Breaking the Stereotype

Contrary to the age old stereotype of the evil mother-in-law and her hatred for her new daughter-in-law (and vice-versa), i'm lucky enough to have a really fantastic relationship with my Mother-in-law.
I think that it may have something to do with me being the same age as her daughter, but being slightly distanced from the family because of that lack of childhood years spent together that means we relate well to each other. We can talk; often about things she wouldn't talk to her kids about.


Today, we all gathered at her house to pack up all her belongings, clean everything from top to bottom, and move her and her new husband into a house they recently purchased together. We rose early to get everything done, and slogged our guts out to finish packing boxes and load the mixture of trucks, vans and trailers we had collected to facilitate the move.

By 2pm, all of their worldly possessions were packed and mobile, ready to leave their past and head to their new home. Settlement on the new house was scheduled to happen at 2pm, so we were expecting a call at about 10 past to let us know that we could move everything in to the new place. At 2:10 on the dot, the phone rang. As my mother-in-law took the call, her happy grin slowly became a frown, and shortly after, she dissolved into tears. Somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong. The solicitors had the wrong paperwork, and the settlement couldn't go ahead.

I couldn't help but be upset myself as she crumpled into tears on my shoulder. She's a tiny little thing, small and petite, with not a scrap of fat on her, so as i hugged her, i was put in mind of hugging a tiny little sparrow. She felt fragile to me, and it made me glad that i was there for her - because if I were her own daughter, that fragility would be hard to bear. Parents are supposed to be the strong ones, and I think even as we get older, we find it hard to come to terms with the idea that our parents aren't infallible.

So tonight, my Mother-in-Law and Step-Father-In-Law are sleeping at my place. All their belongings are sitting outside my house in trucks and cars. And I know it could be a few days until they get everything settled - but that's okay with me, because while it may not be the expected reaction, i'm really very glad to have my Mother-in-Law in my life, and to share my home with her when she's trying to sort out her own.

Christmas

Christmas is almost here! I’ve been so busy pining for a holiday lately, that without me even realising it, it suddenly became December. And now there's only a week and a half left until Christmas.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how much I adore Christmas. It’s not a religious event for me. It’s not about the birth of Jesus, and it’s most certainly not about a fat man in a red suit sneaking into my house while I sleep and leaving presents.
For me, it’s about family. It’s about getting together with all of the people that I love and having a big meal. It’s about giving gifts to my loved ones to show them that although I don’t always say it, they mean a lot to me and I appreciate them.

But while these are the things that I love about Christmas, sometimes life and the people in it don’t seem to want to work with me on this. Some people seem to feel that Christmas is all about obligation, and whinging about Christmas obligations can just suck the fun right out of it in a matter of moments.

Take, for example my step-sister-in-law. This is only our second Christmas together as a family; and for some reason she felt the need to have a very long and complicated discussion (via facebook) about gift giving and who would be gifting to who and how much we were spending. This was while hinting all the while that she didn't want to buy anyone gifts.
As far as i'm concerned, gift giving does not require pre-meditation. The act of gift giving shouldn't be done with any sort of expectation of reciprocation, and most importantly, gift giving should never be done grudgingly. People seem to forget that there is a reason behind it all that isn't just 'because it's Christams and that's what you do.'


Christmas this year has been further complicated for me by crazy family members.
In every family, there are the ‘strange’ relatives. The unusual ones who are crazy or perpetually angry - or sometimes both.

In my family, we have more than our fair share of these, but most specifically my Uncle and Aunt on my Dad’s side. Some years ago, they moved away from Melbourne to a small town about two and half hours drive away. This wasn’t a problem for Christmas lunches, because after years of jumping from house to house at Christams, we had settled into a routine of having Christmas lunch at my parents place. It's the most centrally located place for all of the family, meaning that everyone has the shortest drive possible to spend Christmas with their family. My Aunt and Uncle knew this when they moved, and each year they drove down to see the family for Christmas.

But as the years progressed, my Aunty and Uncle became more and more withdrawn form the family, until they stopped coming to Christams all together.
Then this year, out of the blue, they decided that they wanted my 83 year old grandmother to spend Christmas with them. Only they didn’t want to make the two and a half hour drive to come and get her. Instead, my other Aunt (also on my dad's side) had to offer to give up her regular family get-together on Christmas day and take my Nanna all the way to spend the day with my crazy relatives. And while it sounds nice that my Nanna gets to see her son and daughter on Christmas day, there's one person that got forgotten in it all. My dad. And it's not a case that the two and a half hour drive is too much when the rest of his family lives here. It's that they didn't even invite him.

So I guess that Christmas isn't about family for everyone.


As well as Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles not being around for Christmas lunch this year, my brother and his wife are in England with their three kids, visiting my sister-in-law's family for the holidays.

