Eighty

My Dad would have turned 80 today. Yet another milestone reached without him here.

I miss him every day, but on days like today, I miss him more than a lot.

Dad with his parents. What a hat!

Dad taking me for a ride on the motorbike

Chyken & Dad

At our engagement party

In London with Mum to visit the Queen

His 60th Birthday Party

Pre-wedding touch ups

Dad sung a lot. He often replaced the words with 'doodle doo'.

Happy Birthday To Me!

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 21.  Again.

I had a lovely birthday. 

Chyken took me out for dinner and then to see Hot Shoe Shuffle.  The amazing dancing was somewhat ruined by the very ordinary storyline and a few too many Dad jokes.  The set was very kitsch.  Think 1980's.  Think pastels.
 
At interval Chyken said 'It looks like Daryl Somers has exploded on the stage'. 

We got up from our seats and who do we see sitting RIGHT behind us? 

Yep.  Daryl himself.  Oops!  Although, if he heard us, he didn't seem to care.

Home

We went for a drive on the weekend and ended up the area I grew up in. It's a gorgeous part of the world.

For many years they took sand from the creek at the back of our house.  This is a rusty old sand hopper that was left behind.

We went down a lane that ends up in the back of what used to be our family farm.  Another family owns it now.  It was strange, so familiar, and yet different all at the same time.  I met Chyken after my parents sold it, so although we've driven past the house, he's never been right into the paddocks before.

I took this photo of the dam as I got out of the car to open a gate. 

The farm will always be home to me.

Wordless Wednesday - The Alpacary

 

 

 

 
 

Love and Marriage

Why do people get married? I think it would be fair to say that most people in Australia get married because they love their partner, they want to be with them and build a life with them.  Of course there are going to be exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, love is the driving force.

With that in mind, I cannot understand why, in the year 2012, people that love someone who happens to be the same gender as them aren't allowed to get married.  It seems to me to be a pretty basic right, and yet they are being denied this by our government.  I believe in this more strongly than I believe in a lot of things.  I'm not sure why.  I said that to Dr C last week and he said that it seems to have awakened a long hidden social justice part of me.

I've spoken to a few people about this subject and none of the reasons against it I've heard  make ANY sense to me.  Let's see if they make any sense to you...

'But the bible says it is wrong!' Well, the bible also talks a lot about stoning people to death, feeding people to lions, whipping people and having more then one wife, do we have to follow what the bible says exactly?

'Traditionally, marriage is between a man and a woman' If we never challenged tradition women wouldn't even be allowed to vote, let alone be the Prime Minister of Australia.

'They can be together, but the word 'marriage' shouldn't be used, that's OUR word and they can't have it!' Yes, someone actually said this to me. I had no words then and I don't now.

'Australia was founded on Christian values, so we should continue that and gay marriage isn't Christian'. Umm... Excuse me, but I thought the fundamental principles of Christianity were to 'love one another'. How is treating someone differently because of who they love following those principles?

'It will ruin the institute of marriage!'. Sure it will. It will ruin something people like Elizabeth Taylor, the Kardashians and Tom Cruise have been building up for years.

'People choose to be gay' 'Being gay is unnatural' 'Homosexuality is a mental illness'. You don't choose who you love. I'm in love with Dr C, and I would be regardless of his gender. Love is completely natural and as for the mental illness argument, that's complete bullshit.

'But being married is about creating a family, it's about having kids'. There are so many things wrong with this that I don't even know where to start.  Firstly, lots of gay people have kids. I don't have kids, I might never have them, does that mean I'm should never have got married? When is the cut off for me to have them and stay married? 

Convinced? Nah, me neither!

I really think that in twenty years, and in all probability, even sooner we will be looking back on this and feeling a similar shame to what I feel when I read accounts of how white people treated black people, making them sit in the back of the bus, believing they carried different diseases etc.  I really hope that doesn't happen, I really hope common sense prevails and everyone is allowed to be married, regardless of who they want to marry.

Now at this point you might be thinking 'Fair go, Jo, aren't you being a bit hypocritical? You're asking people to change their minds and you don't seem to want to change yours'. And to that I say that yes, I am asking people to change their minds, to a view that won't hurt them one bit.  I respect everyone right to believe whatever they want to believe, but at the end of the day, if you don't like the idea of gay marriage, for whatever reason, then don't have one, but please don't stop someone who does want one from having that option.  

