anyresemblance

Lost in translation

In Seoul, trapped in function rooms, taxis, offices. It is pouring with rain. Service is amazing, everyone is so polite.

Gangnam style

Tomorrow I am off to Seoul for work.  Despite only going for a week I seem to have a very heavy suitcase.  I have clothes packing down but shoes challenge me more.  I have flats for walking and in case my foot swells up on the flights, two pairs of heels for different work clothes, running shoes and a pair of boots in case it is more wintery than I imagine.  Plus my adored pace gloves for the plane.

Friday had me running round putting out brush fires, some sadly caused by my own team.  A colleague texted me to say she had printed out stuff to read on the flight.  Me, I plan to watch season 1 of Breaking Bad on my ipad and snoozing.

Today was hot.  I went for  a run first thing with Charlie and then I drove 100km to leave the puppy at a more superior boarding facility.  It was way nicer than the last place but he still looked sad when I left him.  I washed the car when I got back to Canberra as it was thick with country road dust and pollen.  A clean car is so soothing.

I was cross with the kids when I got home.  I am so tired of having to issue detailed instructions and wonder if there will ever be a time when they actually observe the household tasks that might need to be done and unilaterally perform them.  I tried not to be too cranky since I am going away but it was irksome. To alleviate my cross patchness, I went and had a pedicure (not that I am planning on exposing my toes in the Korean autumn but they were looking pretty hideous) and shellac on my nails.  I felt better for it. Then I went to vote.  I had to try two polling stations since I could not work out where to park for the first.  My daughter voted for the first time.  She did it wrong since she did not know how to fill out the card but it is so fecking complicated I don't blame her.

Now, I am charging devices and pondering which among my multitude of electrical adapators is the correct one for Korea.

You snooze, you lose

Of all the things that happened this week, grappling with a stupidly designed travel approval database was not one of the high points.  If I knew who the administrator was I would send a very choice words their way, but more to the point was why it was necessary to use it in the first place "trust and integrity in everything we do" ? hello?

I registered a car in lickety spit fashion this morning, talked to my ex about fumigation, fiddled with my tax return and read an extremely annoying e-mail.  I checked the weather in Seoul for next week, had lunch with a professional skydiver and worried about my non-working washing machine.  The washing machine man came and divined errant bra wire in the filter as the problem and waxed lyrical about Miele washer dryer combos.

Someone else dreamed about chasing balls and actually did chase balls.

 

 

Going the distance

I am loving my up and running course.  I am on week 6 now and I am learning to push myself a bit further every time.  This is my second time around but I feeling much more goal orientated this time.  Bonus is that the dog and I are walking further too just in our daily exercise.  I think listening to stories helps more than music - there is always the plot to propel me along.

The kids had dinner with their dad last night so I ate a sandwich for dinner.  Poor housekeeping but I did have a beetroot, walnut and feta salad for lunch and ate the remains of the fennel gratin standing up at the fridge.  Beetroot has an immediate impact in the bathroom with pink pee.      Quite gratifying.

The oldest's dad bought her an utterly charming salt and pepper set back from the UK.  She has long been obsessed with puffins since she had a toy one as a child.  These are super cute.

Her aunt made her puffin a passport when we first left the UK.  It is long expired but she keeps it with her legitimate passport.  Sadly, this same aunt has terminal cancer and is not expected to last the year.  She is younger than me.  Smoker.  That gave the youngest pause for thought.

 

 

 

The girl who

Is it all run, shop, clean, cook and repeat right now?  I am not complaining as I am enjoying the peaceful routine and slow steps into Spring (we had snow the other day, wtf).

Some minor home improvements have been underway.  I should not be surprised what a difference it makes, but the daughter has a new door on her bedroom and freshly painted walls of a nice clotted cream hue.  She is touchingly devoted to its tidiness (a startling change to several years of slovenliness).  Since I had the masonry bit in the drill, I put up a few more pictures which had been hanging around including these prints that had been in my father's house.  I am not sure where my parents got these from, I don't recall them from my childhood so maybe they belonged to an aunt or maybe they bought them because they liked Mr Pickwick. 