So it's going to be a quiet one this year. Instead of 18 of us having lunch together, there will be five. But that's ok, because it's five wonderful family members that I get to spend a whole day with. And I get to spend the evening with my new family-in-law, who despite all the trauma of the gift-giving debate, are great people too.

And for me, that's what really makes Christmas.

Food Memories

Everyone has memories of the foods that they ate during their childhood – the standout dishes prepared by family members that have disappeared from their diet as they’ve grown up. Well, actually, I’m just assuming that everyone has these memories, because I certainly do. And those memories are shared by various members of my family.

For me, the standout dishes from my childhood were all cooked by my grandmother. My mum’s mum was always the standout cook in our family. She was Greek, although she emigrated to Australia from Egypt; and although she didn’t speak English that well, she spoke volumes through her cooking. Baklava, Rum Baba, Avgolemono Soup, Spanakopita, Dolmades and Galaktoboureko amongst other distinctly Mediterranean fare are the strongest food memories of my childhood. I was never one of those children who refused to eat anything without having tried it – I had an adventurous palate for a kid, and I adored these beautiful Greek foods that were rich in flavour.

Sadly, my Grandmother passed away some years ago, and since then the foods of my childhood have slipped from our diet. Like all the best cooks, most of her recipes were stored only in her mind, and while she was here to cook for us, we never thought to learn these secrets from her.

We tried, sometimes, to help with the cooking. But my grandmother was particular in preparation of her food, and you could easily fail basic food preparation while working with her. I can distinctly remember a time when I was around ten years old, helping her to make baklava. She reluctantly let me take charge of the pastry brush, and watched like a hawk while I brushed the sheets of filo pastry with what I thought were copious amounts of butter.

It wasn’t long before the brush had been removed from my hands so that she could slap on copious amounts more butter as though she’d never heard of cholesterol or calories (which she probably hadn’t); filling the places that in her mind she could see needed more. From then on I stepped aside, letting her work her magic. Once the Baklava was finished, my mother then failed dismally at arranging the baklava on the plate in a satisfactory manner. My mum and I laugh about this now, but I see that same level of particular-ness in myself all the time.

It might seem overly anal, but the results of her cooking spoke for themselves.


It’s been quite a few years since my grandmother passed away, and most of these foods have been just a distant memory for me. Then recently, my mum bought me a Greek cookbook which turned out to be the best cookbook that I have ever owned. I made a few of the recipes, and the flavours therein reminded me so much of my grandmothers cooking that I became inspired. My mum booked us into a Greek cooking class which actually turned out to be run by the same woman who had written the cookbook, and after making some fantastic foods there, I became inspired to try to recreate some of my grandmother’s recipes.


Which brings me to where I’m at now. The first place I had to look was in her battered old cookbook. My mum held on to it after her death, knowing that a lot of her recipes were based around the basic ones in this cookbook.
The problem is that the cookbook is in Greek. And it was written in the 1950’s, so it’s slightly out-dated Greek. Well, at least I think it is. I can’t be sure because I don’t actually speak or read Greek. Which makes the whole idea of using my Grandmother’s cookbook to relive my childhood food memories ever so slightly more difficult.

My first attempt at recreating 'Galaktoboureko'

Luckily for me, it’s the 21st century, so I have many and varied tools at my disposal – most crucially, the ability to switch quickly between a Greek and English keyboard on my iPad, and Google translate.

With these two things, I’ve begun the long and arduous process of reading a book that to me, appears to be nothing but a bunch of squiggly lines.

Despite how slow the going is, it’s not been dull because it’s amazing to see the foreign characters appear on the screen and then miraculously appear on the other side of the screen in English. And it’s also been quite amusing to read the garbled translations.

You can’t help but laugh when you find a chapter in the meat section titled “minds” or a recipe tells you to do things like “Dive your fingers into some water” or “Anoint with butter”.

Or when you mistype some characters and end up with translations like “Boiled Husband Soup”.


Translating the recipes is proving to be a painstaking, but incredibly enjoyable experience. And more than allowing me to rediscover some well-loved foods, I feel as though it’s bringing me a little closer to a grandmother who during her life was always ever so slightly distant to me through the language barrier.

Super Secret Recipe

This photo dates from almost the
same era as my kitchen.

Last night, my Brother-in-law came over so that I could help him prepare his ‘secret recipe lasagne’. I’m not sure how it came to be a secret recipe, because I can’t imagine anyone ever asks another person for a lasagne recipe; but at some point it became a closely kept secret, and since then it’s been known to all as ‘secret recipe lasagne’.

The reason that I became privy to this super-secret special recipe last night is that I offered to make the lasagne sheets for him. That’s right, you read it correctly – I offered to make the pasta sheets from scratch. To some that might seem crazy, but I find that kind of repetitive cooking task almost soothing, the same way that I find painting walls soothing. It quiets a noisy brain. And I have an incredibly noisy brain.


