Sad day

Today was a day of mixed blessings for my kids. Princess Sleepyhead got her mug (very briefly) on TV as part of the massed choir in "Thank God you're here". You had to really know where she was standing to see her though. But as a counterpoint to her excitement, today was the day her singing teacher had to leave Australia because the good people at the Immigration Department wouldn't give her permanent residency. She's been teaching here for years, has a house and car and a thriving business, but because she's in her late 50s and doesn't have much cash behind her they refused. Now this is someone with a thriving business that she operates at home (giving singing, piano and violin lessons) and that she could potentially run for years, not someone who's out of a job and on the dole.

It's particularly sad for us because singing is Princess Sleepyhead's real talent, and this teacher was making an enormous difference to her singing. This teacher came from Eastern Europe and had run an opera company in South Africa (where she has now been forced to return) but the good people in Immigration said you don't need such experience and qualifications to teach singing to the general public. Let them come and try to organise lessons in the western suburbs. There is diddly squat out here in the way of teachers able to teach this style -- or at least diddly squat that we've been able to find. At one stage, before we found this teacher, we tried one of the popular singing schools and found it was just about that: pop, and much as PS loves this kind of music, she doesn't sing it well. And the teacher there knew nothing about classical techniques, how to breathe, all of that kind of stuff.

As it happens, PS does have a very good singing teacher at her school, but, because PS has ADD, she can't really afford to miss out on other classes to have private singing lessons, especially when she's already missing classes for literacy support, and when she's not good at catching up on the work she's missed.

When we heard what was happening to PS's singing teacher, we wrote a letter of support -- a very strongly worded letter of support, I thought -- to the said dept, but didn't even score a reply. Not even a thank-you-for-your-letter-and-we'll-take-it-under-consideration. Don't you love bureacrats? At the moment two of my friends have been tied up fighting bureacracy over things they shouldn't have to fight for. People end up paying thousands of dollars more than they should to get past all this red tape. Sometimes you wonder how much humanity these depts/councils show -- do they think about the spill-on effects on other people's lives? My daughter is disappointed and sad and doesn't understand why such a great teacher has been sent away. We've spoken to other parents, and both they and their children feel the same way. What the dept may not realise is that you might not need such experience and skill to teach singing to the general public, but by God you can see the difference that such experience makes. Today we are sad, and Australia is just a little bit poorer.

Time

How strange is time -- on the one hand it can seem like there is so much of it (three weeks between classes because of the two-week midsemester break) and yet at the same time that can seem like nothing (time subsumed by days at work, assignments to mark, writing that I need to catch up on, doctors' (yes, multiple) appointments, dentist appointments, funeral, all sorts of things). It's a paradox.

One week's almost passed and what have I done? Some writing? Yes. Rewrote a chapter today. That was good. Novel 2 assignments? No. Workshopping? No. Editing assignments? No. All these hang over me. Worked on the online unit? No. Read for pleasure? No. Where does time go? Part of the problem with the holidays is that I see them as time to catch up on writing and work I'm behind in, whereas my children see them as family time that I should be spending with them. Part of me rails against this, but another part says that I hardly ever give them my weekends because I'm often doing stuff for school. Maybe I'm just not organised enough. I don't know. I do know it drives me batty. And I do know that I enjoy the time I do spend with them -- and yes they grow quickly so I should be making the most of it.

The only time I've been able to do long-term sustained writing without interruption is the one year I had between my children starting school and my starting work. But even that was sabotaged by my husband being out of work for a good bit of that year. I shouldn't complain. I love my job. Love being with the students. But I do resent how much of my home life it encroaches on. I think the problem is that it's TAFE and most TAFE is more like apprenticeship-type stuff with little marking at home, whereas our course (and Liberal Arts too) are much more like Higher Ed courses with workshopping etc. I mean you can't workshop a stool (wooden) at home, or a haircut, or the serving of drinks.

Really, my complaint is not about my job: it's about my lack of free time. People say to me that they're bored. They complain about this. I always say I wish I had time to be bored. I don't have that luxury. I envy people that kind of free time because I could use it to write. Non-writers just don't get it. But my other writer friends do. We all need to run away together. Antigua, anyone?

LJ vs Blogger

Since one of my long-time SF buds has recently been diagnosed with bowel cancer, I've been reading his blog most days to keep track of his progress. He's on LiveJournal, as are a lot of my other SF friends. I put my Spec Fic URL on the end of his blog, and he posted and said why Blogger and not LJ. I explained that I had writing friends on both, but it was the ones on Blogger who first got me into blogging.

