The month of love. The fact that it is also the shortest month is not at all coincidental.
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The month of love. The fact that it is also the shortest month is not at all coincidental.
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Fun in a box 
Speaking of love, we went to the Cat Show at Nerang yesterday & fell in love with a rather large white Maine Coon. He was very similar to the lovely boy we lost last year. He is only young, but the breeder expects him to get to 12 kilos.
I’m not sure the dog deserves that…
Still, he was ever so gorgeous & we are both pining.
He’s not for sale as he consistently wins Best In Show.
Still, he will have little baby kittehs.
Have you spent much time amongst the giants of the Kitteh World, MM?
I know someone who has one. Actually, it must be John and Libby. As far as I know they’re very chill and unlikely to pose much threat to the dog.
John as in Uncle RV? Can you ask them to assess their threat level for an elderly but still jaunty papillon?
Sounds gorgeous! *sigh* Sometimes I wish the Boss wasn’t allergic. Oh, well, one less creature to clean up after.
We met some Siberian Forest Cats & got to talk to their breeder.
She swears that they are hypoallerginic & that she specialises in supplying cats to have terrible allergies but who love cats & can’t imagine living without one.
Worth looking into down the track, Catty.
http://cfa.org/breeds/breedssthrut/siberian.aspx
You can get a Sphinx. No hair = no allergies. They’ve got great personalities, a bit like monkeys.
The Gimmee’s house is being demolished at the end of this month, but the rental she’s lined up isn’t available until mid-April. The Boss has predicted that she will want to spend the 6 weeks in between at our house – with her cat. She hasn’t said anything yet, but I’ve written antihistamines on the shopping list. The Boss, however, is just practising his no’s. He’s getting very good at it.
After she and her mates have been staying there, I’m amazed demolition is required. They should have just given them another 4 weeks.
Hee hee Hee.
I think the allergy factor comes from the protein in their saliva. The Siberians apparently have a different type of protein than other cats.
They were stunning little cats.
I’m still hankering after that big white Maine Coon. Gosh he was gorgeous.
They need a bit of grooming, I think – but you’d be used to that with the Vans.
Did he show any interest in you? Cats do tend to choose their people, rather than the other way around. If he didn’t, then he isn’t for you.
Spoken like a cat person. You need a cat, Catty.
Well, yes. But cats always show an interest in me, Catty – I’m one of them, remember?
I emit Crazy Cat Lady pheromones, so even the most aloof cat will usually find something to say to me.
He’s not for sale, though, as he’s a show cat – but the breeder will have others available over the next few years.
Siblings tend to be very similar, and she’s a quality breeder – so I’ve tagged her website as she’s a good find.
Our cats will be 14 & 15 later on this year, so I’d like to have a kitten lined up in the next few years to ease the blow when we lose them to old age & decrepitude.
And to keep Riley on his toes.
The poor darling. Our new timber floorboards are so slippery that he can’t jump up on the sofa any more. I’m going to have to get one of those rugs that you can hose off the dog vomit, so that he can get some traction.
Anything from Rugs A Million should suit. They already look vomit-stained!
Ick.
Did you know that’s a fish disease – ick? I’m going to call in ick next time I don’t want to go to work.
Which would be fine if you worked as a piano tuna.
Boom tish! Catty’s here all week, folks. Steer clear of the fish.
Hee hee hee.
Mmmmm… fish…. Now I have a hankering for fish cakes.
And cuttlefish balls. And maybe a little salt ‘n’ pepper calamari.
Cuttlefish have balls? They’d be a bit chalky, wouldn’t they?
Hehehe. No, they are succulent and delicious. And funnily enough, three to a skewer.
???!?!?!!?!!
They’re the fun fish.
I’ve come to this conversation profoundly grateful that I’m allergic to seafood.
And in little doubt now, as to why.
Ick.
In non-icky news, TGP now has an iPhone 5. And loving it. He was asking Siri where she lived. Ans: “Somewhere where troubles melt like lemon drops away up on the chimney tops”.
