End of the Holidays

Audible sigh

I appreciate the school holidays, I really do.

I love the idea that all of our wonderful ākonga are roaming the streets without a care in the world, while I sit here on the final Sunday fair panicking at the amount of work I never got done, the fact the house is still a tip site, and all the projects I wanted to get on with have sat inert.

I signed up for two courses, neither of which I attended. One is a programming course, and the other a two-week course through John Hopkins on nature poetry. The geezer who runs that course is really nice looking and I still didn’t turn up for the perfectly-timed Zooms on Friday mornings.

And I ask you, who actually has time for any of this? Who has time to live or do stuff?

So I ended up doing what any sensible human would do and drank more wine than I should have and researched the history of Hall & Oates.

Today I have literally found the lunchboxes from last term shoved in the bags that are now permeated with the smell of “old mandarin”. You know that smell, I know you do.

Old Mandarin should be bottled so people like me can just get it out at the end of every school holiday and spray it over the entire house and myself and be done with it.

Meanwhile as I sit here procrastinating, I also realise that I just spent every single glorious day with all of my kids and although we did very little, I learned some new things about them.

My youngest wants to start going to church which is really going to shred (not the exercise kind, the paper shredder kind) my Sundays, but what if it turns out ok? I stopped going at age 16 pretty much, maybe organised religion has changed? After all the Archbish of C is called “Justin”.

Word to your mother

My middle child didn’t leave the house until today. He just couldn’t be arsed.

It was today he decided to socialise. The other days I cooked him poached eggs on toast and talked about external hard drives (?), and the world of submersibles and billionaires, mainly dead.

My eldest turned 15 and broke up with her Holden-driving boyfriend. I blame her for sending me the Out of Touch song that reminded me about the rise of Hall & Oates. The troll runs deep in this one.

Anyway, Mānawatia a Matariki.

It really was a day to make yours, however that shaped up. I loved that hardly any of the main commercial drivers of this public holiday really bit. Even Countdown couldn’t work it out. They just didn’t know how to monetise it, so they put out some camp chairs and hoped for the best.

I know my 3am thoughts will be very mixed tonight.

Let’s think of each other at the 3am Terror Thought Rally and realise we are all still 4 1/2 years old in big adult bodies.