I'm OFF!

You not going to see me around for a bit. I'm taking the kids to Gladstone this weekend for a family reunion - my Grandma is turning 90! And by the end of the year I think she is going to have about that many direct descendants! Fancy that hey. No wonder there's a population explosion when two people can be responsible for the churning out of another 90 in one lifetime. Ho-ly! Anyway it'll be awesome catching up with all the masses of cousins down there and seeing "Mumps" after all these years. Oh and from there we're heading to Gympie to visit with my mate Jenny and... get this bit... PICK UP MY T @B SAFARI CARAVAN WITH ADDED SOLAR PANELS, BIKE RACKS, AWNING, BATTERY PACK, BEER FRIDGE, PORTI-LOO.. Can you believe it!!! After being let down at the impossibility of buying them new here in Oz I posted a wanted add on Gumtree classifieds and last Thursday morning BILL (I love that guy) responded that he just advertised his 2006 as new model!!! I emailed him straight back and he called my mobile after answering the phone "IS THAT YOU BILL??? PLEASE BE BILL!!!!" We sorted out a deposit and WHAM BAM!! There you have it. He's towing it half way for me from Sydney and we're meeting in Gympie next THURSDAY!!!!!!!!!!!! You gotta help me find a name for it and us in it. I'm thinking something along the lines of T @BANACLE, T @BTALITARIANS, something like that! Hee hee hee. I'm going to pinching myself for ages.




Man I really have to go to bed, but I have to tell you I went to a crankin' little send off for a couple of friends who have also bought themselves a camper and are setting off around Australia very shortly (you don't have to be grey to be a nomad). It was very cool to be socialising with some dudes my own age as opposed the generation Yers I'm usually surrounded with. We were fully kickin' old school - jamming on Talking Heads songs together and strumming out on a Eukele. Talking about the days of Docs and trench coats and using solutions of gelatine to make temporary dreadlocks, can't remember what else coz I got a bit wasted. (Bless Greg for dropping me off and taking the kids to bed).

That reminds me - I took Izzy out to the pub for a meal the other night. Think All Men Are Liars or Priscilla, full yobbo pub. But anyway we were choosing a couple songs on the, I think otherwise totally unused, Jukebox and we were getting each other all psyched out talking about how everyone in the whole place was going to judge us on that one song each so it'd better be something that fully depicted us as human beings.. blah blah blah, putting the pressure on, giving ourselves the giggles... I ended up choosing Split Endz "I see Red, I see Red, I see Red" coz I had my period, I was pretty happy with how that went down amongst all the blokey-blokes. He thought Linkin Park was a safe bet, it'd have to be typically youthful, in your face, edgy, whatever, he didn't know the exact song but took a gamble.. It ended up being that "No one know what it's like, to be a sad man..." He absolutely hated being responsible for every doleful, sappy, crappy, mournful moment. He sat there almost dying of shame, demanding seriously that I save him from a shameful death by pulling the jukebox out at the wall socket. I just sat there laughing at him, I nearly peed myself... he was groaning in agony, I was laughing my guts out...

Oh, great news, Lucky Duck's legacy lives on - yesterday morning the girl-duck (Caramello)'s clutch of eggs hatched, now we have a beautiful little gaggle of Lucky-Ducks in the garden. They are SO lovely!!

Did a dinosaur get you?

Took a swim down the creek yesterday arve. God it was nice. It's just heavenly down there. A friend of Greg's came with us. He was riding his motorbike to work recently when a wallaby jumped out in front of him and he came a guttza big time on the bitumen. He's still got heaps of gravel rash all over his knees with scabs like an inch thick. Bubby took one look at him and asked "Did a dinosaur get you?". He reckons "Yep. Dorothy gave me a lovebite." Hee hee.

Stopped in at the block to check on my trees and met the neighbour on the other side. He's a chippie who's just started a shed on his block. He works over in Bali so isn't there too often. He didn't stop talking and seemed a bit cracked-on but otherwise a decent kinda bloke. It was good to meet him.

Greg was all set to sell his boats to finance the purchase of a little caravan for weekends away with the kids but the weather was perfect for fishing all weekend and with one look at the water I think he's changed his mind now.

Me and Mum rode our pushbikes to the beach on Saturday morning then hooked up with some school staff to have a walk through the bush to one of the bays and back. Then we had breakfast at one of the lady's 3 million dollar mansions overlooking the ocean and rode home again. I didn't apply any sunscreen as it was like 6.30am when we left home but I got so fried on the way home. First time I've had painful sunburn in a long while.

This blog must sound like a bit of a stuck record but we had another snake last night and this time Lucky-Duck wasn't so lucky :( The thing that sucks really bad is that the snake killed him and then discovered he was way too big to swallow and regurgitated him when he was only half way down. So it was all a big waste. Stupid snake's eyes where too big for it's stomach. It went and ate some eggs instead. Should of just done that in the first place!

That's Life.

Oh man, I've been so hung up on these retro teardrop T@B campers only to find out that the original German manufacturers went into receivership and the one and only importers in Australia haven't taken advantage of the manufacturers in the US who have got the rights to the product and designs and are still churning them out, or maybe thought it best not to. But anyway bottom line is the last new T@B offroad camper was sold in Victoria a week ago and the boats kind of sailed without me. It so frustrating because all the info' and write-ups and adverts are all right there in my face and yet I can't get my hands on one!! It's freakn me out! If I lived in any other country I could buy one no worries.

