fessing up

well i've come clean and admitted to cj that i have my own blog. he was terribly excited right up until the point where he realised that occasionally i was writing about him. interestingly he was (as my readers suspected) a tad surprised to realise i'd been on strike. so maybe it will work well as an inter-family communication system.

but for now it's just fun.
now post a comment to prove you're reading.
i bet it takes days

authentication

today i was supposed to take part in a video conference seminar; only me in geelong everyone else in melbourne. unfortunately there was a power outage of some sort which meant although they could see and hear me i couldn't see or hear them. this is a tad awkward when THEY are doing the presentation. so there were a bunch of tech people who leapt into action, really quite efficiently to be honest. but before they arrived with their cabled capes flying i had to pass the standard authentication test that seems to be generally reserved for women. it went something like this:
phone (in geelong room) ring ring ring ring
leonie: hello
Melbourne tech: oh, you can hear that?
leonie:sorry?
MT: the phone?
LR: yes i can hear the phone...
MT: but you can't hear us on the conference?
LR: no.
MT: but can you see us?
L: no
MT: you can't see us?
L: no
MT: cause we can see you
L: no i really can't
MT: and you can't hear us
L: no. no sound, no picture. nothing. except for the phone.
MT: we can hear you.
L: how interesting...
MT: okay i'll get someone to come and look
L: great thanks
MT: and you can't see us now?

at this point i have to hope that they couldn't see me either cause my body language was NOT polite...i mean what are the odds that i was going to suddenly say "oh, my, yes! sillly me, i was looking at the WINDOW not the TV! Boy do I feel foolish! Golly thanks so much for making me check again...i'd hate to have been wasting everyone's time....

grrrr

and smart too

zaccy talking to himself:

"well, the long hand is pointing sstraight up, so that means its somefing over the clock. and the short hand is pointing to 1. so that means its 1 o'clock on the hickory dickory clock"

god bless television.

now i just can't help myself...

kids are great.

Branching out

i am trying to see if i can do tricky things with this blog. well. tricky by my standards. it isn't exactly an Apollo 13 type repair job but here goes: are thes the cutest kids in geelong or what??

localisation

while i have no doubt that i will be a queenslander for ever and ever and a little bit more, i've noticed in the last few months a few small signs that i may be gradually aclimatising to the whole victorian scene. For example, i can now leave the house (even in july) without running up and down on the spot to generate body heat before hand; i no longer cry when i realise its my turn to take out the garbage (and if i do it's not because i'm frightened of chillblains) and i actually do believe that the worlds 'nice day' and 'freezing cold' can be meaningfully used together in the same sentence. but perhaps the real give away is that i have, on occasion, found myself talking quite nonchalantly about 1 percenters, hard ball gets and osteitis pubis. And sometimes i even care about them!

So let's go the whole hog: carn the cats! (they're a football team you know...)

signs of times

well it looks like i'm going to make it up to sydney in a few weeks and get to spend a night with chrissy and hannah-belle; the funniest thing is that hb is apparantly doing the 40 hour famine the weekend i'll be there. this alarmed me at first becuase i have no itnention of going anywhere and doing hungry things. but my fears were quickly allayed. apparantly in contemporary times 'famine' can be accomplished by giving up technology. how cool is that?

the cj files: stranger than fiction

Lindy loo asked me how cj was. the short answer is great. the longer answer is too long for a blog. but if any of you queensland people make it back to this site you might like to know that:

• he now wears a long sleeve shirt and tie to work every single day, and it's got nothing to do with being cold
• he can speak in long and frighteningly authoritative sentences about profit-margins, WEFTSUs, risk management and legislative compliance
• he is universally beloved by the people in his school inspite/because of the fact that most of them report not being able to understand 43% of what he says (and only about 20% of them have plucked up enough courage to use me as a translater)
  
• he still barracks for Geelong with considerable alacrity (although if they lose to Essendon this friday i shudder to think of the consequences)
• in the pursuit of quality time with the kids and with me he has learnt to watch TV shows such as the OC, Desperate Housewives, Australian Idol, Rove Live and Bob the Builder without appearing even a tiny bit self-conscious (although sometimes he mixes up the names of central characters...fyiwendy does not live on Wisteria Lane) and last night he used the name "Foo Fighters" in context and with aplomb...
  

and although he still can't find the margarine by himself he pours a brilliant glass of champagne. So life, indeed, is good.

wrong numbers...

so i'm sitting in the car waiting for the kids (you have no idea how much of the day i spend doing this at one venue or another) and my phone rings and lo and behold if it isn't the lovely lindy. what a treat! and not only that but lindy sounding as happy as a pig in bendigo (this is a local saying: i don't know what it means. please donn't ask me. for all i know it may be deeply ironic and have nothing to do with either happiness or pigs but frankly that's neither here nor there.) THE POINT IS: it was so lovely to hear from her i don't even care that I was a wrong number. in fact being wrong is sometimes as much fun as being right.

small things

i just saw a weather forecast that said that next week it's going to be 19 degrees on Wednesday. 19! how exciting is that?? (yes i am procrastinating...but i HAVE done one paper outline...)

little red engines...

today i absolutely must do five things: outline 3 papers; write DSO intro; set up workshop date. i think i can i think i can i think i can...

aaarrrggghhhhh part 2

i have been trying to remember the film that features some people reading from a carved stone tablet where the carved message stops suddenly and finishes with aarrrgggghhhhh...is it Monty Python and the holy grail?

aarrrgggghhhhh

what the hell do they put in toothpaste that makes it so impossible to remove once it's on your clothes????

If a tree falls in the forest...

