little earth stories

E's first Christmas

2011-12-28T13:12:00.000+10:00

This Christmas was my first with K's family, and our first with the boy, who celebrated five months (three months gestation) yesterday with his first laugh out loud - so cute!

Naturally it made sense to have Xmas at the Cape, free beach house and all. We acquired a tree from the *ahem* roadside and tizzed it up with ornaments made by E's great nana (!), including a crocheted angel. There was wine, a delicious 'pot luck' lunch where everyone made a dish and which came together exquisitely under our new (and very sandbagged to prevent it flying away) gazebo on the front lawn, heritage values be-damned.

E was thoroughly doted on and spoiled by his nana, aunties and uncles and received all manner of softies, finger puppets, a mobile, bibs, clothes, Baby Banz, a Laura Veirs CD for kiddos, and signed kids books from his kids-book-editor aunty. Santa came through with a full length rashie and sunhat, as well as some funky jeans and Baby Legs. He also left a note for E (thanks to Uncle R who had a few more clues than K about parental duties in regard to S. Claus). The editor-for-an-edgy-Melbourne-publisher (the other editor in the family) heeded a not-too-subtle tweet about book cravings which are being presently devoured, and also curated some funky new music, a foodie calendar and TV viewing for us. We also received a Nice Bottle of Red, a new coffee pot and a proper cane picnic basket. A boon all-round!

Boxing Day, the wind dropped and we headed to the beach and lunched and swam in a tidal lagoon, where the boy tried out his new rashie. On our return, we wandered down the back to the Picnic Tables With a View, drank Pimms and scoffed various soft and moulded cheeses as the sky turned a golden pink. Very satisfactory!

It all flowed very nicely, with kitchen elves making sure the cooking and washing up all happened with minimal input from me. And to top off the gains and festivities, the boy slept a whole NINE unabridged hours on Xmas eve. Woohoo! I am convinced by the new going to bed early routine (we had been quite laissez faire with bedtime, as E just seemed to sleep when he needed to as a newborn).

The door will swing open again tomorrow for more visitors, just as we've bade the last of the Lusks fare-thee-well.

*any errors are the result of attempting to post via iPad, and not the result of having consumed more alcohol in recent days than in the past year altogether.

dog days, and blessed relief

2011-12-12T15:59:00.001+10:00

Hello, stranger. I miss you. I miss the other blog, too. Here's a bit of an update.

Now that the House Move to End all House Moves (and I sincerely hope it is the end of all house moving, at least for a while) is dusted (and that is a whole other post), things are settling into more of a routine. Sort of. And for the first time since E was born (nearly five months ago!), life seems, um, normal. Sort of.

*Attaches self to wooden surface and doesn't let go*

But let me backtrack. I've found it very hard to deal with (read: had high anxiety over) E being in distress a lot of the time. Since we've had him home from hospital, he has been either vomiting, distressed with gas or reflux (and there was a horrible week of constipation too), or crazed by a hunger that can't be sated despite whole days of cluster feeding (and associated vomiting). It is just the worst, not being able to help his pain, watching his eyes fold into a thousand crinkles. And then some days, for no apparent reason, he would not go in either carrier. Or the bouncer. Or bed. But would happily sleep when attached to me. I've spent untold hours on the couch with him, or pacing aimless laps of the house (with requisite scurrying around afterwards with a wet tea towel cleaning up vomit splats). I have resented the endless washing of bottles (it really is endless with a baby who feeds like this one). And I desperately missed walking (I used to get two decent walks in a day, to and from work) and yoga. My mind went spare and my body hurt.

Amidst these days I started feeling weepy again and have struggled mentally with the transition to baby-dom. I've thought horrid thoughts and wondered why the hell I'd chosen to become a mum. (And then felt sinfully guilty, just to top it off.) I've even thought longingly about going back to desk - probably because I got more done inside the bureacratic machine than I do with a baby. And that explains why doing the dishes AND laundry feels like a major accomplishment. Also, I'm someone who needs alone-time like I need air, and coffee. Not only did I have no alone-time, I did not have time to do all those basic things that come before free alone-time (shower/toilet/coffee,etc). 'Hellooo?!' Yes, I can hear you who have had babies boggling at my propensity to state the bleeding obvious. But for me, this is new.

It feels like we've turned a corner in the past week or so. Most of our gains are the result of E sleeping more during the day. Which has given me - oh holy of holies - some time to myself. Yesterday I made muffins (blueberry + oat) AND did yoga. Unheard of. I've also been able to explore more feeding options, at last. We tried (and swiftly ditched) goat's milk formula (see constipation, above) and I'm investigating breastmilk sharing and making my own formula (both exercises in complication, especially living on an island, but very much worth checking out). I'm also ending the nappy guilt arising from our unpreparedness for E's early arrival and subsequent protracted house move. I did buy half a dozen clothies early on, but these are now too small for him.

I'm also tweaking our routine. K strung a mobile above the couch where E now sleeps during the day and this is helping keep him amused once he wakes, and sometimes - *gasp* - get back to sleep! I have some 'sanity-busters' within arm's reach to keep me from going spare during the endless feeds: a book, a notepad, my phone. K usually clocks on for dadda-time when he gets home mid-afternoon, and I'm using this time to do yoga and walk. Oh, wordless rapture.

But best of all, E seems to be doing better. He is more content, less prone to reflux and wind, though still vomits quite a bit (and I think this is in part due to the amount he eats, which is a LOT - at nearly 3 months gestational age, he's now in six-month old + clothes). And he is smiling and even silently giggling! And gurgling back when he is sung or talked to - way too cute. All the awesome bits that seemed like they would never arrive, finally have.

All this has given me hope that I will get to do some of the things on my spiralling wishlist. I bought some Very Expensive Wool before E was born (the fantastically named 'Squishy', in hues of seafoam and teal) and have a pattern for a rug bookmarked. I'd love to finish the paper crane mobile I started making when I was pregnant. And my mind gapes at the driftwood mobiles I could make! Our fledgling vegie garden could do with more tending. Oh and I would cook, and read more. And write. And write. And write...

Nevermind the things I should be doing. Ahem, Medicare application, healthcare rebates, mindless administrivia. La-la-la-la-laaa....

We also need to unpack the spare room of its boxes before we have K's family staying over Christmas, and a revolving door of friends to start the new year. Which I am very much looking forward to, btw, if not without some trepidation. Social minimalist that I am.

Anyway, that's all for now. See you in a bit, with any luck.

we live here

2011-10-27T14:35:00.003+10:00

Now I have that off my chest, to share the ridiculously amazing station we find ourselves in. It is nothing short of stupendous. This place, here...

I've mentioned it before here, and here. Thanks to an amazing stroke of luck/karma/patience/brilliance, and after battling for nearly a year to find work to complement his solo web design, K landed a ranger posting. On Moreton Island. It is so perfectly him. I've never seen a job fit anyone as well as this fits him. It's as though some godly hand reached down from the sky and granted him his lifetime's wish - though I'm sure he remembers the interview somewhat differently.

And it was all so perfectly timed. Fast forward a month from the job offer. We had a baby. Needed family-sized lodgings. And now, find ourselves in the assistant lighthouse keeper's cottage ('cottage' reflecting the heritage value of our lodgings, not the size).

And the location? So perfectly us (though only in our wildest dreams). Living on a windswept sunny Cape, a prime whale-watching spot. On the world's third-largest sand island, all but a whisker of it national park. Remote, salty, thick with coastal heath. We'd wondered aloud before, how one goes about finding a posting at a lighthouse. In the end, it found us.

It's like I blinked and life changed. Baby. Lighthouse. I know not what, next. And it sort of doesn't matter. Life is grand :)

milk (and other catastrophies)

2011-10-22T10:29:00.000+10:00

I have been wanting to write for so long now (writing as therapy etc) but have been utterly bereft of time. It is hard enough finding windows in the day to perform minimal personal hygiene, let alone reflect and document. Lord knows how some bloggers do it. Anyway, to catch up...

We brought E home from hospital on the second day of Spring, after three long and tres difficult nights rooming in at hospital*. K had only been back at work on the island for a day when the doctors suddenly declared, after several days of breastfeeding without tube feed top-ups during the day (babe was initially fed via naso-gastric tube as he was born before he learnt to suck), that babe was fit to go home. Naturally I was super excited, though with only 24 hours notice, barely managed to dash home between feeds and pack a bag for our hospital stay. The short notice meant K couldn't get back from the island to join us for our first night of rooming in. Which in the end was no drama as night one went really well. Thankfully he was there for the second night, which was, at best, traumatic. After a whole day and night on our own, without any tube feeds, E's hunger caught up with him by night two. By the wee hours, he was in such distress that the breastfeeding that had gone so well in the daytime in special care turned to mud. The special care nurse assigned to check in on us took one look at him and said 'that is a hungry baby'. I'd been doing everything possible to boost a low milk supply since his birth, however it was now clear I did not have nearly enough to feed him. After anguished hours, and hankies full of tears - and then some more - I gave him a bottle, thinking it would probably be the end of breastfeeding for us but at least he wouldn't go hungry nor be in such distress.

Reputable breastfeeding advice says that low milk supply is rare, that all babies fuss, especially at night. I knew this was different. His crazed hunger coincided with the withdrawal of regular tube feeds, and we had only been breastfeeding solidly during the daytime (mostly) without tube-feed top ups, for a few days. I was feeding or expressing eight times a day, had been on Domperidone and fenugreek for weeks, tried (and failed) using a supply line, and read and tried everything else: protein-loading, guzzling water and herbal nursing teas, massaging pressure points and ~~trying~~ failing to rest and keep stress at bay. I saw enough lactation consultants to qualify as one myself. Still, I only ever expressed a mournful milli-fraction of what might be considered in the orbit of normal.

In the end, I obsessed. The whole 'trying to find a solution' thing just depressed me, to the point of utter despair. I cried and sobbed and self-diagnosed PND, the whole experience being far more traumatic than the birth, and coming on top of an already stressful time. (Oh, and did I mention we ~~were~~ are also moving house?) I obsessed about how tragic it was, because he breastfeeds beautifully. And my god, how I loaded my body with goodness for him when I was pregnant. The supply issue was the icing on the cake of the whole baby thing not going at all how I had expected.

In the end I let go the pursuit of a magic bullet, for my own sanity, and accepted that we would have to formula feed in the main, while I continued my supply-boosting regime. I have accepted it, but still hate it. (Other than the obvious nutritional and wellbeing differences, formula and bottles are a lot of work, give him loads of wind, and combined with breastfeeding, are mind-bogglingly time consuming.) We did buy donor milk for a while, but at $80 a pop for 20 x 100ml bottles which may or may not be full, plus a car trip or courier from the Gold Coast, probably won't continue with this. Anyway. I am grateful that my initial fears with the first bottle have not eventuated and we have been able to continue to breastfeed, even if it constitutes a small part (volume wise) of his feeds.

There has been much agonising over why, why, why. My GP reckons my body wasn't ready. My midwife reckons that's crap, though I noticed that many first-time mums in special care seemed to struggle with supply. But then others didn't. I think it's a combination of his very early arrival, blood loss at the birth, and a possible predisposition to low supply. Perhaps my body was not ready. I had not laid down any breastfeeding fat stores during pregnancy - I was possibly skinnier immediately after the birth than before I was pregnant (it annoys me when people get jealous of this because I would be happily fat to properly breastfeed). I could also be a candidate for the confidence bustingly named (excuse the pun) 'insufficient glandular tissue'. I think the early separation played a large part... it's tempting to wonder how things would have gone if I'd got to hold him after the birth, if he wasn't stuffed away in an isolette for those first weeks, if I'd been able to feed him round the clock when he first learnt, at around 34 weeks, to suck. Also, no one suggested I start expressing until at least 12 or more hours after he was born, and then the interruptions on the maternity ward meant this was nigh impossible. Anyway, a girl could go spare wondering...

As for the depression, it has all but abated. In fact I have not followed up on a referral to an antenatal psychologist - partly due to the logistical issues of living between the city and the island, and partly because I've cleared the worst of it. OK, and partly because I'm not a talker. I'm keeping a watching brief. I recently ran into an old work colleague who now has two babes - both born about a month early - and it was so good to briefly talk to someone who has had a baby in neonatal care. Because I have felt somehow an unequal member of the mummy club. All of the preparations you do, all the things other mums tell you when you're pregnant about having a newborn relate to having a full-term baby. None of this really held true for us. It's a totally different road, one we've walked with the guidance of nurses and Google searches. Apart from a few couples in hospital we gelled with, we haven't really had that peer support, I guess.

Anyway, life evolves, and I've realised it's not the worst thing that could happen. We are more preoccupied now with wind and reflux (if I can be so bold as to call it that), and when those nasties abate, enjoying E becoming more alert and interested in the world. Let it be said, I am completely over the politics of breastfeeding. And moving on...

*Stupidly, after choosing to spend two nights instead of one rooming in, we were made to spend a third night after E lost 40 grams between discharge from special care and our planned day of departure from hospital. Bitter, much. The third night is now just a blur and I think they would have discharged us regardless of any further small weight loss as they belatedly gave in to the realisation that the environment was not doing us any favours.

our little earlybird

2011-08-24T22:25:00.000+10:00

That last photo of me at 30 weeks was the last one taken of me pregnant. A week later, we had the shock of our lives. I'm not sure that I've actually pieced it all together until now. Anyway, it happened like this...

On the weekend I caved in to my nesting energy and cleaned and scrubbed the floors. As in, on my knees. And then walked to the video store. And back. Up a stupidly big hill. So on Monday, I attributed the mounting back and pelvic pain I was feeling to over exertion. On Tuesday it got worse and I left work early feeling headachey and 'off'. That night I could not get comfortable on the couch and as soon as I went to bed noticed the pain was actually coming and going. Harbouring terrible suspicions, I googled 'early onset labour' and spent a mostly sleepless night in considerable discomfort and denial, thinking 'it can't be, this is too soon'. I got myself a hot water bottle and practised the positions I learnt in yoga. K, home from the Island two days early for training (thank god), got some (but not much) sleep.

Soon as the sun came up I called my midwife and reached one of the other midwives in my group - my midwife was on annual leave. I explained the pain I was having. Maria told me to meet her at the pregnancy assessment and observation unit at hospital at 9am. Her lack of concern relaxed me a bit. Our hospital is just round the corner so we ate breakfast and got ready. I remember thinking in the shower that I would really take to the bath when it came time to actually give birth, as the hot water was great for easing the pain. Denial still intact. We packed a bag of snacks and I threw in my hypno-birthing book and K threw in his board shorts (for the bath/shower)... just in case.

At hospital I was shown to a recliner but couldn't sit down. Finally someone came and took us into a room for tests. I had to lay on the bed on my back which was so uncomfortable. We both relaxed a bit more when we heard the Bunyip's heartbeat. I was given antibiotics for a suspected urinary tract infection. And panadeine, suggested when a very annoying doctor said I looked like I was in a lot of pain. The final assessment was an internal ultrasound. The operator mucked around for a few minutes, then looked disbelieving and uttered the words "fully effaced". I then proceeded to have one of those strangely calm 'this is not happening' moments. I'd always skipped over the 'premature babies' section in Up the Duff. Why would I need to read that?

Maria put on her best faux-calm face and said "right, this baby is coming, we need to prepare for birth suite" and relayed the excellent outcomes for babies born at 31 weeks. K and I looked at each other (more faux-calm) and said stuff like "we'll be fine". I got a jab of steroids in the leg to help ready Bunyip's under-developed lungs. Maria said I'd done really well to complete the first stage of labour without much pain, to which I replied, "actually it WAS a lot of pain", and to K, "I told you it hurt". He'd been worried my pain threshold was really low because I tend to yelp - through surprise more than pain - at minor stuff. Scoff.

Let me just say, we feel so incredibly lucky to have a gorgeous healthy baby, delivered without any cutting or instruments. But because it happened nine weeks early, everything else was the complete opposite of the birth I had hoped for and visualised. The next eleven hours went something like this... wheelchair, hospital gown, continuous electronic fetal monitoring. Which meant laying on my back - or at a pinch, on my side, since my entire labour was IN MY BACK (Bunyip was posterior, like me as I later found out). During this time, no food, limited fluid intake (I verged on dehydration), no toilet, a procession of doctors, student doctors and internal exams. Once in birth suite, Maria told me I could start pushing, which I did for a while. A subsequent internal exam by one of the doctors showed I was in fact only about 7cm dilated, so I now had to supress the urge to push - which was a bit like trying to stop going to the toilet once you've started after you've been hanging on forever, plus BUCKETLOADS of pain. Contractions were short but intense and coming one on top of the other. The only thing I could remember from yoga was the breathing - not strange considering I could not use any of the movements in my prostate position. (I discovered K has some degree of post-traumatic stress the other day when I breathed out with 'horsey' lips, which I am now forbidden to do, ever again). I remember vowing to never clean the floors again. For the record, it was a urinary tract infection - not the floor-cleaning - that brought labour on early.

After possibly an hour or several (time blur) of trying to breathe through contractions and eventually becoming unconvinced that I was not pushing, I told Maria it was getting increasingly difficult. In hindsight, I am not convinced that she or the doctors could really tell how my labour was progressing - at one point I got the severe shakes and thought I was going to vomit and recognised this as transition, however it was ages before anyone gave me the all-clear to push.

Anyway, the doctors told us Bunyip's water bag was bulging and they were worried about cord prolapse - serious but more readily managed than placental abruption which was also on the cards and the reason for various interventions which were suggested to us. Poor K, I realised about a week afterwards, was quietly falling apart on his quick 'breaks' (read difficult phone updates to parents) outside the birth suite, worried he was going to lose one of us. I was too focused on managing the pain to register how he was doing or really think much about the possibility of anything other than a healthy baby... I was so focused I couldn't even look at K or at doctors when they came and spoke to us, though listened intently and kept my talking to a bare minimum as even that required energy I could not spare.

Despite my focus, I was aware of tensions between Maria and some of the doctors - apparently she copped a serve for letting me start pushing early. As unsettling and distracting as this was, I was glad I'd read about the medical and midwifery approaches to labour in The Birth Wars, and the potential for these tensions to affect outcomes.

Knowing that any intervention was likely to kick off a cascade of same, I eventually agreed to an epidural (the upside being it was our decision, made after much deliberation and out of concern for Bunyip's wellbeing), to having my waters broken with one of those needle things (again for Bunyip's wellbeing), and after little progress (probably because I was laying down), Syntocinin (to speed things up for little Bunyip). And some other injection (whatever) to expel the placenta (due to concerns of excessive bleeding). All these had been definitely off the cards up until the moment we conceded their necessity for our tiny babe.

On one of his 'breaks', K told me a swarm of neonatal resus people had converged on the little antechamber next to the birth suite. Which was reassuring but at the same time quite worrying. After what seemed like forever, it was declared I could now push, which was much easier than managing contractions - though perhaps this is the epidural talking? I pushed for a while for what seemed like little progress. Unfortunately the epidural meant it was hard to tell where the baby was, until he was ready to be born and I felt the sting. It was the most amazing thing to watch his head emerge! My hopes that K would catch the baby were now all but lost in the thick of events.

Though things didn't go as we'd expected, there were some good bits. The choices sucked, but they were still our choices. Maria was awesome. She met me at hospital at 9am and wheeled me to my room just shy of midnight, and in between was a staunch advocate. We had a great doctor for Bunyip's birth (not the annoying one), the only OB I'd seen (once) during my pregnancy. He was on my wavelength. I was chuffed that I managed the pain without letting it dominate me, though admittedly the epidural I was never going to have was a godsend, even if at the business end it was only working on my left side.

And the truly great bits... K stuck with me like glue and kept me positive and calm throughout. We helped keep each other together, I think. We watched our baby being born. And discovered he was a boy! When he plopped out, he gazed slowly at us and let out a cry before being rushed to the resus room next door. Our little boy was fine - a lot of bruising to his poor little noggin after sitting so low inside me, and on oxygen for 16 hours - but otherwise great. He has wispery beach blonde hair and the cutest little lamb's bleat that makes my heart melt.

So many nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit have said he's a great size for his age. I was so chuffed when one commended me for feeding him so well. I know I did, but it was so lovely to have someone who wasn't there, and doesn't know me, recognise it. Especially because I feel like I didn't finish growing him. And ~~am now~~ was struggling to feed him.

The saddest part has been the separation. Not getting to hold him until day two (or three? I can't remember now). This is our first cuddle... can you tell we've been teary? I held him and all I could think was how small he was and that I wanted to put him back inside.

It was also hard being plonked in a room on the maternity ward after the birth, with a woman and her bub, born two hours after mine. Spending that night on my own without K, in that room, in utter disbelief and sadness. No baby in my belly, no baby in my arms. And every day thereafter, leaving him at hospital every night, though it has got a lot easier. I need to constantly remind myself how lucky we are to have him, healthy and growing and coming home to us soon. I am crying writing this, nearly three weeks later. I sometimes get flushes of jealousy when I see very pregnant women - and there are many where I spend my days at the Mater Mothers Hospital. I missed almost the entire third trimester... we didn't even get to our antenatal classes (so thankful I did active birth yoga really early).

