eclectica

in detention

2012-01-28T20:26:00.003+11:00

a couple of times lately i have spent two to three hours in sydney's villawood immigration detention centre, as a visitor to the detainees there.

villawood, as we know it, is the holding centre for people who are awaiting processing either in an attempt to get australian residence or while awaiting deportation.

visitors are security screened in the same manner we may be screened at an airport, personal items are placed in lockers, wristbands are issued and gifts scanned.

i have only been to one section of the centre which, on first appearance is pleasant enough. detainees are called to the visiting area which consists of an outdoor grassed area with picnic tables and soccer playing males as well as an indoor lounge area, for want of a better word, where there are plastic chairs, a sink and microwaves, a couple of large TVs, a piano, plastic tables and "coffee" making facilities with styrofoam cups.

it is all very clean and newish, tidy and respectable. there are ramps catering for mobility problems and large windows. it is all quite pleasant, not at all the cold drab place i imagined until you start to notice some odd little things.

it's summertime and visitors bring watermelon, the skins are left on picnic tables with the flesh scooped out because there is only plastic cutlery.

the bathroom has no mirror and there is no kettle, hot drinks are made one by one in the microwave.

detainees talk about missing family, not knowing what the future will bring, strange curry not at all as curry should be, the stupidity of blunt razors that dont work but could still be used to self harm.

today i talked to a man who is 39, has been in transit across the world as a refugee for the past 17 years and feels that he has lost his life. he became a little agitated that his younger sister is soon to be a grandmother and he has no family, no country, no trade (though he has skills) and no life. i felt bad about discussing things that were so obviously painful and diverted to my great default conversation, which is food. i didnt know whether or not food would be a good topic with him and the old sport stand-by doesnt work for me so i was on a limb for a second there but it worked like a charm until i realised we were the only people left at the table and i had no idea what to say next......

visiting those people feels so useless and i wonder if they ever feel like monkeys in cages obliged to feel grateful for the peanuts from the visitors.

" Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

2012-01-05T17:21:00.004+11:00

We all wear masks at times, i suppose, at the very least we extend and reduce aspects of our personalities to fit various situations: conscientious at work, funny with our friends maybe, sexy for the online dating profile, caring with the kids.....you know the kind of thing.

I have often pondered on these multiple personalities and wondered what is real and what is not. Interestingly enough the answer is only just now, as I write, clear. The work persona is as conscientious as a person is able to be because we want and need our jobs. The funny persona (if we have one) is as funny as we are able because who wants to be unfunny?

Our situation specific personas are real because they are limited by what is really there, who we really are. These personas are not exactly masks but more like caricatures.

All of this ran through my mind when the title quote (from Oscar Wilde) was drawn to my attention. Do these personas reflect a person's truth or do they function as a mask of sorts?

The quote says "Give him a mask..." does a mask have to be provided by a third party in order to reveal truth? Is it possible for an individual to create their own mask at all? What kind of masks are there? and

Is it true that we tell our truths more fully when we are masked?

I only have the most basic of ideas in possible answer to these questions and I would love for you to throw in your thoughts so please do that....

What I will say is that stage personas as adopted by actors or musicians sometimes reveal a more complete picture of the person than their everyday personality which is reserved and muted. The stage provides the mask of an adopted character maybe? which i would best express in an imaginary statement "I can be who I am because everyone thinks I am being somebody else"

Following the same example, the actor doesnt create their own mask, we might think they do, but in fact we confer it on them when we become audience and permit them to experiment with truth.

Alcohol tends to make people tell their truths but it couldnt be called a mask. Alcohol is more like an eraser that converts the caricature to a true to life image (the metaphor is falling apart but you get it, right?)

If we allow our religion, our prophets and our holy books to justify bigotry or a desires to repress others is that a mask? Do we use religion to tell the ugly truths we could not otherwise utter about ourselves?

Tell me what you think.

It's nearly One am....In The Morning

2011-12-23T00:46:00.006+11:00

and yes, the "in the morning" is redundant, that's why i put it there! i'm relaxed and chatty and thought i would do a post regardless of the hour.

I finished my Christmas food shopping today, spent a minor fortune in my favourite fruit market come deli. I have become so caught up in silliness that i havent been to that shop in a very long time and i wonder why on earth not. It's a fantasia of good, honest stuff: vegetables and cheeses and biscuits and pasta......
we have a box of my favourite mangoes: calypso; we have halloumi and feta and peaches to grill with brown sugar, we have mushrooms and zucchini, potatoes to roast, broccoli and asparagus. we have turkey and camembert and the makings of punch.

we also have my katten, oscar, soon to be mum & dad's cat. she will provide Christmas-day-pouncing-on -wrapping-paper entertainment. i rescued oscar as a two week old kitten, crying and drenched on a rainy day, no mama in sight. she nearly died of flea anaemia and cost me another minor fortune but she is now seven weeks, doubled her weight, behaving like a cat and worth it? you bet!

i have gifts for all but my wee nephew, as a male he is already impossible to buy for, even at the age of three and the local toy store has closed it's doors. there would have been something there for him but now there is a scourge of the earth dollar store.

i seem to have left the grinch behind, which is easy really, when one is blessed as i am. the greatest gift for me in this season of gifts is the knowledge that the universe truly is unfolding as it should. i dont always like it but who likes whats good for them?

i thank you for keeping on reading and commenting, even when i rudely neglect to reply. i cant explain why i do that except to say that life has taken on a different rhythm lately and a girl has to roll with the punches.

thank you, thank you, thank you for your input to my blog and my life. i wish you joy today and enough other days to make the crummy ones worth fighting through.

" The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness the prisoners" Isaiah 61:1

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. ~Katharine Whitehorn

2011-12-05T10:05:00.005+11:00

I am feeling particularly grinch-like right about now.

The proliferation of Christian imagery that is to be seen in society at this time bothers people who dont relate to it and I am disappointed that anything related to my faith bothers anyone else. I feel the same about that as I do about the stolen generations; that is that I have no personal responsibility for the issue but as part of the group which caused the offence I wish things were different.

I also have an enormous problem with the K mart wishing tree. People buy things (probably from K mart) and put them under the tree for an under privileged child and their motives are honorable but K mart or whichever retailer the gift is purchased from are raking in the profit from the good intentions of the populace, a populace who are already handing their hard earned to the retailers at an alarming rate. The gifts are not targeted, who knows whether there are more Barbie dolls given than girls to play with them (and yes, boys can play with Barbie if they wish but realistically most people wouldn't give Barbie to a boy) there may be too many gifts for 5 year olds and nowhere near enough for ten year olds. It's just a logistical nightmare which encourages waste.

Then there are the gift catalogues where you buy a goat in a developing nation and give a postcard featuring the goat to your intended gift recipient. Dont bother doing that for me, please! If you want to give me something for my own pleasure I will be very grateful to receive it and if you would rather give someone a goat by all means give them a goat but please dont give me the picture of the goat and pretend it's a gift for me because it's not. If you want to make a stand against the commercialism of the season I will support you all the way but giving pictures of goats (or chickens, toilets, taps or sewing machines) is the cowards way.

As a Christian it is a struggle to find a meaningful spiritual message for the season because it is so easy to get caught in the rush of parties and carolling and gift buying and turkey and ham and decorations......

So I am left with the question of how best to remember and celebrate the birth of history's greatest lover?

Reluctantly I have to say the first step would have to be giving up on the grinch.

pa

2011-11-11T21:13:00.005+11:00

i remember my mother's father, pa, as a story teller. i would have been only fourteen when pa died and he lived in new zealand so i had only met him a few times and my impressions have been formed more by mum's remembrances than my own observations but i clearly remember him telling me the story of epaminondas. he told it with a sparkle in his eye, with great accents and facial expressions, humour and suspense. a very quick glance at some websites tells me that the story is regarded as racist and i see why but times were different then and i imagine he just liked the story.

i also remember pa writing a birthday card for somebody and smudging it a bit. he didnt want to give a smudged card so he turned the mark into a picture and though i didnt know it then, in that moment i saw a glimpse of pa's perfectionist side. the turning of a mistake into something acceptable, even attractive would also have been part of his work as an artisan.

pa left school at about the age of fourteen and worked in his father's blacksmith shop and around the age of eighteen he was offered an apprenticeship in some kind of engineering work. pa's father was a binge drinker and knowing that he had a problem he determined to move to a dry area and expected his son to go with him. the plan was that together they would establish a life and the rest of the family would follow. and that, is in fact, what happened. pa never took the apprenticeship. of course we dont know what might have happened if he had taken advantage of that opportunity but i suspect it may have involved great personal cost. i also have fanciful dreams that maybe his sacrifice made a significant difference in the lives of his siblings.

it must have been relatively soon after the big move that pa worked in what i understand to be a mixed business where he learned to make confectionery and ice cream. it would also have been about this time that he met my nanna and these two aspects of his story collide for the period of the great depression, during which time pa made confectionery to sell door to door and waited, a long wait, to marry his sweetheart. without further research the story is hazy but the time from meeting to marrying was seven years for pa & nanna, not so unusual in these days of cohabiting but surely an agonising wait in those days.

Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies

2011-11-04T13:24:00.004+11:00

cant remember what i had to pay for everyone to smile

i suppose i have had a good many compliments in my lifetime. one reason would be that it's getting to be a long lifetime, others would be my great wit and total hotness. unfortunately nobody notices my exellent spelling.
seriously though, Peter Regenzani / Peter Reghenzani, my memory isn't good enough to spell your name but if you ever google yourself and find me please say hello because your assertion that i could converse on almost anything tickled me pink.
i was only about twenty at the time and truth be told i had and have gaping holes in my conversation; pop culture often escapes me, especially sci fi and music, i know nothing of history (but then who chats about history?) and politics are scary.

yeah so anyhow, i liked that and peter (peter as mentioned above) liked that i knew how to eat spaghetti properly. he also told me that no true italian eats it properly so in reality i didnt know the right and proper way but all of that is semantics...

in my family it's pretty much expected that one will converse on a broad range of topics and some branches of the family also operate on the maxim "if you dont know, make it up"

in recent times i have started to wonder why we are like that, none of us is particularly well educated, i mean we do pretty well but we're not the intelligentsia. and probably more to the point, why is it that other people dont seem to want to discuss all kinds of random topics for no real reason? well, bloggers do so maybe i'm asking the wrong people.

i like it, i like that we each bring our specific interests to the table and toss them about. i like that if someone says something illogical/ thoughtless/ plain dumb somebody will jump on it, i like the expectation of rigour (now wait for someone to point out the tautology)

i like that we could spend ten minutes getting sidetracked by funny tautologies we have heard ...
and on it goes.

thinking about all this has had me considering where i come from. how did we get to be here? and i'm thinking i might just muse aloud here on what i know of my grandparents. i dont have a plan, we'll just have a cerebral wander over the next little while.......

i'm sure something will interest someone, even if i have to open my own blog ten times a day to get hits on my counter

geetarr, pancakes & study

2011-10-29T11:28:00.003+11:00

i discovered this pancake mix i really like and the girls make it for us on a saturday morning. actually, they make it at odd moments all through saturday. keaghan is raging about having a science test tuesday when the teacher has been away for the last week, liam obsessively plays his guitar.....
i am enjoying fiddling about with editing photos. so, thats our saturday morning.

afternoon is fast approaching and a trip to the shops (again) is on the agenda. i seem to buy shoes for someone every week and this week the young rager wants a pillow and the fashion plate wants new shorts. and on it goes.

life at the moment is both super ordinary and extra extraordinary. i'm alternately being a housewife and working. as hausfrau i chat online and as "secondary packaging manager" i chat in 3D. both are delightful.

"The more you have, the more you are occupied. The less you have, the more free you are"

2011-10-19T12:24:00.003+11:00

i am on another cycle of not going to work and being at home seems to keep me well occupied. today i decided i would try to rationalise some boxes of "stuff" from my wardrobe. i haven't looked at the stuff or years so i should be able to just bin it but you know how that goes, dont you?
i have a look and find all kinds of things that i'm not quite sure what to do with: a bag full of ribbon & lace from the sewing box of my grandmother, dead twenty years. silver cake forks black with tarnish could be beautiful but i dont live in a way that really appreciates those genteel accessories. there are photos and cards from my courting days, cards welcoming new babes, postcards never sent, random bits of stationery, the first fathers day card i gave my husband, reels of cotton, paper clips, outmoded cookbooks......

maybe i can get two boxes down to one?

cant stop em for trying

2011-10-12T11:53:00.002+11:00

most of the birds in the loosely termed aviary are siblings and they dont choose partners toowell so they have produced a clutch or two of bad eggs with sick chicks. some died and some we euthanised. we took the nesting boxes away to stop the little blighters doing it all over again but i guess the whole procreation urge is pretty unfightable cos there it is: a nest on the floor, out in the open and vulnerable. yesterday i had a bird sittng in a corner and today i have a nest full of eggs.

saudade

2011-10-04T22:28:00.006+11:00

i discovered this new word this week, it's portugese and it is defined by wiki :

"a somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to think back situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived".

or defined by kylie:

"missing something or someone. a lot."

i like this word, it sounds so much better than "homesick" or " i miss you/him/her" or even "nostalgia"

and it's multi-purpose to encompass lost love, missing family, missing home or friends or circumstance.

when have you felt the effect of saudades?

the secret in their eyes

2011-09-24T09:29:00.005+10:00

do you ever watch a film and feel as if you are missing something? the secret in their eyes was one of those movies for me. reviews describe it as rich with symbolism so maybe i can forgive myself, it's obviously a multi-layered story and if i watch it again i might do better but now for my initial impressions .....

the protagonist, benjamin esposito, is a retired detective trying to find closure to a twenty five year old murder through writing a novel and at the same time he is revisiting his unrequited love for his supervisor on the case, irene menendez.

the story of the murder and enquiry was possibly a tiny bit far fetched but truth is stranger than fiction and altogether i thought it was a marvellous story. i was especially delighted with the way that esposito and menendez got their killer to confess.

the part that i cant get out of my head though, is the sub-plot, the romance. right through the investigation we know that benjamin is pretty mad about irene but is intimidated by her position. we see her wishing him to act on it but she doesn't make it clear and the opportunity is lost when she marries someone else.

when he retires and starts writing his novel he goes to see her about it. it is clear that she has a good life, she enjoys her career, adores her children and is happy. then, and i'm still hazy on how it happens, we understand that she is prepared to dismantle all of that to be with him.

the romantic in me loves, no LOVES it but it begs some questions:

the "relationship" was mostly non-existent, how does she know she wants to dismantle a life for something so untested?

how much does she owe her husband who we must assume has been a good partner?

how much does she owe her children?

is it reasonable to dismantle a perfectly good life for the sake of a grand passion?

is it reasonable not to?

