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Halfway Through the Second One, I Knew It Wouldn’t End Well.

15/04/2024 / / 5 Comments

Have you ever been on an emotional rollercoaster where somedays you’re not even sure which way is up?

I’m on that rollercoaster and I’m not sure if I am up, or down.

Emotions are something I’m not good at. I’m either ‘all-in’ or ‘all-out’ – there doesn’t seem to be any in between. There’s no halfway where I feel a little bit in, or a little bit out. It’s all or nothing. And I’m pretty good at ignoring emotions, until they build to a point where I drown in whichever one rises to the surface first.

Today was that day.

In a post on my other website I mentioned the death of a friend, in December 2023. It wasn’t a sudden death, we knew it was coming, but I managed to block the inevitable from my thinking, as I tend to do, until it was too late.

For a long time we were just neighbours, but the journey with Noeline through her illness brought us close together. As I drove her to medical appointments, we shared stories of our diverse pasts and realised we had more in common than we thought.

I visited Noeline in the hospital the day before she embarked on her final journey. It was her birthday, and it should have been a joyous occasion, but it wasn’t. The inevitable end was magnified by her laboured breathing. I made a weak excuse and left the room because all those emotions I had ignored for so long, threatened to erupt at that moment. And I didn’t want Noeline to see.

On my way to the car I could have let it all go, but I didn’t. I held it in. And that’s where it has stayed since then, just bubbling away beneath the surface of this tough exterior.

Add to that several new journeys, with other neighbours and friends, and there’s a volcano brewing that will one day force its way to the top. And that day is dangerously close.

It almost exploded today.

My problem is, I can’t ‘not‘ help. It is just not in my being to say no to anyone who needs something that I can give: a ride to a medical appointment; moral support; a shoulder to cry on. It doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll be there. It’s who I am, who I have always been, and who I always will be. Perhaps it stems from being the big sister, or my father’s child, or some ancient ancestor’s DNA. I can’t be any other way.

But sometimes it overwhelms me when it gets tangled up with my own dreams. And sometimes I struggle to work out where that divide is. That’s when I try to find the way out, and I can’t see it.

Today was that day.

The morning was fine, but by this afternoon my emotions were dangerously close to the surface. Thoughts were racing through my head and I couldn’t make sense of any of them. So I drove. Driving always makes me feel better, besides, I needed a few things from the supermarket – nothing that couldn’t wait, but it was a good excuse to start the car, turn the music up, and drive. It worked – sort of. By the time I parked the car I was torn between a scream, or just drowning in all the tears I should have shed for Noeline. I rationalised that neither would be appropriate at that time, or that place.

Dragging my feet, I went into the supermarket.

Before I arrived at the aisle where the soy milk is, I meandered past the frozen food section. The Lemon Meringue Pie stared back at me and dared me to put it into the basket. By the time I got to the checkout I was second-guessing the decision to fall into the comfort food sugar-trap, but I bought it anyway. I love the convenience of buying four small pies in a pack so you don’t have to heat and eat a whole big pie.

I was still feeling a bit raw as I drove into our little village, so I decided to call in quickly to see a beautiful couple that I recently wrote a story about. The story will be published in our next newsletter but I wanted them to read it first, just to make sure they like the angle I took. When I interviewed them for the story, I left their home feeling privileged to have met such a loving couple. I hoped some of that magic might find its way to me again today. It did. But I obviously needed more than a little of that love because by the time I got home, the lemon and meringue had ceased being seperate layers and had melted together.

Comfort food overload

There was nothing else to do but turn on the oven and cook all four pies, since there was no longer any defining line by which to separate them. That was mistake number one.

Mistake number two was when I took the pie/pies out of the oven, and decided to eat two of them. Two had kind of reshaped into discrete sections, so I started with them. Remember, it’s all about comfort food, with the emphasis on comfort. And I was in need of lots of comfort. The world didn’t seem to be playing nice today so I was happy to hide away in a cloud of meringue.

That didn’t end well

It was halfway through the second pie that I realised the extent of my poor decision making, and I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

The good thing about indulging in a sugar-hit when you need consoling is, it makes you feel a whole lot worse than you did. The urge to scream or cry has gone. I’m not sure I even remember why I needed to? All I feel now is the urge to run a marathon (the sugar hit), but can’t because of the excess weight I just gained in that one indulgence. Actually, it’s probably two indulgences if you count them separately.

I almost made it…

And so the sun has set on another day and another crisis, but at least this one was of my own making.

Yes, I am crazy, and I know it only too well. And nothing will change.

My week is booked up with appointments – some social, but mostly driving people to medical appointments.

