My working life is changing, evolving and more and more it is taking me out of the house.  I had chosen to work from home when Little Pencil was tiny.  I chose to never really go back into a job away from home because essentially I wanted to be at his beck and call.  I wanted to be home when he needed me and I did not want to stress over school holidays and sick days.  I was really lucky that I could find work that accommodated that.  Then when Little Pencil went to school we got Fluffy Pencil and I fell so deep and hard in love with my puppy that I literally could not bear to leave him.

So I worked at home with Fluffy Pencil, took him for walks whenever I got frustrated (he took a LOT of walks) and I was able to pick up Little Pencil from school every day and spend as much time with him as he would let me.

Now work is changing, there is more time in the office.  In fact there is an office at all.   And there is an office for me with a breathtaking few and spectacular people around me.  I still get to pick up Little Pencil and I get to spend as many days at home with him as I like.  My job is perfectly flexible  with an emphasis on the word perfectly.

So why do I feel conflicted and stressed?   Because of Fluffy Pencil.  He is not used to being at home alone till school pick up time.  There is not even a doggy door at this “not real house”.   He is waiting at home for me all alone looking out of the window and wondering why I am not getting frustrated enough to take him or a walk.

And then yesterday I was talking to my friend who I will call Kerri (because that is her name) and she was telling me about the baby sitter she has just employed.  The babysitter, who I will call Mary Poppins (because that is not her name) is an amazing young woman who really gets Kerri’s kids and will take care of them two afternoons a week while Kerri works.

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Now stay with me for this leap.  Fluffy Pencil is not a human.  Some parts of me understand that (although Mr Pencil will attest to the fact that I have done a mighty fine job of personifying him).  But he is one of my favourite breathing beings in all of the world and I want him to feel secure and loved, I want him looked after and I want him to go walking and running during the day to alleviate my stress around him.  Cue babysitter. Cue dog walker. Cue huge load off shoulders.

Now I just need somebody to do the shopping, cook dinners, do the washing, make school lunches, help with homework and take care of my social life.

After all we all do what we can to make our lives easier.  Or at least we should

What do you outsource to make your life easier?

I really wanted to write a post about the upside of moving, about the cleansing and liberating feeling of decluttering your home.  About the catharsis involved in wrapping everything you own in butcher’s paper so that you can put it in a box and then take it out of the box and unwrap it 2 kilometres later.  I really wanted to write it.  But I didn’t because I couldn’t.  I like to keep things honest here.

We packed every single thing that we owned and we moved.  Literally 2 kilometres from our “real” house.  Mr Pencil convinced me that employing packers to do the job would make me more stressed. Strange that he only said that after we got the quote from the packers but still, he had a point.  I am a huge control freak.  I need to know what’s happening, when it is happening and why it’s happening.  Also, most times I like to be the one making it happen.

It was with this control gene running at full tilt that I started to move the contents of my “real” home over to my “not real” home.  (Note I do not use the word “unreal” lest it be confused with something that is amazing or ideal).  Because I was eager to start (and finish) I began to empty the contents of my cupboard into green enviro bags, dump them in my car and unpack them on the other end.  After about 76 trips there was not much left for the removalists to do.  If only I drove a truck…….

And so now we are in the “not real” house.  And I spend every minute reminding myself how lucky I am to be in the position that I am in, renovating the house I love and having the luxury of living away from that renovation as it unfolds. But my minutes spent reflecting my luck aren’t the happiest minutes. I am homesick.

I miss my house. I miss my aircraft noise, I miss my nosy neighbour who I had to dodge every morning as I passed her window to brush my teeth.

I miss my huge kitchen and I miss knowing how the oven works.  Last night I attempted to get rid of the smell of this house that is not mine by cooking a hearty, aromatic stew.  I had visions of the house becoming a home when filled with the smells of home cooking and us around the table eating dinner as a family. But instead the house was filled with the smell of smoldering vegetables and blackened meat and as we sat around the table I showed my family how I had burnt a huge crater into my hand creating this burned offering.  Not quite according to plan.
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I miss my carpets.  There are no carpets in this “not real” house. I have never lived in a bedroom with no carpets and I don’t like it.  Little Pencil, on the other hand, love its.  His bed is on casters, you just have to sit on it and it slides to the other side of the room.  So while he is having a ball “racing” his bed across the floor the dog is howling because he can no longer jump on the bed because he can’t get a footing on the floor to make his run up.

