Blogvember post 26 … bits and pieces

26 Nov 2012

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There is no coherent theme to what I am about to write, I can’t think of anything pertinent. I am ruminating a major piece on motherhood that will take enormous courage to write, as I will have to profess my early incompetence and total lack of clues about how much it would change me. This will take some time to write, as I struggle to express myself about how I felt nearly three years ago.

Instead, I am giving you this, which will no doubt be a string of random madness.

Campari spritzer ~ just what the hot weather demands

I have a campari spritzer and Lou Reed. We are reaching never ending tired. I have a wading pool and toddler to supervise. The bloody gardener cut the bloody mothering banskia rose back again, in spite of it not needing it and in spite of my express wish that it be left the hell alone to grow huge and unwieldy and screen the house behind that grows daily as it is extended and threatens our peace and sanity. He cut it anyway. He doesn’t work for me, I don’t pay him so he does what he likes. Which drives me totally insane. And there is little I can do.

I have a leaking water meter or pipe or something out the front. I only know because the gardener left a note in the letter box. Dial 1300-SaveMe. I do not want to have to deal with it.

I have to write a lot of stuff for work about stuff that is not clear and no one knows how it will end up. Obfuscatory brilliance is required. It is ok to say you don’t know for a while. Except that it is really, really important to people’s lives. The frustration is mounting that there is such a lack of clarity. And that it won’t end anytime soon. Welcome to working in human services.

I forgot to book the cat into boarding over Christmas and now both our regular places are full. I forgot because I picked her up after we got home from Melbourne and I was exhausted and the vet made me wait and tell me all the things about her teeth cleaning, and then I just wanted to go home and forgot that I needed to book the cattery for Christmas.

A lecturer from the University of Western Sydney just used ‘irregardless’ on national television. It is not a word and now it appears so frequently it will become the newest excrescence on the verbal landscape.

I am to have salt and pepper squid for dinner tonight. I thought I was having my dinner alone, as Robert was taking The Talking Boy to the movies. This fell through and now there is not enough squid nor is there anything else except two boiled eggs which he has to make himself. I am going to attempt to not cut my hand off as I make the accompaniments for my squid. After the huge piece of glass that I managed to embed in my foot and then extract, yesterday, I’ve seen enough blood this week.

I sit outside on the third of the hottest days since December last year and while I am attacked by mosquitoes, I ponder the decision to write a blog post a day for an entire month. This writing gig is both important and difficult as Blogvember has amply demonstrated.

This always happens when I have a big post in the off. I find it impossible to write about anything else, not strictly true as I am actually writing this now, such as it is.

Now, I give you Lou Reed because I have loved this since I first heard it when I was seventeen

Told you it would be madness.

 

By: Category: Adventures, Blog-vember, NaNoWriMo, Writing

Blogvember post 25 … working and mothering

25 Nov 2012

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I went back to working full time in July.

After a reasonable period of part-time with an unencumbered day off to clean, shop, drink coffee, run errands, write, it was something of a shock to go to work every day. In the beginning this was only to be a six week stint, and then back to the previous arrangement. Of course, life doesn’t always work like that, and I found myself negotiating to move to full time and to move jobs.

Lots of people have asked me how I manage. I am always reticent to talk about the difficulties because they are wholly middle class problems. I chose to work full time, and if I were really unhappy with the arrangements I could change them. It is not a necessity for our survival.

I do think that there are compromises, cut corners, sacrifices and bargains. There is also outsourcing and a slackening of standards. What bothers me the most is the enrichment activities that I can’t do with Benedict. In Canberra there are so many activities, lots of them free, it’s easy to get to most of them; the only issue is making time.

I try to take him to the monthly Art and Me program at the National Gallery of Australia. It is a fantastic program with excellent early childhood educators and art is a gap in my knowledge and I always learn something.

NGA Fountain ~ so much joy ~ so little time

Art and Me at NGA for 2 and 3 year olds

I would like to participate more in Libraries ACT’s excellent activities for young children. Watch the excellent Vanessa Little talking on 7:30 ACT last Friday about her plans for the libraries of Canberra and their transformation. These programs in the libraries are vital for all kids, particularly kids with parents with low literacy. The library is a gateway to reading, to experiences, to other people who are not like you, to life long habits and patterns where reading holds a primary place in a life.

