Tag: travel

Last of the Party People

Or: How We Farewelled the Spirit by Being Asleep for Most of It

There is a particular kind of person who boards an overnight ferry, finds the bar, and treats the whole of Bass Strait as a nightclub that happens to float. I have seen these people. I have admired them from a distance, the way you might admire a bird of paradise doing its little dance: with wonder, a touch of envy, and absolutely no intention of joining in.

Jo and I are not those people. Jo and I were in bed by half past eight.

I want that on the record because I suspect it will be used against us later, and I would rather confess it myself. Half past eight. The sun had barely finished setting. Somewhere above us, people were no doubt ordering their second drink and solving the world’s problems, and there we were, tucked in like a pair of Victorian invalids, having a lovely time.

It was, in our defence, a very good crossing. The Strait was on its best behaviour, which is not something you can say about it often, and the old girl rolled along so gently I barely noticed we were moving. Which brings me to the slightly sentimental bit, so bear with me.

This may well have been our last trip on Spirit One. With the new ships coming, the old Spirits’ days are numbered, and I found myself getting a bit misty about a boat. A boat! I have walked those carpeted corridors more times than I can count, usually hauling a bag that was too heavy and full of things I did not need, and there is a strange comfort in a place that never changes. The same slightly chilly cabin. The same hum of the engines coming up through the floor. The same announcement at some dark hour of the morning telling you, very cheerfully, to get up. I am sure the new ships will be shinier and better in every measurable way. But I will miss the old one, and I will not apologise for that.

There is one thing I will be lobbying for, should anyone at the shipyard be reading, and that is the showers. Please, I beg you, keep the showers. The Spirit’s showers have the kind of water pressure that can blow you clean across the bathroom if you step in unprepared, and I say that as someone who has stepped in unprepared. More than once. And when you turn the tap to hot, you get hot. Not lukewarm. Not the apologetic tepid dribble that most of the world’s plumbing seems to think is acceptable. Actual, honest, scalding hot. They are, without exaggeration, the most satisfying showers I have ever met, and yes, I said met, because a shower like that is less a fixture and more an acquaintance you look forward to seeing again. If the new ships come with some sad little eco-trickle, I will be writing a strongly worded letter. Possibly several.

So we said our goodbyes in the most fitting way we could think of, which was to sleep soundly through most of it. I like to think she would have wanted it that way.

Now we are on the road, and here is where the arithmetic gets humbling. From here to Queensland is roughly eighteen hours of driving. Eighteen. I have written entire chapters in less time. I suspect that before we reach the border I will have plotted several books, abandoned two of them, and developed strong opinions about every roadhouse sausage roll between here and there.

The plan is to stay with the aunt. Jo, being the better person of the two of us (this is widely acknowledged and I have stopped arguing), is staying on for the month to give her a hand. I, being the one with fifteen cats, a Highland bull, a lovesick sheep and several books that will not write themselves, fly home on Saturday. Jo will be doing genuinely useful and kind things for a whole month. I will be doing a few days of being fed and then leaving. We each play to our strengths.

I will say this for Jo: she has the patience of someone who has listened to me narrate an entire plot out loud across half the mainland and still agreed to get in the car with me. She does the perplexed little smile she saves for the weirdo creatives, nods in the right places, and occasionally asks a question so sensible it unravels a whole subplot. Every writer should have one. Mine is currently in charge of the snacks.

Back home, I am told, the menagerie is carrying on without me, which is both a relief and mildly offensive. I fully expect to arrive on Saturday to a round of pointed stares from the cats, who will want it known that the service in my absence was not up to standard.

But that is Saturday’s problem. Today’s problem is eighteen hours of bitumen, a car full of luggage that is somehow heavier than when we packed it, and the quiet satisfaction of being extremely well rested.

The party people may have had the better night. We, I suspect, will have the better morning.

More from the road soon, assuming I survive the sausage rolls.

Organised Chaos, Roughly Alphabetised

I want to open with a bold claim: I am kind of, sort of, organised. I’ll give you a moment to sit with that. I know. I had to sit with it too, and I still don’t fully trust it, the way you don’t fully trust a ladder even after you’ve tested the bottom rung.

