Hellooooo, is there anybody in there?

OMG, it’s been forever. 

I had actually forgotten I possessed a blog….I know, it takes a special kind of stupid to forget (and yes I am qualified, I am  amongst that very special breed of women who forget to eat….so tar me with the special-stupid brush and let us move on)

What have I been doing? Ugh, I wish I had something other to say than the post-teenage wangst/ possible midlife crisis crap that is about to spew out into the intarwebs like aunt Flossies dirty washing, so please, if you are not given to the dramatics every once in awhile, now would be the time to avert your eyes, and go clip your toenails or pour yourself a glass of wine and sort through the overstuffed filing cabinet in the study.

The boy is still experiencing issues with his bowels. Three weeks of persistant diarreah (or diarick as my six year old calls it) has seen us back at the Doctors surgery and another round of testing under way. Should have results by tuesday.  But boy, that’s one thing they don’t put in the job description for “Mummy”.  It took me 13 hours to get a stool sample from my ten year old. He would forget and flush after he was done….motherhood….so very G L A M O R O U S….(thankyou Fergie, I will never forget how to spell glamorous as long as I live.)

I have a girl-child in the throws of puberty. If I find the hormone fairy, I swear I will snap her fucking hormone activating wand and shove it up her glittery ass. Sideways. 

My husband has been away much of the past few months with work. He’s home now for a few months. Thankfully.  We celebrated our 14 th anniversary seperately. He at work fending off advances from men on Oxford street (I did warn him he was too pretty to wander the streets alone after dark)  me fending off advances from an ex boyfriend who simply cannot live with out me.  WTF? Dude. it’s been 15years. No I will not run away with you to Rome. (As tempting as that may be)

When the hell did I become THAT woman?  he is persistant and stubborn and not thinking clearly. And because I care about him I am probably a little more gentle with his heart than I should be.

I am down a dog, since the female dog took to biting the ten year old. I am not sure why. I never wanted the second dog to begin with, but the husband will look at me with those pretty blue eyes and pouting his kissable lips and say pretty please in a way that I simply cannot say no to. I mean our cat thinks he’s a dog anyway. Seriously. The bloody thing comes when you whistle.  ( I love my cat)

On top of it all, I believe I have gone temporarily insane. As the husband and I seriously consider and persue homeschooling our children for the next two years. We have an interstate move…again. Which sees the switching of grades, curriculum and the fifth school in the last five years that my daughter will have to be the new kid at yet again. The upside, I can indulge my inner snob and teach them cool subjects like Latin, I just wish I could find a secular latin programme I was comfortable with. 

so there you have it.

Let the madness begin…..

where oh where have I been? Not london, and not one queen.

Remeber my smelly son? The one that had his teacher bring to my attention the disturbing fact that yes, he really does fart way outside the parameters of anythign even remotely resembling normal?

He has coeliac disease.

This is why I have been absent from the blog. This is why I have spent the last four weeks trawling shops for gluten free products so that we may have a semblance of normalcy  to our new found diets.

This is why, the rest of my time not trawling shops, has been spent in the kitchen, modifying and tweaking and trying desperately to cling fast to familiar and comfrtable food we love and are loathe to give up.

This is why Sue Sheperd and her cookbooks have become my new best friends. The kind I have coffee with everyday and relax with at night.  This is why I am secretly slamming the incompetant (now dead) doctor who misdiagnosed my coeliac disease when I was 5.  because all of this could have been avoided. 

This is why my husband is discovering cullinary delights he otherwise would never have tried in a million years. And why he looks at me with a look of bemusement when we are in SumoSalad and I politely inquire what ingredients are in their salad dressings.  (regular soy sauce is out for coeliacs.)

SumoSalad where only too happy to bring me bottle after bottle of dressings to check the labels. (Which is why they have my loyal patronage)  The pesto chicken is GF, the spicy prawns are GF. My favourite salad, alas, is not. (Thai beef)

But the great thing about sumo salad is that they offer rice paper wraps. Which is GF. And they are moer than happy to bend over backwards to accomodate anyone who asks nicely.

My new favourite thing? the fact that I finally feel better than I have in years. And my boy is finally thriving. AND  is butt funk free.

Mother is a mchine

This afternoon a miracle occured. I mean a real bonafide miracle. Not just the insane ramblings of a woman hocked up on antihistamines trying to get through the school holidays with grace and dignity and all three children still containing their limbs and breathing abilities, but the real McCoy, walking on water, parting the sea, turning water to wine kind of deal.

Unfortunately the miracle that occured did not contain a long lost Daddy Wharbucks, or the floor of my sons bedroom becoming visible; nor did my ass suddenly regain it’s former glory and lift itself from banging against the backs of my knees; but a girl has her right to a fantasy or two…..

What did happen was this.

A few months ago, I got WiFi broadband. It lasted two days. Whilst I could connect to the internet, I couldn’t actually DO anything on it. I couldn’t log into my account, I couldn’t even log into ebay. So I pulled it all apart and sent it back to telstra with a big thanks but no thanks.

A month later, I recieved a bill. For $470. (The modem and the early termination of contract fee.) I couldn’t believe it. Not only had I sent the modem back, I had the service for two days! I was outraged. Especially considering that I only signed up because the guy flogging bigpond to me specifically said I had ten days in which I could peruse and then terminate should I choose. Of course there is a lesson in there on not taking anything at face value and actually reading the TOS. (Red face moment there, I should know better)

To cut a long story and several tirades short, I recieved an outstanding notice today. Because I had paid the phone and mobile bills, but not the bigpond bill (I was contesting, I sent the modem back, there was no way I was paying for it and I figured I had no choice with the ETF, but the ETF wasn’t due until tomorrow anyway.) there was an outstanding debt. It didn’t state it was a bigpond issue, it was just an amount. So I called Telstra. Because aside from the bigpond charges, my bills were up to date. I have issues with bills, I cannot have overdue notices, they induce insomnia- so generally my bills are always paid either well before or on the date they are due.