I miss the man around the corner who was scared of my dog and I miss the man who used to give my dog bread every day as a treat!  And my dog – he is a mess. He just wants to sit in the car all day because that is the only thing in his life that has not changed.

I miss Little Pencil’s trampoline, I miss my bath and I miss my bedroom.

And in all the chaos and turmoil that has been the packing and moving (and with a fair bit of work thrown in for good measure) I have missed blogging, I have missed twitter and I have missed you.

So from the comfort of my “not real” home  (comfort used in the sense of very, very uncomfortable) I would like to say I am home.  Virtually.  If you know what I mean.

I’ve never written an angry post before.  In fact most times when I feel angry about something I try and digest it a little and calm down before I write.

But today I am furious and I can’t get over it at all so I am going to get it out there – angry and all

I am a vegetarian. That is my choice, and it is a relatively recent one.  I choose to be a vegetarian because I cannot stand cruelty to animals.  The thought of eating them horrifies me.  I don’t push my beliefs on anyone (well at least I try not to be too blatant when I do) and I support the fact that my family eats meat and chicken.  I am very particular though where I buy my meat from. I support ethical farming of animals.  No factory farming, no cages, no cruelty.   I like to think the meat my family is eating had a chance at a good life before it became part of our lives.

And when I go out to eat, I always ask about the eggs.  Because I eat eggs, but I only eat eggs that are free range.  I have been to many places that don’t have free range eggs and, while I don’t agree with their policy, I just order something else. Live and let live.

So today we went out for breakfast to the Coogee Cafe.  The menus said organic eggs. That was a good start.  Before I ordered my breakfast I checked with the waitress (because the thought of eating caged eggs saddens and sickens me).  She happily told me that the eggs were free range and organic. She didn’t bat an eyelid, that is how confident she was. Rehearsed even.

After we had eaten my son decided he needed to use the toilet.  I went with him.  The toilets were rather hideous but that is not the end of the world nor the crux of the story.  Just outside the toilet door was a huge box of eggs.  Yup outside the toilets not in the kitchen.  I looked at the big box of eggs and the words CAGED EGGS shouted out at me.

I felt sick to the stomach.  Sick that I had eaten a caged egg. And sick and angry that the staff had had the gall to lie to me so open faced.
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And so, as is my want, I approached the waitress in charge behind the counter.  And she told me that they don’t use those eggs for breakfasts.  Great so they just buy tortured eggs as an outside the  toilet display!  When that argument did not wash with me she told me I had no right to rifle through their produce. Um, the box was not hidden and I did not rifle!

My husband paid for the meal and we left.

Seriously I don’t get how anyone can buy caged eggs.  I just don’t.  The lives of those chickens who are debeaked and forced to endure their entire lives in tiny cages horrifies me, keeps me awake at night even. But that is my choice. I don’t expect anyone else to carry the same intensity of feeling about this that I do.

But when I go out for a meal I expect to be given the right to make my choice on correct and valid information. I don’t expect to be lied to and I don’t think I should have to stand for being misled.

I am angry, beyond words, that business can get away with this despicable behaviour.

And if you have any concerns about eating caged eggs – you probably shouldn’t go to Coogee Cafe

Mr Pencil told me the other day that he loves Tiger Woods.  Like really loves him.  He didn’t say “I love the way Tiger hits the ball” or “I love watching Tiger’s swing” or even “I admire a man who can sleep with 14 women and not get caught on woman number 2”. No, he just plainly loves everything about him.  He doesn’t even know him so I found that weird.

I began to think that maybe he was having a bit of a mid-life crisis.

• He recently bought a fancy new car
• We are about to do a major renovation to the house
• He has bought a surprising number of new clothes lately
• He owns 28 pairs of shoes (Fact!) and still needs to buy new ones all the time

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Surely this can only point to one thing.  He is having a mid-life crisis

And then yesterday the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Mr Pencil insisted that we all get scooters.

He went off to the toy shop (he insists it was a sports equipment shop) and bought 3 razors.  One for my 9 year old son which is perfect but the one for the 41 year old mum and the 42 year old dad – a bit odd.