I guess this kind of quality addition to the secret recipe lasagne obviously ranked me high enough to learn the secret formula. I like to imagine it as like being promoted in the coca cola company and finally learning the secret formula for coke. I now know what few others in the world know.


Luckily, because I have some modicum of anonymity on here, I can share that secret recipe with you without fear of retribution. Are you ready for it? Are you ready to hear what his super-secret ingredient that he refuses to share with anyone is?


Leggo’s Bolognese sauce.


His sauce is made from a jar.

Suddenly the ‘super-secret’ aspect of it all makes a lot more sense.

I think I might have to start claiming the ‘secret recipe’ clause for some of the meals I prepare. Like ‘2 Minute Microwave Super-Secret noodles’ or ‘Subway Secret-Recipe Cookies’.

The Bones of Wisdom: A Cautionary Tale for Mother's Day

Motherly advice is always
just a phone call away

The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent.

It was a Wednesday night like any other. Outside under a vast and solitary sky, the rural suburb of Torrytown* was bathed in the soothing, cool glow of a full moon. Amidst the wash of pale blue, a single ray of yellow light peeked out from behind the curtains of a cosy little house nestled into a quiet Torrytown valley.

Behind those curtains sat a young woman of extraordinary beauty, intelligence and Scrabble playing skill**. Encased in the warmth of her home, she sat quietly; tapping away on her keyboard, chatting online to a friend in a strange and distant land.

As she worked away on the keyboard with one hand, the other speared tiny pieces of salmon onto a fork from the plate beside her. She ate absently, her mind on the conversation and not really on her dinner.

Suddenly, a sharp pain jabbed at her throat! Her hands flew to her neck. The fork clattered to the table. Her typing stilled. She gasped!
Looking down at her dinner, the cause of her pain became apparent.

With shaking hands, she reached for the keyboard and typed a desperate message that crossed thousands of miles to tell her friend the cause of her agony.


'I'm choking on a fishbone!' She wrote. 'In my (allegedly) de-boned fish!'

She clutched at her throat, clawing at it as though she could remove the bone from the outside. Her mind flew to the advice that she had received about these kinds of things; tid-bits of advice from mothers, uncles, grandmothers, fathers.
She sifted through these kernels of wisdom, searching for something she knew she'd heard about fish bones.
'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' - No.
'Always wear clean underwear,' - No.
'Don't pick your nose' - NO!
'Be careful of bones in fish or they'll get stuck in your throat.'; YES! That's it! Her mothers voice rang though her mind, telling her over and over again to be careful.

Backwards and forwards she played this information in her head, as the fish bone jabbed painfully at her throat. But try as she might, she could not find a single piece of advice in that vast catalogue of wisdom to tell her what to do if that initial pearl of wisdom should fall through!

From the other side of the world advice was coming in thick and fast from her friend (the guy who sometimes kicks her ass at Scrabble, and who has this awesome website, and he's really funny and handsome, and writes great)***.
'Are you dying? Should I long distance call you an ambulance'? he typed. 'Can't you just pull it out? Mash the keyboard if you're turning blue!'

She tried to reach in and grab the bone, but alas, her hand was too big (or her mouth too small) and her gag reflex much too strong.


'Blergh, cough, splutter' she typed back; then realising that her fingers still worked - 'No, I can't.'

'You should have listened to your mother' he typed back. 'Mothers always know best.'


Inspiration!

Gasping for what could be her last breaths she grappled for the phone and hit speed-dial. Her mother answered after what seemed an agonisingly long time.


She croaked out her dilemma through stilted breath, feeling the fish bone jabbing into the soft flesh of her throat with every word.

'Mum! you never told me what to do when your advice failed!' She cried out.

'Bread.' Her mother told her calmly and knowingly. 'Eat a large piece of dry bread and it will dislodge the bone.'

With this simple advice, and another firm 'Mothers know best' from the Las Vegas Larrikin, she picked up a slice of bread and began to chew.

She could feel the fish bone moving a little as she swallowed the great wodge of bread, then a little more when she swallowed another. But four slices of bread later, while her breathing had eased, the little fish bone was still sharp against her throat.

'Mothers know best' she said to herself, 'until they don't! And then what?'

So what does one do when all the advice a mother can give you fails dismally?! She was stumped. Short of a trip to the ER, she had no idea how to remove the fish bone. If only her gag reflex wasn't so strong and her hands too big (or her mouth too small), then she could remove it easily enough.

The answer, then, was simple. What do you do when all roads lead nowhere? You have a drink.

There was some element of logic in this, although the specifics eluded her. Something about the medicinal, sterilising properties of alcohol and the muscle relaxant type of effect that it would have on her body.

