How The Other Half Lives

Every now and then my boring, staid life is brightened by the opportunity to see how the other half lives.

I was about to get breakfast in my flat this morning, having cleared my emails and done the usual Friday domestic chores of taking the rubbish and recycling down to the gate, when all hell broke out next door.

I’m not exactly sure what it was all about, but two women were arguing like the proverbial shrews.

I couldn’t help but hear this. It was all going on in the yard next door and the women had voice volumes that would have been at home making public address announcements at the next Olympic Games in China.

Then again, the Chinese authorities would have probably censored the announcements since they seem to include a large number of expletives and accusations of one or the other being a whore, slag, or slut.

There are two men and a woman living next door (Don’t ask. I daren’t!) and these two live-in guys were standing in the middle of the warring factions looking most uncomfortable, standing first on one foot and then the other, like herons with sore feet. Then again, one of the guys has a false leg (This guy is not a nice person. My landlord calls him a loose cannon. I have other words for him, none of which I dare repeat here) so I guess he was standing on one foot then a stump. But, I digress…

The women – the older one who lived next door, and the other younger one who may have been the older woman’s daughter – continued to scream obscenities at each other with the volume and anger growing by the minute.

It got to the stage that they sounded so angry I thought they were going to attack each other, probably with some uniquely female-favoured weapon like knitting needles (although crochet needles are worse. They have barbs, and barbs can do lots of nasty damage. Just ask Steve Irwin. Oh, that’s right. You can’t. He’s dead. ~sigh~)

At one stage there, the older woman accused the younger one of sleeping with Chris. Now I gather that Chris was quite young because the younger woman screamingly advised the neighbourhood that she hadn’t rooted Chris and she regarded him as a son. I found myself wondering if the other neighbours were also pondering the popularity of incest.

Then the younger woman turned and advanced on Pegleg Pete.

“Did you tell her that I was rooting Chris?” she screamed.

With a tall angry lady advancing on him, Ankleless Arnold stepped back a little and quickly said
“I didn’t tell anyone that.” Ah, bravery from a loose cannon.

At this point I decided that Captain Spunkbubble was needed. Well, catfights are all very well but if they really got their claws out and the police got involved, as a witness I was going to be dragged away from my work for heaven-knows-how-long talking to policemen.

So I walked out into the back yard and said very loudly over the low fence:
“Could you please take your argument inside.”

There was a second’s silence before Limbless Larry said “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Geez, some guys just don’t like being rescued from their own cesspools.

I just shrugged and said; “Listen mate, when the noise disturbs the whole neighbourhood, it is my business.”

Legless Lenny just had to avoid seeing the sense of that and decided to call me a dickhead and a few other things besides. It occurred to me that he was sounding just like the women. Which only goes to prove, I guess, that stupidity attracts stupidity.

So I just shrugged and said: “OK, if you don’t want to quieten down, I’ll just ring the cops and get them to do it.” And walked back inside.

As I walked back into the house, Pinless Pat proved to all in sundry just how thick he was by yelling: “You do that!”

I didn’t ring the cops. I didn’t need to bother. The fighting ceased immediately. I heard the car door slam as the younger woman got back into her car then, with a roar of engine and a squeal of tyres, she left.

Sitting inside, through the open door I heard Footfree Fred get his own. The older women started yelling at him, telling him that he hadn’t supported her in the argument.

Toeless Terry proved, yet again, his stupidity. Rule One: When an angry woman wants to argue, don’t argue back. He argued back.

The result was that she loudly proclaimed that Kneefree Norm had showed his lack of loyalty and she wasn’t staying around. Then I heard her call her scruffy dog to her as she walked away up the road. A minute later, I heard Calfless Craig climb into his ratty old SUV and disappear up the road. Whether it was to find his lady friend and bring her back, or go the pub and drown his sorrows, I know not. Although I’d plump for the latter.

Ah yes, the life of the stressed-up other half. When I was thinking about all this I couldn’t help but remember what friend Teresa, who used to teach in New Zealand but now teaches tiddlies in Japan, told me yesterday.

She said:
“My best Show and Tell happened at Takanini School when a little Maori girl told us that her Mum was very bad. I said why? She said her mum had stabbed their dog and it died. I haven’t forgotten that one.....”

Ah yes. Anyone for a gated community?

Trips and traps

I had an “interesting” week last week! It started off with my encountering all sorts of problems getting some book layouts to the printer. The layouts have to be sent to the printer as pdf files and the trouble was that the photographs being used would degenerate in quality when I converted the layouts into a pdf file. This meant that all the photos looked so blurred one would think that one had accidentally donned someone else’s glasses. Or emptied someone else’s glasses.

And since the man I was dealing with at the other end of the Internet was a Chinese gentleman who was about as helpful as a second bellybutton, life was getting frustrating.

So I rang a local printer and spoke to a lady expert there who told me to convert all my picture files to a special file format. Aha! The answer!

So I did that and tried it out. The result was worse than before. ~sigh~

However, I kept experimenting (and swearing) and I think that I may now have solved the problem.

All this is par for life, of course. To get things right, you just have to keep trying different techniques and combinations. Which is why, of course, us older men are such good lovers. Whatcha mean, where are my certificates to prove it?!

