Couldn’t have said it better myself

Living in Perth, you really have to wonder about some of the people here. Do they have a warped sense of humour, or are they just incredibly thick? I’m talking number plates, and some of stupid things people choose to have stuck on the front of their cars. I’ve already listed some of the more ‘interesting’ plates that I’ve seen before, but below are a couple that really stood out from the crowd.

The first car I saw in the shopping centre yesterday, when it drove into the car park at a speed only acceptable on the German Autobahn or a race track. Once the lives of passing shoppers had been suitably put at risk, the driver screeched into the disabled bay /taxi rank right in front of the entrance, climbed out of the car and lolloped inside.

I use the word lollop, because for all extent and purposes he had the definite whiff of Neanderthal about him – no shoes, skanky feet, clothes that even the homeless would turn down. His tattoos encircled every limb, his hair was matted and greasy enough to fry a dozen eggs and he had, what could only be described, as the remains of dead rat hanging down his back. Basically he looked like something you might see painted on a cave wall, with a club in one hand and a dead animal in the other.

As he disappeared off to buy whatever it is that modern-day cavemen buy, several words did immediately sprung to mind – but I needn’t have bothered forming my own opinion. With his carefully chosen number plate, he’d already gone to the trouble of describing himself. How thoughtful and spot on. Maybe he was more articulate than first thought.

I didn’t actually see the driver of the second car, but I’m guessing they share many of the same qualities as the first driver.

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In case you’re unfamiliar with the word ‘feral’, it’s one that seems to be widely used here to describe a certain sort of person. The following description is from  www.urbandictionary.com, and I couldn’t have put it better (or more colourfully) myself.

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An individual who usually lives in a housing trust neighbourhood who loves wearing flannel shirts, tight faded jeans, tracksuits (usually FUBU, EMINEM, etc branded). Usually has a pack of smokes tucked under the shoulder of their knitted jumper/wifebeater, and one behind the ear for ‘ron.

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Commonly spotted at shopping malls and fast food outlets and especially Centrelink which is their sole source of income with the exception of drug dealing/manufacture/growing/selling stolen goods. Known to swear a lot and are frequently found not wearing shoes, much like their offspring who are usually dirty looking with snot running from their noses.

“What the **** are you looking at ****?” said the feral female with no shoes with a major muffin top over her 4 sizes too small mini skirt and no bra.“Nothing” replied the man walking by and minding his business.

“Well do ya wanna root? If I have another kid I can start me own footy team and Centrelink will fund it!” Asks the feral skank who can be smelled from 20 metres away.

“No thanks. I’d rather have sex with a garden mulcher. It’s much safer than your diseased, stinky p****” Replies the man about to be robbed by the group of male ferals waiting for him around the corner.

So that said, would you seriously want this word on your car?!

When smelly children need surgery

Everyone has heard about those kids who stick something up their nose.

I’ve often thought what sort of idiot, albeit a pint sized one, does that? Images of a manky, sniveling little boy, with a crusted up, snot smeared face and unruly hair spring to mind. The sort of child who pulls wings of butterflies and feasts on worms and bugs. You know the type, they usually feature in the local paper, with a picture of the child proudly clutching the spanner set he somehow misplaced up his nasal cavity and his proud parents beaming away behind, quoted as saying “We wondered why all the magnets in the house kept sticking to his face.”

I also wondered what happened when this unfortunate event occurred. How did the child in question breath, when their nostrils were stuffed full of unidentifiable stuff? How did the parents not notice that little Jimmy had snorted his peas off his plate instead of eating them? And how on earth do they ever get the ‘foreign object’ back out again?

Last week I found out that I have one of ‘those’ children – oh what a proud parental moment that was. So off the back of that, I can now confirm the following. Yes, breathing is indeed restricted with something lodged up your nostril. It is easy to miss something different about your child, if it’s not visible to the eye. And believe it or not, it can take surgery.

The first clue that something was where it shouldn’t be was that my son smelt horrible, with a nasty whiff about his person that would come and go. The type of odour that simply refused to budge, even with much vigorous washing and twice daily teeth brushing. It’s hard to say exactly what the smell was even, somewhere between sour milk and a rotting vegetable perhaps. Fairly unpleasant in other words.

