Champagne and Socks

I’ve been working on writing this blog post for over a week now. But as it turns out, the process of pulling what I wanted to say together, and doing a few other things, ended up bringing me a few understandings that have changed what I wanted to write entirely.

You see, it was worrying me how much I could relate to and understand how people end up on the show Hoarders. On an episode recently, there was a sweet old lady whose house wasn’t dirty or gross but it was jam packing in with plastic boxes stacked to the ceiling filled with perfectly good craft things – books, tools, materials and so on. The probably was that everything was perfectly usable and not able to be thrown out. One of the doctors on the show said that a problem with hoarders in general was the intent, things there were going to get to or do, at some point. So of course, this woman had a problem with cleaning out her house – how could you thrown that stuff out? And in doing so, it would have involved admitted and coming to peace with the fact that she couldn’t possibly *do* all those things she intended to. David Allen describes that emotion as grief – at letting yourself and your commitments to yourself down. He also says that in taking audit and then keeping track of all your projects and commitments, you will suddenly discover the word “No”.

So all of this has had me thinking a lot about my sock yarn stash. It is this major brick wall of both guilt and of scheduled future time. If I’m actually going to knit it all. That means I’ve already decided a whole lot (and I mean a *whole lot*) of crafting I am going to do. At some point in time. And that kinda actually takes some of the fun out of it. It also means I can’t justify buying more yarn when I have so much [1]. The problem though is that your tastes gradually change over time and what you liked 5 or 10 years ago may no longer be your thing. And horrifyingly, I think I have been stashing some of this stuff that long now.

And I’m *still* buying yarn! Despite deciding I need to reduce my stash, I bought this pile in the latest Black Friday sales (of yarn I have be lusting after for years – Lorna Laces in Bittersweet, Claudia Handpainted in Watermelon, Handmaiden sea silk, ooh and a madeleintosh which I’ve only ever heard about never seen and in TPP colour!)

And I signed up for a bimonthly (every other month) subscription to KnitCrate. Here are the yarns in the January stash (Blue Sky Alpaca and Zen Yarn Gardens. Also, miniskeins which I have crocheted up already, see top picture).

I decided that I would spend this year knitting up as many pairs of socks as possible. Just to see how many I could knit. And I’ve got a couple of subprojects relating to that to work on over the year. And to that end, I thought I would cast on during the Opening Ceremony (ala the Ravellenics – the old knitters tradition of picking something ambitious in a tight timeframe and going above and beyond as the Olympic spirit to get it done by the Closing Ceremony. It’s a knitting thing). To that, I needed to figure out the first project and then wind up the skeins into balls to get going.

Easy, right? Wellllll …. I *thought*  I had attachment issues relating to my skein collection. That handpainted yarn looks so gorgeous as skeins that I couldn’t bear to ball it up for use. And that that was my problem with this whole stashing thing. Yeah, I think not so much. I mean, I do enjoy admitting the whole colour play thing but, yarn cakes are also very nice. And so is actually working with the yarn – watching the colour work into a textile.

The first projects selection (shocked how little impact this made on my stash but you gotta start somewhere.

I went to take before and after shots of some yarn skeins into cakes viz:

 And I discovered a horrible truth! The true reason most of my stash is in skeins is not because I love to admire it in such form, it’s because a long time a go, I cut corners on getting all the tools and I skimped on getting a Swift – this is the thing that you hook the skein onto so it doesn’t get tied into knots as you wind it it into the ball on the ball winder (see photo above). I think I thought I could wing it without this device and have never put it together that I hate winding up the balls because it always takes ages and I spend a lot of time undoing the knots. I really have no idea why I can’t commit to a new hobby or interest and buy all the required tools. I really don’t know why I insist on doing it half-arsed and get annoyed and never really execute things properly. I was worried all this time I was a yarn collector and not a knitter. Turns out I just forgot why I was procrastinating.

So I bought a swift online, which is still coming, and in the meanwhile, I wound these two balls up by hand to cast on during the Opening Ceremony. I’m having a go knitting two socks at the same time:

And, confession, after lusting after this yarn colourway for literally years, and then admiring it for months in skein form, knitting it up, it doesn’t really look how I thought it would. And I’m a little disappointed. It’s Claudia Handpainted in Watermelon. I thought the striping would be a bit different, more solid.

And in all this process, I had a second revelation. All this time, like seriously, for 15 years or something, I thought I could only monogamously craft – that I could either knit or quilt and would do so obsessively, but that I couldn’t do both at once and that I certainly couldn’t bounce back and forward between them. I thought I could either do one for like 6 months and then switch out. As in, that is how it’s always been. But in all this faffing around with the knitting, I’ve been quietly also progressing my most current quilting project. And the reason for that is because all the pieces have been cut and the blocks I’m working on all have the next pieces pinned in place. So it’s just a matter of picking the next piece off the pile and sewing it. There is no thinking needed about it at all. Which is the GTD philosophy in action – do all your thinking in one go and figure out the next action so that you can just crank the widgets in the moment.

And so my revelation – the reason I usually switch from one craft to the other is that I get stuck on a project and don’t know how to move forward (or I have to unpick whatever it was I had just done) and it all feels too hard so I go and pick up the other craft. And that craft has all these exciting next actions ready to go and away I plunge until I hit a wall there. None of it had anything to do with being in one head space or the other. It just was a matter of never leaving anything without knowing what the next action for progressing it should be.

I feel really weird with all these breakthroughs. Must be time to lie down. Or buy more yarn.

[1] Which is also not necessarily a bad thing given I’m a student again but there are so many yarns out there yet to try and somehow I got stuck at Blue Moon Fibre Arts![2]
[2] Also not necessarily a bad thing.

This cafe visit was purely leisure as I met up with my sister for lunch last week. It was a very hot day and the baby and I had had an *interesting*, shall we say, morning.

Cantina, on Beautfort St, is a lil’ bit fancy and I’m never really sure about it. It’s a bit pricey but the coffee is really good. The service is very attentive and obliging but you can’t alter anything on the menu, which was problematic for me when pregnant as their only vegetarian dishes weren’t pregnancy friendly.

Pros:

• Good coffee
• Excellent table service
• Very clean toilets
• Nice range of seating options including booths (good for allowing the baby to spread out) and out of the way tables with ramp for access.
• My pram was technically in the way of traffic but noone really minded
• We sat for quite a while and the staff were happy to offer more coffee and refills of free water
• The food is good – I ordered the gnocchi which I both ordered at the cafe I reviewed last week and the last time I was at this cafe. I like gnocchi. Also, vegetarian.

Cons:

• No Wifi.
• It’s pricey
• The coffee is served in itty bitty cups. It felt like 3 mouthfuls of flat white. Delicious but not really enough for if you want to sit over a cup of coffee. Also … expensive for what you get.
• We sat outside on the warm day which was warm

Overall, the coffee is very good and the service makes the visit enjoyable. It’s a nice spot to catch up with friends, I’m a semi regular there. But I don’t think it will be on our working space list.

It’s funny how synchronicity works. How you only suddenly notice that different aspects of your life keep throwing up the same lesson to you and that you know, you could acknowledge it now or acknowledge it later but either way, it seems to be the lesson you’re learning right now.

For me, this year, I feel like “organise” is it. When a baby comes along, I think you start to drown without organisation. In the beginning I was all winging it and stuff but the only real way I’m finding I’m able to feel less overwhelmed and get some air is to be organised. The only way I can get out the door remotely close to the planned time in the morning is if I’ve packed the baby bag the night before. And it only takes a couple of times of having to soothe a screaming-the-house-down upset baby whilst the bottles are in the steriliser and then in the freezer to cool down enough before you clue up to the fact that you should be ahead of the game. Now, no matter what happens, I’m making up at least 12 hours worth of bottles before I go to bed. I’ve even leapt out of bed at close to 1am when I realised I didn’t have enough bottles as back up and stayed up boiling kettles and prepping. Because, then, no matter how much hits the wall in the day ahead of you, at least you have bottles. And there have been a day or two when we’ve gone through what I thought would be 12 hours worth of bottles before lunch. I didn’t realise what people meant when they said you need to organise with a baby. I didn’t really get that it meant you have to organise everything else around the baby, not the actual baby herself.

