Another trip 'round the sun

So another year has slipped away, I am now 39 years old. Ouch!
We celebrated on Sunday so my delinquent step son could be there. Actually he’s been really good since he got expelled from school (duh!). He helped me work on the vauxhall on Thursday and on Sunday he played a song for me that he had written. There are no doubts that the child is a genius with a guitar and I hope he becomes a famous rock star soon and we can forget the whole school disaster. He is actually a very sweet kid and when he wants to be he can be good company. It was nice to be reminded that I do love him, it’s been difficult recalling that in recent months.
The husband, struggling with a nasty cold, managed to cook a seafood BBQ extravaganza for me. The poor thing was a bit addled by the cold&flu medication I gave him and at one stage I found him in the kitchen holding a platter of food, crying, because the platter was actually wider than the doorway and he couldn’t bring the food out to us. Later in the evening, after much booze had been consumed, he decided to do a nudie run to the end of our street. Unfortunately our neighbour simultaneously decided to put out some rubbish. Hopefully the poor women will recover soon.
The girl gave me a packet of little, rubber snakes, some pink chocolate coins and a pink and gold hula hoop. Absolutely no projection going on there!
The husband gave me a lovely spider web necklace and an ice cream machine to replace my old one which doesn’t freeze anything anymore. I am convinced that one day I will no longer be on a diet and I will actually be able to eat some ice cream produced in said machine.
On Monday, feeling somewhat worse for wear after two bottles of champagne and a bottle of wine the night before, I slept, ate leftover BBQ and watched dvds. It was nice to be so indulgent.
Today the girls in my pump class at the gym gave me a bunch of flowers and sang happy birthday to me. They are a gorgeous group of women and have been an important link for me. Some weeks they have saved me from total isolation and I’m sure they don’t realise what a difference they have made to my life here. I do have one close friend here, but she works shifts and it’s hard to get any decent girly time. Fortunately she was able to be here on Sunday and I also had many phone calls and messages from interstate friends and relatives so overall I’ve had a rather good birthday three days.
It’s nice to be reminded how much I am loved. I have trouble recalling that sometimes too. Read more!

