New job
I started a new job last Friday – working at a childcare centre that morphs into a school once the relevant child (in this case, Louisette) is old enough. I’m hugely impressed with the school as a whole – so much so that it looks a lot like I’ll be becoming a real live teacher (qualified and everyfink) eventually. Location + awesome work environment + connection to Louisette = win.
For now, as a not-particularly-qualified child care worker, I’m on their casual register – and so is Louisette. We come as a pair whenever called upon, which is great for everyone.
I really enjoyed my first day and the staff were kind enough to remain illness-depleted through the weekend so I can have another shift tomorrow.
In other news, although CJ and I were officially unpacked days after moving in, today we’re REALLY unpacked – CJ sorted four boxes of miscellaneous sentimental stuff (all his) into one plastic container to go into storage – and he finished today. An EXCELLENT Mothers’ Day present (unless one considers that I unpacked all my stuff weeks ago, so why is this impressive?)
Which also means I was finally able to take photos of our garage (aka CJ’s study, aka “The Library”) as it’s meant to look.
Three-bedroom two-bathroom houses at our end of the market (the “renovate or detonate” end, usually) are around 100 square metres in size, and often claim that the garage would easily convert to a fourth bedroom. This one was already converted (technically it was never used as a garage – it even has down lights, proper insulation – except for the roller door – and is connected to the reverse cycle AC), which meant we could use it right away (most of the houses we looked at didn’t have good alternate parking places, but this one does). You’ll understand how useful that is when you look at the photo and imagine fitting all those bookshelves into a comfortably-full-already-thanks home. We are VERY lucky.
Start your steampunks!
I never felt satisfied with the steampunk pics of Lousiette – her outfits were never right. Then she wandered out in her onesie holding Daddy’s extendable magnet – and it all came together at last.
Hidely-ho Neighbour!
It’s always a gamble when you move into a new place – and so much more so when you’ve bought it. So the other day, when a kid called me and said they were my neighbour, I tried very hard to concentrate on what they were saying above the natural noise of two little girls in my kitchen – but I failed, and they hung up. Since it was a private number, I couldn’t even call back! Luckily they called me again two hours later. . . . but I still had two little ones with me. They asked if my fridge was running.
“Is my. . . fridge. . . running?” I asked.
“Yes. Is your fridge running?”
“Um. . . yes.”
“Then you’d better go and catch it!”
And thus endeth the call with my supposed neighbour. The last time I heard of prank calls being a thing I was the one making them. It made my day.
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One of our real neighbours has a dog. They do a great job of caring for it, and although it sometimes barks (one of our cats loves to sit in their tree) it definitely doesn’t bother us at all (actually I’m a little nervous they’ll be annoyed at our cat…). Another neighbour has a giant yard with a large garden/orchard at our end. It was from that yard that I was pretty sure I heard, “Maa-a-a-a-a-a-a!”
“Ah,” I thought. “Our neighbour has procured a sheep to crop their grass. How incredibly organic and awesome of them.”
I heard it a few more times during the week and sure enough, on Saturday I was walking down our back steps (the only place one can accidentally see into their yard) and I spotted it. I told CJ about it, and was excited about lifting Louisette up so she could see a REAL LIVE sheep after all the hundreds of pictures (too bad it’s not green, but you can’t have everything). I was torn between calling out to our awesome neighbours and keeping silent in the sure knowledge that they are cooler than us in so many ways.
A couple of hours later, CJ was playing with Louisette outside and our paths crossed briefly. “I don’t think you’ll be hearing that sheep any more,” he said. “On account of it being strung up in their tree.”
“Oh,” I said, and made a mental note not to glance in their direction next time I was on the steps.
“Don’t worry,” said CJ, “They haven’t skinned it yet.”
Yep. Our neighbours are definitely much, much cooler than us*.
*Well, cooler than me. CJ grew up on a sheep farm so he wins.
When the fat lady sighs (trigger warning, also PG medical and womanly)
“Body dysmorphia” was mentioned in a TV show I was watching the other night. It’s a mental condition where the sufferer gets utterly fixated on some perceived flaw in their physical body that is either minor or non-existent.
“Aha,” I thought, “Perhaps all this stressing over my weight can be refuted with some simple numbers! Perhaps I’m really not all that fat after all – at least by Western standards, which after all is where I live!”
So I went and looked up the average BMI for Australians, knowing that we’re overweight. Do I fit right in with the majority? No I do not. I am so very, unbelievably much fatter than pretty much everyone. Unfortunately, that’s the maths. [Cue rant about how BMIs aren’t an accurate measure of true fatness. Whatever.]
I don’t care to share the exact details, but let’s just say that to be in the middle of the healthy weight range I’d need to be one and a half feet taller (or just under half a metre, for my metric-minded peeps). That would make me roughly seven and a half feet tall.
Anyone got a spare rack in the basement?