I started the February round of the 12WBT today. And one of the things Michelle really drums into your head is the need to be organised to get this done. The very first round we did (ooh was that 2012 now??) we were organised and it really worked out. And then I found in subsequent rounds, if I hadn’t really worked out how things would go at the beginning of the week, well, it didn’t really happen. Because when all hell breaks loose, you drop the things you haven’t really thought through properly. Thinking just complicates things when you’re in put out the fire mode. This time, I actually sat down and planned out this week  – when we might need to cook things days ahead, when exactly (as in what timeslot) I would do which workouts (she gives you what you will do for the day ahead of time) and I thought through properly what I actually need to do, with mini milestones, towards reaching my goals. I’d like to be running 5km by the end of this gig. That means I need to be running say 2.5 km by the end of 6 weeks etc. We get the shopping lists on a Thursday so you have all the ingredients you need at the beginning of the week. And that really makes such a difference. Today, I was rushing with lots of things on and a very unsettled baby. It would have been easy to eat something less than optimum if I didn’t already have most of it preassembled (thanks to C) in the fridge. Grabbing the healthy option then became as fast as any other.

David Allen really emphasises the need to be organised in GTD, obviously. And one of the elements of the weekly review – the look ahead at the week to come – is becoming more and more glaringly obvious how important that is. Michelle Bridges calls it red flag days, where you know you will have issues either with following your nutrition plan (say you have a lunch or dinner out or your day is filled with appointments that makes getting your exercise in difficult). Allen talks about how you put something near the front door so you don’t forget to leave the house with it as an example of looking for things before they show up and blow up. I’m not always good at getting to this part of the weekly review but damn it’s annoying when I haven’t and hugely gratifying when I have, and have put in place the things I need to have done so things don’t blow up. The other day, we calmly walked out of the house at 8.30, within 5 minutes of deciding to leave because I’d done all the preparation the night before. Because I knew that would be hard for me to do so I did all the hard work ahead of time. Allen calls it the “ick factor” when you do things not because they are good for you – like brushing your teeth – but because you can’t stand the ick. After it not bothering me for ever so long, I now can’t stand leaving the kitchen with mess. I don’t like going to bed without clean benches. It just icks me now, in a way it didn’t before. I wonder what other new habits I might pick up inadvertently due to ick.

I in no way have this “organised” thing sorted. But I’m hyperaware of how it is arising across aspects of my life and how much of a difference it makes when I am organised vs when I am not. I think somehow by the end of this year, I might see myself as a much more organised person than I do now. The thing I don’t yet understand though is how you don’t require more time somewhere in the equation to be able to both do the things you need to do today as well as spend time today preparing things ahead of time for tomorrow. Or, put another way, what was I doing with this time before? It upsets me to think that I might have been doing nothing with it. Or worse, that it might be a bit like how if you put all your things away as soon as you finish using them, you never have to put time aside in the future to tidy up. And you don’t really notice the time you took to say put your shoes back in their spot. I think most likely it all takes the same amount of finite (your whole life allotment) time but one version allows you to live it a lot more stressfree. I think I’m just in the adjustment phase towards that constant state of being. I hope.

This week we tried out Circa on Beautfort St, Mt Lawley (opposite the Astor Theatre, where Diva used to be).

I was a little wary about it because it’s a long and narrow shop and has a bunch of steps into and then through to the back of it. And I wasn’t sure it would have enough room for the pram. But I have to say, access (for a pram) was not really a problem – I did need help getting it up the stairs in but there was enough space to park it next to our booth for a good chunk of the day. Also, the staff were very helpful and understanding and I didn’t feel made to feel bad about leaving the pram there.

Pros:

• Very comfy booths with large tables to work at. I never got uncomfortable sitting and the table took two electronic devices, a whole heap of baby things, big plates with food and a couple of cups of coffee.
• Love the decor of dark wood panelling and also the very pretty bar behind the counter. Very swank.
• The food was outstanding – I had panfried ricotta gnocchi on a pea puree.
• The coffee was good too.
• The service was brilliant – helpful, consistent etc.
• And chocolate mousse ( see above). We tasted the dessert As is well known, the one thing that really improves chocolate mousse is of course, chocolate mousse. This is a chocolate mousse layered on a chocolate sponge and topped with chocolate and then a caramel cream. And then a dollop of chocolate mousse on chocolate biscotti. A++

Cons:

• No Wifi. In theory that should have meant it was a great work space and that would probably be true if I was by myself.
• No parent room facilities and nothing really that could be repurposed in the Ladies room (let us never speak of how I tried to get around this. I think the baby has forgotten.)

Overall, delicious, well priced food, great service, very pleasant place to hang.

I’m the sort of person who likes new things to “settle in” when I get them. I dunno why but I can’t just use up something I just got – I like to admire the yarn skein before it gets knit up, or admire the candles before I burn them etc. The trouble with that though is there’s no clear timeframe on when the settling in is up and the enjoying is on. Luckily for me, I married someone with no such philosophy. C is the kind of person who eats all the goodies out of his Xmas stocking between breakfast and lunch on Xmas day. He has no desire to save nice things for another day.

This, then, is the only reason that we have already broken out the teas from the January Monstrositea and tasted tea number 3. (I should note that I discovered a segment of ginger included in the canister for the peppermint tea and thus the hint that the teas are to be enjoyed now, when fresh and not later when the honeymoon is over.)

I’d baked a cake. I know! I can’t believe it either. I’d just whipped one up for no reason at all. I used to be that kind of person, maybe I’m her again. Anyhow, this was Wednesday night, with Blue Jasmine to watch on the TV:

I enjoyed both the movie and the tea! The tea we had was from Lupicia – a green tea with strawberries and vanilla. It was a subtle, gentle tea, perfect for midweek relaxing and accompanying my chocolate cake. The cake was light and fluffy, not too sweet. I would probably add more milk next time as it was a bit dry. I used The Road to Loving my Thermomix chocolate cake recipe and substituted lactose free chocolate milk for milk since I had one and not the other.

Well, technically I spose I didn’t actually *bake* for Bake Club since none of the recipes used the oven. Usually, I’m enthusiastic about the concept of Bake Club and might still be so whilst thinking up what I will make but by the time it comes round, I’ve tried to get too pack too many things in to my week and C has to step in and help me make my contribution. Which is lovely of him but not actually the point of Bake Club.

Here’s a revelation, since I’m not currently working full time, I have time to do things like bake. And I find myself in the mood to do so. Who knew holding down a day job and trying to juggle a small business plus all the other things would suck your energy for feeling interested in activities like baking?

I’ve been wanting to make friends with my thermomix and Bake Club was the perfect incentive to actually start. Let me just say this, a refrigerated cheesecake that took maybe 5 minutes to make (plus fiddling with the construction of base etc).

I’ve been inspired by the Road to Loving My Thermomix Facebook page and this Chewy Caramel Tim Tam Cheesecake recipe is from there. Basically cream cheese, sugar, sour cream (I substituted for cream to give it more tang), vanilla (above) and then add chopped Tim Tams:

And pour on top of a base of Tim Tams and butter, refridgerate and voila:

Since that took no time at all, I also gave these few recipes of various balls  a go. I’d seen them over Xmas and thought they might be fun. Personally, I found them all a bit dry but they were super quick to make and the best bit is you don’t have to clean the thermomix bowl better batches.

First up apricot balls which as basically equal parts dried apricots and dessicated coconut plus a dash of yoghurt and then rolled in coconut:

Then I tried choc balls and milo balls (the milo ones are made just like the choc but instead of cocoa you switch for milo and coconut). Basically crushed shortbread, sweetened condensed milk plus whatever the flavouring is. She adds different things for fillings for other varieties like a frozen raspberry or a slice of mars bar etc.

The fiddly bit was the construction – rolling pieces of dough into balls and then into the coconut. In the end I was cooking for 3 hours but I didn’t notice the time cause everything was so easy.

Next Bake Club, I volunteered to bring savouries because we had Sugar Overload:

I’m still disproportionately excited about meeting up with Amanda last week for a study session. We had a really great catch up and then got a couple of decent hours of work in. Maybe not the most productive work session in my life but definitely one of the most productive for me in a while. It saddens me a bit to say that equals to sitting down in one stretch and writing 1000 words for my phd and reading one submission with care. But then, that’s also probably almost all the work I’ve done since then. The bub is pretty good in a cafe, much better than at home where she seems to need a lot more entertaining. She might be a bit more of a socialite than me in that regard!

