Anthony Malloy

I was good, I held back the tears as she was placed in the back of the van, covered in a nice warm blanket. It won’t be long, she needs this, he’s a professional, she’ll be back before we know it, feeling and looking better than ever.

The television has gone to television hospital.

And I miss her.

I wonder if I should call and see if she’s okay?

I’ve spotted another couple of signs around town, including one in Yarraville I must have walked past a hundred times and never noticed. I think I need to take a couple of weeks off and just go walking around inner Melbourne snapping away.

a quickr pickr post

Heh, I think it was Penfolds that my nana would have a sip of every now and then. Purely medicinal, of course.

Kids and sleep don’t really mix. Two nights ago it was Bert who decided to cry from midnight to 2.00 am which made for a blurred day on Thursday. Last night Bert slept but it was one of  the fury kids who has me wanting to go to bed at 8:30 on a Friday night.

I woke up an hour and a half before the alarm and as I rolled over to go back to sleep I had a thought. “I can’t remember seeing Bella last night.”. As everyone else was asleep I couldn’t really go around the house calling for her or turning on lights. I checked Rae’s side of the bed, no cat lumps there so I was convinced she wasn’t in the house.

Now I really couldn’t sleep, going over last night trying to place Bella in the house but I still couldn’t remember seeing her. Then I realised it was blowing a gale outside and I had pictures of my little girl being picked up in a cyclonic gust and deposited on top of one of the lights in the middle of the Westgate Freeway.

Thoughts of flying cats kept me tossing and turning until the alarm went off. Even though I could barely open my eyes I got up, walked out to the lounge and saw Bella sitting on the couch. I swear she knew and was having a little chuckle with Thomas about what a panic merchant I am.

Kids. Harumph.

Well, at least for this weekend he will.

At the footy a while ago I took a photo of Richo. It’s one of my favourite footy photos and I uploaded it to Flickr that day, Richard was even kind enough to leave a comment. And there I left it.

Fast forward a few weeks and an email drops in to my inbox. It’s from Sue and she wants to use my photo to advertise a talk at her local church, which just happens to be in the next suburb over. The chaplain from the Richmond Football Club is giving a talk this Sunday entitled ‘Does God go the footy?’ and my picture, she thought, would be perfect to promote the event.

So now my picture of Richo has been blown up to life size and adorns a billboard outside the Newport Baptist Church (and I’m amazed at how well the image has coped with being enlarged so much). It’s been used on flyers too. We’ve nothing planned for Sunday morning so we may even head on down to hear what Paul Cameron has to say, that is if they’ll let a very very very very lapsed Catholic through the doors. Ah well, at least I’m on one of the right teams.

Bugger. Television is still stuffed and Grand Final is coming up. Anybody know a good and reliable television repair person who can come take a look?

As Phee was sleeping overnight at Nana’s we took the opportunity for a grown-ups morning out (with Bert in tow) and shouted ourselves breakfast in Yarraville at Cut Paw Paw. A little luxury every now and then ain’t such a bad thing and Bert got to point at the trains as they thundered past. He’s such a boy when it comes to trains and trucks – the louder, faster, noisier and bigger the better.

It’s such a glorious day I’m trying to get work finished so I can go sit outside and not mow the grass. I swear someone comes along and sprays it with a magic speed growing spray every night. I did them only last weekend and they’re almost back to the same level but now they can wait until next weekend when they’ll get their Grand Final BBQ trim. 

Argh. Another day at home today – this is the third time in six weeks I’ve had to take time off work. Tuesday and Wednesday I went in to work when I probably shouldn’t have but when you sleep from 5.00pm to 9.30am the next day your body is probably trying to tell you something. I’ve wanted to have a day off a week but the plan for that was to spend time with Bert, not to lie in bed or on the couch watching Battlestar Galactica.

It seems I haven’t been able to shake the original virus from those weeks ago which means its probably time for a complete going over at the hands of my doctor. Ugh. I know what he’s going to say – lose weight, eat healthier, exercise. Maybe my body is trying to tell me that as well. Maybe I should listen.

