Broken

We had a night of wild wind recently and when I went outside the following morning I discovered our driveway gate had broken. One shoddy hinge had sheered off a shoddy post. No surprise - it's shoddiness comes from partly from being old and mainly from being poorly made.

My bigger concern was that my dogs had escaped. My fear was misplaced, however. The poor old body of the elder one, Razz - the escape ringleader - was also broken. She could only manage a couple of steps and her back legs would collapse.

She was 12 years old and arthritis had been creeping up. But it seems something had happened overnight that suddenly resulted in nerve damage and severe pain. So we had to say goodbye.

And we went to bed that night with our hearts broken. 

She was my first baby, so to speak.

She had to be involved in whatever you were doing. 

She loved being on holidays.

Hanging with the toddler (in the last photo
I ever took of her).

Just imagine...

Image from www.thenomonworkshop.com

Children are simultaneously a source of great inspiration, and an impediment to, creativity.

I'm currently doing a part-time graphic design course. The tutors - obviously - encourage us to pursue creative past times. Doing so is also recommended by the primal living guy.

Both say its good for the mind and soul. That it doesn't really matter about the quality of what you produce. The process is the point. Devote enough energy to the process and, more importantly, have enough fun with it, and the results will take care of themselves.

My current lifestyle allows ample opportunity for creativity, at some level. My 'job' involves lots of mindless tasks during which my head is free to turn over ideas. And there's Rosie herself, of course. Her laugh, the tiny curls at the back of her head, the light resting on her round cheeks, little hands and feet in action - it all has me longing to capture every fragment that is the beauty and joy of child and childhood.

Yet whenever I sit and attempt to commit these concepts to paper or pixel, it is invariably that moment in which she climbs on the couch and falls off/gets stuck under a chair/gets a little too affectionate with the cat/has a meltdown because some toy or random object won't do as she wishes ... You get the picture. 

And I remember it's not just about chasing my own creative genius (ha!) but being a mummy who comes to the rescue. Who soothes that precious little soul so it can dust itself off, jump back up and once again follow where imagination leads. 

Imagination at work in recent weeks.

Going bush and facebook shame

Those of you who see my facebook feed may have noticed a recent status update - about camping - with no punctuation and no capital letters. None, I tell you! How embarrassment.

This is because I committed the cardinal sin of fiddling around on my facebook page, getting distracted (I'd like to blame the toddler but it more likely was the fact that my coffee was ready, or the mail was delivered) and leaving it open without logging off. My husband (who never met a rule of the English language he couldn't disregard) came along, assumed it was his page, and posted the offending update.

Now, he never logs out of his facebook page, which has me constantly shaking my head. I've 'liked' any number of things - mummy blogs, nappy sites, feminist writers etc - on his behalf, thinking I was logged in. But this time it was the other way around. Thank god he put up something so innocuous - though omitting full stops remains a grave offence, in my book.

Typing and facebook felonies aside, we did indeed have a 'good camping trip out to the block'.

To clarify, 'the block' is a parcel of land less than an hour from home on which we have a prospecting lease. I don't go much for the prospecting, but I do appreciate having somewhere peaceful to escape to for short camping trips, or even shorter day visits. It's not an actual camping site, just a patch of bush, so we don't have to share it with anyone.

I've always loved camping. And since reading up on this primal lifestyle thing I'm an even bigger fan. Turns out being out in the fresh air, away from crowds, being in sync with the sun, getting a bit dirty, staring into a fire, all the usual camping business, is how we're designed to live.

While out there Paul, the prospector, obviously did some prospecting. In his slippers. Including a stint on the edge of a dam:

This is why, despite repeated requests to do so, I did not buy him a pair of uggs of pure wool and costing upwards of $150. I knew something like this would be their fate and the $12 Kmart jobs were the best option.

He also did a bit on dry land with his 'helper'.

Who also helped with the sieving of product.

We saw a rainbow. And an echidna, emus and a baby goanna that popped out of a log once it was on the fire. Luckily it didn't fall into the flames, and the Prospector got it to safety.
Then we came home and I revelled in my flushing toilet and comfy bed. This is the 21st century, after all.

Doing it for me

There’s been very little activity here lately. Obviously. I’m hoping to change that. Well, a little, at least. Because I’ve kind of been missing blogging. Not all of it – some elements of blogging I feel like I ‘should’ do can become a downright chore. And, hey, I don’t have the world’s most fascinating life, so topics can be hard to come by. But the actual writing bit, I love.

Image from www.escapenormal.com

So, my plan (as it stands today, anyway):
1. Take a leaf out of the slow blogging book. I only just heard about this, and basically it means uploading the odd post now and then. Not caring about how relevant your timing is to current events. It also means taking time to create thoughtful, well-considered posts. Ha! Think I’ll skip that bit. I’m not that bloody dedicated. If I’ve actually managed to write something, it’ll get a review or two and posted.
2. Write about what interests me. Which is myself, basically. What I do. Where I go. What I think about. Clearly this means my posts are likely to be rather mundane. Dull, even.
3. To elaborate on point 2, my topics will probably consist of:
* My daily life. Bet you're dying to read all about that.
* Rosie. Of course. Naturally, these ones won't be in the least bit dull, not even for readers completely uninterested in new teeth, nappies, breastfeeding and so on.
* Some work I do as part of my graphic design course. Figure I may as well include it.
* My move to a simpler, more – as described by its proponents - primal life. This was prompted by the enormous sense of calm I felt when I left full-time work and my days followed the rhythm of a baby. But then life got busy and draining again (not that I’ve returned to full-time work. Or much work at all) and I started looking into ways of reclaiming that sense of physical, mental and emotional wellbeing and vitality.
The first step was deciding to quit eating sugar. And led to adopting what is called The Primal Blueprint (and Primal Connection). The most tangible way of practising this is through food and exercise, but there is much, much more to it. So you, lucky readers, will get the chance to hear all about what I eat, my strolls through the countryside, and various attempts to live ‘in the moment’. Again, bet you can’t wait.

Working it

I have a new 'workspace'. Behold:

One where the toddler cannot grasp any number of cords and play giddy-up with them. Or pull down the flap on the printer, stash away some food, and retrieve it several hours later. 
The old set-up had been cramped for a while. And I kind of said in a workspace safety audit review I did earlier in the year as part of my graphic design course, that I'd purchased a new cabinet that meant operating the printer (which had been basically at floor level) was now ergonomic. 
It was the first piece of flat pack furniture I've assembled myself. Being married to a fitter means I'm generally relegated to unfolding the instructions, which never get read, passing tools/screws/'the f***en top bit' and bearing audio witness to streams of obscenities flat pack projects inevitably elicit. 
Granted, the table needed a bit of expert touching-up once the fitter arrived home. Gratifyingly, he resorted to power tools for the adjustments. 
All in all, I'm happy with the result. Of course it remains to be seen whether it leads to any increase in the amount of work actually done.