The Busy Drawer

In the white weatherboard house with a blue tin roof  there was a busy drawer.  Do you have a busy drawer?  (When I was a kid it was the top drawer in the kitchen, but in the Castle it's the third drawer from the top and it's full of crap.)  In my childhood busy drawer there were scissors, dead batteries, lots of paperclips, nail clippers, rubber bands, rolls of film waiting to be developed, stamps you could only use at Christmas time and postcards that had fallen off the fridge.  Basically, all the stuff that we didn't really have anywhere else to put.  Sooner or later it went in the busy drawer. 

Most things were just lying around loose, and the lesser used items you had to search for up the back of the drawer, but some things were kept in tins.  A collection of buttons, some foreign coins and the like.  They were in old Strepsils tins.  I don't remember there ever being Strepsils in the tins, so I'm guessing my Dad had kept them for years, just waiting for them to have a purpose.

When I was a kid, if I asked my Dad what a piece of machinery or something was he would almost always answer 'It's a wing-wong for a goose's bridle'.  We didn't have any geese, so I had no idea why we would need a goose's bridle, but I believed him. Don't you always believe your Dad? Even if every April 1st they tell you there is a white kangaroo in the backyard.

My Dad had several sheds full of wing-wongs.  He seemed to know exactly where everything was and kept a lot of things just because he thought one day they might come in  handy.  I only ever had one bike.  I got it when I was about 8, it was blue and had a white basket with plastic flowers on it and streamers hanging out of the handlebars.  When I outgrew that bike I didn't get a new one, my Dad just took the handles off my older brother's long discarded Dragstar bike and put them on it.  Dragstar handles were those long, high bendy ones, remember?  I got a few more years out of the bike without my parents having to spend a cent.  When my parents sold the farm several years ago and moved into town, I thought they got rid of all the wing-wongs.

A couple of weeks ago I was with my sister and we called into my Mum's house but she wasn't home.  I really needed to see what treats she'd been baking use the bathroom and I didn't have my spare key with me.  My sister went into a secret spot in the garden and retrieved a hidden key that apparently everyone in the family except me knows about.  When she handed me the key, a tear ran down my cheek.

It was in a Strepsils tin.

It turns out you really don't know when a goose will need a wing-wong for it's bridle.


This is not a sponsored post, I don't even like Strepsils.

See, It Wasn't That Bad

Just when I think I'm doing OK something happens that makes me realise I'm actually not.

Perhaps I never was and I am just really good at pretending?

Every January my Dad's extended family has a reunion.  I went to the one a few weeks after Dad died, but I only managed to stay for about an hour before the dirty looks being sent in my direction got too much for me and I had to go home.  Last year I tried to go, I even got dressed and into the car, but two minutes down the road I begged Chyken to turn the car around.  I went this year.  This was hard for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he would be there. But, I went, and I had an OK day.  I got to meet my new second cousin and hang out with some of my favourite people.

Afterwards, I was congratulated on being there.  People said I had done the right thing.  Said they were proud of me.  Said things like 'See, it wasn't that bad'.

Well, no, the actual day wasn't that bad.  I guess.  If you think that hiding in one part of the park too scared to talk to relatives you really wanted to catch up with because they were in his general vicinity isn't that bad.  I would very much have preferred not to put myself in that postition.  But, I guess on the surface the day 'wasn't that bad'.

The day before was a completely different story.

It is those parts of my post truamatic stress disorder that very few people get to see.  The parts where I am unable to get out of bed. The bits where I pick stupid fights with Chyken for absolutely no reason other than to take the focus of myself for a while.   The bits where I am unable to stop crying.  The parts where I am unable to concentrate long enough to write a blog post.  Where I am completely unable to make a decision.  I can't even decide what fucking shape of pasta to cook for dinner when I am having days like that.

Then there are the panic attacks.  They are scary.  Really scary.  Rarely do I realise I'm having one until after it is over.  So gripped by the fear, so overcome with it all.  Muttering things to myself over and over again.  Confused as to why I am feeling like that.  Lost.  Eventually I exhaust myself and sleep for the rest of the day.

The next day I get up, grit my teeth, plaster on a fake smile and force myself into facing the situation I was dreading.  This is the bit people DO see.  The part they base me on.  The part that makes them say things like 'See, it wasn't that bad'. 

If only they realised it IS that bad.

Wordless Wednesday

All I Want For Christmas Is My Own Two Cents

Note:  If you're new here, you might want to read this earlier post for the background story...