2011-09-16T10:32:00.003+10:00

when i was a very young mother, or at least mother to very young children, i loved a free magazine called "sydney's child". it was a little bit radical at times but always relevant and well written but it wasn't easy to get hold of because the limited number of copies distributed to pharmacies and pre-schools and so on was snaffled pretty much on the day of delivery and if you hadn't noticed by now i am not a person to know a magazine's publishing dates.
yesterday i had opportunity to pick up a copy and even though it's not really relevant to me anymore, except that i once had small children, i couldnt resist a copy.

it was an interesting little journey to read. there was someone talking about the impossibility of getting sick when one is a parent, she finally admitted she was ill when she collapsed in the hallway just as she was about to do the school run. someone else was saying that motherhood isn't the utopia she imagined and that we should be more open about the tough bits, another talking about the germ phobia she has developed since her first child had a frail and sickly toddlerhood and another talking about how ugly she felt when her body was permanently changed by pregnancy, going on to say how her five year old's passing comment on her beauty transformed her outlook.

i wanted to tell the person who had the flu that her kids are probably better at taking care of themselves than she gives credit for, my lot are all teens now of course but they were very young when they were able to help themselves to some kind of food, pack their school bags, dress themselves and walk to school if neccessary. i also wanted to tell her that all those essentials she had been focussing on while she ignored her body's warnings were not so essential. i find it tiresome when women act as if civilisation itself will collapse if the kids eat jam sandwiches and orange juice for a couple of days, or the school uniforms aren't clean everyday or the toilet smells.

i wanted to tell the one who lost her rose coloured glasses that it's never perfect, we all need at least one person in our lives who is "dark" they are a welcome antidote to all our expectations of hollywood perfect lives.

the one with the germ phobia, who said she wasnt neurotic, i just wanted to hit her upside the face. she was neurotic and her science was bad. (not that she made any pretence of being scientific)

and the the ugly one made beautiful by her boy? well, my children have believed in me and affirmed me and i hope i can be gracious in accepting their praise because there is nothing so irritating as someone who wont take a compliment.

i feel like a veteran but the one thing that makes me realise i really am an old hand at this mothering thing is that i dont care about the books anymore, i dont obssess over a whole lot (although i have been more nervous about end of year exams than the students themselves) and i no longer think it's ever going to stop. i adore my kids but they are not a novelty, they are an intrinsic part of who i am.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. ~Kenji Miyazawa

2011-09-11T22:46:00.003+10:00

i had no intention of posting about 9/11, given that it is not my story to tell but somehow i am here wondering how to put it together my thoughts for this day.

ten years ago i was woken by my small boy with a story about a plane flying into a building, it must have all happened at about the time i had fallen asleep the night before so i was late to the story. it made little sense to me but i didnt stop to think, i had to get the boys to school and it was on the other side of the world. i did stop to think eventually and the horror was something i could not truly imagine or assimilate so i moved on, saddened but not changed in any real way.

at the time people advised us to cancel our upcoming trip to malaysia, less than three weeks away but i felt that "it" would never happen to me and if it did i wouldnt know much about it so we took the trip. i still feel that way, my fears are more personal than the fear of terrorism, they are tied to my circumstances and change from day to day. people talked of the world never being the same again but the events of that day have made no difference to the way i move through life.

for a number of weeks now i have sat in church on a sunday morning and felt that it is time to talk about my faith here on my blog but what to say? i cannot make any logical argument for God and i fear that my hypocrisies make Him look bad but in these last ten years, as americans have grieved and healed i have walked my own path of grief and healing and the belief that a power bigger than anything else i encounter is looking out for me has been comfort and inspiration. i wont say it has kept me going because nearly all of us, religious or not, keep moving through life for the simple reason that the other choices are unacceptable.

i have seen no answer for the niggly bits of my life but to keep walking and when i could integrate them into my life i have tried to use the teachings of Jesus to help me navigate. even if i have achieved nothing else, the diversion of trying to emulate the perfect human specimen is a relief from life's mundane aspects.

i watched a documentary this evening, the one deemed by at least one journalist to be the best 9/11 programming out of the many hours that will be shown this weekend. it interviewed 5 survivors every year or two since the attacks. each one of those survivors suffered anger, self pity and guilt but made it through to a sense of joy and privilege in being alive, they were each angry at different people but they all came to a position of forgiveness.

i like my spiritual life to be moulded by my own understanding in combination with biblical teaching and the example of some people i regard as God's mirror but whichever way you come by them gratitude, forgiveness and hope would seem to me to be the keys to real life and those five courageous individuals that i "met" tonight should give hope to us all because if they can survive such a monumental event and go on to live, then so can the rest of us and that is what i aspire to, not survival but life.

2011-09-08T15:26:00.003+10:00

i thought i replied to one or two people on my last post but i see i didnt.....
oh well, at least it's fair. sorry folks, i dont have an excuse but thanks for stopping by.

the way to go

2011-08-29T21:49:00.005+10:00

as so often happens around here we kind of got into a ridiculous convo. this one was about my potential funeral at some time in the very far distant future and eco coffins and personalised coffin decor.
yeah so anyhow i have issued some instructions, mainly that i do not wish to have a custom coffin that looks like a screen saver. no sunsets, no rainforests, no dolphins, definitely no dolphins. no sky, no oceans, no soaring eagles.
neither do i want my coffin to proclaim my love for country or sporting team or any other group.
and definitely no cardboard coffin made to look like timber. why have an ecologically sound coffin and pretend it's wood? all that does is reinforce the idea that tearing down forests is the way to go.
i'm thinking maybe a warhol style collection of photos of me. or a car bed.
an all over floral design would have been nice but i want the enormous floral arrangement on top of the coffin to be well appreciated so a floral decorated coffin might clash.....

yeah so anyways, what would you recommend for my personalised mortal remains capsule? or what do you want on yours?

do not disturb ~ fantasy in progress

2011-08-19T12:12:00.003+10:00

when i was a kid i went to school with a girl by the name of katie rabineau, we weren't close friends but we were friendly and coincidentally my brother mis-spent his youth with her brother chris. one of my favourite memories is of lorin and chris showing up at my hospital bed to see me after liam was born and commenting on his enormous red newborn balls.
yeah well, anyway katie looked exactly like her mum but her mum wasnt in school uniform as we were, she had long long blonde plaits and wore long multicoloured dresses. katies dad had a scruffy beard and the front yard of their house was a bit of a jungle. my mind boggled when katie said that when they got too much stuff to fit in the house they built more rooms on.
i was a little awed and a little fascinated by this exceptionally bohemian seeming set-up in middle class bardwell park. i didn't understand it but i was drawn to it in an odd way and over the years i have continued to be a little bit awed and a little bit impressed by any variety of bohemia but i wasn't one of them so i went on with my average life and somewhere in the intervening years i unwittingly created my own little bohemia right here with overgrown front yard jungle and my pseudo artistic writerly pursuits, then there's the child who refuses to comb his hair. i regard that as eccentric. and there's the child who dyes his hair purple and produced artworks of merit from early childhood. then there's the one who wore the helicopter hat to the shops. obviously there has to be someone conventional in that mad lot and there is. she rolls her eyes and tell us not to be embarrassing.
well last night i was sitting up late, because artistes dont keep regular hours, tapping away on my keyboard, fuelled by my latest brainstorm of writing a memoir. mr purple hair was sitting there with me, composing. composing! my child writing music, not rock music either but music inspired by mozart ("what was his first name?" he asks me "wolfgang" "oh yeah, wolfgang, what a cool name, i'm totally calling my child wolfgang")
yeah so anyway, some day someone will come along and expose me as an imposter in bohemia but until they do i'm staying right here cocooned in my very own soft core version.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

2011-08-11T20:14:00.004+10:00

I love film. I don't see as many movies as I would like but I see a fair number and I mostly manage to pick something good so it was with some annoyance this week that I saw somebody state that most popular film is moronic. There is some bad stuff out there but there are also some real works of art.
If we look at film as the art form it is we can assume that it will at times contain social commentary or inspiration or beauty for it's own sake. It might be enlightening, thought provoking or plain old entertaining.
Viewed as a pastime the movies are probably no more moronic than watching a bunch of blokes chuck a ball round a field, or trying to hit a ball into a hole or burning gallons of gas racing around a track.
I had a quick think about some non-moronic films and there are many many more but off the top of my head I could recommend these:

Ten canoes

The Cave of the Yellow Dog

Lives of Others

Blood Diamond

The Constant Gardener

Once

The Bucket List

Hotel Rwanda

The Kings Speech

Into the Wild

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Samson and Delilah

Water for Elephants

An Education

And when it's all boiled down, what's wrong with a bit of moronic escapism?

small joys

2011-08-08T14:10:00.004+10:00

i had the all day bacon and egg breakfast in one of my fave cafes today. that was good.

my favourite bread (lawsons) was on special

i got a package in the mail, not a bill, a book. thanks dana for your ~~dumb poetry book~~ book of stupid poetry

got me two bunches of happy yellow daffodils

the sun is out

we're having chicken schnitzel for dinner

freshly washed hair

i got the kids off to school before i was tempted to strangle someone

all in all, a good day :)

and in late breaking news, we have some new baby birds in the aviary :)

2011-08-05T20:24:00.003+10:00

things here go on the same only different; taffy the dog has made a miraculous recovery so far and i am trying to keep it in my mind that he is not out of the woods yet. the courage of the old fella has been amazing. he is now well enough to chase birds again, forgetting sometimes that his balance is a bit out and falling flat on his side, which is heartbreaking and hilarious all at once but when he was sick he would drag himself from his bed for only two things: to pee and to greet me. he even ate from his bed but dignity and loyalty would see him drag his sorry arse up and he would stagger like a drunken sailor to do what was right.
he is now raiding the bin again, begging food scraps and keeping an eye on me at all times, he has a tremor at times but otherwise you wouldnt know he was on deaths door only two weeks ago.

i am working very little at the moment which could be concerning but for now i am pottering about, experimenting with the slow cooker and attending to bits & pieces i havent got around to. one of those things was to visit the doc for some long overdue blood test results. i am anaemic and low on vitamin D so i guess the prescription is to sit in the sun on glorious days, eat well and take some supplements until things are back on track. i'll be sure to get back for a progress report.....

we are to pick up another car tomorrow, it's not road worthy so we'll have two little blue shopping carts for the hubby to tinker with. there was a stage when we had owned a car for every year of our marriage and it seems that we might be heading that way again. it will be twenty years this year and i think my last car count was about 15?

the more things change the more they stay the same, it seems

collie goes to costco

2011-07-30T22:50:00.003+10:00

costco opened in sydney last weekend, literally creating front page news and stopping traffic.
all reports say that it's much cheaper than the big two supermarkets, or any other australian supermarket for that matter so off we went this afternoon for a sticky beak.

here's what i bought:

huge bag of salad $5 this was only a tiny bit more money for double the quantity i would get if buying the same thing elsewhere. it gets a tick.

60 pack of toilet rolls $22 the toilet paper was worse quality than i would usually get and cost less but i think i could get a similar deal in the local shops if they had a good special on.

3 pack of sensodyne toothpaste $20. i saved about 30% on this, even compared to the very best specials. another tick.

1kg strawberries $9 this time of year 1kg of strawberries would be closer to $15 but i wouldnt buy more than a $4 punnet, so on this one costco changed the economics of the whole deal.

2.5kg 90% lean beef mince (ground beef) $25. great price for top quality, now we will see what kind of eating it makes.

huge bag of chips $6 this one was a request from a chip addicted daughter, normally she would get the much smaller $2 pack. i count this as a loss.

roti, pack of 30 $10 exactly the same product at the same price i would pay locally.

2 big jars of moccona coffee $30 slightly cheaper than the same product on a super awesome special. a win for me.

big jar of organic peanut butter $5 a much better product than i usually get at a slightly higher price.

2 gourmet baguette $7 fantastic bread that was worth the money but i wouldnt normally buy it.

large jar of biscuits $3 pretty standard product and price, i might have saved $1 or $1.50

so, if i factor in the $60 annual membership fee, the cost of petrol to make a 90 minute return trip, the time, the crowds and the impulse buys going to costco is probably not profitable so far.

i was amazed to see how many people were buying huge trays of pastries and while i love a nice pastry i dont consider them to be something you buy in boxes of 20. it's one of those situations where the retailer has changed the economics of the purchase in their favour. who needs 20 pastries for $15 ? (or whatever the deal was) unless one happens to be hosting a big breakfast it's just too much of the wrong food.

the massive big banana bread for $16 was the same. i was dying to buy that banana bread, i could just taste it toasted and buttered and so could the girls but when in the past have i ever bought $16 worth of what is essentially cake? only for birthdays, thats when.

liam drew my attention to the possibility of extra waste which exists when people buy in bulk and dont eat the food before the due date, another pitfall to watch. he also pointed out the blank faces of many shoppers, caused by the narcotising effects of mindless consumption?

and the big test: will i be back? yes i will. i still need to justify my $60 membership and there are some great deals to be had. if i go in there with the idea that it's all a bargain i will lose big time but if i go in there with some caution and some savvy i can probably save some dosh and have a few unaccustomed luxuries. i just need to remember that "nothing is cheap if you dont want it."

just when you think it cant get worse, it probably will

2011-07-22T22:17:00.003+10:00

family and facebookers already know that my dog taff is desperately unwell. he wasnt going so well on wednesday so i took him to the vets. i was almost going to post about it then. for a moment there it seemed that the old taffster had fooled me again and that he was no where near as sick as i feared. i wanted to write something humorous about that but a moment of caution or a stroke of premonition stopped me (or a lack of jokes?)
anyhow, he has got steadily worse and today i made another appointment. we tried to lead him to the car but he couldnt do it and had to be carried. when we got in the car it didnt want to go and i soon discovered a flatter than flat tyre. a quick call to the vets to cancel the appointment, liam changed the wheel in the dark and the rain and we set off again.
it is heartbreaking to carry an animal who even a week ago would have dragged us in there and then to be told he has had the worst kind of stroke was no fun.
when we tried to get him to stand he fell and hit his head and that was the final straw for me and my young men.
we brought him home on medication to reduce brain swelling and we will see what kind of shape he is in when that takes effect.
after all that drama i took the kids out and an accident on the freeway made a 15 minute trip twice as long and we sat still in traffic while the petrol warning light came on.
i finally got home thinking it couldnt be any worse and then i remembered....
in the next few days i will most likely need to make a hard decision on the life of my faithful companion. that will be worse.

and the one you didnt ask for.....

2011-07-16T13:16:00.003+10:00

i get worried when the conversation turns to music. i dont know a whole lot of popular music, whatever popular music is, top forty i guess.....
i know songs when i hear them but i dont know who plays/sings them and i dont follow top 40, in fact i'm probably showing how out of touch i am just by saying top forty.
i have an ipod i use through a dock at work and every time i put it on i brace myself for the comments. i have a whole lot of latin stuff on there because i worked for a time with a latino who didnt have his own i pod so i put his music on mine and he is long gone but i dont mind the music so it stays but i always have to explain.
there is some rock/pop/soundtracky kinda stuff mostly related to my youth and i would have thought it was pretty average relatable music but that doesnt seem to go down too well either.....
there is some gospel, which i really like but thats kinda weird too and i am just too terrified to play the "highbrow" baroque stuff which i particularly like

so what is the ideal music to play at work?

you asked for it....the sex post

2011-07-10T20:56:00.002+10:00

He is handsome and healthy,
the most outstanding among ten thousand.
His head is purest gold,
His hair is wavy,
black as a raven.
His eyes are a pair of doves,
bathing in a stream
flowing with milk.
His face is a garden of sweet smelling spices;
His lips are lilies dripping with perfume.
His arms are branches of gold covered with jewels,
His body is ivory decorated with sapphires;
His legs are columns of marble
on feet of gold.
He stands there majestic,
like Mount Lebanon
and its choice cedar trees.
His kisses are sweet,
I desire him so much,
young women of Jerusalem
He is my lover and my friend.

