A week in New Zealand for me, and then three days away on a roadshow allowed the girlie to stretch out and call the place her own for a while.
I was in NZ for a friend’s wedding, and very good it was with a bunch of people turning up I hadn’t seen for a while. Setting? A kumeu vineyard. Fan bloody tastic. I was also over there to see the Girlie’s older sister into hospital. Dicky kidney, you see. They were going to do a Something Ectomy but in the end settled for an Irish procedure, a Something O’Plasty, which was music to our ears.
So right now Girlie Major is relaxing at home with a tube and a bag sticking out of her side. But everything went well and she’ll be up and causing trouble again soon. Girlie Major went a bit off the rails as a teen but has come out the other end, after a few good scares, a very fine thing indeed.
I went with her to the doctors a few months ago, a urology clinic in Gillies Avenue, to have scans and so forth. The doc was terrific – he only had one kidney and reckoned it was a doddle. One was enough, he said. He still regularly knocks back a few drams too many. Funny thing is, when you get to the reception area you can see into a courtyard out the back with a fountain and two or three of those Germanic “little boys taking a pee” statues.
Inspirational stuff.
Anyway the doc asked a lot of questions, as docs do. Very personal questions about, you know, down there. And about sex. Then he whipped Girlie Major behind a curtain to inspect her waterworks.
Then I heard a little voice:
“If I’d known you were going to do this I wouldn’t have brought my Dad!”
When the inspection was over he came back to his desk and drew a couple of diagrams to explain what was wrong and what he was going to do to fix it. Girlie Major cringed.
Girlie Minor, meanwhile, is planning her Schoolies Week. Schoolies is a great Aussie tradition a la Spring Break in the US of A, they’ve even made a movie about it. Kids head up to Surfers, rent a hotel room between about ten of them, drink themselves stupid, take drugs and shag each-other senseless.
Being a supportive parent, I’m expected to pay.
Schoolies has been troublesome in the past and the authorities have tried to reign it in. But the Girlie isn’t planning to go to Surfers, because it sucks. She and her friends are heading for Bali, where, hopefully they’ll just lie on the beach go home to watch telly and go to bed early.
Yeah, right.
In other news, the boys lost the last test against South Africa and their best opportunity to knock off the one nation they have never beaten in a series. Damn shame, but a great series. Murali is in trouble again, and rightly so in my humble.
ABC’s MediaWatch was funny as hell last night with a terrific fisking, of right-wing columnists Greg Sheridan and the appalling Andrew Bolt. Also a funny item on NZ’s own Sunday News.