Here is the evidence, presented in the order it occurred to me, which is to say no order at all.

We have business cards now. For the nook. Actual little rectangles of card with actual words on them, which I keep pulling out of my bag just to look at, the way you’d check on a sourdough starter. The nook itself exists — properly exists, not just as a plan taped to the fridge — and I am currently elbow-deep in inventorying the stock, which mostly involves me picking up a book, having a small feeling about it, and putting it down again in a different pile than the one I meant to put it in. Jo, meanwhile, is off making the bookish ephemera we’re going to sell alongside it, which is the kind of sentence I would have found deeply improbable a year ago and now just say out loud in the supermarket without blinking.

On the writing side of the ledger: the first eight books in the PHL universe are edited within an inch of their lives. I mean that literally — I think if I looked at Rookie Bloom one more time it would flinch. Now, ‘edited’ is doing some quiet lifting in that sentence — it means edited by me, by my sister, and by an editing program, three separate lines of defence, and still not yet handed over to the cousin, who reads a manuscript the way border security reads a suspicious suitcase. So there is still a very real chance those eight books come back from her with a million more changes, because nothing is truly finished until it’s survived being read through the eyes of a grammar nazi. Said with love. Enormous, terrified love. The artwork for all eight is done, which still feels like a magic trick every single time, because I am someone who once spent forty minutes deciding on a font and I have somehow produced eight finished covers without personally combusting. All the marketing artwork is done too, just sitting there patiently, waiting on delivery like a very well-behaved parcel.

What’s left in that pile is tax. Glorious, glamorous tax, going through every purchase from this whole endeavour and turning it into numbers a human accountant will one day squint at. I have not started this. I am telling you I have not started this the way you tell a doctor you’ve been meaning to get that thing looked at.

So: business, organised chaos. Genuinely. I’ll stand behind that description in a court of law.

Life outside the business and the authordom, however, remains a crime scene. Not a metaphorical one. An actual, if-you-opened-that-cupboard-you-would-need-a-lie-down one. I am aware of this. I am, very slowly, doing something about it, in the same spirit that you eat a large meal one bite at a time — mostly by ignoring the size of the plate.

The one bright, fully-assembled corner of that disaster zone is Canada. We now have all the clothes and ephemera we need for the trip, thermals included, which feels like an enormous adult achievement given that packing for cold weather usually defeats me entirely. It’s 71 days away now, which is either a very long time or no time at all, depending entirely on which pile of tax receipts I’m looking at when you ask me.

More soon — probably in a slightly different kind of chaos by then, knowing my luck.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

A Research Trip. It Is A Research Trip. I Am Going To Keep Saying That.

Right. So I mentioned in the last post that something specific was coming, and that it explained the thermal underwear, and that I’d tell you about it properly another time.

This is another time.

We’re going to Canada.

We leave on the 30th of November. And before anyone gets excited on my behalf, I want to be very clear about the nature of this undertaking: it is a research trip. Wholly and entirely undertaken in support of my writing. There is no other reason. I have thought about it from several angles and I am confident this framing holds.

Here is the itinerary. You may draw your own conclusions and I would ask that you keep them to yourself.

November 30. We leave. Out of home and up to Sydney first, because you cannot simply leave from here. Nothing simply leaves from here. Getting off this island is a process with stages.

Then Auckland, and from Auckland to Vancouver, across an ocean that I have looked at on a map several times now and which does not get smaller no matter how long I stare.

And we arrive on November 30. The same November 30. We cross the international date line and it hands the day back to us like we’d left it on the counter. I have had this explained to me. I have nodded along. I have subsequently tried to explain it to someone else and heard my own voice tail off halfway through. I am simply going to get on the plane and let it happen to me.

Eight days on the ground. Which sounds generous until you see what we’ve done with them.

Because here is the actual shape of it.

We land in Vancouver. Then we get in a car and drive to Edmonton — which, for the locals playing along, is not a little jaunt. It is a proper day of driving. In December. In Canada.