Anyway, late in the week I took Murray’s mid-sized truck from Palmerston North up to Hamilton to bring some furniture back to Palmerston North from Hamilton. It was an education.

Until you have driven an unloaded truck on New Zealand roads you do not realise just how many poor sections of road surface there are on these fair isles. Now, to be fair, overall New Zealand roads are of very good quality. Our back roads are far better than the back roads in other countries. But the quality of our main highways often leaves something to be desired.

I learnt that fact in particular when the unloaded truck hit some washboard bumps on a corner and bounced onto the wrong side of the road. Since nothing was coming the other way at the time, this was merely an entertaining rather than pants-pooing situation.

Should you rush to point out that an unloaded truck tends to bounce a lot and the driver should allow for this, I would point out that on the way back in the now-loaded truck I hit some more washboard bumps, thankfully on a straight stretch of road. I immediately felt as though I was attempting to ride a kangaroo on steroids. The only thing that kept me from reshaping the roof with my head was the fact that I was wearing a seatbelt.

But there is always a silver lining to any cumulonimbus. The experience has taught me to keep a weather-eye on trucks rounding a corner towards me in case they should hit a poor surface and float onto my side of the road. Because if there is one thing a selfish motorcyclist/driver like me hates, it’s sharing my side of the road with oncoming trucks.

Other than that, my truck-driving experience driving was relatively benign. Of course, the opportunity was regularly taken to stop off at cafés and sample their wares … and carry out a critique on the café for my planned Kirk Café Critique website.

Ah, it’s interesting carrying out secret assessments of cafés. The assessment has to be secret, of course. If they knew what I was doing I would never have encountered, as I did yesterday, the young girl serving in one café who didn’t know what Earl Grey tea was. ~gasp~

Or have the staff at another café forget to bring to bring the purchased (expensive) piece of cake with the tea. And when one politely asks a nearby waitress whether they had forgotten the cake, she rushes to point out that she hadn’t served one. Aaaaaargh! The customer doesn’t care *who* served him. He just wants the problem put right!

And do you know how many different types of Earl Grey tea there are? On Friday, in one café, I encountered a weird type of Earl Grey tea I had never tasted before. It was like taking a bite into a muffin only to find that it tasted like tripe!

Ah yes, café critiquing can be very entertaining. I was in Ruddies café in Taumaranui when a customer walked out wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed: “Nuttier than a squirrel’s turds”. When I took that mouthful of weird Earl Grey tea, I had to agree that that was also an apt description of me.

And last night, I proved it. When I was in Pak’N’Save in Hamilton on Saturday night, amongst the bulk food bins in the store was a bin full of “Nuts (no peanuts)”. So I bought a small amount because, although I’m allergic to peanuts, I like nuts and don’t seem to be allergic to cashew nuts or walnuts.

Last night I ate some of the nuts. Very nice, they were.

Today, I have one hell of a headache. Allergies are no fun!

Afflicted by my headache, I have now arrived back at my flat from my truck-driving adventure to find that, in the three days I have been away, the landlord has ripped out the cottage garden at the front of my flat and replaced it with an imitation, sterile, rocky Japanese-type garden. Eeeeeeek!

Although I loved the sensuality of the cottage garden, as a tenant I have no say in the matter, of course. But I guess it could have been worse. I could have been growing marijuana in it…

I have had to go and buy myself a new teapot. My previous one took exception to being dropped on a concrete floor, albeit covered with lino. It ended up in little pieces except that the spout was intact. I couldn't help thinking that it looked like a teapot that had been attacked by Lorena Bobbett.

So off I went to the Wharehouse. But they only had metal teapots. Yeeeeech! Then again, maybe their buyers live in modern houses with concrete floors. But tea doesn't taste the same out of a metal teapot. Oh, the irony. (Er, excuse that. I just couldn't resist it.)

So I wandered off to Farmers and they only had big teapots. Bachelors like I only need a little teapot. Otherwise we slosh when we walk. And, before too long, walk rather strangely.

So then I went along to Inside Out. Inside Out had a Closing Down sale in progress. They kept telling me that it was going to take them three months to close. All I can say is that those doors must be very heavy! Anyway, with the sale going on, a lot of stock was on trestle tables on the footpath outside the shop. So the shop truly was Inside Out.

Now, the only small teapot on sale in the shop had a lid without a knob on it. A knob is very important. Just ask any housewife who knows her jollies.

So I pointed this out to the lady in the shop and she said that the reason the lid didn't have a knob on was because it was a Herb teapot.

I just had to point out then that I wasn't a Herb but an Allan and did she have a better-named one.

She just laughed. It's terrible when the legitimate concerns of a customer are treated so frivolously like this. So she pointed to a larger teapot and said: "There's this one."

I said it was too large and she said she liked a large one. I was tempted, truly tempted, but I didn't say anything...

So, faced with Hobson’s choice (or is that Herb’s choice) I bought the one with the funny lid. I have just used it and I have discovered that if you put your finger on the lid to stop the lid falling off as you pour, your finger gets burned. Do you too get the feeling that one has a Herb’s choice here? Get burned by the teapot or by the tea as the lid falls into it.

~sigh~ All this buying of domestic equipment is just so difficult for a mere bachelor like me.

--
Allan