The pong went on for quite a while, until it escalated to such a point that my maternal alarm bells started clanging loudly in my ears. By this time I could no longer hug him on my lap without having to turn my head away to gasp for breath. Regardless of how much you love your child, no mother wants to sit and bury their nose into a compost heap every day.

Granted I do have a particularly sensitive nose, and could even detect a smoker walking 5 floors down and 500m away when pregnant, but this time it was more than me being fussy. So why wait till I was gagging you may ask? Well, apart from the whiff he was perfectly healthy. We checked him all over decaying flesh or rupturing boils, and like I said, he was washed and brushed regularly. Perhaps it was the fear of having a child diagnosed with halitosis that simply riddled me with fear.

So anyway, off to the doctor we went, where I told him that my son smelled horrible.

The doctor, as I expected, looked at me like I was something of a heartless cow when it came to my mothering care and concern. Then he looked into my sons mouth, and lo and behold spotted tonsils the size of walnuts. Or Brazil nuts. Or was it almonds. Anyway, regardless of the nut, apparently they were enormous and stopping all the air flowing down his throat. So the enlarged tonsils were blamed for the smell and I was referred to an ENT specialist to discuss having them removed.

A few weeks later we sat in front off the consultant. “He smells” I said, bracing myself for another raised eyebrow and resisting the urge to let out a “Mooo”, like the nasty Friesian that I am. The consultant looked at my son, turned him both ways and then informed me that he probably had something stuck up his nose. OK. Didn’t see that one coming. His nose certainly didn’t look any bigger than normal, and as far as I could remember, I hadn’t noticed him foraging around in the tool box and sniffing up a spanner. Perhaps it was a piece of Lego, or one of those wretched little Polly Pocket shoes I’m always telling my daughter to clear up.

Next stop for the doctor, the mouth, and his enormous tonsils were confirmed. They were then linked to his excessive sweating, loud snoring and irregular breathing at night, the long periods of time he spends awake and chatting in the early hours of the morning and his inability to shift a cold or cough. Well that cleared up all of those annoying habit’s then. I was told they needed to be whipped out ASAP, and as luck would have it, he had a slot to do it in a weeks time.

Marvelous, that would be the same day my husband was flying to Sydney for a week. Multitasking is one thing, but multitasking with a sick child alone is a whole other ballgame. By this stage, heartless cow was now looking more dazed and confused cow.

The night before surgery arrived, and with the bags all packed and ready for hospital, I promptly threw up. And then again. By 9am the next morning my husband had turned a rather sludgy shade of green. By 9.30 my daughter had been sent home from school. Or rather brought home, there was no way I was trotting into the school office to collect her dressed in my pyjamas.

I think it would be fair to say that so far ‘Operation Tonsil’ was not going to plan. With all of us (except the patient-to-be) now rolling around clutching buckets, the surgery was postponed for a further week. My son carried on watching Thomas, completely oblivious to the lucky escape he had just had.

A week later and into hospital we all went, lugging three enormous bags of essential items with us, only one of which was half unpacked. The other two sat in the corner completely untouched. My little boy was taken away by scalpel welding men in blue coats, and two nail biting parents sat in his dismal little room and watched the minutes tick by. Time does indeed go by much slower when you’re waiting for your precious offspring to survive.

On the way to be with him in the recovery ward I heard him long before I could see him. Weighing in at only 14kg, and just minutes out of a general anesthetic, I rounded the corner to find two nurses unsuccessfully trying to pin my little boy down onto the bed. Like a child possessed, he screamed blue murder and understandably thrashed around as he tried to figure out where he was and why he felt so odd. I have to say his show of strength was pretty impressive for his size, however it meant that he somehow managed to pull the tube out of his hand, and as I laid down with him to try and calm him down, he nearly catapulted me off the bed.

That night in hospital went as well as could be expected, considering the small and depressing room, the one colour suits all food and the rails of the bed that fitted in just perfectly between each of the vertebra down my spine.

For some unknown reason, all of the nurses also saw fit to raise their voices by several decibels as they barged into the room to check his stats, every 15 minutes throughout the night. To make continuous sleep even harder, each time they left they failed to close the door properly behind them. This left me with little choice but to climb over the rails of a ridiculously high bed, close the door myself and then climb back up and over and in again – in the dark. And all without waking the small restless child sprawled across the majority of a very small bed.

Did I mention this was a private hospital? No, I wouldn’t have guessed it either, if I hadn’t spotted the price list on the way in.

