Happy Valentine's Day

It's a simple message but it's from the heart! ;-)

(click to embiggen)

It's also from here, if we're being literal

A Slight Oversight

It's been ages since I went travelling* and my realisation of this fact ran smack-bang into my remembering that one of my friends who has been working in New Zealand for the last year is finishing up her contract in about a month and will be heading back to Australia.

I messaged her saying it was a pity I hadn't had the wherewithal to get myself organised to go over and see her at any point during that time.

She said "What are you doing the weekend of the 25th and 26th of February? We're going to the beach for a weekend, you want to come?"

A few years ago this sort of spontaneous arrangement would have had me hyperventilating into a paper bag, here in the present I just said 'YES!'

I started looking at flights, got the OK from my boss to take some time off, made myself a reminder to buy a new bathing suit and then I remembered...

My passport was due to expire mid-June!

Crud!

Sure I'd be travelling in February but they advise you not to travel on a passport with less than 6 months on it on the chance that you get to the other country and get turned back at the gate.

Crud crud crud!

I have my Italian passport of course and that would work but what if when I came back into Australia on my Italian passport that meant the immigration office would be considering me a foreign entry and would later demand that I leave the country and come back in on my Australian passport?

Unlikely, I know, but this is where all the nerves which would usually have popped up when I made the decision to travel had obviously decided to set up shop.

I jumped on the Australian passport website and started clicking around to see whether I was in fact screwed.

According to the website it usually takes 10 working days to process a passport - score! - but you should allow between 5 and 8 working days for postage to be safe - un-score**!

Crud crud CRUD!

But wait!

What's this?

Priority processing?

For an extra wad of cash we will process your passport in 2 working days instead of 10?

So, bribery, ey?

I can play that game.

On the Sunday I filled and printed out my passport renewal form and located my old passport.

On the Monday I went into the post office, had a photo taken, signed my form, transferred my wads of cash, watched as they invalidated my old passport with a pair of scissors*** and submitted my form.

On Tuesday I received notice that my passport was finished and would be on its way to me soon.

On Thursday my passport turned up in the post.

Phew!

Pheeeeee-eeeeeeeeeeewwwww!

Considering the amount of dreams and nightmares I've had about racing to airports and realising that I'd forgotten to bring my passport with me, the prospect of actually not having a passport completely terrifying.

Now I have my passport, I have my flights booked and everything else is just details.

This is going to be fun!

I know this is just going to set me off again, with the scheming and the planning and the yearning.

And oh boy am I ready for that.

I am definitely ready for that :-D



*A bit over 2 years.

**At the time I had 15 working days available to be and I was not willing to gamble.

***They just snip a bit off the front cover with scissors so nobody can mess it about to look valid again.

Expanding The Franchise The Old-Fashioned Way

Do you guys remember my mate Awesome?

Well she and her fella have been married for about a year and a half now and towards the end of last year she told me that the two of them were trying for a baby.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Awesome has never been that interested in kids and had always said she was going to have dogs instead.

Of course that was before we met our friend Inky*.

Inky has three little boys.
When we first started hanging out with her they were 0, 2, and 4.
They're now 2, 4, and 6.

Over the last two years Awesome's time with Inky's kids has obviously convinced her that tinier humans are not in fact the devil's spawn that she thought they were and that having one of her own might not be such a terrible thing.

And now Awesome and her husband are expecting.

So having been informed I am going to be an auntie, I immediately starting thinking of ways I could help out.

For starters I've been reminding everyone that as a metal-head couple, Awesome and her fella are not going to be wanting any gifts in pastel.
They've already bought Awesome Junior this here jumpsuit...


...and most of the baby's other clothes are likely to be fairly similar in nature.

The other thing I started doing was research.

This is what I do.

I read up on stuff and just have it sitting in my head in case it becomes useful.
It's how I helped my sister and Awesome plan for their respective weddings and it has served me well in a lot of other situations.

So I did a bit of generalised reading here, a bit of asking all my kid-having relatives and coworkers what are the most useful things you can do to help out a new set of parents there, a bit of looking a baby paraphernalia when out and about.

Over Christmas I spent about four days getting some hands on experience with my cousin's 4 month old and 20 month old so that when Awesome is all sleep-deprived and serial-killer-looking I can pop over for a bit and wrangle the child as she has a shower and/or a nap and gets out of the house for a bit.

