This week has been challenging what with domestic and international things. Is mercury still in retrograde?
Mrs Thatcher certainly caused me lots of anxiety. And world events and some totally bizarre stuff much closer to home. And an avalanche of work.
Anyway, lovely family arrive this weekend so things are looking up.
This little package arrived today. Kids are all out. Hideous work week is over. Excited for the weekend and unfettered euro tv watching. Hooray.
Sunday morning was delightful. That extra hour when you wake up and because the clocks have gone back overnight it's actually still only 6am? Delicious. The 25 hour day come true.
Charlie and I went for a walk/jog. We did 5.4km in 45 minutes of walking/jogging which I was cool with since I have not run in eons. Then I have no idea what we did but it might have involved light food preparation, desultory fiddling around on internet and reading.
At 4pm I went to my first Bikram yoga class. A studio has opened up super close to where I live. I signed up for the cheap $20 for 10 days when they opened 4 or 5 months ago and then my dad and all that I never went. I signed up again for a casual class but when I turned up she immediately refunded my money and told me my deal was still good. That was a nice start. So I was definitely the oldest (I did recognise the father of a kid my daughter was friendly with at primary school but still reckon I have a couple of years on him) and I was definitely the fattest but I was not the least flexible. That was a relief. The hot room was fine (though I should have had a headband to stop my floppy fringe) but the pace! Sheesh, the instructor talked non-stop for 90 minutes, detail on 26 poses. I was surprised at how I could easily stick my head on my knees but my balance was rubbish. Interesting stuff. I'll go again, especially as the days get cooler.
Then I came home and ate roast chicken and potatoes roasted in goose fat. It's all about balance, you know.
Oldest went to work at 7 so the dog and I got up and made some tea and went back to bed. I was going to go the farmers' market but spent an hour mucking around on the internet and trying to uncap my mail file (my work one, that is, the volume of email on my personal address does not need that level of management.)
Eventually the pup and I got up and went to the field out the back to throw the ball and chase it (him not me). Thirty minutes of full pelt running did it for him and he decided he needed to cool off in the (very) smelly storm drain which runs along the bottom of the field. I instructed the youngest to take him off to be bathed and set to cleaning.
Changed and washed the sheets, steam cleaned the tiles in the bathroom, dropped the knives off for sharpening, vacuumed, washed the kitchen floor, went shopping for food, made a bolognaise sauce, made pasta for lasagne.
Oldest got home from work but went straight out to the library. Charlie and I walked to Kingston to pick up the knives. The lady from the cookware shop came out to cuddle him and tell him how adorable he was. He agreed. Walked home which seemed to take forever (World War Z has got very repetitive.)
Rolled out the pasta. For some reason, this made Charlie very angry. I get why the vacuum cleaner and the lawn mower send him into a frenzy of barking but fail to understand why the hand cranked pasta machine and the iron have this effect?
Assembled lasagne. Unloaded and loaded dishwasher for the millionth time.
Had a shower and got changed. Drove to Manuka and found a parking space right outside the book shop. Bought 4 books included Kate Atkinson (thanks ganching). It cost over $100 for paperbacks! Truly the cost of everything in Australia is expensive but how to make buying books a luxury purchase.
Came home, sent youngest out with Charlie even though it was threatening rain (downside of living in a dry state, children act as though you can't go out when it rains). Cooked the lasagne, made salad, had a glass of wine.
Ate dinner with kids. Watched a few episodes of Castle with them. Climbed into my bed with its lovely clean sheets. Slept peacefully. Got up at 6am this morning with the bliss that the clocks had gone forward and I had an extra hour.
This town I live in is planned around a series of connecting suburb villages. I am cool with that, hating as I do, to leave my planned rat-like routes in a 5km radius. We are well planted with European trees which makes the tree scape pleasing in autumn as the colours change. I am not sure if the street lighting has some plan as well but it is very dim and at infrequent intervals. When I walk the dog at night, I often wonder if I would feel as comfortable if I were a 17 year old girl walking home from the bus stop (not that my kids ever do that as they can drive and use cars and never seemed to have spend their lives waiting for the non arrival of public transport, but I digress.)
One of the downsides of this is that it is very hard to read the house numbers and there is a trade in getting the number of your house painted in fluorescent paint on the kerbside by an enterprising bunch of fellas in my neighbourhood. Most of them are also the kind of guys standing at busy intersections also offering to wash your windscreen with the skinniness and bad teeth that years of drug use will give you. I have a regular who comes to my house every year or so to offer to repaint my house numbers. The price varies depending on his personal circumstances but I always say yes, as who I am to say no to someone on the fringe of society armed with a can of spray paint.
He came in around December when I had no cash in the house, but he said he would do it and come by for the money later. I didn't see him again until yesterday when he turned up. He had been in a car accident. He had a giant scar lacing up across his forehead and across the top of his head. He told me he had a brain injury and spent 2 months in hospital. His balance was poor, his short term memory shot, his mood changes swift and unpredictable. He has a wife and two kids. I had no cash in the house and sent my daughter out to get some but it was lunchtime and she couldn't find parking so I sat on the front steps for 20 minutes talking to this guy. My daughter was a bit nervous but years of sitting next to drunks on night buses in Glasgow and outlying towns has given me the skills to keep those conversations going. It reminded me that the poor, the poorly educated, the addicted, the hopeless are still among us even in this garden city. I gave him twice what we agreed and asked him to be kind to his wife. I am a very lucky person.
