One Angry Monkey

If you’re not a plumber but think you might like to be one, this cautionary tale is for you. Plumbing isn’t all glamour, “tradies’ crack” and fixing taps for lonely housewives. Sometimes the job can get unpleasant. Like today, for example.

As it turned out, even the “mad plunging skillz” of the Man of the House were insufficient for the blockage in our pipes. To my surprise (but not the Matriarch whose area of expertise is “poos and wees and water”) the problem wasn’t caused by my chronic intestinal distress. No, it was caused by the trees around us. Damn you, Nature, you rooted my piping.

That’s a specialty which requires special tools, not just a giant suction cup and a bit of elbow grease. Fortunately our property is managed by the Best Agent Ever. BAE, bless her massively tall and kind of scary heart, sent out a pair of specialists just as quick as she could. Why bless her heart? They were the prettiest pair of specialists I ever did see.

*ahem*

They took their cutter around the back and got to work. This is where the chronic intestinal distress really came into its own. I can’t imagine anyone’s waste water smells appetising but the odour filtering in through the back door (open because they needed a power point) was… Let’s call it educational.

Remember that next time you’re thinking you’ve got a shitty job.

The Man of the House has gone all alpha-male on me. I’m not quite sure what to do with him. I’ve never really been that great a fan of being bossed about by the male of the species. Conveniently, he’s never had bossy tendencies. But something has changed all of that.

What cataclysm could have brought about such a polar shift in MotH’s behaviour? I’m so glad you asked. You see, this evening every drain in our house simultaneously clogged.

When someone in the house suffers from chronic intestinal distress that sort of thing is almost inevitable. I’m kind of shocked it’s taken this long, but this is pretty much the longest we’ve been in one place. Now I find myself envisioning us leaving a trail of rental properties with time-bomb toilets across Adelaide as we move about from place to place, using up the plumbing and leaving like the back end of a swarm of locusts. That’s on me. I admit that.

So when the drains clogged, discovered when MotH tried to flush the toilet (it always starts in the toilet, doesn’t it?) I sent him out to buy our very first plunger. Thus began his downward spiral. He found me a plunger worthy of Mordor and returned to unclog my drains. We believed the problem existed solely in the bathroom. So he unclogged the drains through there and all seemed well in the world. I opened a new bottle of wine to celebrate.

A few mouthfuls of that and I realised I had made a grave error in judgment. The wine tasted vile. So I did what any good connoisseur would do and poured it down the drain in the kitchen. At least, I tried to. It just kind of sat there, taunting me. You won’t get rid of me that easily, it said. I’m here for the long haul, baby. I summoned MotH through to see if he could hear the taunts as well. Apparently he could, because he went straight for the plunger.

I wanted to do it myself. I’m not helpless, nor am I frail. I have some experience of my own with plungers courtesy of the stupormarket. MotH wasn’t content with that resume and thus wrestled the plunger from my grasp and proceeded to unclog the kitchen drain “properly”. Once he was done doing that, he went back to the bathroom and attacked the toilet with renewed vigour.
The poor thing may never recover.

I’ve created a monster.

The ability to see causes serious side-effects in certain people. The government should pass a law; all glasses should be labeled. “Warning: May cause compulsive throwing-out of stuff.”

Why is that bad? I like all my stuff, damn it. I don’t want to throw it out. I emptied out half of my kitchen yesterday. Sure, it’s tidier. It’s a small space so sure, maybe it frees up room for me to, you know, cook and stuff. I don’t care about having room to cook. I care about having my stuff. Were it not for my natural and entirely understandable reticence to fossick through my rubbish bin, I’d take it all back in a second. In fact I might even go so far as to beg my poor, discarded stuff for its forgiveness.

Today it’s the bedroom. That’s a way bigger task than the kitchen. Why? Because I hoard clothing, and so does the Man of the House. The greatest crime (other than the sheer ugliness of some of it) revolves around my pants. Most of them were a gift from a friend who had outgrown them after a couple of pregnancies. Most of these pants lacked the catches which hold them closed. A year and a half later I still never wear them, but I still have them. I think I have a problem.

So anyway, I’m tossing out the wrecked stuff and I’m going to donate the rest of it because sure, maybe I think they’re ugly as sin but obviously somebody liked them enough to buy them, right? It’s a huge task. I’ve already filled one box and three-quarters of a rubbish bag. My closet and drawers are looking a bit pathetic.

Time to go shopping!

Now the road is clear of rubbish and the Wombles are gone it’s apparently safe for the door-to-door salesmen to come out. Hooray. I think I preferred being mauled by packs of Wombles. These aren’t just any door-to-door salesmen. No insurance, no vacuum cleaners, no alarm systems, phone or electricity providers. I’m talking door-to-door religious salesmen. People who knock on your door and try to sell you something as intangible as faith.

