February 2010

Today I am wearing hideous shorts, a white shirt (on which I’ve just discovered the elderly sausage dog’s paw prints) and no shoes.

Today I forgot that a new supplier was coming to meet with me.

Today the new supplier (who looked absolutely immaculate) must have taken one look at me and wondered where my children were … I didn’t have the heart to tell her there are no children. Instead there is an old, half-blind and recently face-lifted and tummy tucked sausage dog; a possessed cat and a deranged parrot.

A cat, not mine, is presently in the house hiding from the rain. This cat is really tough (I mean REALLY tough) and he’s not afraid of anything except, as I recently discovered, tea towels. ‬

‪Sally, my family’s elderly sausage who is staying with us so she can recover from her recent face-lift and tummy tuck (courtesy of the family’s new Rottweiler) is stalking the cat. Did I mention she recently underwent major surgery? She’s also blind in one eye. From some angles she looks a little like Two-Face. ‬I’m not sure who I should worry about: tough cat with a fear of the tea towels or recently tucked and lifted sausage dog?

‪Dick Dastardly, the tuneless but sometime lovable parrot, won’t stay inside. He doesn’t like it, it doesn’t agree with him. ‬He prefers to spend his days outside, in his cage, like a sort-of-real-bird talking to the radio and hitting notes I don’t think exist.

‪The cat refuses to eat his rather delicious looking gourmet cat food. He wants the plebian stuff. Sally on the other hand is quite happy to eat all her food, all the cat’s food and some of my food. Dick Dastardly eats everything including his food. Among his favourite non-food snacks are blinds, couches, pillows, hair, hair bands (always a popular choice) shoes (especially the running kind) and his all time favourite snack has to be the DSTV remote.‬ He thinks it’s delicious.

After living with all of this an ANCYL President with wholly inappropriate investments and a desire to nationalise the mines just seems so passé.

This is a real update. Apparently when you’re absent for four months one of these is required.

In the last four months - in order of occurrence - I have:

1. Purchased (and am now raising) a parrot called Dick Dastardly. He’s very single minded and I am besotted. But, even I have to admit, if he’s not raised correctly he has terrorist potential. It’s in the eyes.
2. I got married. And amazingly I’m still in love. I am however finding the whole wife label very unnerving.
3. I honeymooned in the Transkei where it rained nearly every.single.day. It was beautiful.
4. I went skiing for two weeks. Every time I go skiing I come back with dreams of packing-it-all-in and following the snow around the world for a year. I can’t work out if it’s fear, ambition or proximity to my family that keeps me from doing it.
5. I started to, and am still, unpacking wedding gifts and writing meaningful thank you cards. It’s difficult to be meaningful when there’s a time limit. I have also discovered that my handwriting is terrible. At school it was OK, at university it was better and now its illegible.
   
6. My work was good four months ago. It was good in-between and it’s good now.
7. I have a love project. I thought last year was the year it would meet the world. It wasn’t. I think 2010 has the right feeling about it.
8. I haven’t baked at all in the last four month. No cheesecake. No chocolate cake. No crème brûlée. This needs to be addressed urgently.

There is more, but nothing I would label as significant and if it’s not significant it doesn’t make the update.

I’m ruthless like that.

Manage your own expectation … I’m exhausted.

With beautiful new shoes, a cold that just won’t leave and much, much more.