Since moving back to Adelaide (eleven years ago tomorrow) and setting up house and business for myself, I've learned to tell what week it is from looking at the garden. The first baby blackbirds, the first blue-tongue sighting, the first freesia, the first red leaf on the vine.
But I can also tell what week it is from other equally specific and predictable signs. If the tax is fretted about but not done, the cards are bought but not written and sent, the Christmas tree and deccies are checked out but not yet hauled out of the cupboard in the shed and put up, the house is in chaos and all of the deadlines are howling for attention and my sister is on the phone issuing orders about presents and food, it must be the week before the week before Christmas. 'Twas the week before the week before Christmas, and all through the house there were cat-hair tumbleweeds and piles of books and old newspapers and magazines and miscellaneous yet crucial scraps of paper and Pav wanted to down tools and drive into the desert.
Sigh.
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7 comments:
Has it really been eleven years?
I was just thinking earlier today of that strip of shops on Nicholson St where we had amaretto coffee before you left (don't ask me why).
You're welcome to drop in if you're driving this way through the desert.
Is the week before the week before Xmas, you've just have the carpet cleaned and this morning when you left it was already strewn with chewed bits of toast and Cheerios. You can almost guarantee that when you get home you will find that the cats have left a)a hairball b)a small pile of partly digested dry cat food c) a dismemberd bird/lizard/rabbit or d) all three. And you haven't even put the furniture back yet.
You have put up the Xmas lights, but discovered that only 1/4 of them work and to get them all to work you have to find the one bulb in each set that isn't working. Or seach all over town to find replacement bulbs. If the $1 ones you got from the cheapy shop don't work you seriously consider buying a whole new set of lights. You put all the Xmas balls back on the tree after the kids have gone to bed, ready for them to be 'picked' again the next morning. You clean up the former Santa decoration that the cat has disembowelled. You try and do a big shop so you can avoid the supermarket in the week before Xmas, but each day you realise there is something you have forgotten. Rinse and repeat until Xmas.
Happy 11th Adelaide anniversay.
Elsewhere, yes, I'm very much afraid it has. I too remember the amaretto coffee day very clearly; you and me and Coy rather let our hair down conversationally, so to speak, as I recall. If I am driving through the desert, Chez Lulu and her underlings will be my first port of call.
Mindy -- heh. At least I don't have to worry about the Cheerios, chewed toast or dismembered wildlife (they're inside cats), though the regurgitated dry cat food makes a frequent appearance -- sometimes still in such a perfect state I have to look twice to see that it's pre-loved.
oh. Thank goodness it's not just me.
Well, that's certainly my usual Christmas, along with running to the post office to get the last post before Christmas day in the vain hope the presents to the rellies will actually get there ... but this year I feel so ready! Only one thing changed - the deadline for the unwritten article I was going to have to take to Thailand with me was pushed back to March. Yeehar and hallelujah. May your deadlines be so easily slayed and have a top Christmas Pav xx
oh. Thank goodness it's not just me.
Me too! I actually got nagged by an offspring this morning about not having all the decorations up. "It doesn't feel like Christmas".
Well, high-school kid, why haven't you done anything with the boxes of decorations that have been out of the garage for two weeks if it matters so much to you? Did your arms fall off and I didn't notice?
Ah Tigtog, I long for that day when I can turn around and say - if you want it so much, you do it. I try now but it gets me nowhere.
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