Mr Cranky the Christmas Possum

On the eve of Christmas, Thomas complained that the rags that had been stuffed up the chimney in his bedroom had fallen down, making a mess in the room that he had painstakingly cleaned. Jokes were made that it was clearly in preparation for an influx of reindeer that night.

Fast forward to mid morning on Christmas Day and Thomas came to see me to complain with a broad grin on his face that there appeared to be reindeer poo in his room. I went down to investigate and sure enough there was a distribution of little poo-like pellets in one corner. I  assumed that the same culprits that had left half eaten carrots at the front door were responsible, told Thomas to clean it up and thought no more of it.

Fast forward to after dinner. Everyone has wound down with guts full of turducken and is relaxing around the table in post dinner christmas bliss. Caroline goes down to Thomas' bedroom and he shows her the same evidence (it was a bit much to expect it to actually be cleaned up). While Caroline is in there, she moves the wardrobe door that was next to the area where the poo was and screams when a possum appears. It quickly retreated into the deepest darkest corner of the wardrobe that it could and Caroline came down seeking reinforcements.

Enter Turtleman Dave.

Full of bluff, bluster and perhaps a little Christmas spirit (of the drinking kind) I grabbed a washing basket and a towel, intending to catch the possum, dump it into the basket, cover it with the towel and happily dump it somewhere outside the house.

I cleared an area to give me access and dived into the wardrobe with the towel, grabbing at the possum as best I can. As it turned out, I grabbed the first bit of it that I could, which turned out to be the tail. I hauled him out and attempted to dump him into the washing basket. He caught the edge though and clung on for dear life. I held his tail, he held the basket with his front claws. ApparentIy he didn't really like being held by the tail and got a little cranky. I tried to wrap the towel around him to end the stalemate and get him inside the basket.

The instant I managed that and went to cover him with the towel, he bolted for freedom and disappeared under Thomas' bed.

It was on!

Once again I cleared some space and then hands and towel before me, plunged head first under the bed. This time rather than grabbing him by the tail, I managed to grab him around the torso and then dragged him out. This time I wasn't silly enough to bother with baskets, I just held on as best I could and took him outside. I made sure I walked him a couple of houses down the block and stuck  him up a tree. Unfortunately the tree trunk was short of bark and after scrambling up a metre or so above my head height he plummeted back to earth only to shoot off across the road and up another tree.

Nothing like a bit of excitement to bring Christmas to life!

Belatedly 13 and 15

Life has, as seems to be the norm around here, been busy. In the meantime Sam and Thomas have both managed to have had birthdays and have respectively turned 13 and 15. Yes, we now have three teenagers in the house. Huzzah?! The mind boggles and perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to get my head into a space to capture this. Let's just go with life has been rather busy.

Tom achieved his milestone first so I’ll start there.

Tom at 13

Every time I sit down to write one of these little birthday pieces I worry to some extent that I’m going to be repeating what I said the year before. I guess it’s not my fault if they don’t change their personalities too much in a year.

Tom remains the house clown, always on the lookout for the next joke. He’s definitely a thinker, an ideas man. I’ve lost count of the times that Tom starts a conversation with something along the lines of “Just imagine right that …” and off he goes on a fanciful journey of the mind. I can’t say that I can always keep track of exactly where it’s going, but I always enjoy the fact that he’s so actively using his imagination.

Tom played a lot of soccer again this year. School went well and he really enjoyed that portion of the football experience but unfortunately the club experience didn’t quite match up. The club went from one team to two this year, which whilst it meant that he got to play regularly, it didn’t provide last year’s fringe players with a lot of positives. They had some success, but unfortunately the coaching was sub-par (you have to be thankful for someone that’s prepared to volunteer to do the job) and I don’t think the boys learnt a whole lot. I had been asked to coach but with work commitments and everything else that was going on in my life I wasn’t willing to commit. That’s changed for next year and I’ve been silly enough to say yes. It should be a very interesting and bloody busy year.