Song of Songs 5:10-16

patina

2011-07-09T16:53:00.002+10:00

i've waited ten years for this thing to flower

2011-07-08T15:52:00.002+10:00

2011-07-06T19:56:00.004+10:00

eclectica has always been the place where i talk about what is happening in my head. sometimes i talk about my view of an external event, sometimes i ponder aloud the big questions and sometimes i just indulge my silly sense of humour with some mucking about.
the problem is theres not a whole lot happening in my head these days and when something does happen to grab my brain it is usually of the unspeakable sex, religion or politics.....
ok well truthfully i just said sex so you would keep reading and religion because it's part of the trio. as i try to adjust to a new and changing role at work i am pretty much obsessed by politics right now, not politics of any real import, just grappling with the idea of trying to fulfil my own desire to be nice and also have enough assertiveness to manage a group. if i was to write in detail about that here you would be bored and i would be asking for trouble of the dont-mix-work-with-the-internet variety.
i seem to have developed my life philosophy about as far as it's going to go, i dont think i can talk incessantly about my foodie joys so what i'm telling you is that unless something amazing or disastrous happens i'm probably not going to be posting here a whole lot.
just yesterday i was talking to the kids about this sad state of affairs, commenting that by engineering the big blogger round up maybe i resolved a long held dream and inadvertantly killed the whole blogging experience. mister just-past-the-age-of-consent commented that teen romances die for the same reason......the resolution brought about by the long dreamed of sex.

the temporary conformity of a non-conformist

2011-06-29T20:58:00.005+10:00

tonight my first born is off to his year 11 social, it's the watered down version of the year 12 formal (prom)
it's not a major milestone but it is a minor one.
he has dressed in a slightly too small jacket that belonged to my grandpa who died before the boy was born, a grey t-shirt (the girl friend specified white) new jeans and white canvas shoes, chosen by his chosen one and declared by him to be conformist. they will surely be ruined by the time he gets there by train this cold and wet night.
he toyed with the idea of spiking up his newly purple hair but then decided that he had enough smelly products on, what with cologne, deodorant and hair colour still wafting about.
it was all accessorised with a red rose procured with/by? a long walk in the rain and aided in sensual impact with additional rosewater.
it will be a late night and in his usual selfless style he has elected to get the last train home rather than have me pick him up on a work night. i did tell him to let me know if he changed his mind and his first question was whether i could take care of his mate who would otherwise be left alone.
the boy is well into his guitar and his girl, sending his mother into a panic over grades but he is already a good man and i wish him a well deserved wonderful night

i'm a copy cat

2011-06-19T13:18:00.004+10:00

in honour of her 44th birthday Random Chick posted a list of 44 things she has learned in/about life and i thought i would give it a try. i dont have a list of ideas so i dont know if i'll hit the number of my last birthday but then, i'm not telling you how old i was at last birthday so success is guaranteed, yeah?

1. being cold is very unpleasant, take a jacket
2. tuck your shirt in
3. keep your neck warm
4. cover your back

5. good food is worth the expense if you can manage it
6. flossing is important
7. if you're not sure, dont buy it. you will rarely regret it
8. all things are passing
9. sit in the sun, it's good for your soul
10. but wear sunscreen because before you know it sun damage is making you look old

11. dont bother trying to toilet train kids cos when they are ready they just do it and then you save all that grief
12. cranky kids are usually improved with sleep
13. dirt will not kill a child

14. build a relationship with a doctor you believe in, even when you just have a tummy bug, it will help on the day you have something truly horrible
15. everyone, EVERYONE, should see a chiropractor
16. especially babies and small children
17. if a medical professional doesnt listen the first time tell them again. and again.
18. if you are in the emergency department and not being seen it's probably because there is someone who is WAY sicker so count yourself lucky
19. some of these points seem contradictory, they are not but a little bit of judgement has to be used

20. find out how you really look by looking at photos of yourself
21. shoe polish is a good thing
22. confidence is 90% of style
23. confidence is 90% of sexy, too

24. the effort you make for your kids is worth it when you dont have to carry your own shopping anymore
25. it's possible to travel the world with one pair of jeans and a few shirts. what you actually want lots of is undies
26. nothing is cheap if you dont actually want it
27. know thyself

28. at work, there is always someone watching
29. everyone feels about 24

and i miraculously ran out of ideas right on the number of my age ;)

the people that you meet

2011-06-15T12:41:00.003+10:00

i was a different kylie in america, i was the one who would start a conversation just to see what happened, i didnt do it a whole lot of times but enough to come away with a memory or two.

the very first american i met was in fiji. he was the guy allocated the seat next to mine on the plane and hot is not the word. he. was. beautiful. he was too young and too pretty and i was not yet into american kylie mode so i wouldnt have talked to him but he did to me. he bounced onto the plane, said hello, discussed australia, told me about his graduation surfing trip to fiji and his promising career as a lawyer, complained he was hot....my suggestion that he take his shirt off fell on deaf ears. you can but try.

the guy at immigration had a sign on his booth declaring him to be the "face of america". grumpy face it was, too. i wish him a whole load of incoming tourists who dont give him great finger prints and i hope he gets arthritis getting out of his chair to get the right results from every single one. i hope he feels like a yo-yo.

the stand-out person i didnt meet was the one in arkansas who paid for my afternoon snack with bindi's kids. no sopapilla and punch will ever again be so sweet and it wasnt about the money.

ex-junkie brooklyn boy joseph (not joe) who "fell in love with me" on the train to LA was an experience not to be missed. joe had given away all his earthly possessions and was going to live in mexico. i wish him the best even though he begged my food and sloshed hand sanitiser all over the carriage.

also on the train was the ukelele playing canteen attendant who looked like adonis and gave me hot chocolate "on amtrak" i love saying amtrak, i need more excuses to work that in here......

the last "character" i met was an australian woman returning from a US holiday, she wanted me to babysit her through the airport and we were due to catch the same flight home. i dont know whether it was the "few wines" she'd had or just general stupidity but she was going to be a challenge, she managed to embarass me three times in the space of about ten minutes so when i was moved to a direct flight i was happy to leave her at the counter, arguing over her luggage allowance. she is probably still there.

proof there is a god!

USA 6 ~ starbucks and russian doll packing

2011-06-13T10:31:00.005+10:00

today my US adventure ends.
i expected it to be the trip of a lifetime and it has been, absolutely.
i sat myself in starbucks this morning and i took this picture because it symbolises some of my US experience. the cup contains chai because it is not easy to get a decent coffee round here so i eventually gave up and became a tea drinker much of the time.
the starbucks cup is also a reminder of the ever present accent confusion, i mean i know i'm a bit woolly but i wouldnt choose to be called "collie" :)
starbucks also reminds me of certain wild onion patrons (for those who dont know, wild onioners is the name attached to my blogging friends) and of the fast food mentality that exists here even more than in australia.
the bag has some pins on it because i started to collect a few, it also reminds me that i read recently of the "russian doll" method of packing, i have yet to perfect the method but it really is very good. i'm sure organised types have thought of it already but i had to be told!
the russian doll method is where you put bags inside bags, with the things you are most likely to be wanting in accessible bundles. the bag pictured here is my minimalist bag containing wallet, camera, lipstick and any other small item i might need but when i need to carry more i fold it up and put it away or just put it inside a bigger bag. my next size up contains the stuff i might need on a longer trip or outing: journal, travel wallet, book, toothbrush, cardigan, water bottle....
i have learned a bit about the practicalities of travel, even my minimal luggage contains more than i needed, i didnt wear the nice dress, nor two nice-ish tops, nor the swimmers.
i didnt use the hair product either, even with the best of intentions.

i have every intention of posting some more pictures and so on but right now i am experiencing my closing hours here, sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for a shuttle to the education that is LAX and i want to say an enormous thanks for the welcome i have received!
thank you, thank you, thank you to bindi, megan, RC and debbie for extensive and gracious hospitality.
thank you to, to brian, bob, leah and zack for making the trip to LA, i can barely believe what amazing friendships we have forged!
and though they are not reading, a great thanks to the people of america, i have met some marvellous characters, people have been friendly and helpful and my impression of america is a good one even including arkansas!

america, this is not good bye, just a temporary fare well!!
xoxox

USA 5 ~ fried paws & other trivia

2011-06-10T09:48:00.004+10:00

my boyfriend leo

well, it would seem that communicative styles in america are a little different to what i am used to. the "I" in the aussie accent causes a problem for americans; i was talking to dana (random chick) about the southern specialty fried pies and got a very disturbed look because she thought i was going to fry up some animal feet. i have twice tried to order a lemon, lime & bitters and been frustrated by the fact that americans seem not to drink it and dont understand what it is i'm asking for and i have temporarily changed my name to carly because kylie is just incomprehensible.....

hollywood boulevarde

yeah, anyways, on sunday i went to the museum of death, which was great, i got a little queasy , which was not helped by the presence of a dog with, um, digestive issues. i planked in front of it (the museum, not the dog) and then we went down to hollywood proper and i planked on hollywood boulevarde right in front of graumans chinese theatre. apparently people stopped to look. i wouldnt know because i was planking. i dont know why they stopped, hollywood boulevarde is full of oddities.

we passed by the window (below) and i stopped to wonder what those amazing looking things were. caramel apples was the answer. well, not necessarily caramel...there was chesecake, oreo and a whole lot of other things. the shop assistant couldnt resist smiling for the camera and i couldnt resist his smile. his co-worker, a wise young woman, told us not to encourage him :)

i went to have a sticky beak in american apparel which i had regarded as some kind of american institution due to it's advertisements on the blog "the sartorialist". i found out that it is in fact an emporium of bad taste, unless you happen to want gold lamé leggings and lace bodysuits.

well, thats my rundown on odd stuff, you should be pleased i have found (with assistance) the SD slot on my little lappy so photos will be coming ad nauseum now.....

USA 4

2011-06-05T02:24:00.004+10:00

kylie & brian (csi seattle)

from bottom left: leah, zack, megan, dana, kylie, brian

well, i've been to arkansas and i saw squirrels! i saw hummingbirds in california so thats two new animals...
actually theres all kinds of animals in arrrrkansas and one of them did that classic random acts of kindness thing by paying for my stuff in a restaurant. what a blast that was! maybe southern hospitality is a real thing, huh?
went to clinton library for a flying visit and tried to teach bindi to leave a teeny bit more room when she changes lanes.
before my flight out of little rock yesterday i went through security twice, lost my belt & bracelet the first time, had the dude feel his way through my bag and swab it for drugs the secont tahme. lord, bless 'is little hearrrt.
the flight was looong, first to atlanta then over 2000km to LA. leah picked me up from the airport and was totally cool about it even though i suspect it was an enormous hassle
and then the big meet up :) :) :)
we sat on megans balcony for a long time and i opened all my aussie sweets. musk sticks seemed to be a winner and strawberries and creams were dubbed "bloody nipples" sounds like a cocktail.
we went to a bar for dinner, where the hilarity continued and the waitress drooled over one member of our party, mr Z discussed his shoe not-fetish, child raising styles were discussed, sport was watched, lemon drops were had......
came back to m egs place to get me a sweater and forgot to leave again as we discussed naked tennis and national donut day and boobs.
i dunno what is in store for today but i think it will be good

USA 3 : with friends like i have who needs enemies

2011-06-02T15:07:00.003+10:00

i cant post pictures until i get home to the right hardware but for now, for your entertainment i'll show you the ones that other people have posted on facebook

USA 2

2011-05-31T11:03:00.002+10:00

well, i have to say i am really having a problem in getting used to everything being the wrong side. i walk on the wrong side of the footpath, i look on the wrong side of the road for cars, i cant figure out where the traffic will be coming from at any given moment and it's really easy to appear really dumb when everything is upside down.
i had a marvellous night out last night at Steamers Jazz Bar and tried iconic In n Out burgers today, also went for a wander round downtown fullerton where there are lots of cool looking shops but they were mostly closed for memorial day. i did have a bit of a rummage in a vintage place and got me a vintage scarf in pretty colours.
laguna beach yesterday was a nice spot and i had pancakes with bacon for the first time ever. the pancakes were A-MAZ-ING and the chai lattes we got with it were in pretty coloured bucket sized mugs. we had our chai in the gardens surrounded by little sculptures and fountains and windchimes. very nice.
off to arkansas tomorrow.

USA 1

2011-05-30T04:11:00.002+10:00

it's sunday morning, sunny with a crisp breeze and i arrived in the grand ol' USA about a day ago. i arrived at the airport to find that my phone which was supposed to be on roaming wasnt at all and if there was a problem finding megan i wasnt sure what i would do but next thing a woman went dashing past and i caught just enough of a glimpse to think her face might match up with the photos i knew so i put on my loud kylie voice "MEGAN??"
yep, it was her!
we went and got me a laptop and had dinner at the pub across the road. i had a hot dog the likes of which i've never had in my life and hung out watching "too big to fail" i was pretty sleepy by then and didnt register much but it worked out great cos i got a full 8hours sleep and jet lag just doesnt seem to exist for me (touch wood)
today we're off to laguna beach .....
back later :)

unexpected outcomes

2011-05-27T20:06:00.002+10:00

well, the benefits of the big trip have started and i havent even left yet. or maybe it's not a benefit...i've been trying (trying IS the operative word) to stockpike australian candy to take to sweet toothed friends stateside. i buy two packs, eat one, go to the shops again, buy two more, eat more, decide to buy more, settle and then decide it's nowhere near enough. can anybody ever have enough candy? really?

i was here googling images of sweets so i could put a post together and i saw some creative ways to use musk sticks. who would have thought of cutting them into pieces to decorate cup cakes? even more clever was the picture where they used a musk stick as the holder for a meringue "lollypop"

and the pictures of cherry ripe were surrounded by pictures of cherry ripe slice...if i was feeling creative i could try making that for the gang but then again, if i was feeling creative a pavlova would be the thing to make, wouldnt it? i feel a job coming on......

the countdown is on....

2011-05-22T17:09:00.003+10:00

a week from now i will be in fullerton, california. i will hopefully have done a few days work, packed my bags, not forgotten anything, stopped in fiji on the way and then made my way through the daunting LAX to crash and burn at megan's place.
it's the first time i have been anywhere alone (if you can call it that) it's the first time i have left the kids for more than a weekend, the first time i've been to america.
the suspense has been building since i booked my ticket back in february or march, frantic emails have been exchanged and just this week we have seen the big blogger break-up add all kinds of dramas to my preparations.

yeah, well, thats about all i have to say right now. my head is a swirl of things i need to do both for my normal week ahead and for the "big trip"

updates as my head clears

or maybe as it gets more cluttered :)

what riles kylie

2011-05-15T16:26:00.003+10:00

after my recent comments about america my friend snow suggested that i should post more about the stuff that riles me. i hesitate to take him up because i dont really like to show anger online but for the sake of the exercise

i get majorly peeved at people who think it's ok to block the handrail on stairs. leaning on the rail is uncool. sitting on steps under the rail is uncool. putting potplants or other things that block access to the railing is also uncool. oh, and the one that threw me completely was when i was walking up steps, on the left, using the rail for balance and some arrogant twit came down right where i was. i stepped aside at the very last moment but the effort totally threw me. sometimes i have the right momentum and have to keep going and that guy just put a spanner in the works. i get that he didnt understand all that about me but i was on the left. i was reluctant to give up my place. if i want to be difficult about it i was the woman who he could have been chivalrous towards. was it really so difficult to see that i wasnt really keen to move over?
i really hesitate to criticise the church, they get enough of that but i got cranky with them this morning. (actually it's an ongoing annoyance) the sermon was about using your gifts, about the value in each gift that every person has, even if it seems insignificant. we are told to use our gifts but theres barely an individual in my church who cares how much i love to write and those who do are mostly of my own blood. even when i offered a poem (ok, my only poem) for use it was ignored. i like public speaking too but i dont get to do that either. luckily i'm blessed with enough cash and little enough interest in material goods to be able to give a dollar here and there. there's a gift thats always in demand.
i get riled with people who are superior, or rude or self centred.....
fear & greed tv

i suspect snow wanted to hear my opinions on bigger issues but i'll have to think about that

what i like about america

2011-05-05T20:27:00.003+10:00

after chewing out the yanks i'll try to fix my karma with a list of things i like about the great (not greatest) US of A
it's gonna be tough seeing as i havent been there but here goes

peanut butter cups

hollywood: i dont always love it but i love movies and without hollywood there would be many less choices

Coke

Greys anatomy

house

the simpsons

oreos

fried chicken

the Sartorialist

leah, megan, mike, snow, csi, bob, random, suze, debbie, putzy, marnie, bindi, mr shife, inner voices, cece and any other american who regards themselves as a friend

i bet theres more......

the death of a fugitive

2011-05-02T13:07:00.006+10:00

so i'm here on my day off avoiding the vacuuming and wondering whether i can think up something to put here and what happens but osama bin laden is announced dead.
my initial reaction is great annoyance with australians not directly effected by his acts who breathlessly announce it on facebook as if they are watching a western and the bad guy has been shot.

my next reaction is to think that the great jubilation is senseless due to the fact that terrorism wont be going anywhere anytime soon, dont these people realise that he will have legions of followers ready and able to step into his position?

soon after i realise that while i still think that the world will see very little change after this i might sound a bit insensitive to the intelligence people, special forces and service people who risked life and limb in the pursuit of justice. not for a second would i want to minimise the efforts of those people. nor would i want to disregard the loss and suffering caused by bin laden and his followers.

then i hear president obamas announcement of bin ladens death wherein he states that this outcome proves that the US is the greatest nation in the world. the rage is back! the US is one of, if not the most, overtly Christian nation in the world, do they not understand that pride and gloating of that nature is totally the opposite of Christ's message? america is undoubtedly the most powerful nation on earth and that is one of the reasons they should not need to say so.
do americans not understand that this is why the world regard them as idiots? powerful but stupid. and arrogant.