So she poured herself a Bourbon and drank it down fast. Then she had another. And another. She could feel the tension in her muscles melting away, could feel her senses dulling. After four bourbons in as many minutes, she began to feel that she had underestimated her ability to extract the fish bone manually.
Suddenly, her hand seemed smaller (or her mouth larger) and her gag reflex dulled. With the kind of swift (and thoughtless) decisiveness characteristic of a drunk, she contorted her hand and somehow, she reached into her mouth and down her throat to pluck out the sharp little bone.

Later, she would look back on this moment and be unable to explain how she had managed it. Sober attempts to replicate the fitting of her hand into her mouth proved impossible. It was as though some law of physics had been broken - or perhaps just stretched momentarily to allow her to do things that she couldn't normally. It wasn't the first time that Bourbon had this effect on her, and she was sure it wouldn't be the last.


She called her mother in relief, telling the tale of how bourbon had worked more effectively than bread, believing wholly that things had come full circle and she was now the one handing advice to her mother.

'Have another bourbon' her mother told her knowingly, with the tone of one passing on an important token of wisdom. 'The alcohol will do your throat good, you know.'


This brings us to the moral of this tale, which is threefold:

1. If you're a mother, give advice to your children that is not just cautionary, but which is also problem solving. There will always be those rare times when caution isn't enough.

2. When advice fails you, you can always fall back on alcohol and its ability to help you defy the laws of physics.

And finally (and most importantly):
3. No matter what you think, Mothers always know best.


*names have been changed to protect those suburbs involved.
**My story, so I'll look however I want!
***Individual results may vary

Keeping my Heart in my Sock

Freaked out

I’ve never really understood those ‘Funniest Home video’ type shows, where everyone pisses themselves laughing at some poor person falling down, getting kicked in the nuts or crashing a bike/wheelbarrow/pogo stick in what could only be a dangerous and painful way.
That kind of thing just doesn’t make me laugh. So you can imagine my horror when I got to witness a real life version of one of those videos the other day.

I dropped in at my parents place, and it turned out that Mum was babysitting my niece and nephew. It was a nice day so we were outside throwing a ball around. My niece tossed the ball up in the air, way above Mum’s head, and for some inexplicable reason known only to her, my arthritic 60 year old mother leapt to catch it. She tripped on a loose paver and went down like a sack of spuds, whacking her head hard against the bluestone brick border on the nearby garden bed.

I freaked out. I felt my heart drop so far I was scared to look down in case I saw it lying at my feet. It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen happen. I’d never thought about it before, but at some point you reach an age where falling down becomes a really big deal. A while back I saw a woman of about 60 or 70 stumble in the street and hit the ground with a disturbing ‘thwack!’ and it was a terrible, horrible thing to see. But this time I wasn’t just watching some random person fall down, it was my Mum; the person who will forever in my eyes epitomise the strength and power of being a grown-up. It was a horrifying thing to see happen.

My niece and Nephew didn’t understand what the big deal was – after all, they fall down all the time. They couldn’t work out why their Nanna taking a bit of a spill had everyone running around like crazy.


Mum was ok – she had a bit of a headache, a badly scraped arm and bruised ribs, but no serious injuries. Despite the fact that she was ok, I still felt as though I was carrying my heart around in my shoes for the next few 24 hours.


And if I had through some freak of chance caught the whole thing on tape? There is no cash prize that could ever persuade me to air it on national TV with a cheesy voiceover and comedic sound effects.

Uncle Colin

Yesterday, while I was home cleaning up the mess after a torrential downpour that left my street with a fast flowing river running through it, my Uncle Colin passed away.

It wasn't unexpected - he had been a very sick man for some time now. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and given just a matter of months to live. I was lucky enough to be able to spend Christmas with him one last time before he passed away, and even in sickness he was the same friendly, chatty character who laughed a lot and loved his family openly.


Uncle Colin wasn't really even my Uncle - he was my Dad's Uncle, but he was more involved in our lives than my real Uncles ever have been. He and his wife have been there for all of our major life events - births, deaths, marriages - whatever happened, they were part of the family during it all. We spent Christmases and holidays together, and his familiar throaty laugh will always be prominent in my memories of those events.

Right now the news is too fresh for me to really feel anything about it, but already I know that I'll miss him and that it won't be the same at all those family events without him smiling and laughing along with the rest of us.

Random Childhood Memory #4

My grandma used to have this liquor cabinet that was chock full of liqueurs, spirits and things with foreign labels that I still don’t even know the names of. I was always curious about them, because my parents drank pretty much every night, and at family functions the booze cabinet got a pretty good work out.
As a little kid at those family functions, I would hop from lap to lap, having my cheeks pinched, giving the old ladies the attention that they loved, and in return receiving sips from their glasses. Port, Ouzo, Brandy, Scotch, Wine, Beer – every glass was a new experience, a new taste.

My grandma, being a big softie, knew that I was intrigued by the endless bottles of mysterious alcohols in the cabinet, and so when I stayed there she would often let me taste tiny little bits from one or two of the bottles.

