It’s been quite the year …

I have some thoughts swirling in my head that are demanding to be let out.

The last time I blogged was July 30, and at the time I was all about good intentions and WordPress Wednesdays being in the calendar. I noted that I was juggling a few things and made this bold prediction for the coming week:

Next week, for example, I’ll be (briefly) juggling two subjects + a writing course + research + private tutoring + 2 jobs (including a mandatory appearance at a Sydney campus). And, breathe.

Instead, my Father-in-Law fell out of bed the following Tuesday and broke his hip. That was the day I was supposed to be heading up to Sydney in the evening so I could go to mandatory training on the Wednesday. I felt pretty uneasy about the whole thing and insisted that I was cancelling, despite my husband telling me everything would be fine: “Dad” would sail through surgery on Wednesday and I’d be back on Thursday to go visit him.

It was lucky I cancelled. On Wednesday morning the surgeon called and said he was too unwell for surgery, and that an untreated broken hip in an 87 year old was likely to be a life-ending event. Chris proved them right on the Thursday.

The Wednesday was also Day 1 of the four-week intensive writing course. And, as noted above, I was doing two jobs and two concurrent Uni subjects at the time. I got an extension on the final assignment for one subject, muddled my way through, and (somehow–I genuinely don’t understand how) kept up with the Creative Writing workload.

Three weeks later, I was down to one subject at Uni + the CW course, but I started doing marking on top of my day job and my other, smaller Uni job. So 70 hours or so per week of paid work. It was in the final week of this–and the first week of the longer term Creative Writing course, in an uncanny echo that made me very uncomfortable!–that my own Dad was taken to A & E via ambulance. Twice. This has led to some pretty invasive tests, which are still ongoing. One surgery was scheduled for literally the middle day of HSC Marking season, where I was once again working 60+ hours a week. My parents live three hours away. He needed transport to Nepean hospital, which is 2/3 of the way there.

I got them there.

Reader, it’s been a time.

I had moved on to the full year Creative Writing course and was managing (again-somehow) right through the HSC period but then they moved into a new rhythm and I’ve not done anything for about 2.5 weeks now. This is not good. My pop culture research all has to be undertaken outside of work hours because of the nature of the way my job is funded. So last weekend, I did the final edits on one chapter, due out next year; somehow, I also have to watch about 60 hours of footage and write a journal article by January 6. I have two Board meetings between now and the end of the year. My final Uni assignment is due Monday, so I’m trying to get that in and out of the way; I am continuing to plant and maintain the flowers for my daughter’s bridal bouquet and table decorations because obviously, another low-pressure thing needed to be added to the mix. 😉 Oh yes, and we’re hosting Christmas.

I also did a sustainable floristry workshop in the middle of HSC Marking, because of course I did …

These are all things I like doing, but dear Lord, when they all hit at once …

And so, we have limped through to the Silly Season. It is December 4 and my lights and decorations are not done, and if you know me at all, you are probably as alarmed by that as I am right now. But we had unpainted timbers on the front verandah after Jeff fixed our twisted verandah poles. Having paid for the roof and windows to be cleaned, I could hardly hang lights over moldy and/or unpainted poles, now, could I?

Three days of climbing up and down a painting platform before and after work (thank you, Daylight Savings) has reminded me why I paid someone to do the roof and windows. I can barely walk today.

Sadly, there is more painting in my immediate future. On Monday, Child the Younger told us that he and His New Love were looking for a flat together. By Monday afternoon, they had secured one and he’d given notice. So when Open Agent called, I spoke with them, rather than putting them off as I usually do, and now it seems we need to sort out a Contract for Sale and get the place spruced up PDQ.

So, the obvious question is WHY? Why do I do this to myself?

And the answer is: because I am once again getting unemployment for my birthday this year. Does two years in a row make it an annual tradition? Both work contracts end in December; I have 6 more hours to work in one Uni job and 9 more days in the other.

This is why I take on the marking shifts and subject myself to working days, nights and weekends at least three times a year, for two to three weeks at a time–those are WFH jobs I might actually retain next year, when my “main” jobs over the last three years have been extremely insecure. Why push the sale of the flat through so quickly? Same reasons. We’re making hay while the sun shines–I’m not going to have any salary come January, so settling on the flat puts money in the bank that we can then draw down for living expenses.

