{gearing up, sort of}

Back to work this week. It feels like a bit of a slog at the moment. Partly because I'm only back for two weeks and then off on a lovely holiday, so it doesn't quite feel like the year has started.

I'm also waiting to hear on the outcome of a new position that I applied for late last year. It 's an exciting new opportunity, and very likely to be mine, but you know, all that dotting of i's and crossing of t's that has to happen before things are official.

So I'm kind of in an in-between place at the moment. Trying to gear up but also unable to until I know what my role will be exactly and until I'm really settled for the year.

How about you? Are you gearing up and going full steam ahead?

{oops}

How did 10 days pass just like that? I'm trying to get back into good blogging habits! Here's a little glimpse into my world over the last 10 days. 

Life has been busy, good and it seems mostly about food. But that's often the case!

I've been finding my painting mojo too, which feels lovely.

And just taking time to notice the world around me.

How about you? What's happening in your neck of the woods?

{leave a message}

I mentioned on Sunday that I'm in my major busy period for the year at work. I work in fundraising, and that means tax-appeals, and that means May/June are absolutely frantic trying to get your tax-appeal out to donors and get the all-important funds in that make not-for-profit work possible.

It's absolute crunch time in getting everything finalised and out the door.  Hopefully by the end of this week I'll be able to breath a little easier and sleep a little sounder. I'm already, thankfully, a whole lot less stressed and harassed than I was in the job I had last year - that was a whole other level of frantic. Unreasonable. Unmanageable. Unsustainable. Unbelievable.

Anyway, I'm not around much just at the minute, but I'm still here.

In the meantime, have your fur peeps call my fur peep and they can chat amongst themselves.

{forty three years old}

A couple of days ago I turned 43. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this to be honest.

On one hand this birthday definitely has that feeling of a fresh new year about it. Things are settling down, the new house is feeling more like home and I've just passed my 3 month probation at my new job. The shit-storm of last year really does seem to be passing.

On the other hand I feel like I've come full circle somewhere between 5 and 6 years, and am standing at the same place I was standing around that time. Asking the same questions, facing a number of the same challenges and working towards some of the exact same goals.

I know that I'm not really in the same place. I've learned and grown and journeyed over that time. I'm not the same person I was 5 or 6 years ago, for both better and for worse. But there's definitely a familiarity between the place I'm in now and the place I was in back then. And it feels very strange.

{today: a happy list}

Shoes that make that nice click-clack sound when you walk on lino, and make you feel all grown up
Drinking fancy wine in a trendy wine bar with a good mate
Heart-to-heart conversations and good debriefs

Spotting the skywhale on my way to work this morning
Riding my bike to work

Buying and wearing stylish clothes
Realising I don't have to buy into other people's 'stuff'
Seeing and reconnecting with blogging friends in real life

Feeling happy and hopeful

Sunny autumn days

{home}

Day 3 of April Moon offered the word 'home' as a prompt.

Home is a funny thing to me at the moment, somewhat fraught I suppose.

We moved house about 6 weeks ago now, into a lovely new home. After lots of work it's all set up and looking beautiful. Things have a place and we are settling into new routines. I know that it's going to be a great place to live.

But right now, the move and the new house are all tied up with Holden's death, and the grief of losing him. Home doesn't feel like home without him. It feels like part of my family is missing and how can anywhere feel like home in those circumstances.

That's home at the moment. An odd mix of things.

{juicy}

Juicy is:

eating a mango pip over the sink with the juice running down my face

being consumed by a great book

gossiping with girlfriends

heart-to-heart conversations

sharing truths

lying in the sun on a warm day dreaming big dreams

Responding to day 2 of April Moon. All the deets here

{all talk, no action}

That's about how I'm feeling. Here on the blog and with any other creative pursuits. I want to get things happening but I don't seem to be able to move from intention to action. I want to get my book-making tools out, I want to get back to painting, I want to be blogging more regularly, I want to bring {sunday snippets} back to life, I want to get my knitting project started, I want to work on a couple of other creative projects.

BUT I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CREATIVE MOJO WHAT-SO-EVER!

It's driving me crazy. I don't know whether to push myself or whether to just trust that it will happen when it happens. I'm worried that if I just leave it, it might never happen. Is it possible for creative mojo to disappear and never, ever return again????

