have you seen a hobbldehoy today?

hobbledehoy

    

hob·ble·de·hoy [ hóbb'ldee hòy ] (plural hob·ble·de·hoys)

 noun 

Definition:

 rude young man: a clumsy or rude young man ( archaic )

  

[Mid-16th century. Origin ?]

(Encarta)

  

I think that trumps mollycoddle. Use it three times and it is yours!

horrors in the night

My hair lives a life of its own. I think it goes out partying at night.

 

I can have the smartest do, cemented into place within an inch of its life, when going to bed, but no matter how carefully I sleep at night, when I wake in the morning I look like Phyllis Diller's ugly step sister. My hair just stands on end. No matter how long or how short it just wants to go " hey fellas the party is ove here!" and stand on end.

 

I worry that one night our house will catch on fire and when the fire men come to rescue me and carry me out through the smoke and flames, that they will eventually see my hair and turn around and return me right into the buring inferno. Or at the very least request trauma therapy after wards. Probably both.

 

My husband says that it is ok because they will leave him behind also. He sleeps naked - imagine a short, obese, hairy guy, who is bald on top, Not a pretty sight. When he sleeps his hair goes into two little tufts on the side, like little horns. We are a most unattractive couple in the night.

 

I think I am going to lobby for the fashion of night caps to come back. It is my only hope of rescue.

Mondays, Mondays, so many Mondays

Mondays are for wishing you were rich and didn’t have to go to work…or at least lamenting the fact that you didn’t marry rich and so didn’t have to work.

Mondays are for starting diets that last until lunch time, because you thought a good way to start would be not to eat breakfast.

Mondays are for crying in your coffee as you realize there are another 4 days to go before you can sleep in again.

Mondays are for realizing that you forgot to wash your coffee cup before leaving on Friday and now you have mould in you cup that adds nothing to its flavor.

Mondays are for seeing yourself clearly in the mirror and wishing you had retouched the gray roots over the weekend after all.

Mondays are for remembering, as you drive to work, that you left a bag of prawns/shrimp in the car boot on Saturday.

Mondays are for feeling guilty that you didn’t phone your mother over the weekend.  

Mondays are for waving husbands off on week long business trips and reclaiming the remote.

Mondays are for swapping stories about who had the crappiest weekend.

Mondays are also about making your coworkers ill by telling them how you sailed a yatch around the Great Barrier Reef over the weekend, and lo, you looked over and their were Nicole and Keith, Tom and Katie and the kids waving to you to come aboard and throw a prawn/shrimp on the barbie with them….

Mondays are for telling everyone the plot and ending to the movie they were going to see next weekend.

Mondays are for swearing off all relatives, especially his, for at least the next five years.

Mondays are for realizing that, yes, indeed, today was the day Junior child was going away on a 10 day school camp and you have no name tags, or anything for that matter.

Mondays are also for realizing that you forgot to take the staff room tea towels home on Friday to wash and everyone knows because your name in written in large letters on the roster in the staff room. Now everyone is using the front of their shirt to dry their cup.

Mondays are for vowing to do more with your next weekend.

Mondays are for wearing that new outfit/ pair of shoes/ hair colour/ false nails that you got over the weekend.

Mondays are for telling everyone about the trekking holiday you and your partner are taking to Mongolia later in the year. And your partner’s employer is so keen to retain his skills when he comes back, that they are going to pay you BOTH a full salary until you return.

Mondays are for deciding to drop your boyfriend, and then changing your mind when he phones later that afternoon.

Mondays are for just deciding to drop your boyfriend

Mondays are for deciding to join up to an internet dating service

Mondays are for going to the physiotherapist.

Mondays are for searching for self-help books on the net.

Mondays are for sending job applications

Mondays are for checking how many days until you can retire.

Mondays are for realizing that you should have baked 36 cup cakes for the school bake sale that is on that morning.

Monday is the day all school age children develop sore throats and mysterious tummy aches.