We’re driving to Edmonton to watch the Washington Capitals play the Oilers on the 3rd.

Now, I want to be clear that I have credentials here. I have done Brisbane to Geelong to catch the Spirit — nineteen hours, one stage, no sensible stopping — and I have done it twelve times, which I think we can all agree is eleven times more than any reasonable person would. So I’m not frightened of a long drive. Long drives and I have an understanding.

But every single one of those nineteen-hour runs, the only chill involved was the air conditioning set to nipsicle. That’s my entire experience of being cold in a car: self-inflicted, reversible, and available at the touch of a dial. I have never once driven through weather that was trying to kill me. I suspect there is a meaningful difference between “big” and “big and also frozen“, and I am about to learn it personally, in the dark, somewhere in Alberta.

The next morning we get back in the car and go four hours to Calgary, where on the 5th we watch the Capitals play the Flames — in the Saddledome, in its final year. That one matters to me more than I expected it to. Buildings like that don’t get replaced, they get succeeded, and there’s a particular ache in walking into a place while you still can. I fully intend to be embarrassing about it.

And then another full day’s drive back to Vancouver, where on the 7th — and you will never guess this — we watch the Capitals play the Canucks.

The day after that, we fly home.

So to summarise: I am flying roughly as far as it is possible to fly, in order to sit in three different buildings in three different cities across five days and watch the same team play hockey, with two enormous drives wedged in between, and then I am immediately coming home again.

Research.

I write hockey romance. I have written a great deal of hockey romance. And I want to put something on the record here, plainly, because it is the single most damning sentence in this entire post:

I have never once set foot inside a hockey arena.

Not once. Never. I have written arenas I have never stood in. Road trips I have never taken. Rooms I have never smelled. The specific quality of cold that comes off the ice and settles on your forearms — I have described that with enormous confidence on the basis of absolutely nothing but video footage and the reports of kinder, better-travelled people.

At some point a person has to go and check.

That’s my story. I’m sticking to it. My accountant may have questions and I am prepared for them.

The other thing — the real thing, if I’m honest — is who I’m doing it with.

Karen is American, and she and I have been at this together since somewhere around 1998. That’s not a typo. That is longer than some of you have been alive, and it is certainly longer than any sensible person maintains a correspondence about imaginary people.

She has been through forty-eight of my novels. Forty-eight. Forty-five of which have never seen daylight outside my own very small circle — which is to say, outside Karen and Jo. There are manuscripts on my hard drive that only two other human beings on this planet have ever read, and both of those human beings will be in the car with me in December.

There are days I’m not entirely convinced Karen and I aren’t operating on the same brain with a very bad connection between the halves.

And in all those years we have conducted the entire relationship across a time difference that has never once been convenient for either of us. In December we will be in the same country. The same car. The same building. At the same time.

The plan — and I use that word loosely — is that in the down times we’ll get some words down. Between drives. In the evenings. In airports.

I want to be honest with you about how likely that is.

We will write. We will absolutely write. What we will not do is make words. There’s a difference, and if you’re one of us you already know it: making words is the part where you sit down and put sentences in a document and it is work. Making stories is the other thing. It’s two people in a car for eleven hours going but what if he doesn’t tell her and no, wait, go back, what if it’s the brother and building an entire cathedral of plot out loud that neither of you writes down, and both of you remember perfectly two years later.

We’re going to come home with a folder containing one paragraph and a list of things we’re definitely going to write about later. And it will have been the most productive trip of my life.

And Jo is coming with us — I’ve just realised I hadn’t mentioned that — which means there will be a third person in that car, listening to two grown women argue passionately about the motivations of people who do not exist. She’ll smile in that way she does. The perplexed one. The one that says I love you both and I have no idea what is happening here. Jo has read the forty-five too, mind you. She knows exactly who we’re arguing about. She simply retains the ability to be normal about it, which is a gift neither Karen nor I have ever possessed.

We’re bringing the laptops. On principle.

The cats, meanwhile, will be furious. Fifteen of them, abandoned in the run-up to Christmas, with no regard for their feelings. In my defence there is a shed out the back containing over a thousand cans of cat food, which in hindsight makes the August boat trip look less like an unhinged errand and more like strategic forward planning.

