Scrap the plan

I had a great plan for today. It's C's long day at creche and the big girls have after school care; husband wanted the family car, so had offered to do drop-off and pick-up, which left me an empty house from 8:30am til 5:45pm. (That's just over 9 hours, which is unheard of in the extreme). I have truckloads of work to do on two different projects - my big one and a new, smaller one - so the day was going to run like this:

8:30 Family leaves; I do breakfast dishes & boil the kettle.
8:45 I commence work. I work consistently and productively, without interruptions.
11:00 I take a 15-minute break to blog.
11:15 I work again. Go me! Look at all the work I am getting done, in my head!
1:00 I take a well-deserved hour off for lunch, laundry folding and to read a book
2:00 Working again. I am a powerhouse, I am.
4:00 Half hour break to prepare dinner and get it in the oven.
4:30 Finish off the beautifully written and massive work items I've accomplished.
5:45 Stop working when family comes home and enjoy a pleasant, relaxed dinner.

Sounds brilliant, yes?

Here's how today has *actually* gone done, as at 11am.

8:15 3yo is protesting about being taken to creche by Daddy instead of Mummy. I make a snap decision to come along in the car and walk her in. I figure I can walk home easily enough from school (it's only 1km away) and start work at 9:15 instead, which isn't tragic.

8:45 Creche run done, I am walking into school gates with elder two when 7yo spots her friend, all dressed up, and wails, "Mum, it's 100 Day! You forgooooooot!" Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

8:50 "Don't worry", I say to 7yo. "I can fix this." I turn on my heel and jog the 1km home, pausing once to suck down some Ventolin. Home in 11 minutes, I grab some stickers, some dried pasta shells, and head back to school. The return trip takes slightly longer as I'm a bit winded.

9:20 I arrive at school and pelt to the assembly area, extract E from her class (which, thank heavens, hasn't yet had their turn at parading) and wildly apply 100 stickers to her jacket and pants, and hand her the pasta box. She is smiling so I think I may be out of the poo.

9:55 The parade has dragged on, and on, and ON, but finally it's finished. I take a photo of E with my phone and walk home more sedately.

10:20 I arrive home to find an urgent family message on my home answering machine. Returning that call eats up 30 minutes.

10:50 I turn on the computer, but it won't boot.

11:00 It has booted on the fifth try.

11:05 I feel the need to log this before I start working, so here I am!

So much for my luxurious 9 hours of work time ... I'm going to have to do what I can with 7 hours instead, and probably do a little more once the kids are in bed tonight. But at the end of the day, I couldn't have let E be disappointed; I'm not about to let work start to be the top priority, when I'm primarily doing it so I can make our family life more comfortable (and keep myself skilled up enough to be employable, too). I'll get the work done, but this morning, making C comfortable and fulfilling my commitment to E was more important.

Working music #4: Homegrown

Working music this week has been pretty exclusively Australian, and from my teens / university days. It must be all this revisiting the places, preoccupations and themes of my 20s thing, that I'm doing, both as part of my current project and in trying to write a 20-year-old character in my current WIP :-)

The project is in the middle stage, which always feels overwhelming and exhausting. So this song helps:



As for this one: one of the best songs ever. How many farewells to people going overseas for a few years did this one get played at? Answer: A squillion, at least.



Crowded House will always, always have an unshakeable place in my affections. This song is so beautiful, it makes me smile every time.



Of course, the great man himself, Paul Kelly, had to feature:



Twice, in fact.



And OK, it's late 90s and not really the same sort of song, but I like this one. It reminds me of my honeymoon. Really. (It was constant loop on the US radio station we listened to on an 2-day drive through the snow from Niagara Falls to Philadelphia).



I might try to internationalise a bit next week, we'll see!

The evil that men do lives after them (A poem)

the house smells of sour and burn.
the sweetish pungency of sweat and shoes, overripe apples in a bowl
the unmistakeable tuna acid of long-left cat food
the top notes, cigarettes and an overcooked cake

Oh, she says tiredly, stubbing her butt into an empty coffee cup, watching the flecks of tobacco float in the creamy dregs
yeah, the cake got burned. I was making it for you. But I forgot, after.

the kids, coming in wary and so full of need, are eyeing her, judging whether to whisper or shout.
she tries to smile for them, but the muscles of her jaw slip sideways somehow
leaving only a ghost of ease behind.

I say, don't worry about the cake, I'm worried about you, you don't look good
I know I shouldn't say it, hon, but it's true
can't I help? can't I?

and she, starting to shake
the fresh bruises she gave herself in the flailing today showing greenish on her arms
says, nah,
no-one can help me. no-one can.
whenever I hafta feel something strong, I hafta go through it again

and again

again

and now we're not talking about her dying mother anymore
(tragedy deep and wide enough, for most)
and the sea is ink with the filaments of the poison that stunned her
still scars her
every day

And I send my kids and hers to play in the yard
make her more coffee, start the dinner
and try to hold myself steady, so she's free to not be

and the radio says, don't do it if it hurts inside

Huh. That's a joke, she says,
It all hurts, even the love
even that.