(i'm going to enjoy using this line) some of my best friends are americans and there are exceptions to every rule but the arrogance is astounding. and now bin laden is a martyr. even in victory, the US has in a sense, lost. bin laden has got exactly what he wanted.

these are just my initial thoughts and i reserve the right to refine them or change them entirely but for the moment let me say that i see no victory in this day. i just see the beginning of more of the same and i am sorry

the day i quit facebook

2011-04-27T12:52:00.003+10:00

last weekend i had the afternoon home with the girls and at the end of it i realised that instead of doing something fun (or at least useful) with them, i had given them half my attention while i cruised facebook mindlessly.
it was a little disappointing to realise that i had done that so i set to suspending my fb account. the messages saying i would be missed were nice, the music clips even better ....
anyhow, i suspended it quite happily but knowing that my resolve was weak and wondering what would happen next.
when i managed to get $27 worth of fantastic duble brie for $6 i was disappointed i couldnt post it but i stuck with the program for a little longer.
the next day i logged in briefly and suspended again. at least that way i would think twice before spending too much time there and so it went for another day or so.
then it was the long weekend. i had all the time in the world, time that would, for once, coincide with the times my friends were using it and, well, the rest of my resolve flew out the window.

i'll try again soon.

do this in remembrance of me

2011-04-22T12:33:00.001+10:00

2011-04-21T08:57:00.006+10:00

Liam's school band was playing yesterday at the Royal Easter Show and a pressing social engagement earlier meant that he wasn't keen to carry his cornet all day (heaven forbid that he play a tuba) so between his transport issue and the girls wanting to ~~soak in the atmosphere~~ buy showbags, I got roped in to making the trip.

The start was bittersweet. Our bus driver was incredibly cool, telling the kids they should have helped Mum out by telling her the tickets are 20% less if you buy them on the net (you see the bittersweet, there, right?) and as Keaghan tried to shove half a salad roll in h is mouth before getting on the bus Mr Cool told him he could get on the bus with food because people would do it all day anyway.

It's not often he will allow a photo, maybe I should get the bus driver to hang out with us more often?

Mr chick-magnet-party-boy had me on tenterhooks thinking he wasn't going to make it in time. I was biting my nails and fussing because we had spent $100 on tickets just to stand around waiting to give him his "horn" while he socialised on the other side of the city and missed his train. Miss Caitlin found it all much less dramatic!

Yes, he finally came sprinting up the boulevarde with time to spare, the band sounded great and for once in my life I managed to get a reasonable photo.

Official duties finally out of the way we went to see some furries and I wondered what is the collective noun for a bunch of alpacas?

We spent a long long time in the arts & crafts pavilion, looking at some great photography, gasping at the cakes, wondering at the woodwork.....

one particular piece was quite sexy looking and I said so to be told "Mum, that's just wrong!"

I should have said sensual.

The kids went to buy showbags (thats where you think it a privilege to buy more lollies than one person should reasonably eat and buy it at a massive discount of oh, maybe 5%) and I wandered the food dome salivating over all kinds of gourmet goodies.

By the time I came out it was dark and the show had become the province of the young, there to buy silly hats, ride wheels and flirt under the coloured flashing lights.

in mourning for the council clean-up

2011-04-17T14:26:00.002+10:00

All my life there has been the ritual of the council clean-up. In earlier times it was every quarter, then as councils cut budgets, every six months everyone would put their old junk on the nature strip for collection during the week. The weekend before clean-up there would be a bit of a last minute clean out, sacrificial pruning of overgrown bushes and an endless parade of cars, vans and utes looking for scrap metal. The clean-up was a fantastic recycler, the kids once did all their "Christmas shopping" kerbside and for a while we had a great verandah sofa courtesy of some neighbour. The cot used by me and my siblings all those years ago was salvaged by a thrifty acquaintance of my parents and many times we put out small items of furniture or electrical goods only to have some forager almost take them from our hands. I have heard of gardeners coming across a coveted plant on someone else's rubbish, too.

About two years ago my local authority cancelled clean-ups. We can still phone to book rubbish removal but as it's no longer common to everybody the foragers dont know when or where to look. I have here a foam sofa/mattress thing that charities wont take because even though it's as new it's too similar to a mattress. Put on a clean-up it would be an absolute treasure. There's a rice cooker and who knows what else, all with no possibilty of a new home.

Today I saw a barbecue standing all lonely on the edge of the road with a sign saying "FREE. I work." The thing is, nobody takes anything with a "FREE" sign, do they?

I can't quite understand the economics of cancelling clean-ups, maybe the hope is we'll all hang onto our clutter until we have to pay for a skip and get it removed ourselves?

Anyhow, for myself and my community, I sure do miss them.

life begins at forty

2011-04-12T20:24:00.002+10:00

or so they say, i guess i'll find out in 18 days time.
i'm regarding it as a big birthday because it has an "O" in it but i can't say i'm too bothered. to some extent i've faced the decrepitude of aging, i long ago got used to a body that isn't always what i want and i'm still happy with my decision to go grey; the last colour is almost all gone and so far i'm not feeling any pangs of regret, in fact in my mind (which could be delusional, i admit) there's a softness to it and i like it. it matches the other soft bits :)
i have four wonderful young people to cheer me on, a job and a home, good friends...

i treated myself to a new dress (well, mum says it's her treat but i was going to do it anyway, thanks ma) and a trip overseas.
for the actual day i'm planning on a scrummy breakfast with the clan, so long as the folks with rugrats can manage to get organised that early, otherwise an afternoon tea probably.
it could become an excuse for an all out bacchanalia so if life happens not to begin at forty at least i will have had a good time getting there

Marvellous with Mince? or the ramblings of the reluctant hausfrau

2011-04-05T11:28:00.006+10:00

Bantering Baino is saying that she'll survive yet another redundancy in a long and unlucky list because she's marvellous with mince and I have to say that even though the family disagree I love a bowl of spag bol for comfort and economy and just plain ease. It's pretty much my default dinner, which might explain a few things.....

at this point this post could head off into a treatise on the joys of cooking with mince, it could delve into the world of budget cooking, it could go down the road of favourite comfort foods or it could just follow some other obscure side track known only to my easily distracted brain....

I can't decide. There's mince in the fridge right now and not a whole lot else but maybe I'll head to the shops, pick up something else and save the stand-by mince for tomorrow when I'll be pressured for time before my Italian class which I never do the homework for. At this rate I'll be a fluent Italian speaker by about 80.

Miss C has been begging for a rice pudding for a while and we're moving into good rice pudding weather so I might edge that onto today's agenda, along with the vacuuming (is that ever off the agenda?) the blogging, the washing, the ever present folding and the day dreaming of the reluctant hausfrau.

If I say Ciao does that count for Italian practice?

2011-03-31T19:58:00.004+11:00

I seem to have got myself into some hot water over some things I've said here and the price I will pay is high. I thought about moving the blog to somewhere I can make all the indiscreet comments I want to but I've decided not to do that; I have always tried to be accountable for what I say here and I have tried to behave well so rather than giving myself opportunity to be even more of a dumb ass, I have decided on a business as usual policy.

It's reassuring to be watching a reality cop show and see that there are any number of people who stuff up in a multitude of ways.

Sometimes, life isn't what you hope for. Next time I'll try not to make it worse.

anti-aussie?

2011-03-26T13:05:00.004+11:00

talkin to an american dude this week, he expected me, as an aussie, to be in love with tennis. i'm not. neither am i blonde, or tanned or a surfer ( i do like the beach ) i dont follow any variety of football and i dont usually care about cricket tho i have been known to get involved in a very close game. also anti-aussie is my interest in the arts and then there is my dogged exploration of faith in a hugely secular society. i talk like an aussie, i can be well spoken australian or grossly vernacular, in the right situation i can even morph into the australian version of trailer trash. unfortunately here in the wide brown land we dont have such a wonderfully evocative name for our lowest common denominator.... what stereotypes do you associate with terra australis?

The creek of my consciousness

2011-03-21T13:28:00.004+11:00

Over there on that not to be named blue themed social networking site somebody is asking about what to take with them on a long haul flight. The responses are interesting, mine: "something warm & a chapstick" show you just how much I hate to be cold or have dry lips. (truth be told I use paw paw ointment as a multi purpose moisturiser, including lips) The person who worries about germs says hand sanitiser, the person who took three days getting home from NYC says a change of clothes, the silly one says a live chook. It seems that our packing choices say a lot about us, someone should work that into a standard job interview, it has be useful for something? Have you any interesting philosophy regarding job interviews? I haven't been to an interview for something like almost twenty years (Oh, my!) but I have noticed some unusual speech patterns in one person I know and I have decided that if you happen to be the employer and notice someting odd about speech patterns in an interview it might tell you much, much more than the words spoken. Now back to the packing, as I prepare for the inaugural Wild Onion bloggers meet up AKA the first time Kylie has ever travelled alone I'm thinking about what to put in my own hand luggage and I wonder what it tells you?

camera (not for the flight but there by default)

paw paw ointment

sweater

toothbrush

comb

hair elastic

maybe a travel diary & pen

cash

contact phone numbers

I rather fancy an ipad or a netbook but realistically, I probably don't want the weight and you know how they say a change of clothes? I think a clean shirt and knickers give the same nice clean feeling with half the effort.....

Remind me to stock up on SD cards, will ya?

Arcadia

2011-03-14T12:53:00.006+11:00

A variety of folks had got on and off the train as it rocked on it's way, some had stayed a short while and others longer but he barely saw them as he stared at a grey industrial landscape. Sometimes the clouds would break, the late winter sun lighting the carriage with a promise of coming spring and he dared to relax, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back. The world outside his window was beginning to change, there was a new warmth in the air and the changing light seemed to accentuate small beauties in the evolving landscape. The changes were subtle and his view through the window was limited so he lapsed into an imaginary world, the one he felt was somewhere just beyond what he could see. The place in his mind was just a little more beautiful than any he had seen so far, the quiet more peaceful, the work more fulfilling, zephyr winds played music in the trees, there were colourful birds and richly scented flowers. He had travelled this way for some time, alternating between the train induced torpor and his imagined Eden so when she entered the train he registered a new presence but didn't identify it. It might have been a woman but seemed more like a benevolent poltergeist. Her aura waxed and waned, sometimes he watched her flitting about poking fun at the passengers who took themselves oh so seriously, sometimes she seemed to sit quietly observing. The train grew cold as it entered the shadow of the mountain, he shivered a little and hoped they would soon round a bend into the sun but the train was not destined to circuit the mountain and he felt a growing chill as it entered a dark tunnel. The darkness was almost palpable and terrifyingly isolating. He could only hear the noise of the train, he could only see darkness, his heart started to race and his breath seemed not to reach his lungs. Could he feel something? was it real or imagined, this sense of warmth? He concentrated and felt sure there was a gentle warmth on his right hand side. Feeling a little silly he extended his pinky out beside him, if there was someone there they must be close, then suddenly annoyed at this bold movement into his territory he shrunk away. The window was quite cold and he leaned on it, reassured by the tangible pinch of cold reality but again he became aware of the presence. "Talk to me" it seemed to say "relax, the tunnel will end." He wanted to believe it but still he resented this thing and sensing his resentment it chilled a little. He was starting to miss it when it reappeared and so begun a push and pull, uncomfortable but compelling. Sometimes he fancied he heard it speak, sometimes it had the sweet smell of gardenias, just occasionally it caressed him tenderly and his heart skipped a beat before he remembered to resent it. Sometimes it's bony finger jabbed him under the ribs and he slapped it away. He loved and hated it in equal measure as it gradually became a comforting distraction. With each passing leg of the journey he wondered what mood he would find it in. Even with all of it's predictable unpredictability he came to expect it's presence and developed a grudging love of it's idiosyncrasies. He became so focussed on detecting the mood of the moment that the approaching light was close and bright before he saw it. The train pulled out of the tunnel into bright sunshine, his station was close now. As he stepped from the train the nondescript woman in the waitress' uniform was invisible to him, temporarily blinded by the sun but he could smell gardenias as he looked forward to a meal in the new restaurant up the hill, "Arcadia".

Yo-yo

2011-03-05T20:01:00.003+11:00

Today was the second week of the "Writing for Profit" course and I got there feeling buoyant after a good week. The class was smaller today, having lost our green living aficianado and the well groomed lady. Ms Brazilian was looking glamourous, the beautiful Indian lady was still beautiful and Mr Crumpet wasn't quite a grey haired as I remembered. We started with an exercise where we had to pair up and after being told that he couldn't stay with his (life) partner he chose me. The exercise involved interviewing each other about our hopes, goals, challenges and achievements and I made use of the opportunity to try finding out whether the biography I had imagined for him came anywhere near the mark. I was right and the joy I derive from winning guessing games with myself put a smile on my face. Not only that but Mr Crumpet complimented me on my insightful comments. Next up was an exercise in putting a new twist to a well known story. Not knowing anything about The Lord of the Rings or Twilight and next to nothing about Harry Potter left me feeling like not only the least read person in the western world but unable to contribute to the group. In a surprising twist, my co-writers seemed unable to settle on a plotline so impatient to get something, anything, on paper I eventually railroaded proceedings and the person with the least to contribute became the powerhouse. I got a very silly paragraph onto paper just in the nick of time! We spent some time talking about contracts and tax requirements, record keeping and submission guidelines. The teacher showed us the manuscript she had written for a children's reference book and as it became clear that the writing process was a minor part of the work involved in that book I started to imagine the tedious task of finding then collating and referencing all sorts of dry facts. I never had a romantic view of writing but it was becoming less attractive by the minute. The teacher chose that moment to tell us that royalties are usually ten per cent of recommended retail and as I tallied the financial insecurity, the isolation, the boredom factor and potential for ego shattering rejection I wondered why anybody would willingly take on such a life. It's not really a choice, though, is it?

