All over the place this morning...

The front garden looks like a big digging machine has scraped it flat (odd that). The dog is so excited, she doesn't know which bit of mud to roll in first.

We gain access to our property via temporary steps from the next door neighbour's place.

There is chaos in the garden, and slightly less chaos inside where a fireplace man is struggling to get our two heaters up & running by the time we get home tonight. It should have been yesterday, but 1. The water suddenly dried up so he was unable to mix mortar, and 2. there was no way for him to get his 30kg bags of mortar down to the house, even if he got water from next door.

I have amused our architects immensely by declaring "Sheesh, this is only day 1! Will there be a day down the track when you send me an email to say you've discovered the project will cost $3000 less than thought?". I think my email is probably being circulated around the NZ Architects Institute to give them a good laugh.

And so the evening was spent debating between ourselves (the clients) whether "contingency" and "slush" funds should be synonyms. And wondering where I could find a photo of Audrey Tatou dressed as Zorro.

I have made it clear to everyone that things had better settle down for a few months now or we're all in trouble, as far as budgets are concerned anyway.

I have loads to do at work also. Loads... fortunately I have finely honed & sophisticated work avoidance techniques to counter this. I developed rudimentary skills in this area early on, at college certainly, possibly before. I refined them to a level approaching Art at university. I am not the sort of person that plans a project out, prepares, and has it completed well before the deadline. I'm a "Holy fuck, it's half an hour before my 6000 word essay on DH Lawrence's The Man Who Died is due, I'd better read it." kind of guy. I once had to run a seminar on the NZ novel Man Alone. I hadn't finished it, but led a rousing session by asking the class what they thought of the ending. Winged it quite successfully. The tutor, the scary Father Francis MacKay even complimented me. I'm still not sure how it finished, the class didn't really seem to agree.

And so what was the point of that anyway? Oh yes, I have lots to do but this morning I was instantly distracted & moved by this post on Public Address. BusyBoy has figured out that his parents & everyone he knows will one day die.

MiramarMike sent me a meme some time ago, 5 things I miss about childhood. I never completed the meme. For one thing, there was a lot of faffing around with links to do. For another, when I first read it I thought I only had to think of one thing & move everyone else's entries one place up.

The truth is, there is one thing I miss from my childhood. I miss my dad.

I can remember, like BusyBoy, when the concept of mortality sunk in. It seemed important then, not just that my folks remain alive for a long time, but that they remain some good distance from death, that they remain young.

I can remember quizzing them: "Will you still be a young man & woman when I am a young man?" I'm sure the answer was in the affirmative.

Really, what I hadn't factored in at that stage, was that death does not only come to old people. He made it to approximately 6 months older than I am right now. Still young. I was a mere 19 at the time. We really weren't young men together for long enough. Younger brother & younger sister were, and are of course, some 4-5 years younger than me. Now, if he were alive, he'd be in his early 70s. Although if my mum is any indication of how he'd have aged, he might still be considered young.

I possibly get my work ethic from my dad. Certainly, I squirmed recently when my mum observed that it would have been a lot easier for her & her young family, if my dad had had some ambition, he was immensely talented, academically & sportingly, dux at school, scholarships, captain of the first 15 & eleven... I could see my wife looking at me out of the corner of her eyes & pennies dropping into place, and I knew she was thinking about the ambition thing :) Hey, I have ambition! I just haven't yet figured out what I want to succeed at. In the meantime, be assured, I wear lots of sunscreen.

I have a wonderful photograph of my father, taken when he would have been in his early 20s, and it looks like he & the group of men he is with have just finished a shift in a coal mine. He looks for all the world like a young John Lennon (without the moptop). If I had a scanner....

So anyway, I don't really want to dwell on this, I should get back to work, or if not, scour the web for Audrey Tatou dressed as Zorro.

I'll finish with just a very quick story about my dad, which might be indicative of something. Or not.

When we were back in the UK for a year in the early 1970s, dad, who was a mining engineer turned maths & physics teacher, had scored himself a job at a local secondary modern school, pretty much babysitting a hard case class of underachievers, and even teaching, of all things, given he was the least practical engineer who ever walked the face of the earth, metalwork.

After some months, the local school inspectors visited, and were obliged to mention to dad, that one enterprising young fellow, down the back of his metalwork class, had for some months, been quite competently & diligently, building himself a fully functioning revolver.