self help/slow realisations & awkward situations, back then, or I I I I I I...

The last 25 years have been weird for me.

I found I loved more than I could.
I have found that missing someone hurts so much I can't see for tears when watching some films or TV show. I avoid horror and bad SF, why waste time. Sad movies/TV, depends.

I think that I seem to base some of my life on what I hear, what I see, what I read.
And reading back on that, idiot self, is how 99.999% of the rest of the world does it.
Another life revelation.
Humph.
Maybe I should not read into what some people tell me what or who I am,  or that I 'should' do this or that. Either deeply or at face value. But I do. And I think it is to hurt me, cos sometime I just don't give a damn, I rise above the trouble I am in as if it is not there. B+++t I do,  I just need time to sort and fix  things, on my terms Thankyou.
Their life has no Rolls or a pool, and maybe no lifelong partner either, nobody is perfect.
Everyone changes inconspicuously anyway with each and every life transaction. And every one has advice and life experiences to share. Gotta respect that at least.

People have left their mark on me somewhere somehow sometime, and right now one sticks out.
Bev said to me once when I was needing to forget my shitful life at one time, not to drown my sorrows with my mate, 'life has to go on, and drinking won't help us'. Braked at that, and was sensibly morosely drunk without losing it. For once. Wished I had wakened them at another time, really do.

My own folks helped me get into and through tertiary education. Shocked at that as they were. And me. We were all on a shoe string, and got through on it too. That is what got me into this little parable. The eldest is leaving us in the next year, and my resources and resourcefulness will be sorely tried, and advice ignored...

I am basically an opportunist, a modernist, definitely a consumerist.
A DIY type mostly, but I do have the latest expensive gadget when I can afford it.
A camera cost over a grand once, the same thing now is a days work or less. Same with my lil ol TV, & PVR...
I like making wine and beer and spirits from scratch, even converted a ruined batch of (river bank plucked blackberries) jam into wine.
Last year I burnt the shit out of a expensive pot making cordial from home grown lemons.
I was down the street a little bit too long, got in the door and wondered at the noise screeching through the hall, raced down to the kitchen. Shit, the pot, it was smoking like buggery!
Took the pot out the back with the poor cat TEARING past me and it burst into flame (the cordial remains, not the cat).

I think I am a perpetual student, and life observer. Cynic, sarcastic critic. Agnostic or atheist. Soft, tender, class 1 ah***, too strict, and very chillaxed as confident in them the kids. Easily amused at American and British humour, somewhat annoyed at Aussie tv/films. A dumb easily distracted shite ful person of either too much integrity, not enough, or even none at times.

I have 15 or more video tapes of family occasions. Drunk one night a number of years ago I watched some.
In one I found myself being a completely selfish pig at a birthday party. Much tears.
In others I saw little boys growing up and performing for their Mummy and Dadda with air guitars in the back yard or making cubbies with the lounge cushions and the Decaffeinated Coffee table.
A few have eclipses of the sun and the moon too.
Not on the same tape mind, cos they don't really happen together in the same year, as far as I can tell.
And then after the accident, the girls and boys birthday parties and Christmases and Easters. Sports and clan gatherings.

I once was asked to see what was wrong with a company PC back in the workshop.
I plugged in any old cord, switched it all on and WOOF.
Wrong power.

I was making the coffee once. The phone rang. I walked around the bench to answer.
And filled the coffee jar up instead of my mug.

It will only be four of us next year, the girls and boys almost autonomous. Hopefully they will cook and clean their own homes. Not great, god noes I aint! The shopping is fun, "STOP PUSHING THAT THING!" and the "CAAN WE HAVE????"
Rumphhh. "no".

Its all me.

Tarn was a great part of my life. Twenty years of it. Tarn was an old fashioned girl. A proper girl? Definitely of good moral character. I had to laugh at a piece in "Married,Single,Other" the other week where a character had had to "wait". Been there brother. (Such a sad series- great, just too sad, another well done Brit fing).
Tarn did not swear before she met me. She said.
By the time we were ensconced in Crawley, a few years after we started going out, she swore a little. It's so hard to remember which level she got to, LOL, but, I think I was better off for her being a brake on that sort of thing, cos coming back from an oil-rig, the language skills had run done to the basic communication needed between guys...
We do have a certain level of language around the house now, or I may be smote!
The menu she had by then was really good, better than mine by then for sure. But cos "we were modern", she taught me what to do. "Sharing". There I learnt to make Guacamole myself- the only way to eat avocado. The sharing did not mean the house was less dusty, I had to do that.

Tables turned again when we had the first child later in Melbourne. I was the eldest of six, and was babysitting since 9 years old, so nappies and bathing and feeding was like water off a ducks back. Tarnia never did tell me what she thought of that, I was just right in to it. God that was a night, she crushed my wedding ring to an oval, no drugs or needles, just the gas, pass the gas, NOW, sort of. Strong. Fan-bloody-tastic. Another tearjerking night out, at the hospital. With my mom-in-law too. And a bottle of bubbly, unlawful apparently.

Crying- yeah, they have to exercise, or burp or do something to interfere with delicate nocturnal activities that had to be re-learnt.

We had a few weeks in that time of Not Talking. Laughable, and forgotten now. Time to think and change some neuron paths.
Car travel was long and quiet at times too. Dunno.
It was hard to get Tarn to drive tween Adelaide and Melbourne before children.
After children, was okay for her to speed around the state to see the folks if I was off working. Which was good. I needed her to be more independent of me, to trust herself. I could not do anything if I was far far away. And Tarnia was the money sensible one too. Hence the hoose, moose.