Californian Dreaming

Strange things are happening at my place. Habits are being formed and, for a change, they are not all bad ones.

For example, objects are finding their ways into strange places. Like the cupboards where they belong.

Bizarre, I know.

And dirty washing is being placed in the dirty wash basket! Shock, horror! Bathrooms are being left clean and dry, (unlike their usual ‘just been visited by a family of muddy water buffalos’ state), and overflowing school bags and smelly runners (thus far never have been known to make it beyond the back door after school) have suddenly disappeared.

What is going on? I hear you ask.

Well, the house is on the market. And given that it was all due to some pretty consistent nagging from Master Teen about being ‘sick of living out of town’, apparently he concedes a certain amount of responsibility towards keeping the place in ‘imminent inspection’ mode and is happy to do his share.

I must say I am impressed too. It’s not often that you see a teenage boy making his bed. In fact, I was so fascinated by this whole cleanliness in teens thing that I wondered how often you would see the words ‘teenager and ‘tidies’ in the same sentence, so I Googled it on the Web.

Not surprisingly, I found only two references. The first was a headline from a 1973 copy of the medical magazine, Lancet:

“Teenager Tidies Room — Doctors Baffled”
(Sub Heading: “Mother Goes Into Anaphylactic Shock”).

The second reference was from MAD magazine where, clearly, they were joking.

And the new house? I hear you ask.

Well, don’t get excited. It’s not so much a house as an advertisement for Dirty Dan’s Demolition Services (the ‘Before’ picture obviously). Peeling paint, sagging floor, seventeen varieties of gaudy carpet, a kitchen with no stove, a rusty tin roof and an outside dunny with no flush. And all currently buried under twenty tonnes of fallen autumn leaves.

“Delightful Californian Bungalow,” reads the Real Estate guide. “Bring the old girl back to life.”

Naturally they neglected to mention that you would need a defribulator the size of the MCG to get this old girl’s fireplaces burning again. Californian Bungalow indeed!

But whilst she is seriously more ‘Bung’ than ‘Cal’, she is in a great location and we figure that with a bit of ‘T.L.C’ and a fair bit more ‘C.A.S.H’ she will come up a treat.

So, soon it will be on with our very own Renovation Rescue!

But first we have to sell this place. It’s a bit of a mess at the moment but that’s no problem. I will just get my own little ‘Mr Sheen the Teen’ on the job!

Am I’m enjoying this? You bet!