Mondays are for realizing that there went another two days from your life, and vowing to do better next time...

incoherent days

Today is one of those days when my ability to speak coherent English is more an aspiration than a given...sigh

ideas that by morning have left the room

I am not a patient person.

This would come as no surprise to most people who know me well. Or even partially well.  The split personality of my brain means therefore, that if you don’t know me well, you might be given the wrong impression that I am indeed patient. At least a  little. I pretend well. It was one of my first lessons under the tutelage of the Sisters of No Mercy. Deceit as survival.

If I think of something I like to start action.  Much preparation, much haranguing of others if need be. Maturity has lessened the energy spurt and brought on a degree of  lethargy, but the activity of swirling thoughts and ideas and plans in my brain still happens. This lack of energy is not equaled by any pseudo-patience though, it creates whirls of anxiety and frustration and anger.  However, the spurt often melts away to emptiness and inertia .  Impatience can keep me up at night by the ideas that by morning have left the room.

It is a tough lesson to learn to be patient. Is it an art, a science,  a gift?  My body has tried to impart  the lesson to me a few times but  my human condition being as it is,  has seen me soon return to old ways. Motherhood should teach one patience, all those long gestational months, and the long years of child rearing, but looking back it all seems to have passed in the flicker of an eye lid, and the lesson is no closer to being learned.

Will I learn it along with aging? I think not.  Aging may slow my brain and slow my body, but the needs and wants will still be there.  I hope.

 I am yet to be convinced that patience is indeed a virtue.  Does patience not often harbor injustice and feed domination and inequality?  Doesn’t patience just maintain the status quo? Without a sense of urgency would anyone ever act to right any wrong? Would anyone have ever scaled to the mountain top?

full moons and not so bright lights

I once knew a man who would only cut his hair and beard, or trim his nails on the full moon. He was very odd and we suspected that he wore his mother's clothes when at home. She had died when he was a young boy.

In my other life, I managed bookshops and we alway knew when the full moon was in its glory because our freakest customers would come into the store. Every crazy would decide that was the day to go and descend on the bookshop. I thought this was just a coincidence until a friend who is a clinically assessed depressive and takes pleasure in telling me that she has an official certificate to say that she is certifiably mentally ill said that she was indeed influenced by the full moon. Her psychologist also confirmed to her that the moon does appear to have an influence on some people.

 Another customer who only ordered his books (always about manga comics) on the full moon would stand at the counter and go on and on about his latest obsession each month. We did not see them the rest of the month. Even the behaviour of the coffee shop manager in our store would become more bizare at that time of the month (most of the time we called her the creature that lives above the stairs, so it must have been pretty obvious for us to notice!). We suffered more complaints and abuse at that time of the month than at any other time.  We started to suspect our own mental health after awhile but only because of the customers we were forced to serve - I think!

Everyone always thinks that to work in a bookstore or a library is such a wonderful place to work, but the truth is that you are a target for every angry, abusive, lonely or crazy person in the world and because you are in a service industry you just have to take it. And as for reading those books, well you are so tired at the end of the day from moving the books from boxes to shelf and back to boxes that you are too tired to read at night!

A work colleague of my daughter's recently said that she if she is feeling bad about herself she likes to go into stores and is purposely rude to the staff because it makes her feel better. Obviously she has no compassion or any understanding that the shop assistant is indeed another person with feelings. No wonder there are so many conflicts in the world when we have to inflict emotional pain on someone else to make ourselves feel better.

One of my real hates is when I go to lunch with someone and they make a fuss about a water mark on the cutlery, or they make a scene to the poor waitress because the barista didn't make the coffee to the right temperature. Certainly complain and ask for a replacement if you need to, but do it with dignity and politeness.Everyone is so busy thinking "me" no one is thinking "you and me". Notice the you is before me?

 Treat others the way that you would like to be treated yourself and the world will be a better place.

i think i just saw the guy on the grassy knoll.

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.


