Picture this

It's one am and the house, all except the writer, is slumbering. The writer has been trying to write, but realises she has left it too late and the eyes are refusing to stay focused on the screen. Time to retire. She turns the lights off and, in darkness, feels her way up the stairs, then hits the switch to the landing light upstairs. Creeping around so as not to wake anyone, she makes her ablutions, and is about to turn off the final light when all hell breaks loose downstairs.

In the bathroom, the dogs, who presumably have been sleeping, break out into a vicious, snarly fight. This isn't a little tiff between friends, but a full-on fight that keeps going and going and going. If the whole house hasn't been woken up by the fight, they are by the writer yelling (and thinking once again how the neighbours must love this harridan who's always shouting). The writer's yelling doesn't stop the fight, so the writer has to blunder downstairs in the dark and switch the laundry lights on. The second the lights go on, all is quiet, which is frustrating because now the writer can't even tell what's been going on. The big dog, sheepishly, goes back to bed, whereas the little dog sees this as an excuse to escape.

So what did happen? Did one wake in the middle of a nightmare and frighten the other dog? Did the little dog pee on the bed yet again? I guess I'll never know, but as a writer I'll have brain space to invent stories -- just not at one am.

If I think I'm bad...

Mmm, I've just been reading over yesterday's "Chaos chaos chaos" post, and that set my husband off to reminiscing:

about the time he snuck home after dropping my son at scouts and slipped up to bed without saying anything. The scouts were doing a first-aid course, so I just assumed he'd stayed on to be a dummy. So when said scout didn't come home after 9 pm, I just figured they were taking longer than expected. After all, I had no reason to be perturbed because my husband was there, right? Wrong. He'd gone upstairs for a quick nap and gone to sleep. I'd been on the internet so no-one was able to phone through. My mother was less than impressed when she bought the said scout home at 11 pm, imagining we'd all been murdered. Said husband was very sheepish.

about the time he took said scout on a scouting trip to St Kilda at night, and said scout rang me to say that his father had lost him half an hour earlier, and he was now at their destination but husband (and daughter) were nowhere to be seen. I had to ring all the local policestations to leave a message for husband who hadn't remembered to take the mobile phone with him.

Then there is the mobile phone incident -- he got a new one, lost it within two days, and when three months later he found it, the same day he dropped it in the swimming pool. It's never worked since. I'm not sure we ever made one call on it, but we're still paying it off.

Oh, husbands, they are a magical breed.

Out with the dogs

Today, I had one of those funny walks. A German Shepherd was trying to hump our pup, who is still quite small. (For reference, I've put in a photo of the two of them taken a few days ago, and a couple more of her. Anyway, Luna didn't seem to perturbed, though she clearly didn't like it. I kept walking, and calling her, hoping she would come, because the shepherd was going off in the other direction, but all she kept doing was sitting down.

Then another passerby approached and said, "I think you should get your dog." I made a noncommital noise, because Luna still wasn't panicked, and I could see the shepherd wasn't actually trying to hurt her. But she hadn't finished with me. "That man's getting quite upset."

I nodded, and called Luna again. Still, she didn't come.

The passerby said, "You really should keep your shepherd under better control."

Huh? "Oh, no," I said, "the puppy's mine."

She seemed quite surprised, and just said "oh". Then, clearly, she thought about it a bit more and said, "So why's that man getting so upset?"

"The shepherd's his," I said.

"Oh," she said again.

So, off to the rescue I went, scooped up the pup, at which point the shepherd tried to hump me. Nice.

Oh, the joys of walking!

Today's sunset

was a beauty. Here's a photo slightly after the event. I was busy trying to capture it for my swampblog -- and didn't I enjoy standing around watching its gradual progression. In the background I could hear my dogs barking at passersby, but we'd not long come back from a walk, and the big golden one was being very naughty and refusing to be caught.

Chaos chaos chaos

So, today I find Sir Talkalot's school gets out a week earlier than all the other schools for the mid-semester break. Only trouble is I'm working extra days. Oh, well.