One of the many depressing things about this (did I mention I keep buying new fat pants because I outgrow them – over and over again?) is how long it will take to get within shouting range of an average overweight person. . . let alone actually touching the healthy weight range.
It is, unfortunately, perfectly rational to say that I’m very, very fat. It’s also perfectly rational to say it’s now the first thing people notice about me, whether they’re someone meeting me for the first time or old friends seeing me after a gap of a few months or more. I absolutely do look pregnant – about six months, I’d say – thanks to the peculiarities of where a good 20% or so of my spare fat has decided to hang out. If you doubt my rationality on the I-look-pregnant front, just ask the many random people constantly approaching to congratulate me.
I wholeheartedly admit that I do get irrational when I think about the social aspect. I honestly dread seeing old friends, or new people, and I’m now actively avoiding crowds (which is pretty clearly not a long-term solution). I’m also constantly mentioning in passing that I’m not pregnant (which, if you were at Conflux and you wondered why I felt the need to share with the room that I had one child and was planning to maybe have another next year, explains much). I don’t like anyone physically seeing me, not even my mum or sister or CJ. I feel just a little bit like children will run screaming in the streets at the sight of me.
There are two obvious solutions to this problem:
1. Stop being mentally ill (see? How easy was that?!?)
2. Lose some of the weight. I’ve mentioned before that I get sick every time I lose a bit of weight. The good news is that I sat down with a calorie-counting friend and worked out that what I consider “healthy eating” (three meals and two healthy snacks a day, plus 3-6 gentle exercise sessions a week for 20-40 minutes) is actually too little for my height, and would cause my body to think it’s starving and hold on to its fat reserves for dear life.
So once I get reasonably healthy (I’m still waiting on the cough from last year’s bronchitis to move on, and there are other hints that all’s not well physically – including uncontrollable eye twitching and nonsensical muscle pain/throbbing) and I start on the long and painful road to good health, I need to have more snacks along the way. Yay.
I also have enough rationality to know that given the right clothes I can still look pretty all right from the front. So, under carefully controlled conditions, I can still put pictures of myself online in which I genuinely believe I look nice. (I tried to put one here – I looked GREAT by the way – but wordpress wouldn’t let me.)
Just don’t make me turn sideways.
In other news, it looks pretty certain (based on the gyno saying, “You may have. . . . “, me responding, “Don’t be silly”, then googling the symptoms and saying, “Oh. Actually yes.”) that I have at least one more organ in the wrong place, and (because organs gone walkabout isn’t exciting enough) endometriosis (which is when the lining of the uterus grows in places it shouldn’t, which can cause issues with internal bleeding and/or lowered fertility, among others).
Things that bother me about this (other than the fact no-one actually suggested endometriosis a year ago when I went to the doctor and said I thought something might be wrong with me):
1. The treatment for endo is repeated surgery – so that means LOTS more people wandering up and down the highway that used to be my lady parts, and shooting bits off with lasers. Okay, the lasers are cool. But the mere thought that I might – even once – have to let a male doctor anywhere near my privates has given me about a dozen panic attacks in the last 24 hours. And it might happen again, and again, and again. I feel like I’m chained in a rapist’s dungeon and I have no privacy, no control, and no end in sight. All I know is that my body isn’t mine any more, and never will be again.
To be fair, the endo may be mild enough that the same treatment I’m getting for the prolapsed uterus will more or less sort me out (although endo gets worse and worse with time – but, whatever). It’s also possible (SURELY it’s possible) that I can insist on a female doctor, but that’ll probably mean delays (still enough to bring on panic attacks, but not nearly so many). Which leads me to my next point. . .
2. Time. Right now I feel like I badly need a shower every second, and I hesitate to walk across a room because that makes everything worse. Showers don’t actually help. It’ll be a minimum two or three months before things “probably” “begin” to improve. Imagine having a slug sitting on your hand, and knowing you can’t remove it for three months. You can think about other things, you can meditate – but you’ll never quite forget that the slug is there. *shrug* Like most medical conditions, mine suck, and I want them gone ASAP. Better to be gross, debilitating and humiliating than life-threatening. (Yay?)
3. It’s possible that endo will make it harder to conceive our next child. Trying to conceive is certainly a lot of fun, but it’s also really weird and awkward – which, for someone not entirely over an anxiety disorder (who feels uncomfortable being looked at even with clothes on) – is going to take a huge amount of mental energy to cope with. Last time I gained seven kilos in the three months it took. The average conception takes 6-12 months.
But we might be fine.
4. What new and permanent horrors will the second pregnancy bestow upon me? It’s anyone’s guess.
There is, of course, an obvious up side. Now that I have a name for some of the stuff wrong with me, I can (eventually, painfully, embarrassingly) get it fixed. So, yay.