Hehehe.
Perhaps the electoral commission could cite that as my new address, for when The Freaks go looking for me.
Did I tell you that not only am I invisible on the electoral roll, but they’ve decided we are so far away from the nearest polling booth that we qualify as postal voters?
No more ruined Saturday mornings, getting jostled by zealots bearing how-to-vote cards.
Huzzah!
That’s good news. There’s an election coming up soon, I gather from the signs that are popping up like poisonous fungi.
Another election? Sheesh, we seem to change PM more often than I change my underwear. They should just stick with the recent business model and elect their own government. It’s not as if voters have anything to do with the election process, anyway.
According to TGP, someone corrupt will only get in, anyway.
It’s just for local council in Qld so you’re probably safe, Catty.
Although I assume we all have to turn out for the referendum that day on 4 year terms.
Someone on 612 ABC was gabbling about it on the radio this morning. Until I got to the powerlines over the railway, at which point the gabbling turned to crackling.
The static from those does have a way of limiting any information I get from reliable sources.
I have got no idea about any of the candidates. Yay, democracy!
yeah me neither. We’re in a safe conservative seat, so I might just draw Clive’s Dinosaur on the ballot paper with a big ‘Vote 1’ bubble coming out of it’s head.
I don’t know what the Bloke will do, he’s still not happy with the corruption in the CFMEU.
A big cross through the ballot candidates & Bring Back The Brown Shirts, if his grumbles about shenanigans on his work sites are anything to go by. None of which I’m allowed to mention, because 1. privacy policy & 2. I rather like it that greedy developers pay for me to live this close to the beach.
There’s something in the air, isn’t there? It’s soothing.
There definitely is something in the air. Moar Rain, for starters, we had some lovely squalls here in the hinterland last night while the rain skipped over Brisbane completely, and about 6C less oomph in the mercury in my living room thermometer.
Nothing better than a bit of rain.
Unless you’re out in it, walking to the hospital with a cheap Chinese umbrella that turns inside out every time you exhale.
What happened with the specialist, Catty?
Details are posted in the Corner. This morning I am going out to stuff my face with CAEK and if I can find it, Valium.
Good plan. You need to do some serious carbohydrate loading before that procedure.
I had a brownie. Walnuts, no Valium. I came home and the Boss is a bit woozy. He’d had a painful session with the physio, and had immediately gone hunting for Valium but couldn’t find any so he had a sleeping pill instead. Nap time! I’m thinking I can probably squeeze in a nap between school pickup and cooking dinner. The kidlets are going to be stoked; both parents napping means no nagging about homework. Yay!
Napping is all win.
I didn’t nap. We went to an OFI instead:
http://raywhiteferntreegully.com.au/vic/ferntree-gully/1392917/?utm_source=ActivePipe&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=36%2520Hunter%2520Street%2520Ferntree%2520Gully&utm_campaign=Weekly-Listings
I am so in love with it. The big problem is that they’ve already had an offer that’s well over our budget, and it’s going to auction. I’m going to talk to the bank tomorrow, and see if there’s any way we can possibly manage it.
Oooh, it is nice. Lovely spacious living areas. Fingers crossed!
Everything crossed. It’s my dream home.
I can see why you’d love it, Catty, but I’d be concerned about the timing. You’re going to be weak as a kitten after your surgery & if they go ahead with threats of chemo you have to factor in that it’s going to make you feel really unwell.
So as much as you love it, I’d be worried that the house of your dreams could be the stuff of nightmares, given the timing.
Surely there’ll be others?
But there are vast tracts of land!
yeah, when the real estate pix wouldn’t load I went to google street view. The road looked a bit narrow, and you know how I am about parking, after living in a street that had none. I think you’d need to drive past on a Saturday night & see how many bogans have rolled up to drink 4X & light bonfires & do karaoke to Cold Chisel.
But I’d do that at any house I was thinking about buying.
