Makes me smile

I've had the 'flu all week and it feels like crap. But here are some thoughts that are making me smile right now: * Airmail is finally in my hot (flu-fevered) little hands after all these years.

* I just interviewed a lovely woman who is the 6th generation of her family to run a guesthouse on a tropical island, acquired in 1848 for two tons of potatoes.

* After a year of exhausting commuting, Mr B and I are actually going to live together full time again, starting this month.

* This morning, I painted my fingernails a particularly shocking shade of orange.

* My little brother is getting married this week. (This is us as kids on my old horse Queeny - how cute is he in the yellow stackhat?) * I am going to make spaghetti bolognese for dinner, and eat it while watching Glee.

* I finally filled the prescription for my sleeping tablets so I WILL SLEEP TONIGHT.

Credit where credit is due

I can't say it's a direct response to last week's open letter to Marrickville Council (somehow, I don't picture the Councillors sitting around the office reading naomiloves.com), but something has certainly happened in my lane-way since I wrote that post. The eight bags of rubbish we had collected from the street out the front are gone. So has all the rest of the garbage that was so much a part of that lane-way I had almost ceased to notice. In fact, I don't think I have EVER seen this lane looking so clean.

We must give credit where credit is due, so, thank you Marrickville Council!

Some men

Some men pretend they don't like pets but secretly spoil them. Do you know someone like this? Like a lot of men I know, my gorgeous new husband likes to complain about our dog. (Just to clarify: I mean to say a lot of men I know like to complain about their own family pets. Not all of them complain specifically about our dog. He's a good dog.)

But I digress. Mr B says things like, "He gets in the way of our holiday plans," and "He craps too much on a walk," and "He won't leave me alone - he always wants to sit near me." These comments are generally accompanied by a distinctive screwing up of the face, akin to having recently sucked a particularly sour lemon.

However, I put it to the jury that two out of the three above complaints may possibly be related, both to one another and to Mr B's own actions.

And further, I remind the jury that it was not I who made the dog a bowl of ice cream with fairy sprinkles for dessert last night.

Open letter to Marickville Council

Dear Marrickville Council, Don't fret, my family did your job for you. Cleaned the whole street. Gathered up the old McDonald's wrappers, the beer bottles, the coffee cups, even the white and fossilised dog crap.

We swept up the leaves, the dirt, the shards of broken glass and the cigarette butts. We weeded around the spindly trees you planted and then deserted to the mean streets of Enmore.

After months of your neglect, it came to this. Meg got dirt on her heels and a ladder in her stockings. Shocking, I know. And child labour: Em is only 12. How could you? Does it disturb you that just one side of the street on one block resulted in seven bags of disgusting, putrid garbage? I had to carry these bags THROUGH MY HOUSE. And a liquid, brown and sticky that I hope to god was Coke, spilled on my jeans.

Perhaps a little street cleaning on behalf of the Council to whom we pay our rates would be in order?

Just a thought.

Anyhoo, would you mind picking up the garbage from the back lane? We'd be terribly grateful. Yours sincerely,

Rate-Payer Who Wishes She'd Cleaned Up and Spoken Out Before the Election

Home is where the heart is

My nieces Olivia and Alexandra, aged respectively four and seven, made this for me and Scott on Sunday (with a little help from Emily). We live in a beautiful, 100-year-old house in Enmore with decorative ceilings, stained glass windows, French doors, a sweet kitchen garden, and an increasingly famous blue door.

The cat and dog like to sleep on the old Persian-esque rugs that cover the floorboards and wind up the original oak staircases that curve in two directions. Antique gilt mirrors sit above the marble fireplaces in the lounge room and our bedroom. Both the rugs and mirrors were left behind by the previous owner, and we love to keep his history in our house.

The previous owner also left behind a painting over the dining-room fireplace that we call “the pus painting” (pus is the only word to describe the colour of this painting, which defies description in its hideousness). We tried to remove the pus painting but nothing else worked: it belongs with the house.

We love our house. We really love it. And it was even better on the weekend, with the laughter of our friends and family ringing from every room.

But each Monday, my husband flies back to the Gold Coast, Queensland, for his job, and the dog, cat and I are alone in our super house. And without Mr B, my house is not really a home. I once read that clichés only become clichés because they are the best way of saying something…

So I am moving to the Gold Coast, which scares me on so many levels. I will miss my beautiful house. I will miss my parents and brother. I will miss my amazing friends, who are true family.

I feel like I am constantly leaving people behind. First I left everyone I loved in Sydney, then I left everyone I loved in New York, and now that I’ve barely been back in Sydney, I’m leaving it again.

Not to mention, it’s… THE GOLD COAST.

But Mr B and I will live together again. At night we will cook dinner, and argue because he’ll want more carbs and I’ll want more veges. We'll breathe the sea-salt air. We’ll walk the dog at dusk. I’ll sit in front of the TV and write blog posts while he massages my feet.

