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If the human mind was simple enough to understand,

we'd be too simple to understand it. (Emerson Pugh)

this is not reality

February 9, 2009

Statewide Bushfires - February 2009

This weekend just gone is one of those that will be etched into memory. History book stuff.
Saturday was the hottest day in Melbourne on record, the hottest temperature I’ve ever experienced at 46.4deg Celsius (115.5deg F). The hot wind hit you in the face like a hot iron. Clothes on the washing line smelt like clothes straight out of the tumble drier. When Dean and I walked to the shop, it was like a ghost town.

News of the fires made me uneasy, and then more and more and more uneasy. The fire in the Bunyip State Forest was getting bigger, and the expected cool change was bringing a change in wind direction. As such, Mum and Dad in Neerim East were under a CFA Urgent Threat Message: “…may be directly impacted upon by this fire”. I felt like I was going to be sick when their road was mentioned on the incident updates. Later we found it out it wasn’t their road at all, but this wasn’t until Sunday after they’d spoken to the neighbours. They had the sprinklers going on the roof and bags packed ready to go. Heavy smoke and ash and embers - bits of burnt bark falling from the sky 20cm and longer. They lost power and the landline phone.

Other towns were obliterated in separate fires. It seemed the entire state was on fire, east to west and north to south. So many lives lost and they’re still counting. The fire is still consuming public and private property and everything in its wake, despite the best efforts of the emergency services and volunteers. I don’t know anyone personally affected by the death toll yet, though I know people whose relatives have lost everything.

I’m my father’s daughter. Although the farm is now relatively safe (dependent on wind changes and the like, of course), thoughts of what could’ve been haunted me all last night. The wind is a fickle creature and if that southerly had kept itself up… When my parents ventured out on Sunday, to check on neighbours and their property in Drouin, they discovered if they’d wanted to leave during the night it would have been practically impossible with the number of trees over the road. What if…? I feel sick seeing pictures of burnt out cars, knowing many of them were not deserted. Dad felt the same, I know, when I left New Orleans 24hrs before Hurricane Katrina hit. I thank my lucky stars that they’re safe, and grieve for those who were far less fortunate.
Worse than Ash Wednesday? Worse than Black Friday? What will Saturday 7 February 2009 become known as?

jen at 3:13 pm

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November 2, 2008

Goals

I’ve been thinking, amongst other things, a little about goals. I’ve been thinking about what I want. In life, in general terms, in specific terms. Sometimes when my thoughts have been meandering around a topic for a while, I’ll have a little thought bubble burst into my head like some kind of mini epiphany. As I pulled into my street on the way home from work, this was what popped into my head: you’re probably not going to get anything you want unless you specifically state it.

Now, this may seem blindingly obvious to some people - the goal-focused people who have pretty much always known what they want and how to strive towards it. That’s never been me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I finished school. I didn’t have a job in mind when I finished uni (so much so that I put it off for another year and did an honours year). It’s not as though I haven’t achieved things in life to date because I’ve done plenty well in pretty much everything I’ve undertaken; there’s just few and far between things that I’ve said to myself, “Right-o! This is it, this is what I want and this is how I’m going to get there!” And when I have set and achieved a goal (the one thing that springs to mind is weight loss, when I lost ~30kg in ‘04/‘05), the steps to get there and end point have been all a little wishy-washy, and have been more about what I don’t want rather than what I do want.

All this thinking stems from a work/life balance seminar I took a few weeks ago. How can you achieve work/life balance (or any kind of life balance for that matter), if you’re not clear on what it is you want out of life?

This is still a work in progress, and there’s likely more to come on this topic.

jen at 1:00 pm

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October 21, 2008

How my garden grows

I really love having a garden, even the small courtyard out back & deck-with-pots out front satisfies my green thumb. It relaxes me; time passes and before I realise, it’s getting dark (or raining) and I need to go inside. Here’s what I’ve got growing: rhubarb, silverbeet (chard), capsicums (peppers), tomatoes (regular & cherry varieties), zucchinis (courgette / squash), three types of perpetual lettuce (cos, red oakleaf, and some frilly leaf variety), pumpkin (which decided to grow out of the compost), and a multitude of herbs (chives, parsley, coriander, basil, oregano, tarragon, lemon balm, mint, thyme). I think we’re going to have fresh produce coming out of our ears in a couple of months. I also planted some marigolds and nasturtium seeds as companion plants; the nasturtiums aren’t doing too well - the leaves start out pale green and just keep getting paler until they die.

