Still Real

Today, I am clinging to this song. "Still Real" by the Australian group, George, and fronted by the unbelievable Katie Noonan.

The weekend was amazing. In one of those planets-aligning moments (actually Venus is in retrograde, as of Saturday I think...... hmmmmm perhaps something is stirring out in the heavens for all of us? Is anyone else experiencing a slight easing of pressure in their lives, ever so slight? Like letting out the top button of your jeans after Christmas lunch??), I found myself swanning around in "free" time. I know!! I was overjoyed. I spent the weekend very close to my book and was able to speed through a very trying section. I even had Sunday dinner cooked for me by the two dearest chefs in the house - Steve and the LGBB whipped up chicken schnitzels, broccoli, peas, carrots and just about the best mash potato I've ever tasted. And in true fashion, Steve now refuses to tell me how he did it. Addaboy. Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen.

Anywho. Back to the song. It just seems to perfectly fit with what I'm facing this week.... I am at the final couple of chapters of the book. I cannot believe it. I'm euphoric, scared, elated, feeling very bittersweet about it. And like an undercurrent that incessantly nips at my heels, I have an awareness that there are a couple of entities that are just waiting, hoping, willing me to finish and put myself out there with my neck on the chopping block, as if presenting myself for their beheading.

So I'm also wondering, then, how it is for others.... I ask you:
What is truth and what is a lie? If someone tells you something and you have a different recollection or perspective of the same event they are talking about, does that make the other person a liar? Or do you see that they simply speaking their truth and it just doesn't match yours? Do you tend to have one rule or do you change how you feel about what are lies and what is truth, depending on who you are judging or what they are talking about?

This song, to me, speaks to that. And I find it a great comfort.

Still Real

I wonder how long I can sustain this mystery
I wonder how we thought we'd get here without strife
I try to recall the beauty that brought us here
And I cling to that, I cling to that, I cling to that for my life

They say they understand the turmoil that unsettles you
And I say you just fulfill your end of the deal and I'll fulfill mine
Once we reveal ourselves we're so quick, so quick to analyse
I just want you to be free and enjoy this ride
So go on I'll tell you it's alright
Go on, please tell me you're fine
Don't ever let them get you down
'cause everything that really, really matters
is still real
I'd love to see you shine with every possible radiance
And ignore any thoughts that weren't planted by good
And let intention motivate and stimulate, that is all
And let the cloud that hangs above drift off into the sunset night
So go on I'll tell you it's alright
Go on, please tell me you're fine
Don't ever let them get you down
'cause everything that really, really matters
is still real

george - Still Real from SeanieG on Vimeo.

Career change

NERRRD.
Whaaat? You haven't seen an obedient dog with a dog on its head before?

I'm currently in the process of getting police checks done.

It appears Jazz is about to embark on the next stage of her 'career', from backyard marauder and general lay-about to aged care petting dog. Very respectable.

I'm not quite sure if I'm meant to be doing the police checks for me or her, come to think of it.

But the managers of the local residential aged care facility took one look at her today, covered in sludge from nose to haunches (she fell into a blind puddle en route to her thrown ball at the park across the way), and still wanted her to come back. She sat, dropped and looked dutifully doleful in a "please pat me, I'm starved of love" kind of way. They warned me that the elderly - specifically, the residents in the dementia wing - have a habit of asking the same questions repetitively and was I okay with that. I assured them I would leave my bat for smacking over the back of the head at home.

Jazz already has experience working with the elderly

"The Elderly" has warmed to her since these early days

Sort of...

Is it possible for The Elderly to look any more disdainful?

No, really, I volunteered at an aged care residence when I was a teenager. I adored it. I adored all the people. There was one woman I particularly remember, she was 98 years old and I never saw her without a full face of makeup. She was gorgeous, inside and out. So refined. She would invite me to her room for cups of tea. Somehow she had wrangled a double room for herself (she had been a resident there for a number of years, I was told, and used to share the room with her husband who had passed away some years before) and it was kitted out like a beautiful bedsit. All her ornate furniture surrounded her, there were pictures on the wall, she had a beautiful dresser and a little tea-for-two setup, complete with fine china, in the window. It was magical. From what I could ascertain, she did not really mingle with the other residents, who used to congregate in the depressing lounge and dining rooms on stiff-back chairs, not talking to each other but just ... together. They would invariably light up when I walked in the door once a week.

