Monday moment

It was dark when the alarm went off, but not cold. I'd been dreaming - those violent images and actions blurring into an ill-edited montage of mayhem and blood. I wasn't glad to hear that alarm and fumbled for the 'reprieve' button. Could I ignore it? No. Monday. Of course. It is starting to feel like it is always Monday.
I make the decisions in this house. Work happens. The rituals of commuting are ingrained and now unquestioned. The reward is a coffee at the desk after log-in and then what? Then we do what is needful until release.
Release. Repeat. Monday again.

Peeking Around

Greetings all, from after lunch on a Friday. I've been thinking of you, and wondering how you are. Life has been happening to us all, hasn't it?
Dinners and sunsets and laundry and "I thought I paid that bill" and missed appointments and amazingly beautiful unexpected moments and bad dreams and coughs that won't go and all those things.
I've changed jobs (twice) since we last spoke, and changed again inside, although I seem to look the same from the outside. Funny how that goes. "You haven't changed a bit" say people who are running into me from school days (Hi Tim! Hi Ben! Hi Kate!) and yet I don't remember who I was then, let alone bear even a passing resemblance... or do I? I don't know. It has ceased to matter. To quote a much maligned film "we're living in an ocean of motion" (The Secret. Don't start with me). I'm floating and bobbing along, and occassionally stricking out towards somewhere dry.

Anyway, this is more of a quick g'day and to promise that I'll be back soon for a decent yarn. Put the jug on.

Shitbags - That Was Scary!

I'm safe. The family is safe.
It is pretty chaotic.
If you can donate to Red Cross or someone like that, please do - they're on the ground and they know what to do in an emergency. They're helping the people who've been smashed by this thing.
My heart goes out to the people where it is still raining, still flooding, and the waters are just receding to show the ruin.
Thank you to everyone who sent messages of care and support - it meant a lot to me to receive them.

A Bigger Wet

The New Year has been ushered in on a surge of turbulent brown floodwater. So far my life and those of my family have been inconvenienced only and we are very grateful for this. We are all ok. Many people (actually the last count I heard was in the hundreds of thousands, but after this week it will probably edge up to the million/s as now the dense metropolitan areas are being effected) are not ok. They have been directly and negatively effected - damage, ruin and even death.

I have never lived through something that was officially a crisis and it is a bit scary to be inside an event where chance and nature are taking turns rolling the dice.

The water is not how it looks in the pictures - it is moving very fast. Turbulent and heavy with bits of things inside it. It pushes trees over, it carries things, animals and people away - very quickly. Underneath it, the road you take for granted may or may not be there anymore. When it recedes, the smell is boggling. I lack the imaginative skills to imagine what it is like for the people out in the north and west - where townships are facing a week or even a month before the waters recede. Oh, and it is still raining. Still raining. If you are in a position to help with money (the Red Cross is running lots of evacuation centres), then please do. This is not a drill.

Festivus

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, nonaddictive, gender neutral celebration of the solstice holiday, practised with the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or the choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that Australia is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed,color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms:
This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal.
It is freelytransferable with no alteration to the original greeting.
It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her / himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.
This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings, for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Note: No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons have been electromagnetically relocated.

You Know You're A Queenslander (Pt 2)

When...
* You can identify the type of ant that bit you based on the flavour of pain, the duration of the pain and the size of the scar it may leave.

* You pause in the mowing to find some longer pants to wear to protect yourself from the blowback, only to realise you own only one pair of jeans and one goodset of tracky pants and both are too hot. You continue mowing in cutoff shorts and thongs.

* Someone says "it is the Sprit of Christmas" and you think of Bundaberg Rum.

*sigh*

Ok, so I gave up on Nano this year. I don't feel good about it. Lesson learnt.
Actually lesson not learnt - I already knew I needed to say no to a lot more things and I didn't! That large part of me that lives in De Nial thought I could take it all on and get it all done and, as usual, it was wrong.
Is misplaced optimism a sin or just a character flaw?