Religion

My (ahem, cough, splutter) of an ex has finally paid me some money he has owed me for a considerable amount of time. It is a great relief. We now have the money to buy tickets to get the plane to the city to go to the V festival, which we bought tickets for ages ago. The Jesus and Mary Chain are playing, I am very excited. I saw them about 20 years ago, I was totally besotted with Jim Reid, I listened to little else. I bought everything of theirs I could get my hands on, of course it was all vinyl way back then, I even have a "picture disc" which has an interview on it. I listened to it once, then shelved it with my other treasures. I didn’t play my records, I taped them then put them away. They are all in mint condition, these days probably worth oh, I don’t know......bugger all?
All those years ago my friend and I arrived at the concert venue several hours before the doors opened, we weren’t the first there. There was a young man, resplendid with mohawk, chains and big boots, sitting on the footpath with a book titled "Social Anarchy" next to him, while he perused the Financial Times.
Eventually, when the doors opened, we got rushed and almost lost our great position, but managed to run inside and be right at the front, quite literally crushed against the stage - the bruises on my ribs lasted over a week. Died Pretty were the support band and they were great. Our anarchist friend went beserk, he was leaping around, stage diving, going absolutely spako and eventually collapsed and had to be carted out. Poor thing. I didn’t see him again and I don’t know if he actually got to see J&MC after all.
I was, of course, dressed to impress. I was wearing a very tight, low cut mini dress with knee high lace-up boots that had 4" stiletto heels. My hair was HUGE! Towards the interval the pain in my legs got so bad and the air was so thick with cigarette smoke that for one of the rare times in my life - I feinted.
My dear friend organised a chain of people to get a glass of water from the bar to me. I discovered that the air on the floor was much cooler and much less smokey than the air at head height, and I recovered reasonably quickly. I also found a watch. After I had revived I took my shoes off and was able to remain upright for the spectacular performance that I had come for.
The boys were late coming on and were obviously pissed off about something. Life? They wandered about on stage without communicating with each other or acknowleging the audience. They played several songs, then mid song Jim just walked off. Eventually when the other band members realised he had gone, they dropped their instruments and walked off too. That was it. I was elated, I thought it was brilliant. Their sullen disrespect for their fans and their arrogantly short set impressed me immensely. Most of all I was over the moon because Jim, at one point, had looked me right in the eyes and held my raptured gaze for a few seconds. It was pure magic.
In later years when J&MC lost their niave, raw grunginess I lost interest in them; I moved on. I discovered PJ Harvey. I listened exclusively to women for many years having decided I was sick of hearing what men had to say/sing about.
My music for most of the nineties consisted of PJ, Kate Bush, Sinead O’Conner, Cyndi Lauper, Siouxsie, Lene Lovich and few others. I immersed myself in the gutteral screams of PJ, the ethereal beauty of Kate, Sinead’s power, Lene and Cyndi’s shrill individuality and Siouxsie was the bread and butter that all the others were served on.
I have seen PJ three times, she is brilliant, although I didn’t like her last album. Kate, well, only a handfull of very lucky people have ever seen her perfom live and sadly her last album was rubbish. Cyndi I have seen three times now, she is fabulous. Siouxsie I have seen perform with the Banshees and with The Creatures, she is also fabulous and I suspect has a very scary looking portrait in her attic. Sinead is this week playing Melbourne and Sydney, she has never toured Australia before. Unfortunately I didn’t find out about her tour until after I had purchased tickets for Cyndi and I couldn’t do both - unreasonable financially and for the child. I am very sad I won’t get to see her, I know Sinead went totally loopy and probably still is, but I believe she is doing a mix of old and new stuff on this tour and the opportunity to hear her magnificent voice live would have been worth the wierdness.
I have always loved music, it has been an important part of my adult life and is no doubt responsible for my bad hearing. It makes perfect sense that I have married a man who owns over 3000 CDs and it also makes sense that while discussing future renovations we are more concerned about the wiring and placement of the stereo and speakers than the heating.
My love of live music has been diminished ever so slightly over the years by the behaviour of the crowds these days - the commeradere of old is gone. If I feint at J&MC this time the best I can hope for is to not get trampled, I doubt total strangers would assist in the procurement of water or even help me to my feet. Fortunately with age comes a certain amount of wisdom and a love of sensible shoes.

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Eventually

Why is it, that whenever I find something really, really good it suddenly ceases to exist? I spent half my adult life searching for the perfect shade of purple/black lipstick - I finally found one - in the discontinued stock bin at the chemist. The tiles on my hearth in my little house in the city are the perfect art deco tiles I wanted - also from the discontinued bin. There was just enough to do the hearth but heaven forbid if one ever gets broken... And as for finding parts for my car, well that's just a nightmare. My favourite restaurant in Fitzroy dissapeared a few years ago, I can't get Hillman's roasted garlic mayonnaise anymore, or chilli Tim Tams. Boots no 7 moisteriser isn't available in Australia and Blandberra's only goth club closed down not long after I got here. Trivial perhaps, but important to me.
I recently saw the film Serenity. It had been recommended to me previously, but I'm a bit dim and I forgot all about it until the husband came home from the dvd shop with it a few weeks ago. In short, the film is a work of genius. I then bought the tv series Firefly, of which Serenity was the pilot (sort of). I just finished watching the 14 episodes last night. Brilliant. Sci Fi at it's best. Now I'm a long term treckie, Next Gen and DS9 do it for me, not so wrapped in the others, oh the original of course, but I love the grittyness of DS9 and the smarmy shinyness of Next Gen. Firefly is something else entirely. The first big difference is there are no aliens, just humans spread across the universe. Technology has evolved, but humans haven't. Apparently that was Joss Whedon's premis - times change, we don't. And as such the characters are so real...they have sex (OMG!!!), swear at and insult each other, they are dysfunctional, they make mistakes and even - go to the toilet! It's like, and I hate to admit this, Star Trek for grown ups. The grit of DS9 looks like rose scented talcum powder compared to FF. In one episode one character asks another about the bad guys "what will they do to us?" the reply was "rape us to death, eat our flesh and stitch our skin to their clothes. And if we are very, very lucky - they'll do it in that order." Wow! Not even the meanest, low downest, dirtiest, scariest badie in Star Trek ever did anything like that! These are real bad guys. I love it. It is the best sci fi I have ever seen. And they only ever made one season. Fox axed it and there will never be anymore.
Apparently there have been petitions and campaigns to get more made, but it's not going to happen. The best we can hope for is another movie. I went to one of the fan sites to see what's going on, but it was just endless, mindless conversations about things like "would you rather be Jayne's shirt or Mal's trousers?" I found it all quite annoying. Why do sci fi geeks have to be SO fuckin' GEEKY? Anyway, I digress, my dissatisfaction with my peers is subject for another blog. So how come they will make endless series of tv shows about doctors and lawyers and detectives and seriously, how many more of those damn shows are we going to be bombarded with, yet they can't allow an utterly brilliant sci fi series to flourish? It is quite simply, a crime against the tv watching population. And more evidence of just how short sighted and stupid the Fox execs are.
I lament, I am sad and I think perhaps I should be doing something a wee bit more constructive with my life. Read more!