I also sorted the sewing cupboard out which meant I had to revisit my knitting gazing at me reproachfully but I also consigned some fabric scraps I had been holding on to to the dustbin.

On Sunday I did my week 5 run along the lake path.  The dog was very excited by new things like ducks and kangaroos.  The kangaroos eyed him disdainfully which was good as the males can be a bit aggressive at this time of year.  The final km was uphill and a killer but I felt suffused with virtue.  At the dog park I met a couple who my daughter knows from her evening dog group.  They recognised Charlie and said "oh you must be I's mum".  He is a well known professional athlete and she is his very beautiful and charming wife.  They told me my daughter was a lovely girl which made me like them even more.  Dogs are great levellers.

There was no Dr Who on Saturday so I had to make do with Doc Martin reruns which was fine.  Last night I watched the first Jack Irish on the ABC.  It is always interesting to see Guy Pearce and I thought they did it quite well.  I do feel if you watch a lot of television you see the same actors over and over - not just in the small Australian tv scene but even on US tv where we endlessly play the "he was the cop in One Tree Hill and before that he was in Veronica Mars, blah blah" game.  It was very good to see Aaron Pedersen, a very fine actor.  The romance was boring and the girl reporter was way too skinny and I like the books better.

 

Busy body

A lot of work was been done yesterday and a lot of talking.  I had calls from 9pm till midnight.  The midnight call was arranged to suit people in Europe and N America and they did not show.  I was not happy.  Today has another series of long calls though thankfully not so late into the night but I have one at midnight on Friday.  It had better be good.

This was another long weekend.  The oldest went to her brother's 25th birthday party, his silver jubilee as he insisted on calling it, at some salubrious establishment in Sydney.  No doubt, ghastly cocktails were drunk.  While she was whooping it up, the youngest and I had a much more civilised time involving watching Dr Who and eating macaroni cheese.  Actually it was really rainy on Saturday so I think  we just cosied down.  We did talk about Auden, too.   I honestly can't remember what else occupied our time but I am pretty sure I went to the farmers' market, Costco and the wine shop.  The youngest and I did some driving practice, ate lunch with friends, lolled on the sofa, watched our favourite and best Damien Lewis in Life (the youngest, who researches IMDB with a zeal that could be applied to finding a cure for cancer or at a minimum school work, discovered his wife was Malfoy's mother in the HP movies).

The spring weather has abated and I have even turned the heating on a couple of times.   It may be exacerbated by the fact that all windows and doors are open to diffuse paint smell from painter in my daughter's bedroom.  We had a problem with her bedroom door with the lock jamming.  So bad that we had to break the door down to get in so I got a local handyman to come and quote on replacing.  He was super prompt, easy to get on with so as well as replacing the door, he is painting the room as well.  Of course, everything else will look gray by comparison but we go step by step here.

That stuff is taking some extraordinary turns at the moment.  I told my professional advisor that I was gob smacked.  No other word can describe it.  Ever onwards.

 

Unpopular culture

The never ending stuff continues but I am focused on resilience and remembering that control is what the other is trying to exert.  It must be challenging to be a person who can not let anything go.  All that stuff rattling around and controlling your every move and never letting you just be.  Mind decluttering goes along with house decluttering.

There are several things I liked today.  There was a great interview with Bill Henson over at The Design Files.  Just when I was beginning to worry that it was like reading unhappy hipsters, she blew me away with this profile.  He said:

I’m very interested in unpopular culture. So what I tend to read are books which have been out of print for years. So I would nominate as one of my favourite resources second hand bookshops. I think second hand bookshops are the most interesting bookshops anywhere in the world now, whether you’re in New York or London, Paris or Melbourne or Sydney.

They’re interesting because they’re almost starting to accidentally fulfil the role that libraries used to play. Whereas libraries now are being emasculated – anything that hasn’t been borrowed for more than two years is taken out, which is an apalling state of affairs and will sadly keep libraries entirely superficial and fashion prone in future. But second hand bookshops are filled up to the rafters with all this stuff which is not necessarily in vogue, so they’re a real treasure trove.