Then one day when I was about 11, I decided I wanted to see what it was like to have more than just a little sip. I snuck in and filled half a drinking glass with port, and the other half with coke. Turns out 11 year olds aren't that great at estimating a standard drink.


Needless to say, the results of that little experiment kind of diminished my enthusiasm for the mysteries of the liquor cabinet. And now, at 28 years old I have only recently been able to drink port without getting a little pang in my stomach at the smell.

Satisfaction

Ahhh, Barbie car. 25 years of waiting for a childhood toy desire to be satisfied, taken care of in a single hour of play.

Oh yeah, I think my Niece liked it too.

Birthdays & Barbies

Today is my Niece’s 6th birthday. There are positives and negatives to celebrating a sixth birthday I guess. The positive is that she can actually tell you what she wants for her birthday; the negative is that she may not just be happy with any old thing like she would have a couple of years ago.

I asked her about a week ago what she wanted for her birthday and she rattled off a few things, the main stand out being that she wanted a toy cat. That seemed pretty straight forward, so that was my purchase of choice.

Naturally, me being me, I forgot about shopping for her present until today, so at lunch time I headed over to Kmart, which is the only decent sized store anywhere near my work.

After 15 minutes of scouring the shelves for a toy cat, I was forced to concede that they didn’t have any, and that my laziness had left me unable to fulfil her birthday wish. This left me with the dilemma of what would make a suitable replacement for a toy cat.

Another 15 minutes of window shopping still had me drawing a blank, so instead of trying to find something that she would approve of, I decided I would just give in to my inner child and purchase something that I had always wanted for myself when I was her age. It seemed slightly selfish, but sensible – after all, don’t all six year olds like the same sort of things?

Having an older brother, I spent most of my time playing with toy trucks and running around in our sand pit, so there weren’t a lot of girly toys that I wanted. But what always stands out in my memory is the yearning I had for my very own Barbie car. I think it was a combination of the older brother influence with the car, and the girly side of me that wanted something for my Barbie dolls. Plus, back in the 80’s, Barbie had some seriously good taste in cars. I dreamt of owning this awesome corvette:

To go with my Dream Glow Barbie & Ken Dolls:

Ah Ken - what a Dreamboat!

So with that in mind, I headed to that one toy aisle that smacks you in the face with its pink sparkliness, and found the Barbie dolls.

It took me a little while to realise I’d found them, because I kept looking past the trampy, hooker-ised dolls to try to find Barbie - It took a minute or two to twig that they were the Barbies. Sadly, 20 years have not been kind to Barbie. I guess after the divorce with Ken she got a little desperate and has had to whore it up a bit. I chose the least whore-ish Barbie, but even she still looks like she bought her shoes at a stripper supply store.

Those moveable joints must
make pole dancing a breeze

Sadly her car isn’t quite as cool any more either. She’s gone from a shiny metallic Corvette to something that looks a lot like a hot pink convertible Smart Car:

I can only assume she had to sell the Corvette to pay for her many, many surgeries.


Despite my disappointment in the changes to Barbie since my childhood,  I grabbed the doll and the convertible and headed to the checkout. After all, little girls love dolls, and they love the colour pink, so what is there for my Niece not to love?

As the check out chick was scanning my items, she said to me 'Oh, someone's a Barbie fan!'
'Yeah,' I said  'Aren't all little girls Barbie fans?'
'Not these days.' she told me authoritatively 'No, not anymore.'

So it appears my theory on all little girls wanting the same things may be slightly flawed.
I guess we'll know at 6 o'clock tonight. On the plus side, I might find myself in permanent possession of a Barbie car, thus fulfilling my childhood dream (if in a slightly sluttier way than I imagined at age six).

Weekend

I’ll warn you now that this is an insanely dull post, but I needed to vent, because I have had the most emotionally draining weekend ever.


On Friday my Nanna had her post surgery appointment with her surgeon. They told her that she needs to have low dose chemotherapy as a follow up treatment to make sure the cancer doesn’t return.
That was the final straw for her– she just totally lost it. All she heard was ‘chemotherapy’. She blocked out all the ‘low dose’ parts; about how different it is to regular chemotherapy; how you don’t lose your hair and most people don’t even get nauseous. She just kept telling us over and over how she didn’t want to lose her hair, and how she wasn’t going to have the treatment; that she was 81 and she wasn’t going to live forever anyway.

I spent all of Saturday with her trying to cheer her up and trying to stop her from talking herself out of having the treatment. By the end of the day she was a lot better, but it was exhausting – she’s very pessimistic at the best of times, so you can imagine that something like this had her at her peak.

I’m worried for her. Not because she needs the chemotherapy – honestly, if you met her you wouldn’t worry either. She’s one of the toughest 81 year olds you’ll ever come across. And she’s bounced back from her surgery quicker than a lot of people half her age do. I worry because she’s confused about the facts of her illness, and she might just end up getting very sick from the cancer because of something as stupid as thinking she might lose her hair because she won’t listen to the people telling her otherwise.