So now we’re home and I’m sitting with my little ticking time bomb of pain. Apparently he’s going to get a whole lot worse before he gets better, and he runs the risk of bleeding if he doesn’t eat toast everyday. Toast? I can’t even bribe him to open his mouth for ice cream right now. As far as he knows, his throat has just been attacked with a cheese grater.

This week is all about keeping him medicated up to the eye balls and preventing the dog from bouncing all over him on the sofa. It would be so much easier if he could understand why a day out ended in all this pain, but bless him, he doesn’t have a clue. Instead his sad little face looks up at me and I can just tell he’s thinking “What the hell did you let them do to me, you cruel and heartless cow?”

Oh, I almost forgot. The smell. That, I’m pleased to say, is gone. The ‘foreign object’ is still just that, as we have no idea as to what it might be. Let’s just say that if you blew your nose and that shot out onto the tissue you’d be somewhat alarmed, and probably feeling more than a little bit sick.

It’s sitting on the dresser right now, entombed in a plastic tub. I’m not exaclty sure why I’m keeping it, maybe so when he’s older I can whip it out and say “You may not have eaten worms and bugs as a child, but you did stick this up your nose. Happy 21st!”

Who’s afraid of the big bad spider

One of the things that I think most people worry about when coming to live here is whether they are going to come face to foot with an 8 legged killing machine the moment they set foot on Aussie soil.

First off, to determine whether you can actually handle living in a country with some of the world’s most deadly spiders, answer the following question.

If you answered B or C then you will do just fine. If you answered A, then you are without a shadow of a doubt a fully fledged arachnophobic, and would do best to give this country a wide berth.

So what is fact and what is over hyped fiction about Perth’s 8 legged lovelies and are they really as scary as their reputation suggests?

Fact. There are some species of spiders here that do have a deadly nip about them, some that can cause flesh to rot and some that could probably induce a heart attack if you should ever come face to face with one when climbing out of the shower.

Fiction. It is highly unlikely that you will often come into contact with such spiders and even less likely that you will be charged down by such a man eating monster, with fangs at the ready and a body the size of a small elephant, as you wander through the shopping malls and quiet streets of suburbia.

The most ‘infamous’ of all spiders here in WA is the ‘Red back‘, with a body no bigger than a 5p coin and its distinctive red stripe on the females back (the male is back all over). The bite can apparently be nasty, excruciating if the female in question happens to be pregnant. That can be understood and forgiven, pregnancy can bring out the worst in anything.

While they are deadly, these spiders seldom venture inside the house, preferring dark, damp places like sheds, garages or piles of logs. An antidote is available from pharmacies should you be bitten and more reassuringly still, there hasn’t been a death since 1953.

The other spider in question, and probably the one that worries me more is the ‘White-tail‘ , a small spider with a cigar-shaped body and a white tip. They have a very painful bite and their venom can literally rot away your flesh if not treated in time. Babies and old people are more at risk, but once again, an antidote is readily available and while they do sometimes venture indoors, they will not actively hunt you down to attack. Leave them alone and they won’t bother you.

If you are wondering “But how will I know if one has bitten me?”, then I think it can safely be said that you WILL know. The pain level is meant to be up there with childbirth (so a male doctor claimed). So I don’t think a bite would be something you would overlook until it’s too late and all of the meat on your leg left has fallen off the bone. If in doubt, take yourself off to the pharmacy/doctor/hospital and tell them something with 8 legs bit you.

The ‘Wolf‘ and the ‘Huntsman‘ spiders are not dangerous, except if you are prone to high blood pressure and panic attacks. The Huntsman in particular can grow up to the size of a small child’s hand. While I would certainly never want one around the house, they are in fact great for having about as they eat red backs and other annoying insects. Personally I think I would prefer to invest in some bug spray rather than have a house guest that is big and hairy enough to require it’s own set of towels and a face flannel.

A few years ago a Huntsman spider actually caused a pile up on the freeway in Perth. When a woman lowered her sun visor to block the sun in her eyes and had one fall out and land on her, she understandably freaked out, lost control of her car and crashed. – Note to self, must tap my visor several times before getting in the car.

So yes, these spiders that you have heard about are out there, but more often than not they are out of sight and out of mind. Unless you live out in the bush or in a more rural setting, you will rarely see anything that might cause you any grievous bodily harm. The same goes for the snakes.

