Another day, another cake wrecks moment

So it's the weekend and the kid and I managed to do the shopping at Woden and I tidied up the house and the kid read Dilbert, Drowned Ammet and other stuff and I think the telly might be broken but I don't care and the kid hasn't noticed yet. It probably isn't broken, but with all the cords and things attached to it and the 'no picture' kind of thing when I turn it on and try out all the different remotes and buttons and switches and there's still 'no picture', you know, it might as well be.

I might have to ask a Young Person TM to come and help. Also I don't know how to do superscript in this blog environment.

For some reason that made me think of Jean Luc Picard, so maybe I am feeling a little tired.

I tried to ice the kid's birthday cake for his party tomorrow. It's supposed to look like this. It doesn't. The icing slid right off the little swiss rolls, so it looks like naked swiss rolls in a snaky short of shape, with a lake of lime-green icing around the botton of it. Perhaps it could be meant to be the train in Spirited Away when it travels over the flood waters. If the flood waters were lime-green and if the train were made out of eight mini swiss rolls. Which it isn't, really.

The snake was supposed to be a gesture to The Keys to the Kingdom. Instead, it is a gesture to lack of faith in my own judgement. I knew the icing was too runny, but I'd followed the recipe so I trusted them. And if that doesn't sum up my entire life, I don't know how to sum up my entire life in a cake-fiasco metaphor.

Tomorrow we will be off to Michel's Patisserie for a nice mud cake with 'Happy Birthday' written on it.

Also, we are supposed to be having the party at the local playground at lunch time. Storms and high winds are predicted for late morning or noon. It seems likely the party will be in our living room, so I have cleared out some extra chairs and tried to make space. I think I will need to rely on Parlour Games for Modern Families to see me through.

9.55 am, Day 2

The shine is starting to wear off. Mostly because of trying to go shopping at Woden, but I did pull off my first parking in a parking station effort. No damage to humans, concrete or paintwork. However, I can tell you a handy hint, which goes like this: it is quite helpful to take the hand brake off before you try to drive out of the car park.

It is not sunny today either, and I have been shopping for the kid's birthday party on Sunday and it's frankly a bit difficult and stressful and why can't you just buy an ordinary bucket at the supermarket any more? I still need to buy the sausages, which means I have to go to the shops again on Saturday and it's much harder to get mini-swiss rolls than it used to be and I had to buy the chocolate kind (but that's what I get from not being a birthday-cake-from-scratch kind of mum, now isn't it?)

I did give the man at the service station a bit of a chuckle when I bought 4 very large sponges though, and a set of P plates.

Coming up today, in my new theme of Me Me Me, I have personal training in the park with my lovely colleague, and later I am going to pick up a friend of the husband's to baby sit the kid tonight while I go out to a Trivia night with 300 of my closest friends from the Best Department Evah. I have never been to a trivia night before, so I am quite excited. We bought tickets to a kindy fundraising one once, but then we didn't go because of some disaster or other. You know.

As well as remembering to collect the kid from school, of course. This driving malarkey is just too odd for words. Tomorow I am going to the library to do some research after I drop the kid off. Because if I don't get some done my head will start oozing random bits of story ideas and it will look like a very nasty discharge because it is all still gooey in my head. I need some thickener in the form of facts.

Temporary stay-at-home Mum

I'm enjoying this at 10.18 am of day one. So far I have gotten the kid ready for school, driven him to school (with only one swear word), had a coffee and planned out some avenues for my research over the next few days, done three loads of washing, vacuumed the dining room and living room, cleaned up the kitchen and emailed the husband back at KLIA airport where he is presently waiting for his next flight to Hanoi.

The rest of the day will include chores, reading the latest Phryne Fisher novel, collecting the kid and cooking dinner (insofar as reheating frozen soup constitutes cooking).

All the work that usually goes towards implementing government policy is going towards implementing a nice life for the kid and me. Thus far, fun. I'll post again tomorrow and let you know how it's progressing.

