Drivel.

by missmaudy

Yes, I’ve been reading – I’m reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marissa Pessl. I’m about a quarter of the way through it. It’s a bit of a struggle to be honest. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that it reminds me a lot of A Secret History by Donna Tartt which I didn’t particularly like (I loathed all the characters) it was, however, well written which is why I finished it. This is also well written – which is why I’m persevering. But it’s an effort and it’s hot and it’s oh, go to bed in our stifling hot room and read my book or stay in the lounge room where the air-conditioning is and play Candy Crush til stupid o’clock.  (I did in fact read the book in the lounge room yesterday, I’m not totes slow and that!)

But yeah – it has this vaguely outsider-y, ridiculously clever character brought into a group of “cool kids” by a teacher who is a bit out there. She’s a girl in this one, and it’s set in a high school. Someone dies (you find out who fairly close to the start). Not much more I can tell you. I’m off work for a week, so I’ll try and finish it and make more sense of it and try and build a bridge about it!

Week off work – this is the annual OMG school goes back Lordy you kids have grown week off that I have each year which is normally spent bolting from one side of town to the other updating school shoes, uniform shirts, booklists, paying the fifty gazillion dollars I have to fork out at the start of the year for the public education of the Chaos and the Mayhem. This year though – new sneakers acquired a couple of weeks ago, uniform shirts ordered before the end of the year for Chaos and for the first time in his entire bloody school life, Mayhem is wearing his brother’s hand me down uniforms. Cheap as chips, mate. Book lists got delivered and were only missing essentials like  – you know, writing books. Nice. Nothing a couple of latish trips to Officeworks to solve that.

Now the thing I totally adore about this time of year are the gushing blog posts and newspaper articles about healthy lunch boxes and the dangers of school bags and how to organise a homework station. I still read them, and snigger a lot. Yes, after a couple of weeks of the hand crafted  and individually wrapped beautifully designed and definitely nutritious lunches coming home with a bite out of the hand roll, the yoghurt with the lid off and dropped upside down in the school bag , spreading yoghurt all over the entire contents of the bag (and of course, on the hottest Friday of the year); they’ll be slamming a vegemite sandwich together like everybody else, chucking in a piece of fruit and hoping it gets eaten and not left to rot in their bags.

And the school bags – every woman I know who is my age or older has neck, back and shoulder problems from carrying overloaded school bags slung over one shoulder all the way through high school. So yeah, get the point. BUT when the empty school bag weighs 10% of your admittedly rather scrawny eight year old’s entire body weight… well.  At least it’s a back pack, I suppose.

Oh, I’ve been doing rather splendidly on my “new” Resolution – I’ve managed to walk the dog almost every day this year and it’s starting to take effect. Chaos said I didn’t look as wide from the back. High praise from an 11 year old indeed. And I can see some muscle definition happening. While losing some weight would be nice, it’s not my main motivation. Firstly, I want to be able to take the fire escape stairs at work without “OMG DED” and huffing and puffing when I get to the third floor. And climbing the Hill of Doom on the way to and from work with the aforementioned ded-ness of puffed out.

Secondly… well, there’s not much in the way of secondly at the present moment in time. I am working on the firstly first. I’ve lost about 3 and a half kilos since the beginning of December – despite eating my way through Christmas, New Year and getting ever so slightly hammered at a concert on the weekend that necessitated consumption of several tonnes of hot chips. It’s incentive, I tell you.