While watching TV yesterday an ad came up for Susan Boyle’s new album and Luke went on a micro rant! I guess he doesn’t like the way she followed her dreams and succeeded (tall poppy syndrome maybe).  To a certain degree I agree with him, most people never reach their dreams and ambitions in life even if they are immensely talented. It takes more than just talent to break the big time and so many people fail… but we don’t talk about that,  do we?  Back to Susan Boyle though,  I think it’s great what happened to her… it’s like a fairy tale and I love to see the underdog succeed.  Her music is not my style but I wish her all the best.  Luke on the other hand, well lets just say the Susan Boyle story stirred him… it stirred him to write this ‘country and western’ song in two minutes of frustration:

Verse 1

You can have a dream and plan to go far,

Wish for the best, name your own star

But there’s something they didn’t mention

you will wind up dead or on the pension

before you ever make it!

Chorus

You are…

destined to fail!

So put away your hopes right now

Destined to fail

Don’t bother trying, just keep on dying

If you quit now you still have time to get a job!

Destined to fail

Verse 2

We are told that if we dream hard, we can have a hit

Sorry to tell you this, but it’s a load of shit

Don’t worry, it’s not about you

It’s life, and the dole queue

and the fact that your dreams don’t mean JACK

Chorus

Final Verse

So go ahead, see it happen in your mind

That’s the only place it will, you will find

Soon you will be going to the nameless mass

who fell flat on their dreaming ass

only to find the FAIL BUS run them over!

I have been known to sleep walk and Luke calls me an “active sleeper” with all my talking and ramblings during the night. It doesn’t bother me at all but then again I hardly ever remember my night time “episodes”… but I do remember an incident the other night.   It was like I was watching myself from above as I jumped out of bed, ran down the hallway and flicked on the kitchen light while calling out “what? what? what?” as I looked around the room.   By the time I said the third “what” I was awake and talking to an empty room.  I wasn’t completely alone however, through my dining room window my neighbour was sitting at his computer with a clear view of me… the crazy neighbour who runs around the house talking to herself!

Recently we bought a new DVD player/recorder thingy that records onto either a DVD or internal hard drive… yippee… no more tapes! It has the capacity to hold 108 hours worth of TV but I doubt we would ever have a backlog of TV shows that big, we usually watch what we tape with in a week or so and delete as we go. Some programs we have to tape for the children to watch during the day even though we watch it, such as Stargate Universe.  It was this very show that Luke deleted yesterday BEFORE the children had a chance to watch it!  He claims he was “tidying up” but what I want to know is… with 106 hours of spare space… what was there to tidy up?

Yesterday my big girl turned nine and to celebrate we went to Alma Park Zoo.  The last time we went was for Claire’s third birthday and that didn’t exactly go too well… I had taken loads of beautiful photos only to discover the camera had no film in it.  So this time I was determined to make up for past transgressions and take some gorgeous photos… with the DIGITAL camera.   What ended up happening though was me taking photo after photo of the children with nothing but hats over eyes and half smiles set in a backdrop of mud and barren land.  After an hour and fifteen minutes we had seen everything and then it bucketed down rain… so we left.  The kids had a good time feeding the deer, donkeys, lamas, Kangaroos,ducks etc so overall it was a good morning out.  We were also lucky enough to be there to see the week old baboon as well as the baby deer… so very cute. In the end however I always seem to gravitate towards money and I have to say…  at $85 entry plus animal feed it was an expensive hour and fifteen minutes.

At the moment we are looking for another rental to move into and it’s proving much harder than I remember. No longer can you leave $50 and your drivers license to view a vacant house, NO… now you have to wait for the agent to have a 15 min cattle call inspection time that may or may not suit you.  That’s of course if the agent even gets back to you, which sadly most of the time they don’t.  If they do get back to you it’s a phone call saying “inspection in twenty minutes”. How can they expect us to drop everything and come out to a house with twenty minutes notice?  Luke works and we don’t live in the area we are house hunting… it’s impossible.  Luke has driven an hour and ten minutes to view a house only to be told that the agent forgot her key and to make another appointment!  What real estate agent goes to an inspection with out the property key? Then when we finally got an inspection time on a house the agent was talking on his mobile phone and smoking, not even interested in the task on hand.  Another place we looked at was a run down hunk of a place and the agent even told us that downstairs leaks water and the dishwasher doesn’t work but they still want $380 a week for this dump of a house with it’s toilet almost outside… past the laundry!  We now find ourselves with 28 days to find a house and move and I’m starting to stress a little.  With most of our stuff in storage on the Sunshine Coast (that’s another story all together) and us needing to move to the South Side of Brisbane… this move is shaping up to be a real doozy! Have I mentioned that I hate moving?

I was running an errand for my grandmother the other day and found myself waiting for my darn bank to open.  All the other banks in the shopping centre opened at 9am but of course the way my luck has been lately my bank didn’t open until 9:30am.  So here I was standing in the sun (of course my bank was the only one with its entry outside the complex… in the hot sun) waiting, waiting, waiting.  After fifteen minutes other people started hanging around and most of them were elderly people….then it hit me… pension day! I had chosen the worst day of the fortnight to visit a bank… my unlucky streak continues! It seemed like forever before I noticed movement in the bank and not a minute too soon… my thongs were so hot I was sure I would suffer third degree burns if I didn’t get out of the sun. The swoosh of the door was like music to my ears as I headed towards the cool air conditioning.  In my mind I assumed since I was the first one waiting I would be the first one served but how wrong I was… an old biddy with a walker swung wide then cut in front of me!  I was a little shocked and stood still for a moment and that’s when “IT” happened, five other elderly customers took advantage of my moment of weakness and shot in front of me.  “IT” taught me a lesson… the elderly mean business!

I was going to write a post about our horrid experiences trying to find a rental to live in but it’s just too depressing… I need a laugh… and this makes me laugh!

Our Christmas tree is up and my youngest has done the decorating but I can assure you it wasn’t without drama.  We strung the fairy lights and plugged them it only to discover that half the bulbs were not lighting up.  Wasn’t it enough that they were in one giant tangled ball that took ages to unravel? Now I had to take them off the tree and check every bulb… all 250! I delegated the task to my kids, showing them how to test the bulbs and how to replace them but there was confusion so I had to recheck them anyway. After missing most of my T.V. show the lights were fixed and back on the tree, the kids were happy so I guess it turned out fine in the end.  However, next year I’m going to hide the fairy lights and it’s going to be tinsel and hanging decorations only!

It was so hot the other day the poor fish had a water temperature of  29 degrees Celsius… now that’s HOT for goldfish! I wanted to try to cool the water down so I put an ice pack in the tank but it didn’t make much difference. The snails are smart though, it didn’t take them long to latch onto the nice cold floating island that mysteriously appeared in their corner of the world. They spent the afternoon in cool comfort while poor Tom-Tom & Sasha trudged through the the day in discomfort, like the rest of us.

One of our Guinea Pigs was eating out of his feeding container when the food ran out. It’s one of those upright containers with the bowl at the bottom that is continually supplied with feed as it is used up.  However on this occasion it clogged up and Cookie wanted his food.  He backed up and rammed the container with his head, he let out a little squeak but his effort was rewarded as more feed flowed into the dish.  Now that’s what I call using your head!