The Eve of June

11.10pm on the 31st of May and the night is chill. My fingers are cold. I should put the heater on and warm the house before bed but I am going to catch up on my neglected blog instead.

It has been a whirlwind month of moving. Leading up to the move I simply could not get my act together to organise the packing and cleaning effectively. It was such a huge task. I put out panic calls on facebook and people answered. Thank fully I have some incredible and supportive friends. People came from miles around to help pack and clean.Some helped physically, some helped by feeding me, some helped with some moving funds and some with calls and hugs and support in whatever way they could.
 I feel so nurtured.
Helen was a life saver finding boxes for me.


Andy came to drive the first truck and was dreadfully ill. Luke and I tried to load by ourselves and it was taking hours. When I called for help Michael and Kate arrived, Kate packed things and Michael found more boxes then helped Luke load the heavy stuff. Then Bryan and a friend came by and helped shift a few things in the limited time they could spare. Poor Andy slept or found a patch of garden to share his breakfast with.
Shirley dragged a friend along and gave me a solid hour of their time and between us we managed to clean out the shed and helped me load the final truck.
Shay and Angie came by to assist as did Janet and Helen. Shay carted the scrap metal away and did a tip run. Janet was half way through the final carpet clean when the power went out so she kept going with the old carpet sweeper.


Without their support I could never have managed to complete the move in time. I thank each and every one of my wonderful caring friends from the bottom of my heart. (NB Just because your name might not appear on this page does not mean your contributions and support are not appreciated but there is a word limit to the average readers attention span.)

I drove from Warrnambool to Bacchus Marsh and back again so often I swear I could do the trip in my sleep.

Warrnambool is wonderful and I shall miss it. Keep in touch my Warrnambool friends. I am only a keyboard away.

Bacchus Marsh.

So here we are in the fourth week in the new house.

 The view from the front step.

and a lovely picture of the sun through the trees from out on the street.




Day one we could smell gas. Little wafts of it each time any of us walked through the kitchen. I sent off emails to the real estate. Made some phone calls. Mentioned it to the man who came to fix the leaking kitchen sink and the blocked bathroom sink. Sent a few more emails and photos of the still leaking sink, mentioning yet again for the fifth or sixth time in as many correspondences that there was still a gas leak three weeks into our tenancy and please could they have it fixed so I could use the stove without blowing up the house.
Late on Friday and young man arrived at my house armed with a machine reminiscent of Ghost Busters and proceeded to look for the cause of the gas leak. Nothing happened and just to prove the machine worked he switched on the gas and entertained us with a noisy series of click-beeps that slowed as the gas dissipated. Over the stove he waved his wand, behind the over, across the bench, under the knobs and not a beep to be heard. He scratched his head and murmured about the infallibility of his super sensitive device. Finally he slid into the under bench cupboard, his torso disappearing with only his sun ripened legs dangling from his truncated blue shorts sticking out of the cupboard. Way in the shadowy depths the machine went wild. The young plumber popped out of the cupboard and screwed his face into a puzzled frown. "It's the pipe. The skinny one. They don't make them pipes any more. I'll have to pinch it off and let them know." Off went the gas.
Week four and still no stove. Fortunately I am adaptable and we are eating well and my electronic cooking gadgets are finally getting a work out.

So over the past six weeks I have been diagnosed with diabetes type 2, moved house, sewed, made a teensy bit of art, lost 5kgs, attended a class in my novel writing subject, built some shelves, visited people, attended a 3 year old's party, had my first ever IKEA experience and begun to explore a new place. Several of my offspring had birthdays and the days have sped past. I purchased myself a sudoku board from an op shop so each morning I take a pot of tea out to the court yard and sit quietly in the early sunlight and meditate over the pattern of the numbers.

This is my court yard and art space.

This was in the first few days when I had yet to sweep out the accumulated debris and had not yet hung up the fairy lights and wind chimes. The chess board sits on the end of the table now.



It is a lovely place to sit. I can look out over the head stones in the church yard next door.









I made a few more clothing items out of socks for my Lammily doll.I purchased two sets of socks, one on special in a department store cost me $3 and one set from an op shop for 50c. The op shop pair became a pair of spotty blue short pyjamas and a beanie and took about five minutes to snip and sew by hand.

 The second set of socks were pretty white ones with lace trimming and two layers of elastic.

 Cut, trim and hem in less than five minutes my doll had a trendy little skirt.

