Rubbish - a Rant

As neighbours go, I’m not too bad. I don’t have late nights, loud parties or screaming kids. I don’t play loud music or rev my car or motorbike at all hours. My lawn and yard are kept tidy. I don’t own a barking dog, or mow my lawn at 7am on a Sunday. I keep to myself. When my neighbours have the occasional party until the wee hours I don’t complain. When they talk loudly at 2am as they get home from god-knows-where on a school night, and wake me up with their noise 3 hours before I need to get up to spend a day teaching teenagers, I don’t scream, swear or threaten to kill them. You get the picture? I’m a nice person to live next door to.

But that’s about to change.

Someone in my street has been putting stuff in my recycling bin. Lots of stuff. Stuff that overflows onto the effing street out the front of my house. This is my message to those most un-neighbourly neighbours.

I’m going to find out who you are and make you sorry. I’m as mad as hell. At the moment my vengeful thoughts have been limited to antisocial fantasies involving bags of cat poo, late night pizza deliveries and booby-trapped bins.

Hey, it’s not the fact that you put your overflow recycling in my bin. That wouldn't bother me, despite the fact that you clearly have a serious alcohol problem, if the number of squashed Bundy cans I've been seeing is any indication. No, what shits me is this: you put so much of that stuff in my bin that it spills all over the bloody street in front of my house when the truck tries to pick it up. And then you leave that shit there -YOUR shit! - for ME to pick up from the front of MY house!

I don’t want your broken chunks of NON-RECYCLABLE polystyrene packaging all over my nature strip. I don’t want your empty Bundy cans and squashed Bundy cartons. I don’t want your plastic bags or your broken bottles.

 I DON’T WANT ANY OF THAT SHIT - 

DO 

YOU 

HEAR 

ME?

Keep your own rubbish in your own bin, house, yard or shed, or wherever the hell you hide it while you wait for me to leave for school so you can sneak it into my wheely bin on collection day. Trust me, this is the sort of un-neighbourly shit that turns mild-mannered middle-aged lady neighbours into angry, vengeful viragos who you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

You have been warned. *deep breath* Thank you.

Rainy Day Blues

Oooooh, mama.... I got the rainy day blu-ues..........

Back in the late 1980s, when I still lived in Sydney and my children were quite smallish, we went through a rather severe La Nina. It rained and rained and rained - almost biblically, it seemed, for what felt like forty days and forty nights, and then some. Awful. The carpets felt damp and the house smelled of, um, damp carpet, I suppose. I couldn’t get any washing dry. Hmmm, wet undies, dirty undies or no undies at all - what a choice (especially with two young kids)! Leather shoes, belts and bags sprouted mildew in the wardrobe. Potholes yawned open on roads, some of them big enough to lose your grandma in. And the sky was grey; relentlessly, endlessly, horribly grey. Aaaaaaaaaaargh!

And now we’re having another one. It’s only 3 March, but already it’s the WETTEST MARCH ON RECORD in the ACT *sigh*. A rather large bit of waterlogged silky oak (the same silky oak whose roots block my drains, grrrr) fell down on my front fence the other day. Haven't tried to move it yet - why bother - there's sure to be another bit in this horrible weather.

During this La Nina episode I don’t have two small children suffering from cabin-fever and demanding cubby-houses beneath tables, and all sorts of in-house adventures involving cardboard boxes and lots of imagination. You might think that's a blessing - but I'm not so sure. Now, one is happily married and living elsewhere, and the other just loves couch-potatoing with some good DVDs in weather like this. I, it seems, am the only one with cabin-fever and a fit of the SADs (that’s Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is basically having the shits in extended grey weather.)

I can’t ride my bike – the weather is bad enough for several roads around Canberra to be closed due to flooding. I can’t get out in the garden without a bloody snorkel and flippers. I can’t go to Mallacoota because the Severe Weather Warning for the weekend suggested people should avoid East Gippsland this weekend – they’re getting the same shitty weather we’re getting in the Berra. Sigh. And I am so so SO over the grey skies!

How to combat the nasties that creep into your brain when your energy-sapping job joins forces with the forces of nature to dig you a big hole in which to flop? Not easy, I have to say, but I'm working on it.

I'm reading some great Val McDermid books and listening to some lovely Norah Jones/Eagles/Mariza CDs to take my mind off the weather and the cabin-fever. This morning I had a divine massage, then came home and plunged into a fabulously relaxing bath. The amazing pamperedness is managing to take the edge off the edginess - just. I’ve bought the right clamps from Bunnings to attach the bits of my woodwork project to my kitchen bench, so I can plane away to my little heart’s content tomorrow. And at Dan Murphy’s I found a bottle of red wine with dark chocolate essence (double whammy – wheeeeeeeeeeeee!) that ought to make this evening’s mood mellow, despite the 48mm in the rain gauge so far since 12.30pm.

Cheers!

PS - Please, rain – stop soon.