And why add the study/gardening/creative writing/sitting on Boards to an already-full plate? Well, if you’re going to have early retirement thrust upon you, you’d better have some stuff to fill your days …

What’s one more side project between friends?

So, no promises around what may or not be achieved, let alone what may or may not be published, over the next three weeks. But as they sing in the Rankin Bass Christmas classics; I will put one foot in front of the other …

My Midweek “Weekend”

I love Wednesdays. They’re my “day off” from my main day job, or as we jokingly call it around here, the mid-week weekend. Wednesday basically means that I can dress comfortably and feel slightly less guilty when I’m snoozing the alarm and hiding from the cold mornings.

My Wednesdays, however, are no less busy than my “work” days. I swear I spend just as much time–if not more time–moving blocks around in my diary in an attempt to keep on top of everything.

I put work up there in scare quotes because one of the big things I do on Wednesdays is my other job, for another Uni. (Also, my main Uni colleagues can’t always manipulate the calendar adequately so I sometimes end up with work meetings I can’t quite avoid on Wednesdays. I could get all legalistic about it, but I’m on a short-term contract and sometimes it’s easier to roll with it and take an early mark on another day to compensate).

The way my job is funded means that I can’t do my Gothic research on the company dime, so that’s also been pushed to the mid-week and conventional weekends. I doubt there are many GenXers out there with Teen Wolf regularly blocked in to their Outlook calendars, but here we are.

Wednesdays are also used for any appointments like Physio or medical or hair. Last week, we crammed in a past minute meeting with the Jeff the Wonder-Builder who helped me redesign part of the garden for improved bridal bouquet production. His team brought that idea to fruition the following day.

The Birdies vege patch has been here about 15 years. Now moved so a shed can go in this spot.

Four hours later, flanked by brand new rose beds …

While I was unemployed and then underemployed, I thought it made good sense to lean into my (bonus)Granny/(pre)retirement/(sporadic)gardening phase. So I recently enrolled in a Creative Writing course–which both terrifies and excites me–and, as I’ve mentioned in passing before, I am once again doing some study. Now that time is in much shorter supply, I am regularly questioning my own sanity. There are significant financial and logistical imperatives for doing each of these things at the times I chose. It’s just unfortunate that there are times when they are all stacked on top of each other. Next week, for example, when I’ll be (briefly) juggling two subjects + a writing course + research + private tutoring + 2 jobs (including a mandatory appearance at a Sydney campus). And, breathe.

“It’s not the load that breaks you down; it’s the way you carry it.”
Lou Holtz

Wednesdays are also, of course, supposed to be WordPress Wednesdays, which has become more of a stretch goal than a habit over the years.

And so to conclude, I’m going to cheat a bit and thus reduce the “Blog” block in today’s calendar. (Or, perhaps we can reframe that and say I’m utilising a fortuitous coalescence of gardening, writing and studying). So here is a brief Uni piece that I shared last night, around personal, significant cultural objects:

This display is where I can see it last thing at night, and first thing in the morning. On the left is a leather case containing my late grandfather’s binoculars. I used them for bird-watching in my Diploma of Sustainable Living assignments; I’m pretty sure he only used them at the races. The small cloisonné vase on the right belonged to his wife, my grandmother. (They didn’t have the most conventional marriage, so a little distance is appropriate). My Grandma passed when I was 13, but one of the things I loved most about visiting was that she always–or so it seemed–had home-grown roses in little vases on the mantelpiece. So year-round flowers have become my goal–and my planting choices are heavily influenced by the various floral obsessions of my four grandparents, all of whom were keen gardeners: dahlias, salvias, roses, lavender. It’s a way to feel close though they are all now long gone. I guess in a sense the practice of gardening is an attempt to maintain those links in a more conscious and active way.

Starting Over … Again!

It’s been so long since I’ve added to this blog, that I wasn’t able to log-in for a hot minute there. Mind you, that has pretty much been the theme of the week!

In a major life update and against all odds given the current state of Higher Education, my half-year of substantive unemployment has come to a close. I have a half-year contract doing what I did before, at the same level, which feels nothing short of miraculous. It is a Catholic university, so perhaps that is appropriate.