There are other experiences that I wish I could do with Benedict during the week. Paint and Play, a weekly outdoor riot of kids activities in local parks around Canberra. Swimming. Kids music programs. Bike riding in the park in the afternoon. These are the activities that I wish I could do. These are the sacrifices.

Of course this choice to work means that we have great financial stability and it means I can buy lots and lots of book to make up for the lack of trips to the library, but it isn’t the same as engagement with the community. It is no substitute for a broad range of experiences with a broad range of other kids and in quality early childhood programs.

My challenge for the new year is how to make sure we participate in more of these kinds of activities that bring joy.

 

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Blogvember post 24 … Bond. James Bond. Martini anyone?

24 Nov 2012

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Tonight Robert is having a boys’ night and camaraderie to see Skyfall. A rare treat for him to see his mates.

I will not be at all sad. I shall be home mixing martinis and watching Goldfinger.

Sometimes one olive isn’t enough

There has been a lot of talk about martinis and Bond in the fifty years of Bond. From the allure of shaken not stirred, which no true aficionado would put up with, to the rise of the vodka martini which just taste like vermouth, to the creation featured in Casino Royale which first appeared in Ian Flemming’s novel of 1953. The Vesper is ‘Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’

Kina Littet has been renamed and Gordon’s is no longer 47% proof but you could still make this version of the martini today.

Or you could try this which is my favourite way.

Everything must be super cold. The glass, the gin and lots of ice. Shaking is forbidden as it just introduces more of the melted ice into the drink, which to my mind defeats the purpose. Really good gin is essential. There are some great ones being made in New Zealand and in Perth at West Winds Gin. This varies according to your taste, or who you recently asked to bring back duty-free for you. Usually I drink Bombay although Tanquery 10 is great too.

There are many arguments about how dry a martini should be. I swing from just to the right of Winston Churchill who was said to whisper the word vermouth in the direction of the glass and possibly a bit to the left of Noel Coward who suggested waving a glass full of gin in the direction of Italy. There are also arguments about the kind of vermouth, French or Italian. For my money I like Noilly Prat. Good. Consistent. Reliable. Useful for other things.

The ratio in this establishment is probably 5 parts gin to 1 part vermouth, and that part is sloshed over the ice and then stirred and poured out. So in fact it is likely to be less than one part. A ‘measure’ will depend on the size of the glass used. It is the ratio that suits you that is the crucial point. Work that out then adjust volume according to glass.

martini ~ extra dry ~ if you please

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice.

Add one half measure of vermouth to the ice and stir. Then discard the vermouth.

Add five measures of gin and stir until everything is very very cold.

Strain using the shaker’s lid into a martini glass.

Garnish with green olive or a twist of lemon peel.

Enjoy. And remember that martinis are like nipples, one is too few and three is too many.

Celebrate the best of Bond here is the opening to Goldfinger, easily my favourite Bond ever. What’s not to like? Sean Connery , Shirley Bassey, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore and great lines.

Do you expect me to talk?

No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!

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Blogvember post 23 … if Twitter had existed in 1991

23 Nov 2012

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Twitter was ‘invented’ in 2006 and launched in July 2006. I joined 16 February 2009 and my life really hasn’t been the same since. When I joined there were fewer than 6 million registered users. There are now upwards of 200 million. There are 50 million active accounts where people log in every day.

The best statistic I can find is 5% of users generate 75% of the content. This always reminds me of my favourite Remo t-shirt ‘Content Provider’ with all its many connotations. Content to provide content. Providing content contentedly. Those with content to provide.

Today it is a different Twitter world than it was in 2009. But I wondered today, while thinking about my sliding door moment with @mamabook yesterday when we realised that we passed each other, almost daily in all likelihood at Macquarie University during the early nineties, what if Twitter had existed? We might have met. We were there at the same time. Almost studied the same things. I am waiting for her to produce a transcript so we can check if we did study the same subjects.

