Pickled onions are not a food group

Just reflecting on the idiosyncracies of living alone (yuh, it's been a week, clearly I am in a position to commentate on all its ins and outs). Finding myself eating the cutest little one-pot meals, buying eensy weeny little jars to fit in my lillipuddlian fridge, wishing that beer came in smaller sized cans so I could open one and just have a little glass, and seriously considering the nutritional merits of having cheese and pickled onions on crackers as my standard evening meal when I can't be arsed to cook.
The inner nanna is alive and well. I have been giving serious thought to the issue of where to most logically and accessibly store safety pins - a number of random items are to follow (candles, light globes, take away menus, tourist info brochures, string). I have created a 'summer clothes & shoes' box and put it away in the high cupboard I can barely reach. I am flirting with the idea of having a 'good cutlery drawer' and have hung an apron on the back of my kitchen door (can you actually get dirty assembling pickled onions on crackers?). There are so many well designed little cupboards and drawers in this place it is just begging to have things neatly packed away. If only I had a shed I could draw around each of my tools as a talismanic gesture towards them staying in their right spots for ever.
I recognise that this may only last a few weeks, until my first deadline/ dinner party/ painting binge and then chaos will rule, clothes will swim in a sea and the good cutlery will find itself scattered to the four winds. But then I reserve the right to cluck around and do it all again.
In this way I channel and pay homage to both my matrilinial connections with chaos, springing forth life and clutter and food and music and connections and chooks and children and passions and boxes of ripe tomatoes (the flamenco, the caravan, the wearing of boots and long skirts and striding across mountains); and my inner patrilineal side part, where nothing rests on another surface without a gentle doilie to soften the crudeness of its raw backside against another, all of life planned, neatly scheduled onto the calander, polite - better in than out (far in the background is a women in faded sun dress tight lipped and handwringing, mourning dead children lost cruelly to the vageries of the natural world, concerned about neighbours, scared of the unsettling dance of the universe). Ah these my ancestors, these the twin domestic goddesses of chaos and order, dancing together to make the backdrop to our lives.

On being in a new place...

First night in the new place - so much space I decompress. Upstairs floor squeak, the angular chirp of these hoops is like some alien language, long circular dolphin scales. I go out to dinner, glad for the escape, at a friend of a friend of a friend's and the networks loop around and connect us all tangentially. I've bought bread from you who work with the girl who did a mosaic course with the girl I was living with. You work with the partner of the guy who jobshares with the girl who employed me. You two know each other because he rents your shed out and uses it to paint and pays you in bread and yesterday's cakes.

Back here in the 'apartment' my toes chill and I am bare legged on clean sheets I bought to commemerate my first night and safegaurd againts the uncertain contents of as yet unpacked boxes. I washed with a flannel at the basin tonight -a sink full of kettle water - gas guy comes to connect me tomorrow (at earliest) so no shower till then. It was a lark like some reenactment from a book set in 1960's London or Sydney. I unpack bit by bit in complete disbelief that I am actually here, that I have a place of my own, for now and for here, and I can fill it all up with my things, spread out, take up space.

Day two - the inevitable post moving exitement come down?? Also premenstrual, teary, disillusioned with living in an empty quiet space amongst boxes. No chairs yet so I wandered from room to room a bit. Fuse blew and so had no kettle or heater. Phone still not on yet. Things seeming rather shitty. Hands went wrinkly from washing crockery, fingers went purple from cold water. Drank gin to keep warm. Medicinal purposes, purely.

Tonight, a few nights in, warmer, slightly more unpacked, new 'desperate times call for desperate measures' brokenish but still ok chair* from skip bin next door (seriously, I was so excited I almost fell over), this new nest starts to feel like home.