I’d like that noted too.

Research. It’s Called Research.

Well. We’re going to Canada.

November 30th to December 8th, if you want the specifics, and I can tell you exactly what we’ll be doing with that time: watching the Washington Capitals play three games. Edmonton. Calgary. Vancouver. In that order. In December. In Canada.

Now, before anyone says anything, I want to be very clear about something.

This is research.

I am a working author. I write hockey romance under the Bella Bruce name — an entire fictional league, the Portland Pioneers, a whole universe of men who are enormous and emotionally constipated and skate very fast. You cannot write that convincingly from a stationhouse in rural Tasmania on the strength of YouTube highlights and vibes alone. At some point, a serious professional has to go and stand in the building. Feel the cold come off the ice. Hear what twenty thousand people sound like when the puck goes in. Learn what the air smells like at a rink in an actual hockey country in actual winter.

That’s not a holiday. That’s fieldwork. I’ll be taking notes. There will be notes.

(Jo has been very supportive about the notes. Jo has also been laughing at me for approximately three weeks. Both things can be true.)

Why now

Because Ovi re-signed.

For those of you who don’t follow hockey and are only here for the cats and the kitchen renovation: Alex Ovechkin is the Washington Capitals’ captain, the greatest goal scorer the sport has ever produced, and — at the time of writing — a man of forty who has just put pen to paper for a twenty-second season with the only club he’s ever played for. He’d left it late. There was a genuine possibility he’d simply walk away, and honestly, nobody would have blamed him.

He didn’t. He signed. “I’m back!” he said, which is exactly the correct number of words.

And the moment that news landed, we looked at each other and said: right. Now. It’s now or it’s never. Because the thing about watching a legend play out the last of it is that there’s no schedule for when the last of it arrives. You don’t get a warning. You get one more year, maybe, and then one day you’re reading a retirement announcement and thinking I always meant to go.

I have too many of those already. I wasn’t collecting another one.

The plan

Three games, three cities, nine days, and a schedule that is — I’ll be honest with you — mildly deranged. The Caps are on a long western road swing through that stretch, and we’ve essentially chosen to become barnacles on the hull of it. Edmonton, then Calgary, then Vancouver on the 7th, and then home.

Now about Snow…

And now I have to tell you something a little embarrassing, which is that neither of us has ever seen snow.

I mean properly seen it. Seen it falling and staying. Seen it sitting on things — on a fence post, on a car roof, on a branch — being snow, in the way it does in every Christmas film ever made.

We’ve seen the miniscule flurries you get here occasionally, the kind that come down looking very promising and then vanish the instant the sun clears the hill, like they’ve remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. And I once saw snow in Oregon, in spring, which I’d been quite excited about until I got close enough to establish that it was really more ice than snow — a sort of grey, granular, week-old business that had clearly given up on being beautiful some time ago.

That’s it. That’s the whole of my snow experience. Forty-odd years on this earth and I have never once stood in falling snow.

So somewhere in Edmonton or Calgary — and everyone assures me it’s a fairly safe bet in December — there is a very strong chance that two grown Tasmanian women are going to stop dead in the middle of a footpath, in the way of everybody, and simply stare upward with their mouths open like a pair of absolute tourists.

I’m not going to apologise for it. I’ve been waiting a long time. If you’re Canadian and you see us doing it, please just go around.

I am also told that Edmonton in early December is not cold in the way that we understand cold. Tasmanian cold is a damp, complaining sort of cold that gets into your knees. Edmonton cold, from what I gather, is a cold with opinions. A cold that takes an interest in you personally. We’re buying proper coats — real ones, not the optimistic Tasmanian approximation of a winter coat — and this has been budgeted for. It’s a business expense, obviously, because it’s research.

And the history

Because it can’t only be hockey — even I have limits, and Jo has conditions — we’re building the rest of the trip around actually seeing where we are. Museums. Old buildings. The bits of a country that tell you how it got to be the way it is. I’m the woman who once climbed a hill in New Zealand to stand where a film set used to be, so you already know I’m not going to be in Alberta and not go looking for what’s underneath it.

