Operation Fitness Boost

Once again, we’ve faced defeat in our latest effort against the rebellion. My comrade, Cataria, seems particularly upset by this setback. She’s always been the fiercer and more focused of the two of us, and such failures weigh heavily on her. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that she needs some sort of diversion to take her mind off these stinging defeats.

Hence, I initiated “Operation Fitness Boost.” I began by looking for a reputed supplier to get our gear. My choice fell upon a well-known Australian company, renowned far and wide for their excellent and durable products. I browsed through their extensive collection and finally ordered a range of home gym equipment. 

I was impressed by the variety of tools they had, catering to all sorts of physical training and disciplines. Their commitment to quality and diversity was the reason they were known for offering the best sports equipment for sale in Australia. All these factors made them the right choice to source our training needs.

When the equipment arrived, Cataria was initially perplexed. However, she agreed to give it a try after a little persuasion. Dumbbells, kettlebells, skipping ropes – we used them all, transforming our humble living quarters into a makeshift gym. We lunged, we squatted, we did burpees until we were both panting and out of breath.

Unfortunately, this new approach didn’t yield the result I had hoped for. Instead of releasing her frustration, the intense physical exertion only seemed to remind Cataria of our recent loss. The grim determination on her face while lifting weights was the same one she wore on the battlefield.

After observing Cataria’s response to our workout session, I’ve decided that a new strategy is in order. Maybe physical exercise was too reminiscent of our combat training. Perhaps a more leisurely, yet engaging activity might work better to distract Cataria. As I sign off this entry, I promise myself that I will come up with a more effective plan. After all, even the fiercest warriors need a break from the battlefield. Operation Fitness Boost, while a worthwhile experiment, is officially concluded.

The next plan is already taking shape in my mind. Until my next entry, Scorpula.

Bathtubs and Biscuits

‘Are you sure about this, Ma?’ Stewie asked his mother as she laid out a plate of biscuits on the table.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said, lowering herself into the seat opposite him with a grimace. ‘How’s Tina and the girls?’

‘Yeah, they’re great, Ma,’ Stewie said quickly, frowning at the piece of paper in front of him. ‘But we still gotta talk about this.’

‘What’s to talk about?’ she threw her hands up. ‘Have a biscuit, you’re looking thin.’

‘I’m not—stop trying to change the subject!’ he frowned. ‘I’m worried that you haven’t considered the price of getting a bathtub modification for seniors. In Sydney, too!’

‘What’s Sydney got to do with it?’ she asked, reaching over and putting a biscuit on a plate for him.

‘Don’t things get more expensive closer to the city?’

‘Where there’s more businesses competing in the market, applying a downward pressure to the consumer market?’ she frowned. ‘Is Tina not feeding you?’

‘I do the cooking, actually,’ Stewie said, gruffly. ‘And when did you get a fancy-pants economics degree?’

‘I have the internet,’ she shrugged. ‘And I got sick of losing at online poker.’

‘So you… wait, do you legit have an economics degree, Ma?’

‘No, stupid,’ she scolded him, nabbing a biscuit off the plate. ‘It’s a diploma. Easy stuff.’

He stared at her, shocked, mouth open, then quickly closed it once he saw her eyeing off a biscuit to shove in his maw.

‘Anyway,’ she said, dusting her hands of crumbs and leaning backwards. ‘Point is, I know they’re very affordable bath modifications, and they’ll help your poor, abandoned mother out a lot.’

‘You’re not abandoned, Ma,’ Stewie rolled his eyes. ‘Your kids just moved out. Hell, Stevie is four doors down!’

‘And yet nobody ever visits,’ she shook her head. ‘Except to tell me how to spend my money.’

Stewie took in a deep breath through his nose.

‘Great biscuits, Ma,’ he eventually sighed, taking another one off the plate.

‘I know,’ she grinned.

