Proof that I’m not lazy, I’m busy

A great thing about writing a book – which is what I hope will result out of the mountains of paper and post-it notes that I’m surrounding myself with – is that it’s transportable. With the right amount of chains, hooks and rope I knew I could tow my paper Everest behind the car without blocking up too much traffic.

So my best buds and I decided that we’d test Freddy’s suspension (yes I’m crazy, I name my cars.) and drove up to Diamond Beach.

It was a blissful weekend filled with all kinds of girly fun. We even put on facemasks. Facemasks! Next week I’m changing my name to Lady Frillybottom.

The down side of writing a book is that it looks deceptively easy, but it’s not and while I got a bit of research done while I was away, I had no internet connection and came back rested but with a panicked niggle bouncing around my stomach.

I’m not going to bore you with stories about how I spent the following week running around the house and pulling my hair out, but I’m back on top of things (or in denial about it) and mastering the comb-over well.

Thanks for asking.

My identical twin who is me

At the end of June, I got a call from a friend who I hadn’t spoken to in a really long time. He called for two reasons:

1. To find out when I was leaving for Germany
2. To ask when I had become the face of Fast Impressions (the singles site)

Um What?

Fast Impressions. You know, the singles site. The one that sometimes organises speed dates and things. When did you get involved with it?

The answer to that, ladies and gentlemen, is never. I have never gone to a Fast Impressions event.

I’m not a Fast Impressions hater. I don’t burn condoms at the front of Sydney’s glitzy clubs or re-set the clocks at speed dating events or anything. I’m just too busy looking unattractive at Mark’s parents’ house to lead a secret single life.


But what about the photo?

What photo?

The one of you in the promotional flyer.

There’s a flyer?

Oh yeah.

Well unless the person in this flyer is styling her hair to look like a racoon, chomping on some furniture while dressed in Mark’s grey trackie-dacks, it’s not me.

That settled it. We agreed that I must have a doppelganger who is much better with flattery, hygiene and small talk. Or maybe a twin.

So my friend emailed the flyer to me. Just in case I wanted to reconnect.

You can’t imagine my relief that I don’t have a smooth-talking sexy single twin prowling the streets of Sydney in search of Mark.

On the flipside, this means that my face is plastered on a “Friday Fix Up” flyer.

I’m taking it as Sydney’s way of saying “you may not have come to the party I held, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be in denial about it.” And I’m okay with that.

Bronchitis: a true story

She breathed a dejected sigh, the sound of a beached walrus. It was morning and her hair was forming an assault on human decency. She shivered, delicately, lightly, like a butterfly caught under a snowflake, then coughed up a lung.

It was Wednesday. Not that it mattered; she already knew what she was going to do. She had it all planned out: first a quick bout of the sweats just to get the sheets and pillows adequately wet, then some more shivering. Shivering was vogue and she knew how to shiver.

She sighed again, she knew very well that she couldn’t sweat and shiver for the rest of her life. Sweating and shivering didn’t put food on the table. She shivered again. She couldn’t help it; she was just so damned good at it.

With one more phlegm-inducing cough she turned her attention to her next task: walking down stairs to sweat and shiver on the couch. The staircase gleamed with frostiness. It promised a pathway to better things. She swung her thighs over the edge of the bed putting dents in the floor where her feet landed. It was quite a task to get them moving; her glorious tree trunks.

They could suffocate a man, she smiled proudly.

The apartment shivered as she heaved her mass from one step to the next. She shivered along with it. How could she resist? More tremors, then the roof caved in.

Bad construction, she thought as she retrieved her foot from the garage below.

In that instant – mere metres from the couch – something else caught her eye. Something large and white. There was no contest, she lumbered her way towards the fridge drooling and smashing anything that lay in her path. Everything else lost significance. Any trace of humanity vanished from her face as she stalked her prey and then, in one awkward move, planted her jaws around the top of the fridge and swallowed it whole.

With the sweet, sweet taste of metal and fridge contents still in her mouth, she shivered with delight and rolled to the couch. Then sadness rolled over her like a steamroller would not be able to as she pondered what she would eat for lunch.

Based on a true story about how Mark gave me bronchitis and then left me at home alone and unable to function.

The fanciest part of my day

When you’re working from home – like I’ve been working from home – style goes down the shitter pretty much immediately. Sorry about the language, but it’s true.

I went from girl with socially-acceptable standards to sloth-like creature in Mark’s track pants faster than you can say “can you train your pet flies to stay in your room when you come down for dinner?”

My transformation happened on my first day as a commissioned book author. Not that I’m blaming my publisher – I’m pretty sure she’d be as horrified as the rest of the world if she saw what I looked like on a daily basis. I’m just saying that when you imagine Jane Austen penning her delightful works, you should be aware that she was probably wearing giant pantaloons and using quills to keep the hair out of her face.

I can’t back that up. It’s probably not true.

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Hockey causes “black hole”

The nation has learned that the only thing bigger than Joe Hockeys BS is the giant hole in his budget, after Treasury uncovered a deficit of between $7 and $11 billion.

Independent MP Tony Windsor, who is deciding on which party he’d prefer to make a minority government with, said the move has made him question whether he can support the coalition.

"We probably understand now why (Opposition Leader Tony Abbott) wasn't interested in releasing the numbers," he told ABC Television on Wednesday adding that one of the key factors was trust.

However shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, expressed surprise at the reaction, saying that nobody told him the numbers had to add up.

“How else are we going to end Labor’s waste?” he asked.

Abbott has come to Hockeys defence, saying that the figures didn’t match up because the Liberal party used a different model to Treasury. Where Treasury relied on actual figures and costings, Abbott got his figures by undercutting the costs announced by the Labor party.

A statement from Abbott’s office further added that the coalition will make good on its promise to deliver an $11 billion boost to the budget bottom line over four years.

“We’ll just have a garage sale or privatise something,” Hockey suggested.

The statement said that even in the worst case scenario, the coalition was still $7 billion better than Labor’s bottom line, and if they wanted to they could turn that $7 billion into $17billion with the clever use of a pen.

In preparation for the big move

It is exactly seven and a half weeks until Mark and I take off for the great unknown. Or, as most of Australia prefers to call it: Germany.

Our plans have shifted a little, in that we’ll be moving straight to Munich and we have organised for a housemate. More precisely, the universe proved that it is one cool cat and convinced my best friend Simon to move to Germany.

Amazing, right? Thanks Universe! Now find us a place to live and get me a job.

But it turns out that when it comes to things like that, the Universe would rather just sit back, crack open a beer, watch and laugh. I can’t blame it.

At the moment this is where we stand:

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