I’m getting crankier in my old age and I’m starting to find the practice offensive and invasive. I don’t go door-to-door trying to sell people on the idea of agnosticism. I don’t hand out brochures on atheism. I don’t stop people in the street to try and talk to them about thinking for themselves instead of blindly following, especially when what they’re doing defies all logic.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Christians in general, or indeed the followers of any religion. I think that if that’s their choice then that’s their choice. So don’t go getting all up-in-arms. I have a live-and-let-live approach to religion.

That is exactly why these salesmen irritate me so much. I don’t bother you with my ideas of self-governing morality, being a good person for the sake of being a good person rather than to avoid going to Hell. So what gives these people the right to knock on my door when I’m in the middle of something and try to tell me my soul is being tainted by my godless ways?

Today it was the Mormons. I don’t know if they’ll come back. They may want to try and save the Man of the House. I hope they do. I’m going to set up a series of complex traps and pitfalls for them to negotiate. The final trap will be hooked up to the doorbell button (which isn’t connected to any bell so no great loss). When they press the button a giant, perfectly round boulder will fall from the roof and chase them down the road. Or squish them. Not my problem. Not theirs either. Lucky them, they get to go to Heaven early!

Anyway, as I said I was in the middle of something. I’d just pushed through a part I’d been particularly struggling with and was about to be On a Roll, when there was a banging on the front door. I rose with a growl and went to answer the door. There she was, armed with her bible and her brochures. Hi! I’m (who cares). I’m here to talk about the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Ugh. I know what that is. Hell we used to live just down the road from a giant frigging gold building where you people gathered. It was like a mormon migration path there. I thought we were far enough out. Who knew they sent missionaries to the eastern suburbs?

She was in the middle of her spiel, that fanatical light in her eyes religious people always seem to get shining fit to light up half of Adelaide. I really wanted to get back to what I was doing before the moment was lost. I interrupted. The fanatical light sputtered out and she looked at me resentfully. How dare I interrupt her while she’s “working”? I said that, honestly, I thought she was wasting her time. How can I be sure?

I blinked. You knocked on my door, lady.

If someone wandered into the woods and came back proclaiming he’d discovered gold tablets with a whole new gospel on them I’d be doubtful. If he said he was the only one who was allowed to see them I’d be skeptical. If he said they told him he was allowed more than one wife but it didn’t go the other way — only one husband for the ladies — I’d be laughing.

I drove off a mormon! Me! I could see her edging away, eager to be gone before God decided to visit his wrath upon my household. She left and I shut the door (and locked it just in case there were still Wombles out there) with a warm glow of satisfaction in my chest. I drove off a mormon! They’re usually impossible to get rid of. And I have yet to be struck by lightning, plagued by a swarm of locusts or rained on by frogs.

28 years old and still not smitten.

We’ve had a problem with seagulls in our street recently. Well, the whole suburb really. You see it’s that time. Council hard rubbish collection, where everyone takes all the crap that’s been cluttering their spare rooms, garages and back yards and pile it up on the nature strip. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for it. We’ve even gotten rid of a few bricks from the Great Wall of Adelaide. In theory I think it’s a magnificent piece of public service and worth every cent of the council rates we don’t pay because we’re renting. In theory.

In practice it’s a different matter. Now I have nothing against the idea of people going through my garbage. If someone can put something the Man of the House (tearfully) parted with to good use then good for them. They must be creative people. Really creative. It’s a time-honoured tradition, and half the reason why the council puts out brochures advertising when they’re going to do it. Have your stuff out by sunset on the Sunday before your collection is scheduled, the brochure says. Here’s a helpful list of when all of the collections will be. It’s kind of clever really. By doing it that way, by the time mid-week rolls around and they’re actually doing the collection half of it’s been picked over by scaven… recyclers.

Unfortunately it makes leaving the house a dangerous proposition. If you’re carrying anything, like a bag for example, the second you open that front door a ravening horde of Wombles will descend upon you, pinning you to the ground and hunting for anything they might use. Wombles notwithstanding, people walking down the road (or worse, cycling) become more interested in the piles of stuff than in, say, watching where they’re going. On Monday night I saw one cyclist just about run headlong into a car that was backing out of its driveway because his head had turned around almost 180 degrees as he studied a particularly promising pile of crap. The bad news for him was that his search was doomed from the start. 24 hours after it was put out, the Wombles will have stripped it of anything with any potential at all.

It all just goes to show, one man’s trash is another man’s traffic hazard.

So one of the things I do when I’m trying to make myself feel better about the fact that I haven’t written anything for days is clean. I clean things because cleaning things is productive. Cleaning things is a worthwhile endeavour. Even when you live in the dustiest state on the dustiest continent. Cleaning things when you live in a place like Adelaide means that in three months time you won’t be sleeping in hollowed-out depressions in the thick layer of dust on your bed and you won’t be needing to shift the Dusty Ranges from the middle of the living room to off to the side somewhere so it doesn’t block your view of the TV.