Okay so last week i decided that cooking was a seriously under appreciated dimension of my domestic life and that i was going to go on strike until people started acknowledging it/me a bit more. but being so caught up in self-righteous anger i think i forgot to take the possibly crucial step of actually telling anyone about the afore mentioned strike. and for one reason or another i suspect that people still haven't noticed. admittedly there has been the occasional person wondering into the kitchen looking optimistic, hungry and/or bemused around about 6pm, but generally speaking they've either gone away or just taken out a fry pan and cooked something for the whole crew. in fact, i'd have to say that the standard of fare on offer has probably improved over the last few days as, indeed, has my temperament. and i wonder if things would have gone so swimmingly if i had actually announced the strike and done a full one kitchen walk out? now i wonder what would happen if i just stopped doing the washing...

my wonderful friends

there was a lot of stuff i was very happy to leave behind in central queensland--42 degree Christmases, paediatrician offices located up 14 stairs with no ramp, the ubiquitous cane toads and, of course, some of the maniacs in charge of the uni there--but although i've been luckyy enough to meet some lovely people in victoria and to even have a couple of people who don't throw themselves into the shrubbery to avoid me as i pass by, i still Really Really Really miss the great friends that i made there. but there is a lot of comfort to be had in knowing that they are all still out there making the world a nicer place. And they give me something to aspire to. Because one day, seriously, I WILL be as organised as Anne, as colour coordinated as Lindy, as good a cook as Christine and as totally awesom as the lovely Barbara manages to be when she's angry. and yes you are all much more multi-dimensional than this suggests but if i tried to be everything i'd be even less than i am now!

staying on target

somewhere along the line universities turnedinto places with performance indicatos and key targets. i always feel totally foolish when i look at my own list of targets but lately i've also been feeling vaguely panic-ed. can i actually be a grown up after almost 4 years of parenthood? do i really want to be? and do i have any choice??

rainy days

for some reason i can no longer tell whether i found rainy days sweet and comforting or just damp and depressing. but i suspect once i start on the Long Walk to the Childcare Door my opinions will become much clearer...

half baked prince

i've been trying to put my finger on what is really bothering me about the new harry potter and i think it is mostly that i started reading these as kids books and am finding it hard to accept that Rowling has the right to turn them into adult books half way through the series. it's like picking up the latest Hairy Mclary title to find that Muffin McLay has just disembowelled Slinky Malinky and is now eyeing off Hairy Himself....i mean suspense and intrigue and all that stuff is okay in the adult world (although to be honest i could do with out it there too), but while the Cat in the Hat may have been a bit of a prat he very rarely exterminated people...and yes i know all that stuff about the audience growing up with the book but if i'm having trouble accepting it at 38 i wonder how parents out there are coping with trying to explain all this to the 7 year olds who just want Harry to win...

fashion sense

sometime on the weekend i tried to journey to some big shiny shops that i refer to as being in werribee but i think technically are probably in hoppers crossing (either way: they are about half way to melbourne). having been driven there once before i tried to find my own wayy this time (being a big sophisticated city girl). this was way harder than it sounds and involved many many cirquits around many many roundabouts (interlude: one of the particulary interesting moments of this journey came when a person in a car, one one of these roundabouts actually STOPPED. to a dead halt in order to let another car come on to the roundabout...). anyway i eventually made it to the land of many cash registers and had a totally fine time buying large amounts of kids clothes and the occasional piece of clobber for myself. on the way out i passed this 'everything for 5 dollars' jewellery shop and just had enough time to pick myself up a necklace. and today i know that it was worth the effort because step-daughter 1 (girl: 16) said "hey that's totally cool--and here comes the best bit--- can i borrow it??"

i rock.

growing down

home from work today i played the usual games with the kids but declined sophie's offer for me to join her in sliding down the back of the couch in a 'five little speckled frogs' sing a long. she said "okay mamma but when you grow little like me will you do some sliding tricks with me." naturally i agreed. so as soon as i am 3 feet high and 18 kilos sliding down the back of the couch is the first thing i'll be doing

when insights aren't

i just had this chat with someone about the challenges associated with being a working mother and blah blah blah and she put forward (rather forcefully) the idea that working full time and being a mum is just too hard so women should stop trying to kill themselves and just accept part time work cause realities change. and although i agree with this in some kind of way, i also know that not everyone has the option of part time work and if they do it often doesn't have boring things like sick leave or superannuation attached to it. and those of us having kids "later in life" do have to wrry about things like whose going to pay for university and/or bail the kids out of jail as they grow older... anyway, she suggested to me that probably i don't need to worry so much about super or sick leave because i'd be happier if i didn't feel so 'stretched'; and that made me wonder: how the hell does she know what i need to worry about or what would make me happy? and when will i get to be so totally confident about life that i can offer other people advice like thhis and be totally sure i'm right??

forgetting to remember

yesterday we went and visited our friend who had twin boys about 3 months ago. i had seen her a few weeks earlier and at that time i'djust wanted to move in with them and let them all get some sleep. yesterday although they still looked tired they also looked really really happy; the boys are beautiful and the parents really in 'the zone': that special place where you know you haven't slept for months and probably will never sleep uninterrupted sleep ever again but where it just doesn't seem that important. it was lovely. and i really wish that i could remember if i ever looked as competent as they did!

strange feeling?

hmm. well it's monday and i've just realised why i feel so strange. the thing is, we seem to have had an actual, bona fide, ridgy didge weekend. a weekend where we sleep in, then go shopping (this i n itself is a very long story), and then v isit people and then sleep in some more. how amazing! i wonder if we'l be able to do it again some time?