I gave up my Saturdays for six months as a 13 year-old and I would get there under my own steam. I rode my bike (which had no gears, I'll add) there and back every week - it was a good 5-10km's (Wonga Park to North Croydon, if you know the area anyone reading... no paved footpaths and no flat bits either, I might point out too!). I'm not entirely sure what lured me there each weekend. Perhaps the honour of listening to their stories and respecting them as individuals who had had to give up their possessions and their lives as they knew them, basically. I found it really heart-rending, even as a youngster, seeing my grandparents in a parallel existence - they were still alive and (not necessarily well, but fending for themselves) in a relatively palatial home that they ran on their own. I never wanted to imagine their end to be as lonely and bleak as this.

As fate would have it, my grandfather would die less than seven years after my stint in volunteer work - he spent a week unconscious in hospital after suffering a major stroke at home. And my grandmother, who would end up a major character in my book even though we were not close when she was alive, would die (five years after that) of a cardiac arrest very suddenly right before my eyes, also while still living at home and looking after herself.

The nursing home around the corner here has been calling me for the past three years. On a whim today, on our way home from the park, tired, wet, thirsty (and that was just me, let alone the LGBB and Jazz) and not at all looking like we'd impress anyone, I ventured in. And was warmly welcomed.

Will keep you posted how this goes! Who knows, Jazz could whack some poor sweetheart off her rocker on the first day. Her career as petting pet might be extremely short-lived. But I have a feeling that I, if not Lolly along with me, will become a regular visitor there, if for nothing else than wandering through for a couple of hours a week to give a wave and share a yarn... quite possibly the same yarn each week. Gorgeous.


 This is a blog hop!

Sometimes it's good to be bad

Whenever I make a cake (it's rare.... condolences to my husband can be made via the comments section....), everyone always comments on the icing.

If we hand pieces out, or send them along for kindy teachers and the likes, invariably nobody wants to mention the cake. It's all about the icing. After all, it is

All. About. The icing.

In fact, that shall be my new motto. "Why can't I get ahead in life?" "Where has my happiness gone?" "What makes a good cake?" See? Each can be replied with one simple sentence: it's all about the icing.

So, I am going to let you in on my little icing secret. I have formulated a few good variations from this very simple base. You wanna know the secret to my icing?

Butter.

I feel a little like Homer when he goes mad and blurts out that the secret ingredient to his and Flaming Moe's magical drink is...... "cough syrup! Ordinary, everyday, over-the-counter cough syrup! Tee hee!" For that is how simple it is in this case too.

Be warned, this makes a CRAP-TONNE of icing so either be prepared to use it or freeze it, or reduce quantities - I can halve this and it fits perfectly over your average-sized cake.

Try this out on your next batch of muffins or cake! You will soooooooooo thank me.

Butter Cream Icing

225g/8oz unsalted butter, softened
500g/1lb 2oz icing sugar, twice sifted
2-3 Tbsp milk
1 Tsp vanilla

Beat butter with electric mixer til light and fluffy. Add icing sugar with milk and vanilla, fold it all in carefully. Beat til pale and creamy (mmmmmm, creamy). Add more milk if necessary but do it in tiny amounts carefully, it wants to be fairly firm in consistency.

If you want to make a choc icing, reduce qty of icing sugar to 325g/11 1/2 oz, and add 55-85g/2-3 oz cocoa powder plus an extra 1-2 Tbsp milk.

The face of my manuscript

Well, here it is. On the surface, it looks worse for wear. But on the inside, it is becoming meatier and more meaningful than ever. This here is the final page of the recently re-posted 'woman in the supermarket' story. Now, while I thought it was "pretty orright" and so did other commenters here... it hadn't received the fine tooth-comb from my Editor. Let me just say, it is already vastly different, even from the re-post I did last week. Eeek! This is going to be a long and winding road, this 'ere editing stage.

Thanks to Dad's - my Editor ;) - gentle and frank guidance, I am teasing out the many concepts that I have managed to capture from my head and plonk on paper. Now, I am being challenged to really confront what I have really been writing. They are no longer anonymous and enormously suggestive concepts... they are turning into compelling personal insights. Just when I thought I had explained myself fully and completely, I discovered I had barely scratched the surface of what I had really meant.

tau·tol·o·gy

/tɔˈtɒlədʒi/ Show Spelled[taw-tol-uh-jee] 

–noun, plural -gies. 1. needless repetition of an idea, esp. in words other than those of the immediate context, without imparting additional force or clearness.

