As we all know, all work and no joy makes Mac (or Jack) or anyone else for that matter a dull boy - or girl. There sure has been plenty of work going on around here but luckily there has also been truckloads of joy. All members of this household have been enjoying new interests.
My swimming lessons are still in the early stages (my best stroke is still Drownstroke) but I am determined to get to the stage where swimming is actually fun. My partner is a gun swimmer and most Saturday mornings he can be found far out to sea with many other "Masters" (while back at home I try to ignore radio news reports about shark attacks). Somewhere in the pictures below are my partner, my swimming tutor and several of their clubmates completing this year's 3.6km Busselton Jetty Swim.
I don't intend to ever join him in using swimming as a means of transportation, but the other hobby he and my daughter have taken up does look like a lot of fun. They are having surfing lessons at a local surf school and are both doing brilliantly. Here they are only one hour into their first lesson.
My daughter has also taken up hockey
and my son is making great progress with lawn bowls. He now trains regularly in Perth with the state junior squad who are the Australian juniors champions. Lawn bowls might seem like an unusual sport for a boy his age but I am thrilled that he has found a sport he enjoys and is good at as that is something that has eluded me my entire life.
While he attends his day-long training sessions, I get to indulge in one of my favourite activities and explore new-to-me parts of Perth. On the last trip I took the opportunity to finally buy something new that I have been trying and failing to buy secondhand for three years: a bike!
I use it to do chores, visit friends and tootle here,
and here.
Yup, still op shopping. I also now have a legitimate reason to obsessively scour through Trademe as I am helping a friend in Christchurch to furnish her new office. Our most exciting find so far is a huge set of String style mid-century shelving - for $30.
I am finally teaching my daughter to sew by working with her to create her costume for this year's Supanova Pop Culture Convention where last year we spotted the cutest Doctor Who ever.
So plenty of play for everyone but now I really do need to get back to doing some work. I have been offered a very exciting (and a little bit scary) new role and I need to write up some ideas for a meeting.
But I'll end with a wee skite about something that has come about as the result of absolute truckloads of work over the past three years by one member of this household and his workmates. The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre won the 2013 APACA Drover Award for the Performing Arts Centre of the Year. Woohoo!
That centre is certainly not run by dull boys - or girls. There is so much happening there that so far I have had absolutely no need to seek entertainment just down the road from there ... at the bingo hall.
This weekend followed a familiar pattern. Often our weekends consist of one big day out then one big day in. The big day in is usually spent gardening, catching up on household chores, reading and relaxing. Big days out, well, more on them later.
This weekend's big day in was an especially satisfying one as it meant that all the books that have languished in our shed for the nine months since we moved in here could finally come into the house. I have been hunting for some shelves for months and was about to admit defeat, head to Ikea and join the other 60 million Billy bookcase owners. For various reasons, I find shopping in Mandurah often tricky and usually unsuccessful.
Anyway, what Mandurah lacks in other ways, it makes up for in op shops. There are loads of them and they aren't the over-curated, over-priced and picked-over disappointments you find in the big cities. These are your basic hit-and-miss, sometimes crusty, sometimes fabulous old-school op shops. And the joy of living in a place where few people seem to share my taste is that when something I love turns up in an op shop it just ... sits there.
So it was with the great big mid-century design classic Ladderax shelving system I snapped up from a local op shop this week. Way back here I wrote about how I dreamt of finding one of those, never really believing that I would. But as "our Rach" would say, "It didn't happen overnight, but it did happen".
After setting them up and rearranging the library/study/Lego Pit/living room, we now have a different assortment of things in the big shed that we no longer have room for in the house: mid-century vases, Betsy my beloved cowhide orange slice chair, a Fler lounge suite, various small bookcases, quite a few books and perhaps even seven Tretchikoff prints - most of which I originally picked up at op shops.
Looks like I may need to spend my next big day in having a garage sale.
In Western Australia the shops are closed on Sundays. OK, that is an exaggeration. The truth is that only most of the shops are closed. Some shops in leafy suburbs, which have blue flooring, less than 13 employees and a high percentage of staff called Barry are open. Then in the school holidays, shops with a sea view, situated on streets starting with the letter P or S, which sell a wide range of orange-coloured goods are also open. OK that too may not be 100% accurate, but the actual Sunday trading laws in WA are about as logical and perplexing as that. Suffice to say that should I need to replenish a child's sock drawer, select light fittings, stock up on school lunch consumables or get some grog in, then I'm pretty much out of luck if I attempt to do it around here on a Sunday.