After a stressful Saturday, Sunday saw a couple of very close friends of mine who have been together for five years breaking up (again). They’ve split up about 5 or 6 times during the course of their relationship because they’ve known from the start it wouldn’t work out long-term. She wants to get married and have kids; he is vehemently opposed to both – to the point where he tried to get a vasectomy at age 23. They told him of course that they wouldn’t do it until he was older because a lot of people change their minds about these things. She found out about him trying and was furious – yet somehow that wasn’t enough of a warning for her that it was time to end things.

They moved in together about a year ago and that was the beginning of the end. You can’t live with someone and continue to ignore the fact that you want very different things. So Sunday was spent consoling one of them. It seems harsh, but I’m a little out of patience with their break ups. Every time they split up, I spend days comforting one or the other, only for them to get back together almost immediately.
Now when it happens, I feel as though I have nothing left to say to them. I feel as though I just want to yell at them to just get on with their lives and that they’re both better off apart.

At least this time it will probably stick, because they will be putting physical distance between themselves when she moves out.


So that was my weekend – cancer and break-ups. Not the relaxing weekend I had been hoping for.

Long Weekend

Over the long weekend, we went down to KJ’s family beach house. It’s a fair way away from home – probably about a two and a half hour drive. I absolutely hate car travel with a passion. The second someone invents a teleport device I will be their first customer, no matter what the expense. If I could afford it, I would buy a helicopter and fly everywhere - I hate car travel that much.


Two and a half hours is pretty much my limit for being in a car non-stop. I used to be able to go a lot longer, but then we decided one year that driving to Queensland would be a good idea. By Dubbo I was so car sick that I still felt like I was still in the car even when I was out of it. I even felt car sick while I was driving, which is a pretty impressive feat. By the time we reached Redcliffe, I couldn’t go on. We stopped by the side of the road while I attempted to systematically throw up all of my internal organs in alphabetical order, and after that I didn’t really feel like going any further. I managed to make it back to Surfer’s Paradise eventually, where I lay in a pathetic heap for a week and then I flew home. Not exactly the holiday I had dreamt of.

That trip ruined me for car travel. So I don’t particularly relish the idea of travelling to the beach house for the weekend, although I do enjoy my time there once we arrive. The next hardest thing, after the car travel, is the fact that there is no internet access. If you have an iPhone or something similar you can get a very poor internet connection by holding the phone up to the highest point on the window while carefully balanced on one foot on the fireplace hearth, but that’s not exactly ideal.

Now, I have access to the internet pretty much 24/7. I’m online all day at work, then permanently at home. I’m a massive internet nerd. It’s my go-to place for everything. Don’t know the answer to a question? Google it. Don’t know where a town is? Look it up on an online map. Want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world? Read the news online.

So three days without any access to the internet was absolute torture. I had to let such questions as “Can dogs lose their sense of smell?” and “If your eyeball was hanging out of the socket, could you still see out of it?” go unanswered. (I have a Dr. Karl podcast to thank for that last one).

Life is hard for a nerd without the internet. So I’m happy to be home and back to my constant connection to the big, wonderful worldwide web.

Easter

Tomorrow is the beginning of the Easter long weekend. I absolutely love this time of year. Every year when the weather starts to slip into Autumn coolness, I wake up with a sense of quiet excitement that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Something about the air makes me feel good. I wake up with a smile on my face every day. I feel comfortable and happy and I just want the days to go for longer so I can enjoy them all the more.


I think the reason for this is that this time of year was always the highlight of my year when I was a kid. Easter meant chocolate and Easter Egg hunts and waking up to find that the Easter Bunny had been and hidden chocolate all around the place. My Mum’s side of the family is Greek, so that meant that most years I got to celebrate two separate Easters. As a little kid, the only thing better than an Easter full of sugary goodness was having two Easters full of sugary goodness.

On the night before Greek Easter, we would go to church and after the service all hundred-odd people in the church would light a candle and walk around the block. To this day I still have no real idea what it was all about, but when you’re little being part of a crowd that large and taking a candle-lit stroll is exciting.

On Greek Easter, we would head to my Aunty and Uncle’s house where all of the extended family would gather, and we would have a huge feast; the centrepiece of which was a full spit-roasted lamb.

Not long after all of the Easter goodness, it would be my birthday. I have so many happy memories attached to childhood birthdays that I couldn’t begin to recount them all. Our tradition on birthdays would be for the person whose birthday it was to wake up first and drag the other two siblings out of bed. We would all head to Mum & Dad’s room, where we would all pile onto the bed to open presents.


That’s a tradition that we held onto until we moved out of home. Even on my 21st birthday, we still all piled onto the bed and exchanged gifts. Birthdays may have lost a little of their tradition over the years but I still get this happy, excited feeling every year when we reach April.