And that is what makes me happy, because that is who I am. What caused the chaos today is grief that hasn’t been dealt with yet. Maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow.

I offer sincere apologies to all who get swept up in my crazy life.

And I apologise to all who endure my crazy, erratic self. I try to be grounded and ‘normal‘, but it just doesn’t happen. So if you are still around me, I can only assume you’re either so used to me that you don’t notice, or you have a great therapist.

I might need to scream tomorrow – just saying – because there are still some dilemmas I haven’t tackled yet, so you might want to stay home and lock your door.

When the Health Kick Isn’t Working

11/04/2024 / / 8 Comments

The motivation is there, but the will-power is not. Actually it is, it’s the won’t-power that is in short supply.

About a month ago, I found a great local company that delivers organic fruit and veggies, and quickly signed up for weekly deliveries.

So far, so good.

Well, almost. For a few weeks my diet consisted of organic green smoothies, filled with heaps of fabulous fruit.

Pixabay

What I found was, my cravings for chocolate and all the deadly stuff disappeared. The fact that we were sweltering through days of high humidity, made the juice plan easy to maintain. Given the choice of an ice-cold juice over something cooked, the juice won, every time.

My weekly fruit and veggies, packed neatly in a cardboard box, are left on my front porch every Wednesday, so I rarely need to go to the supermarket.

What brought it undone was meetings and weather.

After tough meetings, we head to a cafe for lunch. On cooler days, a cold green smoothie isn’t going to cut it. The wheels wobbled a bit, then totally fell off.

Lately, lunch has consisted of a spinach and feta pie. Why? Because I’ve had to see my mechanic about some car issues, and my mechanic is right next door to a bakery.

Once I fell off the green-smoothie wagon, the cravings kicked in again. Not for chocolate, although Easter took its toll, but lately, for my all-time favourite dessert, Lemon Meringue Pie. So far I’ve resisted the urge to buy one (I don’t know how to make one), but I came dangerously close yesterday. I drove past the bakery that has the best, saw an empty parking space, but kept driving. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I should be proud of myself, but I’m not, because visions of my favourite dessert have played out in my mind ever since.

And the weight I lost …..

… is sneaking up on me. At one stage I rationalised that if I went to the gym every day, I could have lemon meringue pie without feeling guilty, but we all know that doesn’t work.

So, the summary of today is:

  • Breakfast: double-shot espresso with soy milk (my everyday starter)
  • Lunch: spinach and feta pie, and a chocolate milkshake (sadly, yes)
  • Dinner: healthy pasta with heaps of the vegetable stock I made last week (all veggies and herbs, but heaps of salt)

And now I am craving my green smoothies. Perhaps it’s the old saturation thing and I’ve come full circle. I hope so, because tomorrow I’m back to the smoothies, without giving in to the lemon meringue pie (yet…).

Food and Health Police – please note: Pointing out the error of my dietary ways will only wear you out, because I won’t listen. I know when the food I eat makes me feel good, and I know when it doesn’t. Thankfully, the bad stuff isn’t the norm, but thank you in anticipation of your concern for my wellbeing.

My Home Town

11/04/2024 / / 0 Comments

The information panel at Central Station is the beacon that leads me home when I take the train from Northern New South Wales back to Windsor, as I do far too infrequently. Windsor is in my distant past, and a long way from where I live now, but my childhood will always be tangled up in that historic little town on the Hawkesbury River.

I’m not saying I’ve grown up because I’ve saved that for a much later part of my life – and I’m not there yet. I think I’ve honoured the promise a crazy best friend and I once made to each other, that we would never grow up.

But I have moved on…

I have travelled a great distance from my youthful days in Windsor, to where I am now. And not just geographically.

I look back on those days and remember how naïve I was. Well, maybe that hasn’t changed, but I am certainly a lot older (as measured in ‘years’, not maturity).

Windsor is a small semi-rural town about thirty-five miles (57 klms) north west of Sydney, and it is full of relics of Australia’s colonial history. It boasts the Macquarie Arms Hotel (1815), and the oldest church in Australia (1809) at Ebeneezer.

We grew up knowing the significance of St Matthews Anglican Church, the big church with the big steeple. Francis Greenway, a convict, designed the church, and many of the buildings that still stand, or stood, on the ancient soil of the colony.

Not to be outdone, St Matthews of the Catholic faith is in walking distance, and just around the corner from the Anglican church. In my Catholic childhood, never the twain shall meet. As Catholics, we needed special permission to enter into the holy grounds of our anglican counterpart. To this day, I have not been inside the Anglican church, because obviously I never sought permission. I’m not sure if that rule still stands, but if it does, I’ve honoured it.

