narrating kayoz

Eliane loves to play with shells. She can anthropomorphise anything, so many of our shells are named. 

There is one shell (which she’s named Spiral), which was given to me when I was 12, by a secret supporter. 

I was on a church youth camp (I went via the ISCF (Inter School Christian Fellowship) group at school, since I wasn’t yet a church goer at that point), and we had a thing (game?) called Angels and Mortals. Everyone had an angel and everyone was an angel for someone else, but the idea was to keep who you were an angel to absolutely secret. 

I have played similar games in other camps later in highschool, but I’m not sure it was ever so effectively kept secret as it was on this one. 

Anyway, my angel left this shell on my pillow one day over that weekend camp. Possibly with a little note, I don’t remember. 

I have kept it ever since. 

I ask myself why. I mean, sentimental value, obviously. But I have no idea who the person was who gave it to me. I know whoever it was left a few other little offerings, including, I think, a card at the end. I don’t remember what the card said, but I presume it wished me well. 

What’s more, I don’t actually remember anyone from that camp, except the teacher from my school who ran the ISCF, and I *think* there was another teacher from my school who attended too, although I can’t remember his name or face. 

But somehow, the memory of some unknown person taking such care of me, watching over me and trying to make me feel special, is still special today. 

Me and my colon and my empty stomach

I've been meaning to write a post about how this year so far has been filled with accidents and illness (right now Liam has a sprained ankle and Mikaela is sick with a virus that's been going around at school and work).

And, I've been meaning to write about the fact that I've taken a redundancy from my public service job, and as of today am officially self-employed. Though without an income to show for it yet. More on that another time however.

Because actually, today I am just hungry.

I am on the "clear liquids only" diet today, in prep for a colonoscopy tomorrow.

And despite having nothing to eat all day, I have had the pleasure of eating pretend muffins made for me by Eliane. Three is not a highly empathic age.

Not to mention having prepared dinner for the rest of 'em (Chris didn't get home from work until late, or I would've made him do it!). While starving.

Now it is late at night, and I am going to bed, still hungry, to get up and continue on clear liquids (combined with other nasty colon cleansing prep, which started this afternoon), until 10, when it switches to nil by mouth.

Ah the joys of modern medicine.

Of course, I'll be grateful to it if it saves my life, and am grateful to it for intervening in the lives of various other family members (which is why I'm having the colonoscopy - family history, not personal symptoms), however painfully and miserably. But in the mean time.

I. Am. Hungry!

The Car Crash

I was in a car accident last week, and this week I am struggling.

I think it's partly because I'm not sleeping well, mostly due to injuries. Nothing major at all, just bruising, maybe some muscle strains, but enough to ache at night and make it difficult to get comfortable. Also my left hand (which is my mousing hand) is the most injured, and since my job is all on computers, it does make working for long periods painful.

But more than that I am just feeling very flat most of the time, which again, may be mostly due to being tired, or maybe is also the after affects of the car crash. Or maybe I'm overthinking things.  Either way I decided it was time to write the whole thing out, even though I don't have any profound observations to make.

What happened was that I was driving straight down a suburban street (a 60KM zone), and someone coming up the street in the other direction took a right turn in front of me. He said he didn't see me, he just focused on the car behind me. I remember looking in my rear mirror right beforehand and she was more towards the middle of the road than I was (I was planning to turn left at the following intersection). So I guess that's why.

I swerved, so I hit with the front passenger corner of the car, which was probably better than straight on. Anyway, the car was a complete loss, but no one was seriously injured. 

All three kids were in the back, Liam ended up with a slight bruise to his shoulder from his seat belt (thanks to the booster seat it wasn't across his neck), and the girls don't even have that. 

As far as I'm aware the other guy wasn't hurt either, though its perfectly possible he had bruises and muscle strains too - I wasn't even aware of most of mine until the end of the day, aside from the massive swelling of my left hand. But I was more focused on the kids' welfare really,  and so, to an extent, was he. He was certainly also very shaken and clearly felt absolutely awful about the whole thing.

We were all pretty shaken. Chris was away at the time, overseas, which rather sucked, but I'm lucky that my wonderful mum lives nearby, so she came and picked us up to come home, and ran us around to the doctor later.

I'm also lucky to have wonderful friends, many of whom offered to help out or visit, and one of whom even took Mikaela to school and back the next day, which was completely out of her way. (Liam happily took the bus). 

And I'm thankful for the kindness of strangers. There were two women in the two vehicles behind me, who stopped, called the police and took care of the children for me.

One of them just stood with her arms around Mikaela (it was freezing cold - someone said minus two degrees Celsius) and the other picked up Eliane, and someone else who stopped, I think, gave her a large warm fluoro yellow jacket to cover her. She must have stood there holding Elli for 20 or 30 minutes I think. At one point someone - possibly one of the fireys - came over to swap the jacket for his, because the first guy had to go. And then a women came out across the road with two blankets to wrap up the other kids.

The other guy was driving a ute, and I think the whole tray flew off, along with four bags of cement, a bunch of wooden planks (which came off but held together) and a can of wood stain, so there was plenty of mess to clean up, which I presume was largely done by the fire & rescue team, who seemed to all know what they were doing.

I guess I was in shock and it is all a bit of a blur, but the police officer in charge, the fire fighter who came and spoke to me, and then the ambulance guys who came and looked at my hand and checked the kids' pulses etc, were all very kind. The police officer called me later in the day to check how I was doing which was nice. Of course I said I was fine.

And I am fine really. The kids are all good, and don't seem particularly traumatised by it. I'm going to see my osteopath tomorrow after work, but my aches and strains are getting better anyway I think. My hand still hurts but it's been xrayed, nothing's broken, and it's much better than it was a week ago too. I'm just feeling very flat is all. Thanks for listening. I think I'll go to bed.  

October is No-Spend Month (First Status report)

We are having a no-spend month this month. We are sort of mixing up Buy Nothing New month with the Simply Savings $21 challenge (spend $21 on food for a week - only we are doing it for 4 weeks), and coincidentally doing it at the same time as Erica's no-spend month October.

We actually started just before the end of September, aligning it with our last pay day, which was also the day I paid last month's credit card bills - and there, combined with two car regos due this month - is our inspiration! We paid off the credit cards (we usually put everything on credit card and pay it off at the end of the month), but there wasn't much money left in the bank!

"Time for a no-spend month," I said.

So how are we going so far?

Well, not too bad, but not fabulously. We had about $100 in cash between us, so we decided to see if we could make that last all month for our food bills.The $21 challenge is theorically for a family of 4, so that works out about right.

We'd still have to pay for petrol, bills, the mortgage etc, but we're doing 'buy nothing new' anyway (and nothing second-hand either), and then just trying to eat out of what's already in the house as much as we could.

We had to buy toilet paper and cat food the first week, which in retrospect shouldn't really have come out of the cash, but then again, we really don't have a lot of other money to spare this month!

So what are we eating?

From the garden: We have lots of greens growing (3 different kinds of silverbeet, a few pick-and-come again lettuces, and beetroot leaves), though some of them are starting to go to seed, plus Spring onions and lots of herbs, and of course plenty of eggs.

