beware, hubris

So, after finishing up my planning last night, and confidently declaring my goals for this year, my list of things I’d like to get done, the universe reminded me that I was unlikely to get a plain go at it, and that I needed to expect the odd iceberg.

I managed to acheive 1 objective by getting to bed before midnight (11:59 counts. It does). And then I couldn’t sleep. A conspiracy of caffeine-laden dark chocolate, the freezing-cold-ness of the night (I’m *so* having an extra blanket tonight) AND the *ding* lightbulb of realisation of exactly how I’m going to make over that slightly faded and worn pale pink knitted turtle-neck tank-top managed to keep me ticking until at least 1:20, at which point I forced myself to do some serious yoga-breathing and eventually fell asleep.

Only to be awoken at 4 am by Bellaboo, in the midst of a teething crisis involving an urgent requirement for a nappy change, a pyjama change, nappy salve and calpol. All of which woke Rumpus, whose demands to be accomodated instantly in the parental bed were rudely declined . . . which in turn triggered a crisis of epic proportions.

Needless to say, I was a little frazzled (but rather proud of my goddess-like calm and compassion in the face of infantile intransigence and upset) by the time it was all resolved. HARDLY what one would deem ideal preparation for the first day back at school.

Then, to add insult to injury, when the alarm shouted me awake at 6:30 am, I looked out to discover that the weather had had the gall to SNOW in the night. This made the routine twice as difficult as it needed to be, since requirements for getting dressed, gathering necessary equipment like school bags and PE kits, and eating breakfast were constantly undercut by demands to go in the garden and build snowmen, make snow angels and have a snowball fight. Does anyone ever have the heart to explain to children that you need considerably more than 1 cm of snow to fulfill*those* sorts of projects?

Finally, we set off, but not before I have called rumpus (amongst other things) a retard for his complete inability to put his shoes on the correct feet when asked to do so and turned into what can only be called a shrieking banshee. I don’t care how little sleep, it’s not a good look on anyone, and I’m sure the neighbours must think I’m a total harpy now.

Halfway down the road, an accident has closed it (gah! when will people in this country realise that unless you have studded tires or chains on, your brakes DON’T WORK on snowy, icy roads?) and the fire brigade won’t let us walk past the accident because it might upset the children. Which is fair enough, and I understand this, but now we have to walk home and get in the car, because the only other way to school is what is normally a 15 minute drive. Not today. Oh no. Today, it takes 30 minutes, and we are late for school, and it takes me a further 45 minutes to get home. And we only had 1 cm of snow. It is absolutely RIDICULOUS how entirely unable to cope with any sort of adverse weather conditions we are. It makes me wonder how on earth humans have managed to survive as long as they have. Maybe there is a protecting deity, after all.

I decide against taking  Bellaboo to her baby gymnastics class (sounds far more impressive than it actually is ) and opt for a quiet morning hibernating . . . bad choice, it turns out, because within 30 minutes she’s racing her trike around the living room/playroom circuit. Which is fine. It becomes totally not fine, however, when she decides to ram the hearthstone with the trike. Rather predictably (if you’re an adult, I suppose) an inch-high slab of polished slate stops the trike in its tracks, but the laws of physics being what they are, Bellaboo continues her onward trajectory. SPLAT! Face first onto the fireplace. Initially, I thought the trike handles must have cut into her little belly, but as she draws in the almighty breath for the scream that is coming (BREATHE!) I realise that she has a very nasty gash on her forehead, where she’s connected with the protruding metal handle that controls airflow into the stove.

BLOOD! Everywhere, screaming baby, I’m trying to apply clean dishcloths and ice to the wound but she’s not having it, and we’re only going one place – Accident and Emergency.