Our humble little Catholic church of the same name had none of the grandeur of the anglican variety, but it was our church. Our childhood’s revolved around religion. Mass every Sunday, confession on Saturday, and Catholic school every other day.

It’s what we did.

Did it make us better adults? I’d like to think so.

Do I still follow the faith? That’s a little more complicated. Things have changed.

Am I less of a good person than when I did? I hope not.

As I sit here, so far from my childhood, I think about that information panel at Central Station. I can’t help but wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed in that semi-rural small town?

But I will never know because I didn’t stay.

Is It An Addiction Or An Obsession?

10/04/2024 / / 3 Comments

Is there a difference?

My love of sixties music is well documented, well, at least on these pages. I hear the music, my feet start tapping, and I want to sing along (depending on whether anyone is in hearing range), and dance.

And so it was that an impromptu suggestion to hold a Dance Night in the Retirement Village I live in, ended up being a monthly event.

Dance Night #3

On Saturday night our third event will unfold. The process is simple.

Residents and guests turn up at 5pm. We order pizza’s for anyone who wants to partake of sustenance (without bringing their own), the Bar is open (to keep us hydrated), and I’m the DJ (because I want to choose the music).

Yep, I know, it’s kind of like cheating, but that’s how it is. I have a Spotify account, the one without advertisements, and I load up a different playlist for each dance night. Saturday’s list is done, all eight hours of it, and I’ve tested it heaps of times to make sure every song is my favourite. And every song passed the pub test, well, my pub test, not necessarily anyone else’s.

I make no apologies.

We won’t get through eight hours of music (more likely three), but randomly playing the songs ensures a relatively unbiased mixture. However, I may will override some songs in favour of my absolute favourites, and claim it as DJ privilege.

The Searchers will set the scene with WhenYou Walk in the Room, and in case you’ve forgotten who will take you home, The Drifters will remind you if you Save the Last Dance for them.

The Righteous Brother’s Unchained Melody is for Maddy and Jan, because they dance so beautifully together, and for the rest of us incurable romantics, because we love the song.

Helen Reddy will remind us of our girl-power with I Am Woman, but I’ll save that for the end of the night.

Somewhere in the middle we’ll get a bit of pelvic-thrust happening with the Time Warp, and I’m sure Elvis will inspire some hip-swivelling when he tells us about his Good Luck Charm.

If you happen to tread on your dancing-partners toes, Frankie Valli reckons Big Girls Don’t Cry, but Eden Kane will tell you that Boys Cry When No One Can Hear Them. We’ll see.

Dusty Springfield Only Wants to be With You, while Cilla Black argues that Anyone Who Had a Heart would love her too.

Is there no end to the love?

The Everly Brothers will be Crying in the Rain and Gene Pitney knows It Hurts to be in Love, so maybe Skeeter Davis was right, and it is The End of the World without your love.

The magic songs of the sixties (and other decades) will boom through the speakers and go straight to the heart of those of us who remember when each song was released, and who sang it. Trust me, we know all the words.

We were teenagers then, and we’ll feel like teenagers again, when those songs touch our hearts on Saturday night.

Image from Pixabay

Post Script: Spotify is no substitute for having a singer or band at our Dance Night. When we were teenagers, we didn’t have Spotify. But now we have singers, like local entertainer, Chris Harvie. Chris knows our favourite songs and sings them beautifully. We are working hard to get some funding so we can pay Chris to sing at our dance nights, when he is available. When he isn’t, we’ll have Spotify.

Weekend? What Weekend?

10/04/2024 / / 2 Comments

I’m on retired time, so should weekends matter anymore?

For the most part, they don’t, but sometimes they do.

Being retired means every day is the weekend. No more deadlines, early starts, late nights, or paperwork overload. And that’s how it should be.

The Declining Years

I chose to spend my declining years in a retirement village, which was a good move because the residents are all around the same age, which is loosely defined as ‘beyond wild parties’. That works for me. About the time young ones are heading out the door to go to a party, we’re coming home from a sedate gathering that at best could be called a party.

Towards the end of last year my neighbour and I were invited to a friend’s retirement party, at a place about twenty minutes from our village. The party started at a reasonable time – late afternoon – and we were mixing with lots of interesting people (our neighbour’s work colleagues). There was no shortage of food, drinks, and good conversation.

As the clock ticked on, evidenced only by surreptitious glances at our mobile phones because looking at a watch was too obvious, we started to fade. But we were well aware of the golden rule: ‘you can’t leave until after the cake is served’.

