Blogvember post 16 … word of the year!
16 Nov 2012
Exciting news courtesy of Sydney Writers Centre this week, I give you my new favourite word! Read More
NaNoWriMo
Blogvember post 15 … the mid-point
15 Nov 2012
It’s the 15th! It’s half-way. Blogvember is now balanced on this post; which serves as a fulcrum balancing what has gone before and what is yet to come, what is yet to be written.
Possibly the most beautiful celebratory gin and tonic ever
There are still posts to write. There are still ideas. I am having them ALL THE TIME. This is one of the positive aspects of focusing on the discipline of writing every day, it makes you think about writing. What to write, how to write, when to write. Writing, writing, writing. Read More
Blogvember post 14 … the mornings
14 Nov 2012
I am not a morning person. This will not be news to any of you who have seen me in the morning.
While I can get myself sorted and to work at a decent hour, I do not like the difficulty of it. The zigging when everyone else is zigging. The busy-ness. The mayhem of leaving the house. The finding of shoes.
If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I’d zag when everyone else was zigging. I’d sleep and miss the whole horrible thing.
As you can imagine, this has made parts of my life a bit complex. My entire childhood for example. Early motherhood was a bit challenging. I am not, geared for five o’clock starts. Read More
Blogvember … post the 13th
13 Nov 2012
Post roses
She stood on the lawn and she and the little boy threw handfuls of rose petals in the air. The bliss of the petals slow decent made the small boy’s face shine with happiness. There were enough for minutes of quiet fluttering, watching and the occasional noisy shriek.
Blogvember post the 12th … chitter chatter is underrated
12 Nov 2012
A while ago one of my favourite people, with whom I speak far less often than I would like, remarked on the value of chitter chatter. It is the talk you have where you don’t really have to say anything of import, but that the pleasure is just in the conversing itself. You talk comfortably and a rambling fashion in chitter chatter. Women are good at it, but men are too in the sort of conversation they have in quiet moments, when no one else is listening. Chitter chatter is best conducted with close confidantes where indiscretions can be swept aside and ignored. It is not the conversations you have that are programmatic. They are not about process, events, times and dates. It is about dreams, wishes, aspirations. It is about the ephemera of life, the insubstantial and the deeply important. Read More
Blogvember … there will be blood … post the eleventh
11 Nov 2012
Black films
In the past five years when I have gone to the movies, the experience has fallen into two distinct categories.
The films I have chosen, and the films in which everyone dies. Read More
Big cups of tea and restoration … blogvember post the tenth
10 Nov 2012
This mug is sometimes only just big enough
C.S Lewis once said ‘you can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.’
Mostly at present, it is the tea. There is precious little reading time. The essential of tea is a constant.
Today is the first time since starting #blogvember that I wished I didn’t have to write something. Read More
Blog-vember … post the ninth … tactical error
9 Nov 2012
It takes time to establish new habits. While the brain may exhibit neuro-plasticity, the limbic system takes limited effort and energy to operate, while the pre-cortex or front brain which takes a lot of effort to run and consumes vast amounts of energy. What this means is that while your brain can learn new habits and patterns, the pre-disposition is for old patterns. It is quite literally painful to learn new habits and over-ride old patterns with new ones. It hurts your brain.
Today, I might have made a serious tactical error. I have, as is my established pattern, immediately started on the ‘Friday Fun’ when I got home this afternoon. This is fantastic from a Friday Fun perspective, it is lethal from a blog-every-day perspective. Read More
Lion hearted … blog-vember
8 Nov 2012
Life is often an endurance test. Sure, there are bright moments when joy fills your heart, when you can re-charge. But often it is a relentless quest. At present, my patience is daily tested by an irrepressible toddler who is now more willful and dastardly than I thought possible. I need to rapidly acquire new skills. They say not to negotiate with small children. But what am I to do with a child who says ‘I’ll cry if you like mama.’ He has me beaten already and we haven’t even started! Read More
Blog-vember post the seventh … process writing
7 Nov 2012
On the seventh day, she went out to dinner.
If I were a more organised and a more diligent writer, I would have written this this morning, or yesterday or even earlier this evening. I am not that writer. I am pantser not a plotter, as they say in #NaNoWriMo. I don’t map out the plot before I start, I trust my gut and I fly by the seat of my pants.
