Fickle

I realise that in my last post I made a promise to let you know on Saturday if you were to receive one of the Christmas postcards. What can I tell you…I’m fickle! I just changed my mind – not with great intent, I had a busy weekend.

I went to the my work Christmas party. After reading the thoughts of Sussanah about work Christmas parties I wonder why I went. It was not cheap, the food was dodgy…DODGY!, the venue was noisy and echo-y. We left fairly early, wishing that we had spent that amount of money on a cosy dinner for two. My Pete’s work party is this weekend. It is a barbeque, beer and bowling party. Lawn bowls, not indoor. I may just sit in the stands and sledge the attempts of others whilst sipping on diet coke.

I went to a baptism. The giraffe quilt was a well-received gift for a much loved little boy.

I notice that on other blogs people use a random number generator program to select the winners of give aways. In this spirit I wrote the numbers 1- 16 on a piece of paper (leaving out the numbers of my own comments and those people who made more than one comment) and asked my random son to circle three of the numbers. SO…. Aunty Evil, Maureen and Mary I will be posting one Christmas postcard to each of you this week.

Maybe…if I don’t change my mind….I’m fickle like that.

Reality check

I am in denial about Christmas. If it never comes, then December won’t end. If December never ends, it will never be January. If it will never be January, my daughter will stay within hugging distance of her mother.

Reality says:

Christmas will not be denied.

When  I was rattling around in a drawer I found these:

I made them a few years ago and obviously put them in away for safekeeping (then forgot about them, I find that to be the safest of safekeeping). If you would like one you need only to leave me a comment here. On Saturday I’ll randomly select and email three of you for your addresses and post them out to you.

Ho, ho, ho…

Fall in Love

I saw Jerry Seinfeld on Enough Rope last week. I always enjoyed Seinfeld (the show) and I found him to be a really fascinating interviewee. One of the philosophies that he holds dear in his life is to fall in love every day. Not the romantic sort of love, but love that makes you stop and appreciate that moment each day when something is fabulous, no matter how unremarkable it may be. This is a feeling that I enjoy when I get to the end of the quilt without the bobbin running out. It won’t impact the nation, but for that second it feels like everything is right with the world.

These are the reasons that I fell in love today.

1. I shopped for dinner, refueled the car and picked up my son in just forty minutes.
2. I went to the osteopath and she massaged away the knots in my back and shoulders.
3. A thoracic surgeon with amazing credentials in Sydney has agreed to see my son in January. 
4. My son wore deodorant without prompting. (if you collected a 13 year old boy on a hot day and brought him home in a closed car and you would know this is joyous)
5. I saw a portly woman smoking right beside a sign which said, “Welcome to Settler’s Alternative Medicine Centre.” Oh the irony!
6. My son asked me a question from his year eight maths exam and I got the answer correct, in my head! (If you wonder what it is – A pole is three times the size of a tree. The difference between the two is 15 metres. How tall is the tree?)
7. I cut out this giraffe and plan to spend this evening quilting it.

   8.  We heard this song in the car by a British band with an Australian name and turned it right up and sang along loudly.

I hope that you fell in love today too.

Insane in the Membrane

Do you sudoku? I love them. I often do one in bed, just before I go to sleep. (I know it sounds smutty, try to rise above it) My daughter steals my book quite frequently and I have to chase her down.

Recently my Pete decided to do one, a fiendish one. He had never done them before and that is how he started, with fiendish. He loves a challenge. He is very methodical in his approach to everything. So, being a kind-hearted wife, I bought him a whole book of hard puzzles. Naturally he started with the hardest, the one rated INSANE.

Now for the past three days he has been working on it with his weird architectural numerals.

It is has been 48 hours since he added a number with any certainty, but he won’t give up. I told him to look at the answers and just get one hint, but he won’t do it. I told him I’d look at the answers and just give clues, like warm, warmer, cold, freezing. He doesn’t want me to do that either.

He ….is…..going….insane.

