Cholesterol

Cholesterol.  It kills you.

It kills your arteries.
It kills your heart.
It kills you dead unless you fight it.

Fight it with your clogged arteries struggling to pump blood into your struggling heart.
Fight it with exercise which kills you in its boredom.
Fight it by reducing your alcohol intake which kills your sense of humour, adventure and fun.

Fight it by reducing your fat intake. No full fat dairy foods.  No cheese platter with your wine.  Oh sorry.  There is no more wine.

No more creamy sauces.  Wholemeal pasta from now on.  And legumes and beans. And brown rice. Don’t forget the brown rice.

I might as well stop washing my hair and tie dye my clothes now if I have to eat that shit.

No more snags on the barbie! No more barbeques. What’s a barbeque without beer anyway?

No more mounds of mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, boiled potatoes.

No more cakes or biscuits. No more sugar in your tea. No more chocolate. No.

No more love in the kitchen.
My soul has died.
I can’t go on.

Cholesterol. It kills you.

Happy Father’s Day

Dear Daddy,

I love your smile, I love your kisses
Even with your scratchy whiskers
I love it when we laugh and play
I love you every single day

Do you like it?  Mummy helped me with the words, but I told her what to say.  She gave me the money to buy your present too and said I could pick whatever I wanted.  I know you like ice cream and chocolate so that’s what I got.

We forgot to get you a card, but Mummy said that you wouldn’t mind.  Well, she said that because you were in America for work on Mother’s Day you wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if you got upset.  But I don’t get that because I know that you’ve got two legs and you stand on them all the time when you get up off the couch.

I like it you knock on the front door when you come home from work.  Mum used to tell me when you were coming home and I’d get pretty excited just waiting for you, but I’m bigger now.  She just stands at the door and pretends not to know who it is, but I always know that it’s you because no-one else knocks on our door at night time.

I really love your hugs and horsey rides and cuddling up with you on the lounge.  How come you don’t hug me in the middle of the night when I wake up?  Are you scared of the dark too?  Mum always comes in then but she doesn’t play with me and I get too bored with her so I go back to bed.  That’s okay though because I know you will wake me up in the morning when you get ready to go to work.

Mummy doesn’t like that, does she?  I hear her say “shhhh” to you all the time when you drop stuff.  I just wait for you to make some noise and then I yell out to you and you come into my room and get me out of my cot and give me big kisses before you go to work.  You know, sometimes it’s hard work getting Mummy out of bed when you go early.  Maybe you should give her lots of kisses before you go to work too.  I’m sure she’d like that.

It’s great when we make a fort in my igloo tent in the lounge room.  Remember when we built a fort on the couch with the cushions while mum was trying to wash up and pick up stuff and tidy the house and then we jumped into the igloo and she came over and picked up all the blankets really quickly like she was mad and we didn’t know what she was going to do and all of a sudden she put the blankets over the igloo and made it all dark for us?  She really surprised us that day, didn’t she?  We stayed in there for ages.

I miss you when you go away for work, but Mummy talks about you all the time and she tells me how many sleeps there are until you come home.  She gave me a photo of you too and I take it to bed with me.  Can you hear me talking to you in the dark?  I just tell you what I did during the day and then I hug my teddies until I fall asleep thinking of you.  I really like it when you come home again because there are lots of cuddles and you talk to me heaps and we play with nearly all my toys at once.  Then we both get really tired and fall asleep on the lounge and when we wake up we have the house all to ourselves because Mummy has gone out.    She’s funny when she does that.

It’s great at the park when you come on all the slides with me and help me climb up the ladders and stuff.  Some other Dads just read the paper but you chase me all over the park.  We’re like big kids together, aren’t we Daddy?

I’m helping Mum cook dinner tonight and we’re going to make your favourite dinner.  Then we can have ice cream and chocolate for dessert if you want.

The biggest kisses and hugs for you

XXXOOO

Solving for X

At my writing course the other day, we had a bit of fun with an exercise called “Solving for X”. The idea is to write a short story with the following conditions:

• it is exactly 26 sentences in length,
• each sentence begins with a word which starts with one of the letters of the alphabet.

You can either decide to use the letters in order, or randomly, as long as each is used just once to start a sentence.

It was great fun to do and didn’t take that long really (around 20 minutes at the most), considering we jumped straight in. The best part about it was that because you are prompted around a letter, the worry about where the story is going, what is the plot, are you following the rules correctly, are thrown out the window and you just get  into the writing straight away. The results from everyone in the class were funny, clever and surprising.

Have a go, it’s good fun. Here’s mine, unedited. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch, but I recommend it as an exercise if you’re getting a bit down on yourself in regards to your writing.

Thick Australian accents at the ready:

“Ahoy there matey!”
Brian looked up and saw the boat approaching the wharf where he was waiting.
“Christ you two look a bit rough this morning” Brian shouted. “Did you go on a bender last night?”
“Ernie bought over a bottle of bourbon and Lee got in some beers as well.”
“Fair enough mate.”
“Give us a hand with this would ya?”  said Harry throwing a rope to Brian. “If you keep pulling the boat in we can get close enough to tie her up. Just like that, yeah, good mate. King tide yesterday, so we should be good to go today.”
Lee looked up from inside the boat and came out to give Brian a hand. “My arse we will be good to go! No-one goes fishing on a king tide ya dickhead.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake Harry” Brian said. “Please tell me you didn’t plan this trip around a king tide?”
“Quit ya crying girls! Relax those mouths of yours and settle down. Some of us do have half an idea you know. The tide going out will be perfect for us. Under these conditions we can trawl for everything going on out on the tide and we won’t have to go that far neither.”
“Very well mate, now where should I put this?”
“What, the beer? X marks the spot.” said Harry grinning as he pulled back a tarpaulin to reveal a flash new esky.
“You’re getting a bit fancy mate!” the men laughed.
“Zip it boys and lets go” Harry growled.

Wednesday again

I had been feeling unhappy with the regularity (or lack thereof) of my posts. I was sporadic at best until, in a light bulb moment, I realised that I was on a run of posting every Wednesday (I had done it two weeks in a row) and so I thought that I could do that. If it became a regular thing – a post once a week – I’d be happy. I would stop berating myself for not posting more often and slip back into writing enjoyment mode. Cool? Yeah, I thought so.

I had been getting inspiration from my Wednesday dance class and I thought why stop a good thing? Unfortunately, I left my dancing mojo at home, still in bed, curled up in a little ball under the covers. I was tired, lethargic, uninspired and full of don’t-fuck-with-me-ness. My single clear thought amongst my mind-numbing mind-whinging was that I was dancing like Liz Lemon.

I didn’t write that day. Clearly, I was uninspired. I signed up for a writing course. Stay tuned dear readers. In the coming weeks you are going to be blown away with what I can do.

PS. I reserve the right to go back on my word at any time and present to you absolutely nothing.