only came to superannuation late I am not going to have enough money to live on in my retirement. My children are never going to be able to afford their own homes so they may have to live with us for ever...even if they marry. Hopefully I wont need old age care, because there wont be enough places in care for me, and if I need serious medical treatment I will either have to pay huge amounts of money out of my own pocket to ensure speedy treatment, or go onto a public waiting list where a lot of people only get the call for assistance after they have passed on (my Dad got an appointment with a dentist four months after he died).

The number of people on medication for depression and stress is growing every week. Small wonder. The media is, every day in every way, calling us to hysteria, mass moral outrage, and fear. Their motto, as always, is "if it bleeds, it leads".

I feel like my life blood is being sucked out of me and is gurgling down the public sewer. The only way for me survive is to rely on my own ability to build creativity, serentity and peace into my own exisitence and that of the people around me. I refuse to let "them" the self declared all knowing all seeing harbingers of doom to bring me down. I will surivive. I will thrive and I will overcome...

they are not going to push me over the edge... I will jump when I am good and ready

Tipping point.  She Who is Going to Kill Me With Kindness has submitted a request to MegaBoss for new window blinds in our offices…because ours are looking dull and shabby. My “window” is more a 30cm slit close to the ceiling to let some daylight into my cell, but the vertical blind has most of its slats. I wasn’t complaining. Once again it appears peevish and nasty to criticize someone when they are being nice, but it is too much nice. The cup of niceness is overflowing. I am suffocating in niceness. I am being stalked by NICE. The up side is (a) that it is not the frilly curtains I have been fearing and (b) when they cart me out of here in either a white jacket or a body bag, then the next person to do my job will have a nice office – right? My survival mantra is “better than a bitch” …I am mumbling it to myself so much that people are starting to stare and pull their children and dogs away from me.

I followed a midlife crisis into work . He was driving a little red Triumph sports car, with the soft black roof. Point of irritation was that his number plate was Stag. I wanted to throw up on his car. Or at least drive mine over the top of his. I guess he thinks he is really hot stuff. He was pathetic. He couldn’t even park the little thing in the near empty car park, and had to have two goes at getting it straight in the space. Sad man.

The family doctor and I have been telling Mr FD (doctor suggests, I inform) that he has needed to shed a few kilos for some time now. Suggested smaller portion sizes and better meal choices when away from home, some light walking. He is having knee problems as he is a little challenged in the height department and he actually has legs like matchsticks, carrying his weight on the tummy, so all the warnings are there. I thought he accepted the fact that he was a little too heavy, but I was delusional. Silly me! Yesterday he was contacted by the Red Cross as supplies of his blood group are low and they asked him to donate, as he did. I wish I could get the same response from him when I ask for help – re light bulb update: I  have to don the miner’s hat tonight to make dinner as my premade supplies are exhausted. Well, I would if I could see to find the miner’s hat in the shadows. I digress

 They weighed him while he was there, bless them. BINGO! Now he is overweight. He saw the actual kilo number on the little scale and was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see his weight. If someone had asked me to guess the amount of lard in the old man I would have guessed that exact amount, but not he apparently. He thought he was at least 10 kilos lighter. This is despite the fact that we have at least two different scales in our house that he could use to check at any time.  Now he needs to shed weight….not before, but NOW.  He may shed a wife too if he is not careful…

One of the departments I have some critical tasks with is being “outsourced” and “downsized” and “made redundant” by the end of the year and hence there has been a great stampede of exits. Result – no one to do the job and no one to even now the job needs to be done.  I am constantly assured that all will be well and this band aid has been applied during the change process, but first trial and the band aid fails and my task gushes arterial blood. I was going to lie in traffic this morning and then I thought, hey, not my problem. All I can do is ask for the things I need, walk around with a loud bell crying “bring out your dead, do my task” and do a triple circuit of the department of death and if it fails after that, not my problem. No one asked me if it was a good idea, let them take the responsibility for the mess. I will make sure blame goes to the right area, I am like that. If I am willing to fall on my sword for my mistakes then they had better be sure they are too. I do not go down with the ship, Captain.

So the wonderful thing maturity has taught me is to know when it is not my fault and to refuse to shorten my life over it. I do the best I can and then I move on. Like the Queen Marry in full sail. I refuse to be afraid anymore and let the dirt fall where it should. Amen.

            I am sounding like a bitter and twisted woman today…However, yesterday I went down to the lake. It was hideous. School holidays and the Mothers with Children set were out. Now I like children, love them in fact, had three of my own, bless them, BUT maybe it is postmaternal issues or something, but the little lovelies were so irritating yesterday. Truthfully I think it was their mothers who were irritating. So busy telling their woes to each other that they ignored the children. Always a good idea I think when you have three year olds who are rather unsteady of their feet and like to run down inclines to the lake with large rocks in their chubby hands to throw into the lake. I waited, ok I wished, no I prayed, for one of them to tumble in so that Mum had to make a mad dash to yank them out of the water, but God was busy somewhere elsewhere, giving Robert Mugabe Divine Right of Kings I suspect, and so they didn’t fall. It was close though.

Mother’s little joys were picking up large rocks out of the garden, as big as an adult’s palm, and running down to the lake’s edge and throwing the rocks in. Nice plop sound, so they did 4 or 5 return trips despite my evil eye to both them and their mummies. The rocks were in the garden bed to stop water run off and erosion in the garden, and so were integral to the garden , but no adult could compute that. Actually, I was more fearful of the horrors falling into the lake than the rocks. Don’t young mothers see danger, or is that something you only learn after your third trip to emergency? I am not talking about cocooning your monster , but just plain common sense. No three year old should be playing around murky depths without strict supervision. If one had fallen in, the water is so dirty it would have been hard to find them after the third time they went down, if they came up at all. Especially if a rock was tied to their leg…forgive me, I digress to my dreams yet again…Best to avoid the lake until after the holidays. Them not me.

Friday is my flex day. I think I will buy myself some sunshine and light and a pleasant disposition. Can you get that from Target?