Tom continued with his cricket and has steadily improved, though not as much as he could have if either of his brothers was interested enough to get off their backsides and play some of the backyard variety of the game. It makes you wonder where the next generation will come from if all the kids get addicted to their computers and X-boxes. I think the highlight of the first part of the season had to be the reverse hook that he played, much to the amusement of several of the parents (and me!). It wasn’t so much a pre-mediated thing as just an effort to hit a ball that was outside off stump. He’s nothing if not unconventional! If only I could find some of that elusive free time to get around the nets with him, we might be able to improve things even further. He’s looking to play on next year, so hopefully he continues to improve. His batting is getting there as he makes some runs most weeks, though a tendency to try and hit across the line of middle stump has seen him come unstuck once or twice.

Academically Tom continues to progress, working hard (most of the time) to achieve his results. It’s certainly a challenge off the back of the dyspraxia and dyslexia, but he’s holding his own so far.  There was an interesting conversation around the dinner table the other night in which Sam and Michael were telling Thomas which teachers would have high expectations of him because of the bar that they set and which ones might not be looking forward to ‘another Temby’. I think the reality is that Tom will carve his own path!

Sam version 2013 aka Sam at 15

I always think of Sam as the kid that marches to the beat of his own drum, the one that likes to take up sports that none of the other kids play. This last year hasn't been any different.

Over the course of the year since his last birthday Sam has continued to quietly succeed. In terms of sports, he's continued on with his Tennis. Having managed to get himself to a point where he's confident of his ability, he played competition tennis for the first term of the year. He did rather well, making it to the finals and then winning! He and his mates were playing division 13 and with the start of the new season in term 4 he's catapulted up to division 8 where he is continuing to win more games than he loses. I don't think he's actually lost a singles game so far this season.

In addition to the tennis and sticking to something of a theme, Sam has also been playing table tennis. Last year his team not only won, they smashed it., going through the entire season undefeated. That earned them all an MVP award which was a nice bit of recognition. This season Sam did well again, though I don't think there's actually any finals but at the end of the season Sam was presented with a 'Services to Table Tennis Award.' We're not exactly sure what the criteria are, but it sounds good, even if it is, as rumoured, for showing up to every game and practice.

In Winter Sam played soccer and Volleyball, the soccer being the only cross-over with anything the  other kids play or in fact with anything that I played when I went through school (even if I did flirt with tennis for a single term).

Academically Sam has continued to succeed, not quite managing an academic award this last time around, but at least managing a commendation. Oh, and he picked up another Mercy Key at the end of last year which was an accomplishment to be proud of given they only hand out 10 across the year level. To have managed it twice in two years was quite spectacular.

Then there's the other bits. Sam tends to have spent a fair bit of time on You Tube over the last year or so, teaching himself a variety of things. He's become something of an accomplished amateur card trick magician. You have to watch out for his new sneaky shuffling and dealing skills as he works toward palming cards and generally looking to leave you astounded with what is going on. He's also something of an origami whiz. Apparently for one of their art subjects this last term the topic was origami. When the teacher asked if anyone in the class was any good at it, the entire class turned and pointed to him. Oh and he's assembled his first computer too. He used the proceeds from his birthday to buy all the components and then one night at the kitchen table put the whole thing together. Now we just have to drag him away from it every now and then.

Overall, we're very proud of our Sam and his accomplishments, even if he has that teenage tendency to be extremely literal in picking faults out of what you're telling him (especially if you happen to be his younger sister!)

Happy Birthday Boys ... even if they were back in October!

Doonagration

Doonagration: What happens when you combine doona with migration.

At some point, someone clever in our family decided that for the sake of aesthetics and possibly in the interest of sharing that it would be better to place a king size quilt upon our queen sized bed.
Now in theory, this is fine. I mean what can really go wrong? There's extra quilt so it should go further.

Unfortunately it didn't quite pan out the way that it was supposed to. It's not because one party or the other is hogging the quilt or anything as simple to explain as that. It's because the quilt and the quilt cover aren't really on speaking terms. They just don't seem to like each other or be particularly in sync. What this results in is a quilt that shifts within its cover. Which is down right bloody annoying.

It's not a big issue during summer (so I'm looking forward to that) but during winter, its not fun. Its actually quite disturbing when you wake up in the middle of the night under what you think is the quilt only to find that you're actually only sleeping under the cover. A cover that isn't designed to provide you with that lovely warmth that is somewhat critically essential to comfortable sleep. Instead you wake up frozen and remembering that at least when it was -40c in Canada and you woke up they had that lovely central heating thing going on and you weren't stuck in place because you were too bloody cold to move!

