What will keep me going in 2013?

Just gathering my wits at the moment to make a blog post. I managed to get through 2012 with a few wobbles in the middle surrounding mis-haps in the arts and the inability to intervene in the fate of a beautiful cat. Around Christmas things were better than the previous year due to a win in the arts, brought swiftly to earth by an abrasive encounter at a pre-Christmas party.

On the upside, I managed to recover from the abrasive encounter with the support of dear friends and family, plus juggling my pills and vitamins! Currently I feel pretty good and I’ll do my best to continue along this trajectory.

Several things lying around the house (never tidy, but usually not a pigsty) have reminded me that reading has been a good tonic in the past, so I am glad to have a large pile of reading to look forward to this year too. Sonia Faleiro‘s book Beautiful Thing. Portrait of a Bombay bar dancer, is still sitting on the edge of the coffee table, reminding me how surprisingly moving some books can be. I was captivated by this tale of the knife-edge existence of a young woman with the “ambition” to be a genuine dancer, not just a roughly used barmaid. Convinced that her life was quite positive compared to others in India, she made me realise how different circumstances shape different personalities and how everyone has their own frame for their dreams of a “better life”.

While there is nothing in my “to-read” pile that promises to be as inspiring as that book, there are plenty that will keep me occupied with mayhem and mystery!  eg. Michael Connelly‘s The Black Box. He’s always a good read.

Spotrick gave me for Christmas a little book of poems titled I Could Pee on This and other poems by cats.(Author Francesco Marciuliano). On the cover is a cheeky ginger & white kitten who looks similar to our Bendix. The contents are hilarious and are good cheer-ups if I’m feeling a bit meh. Here’s the beginning of “Unbridled love”:
I knead your chest with my sharp claws
To show you my affection
I bite your arm and don’t let go
To show you adoration…

That is sooo characteristic although I wish there was something I could do about the biting! My forearms sometimes get gory teeth-marks from those “adoring” chomps- ye-owww.

I could pee on that

Books are generally for bedtime reading for me, whereas I often get occupied with online courses during the day while Spotrick is at work. While in 2012 I was finishing my Masters degree, with that merely needing some corrections this month, I’ll have more time to concentrate on other things. Last year I did some online courses through EdX and Coursera including “Listening to World Music”, and “HarvardX: PH207x Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical & Public Health Research” , gaining course credits that could be used in real life if I wanted that. Several other courses I sampled, but didn’t complete formal assessment were Computing for Data Analysis (4 weeks of learning to progam in R), CalTech‘s Machine Learning and Community Models of Public Health . I have just started “Economics for Scientists”  as I think it will help me understand more about health economics and the political economy of health, with the hope of enrolling for a PhD connected with those later in the year.

Incidentally, I was stunned to hear of the death of the man who practically invented the “political economy of health” . Gavin Mooney was murdered in Tasmania, along with his second wife Del Weston, whose son from a previous marriage is being held in connection with their cruel slaying. I only met Gavin late last year at a seminar and he seemed a great believer in making the best health facilities available to the most disadvantaged people. He was a lovely guy, and was obviously held in very high regard by people throughout the community as seen by the tributes in Melissa Sweet’s Croakey blog.

Not ruminating about things like the previous paragraph is something I have to develop this year and I have become sufficiently motivated (I think) to get back to some of my art & craft activities, like knitting and quilting. I meant to make some cushions for several friends for Christmas, but time flew by too fast while I was finishing off the degree. Though Christmas is almost a distant memory, I’ll keep going on the cushion project, starting with a log cabin pattern in greens for a friend who has an unusual green leather lounge suite.

Green theme

These fabrics are in the mix and I am putting my new electric scissors to work cutting the strips just right as my wrists and thumbs are wrecked for working with manual ones.

There’s a lot of fabric hanging around here that needs to be made into clothing as well, but I’ve been very slack on the sewing for many years- I can’t get moving on it. This year I’ll get out some projects and see what happens- maybe inspiration will stay with me for a while. I really like these bright, lightweight cottons for making summer dresses and tops:

The garden is starting to look more lush than it has since we moved in, largely due to Spotrick’s efforts in tidying up old plants and pots. I’ve also been blitzing the plants with plenty of fertiliser and misting water under the larger ones on hot days. My ambition is to almost obscure the courtyard walls!

