Like Mother Like Daughter

Sister Dear’s Husband and I are currently engaged in a battle of wills. He claims that I am turning into my mother and I claim that my weirdness is totally unique to me. If I am turning batty it is on my own merit and has nothing to do with Mumsy, thank you very much. Coincidence, dear readers, is what it all boils down to. Just because Mumsy and I share a hat fetish, a book fetish, and the tendency to burst into tears at any given moment for no apparent reason is no reason to assume that I am morphing into a Mumsy replica. Pish posh I say.

 Yes I will admit (albeit begrudgingly) that Mumsy and I do have similarities. We are splashing about in the same gene pool so some traits were bound to be passed along. I just don’t see how two people who are supposedly so similar can repel each other as forcefully as Mumsy and I tend to do. I can’t spend an afternoon with the woman without day dreaming about stuffing her into a sardine can. No-one can rub me up the wrong way quite like Mumsy and if I was stuck on a desert island with her I would try my luck with sharks, and I’m not even kidding.

 Maybe it’s because we don’t really know each other very well. Between the ages 12 and 18 I didn’t see Mumsy more than 3 or 4 times. I went to live with Dad and his wife and for those teenage years Dad’s wife was my Mum. There are people who are not going to like hearing this but in many ways, my step mother is more a Mum to me than the woman who gave birth to me. I may be living closer to Mumsy now and spending time with her, but as far as the Mother/Daughter relationship goes, we will always be missing some key… something.

It’s not like we can even really talk about it because every time I try to bring it up in conversation she looks at me like I broke her heart. We’re stuck in this hurting guilty vortex that neither one of us can get out of. I refuse to take the blame in the situation. We didn’t have a functional relationship to start with. Those last months with Mumsy before I left were hell. She was so caught up in her own issues, real and imagined, that she couldn’t or wouldn’t see her children falling apart around her. While her older children got into all kinds of activities of questionable legality Little Brother and I were left to fend for ourselves.

 Well this isn’t where I imagined this post going at all. I am going to hit publish before I think better of it and promise to be jolly next time.

Sister 2

Good morning dear readers and can I just say a very happy Monday to you all. I hope your weekend was very enjoyable and if it wasn’t my very deepest sympathies. moving on.

Yesterday was my Father’s birthday. He turned 58, which means that he is still a spring chicken. So I did my daughterly duty and called him up last night to do the HAPPY BIRTHDAY routine and before I hung up he said he had a favour to ask of me. Seeming as it was his birthday I couldnt’ exactly refuse but the nature of the favour is a little unsettling.

Father Bear asked me to be the Power of Attorney on his will, which is an honor seeming as I am second youngest in a brood of five, not to mention his vast collection of step children. I must say though that the thought of him making preparations for his death is not what I was expecting on the day which is supposed to be a celebration of his birth.

As my brain was tripping around all these melancholy thoughts, I got to thinking of my sister. Not Sister Dear who we all know and love, but my other sister who I’ve never seen fit to introduce you to because of a slight that I am not big enough to put behind me. My big sister whose room I shared for years on end and who taught me the finer arts of escaping the strap when our cunning plans backfired and roused Dad’s wrath. I idolised my big sister in that way that only little sisters can, and now, because of various circumstances I can’t even add her on my list of family members on a blog that she will probably never read.

Needless to say I am feeling a little ashamed of myself. So, I am going to swallow my pride and a huge slice of humble pie and introduce to you all another branch of my family tree.

Little Big Sister – My five foot nothing ‘big sister’ (24)
Big Foot – Little Big Sister’s husband who’s close to seven-foot tall (28)
Pippin – Little Big Sister’s eldest boy who is about to start prep (5)
Bub – The newest addition to the family, Little Big Sister’s baby girl (almost 1)

And there you have it.

Clare’s 50 Things to do on a Rainy Day

This initially was going to be Clare’s 150 Things to do on a Rainy day as those who have read this before will know. However the creative genius ran out at 50 so I now present to you…

1. The first thing you should do is to make sure that it is raining. To do this you should find a smaller person than yourself. Tie them to a bit of rope, push them outside for about one minute and then pull them back and observe the amount of wetness on their person. An equally effective way is to watch the weather and the nice man will confirm the current weather for you.

