Sorry for the delay...

My friend, J., brought to my attention that it's been a while since I bitched so I thought I had better shoot off a little something to keep her happy.

Seems that 2007 is shaping up to be a 'doing' year for me. I think, facing 40 later this year, I've finally come to realise that all those tired cliches - 'life isn't a dress rehearsal', 'Life is a journey, not a destination' - are immortalised in coffee cups and those cheesy PowerPoint slide shows I get in my email for a reason - they are true.

So what have I been waiting for??? When is my life going to start?

• When I lose 15 kilos, be svelte and have perky boobs? Maybe - but have I done anything to make this a reality? I've always wanted this to happen without engaging in any form of exercise, discipline or dieting. Now I need to get my head out of my sagging ass and face the fact that it ain't gonna happen unless I start to think about getting off said sagging ass.
• When I suddenly get 'discovered' as a major writing/singing/cooking talent? By a Broadway talent scout who happens to read The Picky Bitch and walks by my window one day while I'm singing show-tunes and baking cupcakes. You know, I think one of the biggest mistakes in my life was to believe my own press. When I was in high school, one of my English teachers wrote in my yearbook that he thought I was capable of great things and that he was sure he'd be reading about me one day. (My Religious Ed teacher also said that she thought I could be a great religious leader but I just think she was just recruiting for the nunnery). So I have always believed that one day I would be a published author, living in a loft in New York and dabbling in a little off-Broadway musical action in my spare time. Wow, what an imagination. The only writing I've ever done has been this blog - and it's been three weeks since my last entry. Such devotion to my craft.

I think I've come to realise that my life is already in progress and for some reason - hitting 40? a new year that ends in '7', one of my favourite numbers? finally getting it? - I've already packed in quite a lot this year.

Things I've already done this year:

• Repainted my hall which was a very dark blue (which I actually did like for a long time) to a celestial blue - for some reason named "Jockey" by the weirdos in the paint-name department at the paint factory - must be the fumes. It totally changes the feel of the house for me, highlighting all the other walls that needs repainting - it sets up an expectation that the rest of the house is actually nicer than it is but maybe that's the inspiration I need to keep going. But my heart lifts looking at it so I guess that's a good thing.
• Painted the tile in my kitchen. Not that I didn't like the avocado green swirl on the cream tile - I loathed it. Another thing that I've been looking at for the last 10 years while cooking, washing the dishes, boiling the kettle and thinking, "Ick." Well, we have the technology, we can rebuild him. I went to the hardware store and there it was - tile paint - and now it's just cream coloured, which a la hallway, just makes the kitchen walls look grimy and yucky. So painting the kitchen is next. I think.
• Sorted through the kids' clothing in order to sell them at a`swap meet. That was difficult. I am so goddamned sentimental, it's nuts. I remember my kids wearing every piece and I have to be honest, I've still kept a bunch but I managed to whittle down the stuff to 2 boxes from 4. It's progress.
• I cleaned out the area under my sink. David Attenborough should have been on hand to document the wildlife inhabiting it. Icky cockroach carapaces everywhere. I have basically not opened those cupboards for about 5 years in fear of what was under there. Totally justified fear, I'm afraid. I'm embarrassed to admit it but nothing like a little cyber-humiliation to ensure it'll never happen again.
• I have started to ride my bike - only a couple of times a week so far - but I am loving that bike. So far, no obvious weight loss, boob-perking or svelteness making an appearance but it's early days ( is that grammatically correct? - it's early days - to say 'they're early days' sounds weird - comments, people? PB has fallen off the grammar perch tonight.)

And it's only 23 January. Maybe I will be a Broadway-starring, loft-dwelling, perky-boobed novelist one day. Or maybe I won't. But it will be my life - and that's just good anyway it comes.

I goat you a gift...

This one is for TJ and RC...

I've told this story a number of times now and thought it so amusing that I've decided to share it with the world...

While at a New Year's Day breakfast, I was talking with one of my oldest and dearest friends, RC about Christmas and what Santa brought us. RC's husband is a GP and often gets showered with gifts all year long from his grateful patients who are mainly old aged ethnic pensioners - those cute little old nonni that seem sweet but would put out a hit on you so fast if you messed with their families you'd be in concrete shoes before you could blink - you know the ones. He especially gets inundated at Christmas - I often think of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Atticus gets paid in potatoes and collard greens and imagine RC surrounded by bushels of whatever is growing locally in little old ladies' gardens that season. But she seemed particularly excited by one gift and so goes the exchange:

RC: We got a goat.

PB (that's me): Oh! I got a goat too! My friend TJ got me a goat through Oxfam. What a great idea - that's what we ended up buying for all our family overseas - we bought sewing lessons in Africa and a carpentry workshop and a business start-up...

I stopped speaking when I noticed my friend's expression as I was blathering on about Oxfam and goats and chickens...

RC: No, you don't understand - we got a goat.

And then I understood. We weren't talking Oxfam, we were talking carcasses.

RC then went on to describe the phone-call from her husband and the subsequent panic as she had to drive to his surgery to collect said goat. Like Laura Palmer, the goat (mercifully headless but otherwise intact) was wrapped in plastic. Luckily, she has a spare refrigerator (one of those half-fridge, half freezer jobs, I think) which she cleared out by taking out the shelves and found she had to shove the cadaver in vertically as it would not fit in any other way. While all the time shrieking "eeeuuuwww....eeeuuuwww..." as you would.

Now to most people, being on the receiving end of a goat would be an interesting space to be in. What the hell do you do with a whole goat? I don't even own a knife that would cut butter effectively let alone a cleaver that could do some damage to a real animal. My butchering skills lie on about a par with being able to tell the chicken thigh from a breast but even then sometimes those damned plump thighs will have me looking twice (damned hormone-injected chickens and their fat thighed ways!).

So what did RC do? What any self-respecting Italian girl does on receipt of a goat - she calls her dad.

[If my Dad were still alive, and I had made that phone-call, "Dad, someone gave me a fresh goat" - it would be news on a par with Italy winning the World Cup (AGAIN!) or them finally acknowledging that William Shakespeare was Italian after all (my father believed that anything good in this world naturally is of Italian origin).]

RC's dad sets a land-speed record for getting to her house and all is well. He has a wood-fired oven, people - this man knows what to do with a goat.

So all's well that ends well.

Now I'm hankering for a little marinated capretto....mmmmm...