Archive for December, 2009

Well, we’re going to be doing it tough from here on in. The pacifying foil to the M.I.L.’s endless bitterness is on a plane to Singapore en route to the U.K. Yes, dear old Aunty Jean (Carrion’s older sister) has flown the coop and by now is probably enjoying some distance from the streak of pure evil that is her sister, my wife’s mother, my mother-in-law, satan’s fucking bride.

All the old traits that we’ve come to hate over previous visits are back in evidence. Of all her many delightful qualities, I think the main one is her over-arching sense of her own self importance. This evidences itself in many ways, but without doubt the most annoying is the way she constantly talks over the top of everyone else. And god forbid you try and raise your voice in return to make yourself heard, she’ll just get louder and louder and louder until that horrendous pretend-posh voice with its jarring nails-down-a-chalkboard clipped edges is drowning everything out, up to and including any jet engines that may be running at full power nearby. If she’d been a bit older during WW2 I reckon it would only have taken a couple of broadcasts to the Germans before they surrendered en masse. She talks over the top of TV shows and films too – not just background TV mind you – but shows or films we’ve all sat down to watch. She just can’t keep that flappy fat gob of her’s shut for more than a nano-second.

Another of Carrion’s charming traits is total knowledge about everything. She was having a conversation with Liz this morning and my wife mentioned that I suffered from acid reflux. “Oh no, don’t be silly, that’s just heartburn.” My wife looks at her querulously, “So when he wakes up in the night gagging on his own bile and has to take a pill every night to suppress this, that’s heartburn is it?” Because of course Carrion knows all about everything.

An artist’s rendering of my M.I.L.

The sprog has begun fighting back. Yesterday he was on the toilet and Carrion knocked on the door and said she needed the loo, to which Jack replied in a forthright manner, “Well you’d better go downstairs then, because I’m going to be some time.” At this precise moment the poor sod is out with his grandparents at the air museum in Nowra and Liz has advised him, in order to make the day go as smoothly as possible, to pretend that he’s on a trip with his strict school teacher.

I’ve been escaping to the beach or, when the weather’s shite, my office. I have done more patrol hours this year than anyone else in the club, because sitting on a beach, even one blowing NE 40knots and getting sand in every orifice is preferable to being around the soul-sucking battleaxe.

Other than that, things are going great.

Well now this *is* embarassing. I have woken up at 5:30am this Christmas morning and my eight year old son is still sound asleep. In my defence I can only say that I’m not excited for myself, but for him because I know he’s getting some presents he’ll love. Still, it’s quite a funny situation but one that in many ways sums up the sprog (and, ermmm me, I guess). He’s the one that eats a grown-up and varied diet, echews sweeties for fruit and will strip a lamb chop or drumstick cleaner than a piranha fish would – while I eat reformed chicken pieces in the shape of dinosaurs and gorge on sweet things of all kinds. He’s the one that embraces the touchy-feely bits of films, while I skip through them in search of more explosions. He’s the one who gets genuinely upset if he thinks he’s pissed anyone off, while I get genuinely upset if I haven’t.

So time for an update I guess. We’re now, ermm, two weeks in with the in-laws and as many of you have observed, there haven’t been any major ructions yet. There are a couple of reasons for this – firstly, up until yesterday I’ve been working and secondly when I haven’t been working, they’ve been out and thirdly if by some strange conjunction it looks like we’ll all be in at the same time I either go patrol the beach or visit friends. But thanks to the largess of my employer I am now off on holiday until the 11th of January, which is cool, but is highly likely to start messing up the teetering equilibrium we have in the house.

Carrion has come out with some classics already this year, helped along by the fact that her big sister (Liz’s Aunt Barbara) is here, a big sister with whom she rarely sees eye to eye. We were round at my parents the other day and Carrion said, “You always monopolise the conversation, Jean,” (she calls her Jean despite the fact that her name’s Barbara and prefers to be known by that), “and you always talk over other people.” I snorted my coffee straight up my nose and had a painful coughing fit when she said that. It was akin to Pol Pot accusing the Dalai Lama of terrorising people.

David has been alright so far this year. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still makes Ebenezer Scrooge look generous – but he’s been busy doing stuff around the house. We now have a new hob (or old one died 18 months ago and we’ve been too skint to replace and so have been cooking on a camping stove) and a new cooker which we bought, but he fitted. He has removed the old cooker, fitted the new one in its place and fitted our convection microwave above it, freeing up lots of lovely worktop. He did nearly fuck up the recently replaced pool pump mind you, by attempting to copy the procedure he saw me do when I was vacuuming shit off the bottom of the pool, but he didn’t a very good Bart Simpson, “I didn’t do it!” impression. I gave David a sim card for his phone (I bought an experimental $30 sim from voda to see if their coverage had improved round here) and he practically fell at my feet in gratitude.

So anyway – today we’re having Xmas lunch round at my parents. My sister and B.I.L. will be there, but my younger brother will not. We are having a mixed menu of traditional and Australian because, as per usual, nobody could agree on what to eat. Once we’ve done the present thing, I will be donning the red and yellow and heading off to the beach for a couple of hours to patrol. Not that I’m trying to escape or anything you understand.

