The Week of the Ides of March

It's been a month this week (& it's been a year today).

Saturday 

We had planned to do absolutely nothing (when you commute 5 days a week and do a 200km drive every couple of weeks, I actually protect these rare opportunities closer) and succeeded for the most part.

I also cooked curry. That is my truly most happy spot. I read recently of how fusion food was cultural misappropriation and I think that that is definitely my line in the sand. I would be devastated if "they" were to deny the evolution of taste but I also see the theory also of such a stance in regards maintaining purity and integrity. (There was a fleeting sidetrack regards horses and frogs but luckily I can edit)

Curry was good. Three dishes:

Brazilian Chickpea Curry - a new and very simple vegan deliciousness;

Authentic Bangladeshi Beef Curry - very non-vegan that I wasn't sure was a winner but it really grew as it complimented the other dishes

; and

Palak Paneer - very much a favourite and I cheat with a couple of packs of frozen spinach and Australian feta from the deli counter.

Sunday

Right until the moment before I left the house the prospect of an additional overnight trip was on the table,.so my trip to see my breast surgeon for the first annual check up was efficient.

Google Maps advised me of a journey of 1 hr and 37minutes, and adding in the country contingency of a half hour I left in plenty (ish) of time.

Google maps didn't know about the caravan convoy (Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition) but should have been aware of the roadworks on the scrabbly shortcut between the highway and my destination.

It gets me every time.

I arrived at my appointment with 1 minute to spare.

The appointment took 10 minutes. The last 3 of those was general chit chat about travel, geography and economics. As you do.

Unfortunately it's not really the sort of appointment that you can phone in.  Good news is boobs are fine.

Paid the fee, hopped in the car and headed back home.

Bonus afternoon at home so managed to harvest most of the back meadow before a lovely little rain storm.

Monday

A little bit of work organising moving pieces before I left to meet up with Dad.

We had a lot of hurry up waiting with a few medical establishments, a massive thunderstorm giving a soundtrack and two strokes of incredible medical luck for the day.

Tuesday

Dad got to experience the joy of school mornings with an adolescent teenage girl. I don't think anybody recommends that. 

Dad majors in imparting the wisdom of his nearly 84 (4th 21st coming up) years. 

Paris does a good line in aversion to being told anything.

I dropped him at a shopping centre while I had a quick trip to work to organise working from home for the next couple of days.

After I finished the day's work and was about to prepare dinner, Dad suggested that he wanted to shout for us. 

Among his many attributes, there were 2 at play here. He loves to show generosity (to a degree - it's "share a plate" rather than "splash the cash").

The second is his weakness for a good seafood basket or platter - and the closest option had such - it was a bit exxy but you should always share a platter, and so we ventured forth.

There is a whole saga in that trip that would be worthy of a post in itself, but it included 80s bouncers, economics of bread slices, the inverse theory of proximity to salt water and care and attention to the seafood platter, the alcoholic status of lemon, lime and bitters and carpet design.

Wednesday

Another appointment that could not be zoomed but for a different part of the body.

Plans afoot to give me more room for audacity (apologies - I thought that I had a link to a kiofra tik tok about the anatomy and audacity but apparently I don't have time tok linking skills!)

Took Dad to my hairdresser and got him onto a bus home.

Thursday and Friday

Work. Parenting an adolescent badly. Food. Insomnia. Rinse. Repeat.

Oh - and my laptop died so doing everything on my phone is a new skill that I am developing.

Tomorrow

My list for tomorrow (written at 3 this morning):

Washing

Packing

 Mother/daughter bonding moments

Travel agent

Kmart

Watching softball

Pathfinders

Driving 200km

Mother/daughter bonding moments

How was yours?

Capital A capital L Australian Literature

I am in a book club and there are some books that I love and some that I do not.

A fair swag of it is Oz lit and I am trying to pinpoint what it is that riles me so about the more vaunted tomes.

I honestly think part of it is a modern cultural cringe where they feel that they have to write - so beautifully they do write- about harshness and despair at nearly every turn.

 You get to the point as a reader that you mistrust even the slightest glimmer of hope because you know that it will be spectacularly extinguished by the absolutely woeful "shit happens and then you live miserably in filth" ending they learned in Capital A capital L Australian Literature 101.

I just finished Denizen. Gorgeous writing. Nailed the above.

Prior to that I failed to finish Salt and Skin - the whole time I felt like I had read it before (perhaps I had or perhaps it's cookie cutter AL).

Please offer me something to disprove my theory - or lament with me

Two oh two three...

Welcome to the year.

I would first like to inform you that I have managed to fulfil one of those (always in the long run wrecked) sub-conscious resolutions, to keep diary! (okay, fair enough, for one day - but on the upside -  for ONE WHOLE DAY!)

Of course, I remembered it at 11pm so its already a tenuous prospect.

Last year was a very mixed bag.

• It began with unblogged issues regarding a work situation.
• Then threats of floods.
• Then cancer.
• Then treatment.

The whole litany wasn't dreadful - there are indeed good things mixed in the not so good things in the above.

But the overall IMPRESSION of the year is one of those really dark paintings with some gold flecks highlighting (sometimes ironically) other things.