I'm trying to be kind to myself. I'm trying to remember that I'm in the process of recovering from a really traumatic year and that some of what's happening now probably has a lot to do with things that happened then. I don't want to push myself only to realise that it actually made things worse. But I don't want to do nothing and one day realise that I could have changed things if I'd just pushed myself a little.

So tell me peeps, do you get like this? How do I work out if this is recovery or a creative block? Do I push or do I wait? What do you recommend?

{emerging}

Slowly but surely I am coming back to some kind of equilibrium. It's been a hard slog these past few weeks. A lot of tears and a lot of pain, and the deepest sense of loss. I miss my boy so much. I don't feel like life will ever be the same. And I guess it probably won't. But I'm sure time will work its healing magic.

Life is finally starting to settle down again. The new house is unpacked and starting to feel like home. Some dramas with our former landlord have now been resolved, in our favour too.

Generally I think we are over the humps of the last 12 months with the potential for a period of smooth sailing. I hope so.

Enjoy the weekend peeps. I'll be back with some {sunday snippets} as I have a fabulous weekend planned.

{i thought i knew grief}

Having experienced considerable grief throughout my life I thought that I was well prepared for saying goodbye to Holden. But nothing in my life to date has prepared me for how I’ve been feeling since we said goodbye.

There is a quiet, dull, aching emptiness in my soul that won’t be soothed. It seems driven by the absence of Holden’s actual physical presence in my life. I’m amazed at how tangible it feels.  And I think made so much worse by the fact that we’ve just moved house and there are no memories of him in our new and unfamiliar space.

I have so much compassion for people who have lost a close loved one, like my Aunt who recently lost her partner of 25 years. I can’t even imagine what that absence feels like and how she makes her way through her days. Or people who lose a child. How do they ever move forward with their lives? It takes so much courage and strength to live with grief.

On some level I thought that because we made a conscious decision to end his life {and his suffering} that it would be easier. But in truth the decision has tormented me. In the depths of my grief it has felt like something I have brought on myself and something that I desperately want to be able to undo. My mind has played terrible tricks on me with questions about how sick he really was and whether the timing was right. The hard truth is that he was dying, perhaps slowly, but inevitably. Another truth is that he was suffering, how much we don’t really know. And surely another truth is that we did the most humane thing.

I know that I don’t need to question myself, and I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s just part of the impact that making this decision has had on me.

Mostly though I’m just incredibly sad.

I dreamt of my sweet boy a couple of nights ago. It was such a relief and a comfort to see him. In fact, it was probably the first point at which I started to feel somewhat OK. Before that it felt like he had just completely disappeared from my life, which was causing me so much pain. At least in dreams we can still hang out together every now and then. And who is to say whether the substance of dreams are imagined or really about finding each other in some other realm.

To live the rest of my days without him in my life is simply too much to bear.

{vehicle:circles}

It was like simply wanting to give up at last,

the saying fifty times a day, not quite to yourself,

"I'm tired, so tired of this, of everything",

until you'd forgotten somehow what you were tired of,

and realised, unavailingly, hopelessly,

that saying it meant something else, to you, to life,

something closer to the "Help me! Please!" you used to

want to cry out, aloud, again, to no one,

for no reason,

for simply being there, here, baffled

by these quantities of need and groundless sorrow...

How could you have gone past that,

only to arrive at this,

this about which there is nothing whatsoever you can feel

except the certainty of knowing that you're doing what you're doing to yourself,

but why?

And if you pass this, what will that have meant,

what will it have cost to accomplish this undoing?

                                                                 C.K.Williams

{life goes on}

As hard as it feels, it's true. As much as I've wanted time to stand still, to sit with my grief, to take time to remember and honour my boy's memory.

In spite of all that, time kept going. We moved house. I went back to work. I unpacked boxes, made lunches and dinners, did washing.

And part of me knows that this is a good thing. That I need to keep moving, even though the urge to lie very, very still seems so compelling.

One foot in front of the other. Life goes on. Yes it does.

{farewell little lion man}

BigCat

aka Holden, H, The Studio Assistant, My Beautiful Boy

11.9.1996 ~ 5.3.2014

You captured my heart and soul little man, and you have both forever. You are one of the greatest joys of my life and my best friend . I will miss you more than any words can ever express.