If you’re playing along at home: yes, that does make four universities in under two years!

In the interim, I cobbled together what work I could, which I hasten to add was nothing like a living wage. I did manage to slog my way through to get my teaching number/s reactivated … but didn’t get any work. By the time I was offered something, this 6-month gig was on offer. Since March, I have also been doing some casual delivery of literacy programs and marking at another university. Both contract jobs are based in Sydney, but are very sensibly allowing me to work remotely where that is appropriate, which is the bulk of the time.

I did NAPLAN marking — which was a disaster, and I quit after a week of not getting within a bull’s roar of minimum wage on any given day because of their ineffectual systems and poor communication causing unnecessary delays. I did GAMSAT marking, which started around the same time and is, mercifully, professional, organised, and generates appropriate remuneration. I continued my Board work, and I extended my studies from an Undergrad Certificate, enrolling in the Diploma course.

I am now wondering how to juggle all of this along with a “real” job 4 days/week, but I guess I’ll figure it out, because I always do.

Higher Ed, however, is still a mess. Every day I hear of further job cuts at one institution or another. There is no respite in sight.

Yesterday, both universities were impacted by IT issues and I was struggling to log in to anything. The new place is like working in two half-universities. The team and discussions about work are fabulous and get me very excited about what we can achieve, but then whenever I try to find my way through any system (you know: email, pay, super, induction …), I wonder what in the 1978 is going on. They are evidently still recovering from a past cyber incident, but in my case, issues could also be because someone has not yet triggered my access. It is only Day 3. It would be reasonable to think that further clarity may yet arrive.

Research is going OK. One chapter is with editors, one is off to the publishers, and I was approached to submit a journal article for a special edition on Teen Wolf, which looks like it is going ahead.

Father in Law has had a long hospital stay this year, but is doing well now. One of his other kids is coming for a visit this weekend, which will be nice for him.

Spousal Unit has been doing casual teaching days, because he’s very bad at being retired.

Child the Elder has settled in to her new place and we spent some time with her on the weekend to distract her because the Son Out Law was working away.

Child the Younger has a one year teaching contract and has suddenly become too diligent to spend time with us!

Callie is now on anxiety medication, which has helped my anxiety because she has stopped peeing on everything that doesn’t move (and once, famously, on something that does: me. Lying in bed). Clover is my devoted shadow who tries to race past me and hop into bed with me each night. Unfortunately, her delighted purring if she succeeds is far too much for this insomniac to handle.

The chooks are fine, but in unproductive Winter mode.

The fish are back in the television fish tank, thanks to our amazing builder, Jeff, who can turn his hand to anything.

So: yeah. We’re still here. And I’m still very regional, despite working for metro employers.

A Day of Transitions

Today, I turn 52.

I also moved from full-time employment into … something else. Something TBD.

It was not my intention to “retire” at 52. To begin transition into retirement –ie move into part-time work– was the hope. The state of the higher education sector meant that that was not even a discussion. Just: thanks, you did a great job, we don’t know quite how we’re going to manage with this ever-shrinking team, but there’s No Money.

As someone who wears my leftie little heart on my sleeve, it is both profoundly ironic and profoundly disappointing that I managed to survive the Rudd era pulling of funds from universities to fund schools’ Gonski(-esque) reforms and a decade of political inertia interspersed with robust political uni-bashing and a global pandemic, only to fall as the hoped-for reforms were … well, talked about. And then somehow linked to a housing crisis (which, by the way, started during COVID when there were precisely zero incoming international students, and which ignores basic common sense–like, thinking for approximately 30 seconds about what proportion of the housing market is tied up by international students, and whether student housing typically looks anything like what Mum, Dad and a couple of kids are trying to lock down in the suburbs. But I digress).

My first job was as a waitress in a little steakhouse in Blackheath when I had just turned 15. I’ve had some sort of job pretty much ever since. As of this minute, I have precisely nothing going on until a couple of marking gigs next March. And I don’t quite know what to do with that.

And so, we continue on with our manic little December. Last night, we celebrated my father-in-law’s 87th birthday (Dec 18), my 52nd birthday (Dec 20) and my daughter’s 26th birthday (Dec 21). I am usually vehemently, violently anti-combined celebrations of any flavour in December, but logistically, this was the only thing we could get to work.