People who want to write for Profit

2011-03-01T13:30:00.005+11:00

I sat down to wait and the class soon started to dribble back to the classroom carrying coffee and Coke cans. I wonder how we would all survive without our favourite stimulants? With some dismay I realise that the class is made up almost entirely of women, the one man could be described as thinking woman's crumpet and a very nice crumpet he was, too with his distinguished grey hair and intellectual looking glasses. I'm too married and too shy to actually flirt with a man like that, at least for the first half hour, but all flirtatious fantasies were dashed when I realised he was there with his partner. The happy couple were seated near an eighties obsessed paranormal loving weirdo who spoke in a strangely low voice and seemed blithely unaware that she might appear to be a teeny bit off the planet. The oldest of the group was one of those massively groomed ladies whose age can only be determined as higher than she would like. Who else would bother with the dying, the blow drying, the foundation, lipstick, manicure....just looking at her made me feel impoverished and tired. The beautiful Indian lady says very little, the self described green living aficionado next to me doesn't look so green when I consider the petrochemicals used in her flourescent nail polish or the toxic organic chemistry involved in her unnaturally black hair. On my other side is a woman declares herself to be thirty five but her skin is more like that of a thirty year old, her eyes have none of the tiredness of family and career and I envy her a little until I realise that her child-like way of starting every question with "Sorry" makes me want to scream. In her favour, she gives us a good five minutes, maybe ten, of side splitting laughter as she reads her introduction to a proposed piece of writing about men and their Brazilians (and she didn't mean South American soccer players) The writing is great but even better is her self conscious disclaimer that even though she has a broad experience of hair free men she is no slut. She plays nervously with her hair as we fall about laughing and she digs herself deeper into the quagmire of embarrassment. One woman wants to write a book about family traditions but seems unable to tell us anything more and what could be a fascinating idea is lost to lack of specificity. As I quietly decide that a lot of these people seem more interested in themselves than in writing I also realise that I am an unbearable snob, not in the sense that money or status impress me but I really cannot bear pretenders and without fair trial I have convicted this lot as just that.

Writing about Writing for Profit

2011-02-27T07:19:00.007+11:00

I was already running late and suddenly there was a thwack, twack, thwack noise coming from the car, maybe there was a cat in the engine bay or a stick dragging from the undercarriage. I didn't know but I couldn't keep driving so I groaned and pulled over. Nothing! Nothing on the road behind me, nothing in the engine bay, nothing under or on the car. Some random dude walking home with his newspaper stopped to ask if I was ok and suggested brightly that it was something rolling around in the boot. I shrugged and agreed, knowing full well that my car doesn't normally sound like it's dragging something to a painful death. Back in the car, the sound was gone for a moment and then re-started. I couldn't stop again, I was late! I could stop again, did the rounds again, considered calling my brother who might or might not be home just a block away and then I saw it! A length of duct tape stuck on the tyre. A relieved sigh was all I had time for as I pulled away listening to the tape flap and drag and finally there was silence but that was not to be the only delay. I stopped for petrol and couldn't get the cap open. I stood and looked, I poked, I jiggled and finally realised that locking the car before I got the petrol wasn't saving me any time at all, it would have to be unlocked and re-locked before I went to pay. So much for efficiency! I was late and reception was locked and I didn't know where my class was so I headed in what seemed to be the direction of the action, passing some rather nice new landscaping and noting it's possibilities as a good place to have lunch. A woman waited on the step and called across the quad, asking if I was there for "Writing for Profit"? Feeling just a tad conspicuous I smiled my most disarming smile and said yes, I was. "Most of the class have gone to get coffee, do you want me to take you down there?" Ah, the ubiquitous take away was coffee was my saviour! Did I want to follow her, rushing on unsteady legs and risk being late when the class actually started? "No thanks, I'm good"

writing for profit

2011-02-26T19:42:00.003+11:00

did you think i was gonna tell you how to write? for actual money? HA! today i went to a course called writing for profit, i could describe the day and i probably will but right now i thought i would share one of the prompts we were given.... the person i hate most in the world is coming for dinner, she doesnt know how i feel, what will i cook? and my response: she is coming for dinner and i cant strangle her , close up, snarling, watching fear in her eyes as i press down on her neck. that kind of behaviour would land me in gaol and she's not worth that. instead i will torture her with the spicy sausage she cant bear to smell, some cabbage and beans will give her the wind she cant admit to getting. classy people like her dont have garlic breath, dont fart, dont burp and dont refuse what is offered

if you get bored with food, you better go and play around on facebook

2011-02-20T23:18:00.004+11:00

at a party tonight, (my sister's, if you want to know) we were talking about food and food being ~~my favourite~~ one of my favourite subjects, i was having a grand old time. i mentioned how crazy it is that we who live in the western world, with an embarrassment of riches, seem to be the ones who eat badly. how crazy it is that we will pay money to learn to eat less! my friend, jenny suggested that in the places where poverty is known people will make more effort to make good food. i hadn't thought about it in those terms before and was momentarily bamboozled but of course she is right. if poverty is a daily companion there is no money to spend on frivolous pursuits so it would make sense that a necessity would also be used as a creative outlet, it would mean that if there is enough money to put good food on the table it will be treated with some reverence, it will be treated as a luxury or a privilege. no poor person is going to be producing show-offy dishes that cost a fortune, they are going to do a simple thing and do it as well as possible. broadening the argument a little, i have been known to get on a soapbox about the way people i listen to every day resent paying a fair price for their everyday essentials. they want cheap food, cheap petrol, cheap clothes and cheap utilities. they want these things to be cheap so they can have more money to spend on entertainment, travel, flash cars, bigger houses and expensive hair -dos. there is nothing wrong with wanting those things, i like them too but i think that as a society we tend to make mistakes with priorities. i think that one of the reasons we eat rubbishy food (and i am not going to pretend this is a simple issue) is because we lose sight of how fundamental our food is. familiarity has bred contempt. if more of us occasionally wondered where our next meal might come from we might have a whole new attitude. we might eat more seasonally, we might eat less, we might eat more vegetables and think of creative ways to reduce waste. we might eat more like the chinese or the greeks or the italians.

2011-02-17T13:57:00.006+11:00

i have a couple of days off and needing a new pair of shoes i set off to the shops. well, shoe buying can get a bit complicated and i didnt see any obvious choices so i abandoned the mission in favour of a bit of a window shopping wander and quickly discovered that my current jacket fetish is becoming out of hand. (long term readers would remember my white dress fetish, i may have mentioned others, they are new each season) the trench style looks nice but would i like a classicly styled trench or a military one, what's the best length to get? and why are they all in such practical colours? i didnt see anything i would consider actually wearing for under $80 and my faves were all over the $100 mark......i did as i always do in such circumstances, decide i've managed this long, i can manage a bit longer without it. wouldnt want to get something i'm ambivalent about! i stopped in the fabric store and looked at pattern books in case inspiration struck there and it was nice to sit and leaf through the latest offerings from vogue, simplicity and my old fave, burda. all shopped out i made my way to the cafe i regard as my home at the shops. i was a little disappointed that i couldn't have a booth. the booths are much too big for just one person at lunchtime so i understand but i do love them, they are like a little rampart from stress! a coffee and coconut bread went down very nicely and i was intrigued to watch the woman next to me. her banana bread was not accompanied by butter as would be usual and the next moment i looked around she had jam all over it and was slipping a jam jar into her handbag. what preparation for a simple cup of tea, how habitual must be her life! she also used a fork to dip the bread into her cup of tea. there are no such ceremonies with me, i just gobble the whole lot up, licking butter from my fingers and cappuccino foam from my lips! last stop was the greengrocer where i actually managed to find some fleeting enthusiasm for cooking as i bought gnocci and the makings of a vegetarian sauce. after all the pleasures of the trip, what with fashion and fabrics and food i couldnt resist a couple of figs. i look forward to those. what are you looking forward to?

the makings of a fashionista

2011-02-07T14:20:00.006+11:00

this week nana jo is reminiscing about her mum's sewing and about a particular pink cape, it's a good story (read it here) and it got me to thinking about my own memories of a mum who sewed all our clothes (and even though i write that past tense, mum is still with us and still sewing) jo's mum sewed with some secrecy, only revealing the finished garment but my mum liked to make us try everything on numerous times so there was never a secret about it. my sister and i still fall about laughing as we remember mum poking or tugging at a bubbly shoulder or a twisted sleeve, a fitting was an exercise in patience for a kid who couldnt undertand why it had to happen at all. when i was a wee thing mum would procure the fabric and decide on the style and proceed to make what she thought. often the fabric was given to her and the garment was designed to suit it. i know that mum has fond memories of a coat she made when i was so young i dont remember. by all accounts i looked smashing in that coat and i think that the making of it was a triumph of design because the fabric was a collection of oddly shaped remnants although that could have been something different altogether because the stories tend to jumble in my mind. as i got older mum would buy the fabric while i was at school and i would come home and make design suggestions, there was one particular blue dress i wore when i was about five and i am pretty sure i demanded the frills down the front so my design aspirations started early! as i got even older i shopped with mum and i remember the aladdins caves of fabric treasure we would visit. the rolls of fabric stood up on stands or in boxes, often jammed so closely together that it was difficult to move through the shop. a colour or pattern would catch my eye and the next essential part of the process was to touch it. if the planets aligned the beauty of the pattern would be enhanced by the texture of the cloth and we would take the roll off the stand to search for the price, always hidden by fabric falling everywhere. we would guess at the price as we searched and if it was less than we anticipated that was icing on the cake. sometimes it would be as expensive as we imagined and we would take that as proof of our good taste! i dont remember one of these precious finds ever being replaced on the stand on the basis of price, although they may have been, what i did learn was that the one you have-to-have is the one you will never tire of. if you can find the dollars to get the have-to-have item you wont regret it and that philosophy informs my the way i shop even now. part of the joy in looking for fabric was in the imagining of how it should be made up and after years at mum's knee i was nearly as good as she was at visualising the finished garment. i would describe it to mum and with the really fanciful elements i would have to try to sketch it. mum could nearly always interpret my poor drawing to know exactly what it was i wanted and then she would rise to the challenge of figuring out how to make my vision a reality, she always did make it real. i'm not the seamstress mum was but those days have never left me and i amuse myself when some poor person tells me about a new dress or what-have-you. they say something like "it's pink and it has long sleeves and the skirt is about that long" i often torture the poor person with questions about details they dont see or cant explain: what kind of pink is it? what is the fabric? is it stiff? flowing? matte? does it have sheen? texture? what shape are the long sleeves? what shape is the neck? how is the waist finished? what about the skirt? how does it fall? what details are on this dress that this person cant articulate? ah, mum, it's a legacy all right...... and not always a good one!

la misma luna

2011-02-03T14:34:00.005+11:00

Under the Same Moon was a lovely film making commentary on the nature of illegal immigration, family and love. i think it deserves better than it's IMDb rating of 7.4 out of 10.

it is about a mexican woman who has gone to live illegally in the US and her son, left in mexico with his grandmother.

when grandma dies nine year old Carlitos embarks on a mission to be reunited with his mama. in the course of the journey Carlitos attaches himself to the unwilling Enrique who slowly becomes a true partner to the boy, eventually making an heroic sacrifice in support of Carlitos' mission.

it is the relationship between the two that has remained with me. this is filmworld where the impossible becomes possible, i know, but could a stranger become caught up with the plight of a boy to the extent that he would invite his own arrest and deportation? what is it about the boy that inspires such sacrifice? is it Carlitos at all or is it the romantic idolisation of the mother-child bond that inspires Enrique? is it a cultural emphasis on family?

i dont suppose my questions will be answered but as i ponder i will be happy to gaze on Enrique!

"My weaknesses have always been food and men - in that order. "

2011-01-24T21:00:00.003+11:00

last week was one of my most socially mobile in a while and i'm pretty happy with that... my friend diana, who i have known since high school, was in sydney after spending most of the last twenty years in the US (and the congo and the amazon and europe and who knows where else because i forget) we got together at her house and cat sitting assignment, we watched oprah's aussie advertisement, we ate grapes and bread & cheese with tomato. i drank coffee and ms california- healthy had chamomile or some such thing. we chatted about men and family and jury duty and diana's upcoming adventure as a governess on a remote island off west australia's coast. she has a blog for the purposes of telling the tale, i dont know if she will be a regular blogger but i can promise she will be interesting if you feel like dropping by. on saturday we were invited to the home of some new friends for lunch. it was a hot day but the breeze blew in fluttering the pretty and outstandingly white lace curtains. we had sparkling mineral water and fruit juice and chatted as our hostess made salad and cooked beetroot dip. little boys ran about in various states of undress as they played with a water slide in the backyard and appeared looking for towels or toys or whatever it is that little boys desert a water slide for. we had italian bread cut at the table and pasta with a delicious pink sauce. there was potato cake, too (gateau di patate?) with mozzarella, potato, smoked mozzarella and herbs. it was all served from a delightful collection of mismatched and brightly coloured crockery, watermelon followed and coffee in hand painted espresso cups. both of my little jaunts out involved simple, unpretentious food, fresh and lovely prepared and served with generous hearts. it's no wonder i was so happy with that, you cant beat it!

time for an update

2011-01-16T16:29:00.006+11:00

finally summer has well & truly arrived in sydney. it's muggy on top of humid, it's hot, my first born had his birthday, work is gearing up after holidays and kids are considering their imminent return to school. the sydney festival is in full swing with many, many events happening. the cornerstone of the festival is the series of free concerts in the domain, a large park in the centre of the city.

last week i went to "festival first night" where a number of stages are set up around the city, roads are closed to create a pedestrian precinct and the whole city comes alive.

last night i took the mob to "summer sounds" previously called "jazz in the domain".

there was a local mariachi band sweltering in fab costumes and then los lobos. i still couldnt get keaghan to stay still but look at the smile, you dont impress the kid easily and he is already giving me instructions for next year so i guess he liked it!

the crowd stretches to the edges of the park in every direction and by the end of the night there was barely one who wasnt up and dancing. the sea breeze was a welcome relief from the oppressive humidity, the atmosphere was buzzing, we had cheese and chocolate.....

the two coolest kids on the planet are excited even before we get on the train and mr sixteen is sweet even in the face of mum having a tantrum about trackwork & last minute changes of mind

maybe i'll join the fray for the symphony next week!

beach bums

2011-01-06T15:25:00.010+11:00

i love the beach but i dont take every opportunity to go. you see, walking on sand with my particular brand of dodgy ankles is a special exercise in concentration and persistence, especially when i'm cold out of the water. wearing shoes seems so unsexy compared to barefeet or flip flops, having to ask my kids to assist me into and out of the water takes humility i sometimes would rather not develop. then there are the times my drive for independence means i decide to exit the water unassisted and i end up staggering through the shallows where proud parents play with toddlers and there is no chance of being inconspicuous. i will probably fall and drag myself ungraciously to my feet only to fall again. if i can overcome my pride enough to ignore these things i adore the water, i love having beach hair, i love the post-beach-scratchy skin, i love the people watching and the sea breeze and the colours of the sea & sky. today it was with just a touch of trepidation that i took the kids and headed for coogee, cant remember the last time i might have been there... and i loved it the moment i got there. i loved the vibrant atmosphere, the sea breeze, the salty air. i loved watching kids play in the showers, i marvelled at baby faced policemen, i was reminded of the hilarious incongruity of toddlers showering naked except for sandals and i played games imaging the lives of passers by... i didnt swim, the surf was rough and i didnt want to make all that effort just to take a pounding but it was all good and a little wander taught me that there are ocean baths at one end of the beach, that might be just the thing for me to do another day! on the trip home i decided that a little refreshment was in order and we stopped at a cafe i have often wondered about, the pool cafe. we had milkshakes and iced coffee, the view was divine, the sea breeze coming through the open windows was lovely, the drinks were good and the food looked excellent. a return visit is on my to do list!

link here for a Charcot-marie-tooth fact sheet

the scenery as promised

2011-01-05T17:39:00.006+11:00

amazing texture on this old banksia

love the colour in the bark

dont see many of these any more

"the castle" is an institution

An overcast afternoon

2011-01-04T20:39:00.006+11:00

We took a little trip out this afternoon and went to a local park. There were no end of disappointments starting when the fish & chip shop where i planned to get lunch was closed. Ne'er mind, instead of rushing by the indian grocery we stopped in and grabbed some roti canai, it's a real treat. We couldn't have roti for lunch but it came home to become dessert tonight.
We picked up some fried chicken instead of fish & chips and headed to the park.

There was sand writing.......

