Just when you think things have calmed down…so
often they haven’t.
So after Much
Ado About Nothing Everything, getting her there, She-Who-Worships-Pink
is performing in her big-deal-first-dance-recital-dress-rehearsal and I have
been evicted for an hour and fifteen minutes! I suddenly find myself with an
unexpected piece of day to do with what I will and it feels like I’ve won the
lottery.
So I decide to go home and write (this) among other
things. I make a cup of tea, I sit at my desk, my terminally ill laptop still hasn’t croaked
yet and I’m feeling grateful for my unexpected reprieve.
I sip my tea for a change instead of sculling it.
The bathroom-tile-re-glazer-guy is here setting up a lovely big stinking vat of chemicals. Despite his boss forgetting I left a key out and
where, and the ensuing frantic phone calls to that effect, he’d talked our dog walker
into giving him access anyway.
In minutes the whole house smells like a factory making nail varnish remover crossed and synthetic cow pooh. I pop a Telfast or two, but I think I might already be getting a bit high.
How do these guys do it? One of our younger bathroom tradies, confessed to thoroughly enjoying chemical stinks –a glue sniffer if ever I saw one: no one is that excited about porcelain basins.
Coating the floor doesn’t take long and I’m finally
left on my own to work albeit in a cloud of chemical stench. I whip off my
reading glasses and move around the house executing strategic door closes and
window opens.
Then there’s this sort of funny click sound downstairs
and everything goes dark. The smoke detectors all start up, not their
frantic emergency shriek, thank God, but loud and annoying regular BEEP.BEEP, BEEPs
multiplied by three. (Two downstairs, one up)
Probably a bad weather, lightening, power-surge
thing and since our smoke detectors are hard wired, they want to be helpful and
let me know they’re not able to do their job. They insist I do something about
it; BEEP BEEP BEEP. I go to take a look at the meter box but when I pick up my
glasses, one of the lenses has fallen out and is nowhere to be found.
Closing one eye just doesn’t cut the mustard and since it’s
almost time to fight my way back into the mini CBD of North Sydney, I just
leave. Throwing some blurry switches on our electrical box on my way out, I slam
the door on the problem, thinking ‘what is it with this house and malfunctioning alarms?’
In North Sydney, the fire trucks and evacuees are gone now, but the
rain hasn’t and I balance my umbrella on my head as I feed my last sixty cents
into a meter, half a block away. I promise myself, one day to find the way into this
ONE WAY street that the performance venue lives on because I can see a whole world of parking
200 meters down that street right outside.
Meter fed; I now have eight whole minutes to sprint
through the tempest with Pinkster’s school uniform on a hanger and her shoes
and tights in a bag. Then fly in through the loading dock, which now has an
enormous truck backing into it, keep on through to the stage door and collect
my little dancer from Clip-Board girl.
I need to strip her, (Pinkster, not Clip Board Girl)
and change her into her uniform and raincoat and sprint back to the car,
hopefully dry and hopefully before the parking Nazis arrive.
Can I see a show of hands; who thinks this is a Mission Impossible?
To be continued...
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