The Ghost of Housemates Present

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.