Dances to the Beet of Her Own Drum

Big things are afoot in the household of the Mistress.

PSLS work situation has descended from okayish to craptacular and doesn’t look like picking back up again anytime soon. He’s stayed where he is so long because while the money is on the low side for what he does, the trade off is more time at home that the average truckie gets. But. Furniture orders have dropped off considerably with the economic downturn and don’t look like increasing again any time soon. When you get paid for how many kilometres you drive each week, the loss of orders is never a good thing. Besides he doesn’t want to be a truck driver forever.

Meantime I have realised that even though I can do behavioural sciences through Open Universities Australia, their course isn’t accredited with the relevant professional body. As for other health related areas, they aren’t even delivered by distance education. I can’t do what I want to do by distance ed. Even settling on a degree that can be partially delivered by distance, I will still need to do some residential study and we are nowhere near the campuses that offer the courses I am interested in.

Having me be hours away from home for residential schools and hubs away half the week driving trucks does not work with raising children.

Meantime Lou is in year 10 this year. The school all our kids attend is a K-10 central school and won’t be offering Years 11 & 12 for at least another five years. We don’t want to send our kids to the (one) local public high school for their senior years as it’s not very good, but living in the country, our options are limited without forcing our kids to spend hours of every day on a bus travelling to and fro. And we are having problems accessing services for Lou. The demand for counselling services in our area is so high that we can only see her psychologist once every 4 - 6 weeks. It’s not consistent enough to be of much help to a teen struggling to manage their anxiety. The only way we can get her seen if she has a bad anxiety attack is to contact the emergency mental health team, which again does not provide her with consistency as they will only help in a crisis, not long term.

So we are contemplating a BIG move to a larger centre with uni campuses, more schools to choose from, more employment opportunities for PSLS, more access to services for Lou and more stuff to do for all of the kids.

It won’t be happening till later this year, but it’s taking everyone some getting their heads around and we still have a lot of research to do yet on where exactly we want to go. But at this stage we are thinking somewhere in Victoria. We’ll be taking some weekend trips over the next few months to explore our options.

I’m excited!!

I’m going to be off on another adventure!

I haven’t moved towns or states since I moved home from QLD with Lou when she was 6 months old.

I love my home town, it’s a great place for young families, but it was never our dream to spend the rest of our lives here. It’s time to take the next step on our life’s journey and that will be later this year with this move. I can’t wait!

Kelley would be so proud!

Seriously.

TJ started Martial Arts training yesterday. His age group are called ‘Secret Ninjas’. Is that cool or what?

He was a bit reluctant at first, because he didn’t know what he was meant to do, but after a little while he got his confidence up, started to really get into what he was doing and had a great old time kicking the shit out of the bag one of the other kids was holding.

He then spent the evening practising his moves and showing off for his sisters.

We thought Martial Arts might be good to help develop his confidence, self control and coordination. We especially hope it helps him feel confident to defend himself if any of the bullying he’s sometimes subjected to gets physical as the boys involved get older. He has been given strict warnings not to use his new moves to intimidate his sisters or else suffer the wrath of mum, who has a few ninja moves of her own…

The only problem is that their martial arts gear is white, not black. I may have to make him some black ones for sneaking around the house doing secret ninja-ry things! LOL

sort of.

Okay.

Not really.

But I could have been!!

By one of my friends who lives in Young. We went over for her daughter’s 18th birthday party and ended up staying for 4 nights. And lets just say that there was lots of booze and lots of cake. For breakfast, lunch and tea. lol

But now I’m back (from outer space) and tis time to get back to routine, ready for back to school on Thursday. Ho hum.

What you all been up to?

And her name is Lucy(fer)

If you have it, she has to have it.

And I’m not just talking the usual doggy stuff like everything you eat or drop.

I’m talking about other stuff - like everyone’s socks… which she then buries in the beanbags.

Or CJ’s hairbands…which she pulls out of CJ’s hair.

Or everyone’s small stuffed animals…which are hidden all over the house.

