The meal that was two weeks in the making

August 24, 2015 by 4 Comments

Today I entered a level of cooking prep that I hadn’t gone to before. Understanding that I regularly cook for big groups of people (thanks extended family) and I cook daily for a fussy vegetarian (myself) , a carb–avoiding man (my husband) and a growing teenager (my son) , I am well versed with cooking prep.

But today was different. I was cooking for a family who have had some difficult times lately. Someone at Little Pencil’s school has put a roster together for people who want to help to prepare a meal to ensure there is one thing less to worry about for a while.

The roster was a very well organised, online schedule where you could choose the date that suited you best and then insert the meal you would be providing with your name next to that date.

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This is not what happened when I went to school

August 20, 2015 by 5 Comments

electiveYesterday I went off to a school meeting with all the enthusiasm I could muster for doing anything which means leaving my bed,  that is – none at all. The meeting was to find out more about elective subject choices for Year 9 students and frankly I thought I would struggle to find a more boring basis for calling the parents together.

Turns out I was thinking about my subject choices when I was back at school in the olden days – a decade fondly referred to as the 80’s.

So as my my son dragged me off to listen to a man in a suit talk about elective geography I had my phone at the ready to check Twitter when he started to rattle off about mountain ranges and rock formations. I thought that when he got to cloud formations I might excuse myself for an urgent bathroom run. I was prepared*. Except I wasn’t.

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This one’s for you!

August 19, 2015 by 25 Comments

I was listening to a podcast by Wil Anderson the other day in which he was chatting to Charlie Pickering. Anderson starts the conversation with a rather direct and tricky question.

“Who are you? “ he asks.

Charlie replies very hesitantly with lots of pauses and ums and ahs “I’m Charlie Pickering, I’m a comedian from Australia. How about that is that a good start.” And then immediately he adds “Did you sit there quiet just seeing how uncomfortable I got and what other things I kept added … I’m a dog lover, I ride bikes, I think Picasso’s good and I really like the Doobie brothers.”

It’s the question that Anderson asks because he likes to see what people will say. He says most people on the show tend to qualify themselves by their career or by their profession but he admits that clearly not the whole world defines themselves by what they do.

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The “graphic” photos of newborns

August 14, 2015 by 3 Comments

There are some news stories that prompt outrage from me in mere milliseconds. Okay most do. But obviously when I read something that strikes me at a personal level it creates a different level of outrage. It is the kind of thing that in the old days would make me shout, but now that I am so mature I just write.

NBC Chicago reports

A suburban Chicago family, overwhelmed by medical bills from their infant son who was born prematurely, alleges the popular crowdfunding website GoFundMe did not make their donation page available to the public because the photo of their ill baby was deemed offensive.

According to the family, Baby Jacob’s fundraising page was originally only accessible to those who had a direct link, making it difficult to raise the needed funds to help offset the mounting medical expenses that come with his condition.

When the organizer of the page, a close family friend, contacted GoFundMe, they claim the popular crowdfunding site told them the photo of the young boy was “graphic” and may be deemed offensive to some viewers.

“They responded right away and said, ‘Unfortunately, we never published it because your son’s image [was] too graphic and too inappropriate for our viewers to look at,” said Jacob’s mother Christina Hinks.

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Don’t be the person in these photos

August 12, 2015 by 2 Comments

Haley Morris-Cafiero

I didn’t know how to feel about this when I first saw it, the idea of public shaming is abhorrent to me, more so since reading Jon Ronson’s spectacular book So You’ve Been Publicly  Shamed. But here was a slew of self portrait photographs of a woman who dared to be fat showing the reactions she received from people in the street.

pfizer viagra prix The use of oily food and alcohol has to be clogged strictly. To get over tribulation of shortage of sex viagra discounts drive. While blockage rings won’t price for viagra see for source boost up blood flow into the corpus cavernosa. Snoring is regarded amongst the uk viagra prices main health benefits of using enhancement pills. News.com.au reports

“When photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero developed a self-portrait she had taken in Times Square, something stood out. There in the background, surrounded by a riot of colourful advertising and soaring tower blocks, was a man smirking at her back.