I figure leaving the house with her is going to be the best bet for me in getting work done over the next little while. So I’m going to keep track of the places that work and those that don’t. What do you look for in a cafe? Any suggestions for places in Perth to get a good cup of coffee AND to work in?

My first suggestion was the Waldecks cafe in Karrinyup, mostly cause it has such a nice setting out on the decking with very cool cane couches and the vista of their plants for sale. We went on that very hot day last week and it did have a light breeze that took the edge off some of the time.

Pros:

• Large comfy couches and tables outside and large tables inside to spread out and work on.
• Pretty setting to stare at whilst thinking.
• Coffee not bad.
• Reasonable access for a pram.
• Lots of space to put babies down (see photo).
• Free Wifi.

Cons:

• Service is not awesome (twice I’ve been there, twice it’s not been good).
• Coffee is not great.
• Inside is pretty noisy.
• Hot on a really hot day.

Even though the pros outnumber the cons, I’m still a bit meh about this cafe. Free wifi and lots of space are pretty appealling. I’d have drunk more cups of coffee if the staff had offered me or if when I asked to order another, I wasn’t sent to the front counter to do so.

Despite my well-documented tea stashing problem (see here and here), and the fact that my constant acquisition of tea drives my husband up the wall, for Xmas, he bought me a subscription to Monstrositea. It’s a subscription based tea adventure! Every month you get 4 different teas, enough for a pot each, to try all kinds of varieties both from Australia and around the world. (You might have noticed we have a thing at our place for subscription boxes at the moment!)

The very first parcel arrived on Tuesday and here is my unboxing of it!

It arrived in a gorgeous little tin:

With instructions and descriptions of each of the teas:

And here are this month’s teas:

Since I’m still enjoying my quiet cup of teas last thing at night, I’m looking forward to quietly enjoying these. I’ll report back later!

I skipped a few posts on how I’m going with GTD. I managed to get my knickers in a knot after that first post. Even though I *wrote* about how it was ok to not be perfect and that it was better to get moving in the direction of getting things done than not, I freaked out because my system was not complete before getting it up and running. I’m still working on knowing things at the emotional level as well as at the intellectual one

After a couple of days of realising that I needed a brand new system and freaking out about that because it meant overhauling my then current, and failed, one, I finally had a chat with C about it. Because C already worked out the lifehack to me a long time ago, he pulled out his phone where he’d downloaded the mobile app version of OmniFocus ages ago when Andrew Macrae suggested it to me. We had a play around with it as I explained what I need a system to do for me.  My main problem was trying to get a mindmap brainstorm of each of my large projects (TPP, PhD, Craft etc) into a list management system and also be able to have this system manage both my active Next Actions and also other actions that are sequential and therefore not the Next Action. OmniFocus works perfectly for this. And after having been frustrated for weeks with finding a tool to move to, I decided to finally buy OmniFocus. It’s not cheap at $90 for the Mac and I didn’t want to buy something if I didn’t trust that I would actually use it properly going forward.

It’s been a combination of demoralising to have to start the collection process all over again and also a bit exciting to be setting up my OmniFocus lists whilst doing so. I downloaded the hack to OmniFocus from the GTD website as it needs some configuration to work with GTD (The site says that hack is a public article so hopefully it can be read by non members). It took maybe an hour to st down and read that and get the hang of the software. And then it’s taken me two weeks to get it to where it is now.

David Allen reckons that when they do one on one coaching with people, it takes three full days to get their lives into the GTD system – three full days to mindsweep, collect all your stuff, process and organise into a system. I’ve never really had that kind of time available to me to dedicate to it and now with an infant, I certainly don’t get that many stretches of work time at the moment. I try to do a general mindsweep but my head doesn’t really tend to do a big mind dump like Allen describes in the book. I sit and do that and then I just move on and any subsequent thoughts I have from that point on, I record and throw into my in tray (or the OmniFocus inbox now). It works as a moving mind dump and enables me to at least limit the number of times I have the same thought going forward. Likewise, I’ve done a physical collection of stuff which was in my intray and I’ve noted the various other electronic places where there are collections that need processing. I’ve then just picked up one piece of “stuff” at a time and processed it into OmniFocus as time has permitted. Sometimes I get a couple of hours (I’m working til about 2am at the moment) and sometimes it’s just 1 or 2 pieces in between baby wrangling. Slowly I’ve built up my projects and subprojects and actions lists and I’ve mostly emptied my in tray and inbox and so on.

I found that I needed to also purchase the mobile app for my phone and then enable syncing between it and my laptop. Again, I’m not keen on spending so much money! But, I am often out and about and being able to enter a new thought or idea or to-do straight into the inbox for processing later makes sense in terms of limiting double handling, especially when pressed for time. The other reason I needed it on my phone is because the whole point of GTD is to be able to optimise those odd moments of time that come up in life to allow you to progress a project. You can’t do that if you find yourself unexpectedly in a shop, knowing you had things to get from it but no idea what they were.

I’ve also spent time not only getting my email inbox to zero (yay – finally glimpsed it last night before bed!) but in reconfiguring it. Peter Ball pointed out a pretty cool Gmail hack to me – Don’t Drown in Email –  which I spent 15 minutes getting up and running the other night. I wasn’t sure I’d like it since it brings your two email folders – Waiting and Action – to the front page, making multiple boxes show and you get your inbox empty on the left of the screen by processing and tagging them into boxes on the right (Action, Waiting, Delegated and so on) which means they never actually go away. But it turns out this is great because it’s not out of sight out of mind, which, um ahem, might have been the case previously. After I emptied my inbox, I started reviewing the other folders, starting with the 295 emails sitting in Waiting. Yes. I’d gone numb to them due to the mix of actions and inactions due to lack of reviewage. Anyway, I like this new system even though it too is a work in process.

So in all, I think that’s good progress to report. I feel like I will never get to the end of processing all my stuff. I still have a whole heap of places on my laptop to get stuff from. And I need to go through my physical files in my office. On the other hand, I have a lot less loose paper with lists and ideas on them than I did when I first set up GTD. But the big downside is that it’s taking so long to set up my system that I’ve not yet had a chance to get to the DO stage of getting things done. Which means I don’t yet fully trust my system – things go in, but do they come out?

Tags: gtd

Look, I have a stashing problem. And I’m ok with it. But before I post about the actual problem, let me distract you with these miniskeins that just arrived last week in my Knitcrate kit for January.

These are from Zen Yarn Garden – a yarn dyer I’ve had my eye on for probably a decade but never actually bought any of their yarn to look at in person. These miniskeins  (10g of yarn each) are Serenity 20 Hand Dyed Fingering Yarn in 70% Superwash Merino Wool/20% Cashmere/10% Nylon.

This is the first month that I upgraded my subscription to include the miniskein Add On of 10 miniskeins. I LOVE miniskeins – so sweet and cute and a great chance to see a bunch of different colourways. My plan when I upgraded to this option was to crochet squares from each skein to make this blanket called Bear’s Rainbow Blanket. I had started this pattern to use up some stash of mine but I thought it might be nicer in these luxury yarns.

I think I’m right:

This is the first square in the colourway Composition Storm from the Art Walk Series inspired by Kandinsky. This is exactly the purpose of subscribing to a kit like this. I’ve looked at this series for years online and not really liked it. But working with it up close, the colours are subtle and rich and just beautiful as a worked up piece. I don’t think this photo really does it justice.

I’m so excited about this project!

There’s nothing like a sleeping baby – not just because ahhhh, the silence! and the not having to be in action mode for the moment but also the complete peacefulness that sits across their face. It’s pretty hard not to fall in love all over again when gazing at my sleeping baby. But it’s made me realise the truth of the phrase “sleep like a baby”. It’s not hur hur hur, up and down every two hours crying all through the night. It’s the utter peace and innocence, the complete dissipation of any concerns or worries.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the quote by Nelson Mandela that no one is born racist. That’s such a huge responsibility looking into this completely divine face and know that she learns about the world through me. And there is something divine about her face – this lack of awareness of anything else in the world allows her to be happy or sad in the moment, no baggage from before or to take with her (at the moment) forward. She knows only of – hungry, sated, cold, warm, wet, dry, love. And mummy.