Rest in peace sweet soul.

*****

I'll be back in a while. We're moving to our new house on Friday and without internet for a week or so.

But I will be back soon.

{hello blogging, my old friend}

Is it just me, or does it feel like there's been a bit of a return to blogging of late? It feels like people drifted away from it for a while and now seem to be drifting back. Anyhow, that's not why I'm here. I've been missing it. It was good {and so very necessary} to take a big break, but at the beginning of this year I really felt like it was time to return.

I have to admit to feeling pretty rusty with my writing. I'm looking forward to getting back into the flow of it. Or should I say I'm hoping the flow will return. Practice, practice, practice - isn't that the key to mastery?

One of the reasons that it took me so long between making the decision to start blogging again and actually doing it was a whole lot of faffing about with the design and layout of my blog. I became totally consumed with making it look and feel just right before I posted anything. Then I read a great article on perfectionism and this quote particularly shifted me into gear:

"Waiting for things to be perfect, 'information-gathering', researching and equipping yourself to begin provide an illusion of real work. In reality, these are stalling techniques and very little progress is being made." Wellbeing Magazine, Annual Edition

No more perfectionism. Time to get on with it. And here I am!

{cooking = sanity}

Increasingly I am finding that cooking has become a major creative outlet.  What I love about cooking is the instant gratification.  I spend an afternoon in the kitchen on the weekend and at dinnertime I have something wonderful to enjoy.  Or even better I have meals for a couple of days, which is a great help during the week.

More and more I look forward to that precious time.  And more and more I'm wanting to try new things, develop new skills and stretch myself.  I've always enjoyed cooking and I've always been a pretty good cook, but I want to be better.  I want to keep growing.

The trick to becoming a foodie is to get inspired.  I won't lie - you're going to need to invest some time and money as well - but to get the creative juices flowing you need to get some ideas brewing.

Here's some of my favourite places for inspiration,  some new discoveries and upcoming cooking plans:

• Delicious magazine - it's by far my favourite foodie mag.  It has a great mix of recipes, always easy to follow and not too many ingredients.  I have a subscription and look forward to it arriving on my doorstep every month.  I don't always cook recipes from it each month and I don't care.  I just like flipping through the pages, dreaming about cooking and planting the seeds of ideas.
• Jamie Oliver - I love Jamie.  I'm a bit disappointed to see the current TV advertising for 15 minute meals using an outdated 'sex sells' model that I find pretty rudimentary, lewd and unnecessary.  But I still love Jamie.  He's approach to food is genius and his ability to combine flavours is brilliant.  He makes cooking accessible and fun.  I have a heap of his recipe books and am particularly loving 15 minute meals at the moment. It's great being able to watch the show and see him prepare the meals.  Works well for this visual brain. 
• The Cook's Companion by Stephanie Alexander - this is such a great resource if you want to become a better cook.  Mostly I use it to learn about particular foods, what goes with what and for basic recipes. It has lots of recipes but no pictures and again as a visual person I like to see a picture of what the food is supposed to look like. Especially when you're finding your way as a cook.
• Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day - if you want to learn how to make great bread in the simplest possibly way you have to get a copy of this book.  Everything I know about making dough I learned from this book and now I can pretty much make any kind of dough there is {except shortcrust pastry - this skills eludes me still!}.
• Other mags I love - Donna Hay, Jamie Oliver, SBS Feast, Australian Good Taste.
• Other cooks I love - Katie Quinn Davies, Julie Goodwin.
• Places I love to shop {all in Melbourne sorry} - Vic Market, local farmers' markets, Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder Cheese Room, Simon Johnson, Millawa Cheese Shop {bit of a theme around cheese}, Gewurzhaus, Key Ingredients - Clifton Hill, The Essential Ingredient, cookware shops.  Actually Fourth Village in Sydney is also an absolute favourite.
• Best recent discoveries - La Latteria Mozarella Laboratory.
• Things I want to learn/try - homemade ice-cream, homemade pasta, preserving, jam and chutney making, sauce making, cheese making, knife skills, sourdough bread, cooking with zucchini flowers, authentic Mexican food.
• Cooking plans for the weekend ahead - it's my birthday on Saturday and I have a tradition of baking for my own birthday.  I'm planning some Chocolate Bourbon Peanut Butter Cupcakes, Rosewater Rhubarb Cheesecake, Peanut Butter Fudge and Salted Pecan Caramels.

