Happy New Year
We had a quiet one this year. Less quiet than the last, but still didn’t make it to midnight. I have been reading on a few different blogs the plans and hopes and dreams that people have for the coming year. The whole start of a new year/decade thing has given me a much needed kick in the arse – particularly in the area of DECLUTTERING. Oh my god.
I have been inspired by M in this respect. He began attacking the shed and throwing unnecessaries into the box trailer. I think he’s trying to lessen the amount he is going to have to move when (and I say ‘when’ with a feeling of fond hopefulness) we get around to moving. Which will be when we find somewhere to move to. So I have also been trying to throw things out, but mostly what I end up doing is rearranging things. This MUST STOP. You would reasonably assume that the large rubbish bag full of clothes that I have intended to sell on eBay for the past 10 months would be on it’s way to the op-shop right now. You would. But this is not so.
There it sits, with it’s equal promises of increased wealth and postage miscalculations. To be dealt with in the time that I don’t have. Which brings me to another reason for the DECLUTTERING. I spend most of my time moving things to different spots that actually have nowhere to go. It is time to throw it or stow it. I think I need a plethora of plastic crates or the slightly more asthetic equivalent. Since I woke up on New Year’s Day I have been desperate to organise the crap that surrounds me. Was I cursed by a Virgo in the night?
Regardless of this possibility I have been reacquainting myself with FlyLady after about an 18 month absence. She’s hokey, she uses ‘LOL‘ waaaay too often (more than twice) and, yeah. The hokieness. But other than that it all makes sense in it’s bite-sized approached to tackling your personal hell. It’s called CHAOS (Can’t Have Any One Over Syndrome).
In blathering all this I forgot to mention another thing that is probably influencing this flurry. A few days before Christmas I followed a link from Little Earth Stories to Daily Imprint (which I have now added here) and read the profile on Kristine Pedler, the artist. It wasn’t a long piece, but I was inspired, and took note of the book she mentioned right at the end – The artist’s way: a course in discovering and recovering your creative self by Julia Cameron.
I never get into books like this. Actually, I’ve never bothered to try, but I thought that if Kristine Pedlar was finding it useful, I might also. Dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I pointed him in the direction of the book. Basically it’s a 12 week structured approach to unblocking your creativity and making you productive. STRUCTURED!! That’s what I wanted! So for six mornings in a row I have written three longhand pages about anything at all – the point is to just do three longhand pages. I think it was in thinking about how I was going to fit the other writing exercises into my week, that I realised that I needed to get my shit together and stop wasting my time faffing around with endless aimless domestic tasks. And that’s where FlyLady came back in…
Of course, if you could see the room that I am sitting in to type this, the reaction would be hysterical. You can’t see the floor and my rubbish bags of STUFF…eBay stuff, old baby clothes, stuff to throw away and stuff to take to the op-shop, it would sound like I am all talk, no action. But I am chipping away at it. I suppose that eBay bag really has to go…
Boxing Day and Binginwarri
We had a lovely Boxing Day at Loch – a feast of wondrous proportions. Champagne. Splodge the cat. Unholy amounts of smoked trout, D’Affinois and soy and honey drumsticks. Followed by a cream cake. Small Z had a snooze in the caravan, and was delighted to receive a new book and some Thomas the Tank Engine shaped… PASTA?! Ha!
People lingered until around 6pm, and Small Z and I retired an hour or so after that. I continue to enjoy waking up in the caravan – particularly at Loch where you can listen to birds and cows beginning their day. It’s nice to then tiptoe across damp grass to the house, where there is often a pot of tea underway. I particularly like the new windows in the bathroom that grants the reflected a sort of smoothed, well-lit, blemish free view. A lovely way to start the day…
We set off to Binginwarri at around 10.30am, hoping that Small Z would sleep. We stopped briefly at Korumburra op-shop, where they were having a sale, and then continued on, with Small Z becoming more and more fractious, translating into raised stress levels for driver M. I relocated to the backseat in an effort to alleviate both situations, and actually managed to READ Small Z to sleep by using a very sleepy boring voice… A feat that has never occurred before. Naturally this occurred two minutes before arriving at Roy and Kaye’s *groan* meaning there had to be a quick transfer from backseat to caravan bed…
We had been unaware that lunch was going to be awaiting us, and had several starving people cursing our lateness, in a friendly fashion. We stayed two nights, with each day hotter than the next and a tiger snake spotted on the final day. On the 27th (Happy Birthday Small Brother!!) we all ventured down to Port Albert, where we got some sublime fish and chips from the tarted up place near the pier. I remembered reading a review of it not long ago…
We left in the late afternoon on the 28th, after Kaye showed Small Z her first frog and we got to scope out the cousin’s squeeze (Hi KL!) We paused at Port Welshpool to give Small Z a run and to see if we could replicate the fish and chip experience of the previous day. We did! Go to the place nearest to the pier…It’s interesting that only a few days after this, there was an article in The Age discussing the rarity of fish and chip shops that were able to use locally caught fish.