@ If I had only studied philosophy we could have been friends for a whole extra 20 years! #amazeballs @
November 22, 2012 7:23 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@mamabook
Michelle

If Twitter had existed in 1991 how different things would have been. We wouldn’t have had to make such sure and definite plans. The vagaries of plans with no mobile phones and no cars were few. The plans were concrete. Cancellations had to happen hours in advance. But we didn’t worry much about what we were missing out on either. We had detailed uninterrupted conversations. No beeping. No instagraming. No tweeting.

If Twitter had existed I wouldn’t have had an answering machine that played Arrival of the Queen of Seba when you called and I wasn’t home. The thought of this, the mere recollection of this cracks me up to this day. And I might have had more money as I wouldn’t have had to waste so much money on STD phone calls to my family in a un-deregulated telecommunications market. Damn you Telecom. No really damn you.

If Twitter had existed when I was in first year missed opportunities wouldn’t have slipped by. I might have kept up with world events a bit better while I spent endless, countless hours on public transport dragging myself across Sydney to go to university. I might also have realised sooner, that almost everyone was as clueless and disoriented by life as I was in first year. I might have been able to get real conversations going about ideas that interested me, instead of my so-called friend’s eyes glazing over every time I mentioned phenomenology and existentialism.

There might not have been Drum Media if Twitter had existed in 1991. How great a medium is Twitter for the music scene? The Big Day. I can’t even imagine that on Twitter. I bet it is totally awesome. Gigs at the Horden Pavillion – how amazing would that have been with iphone and Twitter.

I may not have missed out on making connections with people who I would never have met otherwise and who could have been enriching my life for the past twenty years. It was a slower world. In 1991 it was still another four years before I had a new-ish laptop and it was another nine years before you could SMS between carrier networks. Remember that?

It was even more years before I had both my great macbook and cable internet in a convergence of greatness which I just couldn’t believe and I used it to chat on Facebook *face-palm* Even then I was desperate for a medium that would connect me to ideas and conversations and people.

Twitter still didn’t exist for another whole year.

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Blogvember post 22 … the beginning of the end

22 Nov 2012

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The makings for beautiful wrapping and gifting

This evening in the glow of the western setting sun, I went to my first ‘end of year’ event for the year.

The National Gallery end of year shopping night for members. It was a refined beginning of the end of the year mayhem.

A little treat for everyone. A bit of browsing. A live choir that mesmerised the toddler. The fantastic fountain at the new front entrance and the pears for a diversion, while some chilling out and chatting occured. The shopping itself was just an add on. I would have gone just to hear the music and drink the sparkling wine.

I got a few bits and pieces to add to the gifts pile. Plus a few more goodies arrived this morning in the post including yet more MT tape! I am seriously addicted to that stuff now. Pretty. So pretty. I have enough stuff now to start wrapping and list making and packing some things ready for posting. This weekend marks the start of one of the two busiest periods in our family calendar. December is second only to May for birthdays and celebrations. Not only do we have end of year, Christmas, Boxing Day, and cricket, we have birthdays. Lots and lots of them.

The birthdays this year include littlest niece, favourite twins, big niece, my brother, my two best friends’ three year olds, both of them on the same day, and of course, last but not least toddler will turn three on the 27th. Time will tell if this birth date is a burden or not. What is clear, is that a special birthday needs planning, a beach and a bucket and spade. And an umbrella and a big esky for the darling boy’s exhausted parents.

 

 

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Blogvember post 21… about a philosopher

21 Nov 2012

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@ Tell me about your favourite lecturer/tutor at University and why were they so memorable?
October 31, 2012 10:12 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

For today’s post I am mining suggestions from my pals on Twitter. Today @eatshootblog has been in my thoughts. She was featured in a story about cycling today in her role as editor of Canberra Cycle Chic in The Canberra Times, as was @damonayoung for laughter. Damon is one of my favourite Australian working philosophers, and I wish I could write about weighty topics as he does, with proper time and care. He loves fountain pens too and often posts lovely photos of them on Twitter.

