Shoes, Books & Cynicism
Kate Stone Matheson
The Wax That Melts Our Wings

I’d say it’s what separates us, not from the beasts, but the bestial. Creating the future, renewing a learned past - these are reasons to strive. Writing for and with love, taking and framing an image, stretching new melodic skins onto old skeletons of song… it’s how we manage to fly. It’s how we stay you and me, not us and them.

The Wax That Melts Our Wings
Shoes, Books & Cynicism
Kate Stone Matheson
The Lady Jellypants Guide to Grace and Poise

Unlike Osk, who seemed to establish his own tactical task force wherever we lived, scooping up neighbourhood feline troublemakers as sidekicks (including the memorable ginger behemoth Watson, with whom he used to scope the street from the safety of the shed roof), Jelly has the intelligence gathering skills of a sponge cake.

The Lady Jellypants Guide to Grace and Poise
Shoes, Books & Cynicism
Kate Stone Matheson
Love Me Tender

Anyway, somewhere in between my 'and then you should've done this' and 'why didn't you say x and y, rather than z', and 'for the love of monkeys and the general public's eyesight, you didn't honestly wear that heinous shirt did you', something he was saying about the dating extravaganza we were picking to pieces finally penetrated my cloud of self-congratulatory cumulo-waffle. 

"Most people don't talk about how dates are progressing as a tender process, do they?" he asked. 

"What?"

"She said I was 'part way through the tender process' and that she was judging me on my submission. I'd like to think there was irony involved, and I think at the time I may have given an admittedly weak "haha, yesssss, quite". Looking back, I'd have to conclude, computer says no on the presence of Fabulon or other aids to achieving crisply pressed linen."

Love Me Tender

mess

Dr Livingstone I Presume?

I woke up this morning, and it was a toss up between wishing I hadn't at all, and wishing I had woken up in a far off magical land where there may or may not be flying monkeys and little orange people and a yellow brick road. Because let me tell you, I would far prefer to put up with a few wicked witches than what I faced through bleary eyes when I took a look around my apartment.

Actually, I may well already be in Oz. Because quite honestly? It looks as though a farmhouse has fallen on my living room. Either that or a mess bomb has gone off very quietly.

I don't like mess. At all. But at the moment? It would take a whole party of explorers to hack their way with machetes through the wilderness that is Katetopia. It's a jungle in here.

I would love nothing more than to stick my head back under the covers, block my ears with the doona and not do a triage assessment of the site, but if I have any hope of sitting on my sofa in the next 24 hours then a clean up is going to have to happen.

Maybe one of the Oompa Loompas sabotaged me. I don't know. But somehow, between my return from swashbuckling with the Dread P and today, my usually neat and tidy abode has become a post-nuclear apocalyptic awfulness, and it just won't do.

So to the lifeboats! 

Or at least the vacuum cleaner and Mr Sheen.

Blech.

Is there a reward for cleaning your place up instead of doing fun stuff? Aside from not contracting bubonic plague that is.

Maybe (she says brightening) there could be some new shoes at the end of this grubby rainbow!

Suddenly things don't seem quite so grim...