I left my heart to the sappers round Khe Sanh….
I always wondered what that line was. Now I’m just disturbed by the fact that you weren’t wondering, too.
And I sold my soul with my cigarettes
To the black-market man….
I’m like an idiot savant with song lyrics. I hate to think of what useful space they are taking up in my brain,
Same here. Things are so much easier to remember if they have a catchy tune. I should start writing my shopping list into a song.
Got the Vietnam cold-turkey
From the oceans to the silver city
Someone shoot me.
The Bloke has been singing Whitney Houston all morning, while I made Pfoffertjes for the first time…tricksy, but by the last round I’d gotten the hang of it. I don’t think the soundtrack helped.
Thus.
If you two keep this up I will take the worst possible earworm revenge imaginable.
Here’s a hint…
Mmm … Pfoffertjes.
Did you use the dear little pan, or an electric maker/
More to the point, did you make hot potato Pfoffertjes?
And top them with mashed banana?
Yes, they’re the ones. They go great with cold spaghetti.
And turtlenecks in primary colours.
Gimmee that! Gimmee that! Gimmee that food! Oh bugger.
Now you’ve done it. Since “Hot Potato” is the cure for other sources of earworm, it is itself incurable,
I see you’ve been infected. Let that be a lesson to you if you put Barnesy & his ilk in my ear first thing in the morning.
It took a few rounds to get the pfoffertjes right. The batter seemed to be OK, but I’ll experiment, regardless. The hard part was seasoning the pan (with oil) as it’s cast iron, and then working out the best time & technique for flipping them, but I only made 4 at a time until I’d gotten the hang of it.
Once we get settled (kitchen, closets, boxes unpacked et cetera et cetera) I’m considering offering up The Ultimate Stodge weekends.
Visitors can front up with their swags & glut on pizza, pfoffertjes & potatoes.
I can hang out a P3 sign out front, just like the girls from Charmed.
Whoops forgot…yes, by the time I’d gotten the flipping right, they were very nice indeed. I made a berry compote to go with it (strawberries & blueberries) & with fresh slices of banana, Weiss vanilla bean ice-cream, and sprinkled with icing sugar, they were as good as any I’ve had from the markets.
The Bloke was very happy about them.
Which is just as well, as he had to spend a large chunk of the day with his parents, as it was his father’s BD. He took them out to the local surf club for lunch, and came home bitching that they are both losing their marbles. On the drive from Coolangatta his mother kept saying ‘Where are we now? I need to know in case the car stops & I have to walk home.’
This is why I don’t do car trips or lunch with my MIL.
I’d slam on the breaks & say ‘Oh looky the car has stopped. We’re at Kirra. Out you hop, Shirl. It’s a lovely day for a walk, bye now.’
Note: there is nothing fecking wrong with her, this is her way of letting us know that she doesn’t like our car & she belongs in an audi.
Shame on you. I insist that you go out and buy one immediately, and then offer yourself to your MIL as a daily taxi service.
I think he should say, “Don’t you know? Gosh, I’d better stop at once and call the RACQ. So much for lunch!”
Since she doesn’t know where she is, in future he can take her to Sizzler & tell her the expensive French restaurant she likes has gotten super popular & for her convenience they’ve added a buffet.
Tell him to take her to a nursing home for an ‘open day’. Once they’re inside, he can grab her handbag and run. If she’s ranting with fury, and has no handbag or ID, they might think she is one of the dementia patients and give her a nice little injection to calm her down before they lock her in a comfy, soft-walled room. She will probably thoroughly enjoy it. Three meals a day to complain about, and people constantly asking her about her bowel movements. Lovely!
Mmm … calming injection.
Mmm, trank darts.
We could use those in the traffic here at the Gold Coast. Perhaps instead of backpackers running in and out of the intersections offering to wash your windshield, they could hock valium patches, instead.
Ah well, we always knew that the GC traffic was filled with drug-fuelled lunatics, and dodging them on the roads is still way better than listening to them having sex in the shower in the boarding house next door.