It's a strange sadness, mixed with elation. There is a video of me touching Ellery in his humidicrib, at two or three days old. I'm smiling, but it's a smile I've never seen on my face before. Like I've been pummelled by love, bloated with pride, and strung out with weariness.

And now, four weeks after his birth, the days are becoming more joyous as we bond and learn to breastfeed. He'll be in neonatal care until we have breastfeeding down solid. Yesterday the nurses started talking about it being only a matter of a week or two before we can bring him home. And we still have no clothes that fit him (he swims in four '0's), no nappies, no change mat, pram, anything really. We were so unprepared. But in another sense, so ready for this, the completely unexpected.

The past four weeks have been the ultimate surrender.

Welcome to the world, gorgeous little boy.

Ellery Sage Lusk, born 9.06pm, 27 July 2011 at 31 weeks and one day, weighing 1922 grams (about 4 ounces).

---

Life After Desk begins again...

retrospective

2011-07-17T19:48:00.000+10:00

Early new year,

dinner with K's family.

Eating sushi, drinking wine,

unbeknownst for the last time in a while.

We dream of you,

yet have not an inkling.

...

Just for fun, I take a test.

I'm not even sure how they work.

He's wide-eyed when I ask him what he thinks

the faint second line means.

Probably should have mentioned I was taking the test.

Lots of googling ensues, we think yes,

but daren't get too excited.

The doctor confirms!!

4 weeks.

...

Fast forward - since this time positively dragged!

At 16 weeks,
starting to feel a little more comfortable and excited.

By now I have a back-catalogue of dreams about blond-haired boys
but we've decided we can wait to find out.

The little nausea I had is gone.

And the grumpy wench who purportedly took up in my skin
has fled, leaving us to our calm and happy bliss.

In less than a week I will feel your little pulses for the first time.

...

Nearly 21 weeks.

We saw you through the womb and my goodness you are cute!

Tiny hands, fingers, feet and ears,
such an active little babe.
Even Dadda has seen you move now.

Can't wait til you grow some more and show yourself to the world!

...


By 25 weeks I work out that my really hard belly is practice contractions... already! Lower back pain has stopped me walking to work for the remainder it seems but the physio steers me right. You've been listening to Mozart, Saint-Saens, the Middle East and my bathroom rendition of Frank Mills by the Lemonheads, the only non-cheesy song I know that sounds like a lullaby. Big-time exciting news, your Dadda got a job on Moreton Island! You'll grow up with dolphins, turtles, dugong and whales, our little beach babe. Everything we dreamed seems to be falling in place. ...

Hello baby!
(That grin? Your Dadda just spoke your maybe-name!)

By 26 weeks life is busier than ever,
especially now K is on the Island.

You are growing daily
and are a constant reminder of things more important
than the work which preoccupies me.

You love to sit in the sun
and by the way you bounce around at dinner
I can tell you're going to love your food!

...

28 weeks... 7 months!

Boy or girl? You've got us stumped.
Your legs were crossed when we saw you at 20 weeks,
so a workmate says you must be a girl, all practicalities observed.

Another had an out-of-the-blue premonition, and says boy.

Either way, I fail to get my head around
the reality of you,
connect you with the empty little clothes we've got you.

Though it finally hits me that we'll be moving house
- across the water, no less -
with a brand new babe.

OMG.

...

30 weeks

About a week ago I think you turned head down,
your quick little hiccups now feel really low.

Your movements have changed - lots of rolling, wavelike movements
as limbs push against diminishing space.
Your Dad likes to tickle you and watch you squirm.

Materially, we are not ready for you,
nesting thwarted
as we wait for news of a lease on the Island.

Yoga is all the preparation I need.
And the wisdom of generations
before birthing left the home.

Not long now til I finish work and can concentrate
on our journey together to welcome you into the world.

...

tbc

momentum

2011-05-11T22:46:00.000+10:00

It's a slippery sucker... and I've been watching it slip right through my fingertips.

I've lost a bit of momentum in places. Am now trying to start walking again after a sedentary spell. I got a nasty bug a little while back and didn't walk to/from work for about two weeks. And it has rained, leading to even less walking. Then I had 11 continuous days off work (woohoo!) which translated into very little walking - or actually quite a lot of walking but all squished into one day when we circumnavigated Coochiemudlo Island on foot.

Anyway, I hate not walking every day. I get stiff and sore and stodgy without it. But once you've stopped a routine, it's very hard to pick up again. But I'm getting there.

The other thing that's been bugging me a lot is my complete lack of writing. I do plenty at work, mostly a complete borefest. But the less writing I do for me, the harder it is to do any at all. And I mean, really hard. It's taken me a good ten days to finish writing this featherlight post.

I'm not really sure why it's been hard, or getting harder. Maybe there's too much other stuff occupying productive brainspace - a combination of seemingly endless administrivia, and endlessly fascinating pregnancy/birth/baby stuff (and there is SO much to absorb).

Anyway, I'm hoping that acknowledging these ruts will help me haul myself out of them.

And not to dwell on the losses. While I'm losing momentum in places, other things are gathering pace. The bunyip has been making itself felt for the past three and a half weeks. I was centre stage in a meeting the other day and the little monkey started dancing its heart out! My hand shot to my belly to soothe the robust little pokes. Unbelievable that a tiny 20-week old human can squirm so much! A momentum all of its own... and another post of its own - hello inspiration!

a campfire kiss

2011-04-03T22:42:00.002+10:00

I love this photo. I love it to bits. K took it. We're at Woody Head, Bundjalung National Park, just starting out on our first camping holiday last winter. It might've even been his birthday. We spent the day trekking across windy beaches and headlands to Iluka, where we had a late pub lunch in the sun. And headed back to a campfire where we ate a simple meal, and goosed around with a couple of torches and some time lapse photography.

Time disappears. And you weave through ups and downs. And try to bottle happiness. Or at least catch it on film. Thank goodness he did.

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and difficult as that. Leunig

the bunyip

2011-04-01T21:26:00.000+10:00

Though we've become expert keepers of the secret, it's bloody hard when everyone is having babies.

Yep, we are growing ourselves a little bunyip!! I am nearly 15 weeks!

It's been hard to believe it's real, considering my general wellness. Though the exhaustion, ravenous hunger, sore boobs, canine sense of smell and cravings for orange juice (and a nausea-induced pie and chips binge) are giveaways. Oh and the small bump which I can now tell is not just gas and bloating. Which has swallowed my waist and half my wardrobe along with it.

It all became a bit more real at the 12 week scan. According to the scan lady, our bunyip's a 'sleeper'... it had its head buried in the placenta and would not budge, despite her furious prodding. Not even after the doctor was called in and made me do star jumps in an untied gown! It dug it's heels in (like someone I know) and showed the camera its little bum (that one's from the father's side - not kidding).

According to the genetic counsellor at the scan place (Betsy Peach - how cool is that name? - perfect for a fast-talker with a thick Yankee accent), I have the lowest risk rating possible for chromosomal abnormalities. According to Betsy's computer's calculations, my risk rating (slightly elevated to start with because of my age) based on the scan and blood test is on par with that of a 15 year old! Woot!!

Am also feeling pretty chuffed that I've kept up walking to and from work every day: an hour all up, and getting longer (in duration not distance!). Though the walks home are becoming harder, mostly because of the hills and because I'm totally exhausto at end of day. Lucky for me, K walks in to meet me and pushes me up the hills while administering back rubs. :)

I got a second sneaky look at the bunyip yesterday at an echocardiography appointment (for a 'flow murmur' which is apparently a harmless and pretty common thing in pregnancy) - and it was waving its arms and legs and rolling all around! So maybe not a sleeper.

Well, this'll test if anyone's still reading this thing!

#madeinvictoria #janfebmarchaprilmayjunejulyaugseptfast

fillings and gaps

2011-03-31T17:39:00.000+10:00

Poor neglected blog. Thank goodness for Firefox's password memory thingie, as I doubt my own would have got me any editorial privilege here. If you've stumbled here from somewhere else, you might like to keep stumbling to my other blog where my online energies go (as opposed to this one where they clearly don't).

I guess a small bit of updating is in order. *Applies time-lapse technique.* So. December, we visited Uluru. Pictorial evidence here. Christmas, Binginwarri, shamefully scant pictorial evidence here. (Oh and finally upgraded my Flickr account - way less commitment than setting up a new photo blog... refer first point.) Stayed dry through the floods and gagged on my overuse of the word 'surreal'. Baked a little, and found myself inadvertently on a small bandwagon. Got totally addicted to Twitter, various blogs and my mate R's little bub (not in any particular order of course). Went swagging in the rain at Brunswick Heads. Despaired the lack of sunshine. Saw Sufjan Stevens, most awesome Christmas present ever. Whistlestop visit to Melbourne to see Mum in hospital. Started yoga classes after the longest absence. Discovered a genius recipe for steamed chicken.

On the work front, I moved back to the old policy job, after the person who's seat I warmed for a year in manager-land returned. The old-new job has proved thusfar better than expected. Enjoying being back in the policy head space, and actually doing something quite different to what I'd previously done (win). In other work news, the Uluru job didn't eventuate :( ... which is not to say it mightn't yet. We're staying put in Brisvegas for now and K is continuing to build the web empire. Anyone need a WordPress site built or hosted?

There was probably some other stuff in there too. Oh yeah, I finally twisted someone's arm to play Scrabble with me!

Well, there is some other news, but that deserves its own post. ;)

hell or high water

2011-01-12T00:52:00.000+10:00

Inner Brisbane, January 29, 1974. Bruce Postle/The Age

I wasn't quite sure how to start this post. It's been a while and I'm out of rhythm here. But today feels quite surreal. So I'll go with that.

Went to work this morning after having yesterday off - sick all weekend with throat lurgie that migrated to chest. Anyway. Woke up nauseous but optimistic so K (now in lurgie-dom too) dropped me in. We'd been shocked last night to see images of the devastation in Toowoomba. Early reports were saying the floodwaters were headed for Brisbane and these would coincide with a king tide. It wasn't talked up, but K had picked up some stuff from the stupid-market and fuelled the car. At work I was whisked into a meeting straight off the bat. But after that, everything seemed to grind to a halt. It was all flood talk, people checking the news, calling family, wondering whether to leave. News reports were now saying the flooding would rival that of the mythical 1974 floods.

A colleague walked by my desk and recalled a photograph from the '74 floods of someone diving into the water from an awning at the old Festival Hall, where high rise apartments now stand in its place. 'Festival Towers' are just round the corner from my work.

Albert Street, CBD, January 1974.
Copyright State Library of Queensland, author unknown

Our executive director came round several times telling people to leave if they needed to. I encouraged my team to leave and made sure everyone was OK to get home. Just after lunch, I left, worried that if I stayed it might be difficult to get home, which is across the river. I'd already seen photos on the ABC news site of the river encroaching on Davies Park at West End, just down the road from us.

I was one of the last to go. It was eerie outside, the middle of the day but like peak hour with everyone heading home. Traffic was banked up. People were running. Rain fell from low grey skies - as it has for several ~~weeks~~ months. I wondered whether I'd get home my usual way, across the Goodwill pedestrian bridge. I always walk, even in the rain. (My pack-cover and wet shoes have become normal.) Anyway, the busway on the southside had closed at 12pm. K came to meet me, as he usually does. We walked along the river in the Botanical gardens. There's a looped boardwalk out through the mangroves there we often take on the way home. It was underwater. Surreal.

The Goodwill bridge was fine and gave us a birdseye view of the now very high and fast-flowing river. Full of debris. Gangways to floating CityCat pontoons were angled upward to meet the river, instead of their usual downwards tilt. The pontoons were at the very top of the pylons. We wondered what would happen to the pontoons as the river continued to rise beyond the pylons. I've since heard people say they've seen pontoons unloosed and flowing down the river.

At home we hovered over our computers, where K was streaming some tap to a police scanner. I thought Twitter might explode and cursed people jamming up the qldfloods hashtag. Tweets were running so fast as to be an illegible blur on TweetDeck. Anna Bligh held her first press conference at 3pm. I fell in hero-love. She was calm, in control and sympathetic. Clearly teary, even. Twitter subsequently went mad again in praise of Premier.

Tonight we helped K's brother's girlfriend and her sister move their furniture and stuff to the top floor of their townhouse. They (and their poor little spooked kitty) are staying at K's brother's place which is probably one of the highest points in Brisbane. Leaving their place it was odd to see people still sitting inside neighbouring townhouses watching TV. Everyone in their street had been warned to move cars etc to higher ground! People are strange.

So tonight we are fine but feel kind of useless. I heard that 75 percent of Queensland is underwater. Our place is safe and will continue to be so - high on the hill. Everything is damp as it has been for days and we have garbage bags over a window that doesn't shut properly. But we have water in jerry cans and non-perishable food. And internet connections, for now.

I have no idea whether I'll be able to get to work tomorrow. I suspect it's not such a good idea.

All is eerily quiet. For now.

greener pastures

2010-12-04T17:27:00.000+10:00

It's been so long that I've gone beyond filling in the gaps. So I'll just start with now. Now, we are preparing to visit Uluru. This time next week, we'll be out there for a mini-break. Well, the break is for me. K has an interview for a ranger job. For a range of reasons it makes sense. If When he gets it, he'll move out there, working a ten days on-four days off roster. I'll stay here for the time being, til we see how things pan out. We'll see each other once a fortnight. It will be hard. But good, in many ways. I'm excited by the prospect of getting to discover the place. I have not been there since my first visit as a sixteen (?) year old. And excited to be moving forward with life-plans. K, I think, will enjoy the return to a social workspace, after months of web design from the ~~spare room~~ studio. And it will put us in a position to do something about our renewed case of Tassie Mania.

Indeed, it seems the stars are screaming change. At least two group-lings we know are moving to Melbourne town. (And hey, if they must move, what better place?) Mum is finally getting some traction with the medical world, after a fruitless year. For me, the current work gig is coming to an end, and I can't help but embrace the change. I'll be back to my policy post. And if all goes well in the desert, moving out there.

Anyway, that's probably all I've got for now... we are off on this very wet, blustery eve to hear Joel Salatin talk. Which I just know is going to make the Tassie Mania bug latch on.

a general malaise

2010-10-12T23:41:00.001+10:00

Perhaps not quite the headline you'd expect after the preceding tales of love and seaside holidays. If, in fact, you were expecting anything at all, following an entirely silent September here. Life's been roaring along. But something's amiss. I've not been able to quite put my finger on it til today. Self-diagnosis: a delayed bout of post-holiday blues. Fuelled along by an unusually rainy and grey Spring. I've never seen it rain like this... nor missed the sun so much in Queensland.

As usual, work is the nub of my irk. The return from holidays was not so bad... in fact, work was entirely reasonable for a couple of weeks. In the post-holiday glow, I conceded that I would never be entirely on top of it all. Seven peeps to manage, a shirtload of work and an information environment that makes my multi-tab webtrawling a playground. Nevermind that it is kind of a playground. Anyhoo. So the work is amping up. And I've come to a disturbing realisation. Sheepishly, kind of late in the piece. After most of this year warming this particular roost, I've realised that perhaps I don't really like it so much. I don't want to be responsible for other people any more. I don't want to continuously struggle to stay on top of the ridiculous information flow. I'm sick of churning out god-damn widgets. And I hate having to always be 'on', no matter how crap I feel. There's no checking the news, attending to personal errands or taking time for lunch. Sure, I was happy to give it a whirl, and hang about for a bit while they needed me. But now, on the cusp of potentially yet another extension, I feel very much backed into a corner. Like I've been stealthily groomed for it. Maybe I'm naive. I should have anticipated. It gets worse. Next week I am being the Director (bah!) and have to go to Sydney to represent Queensland at a national thingy. Sheesh. I do not feel the love.

Anyway, it all still hangs. Perhaps I'll get to go back to my policy post. I'm trying to remember why I latched the desk shackles back on, chill out a bit and enjoy all the great stuff outside work. But still. I went to the fabulous Women of Letters last week (my cousin said go, then K's sister invited me: fated?). The premise is that a bunch of talented writerly folk read letters they have penned to their most treasured posession. It was funny, inspiring and revealing, and totally worth it even though it made me feel old. (Especially so when I heard the next day that, after I'd bailed, K's sister who is an editor partied on into the eve with the booky-cool crowd, performing a karaoke duet with Marieke Hardy!) Anyway, moving on. Reflecting on the evening's monologues, I realised... I could write like that! I can write like that! I did write like that, once! What has happened to my writing?! Of course, thus ensued my own monologue, along the lines of 'what am I doing with my life, I'm creatively driven, why am I still chained to this god-boring public service desk? Gah! Double gah!! Holy GAH!!!'.

And that's where I'll end this little rant. It's way past my bedtime. And I'm 'on' first thing tomorrow. Any advice about what to take for a general malaise would be much appreciated.

winter beach wanderlust

2010-08-29T19:10:00.002+10:00

We headed south along the coastal road from Brisbane, clutching a map and our weary souls. Excited not to have a destination. And to be taking our first holiday together. ♥ We spent nearly three weeks swagging, mostly in national parks. Oh, the beauty. Spectacular! And places I hadn't heard of. Bundjalung, Yuraygir, Crowdy Head, Hat Head and many more.

What I loved? Being present for dawns and dusks. Open fires and woodsmoke. The chill, clean salt air. Horizons. The endless magnificence of sky. Its shifting constellations. Observing the passage of time by the moon, from new to full. Watching dunes dance with coastal heathland, wetland dance with the beach, playing out a milennia-long negotiation of habitat borders. Wildflowers coming into bloom. Everywhere, the heady scent of Acacia longifolia. Banksias so fulsome, like baby echidnas up trees, bristled snouts pointing skyward.

I positively lusted for the subtlety of colour in the landscape. The windswept coastal daisy, bloom and foliage so pale as though its colour's been blown out of it. Driftwood like dirty snow. Creamy paperbarks and late afternoon ice-pink rockpools. Opalescent shorelines. Midnight blue lakes and barely-purple dune shadows. Amber-rimmed pandanus and casuarina silhouettes. The cool molten twilight sky.

We saw whales - indeed we were close enough, from a headland in Hat Head National Park, to hear one breathe. Saw another crashing its fluke amorously into the water. And met one poor fellow, long dead and washed up on a beach at Lake Arragan. Came face to beak with a coastal emu. And stumbled one night by the campfire directly into the gaze of a tawny frogmouth. Watched pelicans coast. Dolphins surf. Saw a turtle poke its head up for a fleeting minute in our world. And magpies, perhaps the most polite of the sociable birds (and who uncannilly seemed to be named 'Michael' everywhere we went), would join us for breakfasts, sometimes chortling a morningsong.

We slept and rose early, calmed by the never-sleeping surf and the whispering breeze through casuarinas above our heads. Watched meteors slip cross the sky from our swag. Found mystical middens, their powder-white-and-purple shells, mosaic-like amongst water-rippled dunes. Picked up heart-shaped rocks. Saw an eternity of designs in the humble shell. Our quiet insignificance, witness to ancient rhythms.

We didn't venture far from the coast. But mused much upon the ubiquitous concrete abominations to nature, sprawling low brick mansions with kept lawns and sparkling four-wheel drives. Huddled together. Ugly, inward looking, and utterly out of place. In ironic denial of the coastal landscape they intrude upon.

What we relished, simple scenes of oyster farms, dirt tracks and fibro shacks. Our little lunches of sardine sandwiches. Billycan dinners. Unlatching ourselves from clocks and computers. After nearly three weeks, our bones chilled by aberrant north-westerlies, our souls renewed. Toes numbed by dawn and dusk wanderings across cold sand, hearts alive.

The days went quickly. We got as far south as Hawks Nest, on the northern shores of Port Stephens. We'd love to have gone further, and would have - indeed will, in time! As much as 'we love camping' (our catchcry every time we fumbled with crud in the back of the car), we were happy to return to our cosy little house at the 'Hill. With a renewed appreciation of the present. And a scribbled note to self, which, amongst other things, aims to remind me to take greater care with the work/life divide, including taking holidays more often.

As for photos, well, there are a few. I've been kicking the wheels on a few Wordpress themes, and thinking about a photoblog. But perhaps, given my awesome decision-making prowess, I'll start by upgrading my neglected Flickr account.

One more week of holidays. To dream and do. Til next time. Which won't be so long.

a love story

2010-08-04T10:54:00.000+10:00

Oh, there is so much to catch up on. K quit his job, and I've just started five weeks of humungously overdue holidays. Last week we bought an old Landcruiser (I officially own two cars at the same time - woe, the excess!!), which we've been furiously kitting out - K built us some nifty storage boxes which double as a base for our swag, so we can sleep in the car if it's cold/wet. We've restocked on all the tools and camping gear that went AWOL in the back of Barry. We hit the coastal road south in about ten minutes! But that can all wait. First, I'm going to recount a little love story. Because it's worth sharing... even though the photo-feature is already out there.

