Saturday mornings

Sometimes on a Saturday morning I listen to the busy sounds of ‘other people’.  They’re all out there mowing their lawns and hanging their washing and playing with their kids and sanding their latest projects and…well you get the idea.

Saturday mornings for me are quite different.  During the week I am up every day at 5.30am and fall exhausted into bed at 10.30 if I’m lucky.  Only then do I relax and read for half an hour or so before turning out the light usually after smacking myself in the face with my book several times as I doze off reading.

So by Saturday morning I have no intention of getting up and launching into vigorous activity.  In fact on a Saturday morning I spend a long time in my pyjamas.  I drink a whole pot of coffee over the course of the morning, graze on the few things I can actually eat these days, read blogs, send emails, farm my farm, browse magazines, stare out the window and generally do absolutely nothing productive.  It’s bliss, it really is.

For a while I felt guilty about all the things my poor neglected house needs to have done to it.  I kept thinking I needed to get up and just get on with domestic chores and be a good housekeeper.  Wash those filthy windows and dust the top of the picture frames.  But the fact is I just can’t.  I’m busy, I’m tired and I am learning to focus my energy (or lack of it) in ways that make sense.  And if that means having one totally lazy, slovenly, unproductive morning a week then so be it.

 

Blogging stamina

I have none.  I had a good go for a few days there and then lost my energy for it and it all came to a standstill again.

Never mind, I’m not giving up.

Not much to report here, Hannah has finally recovered enough to go back to school. She ended up with an ear infection and slight perforation to the ear drum.  She doesn’t do things by halves that girl.

So life has returned to relative normality. 

It’s almost the weekend (huzzah!) and I am absolutely knackered and can’t wait to have a couple of days off.

Roll on Friday 5pm!

Plague House

I make no secret of (or apology for) the fact that I love winter.  It’s by far my favourite season, and yes, even when in the icy, grey, rainy, windy climes of Scotland it was still my favourite.  I would sooner tolerate freezing cold than heat any day.  In fact, I’ve also made no secret of the fact I loathe the heat.  My legion of long time readers will attest to this. But that’s another post (or several, come summer when the whining will commence).

This winter however has been one of the worst for ‘winter ailments’ in our family.  It seems like every two or three weeks another round of sore throats, coughs and sniffles descends upon us and Tom and I are either a) taking sick leave because we’re actually ill ourselves or b) taking ‘carer’s leave’ because one, or both, of the girls has it.

Once again I had to ring work this morning and make an apology for my absence due to a sick child.  Of course this means a day spent fussing and fetching and carrying and mopping the fevered brow of the little darling.  Fortunately she’s sick enough that she is actually lying quietly reading and has been doing that for the last three hours.  I hate the days that they perk up by lunchtime and annoy the bejesus out of me for the rest of the day.  I’m a great parent as you can see.

The upside is there was time for a blog post.  

Deluge

 It’s raining here and has been for several days. It may never stop.  I’m building my ark and have started gathering animals two by two, so far I have 3 rats (all female), 1 dog and 1 cat.  Clearly I’m not very good at this.

Due to the rain people are not complaining about the drought anymore, which is a relief.  However they are complaining about the rain. Sigh.

Our creek is overflowing and the Royal Adelaide Show has been rained on and flooded.

It hasn’t stopped people going.

 

We’re not going, we only go every two years.  That’s as much as I can stand.  This year is a good year NOT to go obviously.

That’s about it for now – it’s a slow news day at Bridget’s Flame. 

As you were.

Enough

Just lately I’ve been thinking about what is enough. Or at least when am I enough? When is what I have done or what I do enough?

This thinking has been the result of a bit of soul searching on my part. Something I’ve avoided for quite some time because the trouble with searching is sometimes you find stuff and it’s not always pretty. However, my constant discontentment has forced me to take the advice I usually give to my clients and ‘go within’ just a little bit.

I’ve told you about my new job, how much I like it and the people I work with it and they seem to like me too. I also whined about the decisions I had to make about more study or continue with the business etc. I won’t go on about it again, I still don’t know what I’m doing. Anyway….what I have realised is that this is a bit of a pattern with me (at least in career terms). I run away from what I really want, find something that I quite like and will settle for, then decide that I have to BE MORE for this role so I start cramming my life with more hard work and study and angst about my abilities. Until one day I collapse in a heap of disillusion and depression and exhaustion – and slightly lose my mind for a little while. And then I start all over again.

