Any Saturday that begins with a sausage roll or meat pie (or both) and sauce has just got to be a an especially good one.
Why the need for such a hearty breakfast? It was the final day of competition at the pool in London and Mr SSG and I were up at dawn taking it all in. It’s been a crazy week of competition and it’s probably been the first time in the 3 years we’ve had Foxtel that I’ve been truly grateful for the sports channels. The programming descriptions for each channel and segment gave clear details of what events were being covered and the coverage was excellent. I’ve heard rumblings that the life of an Olympic viewer hasn’t been so easy over on Channel Nine.
Unfortunately, with the end of the swimming comes the post mortem on the Australian team’s ‘under performance’. Everyone has an opinion on why the anticipated (or perhaps expected) gold medals didn’t come our way. Champion past swimmers from the recent and not so recent past have hinted at issues with work ethic, complacency and a sense of entitlement that a gold medal time will just happen by virtue of donning the Australian swim team uniform. The press have had a field day with the evils of social media addiction amongst the swimmers as well as their perceived arrogance in pre-Olympics endorsements and press conferences. The swimmers themselves have admitted to intense anxiety, nerves and acute illnesses. The general public haven’t been backward in coming forward in the comments sections of the local newspapers.
I don’t think there’s any one reason over the others that have caused those gold medals to be so elusive to the Australian team. There is some truth and wisdom behind the comments of past swimmers and coaches. However, in the long term, nothing spurs a person on to achieve greater things than a very humbling failure to achieve their dream the first time round.
After my ‘tradie’s breakfast’, I went on to complete a seemingly impossibly mission. I found some steel wool. Proper steel wool with coily, springy bits. The kind that really cleans the bath tub and that really gets rid of congealed melted cheese and red stain from the inside of the microwave safe plastic container you reheated that pasta bake for lunch at work in the other day.
For some reason, the big supermarkets have decided not to stock steel wool anymore. The closest they get these days is this stuff.
That leaves steel ‘fur’ all over the place and disintegrates after a couple of uses.
To cut a boring story short, I found my steel wool at the local $2 shop and I know have a sparkling bath tub and as good as new plastic containers for next week’s lunches. Not bad for a morning’s work.
If finding real steel wool was the highlight of the morning then perhaps it won’t really surprise you to find out that all the excitement this afternoon centred on our clothes line in the back garden. It wasn’t just because it was sunny and warm and that everything dried on the line by 4pm it was also Baby SSG’s first official laundry day.
His entire wardrobe of Bonds (so far) took up one line.
Whilst his socks managed to miraculously survive the front loader without any of the pairs being widowed in the process.
This will possibly be the only time in his life that his T-shirts and tracky pants will be ironed and hung up after being washed. I bought 2 sizes of clothing and Gina Ford tells me that Baby SSG is not to have a single clothes tag anywhere near his skin. So the hangers will help me separate out the sizes of his now tag free clothing.
And that’s about it from me today. I hope to return next time with something more exciting than the laundry and steel wool!
Take care.