Thank god you're still here!

I haven't gotten organised enough to take any photos yet, so here is a file photo, as they say, from a holiday two years ago with Dad.

It's 3.30 am. I had a few glasses of wine last night, which gives me early morning insomnia, reliable as the Religious Right bleating about Family Values. So I've finally found a moment to blog. We've been unpacking for a week now and I think we're basically in. There's a large pile of op shop stuff in one corner of the lounge room, our third such pile. Lovergirl is prosaic while I am a bowerbird - she ruthlessly clears out drawers while I totter along behind, rescuing items on the 'to go' pile and struggling to find places for them in our tiny flat.

Pleasing things about Brisbane so far:
- Early morning walks along the river
- Riding my bike to work
- Living in a house with internal walls means when i get insomnia I can get out of bed and put the light on in the entirely separate loungeroom instead of lying stiffly in bed willing myself back to sleep
- Public transport (the terrible Courier Mail is filled with stories of how bad it is, but that hasn't been my experience yet)
- TONS of work
- Walking to the fortnightly farmers' market yesterday morning
- Living near a little shopping village - walking down to get supplies for dinner each day
- We're getting BROADBAND! It's not connected yet but I can't tell you how excited I am by that.
- It's four o'clock in the morning and there are other people awake - I can hear two men laughing and talking in the flat below.
- There are gay boys & dykes everywhere!

Must go now and see what's happening on all my regular blog-haunts.

Marsupial mouse version of House of Wax (the horror movie, not Tussaud's)

We're in the middle of the move to Brisbane. I'm working while Lovergirl meets the removalists at our very-cute-but-shoebox flat and reacquaints herself with the contents of our multitudinous boxes. I'll tell you more about that some other time - I'm feeling a bit homesick and don't want to encourage a long maudlin 'stranded in the city' kind of post, or reminiscences of wallabies in the vegies, or walks along the beach, or anything.

I do have a different sort of maudlin post. Something has died in my car. I often leave the windows down on hot days and some small animal has climbed in and couldn't figure out how to get out again.

At first there was just a slight 'off' smell, like maybe I'd stepped in dog poo and the pooey shoe was rattling around in the back of my car somewhere. So I cleaned out the car - no evidence of shoe but I presumed I had solved the problem.

Over the next two weeks of hot Northern NSW summer the car gradually increased in stinkiness, a heady ripe green smell that rose up from the floor of the car and blew in through the air vents. As the car warmed up each time I used it, the smell settled in my gut like a warning, an urgent desire to get away from the stink. Most of the time the car sat in the driveway with all four doors open. When I absolutely had to, I drove with all the windows down and my head hanging out, like a dog.

It's been four weeks and the smell has settled down to a dry kind of blood-and-bone odour. I imagine the dessicated body of some small animal - a marsupial mouse maybe? - now reduced to bones and a bit of fur, lying in the catacombs of my radiator. The poor thing's delight at finding the perfect spot to nest, its plans to woo some other marsupial mouse and raise a family there... and then never finding its way out again.

Another suitor leaves downcast.

This is Indy, Zara's brother and our next door neighbour in the hills. He decided to put on his fairy dress and do a concert for us. To the strains of Abba (where did he get THAT from?). It started out quite delicate and graceful but quickly morphed into a kind of haka.

"Yes," I said to the taxi driver, a cheerful jet-black Kenyan man, recently arrived from New Zealand.

He'd been telling me about his family's coffee farm, and how until he arrived in New Zealand, he had never had breakfast without giraffes present. "They're very friendly, and they like lettuce," he told me.
He said he rode zebra often.
"No one can ride zebra," I said.
"No, that is not true. If you catch it young you can ride it. I caught many zebra. It is like an ass." He sounded quite certain, but I'm sure I've read that it's impossible to ride zebra.
He told me that his father was a surgeon, educated at Oxford. That his family left Kenya because of the corruption, "but it is much better now." That he was a businessman, he owned this very taxi we were driving in, had a shop in African art and had bought his own house for $450,000 in the western suburbs of Brisbane.

