Once a year poster?

Well it seems I have become a once a year blogger.  I was in the habit of posting once a week, but then my job changed significantly and I just never have either time or inclination to post.

My brain still comes up with up blogs when I am walking the dogs or trying to sleep, they just never make it onto my laptop, so I am just going to post random thoughts and gripes to try and back back in the swing.

1. If you play golf and end up in a bunker, rake when you have finished.  If you had to have 7 tries and the bunker looks like a bomb site, rake the bunker.  However if you are in a bunker with really steeps side........rake the fucking bunker!  It's called consideration and it's golf etiquette. 
2. If you suffer from anxiety, try to remember other people also suffer from anxiety and just may not be able to cope with communicating with you or anyone else.  Try not to take it personally if people aren't always there for you.  They may be suffering as much or more than you, they just don't want or need to announce it.  People handles their mental health issue differently.  One size does not fit all and it really can be a case of "it's not you it's me".
3. Sometimes when someone does something that you find offensive, you may want to take a step back before confronting them.  It may have been unintended and your reaction could just be to let it slide.  Of course if they are repeat offenders or there was clearly no mistaking their intent, feel free to go for the throat.
4. Don't use the term "stop being a victim".  Victim seems to have drifted into insult territory.  It is incredibly insensitive to insinuate that being a victim is a choice you make.  If you think someone needs to move forward from a traumatic event, it's more about not letting it define them then ceasing to be a victim.  
5. Pick up your dogs shit on walks.  No further detail required on this
6. Never plant passion fruit vines if you are a renter.  If you are not a banana farmer, don't plant banana trees. Weird personal opinions on annoying plants.
7. If you can't sleep, just shut you eyes and don't dwell on it.  At least if your eyes are shut and you a lying down you are getting some rest.  
8. At a very minimum, smile at people you pass while walking around your neighbourhood.  With practice you may even work up to saying "Hi" but this is for advanced walkers only.  😄
9. Be nice to service workers.  If you are a service worker, be polite to customers.  Two way street.
10. Rake bunkers!

TV snobs

I have some friends who are great in every way except one, they have a habit of saying "I never watch TV" in a way that makes TV watching seem akin to saying "Gee that Donald Trump seems like a great guy"!

My reaction is always the same, "You don't know how to watch TV now".

I am a homebody and I work stupidly long days so I just want to chill out most nights.  That doesn't mean I want to switch off my brain, I just want to work it in a different way.

I am in full agreement that free to air these days is pure shit (I was going to say execrable, but shit says it so much better in this case). I also resent how bloody expensive Foxtel is, so that has always been out of the question. 

Imagine how happy I was to discover streaming services.

First they gave me the chance to see some of the stuff that was only ever available on Foxtel, or that I just missed completely when on free.  I fell hard for Breaking Bad, The Wire and Deadwood.  I watched The Sopranos partly because it seemed compulsory, being the first of the big ones on pay. I had already read the Ice and Fire series so Game of Thrones was a no brainer (although harder to get). Soon Zombies crept into my life with Walking Dead and thereafter so many quirky, smart shows.

After everything I have watched and enjoyed, it occurs to me that they all have one thing in common.

Cracking dialogue, even when it's not a logical fit.

It probably makes so sense that the pirates in Black Sails spend more time have wonderfully in depth discussions than they do sailing.  It's a delight for my ears because they speak beautifully (also highly unlikely), and I don't care  how unlikely it may be, it's all so worth listening to. 

None of these shows find it necessary to explain each detail of the plot in detail, they just let you work out what the hell is going on. As a lover of thrillers and unexpected plot twists it is pure Teev heaven.

So to my good slightly deluded friends, you don't know what you are missing.  There is no danger of my brain turning to mush watching this stuff.  It's a feast for my imagination and to me that is the best way to wind down, without logging of my brain.

Thank you mean girls.

I've been walking my current dogs and my two previous dogs for close to 20 years around the local area, so we are fairly well known and have made some good friends and lots of nodding acquaintances. It's a really great neighbourhood, the sort of area where there is just the right amount of walkers to make saying hello to them all acceptable behaviour.

