The last week of term

I have two weeks of solid hard work to do over the mid semester break, especially if I am going to come close to mastering the meta language of our language. Thank fully Mike is making it start to make sense. I hope he never reads my blog because the dangling and misplaced things he would find here are sure to give him nightmares. They will disappear as the year progresses I am sure.

It has been a sleep deprived week with a sick toddler and so much to do however I am managing and my brain is loving me.

I have to play around with the photo manipulation program on my computer and design a logo. I have an idea in mind and as soon as I work out how to do it, you will see it here on my blog.

So a short, short blog this week.

Have a wonderful week all.

Yesterday is history,who knows what there is going to be when we meet again...

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed....anyway it was a flat day yesterday and I felt like I achieved nothing of import. I did feel a grief for the death of two trees in my yard. One because wood borers had killed it, burrowing deep. I had watched it slowly dying over the past several years not knowing what to do to prevent its demise and yesterday the tree loppers came along and sliced through the branches and trunk with their variety of chainsaws then turn the stump to sawdust. The chipper came and turned the branches piled high on the front lawn, into tiny flakes of wood. The other tree had already been decimated when the house was built and was relegated to a mere stump, albeit a vigorously healthy stump which keeps putting out shoots to the chagrin of my neighbour. I am all in favour of the stump being vigorous. However the neighbour won this round by lopping off all the offending branches and sending them to the chipper with the branches from the bigger tree. I am planning to replace both trees with three more and deciding what I want to put in there. The tree loppers wanted to take out all my big trees and I felt very angry at the stupidity and shortsightedness of such a suggestion. One of them suggested I put in a nice shrub. I wanted to respond more aggressively to that suggestion but managed to contain myself.Sadly, no matter what I plant I will be unlikely to see it in full canopied glory, shading the house and providing shelter for cicadas and birds. A tree is a lifetime commitment.

Sometimes I feel we are all angry selfish babies and it is "All about me".

Today is a better day. Today I had a beautiful fruit salad for breakfast and then set about doing some drawing and getting my blog back on track after neglecting it yesterday. I only managed a meagre 400 words on my novels so today I will dedicate time and effort to building my word count. It is a better day today and I will have momentous results from a more positive attitude.

How to cut a coin in half

Today's PiBoIdMo idea stemmed from a dream I awoke from in which a teenage girl was visiting elderly relatives with her younger siblings. The uncle was encouraging the children to be inquisitive and rowdy and the older sister was trying to keep them in line. The uncle admonished her for being too straight laced and constrained and she retorted that she too would love to let loose and run around yelling and leaping but her needs did not outweigh her responsibility to keep the others safe or the neighbours rights to live quietly. It was an interesting debate between the two and the rest was irrelevant but I think I should mention the pregnant man and the clash between other siblings in the city(my dreams are often vivid and weird).
So then my dream wandered to a centrelink scene with some person screaming at the person working there that they had rights and the worker holding up a five cent coin and saying 'should I cut this in half and give it to you? This is legal tender and on this side there is a small animal and it represents your rights, your right to all the things you are yelling about but not once do you turn the coin around and look at the head of the monarch on this side. This side represents responsibility. It is a two sided coin. If I cut it in half it is no longer legal tender. Did I mention my dreams were weird? The worker went on to give quite a lecture on rights AND responsibilities. I woke up thinking about Baa Baa Rainbow sheep, which some thick witted fool decided was more appropriate than baa baa black sheep because a black sheep was racist or some moronic interpretation of the old nursery rhyme. A sheep is a sheep. In times past the wool of a black sheep was highly prized over that of white sheep. It is a sheep. A black sheep just as the nursery rhyme depicts. Then people decided they wanted red and purple and pink and green wool so the white wool became more prevalent because it can be dyed. Funny how fashion changes things. Now the only rainbow sheep that might exist is in a twisted ditty, because scientists haven't worked out how to pre-dye the wool unless we go back to black sheep and so there isn't one. A rain bow sheep - there isn't one! Except in that idiotic changed song that kids are being forced to sing in case they might misconstrue a sheep as a racist icon. How ridiculous. Why not talk to the kids about counting and sheep and historical context and fashion instead of pretending there is something racist about it? Why not be a responsible adult and talk to kids about lots of things. Enrich their world instead of restricting it.

Now I am writing in a course again it seems I need to find more outlets for my skills. it is good to be setting aside specific writing time and also very good to be focussed on writing as my profession. it will happen this time. I spent a goodly part of last night going through old folders and finding odd pieces of prose, short stories and poetry that I had forgotten i even wrote. i found a quirky poem about typewriters being superseded by the computer and I might type that in. The most interesting thing that occurred was my 14 year old son said he had never read anything I had written so how could he know I was a writer. I gave him my first ever manuscript and waited anxiously as he read it. he didn't move a muscle and was extrordinarily quiet for him. When he finished I asked how he found it and with an enormous grin on his face said in a pretend mocking tone...'this is complete rubbish you should not consider giving up your day job..." by which I realized he was giving me his highest praise and later expressed how cruel I must have been to have given his brother only a chapter at a time when I wrote it. High praise from my hardest critics.