I picked and ate my first (ever) baby beet yesterday, and there are lots more to come, but they mostly have a ways to go. Ditto the leaks and garlic. We have a few snap peas, but the kids eat the pods as soon as they are half way ready. Elli, mostly.

Grains: We've been eating a lot of rice, but unfortunately I can see it running out within the next 1-2 weeks at best. However, we do still have a fair bit of spaghetti and a bag of quinoa. We also have a fair bit of spelt flour and bakers flour left, so I see plenty of muffins and other snacks being baked in the next few weeks. We have still been buying bread, however I may make some too. I think I have only about three 5g sachets of yeast, but buying more of that will be cheaper than the bread.

Ready-meals & meat: we've already eaten just about all the meals we had frozen, though we may still have a container of chilli and one of soup I think. Ditto frozen meat, but we do still have about 4 chicken carcasses and some slightly manky carrots and celery I will be turning into chicken noodle soup this week.

Other protein: we still have quite a lot of dried beans and lentils. I made a lot of hommus and froze some of it a few days ago, plus some 'savory chickpeas' (pressure cooked for 40 minutes with a bay leaf, garlic, half a lemon and some salt - came out really yum!), but of course only Eliane & I really liked them, though Mikaela did eat some. And of course there are eggs.

Tomorrow night we'll be having dahl and rice for dinner, but since NONE of my kids will eat the dahl, there'll need to be a lot of rice and yoghurt.

Yoghurt: I make this so we have still been eating plenty, but whereas usually I used cartons of milk plus some milk powder, I have switched back to using all milk powder, since I had an un-opened packet in the cupboard. I've been using the powder to stretch our drinking milk budget too.

What we are spending (grocery) money on:

Is mostly milk, bread, fruit and some vegetables. Oh, and we did buy a 1kg block of cheese. Usually we spend at least $50/week on milk & bread (we go through a lot of milk, and we won't buy the cheap dairy-bankrupting brands), and easily spend $100/week on fruit and veg. Maybe more.

We've also bought tortillas, sugar (the kefir can't live without sugar...), a pack of 'for quick sale' organic mince, and a few other items I've forgetten no doubt.

So the fact that we still have some of our $100 left a week & a half in is an achievement I reckon. We have, however, been using up the powdered milk at a great rate. It won't last another week.

It's not really the greatest time to be doing the 21 dollar challenge for us, with Spring just underway, so not all that much in the garden or left in the larder, plus school holidays began two days after we started. Chris took the kids to Floriade last week and got a lot of whinging about the 'torture' of not being able to buy an ice cream!

But with two car regos to pay this month (that is, nearly $2000 worth) plus a $1000 gas bill that arrived the 2nd day of the challenge, we really don't have any choice.

We did also get around a $500 credit on the electricity bill from our solar panels, but we vowed any money we made there would go straight to paying off the money we took off the mortgage to pay for them in the first place.

What we should be doing and are not:

Is a proper audit of what we do have in our pantry, fridge and freezer, and menu planning. So far we've just been doing what we normally do, figuring out each meal's menu as close as possible to the time it needs to be served. Not so good for being organised and using up food we have.

So that's my goal for this week: a proper food audit, and at least a casual menu plan.

My challenge for the week is having 3 other kids at my house on Friday, for potentially the whole day, PLUS they're all sleeping over.

Snacks I can do okay (muffins, oat slice, and oh yes, I bought some more popping corn too, and fruit), lunch is pretty easy if I buy or make bread, but can I do a dinner meal they will all eat some of, without spending?

We'll see.

Maybe that will be the chicken noodle soup night.

And I think I have enough rhubarb in the garden to make a pie for our Friday night dessert night, though that pretty much requires ice cream, or at the very least cream... Maybe sweetened yoghurt?

(Totally off-topic, but I posted an article I've been working on for a few weeks over at Sustainable Suburbia today, on building sustainable & resilient local communities.)

Is your dream urban, suburban or rural? Are you living it?

Are you happy with your home? Or do you dream about living somewhere else? Kate @ Foxs Lane had a lovely post the other day, about getting home to her farm and being home. "As much as we pride ourselves in being cool farmers that can straddle the country/city divide, we really are the happiest here in the forest," she said. "At home."

It's wonderful to know where you belong, where home really is.

I've spent much of my adult life dreaming of a home in the country, or perhaps on the coast, but for me, I've finally realised, I'm in exactly the right place here in suburbia. I love visiting friends on their rural blocks, I love holidays down at Mossy Point, on the South Coast, and I love trips to urban Melbourne.

But I am happy here. Admittedly, I wouldn't mind a slightly larger suburban block. And I am still working on defeating my bigger-house envy. But I have enough space to have my own chooks, and grow far more of my own vegies & fruit than I yet do.

And at the same time I'm close to my parents and father-in-law, straight down the freeway and better yet a direct school bus route from a wonderful Steiner school, near to cousins and to my kid's friends and to many of my own. And yes, close to libraries and parks and rivers and mountains, and even cafes and museums and art galleries.

Plus I get to do a couple of days a week keeping my web skills up - or developing them even - in my day job. Sometimes I fantasize about quitting that job in favour of more writing, but really I do enjoy it, at least most of the time. I like the department I work in, both on a philosophical and cultural level, and also the team I work with. It's fun to be around adults all day, and it's fun to learn new things. We'll be moving our external websites to Drupal over the next couple of years, so I'm looking forward to more learning there.

Chris and Liam went on a father-son bonding weekend camp recently, out at the yurt farm near Goulburn, and the guy running it asked Chris why he stayed living in the city. Chris told me afterwards he didn't quite know how to answer, but the conversation we had as a result really cemented things for me - and for him I think - about why we do.

For me, as well as being about conveniences and about, quite frankly, not really loving the manual labour that a larger block of land implies, it's about a sense that urban and suburban is where it is going to be at, for a large part of the world's population, for the foreseeable future.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying some lovely rural living, and certainly I don't see all our food production ever being done within city limits. But I think the sense that we hippy-dippy sustainable living types often have, that sustainable urban living is second class, that while we can have chooks in suburbs, of course we'd all rather be living out of town, is misplaced.

Cities aren't going away. What we need to do is to learn to live sustainably within them. To drive less (also a big issue for rural living of course), to produce more of our own food, to create sustainable, supportive communities and live more simply, with less stuff.

It is a learning curve, because the way we've been doing urban and suburban living for the most part has not been sustainable, up to now. That's partly why I started Sustainable Suburbia.

It's taken me a long time - I grew up in suburban Canberra, and once I'd moved away for a while, I really did not expect to end up settling back here - but I finally realise that I love it here. It's a great feeling, and in some ways it frees me up to enjoy visiting my rural friends more without instantly starting to fantasize about being them. This is home, and it's where I want to be.

Gratuitous kid pic - Mikaela climbing in a tree out the front of our house.

What I have been doing lately (photo post)

Nurturing my winter tomatoes in their pot, and discovering that our front courtyard is almost frost-free (not quite though).

Watching my honey pod peas grow twice as quickly in a pot in the courtyard as the ones growing in the vegie garden out back.

And watching Mikaela at her swimming lesson, which I usually don't do as I am busy with Eliane in the shallow water. Today Chris came, since it was a public holiday, and so I was able to task him with hangin' with Elli, while I watched Mikaela. She's doing really well (which these photos do nothing to show!).

