The cold, the neti pot and the wardrobe.

Sick again. After the joys of gastro and an enlarged spleen, everyone should try a nasty cold. Radioactive sinus secretions and a hacking cough? BAGS of fun. 

At the same time my wardrobe has decided to fall apart. Literally. Being a girl, I have too many clothes. I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but I inhabit half the walk-in (it’s a really TINY walk-in, ok?) plus a freestanding wardrobe in our bedroom, plus another freestanding wardrobe in the spare room (where it fights for space with lego boxes and MTG cards).

There may or may not be yet another wardrobe holding costumes and fabric for my optimistically titled ‘spare time’ when I interact with my sewing machine. Part of my brain would quite like to try out the idea of a capsule wardrobe. Probably the same part which thinks I should start every morning with a litre of warm water spiked with lemon before eating half a cup of porridge and practising neti.

(For the uninitiated, neti is the practice of rinsing your sinuses with warm salty water. You get a neti pot, laugh at it’s penis-shaped spout for a bit, fill it up with warm water and salt as per directions, then stick spout into one nostril and try to remember to block the back of your throat so the water flows THROUGH your sinuses and out the other nostril (instead of down your throat, which will probably induce vomiting). Great thing to do, not something you want to do with an audience. )

Anyway, wardrobe. Yes. Unfortunately, the boy has acquired a nasty habit (from me, who am I kidding) of draping clothes to be dealt with later above all the rest. This is giving his side of the wardrobe the appearance of a large clothes heap while causing me to fear for my life when the whole shebang landslides onto my head. 

Really, he mastered the art of the capsule wardrobe years ago, whereas my attitude to clothing is much more like a ridiculously comprehensive multivitamin; I probably DON’T need it, but what if I suddenly die (sartorially) of an acute shortage of grey marle? Or boyfriend track pants (even though my rule is in-house or ballet and THAT IS IT)? No. There’s only one solution. More wardrobe space. 

Manic Monday

Today was meant to look like this:
9-12 teach.
drive madly in car to... (God. Seriously. Drive madly IN CAR? What ELSE would I DRIVE in? Gah.)
1-3 meet to discuss next year's Autumn festival
drive madly home to...
4-6.30 teach.
eat something (possibly after cooking madly)
7.30 - falling over: attend class to make up for missing weekend class due to Book Club and bloggeratti meetup.

Instead, my 11.00 student failed to turn up. They also failed to (a) call my home (b) call/text my mobile (c) email me. This would not ordinarily bother me, EXCEPT that they were attending an 11.00 lesson because they requested a time change. So I shoehorned my existing 11.00 student into 9.30, confirmed swap, well done, everyone happy, yes yes.... No show. FAIL.

So I run late with my 10.30 and head upstairs at 11.30, satisfied that I can grab a snack and head out to this meeting. I'll just grab directions from whereis. And while I do that, why don't I just check my email? Where there happens to be a message advising that the 1pm meeting has been moved... forward... to 12.00 midday. Bastards.

Ok. That's ok. I can at least call the teacher who I'm deputising and apologise (living an hour away from meeting location makes attendance pretty moot). Dial number (helpfully provided on email signature).

"Hello?"
Crap. This guy has a brick in each hand and thinks I'm a plumbing contractor (or SOMETHING, you get the picture).
"Sorry. Wrong number."
I rechecked, of course, but either I have a permanent glitch in my brain whereby I read all '8's as '6' which is only just manifesting NOW after twenty-seven years, or the contact number on the email signature is wrong.

Leave apologetic message at home number. Drum fingers maniacally. No mobile number on teacher listing either.

Ok. Call the office! That's where the meeting IS. Heck, I could probably attend via skype. Or teleconference! Excellent.

"Due to meetings at the office today, no-one is available to take your call..."
This is NOT my day.
Leave apologetic message no.2.

Randomly google teacher and scroll through several irrelevant mentions before hitting a community advertisement. With mobile number. Oh baby.
Apologise and explain trying to get onto... but... yeah. Fail on my part.
(Win: shhhh. Don't have to drive to meeting.)

Confession time.

I have a little secret: a compulsive addiction to fashion blogs. You know the Sartorialist?
I see a new post, I HAVE to click through. Ok, so I think the America Apparel ads are the weirdest clothes I've ever set eyes on (and I read a LOT of Vogue and Bazaar in my teenage years, and wore some incredibly peculiar stuff myself), but the photos that make their way onto this page are just... love. Or WTF bevelled with a little confusion and trying to understand exactly what was so attractive about THAT person at THAT moment in time.

Another sneaky addiction is more like having an ever-updated glossy on my dining table. I look, I explore related galleries, I get all wistful about the days when sewing a couple thousand copper paillettes was no biggie... but then I saw this and I now have to seriously reevaluate my commitment.

Apparently the couple are a couple, although their bony bodies conjure up little more than the idea of painfully colliding exoskeletons, and I can't say a guy who looks like David Bowie during his "Am I male? Am I female? Hell, let's aim at shemale and bleach everything to fairy floss while you're there!" is really working for me.

I haven't read any of the insanely popular Twilight series, but I'm aware there is a certain tension between Bella and Edward - something about vampirism, infection, blah blah, so on. Looking at this couple I can imagine the same kind of thing, except more of the "Oh, I want to make love to you, but the osteoporosis  might kill us both!" or "Sorry, baby, heroin's the only thing I can get it up for. Or get up for."

