Category Archives: domesticity

Ask me what I’ve done this week.
I’ve been lying in bed all day everyday since Monday. Sleeping, or drowning in goob. I am weak, pathetic.
But I’ve had the internet to keep me company. That and a few good books.
I have to get it together for the Canberra trip (if I have the Bad Ears, I’m not flying. No way).
But I’ve just discovered a good friend is doing a paper on dance in my session at the CSAA conf, and I’m keen to hear that and talk nerdy dance with her.
Plus the papers for the cultural transmission in dance seminar arrived, and I’m interested. I’ve heard they’re also doing a workshop day. I’m pretending that will involve dancing of some sort (which is exciting, considering there are papers on capoeira, indian dance, contemporary dance…). But I bet it doesn’t. Unless I’m still pretty crook, then it will definitely involve actually dancing.
Oh dilemma, dilemma.
I’ve also ditched tonight’s set at CBD (thankfully) – I’m finding walking to the clothesline pretty difficult still. Man I HATE this stupid cold.
…and that’s enough of that rubbish. I’m off to read something on paper.

We have ant problems at the moment.
The coffee table is COVERED in them. They’re busy making trails to the giant bunch of (lovely) waratahs and banksia and protea Crinks gave me for my birthday (one of the birthday highlights I forgot to mention in that last maudlin, birthday sook post). Some of them have made it to the dining table where I’m marking. The ants, that is. Not the flowers. Unfortunately. I have to keep brushing them off the students’ papers. Or blow them off my laptop. Every now and then one gets under the keys. I wonder how they’re all doing in there.
Bugs freak out The Squeeze (or should that be freak The Squeeze out?). But not me – I’m from Brisbane. There are very few bugs in Melbourne. It’s cold. And it’s urban. I have almost completely lost my leap-out-of-bed-when-you-feel-something-in-there-with-you reactions. And my super-fast-removal hand flick. When we’re sitting on the couch watching Kerrie in the evenings, I just pick up my glass and tuck my feet under me while The Squeeze shrieks and tries to wipe the table clean (again). He is obsessed with Ant Rid (which I don’t even think about, ever).
It’s difficult to care about a few busy ants when you’ve slept with giant cockroaches and had to type with the lights off and the computer monitor on a low glow, with perhaps a decoy lamp on in another part of the room because you had no flyscreens.

Well, after dentist appointment #4, I have a little dentist trauma to deal with. Now that the local has worn off, my face hurts and I’m a little upset. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. But I have one more appointment scheduled. So that will be four sessions on this one fucking suprise root canal. Today we filled the canals (3 of them, no less). We attempted it without local today, but one good jab in the hole with the pokey thing and I shrieked in agony, and the dentist decided we needed local. He doesn’t understand why it hurts as much as it does. I try to be brave, but mostly, there’s some crying.
The tears just sort of roll down my cheek and into my hairline (because I’m upside down, flat on my back in the chair), and then the snot sort of trickles down inside my throat and makes me cough. And big, long strings of cry-saliva attach themselves to the dentist’s rubber gloves as he reaches for another pointy thing, and then flick off to slap my chin. As he rubs his rubbery fingers around inside my mouth, the cry-saliva – sort of thicker and goobier than normal, watery saliva – adds a new layer of interest to the whole experience, and I can’t help but think about vaginas. And how your vaginal mucous changes when you’re ovulating. So I can’t help but associate this whole thing with hot sex.
So, you know, this surprise root canal experience has had repercussions we are yet to enjoy.
Beyond the delight of post-probing jaw pain, impending (massive) debt and disturbing thoughts about bodily secretions, all this dental work has at least given me an excuse to see a fair few films. Word Play = good stuff.