I am not going to write about either laughter nor cycles. That is actually quite enough about bikes for this blog – even if @eatshootblog takes fantastically gorgeous photos of bikes and describes riding her own bike as like drinking a gin and tonic, I don’t actually like them at all. The hat hair alone is enough to put me off. Apparently, you only need to write about bikes and caffeine to attract more negative commentary than you do if you write about cars and Canberra.

Today, I am going to tell you about my favourite lecturer at university.

When I first went to university, I went to Macquarie University. After about the first two minutes of first year, I realised that everything other than the philosophy I had enrolled in, was a total waste of time. Finally, in philosophy, I had a name and a canon for everything I had been thinking about for, well, for my whole life. I loved every single minute of every single lecture and tutorial. It was sheer unadulterated bliss. Not only the first year course taught by the professor, he was the foundation professor. He had been at Macquarie since the beginning.

At the end of second year our thoughts turned to how best to make the most of our final year. There was a course on the books called ‘Seminar Unit B’. What was this course? Cath, my friend and fellow traveller in philosophy, went to ask.

Max told us. ‘It’s whatever you like. We don’t always offer it, but if you’re interested we will. Just tell me what you’d like to read and we will read it. Then at the end of the semester you can write an essay.’ What? This was a course? We couldn’t believe our luck!

We immediately enrolled. What a gift! Then each week we would turn up, our class of two for a session with the Professor. Sometimes he would forget to turn up. We would slink down the wall outside his office, sitting on the floor talking about what we had read. Sometimes he would just be late and in a flurry of apologies let us in. Every time was a magical tour. His office was stacked with books, with papers and with paintings, two and three deep in places. We often dreamed of liberating them all and hanging them all over the department. He is the archetypal professor, down to the monkish hair and the eccentric clothes. He always wore amazing shoes, and bought clothes in Europe. The sort of clothes I had never imagined. When he laughed his whole body would shake and he would throw his head back and guffaw. Those tutorials were the most liberating and important intellectual discussions of my whole life. There was nothing we couldn’t discuss. No theory too outlandish, no connection too tenuous. The rigour and the depth to those talks, I have never experienced again.

Max supported me through my honours year and assisted my first publication. He also rescued my PhD when I thought that I would never finish it. He nurtured a dissertation topic that few believed was worthy of such a substantial piece of scholarship and he gave me countless hours of his time freely to ensure that I passed. I owe Max Deutscher an enormous debt of gratitude.

He taught me how to think, and how to study philosophy. He gave me insight into how deeply you need to think about things to really get to their core. To the heart of the matter.

The last time I saw Max was at his house. I was walking away with the final pieces of my thesis intact and ready to be written up. I spoke to him afterward, when the result was in and I knew that I had passed. He is without a doubt the most significant figure in my intellectual life.

You can listen to his wonderful words here (vale Alan Saunders). And read about his latest book here.

Max Deutscher studied philosophy (University of Adelaide) and then Oxford (1960-63) with Gilbert Ryle. Appointed Foundation Professor at Macquarie University in 1966; published on themes of remembering, inferring, and physicalism. After involvement in Vietnam protests, wrote Subjecting and Objecting (1983), papers on Sartre, Ryle, and Husserl, and then a series of essays in conceptual analysis after deconstruction. A free-lance philosopher since 1998, he has published Michèle Le Dœuff: Operative Philosophy and Imaginary Practice (2000), Genre and Void: Looking Back at Sartre and Beauvoir (2003), and Judgment After Arendt (2007). His work (since the 1970s), in its concern with themes of European philosophy from Hegel to Derrida, continues to draws upon the varied traditions of analytical philosophy.

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Blogvember post 20 … a rambling, ramshackle and ranting post

20 Nov 2012

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This morning, I managed to get a take away coffee before work. The logistics of this seem overwhelmingly simple. This would actually be overwhelmingly simple in other city. But not in Canberra. The trajectory I have to travel to make this occur, is worthy of the search for the Higgs Boson participle. It is more complex than pure maths, requires more coordination and planning than the mineral resources rent tax and is more frustrating than can be imagined.

Keep calm and drink coffee

The reasons for this are many and varied. They are mostly too tedious and boring to go into, but some of them are taboo. There are things in Canberra that are not to be mocked. The coffee and the dearth of good coffee in Canberra is well documented. Some people care, more people don’t. The ones whose eyes glaze over when you start up about coffee, are the people with whom you immediately change the subject and talk about something else.