Flashback, January 2009. I was house-sitting in the boondocks of Brisvegas. Minding a demanding cat. Had just returned from Gippsland to city life, and to 'work' after my little wanderings and forced spell of introspection. I spent nights cooking tofu, web trawling, and feasting upon the entire Love My Way boxset. During the web trawling, I *fast forwards a little bit* happened upon a guy. Who lived in a bus called Alice. Looked like a bushie. Spoke a desert language. Created amazing landscape photographs. And was migrating from the outback to the coast, just south of Bris-vegas. I emailed him. He emailed back. I emailed him again... and all went quiet.

I moved into a little house on the 'Hill. I went to work, went to yoga. Kept cooking. Unpacked a little. Relished domesticity, and being still.

Fast forward six months. Not looking, I found him again. And this time he wrote back, many times. I counted eleven thousand words in one week. So I invited myself for a visit! We met on Sunday 12 July 2009, at Tallebudgera. We had a nervous cup of tea in the bus. Then went kayaking on the creek. Further upstream than he'd ever been. (Unknowingly, I almost killed him - we'd left without food...) After emergency first-lunch back in the bus, we wandered into Burleigh for fish and chips on the foreshore. At dusk we had beers on the beach. And at twilight, walked back through the Burleigh headland, where our path was lit by fireflies. Dazzling.

It was a huge day. Driving back to Bris-vegas, my whole being raced. I had some mad inexplicable conviction that I was either going to marry him, or he was going to break my heart. Later that week his brother moved in around the corner from me. Of all the burbs in Brisbane! So we met for the second time, and it was sealed.

So much has happened since then. It has been as difficult, at times, as it has been wonderful. We got over some early speed wobbles. And moved on to the greater challenge: longeivity. I can only think to explain it like this. Imagine a forest of really old trees. They survive because they've put down deep roots. Maybe buttresses too. And they need space from other old trees, for the roots to absorb the goodness from the earth, and for the leaves to draw sunlight and moisture. Now imagine, if two of the trees tried to share the same space. How to refashion their trunks to fit the other? How to each get what they need from the world? Maybe it's not a perfect analogy, but it makes perfect sense to me.

A few weeks ago, we went back to Burleigh to celebrate our first year. (We count the day we met as our anniversary.) Sunrise at Currumbin Rocks (above). Beachside carousing. And fish and chips on the foreshore. Where we made it official. The betrothal, I mean. Can you believe the Relics already knew?! And with that, completing the loop on that mad, knowing conviction.

the remaining daylight hours

2010-07-03T00:19:00.000+10:00

The cold has arrived. And it's mostly dark. Though it's light when I walk to work, before I close myself off from the world for the remaining daylight hours. The managerial gig has been given legs til October. And we've just clocked into what is being billed as The Most Hideous Month of the year. Oh joy. It's official: I have no life. I'm wracked with tiredness. Food-ism is gone. Lunches are coffee, and whatever I have scavenged in the morning (thank goodness for muesli bars and leftovers). I realised last weekend, after a much-needed massage from the musculoskeletal guru, that my back has been a crunchy Rubik's cube of stress for who-knows-how-long. I could barely turn my neck and didn't even realise it until I left with big arse cupping bruises on my nape and a slightly new feeling of movement. Ick. Mostly I don't see, hear or read any news (or any cultural communicado, for that matter), aside from my new fascination for TweetDeck. Which I hook myself up to in the evenings like an information junkie. (I have a theory about that - in a nutshell it's about how my twelve thousand emails a day is changing my brain to need to respond to stuff. Which I get barely the slightest chance to skim over.)

Ho-diddly-hum. I'm aware I'm whinging. But this lifestyle SUCKS. I am so terribly frustrated at the lack of balance. I work my arse off for solid hours daily. Meanwhile my whole body falls apart and I have no time to enjoy life. Weekends are catch up and attempted recuperation.

I realised (as did the mindful observer) that I'm probably approaching burnout. And that it's situation 'dissolve into a molten pool of angst', or take a break. So we've cancelled work for August. All of it! We are thinking of selling my little car, getting a second-hand four-wheel drive and camping the east coast, starting or ending up in Gippsland. We would've liked to go west and central, but thought four weeks might be cutting it fine. And I would be the happiest little camper if all I did is hang out at the beach (probably in my thermals with current weather, but that's completely fine), read, do morning yoga and just walk and potter with camera and pen. Maybe revisit Hat Head National Park, Ben Boyd and others a bit more off the trail. I have whole-body cravings for horizons and shorebreaks and salt air. Which I realised last weekend when we escaped down to Burleigh for half a day, which is where the above was snapped.

So, this week I came home to a present: a swag! Now, to survive the month from hell. I'm afraid I'm not going to want to go back. Again...

loveapalooza long play

2010-06-19T00:33:00.000+10:00

Oh. Finally, time stops. Work work work work work. Stress. My brain is full with it. Flitting on the interwebs grasping inspiration in nanosecond doses. If there is one thing that frustrates me, it's the impossible lack of balance in my life at the moment. The work shenanigan makes me so tired I've got nothing left over, not even for basic proper self maintenance. Nuthin! Well, maybe a little bit of cooksy, but even my kitchen mojo refuses to participate lately. I'm also rapidly developing goldfish memory. I put it down to WAY too much info in my work world at a pace I can barely pretend to keep up with.

*Sigh*

Oh, in keeping with previous statement... my news, almost forgot! I got my job, the policy gig I've been doing for past year. Permanent tenure as principal advisor in the policy realm. A relief not to have to go back to the previous work-life, and validation in policy world. Not that I'll be doing that job for a while. Looks like I'll be extended where I am in manager-dom til Sept. Once Estimates over, I can plan hols - woo!

Anyway, irks aside. Good things; K's sister's wedding last weekend, Loveapalooza, (Q's bday eve). The honeymoon came before the vows. The bride wore Akira, we did photos at New Farm Park, followed by the main act (the vows, on stage) and reception (the carousing) at The Zoo, Brissie's most respected live music venue. Oh yeah...

Here's some shots of the peripherals - for the main game, go to the links above...

empty stage...

the groom, best guy and photo-dude wait...

stalking with camer-am-era....

some of the Lusks...

dancefloor moment #one

dancefloor moment #two, with ms k

dancefloor moment #three @ the party end of Loveapalooza

Yes. Naturally the shots of me with choclate mud cake in my mouth, and whooping it up on the dancefloor with K's mum (with my rocknroll face on) are on the cutting room floor... :p

the devoted bureaucratica

2010-05-29T17:34:00.000+10:00

A last dash to press publish on something here in May. Time is slippery and work all consuming, to my utter dismay. All my energy at the moment is devoted to desk [cringe]. And despite the solid manic hours at desk, I have done the thing I loathe most - brought work home.

The past couple of weeks have been quite the little stress-fest. I was thrown out of my depth, delegated to attend a workshop with Commonwealth peeps which required considerable push back from the states (ie, me on behalf of Qld). Eek. I don't love that stuff at all. The policy gig I was doing for nearly a year (until elevation to the current temp desk) also became permanently vacant, so equal parts energy-angst were devoted to making a pitch for it. Outcome unknown, but I think I did okay. It's a level up from my substantive foothold, so would significantly help future escape schemes. Which, have I mentioned I am coveting after a solid year and a half of administrivia/bureaucratica. Oh rosy leave balance, light in my tunnel.

So while my brain went to custard, housecleaning and cooking went to hay. General attention to things going on in the world dropped to nil (not through lack of interest). Never mind things like creative pursuits (luckily I had a couple of foodie posts up my sleeve). But hail the silver lining: K's talent for a killer Chinese chicken stir fry revealed... and deft handling of me in meltdown mode. And while I must remain under my rock, he is my preferred news feed, with wonderful op-ed pieces over the dinner table (when not fawning over new man-crush Alan Davies)... hehe!

But thank goodliness, I think I'm emerging from this little twister. Looking forward to K's sister's wedding in a couple of weeks. And while both our current work arrangements make holiday-planning complicated, we have eyes on a getaway soon-ish. Oh delight.

Vale Barry... (hello Noosa)

2010-04-30T22:12:00.014+10:00

Hmm. Where to start? Life has been chaotic, in good ways, and not so good. K has had a trifecta of crap luck... starting with him sitting on (and cracking) the screen on his phone, escalating to his camera dying while we were (luckily at the tail end of) a (paid) photogig at Wivenhoe a couple of weeks ago. Fast forward a week from then... the Friday before the Anzac long weekend, his car (and some might say, four-wheeled companion), 'Barry', was stolen. Barry was all packed for a weekend of beach camping at Straddie, with the kayak on top. And a lifetime's accumulation of tools and other man-stuff in the back (there's no garage at the 'Hill), and sentimental bits like dot paintings from the desert. Vale Barry...

We were sooo in need of a break so I ended up splurging on an apartment at Marcus Beach, a stone's skip south of Noosa. And I mean literally 'at' the beach... a barefoot stroll through the sand and heath to the shoreline...

We had barbecues, seafood, wine, swam in the ocean, walked on the beach and through the national park to the headland... rounds of morning coffees with multiple weekend papers... and a spa bath with bubbles and more wine! There were even once-in-a-guitar and every-other-harmonica appearances! We even arrived in brand new little flashy hire car courtesy K's insurance... it was all rather extravagant and we felt like different versions of us!

It was an incredible contrast to the ultra crazy blur of life in the new work gig, with its never-more lunch breaks, days that resemble Tetris on 11-speed, drowning in emails, deadlines, inordinate Commonwealth requests (oops probably not supposed to say that) and the revolving door to my desk (I don't have an actual door - I'm still a pleb cog in the machine). I feel very much the parody of the ineffectual middle manager but am optimistic things will get better (though my brain has clearly turned to mush this week after three goes at posting this baby)... ho hum...

Anyway, despite the gripes, there have been equal amounts of goodliness. Here's some snaps from recent celebrations, and meanderings at Wivenhoe to prove it!

once in a lifetime

2010-04-15T21:54:00.000+10:00

Several lifetimes ago (actual time, about six weeks), I ordered a new laptop. Dell charged me for said laptop immediately upon receiving my order. Then made me dig through their website to find my order details, which upon kindly revealing to me (the one whose credit card got hit up lifetimes in advance of receiving anything for the privilege... grrrrr!), didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Which wasn’t much. When I tried to phone, they kept me on hold for insane amounts of time and finally, after a few tries, I got some joy (I use this word loosely), a month into my wait, from an Indian lass who told me there was a parts shortage. Her niceness saved her from hearing about several kinds of shortages I was experiencing.

In the intervening lifetime I've been limping along painfully with my crusty, old, fickle malfunctioning Dell. Double grrr to the power of grrrrrr! It would have done me a favour if it had just carked it outright. But nooo. It lulled me into thinking it was halfway operable. And me, like a moth to the flame, limped along while it drove me halfway round the bend.

Anyway, this week it f-i-n-a-l-l-y arrived. My new Dell - hereafter referred to as ‘Kit’ because he is a slimline glossy black number and though he doesn’t talk to me with synched blinking red LED lights, he has ... facial recognition technology!

[chorus of angels appears while marching girls in top hats and stilettoes parade under a spotlit shower of glittery tickertape and a booming voice announces the beginning of... a new world order]

Well. Perhaps not quite. But a very big leap back into the land of things that just work. Oh the joy!

And. Since I'm told the relics now must tune into the blog to find out what’s going on in my life... a work update. Nearly three weeks ago I finished doing the latest acting stint and went back to the policy desk. I barely warmed the seat before being offered the opportunity to return to the acting post, which I did this week. The one with the team (and a stuffed dog called Poochie, who in my absence, has been elevated to bona fide team member status with his own capability and achivement plan - woof), in a foreign land where numbers and data rule.

Thankfully they have words there too.

Oh, and on the weekend we went out to Wivenhoe (Brisbane's now very full catchment) for a photo shoot at a property with big rolling paddocks and eyefuls of water... photos to come. I wonder if Kit can install his own Photoshop?

introducing... one small kitchen

2010-04-02T14:27:00.000+10:00

After several months of dreaming, plotting and building (and endless tweaking), I finally felt brave enough this week to send my new little web project out into the world. Introducing... one small kitchen. Yes, it's a food blog. Yes, another food blog. I know. And, more to the point, another blog, when I can't even manage to post regularly to this one.

Friends have been suggesting for ages that I do something more with my photography. Over Christmas K suggested I start my own food blog. I was a bit hesitant at first. Does the world really need more food porn? Probably not. But you know what? That shouldn't stop me from following my passions. Besides, I think I can breathe my own style into it. At the very least it will be a record of the things I like to cook, and of my own journey exploring food. Maybe others will take something from it - and if not, that's okay, because I'm doing this for me. But I've been quite chuffed and astounded with the enthusiastic response in the first day and a bit. (Well on my way to having more Facebook fans than friends!) Thank you to everyone who has left a lovely comment, passed it on, or just stopped by. It's nice to know it's resonating with people!

But the biggest thanks goes to K who kicked me in the butt and gave (and continues to give) a humungous amount of time, web-nerdery and design nous behind the scenes (not to mention endless patience and calm when I have wanted to chuck my ailing computer out the window) to make this happen. (He is also a web-nerd for hire.)

Anyway, if you haven't checked it out yet, please do! I'll be posting a follow-up to the sourdough Easter buns with a slightly tweaked recipe.

Happy Easter! x

upgrades

2010-03-14T22:26:00.000+10:00

You know how things can lay dormant for ages and then all spark at once? The past couple of weeks have been a case in point, particularly in the hardware realm. My laptop went kaput (again... because I maxed out its hard drive again). Then my external hard drive clapped out (a stupid lightweight mobile one - grrr! Never again!). Luckily I have most of my photos on disc, though I've been too afraid to check them for fear they have somehow lost their contents (this seemed to happen a bit when I've tried to play them on my jury-rigged-for-far-too-long computer). So in the past week, to the exuberant joy and relief of the in-house helpdesk, I've replaced both laptop and hard drive. The new laptop should arrive this week. Maybe I'm living in some sort of naive utopia, but I'm hoping this will be the end of the line for the techno problems which have been sapping my living spirit for some months.

Before my entire world-on-computer unravelled I had decided to treat myself to, and ordered a new lens for my camera. Yesterday I picked it up. It's the second lens I've ever owned and I love it. It's a fixed focal length with a really large aperture and gives wonderfully dreamy shots. Kind of what the world looks like to early morning eyes when you're still waking up! Though I'm not usually eyeballing an empty Green and Black's chocolate wrapper (above) before breakfast. Anyway. I love it. And can't wait to play with it more.

All the helpdesk has to complain about now is my mobile phone from 1983...

i made it

2010-03-04T21:41:00.000+10:00

Last month I made it to inner circle of recipients who receive a 'pinch and a punch' text message from K's Mum. (I think I also scored points for being the only sibling or partner of sibling to reply... but I digress.) This month, her phone was broken. So the first of the month kind of passed without me really realising it... or its significance. It took me until this morning, on the walk to work, to realise that I'd made it to my goal. 'The' goal. The one that I returned to Brisbane for... long service leave! My leave balance now stands at 64 days... or about three months leave on full pay, or six months on half pay.

Wooooo! I made it!

Now we just have to work out how to use it! Of course there's no shortage of ideas... road trips through Central Australia and Western Australia, reconaissance to Tassie and central coast New South Wales... and a further school of thought (that I'd rather not hear), that says 'save it'. Still, plenty of time to decide... and it's a rather happy decision to be charged with, kind of like the 'how I'd spend a windfall' daydream.

greenmount... and other stuff

2010-02-15T22:11:00.000+10:00

Just back from a beachy weekend at Greenmount, which (if your Gold Coast geography is as negligible as mine), is basically the most southern part of the 'Goldie' before the NSW border. We'd stopped there months ago and had beers on the beach at dusk, the tide crashing about our ankles. It's retro beach chic is still somewhat intact (think vanilla brick low-rise apartment blocks with big sandy lawns).

It was our first chance in ages for saltwater swimming, curtailed somewhat on Saturday by bluebottles. Which meant ... cue the kayak! Our first paddle in many moons, up the Tweed. Woohoo! We also spent some time catching up with some of K's friends. And despite some previous bah-humbug sentiment in this camp about the origins/intent of 14 Feb, had a lovely Sunday at the beach, trawled through a vintage market, and relaxed with beers and fish and chips on the foreshore at Burleigh on dusk (a replay of our first ever dinner - aww!)

Anyway, the sun and salty breeze was much needed tonic. We have been missing its presence. I've been going hard to get the new web project sorted, because it's actually live and scoring hits from Google. Which is great, but also kind of not, since it's incomplete... and probably doesn't make a lot of sense under its current (temporary) domain. And really, I should be keeping this to myself so you don't go and Google it! But it's kind of exciting!

Oh. And stuff happening on the job front. Today was day one in a new job... only a short-term backfilling gig. But in an area I know nothing about, and leading a team... eek! But also nice to have something new to get into.

a complete day

2010-02-07T17:38:00.000+10:00

Life has been speeding along. Nothing new there. A year since the bushfires, and there are downpours here and floods in New South Wales. Work is plenty busy, and there's news on that front just round the corner. I've also been idling away sunny days at the keyboard trying (seemingly fruitlessly) to bend and shape a couple of web projects into being. Lamenting the feeling of another weekend slipping through my fingers, I wondered if maybe I would feel like I'd achieved more if I could finish the sentence, 'a day would not be complete without...'. So. In an effort to check that I'm spending my time where it matters, a day would not be complete without...

cuddles and aimless lovely time with K
yoga, or at least a very quick stretch
a solid walk
making a little bit of art, whether through photography, words, craft-ivity or meddling in the dirt
reading, be it the papers, policy stuff for work, a cookbook or ... lo and behold, that long neglected beast, the book!
and of course, food dreaming, cooking and eating yummy food - accomplished this morning via pancakes with figs, yoghurt and honey... yum!

Feel free to join in...

paper & wood bits and bobs

2010-01-24T12:30:00.005+10:00

Have been wanting for a while now to post some photos of recent domestic~crafty activity ... including my wonderful new kitchen shelves (a Christmas gift from K) which go a long way to solving the problems of an impossibly small pantry, and the ex science-lab drawers that QUT (fortuitously for our craft room) piffed out. Late last year I saw some floor-to-ceiling driftwood hanging things in Biome which inspired a small driftwood, paua-shell and stone mobile which now adorns our front door. And then there's the world's most ridiculously-labour-intensive paper crane mobile, which I made as a xmas gift (but ended up giving to myself, given the time frittered away making it) ...

new years day, forest's edge, binginwarri

2010-01-20T22:29:00.000+10:00

acquisitions, realignments, removals

2010-01-19T23:00:00.000+10:00

Last weekend I had an epiphany. I returned to see Kaja, the musculoskeletal therapist who I had a small win with last year. She massaged, she cupped. And realigned my hips. Oh the glory! I am a new woman. All this time and effort to rid myself of ongoing back irks has been largely in vain because my right hip was completely out of whack. I have known for a long time that my back problems stem from this hip alignment thing. But I cannot believe I have waited ten years to learn that half my pelvis could be quite easily manipulated back to its correct position. Meanwhile I've been hobbling around for half a year with this bloody thing. No more. Cupping? Holistic therapies? I believe. Sign me up. Now.

Cracking the back thing has been like a floodgate. The last 24 hours have been action stations. Yesterday I spied more covetable chuck-out items at the university I walk through to work (the one demolishing their science block, pool and gym). So off we trundled last night on another furniture heist. We scored a low coffee table for the deck, a gutsy all-weather storage box with handles, a cute little display case and a bizarre water-level monitor from 1975 (puchased in 1975 for $1221.57; salvaged from a skip thirty-five years later, gratis).

Also last night, the Greeks across the road tipped us off that the council had been round that day measuring up the bus, which has been parked across the road (innocuously, til now, beside a retaining wall). We’ve had a good run. She’s been there since November. And her Northern Territory rego has just lapsed. Council bills heavy vehicle owners $500 for the privilege. So. After our late-night furniture heist, we had a late-night tactical planning session, and today, got up way too early to relocate the (unregistered, mechanically tenuous but adorable) bus.

She is now snugly re-housed out in the burbs somewhere next to a paddock with goats. If anyone knows anyone with a bit of land they’d like to pimp, within say a 200km radius of downtown brisvegas, please get in contact.

Oh. Life is full. We are also ankle-deep in what could become a very large and cumbersome (but potentially very profitable) book disposal operation. And I am plotting some fun webby stuff too. More on all that soon. And photos of acquisitions and recent crafty concoctions. But now, to bed.

renew

2010-01-08T22:02:00.000+10:00

Just back from a bush Christmas at Binginwarri, which is usually very breezy and contained. This year it became a nest for visiting cousins, kidlings, uncles and friends, and some lovely, overdue catch-ups were had. It was also the first meeting of K and the relics. And K and half the family. Naturally he got the big thumbs up, especially from the older-female-contingent (I'm not sure they’ve seen a bloke wash and fold laundry in… well, I’m stopping right about there).

We made a few easy trips beyond the bush block… a lazy lunch of fish and chips at Port Albert with Cousin B and her bloke M, where we watched their Small Z plop around in the shallows. We also made a much-delayed inaugural trip to the Celia Rosser Gallery in Fish Creek, where Mum scored a very collectable banksia print for her birthday, K scored a personal hello from The Celia, and I scored a $5 teapot from the Fish Creek Op Shop which was having a sale. A visit to our WWOOFer friends up in the Strezleckis provided mucho inspiration for our land/house building dream.

