Lists

Things I have done but probably shouldn't have:

• Signed up for NaBloPoMo. What was I thinking? Seriously, my posts per month haven't broken into double figures since February.
• Offered to donate a prize for NaBloPoMo. I clearly have no self control.
• Committed to sharing a stall selling jewellery at the school Christmas markets on November 22nd - I have no stock! And no time to make any!
• Stayed up till 2am last night - I was falling asleep on the lounge from about 10pm, so stupid.

Things I should have done but haven't:

• Send in the booking form for tickets to Caitlin's dance concert on time - hopefully I can still get the number of seats we need even if they're crappy ones.
• Sent people I met at re-enactment events the emails with info I promised them and now I can't even remember what I promised to whom.
• Ordered new school uniforms for Caitlin, she's resorted to unpicking the hems on her dresses herself so they aren't quite so indecently short. Thing is, aside from the length, they still fit her perfectly well.
• Wash the dog, like, for months. She's surprisingly unsmelly though.

Things I still have to do:

• Update the talk I have to give about the P&C at kindergarten orientation on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
• Ring my 98 year old Grandma to say thank you for the birthday gift she sent me, I did send a message via my mum but that's really not good enough.
• Coach Tom so that when he sings solo at the school talent quest he doesn't completely butcher "I Will Survive" - I did try to persuade him to choose a different song...
• Find my car keys. I had them when I came home on Friday.

What I'm going to do now:

• Give my kids "hugs and kisses in bed" - they all ask for that every night, even the 12 year old boy.
• Make a pot of tea.
• Watch The West Wing on dvd.
• Go to bed before midnight.

It's a dead man's party...

"Who could ask for more?
Everybody's comin', leave your body at the door
Leave your body and soul at the door . . ."

Tom's 8th birthday party in fact, he asked for a Halloween themed party and wanted a cake in the shape of Gachnar the fear demon from Buffy. It's nice to know he has such faith in my decorating skills (last year 2 years ago he asked for a Balrog). Yeah, no Gachnar I'm afraid. Instead he's getting this:

The scale is all wrong but I can't imagine anyone is going to care. It's in the fridge at the moment, because when I took it outside to take photos the chocolate arm bones started to melt and sag - had to prop them up with toothpicks and scramble to make room in the fridge. Fortunately they survived the experience - these photos are post melt and re-setting. Phew!

Time to edit my "About Me" blurb

At the moment it reads:

Hi, I'm Mim, a 38 year old mother of three (David 12 yrs, Caitlin 10 yrs and Thomas 7 yrs). I spend my time doing mum stuff, volunteering at the kids' school, making jewellery and occasionally pretending to be a viking and I also work part-time for a small magazine publisher. I'm a book addict and I'm always in need of new bookshelves. I have a dog, 2 cats and a 4 foot fish tank with one lonely fish in it.

To begin with, 3 of the numbers in the first sentence changed in the last 2 weeks, and then today there was a dramatic change to a couple of the numbers in the last sentence.

Don't go getting too excited though - it's the fish numbers that changed, the mammal population of the house remains the same.

It's been quite some time since I did any actual maintenance on the big fishtank, when people asked if there were any fish in there I'd say "possibly." Turns out the answer should have been "no." I think I've been feeding fish food to the plants for a while.

Anyway, today was Tom's eighth birthday and he'd been asking for a Siamese fighting fish for weeks. Problem is, I hate looking at those tiny little tanks with one slightly pathetic looking fish, so we asked about keeping them in a community tank and were assured it's possible as long as none of the other fish are nippy types. Tom, therefore, is now the proud owner of a 40L tropical fish tank and Simo the Siamese fighting fish is hanging out temporarily in one of my flower vases while we wait for the tank to be ready for him to live there.