I mowed the lawns today and it confirmed what Rae and I were talking about the other day – we may have a roof over head, but we don’t feel like we have a home. In our previous place a freshly mown lawn would have us dragging out the garden chairs and enjoying lunch or a drink but here it was just another chore that had to be done this weekend.

This place, after six months, is still not feeling like home. The day we moved in to the old place it was home. The old place also holds a lot of our history – we were engaged in that house, married in that house and bought Bert home to that place. That builds up a lot of feeling for a home in a pretty short time.

So, what’s different about this place? There’s a couple of things. I guess the first is that we moved here under duress. The landlords at the old place were raising the rent to absurd levels and we had had strong indications they were thinking of selling. The agent wasn’t the best – but that was more the person responsible for our property than the agency. We had to move to somewhere that was better value for money and where we could actually get work done when needed. This place was a tick on both but it was a move we didn’t really want to make.

This year was also an odd one – summer ended one day and winter started the next, coincidentally on the weekend we moved. For almost six months we lived with the heater on and doors shut – and we hate that. Our families think we’re mad how we have our windows and doors open for fresh air on days they think are freezing, but this year it’s been too cold even for us. Feeling ‘stuck’ inside your own place is not a pleasant experience.

Then there’s the actual house. It was a ‘near enough is good enough’ option for us – what we didn’t realise was that we were moving in to a ‘near enough is good enough’ house. Rae has had experience of someone who was full of grand plans but left jobs half done or completed in the most half-arsed of manners and she says this place is the same.

The landlord has expanded and renovated an old 1950s weatherboard by building out. He’s put in a new kitchen, new laundry and new living area which all sounds good but it’s the manner in which he’s gone about it that makes the place seem temporary. I’ve lost count of the number of nails that jut out of walls, and the floor. Some are to anchor blinds, some must have once been for a purpose and some just seem to be there for no reason.

Work is only half done – a pelmet is missing in the living room, a shelf seems in danger of falling off, a door looks like it would come away if you were to close it, paint spots line the floor, no doors on the wardrobes (until Rae found some on Freecycle and put them on), cupboards don’t shut in the kitchen, a pipe sticks out of the bathroom wall for a toilet that was never installed and nothing seems solid. It’s livable, don’t get me wrong, but it’s such hotch potch it doesn’t endear itself to you with any ease.

Of course it’s not all doom and gloom. We’re living in an area we love and we only had to move from one end of the street to the other so nothing really changed that much. Plus we got extra value for significantly less each month – a dishwasher, better shed and air conditioning for the summer – all of which we appreciate and may make us happier on those 40 degree days when we can sit in our lounge and not be melting in to puddles.

We’re working on getting our own place. We’ve hit one major milestone in our savings this week although Albert’s child care is, like many other families, effectively wiping out our discretionary spending/savings. We budget down to the last dollar to make sure we can keep moving forward, but with the market continually surging it feels like we’re treading water, or maybe going under for the first time every now and then. Unfortunately as Rae had her name on a house for all of three months many many years ago we don’t qualify for the first home owners grant so we’re a few thousand dollars behind the eight ball. We’ve committed ourselves to staying here for a few years  to get to our target before we make the move. We may have to build a long way out to get a start, by then anything around here will be so far out of our reach it’s scary to think about.

So for now I’ll mow the lawn every few weeks and hope that those days have brought us a little closer to both a new roof over our heads and new home for our family.

I’m not sure if Australian radio has picked this up yet, and it would probably be only JJJ who would, but if you want to hear and see what is possibly the catchiest song ever recorded check out We’re From Barcelona’s  “I’m From Barcelona“.

Just to confuse matters, they come from Sweden and their name comes from that classic British comedy.

I am bereft – my toast has been discontinued. What am I to do? George Western Foods, in their infinite wisdom, have ‘deleted’ Noble Rise Crunchy White Toast from their Noble Rise range. It was the best toast bread at the supermarket and now I’m stuck with thin, non-crunchy bits of bread that are called ‘toast’ but pale in comparison.

So, now I have a dilemma – do I start working my way through all the brands of ‘toast’ bread at the supermarket or do I simply switch back to cereal after 20 years of vegemite or peanut butter on toast?