New years was a scorcher… the extended tribe milled about the barbecue before some wild weather from the west rolled in and provided a stellar full moon light-and-cloud formation. Back on the verandah, the bubbles flowed, the sparklers spitzed and the party-poppers provided instant rainbow moustaches for those who’d outdone themselves on the fizz (ahem).

My long-lost brother and his partner also made a visit late in the piece. In fact, the family stuff ran so long that we ran out of time for a sail on Westernport and a quick-stop in Melbourne… so we’ll be scouting for cheap flights soon to remedy that.

It sounds kind of busy, but there was still time to slow down and enjoy late afternoon walks along the Hedley Range in the syrupy sun with butterfly escort and curious cows. Frogs provided a pobble-bonk soundrack for the evenings. We picked paths over goannas, echidnas... and dreaded tiger snakes. And picked alpine strawberries at the front door, wild forest mushrooms on the bush block, and wild plums down the road... mmm! Inspiration for the new year.

Wishing everyone a wonderous 2010 with much love, health and merriment. x

postscript: hot and not (#four-and-a-half)

2009-12-19T20:17:00.000+10:00

Some further hots and nots which a) were lost in the Wednesday morning brain-haze or b) possibly not going to make it to the page, since next Wednesday I will be ringing out work for 2009 and enjoying K's company before we part for a week and reunite, post-xmas, in Gippsland...

Hot

A hilarious trip with my mate R out to the boondocks (past Ipswich) to see a psychic who, despite being recommended by more than one person, was utterly crap. Apparently I have a spirit guide called Theodosis, a spritely Aegean man, while R's spirit guide Trish was her lesbian lover in a past life. It went downhill from there. Hot though, because we laughed all the way home.

Our first joint furniture heist has furnished the love nest with three sets of old-school wooden drawers from a QUT science lab. Well, maybe it wasn't technically a heist. The University for the Real World is demolishing some buildings (still can't get my head around why), and since I walk through the uni to get to work, I stumbled across the chuck-outs. Replete with dynamo labels, declaring 'buchner funnels', 'clamps', 'qualitative accelerators' and the like. I'm hoping a second swoop tomorrow finds the furniture pile still there.

A most productive op-shop swoop in Paddington, with multiple pairs of jeans and trousers each and a whole rack of shirts for K. Tally, about thirty bucks.

Pre-xmas dinner with K's family at Mondo Organics. Ten words. Callebaut chocolate pudding with bleeding hazelnut heart and cinnamon semi freddo. Yum. Yum. Yum.

A bizarre Christmas dinner at Binna Burra lodge with K's old choir buddies, aka his geriatric harem... I had no idea groups of old ladies charged with cheap red wine could flirt with such gusto. The old ducks worship the ground K walks on, and hadn't seen him for a couple of months, so there were lots of cuddles. And a few wayward gropes of his thighs - eek! The dinner was followed by a sleepless night in my tent, which we added to the list of things I own which K doesn't fit in. (His head nestles my car's roof and his feet get stuck on the wrong pedals, as previously chronicled). The next day, however was more relaxed, with a visit to his mate Tony from choir, who is the son of the founder of Binna Burra Lodge. We had tea with Tony on the most amazing deck I've ever had tea on, with an outlook over Lamington National Park, the Numinbah Valley and the Gold Coast beyond. He showed us right around his place, Alcheringa - the only residence at the top of the mountain, built by his brother in the 70s but still amazingly stylish. He lets it out and lives in the 'granny flat' next door. A decadent yet homely wood-and-slate chalet with high ceilings, an 'infinity' deck, open fireplace, spa bath and outdoor Japanese-styled bathroom. Oh. My. God. I was agog when K said he'd earlier this year turned down an opportunity to house-sit for Tony. Needless to say, we are now firmly back on the short-list for house-sitting in 2010, while Tony will be gadding around Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and half of Europe, guiding for the tour company he established but which is now run by his daughter. What a life.

Not

In a logical segue from some of the above food-fests, I have padded out quite a bit in the latter half of the year. Mainly because I'm not walking as much with ongoing back irks. Cohabitation with the Hollow-Legged Man has also changed eating patterns somewhat. Anyway, trying to get past my ego, get used to the curves and enjoy compliments about being 'womanly'.

hot and not wednesday (#four)

2009-12-16T07:51:00.000+10:00

Not (thought I'd start at the ugly end this week and work my way back to nicety)

I am ratty. I walk like an old lady and grumble like one because I can’t shake this back thing (nor the work thing, I'm not sure which is the greater evil at the moment). My wallet is falling apart. Any decision-making capacity I had this year (not a lot to start with, and further diminished by the ethical conundrums wrought by the prospect of a new wallet) has left the building. I badly need a haircut, some new clothes and a hip replacement. Work is driving me nuts, with its frayed personalities and bi-polar pace: busy-one-week, tumbleweed-watching the next. I am so overdue for a very long holiday.

I could kick myself for not sticking to my boycott of the work Kris Kringle. With an 11th-hour peer-invoked reversal, I procured a very satisfactory bejewelled soft elephant from Oxfam, which now taunts me from J's desk across the room. While my crappy ‘hugging’ ceramic salt and pepper shakers remain at home, in a very deep, dark cupboard. Grrr.

Hot

Four working days left of 2009. Yee-ha!

My spunky little cabbage moth. For his own little ‘hot and not’ email to me last Thursday morning, which declared yours truly his ‘hot’ item. And a missed opportunity for, well, morning cuddles, his ‘not’!

*Swoon*

And for his stellar ability to put up with my increasing grumblings about work, and encouraging me to see the delight in every day.

To play... write up your own 'what's hot and what's not Wednesday', link back to loobylu and add your name to the widget.

hot and not wednesday (#three)

2009-12-09T23:46:00.000+10:00

hot

An oldie but a goodie… the problem of sound was resolved many moons ago, through a surplus set of Dell speakers K gave me, which do the trick amp-ly (pun intended) for the small space we inhabit.

Also on the problem of sound, I have been expanding my musical horizons via a nifty little doodad (oh, I am so technical) called BitTorrent. Seriously, I have existed in web 1.0 far too long…

Some of the funniest out-takes in ages…

My DVD player carked it (presumably a 'not') as we were about to watch the fabulous Once (a birthday present – thanks S!). Having the bus across the road is proving a winner at crucial moments. K popped over the road and retreived his DVD player, averting the resort to laptop/desktop viewing. And the movie? Brilliant music and a somehow satisfyingly unsatisfactory (weepy) ending… if that makes sense?

Twelve more work days and counting...

not

My best mate R’s date with routine surgery turned very nasty and she wound up seriously sick, with stomach acid in her lungs. The doctors told her she had great karma and was lucky to have made it through. Eek. Which makes the rest of my ‘nots’ seem trifling really...

Burnout. At the very end of my very frayed rope. Putting it down to the continuous slog of more than a year at work without a real break… and ongoing back irks which make me feel a gazillion years old. Upper back and neck now seizing up. We blacklisted mid-week alcohol in an effort to regain energy and be good to ourselves, which admittedly has helped, though the larger struggle to get through the weeks til xmas remains.

Whole-screen pop-up web ads. Grrrr! Also in the media realm, there has been lots of bemoaning at the Hill of the ABC's news programming, which has been sliding, with live crosses to reporters in studios in Adelaide (?) and the holus-bolus feeding on the Tiger derailment.

To play... write up your own what's hot and what's not wednesday, link back to loobylu and add your name to the widget.

hot and not wednesday

2009-12-02T23:48:00.000+10:00

It's still Wednesday in Queensland...

Hot.

Five days beachside in central NSW. Throw in a wedding, dancing, swimming... and float away on a daydream of getting out of Brisvegas.

Using the new Creative Space (aka the spare room) to make a driftwood/riverstone/paua shell mobile which now adorns the entrance. Ta-da!

Cohabitation has brought access to a cordless drill with many-sized drillbits for craft activities (see above). And probably power tools I haven't even dreamed of yet. And don't get me started about having my own web solutions maestro / help-desk in the next room. Oh I could rave...

The third bedroom/storage shed/second pantry (aka Alice the bus). Now parked over the road. Running out of pepper as dinner is served has never been such an easy fix.

K's choir has a CD out!

15 working days until xmas break. And hanging out at Bingi. Think I might create some sort of advent calendar in my Outlook. The count-down will be punctuated by work xmas parties. Which actually promise to be ... fun!

Leave loading. And a core agreement increase, backpaid to August, due any day... woo! Handy, since I've dog-eared some xmas wishes. Oh. And an appointment with the dentist, including multiple x-rays, which cost me $13. $13! Tallying the cost of items in my 'free' care pack, I think I actually walked out ahead! My first ever 'yeah!' for private health insurance! And a clean bill of health, with two remaining wisdom teeth declared fine to stay.

Not

Brain-fry. Courtesy being up to my eyeballs in policy quandries and deadlines on the secret squirrel welfare reform project which Anna is now earmarking as the centrepiece of Queensland's social inclusion agenda. Despite Kevin having virtually gazumped it. Eek!

Missed lunch breaks, emails, life etc (see above).

Federal politics... sheesh!

Back irks are ongoing. However I have given up my Amish ways and am experiencing the revelation of Nurofen. Sitting at desk with minimal discomfort - the joy! Walking up hills without pain... hallelujah!

Summer hit about two weeks early. Hot. Wind-less. Blah. The first of many cold showers of the season.

---

To play... write up your own what's hot and what's not wednesday, link back to loobylu and add your name to the widget.

interstate (love song)

2009-11-30T23:13:00.000+10:00

Just got back from a much-needed five-day stint in south west rocks, a cosy beach hamlet in between Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie. A seven-hour drive (one way by car). Magnificent stretches of unpeopled beaches. Sun. A howling wind. And an all-day wedding, very good friends of K’s from The Rock. We took photos.

The stunning Smoky Cape Lighthouse hosted the party. Pink bubbly and Coopers flowed (and spilled) as we danced barefoot upon a soft lawn, overlooking a white, wild coast below - one of the most spectacular dancefloors in the world!

The sun blazed orange into the hills and the dancing turned serious...

Kidster floral headbands were donned and a plucky bridesmaid turned the tables on the photographers...

Barrelhouse, a whippersnapperish blues trio from Port Macquarie unloosed slide guitar, bass and drums into the gusty eve. A fabulous, long, hot day!

After the wedding, we indulged in lots of swimming, took ourselves for a bushwalk to our very own nudie beach, played more with the cameras (and collectively filled about 7GB of memory), and hung out with the lovely newlyweds.

More swimming was had on the beach-hop home, which we began with a slight detour south to Hat Head National Park – where the surf was bliss! We dreamed of parking Alice the bus there. Slightly crazy perhaps, but not completely off the map, since the hunt is on for a more permanent home for the old girl. She has just been relocated from her caravan park on the northside to a generous spot over the road from the House on the ‘Hill. Though she makes a great third (detached) bedroom (and wardrobe overflow, storage shed, etc), she’s bound to raise a few eyebrows.

A taste of summer and five continuous non-work days spent beachside... bring on xmas!

another list, the resort of the overworked stressed-out deskhound

2009-11-18T20:38:00.000+10:00

Getting on the blog theme bandwagon since life moves quickly (or faster than I seem to have capacity to blog) and any creative energy I had is pretty much sapped by day's end. And I do love a good list.

Hot.
Musculoskeletal therapy and cupping. Out of dire desperation after about six weeks of intractable (even with physio) lower back pain I had THE BEST massage last weekend. Cupping? I cocked an eyebrow at the "musculoskeletal therapist" but agreed to give it a go. A three thousand year old Chinese therapy made current by Gwyneth, 15 minutes is supposedly on par with three hours of remedial massage. My back has not felt so normal in a long time. Unfortunately this normalcy lasted about two days. Hmmph. And now Kaja (the "musculoskeletal therapist") is climbing Mt Everest. Of course.

The kind of tax return refund you get for not working a full year. Yeah!

Work is suddenly busy, after months of gouging my eyeballs out for entertainment. Am working on a sexy secret squirrel social inclusion / welfare reform policy project, a mandate straight from Anna's desk. Finally, some actual social policy work! Unfortunately it's been particuarly subject to political whims and now has some pretty squirmy timeframes on it, resulting in missed lunch breaks etc.

Subtropical electrical storms. One of the nicer things about summer in this part of the world. Oh, and the most exquisite local manzanella olives. And a new vintage sundress (without the pricetag which now goes along with vintage garb).

Looking forward to at least ten days off work over xmas and chilling out at Bingi with the relics.

Not.
Coming up to about six weeks continuous lower back frustrations - see Hot. Hurts to sit. (Even after the heavenly massage, and even on my gymball.) At informal work meetings I stand. Long ago I changed my seat at the desk for a knee stool... unfortunately work is still a... pain in the arse!

My lame double entendres.

Saying no to January sailing on Pelican. Fun work. Paid work. I must be crazy. But this is my trade off for holiday-hoarding in anticipation of the can't-stand-desk-anymore (or at least can't sit at one) leap into the land of no reliable income. Bring. It. On.

And. I'm not sure which part of the list this belongs in, but last week was the one year anniversary of my return to Bris-vegas.

theme of the week: cups

2009-11-11T21:52:00.000+10:00

Had I posted this last week, it would have made a lot more sense. So. Humour me. Pleeease. And pretend you’re reading this during Melbourne Cup week…

This time last year, someone with wisdom beyond the urban bind baffled me with a Taoist parable about cups and the value of their contents. The moral being that a whiff of possibility is far more valuable than any precious stone, sweet intoxicant, nay, anything that can be held/measured by the cupful.

Upon recently re-reading this post, the story made a lot more sense. At the time I barely realised that my cup was empty. (I guess that’s the whole point though: fullness is relative.) I had no fixed address, no next calling. I'd spent more than a year being pulled along by a fluffy dream cloud on a string.

Now my cup overfloweth. With fizz and delight. (But also fair amounts of spillage, stained tablecloths, and working it out as we go etc. Ahem.)

After a long-ish stint of independent living, the house on the ‘Hill welcomed another member. K officially moved in after several months of unofficial cohabitation where we pretended to have separate abodes and he would duck home (to his beautiful motorhome bus) once or twice a week to water plants and pay rent.

So his arrival, with the rest of his worldly belongings not already at my/our place, was not the huge merge of stuff I’d expected (sort of stupidly, knowing his possessions are restricted by the confines of the bus). He came with computer, a few clothes, four indoor plants and an obligatory man-box of power tools. My long neglected spare room is morphing into The Creative Space (the one I have always dreamed of but somehow put up with a dining table instead... though it now more closely resembles a bank manager's office, with big wooden desk from The Salvos and a big-wig type reclining chair... we'll work on the ambience thing.)

Anyway, back to cups. I came out a dollar ahead in the workplace sweeps. I’ve been scouring the local op shops for vessels of all sorts of late. Last week I picked up another old-school glass sugar dispenser.

A dollar, a sugar jar and a whole lotta love. Glass half full indeed.

the list review: part two

2009-10-20T21:53:00.000+10:00

18. Do more creative work. Oh dreary desk, thief of time and inspiration. Thus begins a concerted effort to lessen web trawling and beef up creative play.

19. Do something eco-preneurial / creative with R. Lots daydreaming. See above. Gah!

20. Make and give away recycled notebooks. Ibid. *shudders*

21. Redevelop Pelican’s website. Some advice dispatched... the guts of it outstanding.

22. Start giving blood again. Started going again but got dizzy and was advised not to return til my constitution was a bit more robust.

23. Learn the violin. And pick up my guitar more often. The former is BIG on my 35 list (if there will be a 35 list, I'm undecided given my inability to get through the 34 list). Recently unleashed the dusty axe for the first time for K, to his complete astonishment. :)

24. Visit the Bunya Mountains. Hmph. Feel somewhat OK about not getting there yet since I have instead discovered the southern (and very un-Gold-y) end of the Gold Coast. Who would've thunk?

25. Go for bushwalks. Yep.

26. Get a bike and ride it (and this time, don’t give it away!) Bike, check. Must apply self to riding it more... as soon as this inflamed disc in my lower back settles. Hmm. The relics were right, getting older sucks.

27. Do more for others. Took photos at R’s art auction and helped organise S’s 50th... and did photos there too. Have burnt CDs, provided references and generally I think been good to others. And in poetic karma harking back to my recalcitrant kid-hood, I seem to do a lot of washing up these days for other peeps. I even put the dishwasher on today at work!

28. Get an address book and keep track of friends/family contact details and birthdays. Adult-hood hath started!

29. Apply to become a foster carer. Geez, I can't even commit to getting a cat.

30. Find out about rent-a-chook and herdshare. Researched both. Some pet-commitment type issues prevail (see #29). And what the @#$%! would I do with all that milk!?

31. Go to Sunday comedy and jazz @ the Powerhouse again. Yep.

32. Try to be more open to the possibility of meeting a single/available/adjusted boy with similar interests/values/goals. By far, the best thing I have done in a very long while :) aw!

33. Accept the journey, where ever it goes, and trust myself more. ‘Tis all you can do, right? The best things in life are a leap of faith...

34. Do one thing that's not on this list that I would normally say ‘no’ to! Short-term cohabitation upon return to Bris-vegas. Spent Christmas on my own watching the whole two series of Love My Way. Signed a lease on the spot for a place with a dodgy kitchen. Tried online dating. Tried offline dating. Declared both to the cyber-verse. Took a very big punt. And finally understood how to live in the greys instead of the blacks/whites.

creativity angst

2009-10-19T20:06:00.002+10:00

Have found myself mired in extreme creativity angst of late. Weekends seem to expire with the list of boring chores mostly knocked over, while the (wish)list of arts, crafts and higher pursuits remains untouched. I simply cannot work out how other desk-hounds tweak their schedules to maintain creative dabblings.

I have been wondering whether it is just a time thing, whether I just have too many interests to maintain, or whether something more sinister might also be going on.

Was recently beavering away on a piece for dumbo feather (and have two pieces in the Spring issue – saving me from complete creative woe), for which I was leafing through blog posts from about mid-last year, retracing some of the anarchic thoughts I was having back in drop-outsville. And was sort of astounded at the writerly zest I (me?) seemed to wield back then. And appalled that said zest seems to have leaked from my brain. Though sadly, not onto the page. Or into anything remotely creative.

Back in the Life After Desk days I seemed to have some sort of vague insight into Stuff. And seemed to be able to relay it with some sort of mild humour and zing. Now, I aim words at a target with functional intent. Unpretty, linear information widgets…

Just like a…

Ministerial brief...

Gah! GAH!

The desk. Desk, desk, desk. Sounds like a reprimand. Thief of creative expression, abstract thinking and sweet unproductive time. I have found this year much harder than any other stint in my working life. My current mission: to make more room for creative play. Hmmm.

the list review: part one

2009-10-07T20:58:00.009+10:00

About this time last year I made a list of 34 things to do before I turned 34. Since I'm now being reminded that another year is almost done, I wanted to see where I got to with my (mostly) small aspirations. Keeping in mind my nerdy proclivity for personal 'to do' lists and seething resentment of 'lists of things to do before I die', here's part one. (It was a hefty list!)

1. Find a job in policy (and change blog subtitle to Life And Desk). Check. Blog subtitle may have been more accurate as Life and Dull Stuff Which Pays. Who could have predicted a hulking re-engineering of the entire machinery of government would make ANY job in the Army suck. I'm sure it's not at all Buddhist, but I'm consoled by the knowledge that those around me are suffering too.

2. Save save save and buy some land. First part of mantra complete. Part two awaiteth...

3. Research and design my little sustainable house. Lots of idle daydreaming, ordering journal articles from the library at work, and general collection of thoughts to expand draft design brief.

4. Persevere with a potted herb garden. Holy basil, purple basil, thyme, rosemary, parsley and chilli still going, tomatoes came and went, and now have warrigal greens coming on (thank you Relics), despite the scrabblings of the resident moggie who keeps digging them up and crapping on them. Much angst about vegie seeds not yet planted halfway through spring.

5. Sell my photos. Next!

6. Sell my cards (or at least give them to family and friends on card-type occasions). Aren’t parentheses a wonderful thing?

7. Eat more ethically. Tick, with forgiveness for recent slippage with occasional purchases of sushi and farmed salmon. Am now a certified no-packaging / re-use freak.

8. Buy goods in bulk in own containers. Love Mick’s Nuts and Flannerys. For my next trick I shall implement own lunch-box regime for take-away food purchases (see no. 7).

9. Continue making all my own bread. Sourdough baking was a monthly event at the ‘Hill until recent discovery of artisan-inspired Flour Power up the road, which most people would have discovered within a week of moving in. I credit my tardiness to my tenacity to goals!!

10. Stick to pilates and walking 3 times/week each. Walk to and from work but have completely fallen off the yoga/pilates wagon. Am now self-diagnosing possible sciatica after extended rock-sitting episodes the other week. Of all the list things I should have clung to like a woman falling off a cliff...