Tropical Summer

It seems that after a few dry years we are finally having a tropical summer. In the late afternoon the dark clouds roll in.

 

Thunder rolls in the distance and big, fat raindrops fall.

All this moisture on the ground ensures that the humidity levels through the day never go below wiltingly high. The moist grounds have also provided a fertile patch for my very own mushroom crop, right under the clothes line.

Like this it looks amazing, but get up close and in macro and it looks beyond belief. A landscape of a different world.

I know that Aunty Evil rather likes a fungus in macro. These photos are for her.

Up and at ’em

My daughter is a pragmatic, practial girl. She is a lot like her father that way. It is a quality that I don’t always share.

She read my previous post when she came home from schoolies. She looked at me and said, “You don’t know who you are? You are Tracey. That’s all there is to it. You are Tracey.”

Of course I am. I should have realised.

Did I mention that she wants to study psychology at university? I think she’s made for it.

Thanks for your comments and emails. Up and at ’em!

(Oh, thanks to that person who found my blog by doing a search for ‘young, cool quilters’. You have made my day.)

Who…..me?

I feel like I am having a minor crisis of confidence. I’m not sure where I belong.

I look at my blog and I see ‘my kids did this…’, ‘my kids did that…’. I don’t like to define myself by my children. I find people who do that to be quite sad. Their own self-esteem lives or dies by the achievements of their children. They put pressure on their children until everything implodes around them. That’s not me.

SO I don’t want to write a post about my children.

I sew. I’m quilty and crafty, but somehow I don’t seem to have my mojo. I’m not even sure when it left me. I don’t seem to be making anything of quality or of excitement. I’m not even sure of what to make. The harder I try to think creative thoughts, the more elusive they become.

SO I don’t have a post about my craft.

I think my problem is transition. My girl is going. My son needs surgery. I can’t stop any of that. It will ripple through my life without stop. I am a cancerian. We like a steady ship. I do not have good sea legs.

Frustration

I am doing the rounds of doctors with my son. I feel like I have walked into the middle of an old boys’ club, a secret society.

My son has had an echocardiogram done, but no one will tell us the results. I have asked, but not been given a straight answer. The surgeon who agreed to see our son has told us that, no, he cannot perform the surgery. However, he “has two pectus excavatum cases now and if [he] can just find a third [he] can get his mate to come up from Brisbane to do it here while [he] assists.” Is he advertising for one more? Do we wait for six months until a third case shows up? Do we scout around ourselves and hope to find a third? 

Do we consult with the other doctor  first – before he arrives here to operate on our son? No, it’s OK. He’ll ring his mate later and talk to him about it. He’ll just let us know later what is happening.

We are told that our son’s heart has been displaced by his ribs – it has been pushed too far to the left. We are told that he has a heart murmur that he has NEVER had this identified before. We are told that he has a significantly reduced lung capacity because of the shape of his ribs. THEN we are told that the procedure we are seeking is purely cosmetic.

I asked, “When does it move from cosmetic to medical?”, and I reviewed all of the above information. The surgeon told me that no causal link could be proven. What does that mean???? An enormous hole in your chest might be a contributing factor, but we can’t prove it. How about we pop a hole into his chest and see if he has any ill effects.

Today I rang the college of thoracic surgeons myself. I spoke to a lovely lady, who didn’t mind at all when I got teary. She told me to go back to my GP and seek a second opinion. She gave me her phone number and wants the GP to ring her.

I love that lady.

Schoolies’ Week

Can you believe that a whole week of partying is devoted to the finishing of school. Apparently they deserve it after twelve years of school.

What about my week long party after twelve years of school lunches, band rehearsals, sports training, dance practice, forgot my library book, can we pick ____ up,  need a note for that, excursion attendance, sponsorship, uniform washing, shoe providing, sock searching, hair braiding, assignment checking, homework reviewing, reading log completing work?

Instead of a week off to party I had a week off with laryngitis. I hate having to be quiet. It has almost killed me. I am better now.

Formal Night

I have lost my voice. I am without words. Just look…