THE HALF FULL, HALF EMPTY BISCUIT BARREL

EVERY Sunday for the past five or six weeks I've been filling a large jar with home made biscuits. I used to bake a lot but as the children grew I couldn't keep up with the consumption and it was easier and cheaper to fill a biscuit barrel with Arnotts Milk Arrowroots. It had the dual purpose of being a sweet treat within easy reach but not so delicious a treat to be gone by afternoon tea.

The full biscuit barrels of recent weeks have been a novelty - too much of a novelty. Once again, what I bake in one afternoon is gone by the next afternoon's tea. Adult dependants at home during the day are like big rats through out pantry. So, the biscuit baking has ceased once more, which, truth be told is probably a good thing for my waistline too.

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OP SHOPPING BY INSTAGRAM

IT'S op shopping by Instagram these days. Here's a few things I've picked up in recent weeks. 

The string of colourful beads and coins were part of a fill-a-bag for $5 haul Poppet Hill and I shared. 

The Danish Handcraft Guild Christmas book was $1. My mother had all these guild books and I have a bagged a couple of my favourites from her stash.

This loose cotton JAG shirt was $4 from the Salvos. It's just the right off-white with sleeves that can be rolled up. I have been wearing it with op shop jeans and a head scarf.

I scored 15 balls of Patons Jet pure wool in a glorious moss colour for $20. For pure wool, that's a steal and the perfect '70s pattern for it was sitting alongside for $2. Gotta love the Salvos for its craft stashes.

This bucket hat is super cute, though it doesn't look much here. It was $5 from a stall at Avoca Beachside Markets.

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AUTUMN 2013 || PINNING THINGS WARM AND TOASTY

My autumn pinnings have taken on a much more cosy and toasty warm feel. 

THINGS TO MAKE AND DO: I’ve long loved Amanda’s clever felt play biscuits and sweet treats. This is her latest felt creation, a flower headband for her daughter.

THINGS TO COOK AND EAT: Rachel has the same tastes as me… in Hornsea crockery that is (and toasty warm porridge).

THINGS TO DROP DOUGH ON: I have been coveting these brogues for some weeks. I have a similar much-loved pair of flats bought from the op-shop but fading fast.

THINGS TO HANG ON THE WALL: Pippa makes beautiful wall hangings and I am betting she doesn’t have to beg people to use a coaster or take their feet off her Parker coffee table. I do. Grrrr.

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APRIL 2013... I'VE DONE IT

THE fact I’ve only written a handful of posts in April and this post is 12 days late is testimony to how busy things were and still are, but oh, what fun. Work’s been busy, there’s plenty going on in Girl Guide-land and there’s always plenty with the brood.

It’s been a month of lots of thought-provoking conversation – again, at work, at Guides and around the dinner table.

I hope it was a great month for you too.

IN APRIL…

I READ: Winner of the 2013 Stella Prize and a nominated title in the Miles Franklin Literary Awards, Mateship With Birds.

I WENT TO: Ideas at the House’s All About Women event. If you click on the link, you can see me at 37secs. I am the one on the left. I probably should brush my hair more often.

I LISTENED TO: I’ve been reacquainting myself with a back catalogue from my younger years, when music was on tape, or even better, mix-tapes. Paul Simon and Alanis Morissette have been on high rotation.

I ATE: A rare Friday evening when we weren’t so tired not as to collapse on the couch in front of Silent Witness or the Dr Blake Mysteries, we enjoyed a shared pizza at Garden 2 Plate, Killcare. I’ve been meaning to get back there in daylight hours but it just hasn’t happened yet.

I SAW: A couple of mending projects leave the bottom of the washing basket. One of them, a pair of thrifted woollen Country Road pants had been there since last winter and the vintage dress pictured had been in there from a summer ago.

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CAN YOU TEACH SOMEONE NOT TO FAIL?

SINCE writing my last post about failure I've read writer and broadcaster Sarah Macdonald's own post on the very same All About Women panel discussion and Marcus Westbury's post on his own failings and failures. Marcus and I attended many of the same lectures in our respective bid to gain a degree in communication from the University of Newcastle, so it was interesting to read his take on that time and the impact of one of life’s significant failures – failing at your studies.

In fact, it’s this formative idea of failure that I am interested in. When I was a student the notion of failure was very real, as were the consequences. I can remember children were held back years and lost to the group of peers who progressed to the next year level. Report cards home were clearly graded and there was no ambiguity between an A, through to a D and the unmistakable F. Teachers had no qualms about pointing out your failings and if memory serves me, there always seemed more evidence of these than any of my admirable qualities.

“Could do better” was a common report card comment, echoed by parents who tsk tsk’d if there was even so much as a B-.

Now, I'm not going to pretend I was a dunce. I wasn't  I was a bright student and I liked my studies but failure here wasn't something I was familiar with. Those lessons came by way of life and I defy any parent to tell me they've had an easy road of it: success all the way. Hmmm, didn’t think so.