What I've noticed, though, is a tendency of my LJ friends to write much shorter posts. I think they spend a lot more time reading each others, and networking, whereas my Blogger friends tend to have longer, more thoughtful posts. It's interesting to speculate on what this says about us as a society, seeing as LJ does seem more set up as a networking tool, and is surely related to why we blog. I know I tend to be philosophical, and like to examine my own life -- why I needed to separate my personal blog from my writing one really.

"Lost" time

If there's one thing I hate about chaos, it's the time you waste in its midst looking for stuff. Any stuff. Small staff most usually. Paper stuff often. Occasionally something bigger. This week there have been two things: a tracker that goes with my son's iPod, because he's doing the Nike challenge. He has to run 40 km in two weeks, and for five of those days has had no tracker to monitor his progress. Luckily for him, I managed to find it in an obvious but unexpected place. More frustrating is the disappearance of my digital camera, which means my swamp blog has gone into hibernation mode. Of course the most frustrating thing was that I got up Monday morning to see the swamp full of water (something that's only happened once since I started the blog) -- and, no camera to record it! How can something as large as a camera disappear? Beats me. What does get me is how much time I lose looking for other lost things -- it's like trading one lost thing for another.

The Melbourne of my training course

Hmm, a bit of modern sculpture? No, it's a really cool bike rack. (Or am I just being a nerd?)



This is the inside of the building we did our training course in -- can you tell I'm very attached to place? I loved this building: it's olde worlde architecture. And the frosted glass windows, etched with the births, deaths and marriages registry.



This building was so cute, and so out of place among the skyscrapers. Wonder what it is? Who lives there? Ooh, I could feel a story coming on if I really wanted to...

Photos from our training course

Windy night

Two nights ago I had not long been in bed, at a time when most decent people are asleep, when there was a terrific bang followed by another smaller one. The Gadget Man and I both sat up. My heart was thumping.

"What are those dogs up to now?" he said.

I shook my head. "That wasn't the dogs."

Because I was most recently in bed, I made the trip downstairs and found the study door shut. Strange. I leaned into it -- and lean I had to do -- and wrestled it open. At the back of the house we have double doors that lead out into the yard, and one of these had blown open. No big drama, except I went back to bed with my adrenalin still running high. And Gadget Man was worried the side fence would blow down. The wind, because we have no trees or proper fences between us and the swamp, was phenomenal. For hours I listened to things banging and crashing, but eventually it eased and let me drift off.

Virtual friends

I'm a bit behind in blogging, largely courtesy of a three-day training course for work. But anyway...

Last Monday, I did something I've never done before: I met several virtual friends, three of whom I'd never met before except for electronically. Earlier this year, inspired by a close friend of mine who was doing fabulously well, I joined WeightWatchers, but being quite averse to the idea of meetings, joined as an online member, which meant my meetings were via the discussion boards. I've found these have become quite an addiction, and I look forward to logging on every day, to see what my "friends" are up to.

It's strange how familiar we can become with people we've never met. There, I guess we all have something in common: we all want to lose weight, but often there are deeper psychological issues we share, sometimes buried deep within our psyche, sometimes bubbling to the surface. People will post about something someone's said to them, and others will say how this has happened to them, or will write with passion because that something has obviously touched a nerve. I did it yesterday -- and just proceeded to go into a rant, so I can tell that needs to be the topic of another post.

I found the whole process of signing up interesting. First I had to come up with a moniker. This was hard enough. In the end I went for Arankalee -- my son said, "Ah, you named it after Arinka, the hero of your novel, and your middle name." He was half right. But Aranka was the name of a dietician I once saw -- the only other time since I've been married that I've successfully lost weight. I did find it strange then, this similiarity of names.

But then I realised fairly soon that I had met one of the other members, Lisa, once before, and I didn't know whether I should say anything or not. For a start, I didn't know if she would remember. Also, because I was expecting to fail and slink away unacknowledged I wanted to stay anonymous. But fairly shortly after joining, there was an incident with a past member who had been banned several times and kept trying to come back as a new member, and people were suspicious, and I thought it the perfect opportunity to reveal who I was. And it was. I felt so much better, and it was lovely that Lisa did remember me and was very welcoming. (I'd already figured out from her posts that she was a wonderfully supportive person, so that made things easier.)

Anyway, she's also more socially connected on the boards than I am, and a good organiser, so when she said she was organising a get-together at a local coffee shop, I jumped at the chance. Especially because it was a day I only had to do half my normal class prep, because I was coming up to the above-mentioned training course.