Meanwhile, seeing as I was on a bit of a roll with the whole setting up of fishtanks thing, I cleaned out the big tank that sits in our front hall, rinsed the very dusty small tank that has been sitting unused in the kitchen and set it up in the lounge room, sorted through the accumulated crap in the cupboard under the big tank, took the kids shopping at Reef River Reptile up at Hornsby, came home with 6 silver tip tetras for the big tank, a bunch of plants and the afforementioned Simo, spent a good couple of hours fiddling around with tank layout and then collapsed in exhaustion. (Ten litre buckets of water are kind of heavy and there's an awful lot of them involved in setting up 280L worth of aquarium even when the 200L tank only needs half refilling.)

They look so pretty when they're all clean and tidy.

The big tank with the 6 silver tip tetras.



The small tank in our lounge room.



Tom's fishtank.



And last but not least, Simo the Siamese fighting fish.

Now, to edit that blurb...

Beorgwic was...wet

We left home rather later than we had intended for our trip to Beorgwic, the annual event hosted by the Ancient Arts Fellowship at the Danelaw property in the Southern Highlands. As we drove south I tweeted my fear that we would be putting the tent up in the rain, what I didn't quite anticipate was that it would also be be dark. Pitch black dark. We put the tent up in the rain and freezing cold by torchlight. I am so very glad that putting up a geteld is incredibly quick. (Many thanks to Talisien of Blue Draco for making us such a beautiful tent - it was perfect!)

Our tent

You'd think that with a start like that I'd have been feeling utterly miserable but the truth is I was having fun. I scare myself sometimes. Unfortunately going to bed very cold with wet hair and wearing my furry hat left me with an ear infection that got slowly worse over the course of the weekend, the agony peaked on the drive home so it didn't really spoil my weekend but it did leave me feeling not my best. (Turned out in the end to be a combination of external and middle ear infection, I've had that once before and I suspected it was heading that way. That part not so much fun.)

The kids were great dealing with the wet and cold and went to bed without any complaints being very careful not to let their sleeping bags soak up the puddles on the ground under their airbeds (does this sound like fun yet?). I was so very glad we'd decided to grab dinner of sorts when we'd stopped for petrol about 90 minutes before arriving at the camp.

We woke to drizzle and mist 1000 years in the past. It took Adam a very long time to get the fire going so we had cold breakfast - bread, cheese and fruit - before heading off to do crafting workshops. Adam did blacksmithing and made a cloak broach and I learned how to do Viking wire-weaving (more on that in a later post). Then we had porridge for lunch.

Our fireplace became a favoured gathering place during the day for many of the camp's kids who had a great time alternately poking at the fire with sticks and at each other with rubber weapons. It was...noisy, but at least our fire didn't go out!

Tom and Odin

Caitlin, Emily and David

Dinner for the kids was served early in the tavern, a huge improvement on last year when the kids ate at the same time as everyone else, whinged about the food and generally made dinner time rather stressful.

The kids at dinner

Dinner for the rest of us on Saturday and Sunday nights consisted of a four course feast of deliciousness provided by our hosts. Saturday was meatballs in a creamy sauce, then red wine beef and honey roasted vegetables followed by lamb cider stew and topped off with saffron custard and ginger biscuits. Sunday was lombard chicken pasties, then pork and honey roasted veg, lamb stew again and pears poached in red wine with cream for dessert. Top that off with a drinking horn or two full of beer and mead and all is well with the world!

I got a little bit of tablet weaving done, loosed a few arrows at some targets and generally hung around talking to people and not caring what the kids were up to. That particular approach came a little unstuck when Caitlin almost managed to get herself lost in the bush en route back from the Danelaw fort 700m up the road - she was set on the right path by others who were heading to the fort through the bush and came hurtling down the path to the village with tears streaming down her cheeks having given herself a huge fright and a useful lesson in the do not separate from your companions rule. The kids had all gone up to the fort together via the road and then some had headed off into the bush while the others had gone back via the road and then somehow Caitlin had ended up ahead of the bush bashing contingent who had then retraced their steps leaving her on her own. Or something, I never did quite work it out.