I touch her hand lightly, lightly
and slice green beans. nothing else to do.
she told me once that she'd walk on razorblades for her kids
and I think she does, most days
just to stay,
just that.

And I know she won't live here, in this house, this town, long. She can't. And maybe
when she goes, I will not see her again, won't ever know
how she armed herself to fight the daily fight, if she found kindness in strangers
or if she didn't.

Then the kids are clamouring for icypoles, and with infinite weariness
she drags out the mask again
and puts it on.

- Kathy, 20/7/2012

Reading Notes: Why I am not a Potter fan

(This post is part of the Once a Month Book Club link up over at A Permanent Flux. This month's theme is Harry Potter - "anything so long as it's Potterific".)

This month's theme in the Once a Month Book Club is Harry Potter, and I almost decided not to play. What could I, honestly, write that would meet the commandment that it be "Potterific"? I was stumped, and here is why:

I didn't really like the Harry Potter books all that much. I don't own them, have only read the first four to the end and half of book 5, and have only seen the first movie, and I don't remember much of it, to be honest.

Before you start telling me how wonderful Potter is, how seriously deluded I must be, let me tell you - I *tried* to love these books. I tried really hard. I quite enjoyed the first two books, actually; I thought the idea was a clever and vibrant riff on two of the great tropes of children's fiction, the school story and the magic story. I liked Harry and his friends. I thought the first book in particular had quite a Roald Dahl-ish feel about it, that sense of a resilient child's-eye view of magic and menace, humour and really grisly adult behaviour, that makes Dahl so everlastingly appealing to kids.

I have tried to pin down what it was about the Potter books that ended up feeling so blah to me. It wasn't easy, because these are not badly written books - Rowling is a better than competent writer with an engaging turn of phrase and a real gift for characterisation. I don't do well with prose that is turgid, flat, over-written or excessively descriptive (less telling! more showing and doing!) but I can't honestly say the Potter books are guilty of these sins. In the first two books in particular, the stories zip along, the dialogue is really well written, and the characters emerge (slowly, but it is kid's fiction - you're not going to get Madame Bovary style intricacy, and nor should you).

So if the books aren't badly written, what is my problem with them exactly?

I know it's not just a contrarian reaction to their popularity; I love the Hunger Games books passionately, for instance, and they are extremely popular. I consider popularity to be neither a recommendation nor a disincentive - some really great books are widely read and some really rubbish books are. It's not a useful filter, overall.

I don't think it's the school-story focus, although I'm willing to admit that may be part of it. With the short-lived exception of a 9-month crush on the Chalet School books when I was about 10, I never really took to school stories in a big way; as an older child and young teen, I was mostly reading sci fi, fantasy and crime fiction. Stories set in boarding schools didn't hugely appeal to me, and maybe they still don't.

I think, really, it's probably down to three things:

1. These books very quickly (in my opinion) started to suffer from the Too Many Characters and Too Many Sub-plots traps. As a reader, I can maintain interest in and connection to three, maybe four, main characters, with a suitably rich, but backgrounded, supporting cast. The more people I'm supposed to care about, the more side-stories I have to track, the harder I have to work, and the better the overall story has to be to justify it. I don't begrudge the effort when it's Tolkien, but Rowling, I would contend, is no Tolkien.

2. I really felt that the fourth book (which is noticeably fatter than its predecessors) showed a lighter editorial touch, and not to the book's benefit. Without having the slightest basis for this suspicion, I wondered if perhaps Rowling's increasing fame by that stage made her less vulnerable to editing. Whether that's so or not, I thought the fourth book was bloated, and it didn't inspire me to plunge ahead with any great enthusiasm.

3. I got tired of the master plot. This is what I call the X-files trap - collapsing under the weight of the expectations you've created, that nothing could ever really fulfill. It gets to the point that even if you Break All The Things, Reveal All the Shockingly Shocking Secret Businesses and Kill A Large Number of Sympathetic Characters Just to Show You Mean It, it's not enough. I understand that the final book did a bit of that, no doubt in an emotionally resonant way for those who had engaged fully with the characters and the story (ie not me).

Anyway, for better or worse, that's probably why I'm not a big Potter fan. There are certainly an ocean of worse books, I'm not claiming otherwise, but for me, these didn't ring my bell, and I can live with that.

Sunday Selections: The snow

We just got back an hour ago from a long weekend at the snow with the kids - their first time ever! It was great fun and completely exhausting, not to mention a little hair-raising, as we drove through a blizzard on the top of Mt Hotham and waited out a whiteout on the way down.

There was, naturally, the eating of snow:

much tobogganing:

and walking up snowy slopes.

My husband G looked like a bank robber

while I looked like the Michelin Man.

The road was lost in snow

and the bush was lovely, sugared with fresh fall.

And now, back in Melbourne, the winter sun is shining.

Kim at frogpondsrock usually runs Sunday Selections each week, a photography meme for people to show off shots that might otherwise never see the light of day. The meme is on hiatus officially, but it was too good an opportunity to miss for these winter shots :-)