I recognised Lisa straightaway though her hair was shorter, a different colour and she was only a shadow of her former self. But then I suppose I'd seen photos on her blog too. I met Di, Tracy and Briar for the first time. It amazes me how you can sit down with people you've never met before and yarn like old friends. (Just as it's strange that after a long break from friends, you can find some you have heaps to talk about, and it's as if you've never been away, whereas with others the time is punctuated with long, awkward silences.) But perhaps it's not strange at all. I think often when people only meet electronically, they share intimate things about themselves that they might be too shy to talk about in person. I know I had a long term email "relationship" (only in the sense of friends, or perhaps a bit like a mentorship) with a young Brisbane guy a few years ago. He game me my superhero name: Danger Girl, and to me he will always be J-Man. He even came to visit with his family, and I caught up with him while I was at Clarion. Word got out that I was secretly seeing an elf. All right, he is tall and thin, but I swear he does not have pointy ears. Hmm, I'm getting off the track.

My point was that I met these strangers and felt as though I'd known them for years. We shared family problems, advice, gossip, all kinds of stuff, and at the end I was sorry I couldn't stay on, but I still did have to go prepare a class. Such is the life of a writer-teacher.

Picture this

It's one am and the house, all except the writer, is slumbering. The writer has been trying to write, but realises she has left it too late and the eyes are refusing to stay focused on the screen. Time to retire. She turns the lights off and, in darkness, feels her way up the stairs, then hits the switch to the landing light upstairs. Creeping around so as not to wake anyone, she makes her ablutions, and is about to turn off the final light when all hell breaks loose downstairs.

In the bathroom, the dogs, who presumably have been sleeping, break out into a vicious, snarly fight. This isn't a little tiff between friends, but a full-on fight that keeps going and going and going. If the whole house hasn't been woken up by the fight, they are by the writer yelling (and thinking once again how the neighbours must love this harridan who's always shouting). The writer's yelling doesn't stop the fight, so the writer has to blunder downstairs in the dark and switch the laundry lights on. The second the lights go on, all is quiet, which is frustrating because now the writer can't even tell what's been going on. The big dog, sheepishly, goes back to bed, whereas the little dog sees this as an excuse to escape.

So what did happen? Did one wake in the middle of a nightmare and frighten the other dog? Did the little dog pee on the bed yet again? I guess I'll never know, but as a writer I'll have brain space to invent stories -- just not at one am.

If I think I'm bad...

Mmm, I've just been reading over yesterday's "Chaos chaos chaos" post, and that set my husband off to reminiscing:

about the time he snuck home after dropping my son at scouts and slipped up to bed without saying anything. The scouts were doing a first-aid course, so I just assumed he'd stayed on to be a dummy. So when said scout didn't come home after 9 pm, I just figured they were taking longer than expected. After all, I had no reason to be perturbed because my husband was there, right? Wrong. He'd gone upstairs for a quick nap and gone to sleep. I'd been on the internet so no-one was able to phone through. My mother was less than impressed when she bought the said scout home at 11 pm, imagining we'd all been murdered. Said husband was very sheepish.

about the time he took said scout on a scouting trip to St Kilda at night, and said scout rang me to say that his father had lost him half an hour earlier, and he was now at their destination but husband (and daughter) were nowhere to be seen. I had to ring all the local policestations to leave a message for husband who hadn't remembered to take the mobile phone with him.

Then there is the mobile phone incident -- he got a new one, lost it within two days, and when three months later he found it, the same day he dropped it in the swimming pool. It's never worked since. I'm not sure we ever made one call on it, but we're still paying it off.

Oh, husbands, they are a magical breed.

Out with the dogs

Today, I had one of those funny walks. A German Shepherd was trying to hump our pup, who is still quite small. (For reference, I've put in a photo of the two of them taken a few days ago, and a couple more of her. Anyway, Luna didn't seem to perturbed, though she clearly didn't like it. I kept walking, and calling her, hoping she would come, because the shepherd was going off in the other direction, but all she kept doing was sitting down.

Then another passerby approached and said, "I think you should get your dog." I made a noncommital noise, because Luna still wasn't panicked, and I could see the shepherd wasn't actually trying to hurt her. But she hadn't finished with me. "That man's getting quite upset."

I nodded, and called Luna again. Still, she didn't come.

The passerby said, "You really should keep your shepherd under better control."

Huh? "Oh, no," I said, "the puppy's mine."

She seemed quite surprised, and just said "oh". Then, clearly, she thought about it a bit more and said, "So why's that man getting so upset?"

"The shepherd's his," I said.