I've been spotting these on my walks around the neighbourhood. The dog and I cover a lot of ground morning and evening and I am mixing my usual examination of other people's home and garden improvements with a search for interesting graffiti. This one seems like an article of faith. Some of the others are of a more philosophical bent.
It's funny how you come across metaphors that then repeat themselves in different ways. When I was in Mexico, someone I work with was coaching a team, "you've described the rainbow but not the pot of gold at the end".
Also, WWZ pretty good listening while walking the streets.
I love Easter. The long weekend with no associated frenzy of gift giving but some traditional foods and a slew of chocolate. The imagery is a bit off when you are in the southern hemisphere but I rationalise it by making it by scrubbing off the remains of my tan and getting ready for winter. Not that it feels like anything other than the end days of summer with days in the mid 20s and zero rain. My garden has been hopeless this year but at least I cut the grass yesterday.
I also have skip outside the house for a stack of stuff I could not be bothered making umpteen visits to the tip with. It was a good call as people come by and scavenge stuff and one can make impuslive decisions about whether you really need two sets of friand baking tins or that cup you loved but which now has a chip in it.
I did such a good job of decluttering the garage that there was room to put the car in there, a novel use.
The people I liked were the ones who came to the door and checked it was ok to take stuff and neatly restacked the stuff around it. The people I abhor where the ones who dumped a 10 litre can of cooking oil in my skip (presumably from their restaurant where they could not be bothered to pay for proper grease disposal) and the person who took the old office chair and then returned it 12 hora later in pieces. Seriously?
The older one has been on the northern beaches for the weekend while the younger one did a sterling job of clearing out and washing all the kitchen cupboards. Some cash exchanged hands but she did an ace job and was excellent at the ruthless decision making on whether we needed a cherry stoner. I did prevail on her that we should keep the oyster knife for some fantasy weekend at the beach which involved oyster shucking (the last time I used that knife was christmas 2003 but still it is a very tiny indulgence)
I am so excited to have a full day ahead of me though the week ahead is frantic and stressful. Only three weeks until I have two weeks off with the niece from the western wilds of the Pilbara.
I've been off form with the old blogging thing. Travelling, working, feeling the weight of grief, but Easter with all its denotation has got to me not to mention reading more real books, enjoying the use of language and having a skip. Yes, physical decluttering helps with sloughing off some of the rubbish floating around in my head, as well.
The back story. I went to Mexico. It's a long way. I barely made the flight and the journey began with the kind of tension where you know three hours before the flight leaves that you are probably not going to make it. It involved a cancelled domestic flight and the niggling feeling that they probably should have put you on the earlier flight and not the later one and the growing certainty as that flight gets progressively delayed. Gone are the days when a stewardness met you at the gate and rushed you across the airport waiving all obstacles aside. There was an instruction to run (which helps nothing when you have to wait for the bus to move you between terminals). It was more helpful to phone your friend you is already sitting on the international flight texting "where are you?" and ask her to negotiate on your behalf with the cabin crew not to close the doors. As it turned out they had some engineering fiddling around to do so were running late themselves and she is an excellent negotiator.
I knew my bag wouldn't make it and the $150 in cash Qantas gave me was ok given I knew I had 36 hours in LA and there were at least 5 other flights arriving in that time which would have my bag on it. The ensuing 4 days and 30 phone calls I had with Qantas baggage, the litany of misdirected bags and promises it would be there in 30 minutes is too tedious to relate. Enough that I kept putting off buying spare work clothes thinking the bag's arrival was imminent. As it was I felt like a contestant in one of a game show whose role it was to buy a complete outfit suitable for an interview in 20 minutes before the shops closed in a mall in Mexico City when you don't speak spanish. Thank god for the ubiquity of Zara and H&M and a friend with a credit card who did the queuing and paying once I had done the choosing.
No matter, in LA I shopped Sepphora and had breakfast with a person of great charm
Anyway, Mexico City. How come everyone who flocks to Europe for its art and culture from N America is not hot footing it there? The layers of culture, the street life, the food. All amazing. I am so privileged to get to visit these places. On the Friday we hired a car and guide. I'd never done this before but with a lot of traffic and limited time to get to the airport on a Friday afternoon it made perfect sense. Somewhere to keep the bags and someone to give us the back story. Adrianna took us to the Museum of Anthropology. Apart from being a beautiful piece of 60s architecture with an umbrella roof suspended by a single (enormous) column, it is packed with fascinating rooms on Mexican history - Mayan, Aztec, the conquest. I managed to acquire a rapid overview of the Aztec city which orientated the rest of the tour. Sadly, the National Palace was closed to the public for an event so we were unable to see the Diego Rivera murals but she took us round the back to show us some Aztec ruins and the school where Diego and Frida Kahlo met.
I was trying to describe the kind of place we wanted to go for lunch, typical, not too touristic and she took us to a beautiful restaurant that was a converted convent. The food was fine but better was that it was full of families, white coated waiters and beautiful painted frescos on the walls.
Mexico. You should go there.
Grief changes you. I'm finding myself sluggishly swimming upstream this last few months. Lots if good things are happening and a few of the usual tedious things. But there is still this. Are you happy?
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