Two tips I learned from that particular experience:

1. Don't wear necklaces around babies and toddlers. Not because they will get a hold of them - though they will - but because they have this disconcerting habit of flinging their heads against your chest and you don't want to have to explain a Celtic cross shaped bruise on their soft head bits**.
2. If you've got a voice you use for telling your dogs or cats off it works perfectly with kids. You say 'put that down' in the 'no' voice you use for dogs and they put that right down. So useful!
   

Somehow I managed to not actually be in charge of said kids any time they needed their nappies changed which I just put down to being further proof that the universe loves me.

Awesome isn't quite ready to actually think about the Baby Exit Strategy just yet so I figured I'd have a look into it for her so that when she is ready to start planning I can have the information on hand.

So I started watching this documentary One Born Every Minute and Oh My Lord.

Apparently having babies can be somewhat painful!
I mean obviously it would be considering what has to come out where but until I watched this show I didn't fully comprehend how long labour went on and some of things that can happen during it.
Bloody amazing.

And some people's partners are completely [redacted] useless!
They just sit there looking fed up and making snide comments whilst their lady writhes around in agony.
I know you're only seeing a slice of their life and it's at quite a stressful time but you'd think that during labour would be the one time you'd manage to reign in your jackassery and be supportive!
Even if just to look good for the cameras!

But overall it's a fascinating series.

You get to see a snapshot of people's family situations, their circumstances, their personalities and witness an important moment in their lives.

It does make you think the human body is somewhat bodged together as it seems to take an absurd amount of effort to eject a fresh human being from the slot.

Inky is going to be Awesome's other birth partner (along with Awesome's husband) as she's had several children and is a registered nurse so I won't actually be there but knowing what is coming up is both incredibly interesting and rather daunting.

Both from a logistics point of view and from a 'holy crap, we're adults now' viewpoint.

Obviously we have been for a while, we're all about 28, but the events of the last few years have really driven it home.

Awesome has gotten married and is expecting a baby.

Eep has built a house with her fella and they're getting married at the end of this year.

I have a credit card and have used it to book international flights and hotel rooms like a real grown up and am routinely taken seriously despite constantly feeling like I'm play acting.

We've all had cars, had jobs, paid taxes, organised all sorts of weird and woolly grown up things and after Awesome Junior pops out of the chute everything is going to be different from then on.

Awesome will be the first of my friends to have a baby*** and even with all the reading I've done I don't think I'll be ready for how much that's going to change our lives and the nature of our friendships.

If nothing else it's going to be educational.



*She has tattoos. Lovely tattoos.

**This didn't happen but it was close, oh so close!

***Inky has babies but I didn't know here when she was having them. They came as part of the package with our friendship. Awesome is the first of my school friends to have a baby.

Take Me To The Farm

My uncle's farm is one of the most absurdly relaxing places I know of.

Any time spent there seems to somehow double and slow down.

You don't feel guilty about taking it easy the way you might if you were in your own home surrounded by projects and tasks you know you should be getting to.

And yet you always seem to get something done whether it's cooking, reading, walking, general arty craftiness, conversations you've been meaning to have, drawing...

In autumn we get together to gather chestnuts and bring cheese, meats, marinated vegetables, fresh breads, tarts, pastas, bakes, sweet biscuits, hot drinks, cool drinks and other assorted items to share in a huge communal meal along with freshly roasted chestnuts.

In winter it is what particularly sheltered Australians consider freezing and it is so satisfying to sit around in front of the wood fire with a drink and a book looking out at the winter world.

This Australia Day long weekend* we wandered up again and apart from the usual blur of delicious local foods, cool afternoons underneath the trees by the house, and spirited debates**, I achieved a very specific victory.

Well, two victories really.

First of all, I finally began to learn how to crochet!

My aunt who is a complete art and craft genius talked me through the basic stitches and I have put together a moderately respectable practise square that looks like I know what I'm doing.

The second victory is by far the sweeter.

I was listening to Re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton and once my uncle worked out that it was a song about zombies he started rolling his eyes and he and my Dad started going on about 'you and your obsession with zombies'.
It petered out fairly quickly as I make no apologies for my interest in zombies and we had other things to debate that night but my moment of triumph was yet to come.

