i was cooking dinner on saturday night…
– char siu and zucchini omelette
– steamed soft tofu with shitake mushrooms
– stirfried choisum in oyster sauce with dried scallops
…when the kid wandered in and started getting in the way of sharp knives and hot dripping liquids. she also has that trick where she opens the utensil drawer and picks this ladle or that pair of tongs, and scatters it to the four winds, um, corners of the room so that apart from the dishes and the pots and pans, i will also have these extra bits to wash up. you know that trick? argh!

i shooed her out. “how hard is it to keep a kid entertained while i make dinner?” i wondered aloud to the boy, who lay sprawled in front of the tv, nattering to his out-of-towner friend.

“i’m sorry?” said the boy, all indignance. “i’ve been entertaining her all day!”

at which point i laughed such black hiccups of laughter that i might’ve fallen over. because somehow, “all day” to the boy means the two hours between 9.30 and 11.30 that morning when he took her up the street to get the newspaper and some groceries. before which i had gotten up and made her breakfast while he lay in bed for a while longer. and after which he provided her a nutritous lunch of a finger bun covered in pink icing and coloured sprinkles. and then he read the paper while i read her stories and put her to bed. and then he had a nap.

after dinner, the out-of-towner said, “wow. that was certainly the healthiest meal i’ve had in a long time”… which i chose at that point to take as a compliment, and now i’m not so sure. and then the boys went off to see radio birdman and drink themselves into a stupor, while i did the dishes, bathed the kid and put her to bed, and then listened to the monstrous drunken snores wafting down from upstairs in the too-early hours of the morning. they were still snoring when i got up to make the kid breakfast at 7.30, and snoring still a couple of hours later when the kid and i left to go to the park so that we would not be in the way of one snoring boy on the sofa upstairs, and another snoring boy freshly transported to bed downstairs.

boys suck! boys who “mention” that they’ve bathed the kid three nights in a row, after conveniently forgetting the 30 or so nights over summer when i performed such duties while they tooled about in their country estates, and the casual throwaway “i’ll put her to bed for the next month” they utter on their return. boys who do… boys who don’t…

whatever.

i have found myself about to be in an exhibition, as part of sydney design 06. a friend of a friend this, designers dropping out that, and suddenly i’m scrambling to get an old illustration printed up to the size of a wall. you can see this wall at horus and deloris for a couple of weeks, from saturday.