Making 'healing cabbage soup' out of the cabbage provided in my first seasonal organic box from Whole Food Central. Except when I went to put the cabbage in I realised I only had a a quarter cabbage, not a half, so I added 1/4 cauliflower (also out of the box) as well. It was okay, but I think it would have been better with more cabbage.

We ate the soup with freshly baked rolls, that I made quickly when we got home from swimming. I didn't have any time to let them rise (not even once, much less twice), but they were delicious all the same.

Learning to make my own laundry powder (and other homemade cleaning products).

And reading quite a few books (I think I am in the midst of about four right at the moment), and writing a review of this one for my commitment to the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

On being a Deficient Housewife

(Note, I wrote most of this post late last year, on my iPhone, hence some of it is out of date, eg the fact that I was recently on holidays or that I wasn't working outside of the home).

I confessed to my husband the other day that I sometimes feel a little inadequate as a housewife. And let's face it, I am inadequate, by any traditional measure (come look at my house when I'm not expecting you, if you don't believe me). 

But that's not really what the conversation was about. It started because a very good friend of mine recently called Chris a saint. And no, she didn't mean because he puts up with me, not really (she loves me, I swear), and yes, she was getting a slightly warped view because we were on holidays and on holidays I do admit that I expect Chris to change most of the pooey nappies (in addition to sharing the rest of the parenting), not only because in a normal week I change the vast majority, as well as doing the vast majority of the rest of the child care (just by virtue of being there), but because quite frankly, I'm up with Elli at night, more often than ever when we're away, so I figure I deserve a break from something! Do I sound a little defensive? Let's move on then...

Where was I? Oh yes, so my friend kept calling Chris a saint, which isn't all that unusual actually, and why? Because, look I'm sorry everyone, but from what y'all tell me, most husbands/fathers simply don't pull their weight. But wait, I didn't even need you to tell me that - the research very clearly shows that it is still the case that most women in heterosexual marriages do the lion's share if the housework, whether or not they also work outside of the home, and regardless of how much they work outside of the home. And this is especially the case if there are also children living in that home. In other words, on average, in a household with a man, a woman and some child or children, if both parents work outside the home, on average the woman will do X hours of domestic work and the man will do significantly less than X. (See here and here and here for some actual stats and studies to back that up. Edited to add: and most recently here. Hat Tip to blue milk for the link.)

And guess what? That's not the case for us. Chris pulls his weight with house work, including parenting. Not only that, he can't understand how it's possible that other men don't see that their wife is working all day (whether or not she gets paid for it), and often again much of the night, especially if they have young kids. And, weekends too! And holidays! 

Okay, Chris pulls his weight, people call him a saint, and I cannot deny that he is a stellar husband. So why does that make me feel less than? Chris pointed out that I am seeing it as though it's a zero sum game - that is, if he is better, I must be worse. I know, rationally, that that's not what anyone's implying. Well, not most people.

Actually, do you know what I just realised? I don't know that at all. I actually do think they think I am worse. Oh not this particular friend. Maybe not even most, but some? Absolutely. And it's not just because Chris hangs out that washing at night while he's watching television (after I've gone to bed, because I will more than likely be up by 5 with Eliane), and cleans up the dinner dishes while I'm getting Elli down or later when I'm working (writing, mostly, which I may love to do, but which I am still doing to try to earn an income), and gets up in the night with the big kids, while most of the other mothers I know do most if not all of that themselves - no, it's not just that stuff. It's because I do not keep a tidy house. I mean, Chris does all that stuff and more besides, and what do I do? I don't keep the house basically tidy, and I certainly don't keep the oven scrubbed or the windows clean or the bathroom completely free if mould, or even the toys picked up off the floor.

So why don't I? How is it that so many other women manage to keep their homes beautiful (or at least relatively tidy), while their partners work all day to earn a crust and then watch tv every night?* Is it because I spend my days playing with my children, doing craft activities, helping my eldest with homework, or otherwise having quality time with them? No it is not. Oh sure, I do those things, but no more than most, and certainly less than some.

No, the reason is—

Well. I'm tempted to say the reason is that I hate housework, but that - while partly true - would play right into my image problem. I really should stop telling people our house us perennially messy because we both hate housework and are basically lazy. The fact that is there are two reasons our house us perenially messy. Okay, three.

1. Yes I do hate housework, particularly the kind that involves picking things up and finding them a home. Cleaning I actually don't hate - cleaning the toilet or the bathroom? No problem. It's just a matter or finding the time. That, I find tricky. I've got the time, there are just other things I'd rather use it for. And Chris doesn't love it either.

2. I work from home. Yes, I'm on (unpaid) maternity leave right now, but at the same time I have been working very hard at trying to build an online business for over a year now, since Eliane was about 8 months old. It started out with just looking for a few places to get paid for some very basic web content writing. But it quickly morphed into me starting my own website (SustainableSuburbia.net), and trying to stay true to the principles and values the name of the site implies (and which I hold dear), while at the same time writing to address keywords & phrases that people are actually searching on (in search engines), and create an income from it.** I am still writing a bit for other sites as well (and as discussed here previously have now added narrating kayoz goes travelling to my suite of blogs, partly in order to profit from our recent rather expensive holiday abroad, which is itself not a little work), and I also started kayoz talks books, mostly to have a .au site to use to link to books on fishpond.com.au, on which I suddenly realised I was making some money as result of some posts on this site that rank well in search engines for certain books, so I wanted to leverage that without turning this blog into a sales pitch.

Okay, so the fact is that for the past year - pretty much as soon as I had started to regain some energy and got it together to cope with having three children - I have been working at home during the day whenever Eliane sleeps, plus quite a bit of her awake time, especially when both other kids were at school, as well as most nights after they were in bed. So while she's messing up the house, I am not walking around behind her cleaning up. Much less getting to the oven. Now that we're back from our trip I need to come up with a schedule with better balance, but which still gets the work done. But it will probably have a better balance with sleep, not with housework. So that's reason number two.***

3.  Clutter. Oh yes, the Clutter. And now we come to something I can do something about. I hope. But even that takes more time.

Wait, did you notice what just happened? I've just derailed this post to rationalise, to justify my deficiencies. When what I really wanted to do was to talk about why I feel inadequate in the first place.

I asked Chris how he feels about the fact that our house is a perennial mess, and he said he'd prefer it to be tidy. But that obviously he - and we - don't value that enough to actually "make it so". I said, how does it make you feel about yourself? Or about how other people may see you? He couldn't answer. I don't know, he eventually said.

Of course, we are just two people, and you really can't generalise from the personal. I will say, I think it's telling that it makes me feel inadquate and it makes him feel - nothing. We both would like to live in a tidy house, but only I allow my identity to be tied up in it. Admittedly, I've been the stay-at-home-mum for a while now, but even when we've both been doing moreorless equal paid work, I've still felt this pressure.

This is nothing new, I know, but it's interesting for me to see it in myself. So feminism has done its job? Hardly. And as long as we are still seeing the inequalities in this generation of parents, how can we possibly think the current generation of children will grow up without a similarly gendered view of the world?

Now, here are a few stellar posts you should go read next, if feminism and mothering and housework is of even passing interest to you. I'd love to write more myself, but for reasons outlined in that first post below, I can't focus anymore. It's taken me about three hours to get this far (and note, the bulk of this post was written months ago), and I can't cope with the interruptions anymore.