The drive to get the coffee is the part when the frustration begins. It is not done to mock drivers in Canberra. In places like Sydney, mockery of other drivers, other pedestrians and indeed other commuters of all kinds is sport – love your new train marshals by the way – WTF?

Not here. Here it is not the done thing to complain about the fact that Canberra is full to bursting with drivers who are not able to cope with our ‘so called’ peak-half hour. The peak is lengthening slowly as the city grows and I am told that there are genuine bottlenecks that rival the M4 or the Westgate Bridge. As they all occur in places I have never been, I cannot vouch for the veracity of these claims. It seems that these changes to the road conditions and the congestion suit not the drivers of Canberra with whom I am forced to share the road at the hour of eight. Not that I am at all allowed to mock, criticise or otherwise disparage other Canberrans for their driving, heaven forfend.

So having made the arduous journey that should take all of ten minutes but frequently takes much much longer due to delays caused by, lets call them blockages in my path. These delays are caused by failures to understand that at an intersection with a left turning slip lane, if the traffic is proceeding straight ahead to your right, and a set of lights holds all the other traffic from entering the roadway, then it is perfectly ok to just turn left after checking that you are not about to mow down the occasional wayward school girl who happens to be using the pedestrian crossing – noting that the view of the crossing is clear from at least 50 or 100 metres away so it is not actually essential to even slow down to take the corner if there are no pedestrians nearby.

What actually occurs is that 60% of the cars come to a complete halt to observe the traffic passing to their right before proceeding to accelerate once more onto the empty roadway. If you did this in Sydney you would receive a blast of horn or worse a car right up your clacker. Anticipation and using all the available green time mean nothing here. For too long have the drivers of Canberra have had wide open streets with no competition. Lots of them have absolutely no competitive edge with the exception of instances of merging, when they are all politeness – after you, no really, after you – would someone please just go!

Worse, not that I would know about how to draw attention to these things, is that the drivers of Canberra who cannot cope with the two sides of a roundabout being in use at one and the same time. Or indicating. Or giving way to the right. Or just actually driving straight ahead and just concentrating on where you are going!

It would take longer in Sydney to drive twice as far even in peak hour some days. Now toleration is my middle name and the philosopher in me understands the reasons for this behaviour, but all of it impedes me from getting to the coffee!

Mornings where I actually manage to remain cool and spend the enforced extra travel time listening to Emma Ayres telling me wonderful stories and playing nice music, I am greeted by cheery baristas who live for coffee.

Then all that remains is to drive the other ten kilometres to the office, which is another taboo about good coffee outside the narrow band surrounding Civic. How I wish we had public transport that worked, then at least I could just read. My blood pressure would probably be much more reasonable too.

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Blogvember post the 19th … new traditions

19 Nov 2012

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Coffee, rituals and traditions

I had coffee on Sunday afternoon with three lovely women, all of whom were gifted to me by Twitter. This is not a post about how much I love twitter, although I do and it is not a post about the women, well not really. Read More

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Blogvember Sunday Confessional

18 Nov 2012

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Blogvember has thrown up challenges in a way that I didn’t expect.

Unexpected interchanges about blogging, with other bloggers. Rivalrous thoughts about other bloggers writing. How I wish my blog could be more voice and less blah blah blah. Challenges too about writing every day. The discipline, the highs and lows – like yesterday where I didn’t write at all. A post appeared but it had no text. The posts I wrote thinking I really thought it was good, but no one read it! Read More

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Blogvember post 17 … I’m not here

17 Nov 2012

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The dog ate my homework post!

We all knew it was coming today, but yes it actually happened

I should be here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I am actually here!

Sun and rosé

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listening to this classic. Enjoy your Saturday and join me tomorrow for another Sunday Confession.

 

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Blogvember post 16 … word of the year!

16 Nov 2012

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Exciting news courtesy of Sydney Writers Centre this week, I give you my new favourite word! Read More

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Blogvember post 15 … the mid-point

15 Nov 2012

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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

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