Can I get a housekeeper for Christmas?

December 22, 2010

While most people are stressing about whether they’ve bought the right present, enough presents, or finished their shopping, my stress levels are about something entirely different. The state of my house.

Good friends of mine, the kind that hark all the way back to high school, are coming to stay with me over the Christmas period. I love to have people stay, so this is a welcome visit. It’s just that my house is pretty messy at the moment and they arrive in approximately 28 hours. And those 28 hours include at least 9 hours of work and with a bit of luck, at least 8 hours of sleep. So there will have to be a concentrated cleaning effort on Thursday morning.

I’m also quite nervous because I need to make sure that the place is TOTALLY spick and span. There isn’t allowed to be any missed insect on the carpet, no mountain of things that I’m planning on throwing out in some random room, no stray hair in the bath, and zero dust on all flat surfaces. The reason being that my friends are bringing their 7 1/2 month old baby with them.

I checked earlier in the week that he wasn’t crawling, because that would just add a whole other complexity to the stay. I’ve had nightmares of him crawling around the floor towards an interesting thing that has taken his eye, sitting up, looking around at us talking animatedly to each other and then extending a chubby baby hand toward the hairy rogue caterpillar invading my house.

You see my house does creepy crawlies exceedingly well. There are currently many hairy ‘soon to be moth’ caterpillars sneaking in under the front door, a bold fat mouse that isn’t shy of making his presence known, three slugs in the shower and bath, an army of small black ants on my desk, goodness knows how many spiders, huge starship sized mosquitos and a skink trying to make friends with my router cables.

I guess I should be thankful that the snakes are staying away.

Keeping the menagerie under control is my top priority for the duration of their stay. I need to protect the baby from them, keep him (and his parents) in a bubble of blissful ignorance about the entomologists paradise that is my house and the best way is with a clean and tidy place.

Tis the season for party dancing

December 20, 2010

There’s not much I love more than carving up the dancefloor at a party.

It could be a house party, private party or wedding, if there is good music, I will be taking my sharpest dance skills to carve up the floor.

I don’t know why, but it is so much more liberating to dance at a party. I always let way loose on the dancefloor, pulling out all the stops and contort my face and body like it’s an extreme sport.

Perhaps it has to do with more space on the dancefloor in which to show off the grooves that get the cheers, or maybe it’s just that you are among like minded people that you either know or or could potentially know. Either way, there just isn’t the same kind of posing as the dancefloor of a club, where everyone is trying to look better than the next person and where a sour face tries to scare off unwanted attention yet at the same time seem just hard enough to get to attract that hot guy over by the bar.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, I’ve been hitting the dancefloor in all manner of styles from  work parties with my best aggressive dancing to Pink’s “So What” to funky beats on a friend’s dining room floor.  

My feet may be hanging out for the festive season to finish, but the endorphins are having a ball.

See a snippet of dancefloor action here:

A secret new world

December 17, 2010

I’m moving to LA in February. All the way across the Pacific Ocean to the city, to another country.

But before getting to that point, I finished up my high flying, high paying marketing job and went to the Kimberley in remote north western Australia for a holiday and came home doing various bits and pieces to essentially bide my time.

One such random opportunity that presented itself was waitressing. I have never waitressed before. I somehow managed to get to my thirties without having worked at the hospitality coal-face. I have had plenty of experience on the other side of the plate but making the trips between kitchen and table was a whole other world. A whole other world of scary.

My foray into the world of carrying plates, taking orders and smiling sweetly to customers has come about because I want to overcome the fear I had, and I want to challenge myself.

The thing I notice most clearly are during those pre and post shift walks down the main restaurant strip to and from the restaurant. Here are all these others, people I’d never really noticed before, in their head to toe black uniforms. Suddenly I am catapaulted into a whole new world where flat shoes reign and aprons are standard attire. I am one of them, I am a waitress.

I don’t hold back the urge to smile and nod knowingly to these people in the street setting up or clearing away tables. These are the people who’ve seen it all. They’ve been run off their feet as they juggle plates, egos and customers. They scrape plates and set tables. And once they start a shift they don’t stop running.

So as I savour the time honoured hospitality tradition of a knock off drink, I feel like I’ve been initiated into a secret new world. Thank you for coming, I hope you enjoyed your evening.