So lovely not to be there any more & to wake up to see the Curious Roo outside my bedroom window. I think he’s trying to figure out how he can access my patio to chew on my petunias.
I thought the possums would have figured that out but not yet, touch wood.
It’s still a fabulous novelty to have pot-plants that don’t get kicked over by the turkeys or the brushies.
As for the rest home, Catty, there’s a nursing home across the road from where they live, so she has ‘holidays’ in there when FIL needs a break. She should probably be in there permanently, but hey, that is not my problem.
Still, at least there’s not much of it, compared to Brisbane. (Gold Coast traffic, I mean).
Mmm, dunno about that, MM, there was an article in the paper yesterday saying that peak hour on the M1 from Brisbane to the Gold Coast now lasts 4 hours, at either end of the day. The aggro & the lunacy down here do seem to be really bad. Lots of tradies on P plates with some very powerful vehicles that can do a lot of damage, too.
At least in Brisbane they’ve got an efficient public transport system.
One good thing, Big Mal is committed to improving that, starting with the trams.
They really need to extend the rail line down to the Coolangatta airport – that stalled due to the coast of getting it over/through the hill behind Burleigh – and they need to upgrade the stretch of highway between Robina & Currumbin.
That section is 2 lanes & it’s gridlock at peak hour & school hours.
It’s one of the reasons we didn’t buy at Currumbin/Elanora – conservative estimates are that it’ll take another 5 years to fix the M1.
That section turns into a car park every weekend, too.
Luckily we have the back roads down through Tally to access the creeks, and we’re not out & about at the same hours as the tourists & the soccer moms.
The traffic makes them all a bit deranged & aggro, though.
The old highway into Burleigh drops from an 80k zone to a 60k zone during school hours & if you’re caught out at those hours you are guaranteed to have an enraged tradie or a manic mother tail-gating you, flashing their lights, beeping the horn, & threatening violence. The speeding & the road rage does make you think twice about getting in anyone’s way.
Uni starts back soon so that’ll be interesting.
I’m just doing Spanish, so that’ll be two mornings a week.
I plan to head up there at 6am so I can drop the Bloke at the train & keep going. I can study before class, or use the gym, and just enjoy the Zen of it all.
The library is open from 7am & it’s a glorious space to be. Magpies at window height…magic!
You’ll have the library to yourself at that time of day, too, I should think. Double win!
Yep, they have a silent study hall in the library & it is awesome.
Mind you, I don’t need so much silence now since I’ve gotten clear of Freak Street’s Wall of Sound.
The Spanish for freak is ‘monstruo’. See if you can guess what gilipollas means? Hint: you will need it in that traffic. Also, during the pre-election speeches.
I’ve got a lot of occupational uses for “monstruo’. How do I pronounce it, please?
With emphatic hand gestures.
Can I use Italian ones, or are there special Spanish hand movements?
Depending how good your aim is, you could throw castanets.
That reminds me, I watched Strictly Ballroom again, yesterday evening. I’d forgotten about all the Spanish Dance steps in that.
I think I appreciated it more this time round than when I first saw it.
Um, I have spent the day at compulsory arts orientation activities.
I snored through most of it but at least it was in the AC.
And there were younglings handing out fairy floss, and they didn’t mind how often you went back.
Since the free lunch was Subway wraps (yelch) they were popular.
On Friday when I have to go back for the next snore fest, I might sample the free snow cones. They’re up near the free Segue rides & the clay pigeon shooting, which just happens to be beside the criminal justice/psyche stuff.
If only they’d had donuts, the subliminal messaging in that would be complete.
Fairy floss, yay!
Don’t get on a Segway, it might burst into flames!
No, hang on, I think I’m thinking about hoverboards. Go for your life.
The circuit was set up in the tennis court enclosure. Half was devoted to the ride-on cop carriers & the other half was the aerobics team doing high kicks to Michael Jackson – so you had to risk being captured by them to get in & out.
