I woke up this morning with three thoughts slowly percolating through my head … why did I think it was a good idea to see what an electric boundary dog collar feels like when the dog tries to escape?
Was that before or after we decided that single malt whisky and diet ginger beer was one of the most awesome mixers ever discovered, and finally …
… and most worryingly … did I really allow Kath to apply a fake tan to just one of my legs last night?
reenactment of how I felt. |
For the record, dog shock collars really work and I have no idea how dogs can wear them and still escape, believe it or not I still think that whisky and ginger beer is a good mix (but I did try that after several bourbons and quite a few bottles of wine) and yes, unfortunately, I did have a fake tan on one of my legs.
This unfortunate series of events could only mean that I was either having a very bad dream … or that it was Kim’s birthday … and we were back up at the Gold Coast celebrating it with the Monsters.
Well that’s not 100% true … we actually spent most of Kim’s birthday getting from Hobart to the Gold Coast, and singing happy birthday to Kim at every opportunity.
She liked that, (the singing) and I could tell this because she has this look that says “I’m pretending that I’m throwing you out of this aeroplane” which really means “thanks John, I love your singing” and she put that look on her face a lot that day.
What’s probably more surprising is that despite my many renditions of “Happy Birthday to you”, Kim’s birthday didn’t actually start that well: after we got through security at the airport, I presented her with three blank envelopes for her birthday … the catch being that she could only choose one of them as her birthday present, and she had to do so without knowing what was in them.
I know … brilliant huh!
Now you see I did this because Kim had (boringly) asked that I just take some money off what she still owed me for her bike, and because this was boring, and I really don’t like boring things, and because I know that Kim secretly likes it when I devise complex and clever ways to make boring things not boring … I devised this clever plan.
In one of the envelopes I put a (boring) voucher for $250 off her bike. In a second envelope I put a second voucher for the same amount of money … but it had to be spent on the Gold Coast in the next three days (exciting) and in the third and final envelope … I just put $100 and lots of ‘loser’ messages (very exciting … at least for me).
Sure enough, and much to my delight, Kim chose the third card and I realised that I’d just gotten away with the cheapest birthday ever.
yet another re-enactment of how I was feeling |
Much less to my delight, Kim, without my permission, then picked up a second envelope and opened it and discovered the $250 off the bike voucher and decided that as it was her birthday, she’d take that instead. Just as I was beginning to disagree with this contention, she then opened the third envelope and decided that $250 to spend was a much better idea again and so she decided she’d take that.
I guess I should just be grateful that she didn’t think to demand all three.
Karma gets us in many ways, and for Kim her present stealing affair was paid back in the quality time she then got to spend answering the million and one questions the monsters had to ask once we got on the plane.
I was safely seated over in another row (reading my latest trash zombie novel) and was only half listening to their endless stream of questions, but I particularly liked the sequence of questions that started with the rather reasonable question from Markus “What would happen if the window cracks?“.
Within 30 seconds it was “what would happen if their was a small hole in the window?“, then “what if it was the size of a pencil?” … “what about the size of a fist?” within a minute Markus had got to “would the toilet get sucked out the window as well?” at which point Zara chimed in with “what about all of the wee and poo, would that get sucked out?”
Yes, that is why they are called monsters, not children.
Two minutes to get changed and in the pool … that’s class, Tasmanian class.
When I go to her funeral in a couple of weeks, I promise I will ask to give the eulogy at which point I will bring up her Facebook page on a big screen with the hundreds of comments telling her to rest and take it easy and for her eulogy, I will type in my last little comment which will say
“told you so, LOL, RIP, your little Bro“.
We almost left the theme park then and there …
May is a great time to visit as there were absolutely no queues and it was still warm enough to spend time in the water (just).
It was in fact the very first time in my life I’ve seen a real life koala.
The end result of all this activity was exactly what we wanted …