 

These Were a Few of Their Favorite Things – and a few of mine

These Were a Few of Their Favorite Things – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been interested in science, reading & discovering things since I was tiny, but never had any of those wonderful construction toys that boys seemed to get for Christmas. I had plenty of dolls that I loved to dress up with clothes I had sewn & knitted for them & I was always pestering my mum for “scraps”.

At about 4 or 5 I received a wind-up train set and rails for Christmas, but never really got to play with it the way I wanted because my father immediately commandeered it and made long guided rail things from plywood around the rooms. He would usually take the wind-up bit out of my hands saying “don’t overwind it”.

Wimmer-Heinrich-HWN passenger train set

I quickly learned about the remedy for “over-winding” by taking the little engine apart while dad was at work in the South Island (NZ; he was a government statistician in the 1950s and actually went around and collected some of the data, as they did in those days!). After figuring out clockwork motors, I proceeded to take apart music boxes and wind-up monkeys & put them back together again without anyone noticing. What fun!

No chemistry set ever came my way, in spite of pleading every year, but I did get to play with the usual household substances like vinegar & baking soda, making terrific froth plumes out of soft drink bottles. Developing films in the laundry was vaguely chemical, but you couldn’t experiment with that stuff.

I WAS really interested in stars and space, due to my father showing me the Southern Aurora and tracking the first orbiting space satellites, like Sputnick I & II. He kept an ear out on shortwave radio to find out what times to expect them and we always went out on the front lawn with his old German Field Ambulance binoculars that he had acquired from a mate when he was younger. I can remember the first space dog Laika and the poor monkeys & chimpanzees that were sent up to perish in plumes of fire on re-entry.

Laika – Russian space dog

We kept track of many space objects and star and planetary happenings, and when I was a young adult (at least in years), the appearance of the comet Kouhoutek was quite a colourful spectacle low over the Pacific Ocean in front of my parents house. There was a phase I went through when I was around 14, wanting to be an astrophysicist & work with the Parkes radio telescope (The Dish). I would try to figure out the speeds and heights of orbits necessary for satellites of various weights to circle the earth and where they ought to appear at certain times – what a mess of maths that was!! No computers to help me then.

One thing that really cemented my interest in science was a children’s encyclopedia “of everything” that I received when I was eight. I read that thing to death, over and over. The parts I remember best are the chapters about the solar system and “how the body works”. I knew then that I wanted to be a doctor “when I grew up”.

From my encyclopedia

However, the book puzzled me for years because it didn’t explain exactly what happened to food-waste, once it went past the stomach: I spent years thinking that the solid waste went out through the large intestine and somehow got separated from the liquid waste that exited via the small intestine! It took some exploration of mum’s nursing textbooks to get a handle on the kidneys, which ultimately fascinated me with how they could extract the liquid from blood without letting it all leak out in your pee!

I was a pretty weird little kid at times, with allocating all my little friends in third grade a strange “disease” out of my list from the Pears’ Cyclopedia (1960 edition; I was 8) when we played hospitals! My pals got sick of it before we’d even finished “A”: they’d had achondroplastic dwarfism, asthma, acromegaly and ataxia thrust upon them before I was outvoted on what to play at lunchtimes! Incidentally, the poinciana thorns in the playground (horrors they’d say these days) got a good work-out as “needles” for the play-nurses to prick their victims!!

 

Overpopulation blasts the landscape

Nestle, give baby orangutangs a break!

Although there was no such thing as a “greenie” when I was a kid, I think I’ve had a touch of green all my life.

I first became upset about deforestation when I heard that local farmers/ranchers were chopping down the Amazon rainforests and clearing them to graze cattle. I can remember reading about it in Readers’ Digest when I was six- although I mispronounced the river as “A-may-zon”, until I heard the word again at school about 3 years later!

I could understand that the native people of South America slashed and burned a small patch every year or two so they could grow a few crops, but I was quite frightened of the idea that the forests were just being laid waste to graze cattle and replanting rough grasses.

Obviously, this trend has accelerated and spread to the rainforests of other countries, eg. Indonesia, where they are plundering the rainforest to plant disgusting palm oil for consumption and export. It’s certainly not the cheap product it is touted to be, as we are paying invisible millions of dollars for the loss of the forest habitat. Rare animals have been pushed near to extinction by the mindless land-clearance, eg. orang-u-tangs.