Sated by our food, we decided to call up Loch and ask if we would be able to stay the night on the way back. Glad we did – as it was dark by the time we got there and Small Z was valiantly hoicking her eyelids wide. It was a nice way to finish our post-Christmas journey. In the morning we made scrambled eggs and watched the first episode of Beachcomber Cottage on iView – he reminded me somewhat of Donal MacIntyre.
We arrived back home at around 1pm and I was thrilled to discover the letterbox piled high with all the books I had ordered from the Book Depository. Better late than never. I had warned the residents of Loch that their gifts were in the mail…
Christmas 2009
Have eaten my bodyweight in mussels, and added in a glass of white and six oysters. It’s all good here. Low key and lovely. I found this track while cleaning out the shed the other day – Bidston Moss doing Six White Boomers, a Rolf Harris classic.
Merry Christmas!!
Wednesday. What’s Hot and Not 06
What’s Hot?
MooGoo. Have been meaning to post that for a month. This is the stuff I bought – and it is a LARGE tub and is going to last me ages! It is fabulous – particularly when I use it after washing my face. Love it. Big thumbs up.
More Christmas music. A post from Tony pulled me up short – he mentioned a song I wrote a while back when living in Hervey Bay, about being stuck up there for Christmas. I had utterly forgotten it’s existence, and when I listened back to it I was instantly transported back to my beautiful study, the beautiful swimmable water and the airiness of our Queenslander.
The Victorian home birth pilot project. Oh my goodness! This is such a fantastic development for women wanting to give birth at home. It’s being offered though three hospitals, including Casey Hospital, where Small Z was born. Women can give birth at home attended to by midwives, while being signed up to a hospital for extra care if there are complications. If this had been an option when I was pregnant, it’s what I would have done…except that I was living in a trailer with no insulation and the day I went into labour (and Small Z was born) was about 44 degrees… I think this is great…other people are not so sure…
The new (via eBay) paddle pool…
Cleaning some crud out of the shed and op-shopping it. Oh, the relief.
Not Hot
The odds that my rental application for a house in Hastings will be beaten by another woman who inspected it along side me. Older, single, no kids. Gah.
My ongoing fight with our electricity provider (to be elaborated on in another, more confessional post) that is currently with the ombudsman who seem incapable of speaking to people like they are individuals…
Sleepless nights. These are really getting to me again. This is the most NOT HOT item.
The fact that none of the Christmas presents I ordered (admittedly rather late) online are here. And it is CHRISTMAS EVE. Ohhhhh.
My ongoing and seemingly unending struggle about doing something INTERESTING besides raising a interesting, compassionate, inquiring, creative, humorous little person. What IS IT that I want to get stuck into? Writing? Music? Radio? Whingeing….? My self discipline has gone the way of my sanity, memory, concentration…
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To play along, it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget.
Button
I am astounded. The amount of times I have seen those spare buttons on bits of clothing and thought, “How quaint“…
The amount of times those buttons have come off, and I’ve put them in a tin or a box and then they have haunted me, moving from house to house. Never. NEVER have I used on for its proper purpose. Tonight, I was about to sew a belt loop back on to my trousers that I haven’t worn for at least four years. The belt loops on these trousers are all fastened down with buttons. As decoration. Whatever. I was poised with the thread, when I just glanced at the inner lining of the pocket. And there it was. The Spare Button. Something clicked gently together somewhere out in the universe.
Wednesday. Hot and Not 05.
