Memos to self

Life is too short to clean the underside of frying pans and saucepans.

You can never have too many vases.

You can never have too many scarves.

You can never have too many earings.

Tell my daughter that the back scratcher she bought me for last birthday is just about the best present I’ve ever had.

Read War and Peace again now I have a Kindle and don’t have to balance the book on my knees.

Learn how to tell one cockatoo from another.

Do my Italian lessons daily.

Don’t call computers, IPads and the like, machines; my big grandson really hates that.

Tell my daughter and son that when the time comes, my tombstone has to say that I once sliced 20 Kilos of onions for a charity barbeque.

And speaking of when the time comes, in my second life I will come back six inches taller, have shoulders which can hold a bag strap (mine slope downwards), be very musical and have a cheaper hobby – patchworking is very expensive. On the issue of not being musical in this life, there’s a saying which fits me perfectly: “Swans sing before they die. T’were no bad thing, should certain persons die before they sing.”

Never again sail on a boat skippered by my spouse.

Never again sail on anything smaller than an ocean liner.

(Speaking of expensive hobbies, my spouse has had a succession of boats. As the old definition goes: “Boats; a hole surrounded by water into which you throw money.”)

Never play percussion for a performance of Ravel’s Bolero (unlikely but it’s important to make the point. I’ve been told the percussion refrain is repeated 169 times).

Lose weight. Lose a great deal of weight.

Find out where flies go in winter.

Stop worrying that my grandchildren know more than me, at least concerning technology. When it comes to language and literature, I’m still the queen.

Learn the second verse of Advance Australia Fair.

Remember not to put flowering plants on the balcony table. They get eaten by the cockatoos.

Remember not to put out my hand with seeds in it to the cockatoos. You’d think three very nasty nips would have taught me a lesson.

Find out why my computer calls me Zena, which is my middle name, instead of Susan.

 

 

Quotation for the week, from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Groucho Marx: One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas I’ll never know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Not wild about wildlife

During our first summers in the Northern Beaches, you could see the grass growing. At our first house in Mona Vale the lawn mowing chap had to come close to weekly.

We also had bandicoots – lots of them – until suddenly they seem to have gone on holiday which was quite a relief as their holes in the grass were a danger. At the Mona Vale house we had a pet spider, a St Andrews Cross spider (Argiope keyserlingi) which is quite spectacular looking and makes zigzag patterns on its web while hanging on with four times two pair of legs. My eldest grandson and I adopted him (or possibly her) when we saw his – or her – fascinating web and called him Spidey Horace. Unfortunately, the pest control man, called because of red-backed spiders, didn't have the option of leaving Horace alone while massacring the rest so we think Spidey may have gone to his (or her) eternal rest. But curiously at our new house on Bilgola Plateau, Spidey Horace’s cousin Spidey Harris created his web just outside my bedroom window and only went to his eternal rest after a very windy storm.

Now in autumn, the cicadas have had their day but at their noisiest they reminded me of my North Shore childhood when we collected discarded cicada shells; I vaguely remember one was called a Black Prince.

Other insects, however, still think it’s summer.

This morning I found large ants doing backstroke in my water glass and small ants colonising my grandson's sticky-topped desk. At the Mona Vale house we had carpenter ants in such abundance that one wondered how long it would be before they demolished a wall.

And the only fly in the ointment when living on the Northern Beaches – flies – are still homing in on our kitchen regularly to taste test the cooking.

Growing up on the verdant North Shore, I became used to wildlife although nothing made me like it.

I remember very, very large “tarantulas” as we called them – hairy and harmless garden spiders which nonetheless provoked me to scream – and a fat and repulsive blue-tongued lizard which lived in the shrubbery. The first time I saw it I also screamed – the go-to response for scary wildlife – and ran into the house, refusing to go back to the garden for days.

Unfortunately our current house appears to be a paradise for Daddy Long Legs spiders (surely that’s not their proper name) and when it is raining or even threatening to rain we get the occasional Huntsman which, as I wrote above, growing up on the North Shore we called Tarantulas. No matter how much I tell myself these spiders are harmless, I just wish they’d go away.

Our Bilgola Plateau house is blessed with a huge gum tree outside the porch which attracts sulphur-crested cockatoos, magpies, kookaburras and occasionally rainbow lorikeets. We provide seeds but only the cockatoos seem brave enough to try. And as we can’t tell one bird from another all the cockatoos are now called Fred.

 

 

Guote for the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: 

Hollywood executive, allegedly, on Fred Astaire’s first screen test: “Can’t act, can’t sing, slightly bald. Can dance a little.”

Grandma doesn’t do parks.

If inveigled into it, grandma will only go to a park which is fenced as grandma is too slow to chase after small people disappearing into the distance. Also, the park must be next to a coffee shop or the visit’s off.

Grandma doesn’t do beaches; in fact, grandma doesn’t even possess a swimsuit.

Grandma prefers reading, with or without grandchildren attached.

Grandma loathes watching television movies with the offspring as they talk or ask questions all the way through. Grandma harrumphs off after never more than 20 minutes muttering a string of possible punishments the children deserve.

Grandma, let it be said, is an elderly bore.

As I live with two of my grandchildren and have the other three close by, my grandmother-hood is constant activity. There’s not a weekday when I don’t take to school/kindie or bring home from school/kindie some combination of all five of them. There’s also taking them to gym, picking them up from coding, getting one of them into scout uniform or Nippers outfits and, with my daughter, feeding them. There’s lots of shopping – in person or on-line, and there’s doing the washing, at least three loads per week for the children plus plenty for the adults. There’s cleaning the kitchen, taking the children and their overdue books to the library and VERY occasionally purchasing treats.

The children presently range from four to 12 years old. Of course, they’re quite delicious – talented, intelligent, handsome/beautiful. In this knowledge I resemble all grandmothers everywhere. But they are also naughty, rude, noisy, dirty, aggravating, obstreperous whinge-pots who make grandma’s life a misery – except, of course, when they’re doling out cuddles and kisses.

It is obvious from the above that I'm not fun. I won't rumble and I grumble at the rumblers. I complain that our elder boy, Nicholas, frequently goes to bed un-bathed and in day clothes and the younger, Asher, would stay in his pyjamas all day if permitted. I'm seriously boring about what is and isn't appropriate entertainment for small people and frequently refer to what did or didn't happen in the "olden days".  However, I do love reading with them -- and both are high quality readers -- playing Snakes and Ladders with four-year-old Benjamin, Scrabble with nine-year-old Abby and sewing with seven-year-old Lily. The good phenomenally outweighs the bad but it's comforting to complain every now and again.