2. Pray for it to stop or go away. If this works you should look at Clare’s 150 things to do on a sunny day which will be released soon. If it persists, read on Macduff.  

3. Build a cubby house in the middle of your lounge room with random articles of bedding that can be found in the bedrooms of the invading species (also known as siblings by the scientific ones among us), or stolen from various linen closets. Once your thieving ways are discovered by those that you stole from, you may want to turn your cubby into a fortress for the benefit of your health.  

4. Play practical jokes on other members of your confinement. A good one is the glad wrap in the doorway trick. Please note that you should pre-arrange a good hiding place and a weapon of defence should your trick go a little haywire.  

5. Play hide and seek. Some good hiding places are in the dirty laundry basket under all the dirty clothes, under the bed (works every time), behind the curtain (this works best when the curtain reaches the floor), in a piano, in a suit of armour ect. These hiding places are also good references for number 4. 

6. Host your very own cooking show and use your own recipe. If you’re short of ideas then you are welcome to use one of my own. One can of baked beans, a packet of two-minute noodles, one tin of pineapple pieces, sweet and sour sauce, strawberry jam and self-raising flour, mixed together with a pointed stick and baked at 300°c in a large ice cream container. 

7. Start digging to China. Move your bed so you have more room and you can cover the hole later, use a jack hammer to break through the floor and continue the digging process with whatever implements can be found. You may wish to play loud music to cover the sound of your under goings.  

8. Play scrabble. I don’t actually recommend this game as it is possibly the most boring game in the history of the world, but it is quite fun to throw the little letter pieces at each other and see what words you can make out of the ones that you can catch.  

9. Plug up the drain and the crack at the bottom of the door way in your bathroom, fill the bath up to overflowing and covering your floor with shampoo, slide around the room. Note: Watch out for protruding objects, e.g edge of shower, because collision with such objects may cause severe bruising.  

10. Steal numerous kitchen appliances, e.g blender, egg beater, toaster, microwave and electric mixer, take them apart then reassemble them into a time-travelling devise. Set the time for 10000 BC and go find yourself a pet dodo.

11. Set up a tent in the middle of your living room and pretend that you are an ancient explorer. Make your experience more realistic by attaching some sharp knives to the end of broom poles and hunting random household pets. Cats, dogs and little brothers will do. If you wish you can even light a camp fire in the bath tub to cook the meat from your kill.

12. Make plans to build an underground railroad to all your friend’s house so that you can traffic contraband items between other members of the rebellion (for information on the rebellion please contact Clare). Some of the items currently being trafficked are fruit loops, mars bars, miniature tins of Heinz spaghetti and pre cooked containers of macaroni cheese.

13. Make your own language so that you can communicate without interference with members of the rebellion. I myself am fluent in cave woman and I am currently studying a Pig Latin, Double Dutch, Jellybean, Goober fusion that I will be tutoring soon on a Thursday evening from 4-6. Everyone welcome.

14. Clean your room. Hehe, just kidding. I only recommend this at the point of extreme boredom. This is actually a sever disease that I have not yet found a cure for but previous cases of extreme boredom have resulted in brainmeltingoozingfromearitis.

15. For the daring among you, pile the mattresses off every bed in your house onto the floor of a large room. Then climbing to the highest point that you can find, launch yourself into space then come down and land on your pile of carefully constructed softness. Just to re-enforce the importance of this, please make sure that you do actually land on the pile because a failure of compliance will result in sever brain damage.

 16. Raid your mother’s wardrobe for those scary articles of clothing that make you cringe every time she pulls it out, and do her a good turn by revamping her collection. Safety pins, glue, sticky tape, and bobby pins are a must but you may come up with other crafty utensils.

17. Knit. Now before you laugh at me from your seat in front of your computer screen and go to click and delete me from your friends list and then move to America where no-one knows that you are an acquaintance of me, you must know that this is actually quite a respectable past time and is also a good form of anger management. The needles also make good stickers for jabbing siblings, parents and the mail man.