Whatever I did wrong with the camera produced an accidentally arty, grainy, bleak kind of a shot, appropriate to the light & dark nature of the subject ......

Art imitates life with goofy there......

The dare devils were in form......

I had no end of trouble uploading these so I'll leave you with this brief view of the wildlife and maybe tomorrow i'll have better luck with the scenery!

domestica trivialus

2011-01-03T11:47:00.002+11:00

i'm a teensy bit tired of looking at a Christmas post and a new years post seems redundant since it's all the same really, my poetic/ philosophical/ humorous brain seems switched off so all that's left to me, all thats left to you, even, is a run down on the state of things here at the shack.

george-the-mouse has been showing signs of rodent dementia for a while and seemed to reduce in size by half so it was no surprise to find the little chap lifeless this morning. at least he'll only need a small grave dug...

taffy-the-dawg is moulting and i wonder exactly how many times a dog can moult cos it seems to be endless. there's black hair everywhere and someone who had been vacuuming the car ran over the vacuum cleaner. i always say that keeping a clean car is asking for trouble. it rains when you wash em so there will probably be a cyclone after vacuuming....
anyhow, i digress, you should have seen me yesterday using a wet sponge mop to try to remove all the fluff from the carpet, if you ever need to check your lower back strength damp carpet mopping is a useful test. someone could probably get funding to write a phD on that.....
combined with the yogurt diet it could be the fad of 2011.

you haven't heard of the yogurt diet, have you? thats cos it's my invention and it's still under test. a few months back i designated weekends as my only allowable ice cream eating days and i lost a couple pounds but then the hubby started work at a place that makes the high end, top quality, to-die-for yogurt and sometimes a damaged pack comes our way and well, when everyone else is eating ice cream i eat yogurt. i haven't actually established that it's lower in fat or in sugar but it's gotta be better, right?
i looked forward to the financial benefits of eating reject yogurt but i'm not sure the maths works...i buy fruit topping to dress up the plain yogurt. have you seen the price of that stuff? buy a bottle or two and you could buy a whole siberian orchard.

we got a new telly yesterday, it has created some new decor "issues" because it's twice the size of any previous tv but the gods of mindless entertainment, 24hour news, and phallic compensation-thru-huge-screens are appeased by fanatical worship at this point in time.

thats all folks!

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.

2010-12-23T14:14:00.004+11:00

this Christmas i'm tired of the rigmarole. i'm a little tired of carols, i'm very tired of rampant consumerism, i'm tired of obligations and crowds and cards and wrapping.
i see no point in gift boxed soaps and enormous candles and Christmas earrings and reindeer antlers for cars. i see no point in giving the wrong thing, even with the best intentions.
we have here one lone tree but everything else is chaos as usual. even Chrismas feasting is failing to get much excitement from me.
as i wade through the traditions and the busyness feeling like the grinch i try to keep my spiritual eyes and ears open for deeper meaning. i know the story of the Christ child, the Messiah. i know what His coming meant for humanity. i know what it's all about but what does it mean for me? today?
it is strange that the shortest church service of the year will be Christmas day. if any day is the day for prolonged worship, Christmas would be it but instead we schedule a short service so we can rush home to family and presents and bacchanalian feasting.
even among the Christians the Christchild has made way for consumerism.....

so while the pressures of the season annoy me, while the loss of focus dismays me, as unrealistic expectations of joy and universal peace set us all up for failure it is for me to find joy, real joy and to create meaning. it is my job to teach my children that the birth of a baby two thousand years ago should not be an excuse to clutter the planet or our homes or our minds and spirits with junk.

Jesus was first a refugee, later an itinerant preacher. he was a nobody who had nothing but he changes lives yet. thats something to aspire to.

to all of my blog buddies, whether you celebrate or whether you dont, i know that you cant avoid the season so i wish you joy and peace and just enough grinchiness to make sure that the important isnt lost in the urgent.

lots of love

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

2010-12-10T08:57:00.005+11:00

Back in my day, compulsory education ended at the end of year ten. The rules have changed a little bit but in my mind that is still basically how it works and this week Liam finished year ten.
He will go on to finish high school and he intends to go to uni as well so his formal education continues but I thought the end of his compulsory education would be a great time to reflect on the education that the Australian people, by way of our government, have given him.

It all started in about October of 1999. I took my little boy to orientation day at the local school, Narwee. I was delighted with the family atmosphere, the weatherboard buildings seemed welcoming, the playground had an organic feel about it, if I can say that. My delight with the school combined with the reality that my baby was growing up conspired to have me in tears for some time!
Waterworks over with , his first day of school the following January was not dramatic and he slipped easily into school life.
Those early years were marked by teachers who were kind and patient, they recognised the artistic talent that I didn't because I didn't have anyone to compare him to, they fostered his interest in the world, they supplied costumes for dress up day when his Mum forgot, most significantly they taught him to read and write, the basic skills he would need for a lifetime of learning.
As time went on there were so many opportunities offered to him through the school: he participated in athletics, soccer, choir and art workshops. He went on trips to farms and the zoo, to historic sites, gold panning, museums......I'm sure I have forgotten most of it.
All the while teachers helped him to build on his basic skills, teaching him to research, to read with insight and to construct different types of text.
The shift to high school at Hurstville boys High was smoothed by transition days and orientation programs, there was opportunity to play with a school band, to work in laboratories, art studios, and to learn wood and metal working skills in dedicated workshops. A trip to China last year and performing at the Opera House were highlights in the broadening horizons of my boy and his classmates.

The community of school life has been a continual source of interest to my aspiring psychologist, too. There were those sweet teachers in the early years, later there was the one who demanded that people with dirty mouths seek the dictionary meaning of their preferred curse or insult, the men who modelled discipline, integrity and sensitivity. The principal who read stories to the littlies and got the older boys working in the garden. There was the humour of Mr Farr, who would bestow the legendary Farr Cup on those who stuffed up. There was the extreme conservative who probably shouldn't have made his political views public but who has inspired my apolitical young man to engage just a little with federal politics.
There were volunteers who provided his in-school religious education and supported the schools by helping at special events, running fundraisers, providing extra supervision on excursions and listening to kids read.
Our public education system has given my boy (and his siblings following behind) a solid foundation. He has been exposed to so many opportunities that I probably couldn't have provided, he has a good general knowledge and knows how to pursue the things he wants to know, he has experienced literature, drama, music, visual arts, debate and understands intellectual rigour.
Eleven years of schooling have prepared Liam for continued study and for life's university. He can go forward as a rounded and discerning individual and for that, each and every teacher, support staff, volunteer and interested onlooker has my unfailing gratitude.

gazpacho

2010-11-28T08:50:00.005+11:00

yesterday was a typical sydney summer day, hot and muggy, when all you want to do is drink a long, iced something and wait for the cool of evening. i was feeling rested and a bit creative and i decided that i would make a cold tomato soup. i have made gazpacho once before, to a lukewarm reception but this time it would be different. this time everyone had seen jamie oliver make gazpacho. this time i could not fail, this time this odd liquified salad had been validated by the king of kitchen coolness.
i got out the not-so -trusty blender, i put in some crusty ciabatta, ripe red tomatoes, cucumber, sherry vinegar, virgin olive oil, salt & sugar. i coaxed the blender with sweet nothings and fiddled with it's dodgy switch until it roared into service....
the result was ok but a little bland. i added tabasco, parsley and coriander.
this time it passed the taste test and i served the slightly pukey looking mixture, wishing it looked better but remembering that jamie's was not the most colourful dish i ever saw.
the first mouthful was acidic but pleasant, the next a little bit hot. it got hotter and hotter. my attempt to create something with bite had worked, almost too well!
liam polished off two bowls and declared himself full so i had succeeded in filling the bottomless pit and on soup!
we followed up with butterscotch ice cream and a funny movie "in the loop"
all was well in my world

eat pray love

2010-11-13T23:10:00.005+11:00

undaunted by some less than spectacular reviews for "eat pray love" i went to see it anyhow and was well rewarded for my effort on a cold and wet sydney day.
my most cynical incarnation could agree with the reviewers that it was a story of a woman who went on a self indulgent trip in an attempt to free herself from the guilt of having everything she could want in life but that interpretation would be ungenerous and quite possibly hypocritical. after all, as a member of a self indulgent and self obsessed society i am like most people in believing or hoping that i somehow deserve a fairy tale.
far from viewing the film as a story of a self indulgent extended holiday i loved the element of food porn, the soundtrack, the settings, the clothes.....and of course the romance.
immersing myself in the movie allowed me to imaginatively experience the simple pleasures of a rich life and i'm always happy with that!
i also remember thinking that there was a beautiful spirituality in the film. my companion, a traditionally styled Christian, was quick to point out that the spirituality depicted was not the truth as we understand it but i thought that the spiritual aspect of the film, which showed our journey through life being enhanced by balance, mindfulness, meditation, silence and shifting our focus away from self, was compatible with Christian practices of faith and useful to anyone who seeks a spiritual life in any form.
the plot was not fast moving and the more impatient of viewers might find it frustrating but i thought the pace was great, it allowed me to pay attention to visual and philosophical details and it reflected the often slow and subtle nature of personal growth.
the title "eat pray love" resonates with my greatest challenges and purest joys in life and i enjoyed seeing those challenges and joys played out a cinematic version of someone else's life.

curmudgeonly

2010-11-03T22:38:00.002+11:00

this week the dishwasher got broken. i can take a good guess about who did it in a fit of temper but guessing isnt helping....
this dishwasher is annoyingly off the market and there are no parts so when the broken bit means that the other bit fails under the extra load i wont have a dishwasher. and i am the only person who cares and tonight i got told to take care of it ......
if anyone has motive to take care of the damned thing that would be me!

a good friend told me not to catastrophise (this is a new subject, in case you are interested) only i am not the one catastrophising, someone else is doing that, only my friend cant direct any frustration at the source so i get the lecture. i wont hold it against him but i will hold it against the drama queen who caused it

would someone, anyone, please, please, take the garbage out without being asked and preferably before there is as much overflowing as there is in the actual bag?

and if folks are going to ask my opinion would they be polite enough to wait for and think about my answer? if you dont care then dont pretend. i hate the fakery and i dont want to waste energy thinking about how to present an answer you dont respect

the next person to recommend i get a brazilian, no matter how sincere and well meaning that recommendation is, will be risking a brisk whack (mob style) you might like the idea of getting down on all fours and exposing yourself to a stranger for the purposes of applying hot wax and tearing your hair out but it isnt my idea of a turn on

i think i'm done for the moment.............

for nick!

2010-10-31T21:42:00.003+11:00

so, this is the state of my life right now

i have zero creative inspiration
i have no energy
i might be catching the bug that hubby and keaghan have been suffering (his majesty looks like death warmed up)
or i might just be suffering from life.

the whole bullet point thing wasnt working, right?
i'm working a few extra hours this week , the young 'uns are doing end of year exams, i feel like a dog chasing it's tail but none of that is the reason i'm not blogging!

my hair is annoying me and the desire to cut it all off is like an itch i cannot scratch because i would surely regret it......
despite having a clothing collection gathered over the past twenty or so years i dont seem to have anything to wear............
i turn a big number next year and i hope to have a party of some sort but i cant make up my mind.........
a family weekend away?
a party at home?
afternoon tea in a swish restaurant?
a once in a lifetime dinner at one of sydney's best eateries?
floral decorations?
balloons?
streamers?

oh yeah, and i just went to my brother's place for the second birthday of my adorable and only nephew. i was looking forward to getting some pictures of all the littlies and the battery in the camera died.

so, thats about it. if you want to suggest a topic for a post , feel free. either i'll oblige or i wont!

“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live....

2010-10-17T22:27:00.007+11:00

a dvd has to be seriously good to convince me to watch the extras and yesterday i found one i liked that much. the september issue is a doco about the production of a single issue of Vogue magazine.
for me, the september issue was a glorious thing to watch, full of beautiful fabrics, gorgeous colours, stunning photography and interesting characters. anna wintour, infamous editor, seemed marginally softer than her ice queen reputation and her creative director, grace coddington, was remarkable for her artistic vision as well as for her ability to bring the vision to life.

i was particularly happy when i chose this shot as the stand out dress in a particular spread and the ice queen herself took particular notice of the exact same shot

i was reminded that i was watching the strange world of fashion and it all got a little bit weird when ms wintour made mention of having one arm bigger than the other (dont we all have a bit more muscle on our dominant side?)

for the rest of the day i floated around in a dream of silks and feathers, shoes and bags and jackets and furs.....

today was back to the grind moving furniture and all the things that go along with it, the vacuum was out to tidy up the grungy spaces and a good thing it was when i found an old mouse nest under a bookcase, cheeky things they are.

i collected a box of books to give away, threw out a few odds and ends and generally turned the place upside down. it's funny how you often have to make a whole hell of a mess to fix a mess. thats what i did today and i had to fix it before i'm back in the work-week whirlwind tomorrow.

have a good one, folks!

2010-10-11T21:29:00.002+11:00

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."
General Omar Bradley

Interesting, isn't it? We imagine that we, as a society, value peace. We tell ourselves that we value all of the good stuff. We imagine that we have moved on from some of the ugly behaviours and practices of times past. In our imaginations we are the most elevated of all generations, the most developed of societies.
We all occasionally admit that we aren't as we would like but those who regularly express doubts about our ethics, those who make an effort to do things differently, those brave enough to challenge others are mostly viewed as the lunatic fringe.
Imagine a world where life, peace, ethics and love truly dominated.

Where we spent more on wells than on warheads.
Where fear and greed journalism fell on deaf ears.
Where shopping was, once again, an activity of necessity rather than leisure.
What if, instead of developing road rage we gave other drivers space to make a mistake.
Imagine a world where nobel prize winners were as famous as sporting greats.
Imagine if scholarships were awarded for kindness.

Imagine with me.....................

2010-10-04T17:39:00.003+11:00

church yesterday was an interesting kind of affair. one of our regulars is a homeless dude by the name of chucky. now, chucky was making a dramatic appearance as st peter's assistant at the gates of heaven and as it was his debut performance he invited a mate along, who i will call lucky.
lucky was managing to stay upright in between staggers and the two of them sat in the front row, stage whispering to each other and calling out professions of undying love to the congregation. time came to sing and lucky had his arms around chucky's shoulder and sung about as loudly as the rest of the people put together (dont get me on that soap box)
i'm not here to okay the drunkenness but the two of them had a relaxed joie de vivre, a kind of carefree boyishness, a life affirming cameraderie and i couldnt help but grin broadly as i watched them. chucky performed his part with flair and the two of them left, loudly proclaiming their embarrassment, on the way to the pub.
nobody was judgemental but not many folks were amused by the clowns in our midst and i just thought it was a pity.
i get that those guys are not helping themselves and, i suppose, my grinning is like encouraging a naughty child but just occasionally i would like to see that kind of unrestrained behaviour, that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of un-selfconsciousness, from church people. sometimes i would like it remembered by the hearts and not just the minds, that these guys are the guys Jesus would have hung out with, these guys are the people the salvation army was started for.
just sometimes i would like to see a little more JOY

20 questions. i stole them. from kris

2010-09-30T21:42:00.004+10:00

Were you born early, late or right on time? about three weeks early

Chicken pox? there have been no chicken pox in this house

Allergic to bees? about as much as most people

How about strawberries? only the price

Hereditary illness? i have a number of hereditary conditions but i am not ill

Have you ever been in a car accident? a few. little ones. mostly my fault. i'm improving on that

How much do you smoke? when i am mad you could die of smoke inhalation just by looking at me

How much do you drink? every time i want a comma in the day. coffee

Is your cholesterol normal? probably not

Have you ever run a marathon? what are you on?