The next day I was sitting at the picnic table underneath the apple tree finishing off knitting The World's Widest scarf and listening to the audiobook recording of World War Z.
My mother and my aunt had joined me and we were all sitting there knitting and/or crocheting and listening to Henry Rollins, Alan Alda and others recount their experiences during the zombie wars.

Then my father and my uncle came over and, obeying our family's tendency to listen to absolutely anything going, they sat down and tuned in.

Apart from the odd question about the nature of the virus that was supposed to have spawned the zombie plague and the logistics of infection, they didn't speak.

At the end, after watching them listen to almost the entirety of World War Z, I sat back and waited for their reaction.

Instead of a resumption of 'pfffffffffffffft zombies' I got:

Dad: I've got the solution. Before you send your troops into battle, take all their teeth out, so if they turn, they won't be able bite anyone else!

Uncle: Nobody is going to sign up for that. Gummy veterans. All you need is porous muzzles with slash-proof straps and locks that are zombie-proof. Then they'll be neutralised if they are turned but get to keep their teeth if they aren't.

They spent the next two hours discussing light-weight battle armour options, protection plans for civilians, tactics for dispatching large amounts of zombies with low numbers of human casualties, some of the logistics involved in learning to produce adequate food with lower technology for a population that can't move outside a safe zone, where the biggest sociological and topographical problems would be in Australia that would hamper our efforts to push back the zombie menace and survive as a nation, and whether Grandma would retain enough sentience to hunt us down and gnaw our bits off if nobody went to save her before we retreated to a family stronghold***.

Game. Set. Match. Bitches.

It's taken me years to snare them but of all my family members these two are the ones you want to have planning for your survival.
They're both intelligent, thorough, with sprawling and unnatural memories and interests in just about everything.
They have the kinds of minds that look at the obvious and see the supporting factors that most will forget, and which automatically consider things which you may never have even thought about even when faced with the hardships that the absence of these things may present.

I may not be able to actually coax them into developing an official Zombie Survival Plan and distributing it at Christmas but now that I know the cogs are turning, I feel a lot more confident about my chances of survival should the time come.

Because let's face it, initial survival is one thing but long-term survival is another and initial survival can be a difficult thing to achieve when you're stretching yourself thin trying to gather in a family as large as mine with minimal losses.



*Well, we made it a long weekend by taking the Friday off. What's the point of working Friday after having a public holiday on Thursday?

**What other people may call 'a group of nutters barking at each other'.

***The conclusion was yes, yes she would. So we've assigned the closest family member Grandma rescuing duties in the event of a zombie uprising.

Australia Day

Today someone I'm "friends" with on Facebook posted one of those lovely 'we grew here, you flew here' posters on their wall, apparently as part of their celebration of Australia Day.

That rankled. I hate stuff like that.
So I commented that I'd never thought of them as somebody who would be hostile to people trying to start a new life.
Other people chimed in with their own surprise but I was still cranky.

So I wrote this and posted it on my own wall.

If you've ever used the phrase 'go back to where you came from' and meant it, please de-friend me.
Being scared of different cultures and languages doesn't make you proudly Australian, it makes you a wuss and a whiner.

We may be the lucky country but that's the point. We live in safety and freedom because of luck. Luck of where we are, luck of what we have.
It isn't a right, we aren't entitled to it, we're just lucky to have it, and not wanting to share it is selfish and petty.
Nobody wants to take it away from you, they just want the same chances for themselves and their families.

People go on about how new Australians should integrate with 'us' but when you push them away and shout at them and reject them, how can they? And why would they want to?

We're not full but you are, and I'm sure you can guess what of.

I don't like people who claim to speak for my country and then spray broad-spectrum hostile xenophobia.

I don't like anybody who chooses to define themselves by what they hate because then everything in their world is divided into the things they hate or don't hate, and what kind of way is that to live your life?

And above all, I don't like bullies.

And if you're swaggering around telling people that they need to meet your standards and do what you say and be exactly like you or they can piss off, that's exactly what you are - a bully.

The woman in question deleted her aggressive 'nobody has attacked me yet but I'm going to be defensive about my right to celebrate Australia Day anyway posts' and publicly apologised which was heartening because I don't want to think that she is really that kind of person*.