Michael McCarthy tells a sorry tale in The Independent [Friday 04 November 2011]. He visited the African country Burkina Faso, which was formerly a French colony named Upper Volta. There the inhabitants have used ALL the rainforest to fuel their primitive cooking fires, making the country into a barren, dry wilderness with little potential to support plants or animals. Yet their population is increasing rapidly. If only someone would help Burkina Faso to leap into the 21st century with sustainable energy generation, plus educate the people to look after the country they have, which is roughly the size of Britain. In the blog “Music Cycles” there is some really engaging information and photos of the dry landscape, eg. one of the group rides a bicycle across a bridge where there was once a river;

What once was a river

Landlocked Burkina Faso

We are destroying the planet to feed the current humans but leaving nothing in reserve for the next generations. I shudder to think of millions dying from starvation or disease because they cannot obtain proper nutrition.

Rethink you multinationals who finance local companies or towns to clear their land for your mass-produced but nutritionally harmful foods, such as palm oil. Rethink, you bankers and investors who are buying into this madness. Rethink, ordinary consumers who eat all the prepared foods containing ingredients like palm oil. You will all live longer and help save the planet by preparing your meals from fresh ingredients, obtained from nearby farmland.

Let’s have some change! If I can pretty much avoid packaged, supermarket food [like biscuits, pre-mixed sauces and packs of flavoured noodles], so can anyone else. It doesn’t hurt and everything I eat is full of flavour!

Save the planet and lengthen your life, all in one go. Go green.

The US State Department has some basic information and statistics on Burkina Faso. Take a look and educate yourself. It could be quite sobering.

Day 21 NaBloPoMo: Play the “Get the Parent” game!

Although I’m not a parent, I know my friends have been through mobile phone wars with their kids- some of it ongoing. The girl next door did $450 worth of text messages in a week when she was first given her phone for scheduling car pick-up from school. It was the usual story of kids putting the phone on “Silent” and SMS-ing each other in class. Everyone has similar stories- eventually parents find a solution that works, although some not before having to pay an enormous bill! It’s just disgraceful it can occur- we need some responsible set-up rules for phone companies with teen clients.

 

OK- so that’s all old news now, but the TV sprung a new one on me this morning! Apparently there are several iPhone/iPad game apps that are free or very cheap (like 99 cents), but within the game the players can buy extra stuff that helps them go faster or give them more privileges etc. Although most [trusting, naive] parents would think the same way the presenter did- that the internal transactions of the game would be with “Play Money” as they are in Facebook Games like “Cafe World” etc., IN FACT these things are paid for in REAL MONEY through the online iTunes account- the kids have the password so they can use the phone!

The presenter on the show was in shock when this was revealed..”You mean when my kids play that penguin game and buy scarves to keep their penguins warm, they are using my credit card??”. Yep said the tame geek. “But I thought they were only Penguin Dollars”, surely they’re not real??”- Have a look at your credit card statement was the reply…

 

This sounded like a real shocker to me, so we had a look on Spotrick’s iPhone, finding the “Smurf Village” game which they had also mentioned- sure enough, when you bought strawberries or whatever for the little Smurfs and Smurfettes, the money was the genuine article!! There was a small statement near where the app. could be downloaded for free- but what parent has ever seen it? Kid yells from the bedroom- “Mum…can I download this free Smurf’s game to play on the iPad?”- “You’re sure it’s free?”- “Yeah Mum-look”… “OK!”. $600 credit card bill later…OMG!!!!! *&77%%$#$

Not a good look. I think this is a pretty sneaky practice and BAD PUBLICITY for iPhone. Who’s betting the apps or the real money parts are pulled back shortly?