I was though, I think, a reasonably resilient and independent individual, well supported by my parents and the adult influences around me to test myself and have a go.  But the question I have been asking myself, and peers and colleagues of the same age, is whether we were just the last of a generation that had to create our own pathways in life, and that meant ‘having a go’, or whether the pathways in life were so much simpler then than they are today.

I am watching my own brood get on with life and one of the four has understood her path in life and moved toward it easily and without any real fear it was not the path or that it could fail. The others have struggled to make those decisions in life, and I do wonder, both for them and others I see making those steps toward independence, what part fear has played in that.

So, the question is, does failure have to do with a rather large presence of fear? If so, the converse must be that success is to do with being brave. Hmmmm.

But how brave and can we teach it? Is it possible to give children an understanding of the difference between real fear and real courage? Does it have to be learned as a young person, or is it okay to come to it later in life?

I recall, halfway up a very tall mast on the sail training ship The Young Endeavour, on a cold, windy and wet night being yelled at from the deck. Against the wind and rain I heard: “don’t worry, fear makes you hold on tighter”. No shit Sherlock. I was holding on to that mast with all I had and wondering why an inland girl thought tall ship sailing was something she should ‘have a go’ at. It took me years of applying for a berth and saving my pennies to make the voyage and here I was, quite literally at half-mast and pondering my imminent death.

Calls from the deck were supposed to be encouraging but in my freaked out mind I was thinking holding on tight was neither going to get me to a height of the mast where I could start wrenching the sail in, nor get me down. I was, despite the assurances of my crew members, going to have to let go and I did. I let go, I climbed, I hauled and then I got myself down, shaking like a leaf and near to passing out once I hit the deck. I wasn't the only one. It took three of us to get the sail in and we were white-faced but, in the face of adversity, we had triumphed.

It took courage and, yes, fear, to get the job done but one had to override the other. Courage one out. Did I learn anything? I think I did: to let go. Could I have studied that? Could it have been delivered to me in a curriculum designed to extract a fair and measurable result from all?

Can success be graded? Really?

PS: Am I making any sense, whatsoever? Have I at least given you something to ponder?

PSS: Please, keep adding your comments. Aside from what’s written on my last post, I’ve had emails and Facebook messages, so do keep them coming. 

PSSS: Photo taken at the Rotary Club of Woy Woy lookout overlooking Umina Beach. 

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CAN'T ANSWER THIS ONE? T.R.Y.

WHAT is so wrong with having a good old, ridgey-didge go?

I have been boring my friends and colleagues with this question since attending All About Women at Sydney’s Opera House a couple of weekends ago, so I figured, in the interest of wider debate, to put the question to you.

As a child and on a long visit with my grandmother I was bored, restless and probably a right little prat and I whined a horrid, drawn-out “I cannnn’ttt” in her earshot. Quick as you like she bailed me up and shot back; “Spell can’t”.

Ha, who did this woman think I was? Of course you weren’t going to be able to trick me with this one. “C.A.N. apostrophe…”.

“No,” she said, stopping me before I could get to my grand finale of ‘T’. “Wrong. You spell can’t T.R.Y”.

With that she resumed whatever she was doing and left me starring, slack-jawed at (a) her terribly bad spelling and (b) the fact I’d just had a right ticking off, and (c) sadly for my bored whiny self, my grandmother, bad spelling or not, was onto something.

I can remember that conversation as clearly today as the day we had it and, between you and me, have rocked her line out a couple of times.

I raise this childhood memory because I felt my grandmother’s gee-up to get over myself and get on with it was the elephant in the room throughout all the sessions I attended at All About Women.

The program of speakers and panel debate designed to tease out issues impacting and informing feminism (my take on the day, not the advertised theme) was wide and varied and the first session I chose to toddle off to was titled “How to Fail”.

Now, I’ll lay it out there. Last year I made a decision to leave a job I loved and a career I’d built up over the past 18 years. I left almost two decades spent in a newsroom and 10 years at News Limited to start working for UNICEF. I know. I know. Bloody big gap in organisational philosophy there, right? Hmm, let’s leave that one for another day.

Anyhoot, as far as career changes go I thought I’d faffed it. Things didn’t seem to be going well and I was ready, several weeks in and well before my cursory three-month probationary period was up, to declare defeat and admit I’d failed.

As it is, I’m still plugging along and, looking back on those first weeks in the role, it was a period of transition I was just going to have to go through. My response to it and unexpected shock of the upheaval did, however, shift my expectations and in choosing to attend a panel discussion titled "How to Fail" I think I was looking for recognition that failure is a real, tangible and even necessary part of change.

The women on the panel were amazing, don’t get me wrong, but as I listened politely the curt tone of my grandmother was ringing in my ears. Why were we talking about failure simply as unrealised success and just calling it what it was? A fuck up. Yes, they happen and honestly, for me it was a breakthrough. To have failed was to be put on the other side of a very comfortable comfort zone, to take a look around and wonder at what I’d been missing out on and find a path through it.

