Well it has taken ten days, but alas, today it has happened.  Winter has come.

It is a mere 22 degrees here today, with some windy type of wind that people are saying is a westerly, but I don’t believe them.  Wind this cold must come from Antarctica.  Or the Arctic.  I’m not that good at geography, but I’m almost certain neither of those are in the West.

Anyway, like I said, it is 22 and I am SHIVERING.  Even worse, it appears that there will be a low of SIXTEEN at some stage in the next 24 hours.  If my weather app is to be believed there will be a low of THIR-FRIGGING-TEEN by this Saturday.  I know, I know, how can human life-forms be expected to thrive, or in fact, Iive in conditions such as these?  Normally I can give you an ever so smug pic from my top deck of the sea, but today you get this:

It’s bloody windy

A quick snap through my filthy salt-encrusted window because IT IS TOO COLD TO GO OUT.  The 22 will give me a cold burn in seconds.  I know you’re used to me bringing you the very best in intrepid journalism, but I just can not.  Can you see the little blip in the photo?  That’s a dude setting up a kite or paraglider or something.  Idiot.

So I’m working my frozen little fingers to the bone in my proper job today, and still I’m not thawed.  Between patients I’m wrapping my hands around steaming mugs of tea with a lemon squeeze (I told you I was cold, I think I can feel something coming on..) whilst I click away, with two heaters blaring.

So strap yourselves in Regular Readers.  For those who know me, you will be aware that there will be much whinging and tantrum-like behaviour, well, actual tantrums in fact, over the drop in the mercury.  I haven’t blogged through a Winter yet, but I fear that it won’t be upbeat, and it won’t be fun.  For any of us.  So, if you are game, get ready for the wild ride that is Alison in Winterland.  Things could get ugly.

At least we can remember this: some “new research” has found that shivering for ten minutes can burn up as many calories as an hour of moderate exercise.  And who am I to scorn “new research”?  Please excuse me now, I’m headed outside with this Veuve.  And perhaps I’ll just add a little ice…

Do you like Winter?  What are your fave Winter Survival tips?

…From The Ashers xx

I’ve been mucking around with a bit o’fiction this week. Like this poor guy.  Ever felt like him? …From The Ashers xx

He remembered the days when his nightmares were not things of imagination.  When every night he fought with slippery, skittery things that lurked all day, carefully at the edge of his vision, and who came out once his guard was down, on the precipice of sleep.  He fought them every night and eluded them every day, just as he skirted around the edges of the playground, keeping out of notice of Johnno Barnes and his followers.

If he came into the thoughts of Johnno it wouldn’t end until there was either blood on the asphalt down by the monkey bars, or the yard-duty teacher was summoned by the circling chant of “fightfightfightfight.”

These days it felt like his body was permanently switched to ON, sympathetic nerve system ramped up on high alert, always ready, always ready.

These days he drank and smoked to fill the holes and turn down a mind that didn’t know how to get out of overdrive.  These days the nightmares were of different substance, Can I pay the mortgage, When will my wife leave me, Will I get prostate cancer and be up pissing all night without any chance of getting any joy out of this appendage?  Still slippery grey monsters, on the periphery of his view, but now with names: Job, Mortgage, Wife, Health, Kids.

So he treated them like he always treated the enemy- he refused to look them straight in the eye, in the silent hope that they wouldn’t notice him, as he slunk by in a haze of smoke and foggy alcohol fumes.  He evaded and evaded until eventually he fell, exhausted, into a fitful sleep, always careful not to let his leg stray from the bed, lest that thing beneath grasp his ankle and drag him down.

That monster under the bed.

So the bloggers from The Remarkables have been in town.  My town.

Initially,  I was all full of bravado and I told Nath that I was going to do some funny shit: stalk them (God knows they’re easy to stalk- they post something on one of the socials roughly every seven minutes), wearing a Woogsworld t-shirt that I once won, and carrying a teapot that warm-hearted BabyMac sent me when my mate died.  I planned to run up to them, possibly squealing, and get them to sign my memorabilia.  Nath was going to be the papps, and snap pictures that would be on this blog.  I know Styling You, so she would probably calm everyone down, and explain that I’m not completely mad, just mildly strange.

Except I didn’t do that at all.  I stayed home and thought about how funny it would have been, so now you have this blog with no pictures, just my sad, shy little heart.

