the apple has left the building.

i never really had the chance to bond with it, so y’know, whatever. in fact, to celebrate the return of $2000 to my bank account, i walked across the mall and bought a $7.15 loaf of bread.

this is the most expensive loaf of bread i’ve ever bought… um, unless you count that time i was in new york when the australian dollar was like, US50c — fiddycent — then i suppose all those loaves of bread win. damn you dean and deluca chocolate challah! $7.15 is not the most expensive loaf of bread i could buy though, around these parts. up the street at victoire, they have a saturday special loaf. this is because the raising agent in this particular loaf is a bottle of french beer. they are kind enough to sell you half a loaf, if is too much (because, obviously for a half loaf is much easier to swallow). why am i telling this story? i don’t know.

for the record, $7.15 buys you a work of art: sonoma‘s organic soy and linseed sourdough. chewy and tangy, and studded with whole soybeans. truly, worth every cent. all 715 of them.

[ insert clever pun: "that's a lot of bread! guffaw!" ]

i’m sorry. i don’t know what has come over me. perhaps it is the worms.

our backyard has become infested with giant worms. fat, stubby giant worms.

last week, i said to the boy “i was hanging out the laundry today, and there was an enormous slater-looking wormy thing on the ground, and i thought it was dead and after, when i went to remove it, it was gone!”

i hate when that happens. when the dead cockroach/worm/slug/etc turns out not to be dead after all. they scuttle away and laugh at you from the shadows as your head whips round, a little panicky. where are you?

“those are native cockroaches,” said the boy. he is learned. “leave them alone.”

in the ensuing week, these native cockroaches started crawling out of the bushes in great numbers (so call me overreacting, but in the case of giant worms, three is a great enough number), and because it’s been so hot of late — 38°C on thursday — they have been dying of heatstroke on the sunbaked tiles and then gradually blackening over the next few days.

saturday, the boy was out back, and i pointed out the three corpses in varying stages of carbonisation. “why are they called native cockroaches anyway? they don’t even look like cockroaches.”

“oh. those aren’t native cockroaches. i thought you were talking about something else.”

!!

“so they’re just giant worms?”

“yup.”

i was hanging out the laundry later, and i looked over at the child, who’d been quietly poking at a pile of dried leaves with a garden fork. she made a grimacy, wincy face and held out to me a flaccid black thing. it was a dead giant worm!! i don’t know if it was an instinctive girly reaction or if she had actually licked it, but we got the hell out of there, after i checked to see that the worm was still intact (it was), and shook her hand most violently to release the worm. i mean, i surely wasn’t going to touch it.

shudder.