I am terribly unwell. Well, not terribly, if I can still type.
But I have massively sore and swolen glands, a nasty sinus headache, a sore throat, lots of snot, some coughing, horrible aches and pains in my joints and a recurring temperature.
The cold that tried to ruin my weekend in Tasmania, the weekend before, which had quietened down, was obviously kicked into gear by my preemptive weekend of dancing the following weekend, and yesterday I started getting crook.
I woke up at about 4am with a massive temperature, all confused and distressed. I was freezing, but also burning up like the sun. I went to find some cold water to drink (of course it was a success – a confused, feverish person walking around a dark house looking for the fridge), then I decided that the only person who could help me out at that exact moment was The Squeeze. On my way to find him (cleverly hidden in bed), my sore right instep started hurting again (it’s a recurring dance thing – like fallen arches, but actually a hamstring issue) and made me cry.
So the poor Squeeze had a snotty, feverish crying person startle him awake as they tried to climb into the bed without putting any weight on their sore foot.
Then there was some more crying, as he carefully placed me back into bed, and applied the tried and true Squeeze Method for calming distressed Hams and confused sick people – the clamp. This really means that he rolled me up in the blankets, wrapped an arm around me and exerted his full weight of Sleep. It took a bit of clamping, but eventually I calmed down a bit, stopped crying (what was with the weeping? Man, those feverish confusion thingies make for some weirdness), stopped having strange, confused half-hallucinations (which could only be solved by rolling about in bed, from side to back, to front to side and back again… eventually actually solved by some serious clamping) and fell asleep.
I feel a bit strange now, but those panadols took the edge off my temperature (that was another issue – I couldn’t figure out how to get warm. Blankets and pajamas seemed too complex) and I’m not feeling quite as terrible as I did.
But I’m definitely not getting out of bed today. I’m going to lie here and read and wipe my nose all day.

The plummer has been here since 9am (which was rough after my late night), all the water is off and my bladder is screaming. But I daren’t interrupt him – he’s replacing all the taps in my bathroom and kitchen (which is exciting, especially if you know our taps).
It’s not too bad, really – I learnt a lot about our landlord. Apparently he’s a hairdresser who owns lots of houses and a factory and a shop(s ?). He’s also a tightarse.
All this is kind of upsetting, seeing as how it took months and months for him to do little, inconsquential things like:
– fix the leak in the roof that steadily trickled water down our wall and ceiling and left a very pretty water stain
– fix the wiring in the bathroom so that we actually had a light in there. And an extraction fan that wouldn’t set the house on fire
– fix the toilet that leaked from the outflow pipe. Yes. Imagine that wonderfulness
It’s a little bit shitty that someone with so many assets fucks his tenants around. But as the (Italian) plumber said, “people who have money chase it.”
There are other things that need fixing around our house, but we don’t think about them unless we have to. For instance, the wiring in our house is a bit of a home job. Our first night in the house a plug point caught on fire. The electrician was afraid to work on it, and when he came to install a trip switch (the safety switch that clicks the power off automaticaly when something blows – it stops a gajillion vaults flowing through you when you do something silly) he said he couldn’t as the wiring was so crap. In fact, it’s illegal wiring.
We blessed our landlord when our power failed a summer or two ago and we had no power for 24 hours in two periods. Just long enough for all our frozen food in the fridge to defrost, and for us to die in the heat.
Yeah, renting rocks, but heck. We can leave any day. Not that we want to – our house is actually quite great for the price, and in the best location. And I’ve been renting for over 10 years now, and never lived in any house as long as this – 2 or 3 years now. So I’m just crossing my legs and letting the plumber get on with it.