When I wrote essays as an undergraduate, I found I was still under the spell of my early formative writing experiences. In primary school, there was a kind of writing called ‘process writing’. My memory of this is that children were encouraged to not get it right, but get it written. It was extremely tolerant of ambiguity, which was quite good as it happens for my wobbly spelling. Incidentally, my spelling is still wobbly. (Indeed I just spelled incidentally with only one L)
My early essays, I often wrote a few hundred words or even a thousand words, then chucked away the first 500 and started the essay from the middle. The middle then became the beginning and I went on, having discarded the dross I had written to start with.
As it is already really late, I have no time, tonight, to edit. Like NaNoWriMo this post is about word count and getting it written. This post was to be about ‘the dignity of risk’ and about mud. Two topics that were conversations over dinner. The dignity of risk is about being allowed to make mistakes and undertake risk in your engagement with life’s experiences, and the mud is about demonstrating what you are made of; in spite of those who think you will be undone by being made the wade through a few meters of knee deep clay.
Rather than throw out the beginning and start again, molding the clay into a story, I have to stop. It’s late and tomorrow I have to get up and convince myself yet again, that not every day is a fight to the death.
It’s a long road
Blog-vember post the sixth … the fifth year
6 Nov 2012
… they don’t let a woman kill you in the tower of song …
Yesterday I celebrated five years with the ACT Government. This means it’s been five years since I returned to Canberra, something I vowed I would never, never do, and five years since Robert and I met.
That seems a breathtakingly short period of chronological time for what has come to pass since 5th of November 2007. That moment when his shoe collided with my empty filing cabinet and nearly made me fall off my chair, has the clarity of fine crystal. It is fine, and sharp and precious and rare.
It is two years since I wrote one of my favourite ever pieces; open letter to my child about his father.
While you are reading this, I will be eating his roast chicken and we will be talking about everything and nothing.
I will ask about his favourite Leonard Cohen song so I can add it to this post, and he won’t remember any of the names. He will describe about five songs because he finds it impossible to limit the choice to just one.
Luckily I don’t find it impossible to limit my choice to one.
One song, one soul mate, one shared life.
Blog-Vember My Day on A Plate
5 Nov 2012
MT @keepcatebusy @EmmaStirling wha??? @marcfennell This is among the most incredible bullshit I've ever seen http://t.co/sVRn953B
@stellaorbit
Stella Orbit
Inspired by the furore on Twitter yesterday about Pete Evans’ description of his Day on A Plate, resplendent with its activated almonds, here is #mydayonaplate blog. This post may contain traces of gluten, nuts and irony.
7:00 – Glass of water
7:02 – Two cups earl grey tea – no milk. One straight after the other.
7:17 – Muesli, honey (Honey Delight Spring Harvest), full cream milk, yoghurt (Country Valley) and a seed and fruit cereal topping to stop me dying of boredom – may contain linseed, not sure, but little bits get stuck in my teeth.
8:14 – Water while standing around waiting for coffee (HURRY UP!)
8:35 – Double shot latte
9:12 – Early grey tea
11:04 – More water and earl grey tea
Thoughts turn to second breakfast. Stupid worthy muesli.
11:47 – Two lady finger bananas – because the Cavendish banana is just horrible.
12:03 – At least six Haighs dark chocolate pastilles.
12:29 – More water
12:47 – Lunch of left over chicken, chorizo, olives, potatoes with salad from the garden of sorrel, cos lettuce and parsley.
3:00 – Soda water from my Soda Stream that I take to work every day to stave off the 3 o’clock desk slump. There is nothing so cheering as that PFFFFTTT as the lid turns and my personal carbon sequestration project is unleashed. The tiniest Cherry Ripe ever.
3:12 – Rest of the soda water – after I found I was still slumping
Narrowly avoided a vile cup of coffee.
5:40 – Vodka, lime and soda.
5:55 – Half of one of toddler’s spicy-ish meatballs – just to make sure they weren’t poison.
6:20 – Nuts (yes really) almonds included!
7:15 – Half of the freshly picked sugar snap peas from the garden on the way back to the kitchen – quietly curse myself for not planting four times as many pea plants.
7:40 – THIS
Haloumi and green salad
Grilled haloumi with a salad made of spinach, sorrel, fennel, parsley, mint, lemon juice and olive oil.
Soda with lime.
Every single thing I ate for dinner except the haloumi and the olive oil grown by me. The olive oil was grown by Homeleigh Grove.
I am reserving the right to eat some more and perhaps drink some more tea. Probably jasmine picked by virgins but I really haven’t decided yet.
Have food trends gone too far? How important is balance and eating well to you?
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