1. Well, it's Friday somewhere in the world isn't it? Just not here...
2. We just had inorganic rubbish weekend, which is when you can drag out all your junk and add it to the huge piles on the roadside on every street in the suburb. You are told in no uncertain terms that you must do this over the weekend, by Sunday night and NO earlier (though the reality is that the heaps start growing from about a week before).
Then it all sits there for a whole week, getting rained on and festering and gradually spilling all over the footpath until, with great revving and clattering and shouting, the council truck arrives at 6.30am the Saturday morning after you stayed up working till 2am.
On the days between the junk being piled on the street and the great clattering collection process, the suburb is invaded by an army of scavengers driving back-firing rusty old vans which circle round and round the streets waiting for someone to put out old metal or anything of any possible value.
Daughter-One and I also wander the streets, but for reasons of sociological research. Any scavenging that happens is purely secondary, despite The Husband's moans about me coming from a family of junk dealers and reverting to type.
Last collection time, we saw a box containing a Barbie doll. In a cage. With a little bowl of crushed up pills outside the bars of the cars.
We cross the road when we pass THAT house these days.
Nothing quite so .... bizarre .. this time. A lot of old TVs. Every heap had at least two or three, since next year the analogue signal starts to be phased out and soon only digital TVs will work. Not so many suitcases and mattresses as last time, but still lots of old clothes drying racks.
Daughter-One found a scrawled call centre script on the top of one heap and tried to sell me financial products, and several of those old children's books found their way into my pockets. I hate seeing books thrown out and the scavengers are never interested in them.
A sadly mouldering complete set of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia:
The most interesting pile was outside an lovely but shabby old house, where a young man was sorting through the junk and I found a tin of broken pieces of china. I was photographing it and remarking to Daughter-One that the only thing to say is "why?" when the young man laughed and said "why indeed!" and picked up his wheelbarrow and headed back toward the house and I realised that he wasn't another scavenger but actually the owner of the junk I was photographing and commenting about.
Actually, I wish I had taken the china since there were some beautiful handpainted bits and I imagine someone who does mosaics or something like that would have loved it.
The young man came out again and I was so curious as to why he had such interesting junk that he didn't seem to know much about that I asked him, and he explained that it had all belonged to his old grandma and his mad old uncle who had lived in the house together. Now he had inherited it and was doing a big clean out. And did I want to see some of the old magazines they had?
So before we knew it, Daughter-One, the dog and I were on his verandah leafing through piles of old magazines and filling our pockets.
3. The dog loves bananas. Every day, Daughter-Two has a banana, either after school or for dessert after dinner. She likes them chopped up in a bowl in nice symmetrical pieces, so the dog gets the bits off the end. He has an unerring ability to sense when you have started peeling a banana. I thought this was because he knew when to expect it to happen. But yesterday I unusually decided to have a banana myself at lunchtime. He was fast asleep on the floor in the other room but as soon as I STARTED to break the end of the peel he hauled himself up and came padding into the kitchen. I made no sound that he could relate to it happening so it must just be the smell.
4. I have started noticing advertisements for retirement apartment complexes. They are everywhere you look, on billboards and in the newspaper. Obviously a growth sector with the aging population. And they do look very tempting ... no maintenance, heated swimming pools and a smiling friend always next door. I started thinking that, with a lower age limit of 55 and the age at which many of our friends finally started having babies, they may need to start advertising "good school zones" or "babysitting services" as well.
5. I have started researching my family history, although lack of funds for online searches and work means it is a stop start process. My father's cousin emailed me these photos of my paternal great-grandparents and my grandmother with her siblings. We know little about this side of the family since my grandmother died when my father was little and he was brought up by his father's family.
I used a template coming to the store this weekend to scrap them, so this is the sneak peek of this week's new product!
digital scrapbooking New Zealand, heritage scrapbooking digital, vintage layouts