I posted before about how it breaks my heart sometimes to look into this, smiling face, and know at some point I’m going to have to explain things to her about the world. But I’ve also been thinking about the converse of Mandela’s quote – that no one is born knowing their place in the world. The baby comes in with just the id – she cries for what she needs and she knows not to be embarassed, ashamed, sorry or unworthy. The baby doesn’t know that in this world we have a hierarchy, that we decide, have decided and continue to decide who is entitled and who is not. Who is worthy and who is not. And what utterly kills me when I look at this face, this unreservedly smiling with her whole body face, is that every baby comes out into the world crying the same – for their needs to be met. And that what we do, individually or as society, is systematically squelch some people, and not others, raising some, and treading others into their place. Because … I don’t really know why.

Long time readers may recall a confession I made some time ago about my tea buying – not drinking, mind – obsession. It did not improve after that post. In fact, I might have drunk 1 or 2 cups of tea ever after that day. My tea stashing habit is so bad that I can troll my husband  just by suggesting I need more tea as we walk down that aisle at the supermarket.

Since then, I have studiously worked on my coffee snobbery. I’ve scouted out all the coffee shops within a 10 to 15 minute drive from my place. I have found 2 places with actually pretty good coffee that are sort of nearby. Close to Melbourne coffee, even (with Perth prices). Eventually I realised that since I work from home now, I have time to clean an espresso machine after my first coffee in the morning. I pulled out the one we’d inherited and set it all up and it makes a very good cup of coffee too. And then I started working through the blends and single origin beans of my favourite coffee bean roaster. I go through a 250g bag in a fortnight, which I think is pretty reasonable and I’m enjoying fabulous flat whites in the comfort of my own home. And I’m drinking a lot of instant coffee too as is my way when I’m studying. (I checked, more than 5 cups a day is an issue with breastfeeding and the baby doesn’t seem to mind it as long as I keep under that.)

I like coffee. Anyone in my vicinity knows that.

I lied. I LOVE coffee.

So it was the oddest thing last night to find myself actually craving a cup of tea. And then enjoying it. And following it up with a peppermint tea. It was damn weird. Recently I’d had a conversation with my mother about not enjoying drinking tea anymore and she’d suggested I try drinking it a bunch of different ways to see how I like it. That making it like I make coffee might not be appropriate. This made sense given I adjust how I take my coffee depending on the beans and the barista.  I did try a couple of cups but didn’t really have much enjoyment so to then be craving a cup of tea was downright strange.

I’ve been thinking it over all day and realised that whilst most people offer a relaxing cup of tea to calm you down in a stressful situation, I respond to tea as a reward at the end of hard work, to drink *when* relaxed. Kind of like that beer at sunset after a good hardworked day, when you sit back and reward yourself for your achievements. A drink that’s enjoyed because you already feel good about yourself. And I drink coffee when I’m working, to get myself to work, to comfort myself, to amuse myself when bored or procrastinating and to feel decadent. I think it’s the rich, velvetyness of it, like chocolate, which I find comforting. Tea is less viscous and it often goes down scalding. It’s pure and it strips away impurity.

Lately, I’ve carved time out for myself at the end of the day, very late at night (it’s nearly 2am). It’s when I clean up the kitchen, make the baby’s bottles for the next day, catch up and make headway on emails and when I’ve started eating into digging myself out of my sandpit of to do lists. It’s when I finally feel like I’ve made headway on the day. And because now, so many small things are big victories – like going to the toilet, eating lunch, taking a shower – I’ve shifted some of my expectations of myself (possibly getting my organisational systems more up to date is helping me feel optimistic about digging my way out of my work and phd backlogs). I am also seeing slow headway. So I feel like a cup of tea at the end of the day.

I’m well aware of what this says about how I’ve seen myself and my accomplishments for like the last 5 years. But anyhoo … at least I’m in therapy

And now, to bed.

Tags: life, reflections, tea

Look, it was only a matter of time. No really. I actually have been making it into my kitchen a bit more often of late. For a number of reasons, the first being that when you’re home A LOT and OMG I am home A LOT now, you get bored. And hungry. And baking is excellent for procrastination. I also discovered a little truth about myself – I am far more likely to do things in the kitchen if the kitchen is clean, not just dirty dishes washed, but the benches and sink wiped down, the appliances wiped over, the stovetop cleaned and the pantry stocked in an orderly fashion. Cause of course, yeah, that’s a clean kitchen just ASKING to be dived into and messed up with flour and cocoa thrown about and whatnot.  Turns out, if I do this – the kitchen cleaning – regularly, it’s never that bad or gross. And there’s this sense of satisfaction wandering past such a gleaming room. Oh Gpd, I’m becoming domesticated.

Anyway, that’s all by the by because just before Christmas, my sister sends me this link to a Facebook page that she thinks C would like – The Road to Loving My Thermomix – which has daily posts of delicious things this woman is making to learn to use her Thermomix. I Liked the page and then had her gorgeous photos of delicious things appear in my Timeline each day, quietly inspiring me to think about actually learning how to use our Thermomix to do the same.

I think C nearly had a small MI when he saw me the first day actually attempt to make something myself in the Thermomix. But I’d decided that for our wedding anniversary, I’d make us a cheesecake I’d seen on that FB page. And before I did that, I wanted to try some other things out first. And then, the following day, when I was in the supermarket buying ingredients for the cheesecake, my sister calls me. “The FB page is gone,” she says.

“WHAT?” I try not to yell too panicky in the middle of the flour aisle. “What do you mean *gone*?” Yes. I had not actually taken down the recipe I was planning to make for our anniversary. All I had were the ingredients list. And yes, I had left this all to the very last minute.

“I KNOW! Can you believe it?!!” my sister continues.

“But! I LOVE that page!” I say. “And I wanted to try a whole bunch of her recipes!”

“I know! Me too! There was this note there this morning as the last post. And now the page is gone. I’m on this closed group for this page and we’re all scrabbling to see what recipes we each took down. I’ll see if I can get your cheesecake recipe.”

So the conversation continues. I’m wandering up and down the aisles and gossiping with my sister who is saying that she thinks the reason was that maybe someone did something awful in their TMX that ruined it and now the woman had to pull her page down. It was a hilarious conversation but my favourite bit was that I love my friendship that has truly blossomed with my sister over the last two years. And also that she sent me a screencap of the cheesecake recipe that she hunted down for me later that day.

Anyway. I made the cheesecake. It did not turn out right (it was a non gelatin, non baked one and it never really set til I kept it in the freezer and it wasn’t ready to eat til the next day, frozen). The Facebook page came back up, there was no scandal. One of her kids must have flicked a privacy setting whilst she wasn’t looking. And the likes on the page have steadily increased to somewhere near 20k. And I decided to make a few things regularly, maybe starting out as just one thing a week til I get used to the idea of actually being in the kitchen more often.

And so voila, raspberry filled choc balls. Made from the FB page. Actually she has a bunch of different varieties that I might try. They take exactly one minute to whip up, in one bowl! And then maybe 10 mins to put together – placing a frozen raspberry inside the dough (biscuits, cocoa and condensed milk) and then rolling them in coconut.

One of the most confronting things for me so far about motherhood is the judgment or the perceived judgment. I feel like I’m constantly being graded, and am likely coming up short. In any new job, as Terri pointed out to me, it takes a good few months to learn the ropes and figure out what you’re doing. But mostly, unless you’re in a medical field, education or emergency services, you tend not to hold someone else’s life in your hands whilst figuring it all out.

Which is all fine. Mostly it’s not an issue – things can be washed, inconsolable crying can go on crying, adults can eat dinner at 10pm and so on.

But mostly I feel very wary of criticism – not advice, mind you, and I think there is a difference. Advice is helpful, criticism is judgey. And for some reason, I’ve become aware that I really seem to care about “what they think”. I don’t know who they hell “they” are nor why I care what they think. Or even if I’d know when they thought that. I’ve found myself very tied up in this concept of them and what they think and how they’ll judge me which is completely removed from what those around me who know and love me think about the decisions I make. I suppose part of it is the really strong lobbies that seem to surround birth and childrearing. And the dichotomies that get set up. I’ve been reluctant to post about a lot of my experiences here for fear of attracting attention from hardliners. Which is balanced by how much that pisses me off – that I feel like I’d rather just be silent than risk having the hate comments thing. I hate the way the art of discussion has been lost in favour of a world that has become right or wrong, black or white, with us or against us. Discussion has been dumbed down and we’ve lost the ability to appreciate complexity and nuance.