I drive like a (very careful) lunatic to the hospital, conscious that on icy roads I don’t want to be messing about with corners and trees and the like, abandon the car and rush like a demented person into A&E clutching a howling and bloodstained baby. Needless to say, we are seen instantly – nurses and doctors appear as if by magic (never before have I seen that – previous emergency visits have always been anxiety-riddled tedium with brief bursts of activity punctuated by long hours of sitting around waiting for our turn) – and Bellaboo is examined (she doesn’t like it, very forcefully and at the top of her voice) , cleaned up and put under observation.

For 4 hours.

For the first couple, she does a passable impresion of a dying swan. By the end, she’s running around and playing with the toys and chatting to the nurses and other children in the waiting area as if nothing’s happened.

Eventually, with a glued and butterfly-stitched wound, we are sent home – with a mere 30 minutes before we need to go and collect the others from school. This is not how my day was supposed to go.

But once everyone came home from school, an air of calm descended on the place. Honey and Rumpus were tired after their first day back (Rumpus particularly so after last night’s excursions and alarums), so they watched Nim’s Island on DVD, Bellaboo played with her shape-sorter, and I got the remainder of my patches backed and pinned ready for sewing. It’s just a  sample piece, a mini-experiment with the wild geese pattern I’ve not tried before, and combining different patchwork patterns into the same piece (so the finished piece will be no more than A4 size), but it’s starting to come together now . . .

So, in those terms, I am where I want to be (more or less) with that particular project. I had a new batch of hair clips/barrettes and brooch pins arrive today as well, so of course I’m itching to start on those – it’s taking all my self-discipline to hold off until I’ve finished this little patchwork panel.

Then, this evening, I launched into my writing session, and managed to hit a fine vein of form, and have accomplished what I diarised as two days work in less than a single session.

So, I’m feeling very high and very pleased with myself, but I am taking today’s events as a caution. However, I think it is a good test of my planning that despite the adverse conditions, I still achieved what I wanted to do with time to spare . . . but I’m taking the warning that I shouldn’t be complacent about this.

I know I’ve set myself some pretty agressive targets this year, and today I was lucky that I was still buzzing with possibility and had the energy from somewhere and motivation and desire to hack away. I need to remember today, and make sure I can call up that feeling any time, and under any conditions, because I suspect that life has a way of throwing days like today at you more often than is entirely welcome.

And on that bombshell, I’m going to bed, no doubt to lie awake thinking what I can do with my extra writing session (actually, I already know – I’ve got the germ of an idea for a non-fiction article . . . . . . . . . )

(did I mention that non-fiction articles and short stories are interchangeable in the overall scheme?)

2009 targets

I’ve been turning these over in my mind for a few days now, giving myself a chance to prioritise and work out tasks vs time available (always a difficult balancing act), as my wish list is always a lot longer than the amount of time I ever have to do it all in. But I think this is realistic and acheivable, and I reserve the right to move deadlines around on a quarterly basis, depending on how I’m doing with everything.

I’ve got some catchp to do before I can get stuck into the list, but I’m itching to get started.

1) Writing - always top of the pile, and always the longest list. I’m focussing on getting some of the backlog moving rather than starting a whole bunch of new novels – I feel the need to consolidate, edit and hone rather than build myself another tower of unusable first drafts. Some of this bleeds in 2010, but I’ve got the whole schedule here in case I lose my paper copy and/or my windows calendar dies. Work list/schedule:

Standard tasks:

- maintain schedule discipline of write/edit/submit a story every other week

- maintain current crit group commitments

- complete the “How to Think Sideways” course

 Anneth:

- finalise, prepare synopsis and query letters and get out on the submission rounds

 Serpent of Colchis:

- complete edit by end of Q1 2009

 Disconnection

- rewrite by end Q1 2009

- edit by end Q2 2009

Contain This Hour

- rewrite by end Q2 2009

- edit by end Q3 2009

Sere (working title)

- this is the new ‘Think Sideways’ project, so it will run through the year. I’m planning the major writing as my Nanowrimo for this year, with a view to pushing on and finishing the draft by end Q4 2009

- edit by end Q2 2010

Lest Ye be Judged

- rewrite by end Q3 2009

- edit by end Q1 2010

Storyteller of Akal

- rewrite Q1 2010

- edit by end Q3 2010

Textile arts/crafting – from a business perspective, this is more or less where I want it to be right now, though I have branched out to an Etsy shop this year. There are a couple of objectives I want to state, though they feel a little nebulous at this stage.

