i love my kids...

at the risk of sounding just too boring for words, motherhood really can be kinda sweet especially at this stage where the chubbes are talking heaps and heap smore and really having conversations. todayy when i came back from, well, out, zaccy greeted me at he door and said "how did you go mummy?" and i said "great thanks" and he said "oh i'm SO pleased"...how sweet is that. if only he could cook....

it's oh so quiet...

cj off to footy; chubbies down for a rest suddenly the house seems like an acre of serenity whihc is all the more precious because i know that in about twenty minutes soph will come out and announce that her quiet time is over. and believe me, in the way she announces things, there is never any doubt that the time for quiet has passed. but still, it's nice to have something even when (or because??) you know it won't last.

bad choice of titles..

now that i think about it, i have to say that i always found the "kindness of strangers" character--who i think was Blanche du Bois--absolutely hideously irritating. even more annoying than those people who seem oh so startled when they reach the front of a very very very long checkout que at a spermarket that they might, at some point, have to pay for something and that because of this it might be an idea to have checked before hand that they HAVE THEIR WALLET...

it's a big blog

i just saw an ad for some beer. it's hysterical. it's a big ad..a really big ad...it's really reallly big...doesn't translate to a blog but i felt it should be marked given how hideous almost all TV is these days.

how does it type?

at work we have an electronic diaryy thing which we use not only to set up appointments with people (which thhey may or may not choose to 'accept') but also to book rooms for meetings and the like. the bookings we make are then approved by some super booking monitor and then we are notifed by email. and even though i know all this i find it very strange to get a system generated email that says:

In the WebCalendar System the following people have indicated they are able to attend an appointment previously created by yourself : Education Room

i know it is probably me just being all old an stodgy, gen x-er, but i really don't think the education room is the one sending the emails....and franklyy it is just a little creepy....

kindness of strangers

I have this big important presentation to do about boys, books and reading aloud to the under 5s and was going to go with the standard boring academic lecture but then thought gee, why not try and do something that would actually be, er, interesting...so now it seems like i'll have a 5 minute DVD of some super cute kids doing super cool things with super cool books all thanks to my super cool friends and some total strangers who have gone out of their way to help me with this whole thing. the product itself will be brilliant, and something i am grateful for, but it is even better to have had so many people do so many nice things for so little return. So most of the time, people are pretty neat.

raining again

its raining again. and it is a cold, piercing, chilly kind of rain. but today it feels kind of good. cleansing or something. not that i intend to go and stand in it or anything loopy like that, but still, it is better to feel good than to not.

voice of experience

having recently tried out both sad and mad as states of mind i can confidently report that mad is better. but honestly both of them suck quite a lot

what?

browsing around for accommodation for an upcoming trip to syd en ee i happened upon a hotel with the following address:

117 Macquarie Street
Sydney 2000 NSW
(Corner of Bridge & Phillip Streets)

i know it's this big glamorous city and everything but how many corners can it have??

and i thought it was hard getting directions to places in geelong...(by the way did you know that geelong has street signs on less than 35% of intersections? i'd like to think that this is the council's way of encouraging a sense of fellowship and community (Geelong: we all get lost together...ask directions and make new friends...Spend more time in the city of Geelong because you'll probably never get out of it...) but i suspect it is nothing so grand. they probably just don't have any money left after building the new footy stadium...

what does it mean....

we have a glitch in our email system thhat means when i am at home, i have to send all mail out by our service provider rather than through the work server.that means i have to go into Eudora and turn off the settings under my "dominant personality" and rely upon my home personality. hmmmm.

position matters

i have recently been speculating about the difference between being the oldest and youngest child in a family. i am the youngest of six, and sometimes i wonder if that has trained me to accept being pushed around as just standard procedure and led me to occasionally be inordinately grateful for any kind of attention thrown my way. popular wisdom has it that the youngest are always spoiled. and in some ways they probably are. but in big families it certainly isn't in the general area of attention! this is probably why i obsess so much about trying to pay so much attention to all of our 6 kids. and probably also why i feel so guilty when i get up the nerve to say that there are somethings that i really don't like or somethings that i just don't want to do...in some ways i will probably always be that little girl who was trained to think that fetchhing her brothers a beer was some kind of treat....

should have stayed in the office

well being social i wondered out for a bit of a chat with some folk today and in casual conversation mentioned to someone that i'd had a bit of a sore throat. they looked me up and down and said "and you look a bit pale. and a bit tired. and you know, it's pretty dumb to be wearing a low cut top if you've got a sore throat. tomorrow wear a skivvy instead". so there you have it. Not just sick but stupid too.

three in a row

it has just occured to me that we have somehow managed to do weekend type things every weekend for the last three weeks. once we had lunch in melbourne with friends and their twins; then we went to dinner at a friend's place; and yesterday we had other friends over and cooked fancy soup, tricky cheescake and a yummy apricot and chocolate slice. Much as i am embarassed to admit it, I never feel quite so competent and womanly as when i bake a slice. it is right up there with lace edged hankies, well ironed kids pyjamas and neatly organised tupperware on the indicators of domestic mastery. it's hardly a social whirl but hey, it's a start.

big black books

i know that most public interest is focused in the contents of little black books, but for me the big black book that is the finished, polished and nicely bound PhD thesis is hard to top. today in the mail i got a copy of one of my former students' thesis: with lots of nice gushy things about how much she missed me--as a person and not just as an academic. and that was really nice. sometimes it very helpful to remember that to some people i'm a person and not just a lecturer, a mum or a cleaner. not that all those jobs aren't worthy and fun, but personhood is kinda nice. congrats Jenny, your thesis is great and, like i've always said, you're a uni super star