The only goths in the villiage

We just got back from Sydney, we bussed there yesterday to go to the Cyndi Lauper concert. I put the girl on a plane to Melbourne in the morning, which meant getting up at 6 to get her to the airport by 8 for a 9:15 flight. Unacommpanied minors need to check in 1 hour before departure, I don't know why, perhaps to give the parents time to reconsider. She was aprehensive - she doesn't love going by herself - but she was a very brave little girl and didn't cry. She looked so tiny as she walked off, holding the hosties hand, teddy clutched in the other.

I then came home, ate the scrambled eggs my husband had cooked me, drove him to work, came home again, packed, printed out bus/hotel details, locked up the house, fed the animals, got the bus into the "city", got my nails done, collected the husband and got on the bus to Sydney at 3pm. I dozed most of the way there, being startled awake by some idiots phone going off several times (why do people have to have such loud and annoying ring tones? That said, the husband constantly complains that he can't get hold of me because I never hear my phone ringing.)

At the hotel we got changed into our full goth regalia then headed off down George street to find some dinner. We ended up at a Korean BBQ place, which was really good. The pan fried dumpling were particularly good, mind you, after constant dieting ANYTHING with fat and carbs in it would have brought me ecstatic pleasure.
We then waddled up to the State Theatre. I had never been there before and it is gorgeous, utterly stunningly beautiful. In desperate (literally) need of more female toilets, but one of the more elegant theatres I have ever been in.
As we are now grown up and I had bought tickets not long after they went on sale we had really good seats - the last row of the stalls, so about 6 rows from the stage. I was stoked. This was the third time I had been to see Cyndi, the first was in 1989, I was at uni so couldn't afford a decent seat, she played at the Tennis Centre in Melbourne and I was so far up the back I needed binoculars to see her. I didn't mind, she was brilliant. The second time I saw her was a couple of years ago, I was up in the balcony so had a good view but was still a bit far away. That concert was also brilliant. It was not long after the release of her At Last CD and she did a great mix of old, new and in-between. She performed for two hours and was vey entertaining. In spite of being there by myself I had a ball.