I guess I have to put big girl pants on and use a strong moderation hand, if necessary.

Choice is such an interesting thing. It’s not really free if the options are presented to you in such a way that clearly there is a good one and one that makes you a bad person for taking. That’s kinda how I feel about the whole breastfeeding issue. We took our baby classes prior to the bub’s arrival and were very amused at the one on feeding. At the top of the hour, the midwife says there are two options – the breast (breast is best) and bottle feeding (and it’s totally *your* choice and *up to you*). And then she spent the next two hours only talking about breastfeeding. There was a half hour on all the studies proving how breast is best with all the pros of this option and how awesome you are if you go down this road. And then a whole heap of other things about breastfeeding. It wasn’t til I was in the car on the way home that I realised there had been nothing at all, whatsoever, on bottle feeding – not how to do it, not how to find out how to do it, not the reasons why you might do it and what you might need or who to ask for help. C noticed this too and we amused ourselves on the ride home and many times after that how clearly biased the presentation had been: it’s totally your choice (BUT PICK THIS ONE).

Now, I’ll say up front, I was totes convinced on the breastfeeding long before the classes. Apparently (I learned this in that class), girls have decided whether they will breastfeed or not by the time they are 12 years old and very little after that will make them change their mind. I find this “fact” fascinating  – I didn’t read the paper it was quoted from. I’m sure I hadn’t thought about it at all by 12 or 16 or even 18. Anyway, the advantages of breastfeeding certainly sound convincing, and being a germophobe myself, they had me at increased immunity etc.

Cue to several weeks into the whole shebang and the bubs is not losing weight but she’s not fattening up as much as they’d like. OMG do not tell a Jewish mother her kid is not getting enough to eat. Oy Vey, kinderlach! I’m not really sure what to think about our local child health care. They seem to be pretty busy in my suburb and getting appointments was really hard (we couldn’t get our 10 day check til weeks later). We ended up visiting a drop in centre a suburb or two over and were taken under their wing. I did the lactation consultant thing, the weigh bub, feed bub, weigh bub thing. Got advice on latching. Had more people touch and prod my boobs than in my entire life ever. Boobs have become as unsexual to me as my elbows. We upped the number of feeds per day. Tried pumping. Some things worked, some didn’t. Bub gained weight in a step function then plateau way. Never really hit her stride. In the end, we got doctor advice during her 8 week check up. Now I am on meds that might not really be doing anything and top up bottle feeds.

I tried everything I could possibly do before eventually giving in to the formula. “Giving in” is such a loaded way to express this (no pun intended) but that’s how it felt. I did everything else to try and get the breastfeeding thing to work. I’m currently on the top dosage for the meds, and in bed today cause of the stomach cramps side effects, and I’m going to give it the full two weeks run before I decide. But at some point, when you’ve spent 20 mins feeding bub and then she drinks the whole of the “top up” bottle, you gotta admit, you ain’t producing no milk.

I had a long discussion with my doctor about it – OMG finally committed to a new GP for the baby and I LOVE her (another of my awesome sister’s recommendations). She said to me “it depends how important it is to you”. And that’s a funny thing really. I mean, obviously it’s important enough to me that I’ve been persevering with this for 11 weeks now. But I’d never really framed it as a “important to me” decision to make. I sat there as we continued talking thinking, “well how important *is* it to me?” and “is that actually how I get to frame this?” My doctor was of the opinion that a) I need to face the facts that the boobs ain’t really working out for me here and b) I should get to enjoy the baby. What a concept! I do like holistic medicine – placing decisions in a context.

Because that’s the thing really, isn’t it? All things *being equal*, breast is best. But all things are *never* equal. And what I’m really angry about is the way this is all set up as though there is a good choice and a not good choice. Yet, if that were true, wouldn’t we have developed an industry of wet nursing over the baby formula product? If it were so terrible? I’m angry that never, not once, did any of the child health nurses I saw – and I saw probably more than 5 – even *suggest* formula, or a top up bottle. It was so out of the scope that *even* at the last check up when it was really “yeah you need to take action now”, the advice was *still* go to the doctor and get a prescription to increase milk supply. Formula was never ever discussed. Which had the effect of making me feel like the worst mother in the world for even thinking about going that way. It made it a loaded choice. It made me feel like I was failing, or if not failing, choosing an option that “was not best”. And “not best” = bad, right? When really, what is bad is not feeding your kid. And I’m angry now about all those nights of “the witching hour” which were probably a starving baby crying for food. And probably I could have tried all those other options for upping my supply and also topped the baby up with formula.

The subtle judgment over women’s choices is another way of controlling them. And I hate that women play into that as much as men do. I chose to have a c-section. And I’ve felt weird about talking about this. But it’s not a free choice to make as a liberated woman if you feel you can’t choose some of the options. I didn’t want people to think I was “too posh to push”. Ain’t that a nice phrase? I spent a lot of time – probably about 7 weeks or more – agonising over this choice. I spoke to my counsellor several times, and people close to me who love and support me. And then, of course, with my OB who said that I have every right to choose and she would support me in any decision. I had reasons to make this choice but even so, it was still an elected one. Whilst they make perfect sense – my concerns included Crohn’s flare up (which today, with drug side effects triggering it, I am reminded how right that was to troubleshoot) and also to manage my anxiety (which both feeds into the Crohns and also depression). Had these not been critical, I might still have wanted to opt this way and that makes me feel like I “took the easy option” (my words). (Yeah, there’s no actual easy way to get a human out of your body. When they invent the transporter a la Star Trek, I wonder if that will still be the too posh to push option.)

All things being equal there might be preferred options, for certain pros. But things aren’t ever equal – that’s why we also have the saying “life ain’t fair”. When we set up dichotomies loaded in judgment they run the real risk of damaging people for no real benefit. There are so many other things that make for actual bad parenting choices – locking your kids in the car on a hot day whilst you go inside to the casino, for example. Surely we have better things to do than add to the stress by making people feel bad about choosing between two options that both mean a baby gets a full tummy? All options being equal and all that.

This one falls under the New Years Resolution of “Don’t make things harder for myself.”

Last year I set myself the intention to rejoin the 12WBT program in the new year. Hi new year! *waves* I’ll admit I’d not been thinking about this commitment in a positive light. I spent almost all of 2013 in what felt like a zone of deprivation – I was sick with Crohn’s coming into the year so I don’t even think I got to drink a glass of champagne to toast our wedding or on our honeymoon. And then the pregnancy diet, if you follow it to the nth degree, is not that much fun. Well, ok, that’s a lie. I did manage to make my baby out of icecream and chocolate. And I got away with that mostly because I had morning sickness for 8 of the 9 months and barely ate anything else. But even so – brie! authentic chocolate mousse! custard! smoked salmon! sushi! soft poached eggs! almost any vegetarian option anywhere on any menu! green salad! Oh how I missed you all *hugs and holds on for dear life*

There were many many foods I missed during my pregnancy. And I’ve been eating then ALL since then. I’m home by myself and I have no concept of time anymore. Lunch most days is at 4pm, dinner can be at 9 or 10pm. It’s pretty clear if I continue on this track, it’s not gonna go the way I want it to. On top of that, I feel tired and lethargic all the time. Today and yesterday were the first days in three months that I did something other than watch TV. Yes, I have a newborn. But I think I can feel better and I think with a bit more effort, I can be a bit more on top of this. And … I finally have dug myself enough up out of the sand to care enough to find the effort.

And. It’s not our intention that the baby be an only child. When a woman gets to a certain age, she gets to have certain conversations with her doctors. In the risk factors surrounding falling pregnant again and for a healthy pregnancy and birth, health, wellbeing and fitness are the ones I can control. I can’t get younger. But BMI is related to a bunch of these things. I feel I benefited from spending  a year or two prepping my body before the baby and so … we reset the counter. I guess.