It is actually the mere idea of these spiders that can be far more scarier than the reality.

When you first arrive you tell yourself that you will check under every toilet seat and sofa cushion and never put on a shoe without beating it half to death against a wall.

After a bit however you start to relax and eventually get to a stage where you merely study the web briefly (a red back’s web is very ‘messy’) before you hang out the washing next to it, shake your gardening gloves before putting them on and occasionally wash your hair with one eye open, should that watching spider suddenly take it upon itself to jump under the water with you and start loofahing down with your exfoliating shower gel.

Of course I know they are out there. That much is evident by the large number of webs that appear daily around our garden. One web out by our drive stretched out a good metre and a half between 2 trees. It looked just about strong enough to ensnare next door’s cat. Wishful thinking on my part, bloody thing mercilessly teases the dog, makes him bark and gives me a headache.

Now I know for a fact that this particular spider is fairly hefty in size, as it went through a stage of base jumping out of the tree every night and using my car wing mirror as a landing point. When returning home one night I caught the spider in the headlights ‘mid jump’ and was forced to crawl across the car and out of the passenger door to avoid a face to face meeting.

On the upside, these webs that drape my window and door frames like old fashioned net curtains, make brilliant fly and insect catchers. After spending a Spring in Perth I have quickly learned to make firm friends with any creature that includes ‘fly’ in it’s diet.

Just one more interesting spidery fact.

The most poisonous spider of all in WA is actually one that we have in our houses all the time, swinging from the coving and light fittings and never causing us a moments alarm. The ‘Daddy Long-Legs’ (similar to a UK version but with no wings) is, believe it or not, the most venomous of all. But with fangs too blunt to pierce through human skin it is rendered completely harmless.

Just as well really, otherwise I would have to make more of an effort with the dusting, something that I seldom ever find the time to do.

9 months in a nutshell

Whether it was planned like D Day, the aftermath of tequila or a weak moment with Barry White, the invasion of your eggs by an over zealous sperm will be a turning point in your life as you knew it. As the strains of ‘Jackpot!” can be heard echoing from the furthest reaches of your fallopian tube, your body will begin to metamorphosis into the very shape you have eaten next to nothing for years to avoid.

As the nausea takes hold and commands hot and cold running biscuits, the egg and your ankles will grow. Like a trucker after a hunger strike, you will eat. Wherever, whenever and whatever takes your fancy. As your skin stretches in protest and your backside inflates, you may struggle to squeeze into the shower cubicle. You will feel like you are hot housing a watermelon and that melon is playing pogo on your bladder.

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If you read this and think “oh no, not me“, then think again. This is the process, the side effects are not optional extras and unfortunately for the majority, blooming and glowing equates to bloating and over heating. And as for those urban myths about women who stay a size 8 till the delivery suite and don’t have a clue till the waters break. Only one word. How?

Then just when the end seems unreachable and you have resorted to cornering your petrified Daddy with a manic and desperate glint in your eye, nature eventually steps in and ups the ante. Much like a dodgy curry, (also eaten the previous night) what goes in must come out, and your bundle of joy will start making tracks to the birth canal.

Needless to say the exit is not quite on par with the entry, regardless of whether you decide to out do Mother Nature or pump yourself with the entire contents of the pharmaceutical cupboard. Every fibre of your being will simultaneously go into overload and meltdown, and you will, along with every other reproducing female in history declare the automatic ownership of the ovaries to be an unfair responsibility. Whale music will haunt you forever and your dignity will go out the same door that a group of eager young students have just filed in through, to watch and take notes.

Then, whether you are sliced and diced or squatting and pushing, what comes next will shock you to your hormonal core. That melon that you have carried and prodded and talked to for all these months finally materialises … as a baby.

You will now lay awake at night, worrying about the disappearing ozone, feel toe curling remorse for the terrible treatment of your own mother and a deep sympathy for those with triplets. Only now will you have an appreciation for uninterrupted sleep, tiny handbags and hipster jeans.

So there you are, one day an intelligent human being with a sense of togetherness, in command of your life and hairbrush and with shoes that match your bag. The next it will be all you can do to string two decipherable words together. You will act and react like a sleep deprived idiot, you will look like a Womble and the only thing in your wardrobe that will match will be the regurgitated breast milk on your baggy t-shirt and slippers.

And yes, all of this is absolutely normal.

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