It’s not far from what the panel was trying to say, but, glory be to Jesus, I was a little gob smacked to hear women actually say they don’t allow themselves to fail and suffer an almost crippling fear of it. Because, dear reader, it’s that crippling fear that keeps us women on the comfy side of whatever we’re all doing. Ah ha. It is. We all know it so why aren’t we "feeling the fear and doing it anyway"?

So, I ask, what is so wrong with having a ridgey-didge go?

PS: I’d love you to comment if you saw the discussion and tell me whether you felt the same.

PSS: If you didn’t see the discussion, maybe you’d like to comment anyway. 

PSSS:  There’s more where this came from. 

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AUTUMN 2013 || APOLOGIES FOR THE PINTEREST FRENZY

I AM, without a doubt, the world's worst 'pinner'. I ignore all the rules about Pinterest etiquette and go on pinning frenzies. My poor followers. Why ever do you stick with me? 

THINGS TO MAKE AND DO: I am hunting my op shops for the perfect pair of jeans and fabric remnants to make a pair of jeans like these. 

THINGS TO COOK AND EAT: I love a good sandwich. How good does something with chillijam, avocado and haloumi sound? 

THINGS TO DROP DOUGH ON:  Like everyone else on the interwebs I am taken by Kate Spade’s Saturday range. Now, if only I could get this reversible jacket shipped to Australia.

THINGS TO HANG ON THE WALL: This simple beach scene was a repin and I only recently went back to take a better look at the illustrator’s work. Rhona Garvin’s blog has been added to my BlogLovin’ feed. (You can find me on BlogLovin' here.)

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AUTUMN 2013 || SO WHAT'S AN EARLY EASTER MEAN

THE French proverb goes, "a late Easter, a long cold spring". Granted, France is in the northern hemisphere where Easter sits in the right season, but for us, I wonder what an early Easter means. Lord, I hope it means a short winter.

#opshopfound: vintage aprons, $2 each, Green Point Salvos; egg cups 50c each, Kincumber Vinnies

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MARCH 2013... I'VE DONE IT

I SHOULD have called this post "If that's March, I've made it". I've run a gauntlet the past five or six weeks (I've lost count). There have been two weekends of Girl Guide camp, a work trip to Canberra, two days of a film workshop, and lots of meetings and greetings in between. 

Oh, and a wedding...

So, yes, I am done. I arrived home last night, my partner and I took a couple of beers down to to our local Thai, and then I came home and crashed, enjoying the deepest sleep I've had for ages.

So, here's a recap.

IN MARCH...

I READ: I haven't finished anything new this month. I am part-way through Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana and Amy Espeseth's Sufficient Grace. The second book is from this year's Stella Prize long list.

I WENT TO: Another Girl Guide camp. I know. I know. It's becoming repetitive. 

I LISTENED TO: I'm booked into TEDx Sydney and have been catching up on some TED watching and listening. A colleague shared Dan Pollotta's talk, The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong, with me.

I ATE: At Ms G's, in Sydney. It's been on my to-go list for a while and it was the venue for a regular dinner date with two of my dearest friends. I can recommend the salad of green tea soba noodles with snow crab, avocado and shiso.

I SAW: My second eldest stepdaughter marry her fella in a beautiful beachside ceremony. My partner captured a very special candid moment on camera. The blushing bride had held a mirror up to her make-up, and the look captured was of pure delight. She was beautiful and special and that moment, caught forever on camera, reminded me so much of the little girl who was, and who stood before us that day as a woman marking one of life's important moments.

The wreath hanging on my front door was from the wedding. It was originally part of a table decoration -one of six - my mother and her friends made for the day. Mum also made all the bouquets, buttonholes, the bride's garter, gifts for the bridesmaids, the flower girls' head pieces and so many other little things to make the bride, the wedding and reception look beautiful - thanks Mum.

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AUTUMN 2013 || OF LITTLE VALUE, AND ALL

TRINKETS. It’s a word that tinkles off the tongue. A word that sounds exactly as it is. I can almost touch this word. Hold it in the palm of my hand and roll it back and forth with a flick of my fingers. 

I’ve added this small glazed bowl to my dressing table to hold trinkets. Beads, rings, coins, bobby pins, a smooth rock… things that come and go as they’re picked up, used, worn, moved on, held and spent. 

The bowl is a trinket itself. I sometimes empty it to see those dollops of glaze and to hold it, hollow, in the palm of my hand and feel its weight. And its frailty. If dropped, it will smash. 

Inside the bowl are strings of glass beads – a gift from the children for my birthday – and these earrings, a cheeky point of light in that quiet dark curve.

#opshopfind: pottery trinket bowl, $1, East Gosford Vinnies

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