Motherworkin’ Part II – Interruptibility

My husband does do that - my journey out of the equal parenting closet

Before we call a truce on The Chore War

Putting the Wife Back in Housewifery

___________________


*I don't count the ones where both partners work all day, because if both adults are at work all day then generally there are no kids at home making a mess, and no one home using dishes and so on. At least when the kids are the ages of mine. So while I know that the average woman in that situation still does more housework than the average man, I also assume that there is less to do each day.

** I haven't talked about this much here mostly because that income depends on people either clicking on ads or buying products, either of which could be seen to be counter to the concept of sustainable/anti-consumer living that the website embodies, and I while I have mostly reconciled that in my own mind, I am still a little uncomfortable about it. More thinking to come.

*** and of course previously chris and I both worked part time - mostly - and I was mostly studying as well, enough said I hope.

The holidays are over; Let the work begin

Kate at Foxes Lane asked the other day are you addicted to crochet? Something else? What are you making? (Okay, I'm paraphrasing from memory, and maybe conflating a couple of posts, but she did ask something like that.) And I thought, hmm I seem to have dropped my crochet addiction very quickly once school holidays kicked in.

I was making a lovely rainbow blanket for my nephew for Christmas, but then my sister-in-law came to stay for a week before Christmas and I suddenly stopped work on it (too busy talking?), until the point when I realised there was no way I was getting it done in time, so I caved in and bought something. The blanket will be fine for his birthday (in October!).

Over the holidays I relaxed and wrote (here and here and of course right here), and started researching an article on transition towns. I built a chook dome with Liam. I went swimming with the kids, and sometimes the husband, I stayed up late talking to my sister, who came to stay at Christmas, and again for my grandfather's funeral last week. I even watched a movie (something I very rarely do) and cried my eyes out. We went blackberrying, we went out to visit my cousin on his property out Gundaroo way and met his llamas, we visited my grandfather in Forster (before he died), we went to the beach. Also we slept in a lot, even if it was only until 7:30. What I didn't do was one single stitch of crochet or knitting. I did help Liam cut out some fabric to sew himself some wizards robes, but he is sewing them (by hand, I don't have a working sewing machine), himself.

But school went back today, craft group (at the school) starts up again on Friday, and I'm feeling crafty again. I'm thinking I will come to school pickup a little early and bring my crochet with me. I'm also thinking it's about time I knitted some new dishcloths.

But in the mean time, I'm going to tackle my pigsty of a house. The holidays are over.  It's time to get organised!

Picking wild blackberries, eating blackberry pie

Yesterday we went blackberrying.

I was unavoidably reminded of Little Sal picking blueberries and hearing them go ku plink, ku plank, ku plunk in her pail, which never filled up because she kept eating them. Especially because everybody ate a lot, especially Eliane!

The kids had a great time. Liam said "Let's put blackberrying on the calendar for February 4 as soon as we get one for next year."

We happened to know that some other children from Mikaela's kindergarten were going out to the same patch this morning, so we tried to stick to berries kindergarteners couldn't reach (Mikaela was excepted from this rule for obvious reasons!), but there were gazillions more we simply couldn't get to. One of the kindergarten parents going out today suggested bringing some planks of wood to get deeper in, and I could see why.

We picked about 2 & 1/2 litres between us. Apparently there are lots of wild blackberries around Canberra, And I've lived here most of my life, but this is the first time I've ever been berry picking. It's scandalous!

We had pancakes with blackberries for dinner last night (those of us who hadn't so stuffed ourselves while we were picking that they couldn't eat another bite), a blackberry smoothy for morning tea today, and of course, blackberry pie for dessert tonight (with ice cream and, you guessed it, blackberries).

Mmm, Yum. I don't think I've ever had blackberry pie before. Australians aren't really the big pie eaters that Americans are. Normally I guess I'd just have the fresh berries on their own, or with cream and ice cream (for a dessert). Actually we did that too - after the pancakes! But we had over two litres of berries to use, and this pie used nearly 5 cups. I don't think we could have got through that many fresh. Not on top of the other litre we ate!

We could have frozen them of course, or made berry preserves for winter. Hmm, maybe we'll have to go blackberrying again next weekend!

A busy, busy day with seven kids in the house

Shopping done. Check.

Kids fed (several times). Check.

Gingerbread house put together. Check.

Friend's four kids arrived for the afternoon. Check.

Healthy slice baked for afternoon tea. Check.

And eaten (along with watermelon). Check.

Dinner prepared with something to like for all 7 kids (hopefully). Check.

Craft done, friend's kids with something to take home for Christmas (some of them anyway). Check.

So are the kid's Christmas presents for their grandparents made? Nope. One day left...

Career Change?

Not exactly. Though there have been moments in the past year when I've considered not going back to my Public Service job when my maternity leave ends, but I'm over that now. But...

I just gave my seven and a half month pregnant friend a massage, and rediscovered how much I like doing it. I used to massage professionally, many years ago (nearly ten now!), and I used to mostly do remedial massage, which was good and satisfying and all, but there is also something very satisfying about simply helping someone to really relax and to feel nurtured. Especially when that someone is heavily pregnant and you know they probably aren't sleeping well and never get really comfortable anymore.

Plus, taking off the pressure to fix things is pretty nice actually. 

In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I'm thinking of going back to doing it professionally. Only very part-time, not as a substitute did my day job (which I am due to return to in January), but maybe just a few sessions a month for friends & family or past clients. I'll have to think on it some.

In other news, Eliane has developed a definite tendre for my friend's ten year old son, Jacob, and was extremely excited to see him yesterday, when we arrived back in Berkeley. She's also taken to calling out "Jacob! Jacob! Jacob!" just the way Liam used to do, the last time we came. Although, when Liam said it it was far more understandable than Eliane's, which sounds more like "jaja" than Jacob, and that's probably being kind. Half the time it is almost indistinguishable from Dada.

When the Earth Moves...

The kids lived through their first two earthquakes on Thursday in Berkeley - except they didn't feel the first one, and only Liam was awake for the 2nd. 

The first earthquake was a 4.2 and we were at the playground when if happened. My friend Sabine and I were sitting on a bench, while the kids played in and in a small wooden house in the playground. Not one of them felt it, but we certainly did. The first thing I was aware of was the noise, then the bench rocking. It was an odd feeling.  I've never been outside during a quake before. When I lived in California I think I only felt two quakes in the entire time, one when I was in a bookshop, and the other when I was home in my bed. 

The second earthquake on this day, or after shock perhaps, was only a 3.9, but I guess because we were in the house, it felt more startling than the first one, although it didn't go on for as long. This one had Liam and my son's 9 year old running out from the bedroom to tell us they  had felt it this time! It seemed very appropriate that he should feel his first ever earth tremor while we are here in California.

The start of a new phase

This is the last day of the first phase of Eliane's life. She is two months old today, and tomorrow Chris goes back to work, and Liam to school. Which means my days of being able to focus most of my energy on Elli and her needs are over.