Finally, I really like the 12WBT program. You get emailed your meal plan Thursday before the week starts with a full shopping list. You can swap out meals you don’t like. There’s a really varied and balanced vegetarian plan – something I am not good at doing for myself. This alone means I will start to feel better. I’m not really that focussed on losing weight for the sake of losing weight. I have a weightloss goal for this round and for the year but more as a way of keeping track on how I’m going in terms of building fitness and eating better. I want to feel better in terms of energy and nutritionally as well as physically. Basically, if you move more and eat less chocolate, the weightloss is a natural consequence.

Part of the preseason tasks ahead of the round (which starts Feb) is to make public your commitment so here is mine:

“My commitment is to give the program my all and be careful and thoughtful about my participation and through this, to meet my goal to lose 10kg.”

So. There it is.

Tags: 12wbt, health, new years resolutions 2014

The irony of this post is I have spent all day procrastinating on finishing it because I’m not sure it’s going to say all that I want it to.

This year, I plan to work hard to get my work systems to “cruise control” as David Allen would say. I’ve been trying to claw my way back onto the GTD (Getting Things Done) wagon after falling off, and then getting overwhelmed, when the bub was born. I’m going to hold myself accountable to this goal by posting something weekly about how I’m doing.

When I was in grad school the first time round, I once noticed a little quote one of my friends had up on her computer:

It can be finished or it can be perfect but it can’t be both.

When I read it, I realised this was exactly my problem too. So often, I get paralysed by the knowledge that what I’m working on is not, and will not be, perfect. And I feel that if I can’t make it be perfect, there’s almost no point in doing it. Often I think I don’t even take that thought through that far. I just get stuck like a deer in headlights drowning in quicksand and I’ll do anything else but the task or project I need to finish. I can think of about 8 things just off the top of my head right now that I’m actively paralysed on that fall into this category. (I achieved a lot today including writing about 50 thank you cards, moving some boxes to the shed, sorting through a clothes drawer, filled some book orders, all because I had this post I wanted to finish.) And yet, I told someone just recently who was also suffering greatly from her perfectionism, that 80% is still an A grade. I can help other people draw lines under their work but I have great difficulty doing that with mine.

And it’s not just my work that I’m a perfectionist about, I worry that my systems and my lists are not perfect. That they don’t have all the tasks set out at the beginning and that I might be forgetting something. Or that they’re in the wrong order. My handwriting needs to be perfectly neat. My reference material, brainstorms, notes from meetings all get rewritten for filing. I worry that if I come back later and the notes are messy, I might miss an idea. Or I think that all my reference material should inform my systems right away because I might forget to come back and consult my material later on. I read to memorise, that’s the truth on why I read so slowly, as though I could never come back and reread something again later. I worry I will forget I read the material at all and won’t know to come back and reread it. I do a lot of things more than one time through, I reinvent the wheel often (I am diagnosed OCD so that’s not really a shocker).

But the great thing about life is, it’s within my control to short-circuit this stuff. And something I have learned in the last year is, as much as I prefer to go from point A to point C immediately, it is totally ok to take a pitstop at point B. A lot of the time I get pulled up because it’s impossible to finish a task in one go. I do things like start tidying the pantry but run out of time part way in and will leave everything as is, all over the kitchen if that’s what I was doing, because I’m going to come back later and finish it to make it look perfect. And yet, later could be in 3 weeks or 2 months time. I often look like I’m in a state of chaos. But it’s planned chaos, I promise! So one of the things I’ve been trying to do is learn to take tasks to a midpoint. Say, tidying up one shelf of the pantry at a time, and putting things back in a temporary place, waiting for when I get back later to tidy a different shelf which will have the new permanent place. Or you know, breaking large projects down into subprojects with tasks and being ok with just tackling one tiny task at a time. Something that couldn’t be more crucial to progress for me right now than ever before.

I’m really and truly not used to having whole days (of maybe 15 or 18 hours long) in which I might battle to be able to get time to go to the toilet or make a cup of coffee. Where achievements are far more intangible than items I can check off a to do list – like comforting an upset baby. It’s a struggle for me when ticking things off my to do lists are how I validate how I spent the day. It can now take me a week to get anything substantial done.

I don’t really have the answer yet for how I’m going to make this work and juggle all my things. But I’m having to really take on board what David Allen says about weekly reviews – that if you are unable to complete the whole review, just starting it and doing it partially will make you feel better and more on top of your life than not doing it at all. It makes sense but it’s odd and unsettling to feel very organised in some parts and completely in chaos or in the dark in others. But what I’m trying to practise is learning to take smaller steps. I don’t have time to overhaul my whole system, to conduct a complete review, and to work in the size of work chunks that I’m used to. If I keep chipping away at getting my system up to speed a little at a time, and if I break my tasks down to the smallest of next actions (call Bob, find paperwork, buy stamps, fill book orders) and if I work on keeping my GTD systems going forward from today, in the end, I *have* to inch forward towards cruise control. Right?

Tags: gtd

We stayed in Saint Germaine for the third part of our trip to Paris. This was the least flashy hotel of our stay and it was ok. The room was a bit pokey and the breakfast was really not good. That though totally justified us wandering down to the bistro on the corner to have an energy boost before the full day ahead.

Because yes, the deal was … two days at EuroDisney. And C very patiently schlepped along to all the art galleries I wanted to see in exchange for all the rides in the world. Except, I absolutely refuse to go on rollercoasters and my cold turned into a chest infection and I felt AWFUL. I have a couple of complaints about EuroDisney – everyone smokes everywhere, which yes, Europe, but also, place which has a tonne of kids all in one place! And with my asthma already being agitated by the chest infection, I was not a happy camper with all that smoke. The second complaint was there was almost nowhere to wait that was not in the cold and on a cold piece of furniture. It was freezing and sometimes drizzling with rain and pretty much every ride was a one hour wait in the queue. I’m sorry, but to me, the happiest place on earth does not involve a 55 minute wait for 5 minutes of fun. I went on a few tame rides – the Pirates of the Caribbean, its a Small World, the steamboat, the haunted house thing that kinda stuff. And the rest of the time, I read the first two books in Marianne de Pierres’ Tara Sharp series – Sharp Shooter and Sharp Turn – which were a heap of fun to cheer me up in the miserable cold.

The face of a man who’s realised he has to go on the ride alone, followed by the face of a man who’s realised he still gets to go on the ride.

We ate lunch in one of the restaurants, which had a very US 80s feel to it. It was overpriced, the service was poor and the food was not good. Pretty much what you’d expect. Here, C is realising there is too much to do and not enough time!

And of course we stayed for the lights show, both nights.

Something else I was determined to visit was The Catacombes. I honestly have no idea why this was on my list. I knew it was bones of dead bodies arranged in patterns. I *knew* this. Yet for some reason, it only dawned on me after we’d climbed down the flights of stairs into the under the ground and walked some distance and that the only way out was through (and up) some 2 kms, that this is an actual trigger for me. Yeah. And I got triggered. I had to just look straight ahead and be determined to walk to the end as quickly as possible and not think about it. It was very not fun trying not to have a panic attack and melt down.

(Get me outta here)

There were some interesting things though – here is the aquifer

And intricate carvings into the stone walls:

Much grumpiness ensued as we’d waited for an hour to get in to see them and then I hadn’t even enjoyed it. I took us to Starbucks for a salted caramel hot chocolate and then we finally went to the Marais for falafel. I’d heard it was the best falafel outside of the Middle East and I can confirm it is the best falafel outside of the Middle East.

I utterly loved our trip to Paris. C had never gone before and didn’t know what he’d think but he pretty much fell in love with the city as soon as we arrived and I’m so glad because I love Paris and can’t wait til we can go back again.

The one thing I really do appreciate our travel agent suggesting was taking a really decadent few nights in a chateau “somewhere”. When she first suggested it, I thought I would really want to pack up and move hotels so much but the photos she showed us of Chateau d’Esclimont, I was kinda sold. And in the end, it worked out really well to do a few nights in Montmartre, stay in the chateau for a few nights and then come back and stay in a completely different part of Paris. It meant we saw a lot more, I think.

The problem was, she didn’t actually organise us a way to get there and back. And the chateau was an hour out of Paris and we were booked in there from New Year’s Day. That as a bit interesting. We decided against taking three different trains with all our luggage etc and got a car to drive us there and a taxi back at the end. Neither of us were confident enough to hire a car for that part of the holiday so I’m not sure how much I would recommend it. The plan was to head down there, spend one day out and about on the grounds and in the town, one day at Versailles and one day at Chartres. But both Chartres and Versailles were not exactly close and there was not a way to get anyway from the chateau other than taking a 15 minute taxi ride to the train station and then taking the train to places. I think Versailles was an hour train ride, from memory.

