Turmoil on the home front

It’s been a pretty hectic week at our place. First we had the unexpected storm that dumped a deluge on our little town on Sunday morning. Long term residents of Hervey Bay said they’ve never seen anything like it. Many people will be mopping up and repairing their properties for months. All we had to contend with was a wet floor in the garden shed and empty aisles in the shops that were open. Some are still closed. But that’s coming back to normal. If you missed it, read my take on our extraordinary flood.

At home was a different story.

On Monday a painter who’s doing the whole house started work. Which led to us picking new carpets. I hate the carpets we have. I don’t like the feel underfoot and to me, they’re the colour of mud. While all that happened, a plasterer came in, fitting cornices in the kitchen and filling some damage in the walls resulting from our other renovations. The painter can’t finish until the plaster is dry, so that won’t be till next week.

All of that means chairs, tables, bookshelves, and pictures are stacked up in the middle of rooms so the painter and plasterer can get at walls. Clothes are piled across the stack in the lounge room so they can do their work in the walk-in robe. The beds are away from the wall, there’s sawdust from sanding and I’m not cleaning anything much until the whole lot’s finished. (pant pant pant)

You have to keep telling yourself it’ll be wonderful when it’s finished. On the plus side, the new kitchen not only looks nice, we’re loving the induction cook top and coming to terms with the new oven.

While that’s been happening I’m working on my Work-In-Progress. It’s turning out be longer than I expected it to be. It’s not far from a first draft  finish– after I work out the ending. And I’m gradually buying all of Sir Terry Pratchett’s books as ebooks, which is my (much) preferred reading medium. It’s been a while since I read a few of them and they’re just as good, sometimes better… I was going to say the second time around but I’ve read all of them more than once. 12^th March was the tenth anniversary of Terry’s death. There are millions of people like me around the world who mark the date and mourn his passing from an aggressive form of Alzheimers. This is a quote from the introduction to all his ebooks. “He was awarded a knighthood for services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.”

For the rest, I confess I’ve been avoiding too much reading about Gaza, Ukraine, and the shenanigans in America. I’ll grudgingly accept that Trump has some good ideas but at the moment he and his henchmen are carrying on like pillocks.

Which segues into a memory. Back in the 1980s my mother said to me, “I wouldn’t want to have children in this day and age. All those drugs and promiscuity and what’s happening in the world. It’s dreadful.” She would have been in her seventies at the time (about what I am now). She was born while World War 1 was still on (although the Netherlands was neutral), she married in the Great Depression, raised five small children in occupied Amsterdam during WW2, then had two more kids and migrated to Australia in 1955 to start all over again. The 1980s was a time of relative peace and security, particularly in Australia. But I think now, I’d be saying much the same thing she did back then. I don’t envy the next generations. The world is a very dangerous place.