Hello lovely RRs,

There is no blog today.

I’m having a Sunday night shutdown, and have nothing in the archives to share.  It seems school holidays provide an unanticipated distraction from blogging.

Have a lovely day,

I shall see you tomorrow.

**Strong language warning.  (For something different.)**

She was a 40 year old woman.

A wife, and a mother.

She had a mortgage, a nice car and a career.

She didn’t get out much any more, at least not without some kind of time limitation, so when she did, she liked to dance and dance.  To feel the beat of the music deep in her solar plexus, rubbing off the years and making her young again.  She liked to dance like a loon, jumping up and down, singing into a pretend microphone, gyrating to the songs of her golden years, the years before gravity had begun the everlasting pull.

She was out with friends, a mixed group of men and women she had known for years, and whom she had been drunk with many times.  They knew she’d be signing into a mic before too long, as she knew one of them would abruptly leave when she was ‘done’, they knew each other’s quirks well.  She was in her home town, at the surf club where she was a social member, so she couldn’t have felt more secure.  She had paid special attention to her make up and her underwear, so she knew she was oozing the confident sexuality that seems to only come for women once they are beyond their pick-up years.

They had all drunk expensive champagne and eaten well, and it was finally time for the dancing.  Slightly provocative dancing, yes, but not directed at anyone other than her friends and her husband.  She didn’t even notice the group of men, boys really, standing on the verge of the dance-floor, until her husband pointed them out.  They were blokes from the local footy club, out after the game, ripe with testosterone and tattoos and ready for a fuck or a fight.  Her husband pointed them out again, but she ignored him.  They were young enough to be her children.  Sure, they would leer at her from behind as she wiggled her tightly clad bum to Push It, but they were harmless.  She and they were mutually exclusive, in that their worlds or their bodies would never collide.  And they all knew that.

When the singer started on Better Man she grabbed her imaginary microphone, singing and pointing past the rugby lads to her husband, now scowling into his schooner.  She saw the boys grinning at her gesticulations, seeing her for who she was- a slightly pissed old gal who might have been fit in her prime, now ten years past it, but still a bit of a laugh.  Some of them probably thought her husband was a lucky guy, having a wife who still looked a bit of all right.  Others just looked beyond her to the dance floor, checking the flesh of the girls their own age.

The song finished, and she flitted past the boys, invisible to them now, as women her age usually were, to plant a big kiss on her brooding husband’s lips. He pulled back.  “Be careful how you’re dancing, those footy blokes are watching you.”

What?

And so began the age-old argument.  Steeped in years of indoctrination and attempts to shame.  This time though, it was different, it was in her own circle, in fact as close as it could be.  If a man is ogling a women, then the woman should modify her behaviour.  If a woman is behaving provocatively, then she can expect to get looks and maybe even more, regardless of her age, social standing or inclination.  If a man thinks a woman is sexy, and if she doesn’t want sex, she should turn it down a notch.  Be careful.  Be invisible.  Be demure.  Be good.  Don’t attract unwanted attention.  Sit with your knees together.  Cover yourself up.  Carry some pepper spray.  Don’t get too drunk.  Don’t walk by yourself at night.  Lock the door, lock the door, lock the door.  The rage and the suppression and the indignation of lifetimes erupted forth.

It was like the biblical story of Adam and his first wife, the headstrong Lillith.  A woman whom Adam couldn’t control or subdue, so he went whining back to God and asked for a do-over, and so God said, yeah mate, that Lillith is a feisty bitch, and pretty out-there, here, have Eve, she’ll do what you say.  She’s a good girl.  Eve, who would walk behind him, not by his side.  And so the story goes. On.

The rage of Lillith, sick to bloody death of being stifled and repressed came screaming up from her liver and beneath, surprising her, and finding voice in her yell,  “I’ll bloody well dance how ever I like. I’ll go and felate this stubby in front of the whole team if I feel like it, and NOT.ONE.SINGLE.FUCK.WILL.BE.GIVEN.”