Scary.
One of LK’s friends has one of those hoverboards. I desperately want to go to their house and try it out. But fairy floss is good too.
Did you know that the man who invented the Segway died when his fell off a cliff? I would be amused by that, but I feel too sad for his family.
I can’t segue from that Segway saga.
Me neither. Unless you want to discuss the corrupting influence of American spelling?
I find American spelling colorless.
We all do, but we must humor them.
Yes, they are none of them saints.
Unless Kardashian sporn counts?
#Kanyeneeds$$$
Gigantor just told me this joke: “What cow walks on two legs and is made of plastic? a Kardashian.”
It’s funny ‘cos it’s true.
And it makes a lovely change from his usual run of dick jokes.
Went to see “Deadpool” yesterday. There were a string of previews for very dark – practically morose – superhero flicks. When did they get so murky?
They’re trying to discourage people from being heroes, ‘cos their capes keep getting sucked into jet turbines and it makes a bloody big mess.
Yes, and the public liability insurance must be through the roof.
The Batman movies started it, when they swapped Michael Keaton’s quirky Batman for The Dark Knight. I’ve hated all three of those but the bloke loved them, and all the CBG boys seem to love them, too.
I hated the last superman movie & I saw the shorts for the new Superman v. Batman movie yesterday when we saw Deadpool, too. The Bloke was going ‘Oooh, Ah, V-Max,’ while I was saying ‘Meh, Netflix.’
It looks like the latest Thang is to give up on saving the world from supervillains and to pit the superheroes against each other.
Meh, Meh and Meh.
Probably just softening us up for the inevitable civil war.
Yup. The title of the upcoming Captain America v. Ironman movie.
We need to get more serious about securing our survivalist encampment. Lotto syndicate?
Not nearly so much fun as auctioning the organs of our enemies off on ebay.
Ebay is better than Gumtree. We don’t want peasants trooping through the house.
I can donate some entrails to the cause, if you like. Then the peasants can go and troop through Monash University instead of all over your clean floors. I’d say ‘my’ clean floors, but I haven’t mopped since October. October 2008.
Catty’s Radioactive Offal.
It has a distinctive ring to it, but would it sell?
Yes, as long as you bedazzle it enough.
I can picture the Bling Ring now…
I can’t stop worrying. Even with everything crossed.
I’m not. I’m convinced she’ll be fine. She’ll wake up feeling like a sack of shit, but my gut feeling (bad pun, not intended) is that she’ll be fine.
You’re right. They do it all the time, they should be pretty good at it by now.
If they can keep my MIL alive and kicking through pancreatic cancer & a brain tumour, it’ll be a piece of piss to take care of Catty. And then of course there’s MIL’s sister, the Cattle Baron’s wife, who dined on red meat three times a day throughout 40 years of marriage, with nitrates on top. She’s missing a chunk of bowel & she bounced straight back.
By chance there was someone from a cancer support group talking on 612 when I was out before & they said that being married & having children is one of the best predictors of making a good recovery, regardless of the type or stage of the cancer. So if you don’t trust my ultra-sensitive gut, have faith in the statistics.
I suspect her hubby is in the midst of a nervous breakdown, given the list of chores he had to get through before they send her home, but being a sensible fellow perhaps he’s simply cracked a bottle of Jim Beam & texted the list to his mother.
No, she’s in Belgium. But he’s likely outsourced to the children. “Wear out the young ones first” was always my parent’s motto.
Ooh, emergency chocolate supplies.
What a sensible plan.
Yeah, I can’t think of why else you’d go to Belgium.
To buy a spaniel?
To visit Hercule Poirot’s grave?
hahahaha.
It’s also the home of the Eurozone, I think – although that’s more something to slink away from, these days.
I am picturing Belgium as a Willy Wonka style wonder-land, with rivers of chocolate.
I wonder if I mixed up my Vitex with the Cat’s anti-psychotic medication last night?
Mmm … cat anti-psychotics.