And then it got worse.

Today he insisted that we go scootering as a family.  He is a very stressed individual, he rarely takes time off work and he never has time for exercise. So, given that he has taken some leave (to keep me in check) and today was a glorious, day we set off with our scooters to travel Bronte to Bondi and back again.

I have done this walk hundreds of times.  He has done it many times.  I told him there were too many stairs.  He told me there were none.  I told him that it was a uneven, jagged, coarse, rocky, stony surface (I used lots of words to try denote rough) . He laughed.

So we got there and it was simply magnificent.  To look at.  If you don’t mind stairs and rough ground (oh and also unspeakably beautiful ocean views). Little Pencil raced off doing wheelies and ollies and all manner of tricks, Mr Pencil was pretty nimble and I was a little more hesitant.  Okay.  I was a lot more hesitant.  But I needed to hesitate to point out how many stairs there were and how rough the ground was (and how petrified I was every time I gathered a tiny bit of speed).

I thought I was pretty fit but it turns out I am not scooter fit. My right leg hurt like hell from placing all my weight on it and my arms hurt like hell from having to carry the scooter up and down all the bloody stairs.  I was very worried that I might fall off the scooter and bruise my ego. I was also off the scale terrified watching Little Pencil coast down ravines* at a speed that was inconsistent with being human.   I was hot (not just because I was wearing a jumper and it was about 28 degrees) and I was very, very bothered.

The setting was magnificent and it was awesome to spend the day outdoors with my two favourite boys.  I am obviously delighted that my husband does not have 14 lovers (at least not that I know of) but I really wish he had chosen to buy me a diamond bracelet to celebrate his mid life crisis. This scooter – I don’t think it’s going to get much more of a run

*Okay they were ramps but they were extremely steep

It is Mr Pencil’s birthday on Wednesday and I am stymied about what to buy for him.  After all he is a man and men are notoriously hard to buy presents for.  Tricky already. But, to make it double tricky (because single tricky is for amateurs) I am well known as an excellent present buyer.  Worst bit – I am only known as an excellent present buyer by Mr Pencil.

To be honest this title is well deserved. These are just some of the amazing gifts I have given him in the past

• Sunglasses that really looked good on him
• Magazine subscription for a magazine that he once flicked through more than once (a boy/cars magazine)
• An ipod loaded with all his favourite music
• Tickets to a concert
• A photo book filled with pictures of him and Little Pencil
• Perfume (yup – one year I bought him my favourite perfume but it was only after he bought himself me a new computer for my birthday)
• Signed photos of Mark Taylor (when Mark Taylor was my husband’s favourite human being and captain of the Australian cricket team and not the face of an air conditioning company)

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Now I am all out of ideas.  I have used all the good ones up.

Why is it that men are so hard to buy presents for?  Could it be that there needs are so simple?  Mr Pencil has more than enough clothes and to him they are necessities rather than luxuries.  We already have a TV and an x-box so that’s entertainment covered.  The thought of him wearing jewellery repels me and he already drives a very nice car (in case I strike oil in the garden and want to buy him a very expensive gift).

He only has one past time and that is poker.  I can’t buy him skill and try as I might, I certainly can’t buy him luck. He owns all the music that he likes because he never gives himself an opportunity to listen to anything new and I can’t buy him better taste in said music.  I have tried buying him DVD’s.  They remain unopened and are sometimes used as coasters.

He does not collect anything and has no taste for trinket type things.  I could give him a photo for his office but of what ? I cannot find a photo of myself where I don’t look like a grumpy elephant.  As much as he loves animals, I know he would not like a picture of a grumpy elephant on his desk.  I cannot give him a photo of himself either –though I suppose I could give him a mirror.  I could give him a photo of Little Pencil then I would have no ideas for Father’s Day.

That leaves…well it leaves nothing really.

So I think I will buy him a spa retreat.  I know there is nothing he would like less.  But I would like it a lot.

Last week we admitted Little Pencil to hospital, fit and well.  Happy and healthy.  Bouncy and cheeky.  They were meant to just remove his tonsils but my lord it feels like they made him sick.

