anyresemblance

A ripping yarn

Part of the inspiration for starting this blog was the pleasure I got from reading other mothers (and david here) writing about the highs and lows of parenting.    I really like reading about what other people ate for dinner, watched on television and sanctioned their badly behaved children. 

However, one trend I don't intend to partake in is to make you read the story of my daughter's birth on her 13th birthday.  It's not that I don't find pregnancy and childbirth interesting but I am not emotionally centred on the experience these days.  Interesting contrast,  since being a midwife is still an occupation I day dream about.  Suffice to say she was born at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford after a short labour on the 3oth November 1992.  I didn't get the drugs, my sister was there and I read John Buchan's "John McNab" in the morning before I went into labour and finished it the next morning with my new baby sleeping beside me. 

I so love John Buchan and Greenmantle and the 39 Steps are books that I constantly re-read.  In fact, I think I'll have a Buchan-fest in honour of her birthday.

She got an iBook as a combined birthday, christmas, next several years present.  It is at her dad's so she won't touch it till the weekend but he sent her a photo of it this morning complete with "happy birthday" displayed on the screen. It looks so cool.  She is now dismissive of my little black lap top which is nowhere as groovy as her machine.

Tonight we are going for a hearty Austrian dinner with her little sis and big brother and his girlfriend.  Absolutely suits the weather which is still very rainy.

Bump

What a fucking awful Monday I had.  It has been raining for about a hundred years and someone rear-ended me while I was driving to work.   I was stopped, a sickening crash and my bumper was hanging off.  The other driver admitted all blame but yet another period of dealing with the insurance company, blah, blah.  I was pretty shaken up and got barely any work done all day.

Then I had a very weird dynamic with my sister who has come to stay with her partner. I am still trying to figure out what happened but there was some underlying tension and they have gone off earlier than planned.   It brought a great deal of unresolved resentment to the fore and left me feeling quite wiped out.

Something else happened which left me feeling closer to someone else who helped me through some hard stuff yesterday.

On a more prosaic note, I had a chat with my boss about a slightly different role next year.  It could be more financially rewarding for me and given my focus on trying to buy a house next year is the right thing to do.

I made a killer lamb curry on Saturday.  I went out and left it on a very low heat in the oven for about 5 hours and it was super tender and rich.   I also made butter chicken (this decade's equivalent to spag bol of my childhood) and chocolate brownies.

My boss wants me to set up a blog for work. Ha.  We've been doing a comms strategy and he has the crazy idea that podcasting and blogs would support our communication to our geographically dispersed 600+ team.  Ho hum. I didn't like to tell him that I can barely get round to updating this with my trivial life stories let alone find items of interest to a bunch of techies on a regular basis.

My oldest daughter turns 13 tomorrow.  I can't believe how the years have passed.  She is a mite taller than me now.  She still has the startingly blue eyes of her babyhood.  And she enters teenage years tomorrow.  Dearest girl.

Last night we made a buche de noel.  Younger daughter was doing a talk on Christmas in

France

for a school project.  One of her classmates is moving back to Russia next week (new baby on the way that parents want to be born in Russia prompting complaints of why I hadn’t moved back to England to birth her, never mind that she still has British citizenship, in fact had a passport at 2 weeks with cute photo of baby held at arms length but my hands still visible as I supported her head…) and the teacher had decided they would have this fun activity before Olga left the country.  Anyway, part of the research was around food so we made a Christmas log for her to take in. Not terribly Martha Stewart-ish (if it was, I would have crafted chocolate leaves and meringue mushrooms for the woodland scene) but yummy just the same. In the middle of me trying to approximate bark with chocolate ganache, younger daughter managed to pull the bowl of icing off the counter and chocolate icing went everywhere including my hair.  The bowl hit the floor with a resounding crash and a piece of glass cut my toe.  Bugger, why did I wash the kitchen floor on the weekend? Order was restored and all was well for the delivery at school this morning.

Last week my daughter led the assembly at school.  She set up an altar at home yesterday and tried to get older daughter to say prayers with her to no avail.  A lot of candle wax seemed to be distributed everywhere.

They spent the weekend with their father.  I stayed over in Bondi and walked the beach a couple of times but our plan to look at sculpture by the sea on Sunday was scuppered by the crowds.  I don’t get any pleasure out of that slow shuffle.  In fact, it made me way too irritatable and tired so we skipped that.  We went back to my house and my friend helped me assemble an Ikea bedside table for older daughter and I did my filing.  It made me feel good to have order restored on my desk.  My colleague at work had procured me a 15” flat screen monitor to use at home which is a great improvement but I realize I need to get a bigger desk to deal with all the printers and scanners, etc.

I still can’t find the cable to connect my camera so no

India

pictures as yet. 

Where was I?

India was fantabulous. The food, the colours, the fabrics, the manic traffic, the lack of road rage, the polite people.  Not fabulous:  jet lag, coffee, spending two hours in a traffic jam getting back to the hotel after a long, long day and  the beds in the hotel (single, thin mattress).

I flew into Mumbai on the Sunday night.  I had a driver waiting for me and gave some of my clients a lift to their hotel.  We had a fabulous dinner that night at a restaurant specialising in food of the North West which is ranked in the top 50 in India.  The tandoori lamb (forgive me, that's a bastardisation of what it was really called) was tender and fragrant and fell off the bone.  The breads were light and fluffy and more-ish.  There was a huge platter of grilled vegetables and paneer cheese.    Fantastic clean and sharp flavours.

Traffic was astounding and every street has small businesses filling up the sidewalk.  And lots of people but not so many more than any other big asian city. 

We then travelled on to Bangalore, call centre capital of India.  The hotel was three times the price of the Mumbai one and pretty shabby but this is a town where business is booming but infrastructure still has to catch up.

But did I shop?  i did and my colleague turned out to be an extremely agreeable shopping companion.  He hung around the shop with all the wall hangings and bedspreads.   And we both loved the sari shop, not least because it all looked so like an old fashioned haberdashery shop with piles of silks in glass fronted wooden cabinets and rows of clerks waiting to be of service.  I bought two saris just for the delicious pleasure of handling the silk.  Six yards of silk for around $30 australian.

I so want to go back with my huge shopping list.  Orange and pink never seemed so attractive.

I'll post some photos later when I find the cable to connect my camera to the computer.