Recently the dogs and I decided to take a slightly different route which meant leaving the usual bike paths and walking along a main road before making our way back to the familiar paths.  Just before getting back into my usual territory we passed three late teen girls and as we passed them I did the usual smile, nod, hello routine which is usually results in the recipient noticing how gorgeous my dogs are followed by lots of patting, wiggling bottoms (the dogs not mine) and general feel good behaviour.  This time the was no acknowledgement of me or the dogs and as they got past me I heard them burst into that derisive style of laughter teenage girls excel at.

As I have said before, I hated my teenage years.  I did not fit in with anyone I went to school with and they certainly let me know that I was an extremely unattractive, boring, daggy freak that had no place in their lives or indeed the human race.  This resulted in me feeling completely humiliated too many times to even remember, although I know each instance inflicted deep wounds which left lots of tender scars.  Well into my adult life, if I passed anyone who was laughing, I KNEW they MUST be laughing at the daggy freak that just passed them, even when it was obvious it had nothing to do with me.

So with this history and with the bonus element of teenage girls being the ones laughing I should have had the usual reaction.

But I didn't. I walked for a full minute before it hit me that I had not made the assumption that they were laughing at me, I didn't even care that when I thought about it they probably were laughing at the wacky old dog lady who was weird enough to say hello to them.

Sometime over the years I stopped having such a low opinion of myself that I believed that I should expect to be treated with scorn.  At some point I stopped believing I was ugly, stupid and boring.  At some point I learned that the dagginess was actually intelligence that did not thrive in the classroom environment, but worked wonderfully when I was left to work stuff out in my own way.   In other words, in real life.  The reason  I felt so different is because I am different and and thank dog I never worked out that I could have faked "normal" and I could join the mean girls pretending I was special by making other people feel like shit.

So thank you local mean girls.  Without your laughter I may never have realised the scars have healed and I am so much better off for never learning how to stop being a freak.

Sometimes she is such a mean girl.  😆

Thanks for the desperation

I was doing some training at an office interstate recently and one of the ladies I was to train was a pending nightmare.  You know the type of woman who is loud, overbearing, flashy and usually the archetypal mean girl.  I have trained her before and was not looking forward to doing it again.  The last time was a constant onslaught of me, me, me, god aren't I funny, smart and so much prettier than you.

Now none of this was actually said but it was definitely there, even allowing for my own insecurities. So this time I came prepared with a plan to show her a new process that would make her life easier, lulling her into a false sense of security, before moving on to some areas where she was making big mistakes and refusing to admit she was wrong.  Unexpectedly it was made it easier by her slavish devotion to trends.  The first thing that came in to my mind when I sat down with her was "What the fuck is with the eyebrows"!

At this point I will admit to using eyebrow powder.  I use it to fill in gaps from overenthusiastic plucking of my eyebrows when I was younger.  This, however, was serious overkill. There was so much brow powder there that it was not possible to actually identify a single brow hair.  It was like a pair of slugs had decided to take up residence on her face.

It was really distracting and just a little scary.  It took me a couple of minutes fighting the temptation to go cross-eyed or actually say "What the..." out loud, but once I had managed to stop staring at the slugs, I moved to a sense of calm.  What was I stressing about?  Ms mean girl suddenly seemed  really desperate and I started to feel just a little sorry for her.

Training became so much easier.  I no longer cared how overconfident and cocky she was because she looked so ridiculous. This must be akin to the old adage "imagine the audience in their underwear".

I don't know where this trend started, but I am really grateful to a world filled with slaves to fashion and just a little depressed that they exist.

Zen and the art of kitchen management.

I have been the office kitchen monitor/Nazi/anal-retentive for many years now, I think about 10 years.  This is largely because I work with males and while some men may be exceptional housekeepers this lot ain't.

I have tried many methods over the years to either keep the kitchen free of toxic waste or, rather ambitiously, encourage those of the Y chromosome persuasion to clean up after themselves. These include:-

• Being the designated washer upperer (I do find it relaxing), until I realised it just made everyone take it for granted I would do it  When I went a leave I came back to ewwwww!
• I monitored the dates of the milk to ensure we didn't get to the point neglected bottle became solid
• Requestimg a roster be set up to get the grubs to clean up there own crap.  This worked until peak season arrived and the dudes became tooooo busy to do something as complex as wash a spoon!
• Putting up helpful reminder signs asking everyone to wash up their crap, dry their crap and, most importantly, put their goddamn crap away in the fucking cupboards and drawers provided.
• Throwing away anything left around the sink and the containers in the fridge which looked to be science experiment attempting to create new, furrry, stinky life.
• I have become unhinged and screeched at people who didn't wipe up spills, left dirty plates in the sink or put the paper towel rolls in the dispenser flap to the back!  Bloody Neanderthals!