Izzy's in his last few weeks of Primary School and I can't hardly believe it. Rumour has it that the local high school has taken a serious downward turn in the last couple of years as well and has all these behavioural issues going on. I've decided to send him to a private college with a much more solid reputation. I hope he gets use to all the religious imagery and ideologies because he's never really been exposed to any yet. I've been equipping him with nice passive words like Agnostic to replace his preferred descriptor Atheist. My one hesitation is the long drive twice a day, but he'll travel in a flashy air-conditioned coach and they put DVD's on too.

After giving Paul an earbashing about the fact that before he knows it his son is going to be grown into a man and he's going to look back and regret not being around all this time and it's time he started making some choices based on what's good for Izzy and basically stop being such and narcissistic tool-head, he decided to move back up here. Izzy dying to go live with his Dad for a while and Paul is willing to live on the other side of the village which will make Izzy route to his new school a fair bit shorter. Izzy only has to be away from home for a couple of hours before Anakin is saying "Okay, lets pick Brussy up now... time to go get Izzy...". It's going to be a bit of a change for us all!

The last couple of times I've seen Paul my interest in any of his viewpoints/experiences/stories were at an all time low. What he's doing and the satisfaction he gets from things couldn't be more far removed from mine. I just don't get someone who chooses to get up and move a million miles away from their one and only child, probably the only one he's ever going to get to chase some lame pipe dream and he needs for me to spell shit out for him. Friggin stupid. And when he's here for a day or two every six months or so, I'm either envious of the time he gets to spend with Izzy like he's on a bloody holiday, while I'm still stuck doing the daily grind for the kids thinking shit I wish I could have three days where I had absolutely nothing to do besides have fun with my kid/s. Or he sleeps in both days and then is glued to the computer uploading photos to Facebook or music to his MP3 player with his kid on the other side of the room watching tele probably counting down the hours til his Dad skips out again and I'm seething away thinking, how can you be so LAME?!! How can you not want to spend every precious moment right by his side???? And then it's made even worse by the fact that Izzy puts all these demands on me and lays all these trips on me and he'd never put that kind of shit on Paul.

After seeing John Lennon on TV the other night it made me so sad to think of him and every other little kid whose parents skip out on them and let them down. I couldn't stop crying all night. Every kid deserves a Dad like Greg. Anakin has got it made in the Dad department that's for sure.

Anakin is such a beautiful child. We were out picking lychees today and he says to me "Haven't seen you today Mum can I have a kiss?" And he pulled down on my clothes to get me closer for a big smoochy one. It was SO sweet. (But we were the only ones home all day.. together..)

Last night we had fish n chips at the jetty. Greg did some casting and threw a line in. Izzy couldn't stop taking as he'd spent a couple nights with his cousin and was filling me in on all the (exaggerated) details of their adventures together. I think he might have eaten too many jube ears and drank too much ginger beer at the corner store over the weekend and was a bit hyped. Anakin was giving me heartattacks. As any two year old on a jetty at night who can't swim will do I suppose. He needs a runner lead like a little dog so he can go up and down alongside the hand rails. Next time I'm taking his life jacket for sure.

What's rolling

Broadband has finally arrived in this little household! "Hurray" wouldn't you say? Poor Greg had to spend ages in the roof shimmying around dropping down cables here and there. No small task for a guy his size. So here's some photo's I've been trying to put on for a while:
My two wise guys the night we caught the first snake. And RIP little Tielio, we loved you..briefly.

Horror heads:
Life around here has been nice and peaceful - except for Izzy going through these testosterone driven tanties about not being able to find his hair brush or a tea towel when he wants to drain his noodles (real crucial stuff like that).

You'll notice I've neglected my food and exercise journal for some time now. That's because I've decided I like morning teas with caramel slice and matchsticks. And my diet of sticky-rice and cheesy muffins.. After showing no improvement on the scales (I hate electric scales by the way) I've decided just to focus on the exercise side of the challenge and can at least say I have been proud of my consistency - walking and jogging with weights and pushing the stroller up and down the countryside and using the cross trainer often. It makes me feel a lot firmer - just not in the tummy area where I still have my baby flap (IT'S MY FLAP AND I CAN DO WHAT I WANT WITH IT!) And a mudguts that rivals Kimmy's...

I sometimes get the feeling things are becoming a bit sedentary and want to shake it up a bit with a move or a change. Me and Greg have been contemplating vacating the house and moving in some tenants while we rough it out at the block. Build a livable shed with one of these parked to the side that we can take to the mountains, national parks or beaches any weekend we like (check it out, how cool is it!! It's an off road on too!)

Oh man!! Getting one of these would be a dream come true! It would be a bit of a costly process. We'd need to put roller doors on the shed here to store a lot of our stuff in and spend a bit of money on the house so it's not falling apart for the tenants, finance the caravan and shed for the block etc.. But rent would cover our minimum repayments for both places and then we could slap on any extra we could as well as having a bit of a boho lifestyle on the side...perfect...