morning school run

every week day, a short walk to deposit my son into the school system - there are two sets of lights to cross, a pack of children, a pack of parents, you get to know each other from the slightest pieces of information flicked into the air to keep the social momentum up.

This morning, J's mum was delighted because her pregnant belly has finally taken a definite pregnant shape. She was so happy. And on the way home, F's mum confesses she is really nervous because she is on her way to the airport to meet 'a man' for the first time, as in, she met him on the internet two months ago. He is an accountant from Melbourne. He would have come earlier if it weren't for the busyness of the end of the financial year. I told her she looked hot.

Sometimes this much is more than enough.

things to clip it all together with

The children were playing a myriad ball games on the wet bitumen. Their admonishments and directions and exclamations were a kind of music: rhythmical, disjointed, sequenced, logical, patterned and always, an endless disintegration of sound into the wet air.

Am really tired, I slept on high alert last night, knowing that my car was unlocked but too apathetic to get out of bed and lock the damn thing - ridiculous scenario. Eventually woke from a dream where I rode an unwieldy bike along an arcade and into a crowded book shop and became stuck in the aisles. It was light hearted and comic though which was appreciated after a spate of dreams in which infant humans and animals were injured and I was implicated.

of sleep and mouse shit

Further to space clearing, I have moved my bed twice in the past week. Apparently, beds must be as far away from the door as possible but also have a good view of it for optimum reaction time etc etc. To add to this delicate balance, it is a strange fact that I am really sensitive to which direction my head is pointing. Definitely cannot be pointing south, I feel so odd in that position, literally as if I am sleeping on my head. I like west or east for sleeping directions.

The first new site was a disaster. Even though I was the same distance from the window as the previous site of a couple of years, in which I slept both very well and very badly, I was especially wakeful and aware of my close position to the front of the house and thus, the street.

The second and current site is tucked into the back corner of the room, a position that I had always been wary of because of its proximity to the built-in wardrobe. However, is it indeed the site in which I have had the most consistent fulfilling sleep in a long time? Yes, it is.

Unfortunately, good sleep did not prevent me from rolling a mice poo over my tongue yesterday evening. I made myself the first hot chocolate I have had in many years. I drank it. I enjoyed it. I was probably a little smug about how much I was drinking it and enjoying it and in the last swig, a crumb caught on my tongue, and as I rolled it towards my fingers I thought to myself, please, please don't let that be a mouse poo on my tongue and unfortunately, it was.

No matter how much boiling water I drank, or how much raw carrot and celery that I energetically crunched immediately afterwards, I could not, actually, I cannot, forget the sensation, the shape, of that mouse poo on my tongue.