How many x-ray's have you had (not including dentist)? many

Do you watch what you eat? all the way to my mouth

When was the last time you worked out? right

What is your ideal weight? um....60ish kg

Current? 65 and climbing

How old was the oldest living relative in your immediate family? how immediate?

Veggies or Fruit? fruit

Low-carb or High-carb? i cannot live without carbs

How do you want to die? old

it's a challenge......

2010-09-29T19:40:00.003+10:00

the garage is full of stuff, lots of stuff. there are power tools and bicycles and garden implements, a box of hay, old baby goods, paint, carpet, a lawn mower, an engine, various car bits and on it goes.
the car just manages, by the skin of her old teeth, to fit in between all of the stuff.
as i drive in to the garage i veer left as far as i can because if i dont i wont fit out the door on the right. if i am having a good day i dont hit the wing mirror, which i already hit once so it's no longer a mirror, just a mirror holder. if i'm having a very bad day the car wheel clips a bike pedal and starts to drag the bike, the bike falls onto the car and the whole mess is only untangled by slowly backing up, jumping out to free the bike, putting it back as upright as possible , then jumping back in the car and veering a couple of mills further right.
any miscalculation traps me in the car but i will stubbornly try to get out , contorting myself into spaghetti shapes to try to avoid another reverse and re-park. when i finally get out i hold my clothing tight against my body or something will surely catch the handlebar of another bike and i wont notice until i am caught up with a tearing garment or a falling bike or both.
if the car wasnt clean before it will be now, in fact i think it is extra shiny where i push past it each day.
getting back in the car requires technique. i turn and arch my back a little against the old girl, taking care not to breathe as i pass the handlebars lest i get a stomach injury, slide my let hand out to lift the handle and slide into the cavity where the door was. i sit on the edge of the seat and lean back towards the passenger seat so i can maintain balance as i pretzel my legs under the door, over the sill and above the seat at which point i finally have my whole self in the vehicle and can swivel my little tush around to face the controls. after all of that i might be tempted to grab the pain-away from the glove box and give myself a massage before heading out. i most certainly appeal to every known deity in the hope that i havent forgotten something

the resilience doughnut

2010-09-24T08:17:00.004+10:00

last week i attended a forum at one of the schools. it was about how to produce resilience in children.
the theory has been developed by a psychologist and it seems to be achieving good things.

so, the whole idea is that there are seven factors influencing a child's ability to thrive

education: if a child has a good connection to a person in the education system it's a good thing. the person will most likely be a teacher but it could be the canteen lady or the handyman or the cleaner
peers: a strong connection to a peer group, preferably a group with a little bit of conflict
money: a strong understanding of the relationship between work and money. kids who get their money too easily or are below the poverty line are both disadvantaged
parents: a blend of authoritarian and nurturing parenting styles is the ideal mix. this might be provided by one parent or each parent might fall on one side of the equation, the important thing being a net balance
skill: you know what a skill is, right? a kid doesnt have to play violin or something, just to have something they enjoy and do well. it pays to think out side the box on this one
community: a strong connection to a community group counts. that might be a sporting club or a faith group or some other connection
family: a strong connection with family, even if the kid seems not to like their family

when we want to use the resilience doughnut it is all about identifying which of these factors is strongest for a child (and that's seeing it from their point of view) and trying to get three of those factors to combine in one activity.

we were given the example of a group of young men (peers) who danced (skill) together casually, a teacher formalised the group (education) and those young men, marginalised when they started out, had better rates of school attendance, better grades and the group went on to dance at the winter olympics. there were flow on effects right through all aspects of the doughnut for those young fellas and it improved their chances in life.

the woman who developed the resilience doughnut wants to make money from it so there are books and training sessions and all kinds of things associated with it but even if we can be aware of the fundamentals, i think it is pretty helpful.

i'm also sure that a slightly revised version would be helpful for adults.

to take a look at the resilience doughnut as explained by it's creator click here

fetishist fashion

2010-09-13T11:47:00.008+10:00

perusing the paper on saturday i was interested to see that the sydney fringe festival's alternative fashion parade was to be held that very evening. the use of the word "steampunk" was the draw card that got me motivated to go....

i spent an hour (can you believe it?) trying to figure out the best neo-victorian outfit already existing in my wardrobe. very plain compared to most victorian dress, i suppose it qualified for the neo part extremely well while still managing to include elements of another era. i wore a plain, full length purple satin skirt, A -line with a tulle petticoat for volume, a tucked black blouse, the collar turned under to produce a round button up neckline, black satin sash to create a bow at the back and an antique style marcasite brooch at the neck.

the girls decided to come with me, despite a looming poetry deadline for caitlin. and so we set off.

a bit peckish and with no time to eat without jeopardising our plans we caught the bus with the cranky driver and hoped for some spare minutes at the other end. before we even got off the bus we could see that the mostly steampunk crowd was one of the most colourful i have ever seen. the girls decided that i was looking plain and described the scene as scary but exciting.

the box office was slow so we had plenty of time to be intrigued by multi coloured hair and bosoms spilling from corsets, men in mourning coats and a crowd who seemed all to know one another.

still nervous about time constraints i hesitated to order pizza from the next door cafe but quick sevice and an excellent pizza (eggplant, zucchini, pesto, feta, mozzarella, roasted capsicum & tomato) made everything good.

the fashion was varied with pleasant victorian styles from clockwork butterfly and an edgier version from gallery serpentine. there was showgirl lingerie and fantasy fashion. one chainlink top had the crowd intrigued with the question of whether the protruding nipples were or were not real. there were dresses made from balloons, a pole dancer, a mermaid hanging from the ceiling and an assortment of rubber outfits with cut-outs saw two little pairs of eyes open wide.

the bathroom, too, was an educational experience. where do folks put their beers once safely settled in a cubicle? and was that beer on the floor or was it the puddle of urine it looked like? and how many of the very large women were actually women?

eventually, via the same cranky bus driver, we returned to the safe beige of suburbia.

~above photos "borrowed" from some random facebook person~

of camels and straws, of mice and blankets

2010-09-07T21:08:00.007+10:00

today maithri has posted a story of a swazi woman, disabled to the point where she must crawl to move around, whose life has been dramatically improved by filling the holes in her home to prevent rodent entry, a mouse baiting program, a new mattress and a new blanket. please take the trouble to read and absorb it here.
it struck me that sometimes it takes the simplest things to make a considerable difference to somebody's life. maithri (or any other observer) might have hoped to restore mobility, or to move the woman to a more comfortable home. in our rich and comfortable western world we might do these things almost by force but in swaziland the very simplest course of action has been taken and the woman concerned has testified to the way these simple actions have transformed her life from one wracked with pain to a life which is pain free.
sydney is a long long way from swaziland but the principle remains: what is the simplest action i can take to improve things for this person (or indeed, for myself)
when a situation seems impossible, unfixable, complicated, overwhelming there will probably be a simple action to improve it and just as a single straw broke the camels back, maybe the camel will be saved if we remove one small straw.

2010-08-31T21:23:00.004+10:00

i cant for the life of me think of anything to say here, maybe i'm too busy creating myself

maybe i'm too busy evaluating stuff

maybe i have said everything worthwhile that ever crossed my mind

and now that i've said i have nothing to say i'll think of something

for sure

food revolution

2010-08-20T21:02:00.005+10:00

tonight i watched the final in the series "jamie oliver's food revolution" . i've watched it avidly for the length of the series (six weeks?)
the voyeur factor is good, the compulsion to watch fat americans eat rubbish and slowly kill themselves has the same kind of weird appeal as a car smash.
jamie is kind of annoyingly cute and idealistic and engaging all at once but mostly i love what he is doing. i love that jamie oliver is trying, and succeeding, in helping a city change it's eating habits. i love that he is approaching the problem from so many angles: changing school food, teaching people to cook, educating people about what they are eating now and what they should be eating and how their health is being affected.
after six years of home economics in high school i can draw the healthy diet pyramid in my sleep, even 20 odd years down the track. i have read food magazines, family magazines and health magazines, i have seen tv shows on healthy eating and i have read newspaper supplements. i have the information but i still find it hard sometimes to make sure there is always good, nutritious food on the table.
i would like to think i am a long way from needing a food revolution but i still need to work at making good choices and one of the ways i try to do that is not by aiming for perfection but to aim for small, achievable goals. they might not give us the ideal diet but they get us closer

i only buy good bread. sourdough, multigrain or premium type whitebread, free of additives and heavier than the average white fluff
i have veggies delivered, taking the drama out of the shopping leaves more energy for the cooking
i try to add herbs to food. a handful of parsley or coriander ( or what have you) on a risotto, a soup, a pasta or a sandwich ramps up the nutrients for a teeny bit of effort
i don't keep soda in the house (i will buy a bottle or two as a treat) if it's not there nobody can drink it. same goes for biscuits, chocolate and chips
chocolate breakfast cereals are only for holidays
i keep a box of porridge sachets in my locker at work. it costs about 5 times what regular oats do but it's sooo easy and all too often ease is the name of the game. they keep well and there's always something hot and comforting just a couple of minutes away

do you have any nutrition rules or handy hints?

vapour

2010-08-14T07:54:00.013+10:00

she fumbled to turn off the alarm and curled into a tighter ball, wishing the world away for another moment before an effort of will pulled her from her bed. she was getting a lift today and it would be rude to make them wait.
a quiet coffee was followed by a shower and then, attempting to avoid a recurring sock shortage, she hung washing. knowing it would be some time before a break she sat at the table with toast and tried to converse but she hit a wall with one being sullen and the other irritatingly absent. it might have been a good thing, the clock had travelled further than she realised and now she was really up against it.
mr sullen was in the bathroom so she moved flowers from the laundry tub and cleaned her teeth. the flowers pained her, last night's attempt to create a bunch of subtle beauty had eventually just been uninspired, reflecting her tiredness. she mused on the beauty of the lilies and silently thanked them for rescuing her.
a little discombobulated by the rush she kissed the children quickly and hurriedly wrapped a towel around the flowers. a diesel motor outside provided the soundtrack to these last moments at home and she wondered exactly when it had started.
flustered and disorganised, with too many things and not enough hands, she laboured outside more than hurried, to find only silence. diesel vapour hung in the air, longer lasting than goodwill.

my boy is an everyday hero

2010-08-08T06:22:00.006+10:00

several months back the boy, liam, declared that he would run the city 2 surf this year. he is determined to make and take all the opportunities he can in life and this was one he was eager to grab hold of.
"mum, should i run for a charity?" he said
"well, why not?" is my answer on that one, he's running anyway, he might as well try to drum up a little support for something.
he thought he would like to do something to help the bears in asia, the ones caged up so their bile can be milked. and so he signed up both for the race and to support the charity WSPA

he trained until he hurt his arm. then he rested.
he trained until he hurt his hip. and rested.
he trained until he re-injured the arm......

and so it went. his preparation has been doomed but he has maintained his focus and he will run anyway. he wont run to his potential but he will have a good time and what an experience, to run with 80 000 others!

today he was up at five, he showered and dressed as i made him porridge and a cup of tea. we enjoyed a few quiet moments together in a sleeping, pre-dawn house. he was cutting it fine so i drove him to the station. he missed the train but the next wasn't too far away.

so now i wait to hear tales of his big day. i wait and watch the lightening sky. it reminds me of the day he was born when i laboured long through the night. the rising sun gave me new strength for the birth. i reflect as i wait to see him home again, it seems the morning has always been his special time.

indulge a ridiculously proud mum and throw a dollar or two the way of the bears?

my old man

2010-08-05T00:01:00.003+10:00

this was the only photo of my dad that i could find just quickly and while it's an odd one in a way it fits pretty well.....

thats dad with the rumpled hair and liam, who he taught to play, on his left (some unidentified bald guy between them)

dad is seventy today (happy birthday!!) and we dont do birthdays in grand style, which is a good and a bad thing but anyway, i thought it was a good time to tell you a bit about the old man.

dad spent his working life as a technician working in telephone exchanges, first for the PMG, staying through corporate identity changes to telecom and telstra. telephone exchanges are those strange big brick buildings with few windows. they seem secretive because they contain relatively few people, being full of equipment. nobody seems to come or go from them too much and nobody knows what happens inside. i'm here to tell you it's lots of technical electrical stuff, lino floors and noticeboards full of jokes and safety bulletins.

i have a vague picture of what dad did all those years but of course his work was his place and i can only imagine what it was really like.

i do know that dad's workmates would have been subjected to his dad jokes, only there they would have been "john jokes". i would think that my own workmates would probably regard my jokes with a kind of pained affection similar to what dad would have been given.

i know, too, that they would have heard him hypothesise and philosophise ( i suppose thats where i got it)

they would have known his measured responses and they would certainly have known his love of music, brass band music, in particular.

dad has played cornet for most of his years, he has taught and he has played with various bands, he has played the calls at anzac services, he has played at funerals where a little music made a lonely end a little warmer.

banding is dads great love and he has given wholeheartedly to the bands he plays with, always present and punctual, uniformed and rehearsed.

oftentimes i was embarassed by dads intense interest in folks' ethnic backgrounds and squeamish about him making generalisations based on heritage but if you can't beat it, you join it and dad's continual interest has rubbed off onto me. my interest extends to food in particular and i am always secretly pleased if i manage to impress somebody with my knowledge of their food and/or culture.

oh yes, dad "blessed" me with eccentricity, with his bone structure, with his humour and with a need to see the english language well used. (actually i got the double whammy on that)

he also taught us to appreciate music and not to feel intimidated by a serious concert at a serious venue, he taught us to be reliable team members and to look for the oddities and ironies in life.

i could go on but i am nearing the end of my cohesive thought (i wont try to examine the origin of a short attention span!)

so, dad

thanks

(but no thanks:)

and

happy birthday!!

if you really knew me....

2010-08-01T22:02:00.002+10:00

dana over at "life is good" has written a post about what we might know if we really knew her and since i have not much else to say i thought i'd give it a go (imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery)

if you really knew me you would know that talking about food makes my eyes light up
if you really knew me you would know that i am a bit of a language nerd
if you really knew me you would know that i like to drive fast
and that i cant because one more slip could see the loss of licence
if you really knew me you would know that i start reading the paper with the arts section
if you really knew me you would know that i lick my lips when i'm thinking

if you think you know me you could try adding to the list

how to get dinner on the table even if you cant cook

2010-07-26T12:08:00.005+10:00

that was the by-line, i think it's called, on a book i bought this morning.
i was wandering the discount tables, considering something of Dr Phil's and then i saw it "rita's culinary trickery"
it's a pink hard covered book with a sketch of a curvaceous, simultaneously waif thin, woman in an apron and high heels, little stars sparkling above the fry pan she holds.
culinary trickery sounds right up my alley and so i paid my $5 and hurried a little to the coffee emporium to get a hot chocolate and some alone time with this pretty new acquisition.
if i had read the back cover "for everyone who wants to add a little sparkle to entertaining" i probably wouldnt have bothered. i used to enjoy entertaining once but these days i seem to have got selfish, at the end of the working week i just want to retire to my little cocoon and not think too much about anyone......
but back to the book. it could have been written by my friend TTS (hi you!) she could make canned soup and two day old bread into an event, all with good grace and hospitality and ease. i watched and learned from her before she went off to the UK to bestow her hospitality on that part of the world (who probably need it, given the weather)
and back to the book.......
rita is full of advice like

salad in a large bowl immmediately looks better than when it's spilling out of a small bowl
never buy pasta sauce in a jar (from the deli is ok)
jars of pesto work but buy an italian brand

rita is keen on manners and (this one's for leah) she has ordered some scarlet & green "at home" cards, because people realise you do expect them to show up if they have a written invitation.

she's got me thinking about my own rules on food and entertaining, i'm sure i have a long list

if you must use paper plates get top quality ones and NEVER plastic
i'd rather eat with my hands than use plastic cutlery
a glass isnt that hard to wash, at someone else's place i'll do it myself rather than use plastic cups and at my place i'll wash them all
serviettes are nearly always wasted but you cant do without them
nothing to do with entertaining but all to do with serviettes, i always pop the clean ones in my bag at a restaurant. they always come in handy and no-one will be worried about how cheap it looks if they need one

have you got rules? bug bears? odd quirks about food? or serviettes?

an epitaph

2010-07-25T09:55:00.000+10:00

liam took a particular interest in the poetry on some gravestones, sitting side-by-side and with the same inscription. his interest was sufficient that he turned me from my imminent departure and helped me to the other side of the cemetery so that we could try to figure out what it said. the boy wants to read poetry!
the first was easier to read but had only part of the verse inscribed. it was a privilege to uncover the remaining verse on our return home

Pass a few swiftly-fleeting years,

And all that now in bodies live

Shall quit, like me, the vale of tears,

Their righteous sentence to receive.

