Looking For Stools With Bruno

Bruno and I head down to the shops. Primarily this is a dog walk, you know, training the little beast, before he is an uncooperative big beast. But it is also a bit of window shop, and a hunt for some cheap, but stylish, stools, so I can bring my plants back inside, which have been taken out due to Bruno’s arrival. We have to get them out of reach of the little guy and his big chewing gob, so he doesn’t get sick again.

He’s is not the easiest dog to walk, well, he is a bulldog, and bulldogs are stubborn. Although he is a great improvement over Buddy, in as much as he will actually walk with just one of us, he still walks like a bulldog, you know, the way he wants to.

We head up Smith Street. I sniff around the shops, doing my usual rounds. We say hello to the nice Cash Converters lady. The guy in the opshop gives Bruno a treat and a pat. I buy a Billy Joel CD.

We walk down to Johnston Street and look in the antique furniture shops for stools, or tables, on which to put some plants. (I can’t live without plants until the 6th month old is a 2 year old) They are all pretty expensive $135, $199, just for stools, that are, essentially, temporary. I guess, I need to go to Ikea and not trendy Fitzroy furniture shops.

We walked to Bohemio Furniture and I buy a $40 stool, on sale from $100. Pretty good, I think. But, they only have one left at that price.

As we walk home, I see a couple of discarded chairs in our street. That’s what I need, I think, something I can just get rid of again once bugalugs grows up. I look down at him, he gazes sweetly up at me.

I meet my lesbian neighbour walking her dog further along our Street. She suggests Supply & Demand in Smith Street.

“They have all of those kinds of things cheap.”

I tell her about Buddy. It starts to rain so we say our goodbyes.

I upload the Billy Joel CD onto my laptop and then my phone.

2pm. I go to Supply & Demand to see if they have any cheap stools, they don’t. They have something really ugly for about $40, otherwise everything, even in their cheap corner, is $100 to $200.


My two days off go so quickly. Why can’t it be Thursday and Friday every day? Well, it could be, if I chose it to be, I think. Damn it! Am I being sensible staying at work, or fearful? Should I just give it up and worry about the consequences later? Oh, I don’t know. And, I guess, as long as I don’t know, I should stay at work.

I’m just not how sure Sam would cope if I gave up work?


We walk the dogs in the afternoon. The after work walk.

4.45pm. We’re at Officeworks me, Sam, Buddy and Bruno. Sam is buying an SD card, whatever that is. I mean, I know what it is. What Sam wants it for, I don’t know?

On the way home, I grab one of the two discarded chairs in our street that I saw this morning. A paint-stained white plastic number, I would see later is from Ikea, with silver legs. I can paint it, I think. Spray it. (You’ve got to learn something from watching Cherie Barber’s renovation segments on teev) The other chair is too awful, it was once padded but has been left out in the rain and is now in a bad state. Sam isn’t keen for me to take either of them.

“Isn’t it nice to have a clean, uncluttered house?” says Sam.

“No,” I say. “I’m not living without plants for 2 years while Bruno grows up.”

I want to bring plants back into the house and the only way to do that is by putting them on stools out of his reach.

We ate leftover cream zucchini pasta for dinner.

Eventually, I fall asleep on the couch and wake up at 10.30pm when it is time to go to bed.