Still. After we finally got ourselves organised out of Paris and arrived, here was the view:

And the front:

Our room was the top right hand window. The grounds were gorgeous to wander around in, beautiful manicured topiaries and other more wild woods and lots of other buildings – quarters and I think little cottages for family stays. And a pool, a helicopter pad and tennis court but were closed for the season. It was pretty cold and we headed back inside after a quick sticky beak.

Our room. Or rooms? Chamber?

And this was the stunning view from the window facing the bed:

It was a very fancy hotel. We almost didn’t see any of the other patrons. The restaurant was very fancy in one of the rooms downstairs and the food very French, meaning I had a green salad and C tried all kinds of meats that I would never ever eat. I found French food (when I could eat it) very rich and I progressively ate less and less over the holiday. We were limited by food options as there was not really anywhere to go other than the hotel restaurant.

We made it to Versailles on the second day (the first of our proper stay) by accident as when C was inquiring how to get there, they booked him a taxi to come get us so we ended up doing it a day early. Evidence we were there (and Galactic Suburbia in the Hall of Mirrors)

But, and you know there is a but coming. Versailles was a gorgeous walk from the train station. But it was an hour ride there and back and then hanging around to get a cab back to the hotel (pretty sure we had to call someone who was at home making dinner for her kids and then she popped out to give us a lift back to the hotel). And it was cold. And we stood I don’t know, an hour? Two hours? waiting in the line out the front before we actually went in to the grounds. We wandered around. I yet again lost enthusiasm well before I managed to see everything. We did a bit of the Marie Antoinette stuff – and took the little train thing around the grounds. And we had a delightful lunch. But. I started to get a cold shortly after the photo above and by the time we headed back it was pretty much evident I was sick. I’m not sure if it was all the standing outside in the cold or if the jetlag combined with all the wedding stuff that finally ended up in the usual burnout cold thing. I got a bit miserable.

And really, you book yourself the kind of holiday staying in the middle of nowhere, with almost no internet (no wifi but they had a cable that we had to share), nothing much to do, in order to just spend time with each other and chill the hell out. So that’s what we decided to do for the rest of our stay here. We did a bit of a food shop in Versailles at a supermarket and that kept us in snacks and a few light meals. We ordered room service a bit. I took to my bed in a very Jane Bennett fashion, with that glorious view and the whole series of The Closer on DVDs to watch and I finished knitting these two scarves and it as utterly relaxing and divine. We just hung out and it was really great.

The cowl on the left is the Sartorial Cowl made from Blue Moon Fibre Arts De-Vine in the colourway Kraken.  The scarf on the right is the Barbara Cowl made from a prized skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk which I bought in Toronto when I was there for World Fantasy Con at Lettuce Knits which Jonathan very kindly schlepped to with me.

Final picture of the view from breakfast:

If you have to be somewhere feeling miserable with a cold, it really was a good option

I figure I have like one week into January to wrap up the rest of my year in review/ highlights posts from 2013? Plus I have some plans to spruce up this place and I’m keen to get stuck into those. So maybe some pretty pics from my honeymoon in Paris then? I’ve definitely been thinking about how this time last year, we were wandering around in Paris and seeing out the old year and in with the new one, the first of our married lives.

Some stuff we did before NYE:

We were staying within walking distance of the Moulin Rouge so I grabbed tickets to a nighttime show before we left Perth. I’d heard that the dinner was not really worth the price so I booked for the after dinner show which included a bottle of champagne. Seemed like fun!

It was definitely good that the theatre was within walking distance of our hotel and that I had prepaid for tickets cause we were still so jetlagged, I’m not sure we would have definitely gone otherwise. It was also VERY cold and we had to queue outside with everybody for what felt like hours. It was probably at least an hour and I hate queuing, I feel like the longer you have to queue and wait for something, the less you will enjoy whatever it is you are waiting for. Just too much expectation to wait time ratio. Suddenly, after waiting FOREVER, we were ushered in and the ushers seated the whole crowd in record time. You sat at tables seating about 6 people, so we sat with strangers. Our bottle of champagne was thrust on us, glasses filled and away we went. (It felt like A LOT of champagne but I think that’s because I couldn’t really drink due to my Crohn’s and so C drank pretty much the whole bottle and got quite merry.)

What to say about the performance? Hmm … there was a giant pool with snakes with a woman doing some kind of synchronised swimming. There was the traditional cancan dancing, which was my favourite part of the whole show. There was a lot of bare breasts. There were a couple of fabulous male dancers who did not really have to nude up. And then there was the second half of the show which I will describe merely this way – Eurovision meets Macy and Thorn from the 80s (Bold and the Beautiful).

I did enjoy the show. But more than that, I enjoyed a couple of the smaller museums which we visited nearby which documented a lot of the history of the arts, politics, music and performances of the area and placed the Moulin Rouge within that greater context. I loved learning about the Le Chat Noir, which was in a museum in Renoir’s house.

We wandered around in Montmartre on a glorious winter’s day, drinking lots of hot chocolates and eating pastries when we got hungry. We ended up at Sacre Coeur which had a market day on with lots of stalls – I bought earmuffs! (it was cold) and I also bought a few of these confections. I don’t know what they were but they were not what I was expecting them to be which was chocolate covered marshmallows.

I really enjoyed travelling with C. Even though we’d lived together for a few years, travelling together felt a bit like a “what will we be like as team in life?” I discovered that he listens to all my crazybaked ideas and that I should be careful when I shoot my mouth off because C will have googled whatever it was to see how we can do it. We joked a lot about me being the ideas and him being the execution. I got to see a lot of things I might not otherwise have if left to me to figure out how to get there or do it. Not that Paris is all that hard to get around. But having C to stand around  in long lines joking made the time go quicker and the prospect of tackling more popular sites more inviting. We did a bunch of the galleries I wanted to visit. I got to see all the Dali my heart could desire. And the Pompidou and the Musee D’Orsay, both of which were closed last time I was there.

And I schlepped C to the Louvre. We ended up getting to jump the huge queue and go straight in (with the museum passes, this did not help us in the same way when queuing for the D’Orsay which we must have done for over an hour). I still hate the Louvre and I’m not sure why I still feel the need to go there to check (that’s three for three now) but it was so easy to get in that I thought C should at least experience the Mona Lisa (ie the pushing and shoving and not really enjoying the painting bit). A lovely wander down the Champs Elysee afterwards brought nutella crepes for some and (French) onion soup for others. (Don’t you think felafels, cheesecake and mint tea go perfectly together? No, me neither.)

One of the things C really wanted to do was see a rugby match. I was a lot more wary about catching a train out into the suburbs, a part of Paris I know nothing about and a lot less likely to accidentally stumble my way home from. But C was determined, and he put up with a very complaining me who wore the wrong shoes and didn’t like walking (the fifteen minutes!) to somewhere I’d not been before. But I’ll admit, when we got there, I had a fabulous time. It was cold (yay the earmuffs!) but it was a lot of fun. And the theme song for the home side – Agen – was to an ACDC track which made it all the more amusing. Here’s the view from our seats. C couldn’t resist getting an Agen supporters jersey (that’s him wearing it at breakfast the next day).

And then there was New Years Eve.

One of the disappointing things about our trip related to my travel agent. Normally I would have booked the whole thing online myself but my Mum had used a really great travel agent previously and the idea of someone planning some parts of the trip considering all the other stuff I was doing with the wedding seemed really appealling. In the end, I was given a different agent to the one my mother had used and the one thing I regret is either not being more of a pain about getting her to do the stuff I wanted, or just doing it myself. She was going to book us this really lovely NYE – drinks at the George and then dinner somewhere near the Eiffel Tower etc etc. In the end I think she booked, or we booked, a degustation dinner for the evening but then realised at the last minute that there was nothing on the menu I could eat and the chef refused to do a vegetarian option for me (the French didn’t really seem all that into vegetarians and that was something that was an issue for the whole trip). We ended up cancelling those plans and our concierge at the hotel booked us a river cruise vegan dinner.