Then, as we were pulling up outside my hotel, he asked me if I was married.
In the three second gap - the maximum allowable between question and response before any answer, no matter how truthful, is going to come off sounding like a lie, I pondered my responses.

I hate being closeted.
I hate pretending Lovergirl doesn't exist.
It's not my job to educate a new arrival.
But it's someone's.
I don't feel like I'm in any danger if i'm honest.
But we are friends! I'm enjoying my conversation about Africa. I don't want to deal with that slight gap, that moment when the air opens into nothingness, just before the listener says, 'Oh, right, of course.' Or, 'I thought so.' Or, inevitably, and with slightly too much bright enthusiasm, 'Oh, my best friend/third cousin/ mother's girlfriend is gay.'
I want him to like me. I don't want him to disapprove of me.
Am I being patronising? He's obviously from a well-educated middle class family; they might have a thriving sophisticated gay scene in Kenya.
How religious are they in Kenya? Too late to ask now.
He's a taxi driver for fuck's sake! Why am I thinking about this so much?
And I thought, if I was single and heterosexual, in this situation I might say I was married anyway.

So I mumbled, 'Yes, I'm married'.

Then I felt like Peter. You know, how Jesus tells Peter that Peter will betray Jesus three times before the cock crows? And Peter says, no I never will. Then of course he does. That was me. Because I have the luxury of pretending to be something I'm not, when it suits me.

Time for your dosette box, granma

I haven't mentioned the baby plans for a while and given that this is theoretically a baby-making blog I thought I'd better keep my avid (!) readers up to date. We took Christmas off, and what a relief that was, too. There's a whole world of activities to think about when you're not calculating what day you can wee on a stick. Lovergirl starts again this month, in a week or so; she's doing it the 'natural' way (i.e. with a turkey baster) while I'm planning to throw a few thousand dollars out the window try the IVF clinic in a couple of months.

These are my morning pills. They make my body a veritable baby-machine, apparently. You see eleven pills, three potions and two dietary supplements. The black stuff on the spoon and the brown stuff in the glass at the back are disgusting. I could add that after taking these, all morning I do small quiet yukky tasting burps - sometimes fish oil, sometimes seaweed (not too bad), sometimes herbs - but I hate to ruin the ladylike impression you have of me.

According to my understanding of the situation: Two pills and the brown heap at the back are making my eggs soft - they get harder as you get older????!
Two pills are to calm my immune system (as you know, I kill sperm on sight).
The white powder and the white pill both increase my circulation for a more nourishing uterine environment.
Two more pills balance progesterone so it happens in tandem with something else it's meant to be happening with.
I'm not sure what the evil herb syrups are for.
I have about half of these in the evening, as well.

Also I'm meant to be not having any sugar or wheat, drinking two litres of water and exercising every day (to increase blood flow to the uterus).

The naturopath is a bit of a double edged sword - it's good to feel like I'm actually doing something other than just waiting for Dr K to tell me when to inject myself with cancer-causing ovarian stimulants and when to hop up into the stirrups; but if I don't get pregnant, it will be all my fault because, being far from a perfectionist, this excellent regime invariably fails.

To encourage myself I bought myself a little diary. The idea is that I note down all the things I'm s'posed to be doing- pills twice a day, exercise, diet - and when I do everything right in a day I give myself a gold star (I know this is childish but ten thousand cognitive-behaviourists can't be wrong). After a week of gold stars I get some kind of reward. I haven't worked out what the reward is (my usual reward is chocolate - what else is there?), because after a month of keeping the diary I haven't accumulated a single gold star. That's right, I have never managed to do everything right on the one day.

I haven't even bought the gold stars!

I'm a lone beacon in a sea of silliness

"You are Elizabeth Bennet of Pride & Prejudice! You are intelligent, witty, and tremendously attractive. You have a good head on your shoulders, and oftentimes find yourself the lone beacon of reason in a sea of silliness. You take great pleasure in many things. You are proficient in nearly all of them, though you will never own it. Lest you seem too perfect, you have a tendency toward prejudgement that serves you very ill indeed."

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