Monday 26 February 2007

moved in

The first night we slept there (hot Thursday) it was still floor paint fumey and because of Basil and the hopelessly flimsy flyscreens the windows had to be kept closed. I woke up at 4.30am with a splitting headache so I went out to the front terrace for air. While I was standing there I noticed a cat lying on the lawn and at the same time heard a car start further up the street. Just as the car came past the cat stood up and ran underneath it, rolled over a couple of times and lay still in the middle of the street. For a minute I couldn't move then the horrible thought came into my head that Basil had sneaked out somehow and that run over cat was him. I ran inside shrieking and woke up Dorian and found Basil straight away safe in the wardrobe, then ran back to the street to help the cat. But there was no cat, no marks on the road, nothing at all. Then I remembered there had been no noise and the car hadn't even braked. I'm fairly certain none of that actually happened it was all hallucinated. Pretty horrible. Although on the other hand I haven't seen the cat who weed on my diary last week and it had previously been hanging around quite a lot. That was an awful cat but I wouldn't want it to be hit by a car.

The movers came at 7am on Thursday and were finished by 10am. I have almost regained my ability to totter along more than five or six steps at a time without fainting.

It is all good, the floorboards came up very nice and all our stuff fitted, although we appear to have misplaced our green shopping bags and although I bought curtain fabric on Saturday the dusty pink vertical blinds have not yet been deposed, damn their nasty beady little eyes.

I am back at work today, and have actually managed to do some work. I missed three episodes of The Bill while it was all going on so as you may well imagine I'm pretty excited that tomorrow is Tuesday (oh no just remembered I'm going to see that Jane Austen movie tomorrow, feck! it!) The very last thing moved out of the old house was the cat. He stayed with us while we cleaned every motherfecking inch of that place (nothing works to make you really glad to leave somewhere like having to bloody scrub it on your hands and knees on a 38 degree humid day, while a hot hairy cat lies down upon your cleaning rag and goes to sleep, because all his other beloved furniture mysteriously vanished while he was locked in the bathroom with a bowl of flaked tuna.) He is coping reasonably well with the new house - day one spent inside a box inside a wardrobe, day two under the bed, this morning when I left he was lolling around embarrassingly foolishly on the carpet.

Remind me to get some cat litter on the way home.

ps the landlords are being total bastards.

pps The Handsome Family were really good.

ppps

I have forgotten what i was about to say

16 comments:

Val said...

Poor Basil - he probably ran into the wardrobe, frightened by your shrieking.

All the best for semester 1.

cristy said...

All the best with the remainder of the move. I hope that you have scheduled in a good two days of recovery at some point. It is such an exhausting thing to do.

Anonymous said...

"landlords are total bastards" -not the bloody trees? surely not?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

So did you remember to get cat litter on the way home?

Nothing says "home" quite like a big blue bag of Catsan Ultra.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad it wasn't Basil. That is such an eerie story.

Is there some kind of law that says any house you buy will contain vertical blinds? why do people love them so? Blech.

You mentioned wallpaper. Let me warn you about wallpaper paste, which I bought last w/end without touching the stuff for years:

1. Mitre 10 and K mart don't stock it at all. So you will have to go to bloody Bunnings, but don't forget to give the checkout lady a lecture about the effect of old growth forest clearfelling on the water table.

2. The instructions on the pack say to start with the water and sprinkle the glue in slowly; you find it's like bechamel in reverse (Hello Thirdcat!) It goes into lumps if you put more than a whisper in at a time, and they are damned impossible to get out. (I left some overnight and the lumps seem to get better).

3. How do I know this? We are constructing a big, black spider pinata. I wanted a John Howard but was overruled.

Cast Iron Balcony

R.H. said...

Very good.

Scrivener said...

Congrats on all that you've accomplished during your absence from the internets. Sorry to hear about your landlords, but it almost goes without saying that landlords are total bastards. I second the comment above about scheduling in time to just crash and recover in the near-ish future.

Meredith Jones said...

You are overtired I think, hence the hallucination. Stop doing things lovie, just for a minute.

David Nichols said...

This morning as I was crossing the Jacana Reserve I scanned the terrain and for a second I saw a hot air balloon. A hot air balloon? Not a common sight in our parts. I felt like something odd had happened to my perception. So I looked all around and there was no balloon anywhere. So I fell to thinking about the strange tricks the mind plays on one, and how I must have hallucinated the balloon through some kind of suggestion trigger in the brain. Then a large hot air balloon appeared on the horizon.

...or did it?

Anonymous said...

That cat that pissed in the car turned up squeaking at our back door yesterday but wouldn't be patted. It is apparently a bastard ghost cat that will haunt us by getting itself run over by a ghost car/driver at 4.45am every day FOR EVAH!

Kirsty said...

Are there any landlords reading this? Explain your lying bastard, money grubbing ways. We're all interested.

Anyway, Laura, at least that'll be the last of your dealings with the scourge. That's something to celebrate. Cheers.

Mindy said...

Bazlotto! I hope this is a good sign that he is settling down into his new home. I hope you and Dorian are settling in as well. Do remember to stop and just enjoy having your own place for a bit.

Meredith Jones said...

I was a landlord once for 6 months & the tenants, two solicitors, fleeced me good, & basically never paid any rent. There must be a landlord gene, & most of us don't have it.

BwcaBrownie said...

empathy and good wishes from me.
the cat horror story and the closed windows story have not done me any good though.

I hope you have an electric fan to move the paint-y air a bit and damn the carbon footprint.

Anonymous said...

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