Actually, someone get me some heroin. Not for me. Let's just put the poor half-starved waifs out of their misery.

Oops.

Lessons I have learned today: you can have an old lady haircut and call it classic; an old lady dress - hello? It's vintage. You can even, with irony and grace, wear old lady shoes. But put all these things together and you simply look like a tragic twenty year-old who got lost in her nanna's wardrobe and didn't get lucky with Narnia.

I hate doctors.

I fell off the blogwagon.

Something about the concert post and how horribly it all went (the invasion more so than the actual concert) and my violent physical reaction to writing that post. Then it was school holidays, time to get my craft on and agonise over the quagmire that was our backyard (let me just stop here to thank my father for all his handyman wonderfulness).

Then I ran away to the ashram (Note: ran TO the ashram, because there is no running away from ANYTHING at the ashram) and that will take me another month to process. Or at least another bout of cathartic sickness, which seems to be what I'm currently enduring. Somewhere in there a baby was born (obviously not to me), a friend had a birthday, my husband cooked many dinners and term three began. Good grief.

Posting will return to normal. Just not today. Today I have to crawl away and mutter my ranting about incompetent doctors into my millionth cup of tea while I contemplate the horror of teaching tomorrow and getting enough brain cells together to participate meaningfully in a trivia night on Saturday. Yaarfgh.

I will be back. Read that as you will.

They said there would be ice.

Local paper: "Ice rink comes to Frankston!"

Cool! I love ice-skating. And they're going to set up the rink in front of the AMC cinemas (I pause here briefly to consider the logistics of this entrerprise, but visions of ICE! sweep them out of the way. Of course, this being Frankston, it's more likely they would set up an ice cafe where discerning consumers might purchase the recreational corrosive and soul-destroying substance of choice, but sometimes I like my rose-tinted glasses.

A few weeks later, the boy and I are haphazardly wandering through a sunny Frankston afternoon in search of Star Wars lego and blue bias binding, when we see an enclosed space with the heads of several children jerking about in some disturbing marionette-ice-addicted fashion. Closer inspection reveals several grimacing parents wearing rictused grins while manipulating children across "ice".

Funny. It's not very cold. Or slippery, or shiny, or any of the other traits usually associated with ice of the  gliding-across-variety.
And this is, in fact, because said surface is not ice.
It's plastic.

Sheets of opaque white plastic, laid under a small pavilioned roof and fenced off for bystander safety.
I scuff my foot experimentally on an exposed patch. "Be good for dancing on." (Well, better than the sheets of ply optimistically called a "Dance Floor!!!" laid unevenly and without the aid of levels for the recent "Latin Fiesta!!!"

The boy: "This is STUPID. It's not even slippery. And they're not even BLADES."
He's right. The "ice skates" have more plastic (what else?) wedged where metal should be. Plastic on plastic is creating an... interesting friction coefficient. If it was any stickier the attending parents could simply wedge their child in place and collect them after dinner and a movie.

I toy a little with the idea of purchasing several litres of vegetable oil and making the "Ice Rink!" a slipperier, happier place, but this is Frankston. Someone would be handing out bikinis and setting up a wrestling ring before you could say "Hey, where can I get some ice?"

Things that go "That's ASSAULT!" in the night.

So Saturday night was a concert night. My studio. That’s kids 3-16 and their families, primarily parents. Classical music in a local church, bring a plate for a little social time afterwards.

It was mostly good. Mostly.

Maybe because it’s a long term, or because this was our second concert of the term or it’s cold or there were only a couple of ensemble pieces or, or, or… 

I could keep making excuses, but truthfully I was reasonably devastated by the lack of turnout and the lack of flawless performances. Anyway.

We progress, me looking anxiously (and surreptitiously) at my watch every few seconds to see if we’re on track to stay within an hour running time. Child gets up, plays, stumbles, carries on valiantly, bows, receives applause, I make (positive) comment, etc, so forth. Fine. About to launch into most advanced solo piece of night (actually, can’t remember WHAT I was saying), but I suddenly become aware of a smell.

It’s the smell you whiff when you walk past a sheltered Melbourne laneway, and know that the people sleeping under cardboard beg to drink. They don’t get showers or prescription medicine, and their relatives don’t know when they’ll next turn up. The local cops know them by name, and their trolleys clatter along suburban streets as they bunk up for the night under the eaves of a church or hospital.

There’s a man three feet away from me, gesticulating wildly and shouting that he’s been assaulted. 

He wants us to call the police, he’s not leaving until we do.

A hundred people are looking at him, wondering if this moment is really happening.

I know I went toward him, told him there was a phone in the foyer and that we’d make the call out there. More shouting. “

Sir,- ” 

“Don’t TOUCH me!” and fathers, rising from the seats to cajole, repress, no-one quite sure what law prevails when dealing with madmen inside a church.

Nothing is easy with an audience, so I chose to shoo them out while my indomitable pianist decided to play a little light music. The men did manly things, like calling the police and making sure our intruder did leave the building. We returned and absolved our concert with a Veracini Gigue and a spook-busting Twinkle.

In the days following and subsequent lessons with students, I’ve found myself trying to force the situation into a humorous anecdote. We don’t actually know the truth of it.

He may have been assaulted. He may have been mentally unbalanced, or drunk. Perhaps all three. 

He could have been armed, or more violent, and the shadow of what might have occurred freaks me out more than I’d like to admit.

We’ll have to lock the front doors from now on.