18. Give yourself a hair cut. Now, some instructions before you let loose. Make sure your scissors are sharp, your hair is clean, and you have your hairdresser on speed dial should your new doo begin looking more drab than fab.

19. For this one, first ensure that your parents are somewhere in Europe so that you can’t get into any trouble, then…… get a beanbag, empty it into a smallish room, climb in, and then get someone to open the door and be swept away by millions of tiny white balls of Styrofoam.

20. Swing from the chandelier. Now, I understand that some of you less fortunate aren’t lucky enough to have a chandelier in your possession; a sky hook should have roughly the same effect.

21. Play dress ups. There are two options for this one, you can either scrounge around looking for random articles of what once must have been clothing, or you can go and rob your nearest costume hire outlet.

22. Surf the internet and join up with the randomest club you can find. So far, the strangest I have found is in fact a club that celebrates the many uses of nothing less than a rubber washer. If you don’t believe me, ask Mr Dwyer.

23. Work on some of your school assignments. I wasn’t actually going to put this here because it is an insult to all things remotely entertaining. But… I do hear that unless I want to be a homeless bum (Tempting but no) I need a decent job which does require that I actually do some work.

24. Prank call random businesses and order random things that the random businesses are selling. Please note, that under absolutely no circumstances are you to actually give them your real name/address/phone number because when they find out that it was in fact a prank instead of a legitimate sale, they will hunt you down and KILL YOU.

25. Have a garage sale. Don’t be stupid I don’t actually expect you to sell your own precious things, no, raid your sibling’s rooms and sell all of their stuff and donate the funds to a worthy cause (your bank account).

26. Hold a scientific experiment. One example is to see how large a fire you can make before the various fire alarms in your house go off. (Clare holds no responsibility for any loss of property due to fire damage so you can’t sue me HA HA)

27. Blog. Need I say more?

28. Be artistic and paint a feature wall in your room. The best method of doing this is to stand back and fire paint balls at your wall. You may want to cover the rest of the house (including you) in about 5 layers of plastic to avoid having this affect all over your house instead of your one classy feature wall.

29. Create your own self-defense thingy. I myself have become creator and only black belt in the highly prestigious art of Clare-Chee and Clare-Kwon-Doe

30. Contemplate the meaning of life.

31. Write a letter to someone in China. For those of you that don’t already know, the Chinese people don’t speak, or read English, so squiggly lines on your paper should do just as well, if not better.

32. Set up a game of mini golf around your house. Brooms and umbrellas work well as sticks and fine china cups and crystal glasses make exceptional holes. Extra points are rewarded if you make it up a set if stairs.

33. Practice medicine on younger siblings. They usually get a bit fidgety when you get out the scalpel so you may need an accomplice to hold them down.

34. Watch TV. There have been a few cases of brain mush so you may want to consult your doctor prior to this particular activity. To reduce the risk of becoming a mindless idiot. For those of you who already are, my deepest sympathies.

35. Rewire the electricity in your home so that you have lights that clap on, clap off. The best way to go about this is to make yourself a rubber suit so that at least you’ll have a soft landing when the electric current flings you across the room. It will also reduce the risks of being hit by lightning.

36. Spy on your neighbors. Apparently, there is a potential psychopathic murderer in every street. NOTE: bedroom windows into cute next door girl’s rooms are strictly off-limits and anyone who tests this boundary will hence forth be known as a peeping Tom.

37. Create a strategy for world domination. With the latest technology, you can bring out the fascist dictator in everyone. For hints, ask my Mum.

38. Get someone to stand at the power main to your house and keep flicking the switch so that all the lights in the house flash on and off, thus, creating a house sized strobe light and a perfect disco setting.

39. Create your very own instrument of torture. Try connecting a rubber glove to a power drill and Wallah, the perfect tickle machine.

40. Find all of the paintings in your house and test your artistic skills by reworking the old classics. By the way, painting the good old moustache never gets old.