New Year’s Day 12 noon

Last night no alcohol- this morning, no hangover- yayy!! However, we had to get up early as Bridie and AJ were off to drive to Melbourne and subsequently Zeehan, Tasmania. Bridie has gone for a short but indefinite stay, summoned by her old friend Alan who needs company as he goes through the last stages of bone cancer- very sad. AJ has gone to drive the Jeep with caravan and dog in tow so Bridie has some accommodation at various times. AJ will fly back to the mainland in a few days to resume her uranium-mining job at Roxby Downs.
It has been a busy time having them stay 3 months, with one on the family room sofa and the other on a new chair sofa in the front room! We all thought they would only stay a few weeks originally but the job market was not very bright for either of them for a while. Now AJ has the mining job (after training to be both a heavy-rigid vehicle driver and a security guard) and Bridie has as much part-time work as she can handle with a “helping hand” agency looking after the disabled.
During this time I managed to complete a semester of my Masters in Public Health, although I had nowhere to study quietly and do my assignments- didn’t do quite as well as expected, but ended up with a Credit anyway.
My mood is a lot better than it was 3 months ago, although it took a few dives under the stress of coping with extra people in the house 24 hours a day! I know it was a big ask of myself to cope with house guests when I’m not wildly OK myself- but I could hardly leave them homeless- I would expect other people to look after me in a similar situation!
I think the cats will be relieved to have their humans back unaccompanied! Poor Moggsy has been extra shy about coming into the house for food- if she hears Bridie’s voice approaching while she’s feeding she runs and won’t return to finish her meal. Consequently she’s lost some weight- which isn’t all bad! Bendix adapted reasonably quickly but has been a little ratty at times- he was disappointed that Kevin was a dog and not a cat as he wanted to play with him on an equal basis! Moustiers thought Bridie and AJ ALWAYS lived here, and only haunted us in bed at night as she always did- why she couldn’t haunt AJ more often I don’t know!
Our back garden is somehow surviving the 40degC days, although the magnolia tree is burnt again and another cypress pine lost its top in a whippy breeze. The petunias are mostly OK in their pots and starting to flower, we have a pot tomato thriving, some chives and a few pigface ground covers. The cumquats are greener than last year, but not very healthy yet. I wish they’d come good- perhaps they need root pruning and larger pots?
The atrium plants are OK- tuberous begonias are starting to flower and the liliums have finished. the camellias seem to be withstanding the heat as long as we put the sprayers on often to keep the air moist. I bought some colourful resin pots from Ikea but haven’t managed to plant anything in them. They are supposed to be standing in 2 neat rows on the plant stand in the atrium so we have something colourful at eye level! Fingers crossed- I still have to drill holes in the bases for drainage.
So life goes on at Number 13 and we hope 2010 will be happier and healthier. I’ll put in a big wish for WEALTHIER! Greedy me- but I would like to go back to my old way of living with a minimum of money worry! I don’t want to live in luxury- especially the sort of thing that is publicised as “luxurious celebrity-style”- no gold taps for me- just let me pay the bills on time and go to the movies occasionally!