Child the Younger, Son-Out-Law, Child the Elder, Father-in-Law, Spousal Unit, Self, Parental Units.

When the cake shop says they can only do a max of 35 characters …

And so I have a lot of thoughts but am a bit short on words and utterly devoid of answers to well-meaning and enthusiastic enquiries as to what is next. So, for now: Happy Holidays. And 2025, on balance, probably has to better than 2024, so cheers to that.

Update

Well, we all survived the mid-October mess. Except the 19 year old cat. And I have zero interest in revisiting how that all played out. It was not a fun time.

With regard to the Father-in-Law, we had five hours of debate around consent and who could give it (he has two POAs –both in Queensland; one is MIA and the other was in communicado). One nurse helpfully explained to him that they were just trying to protect his best interests. I pointed out that it was in his best interest to have the festering tumour removed from his head. His surgeon agreed with me.

Luckily, the Nursing Unit Manager is someone I’ve known for years, who has a great deal of common sense and knows it would be out of character for me to be somehow trying to leverage personal gain from an octogenarian pensioner with cancer. He put the case to the Director of Medical Services, who also agreed that maybe removing the tumour was the better option than just letting him walk around with it or trying radiotherapy which would knock him around more (and presumably also require some form of consent!).

He’s healing well, and the skin graft has taken beautifully. He has his follow-up next week so we have digits crossed for clear margins.

Work continues to be difficult. I have been marking, on an impossibly tight deadline that kept becoming worse because of systems that didn’t work as promised, and students who were upset about things that had bugger all to do with me (like 73 being less than 75; or that I had marked the assignment that they uploaded, as opposed to the one that they meant to upload but didn’t).

It is equally excruciating to sit in meetings planning for next year, knowing I will not be part of it. I keep reminding myself not to offer opinions since I have no horse in the race.

Meanwhile, well-meaning people both internal and outside the sector offer platitudes: with your skills, you’ll get another job.

Facts not in evidence, Your Honour.

The Higher Education sector is in chaos. There are hiring freezes seemingly everywhere … which seems very mild, when you are securely in employment, but is quite scarily relevant, when you are actively seeking to be hired. Worse, some universities are shedding jobs–regional universities, in particular. 600+ at ANU, 200 at Canberra. Closer to home, more than 300 at UOW (where some former colleagues I rate highly, and indeed whole schools, have been told they’re on the hit list …. but they can still make an argument to be saved. Bring a support person).

I was asked if I was really trying to find a job.

I am not yet 52, and while I was hoping to transition to retirement in the not-too-distant future (my husband is already past retirement age, so we will need to have some adventures together before I hit one of the magical Super or pension ages!), I did not have complete unemployment in my early 50s on my life plan. So of course I am trying to find a job. I am, however, also a realist who is currently processing that I will more than likely never work again in the field of Higher Ed to which I have devoted myself for the past couple of decades.

Nor am I prepared to sell up and move to another city or state after we both worked so hard to set ourselves up for retirement here. Because, yes, we have thought this through; we continue to do so.

I could, for example, go back to school teaching. All I have to do is find all my qualifications, get them certified, pay a fee I don’t owe but was arguing with NESA about plus a new one, and then wait to see if my qualifications are deemed ok. I may also have to prove I’m literate and numerate, I think. I will be considered a provisional graduate, meaning my thirty years of experience will not count, and I will be on a starting salary that is a fraction of what I am on now (although, admittedly much better than the $0 pa I am currently staring down). And if I don’t get enough days to produce enough evidence to jump through the required hoops within two years, my teaching number will be revoked again. (So don’t believe the stories of a “teacher shortage.” There’s a shortage of teachers in schools. There is, however, a surplus out here of teachers who are no longer employed in schools–for more than thirty years, half of all beginning teachers have left in the first five years!–doing Cost Benefit Analyses because the system is screaming at us that what we have to offer is not valued. Like, at all).

I probably will end up doing the necessary admin to get my number back, because as much as casual teaching remains, in my opinion, the worst bits of teaching, I’ve been assured that there might be some Inclusive Ed days, which would bring me more than just a paycheque. And for better or for worse, I am someone who has always needed more than just a paycheque.