Week Two - Epic Fail

I've never had such a bad Week Two of Nano. Zero count days at this point is utterly demoralising. There's reasons/excuses (colitis, work going spazz, etc) but 'failing' at Nano simply points out how I've allowed work-related concerns to colonise my effective energy. Again.
Another great exaple of an opportunity to learn from my mistakes.

Onward and upward.

NANO 2010

Nanowrimo for 2010 has kicked off!* Woot! I'm the least prepared i have ever, ever been!! Woot! I have written my first 2500 words or so and still have no idea what's going on or if i will basically scrap that stuff and turn into another direction. I have been looking forward to this since December last year. There's something about the frivolous abandonment of setting off on this adventure that is charming and fun. I also discovered last year that committing to this made many other things take off as well, an unexpected turbo-charge that I am hoping for again this year but trying not to expect.

I know I won't be so perky in a week and half when I'm super-tired and blocked blocked blocked, but that's next week's problem!

(* Apologies for all the exclamation marks in this post)

Time turns Away from Us

"Give up the wish for a better past"
is the illuminated sign in the churchyard on the corner. It's a bit of an odd thing to say at first pass, but as I thought about it and also about the way that my 3 hours a night for projects seemed to completely evaporate this week, it started to gel into something quite profound. Something that made echos around how slowly life comes together when we're living it but how quickly things seem to have passed when we look back.

I'd like to learn from my Mistakes

Here's a hot tip for beginners - don't keep using earbuds that have deteriorated to the point that there's exposed wires. I shouldn't have to say it - but there it is.

The Morning After

Since the Fat Quarter Challenge was accepted, there's been a frenzy of lists - ideas, schedules, possible shops and cafes this is a good excuse to visit, and most ironically, a list of all the other projects that really ought to be completed before this one is undertaken... such as the scarf Mellie ordered for her birthday - only one third completed. But, I hope you'll agree, looking slightly fabulous (the photo uploader thing didn't work - nearly got it! sorry).


This project is working excellently to take my mind off the impending horridness of Post Peak Oil* or whatever we're calling the trainwreck in slow-mo that is rolling down the mountain of non-renewable resource gluttony towards us. Kewl. Mission, pretty much, accomplished.
Bring on the Craft.


*"Impending" in the sense that it is the future at some point. However I don't (and no-one really does) know when exactly which is strangely what I find most stressful about the situation.

Craft-tastic! Challenge!

As a way of re-invigorating my creative (bunny ears required?) life, I've chosen a fairly random challenge and recruited a few fellow travellers to join me in participating.
Actually I've tried on two fronts and 1 sunk like a proverbial (Nanowrimo not in flavour this year, tho I'm still in for it) and t'other is a little more accessible.

It is the Inaugural Trash City Fat Quarter Challenge 2011.

Oh baby.

What is a fat quarter? It is a piece of fabric. Still interested and willing to risk learning about quilting? Then read on, but over here. The project will be due sometime in April 2011, all those details are yet to be clarified by the organising society.

That's all for now, but expect updates and hi-larious anecdotes about paper-pieced hexagons, and even, possibly, photos. Yeah, watch my comfort zone blow right out.
Woot.

Very Busy Dog

I once saw a doco on tv in which Grandmaster Flash said
"A dawg that chases it's tail is a very busy dawg."

I can not for the life of me remember anything else about that doco, but really - with a gem like that does it matter?

Panopticon Blues

Wristwatches and schedules and tiny little boxes cut dreams into segments, and some things don't keep living when you cleaver them up into teensy pieces. Try it if you don't believe me. I suggest not with your own pet.

The Doubtful has had all clock readouts gaffed over and we're all the better for it. I prefer to not know what day it is, anywhere. Your timezone is your problem dude, don't lay that trip on me. Of course in my trade we're largely casual about many of those things people have gotten into the habit of thinking of as immutable (psst guys, we made it up and all agreed not to tell - don't you remember?). Occasionally we get all precise and specific. Sometimes bizniz must be clandestine and this requires some snappy moves to a sharp beat. Usually we cruise in rasta zen mode and this is the eternal perfect antidote to the lingering sweaty nightmares from my time in the panopticon.

