Cowabunga, dude

The other day I found myself thinking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and, though I’ve known about the show for over 20 years and can still remember and sing a worrying amount of the theme song, for the first time ever I noticed every single word in the title. The show is about turtles. Ninja turtles. Mutant ninja turtles. Teenage mutant ninja turtles.

No matter where I put the emphasis, I simply cannot understand what about the show appealed to the younger version of me who watched it religiously.

Whining about being sick | Book reviews

Hello. I’ve been doing nothing much this week besides willing time to pass (4 hours until Alan gets home. 2 and a half hours until Alan gets home. 17 minutes until Alan gets home, etc.) and reading books. I’m still feeling terrible, and have taken more painkillers over the last 5 days than I took in all of the preceding 12 months combined; I kind of expected the antibiotics to charge in (chanting “WE ARE AGAINST LIFE”) and indiscriminately murder all the ‘biotics’ they came across in my head, but so far they seem to just be laying low and planning their strategy. All that’s been killed so far is my desire to get out of bed and take care of anyone besides myself.

I read a stupid number of books when Moses was a baby. This year I’ve read far less, partly because I’m studying, partly because I have a preschooler as well as a baby, and partly because after some analysis I’ve concluded that I seem to watch TV rather than reading when I’m depressed, and it’s only since the depression’s lifted (a couple of months ago; I’ll write about that soon) that I’ve had any desire to plow through novels again. Being sick has also helped; there’s something about reading a novel that makes me feel like I’m being kind and comforty to myself.

So I read Me Before You by Jojo Moyes on Monday (Alan took time off work to look after Hazel so that I could spend the day in bed), which I quite enjoyed (7.9/10). The writing reminded me of Jodi Picoult’s, which may not be a helpful thing to say since I’ve only read one Picoult novel and that was three years ago (how do you pronounce her surname? Is it French [pi-koo] or not [pi-kolt]? I’m sure I could google this but I’m sleepy and my face hurts and therefore I won’t). I keep thinking about the things that vaguely irritated me about Me Before You, rather than the fact that I was hooked while reading it and desperate to know how it ended. It was good. I liked it.

And then I read What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty over the rest of the week (which I counted as the spread-across-four-days extra sick day the doctor prescribed that I’d have had if I was not a mother and didn’t have to rely on someone else taking leave from their work in order for me to be able to take leave from my work) and I LOVED it (9.7/10). I borrowed this one after Sarah Bessey said it was one of her “favourite novels to recommend to women in the tired thirties” with her. I’m choosing to ignore how sad it is that I related to this description and instead be thankful for the fact that it led me to such an enjoyable book. 

The story’s about a woman named Alice who wakes up from a concussion believing she’s 29, happily married, and pregnant, when actually that was her 10 years ago and her life has changed dramatically since then. It’s mostly told from Alice’s perspective, but there are letters written by her sister Elisabeth and blog posts from her grandmother that pop up throughout the book too. Elisabeth is going through IVF and writes about infertility and childlessness in a way that made me cry more than once. I really liked this book. Like, wow.

I found the characters relatable and lovable, and I didn’t want to put the book down; I read it as I made toast and I read it as I peed and I read it as I walked from one end of our apartment to the other to find socks. And it’s Australian! Which is always a pleasant surprise. I start all novels assuming they’ll be American, and I get terribly excited when something comes up that makes me realise it’s set in a context I know far more about (JOHN HOWARD?! He was MY Prime Minister!!!!!). Me Before You is set in the UK, which was also a surprise that required some brain readjustments before I could continue with the story. I highly recommend What Alice Forgot, even if you’re not tired or in your thirties.

I’ve been planning to write a big update on everything, seeing as I’ve just passed my 300th post and was wanting to follow the tradition I’d started, but I’ll wait until I’m taking fewer drugs and feeling less grumpy and lethargic. Until then, I’ll be sneakily reading more of Liane Moriarty’s novels (I’ve just placed holds on three of them at my library), and whinging a lot about my head.

Sick and tired

from here

Moses, Hazel and I have been sick multiple times over the last few months, and I’ve HAD. ENOUGH. We should now be immune to approximately 18 strains of Sydney cold virus, as well as 1 from Adelaide (unless Moses carried the Sydney bug down to Adelaide and then got sick there, in which case, SORRY ADELAIDE FRIENDS). I think it’s happening because early this year, when it was Alan catching everything, I may have said, “I’m never sick! Sickness is a luxury I can’t afford!” or something equally self-righteous. Turns out I’m actually rolling in sickness dollars, and I can afford a whole lotta germs. (Alan hasn’t had a full-on cold since then, I don’t think.) So Mo, Hazel and I have been keeping Kleenex in business all by ourselves. Moses had his first cold when he was 10 months old; poor Hazel could practically blow her own nose by that age.

I currently have no voice, gunky eyes and two blocked ears, which means I whisper at people and they say, “Pardon?“ and then they whisper back (it’s weird to talk at a normal volume when someone's whispering to you, I’ve been told), and I say “Pardon?“ My conversations last for hours at the moment.

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For a long time, I was trying to make sure I was in bed by 9:30pm, but I’d always be in bed at 10pm, and then, after feeling guilty about it for a while, I thought, “Why bother trying so hard to be in bed earlier when 10pm is obviously the time I naturally make it to bed?“ So I changed my bedtime to 10pm and now I go to bed at 11pm.

I think I’ll aim for 9:30pm again. I need the sleep.