And so it is that every Wednesday, we check the school education jobs email. Occasionally, up comes a shorter-term contract in a hard-to-staff school with sign-on bonuses, and potentially jobs for both of us. But when we start to work through the logistics, it just doesn’t seem feasible. What would we do with the house? The cats? The chooks? The Father-in-Law? (“Hard to staff” is code for miles and miles from our current home, lives, and responsibilities). Or does one of us stay here, and we lead a separated life (we tried that once before, and lasted five weeks, if memory serves). In that scenario, the sign-on bonus won’t touch the sides of what it costs to run two households, anyway.

The remainder of the local jobs on offer are things like waitressing and motel cleaning, which I’ve done before. I’m not sure how my now-much-older-body would hold up to doing them again. Nor is my Physio. This week, she asked me why my body is so tight. I told her I think my body has been flooded with cortisol since we came back from America … eighteen months ago. She told me she thought that was probably right.

Today’s flooding cause was, ironically enough, the fish tank.

Now, I love our fish tank. It’s purpose built into my grandparents’ former TV cabinet (the person who made it has since gone out of business. I checked). Today, I discovered that it’s been leaking long enough to damage both said cabinet, and the flooring underneath it.

I am devastated. I have temporarily moved the fish, and now I am trying to figure out how to isolate and fix a leaking fish tank. (I guess the leak is on the side with the water damage?). And when to find the time to do it. And what happens if I don’t quite do it right – having to move the fish a second time would not be great, for anyone. (I’ve listed the repair on AirTasker, but no bites just yet).

The idea was to preserve this, not destroy it.

And so it goes. If I can fix the tank myself, maybe that can become my new post-Higher Ed career.

Something Unexpected Happened …

Yesterday, I spent more than two hours arguing with my printer before eventually calling the HP helpline. Like many IT helplines, they give instructions that are very clear to them, but perhaps not to a stressed-out layperson. You know, like: “Can you type in your Printer IP address?”

Me: I’m sure I can. If you give me a minute to figure out where on earth to find it.

The second time she gave this kind of “for the new people, it’s where it’s always been” instruction, I called her on it quite deliberately.

“I’m supposed to be doing my job.” I reminded her. “I don’t work with this stuff every day. You do, because it’s your job. You can’t expect me to be as familiar with it as you are.”

So after forty minutes of me following her instructions so I could “fix” my own still-under-warranty printer-that-doesn’t-print, she thanked me because without me, they couldn’t do what they do.

I pointed out that if the printer did what it was supposed to do and actually printed, they wouldn’t need me and that would probably be a better outcome, as far as I was concerned.

The multi-stage instructions were of course complex and recursive and dictated by the sequence and colour of the in-house disco being performed by my printer, so of course when the same (or another, who knows?) issue occurred today, I have been unable to replicate them.

I do keep getting the most delightful message from HP when I try to log in so I can get out of their extortionate monthly ink subscription. This is not great value for money, since the printer only prints alignment pages. Incessantly.

24 hours’ worth of aligned pages. Is the printer now aligned and printing? Of course not. but they’ve made sure I used some ink!

When the message below came up yesterday, I told the “helper,” “hey- that could be HP’s motto!”

She didn’t understand.

She also told me they’d be monitoring my printer for a few days, which is creepy as, and also patently untrue because I’ve been trying to use it since about 11am, to no avail. I have also tried to get in touch with them, but Nope.

Today, all I can get is the above message. Help, notsomuch. A chatbot keeps asking me which cartridge error I have. None. Mate it doesn’t use English, it uses flashing lights. Which have now given me quite the headache, just quietly.

So … no idea where the receipt from 11 months ago is. (I fear it might have been sent to an email account I can no longer access). I may be able to find it in my tax documents?

I guess all that’s left to do is I lodge as many complaints as I can think of, and chuck the rubbish in the bin.

In the meantime, any recommendations for a printer that does its expected task, as is required under Australian consumer law? A different brand, obviously. You know, one that works.

Minor Life Update

For a while now, I’ve been feeling as though I have more capacity to serve my local regional community. I’m still working for a regional university–albeit with one that doesn’t have a local presence–and I’m still on the Board of Interchange Shoalhaven. But I’m no longer advocating for local students in my day job, and the Nowra Relay for Life has folded, which represented almost two decades of volunteering in the end.

