I am quite excited.

In the UK we regularly (read almost always) did our shopping online and had it delivered. Now, I don’t mind supermarket shopping, generally. I think I am quite lucky in that regard (or maybe it is Beefcake that is lucky) because I get quite a decent shopping high from doing the grocery shop. Not the equivalent to going and buying myself something expensive and shiny and pretty but large. I think it stems from my maternal drive to feed and care for my family. Once I have shopped I know that our house is filled with things I can use to nourish and nurture my brood all for a low, low budget price. In my mind I am a housewife superstar.

Where was I? Oh yes, excited.

I quite like shopping but I am excited because Coles now do online shopping in Adelaide. Quite apart from the fact that I can shop in my pj’s and rest my pelvis* I still find that I achieve almost** the same little high from filling my imaginary online trolley as I do from trawling the aisles in search of a bargain. I shopped tonight. I sat on my couch, recovering from an incident in which Pudding and Grub both jumped on me while I was on the floor and made me cry with the pelvis ouchie, and I did the biggest shop you can imagine. It’s been a lean month due to moving and putting in a new kitchen and it is payday tomorrow.

On a completely different note. Every night this week, Beefcake has had a meeting from 5:30pm until 8:30 and then from 11:30pm until 1.30am. It has sucked the arse. In a large, large way. Each night the small children have become more and more agitated as I try to prepare dinner and get them off to bed without the large beardy one. They are most put out by the change in routine. So much so that even Rhubarb has expressed distress at the craziness that takes place between 5:30 and 8pm, stating that he doesn’t think he can take much more of it. Poor baby, his life is so hard. I am please because tonight was the last night of the crazy. Back to a normal working day tomorrow and then Beefcake is on leave for two whole weeks. Yay! He has promised me much DIYing and fantasticness during his holiday.

Speaking of which, we found a fabbo acrylic surface that is all space age and stuff to use in place of tiles for the splashback today. Looks like glass but is not. We are seriously considering it but it will cost a bit more. Given how excited we were when we went to look today it is miraculous that we didn’t order it on the spot. We have shown great restraint.

I am rambling now. There is not a coherent point running through this post. Oops, the baby*** has woken up.

Bye.

*A regular shopping trip is a bizarre and torturous race for us. I must walk relatively slowly so I don’t hurt the pelvis but we must hurry because walking around like that makes the pelvis sore and we have, at most, an hour before I begin to start limping (and whining).

** I may have saved “a few” things that were too “hard” to get online to buy in the real supermarket on the weekend. Yes, I am sad, why do you ask?

*** When does she cease to be a baby? I personally think that now that she is one she is a toddler but part of my brain is obviously unwilling to admit that.

I have internet connection. Oh the joy!

It is a touch worrying that my feed reader says 1000+ items as opposed to giving an actual number. I have some significant catching up to do so I will be around peoples blogs trying to do just that. I suspect I will be doing nothing but reading blogs for the next few days, but that’s okay with me.

We are having trouble getting the plumber to come. I have an oven, rangehood and dishwasher in my lounge room and an entire kitchen’s worth of packages on the back veranda. It is a touch frustrating but as it has only been a week I should count my blessings, I think. We have a lovely new home and I am very lucky to be getting a pretty new kitchen. I feel a  bit wrong to complain about the unreliable plumber.

So, look for me in your comments, people. I can’t wait to read what you people have been doing.

P.S. I think I may have a slight dependance on the internets. I have been feeling mighty low without my blog to write and other blogs to read. Is it wrong to need the internet so?

The situation, as you may have gathered from the title, is dire. The interent was supposed to go on today. We were too busy* until after business hours to actually check that it was working. It was not. I am using the backup wifi on Beefy’s computer. The stupid help desk person has told us someone will call tomorrow or maybe the day after. This is not satisfactory. I am miserable. I had planned a glorious night of wading through the hundreds of blog entries clogging up my feed reader. So, so sad.

Beefcake’s keyboard has a dreadful action that I loathe and it is larger than mine in order to accomodate his dinner plate hands. I keep hitting the enter key by accident and it is making typing this a complete chore.

So.

Bullet points:

• Move went well, although I have never been more exhausted or sore or swollen pelvised in my life. We shall never move again.
• The new house is slightly more in need of renovation than we had deluded ourselves into believing but it is still lovely and more importantly, it is ours.
• The new house desperately needs a kitchen. The current kitchen consists of two cupboards, a sink and a manky old stove. No benches, no other cupboards. Nothing. We had the ultimate day of shopping high yesterday and purchased super special, very swanky oven, rangehood and dishwasher as well as new kitchen from large Swedish flat-pack icon. Much money was spent. This was quite scary but all in all we are very excited.
• We must now prepare the room and install the kitchen before Beefcake’s leave ends. He returns to work on Monday. We may have our heads up our arses.
• The plumber told us that he would come towards the end of the week to do the plumbing work that needs to be done before we can install the kitchen. We are now both paranoid that he meant next week, which would be an absolute disaster.
• We have no connection for the washing machine either, it really would be a disaster.
• We are okay with DIY. We have renovated two other houses. We do tend to fly by the seat of our pants though**. Pray to the gods of DIY and renovations.
• Pudding was so bored when we were very busy this afternoon that he decided to copy the dog and poo in the back yard. He ran the idea past Beefcake first but was not deterred by being told “no”. I was not best pleased.
• The dog was confused by her new doggy door for the first 24 hours and peed in the house as well as whimpering by our bedroom door that she was busting to go outside at 6am. I was not best pleased.

* Beefcake needed to “chase” channels into the walls to conceal electrical cabling. He did this with an angle grinder. He did not take appopriate steps to protect the contents of the back part of the house from brick dust. It took us four hours to clean up all the gritty red clay dust. Dish pan hands have a new poster girl.