Last night, being night before madi gras and being Sydney, her show was very gay-centric. She did mostly old classics with two songs from her upcoming album but nothing from At Last and hardly anything from any albums newer than True Colours. I was a little dissapointed she didn't do Shine, which I adore, and she played for less than 1 1/2 hours. Don't get me wrong, she was as good as ever, full of energy and her weird, spastic Elvisesque dancing, but I didn't think it was as good as her Melbourne show a few years ago. The husband, who had accompanied me out of loyalty to me and who had no real desire to se Cyndi, stood there with sunglasses on, arms folded and looked more like security than an audience member. I bounced around and danced and got mildly annoyed by the girl next to me who kept clapping out of time and very annoyed by the man behind us who kept bellowing like a cow. Why do people do that? Why do people pay all that money to go to a concert then just drown out the performer with their own stupid noises? Why do people clap and cheer OVER the music, why do they applaude BEFORE the song has finished? Why do people scream out "I love you" at totally inappropriate times - like when the poor woman was mid sentence and had to stop so we could all listen to some random imbecile declaring his stupidity for all the theatre to hear? I paid and travelled to listen to HER not YOU, shut-the-fuck-up you rude arsehole. OK, I don't expect people to sit in silent rapture and I am totally fine with declarations of love and admiration, but at the appropriate time. Cranky old-fartness - here I come!!
I love Cyndi, I have loved her from the minute she hit our screens in the eighties. I had shaved bits of my head and wore elaborate clothes and when I first saw her I immediately felt she was a kindred spirit. Then I read an interview in which she said she was bullied at school because she was weird and I KNEW we were soul mates. She has the most incredible voice, and it's unique, she doesn't conform and she can belt it out big time. But I only want to listen to her music, respectfully quiet while she is performing then cheering my tits off between songs. I don't want to hang around out the back of the theatre waiting for her to come out so I can grab at her and I don't want to loiter around her hotel. People who do that are creepy and a bit sad.
On the way home we did the math: $130 for the bus, $140 for the hotel, $120 each for tickets - that's over $500 for and hour and a half's entertainment.
I'm sorry Cyndi, you're an ace performer and I adore your work, but in hindsight - you weren't worth 500 bucks. And just for the record - Sydney SUCKS!!

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I'm not dead

Long time no blog.....many things have happened - here is the condensed version:
The vauxhall is registered and going reasonably well. We have had the distributor recoed and it is booked next week to get the electrics sorted out, stereo and alarm installed. Then it's just seat belts and we're done. We've pretty much decided not to get it resprayed (save ourselves several thousand dollars) as we gave it a cut and polish and colour restoring wax and it looks ok.
My car, however, is at a garage, has been there all week and will most likely be there into next week. It is getting the front end rebuilt and several bits replaced. Hopefully after this it will be easier to drive. The front end was damaged just over a year ago when the car was stolen - but that's another story.
The husband and I spent 10 days in Tassie, attempting to escape the Blandberra heat. Unfortunately Tasmania was at the time experiencing a heat wave, it was yuk. We basically ate and drank our way around the isle and I put on 4 kilos.
My girl has started school, much to her dismay. I put the tandem on the back of my bike and we pedal there each morning. Tag-along tandem thingies are commen in Melbourne, I appear to have the only one in Blandberra - we attract quite a bit of attention and the girl loves it.
I've been looking for a job, without any luck. I am restricted to school hours so the jobs themselves are hard to find and the ones I have found I haven't been successful with. I get very angry when I spend ages on an application, email it in and then get an almost immediate reply "the position has been filled", well then take your fucking add down you time wasting morons! But even though the credit card is maxed and we have expenses and bills coming out every oriface, I'm not worried. We aren't starving and something will come up. We are happy and healthy and cask wine isn't so bad these days so why panic?
I've been reasonably good on my diet and at the gym and have lost my holiday 4 kilos. My new goal is to get into my size 14 jeans by my birthday. It is achievable although I would quite happily commit murder for a toasted cheese sandwich right about now.
I am still officially the world's worst housewife, my husband is on the verge of a nervous breakdown because there was a hairbrush on the bathroom floor the other day. My mind boggles....
Oh, and I've started listening to Pink. I think I need to get out more. Read more!

Vindicated

The guy from Lube Mobile just left...and as I predicted the car is purring like a kitten. HOWEVER, the timing was OK - I hadn't stuffed it. The rotor button was shorting and two of the spark plugs were shot. If I had continued to fiddle with it I would have worked out the plugs, but I would never have guessed the rotor. Fortunately the guy they sent was over 40yo and had seen a distributor with points before and knew how to fix the rotor - with nailpolish. As luck would have it we have stumbled onto one of the few mechanics in Canberra who has worked on pre 1980 cars, in fact, he used to restore Morris Minors and Austins when he was younger; needless to say he is my new best friend.Now all I have to do is source a new rotor button, get some new plugs and adjust the tappets and we should be going good. It was nice to have a bit of validation and reassurance that I was doing the right thing, I just needed a bit more information.And he wasn't a high school drop-out. He went to tech. Read more!