You see, I’m a fan of the bloggers.  They are my One Direction.  Once, when normal chicks my age were fan-girling over Duran Duran or Prince, I was imagining meeting JRR Tolkien, or in my more lascivious moods, Judy Blume (Remember ‘Forever’? Hot stuff indeed).   As my reading tastes evolved, so did my crushes.  To Stephen King, Nick Earls, John Birmingham, Joe Hill.  I can’t tell you how amazing Twitter is for a book nerd, as authors tend to reply to your tweets.  Be still my dorky heart.

And now I’m onto blogs.

The chicks in The Remarkables are some of the superstars of what is known as the blogosphere.  There are others, sure.  Beautiful, wonderful, writers like Eden Riley, Biance Wordley, Anna Spargo Ryan, Kelly Exteter, Allison Tait, Lana Hirschowitz, and Kerry Sackville (and many, many more) who aren’t in that visiting blog-club, but The Remarkables Group are some of the ones who have been at it for years.  From back in the days when I’d never even heard of a blog )and then when I did thought it sounded like a pile of shite).

Now I’ve seen the light, and I love blogs so much we have this little thing here.  I had a great idea to get to meet my heroes, and then I chickened out.  And now they are gone, far, far away to the hills of Maleny (at least 40 minutes away) and my hopes of meeting them and becoming new best-friends-forever are dashed, dashed like seashells against the first groyne at Main Beach, and I am left with thoughts of what might have been.  Sigh.  Oh for the courage to have approached their famous-arse table at Berados. Sigh.

Fare you well, bloggers.  May our paths cross one day.

Did you know the bloggers were in town?

Have you ever met one of your idols?

…From The Ashers xx

We have a cat.

It looks like this:

Hairy.

Very hairy.

Sometimes this cat does poo.

Mostly the poo ends up in the kitty litter, and all is right in the world.

Once upon a time, the poo didn’t end up in the kitty litter, but remained in the hairy hair for quite some time before my nostrils were assailed by a fecund faecal odour not befitting this establishment.  There was a kitty-dag.  This was bad, but the poo was quite firm and could be easily removed with toilet paper, a little water and much gagging.

Once upon a THIS time, the poo didn’t end up in the kitty litter.  Neither was it firm.  It was quite pliable.  And securely affixed to the hairy hair.  Entwined in fact.  Almost poo-plaited in.  I believe surfers have a term for a similar phenomenon, when they have been surfing for hours and their arse-hairs get a little matted and then they desire deft defecation.  I have it on reasonable authority that this is known as a “netty”.  (Don’t.Even.Ask how I know this.)  So Woofa Butterball Popsicle Asher had a feline fur-netty, and was showing no signs of removing it of her own accord.

The other three sooks in this house were gasping and gagging and basically carrying on.

So, as with all things daring and dangerous and disgusting, it fell to the woman.

I demanded gloves, scissors and toilet paper STAT.  I also demanded a camera, because: blog.

I donned the gloves, held the cat prostrate, and performed the nettyectomy.

A little bit of vomit might have scalded my throat as I swabbed the area clean.

And that is that story of why an unfortunate event has led to me imbibe my second Stella on a school night.

For your viewing pleasure: a blurry pic of the netty. It was difficult to get a clear shot due to the retching.

You might not believe me, but I SHIT YOU NOT: less than five minutes after I cut that poo-pouch off, the cat was LICKING HER BUM HAIR.  I know not why.   It was cut it off.  And if she likes licking faecal-fur, why did she wait?  Why was she licking it at all?  What is wrong with nature-y things?  Excuse me now, whilst I go and eat a placenta I have in my freezer*.

*This is not true.  I do not have a placenta (although our midwife was strangely keen for us to keep them).  I didn’t have a crock-pot back then: opportunity missed.

…From The Ashers xx

How do you handle setbacks in your life?

I had a little setback yesterday, nothing major, it just seems that some things that might have been going to happen quite quickly might take a little longer.  No big deal, and if I’m to be honest, it is probably better anyway, as I was moderately stressed about putting my toe in the water with these two new, and quite different ventures.

It has been interesting to observe myself though, to see how it is that I ‘do’ disappointment.

