The Birthday List #3

Finish this quilt:





I pulled it out of a drawer a few weeks ago and added the two outer borders. Now, I just have to decide how to quilt it. Machine or hand? Hand is slower, but has the potential to be more sociable. Hand quilting gives a softer line, machine quilting is more defined.

I'm thinking shells or seagulls in the borders, and something wavy in the long rows of triangles.

See my post about the birthday list here.

Readwritepoem: Goals for 2009

At readwritepoem this week we were invited to set poetry goals for 2009. Frankly, it's too hot here, and I am still on holiday. I do have vaguely formed goals and plans, which I may make more concrete in the coming weeks - establish some sort of regular writing habit, for a start. I hesitate to put a number to the quantity of planned poems. As I put it in a comment on Dana's blog, I plan to love my poems more this year. That is, not to think they are wonderful and need no improvement, but to love them the way I would my children, which is to pay them attention, spend time with them, and not expect them to behave like adults when they are still two year olds, or teenagers. To let them develop in their own way.

(There will also be a book of poems produced this year by my small poetry group. We have the grant money so we are obliged to do it, no excuses. I'll get a quarter of the space - about twelve to fifteen poems, which I can easily fill from already existing work, if necessary).

I've been thinking about these things, and clearing my hugely overgrown garden now that I have time free from work (until yesterday and today when the temperature soared just too much), and then the Wordle at readwritepoem this week offered up some words which seemed to fit with these thoughts and with something I had written in my notebook the other day.

So, here is a very rough draft, using the words "bombardment", "signature", "stucco", "crimson" and "geranium".

Summer, Here

After Christmas all the days
slide off the calendar and lie
in a tumbled heap on the floor
with the towels and jandals.
The sun beats down and the nor’wester
brings a constant aerial bombardment
of pollen. We eat Groundhog Day meals
of lettuce salad and leftover ham.
The days stretch endless – easy to plan
a triumphant year, easy to think
there’s all the time in the world
to write brilliant poems. In the garden
I’m clearing swathes of long grass.
A vague buzzing grows louder
when I move the blue barrel. All the bees
are heading for that corner,
writing their signatures in long looping flight
confused perhaps by an absence of blue.
They make their way to the grille
in the foundations, lurch their fat
fuzzy bodies over the cross bar
and disappear into the basement.
I am dizzied by bright days and bright
words. White stucco, blue rain barrel,
crimson geranium – searching for entry
into the dark and cavernous mystery
of the poem.

Getting Reacquainted

Well, I set myself goals for the year, and promptly lost interest in them. I'm not beating myself up about it. I realised that I have certain obligations, and I don't need to make further obligations out of activities that I choose for myself.

I've been working full time for over a year and contributing a large part of the family budget. While I don't do so much of the meal preparation any more, I do most of the housework (as much as any housework gets done, that is) and I do all the laundry. I have commitments to the administration of Takahe magazine.

As for the family history, poetry, orienteering etc, I do it because I want to. And if I don't, I don't have to.

Here is what I am up to at the moment instead of pursuing the goals I announced earlier:



You can see my sewing machine manual on the left hand side of the photo, because it was so long since I had used the machine, I found I had forgotten how to turn it on. (In my defense, it was a fairly new sewing machine when I last used it. I can still remember how to turn my old machine on, the one I had for twenty years or more).

I also couldn't find the switch for the light. After searching the manual for a while, I found that the light should come on automatically. It doesn't. Or at least, it does sometimes. When I twitch my nose properly, or when the wind is in the east, or something. Grrr! I can still sew though, with a carefully placed lamp.

The idea was to make a quilt with fabrics on hand. There are two black and white fabrics and twelve coloured strips in each block of this quilt. I've made eight blocks so far - ninety six coloured pieces. Despite starting with a big stack of purple, turquoise and pink fabrics, I still find myself wanting more variety. I'm trying to resist the urge to buy too many more (besides, the ones in our local quilt shops all seem to look the same).

I'll show the quilt again as it progresses, and tell you more about it.

Meanwhile, there has been a little excitement in our household. One of the young people in this news story is someone rather closely related to me...

Catching Up...

A whole month into the year, and when I review progress I find I haven't done much towards my goals. The one thing I have done is to increase my level of exercise. I figure that if I manage one thing each month, I will get there in the end.

This weekend, anyway, may be different. I plan on tackling the first chapter of the family history, and I may even tackle a poem for readwritepoem, for the first time in a while. Mostly, I've been using the summer weekends for lawn mowing and gardening. This weekend that's off the agenda, because I made a visit to the doctor, and I have stitches in my back, so no heavy lifting or pushing for a couple of weeks.

