Five Questions Meme
Oct. 17th, 2018 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watersword gave me five questions1. What was your worst vacation? The vacation I enjoyed least was probably one of the trips to podunk nowhere, northern nsw, to watch my brother compete in athletics competitions. But perhaps instead you would prefer what was probably the worst vacation event, except that I was young enough and my parents cunning enough that I didn't realise at the time.
Scene: you are my mother, a twenty-something mother of two, military wife, living in Perth. You are travelling with your family on your husband's designated annual Return Trip Home. It is Christmas. It is probably the 24th of december? Maybe the 23rd. It is, I think, 1991. (I've have determined this by going through Wikipedia's '199X in australia' pages and looking for a year when parliament was batshit right before Christmas. If this was 1991 then at least it wasn't the same trip that laid the seeds of my phobia of bushfires).
At this point in the RAAF's history, there are SO MANY servicemen and their families needing Christmas trips back to Sydney from Perth that they run a special flight. So you, that is my mother, turn up to Air Movements, aka the dinky passenger terminal on the air base, with your family. Your family consists of: husband, one, prone to airsickness. Eleven-month-old, one, with inner ear trouble, notable for refusing to be separated from you by more than 50 cm, ever, without screaming. Four-year-old daughter, one, melodramatically emetephobic. You know about this, because the baby has been ill a lot, and the daughter has been Melodramatic (in my defense, I think I learned early on that 'brother sick = we panick and wonder if he NEEDS AN AMBULANCE = the four year old gets deposited with friends at weird hours of the night and everything is Rong'. Ergo, people are sick? Time to Screm).
The plane is a 707. You have hyped your daughter up to be excited about going on a Real Plane (you drove to perth, in a car, when you moved) and borrowed a walkman and your husband is dosed to the gills with airsickness tablets. Everything is FINE. Except the plane is late. Hours late. You call your sister in Sydney to say you might arrive around midnight instead of at a sensible hour - you can get a taxi to her house. She insists she'll come and wait.
The plane, you see, is the Prime Ministerial jet. And Parliament is still sitting at mid-afternoon in the eastern states on Xmas Eve.
Eventually, the plane turns up, because Parliament is going to be sitting through the night. It gets refuelled. Your husband explains the intricacies of refuelling to the four year old. You get given your little cardboard meal boxes and get on the plane.
Everything is mostly okay. You sit with the baby, who proceeds to be violently ill; husband is dosed to the gills and distracts the four year old. Everything is fine, until the plane diverts course and deposits you, and an entire jet full of families with under-fives, in Canberra airport, at 10.30, because the PM needs his jet back.
You are there for three hours. Canberra airport in 1991 is not noticeably better equipped than Air Movements back on the base - in fact, worse, as it doesn't even have a vending machine, not in the holding area you're in. Because you're not in the passenger terminal, you're in the private jet and military nonsense terminal. You and this aeroplane full of over-tired, hungry families.
Then they put you, and your ear-trouble-afflicted child, and your airsick husband, and your emetephobic child, in a Hercules troop carrier for a trip to Sydney. (A Herc, for those not familiar with troop carriers, is one of the ones with webbed seats in the back, no soundproof insulation, etc. Also, basically wallows in the sky. Very sway, much bounce.)
Somehow, miraculously, the emetephobic child grows up remembering this as a great adventure, the baby doesn't remember any of it, and only major nuisance is having to wait for a taxi because your sister had given up waiting and gone home.
Many years later, when you are once again living in Perth with a toddler, you are relieved to find the RAAF now just gives employees vouchers for commercial flights.
(An Almost-Ran here was The Time A Freak Storm Shredded The Ancestral Tent (in which i still insist I was conceived), but tbh that was fine for ME, my geodesic dome tent stayed standing, and my brother evacuated to higher ground with my parents so I had the dome all to myself.)
2. What's your least favorite food, ever, the food you could not be paid to eat? I mean.... how much are you paying me? I've adjusted to a LOT of food over the years. You'd have to pay me a lot to eat oysters, though, or spearmint anything. So, oysters with spearmint sauce?
3. What would you cook for an unexpected guest? Because I live alone, but cook in batches, the answer is probably 'whatever i was gonna batch cook for myself anyway'. Failing that: if I can lay hands on tomatoes, though, some simplified version of this roast tomato pasta; otherwise, high likelihood of risotto.
4. What's the weirdest gift you've ever received? Not exactly a weird gift, but a weird gift experience: a prof once gave me 'all my books about women', price of, listening to him complain for 30 minutes about the tedium of being forced to put Token Women Week in his courses and how much he hated the topics. That I had written essays for every time I took his classes. Which he knew, because he was giving me all the secondary sources.
5. Describe your favorite outfit. It's a suit, cut like pyjamas, made of fabric that looks like it might be a couch or 1890s wallpaper. People keep disappointing me by saying it's not as hideous as it sounds: these people should shhh. It is striking, certainly, and it's in that cut that is Good For Large Ladies, so between the pattern (many people admire it) and the fact that women size 16 or over want to know where I got it, it's the most useful networking tool since flourescent hair. (My current lack of hair is /memorable/ but not as good an icebreaker as pink hair)
Here is a photo of it, albeit not with the top I would normally prefer. I was handing in my PhD, I'd run out of normal clothes:
Shout if you want me to ask you questions!