Desperately Need A Shower

I shower every morning without fail. If I don’t shower very first thing in the morning, I’m tired for the rest of the day. I need my morning shower to wake me up and ease me into the day. I need that feeling of warmth on a cold morning and I need to get my face under the water to help fix my eyes which always feel small, heavy and dry when I wake up. If I don’t shower, my eyes feel like this for the rest of the day and I’m never able to actually wake up properly. It’s really hard for me to function on the rare occasion that I can’t shower.

So, this morning, you can imagine my dismay when my shower started leaking. It was leaking so badly that it seemed like two showers coming out of the one shower head. I knew that I had to turn the shower off or I’d make it worse and that meant that I didn’t get to shower. Instead, I just had to splash my face with lukewarm water and call a leaking shower repair company and beg them to come to fix my shower as soon as possible. They can come the day after tomorrow, which is going to make tomorrow an absolute nightmare.

How am I going to cope not having a shower for two mornings in a row? Aside from the fact that I do hard labour for work (which means I smell by the end of the day), I REALLY need my morning shower to be able to function properly. See? I’m unnecessarily repeating myself and that’s because I haven’t had my shower for the day! I’m going to be so inefficient at work today and even worse tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just call in sick.

I really hope that the bathroom renovation company located near Melbourne that I’ve hired for Wednesday has a cancellation tomorrow and can come sooner. I need my shower tomorrow morning. If I don’t get it, lord help me.

Turn On The Cooling

I feel like a lot of young adults still living at home would relate to what I’m about to say: it gets to a point in life where dealing with your parents’ weird quirks just gets to be too much. I first noticed this feeling when I turned twenty and my parents would do little things that would really grind my gears. These were things that they had always done, but as I was growing more independent and cultivating my own opinions, I realised how much these quirks annoyed me.

The quirk that annoyed me the most was my parents’ weird obsession with not having the air conditioner on. If it’s thirty five degrees outside, I seriously do not understand what the issue is with turning on the central air con. Servicing close to Highett is a breeze thanks to local skilled trades being readily available every day of the week. It can be a hot summer but that doesn’t mean we have to be hot ourselves! I put up with this for three more years before I simply couldn’t take it anymore and moved out. It wasn’t a reflection of my relationship with my parents, it was just that I had formulated my own opinions and needs and they didn’t align with the practices put in place in my home. 

When I moved out with housemates, the first thing I did was check that our views aligned regarding what an appropriate temperature to turn the cooling on was. This was very important to me, seeing as it was one of the reasons I moved out of my very comfortable and superior childhood home in the first place. Thankfully, the apartment we moved into had just had it’s regularly scheduled air conditioning repairs. Malvern locals of my age group apparently don’t have any issues turning the cooling on like my parents do, so it was an absolute blessing to have the chill blasting all summer and have no one tell me to turn it off. 

Moving out was a fantastic decision because I was ready to do so. I visit my parents every week and the house is always too warm, but it will always feel like home.

Please No Test

I’ve never liked going to the optometrist or the dentist. As a kid, I had a bad experience with a healthcare professional getting too close to my face and it really scared me at the time. Now I’m an adult and I’m still struggling with going to any sort of health appointment that involves getting close to my face. I don’t even really remember what happened when I was a kid but it was traumatic and that trauma has followed me well into adulthood. 

Now that you’ve got this background, I’m sure you can understand my stress when I went to the doctor and he told me that I needed to go to the local optometrist. Bayside doctors take their level of care very seriously and when my doctor noticed that my eyesight was potentially not up to scratch, he told me to book an appointment at the optometrist immediately. Apparently, I might need glasses. This is a nightmare.

I haven’t been to the optometrist in over twenty years. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to cope sitting in that optometrist chair and having the optometrist’s hands come slowly towards my face. I feel a bit sick about it. Am I going to have to get an eye test? In the Bentleigh area, there really isn’t much need to have really good eyesight. Surely I don’t actually have to have an eye test. I can get around with sub-par vision just fine.

