Random thoughts plucked from my brain

It's been days now since I had a moment to myself. Literally, a moment. I've been working from sun up to sun down and let me just say... Well, perhaps I'll just let this video do the talking:



Spousal insanity has been declared in this house, yes. Though I haven't done any writing on the walls.... yet.

So as the days have passed and I've been running around like a blue-arse fly (are they real? Is there really a species of fly called The Common Blue-Arse?), I have had these sorts of things floating past my attention span:

• When the dogs come inside at night for their nightly "Special Time With The Peeps" hour, I swear we say "Mat!" "On the mat!" "JAZZ!!!! MAT!!!!!" so often that we are now calling her Hazmat. Because Hazardous Material just about sums her up.

• Yesterday, in my "free time", I plonked the LGBB on the trampoline where she practiced her "running round and round reeeeeally fast" while I picked up dog biscuits. No, not Boneo's. Not Good-O's or any of those other cute-named shop bought biscuits. I mean like... rear end bickies. One of our girls (and I'm tippin' it's that old one *squints narrowly*) doesn't have enough fibre in her diet, let's just say, so I was reduced to picking up around this big backyard of ours what I can confidently describe were rabbit-poo-sized dog turds. Fun? You betcha! Nearly drove me bananas (please refer to vid at top of screen if you've forgotten already). And what made it all the more sort of stir-crazy hilarious was that, here I am, Pooper Scoopin' my way through a shopping bag full - they've been hella busy this week, apparently - and I look to my immediate left and there, right near my feet if you don't mind, is Hazmat. Lying upside down, all four paws luxuriantly in the air. Grinning madly and doing that favourite doggy move they do: the back scratch when they wiggle their bums from left to right to scratch nice and goooood. As if to say, "I'm having a glooooorious time here, all my work (shitting and eating) is done. Ahhh!"

I stood there, thinking "Nice. Thanks for rubbing it in, Turd-Burglar."

• Whichever comedian it was (I think Jerry Seinfeld?) who mused that when aliens spy on Earth, they will assume dogs are the leaders because we are going around picking up their crap, was so on the money.

• I then announced out loud, to the LGBB and possibly any neighbours who were outside in their yards, that I was going to get myself a new business card. "You poo it out, I'll clean it up for ya" I just feel like the world is one big pile of poop waiting for me to clean it up some days. If it's not the dogs, it's the LGBB. Yes. Toilet training is going THAT well *withered look to camera*

• I have it on good authority that this is still Tim. "Funny Tim", he's been christened by the LGBB. Even when he clearly states his name is Stevie (wtf? why not just Steve? why do you have to cutesy it up, you're already on a cutesy show with a cutesy haircut, man! Dooooh I'm cross). I hope I never have to have that sit-down "Oh dahl... c'mere, I need to tell you something" talk with her or she'll be crushed. And I don't wanna see that bottom lip pout when she realises that her Hi5 Tim had to stop singing and dancing because of his splintered vertebrae, the poor bugger.

• I loved Tim and Nathan. There. I said it. In a time of day (that time of day, you know the one) when I try to chop like a butterfly and cook like a bee - similar to Ali, uh huh - and need some sweet mercy, I usually allow an ep of Hi5 to sneak its way on the telly. And ok, so on the surface Nathan always appeared to be a tool. Or a fool. Or both. But seriously, so good at the old-fashioned piss-take of himself! Funny, funny stuff. Not afraid to be a dill, that's what he was.

• I can't bring myself to watch new episodes of Hi5. It's all gone to shit. Kelly and Nathan were just hanging on in those episodes they're showing now. She looks so incredibly sad and he looks, well, rather uncomfortable. And the newbies - Funny Tim, Funny Kathleen and Funny Charlie (who at the moment is still the real Charlie but with new-and-improved hair?) - are just wrong, wrong, wrong when you're used to seeing the originals in their younger, happier days. God, it's like Days Of Our Bloody Lives.

• I bumped into a local woman who used to own a café round these parts. It was this café where I first really started to head into the deeper writing of my book. I'd sit for a few hours and just let stuff pour out. Really good stuff, some of my best was written there. So I have a very soft spot for that place and certainly this lady, I'll call her M, and her husband, R, who is a chef extraordinnaire and created the most divine menu of curries and light eats. Healthy, nurturing, lovingly thought-out. Well. They've sold it to people who are in it for the money. The place has lost its appeal fast. So sad. I now use it as a quick coffee pick-up (they do great coffee still) and am trying to break the habit of going there for breaky now and then with the fam because in a few short weeks, hand-over will be complete and R will not be in the kitchen.

Anyway, M and I always got along but never really talked about any truly "deep" stuff. Picture us yesterday, for almost two hours, standing outside the local crystal and oogidy-boogidy shop (that's what I call it in front of the MIL - I think the stones and books on animal wisdom scare her so why not take advantage? muahaha) and discovering that our paths are heading along a very similar track. She has had the most amazing and unexpected confirmation about her natural ability to listen, to heal and uplift people, since selling her shop. Part of what made the place so fantastic was her. She is slowly beginning to accept this but is still mighty uncomfortable with it, even though it's plain as day to everyone else that what she brings to a place, you couldn't market or bottle or sell or teach. It's her.

Now this is very much the pot calling the kettle black here, I know, for I have a similar denial going on. I'd barely sat down, literally, and begun that grief workshop when I had several people tell me how amazing I am (eeek) and the good I am doing (bluuuuurgh). I'm too humble. That's my annoying problem.

So anyways.... I started thinking as I was listening to M and it started coming out that she had been told she was going to be helping women who had been in hardship and needed nurturing, a back rub, some counselling perhaps, or at least a place to talk and feel safe. Perhaps we'll be doing something together somehow, she and I. Because I too have been told, ever since the year I lost Ella, that I would be helping mothers and babies (a concept that, at the time, made me recoil in fear and doubt because I couldn't look at pregnant bellies then, let alone acknowledge the women they belonged to). And I, like her, have been resisting this suggestion because I haven't got any formal degrees hanging framed on my wall. She hit me when I said that, a "Get OUT!! That's what I think!" moment of complete understanding.

So yeah. I think it wasn't such a chance "bump into" meeting at all yesterday. And I will be watching with interest (we swapped numbers) where and when her new business venture pops up, because I think I just may become one of the practitioners there.

Gosh, there's sooo much more I want to tell you! But I seriously don't have time. BZZZZT! That's it. It's up.