So the day of my Christmas party rolls around, but before that we must all do our penance – a staff ‘retreat’. You know the deal, lots of motivational bollocks, some half-arsed psychological profiling, mild embarrassment, shitty food and that horrible feeling gnawing at your stomach that those are hours of your life you’ll never get back.

We had two motivational speakers during our one day retreat and the whole time I’m there I’m picturing that episode of The Office I linked to above. This guy was following up a psychological survey we all had to complete a few weeks previously. There was a fair bit of preamble and then we all got our personalised profiles.

This profile places you in one of four main categories and/or varying shades of a combination of those categories. The four categories being Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness. I was plonked in the Dominance category – we’re apparently goal-driven, easily bored and blunt. We were then asked to get into groups according to our placing in the survey – I was lumped in with the CEO, the General Manager and, ermm, my boss amongst a few others.

So we have a bit of lunch and then the next speaker comes on. This guy’s peddling the whole team-building thing on the back of a motif of adapting to change. This involved us splitting into teams and attempting to do a jigsaw puzzle with gloves on. What had we learnt from the exercise, we were asked. The CEO’s PA pipes up, “It’s fucking hard to do a jigsaw puzzle with gloves on?” Indeed.

The Office
So anyway – the whole time we’re doing this team-building thing, Liz is back at my office working. We arrived at this arrangement because that same day my company party was to take place. It made little sense for Liz to catch the train into town later on when I was driving up anyway, so we drove in together that morning and she sat at my desk and did some work.

At lunchtime she caught a cab over to the hotel we were staying in, dumped her stuff and went shopping. After the secret santa ($20 iTunes voucher ta very much) I drove from Bondi to the Amora Jamison where we were staying with Trent who works in my office and was staying at the same hotel. We’d both been put up in the hotel because the company offered to pay everyone’s cab fares home and then realised that Trent and I live 150km from Sydney – so they put us up in a hotel instead.

So anyway, at 6:10 we raced back to my car and I drove like I used to when I worked in London and we got to the hotel by 6:45. This left me about 15 minutes to get a shower, clean clothes and out the front door again.We walked down to the Aquarium Wharf in Darling Harbour where our party boat was due to pick us up for our booze cruise around the harbour.

We got there in plenty of time and headed onto the boat. There were four other companies having a party on the boat at the same time as us, but I think we won the ‘who is louder’ contest. There was a buffet meal and plenty of booze c/o the $25 voucher we’d all bought.

After we’d eaten we had the choice of an Elvis show downstairs or Karaoke upstairs. I opted not to throw myself overboard and just stayed put in the karaoke zone. After that, very drunk, everyone danced badly. Liz and I were saved from a terrible fate by Trent’s girlfriend who suddenly grabbed us and pulled us backwards as she’d just spotted a girl coming downstairs in the early throws of a full-on puke. She let go her gag reflex exactly where we’d been standing a second before. Nice.

The cruise ended at about midnight and those of us staying at the Amora headed back there. We’d intended to have a drink in the hotel bar, but that was closed so instead we walked down the street for 30 metres and walked into the first bar we found – a place called the Establishment. Highlight of the evening in this frightfully trendy (read: nosebleed expensive drinks and barmaids in schoolgirl outfits) bar was the classy guy sitting opposite us on the sofa. This guy had snared some poor unfortunate girl and besides trying to stick his tongue down her throat, he clearly thought it would be classy to try and finger her there and then. So he kept trying to stick his hand between her legs and every time he got knocked back. Eventually a bloke who looked a lot like her brother showed up and saved her from the inebriated fanny-fiddler. We saw him later looking very sorry for himself, in the queue for McDonalds.

The morning after …
Anyway, the next day I felt rough as a badgers arse. Indeed I felt so shit that I tried to puke. Only there was nothing to bring up so I just made that gagging noise for a few minutes. Strangely, despite the fact that I produced little more than some stringy spit which dangled alluringly from my chin, I felt a fraction better.

I met Trent in the lobby of the hotel and we drove over to Bondi where I’d intended to do a normal day’s work. Only I felt fucking awful and confessed this to my boss who agreed that I could clear off at lunchtime. I managed to get through the three hours before lunch with only the most intense concentration, then I packed up my Mac and headed up the hill to my car.

So i get to my car and note that some dickhead has parked behind me in the No Stopping zone, totally blocking me in. There’s no way out the front of the space either as it’s in front of a bloody great grassy bank. All I want to do is get home, but some cock’s blocked me in. At this point a volvo emerges from the flats – I flag the bloke down and ask him if he knows who owns the car. The bloke does not know who owns it, but points out two things 1) that the car has no number plates on it at all and 2)  that the door is open.

I look around again, but there’s nobody about. So I get in the car. It’s a fucking shitheap in there and looks pretty much like some lives in it. I put it in neutral, let the handbrake off and roll it down the hill a few feet until I’m clear. Not wanting to hang about in case the owner of the car returns I make a swift retreat to my car and drive off.

The journey home was shit because I was so tired. In fact I had to stop off in Kiama on the way home just to get a coffee to try to wake me up. I finally get home at about 3:00pm and collapse gratefully into bed where I sleep blissfully for a couple of hours before I’m woken up by Liz to remind me that we’re going to a barbie at my parent’s house. Crap.