11. Do a first aid, safety at sea and sail training course. Basic dinghy sailing 1 and 2. Aced! First aid is up next.

12. Investigate Indigenous kitchen garden idea. Well, um, I met Mark Olive at the Dreaming Festival...

13. Read about transition culture. Ooh... does blog trawling count?

14. Knit R a beanie in time for Japan. Knit one, pearl one, done. Though she ended up going to Thailand instead and not needing the beanie!

15. Send a krama to N. Hey N, what’s your address? Do you check the Peli box?

16. Blog more regularly. Post more for streeteditors. Keep writing for Dumbo Feather. Nup. Nup. Yep. How my cousin who is in charge of a toddler and a working week can manage to blog every day for a month is beyond me. I am weak.

17. Get my typewriter fixed. Ye old specimen of smudgy typefaces has been lovingly restored and now nestles on the treadle of my Singer sewing machine. Which I should probably learn how to use. Does this mean I need to make a list of 35 things?

... to be continued!

glee. a weekend retreat

2009-10-05T21:37:00.008+10:00

Life has been a bit of a slog lately, largely due to a full-blown case of work irks. I can handle just about anything the desk throws at me. It’s when they stop throwing it that I start losing it. Thanks to Queensland school holidays and a progressive female Premier, the past few weeks in the Army have been so DULL I’ve wanted to bore my eyes out with a rusty drillbit. Dwelling on the dismal imbalance of it (time is short, there are so very many things I want to do, and there is so very much to be done) has been doing my head in. That and doing the shuffle between the 'Hill and the bus (which is now in Brisbane after K relocated from the coast), which is driving us both a little nutty.

So it was perfect glee to spend three whole days (and one of them a Monday!) in Cougal, New South Wales beside the Border Ranges National Park with friends of K’s who moved from 'the Rock' earlier this year to run a guesthouse on 200 acres. This weekend they hosted a bunch of women on a dance retreat. With a baby due any day, K's mates invited us to hang out as back-up hosts in case baby decided to show up, which, thankfully (not being acquainted with home births) he didn’t. So we hung out, washed a few dishes, pulled a few weeds and made daily trips down to the creek to swim and sprawl on sunny rocks with books. Aah! We awoke after slumber-licious nights to the sound of bellbirds and whipbirds (not at all like the crazy alarm-birds at the ‘Hill which have learnt to mimmick every alarm clock in the south Brisbane neighbourhood). We played with a dreamy-eyed toddler and an old dog from the desert. And chatted to I and T about their life running a guesthouse in the bush. And daydreamed (well, I did) about the many possibilities in their extremely large commercial kitchen...

Photos to come, since my camera inadvertently went home with K in Barry, in the continuing saga of 'where's my stuff?' that accompanies the dance between two homes.

spring time, sydney town

2009-09-15T20:50:00.019+10:00

First weekend of spring.

Time stops in a musk-scented garden.

And begins again on dusk.

Farm Cove. Mrs Macquarie's Chair. Sounds like a big colonial doll's house.

And like dolls we sit on the grass and watch

as the moonrise trumps the bridge in a silent argument about the bigger spectacle.

We ride old-school ferries to Manly and rewrite the great Aussie pie.

Pumpkin and fetta? Pies at the beach?

And we walk. And sit by seaside pools of molten gold.

Cabbage Tree Bay. Bare fingers of frangipani point to blue skies.

Late afternoon chill and bruschetta in Bronte. The woman in the cafe gives us blankets.
A yellow balloon rides the breeze above the Waverley Cemetery.

Celluloid unreality.

Saltblown. Somehow closer.

Then a bus, a train and a mad dash to scrub up.

Ben Folds. Second row seats at the Opera House.

Request bowl, piano stool, melancholy.

Warm hands.

In a wink everything unclenches.

Except hope, held tight.

party days

2009-09-01T13:58:00.009+10:00

A rather gargantuan party-ish weekend has caught up with me and I am slicing into my rather massive haystack of sick leave. Last week was busy to the hilt preparing for S’s 50th, amongst all the usual stuff. Since I felt responsible for convincing her of the absolute necessity of celebrating such a hefty milestone – how could the person who, in her fabulous youth, started the Eumundi markets and sailed to India with an international fugitive, let her 50th pass without a bit of a knees-up? – I offered to help out with the food. Thus ensued wads of shopping, cooking, dishwashing and organising by both K and I. Buckets of sand were brought from Tallebudgera to bed tealight candles in brown paper bags. Chairs were carted and fairy lights strung. I made a mega pesto pasta salad from scratch. Plus my first ever quiche and samosas. (Thanks to my long-standing recipe recalcitrance – and the freezer gods – visitors to the 'Hill will be plied with samosa filling for months to come...)

The day before the party, R and J (who I hadn’t properly caught up with for AGES) came over for dinner on the deck. Mainly so they could finally meet K… and both parties be satisfied that my besties/squeeze were not just a psychological dependency I dreamed up. The girls drank a yummy red and talked about the boys. The boys drank German beer. And talked about beer. There was chicken, salad, cous cous. And sticky date pudding. Mmm. Oh. And the day before that was S's actual birthday, so we went to Sakura, the local Japanese, for amazing sushi, tempura and sake. Parteeee!

Since she had friends coming from both ends of the east coast and every hippy haven in between, I thought it would be lovely if S had photos from the evening as a keepsake. Here are some of the more experimental results… and a rather cute look at what happens when two alco-mo-hol-happy dreamers play with a camera :)

brunswick by bus

2009-08-25T18:43:00.017+10:00

On the weekend K and I took Alice the bus for a slow spin down the coast. After some months parked by the Tallebudgera Creek, she needed a run. K found a place on Google Maps called Wooyung which begged the question: a seemingly undeveloped stretch of coast between Pottsville and Brunswick Heads. It was my first time travelling in Alice... and I discovered it is akin to being crowned parade royalty - people look, wave and cheer at you, so naturally it's polite to wave back. (All my secret Moomba fantasies now realised!) We discovered why Wooyung is undeveloped: stagnant creek, mosquitoes and pallid drenchings of end-of-the-worldness. There were no powered sites for us in Wooyung, making the short run to Brunswick a no-brainer. There we found a lovely little nook at the end of the caravan park, right by the Cruising Yacht Association, where honeydew smells filled the air. After executing our entry strategy (parking a bus is kind of like mooring a boat, though thankfully a lot less stressful), we went for a walk to ogle boats. I then proceeded to sate my crazy summer food and beverage cravings (Coopers Greens and potato chips followed by lamb and rosemary sausages and salad… mmm!)

In the morning we discovered Alice had not quite enough grunt left in her batteries to get us away by check-out. So we dutily informed the 12-yo at the desk that we unfortunately couldn’t go anywhere for a few hours, put Alice on charge and took coffees and breakfast-bowls to some rocks by the river and read the paper in the sun. Bliss! Then it was off to the beach for a spell of lolling and swimming.

Accompanied (as has been increasingly the case over recent beachy weekends) by a small boy-pack kicking a footy. This strange phenomenon has seen small groups of not-quite-teenage boys assemble beside us on the beach and engage in a bit of biff - kicking footies, wrestling, etc. K thinks it’s me. Pffff! I reckon they have a sixth dog-like sense and can smell the crazy love gremlins.

We headed back to Alice for a late alfresco lunch of cold sausages and sourdough with leftover tomato-capsicum salsa. Yum! And in a move sure to please the elder Relic, I took out a fully-paid, life-time membership of the Cold Sausage Fan Club.

Bellies full, K gave Alice a turn and she was back in action, putting paid to fantasies of calling work Monday morning to report ourselves "stuck at the beach". Back at Tallebudgera (after people at bus stops on the Gold Coast Highway tried to hail us - apparently this is usual), we did a sweep of Australia on Google Maps, pegging out regions on a big old road-tripping dream across the country. Which was fortuitously followed by the happy Monday discovery that by next March, I will have racked up about six months leave at half pay.

How many ways can a desk-hound say ‘Wooooo!’?

rose coloured things

2009-08-18T20:07:00.006+10:00

Spring is early. Dresses and skirts are out. Along with an unusual compulsion to wear pink.

Jasmine is blooming, spilling over fence-lines and filling walks to work with summery thoughts of barbecues and bare feet. Tallebudgera weekends are salt air and sunshine, walking and swimming, sunset beers on the beach. S has bent to my nudging and is going to (try to) teach me to surf. I'll help make food for her 50th celebration. The calendar is filling: a quick jaunt to Sydney to see Ben Folds at the Opera House, a weekend in a tent at Straddie.

Possibility is rife and expectant. The future is being dreamed...

The coast road. The desert. A swag and a campfire. Fishing gear and a fistful of stars. An adventure ending in a little plot of land. A deli-café? And a dog, a wood-shop and a bus. Ooh and maybe a boat!

Dreams... fluid, shimmering and unknown.

the love shambles

2009-08-12T14:04:00.026+10:00

I have spent the past month hanging out with the most lovely boy in the world.

It has been a wonderful and very surreal month of kayaking, ocean swimming, firefly enchanted forests, beautiful language, riverside lolling and mysterious worm holes that make whole evenings disappear in a love-hazed puff. Seems though the gremlins are a-lurking... wreaking a series of injuries and acute befuddlement upon us. Let me recount the woes…

We went walking at Springbrook and K sconed himself on a tree branch (he is tall and it was dark), leaving a nice red welt on his noggin. I (horrifyingly) gave him a very nasty burn with a hot water bottle. And then (repenting?) got a little too close to the oven while making pizzas and scorched a finger. Early on in the piece, I broke out with a dreaded cold sore… and, despite utmost care and restraint, almost gave it to him... eek! I have lost two pieces of treasured jewellery in his presence (an earring that belonged to my Nana and a ring from Fes). The other week he lost my glasses in Alice the bus (his home on wheels) and was so guilt-laden/worried about me driving in the dark without my 'eyes' that he drove me home from Alice’s digs at Tallebudgera. To Bris-vegas. And nearly killed us both when his foot got stuck on the accelerator (or a water bottle rolled under the brake... we were both a little too traumatised to be sure which) and we nearly ploughed across a median strip and through an intersection at about sixty clicks. (We pulled the bus apart at least three times looking for the specs. He toyed with the idea of applying an angle grinder to a small hole near the wheel arch that may have swallowed them. The glasses turned up a week later INSIDE an ugg boot. Of course.)

Gadgetry is also awry: my TV had a hissy fit, the laptop is exhibiting terminal early warning signs and supermarket conveyor belts simply stop functioning in my presence (after I have loaded my shopping onto them, naturally). We also aroused a few neighbourly eyebrows after he locked his keys in Barry (the Landcruiser) at my place and we attempted to break in with a coat-hanger. In the dark. Oh. And this week my watch stopped working. Which may explain those mysterious time-stealing worm holes.

And. I have also inexplicably become an overnight ditz at work, muddling up all over the shop. Whilst being inducted to the secret squirrel world of the Queensland Cabinet.

Anyway, this week has been clear of funny stuff. Am hoping we've seen the back of the gremlins. ;)

hand-washing

2009-08-12T13:49:00.006+10:00

nine months

2009-07-28T21:57:00.008+10:00

Mind-boggling, but that’s how long I’ve been back in Bris-vegas. And back at desk. The novelty of home and routine and staying put has dulled. I am so reintegrated (re-educated?) I talk about my former cultural alienation like it belonged to someone else. Winter has stolen daylight from my home. It’s too dark and cold to nurture plantlife mid-week and weekends always disappear under the weight of bare necessities… laundry, coffee, papers, food and a lazy snatch of sunshine. Despite a little busy spell – a couple of writing assignments, theatre engagements, kayaking jaunts and dinners out – the past month has yet managed to dissolve in a blur of yoga-guilt, neglected plants and half-started library books. And I’ve been a carefree squirrel, merrily piffing acorns up the wall. So have been feeling grudgingly distracted from goal. But trying still to take it all in and enjoy the ride. The lazy susan of life has been spinning at a breakneck pace. And it has launched a small parcel of spectacular my way. But given recent efforts at Speaking Too Soon, I'm gonna wait a few more spins before spilling the goods.

an unbecoming gloat

2009-07-11T23:38:00.003+10:00

Phew! I won a stay of execution. I am not going back to the communications perch anytime before Christmas. And possibly not even after. Or ever [dreamily].

I snagged the recently-referred to temporary policy role (my second). Actually [enlarged ego warning…] I ACED the field of seasoned policy practitioners. WOOO! Though I must qualify that by adding that selection was based on a written task given to shortlisted candidates. And I’m sure I would not have scored so highly had I been required to talk. But still. There I was, floundering in my little pond of self-doubt, thinking I didn’t have the goods to make it in the social policy realm because I lacked the somewhat critical requirement for content expertise. Which is kind of stupid logic really, because exactly how much expertise could I have expected to amass in my two-and-a-half months at a policy desk. So. I’m sticking this feather in my cap and flouncing down the catwalk with it! The coolest thing about this is that I have done the previously unthinkable – a sideways (and slightly upwards) transition into a whole new field of work.

[winged cherubs with trumpets appear]

Not counting the cooking on boats stuff. Or the writing for interesting publications stuff. And not nearly as cool as either of the above but a) salaried, b) ongoing and c) potentially interesting and worthy enough to hold my attention and let me derive some sense of meaning and purpose while I keep on squirrelling acorns.

I started the new new job – in the same wider policy team but a different branch – last week. And I am locking the jury out, despite their door-battering attempts to make some rash (read unfavourable) judgements about the new environs. Unbecoming it may be, but I have time yet for a little more swooning around with this feather. Tra-la…

lumps, crumbs and irony

2009-06-30T12:25:00.003+10:00

So that little lump of sadness is dissolving in a fizz of urgency for life. However am very impatient with current lifestations. Probably because I’ve just returned from ten days jamful of friends, family, Dali, winter food, mushrooming, open fires, wine, wombat chasing and the wild woolly Prom. To desk. Which is currently proving very blah.

I like to think I have a high capacity for work and usually (at least after coffee) contribute something of value and substance – even if the terrain has seemed rather pointless at times. Now I’m on meaningful terrain, but for reasons largely beyond my control, contributing mere crumbs. I found out last week that a return to my communications perch seems likely, since the seat I’m warming will shortly be reclaimed.

My former boss (the one who I love – I think – for keeping me on a yo-yo string and letting me explore it's furthermost limits) asked me to come work with her (again) in a super stealthy strategic area of the new mega-department. Whispers are the Army has too many spin doctors, so the team is being scattered to the winds. Including super stealthy strategic areas of the department.

I need to go back a few years to explain why this is so ironic it makes me want to puke. I was basically minding my own business at the old desk (thrice removed) when I got lured by an agency to go work in a flashy role in the old human services department, ie, the same department which earlier this year sucked up my department along with several others and became one mega human services department, ie the one I work for now. Follow? After working like an absolute dog on high-profile social marketing campaigns under stupid amounts of pressure, I choked on a hairball and took a rather spectacular nosedive (and watched in horror, mid-freefall, as my ‘superiors’ ran away with their safety net). Whereupon I found myself back at my little old desk batting away flies and self-loathing. Grrr. Shortly thereafter, I renounced my field of ‘expertise’ (bah), put a hex on life at desk, packed up the nest and flew the government coop altogether.

In hindsight, one of the best things that ever happened to me.

So. In effect, my old boss (the one who has me on the string), has asked me to join her in roughly the same place I was when I made that spectacular nosedive.

$#@#%%%$ huh…?

Could this be some rude circuitous groundhog plot, designed perhaps to remind me why I left in the first place? HTF could I end up back in the SAME place which cured me of my desk ambition and sent me packing to the northernmost tip of Australia (which btw is not Cape York but Boigu Island, where the crocs have names and you can feast on mudcrab for all of $2).

There is one small ray of hope, in the form of another short-term position in the policy dynamic. Gah. Maybe I need to embrace the buddhist reality and accept that temporary is just the way things are.

dear universe

2009-06-22T21:32:00.005+10:00

I barely know where to start. The past few weeks have been chockers. A three-week intravenous hit of culture and people I love. Between mud-camping at Woodford for the Dreaming Festival, Melbourne to see friends whilst dosing on food, Dali, design and high-street-retail love, and Binginwarri to gather wild mushrooms, chase wombats and get trounced by the relics in the Winter 2009 Pictionary Play Offs, I’ve barely been home.

Or alone.

And now that I am both, I’m feeling kinda sad.

I’ve been given a fair bit of prodding in recent months to think about the shortness of life. Today another good soul passed away. I am sending warm thoughts to his family and friends. And acknowledging life, the precarious privilege.

Dear universe, I am paying attention.

ho fan club

2009-06-02T20:30:00.010+10:00

My mate Ren and I have started this thing on Friday nights. We do dinner. Actually we do Vietnamese. Actually we do Vietnamese in West End. Starting in Hardgrave Road, which has at least a long month’s worth of Vietnamese Friday dinners. Last week we gave ourselves a name – the Ho Fan Club, after one of the house specials at Quan Thanh. And too much red wine. And at the encouragement of Ren’s partner J who thought "ho fun" (in a 'chinglish' accent with good-time inflection) was the goods. We also adopted some house rules: one, we order to share; two we always order a tofu dish; three, we always mystery-select a chicken dish (ie, in ‘blindly point at the chicken section of the menu' fashion); and four, we never eat at the same establishment twice.

So we thought yeah, that’s pretty cool. An interesting start to our respective weekends. Maybe we should blog it. And then I was looking at The Age and see that one of their food writers has done the same thing! Except on Mondays along Victoria Street in Richmond. They call their little dinner club 'Good Evening Vietnam' (snooze). And they’ve been doing this for a whole year already!

WTF? Seriously! I mean if only we could come up with these ideas a little earlier. Anyway, I'm sure there's only one Ho Fan Club in Brisbane. And here it is...

material girl and the wealth of nations

2009-06-01T14:13:00.003+10:00

Lately I’ve been single-handedly reversing the penny-pinching global trend. My dormant discretionary spending capacity has been unleashed and the industrious squirreling of acorns into a handsome mound has been suspended in the name of cultural participation. It started as a few dinners out, some music, books, wine. A movie here. A haircut there. New jeans. A festival ticket. A 1960s Danish leather chair!

When I moved into the Highgate Hill abode, I found it really difficult to unpack things. The psychological transition from impermanence/mobility to a more predictable, fixed life (with objets de stuff) is unfolding still. I'm still living out of a toiletries bag (old habits) and my pantry which still seems mildly gargantuan is in fact little more than a large shoe box. Now the end of my six-month lease is nigh. I have a new job and am enjoying the company of men-folk (one in particular). I've been coming round to the idea that maybe my view of this moment (the job, the city, the 100-metre dash for cash) being ultra temporary was kind of illusory. That doesn’t mean I have cast aside my self-sufficiency goals. It means that severe shortcuts which demand a reduced/fleeting experience are out. I will unpack the other four glasses in the set! I will get that print framed and I will invest in stereophonics!

Longevity is my new mantra. Temporary is out!

So in aid of making my current stations more comfortable, I spent Saturday trawling the net and visiting Video Pro to talk stereo. iPod speaker docks, in fact. I was completely ready to pounce on the B&W Zeppelin, supreme and lovely beast of speaker docks. Which would have been an immediate fix to my lack-of-decent-sound problem. But at the point of sale that longevity thing reared its persistent little mug. I took a walk and pondered the iPod lifecycle and the scalability of the Zeppelin for future stations in life. It has no tuner. It sounded difficult to hook up to dvd. It has kick-ass speakers, but whose ability to kick ass would probably diminish in larger environs. I pondered the final commitment to adulthood: the purchase of a grown-up stereo. The kind you keep forever.

I stood there on the brink of ideological redefinition, with the sales chump batting his free warranties at me. I hemmed. I hawed. I hedged. And drove away sans Zeppelin, resigning myself to the inevitable protracted trauma of researching amps, tuners and speakers.

When I got home I took out the sales chump's card.

Adam Smith. Indeed. The material girl is back.

good things

2009-05-11T22:47:00.007+10:00

Two weeks ago I unshackled myself from the communications desk for a temporary stint at a remote Indigenous housing policy desk. After I had the week from hell doing my manager's job without recompense, she felt sufficiently guilt laden to let me go at a week's notice, for three months. I love karma.

However the desk is about to change again as half the remote Indigenous housing policy team unlatches from the program area and reattaches to the soon-to-be-portfolio-wide policy unit, which if you believe the hype, has a Far More Strategic Focus (aka softening the Rudd machine to dance to the beat of Bligh’s army). Call me tasky and unstrategic but I am quite enjoying shepherding through the first home ownership application on Aboriginal reserve land, despite the necessary proximity to know-it-all lawyers. I am also quite enjoying not having to dance an eight-hour, 300 beats-per-minute jig. And loving the lashings of time to read about policy stuff (which I secretly did anyway whilst dancing the 300bpm jig). And it looks like - thanks to a dearth of accommodation - we'll be moving to one of the plushest offices in Bligh's army, which is a hop away from the gleaming financial district (though even farther away from my faithful campos coffee house).