Right now I am sitting in the rocking chair in the bedroom with Eliane asleep on my lap, the laptop balanced on a pillow on my knees (and no, it is not comfortable typing ths way!). But this is my last day to be spent like this. Tomorrow there will be school drop off & pick up, & playgroup in between. There will be all three kids in the afternoon, and back to our 'no TV on school days' rule. Eliane will have to sleep where and when she can, in the car, the sling, the Ergo. And I will have to do normal housewifely things, like cooking dinner, that Chris has mostly been taking care of for the past two months.

In some ways I'm looking forward to life getting back to normal, to getting into more of a routine, to getting out into the world again.

But this has been a beautiful idyllic period with my baby who is not really a newborn any more, and is never going to be again. And I'm going to miss it.

Fabulous day date

Chris and I went to see Up In The Air today, on our fabulous 'all day date' (we dropped Kaely at my wonderful Mum's place before dropping Liam at school, then Mum picked Liam up and we didn't collect them until after 4!). And I have to say, I don't think George can be pushed from his pedestal just yet, despite Trish's defection.

I was going to say more about the date, but I have to go to bed.* But it was a wonderful day, which included the first movie I've been to, I think, since before Mikaela was born. And only the second one for Chris. But more importantly it included many hours of sitting around eating & drinking together, with no errands to fit in, no children to worry about, nothing to do but enjoy each other.

Maybe we won't wait until the next baby is three and a half before doing it again.

_________________

*Wasted most of the evening on more car seat research, although I think we have basically solved that dilemma now.

Jobs for today

Jobs for today:

• sort through Kaely's clothes, pack up those she's outgrown, transfer the rest to her new drawer;
• wash & hang out two sets of bedding, both of which got peed on (by the same small girl) yesterday (though once was our fault, since we forgot to but a nappy on her last night);
• water garden before it dies (after 7pm, since I've already missed the 7-10am slot - though I did get a couple of desperate things watered this morning)
• go swimming (yay!);
• make room in master bedroom to put *our* be back in it! (ie get all Kaely & Liam's stuff outa there!) - I am so looking forward to being in our room again, where I don't have to climb over Chris to go to the loo in the night, and to have our ensuite back!
• Survive the heat.

Things I should have been blogging about in the past few weeks

1. Mikaela's burn - she chased the cat under the car two weeks ago today. Chris called me up at work and said "There's been a change of plan for the afternoon. I'm going to the hospital." It's not really a dreadful burn - not as bad as I first thought when he called - but she is still having dressing changes every few days (and improvement from every 1-2 days though), and when I asked the nurse on Sunday how long she thought it would be before Kaely could swim again - would she, for instance, be okay for the summer swim school starting in 3 weeks time - the answer was "maybe". So it's bad enough.

2. The vegie garden. A week or so ago I planted out my third attempt at a zucchini plant for the season. So far so good. I planted it inside a half buried ice cream container with the bottom cut out, and have been spraying with cold black coffee. It's been a little bit eaten, but it's still going, whereas the last two plants were eaten within couple of days.

3. The baby! I am now officially into the third trimester, and I can really tell. I also had a long post about how much I do not like people commenting on my size (or the supposed size of the baby), how this is a common complaint of pregnant women (be they larger or smaller) and how I just don't get why people think it's suddenly okay to make comments like "Oh, you're huge!" (on hearing you're not due for a couple of months), just because you're pregnant. Why?

4. My birthday, which was a crappy day (except for the middle part where my cousin threw me a little birthday party with our three little girls, complete with fairy bread and everything), mostly because I was tired and crabby & so were the kids, but maybe, just maybe, because my very, very dear friend was having a miscarriage, although I didn't know it at the time.

5. My lovely friend and how sad I am for her right now (except I don't tend to blog about other people's stuff so much anyway, so I probably wouldn't say any more than that).

6. The fact that despite it being summer - really, truely, 36 degree Celcius type summer - I have another cold (via Liam) and a sore throat. Why?! Also my iron is right down again, so I am taking an iron supplement. But maybe that answers the why question.

7. Liam's school play, Christmas festival, and move to their class two classroom two days before the end of term (which was last Friday).

But right now I have to go to bed, so more detail on any of that will have to wait, probably indefinitely.

Kids' first trick or treat

As Australian readers know, trick or treating is not particularly common in Australia (although it is becoming more so) - nor is celebrating Halloween in general.* I started going trick or treating as a child after (I think) we did some Halloween things in school and I got all into writing spells and drawing ghosts. But not many of my contemporaries did it, and most houses were visited we less than prepared (but perfectly congenial, for all that).

I don't think we've ever even mentioned Halloween to Liam, much less the idea of trick or treating, but it must have come up at school, because on Friday night at dinner he piped up with "Can we go trick or treating tomorrow?"

I don't know what came over me, but I said sure. So at five o'clock on Saturday night we had to come up with costumes and bags. Liam dressed up as a pirate, with a bit of face paint, a bandana, and a stick for a sword. Kaely decided she wanted to be a fairy (I thought she'd be a pirate with Liam), but then changed her mind when I produced wings out of a secret hand-me-down bag. She didn't like them, but she did like the wand. So she went as not-a-fairy with a wand.

We went very, very local, only knocking on doors where we knew the people, up and down the street from us. We ended up finding six people home, out of about nine doors knocked on. The first (one of our immediate next-door-neighbours) said abruptly "Oh, sorry, we don't do that." (See footnote below for probably explanation.) Which led Liam to say "I'm a bit scared," when knocking at the next house. But happily, everyone else was more than friendly. About half were prepared, but everyone came up with something for the kids. 

We don't really see much of our neighbours. We had a street New Year's Eve party two or three years back which was the first time we met most of them. Many of them have been here since the suburb was built thirty odd years ago, and they told us that way back then - when they were mostly young couples with children - they did this every New Year, blocking of part of the street and having a grand old time. Now most of their children have moved away, and so have many of those original owners, and the community has become more disparate.

So it was nice to stop and chat with some of them as we made our rounds. We visited, as I said, six houses, yet it took us about 45 minutes. And as well as the requisite lollies and chocolates we came home with a bag of broad beans and two tomato seedlings ("the best cultivar in the world").

Before we left home I told the kids that any lollies they collected would be put into a joint family bowl when we got back. This was partly to head off any comparisons on who got what or how much, and partly because the 'fairy bag' I found Mikaela was tiny (though as it turns out, it was big enough).

They got little enough (five houses, after all), that when we did get back I decided to let them eat it all then and there and get the sugar rush over in one go. This worked like a charm. Liam doesn't like chocolate, so although he tried one mini milkyway, he ended up giving it to Chris and was happy for Mikaela, Chris & I to divide the rest. But then, Kaely ate maybe half a dozen lollies, one chocolate, and ended up giving the rest away. She had a butter scotch, which was probably the first really hard lolly she'd ever had, and did not like the effect (I had to dig it out of her teeth for her!), so I think it was partly that put her off.

In any case, they both had a smashing good time, were perfectly happy with their tiny haul, and very keen to do it again next year. And we had a lovely time catching up with some neighbours, so we'll be happy to as well.

_____________

*Which could lead to a whole discussion on how some snotty Aussie's get annoyed by Halloween celebrations, complaining that we are taking on more US culture, when in fact Halloween goes back a lot further than the US does, right back to Pagan culture - but lets not bother going there right now. I'm happy with simply saying that Chris is half American, so trick or treating is letting our kids explore their American heritage.