So I applied to join the Board of Regional Development Australia-Illawarra and Shoalhaven.
I was pretty delighted to go to the first meeting a fortnight ago and be reunited with three former colleagues from different phases of my educational career, as well as some familiar faces from spba. I’m looking forward to seeing where we can go and how we can advocate, as a team, for our member communities.

On the work front, I’ve been doing battle with a non-sentient tool that has become the embodiment of “Computer Says No” and which makes me fear for humanity. Our uni launched a tool that draws information from an internal repository of research and then sifts through it to spit out a metric that determines whether or not you are research active, which has implications for research supervision and things like promotion. By its calculations, I’ve been a full-time employee on a typical research load for the past five years (I haven’t) and have published no research (!). I have not one research point to my name in this whiz-bag new system. Now, other people are finding this hilarious, but as the person who opened a snapshot that has a bold typeface “No” in answer to the question “Performance Expectation Met”–notsomuch.

So I’ve had to register complaints/appeals/please explains line-by-line on this new tool, which thus far have included:

I’ve only been here nine months, why do I have to meet a standard that’s based on five years of employment?
I’m not in a typical research/teaching role (that said, if someone would like to allocate me the 30% research load you’re using in your calculations, I’ll happily take it!)
Why has my 2024 publication been included but not generated any points?
Where are my other 2024 publications?
Why have you agreed to count this publication but then not allocated any actual points?
Why did you decide that this chapter, which began life in Oxford, was peer-reviewed, has a full reference list, is published by an academic publisher and is held in libraries around the world, including Harvard, “does not meet research requirements”?

.. and so it goes on.

In addition, I have to make the case for the “standard” of the publishers and journals because apparently the system only picks up publishers indexed in Web of Science and Scopus. Which humanities publications most typically aren’t. Which only adds to the frustratingly large body of observations over my two decades in academia that most systems are still overwhelmingly biased towards the sciences.

So, stay tuned for updates on my “points” over time. Thankfully, Google Scholar’s version of my h-index (which draws from more than just WoS ie) continues to rise and I keep my ORCID profile up-to-date, so it’s only a problem while, I’m ya know–employed here.

Or until the tool sorts out its teething problems. Which will hopefully come much, much sooner!

Back to happier news, and in anticipation of soon being able to secure our backyard once again coupled with my own significant impatience, I have four new companions. Joining retiree Zoe (who’d wandered out of this picture) and Perri the Isa Brown & Sally Sparrow the Wyandotte (aka the refugee from three doors up – both on the left of the photo here) are Barbara the Copper Marans, River the Araucana, Susan the Sussex, and Rogue the Olive Egger.

Our little rainbow alliance here is designed so that we will be able to easily tell the girls apart, but also as a means of producing a vibrant array of eggs. So far, Barbara has been a bit of a disappointment, since she is producing ordinary off-white eggs, rather than the lovely chocolate brown ones for which Marans are known. That said, I also got Susan at the same time–we try not to introduce solo birds; the pecking order can get nasty–and expected boring white eggs from her, but her first one appeared earlier this week and is slightly pink! River is an Araucana (like Zoe), so we are getting pale blue eggs from her, and Rogue will hopefully produce some green ones soon. It is still early days and still Winter, so perhaps colour will develop as production ramps up.

So that’s approximately where we are up to, EOFY 2023.

They paused in their fight to pose for this.

The Road to Hell

I just read back over my New Year post and gosh, I was cheery. Full of good intentions!

It’s been three months since my last “weekly” post. That probably has some significance.

Although we have moved into the extension which now has adequate means of blocking out light, and it even has an Occupation certificate, the pool build is ongoing and despite the fact that it looks finished and has pumps and heaters and fences and gates and filters and covers, it is still officially a building site until it also gets certified.

Astute readers will note it is now Autumn, in these parts.

Here’s the reason why it remains uncertified:

On fencing installation day, I heard an almighty crash. And I ran.

Then I saw the fencing guy standing there, looking perplexed, with shattered glass all around his feet. I figured I had nothing to add and went back to my desk. And so we wait.

There are two reasons why I ran when I heard the crash. Their names are Calpurnia (don’t worry; we’re calling her Callie) and Clover, and they are the most adorable troublemakers we’ve seen … well, since Tinkerbell and Scout were the same age, anyway.

