I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It was far from my intention when I moved back to Oz to spend less time at my keyboard than ever before. The opposite surely. Alas, as my Dad once told me ‘life is what happens while we’re busy making plans’, at least I hope it was my Dad given the sage words came from a male voice in the bathroom with Mum. These days I have no life and very little plans. I’ve become one of those strange people that operate within a 5km radius of their house. It could be considered cool to live such an existence I suppose, expect unlike Paris or even Manhattan, my neighbourhood isn’t… how should I put this… it just isn’t. It is simply Kew, or as I prefer to call it ‘Far Kew’.
In Far Kew there is as much bad coffee and good cake as you can glut yourself on (yep, still trying to lose those five kgs), a rather average Chinese restaurant, a KFC (make that 6.5kgs) a supermarket, a gym (laugh, I do), pharmacy, a bar, a pub (with a pool table) and The Boat (aka, the new house) where one can find me and need only look to the roof, or under the house, or between the walls, or (as of yesterday) to the front yard, to find large bodies of water. Since taking possession of The Boat back in November nary a day’s gone by that I’ve been able to go more than five kms from home. There’s always a dirty, sweaty man of some varying height and weight (whatever floats your boat really-ha!) coming to fix, or not fix and say they did, something. Thus I have learned, mastered even, the art of straying close to home.
We’re now in our fifth month of repairs to the Boat. My friendship with one of the builders as grown so strong he’s now dating one of my oldest friends. I know the plasterer is on his second marriage and recently lost his brother to cancer, the plumber has a new girlfriend though he’s worried she’s not smart enough to last long term, and the 26 year old development office girl is sleeping with the 50 year old site-supervisor according to the Far Kew grape vine. So why, you ask, is today any different? How is it that I’m finding the opportunity to sit down and long enough to concentrate on writing a blog entry? To put it plainly, I’m waiting. That’s right, going on our fifth month of repairs to the Boat and I am waiting. You see, whoever installed the storm water drainage to the boat decided that after laying enough pipe to get them a metre or so away from the house that they’d gone far enough; going that extra five metres and attaching the pipe to the main it seems was just a little too much to ask. And, after a weekend of rain, Monday morning the front yard began to cave in. (seriously) So today, I actually get to do some work, because today I’m waiting for an excavator to come; an excavator that will dig a trench the full length of the front yard so my plumber (the one with the dumb girlfriend) can connect the house drainage to the storm water for the street.
For two days I have been waiting. I hate waiting. So, this afternoon I called the sleazy site-supervisor doing the development girl and asked what the hold-up was. “We’re just waiting for the excavator to be organised, that’s just a term we use for the really big digging machines,” he said. Just a term we use for the really big digging machines? Just a term we use for the really big digging machines! Just a term we use for the really big digging machines!! “Yes, I know what an excavator is. I’m writing a book about them. Remember, I’m the girl with the Hitachi catalogue postered to her wall?… and we’re not using one of the three in the back lot because?”
FAR KEW.