If a
housemate moves into the woods, but no one sees her… has she moved in at all? Or is she just paying an exorbitant amount of
money to store her clothes?
 |
| Clothes like this wet suit, which fits me perfectly |
We recently
underwent a changing of the guard at the Cliff, with Marika abandoning ship, and
Mandy moving in as her replacement.
Mandy was an excellent choice – easy going, good at sharing and she
laughs at my jokes (thus proving conclusively that she has an excellent sense
of humour).
There’s just
one thing… I can’t actually remember what Mandy looks like. If you did a line-up of appropriately
proportioned blonde girls, I’d struggle to pick her out.
I literally
haven’t seen her in almost two months.
There are two clear reasons why this might be the case.
Option A
The grand
burden of being in a healthy relationship is that you actually have to spend
time with your significant other. Mandy
is so enamoured with said Other that she has no use for a lounge room as cold
as a freezer, in a building which now appears to flood annually, on a street
where parking has become a bitter, bitter knife fight with that douche who
leaves snide notes. In this scenario it
also becomes apparent that she is the first person to live in this house and be
in a relationship at the same time.
Option B
Mandy is a
spy, and ‘Mandy’ isn’t even her real name.
‘Mandy’ is her cover identity, and the Cliff is simply one of many safe
houses she keeps scattered all around the world.
Option B is
clearly the most likely, but let’s just stay open-minded on the topic for now,
because none of this is even the real issue.
‘What’s the real issue?’ asks everyone everywhere (all of them).
The real
issue is: What should we use her room for?
1. A part of
me instantly blurts out ‘sewing room’ (even though I don’t sew) because I am my
mother’s daughter.
2. A second
part of me mutters ‘home gym’ (even though I would never use it), because I am
still that same daughter, and thus have had it drilled into me that I should
probably go for a run because it will somehow make me happier. And that I really don’t need that second
piece of bread because I should still be full from the porridge I had 6 hours
ago.
3. An upstairs
cellar. Vastly more practical and likely
than a home gym.
4. A Rear
Window style set up, featuring a telescope, in order for me to solve crime in
the neighbourhood. The seedy underbelly
of the Lower North Shore will be unveiled when I finally unravel the
masterminds behind such misdeeds as The Case of the Missing Mop Bucket, The Curious
Incident of the Glove Box Thief in the Night-Time, and who the hell owns the
cat that shits on our front porch every single day without fail.
5. A dog
kennel. In order to breed the mortal
enemy of the cat that shits on our front porch every single day without fail.
6. A craft
room – because paper mache feels like something I didn’t fully trial in my
youth.
7. Walk-in-wardrobe. Stop laughing mum, of course I’m joking – my
various pairs of jeans fit perfectly where they are.
8. Bo-ho
café furnished with ‘found’ objects, featuring only tea and staffed by the
street gang of tweens who loiter on the corner and threaten to make people buy
their abstract paintings.
9. A warm
safe place to hatch baby chickens.
Because of course.
There are
some advantages to having a housemate who’s MIA. For one thing, it saves me from trying to
figure out how to tell Mandy not to use my tea cup without sounding like a
total knob.
Also we now
have a back-up room for our next Annual Plumbing-Based House Flood. After the last one a few months back Layla
had to move everything she owned into the lounge room. Now I don’t want to say she’s a hoarder or
anything, but if the mammoth pile of newspapers which appeared to be older than
that soup I made 3 years ago that’s still sitting in the freezer is anything to
go by… an Emergency Flood Storage Room might be a thing worth having.
Of course
the best laid plans of mice and crime sleuths can be easily over-turned by the
Ghost Protocol Housemate herself should she want to use her own room. So selfish.
Painefull
Out
P.S. During
the latest Annual Plumbing-Based House Flood one of the tradies casually said “You
should write a blog about this.” I don’t
know what’s more concerning, that Deputy Hot Plumber & Co may have
discovered my re-telling of their last visit, or the idea that “You should
write a blog about this” is now a passing statement that can be made between
strangers.