But all, before they hence remove,

May mansions for themselves prepare

In that eternal house above;

And, O my God, shall I be there?

Sepia Saturday at Wiseman's Ferry Cemetery

2010-07-24T08:56:00.006+10:00

for those who dont usually stop by here, i'm telling the story of a wee trip i took with the young 'uns last week, which included a little exploration in family history.

we spent an enjoyable hour or so wandering the cemetery at wiseman's ferry. the sun shone, the river glistened and birds sung.....

despite dad's best efforts to educate me, the early history of the jurd family in australia is a jumble of names in my mind so when we found the grave of william douglass i knew it meant something but what, exactly?

well, william douglass was the papa of elizabeth, who married the first jurd in australia, daniel.

"The Jurd Dynasty in Australia began with the marriage of Daniel Jurd and
Elizabeth Douglas at St Matthews Church of England, Windsor on 28 September
1812. Daniel was born in England around 1778, was a chimney sweep in London and
was convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing 20lbs of bacon. His accomplice was
Samuel French. They were transported for 7 years. Daniel arrived on 4 August
1802 aboard the Perseus. Elizabeth was the daughter of William Douglas and Mary
Groves, two First Fleet Convicts.
Daniel & Elizabeth settled in Pitt Town. They had 9 children, 6 boys and 3 girls. Daniel received a land grant in the Macdonald Valley and this was first worked by his eldest son, and first child John, who married Mary Ann Fleming. Daniel died in August 1833, just 7 months after the birth of his youngest child, Joseph."

Hawkesbury Family History Group

this week, as i have started to picture these people they have started to become shadowy figures rather than just names. william was transported at just 16, he outlived his son-in-law by many years, elizabeth raised a new baby as a widow.......

i wonder how they felt about their place in history?

did they see themselves as pioneers or just as convicts? as people fortunate to be out of the grime and poverty of their english lives or as outcasts in a wild land ?

sepia saturday participants are listed at the sepia saturday blog, pay them a visit!

Pitt Town

2010-07-20T21:55:00.002+10:00

the first little stop on our trip was a hamlet called pitt town. it is an historical village and significant to my family's earliest days in australia. significant to the early days of the colony, in fact.
my main point in this post though, is to say that i was delighted to see the kids excited by things like the architectural details on these churches

and the hand made old style pews in this one
(i'm sure there were old style pews in both but we didnt go past the gate of the second)

i think brain fog has stopped me from picking out the best pictures here, but that gives me an excuse to post again, right?

thanks to liam for his photography

post #500

2010-07-19T11:02:00.003+10:00

the vehicular ferry across the hawkesbury at wiseman's ferry

i'm just back from a three day roadtrip with the kidlets. we had a good time and the experience was full of lessons

the shops in tiny towns can't be relied on to stay open until their advertised closing time

nor can they be relied on to open at the advertised time

dont expect to travel in a westerly direction on a winter afternoon, if you do, dont expect to enjoy it

roadside barbecue areas are a great invention, must make better use of them

i also remembered how much i love to drive

introducing doris & mabel

2010-07-11T16:11:00.004+10:00

this is me and my sister, 'Na in character as mabel & doris.
'Na has been performing in small dramas at church for many years, she delivers a mean monologue and has a talent for accents so it was pretty exciting for me to be invited to perform with her at easter time.
'Na and i often ham it up for our own or our families' entertainment but to perform publicly was new to me and poor preparation together with nerves conspired to make sure my performance was less than perfect but 'Na covered for me where she could and my liam prompted, loudly, where absolutely necessary. my ockerism and sense of comedy saved my bacon and doris & mabel were so popular we were invited back for mothers day and then today for a service focused on generosity.
i doubt you'll be seeing me on the red carpet anytime soon but i'm having a blast and today i didn't even stuff up a line.
i hope mabel & doris reappear some time in the future

the swirl of stuff in my head

2010-07-08T19:47:00.005+10:00

it's school holidays here again and we're renting lots of dvds to keep the kidlets occupied while i bust my butt at work. next week will bring a change of pace because the governing body for our industry (TGA) are making their audit visit and i have been asked not to work more than a couple of days, too much of a loose canon?
masterchef has grabbed my attention as far as tv is concerned and soups are my current favourite food, not so much for the eating but for the cooking. potato and onion soup was this week's special, it makes a change from pumpkin.

and the real news of the week is about my foot. it's been a long story but i had a pressure ulcer for some months, getting appropriate treatment was harder than i expected and i started to despair of it ever healing. the ulcer itself didn't bother me because i couldn't feel it but an unhealed ulcer can lead, at extremes, to severe infection, surgery and amputation. eventually, with the help of my new best friend, podiatrist anthony, the ulcer healed but the story wasn't over. after such a long time it was necessary to check for bone destruction and there was a long wait for the MRI followed by another wait to see the specialist for results.
it was sydney's coldest day in 61 years when i set out to see doctor garth and he was worried that his american visitors would be feeling it.
i wasn't worried about garth's visitors, my foot was fine!!
the day was clear and bright and i celebrated with a take away coffee before work

well, that's it from me. masterchef calls and i'm making a lovely sweet warm comforting indulgent dessert: sticky date sago.

can't wait

the $2 a day diet and other ramblings........

2010-07-03T11:25:00.003+10:00

one of my most favouritest tabloid tv shows featured a story this week about the $2 a day diet. because it is my very favouritest show i didnt actually see the story but i looked it up on the internet between stops at facebook and blogging and all that other stuff......
the $2 a day diet consists of oats & fruit for breakfast, lentils & rice for lunch and broccoli & sweet potato soup for dinner. you can throw in an egg or two and thats it.
i'm not sure the broccoli & sweet potato soup would be great looking and a nutritionist declared the diet low on minerals but i have to say that the story diet excited me a bit. if you were really short of cash it would be a reasonably nutritious diet, if you could add a dollar or two you could add variety and minerals with some tinned fish or a little bit of chicken or meat. in it's original form the diet is vegetarian, good for the earth and for health.
i'm almost tempted to try it for a little while (i said almost)

in other food news, the folks i work with seem to take a great interest in each others lunches. i find it a bit odd i have to say because i dont really care what other people eat. there was a guy who ate tuna on raisin bread, i thought that was out-there, but i mostly dont care.
yesterday i was tired and headachey and craving something sweet and comforting but i didnt have any normal comfort foods and i wasnt going to go out so looking to use what was available i added some boiling water to apple juice and was inspired to sprinkle some cinnamon on top. i thought it was creative and filled the bill but i was declared to have "lost it"

so, what odd combos do you like?
and what do you think of the $2 diet?

Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without.

2010-06-27T21:03:00.003+10:00

this week i stumbled into watching "i married a stranger". it's a reality show where a young woman who wants to marry allows her mother, best friend and sister to choose a possible husband for her from five contenders.
realistically it can only be taken as seriously as any other reality tv but i was shouting at the telly in outrage as they asked the men questions like:
"have you been in a threesome?"
"how many sexual partners have you had?"
"take off your shirt"

i suppose those questions could have some relevance but i would have liked to see questions that aimed to find out how he treats people, whether he is happy, maybe something relating to political and religious views. it would be good to see similar spending/saving habits in the possible couple.....

"how do you get along with your mum?" might be a start
"what is good about your life?"
"what is bad?"

what would you be asking if you were choosing a spouse for somebody you care about?

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

2010-06-24T20:35:00.002+10:00

today was an amazing day for australian politics and it was kind of hilariously depressing for me.
i am one of what seems to be a very small number of left leaning people in my workplace, for those who might not know, that means "my" party is in power and "their" party is not. the conservatives seem pretty concerned about a change of leadership in what is not their preferred government. what stuns me is this, they're not happy because their party isnt in power, how can they be even more not happy when the party they already hate changes it's leader?
there were some choice statements

"she's unfeminine and ugly"

what i imagined i said: looked in the mirror lately sweetheart? and if you wear nicer clothes will that make you better at your job??

"i liked the other guy cos he went for walks a lot"

i'll forgive you saying that because you must have heard your parents say it but thinking that your parents might be saying that is a real worry

"i liked the other guy because he went to major sporting events"

would you have thought he was a great prime minister if he loved the arts??

"now we have women as governor general, state premier and prime minister and the country is still going down hill"

WTF????

laundry and cabbage and puppy dog tales

2010-06-21T15:42:00.005+10:00

today i'm off work and i'm happily being extremely domesticated; because we have seasonal vegetables delivered and i dont choose what we get i have a glut of cabbage here so tonight we'll eat sweet & sour cabbage with chicken schnitzel for dinner. it's a recipe belonging to the coles' supermarket $10 meal promotion and i find the promotion a bit sickening but hey, if i can learn something useful then thats ok. also in the bid to use cabbage i bought bacon bones for cabbage and bacon soup, they're bubbling away as we speak and hopefully that will be a good meal for tomorrow. all this cabbage makes me feel mildly virtuous because it's really very healthy stuff.
i also got a new school jumper for keaghan, who seems to out grow everything almost before he wears it, he's declared it too big because the sleeves hang over his hands but if it wasnt a bit big i'd be getting another one next week or the week after that.
the pile of laundry has been reduced by a folding blitz and as i folded i watched "the cave of the yellow dog". i enjoyed it immensely, it's depiction of nomadic life in mongolia is gentle and picturesque. by way of my quirky mind i took particular notice of a couple of close ups of the hands of the women: muscular, dark tanned, with dirty nails they are the opposite of a western beauty ideal but they had a beauty far more resonant with me. they tell the story of capable women, both strong and tender. there was a grace in those hands. if you get to see the movie the furnishings of the yurt are worth a look too.
and now, onward and upward to put the washing machine on, make the dinner and remake the bed.

"The friendship that can cease has never been real."

2010-06-19T21:55:00.004+10:00

when i started blogging i became rather attached, in a remote cyber kind of way, to a blogger going by the name of muser. i was anxious to see him recognise his own potential and we developed a friendly email bond, then muser left our sunny shores for a bit and drifted away from blogging. he drifted from email as well and i often wondered what happened to him but i had seen a glimmer of growing confidence and while i was a wee bit disappointed that he had gone i was certain that he was out there somewhere and actually living.
two years after muser's departure, after i had long given up hope of hearing from him, i received an email!
muser is alive and well. i am so pleased that he got in touch and he has returned to blogging, i won't tell the story because that is his and he tells it on his own blog

so many people come and go from our lives and it's probably best that way but isn't it a wonderful thing when someone from the past takes the trouble to look us up?

silver hair is a glorious crown

2010-06-14T08:40:00.004+10:00

i was in my early twenties when i got my first grey hairs. for a while they were countable on one hand, then they were quickly multiplying and i started my on and off affair with dye. when the grey showed it made me look tired (or maybe it highlighted pre-existing tiredness) so i would pick up a supermarket colour and haphazardly colour my hair. i started with dark brown and over about ten years i stepped down the colour scale.
sometimes i chose the brand that was on special, sometimes i thought the ones with no ammonia would be less damaging, once i bought the brand with the free make-up purse. my attitude to brands and colours was casual and my attitude to the process was ambivalent.
i would toy with the idea of going grey but it didnt seem right, it was too early and the kids didnt want me to appear any more eccentric than i already was so i continued with it but i didnt like it. i didnt like the multitude of little plastic containers, i didnt like using chemicals, i didnt like the regrowth and i didnt like being obliged to fix the regrowth.
a couple of years back i started getting it salon coloured, that made it a whole lot easier but it required me to spend hours in the salon, not to mention the money it costs.
this year i didnt want to spend the time or the money and my grey roots got longer and longer. there would be a time, i thought, when i would look in the mirror and find it unbearable but that time never happened, i started to toy with the idea of going au naturale, the grey around the edges seemed soft rather than tired, the coloured section seemed almost garish so i went and got some foils, teeny fine foils of blonde and hazelnut, they blend the roots with the growing out colour but the grey is still there. the hairdresser was not happy, she naturally wanted to send me out into the world looking coiffed and perfect.
i wanted something that reflected the reality of my attitude, my age and my looks. i wanted to acknowledge that i am not a perfectly coiffed kind of person, neither am i anymore a dark haired, pale skinned beauty. i was also taken with the biblical statement that silver hair is a glorious crown (proverbs 16:31) so for the moment i am going grey, whether i will stay committed to it i dont know, one day i might hate it and go goth black or soccer mum foiled chocolate but right now it feels right. it looks soft and natural, it is who i am more than who i used to be, it matches my stretched stomach and my wobbly legs, it matches my crepey eyes, what i hope it matches the most is the woman i have become, a little softer and a little wiser than the pale skinned, dark haired girl of old.

2010-06-11T17:54:00.002+10:00

i've just been over at the sartorialist where there is a picture of a gorgeous woman wearing double denim. i really dont think i will ever like the double denim look, even though it is supposedly back on the "in" list. then again, i never thought i would like three-quarter pants on men, either....
my current fashion hate list would have to include

white shoes
high waisted jeans
synthetic fabrics (even though i wear them)
over perfect details, i saw a woman the other day who had on a black dress, red belt, red shoes, red beret and red shrug. i wanted to grab her and shake her. i wanted to scream "YOU ARE TRYING TOOOO HARD!!" not to mention she was way too old to look cute in a beret, who over 23 can pull off a look like that?

this is the best i can come up with right now and if i look like a snob, sorry. or maybe i'm not sorry, i have a very definite aesthetic sensibility .......

2010-06-05T09:21:00.003+10:00

"bureaucrats don't like untidiness, and nor does evil. the evil are revolted by the sheer messiness of human existence. they are purists who prefer the perfection of death to flesh and blood.....the only thing about them that is not quite dead is the pleasure they reap from destruction"

i thought i had something to say about this and now i find that i dont at all but i still love the quote
i think i know some of these people

meme day

2010-06-04T08:13:00.003+10:00

i said i was going to discuss another quote on goodness for this post but then nick invited me to participate in his meme and well, i need to live up to my school reports: "kylie is easily distracted" i wouldn't want to deprive all those teachers the opporunity to be correct, that would be mean...
so, as a service to the teachers of bexley north public and st george girls high here is the meme:

1: Do you believe in life after death?
yes, i dont know what form it will take but it's there

2: Do you believe in fate?
fate? um, i'm undecided. i do believe that life/God/the universe sends opportunities or difficulties our way but i think it's up to us to determine what happens next

3: Do you ever have dejà vu?
i sometimes have a sense that i have seen events before. it is always mundane and it is never overpowering, so is that deja vu or is it just that life consists of many similar moments?

4: Have you ever read someone's mind?
reading minds is all about knowing a person or reading their face. i do that all the time but thats not mind reading.
i will never forget the day somebody said "i'd rather jump over her than walk round her", there was a short delay then suddenly me and another guy who i didnt really know just started to giggle like lunatics. maybe i read a mind that day or maybe i just met another freak

5: Have you ever had a premonition?
nope

i'm supposed to write more questions and tag more people ......gah!
this is where the easy distraction is good: "i forgot, sir"