Sitting at the Welcome Table

I don’t think I could be more negligent. Actually, I did check the blog comments once, but they were all spam.

I’m back. In fact I have been around for a while, riding the waves of the information highway or something like that, but it has not been until tonight where I’ve found myself indulging in a little blogspedition.

I’ve settled into the new place now. It’s not entirely finalised in terms of furniture, but I’m getting there. Moving day came as a great shock to me when I discovered just how hard those fellows are who usually move everything for me. When it’s your own muscles doing the lifting, it’s amazing how you are suddenly overcome with the urge to swear and give up. No matter how enthused I may have been about moving, when you’re holding half a couch and the door is in slightly the wrong place and somehow not the right shape, you can loose an ounce of your enthusiasm. I was moved in basically one weekend. The furniture all went day one, along with many boxes, then Brett helped me the following day with the vast majority of the rest of my belongings. Day one involved a lot of me driving the ute, an experience just a little more tense when I had my mattress on the back acting as a rather unforgiving parachute.

The place itself is great fun, and quite retro. The doors are covered in brown padded vinyl and the names of the residents is in the entrance on one of those boards with the stick on letters like the girls used to hold at the front of school photos. My next door neighbour is 80 odd and can’t remember my name 2 seconds after I say it. She likes to come up behind me as I’m leaving and say “boo!” and look at me with an almost manic glare. At times I feel like I’m living next door to Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby. In fact, I named my new wireless network “TannisRoot”.

I think the mood was set during the first night of my stay when I walked down the hallway and a dark shadow caught my attention. I looked up on the wall and there was one papa-sized huntsmen spider and he was not a happy chappy. Since then I’ve been battling a small army of cockroaches. I have my good days and my bad with these creatures, but they should know by now that as soon as I see a live one, I’m going to go a little bit Rambo on their entrances and exits with the heavy-duty Death To Anything Smaller Than A Handbag bugspray.

I went on a bit of a cooking frenzy the first week or two and cooked almost every night, learning some important lessons very quickly. For example, who knew that overflowing water and an electric stovetop is likely to cause a little bit of steam? In fact, I cooked so much and had so many left overs (even after taking lunch to work each day) that I imposed a cooking ban this week and have eaten purely defrosted meals all week. Hopefully I’ll be breaking the ban later tonight with some late night pancakes and real maple syrup.

The down side to all the cooking is that I have become a middle-aged housewife. I stop in at Woolies on the way home, get home, cook, eat, clean and go to bed. I trade recipes at work (to the point where a colleague has begun a “recipe of the day” email list) and can be heard to say things like “Really? A pinch of brown sugar in pasta sauce to remove the bitterness? I’ll try that tonight!”

Because of my extreme devotion to thriftism, I’ve taken to buying things in bulk in the no name brands. The only problem is I’m limited to what I can carry as I walk to and from the supermarket. This is suddenly important when I buy a 1kg packet of sultanas because it was a dollar more than the 225g you get in those small six-pack of boxes.

I’ve learnt some other important lessons. For example, when moving into a place that someone else has inhabited, replace the toilet seat. The previous seat had a rather unpleasant staining around the rim, so I decided a trip to Bunnings was in order. They had a $7 offering but I’d rather not slice my cheeks open with a bit of stray plastic where the mould hadn’t quite met. Instead I went for a $20 selection with quick release buttons for easy cleaning. I guess in case of a cleaning emergency. The point is, when unscrewed the old one the part that was always hidden by the hinge was a shade of grey that to be honest I wasn’t all that familiar with. I got the heavy disinfectants onto it and soon enough my toilet seat was not only worthy of use, but a conversation piece for my guests.

All in all, I’m still finding my routine in the new place, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the independence of it all, and the convenience of being smack bang in the centre of town is terrific too. My new lifestyle is busy, but certainly not too busy for my heavily ignored child - you all - whom recently I’ve been keeping in the basement and telling my neighbours you left to join a cult. And quite frankly, that story is getting a little thin.