There’ll be a fair bit of that. There’ll be photographs. Given my track record with a certain tour group and twelve thousand photos of a fictional village, you should probably brace yourselves.

The honest bit

Here’s the truth of it, under all the joking about research.

I’ve been writing about this sport for years. I’ve built a league, filled it with players, given them lines and rivalries and terrible haircuts and love stories. And in all that time I’ve never once sat in a rink in the country that invented the thing and watched it happen in front of me.

That’s a gap. Not a fatal one — you can write around a gap — but I’ve always known it was there, sitting in the back of my head every time I described the sound of a body hitting the boards and had to imagine it.

So yes, it’s research. It’s genuinely research. It’s also nine days with my favourite person, in a country neither of us has seen, watching a forty-year-old Russian do the thing he’s better at than anyone who has ever lived, while there’s still time to watch him do it.

And somewhere in the middle of it, if the weather is kind — and by kind I mean appropriately unkind — I’m going to stand outside in a proper coat and watch snow come down and settle on things, for the first time in my life, at the age of far-too-old-to-be-this-excited.

Some research you have to go and get in person.

See you in December. I’ll bring back notes. And photos. So many photos.

— Suzy

The Closest I Ever Got to Sam Neill

Vale Sam.

Sam Neill has died, and I find myself unexpectedly wanting to sit down and tell you all a story.

He gave us so many good films over the years — more than I could possibly list, and every one of you will have your own favourite tucked away somewhere. Jurassic Park, obviously. The Piano. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. That particular brand of dry, watchful, slightly rumpled charm he brought to everything, where you always got the sense he found the whole business of being a film star faintly ridiculous and was quietly enjoying the joke. I liked him enormously, in the way you like someone you’ve never met but have watched be excellent for forty years.

But my best memory of the man isn’t from a screen at all. It’s from a paddock in New Zealand, and it remains, to this day, one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes.

Let me set the scene for you.

Some years back I was on a Lord of the Rings tour through New Zealand. Now, I want to be clear about the calibre of people I was travelling with, because it matters enormously to what follows. We were not casual fans. We were not there to nod politely at a nice view, buy a fridge magnet, and be back at the hotel in time for the buffet. This was a fully immersive pilgrimage, and it was run like one.

The days were long. We’d often be up and moving before sunrise and still going late into the night, chasing the light, chasing the locations, chasing the exact spot where a thing had happened in a film that, to us, had rather more authority than most historical records. And here is the detail I really need you to sit with: a good number of my fellow travellers would set their alarms an hour earlier than they strictly had to — sacrificing sleep they desperately needed — purely so they could don their ears and their wigs, strap on their fake feet, and assemble each individual, painstakingly recreated piece of costuming, so that they might walk the paths of their chosen race properly attired. Not for a photo. Not for a laugh. For the integrity of the experience.

That was the calibre of devotion on that coach.

And it wasn’t only the dressing-up, either. This was a serious tour — run by Red Carpet Tours, in fact, and this same crew, plus or minus a few faces, has now done the whole pilgrimage twice — and it opened serious doors. We had lunch with the producers. We sat in on classes with the make-up artists who’d done the real thing. Weta Workshop opened their doors to us and let us stand among the actual artistry of it all. We were, in short, known. We were followed around by newspapers — and yes, I’m dating myself here, but this was back when newspapers were printed on paper and a photographer would trail a busload of costumed adults across the countryside because it made for a genuinely good story.

And speaking of photographs: when our group of twenty-five descended on Hobbiton, we came away with over twelve thousand photos between us. Twelve thousand. From one visit. To one location. We used to joke that no tour group on earth had ever documented a patch of ground so thoroughly — that entire professional survey teams had mapped smaller areas with fewer images. Every door of every hobbit hole. Every cabbage. Every artfully placed tiny wheelbarrow. If it existed in the Shire, we have it archived in triplicate from four angles.