I'm having that feeling at the moment that I'm just a taxi service. I know it comes with the territory, but even so I wonder how I'm supposed to be in two places at once. On Wednesday, one child rang me from school where he was rehearsing a play (after school) and said, "You need to pick me up at six." Trouble is that I'm dropping other kid off at six, twenty minutes away. The Gadget Man was doing overtime, and my mother's in China. She always has some excuse like this when I need her to do me a favour! China! The lengths she'll go to.

Luckily, my life has been chaos for many years now, and I dread to think how often I had small children waiting for their mum on the side of the road, because Mum had been caught up at work. I tried to get away on time -- I really did -- but I failed more often than I succeeded. Now, I realise they were just in training. Still, when it's after dark, I hate the thought of them standing around, alone, in the cold, waiting -- even if it is in the school grounds.

I don't know where the days are going -- too much time slippage. Today, I spent over an hour trying to print out a calendar to replace my missing diary -- my missing diary with all my work hours penned into it. Arggghhhh! An hour does seem somewhat excessive, I know, but first it crashed the computer, then once I rebooted, it jammed the printer (probably required too much RAM), and then, once I decided to delete the job, it spent ages trying to do this, and required another reboot. Then, just when I got started, I got up to answer the phone and got my foot caught in the wires and accidentally ripped them out of the back of the machine. Another reboot followed. Eventually, I got to print my diary one month at a time (and then every second month came out without any day numbers!). This type of stuff is just typical of what happens to me. Why? Entropy -- ah, yes, I do remember the laws...

Views of Melbourne

Ah, I'm still contemplating the camera I would like to own (Olympus 510) -- the digital SLR I just cannot do more than think about at the moment, and feeling rather snap happy. The idea of a photoblog is more and more appealing, and make me recall with great fondness my early photography days when I first got my OM1, and how I would catch the train into the city, purely with the purpose of doing a photo shoot. These days I wonder how big a hard disk I'm going to need to satisfy my appetite for photography. Here's a short photojournal of Melbourne that I've taken over the last few days.

Well-made plans

Sometimes I think the world conspires against writers. For a start, the Melbourne Writers' Festival is on and I haven't got there yet. I love going to sessions and hearing writers speak. Usually, the festival clashes with Sir Talkalot's birthday, which is problematic, but now it's marginally later, which means it overlaps Fathers' Day. In neither case can I attend sessions because I have family duties, and while I would like at times to put my writing first, the reality is that I am part of a family, and I have to do my bit. The Gadget Man is very supportive of my writing: he let me go off to Clarion for six weeks a few years ago, he doesn't mind if I go on the odd writers' weekend away, nor if I go to sessions and leave him home with the kids. He was a dab hand at nappy changing when they were young. In fact, if I said I wanted to go on Fathers' Day, he would say go. He always lets me do what I want, but this leaves me feeling selfish, because he doesn't have activities outside the household. Feeling selfish is my problem, I know, not his. What I don't love about the MWF is the parking around the Malthouse -- am I ever looking forward to the festival shifting to Federation Square next year, so I can catch the train in. This year, the sessions I wanted to attend most were either at times I couldn't make, or not near any other sessions I wanted to see, which did dampen my enthusiasm a bit. Plus the finances were sooooooo stretched, I kept thinking that I really, really, really couldn't afford to go.

So, anyway, I had my week all planned out: one vet visit for vaccinations on Friday, but other than that Thursday and Friday were writing days (though part of this was going to be working on the online unit for work), so what happens: one kid's home sick on Thursday and being rather demanding, and the other's home on a curriculum day Friday. Of course I knew about the curriculum day, but Gadget Man was supposed to have the day off and do something with her, and then he couldn't. She was tired because she'd be on in at Nunawading filming for a TV show (it's embargoed so I can't talk about it yet) with the Victorian State Singers.

Anyway, got to dash out for a writer's party, leaving poor Gadget Man home with the kids, yet again.