Sigh.

Why do I do it, why am I constantly putting myself in the position of thinking I have to be more, always more. Never ok just as I am, never ENOUGH.

Jennifer Louden writes about the ‘Hounds of More’ she says “Hounds of More are petrified you won’t be able to do what you most yearn to do in your life, so they keep you running in circles, chasing your—and their!—tails.”

Mine are there, always snapping at my ankles making me go faster, search harder, grasp at more, and more and more. So much to do and learn and achieve and BE!

When in actual fact I don’t think I really want any more – at least not that stuff. I want a peaceful life, I want to plant a herb garden and draw again and grow some vegetables and walk the dog and play with the children.

I just haven’t quite worked out how to pacify the hounds.

Memory

Isn’t memory a strange thing? Well perhaps not memory itself but the way it manifests (or fails to). Let me explain. I had a completely exhausting week last week. We have long days anyway, with both of us working full time and the girls in before and after school care every day, but last week 4 nights out of 5 we had ‘other activities’ to attend which made for very long days away from home. Places to go, people to see you know. Add to that three very disturbed nights for me (for various reasons) and I was left utterly knackered.

So yesterday afternoon I decided to have a little nap and took myself off to bed for an hour. Lying there, slightly demented from tiredness, my mind began to wander into those mysterious places it goes been waking and sleep. I suddenly had a very comforting image of a house that I love very much. I don’t know who it belongs to but I’ve always admired it when we drove past. It sits near the top of a gently sloping hill, and is surrounded by beautiful trees. It has a small fenced field close to the house where live two chocolate brown, velvety faced donkeys. There’s just something about that house that makes me feel peaceful and content and only slightly (ahem) envious of the people lucky enough to live there.

This isn’t it, but it’s not unlike it. Photo credit here

In my semi-slumber I thought ‘we must take a drive past it so I can see it. Where is it again?’ After a few moments confusion and delving into memory I recalled where it was. I also recalled that I hadn’t been there in more than 20 years. It was in Scotland, on a road we sometimes took home which my mother referred to as the ‘wee road’. We’d leave town and Mum would say to Dad ‘can we drive home on the wee road’. We all knew what she meant, it was the ‘scenic route’ and we all loved it. Part of it took us down a narrow road past a farm, in spring and summer there were always wildflowers growing at the side of the road and we’d stop and pick them. The road had steep banks and hedgerows and as we picked the flowers the Highland Cows in the field would peer curiously over the hedges at us.

Photo by John Toms

I was a sucker for those gentle brown eyes and silky noses.

Now I can understand that is a happy memory and I guess that somewhere in my mind something triggered that place and I probably needed that sense of comfort that it gave me. But I can’t helping feeling that ‘memory’ is a miraculous thing and a little strange. It was vivid, I could see it and feel it and smell it, for a short time it fooled my sleepy mind into thinking it was a recent memory, but it wasn’t.

I really believe we have access to everything we need inside ourselves. In the past few days I’ve had lots of realisations and epiphanies about things. I think there’s something in that memory for me examine too, I just have to work out what it is.

The winter of my discontent

I’m quite surprised to find myself here writing a blog post so I can only imagine how surprised anyone reading it might be.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about this blog recently, shall I keep it?, should I stop completely?, should I try to do one post a week?…do I need anymore ‘to do’ or ‘shoulds’ in my life? ‘should I continue to use appalling grammar?’

I don’t know.  I used to enjoy it (the blog not the bad grammar), I don’t anymore.  It’s not that I don’t have thoughts and feelings and plans and ‘stuff’ happening that I could write about.  I just don’t like it here anymore.  I still like the idea of blogging, I just don’t like this blog.  I’ve moved on, grown out of it, changed my direction (or should I say my directionless-ness, for I don’t think I’ve had any real direction for a long time and now I just have a new set of directionless issues).

I’d still like to talk about what I’m thinking, what’s happening Chez Bridget’s Flame, who annoys me, makes me happy, makes me laugh, frustrates me, inspires me and so on.  And I’m sure everyone is dying to hear all that crap fascinating information.

With spring just around the corner here in the arse end of the world, perhaps I will suddenly have a new lease on my blogging life and feel inspired to re-invent my blog identity. 

Perhaps.

Photo credit this blog right here

Couldn’t resist this photo…I love winter but the image still made me smile.