Hair

I like my hair colour. It’s taken a while; I used to be convinced that God had made a mistake when He chose to give me not-quite-dark-enough hair, and I’d dye it regularly to make up for the error. While I was at school I experimented with various shades of red, and then later, at uni, I gave blonde a go, which was disastrous but probably a helpful lesson to learn. And then one day I realised how much money I could save if I didn’t have to buy dye every couple of months, and how much time I could save if I didn’t have to factor in hair-colouring to my getting-ready-for-an-event schedule, and I decided then and there to let the dyed parts grow out. I haven’t dyed my hair since. Because I’m a lazy tight-arse, pretty much. And also I’ve grown to like my natural colour. 

There are lots of parts of me I used to like but now, not so much; it‘s kinda nice that my feelings about my hair colour have headed in the opposite direction.

I used to cut Mo’s hair, until he got too squirmy and his hair started looking particularly hacked, when I decided to try out a barber. Unfortunately the one we chose was uncommunicative and rough, and so we decided to use our clippers in future and shave Mo’s head ourselves. He looked like a bogan with clippered hair, but it was free and quick, and so we’ve stuck with this system ever since. The one teeny tiny problem with this, though, is that Moses HATES having his hair clippered (he also hates having his nails cut; he basically just wants to hang onto everything his body has grown), and every time we do it he seems so devastated by the experience that I decide we’ll try out a new style that involves a kinder barber and less machinery against his head. 

But then after a month or so his hair grows over his ears and looks untidy and terrible, and then something big and important inevitably comes up (Nanna Parsons comes to visit/a friend has a birthday party/etc.) and I realise I can’t let him be seen or photographed with hair like that and there’s no time to go find a barber. So we pin him down and clipper it again (we do love you, Mo, I promise). We use the 3mm attachment so that it will take forever to grow and we won’t have to think about haircuts again for as long as possible, so Mo goes for a week or so around haircut time looking like he’s terminally ill, and then he goes for a few weeks after that looking like a regular (bogan) kid, and then he starts to move from regular kid to feral kid, and then the whole process starts again.

Kerry suggested we try putting his feet in a bucket of warm, salty water while cutting his hair to somehow ease the trauma, and it did seem to help last time; next time I plan to test whether or not the water working was purely a placebo effect and I could therefore use something else instead. And the time after that I’ll let him grow it longer and then find a barber.

Hazel has a mini dreadlock. We haven’t cut her hair yet because Alan doesn’t want us to, and also because I never have scissors close by when I spot her dreadlock. I have no idea how we’re supposed to decide how to style her hair as she gets older: Fringe or no fringe? Long or short? Pin her down and clipper it? There are too many choices, and too much time before she’ll care enough to make her own decisions about it. Also, is it fair that if Hazel hates having her hair cut in future she‘ll be able to get away with it staying long because she’s a girl, but poor Mo has been shorn far more times that he’d have liked just because he’s a boy? OF COURSE IT’S NOT. What to do?

And finally there’s Alan. His hair is completely his responsibility, fortunately.

(For the record, these cheap clippers were dodgy, so we returned them. But it was worth trying them out, just for this photo.) 

Obligatory whinging-about-my-essay post

My essay has been paused; I’ve been given an extension. I managed to battle on through our thirty-fourth cold (but worst one by far) for the month, thanks to which Moses missed three days of preschool and looked like this for the best part of a week:

[insert photo of Moses looking miserable and puffy]

And Hazel looked like this (only for a day or two):

[insert photo of Hazel looking miserable and snotty]

And I looked perhaps even more disconsolate because, unlike those two, I wasn’t allowed to sleep as much as I wanted to, nor did I have someone bringing me apple juice or stroking my forehead or caring at all how I was feeling. We were lethargic and had no appetite and spent a lot of time groaning at each other. But we survived it, leaving me free to turn all of my returning energy towards my essay! Finally! On Tuesday, Mo went off to preschool, I put Hazel down for her morning sleep, got my books out, turned on my laptop, entered my password, was given an error message, then repeated the previous two steps numerous times with the same result but increasing panic.

During the following 4 billion or so phone calls  to a few companies including Microsoft (who said they’d be helpful only if I paid them $80) and Hewlett Packard (who were very helpful for free), I found out the error message was a cryptic way of telling me I needed to take my laptop to a service centre to retrieve important non-backed-up files from my hard drive (such as my essay) and then install a new operating system on it, which, I was told, might be difficult for HP to find and send to me because the version of Windows I had was now completely out of date, being – HORROR OF HORRORS – three entire years old. (They found one. It’s on its way from Singapore now, apparently.)

So my computer, including my essay, is currently sitting in a repair shop in Beverly Hills (THAT’S where I want TO BE!) with a guy who’s told me that he’ll take a look at it in a couple of days and then let me know how long he thinks it will take him to actually fix it. Which, when I’d spoken to him earlier in the day, he’d said would take 48 hours, but then when I saw him later he said could take 3 or 4 days, and when I asked more questions to try to work out whether he meant 3 or 4 days from that exact moment, or 3 or 4 days after he’d figured out what the problem was in a couple of days, he told me he’d call me later in the week and we’d figure it out from there. “Everybody says it’s urgent,” he said not-actually-apologetically, even though I hadn’t.

Fortunately MST are also very helpful and three very kind staff (including the Dean of the college) let me cry at them for a bit before reassuring me that this happened to a student pretty much every semester and it would be fine, I could keep them updated, and we’d figure out a new deadline for my essay as soon as Computer Guy was less vague about actual dates.