Now, I’ll be honest with you: not every one of us was quite that far gone. There were some of us — and I count myself gently among this number — who were deeply, sincerely committed to the books and the films, but who had perhaps not crossed fully into the fake-feet-before-dawn tier of devotion. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I have nothing but love and admiration for the pre-sunrise wig people. I simply also enjoy sleep.) But committed tragics, one and all. That’s the important part. Whether we were in full regalia or merely in spirit, we took our roles seriously. Possibly too seriously. Definitely too seriously.

And lest you think I’m exaggerating the depth of it for comic effect — I’m really not. Here is the proof of the pudding: two of our bravest of men, the very fellows who served as our tour’s own Boromir and Aragorn, now work for Weta as weaponsmiths. Actual weaponsmiths. Forging the actual blades. And two of our hobbits went on to join Weta as costume experts. Four of the people on that coach were so genuinely, unshakeably good at this that the wizards behind the curtain took one look and hired them. So when I tell you we were a serious bunch, please understand I am not being cute about it. We were a pipeline.

So there we were, early one particular morning, being told with a certain amount of ceremony by our lovely guide that this afternoon we’d be making a special stop at Sam Neill’s favourite café. Not far, apparently, from his winery. There was a pause, clearly designed for a ripple of excited murmuring to pass through the coach.

The ripple did not come.

We took this news entirely in our stride and carried on regardless, because — and I say this with the greatest affection and no small amount of shame — poor Sam meant very little to a coachful of Tolkien obsessives. We had bigger fish to fry. We had Rohan to think about. This was a group that would rise before dawn to correctly attach a pair of pointed ears; a café patronised by a knighted New Zealand screen legend simply could not compete, in that moment, with the promise of another paddock that had once, briefly, in a certain light, been Middle-earth.

I’m not proud of it. But I’m not going to lie to you either.

When we finally arrived, the group split neatly in two. Some of us descended on the café like a clan of hobbits who’d caught the scent of second breakfast and would not be stopped by man nor Nazgûl. And a few of us — myself included — stayed behind on the coach.

Now, in my defence, I had earned that rest. We all had. It had been a big day. We had made the climb up to the site of the Golden Hall — where Éowyn stands watching the riders return to Rohan — and stood at the top waving the very flag the Fellowship carried, the wind doing its level best to tear it out of our hands. And here is the part that still makes me laugh: I found that climb genuinely difficult in ordinary human shoes, with ankles and arch support and all the advantages of modern footwear. The hobbits did it in silicone hairy feet. Silicone hairy feet. Up a steep, windswept hillside. And they did it without complaint, because to complain would have been to break character, and one does not break character on the paths of one’s chosen race. I have never simultaneously respected and worried about a group of people more.

We had also recreated the Charge of the Rohirrim across a hillside with more commitment than dignity. And we had spent a genuinely alarming amount of time on our hands and knees searching for Pippin’s Elven brooch, which one of our number had dropped and which had assumed, in our collective imagination, the significance of an actual plot point. We were spent. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. We slumped in our coach seats like the survivors of a great battle, which, in our heads, we absolutely were.

Little did we know that we — the exhausted, the seated, the ones who couldn’t be bothered — were about to receive the revelation of the entire tour.

Because as we sat there, a battered old SUV pulled up a little way off from the coaches. Nothing flash. The sort of car a man drives when he has nothing to prove to anybody and a winery to get back to. And out of it climbed a man.

I will never know precisely what tipped him off. I’ve turned it over many times since, and I like to imagine it unfolded slowly, the way dread always does in the films he was so good in.

Perhaps it was the fellow in full Boromir regalia, sword and all, slurping contentedly on a vanilla latte outside the café. Perhaps it was the Elven princess serenely demolishing a vanilla slice, crumbs cascading down her ethereal robes. But more likely — almost certainly — it was the three ginger hobbits who chose that exact moment to come clomping merrily out of his favourite café on their great fake hairy feet, chattering away, utterly at home.

Whatever it was, I watched it land.

