Christmas 2020

Hmmm. I’ve always loved a good Christmas tree. One that is glowing with lights and glittery decorations. So this year I was especially excited to get my lovely white Christmas tree out of its box, and to decorate it to cheer us up.

The weird thing is, I’ve never really seen snow, but having a white tree brings snow right into your front room, even on a 37 degree day (100F), makes you feel like you are right at home in the Northern hemisphere, not stuck inside in South Australia, because it’s too hot to venture outside.

I should have known that in 2020, having something soothing and lovely, that reminds you of years gone by, would not be the ticket. Enter Sparkles.

My gorgeous little rescue kitty became entranced/obsessed/fixated on the tree. It became her personal boxing ring, her ‘greatest prize I’ve ever gained’ award (as she carried the decorations off into the house), and having four ferrets to help her stash these prizes around the house proved too much. I must have redecorated the tree three times in an effort to stop her. But it was to no avail.

After a night listening to her attacking the tree while I lay in bed, my muse (hubby) and I gave up. I packed everything away, and that was that.

Hubby couldn’t quite go there though, and bought home a really sad little twig of a tree with fibre optic lighting. The first thing Sparkles did was to try and climb up it. Undeterred, I put aluminium foil around the base, put it on a chair and put masking tape around it, with the sticky side up. All good cat foils, according to YouTube videos.

Well, Sparkles breeched all the above, and climbed the tree. It tumbled over onto the blind, and I saw her fleeing up the corridor like Satan himself had whacked her on her bum. After I removed all the crud from the base of the tree (what’s the point?), I noticed she’s left it alone!

Is there a moral in that? Probably, but for now I’ll take our tragic twig tree and just be happy that I’ve discovered solar lights. Yup, being in the Southern Hemisphere means it’s light for ages, so the solar fairy lights have fired up. Hubby announced the other night, as we gazed out onto the backyard, that at least now the aliens have a place lit up enough for them to land. I have to agree with him.

So maybe the lesson is this. 2020 has stopped us doing things we could normally do that bring us pleasure. But if we look a bit further afield, maybe we can create something new to make us happy. And be part of history when the aliens finally do decide to visit!!

If You Had Told Me…

This was my overlocker (serger) on the weekend. It turns out, you shouldn’t try to rethread one without reading the instructions first. Frankly, I think it’s also a very good representation of 2020. Where do you start to untangle it all?

If you had told me this time last year, that I’d be sitting in the front room, having just watched the Melbourne Cup on TV, with no spectators at the race track, I would have thought you were clinically insane. What’s so good about the spectators? Well, this might sound terrible, but it’s the drunk people falling down, showing their knickers, that make Melbourne Cup so damn special. It’s practically an institution, and with no knickers on display, it seems pointless to me.

Then there is possible civil war in the USA post their elections tomorrow, the lockdown/beheadings in Europe, typhoons and earthquakes and… I could go on but I might give myself a panic attack.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed this year (apart from putting butter on everything, because who cares about your cholesterol if we are all going to die), is listening to Vedic astrologers on YouTube. I say this, because they have predicted nearly everything that has happened!! It’s been quite comforting to know that the universe is unravelling, and that the aliens might land soon. It’s literally written in the sky.

If the aliens did land, I think they might turn around and drive away in their space ships. It’s a bit of a shit show here at the moment. But, just in case, I’ve put up enough fairy lights in the backyard for them to use it as a landing strip.

Stay safe, and stay sane!

There’s no going back…

 

A friend said to me the other day ‘I just want things to go back to normal.’ We were talking on the phone, and I could hear in her voice her frustration and sadness about what’s going on in the world. She was yearning for the days where you could hop on a crowded bus without fear, go shopping without standing behind lines of tape on the shop floor, and you could look at a crowd in a football stadium on TV and not feel like you were going to have a nervous breakdown.

Here’s the problem, you can never ‘go back’ in your life, and there is no normal now on the planet. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my thoughts on that one but it got me thinking about how people do seem to say ‘I just want my old life back.’ They usually say this (I’ve said it myself) when something bad has happened and their life has been flung up in the air. We are all in that boat at the moment, and as the weeks drag on into months, I see people getting more and more depressed as they realise they won’t be going to France this year, that there won’t be a sudden cure for all of this, and even worse, there are no new episodes of The Bold and The Beautiful to watch.