But the amount of people who then sprang up to bemoan the fact we have to apologise for loving our country or saying 'Happy Australia Day' - which nobody had said they did - or let the Muslims stop us celebrating Easter and Christmas or singing the national anthem in schools - which they haven't - was depressing.

Does anybody actually know anyone who has ever been told by an immigrant to stop doing what they're doing?

Have they ever had a person of another faith start screeching at them to stop celebrating Christmas?

Do you really this it's inappropriate for Aboriginal people to protest the celebration of Australia Day?
Can you really not understand why they might refer to it as Invasion Day and want any celebration of our shared nationhood to be acknowledged on a different day?
How can you say 'get over it' to a people whose society has been decimated and their culture irreparably damaged by the wholesale theft of their land?

The wonderful double-standard of telling new citizens to shut up and do what they're told and not try to change anything or try to steal the country from us and telling the original residents of our country to shut up and do what they're told and stop complaining about how we changed things and stole the country from them!

When I lived in Brunswick which has a large immigrant presence with a decent sized Muslim community, I was never treated with anything but respect or at the very worst disinterest.

Nobody there cared how I dressed or how I acted as long as I observed local laws and basic social rules of civility and I extended them the same courtesy.

I love my country.
I love living here.
But I really dislike stuff like this and always will.



*She may still believe in integration but at least she posted that she thinks that anyone willing to work to support themselves and their community is more than welcome as far as she's concerned. She's still obviously got issues but at least she'll engage with you on the topic.

Knit Wit

Remember how instead of learning how to crochet, I got seduced by the unholy art of knitting?

Well, as I march onwards to becoming the owner of the widest scarf in history*, I thought I'd post a couple of the videos that I found helpful as I began knitting.

The diagrams in books are all very good and well but until you've seen an action in motion, if you're anything like me those diagrams may as well be Magic Eye puzzles WHICH DON'T WORK AND HAVE NEVER WORKED AND DON'T SHOW ANY PICTURES EVER NO MATTER WHAT EVERYBODY ELSE SAYS!

YouTube has been a real boon to crafty beginners who don't have regular access to friends, relatives or teachers who are familiar enough with said crafts to be able to guide them.








Knittingtipsbyjudy does a 'how to add a new ball of yarn' video too but as she was purling and I haven't got to purling yet, I found it less straightforward than the video I embedded.

And soon I'll even get to try this one...





... at which point I will throw my outlandishly large scarf around my neck and shoulders and part of my torso and will settle down to actually learn how to crochet!


*I started off with a bunch of stitches because it didn't look that broad but it turns out, yes it was. I think I'm going to have to fold it in half and sew it up and turn it inside out or some malarky unless I want people to think it's a shawl.

And Then There Were Three

In the interest of organisation and simplicity I'm creating two complementary blogs to keep this one company in the cold dark waste of the internets.

Additional Blog #1

I tried formatting my Reading List as a page attached to this blog but after a certain amount of books, the page refused to show any more and either deleted entries from earlier in the piece or didn't show later additions.

After temporarily conceding defeat (i.e. ignoring it for a while), I've finally created a separate blog to list all the books I've read and what I thought about them.

It's as much a personal record as a way to share these books with other people.

I'm afraid my descriptions and reviews tend to run to superlatives and generalisations but I can promise you 'no spoilers' because I have a soul and some common decency.

So here I give you Ricochet's Reading List which I will be bringing up to date shortly.


Additional Blog #2

As one of my freshly made New Year's Resolutions, I vowed to make one comic for every day of this year.

As I've found public accountability a great personal motivator, I've decided to post them all online.

That and the fact that whilst art for art's sake is an excellent and worthwhile pursuit, it really is much more fun when you share it around.

So in order to avoid cluttering up my normal blog space with comics, or allowing myself the cheat of pretending that they pass as normal blog posts instead of writing normal blog posts, I hereby declare this corner of the internet Pinball Panels.

Once I've spent some quality time with my scanner and had a fiddle about with the template settings and whatnot, I hope they will be made welcome and that the elder sister of the three blogs won't feel jealous of the twins and start bullying them.

They're just little, Pinball Mind, they don't know any better!
And they're both kind of one trick ponies so you've really nothing to be worried about.