41. Set a booby trap for the mail-man. The most effective so far has been a pit dug under the front door mat. When the unsuspecting mail man comes along to deliver the evil phone bills, he falls into the pit and awaiting him is a pit full of hungry Chihuahuas. Maw ha ha

42. Find out what is so appealing about chewing on shoes. Ask the local dogs and if that fails, find a comfy old shoe for yourself and have a nibble. The best shoes for chewing are your sister’s gorgeous designer label shoes which she paid a years wage for.

43. If you have tiles in your living room, move all of the furniture outside (but not in the rain) and cover the floor in detergent or shampoo. Then covering your feet in sandwich bags, grabbing a mob or broom handle and a round Tupperware container, play a game of slippery tile hockey.

44. Get handfuls of wet toilet paper and try to stick them to the roof. For extra excitement, use your mother’s favorite red nail polish to draw a target on your beautiful white ceiling and score yourself on your success.

45. Hack your way onto your little sister’s MySpace / Facebook and reveal her undying love to the freak in her form class. She will love you forever when she realises the good turn that you have done her.

46. Try counting the rain drops. This may seem like an impossible thing to do… but if you are inventive, you will come up with a way in which this can be achieved. One that I found particularly effective is to record rain falling and then play it back in super slow motion.

47. Try and solve a rubix cube. This may be a feat deemed nigh impossible for us mere human beings, but I found a YouTube clip that shows you how it is done so there are no longer any excuses.

48. Find a cure for cancer. I have figured that this may be a task too huge for only one rainy day, so wait until the weather man tells you that there will be a slightly longer period of wetness because you may need at least 7 days.

49. Build an Ark. This feat may only be undertaken by the bravest amongst us. Why you say? Because only the very bravest (or the very stupidest) would be able to construct an ark and try to appease angry parentals and explain the reason as to why the walls and frames of the house has been turned into a giant boat.

50. Create your own fantasy character. Try and adapt yourself and all of your admirable virtues into a conquering hero. Of course, no-one else has quite as many brilliant points as I do but at least you can have someone to aspire to become.  

Please Note: Any activities listed in this list or any previous or future lists published on this site are not meant for any megalomaniac tendencies that I or anyone I am closely associated with, have or have previously possessed. Any links that the reader may draw with these activities in correlation to similar plans of world domination are strictly coincidental.

Awful Swotters unite!!

Someone fetch me a soap box… I have something I wish to say.

Folk of the Faraway Tree

Growing up I had more than a little dissatisfaction with the world around me. I prefered the company of characters in books to that of my siblings and to this day if I had to choose between saving a tree or a box of musty paperbacks, I hope the tree enjoys being match sticks. I’m just saying.

 

One of my earliest memories as a child was snooping through my local library’s kids section, pulling out all these Enid Blyton books and flicking through them before I could even read. Taking as many books as my junior library card would let me, and secreting myself away in a closet to dream about what stories could be waiting in between those plastic, taped up covers, just waiting for me to learn enough of the alphabet to discover.

 

Years went on, as I grew I learnt to tie my shoe laces, braid my hair and write out my 2 to 12 times tables in under 2 minutes, but much more importantly, I learnt to read, and my favorite stories by a long way were those by Enid Blyton. Books like The Naughtiest Girl in School, Mr Meddle’s Muddles, The Wishing Chair, and Folks of the Faraway Tree raised me even more so than my parents. While Mumsy and Dad taught me not to talk with my mouth full, Blyton stories taught me how to imagine, pretend and have adventures.

 

So you can all imagine my supreme annoyance when I discovered that publishers were looking at ‘modernising’ these sacred tomes and making them more accessable to the next generation of bookworms. It would seem that children today (yes I just said that… deal with it) are unable to understand terms like ‘school tunic’, ‘awful swotter’ and ‘mercy me’. Apparently parents will have problems trying to teach their children that names like Dick and Fanny were quite common during the time when the book was written and in the years before iPods, laser tag and publishers on high horses, this style of writing was the norm.

