I must have been adopted

Slinky: "Hi Daddy!"
Slinky's Dad: "Hah?"
Slinky: "Daddy? Can you hear me?"
Slinky's Dad: "What?"
Slinky: "Daddy, it's me!"
Slinky's Dad: *yelling* "Who's this?"
Slinky: "DADDY! I just called you 'Daddy'! Who do you think it is?"
Slinky's Dad: "M-?" (naming Slinky's youngest sister)
Slinky: "NO! Daddy, it's ME!"
Slinky's Dad: "B-?" (naming Slinky's younger sister)
Slinky: "DADDY!"
Slinky's Dad: *honestly bewildered* "Who's this?"
Slinky: "I'm your daughter, the one you sent to Australia, remember?"
Slinky's Dad: "Oh, you."

Cue hysterical housemate laugher.


I've been spending time with my father recently, thanks to needing new bed stuff. It's funny, but even though both parents drove me nuts in Japan, it's heaps of fun hanging out with my dad. (Maybe because it's one parent at a time. Lesson learnt.) There's something about being overseas for months at a time and the sudden, tragic death of people younger than your parents to make you appreciate spending time with the folks.

We headed to Robinsons' to get a new mattress and he insisted that I try out practically every single one before we bought one. Nosy mattress saleswomen were eyeing me in my invisible skirt and my father while we performed gravity-defying bounces testing out mattresses, and you could see the clockwork tick over in their small minds. I took every opportunity to call him "Daddy". Humph. Honestly, a girl can't just hang out with her dad any more.

I lost my father at one point when I went back to test another mattress, then returned to where I had left my father, only to find that he had disappeared. I searched around a bit, and got a bit frantic before I spotted a pair of bare feet sticking out from behind a headboard. There he was, lying on a mattress, hands folded on his tummy, toes wriggling contentedly and bright-eyed as a squirrel in a roomful of nuts. "Hey, try this one, it's good!"

We got into a fight when I expressed an interest in buying a new quilt. My father decided immediately that we should buy one, and torn as I was between two, I had to pick one then and there, and then a fight broke out as to who got to pay. Very unbecoming to have a doctor and a doctor-to-be standing at the cashier waving their respective $50 bills screaming "Don't take his/hers, take miiiiiiiiiine!!!!" (Note: Givne more time to think, I would have bought the quilt. That's a $100 I won't see again.)

The other day, we went to IKEA to see if we could get lumber to fix the base of my bed (remember my bed breaking cousin Fatso? Yeah.). Armed with an inexhaustible supply of those stubby IKEA pencils and some IKEA brochures, we spent an entire hour dragging around pieces of wood, drawing my bed entirely not to scale and doing rather dubious mental calculations before my dad pointed out that it might be cheaper to actually just buy a new bed, especially given some doubts as to whether the wood we found would hold up. Up we went to check out bed frames, which were decidedly not cheaper.

Slinky's Dad: "You should just buy one anyway."
Slinky: "Why? It can be repaired! The frame is still fine."
Slinky's Dad: "It's old anyway, might as well throw it out." (My father, like the emperor and his clothes, adores new things. Furniture which manages to survive past the four year mark mysteriously becomes obsolete in his head, and acquires all sorts of imaginary afflictions requiring replacement of said furniture. It's like some sort of Crate and Barrel hypochondriacism.)
Slinky: "It's so consumerist, it still works, we don't need to buy a new one."
Slinky's Dad: "Stubborn old goat."
Slinky: "Daddy!"

Five minutes before closing we were back in the lumberyard and still bickering over wood, but managed to get our arses in gear in time to pay for everything.

This Friday its DIY time and we're going to attempt to turn some shelving parts into a bed base. If he remembers who I am, anyway.

Oooh, and this is the dino hoodie I made for my sister for Christmas!