Monthly Archives: March 2006

The seemingly endless flow of Delta Goodrem fans who seem intent on telling me how evil I am, to…

(drum roll)

Congratulate Pete & Wendy, who had their first bub at 2:51 today.

Great news guys. Now comes the really fun part.

There’s big news afoot, but I’m too brain frazzled to write in detail about it right now. Expect an update to Third Time Round shortly.

Instead, I’m going to complain. Bloody Delta Goodrem tried (but failed) to steal my 2 year old son’s shoes…

Well, not exactly steal. Still. I need to vent somehow. Having dealt with last night’s dramatics (that’s the stuff I still have to mentally process and then I’ll write about it in the proper context), I headed out today to the Macquarie Shopping Centre to buy James some shoes — specifically there because it’s the nearest Big W, and they tend to have a decent range of cheapish kids shoes. Cheap kids shoes are a must, partly for wear and tear reasons, but mostly because they grow out of them so very quickly.

Unfortunately for me, I scheduled this visit to Big W right when Delta — Wikipedia tells me she’s “Australia’s sweetheart” — was doing an instore appearance. Now, she’s an ex-TV star and local pop celebrity. So, where do you think they put her to do her signing — or singing — or perhaps disembowelling budgies live on stage, for all I really care?

If you picked A) In the music department, you’d be wrong.
If you picked B) In the TV department, you’d be wrong.
If you even picked C) In the DVD department, near her DVDs, you’d still be wrong.

No, the correct answer is D) In the toddler shoes department. In the boy’s toddler shoes department. It all makes so much sense, doesn’t it? Well, except that her entire fanbase at the store appeared to all be about 12 years old, dazzlingly pink and resolutely female. Perhaps Delta’s got a secret (and rather disgusting) fetish that has previously been kept under tight PR control..

So, instead of a careful and considered trawl through teeny-tiny sneakers, I instead found myself surrounded by this teeming, swarming and glowing pink mass, alternately screaming and chanting DELTA-DELTA-DELTA like a bunch of badly programmed terminators. With two kids to control. And no space to move. And very little in the way of breathable air. Did I mention the badly tuned and positioned speakers blasting out “Out Of The Blue” in an insanely repetitive loop?

It was then that my stupidly stubborn gene — a Kidman specialty — kicked in, and I decided, come what may, that Delta Bloody Goodrem wasn’t going to stop my boy from having new shoes. So, despite the screaming — which was so loud that my daughter curled up into a ball and hid at the back of our stroller — and despite the hordes of shrill tweenage skanks — I gritted my teeth, tried to block my ears and tried shoes until I found the right pair. My resolve didn’t quite last to trying to find a matching pair of socks, though.

Bloody Delta Goodrem… I even got ignored by Rah and Magic Dan on the drive out when they nearly crunched into me in the Rah-mobile on the way out of the parking lot. From now on, I’ll be blaming everything on either Cashews or Delta Goodrem. Maybe both.

Something new today, with my musings on becoming a father for the third time getting a page all of their own. With pictures. Of babies. That you haven’t seen before (unless you’re my wife, who’s rather more familiar with what an ultrasound of her innards looks like than I suspect she’d like to be).

There’s also a link on the right hand column; this should update on a semi-regular basis. We shall see.

And I’ve already had two of my three.

#1: Stop breathing for a period of time; don’t sleep thereafter (see previous entries for more details)

#2: This morning, the bookcase/shelf in the laundry collapsed. Much broken glass, bits of bent metal, dented tins of catfood and a massive, rotting shelf that i had to lug out of the laundry somehow. Except that it’s already full of the stuff that was up on the deck, so it’s twice as hard. My back and shoulders currently feel like they’re going to beat my lungs to collapsing.

At this rate, bad luck #3 is going to involve falling elephants…

(Well, to be strictly accurate, it was yesterday. But that’s not what Elton John sang, and I can’t find any song references to cashews)

Yesterday didn’t exactly go as planned — well, at least for half of it. Off to Church on Sunday morning (as is our normal habit), and as part of the sermon, our minster handed out cashews (don’t ask, and if you want to berate me for attending a church service, you’re seriously at the wrong blog). I’ve never had a problem with cashews, so I chomped away merrily.

The service ended, and we headed in to do some light shopping, including some new sneakers for me, as my existing ones (which were IT-vendor-branded anyway) were covered in tiling cement. As we drew into the carpark, my windpipe decided to draw closed — very suddenly indeed. Imagine, if you will, your entire throat throbbing and swelling up to twice its normal size, while your windpipe within suddenly contracts to the size of the straw that comes with Juice poppers.

All within about five seconds.

I managed to gasp out to Di that I couldnt’ breathe, and she rushed me to hospital. I had visions of waiting and gasping in the emergency ward, but to their credit I only had to croak out that I couldn’t breathe and the hospital staff had me on a bed, canula in arm being pumped full of steroids, while the other was hooked up to blood pressure, oxygen saturation and heartbeat monitors. Uncomfortable isn’t the word, but it sure beats being dead.

The drugs they had me on made me massively drowsy, but this was seriously annoying, as the beds in emergency were clearly built for Dorothy’s Munchkins — lying flat on my back, which I had to, due to the sensors and tubes sticking out of me, there was no way to actually sleep.

Six hours later I hadn’t relapsed, so they let me go home, where I collapsed into a torpor in bed, pretty much for the whole night. So much for getting lots of work done on Sunday, and so much for things like cashews, peanut butter, gleefully ignoring “may contain traces of nuts” labels on product packaging and even Chili sauce! (those who want more reading on the topic can look here)

Right. Now to deal with Monday. Hopefully it’ll be a bit quieter.