1.  Act as if it’s all cool.  You know, the drill: fake it a bit, until the new information can be assimilated, but in the meantime, pretend that, yeah, no worries, she’ll be right, it’s all good, no probs, and on and on until my brain is going to explode from all the bullshit.  I might also go further than to pretend I didn’t really want that thing, into making up a shit-hot story as to why, even though all of the available facts show otherwise, someone has made a mistake, and I’ll soon get to do or have what I thought I was getting.  So I guess stage one is basically just denial.

2.  Get a bit pissed off.  Here I’ll usually be a bit cross that I didn’t get/have/do the thing I wanted.  I’ll probably sulk a bit, because that my friends, is something that I’m pretty bloody adept at.  Might as well play to my strengths.  So this could pretty much be the anger stage.

3.  This is a good stage (it’s not really, I’m really bullshitting you again now), this is where ‘if only’ is on high revolution.  If only I’d…. If only things were…. etc until everyone around me is about to spontaneously implode from all the whinging.

4.  Attack of the sads.  I’m ridiculously bad at crying, unless there is a chocolate emergency, but I can do a good old sook if required.  If I need to actually shed tears, because you know sometimes only actually salt-drips will do, then it’s time to dust off the old copy of Bridges of Madison County or E.T. and get the ducts a’flowing.

5.  There really is no five.  I just go back to 1. and pop this list on repeat until I end up getting so sick of myself that I either ‘shit or get off the pot’.  Usually I shit.  Because if anything is important enough to get past stage one, then it is probably worth it.  Or at least worth having a dip.

Interestingly, my setback stages are pretty much the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief, (although step five by her reckoning is acceptance- you can guess what I think of that as an idea) and that makes me wonder, do other people also run through this little schematic when things don’t go to plan, or when they just feel like being a big baby?  Or is it just me?  I guess I really am a psychologist’s dream…

Do you run through the stages?  Do you get stuck on one of them?

P.S.  Talking of Big Big Babies, check out this.  No, I don’t know what the hell is going on with it either, but I do know the Evil Geniuses like to  say “There’s a chicken in a box do you like my socks? Boom. They’re elasticated” more than is humanly necessary.  So there’s that.

You’re welcome.  (Warning: it can’t be unseen)

…From The Ashers xx

Today I was reminded of why I love the interwebs…

I remember about two years ago Melbourne experienced a “devastating” earthquake.  Remember it?  We were sitting on our couch in Southeast Queensland, and before any of the old school media could inform us, Twitter had told us there had been a ‘quake.  Just moments after it happened, and even before the last aftershocks had settled, this is how we discovered the horror that had befallen The Garden State:

We pissed ourselves whilst ringing our friends and family to see if their Jenga games had emerged unscathed.  The funny part for me, was not so much how pisspoor the ‘quake actually was, but the fast response of regular punters sitting at home with their meme makers.

Today the Wonderfully Witty World Wide Web delivered again.

Nathan, for some reason, was looking at Vintage Wooden Boats on eBay (at least that’s what he said he searched up), and was admiring the clean lines, and warm tones of some such vessel when he came to what shall henceforth be known as the infamous Image 9.  Please scroll through the images HERE.  It’s worth your effort, I promise.  Again, we sat on our couch and pissed ourselves at the funny things that people do.

So of course I posted the cover pic on Facey and Twit, and then continued for the next  hour or so to snicker at the juvenile double-entendre flowing in from real-life and twitter friends.  Jokes about being water-tight, and seaworthy, about wood and deep hulls and other such nonsense.  I emailed the seller, telling him how much I liked his Image 9.  I was half expecting a ‘whoops’ and for him to take the pic down, but instead he sent me ‘  …Not even the whole semicolon/half-bracket thingy that people use to denote a wink- just the sleazy winky-eye.

We pissed ourselves again.  IDK why, it’s just funnier that way.  With just the winky-eye.

And that, my friends, is why I love the internet so*.  Not for live-streaming and wifi and research and Dr.Google and time-saving and all the rest.  But for funny shit like this.  I know today there was yet another shooting tragedy in The States.  I know today somebody got bombed, somebody died in a car-crash and somebody else went bankrupt.  I know some politicians lied and some children fought each other in cages. You can find that all out too, if you want to.  But somewhere in Nerang, some dude, sitting in front of his computer, uploaded all the best pics of his boat, for us to bid on, and thought he’d add one last surprise for all the other boat-nerds who happen upon his listing.  It kinda gives me hope.

So are you gonna make a bid?  She seems fairly cheap.

*Well that, and funny cat videos, but that goes without saying.

…From The Ashers xx