I have a phone number, a new quilt, room for a desk, plans for dinner parties. It is like the physical manifestation of reassembling a life after having disonnected the fragments of habit and history and expectation and circumstance, living in the blissful empty space the fragments used to take up and then slowly piecing them together again. It sounds like something awful, don't worry it hasn't been, just so far I've been putting back the pieces on an abstract level, now it's playing it out on the material plane.


Actually feels something like 'Rear window' or 'Delicatessen' - think amusing squeaky noises, think twee kitchen windows over sinks with little curtains strung across, think looking out and being able to see 8 windows and them see you. Only if it were Rear Window, what character would I be? Pervy on the neighbours out of boredom, drunken girl entertaining sailors, grouchy shrieking permed wife? And if Delicatessen there'd be more amusing, well lit, colour coordinated amorous action taking place to make the floorboards and bed squeak, something there is rather a paucity of so far. That aside it is a very cute little abode. The building even has a name - all pompous and important sounding. Hard to drag myself into work this week. Like the fishing stickers I need one that says 'I'd rather be rearranging my crockery and hanging up pictures'...**

* I actually have chairs of many varieties, they're just not here yet due to poor planning on my behalf
** (Only where would I stick it as I don't drive a car?? Hmm did I just ask that? Be polite with your answers ploise)

Bless this mountain town.

At a dinner party someone asks seriously "but if you're wearing long johns it's not technically freeballing is it?". You look around and everyone (literally everyone) is wearing green or brown or orange fleeces, zipped up to their necks. Over dinner you get two recipes for nut loaf - both of them genuine, involving both nuts and lentils or adzuki beans and without a smidge of self parody. You plan to make them both sometime soon, after a trip to the co-op.

You walk to work along a street built wide and straight as if for a traffic jam that will never come. The street is peppered with bed and breakfasts, 'lodges', a women's health centre, a colonic irrigation clinic, a decorative plate museum. You can flick a prayer wheel on your way to the corner store for milk.

It is so cold you put all sleeveless tops away in a zip up bag destined for high shelves in cupboards because just seeing them makes you shiver. You give out your phone number as four digits - like you are handing out your extension at work - because you assume all the locals know the first four.

And best of all, it's absolutely expected that you are a painter, writer, singer, weaver, sculptur, performance artiste, musician, vegan chef, shiatsu masseuse, permaculture gardener, healer, that you are into community cultural development or recycled timber, that you work part time, you are part way through planning the perfect chook coop, and that you are happy to be a recluse and also love knowing people who know people who know you.

Hello gorgeous guys and gals
Quick update on the mountain life. Getting terribly excited about the move. Isall scheduled for this coming saturday, but then it has been scheduled for theprevious 2 saturdays too! Seems that the floorboards of this place need sandingand oiling and in some places swathing in (appropriate pattern to the period ofthe house and terribly tasteful apparently) carpet. I spent quite a few gainfulhours shuffling boxes from their storage space in ex-flatmates shed / underspare bed - consolidating lets call it - ready for ferrying up the hill. Friend was driving up the mountains from northern beaches and took a car load for me. Amazing what you can squeeze into the back seat of a car! Had coffee withanother woman from my old work in the cruisy innner west in the hours betweenbox shuffling and back seat packing, she reminisced about the days when she'dmove house in a taxi 'pack the milk crates into thwe back seat and off I'd go'.Those days seem long gone for me - if they ever existed! Despite my self enforced past 2 years of adaptation to other people's homes and lives, and thequite satisfying shedding of the outer accoutrements of persona as embodied byobjects, I still have a lot of stuff! I plan to go through it at the new place -I find myself more critical then. Other people suggest doing it first, so youdon't have to lug crap with you. Good point, granted, but I like the idea of holding the questionable objects up to the new space and seeing whether they are new abode-worthy...
So, starting to gather up my boxes of treasure and get very excited about dinner parties and painting and lounge room dancing and trailing books across vast expanses of newly polished floorboards. Have organised a moss green couch with cute little legs from a girl from work and fought back an almost overwhelming urge to purchase new bed sheets on masse.