A girl can dream.

I will learn to cope with the humidity, and the schoolies, and I will find where the more artistic scene hides. It has to be somewhere, right?

And in the meantime, because Mr B is as sad as I am to say goodbye to our house in Enmore, I had it made into a snowdome. Now he can carry it with him everywhere.

Book clubs

If you're in a book club and think it might be fun for me to come and chat about Airmail, let me know. I'll get baking, and bring you some of my mum's famous lemon slice, or cup cakes, or possibly Aunty Bev's delicious chocolate-and-licorice-allsorts-brownies if she will give me the recipe. I'm in Sydney right now but I'll be travelling to Melbourne shortly, and moving to the Gold Coast / Brisbane in a little while, so if you're in any of those places I'm sure we can work something out.

Yours truly, Naomi

Too much Masterchef

Signs your husband has been watching too much Masterchef: he cooks burgers for dinner and plates up with a flourish of tomato sauce.Signs you have been watching too much Masterchef: you just wrote "plates up" and then photographed your dinner.

How cute is this?

Yesterday our daughter Emily invented a game in the garden for her little cousins. She hid bunches of flowers in vases all over our back garden, and the little ones had to search through and find them among the 'real' flowers. They had a ball. (This is Olivia and Mia returning with 'found flowers'.)Continuing the "awesome cuteness of family" theme, we had a quadruple birthday party at our house on Sunday and, not for the first time, the kids saved the day.

Aunty Alma, Aunty Bev and Baz, as well as little Mia, all turned a year older this week, so I organised a kick-arse Adriano Zumbo V8 Diesel chocolate cake for them. But after battling the Balmain traffic and lining outside in the pouring rain for over an hour, I discovered that the Zumbo folk had somehow "not received" my order, despite the giving and taking of credit card details online. I returned back to a house full of birthday-bbq-goers feeling deflated, sorry and soggy. And minus a cake.

Not to worry: Emily, Alexandra and Olivia (with a bit of secret input from Nanna) set to work and made an absolutely delicious chocolate cake that I think was better than anything Adriano could have concocted himself. This is Alexandra with the masterpiece. Did you ever see a cuter chef? Oh and also, we got hitched. In our garden that my mother fixed up, in front of the Notting Hill blue door that my father painted, followed by 10 courses of deliciousness with a very small group of beloved family and friends at Bistro Ortolan in Leichhardt. All in all it was a pretty darn good weekend!

Ain't it hard to be humble

In honour of my grandfather Kevin, whose birthday it would have been today. This Mac Davis ditty was, like, grandpa's theme song. Boy would he sing it with gusto! I miss him.

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way. I can't wait to look in the mirror cause I get better loking each day. To know me is to love me I must be a hell of a man. Oh Lord it's hard to be humble but I'm doing the best that I can.

I used to have a girlfriend but she just couldn't compete with all of these love starved women who keep clamoring at my feet. Well I prob'ly could find me another but I guess they're all in awe of me. Who cares, I never get lonesome cause I treasure my own company.

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way, I can't wait to look in the mirror cause I get better looking each day To know me is to love me I must be a hell of a man. Oh Lord it's hard to be humble but I'm doing the best that I can.

I guess you could say I'm a loner, a cowboy outlaw tough and proud. I could have lots of friends if I want to but then I wouldn't stand out from the crowd. Some folks say that I'm egotistical. Hell, I don't even know what that means. I guess it has something to do with the way that I fill out my skin tight blue jeans.

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way, I can't wait to look in the mirror cause I get better looking each day To know me is to love me I must be a hell of a man. Oh Lord it's hard to be humble but I'm doing the best that I can.

We're doing the best that we can.

Rainy weekend

Lovely rainy weekend that opened with an impromptu evening visit to Kurrajong, revealing my mother heading out for dinner at the Heights Pub wearing a brilliant turquoise moo-moo and a wooden necklace of carved African animals, in honour of Multicultural Day at Bilpin Public School. Saturday continued with a relaxing facial, a gift from the incomparable and adorable Sarah J Hyland, followed by a sublime cheese-tasting at Bistro Ortolan with my beloved. We spent the evening listening to music and rain. He made chocolate pudding while I painted little stick-figures on each of the 40 placecards for our wedding next week. Slept to the rhythm of rain on the tin roof outside our bedroom, sweet and unrelenting.

The sun came out briefly on Sunday, making Sydney Harbour sparkle as as we crossed over to the north side to visit my birthday-and-soon-to-be-anniversary-twin Kate and husband Nick, who served up a three-course lunch extravaganza of good food and wine and laughter. Joyfully distended bellies. It was almost dark outside when we left.

More rain, tumbling over the tin roof all night, entering my dreams.