I was settling in for a quiet one last night when my front doorbell started ringing repeatedly.
The dogs went absolutely nuts and the intercom screen showed two women in hard hats.
Weird.
I didn’t fancy letting random strangers into the building, so I flitted around looking for my keys while the dogs barked their heads off.
Then I dashed downstairs to find two women in pink hi-vis repeatedly pressing my buzzer.
Actually, they were repeatedly pressing everyone’s buzzers, but I must have been the only person home.
They were looking for the owner of a blue car parked out the front because they needed to do night work on the road.
Words to strike dread in my I-need-a-quiet-night heart.
I pointed out that it was unlikely to belong to anyone in my block as we have garaging under the building, but there was a street filled with restaurants a block away …
Good luck finding the owner of that blue car gals …
In other apartment block news, I was a bit PTSD yesterday after being sent a photo of what a brush turkey is doing to our front yard …
Long-time readers may recall that a brush turkey played a starring role in the last months of my marriage.
We had a 25m x 5m concrete strip along our back fence and a family of brush turkeys decided it was the perfect spot for a nest.
That might not have been such a problem in a leafy, rambling backyard, but it looked like Armageddon as they constantly flipped every bit of dirt and wood chip and leaf mulch they could find onto the concrete.
Every day my ex would sweep and scoop it all into a green bin, then methodically return it to the garden. He loathed his life, me and those damn birds more with every scoop.
One afternoon, I decided to surprise him by doing the restoration myself. But I got impatient with the endless scooping and bent down to try and flip the whole bin filled with mulch into the garden.
ARRRRRRGGHHHHHHHHHHH. There went my back. Or, more specifically, the ligaments in my pelvis.
My pelvis was already dodgy from ‘The Chicken Incident’ … in case you missed that one as well … I had two baby chicks tweeting around on our back deck one day – we were urban chook owners – when it started pouring with rain. I grabbed one chick in each hand and dashed inside, where I promptly slipped on the wooden floor boards and … gave myself a splits injury.
Nasty.
Around a year later, just as I was finally starting to do lunges again at the gym, I’d stuffed it up for the second time.
At first I tried to pretend everything was fine and kept raking out that damn mulch. I was loathe to call my husband because relations between us were not cordial.
I can’t remember exactly why, but we’d had a falling out the previous night. We were not friends.
But, finally, I faced the fact that I needed his help more than I needed to remain on my high horse.
He dashed home, frantically searching for after-hours physios on his iPhone as he went … which may explain why he ran up the back of someone on the way … who turned out to be one of the school mums, double ooops.
That was in August 2013 and by February 2014 my ex was gone. The six intervening months were among the most distressing of my life and those bloody brush turkeys played a starring role.
They were relentless, unstoppable.
Fortunately, it wasn’t mating season when we sold the family home, so there were no mounds on the property during the process, but the new owners emailed the real estate agent in the spring asking if we’d left our pets behind.
Ah, no, they’re native and they’re your problem now …
How dare the turkeys rear their ugly heads again!
As for the chicks in pink hi-vis, that was very weird.
I didn’t hear a peep of road noise all night. When I took the dogs out for a wee, the streets were deserted.
Odd.
OK, clocking off for the weekend.
Take care, catch you next week.
Song of the day: Gotye “Hearts a mess”
housegoeshome 
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