Instead of being hurt, Haley was intrigued, turning it into the first piece in her extraordinary series Wait Watchers, which looks at the meaning of other people’s stares.

“He was being photographed by this woman, so to have him focused on me was really interesting,” Haley, an associate professor at Memphis College of Art, told news.com.au. “Then five minutes later, it happened again.”

The 39-year-old began setting up her camera in crowded streets, beaches and shopping districts all over the world, using a remote to capture how other people reacted to her. The result is a revealing and uncomfortable collection of suppressed smiles, sneers, puzzlement and wide-eyed fascination.

“I don’t care what anybody thinks,” she said. “I pick images if something looks critical on a stranger’s face.”

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The 21 things regular parents do

August 10, 2015 by 12 Comments

When my son was younger I classified myself as a helicopter mum. The label carried no negative implications for me, I believed (and I still do) that my parenting was appropriate for his age. Imagine my horror when I discovered that it wasn’t actual helicopter parenting because “proper” helicoptering means doing his uni assignments and stalking him, er I mean watching him play with this friends when he is at school, at least according to this column that appeared in the weekend newspaper.

Stuck without a label (bonsai, tiger, extreme, dolphin and free-range aren’t doing it for me) I decided to give myself one. From now on in I will go for the “regular parent” label.

To avoid any issues with you calling yourself a regular parent only to discover that you aren’t (although your child is perfectly fine) let me help you with a list of things that regular parents do.

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Won’t somebody think of the children?

August 6, 2015 by

Maybe it is because I have the emotional maturity of a child that I can’t help seeing most things through the eye of a child. Some would counter that’s why I enjoyed Spelling Bee so much, others would point to my pre sugar-free sherbet addiction, others would just acknowledge my predisposition to the tantrum.

Perhaps it is this immaturity (or ability to see things through the eyes of the child) that reacted so badly to some advice given to women recently in a post headed Habits of Successful Women. Juanita Phillips was quoted as saying that she didn’t allow her children to do weekend sport because “it’s too hard”. “Weekends are for no schedule, fun, frivolity, flexibility and a slower pace” the article maintains.

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The real reason they tell you to stay in bed

August 4, 2015 by 14 Comments

stay in bedI am writing this post from a pool of mucus. Sorry there is no other way to say it. I have the same hideous, dreaded illness that seems to be taking over Sydney – except I have had it for five days now and I am over it. I wish I was over it in the literal sense – rather I am just over blowing my nose every ten seconds and coughing as soon as I try to lie down. I am also over feeling like my body is walking in concrete and my thoughts are floating around in honey.

I have been to the doctor and he has plied me with drugs, after asking if it was okay if he examined me with a mask on. That’s understandable, the poor man does not want to get ill, but it did make me feel that perhaps I was not presenting my best self at that time.

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Not The Bachelor review you’re looking for

July 30, 2015 by 2 Comments

There’s s a strange phenomenon that seems to happen every time The Bachelor airs. Thousands of women sit down in front of the TV and tear apart other women under the guise of reviewing or live tweeting the show.

I don’t watch The Bachelor because I don’t agree with the premise, I don’t like the concept of dating shows and I am trying desperately to stop hate-viewing/reading in general. But by mistake I watched Twitter for a while last night.

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My truth about giving up sugar

July 28, 2015 by 19 Comments

I am not new to giving up sugar, I gave it up once before and wrote about it here. At the time of writing I had given up for 10 days and I ended my post with the words “I am discovering a new way of eating, not feeling fantastic YET but at least my focus is expanding (and hopefully my waist isn’t)”.  I think I ate some nutella soon after that. The no sugar thing didn’t last. Maybe I didn’t give it long enough back then.

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