About everything and nothing

I’ve not blogged much for a while, largely because of that job. Yes, the one I’ve been working on for some x number of weeks now. Anyway, as I sit now with about 9 emails in my inbox yelling for my attention, I’ve decided to sod it all and write something on my blog first before tending to them. After all, even though they are paying me a little bit more for this job that has gone on longer than expected, I have developed a if-they-never-call-on-me-again-I’m-not-injured attitude. Meaning, if you say my deadline’s 6pm tomorrow, I’ll deliver at 6pm, not earlier. Great work attitude, I know, but at this point, I just can’t be asked.

So it came upon a wonderous afternoon when I realized that Smallville has gotten one step closer to being totally self-sufficient. We have almost everything we need here without having to venture out into town, but as of this week, a day spa has opened here. OMG. I am grateful. I can get a massage. Finally. And probably at a nice convenient time too, seeing how it is it opens shortly after Sara needs to be at school, and how it’s so terribly fortuitous to be located just across from her school. Like two seconds away. Of course, it remains to be seen if it’s any good, but hey, I’m not picky.

After finding two inch-long centipedes running around our bedroom in the past week, I decided to do something about it. Call the landlady. She sent her bug people, but not before sharing this with me. 

“Note that the centipedes are quite common in [Smallville] at this time of year, it seems to be one of the indigenous pests they have in HK.”

Sigh.

And back to work we go.

The damned

In all his dead glory. Danny cheerfully reminded me to stretch him out before taking the photo. LIKE HELL I WILL. I just took him the way he died. You can’t see clearly on the measuring tape there, but he’s about 13 centimetres long, just lying like that. Figure head-to-toe, he’s gotta be more like 14 and a bit.

Called my parents for a little TLC (i.e. tender loving care) this morning. Yeah, go ahead, tell me I’m such a baby for making a mountain out of a molehill, but if there’s anyone who understands I’m deathly afraid of these creatures, it’s my parents. Of course, looking for TLC, I got none. My mom quickly quipped within my telling her of the centipede and how huge it was, that she needed to hop and that I could speak to my dad about it after he dropped her off. My dad, knowing I had called in distress about a centipede, DID NOT CALL BACK, so I called him.

And whined.

His crisp reply was, “You gotta keep rolls of newspapers around the house, so you can whack them when you see them. Don’t waste time looking for spray cans because they’ll run away and you can’t find it. And anything else going on there?”

And I’m like, wha…..??!?!?!? I virtually had a nervous breakdown last night and he sweeps it away with two lines of advice about pest-killing??!?! AAARGH!!!

So I just update him about the grandkids and hang up. Sigh. So much for TLC.

Anyway, gotta move on – life doesn’t stop with a centipede appearing at night. And sorry for the heavy use of profanity in the earlier post. Yes, I do cuss when I’m under duress. The kids weren’t awake anyway.

F.E.A.R.

Is a fucking huge centipede. IN MY BEDROOM. Crawling within a metre of my baby’s crib. Stumbled upon in 11pm at night. With no husband and two sleeping babies.

I do not like insects. I think I’ve made it clear before. They scare the shit out of me the bigger they are. And somehow, they just know it. I knew something like this was going to happen. With me working late each night and Danny away for just three nights. It had to happen now.

The fucker is H-U-G-E. If I wasn’t so shit scared, I’d take a photo of it right now. Instead, I will wait till daylight tomorrow to take a photo of it instead. Yes, that’s right, I killed the motherfucker. Not with a roll of paper. I’m more elegant. Or to be more precise, I won’t use anything that doesn’t guarantee death. A can of almighty Baygon guarantees death. A roll of paper does not. Plus, sometime between the spider attacks, I had acquired more of these magical elixirs of death. One particular can (bigger than the rest) deals a mighty blow swiftly. So swiftly that that in itself is a scary thought – shit, what are these manufacturers putting in these cans these days? I’ve killed a cockroach with this one can with two tiny squirts. The bugger never had a chance. He practically slowed down in mid-spray, crawled drunkedly a little bit more and turned over to die.