• Paris is now a high schooler
• ergo, V is now the male parent of an adolescent.  That is going as well as can be expected
  
• unfortunately with a side-salad of holy cow, I am the mother of one.  Eek
  
• House stuff happened.  House next door stuff happened.
  
• Work stuff happened (in fact, this statement is sprinkled liberally through)
  
• Family stuff happened (and keeps on happening)
  
• Covid hit
  

'Salina is all grown up and a well-regarded allied-health professional, doing well and enjoying what she does for a living.  We are still looking for some photos of the first ever orthotics that she made when V came into our lives!!

Eddie grew very old in November and we took him to the vet in December.  They said whatever we did would be palliative and then we got what medicine was available for his competing old-aged woes.  

It worked until it didn't and we said goodbye to him last Thursday.

Poor boy boy.

So 2023 has a clean slate on which to write.  I have some goals to try to achieve this year and might have to start taking being a grown up seriously.

Who knows if I will write more or stress less - but I can but try. 

So I am hopeful for the year ahead.

Possibly wary, but hey, we got through 2022.

The organisation skills of a newt*

Quite chuffed as I am at the start of a 2 week holiday.

Right on the edge. Toes curling over the threshold and contemplating the temperature of the water before diving in.

Ahead of me there is some chop, I can tell you.

For a start, I have continued the tradition of leaving the majority of the shopping for detritus and tat to the last three possible days of the year to indulge thus.

( I will return but writing is currently competing with

...)

(Back now - grumpy old man tried to gum me for attention)

Where was I?

Oh, little time, sosietal pressures and leisure - and the organisation skills scale and whereupon this scale sits the newt ** - and where me?

So tomorrow will have at least one and up to three trips to town. Now, town is not within walking distance nor cycling ability - and the round trip is 30-50 km (18-31 miles). 

One little bit of my brain whispered "you could catch the bus" and because I am on holidays, it comes a possibility that is technically feasible.

Alas, it has become a bit of a hole in the bucket fiasco... ***

I have got 3 big ticket items to check tomorrow. 

We have hair appointments.

I need to trim but omg Paris is not a little cutie any more but is taller than I and is all about the hair (and the fashion and I am hoping this land at the top of the faraway tree change soon and usher in a more benign obsession) ****

We need to see the Christmas lights, an annual occurrence and semi-guaranteed to bring on obnoxious weather. 

I will need to address the budget, and see where in the balance of "respecter of the environment" and "guilty bearer of ill-bought material goods" I fall. 

Although I do have a handle on home-made dross.

These are the biscuits that didn't make the cut on Saturday to be gifted to my workmates today.

I have been assured that there are no calories between the US Thanksgiving and the 2nd if January.

The day after tomorrow is the 13th birthday.

* I don't actually have the science on any -ology of newts. I know their eyes are referred to in cauldron -lore.

** As said above, I cannot cite any actual peer reviewed studies of the organisation skills of newts and it is possible that I am being quite species-ist to suggest that my skills are automatically superior to an animal that I couldn't pick out of a line up.

*** The local bus company has recently been sold and there is no information on their webpage about (a) ticketing and how they approach it in the modern era, (b) if it is compatible with the card that I had to use in Brisbane the last time I took public transport about 18 months ago and (C) how to actually obtain the card in the first place.

**** We have lived through Frozen, slime, secret detective clubs, dogs, vet clinics, reading eggs and Roblox already. 

-a-thon

(waaaay) back in the day, the little school that I went to did an annual (at least 2 years running) walk-a-thon.

The walk-a-thon started at the school at crack-of-dawn o'clock.

Various categories got off to a staggered start. 

Little and slow kicked off first to allow time for stringing out.

Then the couldas and shouldas made their move through this undulating landscape, one year so crisp and brown, the next if verdant green.

Last were the serious contenders - frothing at the mouths, chomping at their bits, jumping out of their smart, white socks to eat up the 24 km out to the dam.

(I, of course, can only imagine the latter category, as I was never in a position to witness it firsthand.)

Back in the day, of course, anything-a-thons were all the rage.

You were forced to write to relatives far and wide and explain the plight of the charity of choice; and the possibility of you -thonning the whatever-a forming part of a solution; and the fact of them promising coppers-per-whatever for the a-thon would be the other part of the puzzle.

There would be great competition as to who got the most pledged - just for the glory, no incentive prizes needed.

And this was back in the day. The 70s had a lotof things going for it - fashion, music, movies - but it also had 1c and 2c pieces and they were used!it was a simpler time, where very few ruined the ethos of the a-thon by making straight donations to the cause - oh no, it was multiplying lots of 24s (if you were able to stagger that far).

According to my memory I made it both times - a blistered, sun-burned, sweaty and possibly sweary child, in one instance bleeding.

My triumph was to then do my maths, write letters of my success to the pledgers, await the fortune in small coins and write thank you notes*.

 A version of this ritual exists today.

My old school (45 years later and they have their own facebook page)  have finally arrived upon the concept of wheels. My Old SS Bike-a-thon

I wish we'd thought of that.

To think, I had nearly two full days of thinking time and I could have used that time more wisely than just thinking "ow ow ow ow ow".

* To be perfectly honest, I think I probably still owe a few thank you notes. In fact, I probably need to use as my standard "what is your biggest weakness" response to be the sheer immensity of my thank you note list.