Working with these guys around feels a bit like a mini-Staypuft scene.

Now when Mum (ie me) is a former English teacher with a PhD in English literatures, you get themed pet names. Cats are named after favourite book characters; chickens after the Doctor’s companions. When we had quail, they were named after characters from Bridge to Terabithia and lived in an aviary named Janice. (Geddit?). Fish have been named after Mulder, Scully, Lone Gunmen etc.

Naming the kittens proved trickier than one might think, since there is still a dearth of strong, female characters out there. I went back to childhood and in one instance, there was a seven book series featuring only two females. And they were named Jane and The Lady, so that wasn’t going to work.

For the record: Scout & Calpurnia are from To Kill a Mockingbird. The late, great, Tinkerbell was named from Peter Pan (I looked for more options from the same text, but there were very few: Wendy or Jane, or the racially problematic Tigerlily, or Nana, who was both a dog on the page and stage, and a grandmother in our household, so that wasn’t going to fly. As it were). Clover comes from What Katy Did, which was probably my earliest introduction to representations of disability in literature. Clover was the eldest sister after Katy and was described as being “pretty and clever with a cheerful disposition,” as being loved by everyone and loving them in return.

Callie and Clover were being fostered in Lithgow, and I saw their pictures on a local Facebook group and fell in love. And so I ended up in Lithgow for the second time in three weeks, having just been back for a school reunion. This time, I caught up with a school mate who hadn’t made it to the reunion, and we talked for hours. We’re booked to be back there in another three weeks, for the wedding of another dear school friend. The Spousal Unit is totally on board with this, because he reckons that when I visit, I come home happy and stay happy for, like, days.

For someone who actually lived outside of Lithgow (apart from eight months in 1978, but that’s another story) and always felt a bit Other, going “home” to Lithgow has been something of a revelation to me. When I left for Uni, I didn’t think I was all that attached –we had lived in three states by the time I was in first grade, I went to 5 different primary schools, and after going on a high school exchange, I effectively only spent nine months with my ultimate year 12 cohort–so I never had a particularly strong sense of belonging anywhere. But that year 12 cohort went a long way to change that, and I’ve since been told, on more than one occasion, that I was–and am–a “Lithgow person.” And Lithgow people have the back of other Lithgow people permanently, as far as I can tell. So when I go back, I feel very safe, and at home, and understood, and like I don’t have to give a back story because there’s a shared history there.

Adopting two wee feline babies from there seemed like an apt way to bring a little bit of Lithgow into our daily lives.

New Year, Same Me

And, as I added when I said this to my spouse in response to some God-awful ad for new year weight loss programs … “because I’m an effing delight.” Or something like that. 😉

I have managed to restart some (good) old habits with the turn of the calendar … my morning pages and my morning walk, aka the morning ritual that hasn’t been done consistently in … well, it might even be years, at this point. I’ve been in my new work-from-home role a couple of months, and the build is more-or-less finished, meaning that I’m in my study/home office, so the feeling of “camping out” while transitioning roles is pretty much gone. I say “pretty much” because yesterday was my first day back, and it was challenging. The NBN guys who came out on December 20 said it was too wet to complete the task so even though we’d moved the furniture and computer equipment into the brand spanking new study so I could work from there (Happy Birthday to meeee!), it turned out that the internet didn’t actually work reliably in there, as I discovered during my first hour of attempting to work in there yesterday. So the Spousal Unit went off to buy a wifi extender and then I spent about the next twelve hours trying to retrain the printer and all our other wifi-reliant services.

I sent my colleague a text saying, “Look what I got for my birthday!” She congratulated me before pointing out how much less fun adult birthday presents can be. Not pictured: “Real” annual present of a trip to a musical with Firstborn, who also has a pesky just-before-Christmas birthday

I was doing this “retraining” on very little sleep because I’ve sort-of moved into the new extension, but one blind was the wrong size and one shutter can’t be fitted until something else is, and so on I only sleep on cloudy nights. Which the evening of January 1 was not. So I was not in a good space to be trying to think things through, and feeling vaguely homicidal.