The music had stopped.  There was relative silence for a beat, until some drunk old fella in the corner clapped.  Some woman yelled out, “You go, girlfriend.”

And the rugby boys?  They didn’t even look up from the Keno game they were playing.  Not s single fuck was given.

…From The Ashers xx

As you know, I’m a student of the world, always learning (!) and I love a list, so here are the things I have learned this week:

1.  No matter when you get to the airport, your law-abiding kid will ask you more than seventy-thousand times if it is time to go through to the gate yet.

2.  No matter when you get to the airport, you can almost miss your plane.  Even with a kid like that.

3.  Regardless of how much you despise craft, and how much you avoid it, you will have at least one child who loves craft, but can’t do it themselves (and so requires your assistance.  Constantly.)

Looking innocent… The crafty crafter, with craft

4.  Even after you think the craze has passed, you will ask the musical question: “What does the fox say?” in your head, eleventy-billion times per day.

And this is why…

5.  It does not take three minutes to heat up a beanie heat pack thingy in your microwave.

6.  And if you try, you will find your whole house stinks for seventy-five times that three minutes.

Overdone?

7.  Stephen King is the greatest modern author.  Still.  And you will be by turns both jealous, and in awe of him.  Like nothing you have ever experienced.

8.  You can still get pimples after The Menopause.  Especially if you drink several Coopers.

9.  Even though you think you are prepared in your mind, when you arrive at your friend’s house months after she has died, you will still feel like someone just stuck a tack in your lungs and punched out all of your air.

10.  You will sit in her chair, where she was supposed to be convalescing and wish for a different reality.  Again.  Your throat will hurt and your eyes will sting with brine kept back, and still, still you won’t hear her laugh again.

11.  But you will be glad, still, that you had the chance to have that laugh in your life.  And you will be glad you came.  To sit.

I learned some things this week.  But none of them are really new.

…From The Ashers xx

1. I am in Newy.

2. It’s too cold to type.

3. I have no wifi.

4. I have imbibed many Coopers Pale Ales.

5. Did I mention it’s too cold to type?

5. I feel really, really sorry for the dude who finds everything he touches turns to Skittles (TM)

6. Nathan just gave me another Coopers.

7. 60 Minutes is engrossing*

8. I’m pretty lazy.

9. It’s hard to type on an iPad.

10. This is taking AGES to upload.

etc.

So I’ll see you tomoz**

*not really

**probably

…From The Ashers xx

Things our kids argued about in the car today, before my first coffee:

• Whether or not google is actually a number.  (It kind of is, but it is spelt googol)
• Who knows the most.  (Me: About what? Them: Everything.   Okaaaay then.)
• Who is better at violin.  (Hard to say, they are both shit and sound like tortured cats)
• Who is better at Minecraft.   (Depends how you define better of course.  So they devised a competition, of which I will judge, where they will each craft a thing- say a castle- in a set time-frame.  I already know how this will end.)
• Whether or not Liam brushed his teeth properly.
• What exactly Coco meant when she said they do “skill building” first up on Monday mornings.  (By now I was shouting: You know what skills are, you know what building means, so “skill building” is both of those things put together.)
• Whether or not Loom Bands are better than Pokemon Cards.  (They are both shit and I’m close to banning both.)
• Whether or not One Direction used to be Coco’s favourite band.  (They were, briefly, in 2012.)
• Why Coco should refer to other kids called Liam by their first and last name.  (Apparently our Liam gets confused.  For example:  Coco: Mum can I go to Liam’s party?  Liam: What party?  I’m not having a party.  My birthday is in September.   I shit you not, this was an actual conversation.)
• Who the cat likes more.  (No-one.  She’s a cat.)
• Whether or not Coco meant to hit Liam with an ugg boot when she hit it with her tennis racquet.  (I don’t think so.  It’s unlikely at this skill level that she would have dared even think of connecting.  However I think she was overjoyed with the result.  Which, of course became the problem.)
• Who is better at the six times tables.  (Who cares, I still rule, so suck on that, under 10s.)