Me tablet weaving



The archery range



The village green



The tavern, complete with beer garden out the back



View from our tent looking towards the village

When it came to pack up time on Monday the kids did not want to leave, I on the other hand was well and truly ready for a shower and clean dry clothes, it seems a long weekend is about my limit for living in the dark ages! We capped the weekend off by packing the tent away in the rain and crossing our fingers that we wouldn't get bogged on the way out of the forest and then drove home through a hail storm. The tent is currently up in our backyard slowly drying out and I'm already looking forward to next year.

Teaching moments

The drive to school is about 5 minutes give or take depending on traffic lights. Most mornings that time is spent telling people to stop squabbling or lecturing them about the unwisdom of making me ask 20 times for them to do something that has to be done every single morning. But every so often I find myself having one of those conversations that come out of nowhere and make me sorry the trip is so short.

Today is Grandparents Day at school and for some reason David was speculating on what it would be like if your grandparents were very young. I asked how young he thought it was possible for a grandparent to be, he guessed 20-something, and before I knew it I was discussing teen pregnancy and pointing out that it was perfectly possible for someone to become a grandparent by the time they were 30. At which point I said I'd prefer to be heading for 50 before I became a grandparent and that if they wanted to have sex they didn't have to tell me anything but please use contraception. They all laughed, apparently I'm amusing when I talk about sex.

As they were getting out of the car I was saying "Always use a condom and Caitlin - go on the pill! Seriously guys, if you need to go to the doctors or the chemists, just tell me, I won't ask questions! Have a good day and be good for Grandma!"

David's farewell was "You're funny Mum, love you!"

Spotted in Waitara this morning

An enormous 4WD thingy (I'm so not a car person) with the following things plastered across its rear end:

A fish symbol
A sticker with the text "Sportsmen for McCain"
A sticker with the text "McCain + Palin"
A Scouts decal

I was...disconcerted. Has someone gone and developed a teleportation device or something? 'Cause that vehicle seemed a little out of place - though, sadly, only a little.

(I may be paraphrasing on the sticker texts, I did consider taking a photo but on reflection I thought perhaps better not.)

Why congratulations?

So, it's like this, some people you know are getting married. They may be close friends, relatives perhaps, or merely acquaintances. They are a cis-gendered, heterosexual couple with an unremarkable age difference, they share the same beliefs and cultural heritage. You've just been told they are engaged, or perhaps you're writing a message for them on the occasion of their wedding.

There are a number of things you might say but I'll bet "Congratulations!" is right there at the top of the list of appropriate sentiments to express. It has certainly been my default message, "Congratulations and best wishes, love Mim" (Damn I'm bad at writing on greeting cards.)

Why? Why congratulations? Has someone won a prize? Overcome some great obstacle? Excelled at something and is therefore deserving of a reward?

I started thinking about this pretty much out of the blue and when I got to the "won a prize?" question my brain yelled "OH ICK!" because it brought to mind all the worst phrases used to describe two people getting married. He has won the girls hand in marriage - she's a possession. She has caught herself a man - how exactly, by trickery?

Then there's the obstacle thing. I can see congratulations being a sentiment I might very much want to express if the couple in question had been forced to battle for their right to choose to marry, but really, that couple I described above are taking the socially approved path, far from a path strewn with obstacles, they are cheered on by all and sundry.

I'm thinking that from now on I won't be saying "Congratulations!" when someone tells me they are getting married, instead I'll go for something along the lines of "How wonderful, I'm so happy for you both and I wish you all the best for your future together." It takes a little longer to type but it has the virtue of saying what I mean.*


*Actually even that phrasing makes the assumption that marriage is an unequivocally good thing, which I'm not at all sure is true, but I figure if two people have decided to do it they clearly believe it's a good thing for them** at any rate.

**Let's not enter the territory of the couples for whom the first thing that pops into your head is "Oh dear god, you're kidding!" or something along those lines.