We anxiously watched every movement, out of or into the kitchen, for the elusive ‘cake’.

Finally it arrived. A few speeches ensued, the cake was cut, we obliged by taking a piece, and then we bolted.

The Midnight Hour

Getting lost, in our haste to make it back to the highway, didn’t help in our bid to be home before the stroke of the midnight hour.

We finally arrived, and as we made our way to our respective units – me upstairs, Cheryl downstairs, we bid each other goodnight on the communal stairs.

Once inside, I closed the door and sighed with relief. It was good to be home. A quick glance at the clock assured me I’d done well. It was 7.30 – as in pm, not am, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop throughout the village. The silence signalled that all was well, with the majority of residents either tucked up in bed, or quietly watching television with the volume on the lowest setting. These same residents are usually up at some indecent hour of the morning, but have the decency to tiptoe around until a reasonable hour. They know that some of us are not early-bedders, therefore are not early-risers.

I’m not a typical resident.

My bedtime varies between 10pm on an early night, to the early hours of the morning on a late night. Years of teaching set my body clock into that pattern and that’s where it is stuck. And I’m fine with that because I’m at my most productive self somewhere between 7pm and 1am.

So, what differentiates a weekend from any other day of the week in this sleepy little village?

Tradies!

That’s what we call contract workers who buzz in and out of the village – repairing burst water pipes, refurbishing empty units, or making sure electrical wiring is safe. And Tradies don’t work on weekends, unless there is an occasional emergency.

No matter how much you want or need to sleep in, the familiar sound of the tradie’s trusty ute with tools bouncing around in the back, or the sound of a jackhammer dislodging old tiles, shakes you mercilessly out of peaceful slumber on most weekdays.

But on Saturday and Sunday it is different. The only sound that occasionally disturbs my peaceful slumber is the sound of my coffee machine. The machine is programmed to turn on at 6.45 each morning, but whether I hear it or not depends on how deep my slumber is at the time. Mostly, I don’t hear it. And whether I respond to it or not depends entirely on how desperate I am for my caffeine fix. I’m usually more than happy to go back to sleep.

I’ve even learned to sleep through the sound of the kookaburras marking out their early morning territory with their loud laughing, in the trees nearby.

And if I am awakened by them, the magpies are happy to sing me back to sleep for another hour or two.

But there’s nothing gentle or sweet about the sound of the tradies music blaring from the front of the ute, and tools crashing around in the back.

Do I look forward to weekends?

You bet I do!

Is It Too Soon To Quit?!

08/04/2024 / / 14 Comments

I signed up for the Ultimate Blog Challenge (UBC) for April with all the enthusiasm I could muster at the time.

Today is April 8th, or, Day 8 of the blog challenge (well, it is here in Australia, and for once I’m on the right side of the big time-divide). As hard as it is to admit, I’ve only posted two (or is it only one?) new posts on my website in the month of April, which is a shortfall of at least seven blogs.

So what went wrong?

Maybe I wasn’t in the right space when I signed up, or perhaps I signed up for the wrong reason.

Before the UBC began, I wrote a post about the significance of music in my life, based on an experience where one of my favourite entertainers recently sang at a local venue, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to be there. The songs Chris sang were right out of the best part of my life – my teenage years, and somehow I got stuck back there in the rememberings.

Those years were filled with great music, friendship, love, and the quest to discover who I was. And every word of every sixties song, takes me back there.

And that’s where I was when I signed up for the UBC – stuck!

I wanted to stay back in the sixties, where life seemed so much easier. The hardest thing back then was learning the words of every new song that made it into the charts. Committees and AGM’s were not part of my life then, but they are now. Can you blame me for not wanting to leave those rememberings of the sixties?

But the thing about being stuck is, it’s hard to get out. The UBC looked like a lifeline; a lighthouse on a dark starless night. I hoped the UBC would steer me safely back to the real world.

And that’s why I signed up with very little, or no thought really, about how hard the challenge would be.

The new, old committee.

Our AGM came and went on the 2nd of April. The remaining four of the original six committee members are back. We managed to convince another resident to nominate because she’s good with spreadsheets, and because we need a new Treasurer. Luckily, she accepted, so we now have a five-member Strata Committee for the coming year.

Back to the UBC…

Days 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and now 8 of the UBC are still not written.

Songs from my Spotify playlist send my mind hurtling back into the sixties, when I should be writing. I need to turn the music off and concentrate on my website, and the lack therein of current blogs, because I need to finish the UBC.

Should I try to catch up and keep going?

Or is it time to quit?

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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