It’s cold and windy (ah, the downside of Melbourne in the autumn – overcast skies, endless Antarctican winds, rain. rain. rain),
I have some serious muscle tension in my right shoulder/back/neck which is trying to become a headache,
I’m worried about an article I have to submit on the 20th which isn’t re-edited yet (because my supervisor(s) can’t keep up with my prodigiously productive brain. hell, my productivity is scaring even me at the moment),
our lounge room is full of drying laundry that smells odd,
I’m in that difficult blanket – quilt interum period, where it’s too hot for a proper quilt, but too cold for less than 6 blankets (whose weight no doubt contributes to my muscle tension, seeing as how I can’t roll over in bed as I’m pinned to the mattress by 60million blankets) so I’m not sleeping properly, or having weirdo, too-hot dreams about superheroes (all sans cape),
I’m sewing obsessively (they’re nice camel needle cord trousers. why thankyou, but it’s not camel – it’s sand. only $4 a metre),
I can’t face cooking or doing the washing up (Saigon City, you are going Down – no more home deliver for US, thank you very much),
mysterious boxes keep arriving (as per usual – I see the parcel guy nearly every day), but they’re never for me (seeing as how I can’t afford to buy anything more often than once every couple of months – and then only cheap CDs) and they’re never worth opening as they’re always cords or bits of computer and boring if you’re not an uber-nerd,
did I mention the muscle tension? ow! Dang, I need more exercise, but anxiety-induced malaise and autumn weather are not condusive to long bike rides or step-step-triple-step practice,
I love my yoga mat, especially now it no longer smells weird. Was it wrong to hose it in the backyard?
I’ve just read some fascinating articles on the phenomenology stuff, but half of me is distressed because it’s way too late in the thesis progress to discover important articles and I’m not sure I’m buying this bullshit phenomenology crap,
I think I have that thing where 9months pregnant women suddenly aren’t sure they want to go through with this. What will I do without my thesis? You know you have to give it away as soon as it’s done, don’t you?
I’m partway through a crazed Buffy re-veiwing obsessession. Somewhere in season 3 (best season ever), and I’m still getting at least one good scare (though usually 2-3) for each 2 episodes we watch a night. I get startled/scared easily. I think it’s because, when we were young, my brother and I went through a prolonge phase of scaring the bejesus out of each other. We’d wait behind doors or under beds and then jump out at the other, yelling “YAH!” to scare the other. And it worked. Thing is, the more scares you get, the more easily scared you are. Plus there’s the whole anticipationn-of-a-scare thing. I mean, we both thought it was neat, even when we were scared and angry-laughingly chasing the other round the house for retribution. But still. I’m still a trembly leaf person. And I’ve noted that (having just leapt out of the larder at our p’s house, after huddling silently in wait for ages, fleeing from my life from my hulking younger brother, both of us giggling like fools, leaping cats and ignoring shouted ‘stop shouting! calm down!’ threats from the ps) that he’s just as susceptible to the scare as I am. What have we done to each other? Made it impossible to watch scary films? Or perhaps made scary films that much more exciting for ourselves?
I’m dancing like crap. Like real, terrible, awful crap. I need to work on my dancing to get better, but it’s just not a priority in my life at the moment (not when I have trousers to make).
could this be cabin fever?
yoga. I need yoga. Thank god class is on tonight!