I'm not necessarily saying that I think WA's laws should change, as while NZ's trading laws are certainly convenient for us disorganised folk, they simply mean that each household's weekly spend is spread more thinly throughout the week, and that to enable this some people have to work very unsociable hours. What I am saying is that after living here for a year and a bit, I'm still nowhere near used to the situation.
The fact that Mandurah's one shopping mall is closed on a Sunday does however enable locals to have a shopping experience far more interesting than anything the mall ever provides. On Sunday mornings a Swap Meet is held in the closed mall's carpark and my daughter and I have become regular attendees.
On Sunday mornings I scoff my toast, gulp my coffee and dash out the door in anticipation of finding a Ladderax shelving system or some some Villeroy and Boch Acapulco for my collection. By the time we park and head up the stairs to the market I'm convinced I'll find a Case Study daybed and I've already mentally reupholstered it with the Lucienne Day fabric I'll surely find. My somewhat more realistic companion comes along in the hope of adding an antique key, interesting coin or Dr Who figurine to her various collections.
Then the shopping starts. We stroll past the dusty framed jigsaw puzzles, endless crusty dolphin ornaments, laughably fake DVDs, sky-high piles of Dan Brown books and wheelie-bin sized soft toys. Sigh. I'm not usually one for advocating throwing things out but after passing stall after stall of pilled K-Mart jumpers, budget furniture with its swollen chipboard busting out from its vinyl laminate, used duvet covers with pictures of tigers on them and nicotiney macrame creations, a little voice in my head starts chanting "Get thee to a landfill quicksticks!"
But the reason we go to the Swap Meet is obviously because sometimes we really do strike gold and even if we come away empty-handed, we always see plenty of bizarre, amusing and entertaining tat there.
This is some small consolation for the fact that my Sunday evenings are often spent drinking Soda Stream out of a wine glass and warning family members not to eat various meagre foodstuffs required for tomorrow's school lunches while trying to convince myself that a) my drink is something more interesting and b) next Saturday will be the one I finally remember to get organised.
One more bit of advice. If you are planning on moving here and you plan to flog off your mid century furniture and home wares in order to keep your shifting costs down to many, many thousands of dollars instead of many, many, many thousands of dollars on the assumption that you will replace it when you get here using the local alternative to Trademe and visits to a variety of dishy second hand shops, then stop now!
You are wrong. I can see the future and this is what is going to happen.
You will become the uncool hunter. You will spend the first few months of your life in WA seeking dishy secondhand furniture shops (actually any secondhand furniture shops) but not finding. You will shop, shop, shop, shop for a ridiculous amount of time, but your home will still be unintentionally minimalist as you can't bear to hand over cash for furniture so ugly it will give your children nightmares.
When you do finally find a secondhand furniture shop it will be selling this
aagh! or this
aaagh! You will run around groaning "what-the-heck!" You will go to bed and dreaming about Hans Wegner and Verner Panton and Arne Jacobsen after being told by local dealers that on the rare occasion they unearth anything tasty here, they send it to Sydney or Melbourne to sell as so few people here get it or want it. Noooo! You will give in and visit some of the thousands of big box new furniture shops but find it all so ghastly yet expensive that you leave screaming.
You will read InsideOut and UK Elle Decoration and Design Sponge and Apartment Therapy and Bloesem and wail "My taste is such a cliché everywhere else on the the planet! How can it be so unusual here?"
Finally after several months of obsessive hunting you will either cobble something together, or decide to do without, or order online from another state, or take Valium and go to Ikea and decide to just ignore all those horrid visible screwheads. Well, that is how it went for me anyway. So here, finally, after many months of darned hard work is our new cobbled together dining arrangement.
Phew! Particularly pleased with that original 1970s Casala number which was covered in slime and bird poo (it is actually an outdoor chair) but thanks to Jif plus elbow grease it came up a treat.
Next on the list is lounge furniture. After a well-deserved lie down and 500 more "what the hecks!", I'm going to order this
in orange, from here. And then I'm going to get on with my life.