A perfect day

I have had such a lovely day today.

After dropping Liam at school, Mikaela and I went to my mum's, where we spent the day hanging with her, along with my cousin & her two little girls (4 months older and 12 months younger than Kaely).

The three girls see each other almost every Monday, but this was a particularly good day. There was some squabbling, of course, but there were also tea parties, taking turns playing drums and piano, racing around squealing like crazy people (okay, that did get old fairly quickly, but my wonderful Mum put a stop to it by reading them a story or two while I got lunch), feeding the fish in Mum's backyard, hiding under bed clothes, building train sets, and so on. Most of which was done in remarkable harmony.

It was 32 degrees today (90F) so after school (and a few errands) Mikaela, Liam & I hung about outside in the shade for nearly an hour, the kids having a cool outdoor bath (in a clam shell), me sitting with my feet dangling in the water. Liam actually spent most of the time out of the water, just popping into it to cool down from time to time, so it wasn't much of a bath for him, but it was a lovely way to spend an hour. And then later the water can be bucketed onto the garden, which it needs.

When we came in I sat knitting* for another half hour or so, while Liam read to me (his idea - we went to the library before we left school), and Kaely pottered around, making beds, reading books to 'Baby Purple Teddy' etc, and Chris cooked dinner.

And after dinner, we spent another half hour outside enjoying the evening cool, playing with Lochie, and watering**/weeding the vegie garden (not as much as it needs though, of either one).

Now the kids are in bed, and I'm off back outside to bucket the water from the clam shell onto the new plants we've put in out the front.

__________

*I'm knitting a blanket for the baby, to match the ones I made for Liam & Mikaela (a bit like this one, but it I gave to my best friend's baby, who was born first - Kaely's is not even half this size, and neither will this new one be), but while I'm more than half way through the pregnancy I'm only maybe a third of the way through the blanket, so I really need to get on with it!

**With rain water, of course, though that is fast running out.

Poetry Salon

I've just come back from a 'poetry salon' at Tilleys in Lyneham with the lovely and talented poet, Sarah Tiffen. Who just happens to be a friend of mine too :)

Sarah is poet in residence at Tilleys at the moment. She goes in there a couple of times a week during the day to sit and write and whatever, and she's hosting these salons on (at the moment) Thursday evenings. So far it's just been three of us going (and I missed last week), but we have high hopes of it!

And since it is just three friends there'd be a good chance that we would just sit and chat the whole time, but actually, we really did read and talk about poetry, at least for part of the time.

I remember having this moment, the first year I was in uni, sitting on the steps outside the library: I remember suddenly thinking, feeling, I'm here, I'm at University. Like Cambridge, or Oxford - only not. Actually I was at Flinders Uni in Adelaide, which was only about 25 years old at the time, so did not have the history or ambiance of somewhere like Oxford.* But I had spent my early teenage years reading about Tolkien and CS Lewis and Oxford and the Inklings, and I suddenly had that sense of being there, at university, studying literature, just like them.

Well, the first week of our poetry salon I had a similar moment. Not quite the same awe, but the sudden sense of - I don't know. Like we could do something here. We could, for instance, actually talk about poetry, not just chat on like we usually would. And then we did! Woohoo.

Anyway, it was fun. Sarah wants to take it a bit further - maybe read some of our own poetry, or even have a performance night, or even more unlikely, actually write something.** I don't know about that, but I am going to keep going along. Of course, I can't actually afford to eat at Tilleys (my one decaf coffee tonight cost me $4.70 - can that be right?), but the atmosphere is great.

__________
*Then again, it didn't have signs saying you could only walk on the grass if accompanied by a fellow, which Oxford does, snotty place.

**Not that I in anyway consider myself a poet, but I did write a few poems that I'm a little bit proud of in the course of doing my masters project last year.

Getting back on track: writing, blogging and the Fab Fatties Challenge #2

I have been back at work for nearly a year now (I started back at the beginning of July).

In that time I have written almost nothing, submitted absolutely nothing (despite having several pieces either ready and waiting or just about ready to submit), have blogged very little, have gained about five kilos, have had one miscarriage and have not (since then) gotten pregnant.

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging much is that people at work might read it (being in a web team is quite different that way, as it turns out, to being in a communications team). Not that I mind if they do, exactly, it's just that there are things one usually doesn't talk about at work - trying to get pregnant, for instance - that one might blog about ad infinitum.

So here's my little disclaimer* for work folk:
Feel free to read. Feel free to comment. Don't talk to me (or preferably anyone else) about it at work. At least, not if it's something you think I wouldn't talk about at work. Like trying to get pregnant - not always something that's good for one's career, though it's not politically correct to say so. But I learned that the hard way last time.

Also - some notes for anyone new to the blog, eg, someone from work:

• it took me 17 cycles and one miscarriage to conceive Mikaela.
• I only have one ovary.
• my mum started going through menopause before she hit 40.
• my sister took four years to produce her beautiful son
• I am 37, Chris is nearly 41...

So just because I'm trying to get pregnant, doesn't mean I'm going on maternity leave any time in the next year. Or ever. Just so we're clear.

Now, back to the point of this post, which is not that it's seven months since my miscarriage and I'm not pregnant, despite being convinced that May was the month it would happen. Nor about the lack of blogging lately.

No, it is about the fact that I've put on about five kilos since I started back at work.

There are a few reasons for this - too much junk food at work and not enough exercise being high on the list - but the main one is that I lost my focus.

I got back down to my goal weight of 63kg early last year.** I had a health check within a month of starting work that determined that my healthiest weight range is something like 62-66kg. All good. And then I started trying to get pregnant again. And then I got pregnant again. And then I had a miscarriage. And somewhere in there I told myself I could eat whatever I liked (ie lots and lots of chocolate) because obviously I deserved it.

Yes, I have issues around food and deserving and comfort and anger and self image and shame and probably all sorts of other things. As I'm sure have blogged before,*** I took a long time to acknowledge any of this, let alone to acknowledge that I was overweight, still less that I cared. I was a feminist. And we feminists don't care what we look like, do we? Right...

Actually it was two things that snapped me out of it. It was realising (shortly after Liam was born), that I was unhealthily overweight (and I was, trust me on this, I'm not talking putting on five kilos here), and also that that was not okay now that I was a mother, and realising that however much I pretended not to notice or care, other people just had to look at me to know I was unhealthily overweight. I was fooling no-one.

Despite all this, now that I am back to an ordinary sort of weight I have largely gone back to pretending that none of that happened. That I don't have any food/weight issues. That I am, in short, too cool to care.

Well, I'm not. And that is why I am now taking back my focus and my control. It may take me another year to get pregnant (although we've given ourselves a deadline of this December, so lets hope not), or it may never happen. So to say even half consciously to myself (as I have, if I'm honest, been doing) that I can wait till after the next baby's been born to get back on track is ridiculous. It is self-delusion.

Food tracking, I've discovered, is my best defence against over-eating. So food tracking is what I will do. And to jump start myself, I am signing up for the Fab Fatties Challenge #2 - there are about five hours left to sign up, but if you do, make sure you tell them I sent you so I get me some 25 points in the challenge!****

The challenge goes for two weeks from today (May 29) and involves the following - all of which I am going to try to do every day (except the one about not drinking 'soda pop' since I don't do that anyway).

• Eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily- 5 points
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day- 8 points
• Exercise- 1 point per minute
• Do a random good deed- 5 points
• Stop drinking soda pop for a day- 1 point
• Actually read someone else’s blog post and leave a comment- 1 point
• Answer [their] Fab Fatties random bonus questions about [them]- 5 points
              -Bonus questions will be posted daily on [their] blog.
• Recommend 2 fabulous friends from twitter and tell us why we should follow them- 2 points
• Eat a healthy breakfast-1 point
• Lose weight- 1 point per pound
• Keep a food journal for the day- 5 points per day
• Take a walk during you lunch break- 5 points
• Have a friend join this challenge- 25 points per friend
              -make sure your friend tells us you recruited them!

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*I've probably said this before, I'm just a little paranoid and still haven't come to terms with this weird collision of offline-personal, work, and online lives that facebook has created.

**Back down not from all the weight I gained during pregnancy - though there was some of that - but from all the weight I gained while trying and failing to become pregnant beforehand.

***But it was a loong time ago, before categories, let alone tagging, when I still did each entry by hand in dreamweaver, and I can't find it.

****And thanks to Food Food Body Body which is where I discovered the challenge.

Decadence, thy name is Kahlua

Back when I was 18 and living in a group house with a couple of (male) friends, the absolute height of decadence was a Saturday night at home, without the housemates but with my best friend Susan, swooning over Booker, eating chocolate (preferably dark and peppermint), and drinking very small glasses of Kahlua.

To this day the taste of straight Kahlua - the delightful sensation of it just slightly burning my mouth, my throat - spells decadence to me.

I don't drink it much because, well, I don't drink much alcohol in general, and besides it's expensive and I am a penny pincher. So one bottle will last me a year or more. But when I do partake a little, it takes me straight back to that feeling of slightly forbidden luxury. Delicious.

I have been de-friended.

Just before Christmas I was de-friended (by email) by an old friend (from my undergraduate years at uni). It was the first time that's ever - at least openly, explicitly - happened to me. It was ostensibly based largely on a misunderstanding (she was mad that I hadn't replied to an email telling me she was pregnant, but I had never received the email), but I'm guessing it's really more a long term resentment that I don't call/write/whatever enough. And, interestingly to me, that impression of hers seems to be partly due to my presence on Facebook.

From her perspective (I think) I spend enough time on facebook that I should have time to call her more often. Actually, I spend very little time on facebook, but because I often leave it open half the day, and check and comment on people's status updates when I pop into the study for five minutes here and there - not to mention update my own status via twitter (which is sometimes via mobile phone, so I'm not even at my desk), it seems to her like I'm there a lot.*

I replied to her cross email immediately, of course, even though I was in the middle of packing to leave for our holiday (which I always do at the last minute, so we didn't end up leaving until really late and didn't end up getting there until 11:30 at night, at which point the kids were so excited by their bunk beds that they didn't get to sleep until 2am - so you can see that stopping in the middle of my packing really meant something). And then later - while we were away - I decided to add her to a limited friend list in facebook so that she wouldnt see my status updates any more. I was starting to feel paranoid about them. That's when I discovered that she'd also defriended me on Facebook (unless she's quit facebook altogether, which is certainly a possibility I suppose).

When I got back from our holiday (we went to Forster to visit my grandfather for Christmas, did I mention that?) I emailed her again, just a brief email to reiterate the main points of my (rather longwinded) first one - that I was sorry I'd hurt her, that I hadn't known she was pregnant but was thrilled to hear it, that I did value her friendship. She hasn't replied, and for all I know she sent my emails straight to the trash without reading them. Or she read my first one and got more offended, I don't know (her email was *quite* sarcastic, so while I thought I was being all objective and conciliatory in my first email, I think I was actually feeling rather defensive).

I've considered calling her. Maybe it's a no brainer that I should have called her to begin with. Email is probably not the best medium for such conversations. But when I got her original email I was in middle of packing and was really needing to get Kaely down for a nap (yeah, we left *really* late). I could have called when we got back from the holiday (I did tell her we were about to leave town for a week), but... the truth is when I re-read her email I felt pretty cross myself. She was awfully sarcastic and frankly she seems to have cut me off over a misunderstanding without bothering to give me the benefit of the doubt, or even a hearing. And given that we see each other so rarely anyway, I wonder if our friendship can come back from that. She could apologise (though she may not), I could apologise (and I have - for being generally unavailable - it's true that she would call me more often than me her, though I'm talking once or twice a year here), but can that make the bad feelings go away sufficiently, or would it simply mean that we were ostensibly friends again only to lose touch less deliberately?

I did value her friendship, she's a lovely person and a pleasure to spend time with. But I'm worried that if I call her she won't apologise, and we'll both get cross, and instead of patching things up it will leave things as they are but with an even worse taste in both our mouths. Or alternatively we'll patch things up but my every interaction with her will be tinged with guilt that I don't make more effort and therefore resentment that she expects me to, and... well, given that we really don't see much of each other anyway - she lives in country Victoria, and I haven't made it down to see her since her wedding four years ago, and she hasn't been up here for even longer - is it really worth it?

And, I admit that I do feel cross that she seems to have written me off so easily, so there's a part of me that wants to just say to hell with her.

___________
*This is a whole different post that I am probably never going to get around to writing, but it is an interesting side of social networking sites -that they make your every action so open, people can easily measure - how many times did she write on X's wall, compared to Y's wall or my wall? And, especially when there are people who use social media extensively who are 'friends' with people who use them only hesitatingly, there are bound to be some of these issues pop up.

I lost all my email

I reformated a hard drive thinking I'd taken everything off it that I needed.

I hadn't.

I accidentally deleted all my kayoz email. I practically never clean my email out (though I do use filters) so I had emails going back - well all the years I've had the kayoz domain, so I guess that would be going on for nine years. All my passwords, all your email addresses, everything. Damn.

And now I need to remember my password for that account so I can set it up to download again.

Damn damn damn.

10,000 steps

I've join the 10,000 step challenge at work this week. I've only done four days so far, but what I've discovered is that on a normal home-with-kids day I have no trouble getting to around 10,000 steps or more, but on work days, unless I make an extra effort, I'd probably only get to 7-8000.

Of that 8000, I get about 3-3500 walking to and from the bus (so if for some reason I get picked up, there goes a good chunk of it) and about 1000 on my daily walk around the outside of the building at lunch. The rest is incidental.

By comparison, on a day when I'm home with the kids, I've done about 3000 steps before I even get out the door to take Liam to school!

Moral: I need to go for longer walks for lunch, or more evening walks with the kids. We're doing the latter a bit again, now that it's staying late for longer. But it involves getting dinner organised a little bit early and skipping the time Liam and I usually spend reading and chatting, while Chris and Kaely either look at books or - often - go for walk on their own.

Dinner with friends (and no kids!)

I have just been out to dinner - in an actual restaurant, and with no children present - with four women I went to uni with. We did our honours year in English together, and were all slightly on the outer as a result of being older, and/or having come from a different university (me), or taken a year off to have a baby or whatever. We've been meeting up from time to time every since, but I think this is the first time since Liam was born (at least) that we've managed to do it completely child free.