It must have been my lucky day because I got Kelly. Kelly was wonderful. She went through the last three bills with me, item by item and amazingly took my anal retention in her stride. She managed to do the unthinkable. She reduced a $710 bill to a mere $236!! She tracked down the modem I had sent back, she even had my ETF taken care of. In short, Kelly restored my faith in Telstra. Big corporations are generally machines, with no ethics or thought of the people who pay for their services, their sole obssession profit margins and top dollar for shareholders. Finally, some common sense prevailed. Someone actually decided that charging a woman $330 for terminating a service she had for two days was ridiculous.

See, bona fide miracle. Thank you Kelly. Telstra is lucky to have you.

Absent note

Dear Intrawebs,

Please excuse my absence and lack of posting of late, it’s not that I am not online, it’s that my body is not coping well with allergies right now, so forming coherant and reasonably intelligent sentences has proven a bit of a challenge.

Couple that with the innate fear of not being clear(at least as clear as I get)….and you have an absent blogger.

Sincerely,

Pirra.

not here….currently having a life. (for now)

I have been distracted of late, by motherhood. If you read the entry on my son’s parent-teacher conference, you’d know my poor boy is a little on the stinky side.  So we are conducting an experiment. Given that I am lactose intolerant, and our oldest child was slightly lactose intolerant when she was younger…she doesn’t really eat dairy foods so I am not suer if she has grown out of it, it simply doesn’t eat enough of it to make a blip on the radar these days…..I figure, let’s try cutting out dairy.

I am amazed by how much dairy we actually consume. But the boy has gotten to like milk and cheese products from goat and sheep rather quickly. (He despises soy with a passion and frankly I don’t blame him)

So I came up with a dairy free quiche tonight just for my boy. (The husband wasn’t home so it was safe to cook one….cause real men don’t eat quiche so the boys will actually eat it if Dad isn’t home)

Instead of using cream I mashed up a slab of feta made form goat’s milk and added some goats milk to the mashed up feta to give it the consistency of cream. Threw in some eggs, some sundried tomatoes and some of those herb sachets since my garden is too new to harvest yet and the local supermarket herbs look like the lettuce you find all runny in the bottom of your brother’s fridge. Guess what? There’s freakin milk in the herbs!  All I can do was shrug and let him eat it anyway….he’s intolerant not allergic, it on’t kill him, it’ll just make him smelly and uncomfortable.   Which made me think about all those poor parents who do have to contend with allergies. 

Most primary schools and daycare centres these days are peanut free. Long gone are the days when you can bake 24 cupcakes for your kids birthday and send them in to school, now you need to consider the kids with allergies and send them in with an ingredient list.  And as huge a pain in the ass it is that I can’t let my kid have his favourite sandwich of peanut butter and honey at school, I would much rather listen to him whine about it than be the cause of a kid going into anaphalactic shock.

Which is why I now have to march my youngest off to the doctor to get his immunisations up to date. With there being two kids with Luekemia at the school, things like chicken pox can be fatal.

So this is why I am not here at present. I have been busy and writing and reading and have relatives arriving next week for a week. And as much as I love my in-laws, I need to brace myself as we come from two very different worlds.

when what you wanted turns out to be shit

Two carboard boxes sit patiently in my study waiting for me to take them back to where they came from. In short, I am extremely unhappy. Sad even.

It all started many many moons ago. Back when I only had two children (and a smaller backside).  My son was born with a rare abnormality. I needed to know more. So I begged and pleaded and I was allowed to get the internet.  (This is 1999) We got bigpond. BIG mistake. We lived on the outskirts of a major city. But our internet connection, was dodgy at best, non-existant any other time. So we cancelled it. Around 2002, we thought we’d try again. This time we went with AOL and have been happy dial-up customers since.  but I want broadband.

Greedy little goat aren’t I?  Finally after years of pleading, cajoling, pouting, making promises  not fit for a PG13 veiwing and just generally being a pain in my husbands arse, he gave me the all clear to get broadband.

My little box arrived and I unwrapped it with glee. OMG wires much? It was horrible. I use the laptop at the kitchen bench because it’s the only phone outlet, I could not have a broadband modem and fifty freaking wires littering my tiny kitchen bench. So I requested WiFi. The box arrived two days ago, I was so giddy.

I set it all up and went to log into My Bigpond. A big fat nothing happened! I rang, and after talking to Craig for an hour (who has the hots for his boss) he decided there must be something wrong with my laptop.  I should also state that whilst I could get on the net and browse and that I could log into this here blog, I couldn’t post anything. I could read blogs, and read my own, but I couldn’t use any active features. And this seemed to be true every where.

So I jammed the wireless thingy in the PC, (which has no access to a phone line which is why we wanted wireless broadband in the first place) and the same thing happened on it, which made me question Craig’s theory of my Laptop being on the fritz.)

So i rang bigpond yet again, spent half an hour talking to Michael and he told me others were having problems logging into my bigpond but no one had complained of not being able to access other components of other sites.

So this morning I did a little experiment, my dial up connection works fine. Bigpond has just lost a customer. And I am probably never going to convince myhusband to get an updated version of internet access until dial up becomes defunct.

*sigh*

sometimes, the internet sucks.