What’s Hot?
After a difficult weekend, I was again drawn to the wisdom that prevails at askmoxie.org – the comments on this post resonated with me. A lot.
Alcohol. Everything in moderation, right? But the bottle of gin M bought me on Monday night helped considerably.
Pocket Tunes. OMG. This is frying my brain with it’s wonderfulness. I’m getting rid of all my other radio apps (except NPR News). I’m also loving Newsstand for catching up on blog entries. Oh, and MxTube for downloading YouTube to my phone. It’s always good to have a tank engine on standby…
Today. It was so damn hot that I ended up working in the kitchen. The study was unbearable. Small Z seems to be taking after M in the heat tolerance stakes. Or maybe it was just the joy of her New Yellow Slide…
Google Chrome. Totally zippy. Have left Safari whimpering in the dock.
The Tullycraft News blog’s 12 Days of Christmas mp3’s. Always a great site, but I love the Christmas flavour and being able to download stuff that isn’t Jingle Bells.
What’s Not Hot
Some kind of new developmental leap that has rendered Small Z sleepless at 3am for about an hour, most nights. AAAAAaaaaagh. This too shall pass. This too shall pass. This too shall pass…
My inability to not fill my days by shuffling mess and sifting through domestic tasks. Am getting closer to binning everything without two good uses. Grrrrr. Can I not just get everything done each day in one red hot GO?!
Typing my endless files of people’s woe doesn’t usually get to me, but why do I suddenly have so many chronically bad backs just as my dad is battling the same thing? It’s unsettling.
No plans for Christmas Day. Everything has sort of fallen in a heap. We had high hopes for NSW, but the flights are ridiculously expensive. On the other hand, not driving anywhere is a bonus… Maybe we can try to eat our own weight in seafood?
Today. The heat. It’s really making me consider what kind of cooling the next rental house might have…and leaning me a little in favour of the Tooradin one. It may lack character, but it’s got a split system, good insulation and a wood fire.
My Nan.
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To play along, it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget.
The no-cash-bonus
There is something so decadent about managing to get Small Z to sleep before 7pm and having the house to myself. Yesterday I felt shattered. Today, I woke up at 6am, got into work by 7.30am, delivered my files, cooed over my boss’s new iPhone and Mercedes E Class coupe, and was back on the road by 8am. Did the grocery shopping and was home by 10am.
As I was leaving work in my now seemingly incredibly dated Mercedes 300D, my boss tapped on the window. He had raced down with two wrapped up bottles of wine and a little bag of chocolates! I was thrilled, and thanked him. As he disappeared back toward the office I pawed pathetically through the gift bag for an envelope…but no dice. The first year I haven’t got a bonus. Goddammnit. (Yes, I am aware I appear to be an ungrateful swine, but….waaaaaaaah!)
Have I mentioned before the strange powers that getting up early brings me? Astonishing. I did, of course, need to nanna-nap with Small Z at 11am, but that was fine. After a horror day yesterday with Small Z, she seems to have recovered from being dragged all around town and made to sleep in a weird hotel room. Today was far easier. I think another reason for my early-evening smugness is the sunlit stillness of the late afternoon, and the fact that I just successfully cooked a quiche. A QUICHE?! Do you hear me?
I have only attempted such a thing once before, and the person for whom I cooked it was kind enough to say it was lovely – but I knew they were lying. This time, I made one that I bought the ingredients for weeks ago – and today realised that the cottage cheese was about to hit its use-by date. Thus, I composed a Salmon Quiche, with the help of some Thomas the Tank Engine audiobooks I had nefariously downloaded. It went down very well with a glass of my non-cash-bonus Marlborough white.
And now I will away, to ponder the ongoing conundrum of whether to live in a house that our real estate agent is happy for us to lease in Tooradin proper, or endeavour to move a little further afield to Hastings. The former is closer to the boat, but has very little else to recommend it. The house is a long rectangle, scarily trailer-ish, with three small bedrooms, a big garden and a big shed. I will still have to drive everywhere in order to do the weekly shopping and take Small Z to playgroup and pool. Hasting, however, is replete with excellent library, shops, pool…but no accommodating real estate agents. Gah. Any suggestions gratefully received…
(Oddly – I just entered the location of the boat into Google Maps and Hastings, and it tells me that it’s a 39 minute drive. We must have managed it in 15 minutes the other day by some kind of magical transportation spell….)