I also started a dinghy sailing course a couple of weeks ago. So the last two Sundays have been spent learning how to avert collisions (unintentionally), capsize (intentionally) and get very bruised knees scrabbling round in the back of the boat in a tangle of tiller. Anyway, things now make a lot more sense. And am v chuffed that (in a rare ongoing left brain victory) I Still Know My Knots. If I was more handy with html those last five words would be decked in a gaudy bells and whistles font.

Um. And. More small but happy developments in the realm of good things... stay tuned.

layers of crud(e)

2009-05-01T18:24:00.004+10:00

You may have noticed. The whinge about Easter and repeated failed attempts to get out of the city. The tendency to bang on about work. And salivate over other people's travel. Yep. I've got cabin fever. Good and proper. Despite the hellish pace at work over the past few weeks - I have had novelty punching bags delivered to my desk by colleagues who appear above the partition sporting worried ‘appease the wildebeest’ faces... at day’s end I go into a coma on the couch at nana o’clock, waking like a drugged automaton amid mysterious puddles of drool - I've been rampantly bored at desk. Crafting the same old word widgets. Dancing the same old jigs for clients. I've become a very industrious, obedient, purposeful ant. Scurrying to and from the nest, busily occupied with nation building, in exchange for the daily dispense of crumbs. I've become one wired little wage zombie. With little space for much else.

Last weekend I finally let a little light in. I woke late, grabbed food, notebook and music and fled like a possessed survivalist, driving two hours to Alexandria Beach. Stunning blue day. Salt. Sun. Little breeze. I walked in the back way, through my favourite snatch of coastal heath. Womping great banksias, pale yellow, lime, amber, umber, bronze and char. Prostrate ‘birthday present’ plants with leaves clumped like birdsnests of finely spliced ribbon. Skirted grasstrees which shimmy amongst lush green drenchings of shade. Lolloping saw-toothed palms threaten to fold in on themselves. And all of it leaning landward, as if receiving a secret. Straining to hear above the din of the shore.

On the beach I sit. I eat. I want to swim but my body yawns so I lay in the dunes. Then walk. And walk. I breathe it all in and try and hold it. I think of the plant I keep on my desk who I call ‘Sol’ to remind me of mine. And marvel at why the forgetting always happens so quick.

Suddenly the sand beneath my feet is not white anymore, it’s black. Stained with oil. The shit of life has its claws on everything. Even this sunny little sweep of beach in all its unfettered nudie joy. A little tear appears in my renewal. Two young guys are sticking their toes into the slick, looking, maybe wondering. And I wonder too, how long it will take for this forgetting to happen, for the miles of beaches to forget. And recover. I'm sure it will be longer than it takes for Us, probably already coveting the next shiny (imported?) widget and jumping in cars for the next long weekend.

easter momentous

2009-04-12T11:20:00.004+10:00

I have a history of eventful stuff happening over Easter. Easters of yore have variously been occasioned by relationship evolution/dissolution, the Cruising Division title in the Brisbane to Gladstone yacht race, gadding around Moreton Bay on a boat, and a towtruck ride into South Melbourne after breaking down in the city-bound middle lane of the Westgate Bridge at about 5pm on return-to-town Monday.

This Easter has so far been very un-momentous.

I had much-lusted plans to go camping with friends at Boonoo Boonoo National Park. My hairdresser - who skips to the beat of her own drummer - had told me about a trip there. Big waterfalls. Rockpools. Granite outcrops. Bush. No screaming kidlings. I called the NSW parks peeps. 15 campsites, no bookings required. “We’ve never turned anyone away.” Then friends discover a tragic double booking with a very expensive theatre performance. Gah! They assure their commitment to camping and try to sell tickets. In vain. Which is probably, in some mysterious realm not yet evident to me, for the best, since it has rained on and off the whole long weekend and looks set to continue thus.

In fact, the weather is very un-momentous too. It's that kind of still, grey, dove-warbling, nothing-much-happening-here weather. If there were tumbleweeds here, I'm sure one would roll by.

So instead of drinking wine beside a campfire under the stars in pleased exhaustion, I somehow got passively coerced at the last minute into driving all the way across town to check on a cat (the one who let me stay over while his mum was in Europe for six weeks over xmas) so his mum could spend four days in Byron with Ben Harper. Which no doubt has been planned since Blues and Roots tickets went on sale. Though it took her until THURSDAY to ask me.

Oh, and I also found out that my beloved local market has just been pimped to a fly-in/fly-out Sydney consortium which will glamourise them into just another expensive foodie market for stupid bourgeois Baby Boomers.

So. Instead of camping, instead of channelling Jesus and feeling the love (or whatever it is you're supposed to do at Easter), I battled traffic, seethed, scooped cat poo, and generally resented humankind.

The one very excellent thing that has happened this weekend was I finally worked out how to tweak the tv aerial to get full and unfettered reception for SBS. For the first time since plugging in the teev at its Gertrude St home. WOO! I am now complete.

turning circles

2009-04-06T19:48:00.003+10:00

Was highly amused today by colleague’s description of current machinery-of-government changes: “government agencies have the turning circle of a large aircraft carrier”. Well. I thought it was hilarious. Maybe I’m just a wee bit over-invested in work. Hardly surprising I guess given my daily remit to turn tepid horse poo into something highly desirable. On the turning circle of a gnat. With the reflexes of a reef fish.

Humph.

You know when you exclude something from your life for a higher cause (like chocolate, though that’s just stupid) it automatically appears all around you like an evil cherry to tempt you from your commitment?

An adventuring friend emailed last week enquiring my interest in

"Diving in the caves of Mexico
Walking across the Pyrenees from Atlantic to Mediterranean.
Ride around Ireland. I think it would be neat to then ride around northern France.
Annapurna crt or even an Island/Mera peak trip in Nepal.
And something still tugs at me to go back to NZ and paddle around Marlborough sounds and hike some of the classic areas in the south.
And I keep coming back to the idea of a trip into Northern India."

Money in the bank. Money in the bank. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH can’t hear you can’t hear you not listening WHAT?

The trips in bold are my picks. I will covet and store these away, to be dusted off when I've grown the acorn stash a bit bigger. And meanwhile content myself with curry-from-scratch, the ABC’s India and Ravi Shankar's back catalogue.

I love my little pad. I love walking to and from work (pity about the intervening hours). And yoga. And having stuff. Like a garden and a sandwich press and proximity to friends. But as you can see from my capacity to be disproportionately amused by inconsequential tripe (above), sometimes life at desk just doesn’t cut the ghee…

bligh's big broom

2009-03-31T19:53:00.003+10:00

I can’t believe it’s only TUESday. I am too knackered for it to be only TUESday. Am wondering whether this recurring fatigue stalking me is perhaps a latent viral thingie. Ironic, since today at work my pod-sters started calling me ‘the canary’ in a weird tip of the hat to my rampant health. (Which I actually prefer to 'Prouds' - an antidote to there being two Sams in the pod. My brother was called 'Prouds' at about age 13 by all his sweaty ruffian mates, and I really don't need these kind of flashbacks at work.) Anyway. To explain. My rampant health is sort of known. I’m the last chick standing after successive sustained lurgy attacks through the office. The girls in my pod think I'm an over-achieving health geek. So naturally, they laughed themselves silly at the chance to declare me the barometer for office ventilation issues after I went all queasy when the air con crashed.

Anyway. The real news at desk is Don't-Fluff-With-Me Anna has pulled out her broom and made a clean sweep of the army. My whole department has been abolished!!

[Delighted evil giggling.]

Super departments focused around ‘issues clusters’ are the future. Ironically, I now find myself back in the department (it's a new department but with the name of an existing one) that seeded my loathing for my bread ticket. DFWM is promising no job cuts, but there WILL be rationalisation of corporate services.

[Practically explodes with delight at prospects for life at desk. Or not at desk.]

The changes are in name only at the moment. But the broom is out.

BTW, am completely over all things ‘stimulus’. I’m with Satyajit Das. So hair of the dog.

two wheels good, four wheels bad

2009-03-28T17:57:00.005+10:00

With my usual deft display of indecision, I finally bought a bike. Not a mountain bike as originally planned. Original plans got dusted a couple of weekends ago when I tried D’s road bike and discovered that I am a speed freak. Oh. My. This must be what surfing feels like. Except on water. Yeeeeeee-haaaaaaa!

So, realising that I still needed a bike for commuting, I sprang for the Trek 7.3FX, which flies along like a road bike but has the hardiness to handle Brisbane’s pot-holed streets. And importantly, is not white. Ironically, I'd taken this bike for a test ride a while ago and liked it, but had MTB on the brain. I got some basic stuff (pump, lights, water bottle cage, lock) but have since realised I won’t get far in my commute quest without a rack and pannier. And tools. The wisdom of getting toe clips or cleats has also been pointed out to me and I suspect I’ll soon be hearing about the virtues of gel pants, special shoes and assorted lycra wardrobery.

Yesterday, after an afternoon river loop ride with lunch at the Japanese Garden at Mt Coot-tha (and a quick dash and grab through the herbarium – I blame my mother for my botanical banditry) I rode to the supermarket. On the way home, I passed the Critical Mass riders – bike enthusiasts who ride every month in a kind of ‘reclaim the roads’ demonstration of pedal power. They spied my white flashing light and binged their bells at me in a kind of mating ritual, saying “join us, join us!” … I smiled and continued on home to fridge my dairy, slightly suspicious of their hippy bike-love happiness.

I have entered the cult of bike...

two wheeled $timulu$

2009-03-12T22:01:00.002+10:00

Apparently it’s my national duty to spend. So while I ethically can’t justify buying crap I don’t need, I’ll acknowledge that I’ve got a couple of years worth of significantly reduced discretionary spending to make up for. So I’ve been plotting how to spend a lot of money really quickly, aka buy a bike. I’ve been round all the bike shops within a 10km radius of the central boring district. I’ve websurfed bike forums to the point where I get what ‘lbs’ means without having it explained. (local bike store, duh!) I’ve decided new over used. I now know more about componentry and geometry than I ever learned in high school mechanics and maths (I sucked at both).

So, in my search for a mountain bike that I can put slicks on to hoon round my ‘hood, but still take on long road rides and the occasional trail… I found the Trek 4300. Light frame, good componentry, NightRider-esque paint job, nice to ride, all round excellent entry-level mtb (mountain bike, duh!) Decision made…

Til I webstumbled upon the Gary Fisher Wahoo… superlight frame (same as their v expensive models), has lockout (the Trek doesn't) and even better componentry than the Trek for about $30 more. And a super smooth ride. BUT… the top bar on the Fisher is a lot longer so it’s got a much longer reach, which supposedly is THE measurement I should be worried about for potential back/neck/wrist strain. The other glitch is I can have it any colour I want, as long as it’s … white! Even the saddle is white! I'm worried it'll lead to an urge to call myself Powderpuff and get an 80s afro-perm...

So… what to do? The bike that has more bang for $, feels great now, could cause problems later, looks naff the whole time... or the one that is ok but defintely looks slick... or waste more weekends looking instead of riding!

If you know stuff about bikes… or hauling thy butt out of indecision, please, little help!!

the black russians

2009-03-08T16:03:00.005+10:00

Got to love a tomato that sounds like the Soviet mob. I remember growing tomatoes in plastic garbage bins when I was a long-haired, bare-footed little person. Actually I should say I remember making dirt tunnels in plastic garbage bins while one of the not-then-relics planted tomatoes in the not-yet-tunneled garbage bin. Anyway, my black russians, which I have nurtured from seedlings (thanks Dad), through a three-state, three-day road trip and three Brisbane addresses, are about to deliver their lycopene goodliness!

YEEEEAAH!

I have looked after these little grommets like a mother-in-training, hauling myself out every night during a swampy Brisbane summer, shagged from work, to water them by bucket. I've hauled them round in my car from house-stay to house-sit to housebound-bliss. Frankly I've never invested so much grunt into a plant before. Well actually that's a lie... but I am not going to flaunt my criminal past here. Anyway, today I made three loaves of sourdough and am thinking the russians will go nicely with that, a little olive oil and some of the purple basil that I have unbelievably managed to sprout from seed and which is now growing like medusa on speed in my little potted garden. A perfect, if hard-won, home made lunch.

4101

2009-03-06T22:10:00.006+10:00

It’s official: I live in the best neighbourhood in the 4000s. Yes, this is a dorky ode to my new hood, because we have:

1. The best video store (think Black Books but with moving images and social skills, staffed by film students who let you keep stuff if you haven’t quite managed to watch it by the due date).

2. The best markets. I have probably raved enough. So you'd think I'd be over it after about five non-continuous years of patronage. Nup.

3. The best felafels and the competitors yet to try.

4. The best Tibetan, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Greek...

5. The coolest apartment block (mine!) which has a water tank, compost bin, resident blue tongue lizard, and a rooster down the road who is not really mine to claim but makes me feel like I’m back in rural Laos every morning! And the girl upstairs who plays a sweet guitar and the boy next door who makes honey.

6. The Greeks across the way have perfected the art of sitting on the balcony watching the world go by.

7. Furniture gifts by the roadside. Hello new cane deck chairs and lounge.

8. Walking to and from work. Who needs the bus?! iPod, backpack, hotshoe over the Goodwill (pedo bridge), through the botanical gardens, along the river, look at the boats and pick one to take out for the day, shower, desk, brekky. LOVE IT!

9. Getting round on two wheels, a VERY exciting prospect. Coming soon.

10. The local thrift shop. Reverse Garbage. The Green Grocer. Mick's Nuts. The Rumpus Room, Lychee Lounge, wamble home. Neighbourhood lolly bag of the good stuff.

I am planning on moving anytime soon WHY?

hobson's choice

2009-03-04T20:09:00.004+10:00

(HOB-suhnz chois) noun The choice of taking what is offered or none; an apparently free choice with no acceptable alternative.

This week I was asked if I wanted to do my boss’s job again. When I say ‘ask’, I'm being overly generous. The 'offer' was disguised as a question, but before I had time to respond I was told the work would probably fall to me anyway so I may as well get paid for it.

SIGH.

I wouldn't mind so much but there are some icky team issues that do my head in.

I must have sent my hesitation flapping up the flagpole, as the next day, my boss 'offered' a retraction. In the vein of "don't feel you HAVE to do it, I can always do [the big cahuna's] job and my job".

GAH! (money in the bank, money in the bank, ommmmmmmmm)

Glimmers on the horizon:
a new bike
camping at Easter at Bunnoo Bunnoo
dinghy sailing course in May, yay!
Dreaming Festival in winter
idle daydreams of running away travelling with Ren

mysterious case of the honey pot

2009-02-17T21:53:00.005+10:00

A couple of Friday nights ago, I arrived home after a dangerous mix of beer and mojitos and sat on my deck with a friend, courting pain and suffering (slurping down gin and tonics).

I spied something sitting by the back door, which in the semi-dark sozzled-ness, I could neither identify nor get up to investigate.

When I opened the back door on Saturday morning, there it was: a mysterious pot of honey. A rather large mysterious pot of honey. A rather large mysterious kick-ass pot of honey.

I am in awe of these bees, for this is The Most Amazing Honey, with a subtle, round-mouthed sweetness that makes me want to give up coffee and convert to chai, it is THAT good.

So with super sleuthing prowess, I asked my landlord, who lives next door, about the honey. Ha! It was him! He keeps bees (not here, though that would be excellent for my potted garden).

I have been a bit wary of my landlord, as in not wanting to be TOO friendly, if you get my drift. Someone told me the gifting of honey is a Greek courting tradition. I googled it but couldn’t find anything compelling. But I shall throw caution to the wind and return the favour with some freshly baked sourdough. I on-gifted half the pot and am now extra conscious of keeping my supply lines open!

very yin and yang

2009-02-10T18:18:00.005+10:00

What a weekend. Feel incredibly saddened by the bushfires and the scale of devastation. The relics escaped unscathed after being on high alert through the weekend, with spot fires a matter of kilometres away. There are still fires close by in Yarram, caused by a bloody arsonist – plus fires to the south of them at the Prom. A cousin and uncle still in the thick of it and fighting fires respectively in St Andrews and Kinglake/Acheron. Hope they are all ok.

Makes you wonder about the ongoing safety of living not just ‘in the bush’ but ‘in the regions’ in Victoria. Seeing the floods in North Queensland at the same time is a pretty in-your-face illustration of which areas of the country are being affected by climate change. First. Even though the relics have so far been incredibly lucky, their entire garden has been demolished to the point of 'give up/start again' by the heatwave and they are looking at having to buy water.

It’s all so close to home that I feel sort of guilty about life going on and positive things happening. Though I guess that's what happens.

Despite a few nervy waits through periods of uncontactability with family, I had one of the BEST weekends in a long time. One of those ones that stretches on and bathes you in the sunny light of renewal. Started with mojitos and dinner with an old/new friend D on Friday night, ambled through Sat with pilates and walking to the markets and Reverse Garbage, where I scored some industrial-calibre cardboard boxes and cylinders which I am re-purposing as deck furniture.

Gently morphed into Sunday with brekky with a friend K, followed by more nest feathering (think retro tupperware) and opportunistic jam-making (fig and hibiscus), and finished with impromptu champagne in S's garden with her and N who was up for the weekend. And then had dinner cooked for me. Oh and I just discovered that my black russian tomatoes are bearing fruit. Hooray for life ;)

Like I said, very yin, very yang.

ramble without a point

2009-02-02T20:41:00.004+10:00

Indulge me. I have now spent two and a half months on a drip-feed of housing-related information. Housing policy and service delivery is my daylight LIFE between weekends. My mind has been overtaken and my 'pen' co-opted. As far as topical issues go, it’s pretty newsy. But not exactly Jay Griffiths, writer de force and subject of my current and ongoing infatuation… (ongoing because I don’t have time to read anymore and when I do my eyes are gluey/fried from the screen and page).

So this post is just a shameful attempt to register a blip while I am mired in uninspiration, with scribblings limited to the paid kind (wistful hmmm goes here). Specially wistful since the feather sent a lovely postcard at xmas but has not since called :(

I’m hoping energy and inspiration will improve now I'm housed (irony noted, in spades) and have, as of today, finished a two-month warming of my manager's seat, during which I discovered how rare and special is the trifecta of maturity, critical thinking and work ethic. Suffice to say I am very glad to slip back to my minion chains where I am responsible only for myself ;)

In defence of life, there has been a lurid yet brief smatter of inspired moments beyond the desk ...

seeing my best friend from primary school who possibly knows more about me than anyone and who I hadn’t seen in about 15 years! (Never thought I would say this, but Facebook rocks.)

meeting an interesting someone who is coordinating Brisbane’s Choir of Hard Knocks

seeing the Namatjira exhibition

invitation to be a hair model... have been a cheese model (evidence below with the disclaimer that I was made to wear the purple frilly shirt and it certainly isn't mine!)... but this could be fun, too!

inspired muffin-dreaming... in particular: pear, pecan and ginger (first attempt not pear-y or ginger-y enough but addition of dark chocolate a piece of muffiny genius!) AND Fig, pistachio and rosewater muffins (which may also wear a native hibiscus syrup decoration after I inquisitively picked up some rosella flowers at the markets - v yum in champagne).

the markets, the markets, the markets. My weekend SALVE.

So there. Cultural reintegration almost complete. I almost have pre-approval on a m-m-m-mortgage (ha! you thought I was going to say muffin!! oh god it's late, and my brain is wrecked), though am embarrassed to report the need to re-learn how to use major appliances (both the oven and TV work, it's my domesticity that's rusted).

Am clinging to my toiletries bag like a backpacker in denial.

unpacked

2009-01-26T21:16:00.005+10:00

From the deck you can see the city hiding over the hill.

Old school kitchen with frog-garden lampshade

First loaves and crafty storage

bedroom window and the gabba through the louvres
(the lights are a bit lost in the clouds)

a home on the hill

2009-01-11T11:55:00.003+10:00

After two years of boarding, backpacking, house-sitting, couchsurfing and sailing, I have finally found a place to call home. For at least the next six months. Yippee!! I am giddy with the thrill of all the new nest offers, because:

1. There will be no more living out of bags. And no more chronic disorganisation, as I begin to consolidate my worldy things currently dispersed along the eastern seaboard. While the commitment is sort of scary, there are loads of reasons it is good to know where you'll be next week/month. Like signing up to herdshare.

2. I have inhabited other people’s spaces for what seems like a very long time now. I’ve cared for needy poodles, post-traumatic german shepherds, crazy cockatiels and various cats that a) leave surprise puddles outside your bedroom door in the morning and b) wail like a muezzin at 4am, 4.15am, 4.30am, 4.50am, 4.59am, 5.19am and 5.30am daily, thereby inducing learned insomnia, a haggard appearance and general functional paralysis. It’s time to reclaim my sanctuary.

3. Sanctuary is an apt description of the new digs, which were acquired in hasty fashion. As in, I went out yesterday to look for lodgings, saw two places and negotiated a lease on the spot for the second place. Very unlike the girl prone to prolonged opportunity-cost deliberation of sandwich fillings etc. And very out of character, given the one big flaw of the place is an extreme lack of kitchen bench and cupboard space!