I find that drinking black tea (or digger tea as it’s known in our house) after lunchtime makes it difficult to sleep at night. Yeah, yeah, call me pussy caffeine intolerance girl, but there you go. I don’t even try to drink coffee any more – it makes me nuts (though not as nuts as gelati made me on the ride into town last night … is it wrong for The Squeeze and I to take such great delight in riding through the crowd of seagulls in the parking lot of the Markets, yelling all the way and praying we won’t hit a bump in the dark and break a leg?).
So there’s some illicit pleasure in sitting down to a cup of tea at 5.53pm. But hell, I say, if you can’ty drink caffeine after 12 on a Friday night, you’re not really living!
Anyhoo, one week later I go in to Uli to have the experimental mass removed from the middle part of my head. We’re not just talking fringe here, we’re talking girly bits… no, wait, the girly bits are mostly there still, but smaller. Tidier. Anyhoo, after a week of deliberation, experimentation and consumerism ($15 for hair product? That’s crazy talk!) I decided a long fringe was not for me. Long as in longer than half a centimeter. I exaggerate not. Both The Squeeze and I had decided we much preferred the ‘pixie fringe’ as he calls it – I discovered it years ago when it was actually fashionable, and now I’m aiming to look like a serious feminist academic til the day I die. No fringe shall be longer than 2cms. No jewellry shall not be silver. No shoes should not be practical/comfortable, unless teamed with a hideously expensive handbag and black-rimmed glasses.
[diversion] Which reminds me. At a very interesting seminar on Thursday, I decided that breaking an icing sugar-coated biscuit with a spoon to make smaller nibbling pieces was a good idea. Of course, both pieces went everywhere, luckily not during the paper itself. Now, I didn’t freak as this shit happens to me all the time (let me repeat – all the time. I don’t fall down all the time any more, but I sure as shit drop stuff, knock things over, etc etc. And please, let’s not talk about the very public too-long-held-down-click-button-on-the-laptop-while-DJing-so-causing-a-song-to-begin-midway-through-another-song-on-multiple-ocassions thing). But the best bit was watching white powder fly out in all directions. Not so great a way to win friends in a room full of cultural studies types.* I apologised, giggled irreverently and perhaps shouldn’t have proferred a used hanky.
*this is a joke utiilising the stereotype that all cultural studies types wear black turtleneck sweaters, black rimmed glasses and black trousers. While they mostly did in the 90s, now most of them seem to have passed into the ‘comfortable’ fashion bracket. At LaTrobe, anyway. Phew – I wasn’t sure I could manage the dress code.[/diversion]
At any rate, I now have awesomely excellent super-short hair. With minor girly bits but major pixie fringe. All free and included in my original haircut price. Phew. And double phew for DJing – I dropped $60 on a fabulous colour – dark marooney red (which will lighten, I was assured, as the colour sets… which is hairdresser word for ‘fade’ I suspect). And boy did I score the gossip. Mostly restaurant related.
Apparently Bali Bagus (said Bar-goo) is ace. La Paelle (Spanish/Moroccan) is great for small groups but crap for large groups. There’s an Ethiopian place in Fitzroy called Lalla/Lulla/Lilla something or other and is amazingly wonderful.
I also met a local artist type person who does interesting ziney stuff (that one’s for you, Skirt).
I popped in to Spotty to get something for a subdued winter jacket/jumper. While I adore my bright pink and red micro-fleece hoody (Hello Kitty hood lining – pics will follow), sometimes it’s not really the go for a more conservative colour scheme. I can’t really wear bright pink with plum cords and a cream blouse. Well, I can, but it’s kind of…. vivid. So I got some blackey/grey stretch denim (no, don’t worry, I’m not tempted to make some low-riding tight, straight legged jeans… I was THERE in the late 80s/early 90s when that shit was cool the first time. And I am NOT going there again) and some black micro fleece to line a very basic jacket. It will have a metallic zip (ie black tape, but silvery teeth), and either a hood or a collar. I like hoods because they’re practical in this godforsaken climate (esp if they’re water resistant), and I’m tempted by the idea of a fleece-lined hood, but it could all go tragically wrong. We’ll see. The whole jacket will probably be like my waterproof, red, quilted one (sort of box-shaped), esp with the layers and all, but I love that red jacket (could be a little longer though – esp on the bike) so who gives a fuck.
Speaking of which, bike jumpers and jackets have a little lowered ‘saddle flap’ (is it just me who thinks of those curves on the bottom of men’s shirts as being like the flaps on a saddle…? Go horsey girl, go) to cover your lower back and crack. Because, of course, you bend over to ride your bike. Those low-riding trousers are awesomely obscene on bike riders (though very entertaining on the novice bike-kid – ha-HA I strike another blow against the horrid teen-groover invasion of B’wick!). The high-waisted trouser is very pleasing, as are stretch fabrics. In fact, the three quarter tracksuit pant is perfect.
…
yes, I think I had mentioned the importance of practical clothing for active lasses before. Whatever.
Back to the endless I-did-this-today story….
I picked up some of those FUCKING AMAZING sausages from Nino and Joe’s for dinner tonight. Is it wrong to drop in to a butcher just to browse? Is it wrong to be delighted by the close proximity of hairdresser to Spotty to butcher?
I declare Friday culinary day. Wait for pics. And will endeavour to start a meme. Can you start a meme if only, like 3 or 4 people read your blog, and only about 2 of them blog themselves? I reckon you can. In fact, I think you’re even cooler if you don’t start memes for other people. I think a meme can be cool with just one person in it….
Anyway: on Gastroporn* Friday (whichever and whenever Friday you choose), you have to write a post about a meal you have recently prepared or consumed. Photos are optional but certainly preferable. It doesn’t have to be great food. I will try to do this later today…btw, ignore the times on this blog as they’re a bit out of wack.
*I really wanted to type ‘gastropod’ there.