For a week now he has been in pain.  He doesn’t whinge.  He doesn’t complain.  He’s just sad.  He won’t eat, he’ll hardly drink and he is reticent to speak (this is actually a very good thing because when he does speak he sounds like a chipmunk who has just swallowed helium).

We have been stuck at home for a week now.  A week where he has not wanted to be more than one metre away from me. Although we have managed four outings

1. To the doctor – he seemed to me to be getting worse not better.  Official diagnosis – he needs to eat
2. Family dinner to honour the Passover celebrations.  Yup with great faith comes great responsibility . Considering that I do not have great faith that should possibly read “with great familial pressure comes great responsibility “
3. To a friend – because we needed to smile and we needed to escape the cleaning lady.  This was a very bad move because although he loved seeing his friend he went into meltdown on arriving back home.  Literally fall apart.  And when I say literally, I mean literally.  Falling apart included throwing up
4. We went to see a movie.  He held his throat and I watched him hold his throat

So it has not been a great week.

He is painfully thin and is in agony when he tries to eat.  I can put close the fingers of one hand around his leg. And his cheeks are sunken and hollow

I have offered him

• Ice cream – every flavour known to mankind. With bits, without bits. With sauce, without sauce. With sprinkles, without sprinkles. In a cup, in a cone, in a spoon, on a stick with a straw and with my fingers
• Chocolate – whole, melted, pureed, liquidised, grated and even cut into teeny tiny squares
• Jelly – orange, red, green, blue, yellow, rainbow.  Set, not quite set and even in liquid form
• Soup – Chicken. Vegetable. Hot. Cold. Warm. Tepid. With noodles and without
• Eggs – scrambled, boiled, poached, fried and Easter
• Nutella – so he had to fight me for this one but still I did not put up much resistance
• Peanut butter – he ate some.  From a spoon.  It almost glued his mouth shut.  He won’t eat it again
• Pasta – with butter and without. With tomato sauce and without. With cheese and without

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Oh and last night he woke up crying at 1am in pain.  Refused to even swallow the panadol and finally, after much threatening that I would not like to publish, he went to sleep at 4am.

This feels like the bad, old days.  I coped then.  Not so much now.

This is my tether————————————————————————————— and this is me, right at the end of it.

Today my Little Pencil had his tonsils removed.  He was incredibly brave.  In fact ridiculously so and it really showed me up.  I was a petrified mess.

His amazing attitude and his tremendous resilience is managing to rub off on me just a tiny bit – it may be because we are sharing the smallest bed known to mankind and his very being is literally being forced into mine, nonetheless, it is all good.  In fact, in this very squashy jolly state of mind I have decided that hospital is a pretty cool place and I’ll tell you why

• You don’t have to make the bed.  You can actually spend many wonderfully happy hours playing with the bed.  (On a side note why is there a button to lift just the centre of the bed?  What weird illness or injury would you have that necessitates the lifting of just your abdomen with your head and feet dangling precariously below you?  This is the BED not the operating table)

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• You don’t have to make dinner.  Although once you witness the slop that is hospital food you may wish to take up cooking in earnest. You may also wish to cook for all the other poor souls that have been given “A Study in Modern Art in Muted Greys” for dinner

• You can’t be guilted into walking the dog.  This important point is not to be confused with the more negative point that you will miss your dog terribly and wish he were there to lick away the smell of, well the smell of hospital.  Hospital smell is putrid so really you should not wish it on your dog and rather focus on the more positive fact that you can’t be guilted into walking him.

• There are people to talk to at any time of the day or night, even if they are carrying a heavy duty torch and checking your vitals.  What’s more, when these people say “how are you?” you can really go to town with your answer.

• Being in a hospital bed allows you time to appreciate the fact that your bed at home is not made of a waterproof piece of foam.  Unless of course it is and then it allows you to marvel at the fact that you are still alive after sleeping on such a terrible mattress for prolonged periods of time.  Presumably you will do most of this marvelling in the physiotherapy department.

• There is always a supply of band aids, oxygen and hundreds of drugs. This is very handy if you are a hypochondriac.

• If you squint quite a bit and you block out the drip, oxygen, life saving machinery etc you can pretend you are in a hotel.  This only works if you are in a private hospital and the hotel you pretend to be in is a pretty crappy hotel.