I'd love to hear any of your recommendations or favourites.

If things go according to plan I hope to share more recipes and ideas here in the future.

{move along now}

There's nothing much to see here.  

I'd hoped to be back with {sunday snippets} but all I really have to show from the weekend is my 7-page to-do list that I'm currently trying to wrangle into submission.  It's one of my two busiest times of the year at work {in an already ridiculously busy job} so I'm pretty much 'on the clock' all week and at least part of the weekends.  I don't mind too much.  It feels good to work hard on something that I care passionately about.  It feels good to know I'm making a difference.

But I do miss you guys, and my blog, and painting, and book-making.  I'm hoping that things will continue to fall into a rhythm, as they have been.  I'm hoping that by November {the next busiest time} things will feel second nature at work and I won't be running to catch up to myself all the time.  I'm hoping that once I get through this busy peak I might be able to turn some of my attention to other things I love to do. I'd like things to be just a little more balanced.

Have a lovely week peeps.  I don't expect you'll see much of me, but you never know.

{things i'm thinking about on this sunny day}

• Politics. Yours. Mine.  The nation's.
• Propaganda. Who it serves.  What are they getting out of it?  What's the real agenda?
• The taste of persimmons.
• Baking cookies for National Volunteer Week.
• Washing drying in the wind and the sun.
• Projects and project plans. How to wrangle the damn things into order.
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  But that's for another post.  Another time.
• Strength and resolve.  Feeling mine returning in all areas of my life.
• Lunch.
• Happy thoughts.  Mostly.

{things i'm thinking}

• That I need to get {sunday snippets} happening again.  Perhaps next week.
• Why people steal other people's ideas?  I've had another blogger repeatedly stealing elements of my style and even one of my regular memes over the last 18 months.  It gives me the shits.
• That copying is not the ultimate form of flattery.  It's just rude and unethical.
• That weekends always feel so damn short at the moment.
• If waiting for things to settle down is a futile pursuit.  Maybe this is as good as it gets.
• About snacking.  I'm returning to my focus on health and weight loss and all I can think about is snacking. Sigh!
• How my first world problems feel so trivial compared to the trials of others.
• About a big challenge that I've set myself.  Whether I'll be able to achieve it.  Whether I'll even really try.
• That I do love the colours of Autumn.  Watching the leaves change colour and then surrender to the cycle of life.
• When to fight and when to surrender.

What are you thinking about today?

{dear house}

 

Thank you for sheltering me through the storms of the last couple of years.  Thank you for giving me the perfect space to rest, to stretch, to soar, to fall, to learn, to let go.  Thank you for being the place where I restored my soul and my faith, and found my way back to my path.

Thank you for taking care of me and my precious family.  For giving us a place of peace and comfort.  A place to call home.

Thank you for kind and friendly neighbours, for their company, their laughter, their friendship and their care.

Thank you for the most beautiful tree I've ever seen.  Majestic and glorious. A refuge for both me and the birds.

  

Somehow living here always felt like a moment in time.  Somehow I always knew it wasn't forever.  To be honest I'm torn between a real sense of sadness and loss, and leaping into the bright new future that lies ahead.

But it's time.  The future beckons, loud and strong.

*****

We're heading into 2-3 weeks with no internet connection.  See you on the other side peeps.

{work, eat, sleep, repeat}

truth. 

i am doing it tough at the moment.  

trying to get my head around a very challenging and big job.  i reckon i'm going to love it eventually.  once i've been able to build my volunteer team and set up some good structures and routines.  there's so much great work to be done and such an exciting opportunity to really bring my creativity and passion to an issue that i really care about.  this feels like important and meaningful work.

but at the moment i'm running in circles with absolutely nothing left over at the end of the day or the end of the week.  i'm exhausted. and pushed to the very edge of my limits.  all the time.  it's horrible.

i'm just waiting for that moment when things start falling into place.  in fact i'm desperately hanging out for it.

i miss the other side of my life.  where there's time for creative pursuits, friends, exercise, cooking.  i miss feeling balanced.  i miss it terribly.

truth.