But… this concession may prove worthy for the improved space-time continuum I hope the apartment will bestow. It has big light rooms with high art deco ceilings, kick-ass breezes, and a big deck AND courtyard with killer views. And I can ride to work (and the markets and the local cheapie flicks), thereby reclaiming my commute time (and cultural engagement). Which also leads to a karmic side-story about how I stupidly gave away my bike two years ago during the material cleanse, and now look set to inherit a surplus bike from a friend... at the risk of numbering a chicken, I believe ‘woohoo!’ is in order. I figure I can scour Vinnies for a stand-alone pantry and outdoor table for the deck, which can double as a food prep bench... though those breezes may foil my creative vision.

Photos will be posted with due fanfare once the cocktail glasses are unpacked.

stuck in punxsutawney

2008-12-22T21:34:00.008+10:00

As I grumblingly accept my lot in the big wheel of the wage economy and bemoan the loss of free time, I’ve noticed a dangerous little feeling brewing. The feeling that this existence – for all its family-sized upside-down fridges and missed lunch breaks – is somehow comforting. Like the progression of a clock: the tick-tock repetition, while illustrating your dwindling years/weeks/hours, is also oddly soothing. Call it a whacked biological need for regime, but this knowing-what-you’re-doing-tomorrow bizzo has definite - albeit mysterious - appeal. Maybe it’s because I’ve been seriously deprived of structure/trivia and the ego-entrapment of office life. Whatever. About the same time I began musing over this little irony, my ping-pong relationship with Bligh’s Army was formally and publicly acknowledged. Last week I took out the Groundhog Day title in our unit’s frivolous awards bestowal. I am so Bill Murray with a microphone in the snow waiting for a furry animal to forecast the weather. Luckily, I've moved through re-integration wobbles and a protracted bout of cultural alienation. Now I'm going to have some fun with the Punxsutawney locals.

Savouring domestic novelties:

DVD watching – the whole first season of Love My Way. That’s ten episodes in one week... a couch-sitting personal best. I blame it on the cult of Claudia, who I have loved since she celebrated all the good bits about share-housing in St Kilda.

Small talk with the cat.

A proper bed. A big bed. Soft sheets. Totally underrated. I would give it all up for just this… if only the birds and sunshine didn't start at 5am.

i love it when a plan comes together

2008-12-15T22:04:00.008+10:00

Last week I moved house - again! - and moved in with Mr T, a cat pushing the ‘aloof’ edge of the feline sociability scale. He is also rather accident prone. The night before his mum departed the country, he had an investigative encounter with a long piece of wire and got horribly tangled, and then horribly anxious to get free, cutting his lip and back leg in the process. Thankfully mum (who is probably at this moment drinking gluwein for breakfast in Prague) whipped him off to the emergency vet before leaving.

Mr T's general post-traumatic narkiness has not helped us to bond as house-mates. He has generally avoided my company, and despite offers of fresh meat, has preferred instead to spent large amounts of time amidst the fabric mounds in the linen cupboard.

Yesterday afternoon was round two at the vets. Off we trundled for a check up, after several attempts at going in the box and a close encounter between claws and a long necklace. I should have made like Hannibal and drugged him in preparedness for travel. But I didn't. (Pity the fool.) He growled about going in the box. He growled about going in the car. He growled about the dogs in the waiting room. And then silently complied as the vet ripped off his scabs ("to check for abcesses"), doused the open wounds with Betadine and jerried a thermometer up him.

What the...?

From Wrestlemania-style defence to complete and total submission? And all I did was show him the door to a small box, purportedly one of his most favourite places! Oh to bottle the magical powers invested in the vet's table...

When we got home, things got even more bizarre. I opened the box. He sauntered out, rubbed at my heels and purred deeply. He even let me scratch his neck for FIVE seconds. I know better than to question feline behaviour. But I think I can venture that we have begun to bond...

parable of two worlds

2008-12-05T22:14:00.005+10:00

Oh dear. Paid work is so uncool for my blogging. Anyway, here's a small parable. As the rain falls in Brisbane and grows my Black Russians like beanstalks...

---

I know of two worlds. One I live in but don’t believe in. The other I believe in but can’t quite reach.

One has mobile phone towers and kept lawns, suburb to city commutes and satellites orbiting through space to get us there. It breathes air-conditioning upon us, which stealthily sucks our lifeforce. It has a strange obsession with plastic packaging, which it goes to greath lengths to manufacture, only to immediately throw away. It squeezes us through a series of institutions designed to crush our uniqueness, creativity and spirit, so that we may become full and conforming participants in the Economy. With its high demands on our time, the Economy keeps thought trimmed inside little boxes. This world relies on insulating constructs that remove us from our humanity, that deny our relationship with the earth, that impose falsity at every turn and propagate rampant unwellness. This world is a bubble of unreality. Inside the bubble there is only the bubble; it is difficult to imagine an outside to the bubble. Perhaps this is because, for the most part, we don’t see the bubble, let alone recognise its delicate nature.

The other world has none of these things. It has land and sea scapes and natural abundance and diversity and community and art and stories and ideas. It lacks disposable income but has bountiful simplicity and mass wellbeing. It has a different kind of knowledge. It knows about growing, building, sharing and looking after people. And it is not just one world, but many. They are the many small, purposed and felt traditional worlds of humankind.

These small, bountiful worlds once held us all, to varying degrees, in their embrace. But then agriculture was born in the Fertile Crescent. We domesticated plants and animals, stored food and became settled. Well-fed populations trebled. Land was put under lock and key, and with it, the freedom to feed your family by the sweat of your brow. Many peasants were ‘freed’ from food production to toil in trades. Labour was divided, giving us artisans, who were later replaced by experts. One of whom invented the modern steam engine, giving birth to Industralisation and exploding us into a new age of mechanised largesse. The bubble blew bigger and bigger. With our armies of well-fed experts, technology bounded ahead and distributed knowledge to the masses – which told us to buy, buy, buy. And so the bubble bulged until it was bulbously magnificent.

Now grows a small movement that can’t make sense of the bubble. Some intuit the bubble’s wrongness but are caught in its maw. They believe life is inherently combative and destructive. They believe in the inevitabilty of our culture: you can hear them teach it to others by saying things like ‘such is life’. Such believed impotency makes them sad. Through this immobilised sadness they press on with air-conditioning and kept lawns and the distraction of new dresses, growing ever more deeply indebted to the bubble they can neither make sense of, nor escape. They are the anxious and depressed.

Some others – artists, landholders, marginalised liberals – increasingly muse that the bubble is precariously inflated and not at all magnificent. Their worldview is unrelentingly at odds with the bubble. They sing of those other small worlds of bounty. Their voices grow in volume and number. Somehow, whilst living in the world that shoehorns thought, they are able to imagine real and beautiful alternatives. Some of them have gone beyond imagination, beyond the bubble. They are true visionaries, who have the sense of self to play what they hear in a world that is largely tonedeaf. They inhabit the world I believe in... those worlds beyond the bubble.

carrots on toast

2008-11-17T20:52:00.005+10:00

On a good day I have trouble deciding what to put on my toast. But today, when I really could have used it, my well-thumbed handle on indecision deserted me.

I was presented with the kind of challenge I knew would eventuate when I rejoined the salaried life… though didn't quite expect so soon. My manager asked if I wanted to relieve in her role for a couple of months. I’ve done this job many times. It really doesn’t have that much to recommend it. Other than more money.

And ... I ... bit ... the ... carrot.

It was the kind of moment when the world slows down and you feel yourself saying something you can’t quite comprehend you're saying, but can't quite stop yourself from saying either.

Like yes.

And that was BEFORE I found out the position has been regraded up a level during my absence. I will shimmy up two pay brackets. Quite phenomenal if you could see my last tax return.

Three weeks ago I was crafting my resignation letter. I had a valid health care card, confidence wobbles and a dream. I am supposed to be finding a way out of communications. Not burrowing further into it.

Maybe it was all that leftover electricity in the air.

I feel dirty. I feel compromised. I am going to hate myself in the morning. Every morning. For at least the next two and a half months. I’ve just discovered my price.

acronym-phomania (is a disease of people in offices)

2008-11-13T22:51:00.004+10:00

Here is a list summarising the first week back in life and desk. Seems I can only think in lists and dot points this week. Strange. Hmmph. Think I need one of those website counters - the ones that count down the days til some important event – in my case, the end of my ‘gap’ year back behind the desk.

1. Freaking acronyms. They should all be hogtied, painted with honey and stuffed in a small cage with a hungry brown bear. Except TOIL and ATL, which are quite dandy acronyms which I hope to become better aquainted with. So far I’ve acquainted myself with lots of zzzzzzzzzzs and gotten friendly with a few G&Ts. I would also like to retain the many-purposed WTF in my arsenal. It’s come in handy several times this week.

2. WTF is with the sudden profusion of white – yes, WHITE – hairs????? Mysteriously this little jab to the jugular coincided with my return to a lifestyle I deem to be in contempt of life. Maybe it's not the profusion but my noticing that is sudden. Perhaps my renewed compulsion to preen after a lull has afforded me a fast-forward from ‘before’ to ‘after’, otherwise denied by continual attendance to mirrors. Either way, WTF??

3. Sports shoes that pretend they’re office shoes: it is my week’s mission to find some. After three blisters on day one in my formerly comfortable flats, I am starting a homy-peds facebook fan club.

4. Quietly freaking out after re-reading points two and three in succession. Moving quickly to convince myself it is not a sign I’m upon old lady days, merely an indication of my slide even further to the left… and, well… I can’t think of any positive reinterpretation whatsoever for WHITE HAIR.

5. Ah Brisvegas. You have Campos coffee. You have Avid Reader and the awesome West End markets. You have cute Queenslander houses (albeit now totally unaffordable) and mango trees and sunshine. You even have a smattering of decent cultural institutions and events. But you are also painfully thin on the ground with the good stuff. Why do I always forget how small and unsophisticated you are? I am bemoaning the demise of your cheap-ass Dendy, which is clearly a ploy to get us to drive to the upmarket one in a posh suburb in a bling retail development on the river and pay more. Pfff.

6. Had also forgotten how small Bligh’s Army is. And how postively miniscule is Bligh’s Army of Spin. I like the sound of that, we could almost be a cricket team. Except I don't like cricket. Almost made it through one week without an urgent request for speech notes from the Office of the Lesser Grand Poo-bah. Am taking rehydration salts to work tomorrow after spending a week dying of thirst in the stupid airconditioning. WHINGE.

7. Someone asked if I’d planted the herbs and black russian tomato seedlings I brought with me from Vic. Let's see... arrived Friday PM, spent weekend getting self into new lodgings/retreiving work things from storage, started work Monday... When would I have done that? I’d forgotten how close to impossible it is for a desk hound to have time for much else other than work during the week. Sob.

8. A couple of points in opposition to my general brooding cynicism: I am secretly amazed by the little ripples we unknowingly make. I am also running away with Leunig this week.

9. Back to the brooding. I sense that with my return to desk-bindings, the part of my brain disposed to ideas and deep thinking is involuntarily shutting down. It – which thrives on idle time – is being usurped by the (still sluggish) part that has been called into action to juggle multiple compact chunks of information. Like lists and bullet points. I want to scream that these little information snacks are useless to me, they are merely functional, inconsequential snippets of trivia, unrelated and meaningless to my place in the world. But no one is listening. So I am running away with Leunig, he understands.

10. A concentration of sympathy and wellness vibes to all the poorly kitties and all their mums and dads. I fear it will be my turn soon and the little blighter’s in a different state.

34 things

2008-11-03T23:00:00.003+10:00

Tonight I stumbled across bugheart, a blogger (who also has a great idea for a photo blog) who made a list of 34 goals on her 34th birthday. Spooky, since tomorrow is my 34th birthday. It's probably unwise to ignore such blatant/weirdo prompting from the universe, and I've kinda been in renewal mode anyway, so here's my to-do list for the coming year...

1. Find a job in policy (and change blog subtitle to Life And Desk).
2. Save save save and buy some land.
3. Research and design my little sustainable house.
4. Persevere with a potted herb garden.
5. Sell my photos.
6. Sell my cards (or at least give them to family and friends on card-type occasions).
7. Eat more ethically.
8. Buy goods in bulk in own containers.
9. Continue making all my own bread.
10. Stick to pilates and walking 3 times/week each.
11. Do a first aid, safety at sea and sail training course.
12. Investigate Indigenous kitchen garden idea.
13. Read about transition culture.
14. Knit R a beanie in time for Japan.
15. Send a krama to N.
16. Blog more regularly. Post more for streeteditors. Keep writing for Dumbo Feather.
17. Get my typewriter fixed.
18. Do more creative work.
19. Do something eco-preneurial / creative with R.
20. Make and give away recycled notebooks.
21. Redevelop Pelican’s website.
22. Start giving blood again.
23. Learn the violin. And pick up my guitar more often.
24. Visit the Bunya Mountains.
25. Go for bushwalks.
26. Get a bike and ride it (and this time, don’t give it away!)
27. Do more for others.
28. Get an address book and keep track of friends/family contact details and birthdays.
29. Apply to become a foster carer.
30. Find out about rent a chook and herdshare.
31. Go to Sunday comedy & jazz @ the Powerhouse again.
32. Try to be more open to the possibility of meeting a single/available/adjusted boy with similar interests/values/goals.
33. Accept the journey, where ever it goes, and trust myself more.
34. Do one thing that's not on this list that I would normally say ‘no’ to!

empty is the tao

2008-10-30T16:15:00.005+10:00

My enviro-mentors from the Strezleckis came for lunch today. (The enviro-mentors who I planted a walnut grove with, who henceforth have looked upon me beamingly as their little green disciple. They who shall now be known as 'Gifted With Asparagus & Artichokes' for their bestowal of two shopping bags heaving with the season's best from their garden. I will be weeing green before the week is out!)

Ahem.

So after emptying several glasses of champagne - ten days til I clink the desk shackles back on & damned if I'm going to let the opportunity for daytime carousing pass - I told Gifted about my plans re work. He replied with a parable from the Tao Te Ching. Something about a cup of water being valuable, a cup of wine being even more valuable, and a cup of diamonds being more valuable still. But what trumps them all, he said, is the empty cup, which can be filled with anything.

Me: ......................

Hopefully I looked very zen. And not at all like someone experiencing mild panic over a recent and fairly life-altering decision after being ambushed with the Tao. And DEFINITELY not like someone wondering if the empty cup could be filled with champagne and that was why it was the most valuable.

No. I think the little parable turned something in me. When I was a desk hound, no one would've recited the Tao in response to something I said. Never. Nor would they have brought champagne and home-grown asparagus for lunch. I think it’s an achievement that I’ve trotted on my idealistic high horse back to reality. But it's still a way from the saddle to the 40-hour grey-walled commute-consume pantomime which I've philosophically divorced. For a long time before I left work, I felt like I didn't make sense in that world anymore. It's not just a different drummer thing. I feel like I'm on tour with the whole freakin' band.

Hrrrmmmmppph. Empty cup. Empty cup. Empty cup.

life and desk

2008-10-28T22:38:00.003+10:00

Finally, an outcome: I’m submitting to the desk shackles for one more year to get my long service leave. I have a week in Bingi before I will drive (again… hrrmph) back to Brissie.

Some very excellent things about the move: 1) sunshine 2) return to urban life including Campos coffee, West End markets and impossible-to-get-in-the-regions-fare like tofu 3) totally ace friends who don't desert me when I desert Brisbane, and 4) reclaiming my life in boxes. Eventually. Like next February, since I’ll be couch-surfing in November and cat-and-house-sitting during December and all of January. Which will bring me up to TWO YEARS of inhabiting other people’s spaces and/or couchsurfing.

Of course there’s also the excellent matter of $$$ and its central role in the procurement of real estate and attainment of grand plan.

Fortuitously it looks like there'll be no boat work to miss out on in the first half of next year and hopefully by then I'll be able to negotiate leave.

The other excellent notable is that my stupendously supportive and selfless manager is assisting in my search for work outside her area since she knows that the work inside her area will bore holes in my soul if I have to do it five days a week for a year.

Thank you to everyone who offered advice and support re the resign/return dilemma. After mentally prepping myself for the 'resign' option for a year it would have been difficult to change tack without some appeal to rationality!

freak.

2008-10-22T13:54:00.002+10:00

Freeaaaak! FREEEEEAAAK!

I'm having a minor freak out. [Cue golf-ball sized hailstorm - really.]

Last week, after about 14 months leave, my work asked me for my decision: return or resign. An 11th hour thought about long service leave has thrown me into the guts of a stinkng I-wish-I'd-never-asked type dilemma. If I return to work for one more year, I will get about 12 weeks paid leave. Which is a lot. At least from where I sit in under-employed povertysville.

It is very freaking tempting. I could squirrel my ass off and actually realistically be able to afford some land. Which is Step One of the oft-alluded to Grande Planne (something along the lines of the Hobbit House but somewhere sunny and with permaculture gardens and chickens and a boat).

And. AND. I could potentially negotiate extra leave to continue sailing type adventures. But I would pretty much have to return to work… NOW. I'm seeing my tax guru on Friday, which could also influence my decision. But of course I need to let work know... TODAY since there was a stuff up with the dates.

Just when I thought I'd made my decision, along comes this dastardly little carrot.

GAH! Help! All you non-commenters, speak up now or forever hold your peace. I need some advice. Lest it be curtains for Life After Desk. Gracias.

master of unravelled plans and small detours

2008-10-19T22:56:00.005+10:00

Ah Byron. A two-day detour into green rolly hills, rainbow-glimmery waterfalls and surf, where land prices make you cry and German snowboard instructors make you want to learn to surf. Again. And then go to Tibet. (After I just narrowed the focus of my wanderlust down to Western Australia. And India.)

There’s something frivolous about taking the long way home. And unravelling plans into the wind.

I was in Byron 15 years ago, pretty much to the day. (Before it was completely besmirched by the likes of Dominos and Supre, promulgating their cheap-ass chain-store mediocrity to affluent city-slaves searching for something they don’t realise is long since gone and which they have effectively helped kill off. Not that this was intended, nor that I can separate myself from them. But back to topic...)

I’d dropped out of uni for a semester and headed, for the second time, to Byron, to think and be. OK, there may have been some cavorting too, of the kind that it is natural for an academically focused 19yo to do when unchained from her small world. I hung out with loads of people from all over the world. I tried to surf. I sailed a hobicat. I stole a hubcap/ashtray from the Railway pub. I tried … a lot of … um, different stuff for the first time.

Oddly, I feel closer to my 19yo self than my 19yo self would have liked. (If my 19yo self could see me now.) Crazy to think that I knew back then that I was on the wrong path. Crazier still that it took me 15 years... 15 YEARS GODDAMNIT!! to alter course. Even more pathetic is that I still don’t have a clue where I’m going!

But maybe that’s OK, in some small, skewy, not-the-Hollywood-ending kind of way.

On my 19th birthday, I hitch-hiked from Byron to Nimbin with an English lad. I remember not quite knowing whether we would make it there, and if we did, where we would stay. We made it to Nimbin. That night I stayed in a little house which belonged to friends of friends, and fell asleep under a window of stars, stoned to the eyeballs, as two girls made love in the next room. It remains one of my most spontaneously lived birthdays, and one of the few I actually remember.

the poverty of affluence

2008-10-15T09:39:00.006+10:00

Today is Blog Action Day, a day where bloggers of conscience are encouraged to talk about issues of poverty.

Poverty, by definition, is a lack of the necessities of life. As well as the pressing forms of poverty caused by war and the failure of government policy and global markets, there’s a growing form of poverty that is so sneaky as not to be immediately recognisable as poverty. It is the poverty of affluence, now pervasive in Western society. In exchange for our material wealth, we have a diminished freedom of choice in how to live – freedom of choice being an assumed given in this culture. We are shoe-horned into wage slavery, into bondage to the markets, and sold the illusion of choice, convenience, status, mobility – all things that are certainly not poverty.

Since we no longer have free access to land, we must obtain the provisions for life within a market economy, where our wants – which we mistake for needs – grow in proportion to our ability to meet them. The lure of 'more' is reinforced at every turn. And so we experience life as the perpetual tension of desire.

Robert Dessaix wrote in the recent Weekend Australian magazine that “cacophonous emptiness is the postmodern condition”. Emptiness usually stems from a lack of purpose and meaningful human connection. It manifests as anxiety, frustration, depression – all normal responses to loss of control. These symptoms are never attributed to the all-powerful capitalist-democratic culture; the link between symptom and disease is so heavily obfuscated by glitz, and the power to change one’s circumstances so limited, that ignorance and denial succeed. Besides, to question the foundational assumptions of your own culture is anarchic.

These thoughts are not new. Leunig has despaired the “fake mass wellbeing and prosperity” and identified a “Western deprivation – a new kind of famine”. Bill McKibben in Deep Economy argues the need to pursue a broader prosperity – one that values community, environment and human happiness and chooses localism over globalism and ‘hyper-individualism’. Buckminster Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Bill Mollison, Daniel Quinn, Tom Hodgkinson, Carlo Petrini and Derrick Jensen are a few others.