** By fly by the seat of our pants I mean we laugh at the thought of stupid things like planning for prevention of billowing clouds of bright red dust filling the house.

Wow, I took a couple of days off from the internet. Really off. I mean not opening my computer at all. I know, you’re impressed.

It caused two things two happen:

1. I forgot my friends birthday yesterday because, without my computer to anchor me to reality, I was floating about the world with nary a sense of date or time. That is crap because I never forget my friends birthdays. I groveled but I’m not sure that it worked.

2. I realised that I have not read a book since Grub was born. I have read a magazine, I have read *ahem* a few blog posts, I have managed to read the blurbs of several books, whilst shopping for the Christmas presents of others but no whole books.

Now, problem one was a once off. It’s regrettable but she’ll get over it because who could stay mad at me? Problem number 2, however, requires serious remedial action to be taken.

Ordinarily I read a lot. I guess lately I have just taken my new found internet obsession a little bit too far.

This was never more apparent than today, when, during a quick visit to Borders so that Rhubarb could spend a voucher he got for Christmas, I lost the plot.

I started picking up books in the SciFi/Fantasy section and fondling them wistfully. Beefcake thought my behaviour was quite bizarre. The heady aroma of new book was too much for me and I was nearly completely overcome. I found myself holding things up for Beefcake and exclaiming over the beautiful binding or cover.  I usually enjoy a good visit to Borders as much as the next person but today’s visit took it to a whole new level. I had to remove myself  as I knew that any selection I made today may have been based purely on a pretty title font as opposed to any real desire to read the book’s contents. I also have four or five unread novels at home that are on my ‘to read’ list, so in an act of incredible restraint on my part, I left empty handed.

So, in light of my little “episode” I have decided to allow myself some designated reading time each day. Having days without even opening my computer doesn’t work for me either so I am going to try to strike a balance between my current level of internet time and none at all. I am determined to win back some time from my internet obsession. To win back some time for words written on paper, words that smell of new book and can be held in my hands.

Wish me luck.

So, I am on day three of lying around doing nothing. My muscle spasms are improving but it seems my back can’t take the strain of me sitting up for any length of time. My neck seems unprepared to handle the weight of my head, as though it’s a unexpected new burden I have sprung on it, without warning. I do have an unrelated neck problem (because my body was apparently cobbled together from dodgy spare parts), which appears to now be in cahoots with the rest of my back muscles, trying  to cause me to retain as little function as possible. It’s actually pretty amazing that my pelvis could cause this cascade of ever worsening muscular problems. I feel and walk like I am 105.

Have I mentioned that my physio would have liked me to use a walker??  Nice. She conceded, eventually, that it may be a touch impractical for a woman with  a baby and toddler, and suggested a walking stick instead. This was a few months ago during a previous, much less severe, episode. I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve tried but it helps very little.

Also, this particular physio is convinced that my breastfeeding Grub is perpetuating the problem because of the presence of some relaxin in your system whilst breastfeeding.  My previous physio assured me it was not. I can’t really handle the stupid physio’s anti-breastfeeding agenda and so stopped going to her. She was refusing to help me with exercises at any rate because “you won’t get better until you stop feeding” and I was paying large amounts to walk back and forth in the hydro pool three times a week and have her put some heat packs on me. It was ridiculous. When I told her that my problems had continued after Pudding was weaned she loaned me a book explaining that I was just imagining I was having pain because I’d been in pain for so long I no longer knew how not to be. Or something. There was probably some merit to it but when you’ve recently had a baby and your pelvis has all the stability and strength of a wet tissue, it’s not really that constructive. I am looking into a new physio but the  neverending parade of retarded health professionals, that I have seen thus far, does not motivate me to try again.

Beefcake is being superhousehusband. He’s awesome,  it’s just the little things that get missed. Like last night when I hobbled out to get a drink, while the family was eating dinner, to discover that the children were eating off of tin camping plates and Beefcake was eating out of a salad bowl. Actually, Rhubarb was quite annoyed because he got to use a normal bowl. I am just focusing on being grateful that everyone has been fed and is relatively clean.

My swelling is much less pronounced this morning. Instead of a flesh bustle, it looks as though I have a small second arse located above the first,  so that must be a good sign. I think I will be up and about tomorrow. Which is good because I actually think I have reached some sort of limit with my love of the internet. As much as I might bemoan the amount of time I can usually find to read blogs and blog for myself, it appears that 16+ hours a day is too much. Who knew.

The Australian government is planning to strip me (and all other Australians) of my right to view what I wish on the internet.

They are planning to force all ISP’s to apply filter’s, which will restrict what can be viewed over the internet.

The idea is to protect children from viewing objectionable material over the internet.

The filter will be compulsory, everywhere.

We will have no say in what we choose to view or not view in our homes.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff on the internet that I wouldn’t want my kids viewing. Hell, there’s A LOT of stuff on the internet that I wouldn’t want to view. The things is, at the moment, it’s my choice. I choose what information I accept or ignore or reject.

As for my children, well, my job as a parent is to protect them. That’s why they get supervised when they use the internet. IT’S MY JOB to take care of my kids’ emotional wellbeing. To make sure that they are protected. It’s not my government’s job to use my taxes to babysit them. I CAN HANDLE IT!!!

I can not believe that our government is really trying to pull this puritanical nanny-state crap.

If this goes ahead, you have to wonder how they will define inappropriate material. How will I know what information the government has decided that I should not see?

I’m very angry about this. I think all Australians should be.

It’s a slippery slope people, a slippery slope.

Go check this out:
http://nocleanfeed.com/index.html