by First, I saw this piece about autism in the Guardian last Friday. A wonderfully written piece that moved me to tears.
My cousin put me in contact with a Romanian lady; last night I got the chance to talk with her. We chatted for over an hour on the phone, almost entirely in English. She did most of the talking. Food and gypsies were her hot-button topics. I can’t wait to try Romanian food. I’m always thinking about food at the moment.
I bumped into my other Wellington-based cousin at the market on Saturday morning, the cousin that I have so much in common with, you just wouldn’t believe. We’re less than a month apart in age, we go to the same market, we even support the same baseball team. He was sporting a Boston Red Sox cap that he said he picked up in Rebel Sport. Guess where I got mine, I happily said. He gave me the news that he’d just become a father for the second time – another daughter to go with their two-year-old.
My flatmate’s phone calls to Liberia added up to $82. I was worried they might have been more. I’m sure they would have been more if I hadn’t overheard him spell out his very common name and asked him about that. For all my previous flatmate’s faults, he’d always pay me promptly, thanks in no small part to his dad. Things are a bit harder with this guy even if I do get the money eventually.
With this bloke, food shopping is extremely stressful because he wants to spend almost bugger all on it. Every week I make a ridiculously small list. He vets the list, queries items that he doesn’t think should be on it, and puts asterisks next to the things that he doesn’t eat, lest I charge him for them. I go to Pak ‘n’ Save and come out through the 15-items-or-less lane with less shopping than I did when I lived alone. The first time I did the shopping after he moved in, I just, well, did the shopping. He didn’t like that one bit, and pulled everything out of the cupboard complaining that I’d already got three jars of this or four packets of that, jars and packets that I’d bought with my own money. Now the cupboard is virtually empty. I’m eating a lot more pies at lunchtime than before. I used to struggle to eat the BBQ pork fried noodles I sometimes get from the takeaway next to McDonalds on Adelaide Road. Now I wolf it down.
I wasn’t too happy with my English lesson tonight. I made the classic mistake of trying to pack too much in, too much vocab especially. I’m still learning.