It sounded awesome and we were really looking forward to it.

However it had rained the days before NYE and when we headed down to the Seine it was cold and wintry. When we arrived at the correct berth we discovered that the river was too high for the boat to be able to cruise (too high for it to pass under the bridges) and so it was going to stay docked for the event. That seemed ok. But the evening was not quite what we had imagined. I guess we had in mind something similar to the original plan but on a river cruise. And I can’t quite remember how much it cost but it didn’t really seem cheap. I think though what we had stumbled across was a club or a vegan group who were having their end of year/new years eve celebration. Most people seemed to know each other and the diners also seemed to know the waitstaff and kitchen crew. Seating was at large round tables and there was a band set up in a corner. Like we were at a wedding or 21st on a cruise ship. We took a tiny table in one corner near the exit and tried to melt into the scenery. Slowly people asked to take the remaining chairs at our table for sitting at others and we were good with that. We were hoping for a romantic, intimate dinner to see in the new year.

(I have no idea about my hair other than we stood in the wind on the dock for quite some time before dinner.)

We got adopted by a somewhat eccentric woman who seemed to know a lot of the people in the room but didn’t actually want to sit with any of them. Instead she sat with us and provided lively conversation. She gave us some suggestions of what we should see when in town (we took none of the suggestions), told us how she’d been on a diet for several days because she was auditioning for some dancing show the day after (and then shovelled a loooot of food into her face, whilst continuing her stories unabated and sometimes spitting food in my direction) and was very generous in hunting down lashings of food from the buffet and insisting we share from her plate.

The food. I think really what we learned is that C has no desire to become a vegan any time soon. I didn’t really mind the food as much, being a vegetarian and having almost no appetite due to the Crohn’s. We had to keep going to the bar which was hidden behind the entrance, for tiny cups of drinks. The cups seemed to be in limited supply and got more and more assorted as the night wore on. The food was a buffet spread out on a trestle and was a lot like if we went and cooked up a storm for our friends. It was not quite the evening of decadent, French fine foods I’d been planning. And I felt very self conscious and out of place for most of it. At some point we both realised we were more than happy to bail and whilst our friend was off saying hi, finally, to someone, we ducked out the door and off the boat. But not before grabbing our goodie bag of vegan delights, most of which we couldn’t bring home to Australia. Though we did enjoy the vegan chocolate and the eucalyptus bubble bath.

Not quite the night I had hoped for but still a story that brings a good laugh. In the end, all I wanted was to spend the night in Paris, with C, and see the Eiffel Tower lit up. And we did. And then we headed back to our hotel well before midnight. The staff had left us a new year’s gift to wish us a sweet new year:

Tasting Pierre Herme’s macarons was on my Paris to do list and I don’t think we would have got there on our own. I can quite happily say that our Adriano Zumbo’s are still the best I’ve ever tried.

We kept our eyes open to see the new year in and then fell fast asleep, jetlag still prevailing.

Last year I sat down and wrote a pretty extensive list of resolutions for 2013. It was pretty intensive and would have been pretty gruelling to stick to if I had. Instead, I fell pregnant and got slowed down quite a bit. I left my government job, took up my PhD studies, published a couple of new books, wrote, submitted and passed my PhD candidacy application and had a beautiful baby girl. Basically, life happened. And whilst I’m still going to audit my New Years Resolutions for 2013 (which was really a pretty large to do list) I don’t actually feel too bad about not having ticked off most of that list. I feel like I learned some pretty large lessons this year, the most important being, you can’t control the fact that life happens, all you can control is how you respond to it. So my resolutions for 2014 are going to be a bit different to my usual.

1. Don’t save things for “special occasions”

I used to be one of those kids who saved everything up for special occasions. I had a pretty cool rubber/eraser collection which I never used or enjoyed, I just had them in a jar to take out and look at on occasions. I now think that’s kinda weird. I was also one of those kids who saved the pretty shaped soaps and candles for … I have no idea when cause they ended up all soggy and moldy and had to get thrown out unused in the end.

This year I decided not to do that anymore. My mum told me a great story that my nanna had told her about a young woman she knew once who had put all her beautiful wedding gifts away to be used on special occasions but then died a year or two into her marriage. Her husband remarried quite quickly and that woman used all the first wife’s special crockery and manchester that she’d been saving, and had never gotten to use, for every day. The moral of the story being use it now and enjoy it because life happens. So I’ve pulled out my pretty Kimono tea set that were wedding gifts for every bake club I’ve hosted this year and for whenever someone came over to visit. I’ve even used the teacups for just a peaceful afternoon cuppa or when I’ve overdosed on Downton Abbey. And I’ve felt quite the well to do, I must say. I’ve also used the pretty soap and <whisper> I already ate the chocolates I got for Christmas </whisper> and I don’t regret it at all! Better to be enjoyed now than never enjoyed at all. When will a special occasion be special enough, otherwise?

2. Don’t procrastinate, rip off the band aid already /JFDI

I’ve spent another year practicing David Allen’s GTD methodology. I’ve had some great runs where it was all working perfectly and I had great productivity and I’ve also fallen off the bandwagon a few times and had to slowly climb back on. I’m currently slowly climbing back on after the baby etc. But in either state, I’ve managed to have things that I’ve been procrastinating on due to bad feelings – like, not getting back to someone fast enough about something and then the longer I leave it the worse it is that I haven’t responded and the worse I feel about it so I leave it to repeat and the bad feeling to grow. Or there is something I know I have to do about something or there’s nine things I have to do and I have to sit down and think about them or something I have to do but I don’t know how and so … I just leave it. Unknown but still to do and sitting there making me feel bad cause I’m not doing it.

Turns out, it’s actually not that horrible just to cop to having been lax on something, apologise and move on. Actually, it makes you feel better. And you can stop avoiding a person or a thing. And most of the time, the thing you’re avoiding actually takes less than 3 minutes to do. And you wonder why you waited 8 months to damn well do it. You could have not been feeling bad all this time if you’d just done it in the first place. I’ve been working on doing that – instead of avoiding the bad feeling, zoning in on it, interrogating and seeing just what it is that I feel bad about. It’s not always obvious and it can take a good while to pinpoint it but much like anything, naming the Big Bad Thing weakens it’s power. And fixing the thing that needs to be fixed is often really not that hard, in the end.

So for 2014, I’m aiming to uncover all the sore points, expose them to the light and rid myself of them. And focus on doing so when I notice the “bad feeling” the first time. Kinda long the GTD lines of write the thought down the first time so you don’t have to keep rethinking or remembering it.

3. Don’t make things harder for myself

Just after I took the picture above – the 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle C gave to me for our one year, paper anniversary – I started sorting through the pile to start working on it. I picked up two pieces that were still together from manufacture and pulled them apart and said to C, “it’s cheating otherwise.” He wandered off and I sifted and sorted through all the pieces looking for edges and bits of yellow and red etc. As I found more pieces still stuck together, I pulled them apart and mixed them up in the pile. After I did it like three or four times, I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing? I was deliberately making it harder for myself for no discernible reason other than to make it harder for myself. There’s no overseeing body judging my performance at assembling a jigsaw puzzle who will take points off cause 8 pieces were preassembled in the factory. It’s a 3000 piece puzzle, finishing it will be cool whether or not I assembled 3000 pieces or just 2992. And it occurred to me that I do this kind of stuff a lot to myself – for no reason. As a friend said to me the other day, life is hard enough and throwing enough curve balls at you that you don’t have to deliberately make it harder for yourself.

This year I had a few examples of where I did choose to make things easier or better for myself and the sky didn’t fall in. Noone appeared behind me to strip me of my blue ribbons. And no points were deducted.

I’m gonna work on not making things harder for myself a lot more in 2014.

4. Be more compassionate and forgiving and less judgmental

I was very sad to see the passing of Nelson Mandela this year. I feel so despondent about the lack of leadership we have in the world right now. I feel so very sad and depressed about a lot of what’s happening here in Australia with our new government. I feel like the best way to respect the passing of Mandela is to live some of his principles rather than spout hollow soundbytes. So I’m going to do that – concentrate in 2014 on being more compassionate, more forgiving and less judgmental of others.

2014 will be a year of focus on my various projects and I’m hoping to post a lot about all of those as the year progresses.