• The hospital has a fridge full of ice creams and icy poles for the patients but they do not check religiously who eats them.

• It is never completely quiet. Oh no, sorry that is a bad thing

That said, I cannot tell you how happy we will be to be out of here tomorrow!  Without those hideous tonsils.  And in a decent bed, with delicious home made food and a dog that licks our feet and no sign at all of sickness.  Anywhere.

The wedding invitation looked like a tattoo but we were not surprised.  The groom is a famous tattoo artist after all, and the bride, well the bride is a beautiful, creative (the groom described her in his speech as “artsy fartsy”)  young lady who also happens to be the daughter of my husband’s step mother.

The dress code at the bottom of the invitation read “dress to celebrate” so we did.  We viewed “dress to celebrate” as “dress to attend a wedding that is not too formal and will be held on the cliffs of the beach at 5pm on a Saturday evening in summer” .  We are good with detail like that.  When we arrived at the venue we realised that our interpretation was just one of many.

There were two women dressed as pirates – complete with three cornered pirate hats, there was an Elvis with an afro, a Greek Orthodox priest (not an actual priest but just a regular man in an Greek Orthodox priest outfit – a regular man being a man with 28 piercings in his face) oh and there was a woman wearing a kimono with her face painted white.  There were also quite a few people wearing, you know, normal clothes but most of these people would step out of the shower in the morning looking as if they were fully dressed.  If tattoos count as clothes.

My husband wore pants and a shirt and I wore a dress.  We stood out a bit so I took off my shoes to blend in (handy really because they were very high and hurting my entire body).

The ceremony was absolutely beautiful – moving and emotional.  The love between the bride and groom was glaringly obvious. The setting was so magnificent it was almost surreal. We watched in awe-struck fascination as the celebrant explained the Polish tradition of sharing bread and salt after the vows are exchanged.  Much of the fascination was directed at the fact that one of the guests had wandered over to the bread and salt during the ceremony and eaten most of it.  I guess he was hungry.  After all he had dressed for the wedding like he had slept in the park for the last 7 months.

The reception was held in an equally magnificent setting just a few hundred metres up the road.  I was quite keen to see if the pirates would travel by ship but as it happens they just walked like we did but with high heeled, black, thigh high boots.

There was just one table, magnificently laid and decorated by a member of my extended step family who wore the brightest yellow shirt I have ever seen.  Ever.  He told me it was a Thierry Mugler shirt as if that would reduce some of my shock at the colour.  It didn’t.  In fact if I close my eyes now all I can see is his shirt.

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The reception was unique.  Most weddings I have been to the groom ends his speech with a toast to his bride, at this wedding he ended his speech with “fuck you punk rockers”.  It doesn’t mean he loves her any less, I mean he did say that every day with her is like a fucking holiday.  And he did look at her with the most intensely loving eyes.

It was different.  But different is not always bad.  I am not the most conservative person I know – that award goes to the poor Italian couple of about 89 years old who sat at the end of the table.  But, I was well and truly rocked by this wedding.  And when I say rocked I don’t mean just by the Polish Anarchist punk rock that we danced to.

I spoke to a man who had spent 5 years in Rikers Island Correctional Facility and two years in a Peurto Rican jail, I asked the man with the 28 facial piercings if I could photograph his face and it turns out the two pirates are Swedish sisters who work together – one as a tattoo artist and one as a tattoo removalist.  They were gorgeous and charming and only dressed as pirates to give the groom a laugh.  I read Psalm 23 off someone’s chest, I saw more ink than I have ever seen before and because my jaw was so close to the ground much of the night, I saw some of the most amazing artworks I have ever seen.  Even if the canvas was someone’s leg.

A highlight of the wedding would have to have been a Skype link up with the groom’s family in Poland.  Dressed in their suits and ties and projected onto a huge screen, the groom’s family attended the wedding in Sydney.  And no amount of ink, piercings, dress up or bravado could disguise the warmth, the love and the happiness in the room that night.  This crowd were all rockers, and they were all “out there” and they were all a little bit scary and intimidating to look at but they were all so human.

I was flattered to be part of this wedding.  Which is really good because when I first saw the crowd I thought I would be flattened.