Eight pointers to success

I watched the little vid by Richard St John on TED Talks. HE said I need:
Passion
Hard work- Put your nose down and work hard at it.
Practise, practise, practise.
Push (or get your mum to push you)- through shyness and self doubt.
Serve others something of value- it can be a privilege to serve.
Ideas- with lots of evidence why they’re good.
Persistence- past the CRAP: Criticism Rejection Assholes and Pressure- still persist
Focus.
OK- I’ll start with the first:
1. Passion: I have very little passion about anything any more. A few months ago, I still had some passion about photography- now I see it as something to occupy my time and give me occasional income. I can’t be bothered doing anything fancy with my photos and don’t spend much time in Picasa- just a crop and occasional brightening of colours and light. I was passionate about my glass fusing and slumping for quite a while, but lack of money to buy an array of materials to help me express myself has knocked any passion out of me. I usually have glass but nothing to make molds or vice versa; no viable shelf paper, no rods the right colour for a project etc. My passion for my work only happens when I have ongoing work to be passionate ABOUT- I only have a little editing to do for a few hours per month, so don’t get a chance to get very keen. ‘m not invoilved in any research now- so my natural passion and curiosity to discover new facts has disappeared. I have no teaching, so there is no challenge of empty students to fill up with useful knowledge. I was passionate about getting a new job a few years ago, but that died when I was fired because the boss plagiarised my work and didn’t want me around reminding her. I am not brave enough to apply for a job in my own field any more- I can’t even talk about it.
2. Hard work: when I have work I like, I work very hard and I always did. I guess if I get another job, this won’t disappear. I CAN work hard, I have the capacity- it doesn’t worry me and I don’t expect to be paid for doing a half-arsed job. I resigned from a job where I didn’t have enough to do to keep me occupied- should have stayed- the work wasn’t bad when it popped up! I still work hard on the editing when I have some to do. I work hard on my uni assignments when I have those.
3. Practise: It’s difficult for me to practise my job skills when I haven’t got a job, but I DO practise researching things for fun and sometimes for friends’ business ventures. I’d like to practise my glass slumping skills but feel restricted by lack of resources. I can’t practice data analysis as I haven’t got the software- that usually handicaps me when I go for a job interview and they slot in a timed statistics test on some software I haven’t used for years. Then I don’t make it to the rest of the interview because I make simple booboos from lack of practise. If they’d asked me HOW to do something complex, I could tell them- but I couldn’t use the exact programming words to say it. I’ve tried to practice my writing skills by contributing articles to various websites, but none have been accepted, so I’ve given up- too boring and I won’t earn anythiing. Totally sick of that- no persistence, eh?!
4. Push. He said to push through shyness and self doubt. Unfortunately my self doubt has mounted over the years and I seem incapable of pushing any longer- that’s not good- but what can I do? I’ve tried until I cried so many times it seems pointless. I’m certainly not shy in job interviews- perhaps I SHOULD be! Who knows? I used to push hard when I worked- over obstacles and lack of support and lack of a boss and lack of resources, lack of respect, lack of room etc- I was pretty good at pushing- we got a good pile of research money when I did the lions share of the applications.
5. Serve. It’s hard to serve when you haven’t got a job. I hate serving in a meaningless way- I couldn’t be a checkout chick unless someone said they’d shoot me if I didn’t put in my time! Doing a reseaarch job is not REALLY about serving. I try to find answers to problems and questions and hope that the knowledge or whatever I discover will serve some good. However, I am not a serving sort of person. That might be why I’m not a success- how can I become service-minded? At home I hate doing the housework and being of service to Spotrick who is out earning the money every day. I hate being of service to the cats by keeping their food bowls and litter box clean. I get no sense of pride or accomplishment- just relief when I do something useful and in time. I don’t feel I’m performing anything of service when I load the dishwasher or scrub the sink- I don’t like dirty things, so I try to make sure most of them get cleaned.
7. Persistence. Through criticism, rejection, assholes and pressure- still persist. This something I can lack- all my life I’ve tended to give up when something got boring. I persisted for many years trying to get a job, through criticism, rejections, asshole interviewers and my own pressure. I persisted through all my years of depression while I was working- getting up and going to work every day, working as hard as I could, even crying all through showering and breakfast and driving. I ALWAYS went, and I only cried on one day at work- the boss just kept asking me to hurry up and get the stuff right- I wasn’t allowed to stop- so I just stayed at my computer with tears running down my face all day until I finished. These days my persistence is severely dented- I don’t seem to finish many things, I don’t care about most of them and having to repeat things over again just makes me cry. I can’t tell if I would persist if I had a decent job. I had a pretty menial job auditing some data last year and I persisted from dawn till dusk doing all this boring stuff because someone was paying me $21 an hour for it. However, without a reward, I’m stuffed.
7. Ideas. I’m usually brimming with ideas, but I’ve run out of them with regard to getting another decent job. When I have a job, my ideas run free- and they’re usually not silly or irrelevant. I tend to have some useful and creative ideas about most things and like brainstorming. In fact I’m trying to start a think tank.
8. Focus. When I have a job I’m very good at focusing- I can stay on task for ages, without breaks if I must, I can thrash out written materials and statistical anaylsis until they’re limp and unresponsive! I don’t tend to get diverted onto non job topics or activities. I don’t tend to spend time gossiping or hanging around in the tearoom etc. I know what will be productive to explore in my research work and what is unlikely to be fruitful- I guess I have a sense of focus on what’s important for a task. I can also focus through distractions, noisy environments, silly co-workers and people slacking off around me. It’s not ideal, but I am good at ignoring things that might interrupt other people doing my job. However, let at home on my own with nothing very vital to occupy me, I tend to lose focus if I am unhappy- and I am unhappy a lot of the time. If I feel reasonable, I can focus on doing the housework very well in one area, but I can’t focus on a whole day’s worth of unrelenting toil.
I think it might be a good idea to keep a copy of the 8 words/concepts near me and try to concentrate on cultivating the qualities that I lack.

Five Projects meme

After being tagged in Rantz’s meme-blog on Five Projects (+1), I am finally having a go on 27Jan 2009.

Pillar of wisdom

It’s a bit of a trial choosing just five things to nominate as the projects:
1. Enrol in and complete Semester 1 2009 Public Health at Adelaide Uni.
2. Make 5 flat clear glass beads with holes for stringing (never done small things with holes before). Make them in my kiln.
3. Take five semi-abstract photos of hard landscape, eg. Buildings, pavement, sculptures etc, suitable for putting on RedBubble.com.au.
4. Try five new recipes and feed them to Spotrick.
5. Visit 5 art galleries and learn something from what I see.

Plus 1 is even trickier- I’ll leave that for later.

It’s even worse trying to tag 5 people as I’ve already been in some tagging exercises in Facebook and Flickr. I’ll go away and think about that now. Hey- perhaps that could be the +1 project, hehe!