I am being challenged with my apparent love of tautologies and sentence fragments that hiccup throughout the reader's train of thought. I am being pulled up left, right and centre on my technical structure. But most heartening, at the end of just about every chapter, I am receiving a "Wow. Powerful chapter." This is no easy feat to achieve with my wordy, worldly, well-read and learned Papa! So I am buoyed greatly to continue with renewed confidence about the whole project.

And although it is a hard slog - facing these words and these chapters yet again - I am loving every moment of the process.

Added to this, I received last night a most prized email address passed on to me by a mutual acquaintance (the best kind to have!). So I now have the contact details of the Marketing Director of a prominent Australian publishing house with an internationally recognised name, who is waiting for me to send an extract.

Excuse me while I go and vomit and then faint a little bit  try to maintain my composure but fail miserably  keep working hard so I don't keep her waiting too long.

The filling day

I have just come back from the most astounding, enriching family day at the beach.

If you can imagine, my family is spread pretty wide. Cousins flung from either side of the country - my mother's relatives settled predominantly in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne - so we are separated by distance and always have been. Add various inter-generational rifts (what appear to be genetic methods of coping with situations too difficult to express in words) and this has further contributed to separation and estrangement. Let's just say, it's rather commonplace at least on one side of my line.

My oldest cousin turns 50 this year. She is 15 years older than me. I remember her as the coolest, most lovely and nurturing girl - the one who willingly had me over to stay, as a spritely 6 year-old, at her home when she had her baby (and I was so besotted by her little girl during a trip to WA that I had taken with my mother). She was the one who got married the same year as Charles and Diana. I thought she was living a fairytale and I was always a bit starstruck by her.

I haven't seen my cousin since I was eleven. But I would know her in any crowd.

In recent years, I have heard from various members of the family that my cousin has taken an interest in the genealogical lineage of my mother's family. When my great aunt died earlier this year, my ensuing trip to the family home in remote outback Australia ignited a drive in me to remember my roots. This ties in very neatly also to my energenetics studies - the energy locked up in our genetics, basically - which have, these past 12-18 months, turned to unravelling the intricate webbing of genetic patterning (the stuff that isn't locked up in physiological DNA, but that which is energetic - passed on down the line, in much the same way as the physical characteristics).

Imagine my utter surprise today to discover that my cousin has been "hoping to learn more about healing the energetic side to a family's history." My ears pricked up when she said this. She referred to it as "healing the family tree". And imagine her keen interest when I told her, rather awestruck, that I had been learning how to recognise and decode family genetic patterns - the outmoded "ways" that carry down our genetic lines as patterns, overlaying our natural original self.

There was a bit of a grin and a slow head-nod of recognition for us both then, as we looked at each other, suddenly realising we were both striving to learn and uncover - from different ends of the same spectrum - this same thing. It's not very common, one has to admit, to hear about anyone studying their family pattern (not the tree and who was in it and who was born/married/connected to whom, but more the patterns of their ancestry and what they passed on). And as they go, let's just say our family has a few DOOZIES of recurring patterns!

I feel honoured that this chance catch-up (for they have been to Melbourne before on fleeting visits but we've not caught up before today) has given me a connection, or reconnection, to this beloved cousin. And now I have another family member in the know about our specific family dynamic - the strange, delicate, dysfunctional, unique and beautiful ways - to bounce theories and ideas off.

I have heard of courses such as Cutting The Ties That Bind and so forth. These aim, basically speaking, to safely and respectfully allow the individual to recognise and remove themselves from family patterns (or societal ones, for that matter) that do not fit for them. What we're doing seems to be something slightly different to that. At any rate, I know what I am seeking is a real understanding of where each member of my ancestry was 'coming from' as much as I can, in order that I might wholly accept that individual and their monumental role in shaping the generations that followed, right down to li'l ol' me... And Lolly, for that matter.

For, once again, that is what I am doing all this for. It's for her. My LGBB. For my further training, yes (and what better way to learn how to guide others than to first go through the tough trials yourself - heal the healer, etc etc...), but ultimately it really is to safeguard the way for her.

There may be more I'd like to share about this, but anything more specific might be best left for the private blog sometime in the near future.

Today, I....

Am packing away the polar fleece. It's going to be 24ºC! Hello, old friend The Sun.

