I’m in my accommodation for one maybe two nights at Isla House in Greenslopes, while my flat is emptied and my new apartment is furnished.
Gotto admit I made a few changes to this room. It’s not a regular motel room, so there is no water boiling or micrwave, all that’s in the kitchen down the corridor.
I brought in a cafe table from the verandah, borrowed a tea towel to cover the weathered top. Was able to fit my walker mostly in the wardrobe.
Doors open, I’m not a fan of everything out of sight, especially in teeny tiny room. Like a box.
Lol, you’ll have to look down the bottom for picture I tried to post here. I tried twice, there are two pics.
Not that I’m really running or even jogging. Though at times I’m up for an elderly heavy-footed jog up the corridor, this is a one-fingered jog over my mobile’s key pad.
In other words, I have no time for regular posts. No time for fiction, construction or even a slightly fictionalized cat story. This is an update on what’s going on in my life.
Next May the rent where I’m living is set go astronomical, $700 AUD per week! I decided no way can I afford that.
So I’m in the process of buying a place in a retirement village. Two meetings already with management, and half a dozen phone calls to secure my unit. Today I am going there to sign the contract and pay what they call a ‘soft’ deposit.
I laughed about that. Two weeks rent at the present rates! But I guess they know that people not working in the money economy have their money tied up in banks and super annuation schemes.
My house when I still lived in NSWView from unit where I live now
Finally I could learn to hunt, and me a large middle-aged cat with a low-slung belly. As a kitten, and with my mother and my brothers and sisters, we were ‘contained’ in a cattery yard. Where my mother could teach us only how to hunt flies and cockroaches.
As a teenage cat, I was contained in the basement of a large house. A large basement that meant, but all of it indoors. Cockroaches there, too. Then I came here.
After studying my new territory, I decided that my first prey animals up from cockroaches would be garden skinks. About the length of my foreleg including my paw, and very fast.
These little lizards live on all the fences surrounding my backyard, about one per metre, but come down onto the ground to catch insects. Where I’ll catch them. When I get fast enough.
The first time I was nearly successful the pernickety old woman took a photo of me, as above, and then laughed.
She laughed at me?
“Too slow!” she chortled. “They know all about big black and white marauders, and have evolved to be very fast!”
I set out to prove her wrong. Days later, I managed to snag with my paw a look-alike from the house wall. I laid it proudly outside the laundry for the pernickety old woman to inspect.
“An Asian Gecko,” she said. “Very good! You can eat as many of those as you like. They’re not native and starting to be a real pest, running over people’s faces at night, and the like.”
I ate it but it was nothing like my kibbles. The tail had spines on it. Yuck!
Escaping from the house, I rapidly got into new habits. I’d sleep most of the day. On weekends, I’d spend the day on the deck with my human.
Weekdays, when the builders arrived at 8.30 AM and went home at 3.30 PM, I slept somewhere warm but out of sight and out of mind.
From about 4.00PM onward, I got to know my backyard. Because, of course, the pernickety old woman put every kind of barrier up to stop me wandering. More on those later.
At approximately 5.00 PM, the pernickety old woman would open the screen door and stand there shaking the kibble tin.
The kibbles rattling was her sign that I should come inside for my dinner. She’d lock the screen door after me. Keep me inside during the exciting hours of the week.
After only my second night inside ready for anything, because I’d slept all day, I started planning my escape.
Watching for wildlife with the deck still a bit wet from rain during the night. I’m on the lookout for intruders.
Some time later … my human looked at a thing she calls a calendar and had turned quite a few pages … I just knew a lot of days had passed.
In the early morning, the pernickety old woman said, “Ha, I hear the truck. I better go tell them where to park.”
Remembering the whole business in the roof that time ago, I hid.
The pernickety old woman came back inside with two men following her, both grey hairs like my human.
Neither of them took their boots off at the backdoor as is the custom. They walked in and out all through the kitchen, the living room next to it and the sunroom behind both.
The pernickety old woman darted in front of them, rolling up the rugs and getting things out of their way.
When they helped her move the refrigerator into the living room and parked it right in front of my hide-out, I’d had enough.
I scooted out of there and ran zig-zagging like a dervish-cat, circling them, then in front and then behind them. Thinking that if I could trip them over, they’d pick themselves up and go away.
The men just laughed and continued with their flicking measuring devices, pens and notebooks.
You’re surprised? I said they were grey hairs!
My human scooped me up and tucked me under her arm. She slid open a cabinet in the sunroom, took the drawer out completely, and put me in that cave.
“Stay there,” she said. “You out of their way and them out of your face.”
This is me looking taken aback. Did my human just tidy me out of the way?
This is one of those days that I need to “make my daily march (back) with the heavy baggage wagon” These words from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as interpreted by Ursula K LeGuin.
Meaning to me that I need to attend primarily to my physical and on-ground community needs.
I must be out of the house by 9 AM, spruced up and ready for anything. First an after-care eye specialist appointment that’s walkable. Then bus into the city for early voting on the Yes/No referendum, and a bank ‘appointment’.
I call it an appointment despite that they don’t know I’m coming.
If you’re interested, I’ve begun summarising entries into the Lodestar Timeline on its dedicated page, accessible through the menu.
Rita de Heer 