You can’t go back ever because even if you did, you aren’t the person you were once you’ve suffered a trauma, therefore your life can never be the same as it was. (But you can enjoy the best of The Bold and The Beautiful that plays on TV early evening, while sipping a gin and tonic. Who knew Brooke and Ridge had been married to so many different people, and so many times to each other!! They must be exhausted.)

It’s hard to sometimes believe we will come out of all of this one day, but we will. Like Ridge and Brooke reuniting yet again, and divorcing yet again, life goes up and down and round and round. And when it is all over, we will look back and be damn glad that you can only go forward. All great stories have big dramas, where you think the characters will never be able to be happy again, but in my experience, things usually work out for the best in the end.

So, on that note, I’m going to go and make myself a gin and tonic, and settle in for my nightly dose of drama. No, I’m not talking about the TV news. I’ll be watching The Bold and The Beautiful best of series. I wonder who will get married/divorced/killed/bought back from the dead tonight?

Wake me up when it’s all over…

 

Plagues and Death

 

Well, May didn’t quite turn out how I thought it would. By that I mean, even in a pandemic, where your entire life is turned upside down, you can still end up on a spin cycle that you didn’t see coming, on top of the pandemic that you kind of saw coming, but still can’t believe arrived.

Our little ferret Maisy (pictured above) got a respiratory viral infection at the beginning of May and died. She fought so hard to stay, but in the end, her little body just couldn’t take anymore and we lost her on our wedding anniversary. It was horrible, and I miss her everyday.

At the same time, I noticed black dandruff coming off our five month old rescue cat Sparkles. She literally is a rescue cat, as I rescued her from the next door neighbours garden in January, when she was a tiny, lost scrap of a kitten. I casually googled black cat dandruff and discovered she was INFESTED with cat fleas. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a bit of a phobia when it comes to fleas, and trying to deal with that, while Maisy was so sick, was stressful.

Thank God for my washing machine. Fifteen boiled loads of washing later, the house was sanitised and scrubbed, although my friendly vet informed me that problem will be with us for years, and in fact, I’ll probably never get rid of the billions of flea eggs around the house. So Lottie, our remaining ferret, and Sparkles settled into their new routine in our very quiet house. It didn’t last. A few weeks later, hubby and I agreed to foster three gorgeous ferrets from the ferret shelter. They needed a home, and they all come with physical issues, so they can’t be adopted out. We thought it was the least we could do to help out the shelter. Lottie and Sparkles were totally unimpressed with the new arrivals, but after a lot of squealing, chasing of the cat and general ponging of their scent glands, the tribe has now come together harmoniously, so we have five animals in our care.

Great, I thought. Everyone is getting along and it looks like we’ve flattened the flea curve so things can settle down now.

But no. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Turns out, as soon as I let my guard down on the flea front, we had a second wave. The new ferrets came with their own fleas, so everyone got reinfested, and all had to have baths and be dosed with flea treatments. Sparkles sleeps in our bed, and the new arrivals had been bounding all over the bed, and into every dark corner, and couch pillow in the house. It’s winter now so I can’t possibly wash everything again. The vacuum cleaner and flea comb have become my best friend.

Pandemic dramas. They bring their own special problems. Along with the fleas, I think I’ve given myself RSI from kneading bread dough, and whisking flour into butter and sugar, because I’ve been in a baking frenzy trying to get through a huge bag of flour I stupidly purchased, thinking we would never see flour again. The flour is poor quality too, so it hasn’t been a very satisfying experience. Thankfully I don’t have a stash of 540 toilet rolls to work through too. Honestly, 2020 is just the weirdest year all round. What else is going to happen?

We shall have to wait and see. Meanwhile, our house has closed its borders to any new animals coming to visit. A third wave of fleas is not going to happen (until next summer when apparently all the eggs will hatch – dear God).

Stay safe and flea free

 

 

Thank You Nurses and Frontline Workers

I gave up nursing a few years ago, but my God I remember how stressful it was. I worked a lot in emergency and it inspired me to write my novel Looking For Wonderland, which is a nursing comedy eBook, with the main character being a germaphobic nurse who falls in love with an Infectious Disease consultant. When this pandemic struck, I thought, what would Celine do? If you haven’t followed my blog, you may not know that Celine Dion is my touch stone for how to deal with life’s little stumbling blocks (and fucking enormous mountains that you think you will never get over). After reflecting on what my idol would do, I wondered, how can I support the front-line workers? It’s so bloody stressful dealing with the public, and the madness of working in a hospital.