Am going to Bunnings to look for baby spinach and rocket (rocquet?? I can never tell, the spelling changes everywhere) seedlings to plant in the vegie patch.

Start Pepper on her dementia medication. The old girl has started to call me Roberta and is smelling oranges for no reason. She's losing it. She barks, as regular as a metronome ticking, and it's because she wakes and forgets where she is and what she was doing. And then I go and shush her with various semaphore arm movements (she's deaf) and the look on her sweet face tells me.... she knows who I am and she's sheepish, like "Oh. It's you. Was I making a noise again? I can't tell."

Rescued two lonely, wisened, dried up Bangalow palms from Woolies. They were getting chucked out for $10 each - they were double that price last week. Score, me and them! I love potted palms.

Will attempt to make the chocolate cake I was planning on making since last Saturday, but I reckon the weather will entice me outdoors all day. So, fat chance of cooking.

Am looking forward immensely to the rematch of the AFL grand final. Last Saturday, Steve was sick and spent the day in bed. Lolly and I had a blast watching it and eating pies, but it's more fun with Daddy to explain the rules 'cause we haven't a clue what's going on. We just cheer everybody on.

May just finish weeding the front garden. Heh. I said 'may'.

Will stand in my backyard with my face to the sun and be thankful.

Shine your shoes, brush your hair, scrub your windows!

The sun! The blessed sun is going to be out for two days in a row!!!!  Time to.....

Wash windows.

There comes a time in a domesticated adult's life when they must wash their windows. Properly. Thoroughly. And not just the main one or two (namely, that one at the front door, the one you look out of most - the kitchen - and the one the parents in-law are likely to notice straight away is covered in bits of dog fur and slobber). I mean, all of them.

Dust and grime and grease off the rod is likely to have rendered most winter-battered windows barely see-through. Well, it has around here, anyway. So I thought I would pass on some ever-so-easy failsafe tips that were offered to me by a kindly gentleman at a cleaning shop, when I went in to buy an industrial sized window squeegie-thingy.

What you will need to clean your windows:

Good squeegie is a must. Dog optional.

• Dish washing detergent - average, everyday liquid - nothing fancy required.

• A bucket with about 1L of warm water in it.

• A soft broom - I use my kitchen broom, it dries easily after I do this and it gets cleaned by the water at the end.

• A good quality squeegie - this is key. I forked out $20 for mine but I have not regretted it yet.

• A microfibre cloth - for cleaning down the rubber in between scrapes of the window and finishing off around the edges of the window if your squeegie doesn't quite grab in some places.

What to do:

Soap that baby up

1. Use the broom, dipped into the bucket so it's all nice and soaking, to soap up the window. Really get in there and make it soapy.

TIP #1: Do not hit the top of the window with the broom! Stay away from the top, so that it doesn't drip or dribble down your nice clean window.

TIP #2: Remember, you're not cleaning the window with the broom - the cleaning is actually done by the squeegie (hence the importance of a really good one), the broom is merely going to loosen up the gunk.

 

Don't hit the top of the window with the broom.

2. Starting from the top, scrape across the window with the squeegie, turning at the point where the end of it is going to hit the side of the window (so you're sort of doing a twirling motion with it, not straight across).

TIP #1: Just like not wanting to hit the top with your broom, you don't want to hit the sides with your squeegie if you can help it - this will only cause all the soapy water to dribble onto your window sides, which sort of makes the cleanup a bit more tedious. Not to worry if this happens, though, because you have your microfibre cloth and can give the window surrounds a bit of a rub-down.

TIP #2: Clean the rubber edge of your squeegie regularly, don't let it get too gooped up with the crap off your window or it won't work as effectively.

Cleaning inside windows:

Bit of water (and a drop of methylated spirits, but not necessary) in a spray bottle. Spray it on, clean the window off with a clean microfibre cloth. 

Violé! That's it, you're done. Now go grab a cuppa.

And there you have it. I tell you, I have enjoyed - yes, actually enjoyed - cleaning windows since learning these couple of easy tips. I owe that bloke a drink. He's made looking out my windows again thoroughly enjoyable, not plagued with angst-ridden thoughts of "Sheeeeet, is that dribble stain on the inside or the outside? Oh, WHY do I always miss bits and get scrape marks? I may as well have not done them."


Enjoy hopping the blogs today and have a great weekend, everyone.