living away from home

to remember this time; it is the Time of Living Away from Home. Since Grand Final weekend (the second one). We moved out of our house & into the house of my parents. They are overseas. We are renovating.
And we squashed everything into our shed - tables, chairs, bikes, beds, you know - look around you. Brought some clothes with us here and some of the toys. And it's been about a month now.
What have I noticed?
I've noticed we drive everywhere now. Except to post a letter. They have been some good walks, kids in dress-ups, traipsing along wearing a beanie & a blow-up life-saving ring. But no bike riding. Driving to buy milk. Drive to get the paper. Sheesh.
I've noticed that we get by with the one car no worries, 6 days a week. That seventh day, however, upon which C & I each work for cash & the kids each check in at kinder for the duration, has us performing an intricate car shuffle.
It's difficult to overcome the prevailing culture. Difficult to swim upstream. Difficult to ride around the relative Alps of this suburb compared with our Dutch-like topography of our home suburb.
I've noticed that the kids are rolling with it. Life is good for them. whole days go by spent in exploration & imaginary lands, taking on imaginary characters, performing amazing feats - all with running commentary ("she muttered, as she escaped from the gaping jaws just in time" (for example)).
I've noticed that electronic communication is bad for your thinking. A much reduced value placed on editorship & revision of thought in this world of instant gratification and wall-to-wall OPINION. "I've had a thought - better post that." Or even "I'm yet to have a thought - better post that."
Came across an interesting article arguing that web culture is altering our brain's wiring & how it would be a Good Idea for us all to DISCONNECT once in a while. e.g. every weekend for starters.
How would you go with that? No internet all weekend, every weekend?

Work on our house is on track & looking good. The place is a mess, of course, but we aim to get back in there in a few more weeks.
My Mondays & Wednesdays are the gold of my week these days. My Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, regrettably, not much fun. As we say around here though, you make your own fun. And really, no one is responsible for my having a good time, except me. So I'd best pick up my strides.
Read "A Long Long Way" by Sebastian Barry just now. My word. I'm amid what I would call a reading period of my life, yet this one stands out from the recent pack. It had me laughing and crying and everything in between. It had me disembarking the train at Southern Cross, unable to stop reading, and instead standing off to the edge of Platform 9 as train after train arrived, spewing its passenger cargo round me, before I reached the end of a chapter. My best read of the year, to date, without a doubt.

slaínte

monday (great)

yep i might forget this in years to come but right now Mondays are ace.
Why is that? Today i'm sitting in our house after lunch - two electricians are climbing around the roof with a view to a bit of renovation work happening here. Two sisters are playing happily by themselves. K is creating a the life of magnet doll in her bunk room. S is separating her dress-up clothes - classifying them as dirty, clean, hang-up, bags, etc in my room.
Mondays I stay home with the kids. Wednesdays, too. It's been a couple of years now.
This year, our routine has taken us to the pool on a Monday morning - withdrew S from formal classes last week & instead the 3 of us splash around and do a bit of copy-the-nearby-lesson.
Wednesdays the kids each have a morning at kinder - so I get a morning TO MYSELF.

why was that blogged, again?

Up til now I have sent emails to a large group of contacts, advising them of the latest entry in this worldsafari space. I thought of it as like sending a postcard. Like an update. This began in late 2004 when we moved to Darwin.

So, nearly six years later, what’s changed? Well we’ve settled in East Brunswick, CJ & I have worked at a few different jobs, we have two kids and made new friends over that time. That’s the obvious stuff.
The world had changed too, of course, and I’m thinking of cyber-world for a moment, like identify theft and remotely accessing your machine etc etc. It makes the idea of public blog kind of odd. Why would you do it? Why do millions of people continue to post personal information about themselves online? Facebook is a good example of this. Why, oh why, do many of us spend our lives doing this?
There must be a need, unmet through our regular day-to-day lives, to contact people. But instead of sharing, it’s more like a kind of platform, or podium from which we can launch an “identity”. A brand. A way that we would LIKE the world to see us. It’s dressed us as being about people sharing, but from what I can see, there’s a helluva lot of talking/ typing/ posting going on, but I doubt how much listening/ reading/ thinking is taking place.

Yes, everyone seems to have a story to tell. Mini autobiographies in 140 words or less. They have a sore knee. They are thinking of going to Tibet. They are eating a steak sandwich. They heard their child say a word. They were awarded a pig on Farmville (huh?) . Here’s a photo of them in front of Westminster. And another at the leaning tower of Pisa. Golly.

Online social networking would have us believe that we are becoming closer together as we share this stuff with friends. But I think it’s less about “sharing”, which is clearly best done in person, and more about people creating their image and fanning their little fires.

Which leads me to the blog space. Why would I keep posting on a public forum personal information? Do I pretend that other people care? No. Do I try to create an image of myself that I hope others buy into? Maybe.

I’m grappling with the idea of letting it go. When our computer & back ups were stolen last year, without the blog being online, I would have lost the whole record. Because it’s online, it will always be there.
I plan to keep posting online, but to stop sending notifications so regularly. Maybe that’s a compromise for now…