Or the baby/toddler toys that were out for my niece to play with…that we found buried under the lounge cushions.

Or my dusters….which are found in random places all over the house.

Or our undies….which are often found with the socks.

Or the teatowels from the kitchen.

Or anything out of the kitchen really.

Or tissues… She loves tissues. She loves to rip them to pieces and leave them on my bed.

Or TJ’s matchbox cars that he was playing quietly with in the sandpit yesterday only to start yelling indignantly when the pup started knicking off with them to bury in the garden.

Or the freaking trivial pursuit pieces which she stole by climbing up onto the lounge, jumping across onto the dining table where we were playing and then scooping up into her mouth before anyone could react!

Fortunately hubby was able to scoop it back out of her mouth before she could either swallow or bury it (in the beanbags).

We need to start nailing everything down!

The gone fishin’ edition.

There are a few state parks within a couple of hours from us including Lake Burrinjuck, Grabine, Wyangala Dam and Lake Burrendong. Yesterday Wyangala Dam was hosting a Junior Carp Fishing Competition with entry a mere gold coin donation. We decided it was the perfect excuse to pack up for the day and go fishin’… though the early morning start was much grumbled about by teens and moi!

Driving over the top of the dam wall - At around 6% of it’s capacity, Wyangala Dam is currently a pitiful shadow of it’s full self though 6% is a great improvement on the 3% it was before Christmas. Some of the towns relying on this dam to feed the Lachlan River for their water supply have had their supply cut off - without significant rainfall soon, more towns are screwed.  (read the article, I’m not exaggerating)

Don’t let the greenery fool you into thinking that the area can’t be that badly in drought. All of this in the foreground is underwater when the dam is full. You can see that what trees are here are all quite young.

You can see the spillway in the far distance. The water is nowhere near it. You can see the regular waterline where the trees cover the hillside.

The kids took to wading out a bit in order to cast their lines beyond the weeds growing along the waters edge.

But that was dicey in spots where the weeds were thicker.

I’ve been fishing at Wyangala since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I’ve never fished from behind the old dam wall before. The old (darker section of) wall was completed in 1935 but is usually covered except for the tops of the water towers when the dam is at capacity. The new wall was completed in 1971 giving the dam a capacity 2 1/2 times greater than Sydney Harbour… when there is water.

The aim of the competition was to catch as many carp as you could in order to remove the unwanted invader from the local river systems. Carp are considered an invasive pest here. Most people do not eat them, but everyone does dispose of them if they catch them. They aren’t returned to the water.  All of the carp caught today are bound for the fertiliser factory to be turned into something useful. Our carp was 47cms long and weighed in at 1.587 kgs. The biggest ones weighed in at 3.7 kgs.

We did return the little Silver Perch to the dam though. Was a bit too small for the dinner table though caused as much excitement as the other fish.

No major prizes for us today - though CJ did have her name drawn out for a t-shirt - but it was raining by the time presentations were finished at the local club, a win for everyone  in this dry part of the state.

And one of my favourite parts of the day? There is no mobile phone reception at all at Wyangala Dam. Not even within 20 km’s of the dam.  That means no phone, no internet, no nothing. We didn’t even have to declare an electronics free day because the electronices were useless to everyone anyway! lol

Oh and the kids are all starting to feel comfortable baiting their own damn hooks without squealing, dropping the bait or complaining about worm guts on their fingers meaning less work for mum and dad, and more fun for them!

My  young fella has been spending a bit of time with his cousins while they are up for the xmess holidays  and has been coming home telling m tales of Uncle R and his new g/f.

*inset puzzled face*

So when talking to my mum the other day I asked her what was going on with the bro and she confirmed that there is in fact a new g/f. And she too is staying at Mum’s house along with bro and his kids. *shakes head*

Mum says that the new g/f seems okay. Isn’t noticeably strange or different like SWIL was.

BUT.