Unfortunately, my doctor didn’t give me a choice. He told me that I can’t come back to his doctor’s surgery until I’ve had my eyes looked at by a professional. I guess I could find another doctor but I’ve also been visiting this doctor for several years now, so he knows my medical history really well. 

It should be interesting to see how this plays out. Will I get the eye test or will I find a new doctor? Only time will tell.

Botany Expert Designs

I am a botanist who lives in Australia. I love my job. It’s what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a young girl, as I’ve always been a bit obsessed with plants. A bit too obsessed, my friends would always say. But who’s laughing now? They’re all jealous of how cool my career is. I get to be surrounded by beautiful plants all day, every day, and spend most of my work day out in nature. Who wouldn’t want that? In fact, I love it so much that I am planning to bring it home.

That’s right, I’m redecorating my house and filling those blank, empty walls, with a whole bunch of beautiful flower wallpaper designed in Melbourne. It’s going to look incredible. There are already a few small touches of my botanical flair in my interior design choices, such as my wooden coffee table, which has engravings of daisies and leaves all over it. Or, even in my bathroom, the knobs on the drawers underneath my sink are just golden carvings of flowers. But I’m really looking to take this a step further.

While most people would shy away from the idea, I actually want to become that crazy flower lady that everybody shakes their head at in the street. I want to smell of flowers everywhere I go. They’re just so beautiful. Why wouldn’t you want to surround yourself with them every single day? I am particularly interested in purchasing some Australian botanical plants wallpaper and sticking it up in my kitchen. I’m going to get the self-adhesive kind, which means it can be applied a lot faster and uses a much more simple process than the traditional type of wallpaper, which is so fiddly. I can’t wait. It’s going to be so much fun cooking Australian delicacies in my kitchen, only to look up and see all the Australian plants stuck up on my wall.

Can’t Help Mum

Why am I always so behind on these things? I feel like I’m catching up only to fall straight behind again an hour or so later. I don’t think I’m cut out for looking after my mum anymore and I’m feeling overwhelmed with the whole situation. I love my mum more than anything, obviously, but looking after her has taken up my entire life. I’m behind at work and I don’t know if I’ll hit the deadline that I’m supposed to. In fact, I’m still working on a project and tracking it to a client that I shouldn’t be because I’m behind and I’m trying to cover it up. That’s all because of my mum. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t stressed.

As sad as it makes me to say, I think I need to consider potentially putting my elderly mother in community nursing. In the Adelaide CBD, there are plenty of really well run facilities that would do a significantly better job at looking after my mother than I am currently doing. It would mean that she could get the care that she rightfully deserves and I could actually do my job in a way that I’m supposed to. That would be really important and good for us both, especially seeing as I’m almost half an hour behind on my work now which is going to be almost impossible to catch up on.

I think I’m going to give the local disability support worker a call on my lunch break and discuss the possibilities of community nursing/care. I don’t know how much it costs or whether my mother would be eligible for care, but seeing as I’m her sole carer and I can’t look after her properly anymore, I have a feeling that I will probably be able to get her into care sometime soon. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

A Minor Break-In

‘So what did they take?’ the detective asked, flicking open a very official-looking notebook with not enough pages left.

‘Uh…’ Suzanna glanced around her townhouse, trying to remember what it had looked like before the burglary. ‘I think there was a bust on that mantlepiece. And was there always a book missing from that shelf? Harold?’

Harold, comfortably reclining in his armchair, still in his slippers, didn’t look up from his newspaper.

‘That’s the one you’re currently reading, darling,’ he said, flicking the page.

‘Oh right, of course,’ she chewed her nails nervously.

‘It’s alright, ma’am,’ the detective said, sounding bored. ‘We can get the information from you later. Now, you say your phone line was cut?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Suzanna swept into the kitchen, picking up the phone so he could hear the flat tone. The detective smiled weakly.

‘I would have just believed you, ma’am.’

‘Ah, of course,’ she squeaked, clutching at her necklace.