 Here it is before hemming.

The socks before snipping. I still have one blue and one white sock to play with.

Now my most exciting news. 

For the first time in my whole life I have a complete set of matching bookshelves. All the same colour and brand spanking new.
Here is the before photo of my lounge room.

a small mountain of unpacked bags and boxes, clogging the centre of the room. Bit by bit I have chipped away at it and then...














The progress shots -

 The unpackaging
















The tools and parts

 The instructions, tools and parts

The screws going in

 The top, bottom and centre going on














The other side

 The super uber duber screw cap thingys

 The second uh oh moment of discovering a back to front shelf...

 The crack

 Nailing on the back board after careful and precise measurements for the placing of the nails. Thank goodness I have someone to keep me in line with a ruler or I would be doing the artist tradie thing and just guesstimating.

 The oops disaster moment when I stepped over the end and snapped the base board with my clod hopping foot. I managed to glue and plaster a bracer which is hidden from view. OH MY GIDDY CHICKENS!

More nails and then (drum roll please)
The next set of progress shots -

 number one
















Number two - getting those shelves just so is my lovely friend Mica getting it right.

 One, two and three and some decisions about the depth between shelves.

 The first four shelves

 The beginnings of Alphabetical Order

 Still more books and more shelves to fill

 The gargantuan pile of bags grows higher and higher as each one is emptied of its precious contents.

And finally 

Ta Dah! I have my very own personal library. Only five more shelves to build for the non fiction. It is such a marvelous feeling. On that note I shall go read a book and fall asleep between the pages.

Special thanks to Gemma.

Books vs electronic Not Books

Wow how did a month slip by without me blogging?

A whole lot of real life offline kept me busy and distracted.

I am packing to move house and house hunting. I taped all of daughter dear's spare clothes into the blue wheely bin and her shoes and bits into boxes and green bags and restacked them on her shelving.
 
I have been cleaning walls and ceilings, light fittings and windows and repairing small lumps and bumps of normal wear and tear and I am planning a garage sale (scary) [Yard sale for those in the north]

I do not like moving and considering how many times I have done it in my life you would think that I would be a practiced hand at it but still I find it stressful, especially because this is the longest I have ever lived anywhere and the longest I have ever been in the same street. I have grown fond of my friends and a few neighbours and the town is a lovely place to live. Still I have become a little complacent and need some more energy pumped into the writing career I have chosen. I moved the teens to Melbourne to temporary accommodation to take up studies at Swinburne and it has been very quiet around here without them. They are learning some independent living skills and I intend they continue the trend when we all move back into the same house. They are growing and glowing with their new found studies.
I did have one of my little grandsons come to stay for a while. That was fun and exhausting. I am SO far past nappies and bottles at 3am but we do these things for the ones we love and he is just too cute for words.

I created a vision board (this woman offers a free ebook about vision boarding on her blog http://christinekane.com/how-to-make-a-vision-board/ ). The board is something I have done in the past but not to this extent. My sister had been to an art therapy session in which they painted and collaged their boards and after a lengthy phone call with her I decided it was time to revisit this fabulous technique for visualising my own future. I wanted a was to express the things I want to happen and to focus my new found meditation upon.

Right smack in the middle is the word Believe in little crystals. This is a big reminder to me that I must believe in myself and my talents and my ability to do what is needed to make my goals a reality. It was good to sit and think about what I want from life and what aspect of my life I need to change and improve. I thought about love and family and career, I thought about health and wealth and travel and so much more. I have always wanted to be an in demand motivational speaker and a published author and my vision board was an excellent place to represent these desires so they became more concrete and less vague thoughts. The meditation came in the form of a 7 minute chakra cleanse, a mantra and a huge amount of research into binaural beats and harmonics and how sounds can affect health and well being and then I discovered Headspace with its 10 day ten minute calm sessions. I need calm sessions. https://www.headspace.com

In the past month I had my first and second Write a Novel in a Year class through Victoria University and I missed the second one but have read all the notes and I am implementing the suggested course of action. I am 12k into an idea I came up with 12 months ago and have begun to plan, write character sheets, write back story vignettes and discuss with fellow class mates. It is a futuristic social commentary with horror and romance elements in the drama.I am liking it so far.