Automobiles

It's been quite a while since my last rant, life has been hectic. An update on recent events:..
My husband's car died. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and is resigned to the car afterlife status of "good for parts". We have a 1962 Vauxhall cresta that we bought with the intention of doing up slowly over the next few years. It has now become a matter of urgency.
Having (mostly) always owned an old car I am somewhat accustomed to the trials and tribulations that go with old car ownership. The Vauxhall is 45 years old and has sat unregistered in somebody's backyard for several years, we bought it sight unseen. As far as I'm concerned we are lucky that it isn't a rust bucket with shot rings and burnt out valves. My husband isn't so optimistic, he's more of a glass-is-half-empty type. So far we have replaced ALL of the brakes, which cost $1200. The exhaust needed replacing (common for cars that have sat for some time) that was only $200; various bushes and seals associated with the steering and suspension have also needed replacement. Not totally unpredictable. Overall we will probably get away with around $2000 for the car to get roadworthy. Then we have the leaky transmission and getting seat belts fitted. On top of all that are the cosmetics of a re-spray, a stereo and an alarm. I'm betting we will eventually have forked out at least 12 grand for the whole deal, including purchase price. OK, we could have gone and bought a brand new little chaff cutter for not much more, had a problem free and economical car – but it would have been a characterless, boring little box made of plastic which blends into the background.
Instead we will have a gloriously sexy, winged and sleek car that's made of actual metal and that is unique. It will suit us. In the mean time the husband had almost lost the plot, the loss of his motoring independence and the fact that I have been the one dealing with various mechanics and beurocrats has been frustrating for him. He feels powerless and is convinced everybody is ripping us off. Meanwhile I have been in close contact with all the mechanics, the spares guy from the Vauxhall club and the RTA and I know what's going on. Unfortunately when we took the car back for what should have been its final inspection the mechanic actually found a new fault. The husband is ready to pick up a semi-automatic and climb a tower, I'm still of the opinion that we have managed to buy a good car and all will be well. I predict the car will be on the road (legally) by the end of January.
When I owned a Morris minor I did much of my own mechanical work – I had no choice, I was a student and it was either pick up a spanner and work it out or walk, and you can't be a proper Goth in Birkenstocks. So I learnt how to do the timing, the points and plugs, change the oil and do a lube job (which is a lot less fun than it sounds). I arrogantly assumed that since I could handle a Morris I could also handle a Vauxhall – same vintage, both English. Important distinction: the Morris was a tiny 4 cylinder, the Vauxhall is a massive 6 cylinder with extras.
So far I have managed to take off and replace the manifold without too much drama, but attempting to adjust the timing has brought me undone. I've gone from having a car that was running roughly to a car that is only running on 3 cylinders and has no power. I have raised the white flag. Lube Mobile are coming on Thursday to sort things out (hopefully).
This sort of situation annoys me no-end. I am an intelligent, educated, competent person. I am capable of mechanical work – I have proved this. Yet for some reason I am unable to get the timing right on the Vauxhall. And the thing that really annoys me is that some bogun bloke who dropped out of high school is going to come along and get it right first go. He is going to adjust the points and the timing and the fuel mix and have the car purring like a kitten without so much as raising a sweat.
In my efforts to tune the car I have skun most of my knuckles, caused myself much back pain, aggravated my husband and discovered a whole new world of profanities but actually achieved very little.
Why is that? Why can't I manipulate a machine to run as it should? In my previous job I manipulated proteins at the molecular level and was (usually) able to make them do what I wanted – could a mechanic do that? I doubt it. I guess it is my ego that trips me up – I should be able to do what a mechanic does, given the correct set of instructions and the right tools, but I apparently I can't. I don't understand why.
I will continue to try to learn how to fix my own car and I am sure that one day I will be able to wield a spanner with the best of them, but for now I admit – I'm not that good. Read more!