inspiration

..croak.. I couldn't find any clean bras this morning so ventured to encase my modest bosom in a jogging bra. Gasp. Can hardly.. breathe. Like having a very lonely boa constrictor wrapped .. around .. chest

With my last breath, can I be recommendy? Let me pass on this useful link from David Allen (Thank you Pale). I have not read them all but the succinct and simple Finding your inside time (don't be put off by the brand-iness) enlightened me hugely. I core-dumped (no tittering in the cheap seats please) as advised, and it was like a weight fell off my poor over-revved Nissan Micra-style psyche. There is now room in there. And calm. At last.

Also, I loved this woman's perspective. Worth every minute of the twenty. Thanks to the lovely DoctorMama, whom I don't even know, or even "know", but I still really like.

I had fun today with this, as inspired by Overheard in the Office.  I don't know why exactly, but I found this exchange very funny, and thought it'd do me good to do something purely for the gas:


And I did some life-drawing last night, in a ricketty back room over a pub in Dublin 2. I love this town, sometimes.

 


It is spring, suddenly.

Let us indeed be happy for today. Even as we keep our fingers crossed for tomorrow.

x
T

confusion

Time for an update. Something must have happened, right? A whole week has gone by. Hmm. [Drums fingers idly.]

Well, there's work. Work is driving me barmy. No, I am. I am driving myself barmy. This is the state of my studio and yes, it is a accurate reflection of my state of mind:




I have a million things I want to do and they are all crowding into my head at once jumping up and down, demanding attention. Instead of ordering them into an logical sequence and doing one thing at a time, I find myself, for example, researching sending countries, holding forth on skype about planning permission with a friend, painting some sample pages from my comic, answering emails, installing drupal, devising courses, planning angry letters to Cartridge World, all at the same time.

No, it doesn't work. Yes, everything is half-arsed.

When will I learn? What I need to do is to allocate time to each thing, do that thing, finish it, move on, do another thing. Fairly simple, you would have thought. And none of this panic and feeling I am missing something all the time. One of the downsides to working on your own, as I well know by now, is the huge effort that goes into thinking what you need to be doing every day.  How do you do it, anyone? Do you do it?

Maybe I need an assistant. Or a boss. Or a list.

*** Interlude to calm the nerves ***

Not much else has been going on. Oh! I did screw all my courage together to buy something that might, potentially, fingers crossed, one day be for our child. (Insert obligatory touching of wood, saluting of magpies, making of Italian anti-sfiga sign). Gulp! It's a big lifebook, where we can stick all the photos and mementoes from his or her country of origin. It's very odd to think of a real child, who may well be already born, being given this book and coming to live in our actual house, with us. Imagine!

Blimey! I need a lie-down after that.

Let [us] have cake

Thank you so much for the cake and empathy.
You should all come and visit and I'll make one. 

Life proceeds, gloom or not. Here we are: gloomy, hopeful, busy, bored, gloomy, excited, hungry. JB has his moments of self-defeating and humourless glumitude too, but we always pick up ourselves up again and march onward, in the belief that surely surely we'll get out of this somehow. What else can we do? We'll be okay, we'll be fine, we'll be better than fine.

Speaking of being fine, I can't help being a bit nervous about these social worker assessments, which I have heard to be fairly rigorous, almost like marriage counselling. (Gulp.) We have all our "homework" in order for it. The JB wrote 24 pages for his, to my eight. Academics, eh? Wordy.

I sorted out our family tree too, except for a few gaps in my father's branch. He has always been silent as the grave on the subject of one of his brothers, who must have done something Really Quite Bad to be cut off by my father, who is a decent sort, really. High treason? Betrayal? Larceny? Ran off with his geography teacher? Your guess is as good as mine. I'll have to ask my mother, my spy in the camp, so to speak: her family is disgrace-free, as far as I know.

Jokes aside, I'd rather know what went on. I could google him or poke around on the internet..? HFF's allusion to her discovery of family stuff on Findmypast.com made me think twice though. I don't know if I want to know. Hmmm. Would you? Any thoughts?

This is giving me the smallest insight into how an adopted child might feel about the gaps in her history - that fear of discovering something awful. In my experience, the imagination fills the void in a far worse way than the truth could. That might be just me, though.

Well, no secrets from me, any future child of mine, I solemnly promise you that.

T

polish

A phenomenon has occurred. Previously perfectly content to live in my own grime, I showing signs of being, well, the only expression is: house proud.
!!!
It started with the discovery of a microfibre cloth and a single tile and now, I find I really, really like the gleaming! I know! Odd as it seems, it makes me happy when things shine. I spent a long happy time sorting out our bookshelves last weekend:



It was just so much fun.

I can only conclude this is a new type of nesting. Previously my nesting activity took the form of painting and decorating but now it seems that in some deep part of my subconscious I believe that our child may arrive next Tuesday, complete with white gloves to test the surfaces with, and a preference for novels being stacked with other novels, not comic books, nor travel books, for instance.

Be that as it may, I have been feeling a bit glum off and on. This time last year I was pregnant, and I don't even know how to describe it, but the way the air smells reminds me so much of how I felt last year at this time. A natural anniversary, I suppose.

Sigh. Sigh. It's not a deep gloom, I have to say, it's the kind where you can be jollied out of it by a joke or a coffee with a friend. Or a piece of cake, that would do it. But I do hate the way it seeps into my general attitude, and I start to have gloomy thoughts about work, and related (in)eptitude, and wake up in wee small hours to feel crap and straight-faced about things.

How about you? How are you sleeping? Tell your aunty Twangy.
T