M. The saboteur.
What a week. M’s eldest sister arrived from Hervey Bay on Tuesday, after we had a weekend full of people staying over and then the 2nd birthday of Small E on an action packed Puffing Billy ride. It was great to see M’s sister, who came primarily to make an acquaintance with Small Z – her niece.
We had not all seen each other since 2006. I was in awe of her escaping her committments to her grandchildren and the restaurant and aquarium to spend five days in the arse end of nowhere. It was lovely. Small Z got lots of presents, which helped the bonding process no end! On Friday night M and Jan stole across the road and quickly and painlessly removed a small pine branch, and brought it home to stand in the hall. Small Z’s first Christmas Tree!!
It was odd how quickly she took to it. She cantered around it making us sing Jingle Bells while Jan decked it out in her streamers made from Christmas paper. We hung the two glass angels that she had given Small Z and I, and added in some old fake pearls of my grandma’s and a ’silver’ fairy wand of Small Z’s for the top. She thought it was heaven.
Saturday we drove to the city via Hampton, where M picked up a slide he had bought on eBay. As Jan had to leave early Sunday morning (7.30am) we had booked a cheap hotel room for Saturday night to avoid driving into the city, back out, and then back in to the airport…and home again. What we booked were two queen beds. We assumed they were in separate rooms. We assumed wrong.
After a day schlepping around. Lots of time in the car. Some time on a tram. We met up with M’s other sister, who happened to be in Melbourne (she lives in Sydney). Small Z got more presents! We hit a cafe and then spent an hour or so in the garden near the fountain near Parliament House on Spring Street. It seems that not only do a lot of people get married on Saturday – they also appear to be obsessed by having their photographs taken right near where we were sitting…
We walked back toward Flinders Street Station via Fed Square and the book market. We stopped for more refreshments and were happy to see the Box Hill Community Arts Centre Choir performing! Small Z was particularly happy with this. (I love the bit at the very last frame where she throws her hands into the air…)
M, Small Z, Jan and I said goodbye to M and Jan’s other sister, Yvonne and her partner and then got a tram back to our hotel. The one with two queen beds. In the Same. Room. Small Z was exhausted from the day and conked almost straightaway. M had brought in some beer and wine, so Jan and I sipped some white as we watched (some very relaxing) trashy television. Small Z slumbered throughout.
However. The night was fraught after we all got into bed. M later reported that he thought Jan snored all night ‘like a banshee’, and this kept waking Small Z up. I didn’t hear any of that, but I was woken by Small Z about a million times, and by 4am we all gave up any pretense of sleeping. M was bitten by a grumpy, sleep deprived bug and said something to Jan like;
“How about I drive you to the airport now?”
“But it’s FOUR in the MORNING? My flight isn’t until seven thirty?!”
“Well, there’s an ISSUE with SNORING and it keeps waking Z up…”
I dived under the doona and pretended nothing was happening. M took himself off to stand under the shower. Jan got up and began getting her stuff together. They left at about 5am. I couldn’t help feeling that after a lovely week together, M had sabotaged the lot with a badly calculated swipe. She ended up at the airport at FIVE THIRTY in the morning TWO HOURS before her flight. Oh, the shame.
M returned bearing fruit salad containing grapes, moments after Small Z (who had deigned to slumber between 5.30am and 6.30am) had squawked, “We go HOME now? We go home? Take Zoe-zie HOME to eat some GRAPES?”
We all ate fruit salad in bed for a while, M and I discussing the extent of his faux pas…
“We didn’t talk much on the way to the airport,” he said, musing over a strawberry.
“What about when you go there and stuff?” I asked. “Did you go for a coffee?”
“Um.” said M, spearing another grape, “Noooo. She told me not to bother parking and I just left her out the front.”
I felt the fingers of creeping doom, and cringed back into the pillow. Evil M. I let Evil M have a hour of sleep by taking Small Z into the bathroom and playing in the bath. Later that day he rang Jan and apologised for being an insensitive sod. Thank god. I was afraid that Small Z would not see her aunty again until she was about seventeen.