- Eleonora Duse

“I looked in the mirror on my birthday and discovered that my ears had gotten old. They are no longer shell-like and appealingly pink, but pendulous and wrinkled, something like Hermione Gingold's ears in Gigi (and how many years has it been since I realized I had begun to relate to Hermione instead of Leslie Caron when I watch Gig?) The spots and freckles, the flab and wobble, the folded eyelids and the stubby eyelashes, the creaky knees and crumbling teeth had, until the moment of the pendulous lobes, been matters for denial and half-hearted plans for renovation and disguise. Old ears were my turning point. I have reached the Age of Acceptance”

Jane O’Reilly

Decadence

Two pigeons have taken up residence on our bedroom windowsill. First, one arrived and it billed and cooed and cooed and billed until its mate arrived. The pair then sat quietly side by side, on the brick windowsill. They sat under the cover of the fronds of the palm tree in my garden, in the hot, humid, morning air. They didn't seem to notice me watching from the other side of the glass, as they were too intent on looking at each other.

Devotion is hard to find, but sometimes it is on your very windowsill. Breath deep.

the first day of the new year is almost over and neither fame nor fortune has come my way. 364 chances to go.

what was that?

Mr FD and I were discussing whether to watch a particular program on teleivsion when Mr FD said we didn't need to as "I have the VD."


I burst out laughing at his delusion of grandeur.

His reply was "there is no way out of this is there?"

Best laugh I have had all year (you didn't think I was going to miss the opportunity to say that did you really?)

And Mr FD didn't watch the program as he has the DVD.

Happy New Year! Here's 2010!

May health and happiness be yours throughout 2010.

two hours and counting

We are already celebrating - in anticipation, or fear of falling alseep before 12, I don't know - but we have a cheese platter, dried apricots and quince paste and we are having fun. 

last day

I love New Year's Eve. All day I get to make really obvious, pathetic statements like when farewelling a phone caller with "see you next year". This morning I told Mr FD that if he mowed the lawn today that he wouldn't have to do it again until next year.

And the fun goes on. Tomorrow I get to say classy things like: " haven't spoken to you since last year" or "I haven't eaten since last year". Minutes and minutes of fun.



You're really looking forward to the calibre of my postings next year now aren't you?

inside words and outside words

Do you ever say what should be an inside word as an outside word? I mean, do you blurt out something that would have been better left unsaid? I find that as I get older I am doing this a little more often than I should. Does it mean that eventually I will be one of those rude old ladies who thinks nothing of telling someone that they are fat, or ugly? Or does it mean that I am just tired of playing games and want a bit more honesty? Dangerous game though isn't it?

Evil intent

My dear children,

When I am old and no longer coherent or mobile, please, do not allow me to be parked in a chair in front of one of those Rainforest Screenscape DVDs. Imagine a spectacular cascading waterfall, or a picturesque stream gently bubbling through an old growth forest with a choice of 4 rainforest landscapes and natural sounds or ambient music – on repeat for 10 hours a day.



Darling children, if you do that, I will come back and haunt you, your children, and your pets. Revenge is sweet, and it will be mine.

Anxiety is my other name

Anxiety, for me, is not the second album created by the alternative rock/post-grunge music group Smile Empty Soul (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety (album) ). Rather, it is an unpleasant, emotional and relatively permanent state in my life that involves a rather complex combination of emotions that include, but is not limited to at any time; fear, apprehension, and worry ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety ) The varying degrees of fear, apprehension and worry fluctuate wildly throughout any given day.



Logically, I realise that this is because I am a 52nd generation member in a very long line of anxious people in my family. I have spoken before about my mother’s perennial question “can you do that?” that sticks with me to this day. If you can’t control it you have to be anxious about it. My flight or fight switch is permanently in high gear. Thanks Mum.



I also thank the Sister of No Mercy who taught me from age 5 to 12. They applied guilt and anxiety along with hell and brimstone, and a fair degree of corporal punishment, but that is an issue for another day. Let us just say that their not so tender unmercies certainly did nothing to soothe an anxious, shy child.



