Housesitting again these last few days. The house with the cat that looks like a chubby rabbit and hops around and waggles that stump of a tail in delight. Funny thing. You know how people say that when they get the house to themselves they're gunna take great delight in walking around in their knickers? Well housesitting to me involves walking around in all the clothes I have on all at once - think indoor scarf wearing and even the hood up on my fleece (this house is very cold - something about being on the wrong side of them there tracks, like the cheaper real estate on this side of town didn't come with very nice weather options). It also invoves the occasional bout of loungeroom dancing to Sly and the Family Stone, shower singing loudly, napping on the couch in between the early evening and the late evening, and zany cooking involving lots of things that need soaking and fix nitrogen to soils. And right now it might involve a little bit of trash crime fiction reading in the bath with a cup of tea. Aaaah.


Sometimes you have to laugh; people are all silly. All of us. These dances we do that we call living our life. Dancing around and around; to duck, to weave, the tempt, to tease, to impress, to feel good. Sometimes we catch another's hand and we dance together, in synch, coordinated, spinning around, getting dizzy, giddy; and then we let go and off into new orbits we go....
- Thoughts from a correspondant in the north

I'm not catholic, I don't get to go to confession. This is the best I've got - sorry.

5 things I didn't really want to know about myself which I confirmed in the past few days:
- I am more than happy to recycle socks rather than do washing
- When I get drunk I can hear my mother telling me to 'stop showing off' and the next day I wish I'd listened to her
- I say yes to things I don't want to do because I don't like saying no. Then I don't do what I've agreed to do and feel racked with guilt. So next time I say yes again. derr.
- My experiement with non-aluminium deoderant has been an abject failure. My armpits are smelly. What to do?
- I am not someone I would want to date.

The week progresses, marching coldly, erratically towards the weekend. Headcold peaked on sat night and now is the whinging sniffling tail end of sick without any of the dramatic features of earlier. Last night hung *work* in shop window - me precarious on chairs reaching up fastidiuously tying string, bossa nova on the stereo and tall dark handsome (more winsome) cafe boys busily attending to whatever cafe boys attend to when the doors are closed and customers gone. Under the music enjoying the full comfortable silence of busy people concentrating on the task at hand and also breathing out in relief at the end of the working day, relaxing and expanding to fill the space of the night to come. Me enjoying standing in a window for the exhibitionist quality of sharing my bend and stretch with the street, with the boy in the beanie who I steadfastly ignored - ignoring in a way that could never be casual and is as pointed as attention ever was. Such a nice time of night as the light fades and inside glows in comparison. And then, as if by a sudden exhalation of the building which is also clearing itself of the day's debris, we gust out onto the street propelled in different directions towards whatever comes next.

~~~

And.. my dear friends I never meant you when I talked about lost books and life crap! I consider our bookshelves sub-branches of the same library. I meant the other kind of lost - like leant to casual acquaintances in a fit of generosity warranted neither by their character nor by the circumstances of our (little r) relationship, like left on trains, like left in other cities as a function of crap packing skills. But I plan to be getting more roomy accomodation soon (a few weeks type of soon) and any items you want to return will happily be repatriated now or then. And the chaise lounge! Yes, I do plan to take that off your hands one day - love that scarlet cordurouy...and very good for day lounging with a cup of tea. Do you think I can sneak it on as hand luggage if I put it in a Duty Free bag?

***

Oh dear, I'm a terrible person. I skipped choir because i was getting drunk on free champagne (no no not drunk, tipsy) at the launch of an art thing, and mingling (of course mingling) and enjoying being part of a local town for local people, and I was just do warm and happy watching all the cute people get their cute prizes and everyone all mountainy and brown, woolly, not a gloss blonde bob in sight. So now? Maybe I can hum the words on saturday when the choir performs and I don't know the song??

Ok ok ok - I promise that in the next week or 2 I will put links back on this site (not that anyone particularly cares, I'm sure). I miss being able to flick to you all with ease. Help out this bear of very little brain by emailing me your web /blog addresses again?? This is even if I've asked you a million times before. And even if you are a 'please don't put a link to me' person. Because I wont, but at least I can save the details, find and read your lovely words. Somehow web addresses keep slipping through my fingers, like the other black sock, the groovy jacket, my bank statements, the book I could have swore I once had.. are all these items are either lost in a box in a shed, in the letterbox of a house I no longer live at, in some corner of the suitcase I haven't looked in yet or randomly deleted from my email in box thanks to the strange combo of hotmail accessed at a video shoppe. Forgive me for my life is a little fragmented at the minute. But not in a chaotic, no pattern kind of way, more in a crazy interrelated synergistic web. A web with a few little holes in it where the black socks fall through.