Second hand music shops that sell vinyl and CDs I find really interesting too. I like to be able to browse physically in shops – record shops and book shops. It’s a totally different thing to browsing online – because you really don’t know what’s going to catch your eye, whereas online the path people use really does involve a line of thought beforehand, so the truly unexpected doesn’t occur in the same way as it does in a physcial shop.

Also, I love his work.

I had a 6am call and my daughter got up without asking and took the dog out for an hour.  Unexpected acts of thoughtfulness.  Someone else was writing about what a pleasure grown up children are.  It's true, they are delightful people.

The youngest is so much happier.   She is friends with all the dog owners who congregate on the parkland to the back of our house.  They are a mixed crew but whereas I stand on the sidelines shy and self-contained, she knows their histories, their dogs' histories and is their friend.  She says "mummy, you just have to ask them about their dogs and they tell you everything".  She has always been good at making connections.

Sadly, I am still on borrowed computer without access to photos but the world is looking brighter.

Petrolhead

On Saturday, I had to fill the lawnmower with petrol.  For some reason (probably to stop the dog sniffing it) I had placed it on a high shelf in the garage.  The lid was not on securely and when I lifted it down, petrol splashed on my face and in my hair.  I ran inside and got my kid to pour jugs of water over me.  We got it out of my eyes pretty quickly but four days and four hair washings later my hair still smells of petrol.  It is quite hideous.

Also, I fell asleep on the sofa last night.  A long walk with the dog may have contributed. This morning I got up at 5.30 to dial into a call which was mostly listening on my side, so I put the phone on mute, stuck my earphones in and did another one of my up and running workouts.  It felt very rewarding to multi-task in that manner.

The holiday hangover

That was it? I spent 19 fucking hours listening to that horrible book and that was it?  That'll learn me to pay the slightest attention to best seller lists.  I downloaded an old Sara Paretsky to take the horrid noise out of my ears.  Plus this one is narrated by Jean Smart who I know little about but who has a nice Alison Janney sardonic lilt to her voice.

I am using a borrowed laptop and I quite like its big clear screen but it weighs a ton.  I fear I am drawing ever closer to joining the ranks of mac owners since our company policy is driving us ever closer to bring your own technology.  Whatever, there are a few items that come ahead of one of those in the pantheon of home improvement.

It was a long weekend.  I bought the new Ottolenghi/Tamimi  book and love nearly everything in it.  An ode to hummus! 

This weekend was industrious.  I made an easy and delicious tiramisu.  I cut the grass.  I wheelbarrowed 20 loads of manure to the veggie beds.  The dog rolled in the manure.  The oldest cleaned out that horrible cupboard where the vacuum cleaner and cleaning stuff goes and it is possible to open it without stuff tumbling out on top of you.  Three sets of sheets were washed, ironed and replaced.  More cushion colour choices were arranged.  I walked the dog umpteen times.

On the down side, the lock on my daughter's bedroom jammed and we could not get the door open.  I climbed in her window but it was stuck from either side.  We ended up having to hack away at the wood around the lock to release the whole thing.  I am not too sad as it was a rubbish door and needed replacing anyway but it was an hour that could have spent on more productive activities - like making cake.

On Saturday night we had souvlaki and crunchy salad.  On Sunday, we ate roast chicken, cauliflower cheese and roast potatoes.  Last night, we ate grilled lamb chops and salad again.  I feel the food of summer is moving in.

We watched the first two movies of LOTR.  Well, we watched all of movie one but to be honest we skip most of the Frodo parts of the second one.  All that angst and drama - it's like the annoying teenage Harry.   I've been reading lots about New Zealand from Wee Birdy and the one true ring and am seriously thinking a visit is long overdue.  I have been to Christchurch and Wellington lots of time for work but hardly anywhere else.

Today was a return to daily life but things are weirdly quiet with half my geographic region on holidays what with our labour day, moon festival and Ghandi day.  Time to wade through all that stuff which is backing up.