 

It’s not like I am an 80-year-old biddy who is unwilling to acknowledge that the world is moving forward. I embrace new technologies and new ideas, but I also remember and appreciate old ones. What is next? Are we going to paraphrase history and only show our children bloody pasts through censored, rose-coloured glasses? If that is the case we’d better do something about all the nudity in Renaissance art, heaven forbid our bubble wrapped offspring are exposed to that. Lets black out the fact that Australia was kickstarted by convicts and prostitutes, after all we wouldn’t want to raise that sort of conversation with little Johnny at the dinner table now would we. Can we even use the term ‘Little Johnny’ seeming as it appears in thesaurus’ as a slang term for Penis?

 

At what point are we going to stop trying to re-write our past to make it acceptable in our future? Are we teaching our children that we don’t overcome language barriers but bypass them with clever editing? I loved reading my way through my childhood and desire a future when I can read to my children at night without being labelled a bad parent for saying a ‘naughty word’. Are we forsaking culture for political correctness. Mercy me!!

Wonderland?

 I could feel it burning a hole in my mind. Every time I closed my eyes I could feel it pulsing inside my head. Like a metronome ticking over and over, taunting me with a message that try as I may I cannot comprehend. I rolled over to stare at the ceiling, trying for the millionth time to clear my thoughts and slip unnoticed into sleep. But just as I would get to the edge of the world of dreams, that one thought would creep in and knock me back into reality and darkness.

Frustrated I slipped out of bed and grabbing a shawl I softly made my way out the door and into the night. The moon had already made her way through the heavens and was now gently nestled in between two hills. The stars who share her domain all trying to be brighter than the next so that they too can earn their places in our hearts. With a sigh I leant my head back against the rough bark, wrapping my shawl tightly across my chest so that I could feel the rhythmic beating of my heart against my arms. It was one thing that I could be sure of on this night when everything else churned around me in a whirlwind of uncertainty.

Questions without answers and answers with no questions. All these thoughts, both sought and unbidden all crowd inside my already befuddled mind, all pushing to be noticed among the others. Like a teacher in a class full of over-eager children I brushed my hand across my eyes, trying without success to make sense of the chaos that I find myself confronted with. If it wasn’t for the sake of my fraying nerves I would welcome this gaggle of thoughts because it was keeping at bay the one thought that was the cause of this midnight ordeal.

As I looked up into the satin sheet of darkness scattered with burning diamonds, a shooting star streaked across the sky, and with it that one thought came, racing through my mind. Closing doors on all the other questions and answers and unsolved mysteries that had been jostling until a moment ago for my attention. Now alone and with nothing to vie for my notice it stood, defiant, waiting for me to acknowledge it, and face the new problem that it represented. However hopeless I waited like a petulant child, hoping that if I ignored it, it would go away. That somehow it would sense that I was unwilling or unable to give it justice and it would go to wherever unwanted thought went when their hosts were done with them.

It was not to be so. Like a beacon it shone in my minds eye, demanding that I give it my full attention, and unwillingly I open myself to this thought that has left me no choice but to explore it. Like a prisoner about to face a firing squad, I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and let myself go.

Like Alice down a rabbit hole I fell, passing bits and pieces of my broken dreams and discarded childhood fancies as they hung in the in-between worlds of my imaginings. Like broken toys and outgrown story books left for whatever end, these memories served like a thorn in my heart. I was filled with an urgency to find out what was at the root of this thought that was causing me go back through all of this that I had thought to be left behind for good. Back when I decided that I was going to take up permanent residency in the reality that I was constantly told was where I belonged. Before I grew up. And there it was. Hidden behind my childhood dreams was my answer and the realisation of what I had been looking for came like morning over the horizon.

I opened my eyes. I didn’t remember when I fell asleep but I could feel the dew beneath me as I sat propped up against the tree. I looked up and saw the sun bravely shining through a soft layer of cloud. I put my hand above my eyes and looked out as far as I could. A smile lights up my face as I see the world spread out around me coming awake, lifting heads to greet the arrival of a new day. I get to my feet and bend down to pick up my shawl from where it lay. I wrap it around my neck, leaving it trailing down my back and run. It streams out behind me in the wind that I make with my passing and laughter bubbles out of my throat as I fly down the hill. Free.