Somewhere around about here I told them both to shut-up.  I may have mentioned that they were both hopeless at everything, and that I was better, and would always be better, and they should both stop talking to each other immediately and look out their own windows, or else there would be no ‘devices’ for the whole week, including the weekend, if I heard just one more peep.

We drove along in blissful silence for at least thirty-seven seconds, as I hummed along to some young-person’s song on the youth network.  Some young person with no kids or mortgage, who was probably at this moment stressing over mid-year exams, or whether the beer-can wall would get completed before the next house inspection, or planning a snow-boarding trip to Perisher.  Mmmmm, yes, Perisher, with schnapps and sore bums from falling onto the the icy-snow and sore knees from, well, nocturnal activities…

A tiny voice from the back, broke my reverie.  “Mummy, Liam just looked out my window.”

Do your kids argue about bullshit?  Do they have their “own” window?  (And why did I say that?  Because now, there are “own windows, of course)

…From The Ashers xxx

I usually have very short hair.  I like it that way, and I guess it suits me, in that I don’t have to do anything much to it- just wet it, add some product, and voila, I look like I’ve just stepped out of the salon.  Or the pool.  Or it’s very humid today.

Either way, I’ve had this crazy ageing thing happening to me, in that I have been getting older.  It’s been happening for many years now, but I’ve only just realised.  So I thought I should grow my hair a little.  To soften my look a little.  To something not quite so severe, befitting of my advanced years.

The gusto in which my hairdresser agreed leads me to suspect this was a thought she had long been having herself.  So I grew and grew and grew my very short hair over the hot Queensland Summer, until I could stand it no more, and I went back to Jules with the command: cut it all off.  You see, I have A LOT of hair, and it was driving me slowly insane.  Jules refused to comply.  She said I was doing so well, and I had grown it so long (not even to my shoulders) that I had to reflect and wait another six weeks before doing anything rash.  You’d think I was Sampson, with how adamant she was about two inches of hair.

In the meantime she coloured and cropped and thinned and slashed at my tresses until she was satisfied that I had a ‘do’ that I could live with until next we met.

Everyone has been sweet and encouraging, calling my new style feminine, pretty, and lovely.  They have said that I look more like my daughter (who is seven and jaundice, so I’m not sure what than means), that I look younger and like a Hawthorn Mum (again, not sure if I’m happy with that, ROSE.)

This is kind of how it looks:

It’s a bit thin, but it might be okay in a few months…

I have been coping (just) with all the extra styling and attention that having hair requires, until this morning.

This morning something horrific beyond mention occurred.

And no, I didn’t burn it all, Michael Jackson style with the straightening rods.

First I must explain: in the beautiful pictures you see of me on this blog, I am only showing you part of the story- I am wearing contact lenses, because, frankly, I am extremely short-sighted, and my glasses are as thick as the bottom of a schooner.  The frames?  Well I purchased them about a year or so ago when my hair was short, and thick black frames were all the go.  They really were, I promise.

This morning I was getting the kids breakfast, when I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and this is what I saw:

…a strange man/lady looking back at me…through my glasses…

Well, not precisely that, but the thing looking back at me was strikingly similar:

I think I’d rather look like Wayne…

And quite frankly, the Garth look is not really what I was aiming for.

It appears it may be time to re-visit the salon, and not for a simple blow-wave.

So there you have it, my greatest secret revealed.  Me, in glasses, on the interwebs.  Don’t ever say I don’t suffer for my art on this blog.

Now please excuse me, I’m off to see if I can get a li’l sumpin’ sumpin’ from my main man, because you know I’m not gonna be getting ANY after he sees this blog….

Ever had a bad hair day?  Who did you look like?  

(One of you should start a thread with all of your comparative pics.)

…From The Ashers xx