I posted something on Facebook last week about how I wished people would stop writing things on there about Christmas, and more to the point that I wished Facebook wouldn't do the thing it has recently started doing where it tells me just how many people are talking about a particular topic.  I wrote it fairly late at night when I couldn't sleep and a billion thoughts were running through my head.  Although the topic was making me cranky, I tried to tackle it in what I thought was a lighthearted way:

It would appear that some people took it to heart.  I got comments on the post and a couple of people contacted me privately to tell me they weren't happy about it.  Apparently it is OK for other people to tell me to lighten up about it, but not OK for me to hate on Christmas.  I tried to point out the irony of the situation but got nowhere.  In the end, we agreed to disagree.  They went back to loving and I tried not to go back to hating, but it's really hard.  Christmas is bloody everywhere and it seems to have been since Easter finished.  I know this all started by one flippant post on Facebook, I know it shouldn't bother me, but I have been thinking about it a lot since then.  I've tried to work out why (apart from the obvious) very time I logged on to Facebook and saw Christmas mentioned I felt my heart rate rising and tears welling up in my eyes.  Surely I'm allowed to have a bit of a whinge about it on my own Facebook page if I want?

The thing is, I don't want to hate Christmas. I don't want to have this feeling of dread. I want to be excited about it.  In fact, I used to be excited about it.  I could barely wait for the first day of December to put up the tree.  I was the person who searched for the biggest, shiniest Christmas earrings with the most LED lights in them.  I still have them, somewhere, along with several Christmas t-shirts.  I wrapped my presents while watching the Carols by Candlelight on the TV.  I LOVED the lead up to Christmas.  If I'm honest, the actual day was usually a bit of a let down, but the lead up?  The lead up I loved.


But now? Every tree I see and every carol I hear just reminds me of what I don't have any more.

Christmas

It's almost that time again.  Christmas. 

Christmas had always meant 'family' to me.  It was a time to be spent with family, where presents were given and received.  By family.  When my Pop was alive, he ALWAYS arrived with Red Tulip after dinner mints (the thin square ones in the paper sleeve) for everyone and Tweed perfume for Mum.  She didn't like Tweed perfume, but she never told him that and he continued to buy it.  He would also have a packet or two of Mackintosh's Toffee De Luxe.

The Egg & Cream ones were my favourite.  I used to leave the Coconut ones for Dad because coconut is foul and gets stuck in your teeth and to the roof of your mouth.  Let's not talk about how I left the almond part of sorched almonds for him. 

Christmas day involved lunch with everyone around the family dining table, eating too much home grown roast lamb and the best pavlova in the world made by my Mum.  After lunch we all had a nap and then had leftovers for tea. 

Later on, when my siblings got married and had families of their own, it was traditional for us to spend Christmas Day at home, or with the in-laws, then we would all get together on Boxing Day.  It was an unwritten law.

That changed two years ago. 

Well, actually, four years ago was the last time we were all together on Boxing Day.  Three years ago Chyken and I spent Christmas in England.  We spent Christmas Eve in York and Christmas Day having lunch with his extended family, including his Grandma.  Despite me holding out hope until 11:50pm, it didn't snow, however I did see my first and only squirrel that day.  We spent Boxing Day in front of a fire in a 300 year old barn that had been converted in to a house.  Different, but still involving family, and we had celebrated Christmas with our Australian families earlier in December.

Two years ago we had our usual Boxing Day thing, but my Dad wasn't there, he was in hospital.  The rest of us had lunch and made plans to do it all again when Dad came out of hospital. 

Dad didn't come out of hospital. 

We never had a 'proper' Christmas that year. 

I doubt we will again.

Happy Birthday To Me!

Yesterday was my birthday. Chyken left me early in the morning to head off on school camp to the snow all week.

My sister and I went to Daylesford.  We started out at the Convent Gallery where we had an early lunch.

They have a wine called 'Good Catholic Girl'.  I would have tried it, just for the irony aspect, but I don't drink wine.

We did some browsing in the main street...

This one is for Chyken...

We went to The Hepburn Bathouse and Spa but I didn't take any photos.  It was divine.  We didn't want to leave.  But then we got hungry.

Cheesecake and Hot Chocolate at the Daylesford Boathouse Cafe.

And Devonshire Tea.

A visit to the book shop...

So many books!!!

And then it was time to go back to reality.  With a promise to return again soon!

Wordless Wednesday