I was relieved to discover I hadn’t killed the worms in my worm farm. I built it about a month ago, based roughly on this instructable. There didn’t appear to be a lot of action aside from a whole lot of fruit-fly type bugs each time I lifted the lid, and so I worried that I’d let it dry out, and then I worried that I’d over-watered it. This evening I discovered all good things take time (and I needn’t overcomplicate things; particularly things as simple as a worm farm). Really, what kind of action-packed excitement was I expecting from a worm farm? When I opened the bottom drawstring, there was plenty of compost / worm casing goodness. I sorted out the good dirt and put the worms back in the top; my plants will love this tasty dirt.

I’m grateful for my patch of dirt and to at least start creating some self-sustainability.

jen at 8:33 pm

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October 6, 2008

The problem with thinking

There’s a problem with this whole not sleeping thing. It’s called starting work at 6am. It’d be all good and well if I could operate on five or six hours sleep, but that’s not me in the slightest. Give me eight hours a night for satisfactory results, nine hours for optimal results. Of course the daylight savings starting a month early also has played a little havoc with me on top of this insomniac phase - I get to lose another whole hour. Yee-ha.

One tactic is to read before I sleep. It gives me someone else’s thoughts to think about - I’ve been reading a lot of chatty, not-particularly consequential, “fluffy” books. Nothing too taxing. It helps a lot that my sister (whom I now live with) works in a bookstore - hooray for uncorrected proof copies! (Therein lies the minor excitement of discovering a nonsensical sentence and all sorts of other grammatical errors… had I better prepared for my final high school English exam, lit or journalism or publishing may well have been a different career path. That’s another story all together.) Another tactic is guided meditation, which also works well but then there’s the effort of setting up the CD player in my bedroom. I simply need to stop worrying / analysing / indulging in mentally beating myself up.

I start a yoga class later this week. I’m hoping this helps me, amongst other things, to sleep.

jen at 5:15 pm

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October 2, 2008

Some kind of truth about happiness

There’s been a lot of thinking lately - I guess you could say time for reflection, but often it ends up impinging itself on me in the form of worry at 3am. There’s good reflection and then there’s bad reflection. I have a tendency towards the latter. Amongst the good reflection I’ve been doing, I’ve been reading and re-reading books that occasionally give me glimmers of inspiration. Cheesy as it is at times, one of these books is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Don’t ask how I came to be in possession of this book - I don’t want to talk about it. Nonetheless, I’ve read it and reread it at least three times in the last couple of months.
I’ve also been re-reading Anne Giardini’s The Sad Truth About Happiness, a novel I bought on holidays a few years ago. It’s mostly a light read with the some moments of great depth - in the closing chapter, there’s soliloquy that’s been the focus of my reflections…

“Happiness is more ephemeral than thought. It can’t be observed without changing its nature. Its ingredients are subtle, and there is no guarantee that a formula or recipe for joy can be written out or passed on or repeated even once again. Happiness evades capture, dissolving like a melody into the air, eluding even the most delicate, careful grasp. It frustrates any systemic search, responding better to random fossicking and oblique approaches, and its rewards are infuriatingly arbitrary, stingy or abundant by purest chance.
“Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change - sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once - and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment.” Anne Giardini, The Sad Truth About Happiness

I’ve also been thinking about what I want from life - what I want for myself. I’ve never been much of a goal-orientated person, but I do know that I want to live simply. Comfortably but simply and content within my means and with the impact I have on the world around me. A few blogs I’ve come across recently remind me of this:

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There’s been a change in my work schedule. For a number of reasons, the opportunity arose to work a shift of 6am-2:30pm. I jumped at the opportunity - I still miss my afternoons since I stopped working as a sleep scientist. Yesterday morning reminded me why I love that time of day - the air is fresh, the sun not quite risen; it’s as if night is delicately lifting the cover off a new day. It’s these things I forget to notice when I get caught up the worry and ‘bad’ reflections.

jen at 9:07 pm

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