a duck other ducks are ashamed of

This morning I woke up in Carlton with dry lips, unsure of the whereabouts of my clothes and of the quickest way to get to work via public transport. My first morning in my new house. Who'd've thought that packing for three days straight and then shifting everything on the hottest day could suck the life out of your very lips, especially considering we were keeping hydrated with tea, coffee, beer and eventually whisky?

Our (mine and Adrian's) place in Carlton is a high point in both our housing histories. Albert Street just about fell down around our ears as we fled Abbotsford, and the junkies shook their fists and rattled their teeth.

Happy differences between the new place and the flatteringly-nicknamed Chalet include but are not limited to:

• no carpeted-over craters in the floor, at the new place

• no early-morning traffic right outside our bedroom windows, at the new place

• no slugs, yet, crawling out of the walls or appearing in the shower, at the new place

• no possums falling through the hole in the bathroom ceiling and then streaking across the lounge and out through the back door, at the new place

• no scary dark hole in the shower where Adrian, cleaning, put his hand through the tiles and the landlord never got it fixed but went ahead and increased the rent and is now unfathomably trying to rent the place to new tenants without having fixed the hole in the shower (etc)

• no mezzanines, at the new place, just complete levels. Mezzanines are not as exciting as they sound. On moving in to the Chalet I couldn't wait to experience that childish, monkey smugness that comes with climbing ladders to get to bed, like a jungle human.* Unfortunately though, grown-up Chloe likes to take tea and books and the occasional breakfast to bed, and having to carry these things individually up a ladder in one hand while the other hand does the climbing is a real obstacle on the path to sloth. Also, heat rises; in the summer, it's tempting just to drag your bedding down to pedestrian-level and nest on the floor. But I never did that, see, because of the slugs

This is not to say that the town we know as Habitsford doesn't have its perks. Nhu Lan bakery on Victoria Street does a texturally-satisfying salad or tofu roll for less than the price of a tram ticket. Our proximity to the Abbotsford Convent was welcome on summery lounge-in-the-sun days, and on mornings when I could get up the gumption to jog. The shiny Abbotsford ALDI with its familiar yet unfamiliar versions of regular supermarket fare; the pho; the antics of the local smackhead population whom we knew by gait if not by name - all these things will be sort of missed.

But mainly, the florescent bourgeois beneath my unkempt exterior is just really, really happy to wake up in Carlton.


*this is amazing: in one episode of Radiolab ('Still Hanging On') Professor Frederick Coolidge claims that the hypnic twitch - that jerking sensation that wakes you just as you are falling asleep, and probably falling in your dreams, too - is a mechanism left over from the days when people used to sleep in trees and could not afford to fall out of the trees, in sleep, because of ground-dwelling predators (and, I guess, the possibility of breaking bones). I'm really taken with this hypnic-twitch explanation, especially because it is congruent with everyone's childish (primal) love of climbing ladders to get to bunks/lofts/treehouses.

PS. Here, in anticipation of a hangover proper this weekend, are The 10 best Fictional hangovers.