 I read a novel, Atonement and discussed it with  two young male students who are studying the novel and struggling with it. I struggled with it and I am reasonably well read with a wide and interesting life of experiences to draw on. I thought it might be a good book for uni students to deconstruct and am in total sympathy with mid teen boys trying to wade through it. I can see how it and its author have generated a lot of positive reviews but fail to understand the choice as reading material for rural students with academia at the bottom of their list of worthwhile things to do.

I wrote several reviews for other authors.

I also wrote some childrens' book ideas and attended a webinar or two and read copious notes for my class and learned to count to ten in Thai. I do sudoku each night before I sleep to quiet my mind and I do them in Japanese and Russian so I learn the numbers.

I also cried for the deaths of Leonard Nimoy and Terry Pratchett (Sir).
Leonard Nimoy as Spock gave me hope that there could be logic and sense to my childhood, his character was a spark of hope in the chaos of my family life.
Sir Terry Pratchett allowed me to understand that I must be well read because I recognised so many of the original stories he so cleverly twisted into his own on the disc world.

These men were very important to me and my sense of self worth.  I suppose Gene Roddenberry as the creator of Spock and Star Trek also played an important role but as a child I didn't think beyond the character on the screen and I idolised Spock.

It has been such a busy time that I have barely lifted a pen or pencil to the page so my pinterest has had no new uploads for six weeks and my folders have not been filled with colourful depiction of the world around me and I have neglected my online art groups.  Here is my landscape painted with coffee on water colour paper.

One of my favourite authors. Lois McMaster Bujold, has announced she is writing a new book for one of the characters in her Vorkosigan series of books and I am incredibly excited by that. This woman has been writing her series for almost 30 years since 1986 when the first was published. I realised as I perused the shelf I have dedicated to her work that I have been influenced by many women writers. Enid Blyton and May Gibbs from my very early years, Ursula K Leguin, Dianna Wynn-Jones, Zenna Henderson and Anne Mcaffrey through my teens, Isobelle Carmody in my twenties and beyond and so many many more, I had not realised until I was looking through my books and deciding to pack them that I had so many women on my shelves. Not just fiction either and not simply science fiction although right after fairy tales from around the world, science fiction is my second love. I lost many of my books in the '09 fires along with art but it never takes long for me to refill my shelves.
The first novel I wrote was so English it was embarrassing, especially as I have never been to England except through my reading, but it was also a good way for me to begin to understand the influences these authors have had on shaping who I am as a writer. I sent it out eventually to two large traditional publishers who wrote me two very positive and encouraging rejection letters.

I love my books. I love the scent of books. I love holding them and tucking a book mark in them. I love sharing books and writing little codes in the back. I love editing a book with a pencil I keep tucked behind my ear. I love giving the gift of a book. I love that I don't have to scroll through a book and be dictated to by the program on my computer. I love that my pages don't skip ahead. I love that there are over a thousand books in my bedroom and all of them are mine and no big company or remote prude can decide what I can or can't have on my bookshelves and take them away on a whim. I love that I can throw a book in an emotional upheaval because of the words on the page and I don't have to worry that the screen will crack. I don't have to put a battery in my book or charge it up or keep it cool. I can take a book to the beach or on a picnic and if it rains well I can dry the pages with my hair dryer. I love that if I am ever stuck in a remote location with my book and there is no toilet paper I can sacrifice the end pages. I love snuggling in bed with a good book, or into a huge armchair and reading on a cold day. I love seeing my books all stacked and lined up and feel a sense of pride in ownership of them. I feel like my books are a display of me. Not streamlined and generic that's for sure.

There are times when an electronic reader is preferable to carrying an extra suitcase of reading material. An electronic reader is a useful way of storing works to be reviewed and when the budget is tight and there is a strict no no on purchasing, a little ebook can be snuck in past the vigilance of the household harridan holding the purse strings(that would be me). I think I would prefer my newspaper in e form but I can read the news online now. A friend has a screen enlarger for her diminishing eyesight and of course I read every day on my PC for a whole range of reasons. There are many good reasons to have some form of electronic reading device. Those clever people who invented them are marvelous but -

 -In my incredible and crazy life, books have been my stabilisers, my strength, my teachers and my friends. They have been my places to escape into so I could escape from. Books have been my furniture and my door stops. Books have kept me from starving and have given me travel and riches beyond measure.  Books are my first choice of reading material.

  To the thousands of authors out there who have been part of my life journey, thank you.
To the aspiring writers yet to be published. Keep writing, don't ever give up your stories until they are on the printed page, you just never know whose life you will change.