The Invisible World

The Doubtful has been in dry dock so I went crewing on a couple of other ships. Let's face it, sitting around planet side is not a strength I have nor really wish to cultivate.

It is always interesting to see how other systems handle the same things your own do but in bizarrely different ways - and of course that sometimes they don't. My ideas of critical functions and basic comforts that are just so obvious as to not be worth a mention are simply not shared by others. Whoa! I was away just long enough for it to all be an entertaining curiosity and working holiday rather than a horribly jarring experience.

So here I am, back in the same patched chair that has a little bit of stuffing coming out of the broken seam at the back, and thinking about something a wise man told me this week...

The freedom to reinterpret the world, to abandon a story of desperation for one of possibility and hope, is basic to the worldview of magic. It’s a freedom that today’s progressive community might find it useful to embrace as well.
...
It’s not just that change has to be thinkable before it’s possible, though this is true and important; it’s also that imagination can change the world by itself.

... and realising that so many things that have meaning are actually almost entirely held within ourselves. On a personal level, in our communities, our nations or ships. All of it can be reinterpreted according to our will, or the will of our enemies, or the will of the readers of the future to name just three obvious ones. In a world-view where 'reality' is this fluid, what can we hold on to? And let's not pretend that feeble humans do not feel safer holding onto things!

I've noticed that we hold onto habits and the familiar. Broken chairs, unsubstanitated opinions even our expectations and hopes sometimes are just placeholders for the meaning we really yearn for and that maybe we could finally discover if we accepted this secret. We are free to reinterpret the world.
Crazy. Could it work?

Morning Planetside

Do you ever dream of birds, of warm currents that lift and caress? Do you dream of eternal sunsets and wondrous, unknowable patterns? Do you aspire to lift and see more? I'm held here by the miracle of gravity, part of this web.

That's the urge of sap rising, of rich complex earth smells.

Smother

There's plenty of space out here in, um, space. But no matter how far away you are from the cities or worlds of the Culture, somehow, your mother can find you, and in just seconds say exactly the thing that will just most piss you off.

That's the super-power of blood relations. They accumulate a lifetime of misunderstandings, judgements and irritations that can be channelled directly into your reptilian brain, bypassing all higher-control functions.

Gotta love 'em.

"What's that?! Sorry, you're dropping out - there's a lot of solar flares in this quadrant..."

Stuff Dead People Like

Do you think that would make for a good blog? It could be pretty involved, or maybe just really really short.

Do you think opinions would differ on whether being dead was basically pretty good, or ultimately suckful? By persons who are deceased obviously - not by us living types.

If all life and matter is really energy vibrating at different speeds and levels, then surely blogging - or interacting with the cybersphere (or WTF we're calling this space these days) would be the first place we could make "contact with those who have crossed over" in a way that does not require any human third party. Actually, it should be "receive contact" as we'll need them to set up some kind of Ghost account. Gmail of a new kind.

Pros:
* Either no longer conscious of human depravity and suffering or all-knowing
* Can understand all languages, see through all politicians and finally be certain of something
* Re-incarnated as cool person/animal
* No need for money, haircuts or bowel bacteria
* one-way ticket

Cons:
* Sensual /worldly pleasures a thing of the past
* Can't take advantage of perspective/situation to improve plight of loved ones
* No afterlife of any kind and so souls/consciousness disappear right on the moment of death, making this blog concept N/A
* Whatever the next realm/stage is, it is too awesome to be bothered remembering to try and tell us about it - everyone just scoots on over/up and gets on with it
* one-way ticket


Probably a bit of a shit idea, but I do wonder...

Detoxification

Re-initiating the sugar/fructose detoxification process after dismal failure two weeks-ish ago. I've spent the intervening period clearing out the various storage facilities and carefully re-stocking, along with practising the "It's not being deprived it is being healthy" mantra which doesn't yet feel or sound sincere.

Aiming to stick to it for a month and trusting that it comes with the benefits as advertised on the packet.

Day 2: Basically holding my breath.