Kids. Schools. Whatever.

Whew. Summer temps are here. And now is the time they decide to refurbish the air conditioner. Our building is re-routed to another, smaller system. It keeps overloading. So we spend most of the time with no aircon in the building. And they can't give us an end date to our woes.

And for the icing on the cake - I had a phone call from the school yesterday. The Teen has been suspended. For 3 days. For writing on the wall. Yes, that's right. For writing one sentence "Only noobs write here" on the girls' toilet wall.

The Deputy Principal was impressed with her conduct; she owned up to doing it. She was polite, truthful, and willing to face the consequences of her actions. Seems I did manage to teach her something after all. She tells me that none of the others owned up to having done anything.

But apparently, suspension is the standard punishment for graffiti these days. I can remember doing my time for writing on desks. If the teacher were especially grumpy you got a week's detention. If not, punishment was much less severe.

3 day suspension. So, what do they do for something really severe?

*shakes head*

Scooters. Memories and other.

The Elder gave me a lift to work this morning. Well, I suppose that since she has to come to campus too, it can't really be called a lift. More like I strap in and hang on for dear life.

She has purchase a parking permit now though. Which means limited travel on public transport for a while. I am to go halves in the cost of the parking, and ride the train when she's not travelling my way from home. I'm hoping that won't be too often. Or she can pay for her parking herself. So there.

This morning, while burning rubber up the main drag, we noticed one of those commuter scooter things. It was a bit hard to miss; going hell for leather along the edge of the road. I'm sure his fingers were crossed. And a look of concentration on his face as he leaned over the handlebars trying desperately to get that last little gasp from the motor.

Heaven knows why these things are allowed to share the road. What good are they? They don't have enough power to travel in the mainstream traffic - they just aren't fast enough. Maybe they should ride the footpath with the pedestrians. Or those scooters for the mobility challenged. Now there would be a sight. A race. Between the scooters. Winner takes on the footsloggers. I'm talking, of course, about the scooters that you don't need a license for. The little ones. About 50cc or something.

I reckon they would travel almost as fast as a kid on one of the usual ones. The ones that were all the rage a couple years back. The silver ones with the slick wheels. The ones the parents made all the fuss about because of there being no proper brakes. You had to put your heel on the back wheel. Or something. But what's wrong with that? You can't truly have a childhood without the possibility of mangling yourself doing something fun. Like jumping on a bed when your older sister advised you not to.

We had a scooter. But it was nothing like the fancy ones. It was old and battered. And well loved. The plastic/rubbery handle grips were cracked. The paint was chipped. The frame was rusty. The wheels were white and solid rubber. Cracked too. And there was nothing we liked better than to get a good run up, jump on and fly down the yard, around the corner down the slope, and along the driveway. And see how far you could get without putting your foot to the ground. We wore a groove in the grass our dad wasn't necessarily impressed about. And I've lost count of the amount of times we stacked it.

Can you imagine doing that with any of the fancy pants things that pass for a scooter these days? And that statement includes the ones worthy only of a race against the pedestrians.

I've forgotten........

I thought, while the work computers aren't working, that I would sidestep and jot something down. I know darned well that this morning I had a topic I would talk about.

But now I'm at work, and I can't for the life of me remember what it might have been.

I was lying in the dark. In the lounge room, plotting MOTH's gorey demise. He suffers from sleep apnoea. And snoring to boot. I had ejected myself from the bedroom after giving up a losing battle with sleep.

And I KNOW I had something worthwhile to contribute. Then. But this is NOW, and it's all gone away.

Perhaps it will come back one day. Or maybe it's all gone; slipped away into the ether, never to be thought of again.....

How does that song go?

... it's raining again ... Yes. It is. And here I am, stuck at work. Without my umbrella. Now, how did that happen?

I don't usually take an umbrella with me. A strange thing, considering how I feel about getting wet. But somehow, the fact that it's rain makes it better. But there you have it - I have walked out the door without one.

On leaving home, it was grey. But not too badly so. And cool; almost jumper weather. In fact, the Elder commented that she thought she might need one. Till I talked her out of it. It had stormed briefly, very briefly, and was no longer raining.

But now, I'm sitting here at work, tucked away in my cozy little office. It's dark outside. And wet. The thunder is rolling around the sky and the trees are weighted with water. And here I am, no umbrella.

The forecast I heard this morning said mostly fine. A workmate tells me she heard storms. Woe is me. Well, we shall have to see who is right. Think I'll hedge my bets and say if the rain goes away, it will be fine.

Sister Wherefore Art Thou? Random stuff.

So after my last post, I thought I would contact said missing family member. Who told me that she's usually on MSN at a particular time. But noone else is. Funny that. If you don't tell me that you are on during those times, how am I going to know you are there? No, wait. I am the eldest, so I should be psychic enough to pick up on that.