Easter might not bring the chocolate and the Easter Bunny any more, but it does bring a four day weekend which is exciting in its own way.

I stopped going to church with my family a long time ago, but we still have our family Easter celebrations. We still head to my Aunty and Uncle’s place every year for the spit-roast and that’s where I will be this Sunday.


Like all religious celebrations, for me Easter is more about celebrating family than it is about biblical stories. And even though I’ve long stopped celebrating Easter for its traditional meaning, I believe that for the rest of my life, the traditions of my childhood will mean that I wake up one day in Autumn with that sense of quiet excitement that makes me smile for no real reason.

Random memory from my childhood #2

I was about 10, my brother was 12, my sister 8. My parents had gone over to the neighbours place for a minute, leaving us to continue our game of backyard cricket. Almost immediately after they left, my brother hit the ball straight into the kitchen window, putting a massive crack in it.

A recent window breakage by my brother had resulted in him being sent to his room without being allowed to watch Transformers (clearly we had a very rough childhood), and since no one wanted that hideous punishment to be doled out again, within seconds he had convinced us to tell our parents that a bird flew into the window and broke it.

We did and they believed us. That day was the magical, wondrous day when we realised that we outnumbered our parents, and if we stuck together we could get away with just about anything.


When I remembered this last week, I confessed it to my Mum because I wanted to know if she genuinely believed us or not. Usually when a bird would fly into the window, it would be too stunned to fly away for a while, and I had to wonder whether or not she believed us given our total lack of physical evidence.
Sadly, she didn’t even remember the incident although she was very amused to find out that we banded together to lie about it.

So I will never know whether our invincibility was imagined or not. I think I’ll choose to go on believing that it was. It’s like many of the things you believe in as a child – they're pretty unlikely to be true, but the world is a happier place when you choose to believe anyway.

A New Niece

I have a brand new Niece! She was born yesterday morning. She’s a cute little thing - I even held her (briefly). Usually I refuse to hold babies because they kind of freak me out, but with every baby my Brother & Sister-in-law have, I get ever so slightly less freaked out by them. If only they would have 20 or 30 more so that I could get properly used to them.

Babies are cute and stuff, but it would be great if you could skip that whole first bit where they’re so small and breakable and smelly and goo-ey, and skip right to the bit where they can go to the toilet on their own and tell you if they want something instead of just crying. I can barely look after myself let alone a little person who needs things all the time and can’t tell you what they are.

I guess what I'm saying is that babies are really so much nicer when they belong to someone else.

Learn a Language

I’ve decided I’m going to learn another language. I’ve wanted to learn to speak another language for as long as I can remember. At school we studied Italian and I was quite good at it at one point, but then the distractions of high school took over and now, like every other Victorian student I can pretty much only remember how to say one or two things, most of them related to the fictional characters from our text books.

My first choice was German. It’s a bit similar to English and I like
the way that everyone always sounds angry when they speak in German. I thought it would be a good language to know because I could express my thoughts aloud in an angry sounding way as a sort of stress release – and people wouldn’t bug me about it, because an angry person speaking the same language as you is just an angry person – a person cursing in German is angry and possibly dangerous, and people don’t mess with that.

Sadly, I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to learn german with me, so that kind of killed that idea. There’s no point learning another language if you have no one to speak to.

After German, I didn’t really have a preference. I debated learning Italian again because it would be a lot easier to learn having some idea about it already. Then my sister expressed an interest in learning Greek - so I think that’s what it will have to be.

My mum’s side of the family is mostly of a Greek background, so pretty much all of my relatives on her side speak Greek in some form or another. Sadly, Mum never thought to teach us the language while we were little, so none of us speak it. It kinda makes us the odd ones out at family events. We’re like the family that went wrong. In fact, if you’ve ever seen the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” you’ll know what outcasts we are – my mum basically went through the whole secretly dating an Aussie thing with her Dad with very similar results – although not as comedy-movie weird. That pretty much sums us up – we love our family, but we do things a little differently.

So later in the year when the courses start again, we’ll be heading along to ‘Greek level 1’. And if I’m lucky, soon I’ll be able to say something in Greek other than “Nice Flowers” or “Say hi to your Mum for me”.

February - The Blah Month

February is such a Blah month. That’s right – Blah with a capital B. Nothing good ever happens in February, hence there is never anything to write about.

The highlight of my month is that my mum is cooking a roast for dinner tonight. She’s promised me lots of vegetables as well - this should go a long way in ensuring that my horribly low fruit and veg intake doesn’t give me scurvy or something.


Mum makes an awesome roast. She always has, but ever since my brother and sister-in-law moved back to Australia, it’s been even better. My sister-in-law doesn’t eat red meat, so that means that when we have a roast we have either lamb or beef as well as roast chicken.