Then suddenly this week it happened.  I stop giving a toss.  I realised as I have my own plate cup and utensils I am safe from death due to using the potentially botulism ridden ones in the kitchen.  I have been using a bar fridge, that lives in my office, to store my stuff for the last two years (for convenience as I sometimes often don't stop for lunch) so I don't have to see, or worse smell, what is in the communal fridge.  

So I went around the kitchen and removed every single helpful sign.  For the last week when I go into the kitchen to wash up my stuff, if there is crap in my way I simply move it aside, (not huffily, absolutely calmly) finish my washing and drying and put the crap back where it was.

You know what?  I am so chilled it is unbelievable.  I have spent so much time being pissed off and chucking wobblies that achieved nothing.    AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE?  The guys are actually cleaning up after themselves a bit more.  I said nothing about my new outlook but they can't have avoided noticing the missing signs and me calmly floating around, so maybe the new atmosphere is having some magical affect.  

Now I don't expect any miracles, I don't have any expectations at all around how neat the kitchen will remain, what I do want is to be able to sustain my new outlook and, as I am going to be in travelling for work shortly, the big test is coming.  I have high hopes that I can.  I just might take a couple of really deep breaths.

Memories, light the corners of my....... I forget the rest.

I am reading a book at the moment called Brain Rules about how the brain works and I am up to a chapter on how memories are formed, stored and deleted.

Some memories are kept because they are necessary for survival and some are too momentous to not get carefully filed away and then there's other stuff that are neither but are either stored or deleted for no discernible reason.

It made me wonder about some of my memories or lack of them and triggers to bring old ones to the the "front" of my mind.

I was baking biscuits yesterday and it brought back a memory from a Home Ec class when I was at school long, long ago in a place.....well not that far away.  We were making cakes and one girl grabbed a straw broom, broke off one of the straws and used it to test if the cake was cooked.  The teacher saw it and freaked out.  She told the girl she was a disgusting dirty creature to use a straw from a filthy broom to stick in a cake.  Of course the girl was humiliated and I suspect very hurt in a different than the teacher would have expected.  I would bet a stack of money she had picked up this habit from her mother.  I know this because I have a very distinct memory of my mother doing the exact same thing and I in turn had also done it, thankfully not in front of that teacher.  I never did it again after that day because I realised it is a pretty gross thing to do.

So I'll call that a kind of social survival memory.   My next set of stored and deleted memories a a bit more mysterious in why they exist or not.

My mum died when I was seven and although I was so young I have clear memories of her, like the straw broom thing.  I remember going places with her and the rest of the family, her being in hospital after the birth of my younger sister (I was only two and a half) and again visiting her when she was in hospital towards the end.

I have no doubt she loved me, but I have no memory of her ever saying anything nice to me, only memories of when I had been in trouble for doing something naughty and in one very clear memory when I had done nothing wrong and she was in fact wrong (an early lesson that parents are not really all knowing) so no mystery why I would remember that occasion.

It almost sounds like one of those cliché stories you hear that stress the importance of making sure you tell everyone you love then frequently just in case you kick the bucket suddenly and regret for all eternity while sitting on clouds playing a harp.

Sometimes I feel a bit ripped off, but I am not one of those people who blame everything that might go wrong in life on my parents (waaaaahhh, my mother never said she loved me).  I have a heap of stupid memories that come back to me a odd moments that I REALLY wish would be deleted forever, but never a happy mum and me moment.  I do have heaps of great memories with my dad, but I had him for a whole lot longer and, importantly, as an adult.   I sometimes wish I had asked my Dad before I lost him for a reminder of what my relationship with my mother was like, but somehow it always felt like I would be criticising her to the man who loved her until the day he died.

So memories and gaps in them are tricky.  Sometimes the deleted ones turn out to be more valuable than our brains thought they would be.  Perhaps my young brain considered remembering the details of parent child relationships was a bit of a waste of space given all the important stuff to come that could be a matter of life of death. There should have been lots of time to form those memories.

Poor brain, just like parents they are not infallible.