I visited the doctor a week or so ago for some asthma medication, and she noticed a suspicious spot on my back which was why I went back to have it removed. When I was a child, it was quite normal to spend all summer on the beach, wih regular doses of sunburn. I recall peeling great strips of skin off with great glee! So I always figured this was going to come sooner or later, and it doesn't appear to be too serious - she thinks it may be a BCC (basal cell carcinoma) which is very slow-growing, but still not something you invite to stay for a long visit.

The trip for the asthma medication was overdue too, but the ongoing saga of the waterbed prompted me to visit - I'll save that one for another post.

In the meantime, here are some photos of the walking track I discovered while orienteering last week. We had another event this week, which was quite different - among flat suburbs with waterways and wetlands interspersed - lots of reeds, waterbirds etc. These Wednesday evening events are a series we have every summer around local streets and parks, and then for the rest of the year we mostly have Sunday events when we get out into the country more.

The track passes the bottom of a garden:



The view from the top:



I have a fascination with roots and rocks:

What I've Been Doing

Not blogging, obviously. Although I've still been visiting other blogs, and occasionally commenting.

My part holiday came to an end, and as of this week I am working fulltime again. I am also trying to keep my goals for the year in mind, so here are a few things I've been doing:

1) Walking. I started off the year a bit erratically, but I'm having fewer and fewer days when I don't exercise. Last Friday I went for a particularly long walk, as I reached the top of the track seemingly almost effortlessly, and decided to leave the track to wander across the hills (allowed, as it is a public park even though it is also farmed). And then I came across a barbed wire fence. I figured I could cross it right by the post where it was a little lower, but I got stuck half way across. And I didn't want to rip my good trousers. Eventually after fruitlessly trying to unhook them, I decided that the best way would be to take them off. Once they were down around my thighs, I had enough slack to unhook myself, and I finished climbing over, did up my trousers and turned round to find a mob of curious sheep staring right at me...

2) Transcribing testaments from the 1600's, including those of my 7x great-grandparents. I was about to start writing the first section of the family history - but I've had images of these documents for quite a while, and only partially succeeded in deciphering them. Finding a full transcription of one of them in privately deposited papers in the Stirling Archives, I thought it would help with the others. Think archaic handwriting, archaic language, messy crammed up handwriting, ink blots, and show through from the other side of the paper.

I've also been practising my Photoshop skills by trying to clean up the images in Photoshop to make them more legible.

3) Sweating. It's been hot. Up to 34 degrees (in the nineties, for those of you using Fahrenheit still). No doubt our Australian cousins think that's quite cool, but it is hot for New Zealand, and we don't have air conditioning.

4) Trying to gather information and fill in complicated bureaucratic forms with details of my income so that my son can get a student allowance. It is means tested on parental income for students under 25, and they go on the last tax year. Since our income has dropped since then, we have to have it reassessed.
S. also has to give details of his income. He put "zero" and now they want proof of his zero income, eg a letter from an employer!!

5) Putting all my holiday photos (the ones I had printed, anyway) into an album. And then I found I'd missed one out, so I moved them all so that they would be in the correct order. And then I found three more I had missed out.... yes, I moved them all again! I'm a bit anal sometimes, can you tell?

So, now I should stop blogging and get back to the form filling...

Still in Holiday Mode

I have to go to work today, which seems almost attractive. At least I am looking forward to spending the day in an air-conditioned room. It's been hot here. Not Texas hot, but hot enough for a temperate-climate lass like me.

So, I am still easing into my goals for the year by spending a lot of time "clearing the decks". (Translate: reading old magazines and occasionally throwing one into the recycling). I've sorted photos from my trip, and historic family photos that I scanned into the computer, and had some printed while a local stationery shop was offering 15 cent prints. I did a little light gardening later in the afternoon yesterday, and by the time I was done I was dripping with sweat, which didn't encourage me to go for a vigorous uphill walk. But after all, I'm on holiday, right?

I know when our plums are nearly ripe because I start hitting my head on the branches when I walk along the path. They are weighed down with their burden. I found myself contemplating the idea of lying on the lawn under the umbrella-tree and gazing at the sky. Probably a better way of spending my time than playing sudoku on the computer. I may try it over the weekend. It won't be long before the lawn is covered in squishy ripe plums and then it will be way too messy for bathing in dappled light.