Parlour games variations - Topper and On the Bright Side

So a while ago I raved about Parlour Games for Modern Families, which is full of fun games to play that are not attached to the telly or the computer. The kid got a Wii for his birthday, and he really loves it, but it's good to see that he is also enjoying the more drawing room style of entertainment.

This evening we have invented two variations to 'It could be worse'. In 'It could be worse' you have the first person say something bad, like 'the house burned down' and the next person has to say 'it could be worse, the cat could've been killed' and so on until it gets really ramped up to terrible things. I have a hard time stopping the junior from immediately leaping to 'the universe exploded' but we have a lot of fun.

One of our variations is based on a character from Dilbert, the 'Topper' who can always top a story with some self-aggrandising version of his own. Each player has to top the story of the last player. It's very funny. So you can start with 'I went for a really long walk yesterday' and end up with someone on the moon, or you can start with 'My ankle is really sore' and end up with, well, probably with 'the universe exploded', but maybe with shattered legs, body parts scattered over half of Switzerland and an urban myth about ski lifts.

The other variation is 'On the bright side', in which one player starts with a bad thing happening, and the next player has to come up with a bright side. I don't think there is any winning but it is very funny (and potentially good practice for certain kinds of discussions that come up with certain kinds of relatives over Christmas).

The other thing that happened today is that the husband departed for Vietnam and he won't be back for eight weeks. It's quite the thing, I can tell you. If you have a Topper or an 'On the bright side' for me on that topic, I would be happy to have them.

We're all going on a something holiday

Something, something for a week or two. Or four or so.

So that means only fielding questions from junior for quite some time. No phone calls or emails asking questions about stuff, stuff and more stuff.

I already fear how many emails there will be upon my return.

But hopefully a few weeks of tooling about in the National Library and going to the beach in Sydney and eating cake on Acland Street and things like that will make me forget all the other stuff. Not forget it forever, though, or I will become an 'inefficient use of Commonwealth resouces' after my return to work. That would be bad. I fear that nearly as much as I fear causing my Minister to mislead Parliament through a moment of inattention. That would be really, really bad. The only thing worse than that is the fear of missing out on the sausage rolls at divisional morning tea again. That would be really, really, really bad. I haven't had one for weeks.

The life of a public servant, very tough, I tells you, very tough indeed.

Books with girls

This week the kid is reading (with no guidance or recommendation from me) Anne of Green Gables and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. I am extremely pleased to see, at nearly nine, that he is refuting that old and hoary chestnut that boys won't read books where the main character is a girl. Both of the covers are extremely pink and coded 'girl' in terms of the design. He has read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit before, but he decided he would like to buy it for keeps today.

Of course, his other favourite literature presently is Dilbertcomics, so he may not represent a 'typical' sample. On the other hand, very few children are typical and it annoys me when people make generalisations and then speak about them as if they are the truth and then they get annoyed when someone doesn't fit into their narrow little regime. Not as much as it annoys me when people tell a bookseller that their kid is a 'bad reader' in front of the kid, but nearly as much.

Junior's other purchase for the week, with his very own savings, was a new cricket bat because the old one fell to pieces. He has bashed a lot of cricket and tennis balls in the past two years, more than a stick of willow can stand, apparently.

General thinkiness

Having lots of fun researching Melbourne in 1937. It is so familiar and so strange at the same time. I keep finding myself shocked about what is there and what is not there.

The ACT library has introduced this new automated system with a card-activated chute, so when you put your books inside the chute, they are automatically checked back in. The chute is slow - a little door opens up each time for every single book, and a conveyor belt sucks them inside. The chute will not accept books that are not checked out on your card, which results in eager-to-return-library-books patrons standing around looking foolish and confused. And angry and impatient. The library thinks I have about 8 books and 2 DVDs out presently, but it's not true. The husband who is very helpful tried to return them but it just didn't work. The books are in the library, but the library doesn't know. Disaster. Not a good incentive for high library patronage.

The kid got ready for bed too quickly.

Bye.