How anxious you ask? I can not listen to phone-in competitions on breakfast radio while driving to work in my car. As soon as someone is put on the spot and has to remember the 2nd line of the song played just before the 7am news, yesterday, I tense up and have to switch off the radio until I judge that it is all over and can switch back on to the music. I empathise too much. I feel their stress, their anxiety, their desperation to win that double pass to have smallpox vaccinations. Too much to bear.



I took pills for awhile, but then I started to get anxious about the medication I was taking. Long term effects? How long should I take the pills? If it says take once a day, is it better to take in the morning, or the evening? ….zillions of anxious queries and issues rising in my head again.



Anxiety is not all bad. It does let you write “I have great attention to detail” on your resume and mean it. I have “midnight epiphanies” where I wake in the middle of the night and think “NO! I forgot to reply to the email about the boobahs” and I cannot go back to sleep until I get out of bed, log on remotely to my office and send that email. Like someone is waiting at 3am to receive my missive.



A friend handles it better. If she has a midnight epiphany she just grabs something off her bedside table and throws it at the door. In the morning that thing lying on the floor reminds her of the issue and she deals with it. If only. I would worry that one of my kids would fall over the item just inside the doorway. After I threw my lamp I would eventually have to get out of bed and retrieve it. Then I would have to think of a new place to put the lamp to remind me about the thing that woke me up to worry in the first place. I would have to change that lamp’s position three times. By now day light would be peeping through my windows and I have to also worry that I will now be tired at work all day.



Would I be less anxious if I let go of my anxiety regarding my anxiety? Celebrated it even? I could have an ANXIETY party with an anxious looking piñata that I danced under while pulverising with a stick, thus representing the letting go of my anxieties. I fear that the sight of me in high party mode may frighten my few remaining friends and make them anxious about me, or at least my stick.



Or should I just embrace my anxiety and acknowledge it for what it is? Acknowledge that I will always walk back to the car, twice, to check that I did actually lock it the first time. No longer fight the fact that I will always make my daughters pack a jacket, even on holiday to Fiji.



I am 52 in 4 months time. Is it too late for a mature dog to lean new tricks ( would they be too hard, too complicated, too physical?? Or should I just go with the established status quo and keep harrying the bone? Make anxiety my friend?



I am not going to sleep tonight, am I?

How to pass a rainy day

How to pass a rainy day (if at home).

By Flamingo Dancer, aged 51 years and 10 months





The obvious – read, watch movies, craft, sleep

Cook soup and muffins (even if 30 degrees Celsius outside!)

Locate all the cutlery into one spot and place them neatly in a drawer. Spoons spooning, that sort of thing.

Gather together all the Christmas cards and update my address list

Go through the pantry and check use by dates.

Find all the stray socks and match up.

Untangle all the wire coat hangers at the back of my closet

Drink tea

Go through old magazines, rip out any recipes I think I can’t live without and recycle the magazines

Make a stew (yes, even if 30 degrees Celsius outside!)

Think (but not too deeply, let us not get too carried away)

Watch rain run down the window pane

Check the rain gauge (becomes an obsession in a drought!)

Knock on the rain water tank to check how much rain water has been collected. Listen for variations of sound to decide on water level. Knock some more trying to make music.

Surf the net

Drink more tea.

Wait for the mailman who will only bring requests for payment and so avoid opening anything.

Think about ordering pizza, but try and be strong.

Search for hidden supplies of chocolate. Give in to weakness

Consider going through my closest and throwing out clothes not worn for 12 months. Think better of going through my closest and throwing out clothes not worn for 12 months.

Feel guilty and phone mother, and then wish you hadn’t.

Drink more tea.

Plan dinner for next Christmas – put in too hard basket and promise self to just buy take away.



So that should keep me occupied until lunch time. Suggestions for the afternoon please?