"Oh," she said again.

So, off to the rescue I went, scooped up the pup, at which point the shepherd tried to hump me. Nice.

Oh, the joys of walking!

Today's sunset

was a beauty. Here's a photo slightly after the event. I was busy trying to capture it for my swampblog -- and didn't I enjoy standing around watching its gradual progression. In the background I could hear my dogs barking at passersby, but we'd not long come back from a walk, and the big golden one was being very naughty and refusing to be caught.

Chaos chaos chaos

So, today I find Sir Talkalot's school gets out a week earlier than all the other schools for the mid-semester break. Only trouble is I'm working extra days. Oh, well.

I'm having that feeling at the moment that I'm just a taxi service. I know it comes with the territory, but even so I wonder how I'm supposed to be in two places at once. On Wednesday, one child rang me from school where he was rehearsing a play (after school) and said, "You need to pick me up at six." Trouble is that I'm dropping other kid off at six, twenty minutes away. The Gadget Man was doing overtime, and my mother's in China. She always has some excuse like this when I need her to do me a favour! China! The lengths she'll go to.

Luckily, my life has been chaos for many years now, and I dread to think how often I had small children waiting for their mum on the side of the road, because Mum had been caught up at work. I tried to get away on time -- I really did -- but I failed more often than I succeeded. Now, I realise they were just in training. Still, when it's after dark, I hate the thought of them standing around, alone, in the cold, waiting -- even if it is in the school grounds.

I don't know where the days are going -- too much time slippage. Today, I spent over an hour trying to print out a calendar to replace my missing diary -- my missing diary with all my work hours penned into it. Arggghhhh! An hour does seem somewhat excessive, I know, but first it crashed the computer, then once I rebooted, it jammed the printer (probably required too much RAM), and then, once I decided to delete the job, it spent ages trying to do this, and required another reboot. Then, just when I got started, I got up to answer the phone and got my foot caught in the wires and accidentally ripped them out of the back of the machine. Another reboot followed. Eventually, I got to print my diary one month at a time (and then every second month came out without any day numbers!). This type of stuff is just typical of what happens to me. Why? Entropy -- ah, yes, I do remember the laws...

Views of Melbourne

Ah, I'm still contemplating the camera I would like to own (Olympus 510) -- the digital SLR I just cannot do more than think about at the moment, and feeling rather snap happy. The idea of a photoblog is more and more appealing, and make me recall with great fondness my early photography days when I first got my OM1, and how I would catch the train into the city, purely with the purpose of doing a photo shoot. These days I wonder how big a hard disk I'm going to need to satisfy my appetite for photography. Here's a short photojournal of Melbourne that I've taken over the last few days.

Well-made plans

Sometimes I think the world conspires against writers. For a start, the Melbourne Writers' Festival is on and I haven't got there yet. I love going to sessions and hearing writers speak. Usually, the festival clashes with Sir Talkalot's birthday, which is problematic, but now it's marginally later, which means it overlaps Fathers' Day. In neither case can I attend sessions because I have family duties, and while I would like at times to put my writing first, the reality is that I am part of a family, and I have to do my bit. The Gadget Man is very supportive of my writing: he let me go off to Clarion for six weeks a few years ago, he doesn't mind if I go on the odd writers' weekend away, nor if I go to sessions and leave him home with the kids. He was a dab hand at nappy changing when they were young. In fact, if I said I wanted to go on Fathers' Day, he would say go. He always lets me do what I want, but this leaves me feeling selfish, because he doesn't have activities outside the household. Feeling selfish is my problem, I know, not his. What I don't love about the MWF is the parking around the Malthouse -- am I ever looking forward to the festival shifting to Federation Square next year, so I can catch the train in. This year, the sessions I wanted to attend most were either at times I couldn't make, or not near any other sessions I wanted to see, which did dampen my enthusiasm a bit. Plus the finances were sooooooo stretched, I kept thinking that I really, really, really couldn't afford to go.

So, anyway, I had my week all planned out: one vet visit for vaccinations on Friday, but other than that Thursday and Friday were writing days (though part of this was going to be working on the online unit for work), so what happens: one kid's home sick on Thursday and being rather demanding, and the other's home on a curriculum day Friday. Of course I knew about the curriculum day, but Gadget Man was supposed to have the day off and do something with her, and then he couldn't. She was tired because she'd be on in at Nunawading filming for a TV show (it's embargoed so I can't talk about it yet) with the Victorian State Singers.

Anyway, got to dash out for a writer's party, leaving poor Gadget Man home with the kids, yet again.