The most annoying thing is that I don't know why it happens! It doesn't happen all the time and there's no particular pattern to when and why it does. I've just accepted the fact that it will happen, I won't sleep well, i'll re-introduce the quilt to the cover so that they get along for a couple of days, or possibly a week until it happens again.
Bloody annoying though.

Biggest Loser

Way back in June, someone at work decided that it might be ‘fun’ to run a biggest loser competition around the office. It was something of an incentive given that I was headed in the direction of trying to drop a few kilos anyway. After all, I seem to perpetually be chasing the weight loss in varying cycles.

I did something similar in Canada a few years ago and was successful to a moderate degree.

I threw my money in the ring and decided to see what happened – even if it was going to start just before my birthday. I made some good inroads for the first 3 weeks, recognising some early gains and then at the half way mark was surprised when I was told that I was near the front runners. I’d lost 6.3% of my starting weight and was only 0.2% behind the leader.

I went a bit sideways at that point though and bounced around over the next 3 weeks without losing any more weight whilst the leader shot ahead. It turns out that she had some added incentive given that she’s due to get married in the near future.

I decided that I wasn’t going to give in and plugged away as much for the personal satisfaction of starting to see weight numbers that I couldn’t recall seeing (which is the whole point after all) rather than any glory of financial reward at the end.

Slow updates from those that have run the competition meant that coming into the last week, it was something of an unknown as to where things stood. I decided to smash myself and see what happened.

Every day this week I’ve dragged my sorry arse out of bed at 6am and hopped straight onto the elliptical trainer and spent an hour there watching episodes of Big Bang Theory and pumping the legs. Then after work, back on it for another hour or alternately off to soccer.

Today was final weigh in. The leader was being pretty cagey about her final weight and giving answers like ‘my final percentage is between 10 and 15%’. Consequently I followed my pattern of the last couple of weeks. Fast all morning, run at lunch, weigh in when I am nice and dehydrated and at the lowest point of my weight cycle for the week.

At the end of the process, I stood on the scale and have to admit to smiling. I managed to drop 11.8% of my starting weight and have apparently in doing so managed to win the competition as well. 3.25 kgs came off in the last week. Apparently all that pain was worth it.


It feels damn good.

Getting Sentimental

I must be getting old. I remember the good old days when I’d be driven to pull a post together for this blog because a small child had put themselves in hospital or tried to blow the house up or something. If you’ve been following for a while you’ll have noticed something of a decline in output.

Partly it’s because life is just damn busy. Not only is it busy, but it’s rather repetitive as well. Monday to Friday is work and then the weekends tend to be a little absorbed by the 6 games of soccer, a game of netball and a game of hockey that make up our winter. Somewhere in there, Caroline is attempting to study and occasionally we think about doing outrageously wild things like cleaning the house or mowing the lawn.

Just occasionally though something gets thrown into the mix that drags us away from the ordinary.

We were lucky enough to get to go to a wedding in Bowral. The first instinct was wow, how cool would it be to go, it’s a pity that life’s too busy. The invitation sat there though and we looked at where Bowral is and wondered if perhaps there was a way to get there.. After all, we wanted to be at the wedding, it was only logistics and dollars. After all, taking four kids gets to be an interesting exercise.

After much thought and consideration, we realised that Bowral isn’t that far from Wollongong, home of our good friends the Handicotts. A plan started to come together. If we could farm out Michael and Sam, whose interest in the whole escapade really came down to whether they’d get Krispy Cremes out of a trip to Sydney, then perhaps we could get away with only bringing Thomas and Emily with us.

It worked. The Handicotts were happy to have us and kind enough to look after Tom and Em for the time that we were at the wedding and we managed to go enjoy the nuptials and all that it entailed.

I love a good wedding and I have to say that the McLloyd affair was a wedding worth being at. We had an awesome time and everything was brilliant from start to finish.

In those moments when I wasn’t listening to the priest telling everyone about sex, I had a few sentimental moments reflecting on our own wedding (so long ago) and the whole marriage experience. Add in the chance to randomly catch up with someone you knew from primary school and what more could you ask for?  Good times and good memories. The party of the reception stopped me from getting too memory laden on the night, but it’s hard to avoid it completely.