Every time I return to a city after time spent in uncluttered landscapes, I’m struck by the busy purposelessness, the excess of consumption and waste and the denial of community that defines the urban lifestyle. The more I become removed from this way of life, the more keenly I sense its artifice. Its smells are always the first thing I notice. The deodorants and perfumes, laundry powders, handwashes and hair products. We are masters at disguising reality, dressing up the truth til we no longer recognise it.

I am happy to be bumping along the road out. Real freedom, real choice in how to live, to be able to use one’s skills and interests in a way that is self-sustaining and not harmful, to live in a community… these are the necessities of life. And necessary not just for an ethical existence, but for existence. For biodiversity. It is not a cultural imperative, but an environmental one.

--

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it…” Henry David Thoreau

the next part

2008-10-08T01:57:00.005+10:00

Freedom. So elusive. Perhaps fortuitously so. Its attainment forces a very personal issue. How to use it? Given every liberty, what should we do? How to start tomorrow? These thoughts taunt me right now. For tomorrow I must answer them.

The Hope Vale project has finished. There’s loads of cool stuff that I could relate (eating turtle, kayaking from North Direction to Lizard Island, the impossible cuteness of a wordy two-year-old, meeting people living the cruising life, all the cool places I've seen/been, etc). But I’m sort of consumed at this late~early hour by crisis-of-purpose thoughts. After an exhausting but happy month, that now familiar blank canvas stretches out before me. Uncontracted infinitum. I know myself better than ever. But there is the interminable tension between wants and needs, habit and change. Between possible paths, divergent values. And of course, between two (geographic) states.

There is no rational reason that I should be so nervy about not knowing what I’m doing beyond next week, and where I’ll be doing it. So why is it doing my head in? Exhaustion? The perpetuity of uncertainty? I wish someone would bloody hire me to do something fantastically cool for the next few months and I could just put these stupid thoughts to bed. For now.

Since I'm asking, a sleep-in without a wordy two-year old who awakes at sparrow fart would also be grand. Please. Thank you. And now, me to bed...

--

Looking forward to:

Spending overdue time with friends in Brisvegas (and having the next 10 days sort of planned)
Officially resigning from my cushy permanent gig for the still wide unknown
Clean hair, clean fingernails, clean clothes, clean bed, etc.
Retaining inspiration aka a sense of infinite possibility

mayi dupbar*

2008-09-28T13:57:00.006+10:00

It's always about the food.

Up early on our day off. Can’t sleep in (damn diurnal rhythms). Pelican’s tech-guru N and I prep pancakes on the barbie with fruit salad, yoghurt and honey (the maple syrup went out in sympathy for the armies of bananas which have fermented on this trip). A lovely long brekky with coffee and tunes.

It’s a fitting start to our Sunday after Pelican's four huge days supporting a group of Hope Vale community members to retrace, by kayak, a sea route used by the Guugu Yimidhirr Aborigines to Lizard Island to collect (you guessed it) food: wild arrowroot and yam, clam shell, sea gull eggs, turtle, wangay, fish, dugong and pigeons. The original inhabitants paddled in dugout canoes from the main camp at Cape Flattery to Lizard, via Rocky Island, South Direction Island and North Direction Island.

Our first night’s anchorage is at Rocky Isle, a protected rookery for Torres Strait pigeons. We have time for beachcombing before picking up the kayakers who will arrive after their first day's paddle. The shoreline is paved with flat white stones and the sand is spangled with driftwood, prongs of bleached coral and manmade flotsam. We return to the boat with the kayakers and an armful of rubbish and rouse a few hands to help prepare the meal: freshly-hooked barbecued fish, jacket potatoes and salad. Camping is not permitted on Rocky so Pelican sleeps with 29 people under her wing.

On day two, the kayakers paddle from Rocky Isle to North Direction Island, which rises like a pudding from the sea. Our mooring there is tenuous, with gusts bulleting the boat, and reefs surrounding us. So after unloading support people and camp gear, Pelican and crew depart for the sheltered waters of Watson’s Bay at Lizard for the night and a quiet meal of ganguruu (kangaroo) and mediterranean vegies on the barbie (with thanks to E and crew for giving me the night off!).

We motor back to North Direction on day three to pick up all the kayakers. With 25-30 knot winds and a messy two-metre swell, some paddlers are not keen on completing the last leg to Lizard Island. With them aboard, we sail back to Lizard and moor at Mermaid Cove, a secluded bay where a rock ledge shelters a lively reef. It's decided that we'll wait to see if conditions ease enough to complete the last leg tomorrow. After a tiring day of loading and unloading people and gear, N and I squeeze in a late afternoon snorkel. Sunlight streams through the water onto bright blue, fat-fingered starfish. Giant winking clams and baby clam nurseries ogle us from below. Neon reef fish duck in and around coral bommies. We stick our heads up just in time to catch a sunshower. As we return to the boat a turtle swims by. What a world! After visiting the shore camp we enjoy a late dinner of baked spangled emperor, rice, cucumber salad and coconut-lime sambal.

Day four and we are three paddlers short. The kayaks must all be returned to Lizard. In the interests of logistics, I, along with two other Pelican crew, put my hand up to jump in a kayak. Not without nerves, as the instructors focus us on how to handle a capsize and our skipper talks about retrieval procedures. Conditions are still rough, with 25-30 knots, frequent gusts and lots of chop, but we're paddling downwind and have Pelican close by. As we launch the kayaks from North Direction Island, an eagle circles us overhead. I'm too busy staying upright to notice, but those remaining on Pelican declare goosebumps. This is the final leg of an historic voyage. After an hour’s paddling, we approach the shallow waters of the lagoon at Lizard, all eight kayaks with sails up, cruising the rest of the way in. A welcome party of three ngowia (turtles) greets my paddle honcho J and I as we are among the first to arrive.

What a journey. Kudos to the kayakers who completed it, and brought to life part of their cultural heritage. It is hard to imagine making this voyage in pursuit of food, as the Guugu Yimidhirr once did.

*Yummy food in Guugu Yimidhirr

postcard from cape flattery

2008-09-18T22:18:00.012+10:00

At last... back where the sun shines! We are anchored at Cape Flattery, at the southern end of the Cape York Peninsula.

We sailed from Cairns a week ago, arriving that evening in Cooktown for a community sail the following day. We took a group of school students and marine scientists out to the reef to undertake water quality monitoring. After last dash provisioning in Cooktown (including an all-important last icecream for a month), we sailed to Cape Bedford, where we anchored for a couple of days, doing sail training. We've had five Hope Vale fellas aboard for the first week, undertaking training with us towards their coxswains certificates. Great bunch of guys (that's them above in celebration mode as we arrive at Flattery).

Bit of a perk for me to sit in on most of the training and beef up my boatiness.

On Tuesday we sailed north to Cape Flattery, where the Hope Vale community will set up camp on the beach over the school holidays. This will be the base for a whole bunch of activities, including digital storytelling (there is a whole media tent with computer editing facilities), a kayaking trip following a traditional dugout canoe route to Lizard Island, music and dance workshops, basket-weaving, spear-making, turtle and dugong research... and of course sailing!

Sailing north from Cape Bedford, we had a bumper catch off Low Wooded Isle, a favoured fishing spot of skip's which always provides. Northern bluefin tuna, spotted mackerel and coral trout: five in all. We have since feasted amply on sashimi and barbecued fish, rice and salad.

The only food issues so far have been frostbitten greens and fermenting fruit. Since we are quite remote and catering numbers are a bit 'fluid', I've been swallowing my tongue every time I see space appearing in the fridges! Have also been helping with meal planning for the community camp – up to 120 people for three weeks with only eskies, a simple woodfire grill and gurramah (underground camp oven) to play with. Luckily there is a cook in charge of the camp kitchen (I had been wondering!) and he used to be a chef in the navy.

Today was our first community sail at Flattery, with the marine scientist involving Hope Vale kids in seagrass monitoring activities. Privileged to have a traditional owner aboard. We are learning lots. Many dugongs sighted, one curling up through the water close by the boat.

Will write more soon - my battery's dying!

prorogue

2008-09-04T21:49:00.002+10:00

(pro-ROHG) verb tr.: 1. To discontinue a session of something, for example, a parliament. 2. To defer or to postpone.

Sometimes new words come along at just the right time.

Spring has sprung and we are into our second week of continuous sunshine! Those of you living beyond the reach of proper winter will probably not understand my unfettered crazy-woman bliss. Suffice to say, it is like falling into a very deep mire of fetid baby-poo-like sludge while you’re sleeping and wondering, when you wake up, why everything is suddenly rank and it’s difficult to move without clenching inwardly against the tide of crap… until five months* later you’re miraculously hauled out of the baby-poo-like sludge, whisked to a day spa and washed, pummelled and spruced back to life, whereupon robed courtiers who look very much like Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords escort you to a candy-striped sunchair where a glass of bubbles awaits your pleasure as wardrobe, hair and nail attendants get to work on further sprucing.

Well, it is very much like this. Of course it isn't actually this. That would be stupid. Or very amazing.

But back to my main reason for posting. Tomorrow I leave the country. (Not Australia, Gippsland, aka the country. Ha!) For Cape York, via Cooktown, via Cairns, via Melbourne, via bus, train, J's place, train, skybus, plane, car, boat, etc.

I can almost smell the salt air! Yippee! does not even come close. Business as usual (winter, under-employment, everything in my life that doubles for baby-poo-like sludge, etc) is hereby prorogued for a month.

Spring has also returned my kitchen mojo, courtesy a genius creation of barley, mushroom and mozzarella burgers. Which are so meaty that I’m toying with getting the kids (the ones I’ll be working with, who only eat meat – and then only the lips-n-a$$holes kind) to make and eat!

Hehehehe. I am pure evil.

--

*because that is how long a real winter lasts.

score one, the regions

2008-08-28T12:22:00.004+10:00

Last night the relics shouted me to dinner and a movie. Which on its own would be notable, given the extreme notability of any type of cultural excursion I make these days.

But this occasion belongs in the realm of Wonderful.

By some bizarre act of mercy, Son of a Lion came, for one night, to Yarram’s Regent Theatre. Which despite its potential arthouse allure (balcony seating, pressed metal ceilings, Bud Tingwell photographs on the walls) generally only shows crap.

Not only is Son of a Lion not crap, it is a beautiful story with stellar acting, gorgeous one-liners and a brilliant soundtrack. (And the story of its making by an Aussie paramedic is facscinating.)

That this subtitled flick featuring jellaba-wearing Pashtuns shooting guns and praying to Allah in Al Qaeda country screened the day before it’s national release, in the land of dairy farms where ‘F OFF, WE'RE FULL’ bumper stickers prove your manliness, was unfathomable.

--

I am further impressed to be able to label this post 'bingi' AND 'movies' (who woulda thought?)... and possibly creating a new category for my recent favourite list discovery: Stuff White People Like. (Think sushi, indie music and threatening to move to Canada/New Zealand.) I don't think there's a post yet for Middle Eastern Tribal Culture!

potatoship to the camembert moon

2008-08-24T18:29:00.007+10:00

Two weeks before departure for Cairns. Less, actually.

From my bolthole in the virtual Antarctic (aka southern Gippsland), I can’t quite grasp the subtropics. My disbelief starts somewhere around my ugg boots. And tapers off around my beanie. T-shirts and shorts sound about as appropriate right now, as, well… flying to the moon in a hollowed-out potato.

[Gah! Potato rocketship + moon-as-cheese = brain preoccupied with stodge! I know those moon mythologists have dibs on Swiss but I'm going for camembert. White rind. I think it works. Mmm, camembeeeerrt…]

Which brings me to my next challenge: getting my head around summer food.

To explain. I’m joining Pelican again (as cook) for a project with the Hopevale Aboriginal community. The itinerary goes something like this: Cairns-Cooktown-Cape Flattery-various islands-Cooktown-Cairns. Four weeks, a bit of sail training, a splash of kayaking, some turtle/dugong monitoring, digital storytelling, traditional craft-making... and boatloads of cooking.

So. I’m kind of hoping my kitchen mojo reappears. Soon. And in summer mode. About a month ago, some kind of evil winter slump repossessed my food inspiration. So I’ve been getting by on tofu stir fries and steamed vegies. Which I love. But not in a daily way! I suspect the mojo walk-out was in response to the freak-it’s-cold/regional-food-supplies-are-crap/why-am-I-in-this-puposeless-pit blues.

Am also hoping the four-hour flight triggers a reversal of hibernation-lethargy and reinstates former physical glory in readiness for the slog that is four weeks of creating food-love bounties from a rockin’ sweatin' galley.

But I guess this is all small fry. I'll be shootin’ for the camembert.

nuts

2008-08-22T12:06:00.002+10:00

I’ve just returned from two days at Churinga, where the Relics and I lunched last week. Churinga’s guardians are part of the WWOOFing fraternity and had invited me to come back for a bit of hands-on. I was told I’d be planting walnuts. Naturally, my rose-coloured urban brain imagined me begloved, kneeling in dirt, sunshine beating down, digging a few holes with a trowel and asking, ‘What next?’ with the satisfied glow of a woman who has just planted walnuts.

Naturally, it wasn’t like that at all. What it was like, was plotting an entire orchard of walnut trees. No, cancel that. A plantation of walnut trees.

Two of us spent the best part of one and a half days measuring and staking out where 50 walnut trees should go on a very large, steeply sloped, bracken-covered plot of land. We couldn’t even get a proper line of sight since there were trees to be felled. We got 26 in the ground. There were no trowels in sight. Clearly, I still have a way to go on this urban to country curve.

But for now, you can call me Walnut Queen.

inspiration and anti-kindness

2008-08-17T09:58:00.002+10:00

Last week the Relics and I made an inspired house call. Up through the hills of Jack River went the little van, dodging wallabies and wedgies*, to Churinga: 85 acres of bush and home to a couple of Landcare-Greens renegades.

The vegie garden overflowed with artichokes and mountain pepper and raspberries and garlic and chestnuts and warrigal greens and rosemary and kaffir lime and grapefruit. Its views and bounty made me green. After a tour of the river, during which we released an anti-kindness**, witnessed the pulling apart of the turbine which provides them their power (!) and stuck our heads in on the nearly-complete cool storage cellar and fire bunker… we were fed an amazing home-grown lunch in a house made from reclaimed materials! Warmed by a glass of red and a kick-ass woodstove with a fandangly system which pumps hot water underneath the concrete floor!

We left with a heaving bag of lemons and grapefruit and John Ralston Saul's On Equilibruim, which is kind of like brain-citrus: a little hard to get down but good when you know to just approach it in small bites.

I have been invited back next week for some hands-in-dirt experience.

--

*Wedge-tailed eagle, an Australian bird of prey.

**A small native mouse. I suspect this is not its real name but this is what I repeatedly heard.

old-school cool

2008-08-13T20:44:00.011+10:00

When Safeway publicly apologises for its short supply of brocolli due to extreme cold weather, when the entire world around you scarfs sausage rolls for lunch, when the best thing about waiting for a train at Flinders Street is the passive ingestion of potato cake/salt-n-vinegar smells… perhaps it’s time to ditch that halo and get thee some old-school comfort.

Sometimes in life, the only correct answer is:

1. Risone with tuna and loads of melted cheese. My conscience was lurking from the sidelines so I had to put some green things on top – freezer peas are old-school good.

2. Butter-licious jaffles with baked beans. From a can.

3. Hot chocolate. With a choc royale on the side.

4. Peanut butter on toast. Forget chicken soup. This is the old-school antidote to just about anything.

5. Nanna blanket. Hottie. Couch and ... (still thinking old-school?) the Sesame Street Classics DVD set... which I won from the very cool folks at Three Thousand! It came today!

An excerpt from their review: "A mood-disordered green hairy homeless person hanging out with a gay worm, a bird who lives in a vacant lot in Harlem, hallucinating that his best friend is a woolly mammoth, children going home with a strange man named Bob for "milk and cookies". A monster smoking a pipe while hosting a TV show - then eating the pipe."

The inhumanity of it is that Bird et al will have to wait, since I must make a hastily arranged day-swoop to Melbourne tomorrow - a seven-plus hour return trip. I will be a mood-disordered green hairy homeless person by tomorrow night.

oh glorious productivity

2008-08-12T11:16:00.005+10:00

Yesterday was about the most productive day I have had in aeons. After dropping the pee-anywhere cat off to the vet bright and early, I had three whole hours to fill before my knitting class. After a quick look in the opp shop (and another el cheapo woollen jumper score), I headed to the Federal Coffee Palace and plonked myself by their open fire. With laptop and caffeine I proceeded to work like a madwoman. At home, despite being stationed behind a closed door, my day would be about one part work to two parts tending fire and sixteen parts engaging with domestic life that refuses to believe in my ‘absence’ (a Snuffle-upagus case in reverse?). Then there’s time spent in the thrall of the kettle, which, thanks to its perch on the always-on woodstove, graciously affords a constant stream of little breaks. (Much like the always-on internet.)

FCP is my saviour. I did a full 'Bingi day’s' work in two hours. I will come back often. So what if it’s a 40km round trip? So what if they don’t have wifi (actually that’s a good thing, since internet access would’ve thwarted my blitzkrieg). At the very least, I will move my homebound workspace to the big caravan on the property.

But that’s not all. Yesterday I also finished my beanie – my first knitted project EVER! (Every time I enter her orbit, my knitting yogi apologises for starting me off on such a not-quite-straightforward project.) See here.

On the whole, I'm quite chuffed. I'd like to wear it with the roll-up bit rolled down, but because it's got a bit more headroom than I can use, wearing it like that makes me look Smurf-headed. So I plan to tweak the design and make another. After I finish the scarf I also started yesterday.

one

2008-08-10T21:50:00.004+10:00

Today is special. It may lack the ring of 080808, but today is my one year anniversary of Life After Desk. Woohoo! I have survived a WHOLE YEAR unrestrained by desk shackles! Before I march off to knitting class - it is also 'd' day for the beanie - I thought I'd share a few kernels about the quest for meaning, purpose (and income)* beyond the desk. Forgive me, this is about five different shades of nerdy. But I am in high celebration mode.

1. Do what you love (but don’t plan too much!). Never before has the universe responded so well to my lack of life direction and planning. I leapt into the fresh unknown with the unshaped idea to do what I enjoy. There were vague dreams of star-lit skies and open spaces. I bought a guidebook to Western Australia. Then mysterious planetary stuff happened and I stumbled onto Pelican. Literally. I spent almost the rest of the year at sea. Sailing. Travelling. Working for Indigenous and environmental issues. And of course, cooking. Kooky! All I did was fire off an email and two weeks later stepped aboard. The important lesson was to take the leap. You need to make room before new things can grow, etc.

2. Amazing starts are just that: starts. Equilibrium is nature’s genius. It's not all croquet and cloudwatching. I guess the past few months’ battles to gain a toehold in the freelance world were inevitable after such an effortless start.

3. It’s difficult to turn a lone cog. Come with me on this journey: we’re all cogs, we were born to turn. As a lone cog, you can no longer just turn up and submit your jagged little edges to the wheels of the great machinery. No. Like all cogs, you must turn, but you must find a way to turn yourself. And in the depths of winter, when you’re bogged in philosophical quandries about the purpose of cogs, when there are no other cogs for miles around, when you’ve been rejected by the big cogs, when you’ve exhausted your self-turn talk and even your cog-mojo gets disgusted and leaves… being a solo cog is No Bloody Fun.

4. Prosperity has little to do with numbers. (Beyond a certain point.) My income is a sliver of its former self. As is my consumption. Not to mention my ‘productive output’ aka the number of widgets I have birthed in the past year. But I have become so much more rounded, I am the essence of BALL.

5. I’ll have the …………………………………….. ? Too much choice confounds decision-making. For me, anyway, who can barely decide what to order for dinner (when I used to go out for dinner). Choice is like money (see above): you only need so much to be happy; the surplus conspires to remove your happiness. (It’s like we got smitten by money and choice and suddenly forgot about the law of diminishing returns.) Anyway, removing myself from a widget job was cake. Compared, that is, with choosing an alternative… and pursuing it with intent to attain self-sufficiency. Though I've narrowed it down a whack, I’ve been bogged of late in philosophical quandries about the purpose of work. Sometimes I think the answer is lurking at the other end of the sentence: what the world needs now is…

6. The nomadic thing sucks. Unless of course you have your own yurt, which would be cool, though not without its troubles if you wanted to pitch it in, say, Collingwood. After 18 months of living in other people’s spaces, what I miss most is my own. Life After Independent Habitation (I started cohabiting again six months before the desk divorce, for anyone paying attention) has flung a latent dream to the fore: to build my own house. Out of reclaimed materials. With my own hands. Where I will sustain myself by the freelance life and the bounty of the land. There is a bit more to it, but that’s the nutshell version. This is the oft alluded to Grande Plann.

So there you have it. That's what I learnt loosing the desk shackles. Maybe it doesn't look like much. But it's more than I had a year ago. And this is just the start. Now, where are those bubbles?

*My first learning should have been: 'Never Put Income in Parentheses', it is alphabetic feng shui. Or was my lack of income a result of my giving away my jade (aka money) plants when I purged myself of accumulated material crud?