So I thought I would give it a shot. I had to do some hard haggling with the Teen. It was her computer time after all. But lo, the only person on was Elder.

I chased my sibling, and where was she? In bed with a headache. Sometimes you just can't win.

I did have a win on another matter though. I got the tv most of Saturday; a huge achievement - Bathurst warmups were on. I managed to watch 2 season's worth of unseen - by me - eps of the IT Crowd. A BBC production of unbridled hilarity. Based, as you may have guessed, on an IT department in a large corporation. A cast of thousands - well, 3 regulars and 1 part timer - whose department is so well regarded, it exists in the basement.

Jen - Relationship manager. She's the 'people person'.
Roy - Geek 1. Irish. Pretty normal, considering.
Moss - Geek 2. Not Irish. Stereotypical geek.
Richmond - the Goth who lives behind the Red Door. My absolute fave character. But he isn't in every episode.

We don't know what's behind the Green Door yet.

I love it. A Saturday well spent. I hope they make another series.

The Case of the Mysterious Disappearance of the Sibling

I write this blog for me. And my siblings so we can keep up to date with the minutiae of our lives. But mostly for me. In the vain hope that it might mean something to me when I am old and demented and forgetful. It will give me something to remember myself by. And don't worry about computers and stuff. We'll all be wired into the mainframe by then.

But one of my three readers - if you include myself - has gone missing. All is quiet in backwoods bobbyville. They have only recently joined the technological era. Perhaps the computer has become sentient and swallowed them all. Sucked them all in so they have become lost. Lost in a surreal world of multi colours of red and blue, and a very nasty central computer with delusions of grandeur and world domination. No, wait. That's Tron. Actually, I did once read a story of people being sucked into computers by some black goo and a somewhat unhealthy dose of pixellation, but I can't for the life of me remember the name of it.

So where has she gone? She once begged not to be included in our chatty emails - "They clog my inbox" - so we relented and refused to talk to her. She sent pictures of some cat with no tail. And I responded. Twice. To no avail. She has gone. Drifted off into cyberspace, dancing among the stars, shipwrecked and comatose, drinking fresh mango juice, goldfish shoals ....... Sorry. Gone all Red Dwarf on myself there.........

Life is good.

It's Monday. And you know what? I don't feel bad. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe I'm heading for a manic cycle. Or maybe I just had a good weekend.

The Teen and the Elder had their own agenda, so disappeared fairly early Saturday. With every intention of not reappearing until Sunday sometime. We were at a loose end, so to speak.

MOTH decided to do something on the spur of the moment. A HUGE accomplishment on its own. And we took a drive out to Cleveland. The sky was clear and blue. A full tank of fuel, airconditioning in the car was working a treat; traffic was moderate, the UBD on the floor at my feet, and a calm and relaxed midset with regard to the possibility of getting lost.

I can't describe how bouyed I felt. No rush, no need to be anywhere at any particular time. Just a day to do what we wanted. Of course, the lure of a shopping centre we hadn't been to before was too hard to ignore. We stopped at Capalaba Park or some such. It was quite larger than we expected, but had a Zarraffas, so we were set. MOTH had never had coffee from there before, but had to agree that yes, it was better than Gloria Jeans.

The shopping centre had a wildlife display going on. Perhaps it had just finished - a family were having their photo taken while nursing a freshwater croc across their knees. We wandered around and looked in the windows of the set up at some of the reptiles. One display held gouldian finches, the bright purple and green ones. I tried to take some shots with the phone, but heck, they move waaaay to fast for that. Once I snapped the camera on one of the birds on a branch, but when the photo displayed on the screen, there wasn't a bird in sight. Perhaps I might even put that Missing: Fast Bird poster here. When I get around to pulling the pics off the phone.

So we ended up somewhere out at Cleveland. Not Wellington Point way, but the other direction. And decided to stop somewhere for lunch. The name of the place escapes me now, but the food was good. MOTH ordered bangers and mash, while I had tagiatelle with bug. Delicious. The garden out the back had Emu in the name. We sat in the shady pergoda, against the railing while the sea breeze stirred the fronds of the palm tree where the rainbow lorikeets played and the cockatoos rested in the trees around the park.

Oh, and one old one with her mate and her brood of two obnoxious children sat at the table directly below us. She forghorned, and every time she told those kids to do something, they did what they pleased anyway. I spent a fair bit of my time mumbling under my breath, planning ways to destroy them. On one occasion, I wondered if there were some way I could coax the cockatoos over and have them beat the kids to death. MOTH sat grinning like a loon, commenting later that he didn't think that strip of I-don't-like-kids ran quite that wide. Bloody bogans annoying the croutons out of the general public.

But in spite of that, it was a brilliant day. Or maybe because of it. I know I had a lot of fun planning their destruction.