Thanks for the invite Matt and Jac, it was wonderful to be a part of it.

The fact that we also got to spend time with the Matt and Bron, who we hadn't caught up with since Caroline's 40th was an exceptionally good addition to the trip. It brought back it's own series of memories that added to the sentimental (and fun!) element of the couple of days away.

A couple of weeks after the wedding we were invited to a 50^th birthday. I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to the format of the night, I’d been told when we I needed to go there and that was sufficient information. It wasn’t really until the night that I thought to ask Caroline how it was going to work and whether we were supposed to bring anything. That’s when I found out that we’d actually be going to a sit down dinner. Not quite what I expected.

It wasn’t until we were sitting around the table as part of quite an intimate group of only about 16 people that I realised just how privileged we were to be there. Whilst spoiling us with a degustation menu of some 6 courses, Mike (the birthday boy) took us on a journey throughout the dinner of how the various guests (some of whom we’d known and some we hadn’t) had come into his life and ended up at the party.

I certainly felt like Caroline and I were the newcomers to the group which emphasized the sense of privilege that grew throughout the night.

It was a fantastic night and once again, as with the wedding, it left me thinking about a whole range of things, about how fortunate I’ve been in my life, the friends that I’ve accumulated and the journey that I’ve taken.

Clearly it’s a sign that I’m getting older myself. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that after a wedding or big party all I was left with was a big hangover and an absence of memories!

Holiday Envy

When we left Canada a few years ago, one of the realities that we knew we would face was the fact that holidays weren’t going to be the exotic affairs that we’d been enjoying from the frozen North.

Let’s face it, choosing to put 4 kids through private school is no small feat and the reality is that travelling anywhere from Australia is bloody expensive. One of the prices one pays for being so far away from everywhere else.

For the first couple of years I can’t say that it bothered me much. We’ve been lucky enough to holiday with family and friends and settle back into the life that we were accustomed to before Canada.

But we also had our eyes opened to a whole other way of holidaying. The skiing, the cruising, seeing parts of the world that you thought you just might never get the chance to … it might seem easy to give up at face value but it gets under your skin.

I guess it really got under my skin a long time ago. I left home and went to Singapore. Caroline and I married and took off to Europe for 3 months. That really set the tone. We talked on and off for years about going overseas to work again, but the whole having a family process meant that we didn’t chase it with any vigour. Then Canada came up … the timing was perfect and it was like fate had stepped in.

Now we’re home again. We’ve been back for 3 years and I’m getting itchy feet. I don’t want to pack up and move overseas, I just want a holiday. A holiday that sadly we just can’t afford right now.

It hurts when you get offers like 20% off Qantas flights … and then find out that it’s just when Michael will be starting year 12. Bugger.

So it’s back to dreaming and living vicariously through other people’s holiday photos on facebook. Keep them coming, I can deal with holiday envy … it just fuels the dream and desire. And one day I’ll be the one that’s posting exotic pictures and a new set of adventures to write about.

Coming Soon ...

< rant >

TV is starting to give me the shits (or maybe that’s still giving me). Maybe I’m getting old and crusty, but I miss the good old days. It used to be that when they put a program on TV, they’d stick it in a time slot and go with it. Occasionally something would end and not see out the season, but at least they tended to fail on the night selected.

These days they manage to piss me off before a new show starts. It’s the teasers that kill me; coming soon … a brand new heap of reality trash (they seem to be the most prolific after all). Even the shows that interest me start to piss me off because before they start they have to tell you it’s coming. They have to whet the appetite and that’s fine, but they start doing it so long before it starts that I’m almost ready to ignore the show when it does finally start just because of those bloody ads.

Not only do they start a long way out, but when they do start they don’t even tell you when. They can’t say coming June or anything specific, just … soon. A couple of weeks before it finally airs they might give you a date when it will start, but by then I’m over it!

Then when the show is finally on, they keep messing with the times. TV Shows used to be scheduled to start on the hour, or half hour. Same bat time, same bat channel. Not now. Oh no, now they move it about by 10-15 minutes here and there, or skip a week to broadcast some lame-arsed special event. Even if life allowed me the consistency to watch a show at the same time every week, I simply can’t be bothered finding out that they’ve decided to move it or to put the finale on a different night to the rest of the bloody series.

Stop it already!

< / rant >