Anyway, finally everything was moved out after some 300 trips… and we hired professional cleaners, thank god… cleaning the old place would’ve just about finished me off this weekend… not that I wasn’t completely and utterly exhausted anyway… but I saw it all clean and smelling fresh and compared it with the new place that doesn’t have one square inch of free space at the moment and smells strongly of paint, and I just wanted to throw myself on the newly steam cleaning carpet and go to sleep for a week!
So yes, the painting… what a far out experience that was. It was really hard work but also lots of fun… I’ve decided it’s going to only be a once in a lifetime experience though. But then again, we are now indebted to everyone who helped us and if ever they decide to paint their own house, we will certainly pitch in… but after our little experience on Friday, I think everyone is well aware of all the pros and cons… So we started at 2 pm and finished around 2 am… I didn’t even know I had it in me to keep at something for 12 hours… it wasn’t a perfect job… tons of touch up work to be done… but we pretty much painted everything we set out to paint… except for my dark trim… sob sob… sacrifices had to be made… that is my own personal project but and I will make it happen!!! But most importantly, we couldn’t have done it without all the wonderful people who turned up to help us (and also to help us move)… only some two of them know of this blog, but anyway, thanks guys! Maybe I’ll tell you about them… I’d be quite interested to see what I have to say about them myself because most of them are people I’ve met here and haven’t really spoken about before in terms of what they’re like…
We had the day off on Friday for the so called “settlement” of the house and to begin the painting… so we started off by picking up our perpetually jobless friend… let’s call him Sam. He’s not unemployed but he’s a student so he only works part-time and has Fridays off and class like once a week or something… he’s not really a new friend. He was Mr. Moonlight’s friend from college and I’ve known him for as long as I’ve known Mr. Moonlight… he is, of course, best friend, recently departed housemate, and in general our fellow Madras person… we partied our asses off together, drank shitloads of rowdy rum together, smoked shitloads of weed together, hung out with a lot of the same people at all the same discos and parties, and met up every single day for an afternoon smoke and then we’d go to Coffee for cold coffee… oh man, I miss the cold coffee at Coffee… by the time he arrived in Australia in 2004 he’d quit smoking weed which was a huge shocker and had taken up smoking cigarettes like they were going out of style which was a bigger shocker and he’d also switched from rum to whiskey… why am I the only one who still loves rum?? So he was housemate until a few weeks ago and we had many fun times here too… and we actually smoked hash together the other night… it was my first hash night in Australia… apparently its really expensive but some friend of Sam’s had some… so we smoked lots and Sam eventually passed out cos it’s been a while. Anyway, that’s our friend Sam…
So the three of us went to Amici and ate the usual and waited for the agent to ring and say settlement had happened so we could pick the keys up. This settlement is a big anticlimax. The previous day we went and left the cheque for the remaining amount and that’s all… there was no formal signing over/handing over of keys or anything. I was quite disappointed. So when she finally rang, we just looked at each other and said Homeowner… we just did that the whole weekend… I like saying it… homeowner… hehe… I want the MSN emoticon for hehe to go here…
you would only understand if you saw it bobbing about… Rat and I chat on MSN everyday and almost everything we say is followed by a hehe… Anyway, we arrived at new apartment and the first person to arrive to assist was photographer by profession pal… let’s call him Shutterbug. Shutterbug is my friend from school days and he is of the alcohol/smoke/drug free variety… he gets very high on life though and if you were ever around in Madras between 97-99, you might’ve noticed the guy with the chessboard shaved into the hair or sometimes the concentric circles, dancing near the speakers at a party or disco… he was perfect designated driver and he would insist on walking us girls to our doorsteps even if it was after dropping us off from rowing at 9 in the freaking morning!!! But that’s Shutterbug for you… his charm lies in his old fashioned chivalry and other eccentricities… :-) so he read my blog last week and called to offer assistance and I was quite happy to have him along to bring some method to the madness… he’s always been quite good at bringing method to madness…
However, this painting an apartment thing is no easy job and by about 6:30 pm, we weren’t even close to halfway done and Shutterbug had to leave and we awaited our second shift of happy helpers. First among these was the guy who used to live in Geelong… he now claims that Melbourne is the Big City and Geelong is the City of the Future… hehe… I have decided anyhow to name him Big City Dude on this blog… he spent his childhood in Africa, his adolescence in Kiwiland and moved to Australia about 3 years ago which is when we met him through common friends… I am at quite a loss to describe Big City Dude… he is at once most hilarious and fun and also quite peculiar and random… I think the hilarity for me lies in all the peculiar random things he says… at a lot of the times we hang out, you will find me simply shaking my head in wonderment at his newest bizarre theory… he had a metaphor once about dance performances and group emails… I won’t even try to explain… but he did follow it up with a short demo of classical Indian dance and by then we were laughing too hard to care… hahaha