- try 1 new stitch, technique or craft I haven’t tried before each month

- stick to my ‘buy handmade’ pledge

- stick to my ‘wardrobe refashion’ pledge

- do at least one of Marysa’s lovely courses at the Otter Bindery

For next year (2010), I’m thinking that with Bellaboo starting pre-school, I’ll have more time on my hands, so I’m going to gear up for doing a couple of craft fairs, and will also get myself organised and apply for full membership of both the Embroidery Guild and the Surrey Guild of Craftsmen.

Personal - not so much here, though with so much going on in the above two, one of them must be:

- REMEMBER I HAVE A FAMILY

- I will take at least 2 weeks holiday this year

- I will try at least 1 new thing with at least 1 of my children every month

- I will work through the “How to talk/how to listen” book

- go to bed before midnight at least 4 times a week

- Books/Reading

- I will read at least 20 books this year, and I will (try to) not buy any more books (excl below) until I’ve caught up my backlog

- I will catalogue the existing collection on Library Thing

- After cataloguing the existing collection, I will rationalise it, and divest duplicates, those I won’t read again and the misfits in the first edition collection

- I will reinvest the proceeds of any divestments in new acquisitions that fit with the first ed/rare collection

- house and garden

- grow more fruit and veg this year than we did last year – stick to the planting and maintenance plan

- reduce waste again to 1/2 a bin bag every week

- take another 5% off our total energy usage for the year

- declutter and redecorate loft, improve my workspace

- list and sort out all the little leftover jobs now the refurb is finished

- and last but not least, get my BMI back down to 22. It’s completely out of control since Bellaboo arrived, and I don’t think I can call it baby fat any more. It’s just fat. It must go.

 

If it doesn’t kill me, that little lot should keep me out of trouble for a while . . . wish me luck, and I’ll let you know how it all goes!

Politics, nonsense

Errico Malatesta

I used to be a bit of a political firebrand in my youth (ha! quoth the graybeard), and ran the usual coming-of-age gauntlet of anarcho-communism. Actually, I still think anarchy and the ideal of mutual aid is actually a good one, so long as you take human beings out of the equation (at least until we learn that maybe, just maybe, our next evolutionary step is to learn that co-operation rather than competition is the winning strategy). I still don’t think that governments are a good idea, basically because the bigger an organisation becomes, the more I’ve noticed that any sense of personal responsibility diminishes in the component humans who make up those entities. ‘Computer says no’ syndrome, I suppose, when dogma and policy overtake compassion and need.

But I digress.

I gave up on politics when I realised that I was approaching it all wrong. I was interested in a discourse, in a pragmatic, logical examination of a given social or economic problem with an open-minded, genuine desire to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution. (A part of me still thinks that’s how it ought to be, but there you go). When I finally realised that it was actually an argument, where the objective was to defeat one’s opponent by refuting every single point they came up with (and vice versa) until one of you eventually makes some monumental error of judgement or logic, or contradicts oneself, or reduces oneself to absurdity, or loses patience and calls the other person a fascist (or nazi, or whatever insult is flavour of the moment) – and loses the argument by default. I discovered that I had little interest in such yah-boo nonsense, and gave the whole thing up in disgust. Though I reserve the right to snipe from the sidelines every now and again.

Thus now.

