A bag of hair, and other tales

It has been SO LONG since I posted a blog (on this site;  I’ve been religiously posting twice weekly  over here) that even my own father has commented on my absence.  (This is a man who has been known to distractedly eat a platter of chicken wings, and then remark they were “a bit chewy”; “Did you overcook them?”  Pause, to allow the full ramifications of his actions to settle, then:  “THEY WERE MEANT TO BE COOKED???”  So, you know, he’s not given to paying 100% attention to things.)   Anyway, I’m sorry.  Mea cupla etc.  Except not, actually *mea* culpa, but rather the culpa of life and house-moves and parenting small people, and a DEATH IN THE FAMILY. (More of which anon.)

So anyway.  Like long-distance flights with children and childbirth, I have put The Week From Hades into a closed part of my brain, and am struggling to remember anything more than the most horrific points.  It started off badly enough (which you can read about, concisely, here if you so desire) but then it just got worse and worse, and honestly I felt like I was losing my mind.  I recall thinking at one point (deliciously self-indulgently) “I’m not sure I can do this any more” – as if I was running back-to-back marathons (or even having to clean my own house, GOD FORBID.)  The movers were fairly inept, and there was much sitting around waiting for Lady to give them directions (“Maybe you could, you know, carry a few boxes out to the van?”), and when at 930pm they still hadn’t finished moving all the boxes into the new house, I may, just slightly, have gone a bit shouty and ordered them all to LEAVE NOW.  And so we (“we”, meaning the 3 children and I;  the Man was suffering his own sort of hell in a posh hotel in Japan.  “But I wish I was there helping you!”) all went to bed in my room, camping on whatever unpacked bit of cushioning we could find, and no one could sleep because of “the dark” and, later “the light” and, variously, “the quiet” and “the noise”, and there was much bed cushion-swapping, and they were a tired and cranky bunch the next day.  And I was a tired and cranky Lady who still had to give minute instructions to the unpackers (“JUST UNPACK FOR THE LOVE OF GOD”) and then, about 3,000 hours later, It. Was. Done.  (Well, sort of. In a not-really kind of way. But it’s as done as it’s going to be this side of the summer holidays (which have already kicked off for the Boy, and which see me, ALONE, dragging the three of them, ALONE, to Europe, in two weeks. ALONE.))

So.  Overall it’s fabulous to be in a house, with an upstairs and a garden and a back gate, and A POOL*.  The kids have about twenty things they can do at any one time, and if there is any bitching&moaning about Being Bored, the Bitcher&Moaner is sent to their room, which is upstairs, where bedrooms should be, and so we cannot hear a thing.  There is outside seating (with overhead fans which sound as if they are about to break free and decapitate us) and a playroom and our bedroom is big enough to swing both cats (if they ever deign to come out from under my bathroom sink, where they took up residence on day one, and have barely left. They did venture out to the garden one morning last week, but one of them met the neighbourhood bully, which scared the shit out of her (literally) and the other ate a lizard and spent the rest of the day vomiting.  So both seem to have thrown in the Towel of Adventure and are staying put on top of the spare toilet rolls, where nothing, other than a desperate TP-seeking claw, can harm them.)

There are a couple of things which are not entirely fabulous. We have monkeys in the garden, which I was alerted to on the first morning when I got home from School Run 1, to find the Alpha male sitting in the garden eating a banana handed to him by the Alpha Boy. The entire troupe made an appearance yesterday evening as we were finishing lunch, brazenly walking along the garden wall about 6 feet from us, and giving us a total Fuck You glare. (Then they sat eyeballing us for a while, sending telepathic messages to the Boy to Give Us Food.)  I like the idea of monkeys – nature and jungle and wild etc – but the Wild bit of that ideal worries me somewhat.  I’m too young to have my face ripped off!  (Actually, I am probably just the right age for such an event;  there is a decent amount of saggery allowing probably for total facial removal, but not so much that there wouldn’t be any challenge for them at all.)

Also, there is no internet (I know!  I feel like I’ve stepped back into the 80s - a feeling propounded by the house’s hideous bathrooms and kitchen) and the phone connection is very weak (we’re in the Singapore version of the Yorkshire Dales) so unless I schlep self and my ancient laptop to a Starbucks, I am basically removed from civilisation.  (Greetings from Starbucks, btw.)

On the plus side, having no internet means that when I do have internet, my blog feed is AWASH with weeks’ worth of fabulousness.  (Which reminds me, if there is any amongst you who is not familiar with this blogger, (a) get familiar quickly, and (b) buy her book.  (I say that, all authoritative, while in fact I have (SHAME ON ME) not bought her book myself.  I have tried, dammit, but it’s just not sold here.  And Singpost will either lose or steal it, and I want a real book, not a downloaded one.  Some books deserve holding, and I’m sure this is one of them.))  And I am almost weaned off the black hole of Facebook, which can only be a Good Thing.

But having said that, I have just spent my entire free two hours on the damned Facebook, and now I have to run to collect the Baby.  Usually I’m not terribly excited about having to collect her, but today is different; today she had Show & Tell, and brought in... A BAG OF HER OWN HAIR.  I can’t wait to see how that went down.

I have to run.  The Family Death will have to wait. 

(*Quite teeny tiny and more like a tarpaulin stapled into a deep hole and then filled up with tap water, rain, and the desperate tears of Lady.)