Lovely and light-filled … which is great *during the day*

Nevertheless, we persisted. Without a homicide that would have stopped us making it to our 26th Wedding Anniversary today. Five years ago we were in Paris; one year ago in Fiji. Today I’m in the home office and gritting my teeth as he watches things too loudly elsewhere in the house. Seems like a pretty good metaphor for the ups and downs of a long-term marriage, really.

Also, please note that it’s “WordPress Wednesday” and I’ve actually logged in to WordPress. On a Wednesday.

And now, onto my next good intention … finishing up the proofreading and Indexing of our Vampire Diaries project. It’s due in four days (five, if you count the way the time difference works in my favour). You can preorder here from McFarland in the US, or I’ll be selling them from my website – probably by the end of January, but it might end up being February.

Something Fishy

Passport Update: 10.5 weeks’ wait; still no progress.

I contacted my local MP and got a very prompt reply from her team, who in turn contacted the APO, who sent me a generic reply that included the line (I kid you not): We apologise for the delay you have experienced waiting for your passport to issue OR difficulty you have experienced in contacting our passports team.

I mean, at least delete the option that’s not relevant if you want us to believe you’ve even read the message to which you’re allegedly responding, guys.

They sign off by promising “we endeavour to have your passport ready so that you an travel.”

Again: Aim High, Team.

Can you imagine if we here just “endeavoured” to deliver education courses? I don’t think “there’s a high demand for our services right now” (an actual line from my September 15 “response,” as opposed to the September 30 one, above) … would cut it as an excuse in *our* federally funded government department, but OK.

Anyhow, those annoyances aside:

It’s that time of the year when the Spousal Unit is on holidays and I’m not, and it’s a busy time at work, and when you add personal stresses like AWOL passports to the mix, things like brains start to malfunction a bit and then you do things like forgetting the password to your entire work network that you use a million times a day and knew perfectly well at the start of the weekend … but I digress.

So the Spousal Unit and I have been trying to retain the last remaining threads of my sanity by doing some projects around the house (yes, I know), and also having him join me for part of a work trip to Batemans Bay. I might leave that story for another day, because I’m still processing it. I think if he hadn’t been there at the time I might have convinced myself by now that it was all a particularly surreal dream.

So we’ve been digging up very overgrown front garden with a view to planting some things we actually like and that aren’t taller than us. The process has been like stumbling upon lost civilisations in the jungle, with pots and garden statues appearing that we’d forgotten we’d ever owned. And my poor crabapple tree, which has been struggling since I planted it a year ago, suddenly has leaves on it. Turns out a bit of sunlight works wonders for photosynthesis.

But because the East Coast of Australia is semi-permanently under water these days, progress has been slow. So Him Indoors turned his hand to an indoor project–cleaning the tank of our last remaining fish, Mulder. This was prompted by the pump in the tank apparently giving up the proverbial ghost.

So off to the pet store he went, where the young salesperson told him that his pump was an old pump type and even though it wouldn’t fit his aquaculture tank, it was his best option. So he came home and set everything up.

Kind of important for the submerged pump to pump water into the top tray for this to work …

The next morning, Mulder had swum off the mortal coil. Belly up, eyes shut, unequivocal. I also noticed that the brand new pump wasn’t working. He dealt with Mulder, I puzzled over the poor quality pump. And put my hand in the water. Which was warm. And gave me a small electric shock.

“Are you sure this is meant to go in the water?” I asked.

“Where else would it go?” came the reply.

So I asked were there any instructions. Of course, he replied, looking offended, and handing them to me. I looked at the diagram, then back at the pump. “There seem to be bits missing,” I said. He promptly produced them with a flourish, from the same place where the instructions had been. He’d cut one cord to shorten it, and not used another bit, or the air bubble. OK, I thought, there goes any chance of a refund. Then, I realised we’d had a pump just like to aerate our outside pond. It did not get submerged. My poor brain was trying to piece these bits together, but it wasn’t until I looked at the diagrams that it all came together in, ahem, a flash.

The diagrams where the pump was sitting on furniture next to the fish tank.

I read on.

“This says,” I said slowly, “to discontinue use if the pump gets at all wet.”

That night, he told me he felt really bad about accidentally electrocuting his fish. “And nearly electrocuting you,” he added, as an afterthought. “That could have been bad.”

The original pump is repaired now. We’re waiting a few days before getting new fish.