‘I can give you the number of a telecommunications contractor in the Melbourne CBD,’ he said, hastily scribbling it down. ‘They can come out and do the necessary repairs.’

Suzanne accepted it with a gracious almost-bow, pressing the paper against her chest like it was a life raft.

‘Look, we deal with this sort of thing all the time,’ the policeman said, closing his notepad and tucking it into his jacket pocket. ‘A couple of young kids, out for a bit of a laugh, find a respectable-looking building and break-in. Only,’ he added with a smile, ‘they tend to wet themselves at the sound of breaking glass and leg it before they steal anything.’

‘Really?’ she asked, aghast.

‘I can put you in touch with a company that does commercial CCTV camera installation too, if you’d like? I’m sure they’d make an exception for you fine people, of course.’

‘Thank you, detective.’

He smiled and raised his hat in farewell.

 

Palace for Peace

Taking a deep breath, the queen steadied herself against the oaken door. She’d made a promise to herself, to never enter this particular room angry; it was her private, secret chambers, the one that Harold didn’t know about — her sanctuary. She loved her husband, but if he got involved in one more bathroom renovation…

She took another deep breath to counter the sudden spike in her blood pressure. It had been weeks since she’d found the time to relax by herself and she wasn’t going to let anything ruin it. 

With a gentle smile, she swung open the door.

‘Hi honey!’ Harold smiled at her, looking up from the block of timber he was sawing.

‘H-Harold?’ she stammered, physically unable to comprehend what was happening.

‘I didn’t think you knew about this place,’ he smiled at her. ‘I found it a few weeks ago when I was looking at the plans for the castle, and nobody could tell me what it was for!’

The queen’s mouth slowly opened as she glanced around the half-renovated room.

‘Now, I know how much you hate when I get in the renovation spirit,’ he chuckled, ‘so I’ve been coming here, getting that bath tub conversion urge out of my system.’

He fell quiet, beaming as his eyes wandered around the room.

‘I guess you could say it’s become a bit of a sanctuary.’

The queen’s eye twitched so hard she was surprised her eyelashes didn’t fall out.

‘Plus, I just got an amazing quote for a bathtub remodel cost near Sydney, I’ve been dying to tell you about it for ages!’ he laughed. ‘I’m so happy that you’re here and I don’t have to hide it from you anymore!’

His face dropped as he looked at her and finally noticed her expression.

‘What? What could I have possibly done now?’

The queen wanted to yell. She wanted to cry. She wanted to get furious — but she’d made herself a promise.

So instead… she very softly closed the door.

Eco-friendly Consumers

I am absolutely loving the trend of businesses trying to be more environmentally friendly and sustainable in order to get customers. I know they’re just trying to do it to make more money, but if it positively impacts the environment then literally, I don’t care what their motivation is. I’ve been really into protecting the environment for years now and have been trying to get so many people on board. It hasn’t been easy and I’m definitely not responsible for this latest trend towards solar energy and saving the planet, but I’m happy about it.

You know, I won’t actually shop or spend money at any big business that doesn’t have solar panels. For small business, I’m a little more lenient, but they have to show that they’re making some sort of positive impact on the environment for me to shop there. It just doesn’t make sense for me to support businesses that don’t value the things that I value. I’d so much rather pay a little more for products that support the environment than pay for dirt-cheap alternatives that aren’t made in any sort of eco-friendly way. And you know what? I’m not the only one! That’s why so many businesses have started noting how they are helping the planet and why. I really like businesses that highlight the commercial energy storage systems for Melbourne companies that they use. That way I know how eco-friendly their energy storage is. It’s super beneficial as an environmentally conscious consumer!

Anyway, I feel like you’ve definitely gotten the point. It’s pretty clear from this blog post that I love the environment more than anything. I guess you could also say that I love the eco-friendly business trend just as much, but that goes hand in hand really. I’m hoping that a business owner will read this, or someone will share this post with a business owner that they know and it will make a difference in the world.