The man went still. He slowly reached up and took off his glasses. And his eyes went wide — and I need you to understand that this was not a general sort of wide. This was specific. This was, to the millimetre, the exact expression Dr Alan Grant wears when he first stands up in that jeep and claps eyes on the dinosaurs. That pure, silent, slack-jawed awe. That “we’re going to make a fortune with this place” face. Except in reverse. Except the wonder was horror, and the dinosaurs were us.

And then, without a single word, Sam Neill — knight of the realm, national treasure, the man whose café this was — gently sank back down into his battered SUV, quietly closed the door, and reversed out of there in a magnificent cloud of gravel dust. Gone. Vanished. Fled his own regular haunt rather than face a busload of feral Tolkien enthusiasts eating pastries in cosplay.

I have never respected a man’s survival instincts more.

That was the closest I ever got to Sam Neill. Not a handshake. Not an autograph. Not even a hello. Just the fleeting, unforgettable privilege of watching a genuine legend decide, in real time, that whatever was happening at his café today was Not For Him — and remove himself from it with the speed and decisiveness of a man who has clearly outrun a velociraptor before and knows exactly how these things go.

And do you know what? I wouldn’t trade it. A handshake, I’d have forgotten. That, I have dined out on for years.

Rest easy, Sam. Thank you for the films, thank you for the wine you probably poured extra generously the moment you got home that afternoon, and thank you — most of all — for the retreat. You clocked the situation, you made the right call, and you got out clean.

Life, uh, finds a way. 🍷

Small Steps Forward

The house is still sad. There’s no other way to put it — Miss Mu left a Mumu-shaped hole that we’re all navigating around in our own ways, human and feline alike. Some days that’s fine. Some days you turn around expecting to see her and the missing her lands fresh all over again.

But life, as it tends to, has been happening anyway.

First, the practical: our internet has been absolutely abysmal, which has made everything approximately three times harder than it needed to be and my patience approximately three times thinner. Luke is back tomorrow, and I am choosing to believe with my whole heart that this will be remedied. I’m sure Luke is a perfectly lovely person in all other respects but right now I am thinking of him primarily as the man who is going to fix my internet, and I will not apologise for that.

Now. The Pusheen situation.

For those playing along at home, there is a Pusheen in this house that is apparently up for grabs, and we have reached a diplomatic resolution of sorts. Our two littlest girls — Hopalong and Pretty — are going to share it. I use the word share loosely. What appears to be happening is that Pretty has decided this is happening and Hopalong is coming to terms with that reality on her own timeline.

Hopalong’s participation, I suspect, is reluctant at best. She has the energy of someone who has been voluntarily annexed and is still working out whether to file a formal objection. Pretty, meanwhile, has apparently decided that the answer to everything is overwhelming affection, and is pursuing this strategy with considerable commitment.

It makes a certain kind of sense. Pretty was Mu’s little wingman — always nearby, always orbiting. She knew her role and she was good at it, and now there’s a Mu-shaped gap where that role used to live. It seems she’s decided Hopalong is the logical candidate to redirect all that devotion toward. Hopalong may not have been consulted on this decision.

In other diplomatic news, Hopalong appears to be slowly, cautiously, with great dignity and absolutely zero acknowledgement that anything has changed, warming to her similarly sized adversary. No formal statement has been issued. Progress is being made.

And then there is the weekend’s great reshuffling of the flock.

Six of our geese are heading off on Saturday to a truffle farm belonging to friends of ours, which is honestly a retirement story befitting their personalities. I wish them well and I suspect the truffles do not yet know what is coming. In their place — because this is how things work around here, nature abhors a vacuum and apparently so do we — we are welcoming two Sebastapol geese, which will bring the goose flock to a very respectable four.

And also arriving at the same time, because why do one thing when you can do several simultaneously, is the foundation of our Cochin flock. One hen, one rooster. The rooster is Columbian variant. The pullet is Partridge variant. They are, by all accounts, extraordinarily fluffy and I am choosing to lead with optimism on the subject of how the existing residents will receive them.

We are, in our own chaotic way, finding our feet again. The farm turns over, the cats negotiate their new arrangements, and somewhere in all of it there is something that feels, cautiously, like forward motion.

🖤 🏒