Then I had a vision of tired nurses kicking off their germ ridden shoes outside their homes, boiling themselves alive in a shower before they felt safe, and maybe they could sit down with a glass of wine (or a bucket of gin), and have a read of something a bit light hearted. So, my publisher in the UK is making Looking for Wonderland a free download from May 1-5th, from any of the Amazon sites. It’s just a little something I feel I can offer in these weird and stressful times. Something a bit lighthearted that maybe can take you back to a time before…

Thank you to everyone out there putting themselves on the front line. I know it feels like you are not always appreciated, but please know, you are.

See you on the other side.

 

Delicious

Not so long ago, in a land now far, far away, a friend and I went walking one summer morning. And, we stopped at a bakery and had breakfast. I’m so glad now that I ate what was quite frankly, a glorious meat pie that morning, because now, we couldn’t do this activity at all. The bakery is closed for sitting down and eating, the road it is on is too narrow for social distancing with a friend, and if you did manage to get a meat pie, you’d have to eat it out of a paper bag, perched on someone’s fence down the road (okay, I might have done that). Yes, I know meat pies are not the breakfast of champions, but it was so delicious, and reminded me that sometimes you just have to seize the moment, because god knows (literally) what might be heading our way, so it is important to enjoy what is in front of you.

So Jane, I hear you say, share something with us that will help us while we are stuck inside. Okay, I’m not even going to pretend this is healthy, but it is seriously one of the most delicious slices I’ve ever baked (and eaten – I can’t stop when it’s around). It’s super simple too, so if you can get it into the oven and baked without eating all the filling, then you are in for a treat. It’s a really old recipe from New Zealand (where I grew up). Hopefully you can get the ingredients. It doesn’t contain loo paper or hand sanitiser so that’s a good start. Let me know if you try it!

TAN SQUARES

Base:
185g butter
310g flour
60g sugar

Rub the butter into the sifted flour which has been mixed with the sugar. Press into a sponge roll tin lined with baking paper, but save some of this mixture to sprinkle on top of the filling.

Filling:
125g butter
1 tin of condensed milk
2 tablespoons golden syrup

Warm these delicious ingredients together in a saucepan and don’t even think about the calories. Pour over the base in the sponge tin and sprinkle the remaining base over the top like breadcrumbs.

Bake for around 30 minutes at 180C

 

A New World

I’m not even going to try and justify the time it’s been since I last posted, but in this weird, new world we find ourselves in, I thought I’d like to fire up my blog again. Here in Adelaide we are not in official ‘lockdown’, but so many places are closed that there is no where to go, and really nothing to do. Plus, the government is asking us all the stay at home. So here we are…

To be honest, it’s strange, but not unpleasant to finally have an excuse to get on with all the craft projects that have been lying around half finished for what seems like forever. I was in the process of setting up my own business, but all that’s been put on hold. I have been put back on the nursing registry by the Australian Government, but whether or not I get called back into duty is something to wait and see about. Who would have thought?

My muse (husband) is around the house more, and thank God that’s a good thing. We also have a new member of the family – Sparkles – a rescue kitty. That’s her hanging off the front door. She even gets on with the ferrets.

So, here we are. A very uncertain future, but I’m certain there will be good things to come out of this situation.

But dear God, look at the banner for my blog. No social distancing there. I’m going to have to update that I think!!

Okay. See you soon.

 

Moving at the speed of light

I’m quite cheered. This year is FLYING by. I mean, in my mind it should be around March 1st, but apparently it’s nearly the end of April. But, what has cheered me up, is that everyone I talk to is saying the same thing. Time has sped up. Young and old alike are feeling that time is zooming by, so, because of that, I don’t feel so guilty about posting so late on my blog!!!

‘So Jane,’ I hear you say, ‘how is your self-care journey going?’