These women are all fabulous successes, although they may be surprised to hear themselves described that way. One of them has just had her third novel published, one is about to launch her third book of poetry, one had to rush off to rehearsal for a play she's performing in, and one is a branch head in a government department. I'm amazed I didn't feel completely inadequate in their company actually, when I put it like that, but of course I also know the ups and downs in their love lifes, the joys and worries with their kids (and - almost - grand kid in one case), their homes, their day jobs... I know that they're four amazing women but also that they are human just like me.

It was a lovely night. We talked and laughed and managed to avoid crying. I haven't been out with friends like that for ages. I'm going to try to do it more often.

[And now, it's off to bed, old fogie that I am, it's nearly 10 o'clock and past my bedtime. Besides, I'm on my third week of this damn virus and it still hurts to swallow. I need my sleep.]

In cotton wool

It's a weird feeling having completely blocked ears. It's like I'm living inside my own little cotton wool wrapped bubble. I can hear most things but I can't hear the more subtle sounds, and I can't tell, when I'm not hearing anything, whether it's because there's no sound or just because of the cotton wool effect.

Brrrr

It must ber cold outside this morning, because I've been in my nice warm office building for a good ten minutes now (after a ten minute walk from the bus) and my face still feels slightly frozen - almost numb around the edges - and my fingers still aren't working properly.

Back in the workforce

I feel I should be blogging about the Garnaut Report today, but I haven't got the detail of it yet, and besides I'm sure there are many, many other people doing it better than I could.

So instead I'm going to blog about my new job. I started back to work in the public service this Wednesday. I'm still officially working for my old area (that is, they're paying for me), but I'm located in a different area. It's web work basically. Initially it looked like it would be more writing and editing, but it looks like it might end up being more the technical side of things, though perhaps with some editing, or at least providing advice about writing for the web.

And that's okay with me, because I'm going to be learning new stuff. Yesterday, for instance, I learned some new things about coding in XHTML (strict) which I haven't done before. Also the main website I'm going to be working on is in a content management system which I haven't used before, and the intranet (managed by the same area) uses SharePoint, which I also haven't used before.

More importantly even than the work, the team appears to be fairly together. By that I mean they seem to like each other, they're interesting people, and I think they'll be fun to work with. My last team was peopled with lovely people, but was nonetheless rather dysfunctional - most people didn't seem to want to be there. I think this is going to be quite different. There are also a number of other part-timers in the team, which is a good sign. I've only spent a day and half in their company, so I could be wrong about this team. But I don't think I am.

When I was studying psychology in year eleven, I remember reading that people's beliefs tend to match their behaviour to the extent that if you manage to change someone's behaviour their belief system will usually follow.

I've been back at work three days, and already I can see that working on me. I think I might just like working. True, it costs me the time I've spent writing over the past year. And if someone would pay me to sit in my study and write - write the stuff I want to - than yes, I would choose that. But you know, there's something rather pleasant about getting out of the house, getting to dress-up a bit, maybe even put on some makeup (though I predict that won't last another week) and be with other people.

Another nice thing is that while I was on leave the function of government I work under was moved from one department to another. So I am working in a new department, and of all the departments there are, it is probably the one I would choose. (The one I was in wasn't bad, but only because of the function that came across to the new department*, and even so, I didn't feel quite as at home there as I think I will here.) And now I am working in the main part of the department, so that potentially opens up opportunities to move into other areas at a later time.

And so, for the first time really in years I can see myself starting to think of this as a potential career, rather than just a job. So much, I think, depends on the team you find yourself in. I hope this one goes on as well as it has started.

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*Sorry about the confusing code, I don't want to actually mention department names. Though anyone from my team who read this would immediately know who I am, so I'm not sure why I am so careful. It's just my policy.

One blissful day, or, Meeting Trish, Eating Oysters and Getting a Fabulous Massage. Mmm...

Yesterday was a day worth repeating.

First there was the morning. Then there was the afternoon. And then there was the late afternoon. Mmm.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning. For Mother's Day this year I got a gift voucher. It was for a massage, a special kind of massage, from my husband. He is a qualified massage therapist, but this is not the sort of massage he would give anyone else. I leave the details to your imagination.

But the trick was finding the time and space - kid free time and space - to make the most of such a gift voucher.

Actually, that's not the beginning. The beginning was more than two years ago when Trish first said, "Let's get coffee together." At the time she was working and I was working. On my non-work days I had Liam. On my work days I didn't have a car. Also I was heavily pregnant. And then she got sick. Long story short - we never managed to get together before Mikaela was born.

Roll forward two years to Trish emailing last week to point out that with neither one of us working now (not for money anyway) we had no excuse. So yesterday morning we had coffee. We got a lovely sunny table at Cafe Fontaine on the top level of the Canberra Centre, and for two hours we talked and drank coffee and ate yummy blueberry pancakes. And I'm here to tell you that in person Trish was just as lovely and interesting as she is on her blog.

We talked about the way people can seem different in person to the way they do on paper - pen-friends, or job interviewees, for instance. And yet somehow I never made the connection to the two of us, meeting for the first time in person, after a few years now of reading and commenting on each other's blogs. Afterwards I thought about it - was she different in person? I decided that one meeting was perhaps not enough to go on, but if I had to make a call I'd have to say not particularly. Luckily we decided to get together again in August, so I will pay more attention then!

While I was having this lovely morning with Trish, Liam was in school and Kaely was at my mother's house. Liam finishes school at 12:30 on Fridays, but my child-free day didn't end then. No, my mother picked Liam up and took him home with her, while I picked up Chris for a romantic lunch date. This was planned as a sort of last hurrah before I go back to work next week, as well as a nice lead-in to using my gift voucher later in the day. But it also worked out to be a celebration of me finally posting off my bound masters project the day before.

We went to Delissio in Curtin. Mmm, yum.

We started with a dozen piping hot Oysters Kilpatrick, served around a hill of rock salt. That cost $24 which is about what I had initially planned to spend on this whole meal, but they were well worth it. Then we each had pasta dishes. Mine was a chicken, sundried tomato, pesto sort of thing. It was very good, though not out of the ordinary. Chris had something with seafood (predictably). I didn't pay attention to what exactly it was, but he looked like he enjoyed it. To finish we shared a Lindt chocolate fondant. A hot chocolate pudding with a lightly crunchy crust and a gooey chocolate sauce centre, served with a mint coulis and just enough cream. It was as good as the oysters and that is saying something. To keep ourselves hydrated we also had a glass of wine each with the meal and coffee with dessert. We were the last people in the restaurant (everyone else looked like they had to go back to work, poor dears) - we didn't get out of there until three.

Of course, a single glass of wine - even when strung out over a couple of hours and a solid meal - is enough to put me to sleep. So it was just as well Chris took some time to set up the massage room when we got home (with candles and an oil burner and so on), while I got to relax with the last of the Diana Wynn Jones series that has been my reward for finishing my project. Then, finally, I got to use my gift voucher. And let me just say that despite working professionally as a Rolfer and remedial massage therapist, Chris does a darn good relaxation massage when he sets his mind to it. And what there was beyond that, is not for this blogger to tell.

I'm creating a new category called 'the story of my life' I think I'm stealing it from Dawn.

Oh yes, there it is on her list.

That's all.