Back to the centipede. He took longer (now, I don’t actually know he’s a he, and frankly, given his size, he’s probably a she. A huge bitch of a she). Sure, he did a Mexican dance upon the first spray, but he took all of the next 30 minutes to writhe and die. Before my bathroom door, I may add. So now I walk this wide berth around the dead body. I won’t touch it, and if we didn’t have a helper, the fucker would stay there till Danny got home.

I called Danny after dispensing the Baygon and told him, in all shakiness, there was a motherfucker of a centipede, 20 cm long, in our bedroom. Now that I’ve glanced at him a couple more times (to make sure he’s really dead), he’s more like the length of my hand, tip of middle finger to base of palm. Idiot my husband is, knowing my fear of all things with this many legs, asks me whether I can take a photo of it. I was all tears – the fucker could’ve bitten the baby. Or crawled unseen to my other baby’s room and bit her instead. And I could’ve totally not seen the fucker, seeing how it is I was just randomly popping into the room to check on Nate, and only saw the bugger out of the corner of my eye (eh, what’s that rippling in the shadow there?). Danny was just amazed I had it in me to get the can of insecticide and kill it. Of course I had to. There’s no one else around – our helper’s room is outside the house. I have two babies to protect.

And the upshot of it all. Call it woman’s intuition, but I KNEW something like this was going to happen. The spider incident was too long past without any other insect showing up in this house. I love where we live, but for that 20 minutes or so back there, I was thinking of moving out back into an apartment where we see none of this kind of shit. It had to happen in the middle of the night, and for the love of God, in our bedroom! Not the living room or dining room or kitchen. Why the bedrooms? You can’t feel more violated than that.

And I KNEW it was going to happen now. While Danny was away. Three nights the man is gone, and we have an insect episode. Those insects, they’re good. They know when to come.

Coming up for air

*GASP*

Okay, so I committed myself to this editing job and now I see it was as massive as I thought it would be. Anyway, I find myself with a few minutes of spare time, so thought I’d take a blogging break. Hm. How ironic. When I have the time, I find I have nothing to blog about. When I have no time, I find myself thinking, “Hey, I can blog about that….” every couple of hours or so. Of course, like the promising budding writer that I am, I forget to write it down in my handy-dandy notebook and now, with this few precious minutes to spare, I can’t remember what I wanted to blog about.

With all these late nights peering bleary eyed at Word documents with nasty, long and convoluted Japanese-translated English (oh, if it wouldn’t get me in trouble, I’d post some of the more horrendous chunks of translations I’ve had to edit to make it comprehensible to the English-speaking world….), it has occured to me that I need to manage this “work” thing better. That is, I can and want to do this work, but I need to set parameters. Working late into the night or having my helper babysit for hours on end while I struggle to meet deadlines wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I suppose it does sound rather silly for me to stamp my foot and say I won’t work for anything more than the couple hours a day I can afford. If that’s the case, perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this at all. But I want my cake and eat it – I want to do work like this, but on my own terms. Perhaps not the right attitude to take at this point, but I can’t quite accept giving up precious sleep in the name of work.

Perhaps all this bellyaching won’t amount to much anyway. I know I’m quite far down the line in terms of editors they want to use, and if history repeats, I’ll be getting jobs once in five or six months.

In other news, we’re planning a holiday! Whopee! I know, I know. I said we wouldn’t be getting on a plane for a long time to come, and yet, at the suggestion of a holiday (and not just going back to Singapore), I’ve thrown my resolution to the wind. So yes, we will battle it out with two kids on a long flight. I have a girlfriend who can do 10-hour flights with three kids under five ALONE, so what am I going on about anyway?

Okay. I have to get back to work. I wonder when I’ll get paid, seeing how it is that I’m still waiting to get paid on a copywriting job I completed more than a month ago. That said, Sesame’s already warned of the pitfalls of freelancing….