Coming soon: Hilarious tales that don’t involve body parts! (I’m not joking. I really do have some good
Another look into one’s lady parts
I saw a specialist today and confirmed that my lady bits are indeed, as I suspected rearranged slightly due to big baby + bronchitis (“prolapsed uterus” is the term). This is neither uncommon nor life-threatening, and it doesn’t do bad things to my fertility or anything other than my ability to stand up or walk or lift things (I miss being able to casually walk down to local shops). After a year and a quarter, I’m still finding new ways for pregnancy to make my life more humiliating and less pleasant.
It’s a good thing Louisette’s cute.
Yep, that’s a knife.
Steampunk Map
Hi all,
If you’re here looking for the infamous map of Steampunk literature (circa before-I-got-pregnant-with-Louisette-in-2011), it’s at http://shootingthrough.net/2012/10/01/beginners-guide-to-steampunk-lit/
Conflux 9
As usual I’ve forgotten to actually mention my role in Conflux 9 – which this year is also the National Fan Conference, featuring (among others) Garth Nix and Richard Harland. . . . and yours truly.
All the details are at http://conflux.org.au but here’s where I’ll be:
Today (Thursday) 3-3:55pm: Self Publishing with Patty Jansen, Phil Berrie and Felicity Pulman
4:30-4:25pm: Instant Gratification With Ebooks with Jason Franks, Amanda Bridgeman, and David Versace.
Sunday 11:30-12:25pm: The Essence of Steampunk, with Richard Harland (really!), Rachel Holkner, and Jo Anderton.
Against Further Obfuscatory Practices
I’ve recently done a LOT of reading – and not the fun kind. I read through our mortgage documents (technically we have two mortgages; the explanation of why is simple but dull so I won’t go into it here) from beginning to bitter end (and the contract of sale for the house, which was also about a hundred pages), and I just (today) completed a Senior First Aid Certificate course, which takes eight or nine hours on the day, and assumes six hours of study (from the 400-page book) beforehand (there is a workbook to fill out in preparation, plus written and physical exams).
The difference in language, however, was striking.
The contract for sale does actually include a lot of information – building permissions, pest reports, whether the house is falling down or not. It has about twenty pages of, “Hey look man, I know that the whole point of you paying hundreds of dollars to me is for me to do my job, which is to tell you if the house is okay or not, but if it DOES turn out to be a termite-infested asbestos-walled shack then it’s totally not my fault and you can just get stuffed” but it does at least have some pretty simple summary bits that any normal literate person can understand (if they can find them, and followed every time by, “This is just a summary man, so it totally doesn’t count at all and you really need to read the other twenty pages including the bit about me not necessarily reporting anything wrong despite catastrophic flaws that you’ll discover two minutes after moving in.”)
The main task of a conveyancing lawyer appears to be sticking stamps on forms and sending them back and forth, followed closely by – seriously – reading the two contracts (one signed by the buyer and one signed by the seller) and making sure they’re the same. This costs $1500, and is just about worth it. (Those who know more about conveyancing law can feel free to chime in and outline what other jobs lawyers do. Oh, and sidebar: the forms the LAWYER sent us say stuff along the lines of, “We totally recommend you get another lawyer, because you never know – they might be better than us” and, “If you are utterly legally screwed that’s totally nothing to do with us. Be careful out there!”)
But before this post gets any longer, here’s the point: It was abundantly clear that the 400-page St John’s First Aid Book was trying its darndest to make an extremely complicated thing – what to do when one of the many intricate systems of the human body gets stuffed up in any of a million different and often life-threatening ways – as utterly simple as possible. And may God bless them for that.
It was also abundantly clear that each one of the documents in my mortgage folder was designed to make a simple thing (“You are borrowing money off us to buy a house. If you don’t pay us the money, we take the house back – and probably a bit more just for fun”) as confusing and unreadable as possible – including the bits that said things like, “We can totally change rates without direct notice to you at any time, then punish you if you don’t get everything exactly right, and we can pretty much make you dance and dance for mercy and then just laugh and take all your money and all your children’s money and your house too – anytime we feel like it.”
Which I do believe is actually a lie. In Australia, we have a government and a population that would destroy a bank that tried to actually pull that kind of thing (the government being the bit that makes claims like that illegal from the start). That kind of thing is written into a long and scary document that only the very brave will dare to read. The entire system is designed to make you feel helpless and a bit guilty, so that the bank can try to screw you over in smaller ways and get away with it.
“Banks are evil” is a pretty weak moral to the story, but there it is.
A good day
This is our living area in the old house (a unit, technically) on moving day. We rented an 8-ton truck and still took two trips (several hundred books will do that to you). Yikes.
Amazingly, we only had one major moving day with all hands on deck – plus months of prep, and two days with just CJ and I moving awkward or fragile things in our car. As of one hour ago, we have internet. Now we’re really here 🙂
Felicity Banks 