Next to arrive was fellow blogger and Beatles enthusiast… you will find him under Blogger Buddies as Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid and this is some arcane reference to something I’m not very sure about so I have decided to name him Guitarman on this blog… he has another new nickname that is really most amusing but he will probably kill me if I publish that on the world wide web so I will refrain… Guitarman is also from Madras but we only met him in Melbourne and it’s really one of those random small world chance meetings… Guitarman and Sam used to be neighbours as children or teenagers many many years ago in Madras and one night Mr. Moonlight, Sam and I were chilling on some bench in the city hungrily eating our subs after an evening of watching Saturday Night Fever – The Musical… hehe… I’ve forced these boys to do many things they wouldn’t normally do ever…
but guess who ended up shaking their booty through all the musical numbers… but I digress… so Guitarman was going to cross the street and he was with this other friend of Mr. Moonlight’s and mine from Madras and we yelled out her name and we were just talking and next thing we know Guitarman and Sam are all over each other like ants on a jar of honey… of course, I exaggerate… but so anyway, long story short, Sam and Guitarman got reacquainted… by general proximity and love of all things alcoholic and herbs, Mr. Moonlight and I also became friends with Guitarman… and naturally I have named him Guitarman because he plays the guitar really well and I cannot count the number of singing sessions we’ve had… the latest song he’s learnt is One and since that is currently everyone’s favourite song (I’m not entirely sure why) we just force him to keep playing it… Oh, and Sam, Big City Dude and Guitarman are now housemates and they’re the cutest little family ever… sometimes it’s hard to see the jar of honey because of the ants all over it… kidding, kidding!!!By about 8:30 pm, the base coat was mostly completed except for two bedrooms but we’d also ditched base coat for a few of the living room walls because they’d been painted recently. This killed my obsessive compulsive Virgoan trait of everything being done exactly the same way but fatigue and common sense prevailed…
Enter two new labourers… she is a bohemian free spirit type video editor who I met through common friends and he is her boyfriend who I’ve only met twice so can’t really say anything about him except he seems really nice… I shall name her Flower Child… I’ve only been hanging out with her in the last five months or so and the first time we were both totally wasted so I thought, well here’s a chick I can finally drink with. Alas, the next time she was drinking Bacardi Breezers… and I said why, why, why would anyone do this? And she said, we drink for very different reasons Penny Lane… it seems she drinks because she likes the taste. I know there are lots of people who do this, women in particular… I am just so not one of them. Anyway, it kinda works that she’s not that drunk while I’m always super toasted… she faithfully listens to all the extra shit I have to say when I’m drunk. When two people are really drunk it often happens that both of them say a lot of shit that neither of them pays much attention to.
Oh, I forgot to mention… at some point in the evening, 24 bottles of beer arrived… I had grave concerns about drunken helpers spilling beer on the walls instead of paint but an admirable job was done in spite of the beers going down like water. I didn’t drink because I found it way too hard to hold a paintbrush in one hand and a beer bottle in the other and simultaneously climb onto the stool to reach the upper wall.
By about 10:30 pm we reached the last stage of our painting marathon… the soothing Beige Drop was on most of the walls and only the skirting and corners and edges needed to be completed as also the feature wall. Our final two helpers arrived bringing a fresh second wind with the rest of us being totally over the whole thing. He originally studied with Mr. Moonlight for the final two years of high school in Madras and then came over to Australia for his undergrad. They had completely lost touch and they both got the surprise of their lives when someone in common reunited them in Melbourne in 2002 when we arrived… Madras is just the smallest little village I tell ya… that’s why I love it and why a lot of people hate it… She is now his wife and they started going out about five months after we arrived and just tied the knot a couple of months ago in a civil ceremony… that was their first wedding… they’re having two more weddings in Delhi and Malaysia in November and I really really wanted to go but many constraints have held me back, the strongest of which is finance. So now they keep referring to each other as oh, my husband, oh, my wife… kinda like our homeowner thing… and I just find it really funny…
I shall name them Bonnie & Clyde… no reason… that’s the first ‘couple’ name that popped into my head…So finally we packed it all in by 2:00 am… the last wall to be painted was the feature wall… I applied the inaugural strokes of the delicious Palm Sugar and then went off to start cleaning and left the rest of the crew to finish it up… I didn’t take any pictures because at the start there was nothing to take pictures of and at the end I was covered so much in paint I wasn’t going to let my fingers anywhere near my camera. Also, I really want to finish all the touching up and the dark trim and receive all my new furniture first and set up the house really awesomely so it looks likes a picture for one of those Home & Country magazines.
But anyway, it was fun :-) And these friends of ours quite truly rock!
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