Oh, and I missed posting yesterday, so I am officially not joining the group who plan to write a blog post every single day of 2008. Well, that's a relief!

Cute Furry Animals

The trouble with being on holiday is that I tend to sleep in. And the best part of the day, when it's cool enough to garden, walk etc is first thing in the morning. The southern hemisphere sun can be harsh on the skin in summer, however I did manage to get out for a walk today in that narrow window of time between "too hot to move" and "dinner time". I found myself puffing and panting, but I hope that will change within a few weeks.

And now, back to our family visit to Orana Park, as mentioned in the previous post. We rarely get all our "children" together now that the youngest is twenty, however we had a real family outing with only one of the five missing.

Orana Park is not a traditional zoo but a safari park, with the animals in spaces as wide open as possible, and moats in preference to heavy wire fences.

Mostly, we followed around a route timed to catch feeding times of the various animals. Of course, being summer holidays, there were big crowds all doing the same thing. So we didn't get a very good view of the lions which are one of the most heavily fenced animals for obvious reasons.

Never mind, I think the giraffes are actually way cuter. And it is possible to get up close and personal at giraffe feeding time - they seemed quite happy to keep eating, and eating, to satisfy the long queue of waiting visitors.





Also high in the cuteness factor are the meerkats:



and the otters:





These are Asian small-clawed otters. They are more social than most otters, and spend more time on land. Apparently they are an indicator species - that is, if you have otters in a river or stream then it is an indication that the stream is healthy and unpolluted.

The otters are very frisky and act like a chorus line - they would be sitting in a grass, and all of a sudden would all dash off almost as one, with pauses to tumble over each other.

I suppose if we lived a more primitive life then we wouldn't be thinking of these animals as "cute". We'd be more concerned with whether they were good food, or whether they were competing with us for fish, or similar concerns. And I have to admit that from reports of how some of the animals can bite and scratch, they may be cute and appealing only at a suitable distance.



What's that they are eating? One young visitor was rather squeamish to see that they were eating whole one day-old chicks. Her father teased her about it: "Oh look, he's chewing on the beak". And then when she had had enough, he said, "We'll go somewhere else - somewhere they are eating two-day old chicks." I can't say that it bothered me - as long as I don't have to eat one myself!

Happy New Year

2007 was an interesting year - we weren't very far into it when it took a turn that I hadn't anticipated, so my goals were sidelined while I did other things.

While I never expected to find myself working full time, I've really enjoyed my second job and don't anticipate going back to part-time work anywhere in the near future.

Still - with a new year on us, and feeling adjusted to the new workload, I think it's time that I stopped procrastinating and found ways to achieve some of the things I hoped to achieve last year, and didn't. So no resolutions - I'm not strong on resolve - but several goals for the year, which at some stage soon I may turn into a poster for my studio wall.

Firstly, I really want to write the family history - a project I embarked on about five or six years ago, expecting it to take a year. Of course there is always more that can be researched, but having made the trip to Scotland, I think it's time that I acknowledged that I should preserve the research I have done in written form, even if it is not complete (and probably never can be). When I wonder what I would do if I was told I had a year to live, this is the one thing that comes to mind - get the research into a form that can be shared with the rest of the family.

Secondly, last summer I spent six months walking a lot, eating healthily and reducing my weight by 13 kgs (about 29 lbs). Once I started full time work, and winter arrived, that all faded away, and what with too much Christmas chocolate and candy I've put about 3 kgs back on again. That's not too bad - I'm still 10 kg lighter than I was. So this year I want to reduce my weight by another 13 kgs, and increase my fitness as well (I'm a bit vague on measuring the latter part, but my orienteering results should give me some record of my improvement).

Thirdly, I'm inspired by January who records her poetry achievements in the sidebar of her blog - numbers of poems written, acts of poetry committed each week and so on. I want to increase the number of journals my poetry has appeared in by at least one. This is not really in my control of course, but what is in my control is to spend more time writing, a lot more time editing, and to send more submissions out into the world (and not always to the same fall-back journal that has published my poems before).

Fourthly, become a whiz at Photoshop.

And then, there is the usual plan to keep the house and garden better organised, procrastinate less, blog more, play fewer computer games, be kind to the environment - and did I mention procrastinate less?

I have in mind trying to do a blog post each day, without being too rigid about it. Coming soon, photos of our family visit to Orana Park, but here is a taster:



Meet Jabba the ten year old (still juvenile) tuatara, one of the world's most primitve living reptiles.