LIVING IN A TUPPERWARE BOX

Finally, we are almost moved into our Tete ‘home from home’.  Which happens to be a lidded plastic box, with a few windows, doors and airconditioning.  You’ve heard of Silicon Valley, we are in Tupperware Tete!

I’d best be circumspect, because if Him Outdoors gets to read this, I’m in trouble.  He’s gone to extraordinary lengths to secure a double unit, hunt down a sliding glass door, find a carpenter to fit a mini kitchen (all non-spec) and ensure we’ll have running hot water by tonight.  Bless him.

My job is to pack up our bits and pieces at the house in Matema and get them safely across to Moatize, which is a doddle as we don’t have much left to move, HO has transported quite a bit in the past week.  He also, in the process of hunting and gathering the above, tracked down and clasped to his chest not one but TWO of the largest TV’s I've ever seen, and has already safely locked them up on site!

One will fill the lounge end wall, and he seems to think the second one will fit into the bedroom, for use when I’m not there.  After all, much comfier snoozing in front of the box on the bed  than falling asleep on the couch, waking up, and having to walk 3 steps into the next room.

He’s a nutter – a screen of that magnitude requires a room the size of the average town hall, failing which our eyes will be blown backwards out of their sockets.  That ‘essential’ will find a home elsewhere in the Kwikspace complex – it’s too big for the gym or communal dining room so either he builds an outdoor lapa pub next to the swimming pool, or we set up a cinema in town.

Anyhow, enough of the boy toys, back to the plastic box.  Our new home closely resembles a shipping container, made of plastic panels. It’s quite compact and neat - a wipe down with a damp cloth will clean interior and exterior walls, floors and ceilings. The shower is a plastic nook, but a decent size, taking up at least half of the bathroom.

As you can imagine, this is a huge adjustment.  We've always lived in brick and mortar houses, differing only in size and roof types (tin, slate, thatch.  3 or 5 bedrooms, 1 or 2 lounges, single or double story.) But we've also always lived in established towns or cities with a growing family.  Now we are pioneers in a mining town and the boys have grown and flown.  Darby & Joan enter a new era.

On an intellectual level, I get this, I really do.  It has everything we need and is plenty big enough for our rather simple lifestyle.  A large outdoor living area is planned, thus the box is purely for sleeping, showering and privacy.  Anything bigger would be a complete waste of space.  We can lock up and go; the unit seals like a dream, therefore it will be very energy efficient at keeping dust out and chilled air in.  Arguably its construction footprint is better than a plastered, painted, brick and mortar house would be, especially in this neck of the woods.  What more could we want?

Meanwhile, I’ll get cracking on planting a vegetable patch and establishing the garden.  Perhaps that’ll pacify the tiny inner voice questioning the weirdness of calling this soul-less plastic box ‘home’.

Felines and Meat Free Mondays

Watching the cats turn their noses up at their breakfast this morning started an esoteric train of thought.

First reaction, of course, was the usual hurt a mother feels when her family rejects her love offering of food.  For goodness sake, it's a perfectly acceptable high end range of dry cat food and they are both very healthy as a result.  Yes, I've realised that they don't like the Gourmet Feast flavour and aren't mad about Ocean Fish either, leaving them with Chicken, Hearty Beef and Deep Sea Delights, carefully rotated so that they don't eat the same flavour day in and day out.

But Egg's pointedly averted face, as she sat upright and indignant 3 metres away from the bowl, refusing to tuck in, was an insult and she got a dressing down for it as well.  "You may well be tired of Chicken, but they don't do a Sparrow flavour yet!" I cried in exasperation.  

Hold on, now there's a thought.  Neither of the cats will touch any fresh fish, chicken or meat tidbits occasionally shared with them, although the water poured off a tin of tuna goes down well.  So why assume that they like chicken, beef or fish flavoured biscuits?  It's perfectly obvious that Egg, the hunter, would like a wildbird flavour - Bronze Mannikin, Crested Barbet, Laughing Dove, Bulbul...as for Speckle, if she were human she'd be a hippy, wearing flowers in her hair, long floaty skirts and sandals, skipping through the meadows stopping to greet the sun and stroke a rabbit or two.  Vegetarian, that's her.

The marketing guru's at Hill's and Purina need to get on this right away. Vegetarian cat food, Catnip flavour.  If her reaction to that is anything like the insane way she attacks the infused scratching post, she'd adore Meat Free Mondays, a la catnip.  My father, very definitely a non-cat person, watching her frenzied antics one day expressed his disapproval of the feeding of what he termed 'drugs' to her.

It may be in bad taste to have a colourful photo of a beautiful Golden Tailed Woodpecker on a pack of cat food (and who would eat one to define the taste?) but since the customer is always right, and the cat is after all the end user, why not offer them a taste they'd prefer?  Perhaps bunny huggers would be less sensitive about Rat or Hadeda flavours?  (Still got that taste testing issue though)

Why stop at cats?  Dogs deserve a preferred seasoning as well.  And they stoop to the lowest possible level, sniffing and gulping down truly disgusting items (I won't send you off to the bathroom retching and heaving with a description, but you've all seen the sort of things that dogs stick their snout into and slurp up with relish).  Now that taste development job comes with an enormous pay package and benefits!