Urban Wild Flowers, Or Hiltch (Flickr Creative Commons)

Here we are, and the Israel/Palestine conflict flares up again. Yawn. Yes, yawn. I’ve been through the whole thing too many times before to get worked up over it again. Attempting to come up with any sort of analysis has only three possible outcomes:

1) Israel’s supporters decide you are being anti-jewish and call you a nazi

2) Palestine’s supporters decide you are being anti-palestinian/anti-muslim and call you an imperialist dog

3) Both sides decide you are sitting on the fence and therefore they both shoot at you

My point is, really, that the latest infarction is just another in a long line, and from where I’m sitting there’s going to be a hell of a lot more. I don’t mean to diminish the personal and real tragedy affecting the “ordinary” people (are there any other kind?) on either side of the divide, caught in the middle of another battle, I’m just saying that I can’t find it within myself to go into a detailed examination of why this latest episode has ignited, and the rights and wrongs and ins and outs of it. I’ve been there too many times before, and I just don’t have the energy.

This is politics taken to a violent and absurd extreme, and it becomes just such a grand, operatic, epic disaster that all one can do is throw up ones hands and wait for the climax. Only it will never come, because each side is now so firmly entrenched in their respective positions that neither can move, so they are chained to this stupid, ever-growing hamster wheel of tit-for-tat petty bloody vengeance. Hamas will never move from their position that Israel has no right to exist, even though it has now reach pythonesque levels of ridiculousness for them to continue to maintain that position. And Israel will never defeat Hamas, no matter how many troops they send into Gaza, because Hamas is like the hydra – for every one head they cut off, another hundred spring up. And even if they do defeat the organisation currently known as Hamas, the ethos will only be reincarnated in another group with the same philosophy but a different name until change in terms of both civil rights and economic opportunity is realised.

I’d say that the truth is that neither side can hold the moral high ground, and that neither accomplishes much by the continuous recitation of grievances in an emotive attempt to justify their stance by proving they have been wronged more than the other side. As it stands, both sides look set on a path of mutually assured destruction, and I’d be tempted to let them get on with, if it weren’t for the nagging sense of conscience that tells me it’s not fair on the people not directly involved in the fighting, and that there’s a risk it could drag the whole region into conflagration with it. It annoys me too, that instead of trying to solve the problem, the world’s leaders come down on one side or the other, and do nothing helpful, whilst the UN sit around endlessly talking, a toothless cur with neither bark nor bite, that no-one either fears or respects any more.

The only people who can bring about change are the people directly involved. The problem is, that until they get tired of fighting each other and sit down and really talk about a solution with a genuine and open intent to bring about a peaceful solution, it will never change. I can’t make them do it, and I’m bored of arguing with people who aren’t listening to anything except the sound of their own self-righteousness. So I wash my hands of the whole business, and will quietly hope that the change will come sooner rather than later, if only for the sake of all the mothers over there with children the same age as mine, who would like to see them grow up.

Crying Angel, Annikaleigh (Flickr Creative Commons)

Another year, what to hope for?

A Boom Boom Boom by Asmunder (Flickr Creative Commons)

We were talking, last night, t’o-m and me (as you do), and inevitably we marvelled at the speed with which last year shot past, and then we started talking about the year to come, hopes, predictions, fears.

I asked him what he hoped for, in the coming year. He looked a bit puzzled, scratched his head, and finally came up with: “I hope I don’t fall off my bike.”

That’s it?

I was gobsmacked.

It got me thinking. Does he have so little imagination or ambition, that he can’t come up with anything better than that?!

Durrrrr.

Or, looking at it from an alternative viewpoint, does it mean that he’s perfectly content with what he has, and wants nothing more for it to continue as is.

Yes, the latter.

That’s even more astonishing. I dream and plan and scheme and fritter my life away in hopes and fears and wishes and horses, trying to find a way to bake my own particular cake and eat it too, and yet still be blind to what I do have.

His comment was a timely reminder that actually, stasis is not necessarily a bad thing, and that what we do have is something to be cherished and protected.

So, my primary hope for this year is that he doesn’t fall off his bike.

Bicycle by YuvalH (Flickr Creative Commons)

I’m sure there will be more later, but that will do for now.