Sunday 15 April 2012

I will.

G'Day,
Last night I did quite a lot of reading on depression. Today I feel as if I am stronger than I have been feeling, and worrying that my behaviour has maybe effected the people around me negatively. I worry that my husbands depression may return. I will try to be less impatient and communicate better with the people around me (Mum). I will try to be more positive. I will try to not let my worries and frustration over flow onto the other people in my house because of it.
Yeah well I tried. But bloody hell it is so F****g frustrating with my Mum here. If I talk to her she asks me to repeat 3 times, then I have to go back to the beginning of each sentence and re explain it all to her over again. If I talk to her it opens the door to a never ending rattling of words and advice straight back that , Yes! I repeat! Never ends. She has no sense of what she is saying being wrong or intrusive or prejudiced or negative, she never has. And I can feel the old bloody pressure rise and my frustration along with it. It is so hard. I always have to be the strong one and consider every one else's feelings and shut off my own needs in case I worry someone else. Oh my, this post has turned bad hasn't it.
I have a duty of care towards her and it drags me down. You see a poor old lady, I see a mindless torment. You see a angry impatient selfish daughter, I see no future without frustration. You see, a romantic notion of looking after elders in a society where many are put aside in nursing homes and mistreated. I agree with that one, nursing homes aren't always nice places, I worked in one for many years, but it really isn't a loving fairy tale existence to do it yourself either. It is bloody hard. Nursing homes are cruel places, where patients are made to fit the mold of routine etc and sit there waiting to die. But they do get medical, physical and social care that they otherwise might miss by staying in their own homes. I don't know about other countries, but here they are also very very expensive. Doing that to my Mum is out of the question for me.
Yes I know all the cliche's, I have heard them, seen them, felt them. I know I am not being a nice person. Walk a mile in my shoes.
I love my Mum, but by god, she drives me mad!

Friday 6 April 2012

Words Words Words.....

G'Day,
I have always found great fun and amusement in words. We depend on them don't we. Language rules our every action and interaction, no matter which language is our language of origin. In particular I get a lot of fun out of other people using the wrong word. No I am not saying I am better and know all there is to know, I am no great brain or expert on such things. But...what I really love is when in conversation, people to whom I am talking try to sound intelligent and use what they think is a really big word then get the word wrong and use it with the incorrect meaning.
Here is for an example, the difference between two similar words. "My husband Bert had a prostrate operation last week, oh the poor old fella has had such a rough time of it." Love it!
Well...... if I had an operation on my nether regions, I am sure it would be much more comfortable if I were prostrate than standing, ha ha.
Last week I was in the local west field shopping mall and looking through one of those Asian style cheapish shops, you know the ones with the gadgets, everything you might want for your house and lifestyle if you knew what you wanted it for? Anyway, in one section of the shop there was a cleaning gadget section which contained cleaning cloths of various varieties, woolen dusters that would fall apart the first time you used them or get hooked in the top of your favorite antique ornament and send it crashing to the floor. Plastic brooms, mops, window squeegees, dust pans and brooms, etc. One item took my attention . It was a plastic floor cleaning tool with a sponge blade on the end. The translation on the packaging said "For warm, clean, homeless feel"
Really funny translation.
Another thing that I have found great joy in is the words that children use when they are learning to master language. My own kids bring many sayings and word variations forth from my memories of their youngest years. Mistakes in word meanings and pronunciation. My second son Dave when he was 2 or 3 years old could not pronounce some word sounds namely Tr. He always said them with an FW in front. So Train was fwain, truck was fwuck etc. We were trying to coach him one day and were saying different words for him to pronounce "Davey say train for Mummy" He replied "Fwain". OK Say "Train tracks" Reply..."Fwain fwacks, haha you get the idea. Next we tried Crackers, which became Fwackers, then I thought hmm, maybe a c word to show him the difference. So I said, say "Cat" so he put the word cat and crackers together, which had us all rolling around laughing ( picturing a cat with crackers, we call fireworks, crackers here) he didn't like that, so he had a bit of a meltdown which made us laugh all the more. Poor little kid. Why didn't we have a video camera in those days? Oh I am still laughing about that, he was so gorgeous.
My youngest child Annie was also a mistress of word play when she was around the same age. Some of her word changes are ones that I still use in my head when thinking to myself and they always make me smile . So cute. She use to call vegemite, megebite. Disappeared became misappeared. If we asked her where something was and she didn't know she would hold her hands out wide and look up at you, shake her head from side to side, with very wide open eyes say, "It's misappeared!" So funny. Similar meaning, which was quite clever of her, but not quite right, hahaha.
Another story of her when she was probably 3 years old. We took the kids to visit my husband's grandmother who was very old at the time. We introduced Nanna Lander as Daddy's grandma. She thought for a while and in her mind must have been working out the concept of great grandmother. She could see that Nanna Lander wasn't the same person as her other Grandma or Nanny so she turned back and said " Oh you are my Nanny- Granny!" Hahaha.
The children I sometimes see while at work come out with great things too. One of my funniest memories happened a few years ago. My son, with whom I work was walking past some kindergarten children one afternoon . He has long red/brown hair and a reddish beard. One little boy stood staring, open mouthed and swiveled to watch my son go past. Then turned to his little companion and said in awe "Did you see that, he is a wookie!" Wookie being that big hairy critter from the star wars movies.
A few weeks ago, we arrived at one of the schools, and a group of children were waiting around for their bus number to be called to go home. I entered one little boy's classroom and he stuck his head around the door and said "Hello" Then called to his playmate to say "Hey Adam! Look it's the Mopper" Ha ha so funny. Well...I guess that's better than being called the rubbish lady, which is what one little girl referred to me as, at another site we clean. I did correct her , she now calls me the cleaner. Kids are so funny.
You have got to love the way little kids minds work haven't you?
I hope you have a lovely Easter break. Today is Good Friday. I made another batch of yummy fig jam. The figs are still going but getting closer to the end of this season's fruiting. There have been so many this year that I think even the little silver eye birds are getting sick of them, lol.
I managed to wipe a few things off my to do list for today, I really need to go wash my baby car. Instead I am here on the computer. Better get to it!
That's about all.
Bye
Love Linda.

Monday 2 April 2012

Autumn Garden

G'Day,
          I have'nt posted about what is happening in the back yard lately. So here, goes.
Autumn is here and daylight savings ended over the weekend so it will get dark earlier. The days have started to become shorter over the past few weeks, and become cooler, but we still have been having some warm late summer days amongst them. This weekend was beautiful Saturday we had 26C Sunday we had showers in the afternoon and it was cooler. Some of the deciduous trees around Canberra have colored up with the autumn change, many are yet to come.
Anyway, enough innane talk about the weather, I am sure everyone knows what autumn is like.
I am trying to do my first post in here from my new baby computer. It is correctly called a tablet so it is quite different from the other one we have therefore I have to re-learn some things, please be patient. The photos I have included were taken just a short while ago around my yard.
I also haven't worked out where the spelling correct button has gone, so there will be mistakes. I will try to fix them but....oh well you know me.
I haven't worked all this out yet. I don't know how to put the text in between the photos. So Um? They include red cyclamen, oregano in flower, zucchini flower with lady bug, figs, gardenia, diosma, lavender, iceberg rose, one last azalea, and easter daisies.
The other few pics I have included here are of some bowls I have been working on. I have been decorating them over the weekend with some colored slips ( liquid clay) . A work in progress. The little lidded containers are finished, they were pretty but both of the lids are glazed closed, oh well, I can pretend, hahaha. If I hadn't told you that in here you wouldn't have known and you might have thought I was a good potter or something.