Author: ThirdCat

December will come which will be winter which is weird if you grew up south of here

A meme from suse and janet (at muppinstuff)

What’s hot
– My booty (I know, sophisticated and hilarious)
– Abu Dhabi autumns – while the temperature has definitely dropped and the humidity levels are almost bearable, it’s still around 35 degrees most days
– Vacuuming – my goodness me you can get up a sweat vacuuming in 35 degrees
– Cooking – see vacuuming
– The walk to school – see cooking
– Iced tea left out of the fridge for more than five minutes – see Abu Dhabi autumns
– Swimming pools that have not been cooled – see iced tea left out of the fridge for more than five minutes
…and so on and etceteraggghhhh

What’s not
See above

…>>>…
PS I had 12 kilos on my bar during the chest track in yesterday’s pump class. I am proud of this.

PPS I’m sorry I can’t link to janet’s blog because for some reason I can’t see any typepad blogs – they aren’t blocked, because I don’t get the blocked screen telling me that the site is blocked (as I do, for example, with skype and flickr), and I can see them through google reader (which is good if you’ve got your feed reader set up to send full posts to the reader), but they don’t download.

Opportunity going beg

So I’ve always loved alpacas and I do love olives, and over these last few months as I’ve been devising my cunning plan to not just preserve my sanity, stave off alcoholism and avoid divorce, but also to enjoy a satisfying, productive and contributory life, I have been forming this idea.

An idea which has been brewing for many years, but is finally synthesising into excellence.

An alpaca farm and olive grove.

And I found the perfect place in Spain for just such a finca, not far out of Gaucin, where the boys could walk to the waterhole and I could still see out past Gibralter.

It would be awesome. Ace.

The mister refuses to invest in such a project (in any way – financially, physically or emotionally). He says that having funded his way through university by picking apricots, he has no desire to return to a life of primary production. I say, that’s fine, it will be my farm. At which point, he says…well, let’s just say he is unsupportive.

I have endless niche ideas, and we would have a ready market in the Adelaide Central Market. Alpaca milk cheese (‘do alpaca’s make milk? the mister asked) is only the beginning.

So anyone wants to be a sleeping partner in what is a bloody good idea, let me know. All I need is your money. You would not have to pick olives or shave alpacas or anything like that. Me and the lads will take care of all that. As an added bonus, you could come and visit once or twice a year, and I reckon you’d be able to claim the airfare back on tax (though check that with your accountant, I might just be making that up).

I’m not saying this would be our exact view, but it would be something along the lines of:

From spain
From spain

)

More Spain, we should be having more Spain, don’t you think?

So here’s the lads sketching in a church. I gave them books through which I, of course, wanted to encourage the obsessive transcription of every moment of every day.

Just this morning a friend and I were having coffee and reflecting that even with still-young children you look around and think, ‘But that’s not what I wanted to teach you…I haven’t taught you the things you need to know yet…don’t be nine, we haven’t finished with eight’.

But if you leave the space, you get your compensations, don’t you? It never occurred to me that they might like sketching.

From spain

And here’s the lads, map in hand, finding the way to our hotel in Burgos. Moments to make your heart sing indeed.

From spain

And you can never have enough Mortadelo y Filemon. A worthy use of your allowance even if you can’t understand a word of it.

From spain

Also, you see that chair in the window. At the end of the day (quite late in mid-summer, I think getting close to eleven o’clock), you can sit in that chair with a glass of Spanish red and watch the colours change over the sea.

From spain

And now I am going to sew a frock

I was re-reading my post on happiness, and as I was reading, it occurred to me that I have never been unhappy before.

Not like this. Not the way I am now.

I have had times of sadness and grief. I have been dissatisfied, unsatisfied, I have yearned. I’ve been stressed, I’ve been lonely, I’ve been scared. But I have never been unhappy. There is not a period in my life that I look back on and think, ‘Those were unhappy times’.

From which line of thinking, I have thought two thinks:
one, I’m bloody lucky;
two, I’m extraordinarily stupid if I don’t do something about the situation I currently find myself in. Why would anyone be unhappy if they didn’t need to be? And I don’t need to be – I am not a woman of unlimited means, but I certainly have middle class choices.

So then I made some decisions – some of which were simple, some of which were hard, some of which are selfish, some of which are selfless – and I feel much better now.

I would get eight hours sleep

Time would expand so that I am able, within the space of just one day, to dazzle my boys with cultural experiences which ignite lifelong passions; and laze on the lounge cuddling with them and stroking their still-soft skin as we take turns reading aloud from our well-thumbed books (we are now reading fluently in French, having mastered Spanish last summer and Arabic this term); and still have time to write in my journal and do two good hours on my new manuscript; and whip up a lasagne from scratch (including freshly made pasta sheets).

At the same time, I would have less need for this time, for the words would run from my pen, revealing perfectly formed sentences which linked one after another, to create, without revision, a lucid and riveting plot.