Barking & New Years Eve

Every night at about 10pm a group of people stand in the park across from our apartment for about 2 hours and let their dogs bark at each other. The dogs bark and bark and bark, for TWO HOURS! All I have to say is FFS why don’t you just take them off their leads and let them kill each other! At least then I will be able to sit on my couch in peace and then lay on my bed and sleep in peace!

I love dogs, I am a dog person, I wish I had a dog, but we live in an apartment and that would just not be fair on the poochy. But if I had a dog I would put the d*mn thing through some training so it doesn’t bark for TWO HOURS every night. Another thing! How about not walking the d*mn dog with all your friends and their d*mn dogs at 10PM at night! How bout that?!

Well…now that I have that off my chest, I hope that everyone has an amazing New Years Eve! Just make sure you don’t build it up too much, cause if you do, you will be disappointed, expectations are a fungal rot on a New Years Eve. Instructions are as follows; go with the flow, say yes to everything (except cheating on spouses and drugs), drink and be merry, make sure you kiss someone you love at midnight!

New Neighbours

Now that we have moved we have a whole new set of neighbours, of which we can regularly hear turning on and off light switches inside their apartments. Welcome to apartment living, where if you are lucky you won’t hear your downstairs neighbours fart! Speaking of farts, and the downstairs neighbour. He really likes garlic, and I mean really really really likes garlic. How do I know this? Well every lunch time I smell this really intense garlic smell, like I am myself wrapped in a giant garlic clove. Now I know I am occasionally prone to exaggeration, but I am not exaggerating this time, I promise. The guy must put at least 15-20 cloves into whatever he makes for his meals! Ok maybe 15-20 is a bit of an exaggeration, but the garlic is making my eyes water and we live on different floors, so I am guessing that he is using quite a bit of the stuff. I am also guessing that even though I haven’t heard him fart as yet, that he must be letting a heap of those go, and I am thankful that they are not seeping up through my floor and into my nostrils. This may also explain why the guy is still single. Ok, so I don’t know for sure that he’s single, but I have never seen a woman/man (you have to have an open mind, this is Sydney after all) go into his apartment, and with all the garlic I am pretty convinced that they never would.

I suppose Garlic Guy could also be trying to ward off vampires! You never know, you have to keep an open mind, after all this is Sydney! So really I should be sending him a little thankyou card with the words “Thanks for keeping the vampires away with all the garlic, our families thank you for protecting their loved ones” Aah neighbours, neighbours, neighbours. We did end up seeing our old neighbour in Perth one last time, the one that we thought was dead. She was in fact not dead, but backing her car out of her drive, after she had removed all of the plant growth that had engulfed her wheels of course.

We do have another neighbour; she is not in our building but the one behind ours. She religiously practices her violin everyday and it is so lovely. I can regularly be seen taking out the trash, then holding my nose to block out its smell, and prancing about the back alley listening to her swooning violin playing. She’s really very good.

She’s coming tomorrow!

Tomorrow one of my girlfriends arrives to stay with us for a few days, and I am super excited. Also I have this un-nerving compulsion to scrub my apartment from top to bottom, drive to Ikea and buy little frames to put up all the pictures I was going to attend to later, go and buy some Christmas paper and make decorations, baste a turkey, scrub the apartment from top to bottom again. It’s not that the apartment is dirty at all, I cleaned it on Monday and I do general cleaning every chance I get during the day, it’s just that I have this ingrained need to have everything perfect when people visit us. It’s not that my friend will even mind, she won’t at all, it’s just that I will worry that the house is not perfect and will passive aggressively torture myself if it’s not. Damn these OCD Italian cleaning genes!

Sooo, this afternoon I will drive out to the shopping centre and get some flowers, some stuff from Lindcraft and a paper shop to make my house look even more perfect than it already looks! (Oh dear, I really do worry about myself sometimes!) I am worried about killing myself on the way to the shopping centre though, as I have not yet driven over here and I am worried that all the Sydney scary drivers will ram me like the insane taxi driver did a couple of weeks ago. See I just can’t risk that kind of stress as my head may explode if the car gets ruined in addition to there being one speck of dust on the coffee table.

So despite all the torture that I will inevitably put myself through today, to ensure that the house is perfect, I am still super excited about my friend coming over here! I have really missed my girlfriends!

P.S Mental note: do not paint nails in enclosed spaces like I did this morning. When you paint your nails in an apartment the size of a shoebox it is important to open a window so that your husband doesn’t come home and find you shrivelled up dead on the floor from the nail polish fumes. Nail polish poisoning…another side effect of having everything anally perfect, including your fingernails.

The morning I had a visit from a Cherry Picker.

As I type, there is a cherry picker parking outside our apartment building and orange traffic cones being spread around it to stop traffic. You know why? Well when we moved in there were several cracked windowpanes in our little 1920’s windows and these guys, they are here to fix them. I thought that maybe they would come in the apartment and fix them from the inside as it seemed like the obvious course of events. But noooo, apparently there are three guys and a cherry picker required. They are not yet on their way up, probably packing the panes of glass into the picker part of the cherry contraption.

So this post will be a live post, well not posted live, but written live as opposed to my regular posts reflecting on the day. You’re in for some fun!

Oooh, it’s coming up! Yay! (Can you tell that perhaps I have been a little starved of human contact?) Wow they have blocked half of the pavement too, must be to prevent people form being showered in glass and suing the bajeezes out of them.

Oops, fell behind a bit, was setting up presentation boards. Ok, so there is glass all over kitchen, lots of banging, and new panes going in. All I am thinking right now is that those guys had better bloody come in and clean up my kitchen, I can’t even look at it right now as my head may in fact explode.

Thank god, they just came to clean up, and they have just left, and I have new windowpanes. The thing is when boys clean up, they don’t really clean so it’s crystal clean, so there are tiny glass shards all over my kitchen and all over the window sill in the lounge. See Boys, a dustpan and brush don’t really cut it when you are dealing with teeny tiny shards of glass! Didn’t your mother’s teach you anything! Vacuum cleaner time for me and I have had enough of the live writing business, doesn’t give me time to think of anything witty.

P.S Did I mention the glass boys were cute? But they can’t clean very well, so sorry all you single gals, that makes them a no go zone, then again they would come in handy in the event of a glass breakage. They were not as cute as my husband of course.