Mmmm, I’m drooling just thinking about it.

I like dinners like this, because it’s good to see all of my family. My niece is 5 now and is an absolute crack up. She’s at that age where she’s still cute and little, but she’s starting to become an independent person which means she comes out with some hilariously grown-up sounding things. You don’t realise the stupid grown-up turns of phrase that you use until you have a 5 year old repeat them back at you.

Sad, really, that this is the highlight of my month.
The only good thing I can say about February is that there is only 2 and a half weeks of it left. Then we’ll be in March and the year can really kick off.

Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve, and while I really have nothing much to share, I felt like I should post something, because it will be a few days before I have time to post again, and I hate to feel like I’ve gotten slack about blogging.

I’ve been up since 7am helping to prepare things for the big family lunch tomorrow. It’s a huge traditional meal, and there are usually about a dozen of us there for lunch and 18 or so for dinner. It’s a big day. We spend a lot of time setting up the table in a kind of explosion of Christmas decorations - green tablecloths, red sparkly placemats, coloured crackers and Christmas confetti everywhere. It’s like Christmas threw up all over the table, and that’s the way it should be – festive to the point of tackiness. It wouldn’t be Christmas otherwise.

Santa has already been, dropping off a new 46” LCD TV (I must have been really, really nice this year!) that I will later crank up carols by candlelight on in a last ditch attempt at maximising my Christmas spirit.

Now all that’s left to do is sit back, put on some carols, open a beer and wait for tomorrow to roll around.

I hope that everyone reading this has a Christmas Day as happy and enjoyable as mine promises to be. Merry Christmas everyone!

Smell Memory

I put my Christmas tree up over the weekend. It’s a fake one, which is kind of a letdown, but we can’t have a real tree for many and varying reasons, the most important of which are that KJ gets hay fever from them and I’m too lazy to clean up after a real tree.

Instead I went to my brother’s house and got my Christmas jollies out of inhaling the pine-ey goodness of their real Christmas tree.
The smell of pine trees always makes me happy because it reminds me of childhood Christmases and the excitement of running downstairs on Christmas morning to find the pile of presents that Santa had left for me. It reminds me of big family lunches and eating so much food that I would feel sick by the end of the day.

This weird kind of smell-memory got me thinking about what other smells had some kind of significance for me. This is what I’ve come up with so far, but I’m sure the list would be much longer if I spent a bit more time thinking about it.

• Freshly ironed clothes smell like responsibility to me. I can only assume that this is because the smell of ironing clothes was always present at the big events where your mum wanted you to look your best. First days of school, big functions, job interviews – these kinds of responsible moments were all moments where your clothes had that newly ironed smell.
  
  
• The smell of truss tomatoes reminds me of my grandfather. He used to grow tomatoes in his backyard and from memory he had quite the green thumb. To this day, the smell of truss tomatoes always makes me feel warm, safe and happy. It makes making salad a very happy experience.
  
  
• The smell of ‘Acqua di Gió’, while it makes me want to gag, reminds me of a boyfriend I had who was pretty influential in my life, but who acted very melodramatically (I think he thought he lived in one of those generic teen angst TV shows). Similarly, the smell of ‘Joop! Pour Homme’ reminds me of the guy I lost my virginity to.
  
  
• The smell of mothballs reminds me of my grandmother – not because she had that old lady mothball smell like so many old women do, but because she was a dressmaker and used mothballs in the endless bolts of fabric that cluttered her house.
  
  
• The smell of burning rubber reminds me of summer. I know that’s kind of bizarre, but I’m pretty sure it relates to a great summer weekend spent at Summernats many years ago.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has any weird smell memories like these.

Up in 3D

I’ve been sick all weekend and now that it’s Monday and I’m back at work with more stuff to do than I have time for, I’m feeling pretty grumpy - but I’m going to blog anyway. So forgive what will most likely be a short and very dull post.

In Friday’s illness, I forgot that I had promised I would take my 5 year old niece to the movies over the weekend, so on Sunday afternoon I dragged myself out of bed and went to see ‘Up’ in 3D. I haven’t seen a 3D movie since I was about 7 years old and you had to wear those weird cardboard glasses with one red and one blue cellophane eyepiece. This was pretty different to that. Instead of the old cardboard glasses, you got to wear these weird Buddy Holly looking things. And the 3D stuff was way cooler than I remember it ever being before.

I have to say the whole thing was pretty cool – once my eyes adjusted to it. During the previews I thought that it was entirely possible that the movie was going to make me motion sick because my eyes couldn’t focus fast enough to keep up with it all, but once we got into the movie itself, it was fine.

The only thing wrong with the entire movie was that I had to pay so much bloody money to see it! Somehow it just doesn’t seem right to have to pay more than what a regular adult movie ticket costs for a 5 year old’s ticket. But then I was sick and grumpy, so maybe it’s not all that bad.