Self-care is a great concept, but what I’m discovering is that it means saying ‘no’. This is not something I’m all that comfortable doing. No. Such a simple word, but it has big implications. Like saying ‘no’ to a friend when they have assumed you will be available for one of their celebrations. So sure, they didn’t even bother asking you if you were available. What does that say about how I’ve been caring for me? It means I haven’t. I’ve let people’s expectations of me guilt me into saying ‘yes’, when I wanted to say ‘no’. It’s a lot harder, and a lot more simple than I imagined…

And then there is saying ‘yes’. Recently, I went to a pole dancing class. I’m at least 30 years older than a lot of the youngsters in the class. However, when I began the class, I wasn’t quick enough to get a pole at the back of the studio, out of sight in a corner, and was forced to stand centre stage in the room, right next to my 20-something year old male teacher, who is as flexible as a piece of cooked spaghetti. I was mortified! I thought about slinking out, but then I decided to say ‘yes’ to the whole experience, and just get on with it. Turns out, being that close to the teacher means I can see everything he does. I’ve been able to ignore everyone else in the class (cos they are behind me and I can’t see them), and I’ve had a ball. I’m completely useless at it too, but I’m having a blast, instead of feeling embarrassed about being the oldest in the class, and worried by what others think..

So, self-care. Far more confronting than I thought it would be. It will rock your boat, it will make people around you feel upset, and you will feel guilty. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and also the most exciting. As I start putting myself first in my life, my life is starting to look a lot more interesting. It’s not for the faint hearted.

I’m going to finish with a beautiful quote from the poem ‘The Summer Day’ by Mary Oliver.

What indeed? And, as always, I ask myself ‘what would Celine do?’ I’m pretty sure she would go to sewing class every week, would have a great time at pole dancing class and would bounce out of bed every day and take care of her heart. 

And that’s how I intend to continue. I’ll let you know how it goes.

One Month In…

I’m staying at home today. Very unusual on my day off as I usually run around ‘doing stuff’. But some friends asked me to look after their seven baby ferrets for the day, and it’s going to be 40C (bloody hot), so here I am with a free day. Well, as free as you can be while looking after little baby animals, who seem to do nothing but eat and poo. And I’ve been peed on by one of them, and am onto my second outfit of the day!

But I digress. So, with a day off, I was determined to let myself do some fun, creative activities. This includes writing (hello blog), and I’ve even done some sewing. A lot more unpicking than sewing, but that’s par for the course when you are learning. Reading back on my last post, I’ve realised how hard I’m finding it to let myself do fun and creative things. It’s such an intrenched habit of mine to do everything else like dishes, washing, cleaning, etc. instead of just sitting down at my desk and writing, or sewing, or working on my miniature projects. And I’m not saying I don’t want to do all the chores that you have to do to keep your life ticking along. What I’m saying is I have plenty of time to fit in fun things around all the chores, but I’m really, really bad at letting myself do it.

How do we give ourselves permission to do what we love? I never thought it would be so hard!!

I’m going to look for some solutions and report back soon. And any suggestions would be very welcome.

In the meantime, I need to go and cuddle my four fur babies. They are not impressed with the newcomers (even if I am).

Hello 2018 – The Year of being kind to myself

 

It’s 41 degrees Celsius here today (that’s 106F, or as I like to say, bloody hot), and after a genuinely wonderful festive season, I’ve taken the Christmas decorations and tree down, packed them away for another year, and am lurking in the house until a cool change comes through tonight (apparently with 90km winds). As I was packing away the decorations, I wondered where we will all be in 12 months? I’m old enough now to know that anything can happen. And often does. I don’t take things for granted like I used to. Especially after last year’s health scare, I’m determined to make 2018 a fabulous year.

It’s easy to think about having a fabulous year, and a little more complicated to try and figure out what that means. For me, it means:

1. Talking more kindly about myself, to myself and others. No more ‘too fat, too old, no good’ talk. Enough of that, it’s nonsense.
2. Enjoying each day a bit more. Really enjoying my friends, my work, my hobbies. Relishing and savouring life more than I have let myself in the past. Looking at the good around me, focusing less on the negatives.
3. Making time for stuff I love to do. I’ve spent so much of my life, especially when I was younger, doing what I thought I was supposed to do on all levels. Only to find out it’s pointless and doesn’t make you happy. Being creative makes me happy. Cleaning the shower does not.
4. Letting others off the hook a bit more. I’m sure as I do that with myself, I’ll be able to really do it for others too. Easing up on life.
5. If I get stuck on any of the above, asking myself my soul question: ‘what would Celine do?’

So, that’s the plan. The Year of Being Kind to Myself. Slightly more ambitious than The Year of Reading Instructions was, but I’m sure it’s going to be just as useful. In the meantime, have a wonderful January, be kind to yourself, and let’s make this the best year yet.