The Quiet Life
We are all loving it down here in Rosebud. The Mornington Peninsula is a great place to be, or it's where we want to be now so it's working out good. My wife is happy, my daughter developing into some loud, skipping, energetic bundle of noise, and I'm even more happy that their happiness is obvious.
Yes, everyone loves it except our cat. To say he fucking hates it here would be putting it mildly. He had an altercation with the next door dogs when he strayed onto their property shortly after we arrived and has been chased out from underneath the shed by some huge fat fluffy gloriously insane ginger thing that could well be a cat and then refused to go out at all for the next four weeks. Wouldn't even eat outside, rather starve to death. So kitty litter inside at the moment, and I HATE HATE HATE that. The smell of cat shit permeates the house so intensely and rapidly that we are all gagging and Jules and I are drawing mental straws to see who has to clean up. And clean up we do, as Claude is a fairly dumb chap from what we can tell (or malicious) and positions his bum on the edge of the tray while he sits in the middle. This way he can shit in the tray, on the side of the tray and on the tiled floor simultaneously. We put newspaper under the tray to hopefully negate the shit on the floor thing, but because he tries to dig holes and bury stuff (and he's not burying his piss or his shit so I'm buggered if I know what he thinks he's burying) he ends up ripping or moving the paper to reveal freshly cleaned tiles all a ready for a shitting. After being inside all day, he goes crazy at night time and tears up and down and around and claws everything. I tell you, I ain't feeling much love for the boy. Though we had a breakthrough today and he spent an hour and a half outside with us this afternoon. One of the few afternoons we've been outside too.
It's been raining and freezing for most of the time we have been here.
The house is big and freezing. The floor is freezing. The bed is freezing. My wife is freezing. Ducted heating arrives tomorrow, and the two Fujitsu inverters that don't seem to do much more than remove the ice from the air and rack up enormous power bills will go into hiatus. I've had network cable put into the house (wireless was terrible, hell, things like redtube became a downright impossibility!), quotes (hideously expensive for what we though we were wanting) for custom made book shelves and cd shelves are in progress so we can begin to unpack all my shit basically - books and cds - , new dining table has arrived, couches have been ordered, mortgage growing bigger by the day, new kitchen design (oh, my wife!), skylights needed in the living area, trees chopped down, dirt moved, kangaroos eating the lawn, rosellas flitting, two magpies - the Boss and Her Husband - controlling the airspace of the neighbouring properties, kookaburras laughing their heads off at 6:30am (I don't mind) and a driveway about 40 metres long and all uphill as an excellent start to my physical day upon newspaper retrieval.
I am getting fitter and stronger. That driveway had me out of breath walking up it in the morning, now I'm running up it (albeit slowly) to collect my cryptic crossword. The national park has let us visit four times now, with the shortest walk about 45 minutes, the longest an hour and a half (and that one was just me and Isla, with two rosellas guiding us home from tree to tree).
And two writing projects that pay, that should see me getting my shit together and becoming a full time writer this year. After all, that was part of the plan and originally I was nervous about sitting in front of the blank screen but some things have fallen into my lap, good things, big things, and so the full time writer I shall become. More on that stuff once I have contracts and whether I can make it public.
But I'm busy. I'm happy. My family is happy. If we ignore the cancer card and the god damn cat, things are going just fine.
Yes, everyone loves it except our cat. To say he fucking hates it here would be putting it mildly. He had an altercation with the next door dogs when he strayed onto their property shortly after we arrived and has been chased out from underneath the shed by some huge fat fluffy gloriously insane ginger thing that could well be a cat and then refused to go out at all for the next four weeks. Wouldn't even eat outside, rather starve to death. So kitty litter inside at the moment, and I HATE HATE HATE that. The smell of cat shit permeates the house so intensely and rapidly that we are all gagging and Jules and I are drawing mental straws to see who has to clean up. And clean up we do, as Claude is a fairly dumb chap from what we can tell (or malicious) and positions his bum on the edge of the tray while he sits in the middle. This way he can shit in the tray, on the side of the tray and on the tiled floor simultaneously. We put newspaper under the tray to hopefully negate the shit on the floor thing, but because he tries to dig holes and bury stuff (and he's not burying his piss or his shit so I'm buggered if I know what he thinks he's burying) he ends up ripping or moving the paper to reveal freshly cleaned tiles all a ready for a shitting. After being inside all day, he goes crazy at night time and tears up and down and around and claws everything. I tell you, I ain't feeling much love for the boy. Though we had a breakthrough today and he spent an hour and a half outside with us this afternoon. One of the few afternoons we've been outside too.
It's been raining and freezing for most of the time we have been here.
The house is big and freezing. The floor is freezing. The bed is freezing. My wife is freezing. Ducted heating arrives tomorrow, and the two Fujitsu inverters that don't seem to do much more than remove the ice from the air and rack up enormous power bills will go into hiatus. I've had network cable put into the house (wireless was terrible, hell, things like redtube became a downright impossibility!), quotes (hideously expensive for what we though we were wanting) for custom made book shelves and cd shelves are in progress so we can begin to unpack all my shit basically - books and cds - , new dining table has arrived, couches have been ordered, mortgage growing bigger by the day, new kitchen design (oh, my wife!), skylights needed in the living area, trees chopped down, dirt moved, kangaroos eating the lawn, rosellas flitting, two magpies - the Boss and Her Husband - controlling the airspace of the neighbouring properties, kookaburras laughing their heads off at 6:30am (I don't mind) and a driveway about 40 metres long and all uphill as an excellent start to my physical day upon newspaper retrieval.
I am getting fitter and stronger. That driveway had me out of breath walking up it in the morning, now I'm running up it (albeit slowly) to collect my cryptic crossword. The national park has let us visit four times now, with the shortest walk about 45 minutes, the longest an hour and a half (and that one was just me and Isla, with two rosellas guiding us home from tree to tree).
And two writing projects that pay, that should see me getting my shit together and becoming a full time writer this year. After all, that was part of the plan and originally I was nervous about sitting in front of the blank screen but some things have fallen into my lap, good things, big things, and so the full time writer I shall become. More on that stuff once I have contracts and whether I can make it public.
But I'm busy. I'm happy. My family is happy. If we ignore the cancer card and the god damn cat, things are going just fine.