When my bro walked in my front door with the new g/f in tow last night… my girls and I nearly had a heart attack. She doesn’t look like SWIL close up, but at first glance we thought she was for a second. Similar type, similar dress sense, just a couple of inches taller.  They even have the same first name.

And it turns out, similar bad manners.

I would NEVER walk into my new b/f’s sister’s home, then five minutes after being introduced, and nodding at everyone without speaking to anyone, nudge my new b/f with my elbow and commet to him that the kitchen floor has a sticky spot with my hostess not 2 metres from me and definitely within earshot.

But I suppose that’s one way to leave an impression….

Pity it wasn’t a good one.

These are all monotype prints done over the past couple of weeks.

Pretty basic I know, but I am learning lots of different ways to make prints that I had no idea about.

One of the things I have to experiment with and produce for my printmaking unit is a woodcut print.

But it was not a straightforward assignment to put together. We had to invent rules and make a print at every time that our rules dictated that spanned the whole of our creative processing.

In other words we had to print from blank piece of uncut wood till complete end project according to a random time interval that we assignmed ourselves.

I decided to print whenever one of the kids asked me a question or hubs went outside for a smoke.

Now I’ve made linocuts before, but carving a plate out of wood is a little harder and trickier.

My inspiration was a portrait I took of Bubbles for CJ last week

So first print - blank. Of course

PSLS got a little nervous watching me with the sharp tools not long into this process so decided to help out

I’ll admit to being happy to accept his help lol

I decided it was a bit plain at this point and started adding leaves

At this point PSLS left me to my own devices to add the details with the small hobby knives.

And with some minor alterations - the final print from my finished block

I’m quite pleased with that. For a first attempt.

What ya think?

I’m not one for resolutions - I don’t like to set myself up for failure in a month or two - but I do think it’s healthy to have some kind of goals so for this year, here they are.

To do

• Move - this is by far our biggest priority this year - we need to be settled in a house we are happy with, that fits us… and where the real estate agents aren’t complete arseholes.
• get away regularly as a family - we needs us more fun times!
• Find creative ways to make more of our vegie gardening portable so that being semi self sustainable is attainable wherever we end up without taking months to get re-established
• Get back into exercising regularly and sort my health out.
• Teach Miss Lou how to drive.  Goddess. help. me. Seriously. I’m not sure which is scarier, the idea that I will shortly have a 16 yo or my vague child behind the wheel of a car.

To buy

• A second car - I realise that this doesn’t exactly fit with the ideals of decreasing our dependency on fossil fuels, or lowering our carbon footprint but we live in a country area with a minimum of public transport and I need to be able to develop a reliable night time routine if I’m going to beat the insomnia monster in the long term. Time to face the fact that I am firmly on the other side of 35 and can no longer burn the candle at both ends all the time. For that to happen, we need another car so hubs can get himself to and from work in the wee hours of the am. This will also help cut down my running around through the day freeing up some time and energy for other things.

To try

• budgeting - fair dinkum, sit down and account for every dollar ‘because this is serious shit’ budgeting instead of our usual estimates and ‘rob peter to pay paul when we have to’ working out. I could tell you where most of our money goes and what on, our bills are all paid and we do ok, but we want to get more out of our money, do more with it and develop a secure safety net in case anything goes pear shaped
• saving - we don’t have any. See above goal. We have a number of savings goals this year with our first being the bond for a new house. Other savings goals include emergency money, and holiday money.

To learn

• to keep going with uni
• to balance things better
• to laugh more again after the sucky year that was 2009.

What are you hoping to do this year?

Playing with our flock

Enjoying the ducks enjoying their new garden bath tub

Checking on what remains of our poor vegie garden. Most stuff bolted straight to seed with the extreme heat early in the growing season so we aren’t left with much

- a handful of spuds

Giant zucchini!!

A success! Our first ever capsicums

Rambling rockmelon plants starting to flower

Liking the results of my monotype printmaking experiments for uni

TJ said to me “That looks really good Mum. It’s like it looks like a tree and you can see the patterns in the bark and stuff”. Exactly what I was aiming for mate!