The latest chore in my eternal quest to justify my failure to finish my rainforest-destroying work of pure genius? The window frames. We live in quite an old building. It was built in a time before aluminium window frames became standard. The windows are therefore held securely in place by bits of painted wood. There are lots of corners and the paint is coming off in some parts because whoever last painted the place doesn’t understand how painting actually works. I’m not making baseless accusations here. You can see through the single layer on the red “feature wall” (thank you Better Homes and Gardens), and the door frame on that wall got a liberal dose of the same crimson disaster, only there was no undercoat used there and if you’re not careful (or if you’re a habitual picker like I am) you can detach that single layer of red from the gloss paint it was slathered upon.

I’ve cleaned those frames before. Not long after we moved in, in fact, I was looking out the window, as you do, and I noticed the terrible state of the frames. So I got out my cleaning products and got to work. That was something in the region of eight months ago. Now living in the dustiest place on earth means that clean frames last only until the next time you open your window, but I could live with that. Then came the Great Procrastination. So I decided to clean them again. This time I had a secret weapon - my old toothbrush. Armed with that and a big bucket of very warm water I got to work.

I was scrubbing away at my first window (today, I did the bedroom yesterday) and a flash of movement caught my eye. Something was skittering across the window right next to where my head was. I glanced over, disinterested, before returning my attention to what my abused former toothbrush was doing. Every muscle in my body clenched. Reluctantly the ones controlling my eyes released and I looked back at the moving thing.

What I meant to say was something along the lines of “Oh f$#k Brendan there’s a massive spider right next to my head!” What actually came out was, “Aaaaaafuuuuubahaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.” It’s a word. Look it up. It’s there, you just have to kind of squint a little.

The Man of the House, true to form, made it two whole steps towards me before stopping dead in his tracks. “What is it? Are you okay?” All I could do was point at the spot right in the middle of one of the panes of glass where the thing had stopped so it was framed like a frigging picture and kind of ‘rabble’ at him like a severely traumatised gibbon. “Which side is it on?”

I wish I’d stopped to think about my answer. Instead out of my mouth popped the first thing to enter my head. The truth. “The outside,” I wailed.

Word to the unwise, MotH: If you want to be painted in a better light when I tell people about you, don’t laugh almost until you puke at things like that.

Normally I have a little voice in my head. That little voice performs a valuable task on a daily basis. It inspects every thought and idea that passes through my mind, checking each for sanity. Ironic, really, since it’s a voice in my head. Last night it was distracted, perhaps by the return of Grey’s Anatomy. Perhaps it was just a little tired. After all there’s a great deal needing a sanity check inside my mind. Whatever was going on in there, it was lax. I’d fire it, but I really need that pedantic little bastard.

There I was, sitting on the sofa, wondering what the Chief would think of Izzy using all of those hospital supplies to save a bloody deer for Christ’s sake, I mean honestly surely she could have found something with only two legs, when an idea occurred to me. I passed it on to the veto department who, to my surprise, passed it right back with a “Great!” stamp decorating it. What was this idea?

I could wash our underlay tomorrow! I can do it in the bath tub! It’s going to be warm and sunny for the next few days! Even if it doesn’t dry tomorrow, it will by Tuesday! Read the rest of this entry »

I’m the first to admit I have a hoarding problem. I’ve gotten better. Circulars are now thrown out as they arrive, instead of being kept in case I need to clean the oven and don’t have any newspaper. Every little bit counts, right?

During my hospital stay last year the Matriarch came over to help out and take care of me. Part of the duties she took upon herself (with absolutely no guidance from me, of course) was clearing out some of the junk I’d managed to accumulate. One of the first things she inquired about was the rather large collection of coffee jars I had in my pantry. “No, keep those,” I said. “I’ll need them if I decide to make jam one day.” Read the rest of this entry »

I baked some muffins today. I know, I know, not exactly traditional Christmas spread but I’m hardly going to make a whole Christmas cake for just me and the Man of the House now am I? Baking, I’ve noticed, is an excellent way to get yourself thinking about things that are entirely unrelated to what you should be doing. What was I thinking about? Cooking.

You see, I’m an okay baker but I’m an extremely ordinary cook. “What are you baking?” is invariably assigned a tone which suggests optimistic anticipation. On the other hand, “what are you cooking?” is reluctantly voiced as the Man of the House prepares himself for the worst. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Christmas is looming before us it seems. The shopping centres’ decorations are sprinkled with about a month and a half’s worth of dust. The music being piped through is an assortment of insipid Christmas carols. The major channels are ruining the good, old-fashioned Sunday Night In with saccharine “comedies” such as Surviving Christmas.

It’s maddening. Last weekend they wasted Christmas with the Kranks. It was the first of December! Although it’s not exactly my cup of tea, it would have made for a better Christmas Day than the 60th screening of Miracle on 34th Street. Read the rest of this entry »