There’s Something Wrong with this Picture…

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I’m hurting so bad. I went to the gym this morning (week 2) and nearly killed myself.  The fan above the area I was slaving in was the only one not going in the whole place. And it would have to be one of the hottest days we’ve had this summer. There’s a woman at the gym who is trying to murder me. What’s more, I’m paying her to do it. There’s something wrong with this picture.

The trouble is, there isn’t enough room on the floor of my tiny home for a gnome to do a sit-up, and I’m definitely not going to go outside and torture my body in the blazing hot sun, so I don’t really have much choice in the matter. At least at the gym there are other people who resemble sweaty, puffing podge-pots, so I’m in good company there. Except for the instructors who look trim, fit, and never break out in a bead of decent, honest sweat. I hate them. Continue reading →

8. Smudge – The Tree Bear Stunt Cat!

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Spot the tree bear.

Spot the tree bear.

Servants POV:

We woke up one morning and couldn’t find Smudge anywhere. Grey hairs were almost instantly developed while running around calling her for ages and worrying ourselves silly that she was okay. Then ‘other servant’ called to my attention a creature sitting very high up in one of the tallest trees in the neighborhood. Sometime during the night, Smudge had decided that she should be a tree bear. By the time we found her though, she looked like she’d had enough of being an arboreal-type animal and wanted to come down. Read it HERE Continue reading →

Tiny House Living – Life Without a Television. The Ice – It comes!!

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P1040449 72A lot of people gasp with shock when I tell them we have no t.v.

“Did you see blah blah blah last night…?”

“Nope. Haven’t got a television.”

“What??!!”

I do caregiving for a living, so I stay for two days and two nights in a house each week. But even then I’m still not tempted to stare at the goggle-box. Unless there’s a good documentary on, or Bones – about the only drama I like to see regularly, because her autistic-type personality has a train-smash sort of fascination to it, and the other characters make me laugh. The other exception being America’s Next Top Model, but that’s because I like watching the photo shoots that they come up with. In between the shoots (when they’re bitching at each other about who should be doing the dishes or what a cow so-and-so is) I usually wander off and hand out meds or empty catheter bags or something else so much more fascinating.

It’s no hardship though, having no t.v. We do have the internet, after all, which can keep us amused for hours. Any question you can possibly come up with, Google will find an answer to it somewhere. Which is how I know that steam rollers don’t roll steam… Continue reading →

Factoids: Catnip – The Drug of Choice for SOME Felines

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Otis Friday. I was on her staff for 16 wonderful years. Beautifully-natured, but still happy to take a swipe at me from behind the shower curtain.

Otis Friday. I was on her staff for 16 wonderful years. Beautifully-natured, but still happy to take a swipe at me from behind the shower curtain.

When I was growing up, we always had two cats in the house, so I quite like having them around. They’re funny little critters – total mercenaries one minute then all furry and purry the next. They’ll never deign to fetch a ball for you, yet they’ll play “I want to be on that side of the door, no – that side, no – that side…” with the patience of an ancient Mah Jong player. They’ll lay on their backs all innocent-like and invite you to scratch their soft, warm stomach fur then suddenly change their minds and gouge holes in your birthday suit. It’s an ongoing mystery as to why we put up with their mercurial little souls, but once you’ve been a staff member of a cat-keeping household, you’ll always look at them with a certain amount of fascination. Continue reading →

Things That Rustle in the Night – or – No Nasties in New Zealand

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No words really...

No words really…

Much as I enjoy wandering around the fascinating tropical areas of Asia, there are times when I’m pretty glad I live in New Zealand. As I sit here right now (about midnight), in my awning outside my tiny house caravan, I can hear loud rustling outside amongst the dry leaves – the rustlings of a nocturnal creature of some sort. I am remaining fairly calm about this, because I know the odds are it’s just Russell, the avocado-eating prickle-critter. Russell won’t eat me. He just eats snails, slugs, cat biscuits (stolen ones taste best) and avocados. I think that’s why he lives around my tiny house – it’s situated under a plum tree and an avocado tree, and lately it’s been raining avos down so hard that it pays to wear a helmet outside. A veritable feasting ground for a prickle-critter.

Russell the prickle-critter, saving me from nasty vicious avocados.

Russell the prickle-critter, saving me from nasty vicious avocados.

Continue reading →

Lizard Queen of Navarac – (Contains Lizards).

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Tiny house living has its idiosyncracys. Such as being stuck inside a small space during very bad weather. A couple of winters back I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing this while it rained for two weeks solid. After several days I got to wondering if I should tie 44 gallon drums around the outside of my wee home, while nursing visions of it lifting from the ground and gently drifting out to sea.

A bottle of wine or two combined with over a week of solitude, and three nights later, I had written a poem/saga encompassing the visions that flashed through my head. It contains lizards because I’m great fan of them and somehow a collection of lizards ornaments and doodads has grown around me over the years. Funny what happens in a 17ft-long tiny house when the rain and the wine do flow…

Never had the lizards seen a sighting like the Lizard Queen, leading from the towbar thus...

Never had the lizards seen a sighting like the Lizard Queen, leading from the towbar thus…

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23thorns – In Answer to Your Questions on Tiny House Living

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There’s a great blog on the WordPress site written by a guy called 23thorns, full of witty descriptions on South African wildlife, parenting ups and downs, and all manner of other ravings. I had a nosy at his blog, he popped into mine and read one of my ravings on Tiny House Living, and he wrote a post of his own that posed a few questions about the lifestyle to which I am largely now accustomed.

The answer to why I went (back) into Tiny House Living is in my blog here

My point of view about some of the Pros and Cons of Tiny House Living is here

And the raving that 23thorns read about Tiny House Living is here

And now to his questions. Continue reading →

In Which I Give Mother Nature erm, a Certain Gesture, on a Cold, Rainy Night.

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There’s a lot to be said for having an awning off the side of your caravan on a cold, rainy night. While sitting here with a hot water bottle stuffed up my clothing, somewhere between my merino undershirt, my lambswool jersey (purchased from a menswear department because menswear departments for some reason unknown often have better quality garments for lesser prices than their womenswear equivalents), and my very thick sweatshirt (also purchased from a menswear department for the aforementioned reasons), I have pondered upon this fact mightily.

A few weeks ago I pulled out all the coins and notes I had been stashing aside for a very long time and forked out for a new awning to be tailor-made to my requirements. It’s not that I didn’t like the original awning that came with the caravan, it’s just that I was running out of places to put duct tape to plug up the holes where the wind whistled beautiful melodies into my private spaces, and the water feature was quite frankly getting out of hand. Far be it from me to complain, but when the bits of duct tape begin to outnumber the bits of awning, a girl just has to get practical.

Continue reading →