update on the 'sabbatical'

What have I been up to?

Well, not blogging clearly. Dammit.

But lots of actual things in the world with real people, which is good right?

I've spent some time with my little nephews. At nearly 1 and nearly 3 they are both just delicious, the older one chatty and funny and busy - the baby still baby enough to have a good cuddle. These are probably 'my' last babies until grandchildren and it's been wonderful to have this time with them.

I've been working out - 4 times a week at least, sometimes even getting up before 7 on a Saturday for an extra class (this is totally unheard of for me). 

I've made some progress on clutter and sorting out my home office and bagging stuff up for donation etc, but not as much as I thought I would.
Ditto personal admin. I've not been great on that. Turns out it's still as utterly boring as ever, I just don't have the same excuses about not getting round to it. I've done some good work on generating more though - namely reversing into my friend's car outside our own house a few weeks back! Ack.
Ditto website updates, inbox clearing and filing - I've spent very little time on all that rubbish.
Because really, do I want to spend any time on my laptop when I don't have to? Fek no.
(See also, reasons I've not been blogging.)

I've done some quality appreciation of this beautiful place I live though.

A cycle tour through the City on a magnificent blue and gold day. From the touristy bustle of the waterfront, up Adderley street in the heart of the city, along pee- and dagga- smelling pavements outside the Station, past City Hall (where 1 year ago I was in the THICK of a massive project), through the serene Company Gardens, up cobble-stoned streets into the Bo Kaap and then down through Green Point and back to the sea.
This city will never, ever lose its allure.

Then the first leg of a summer project to swim in all (25?) tidal pools the Cape Peninsula has to offer. We managed 4 on a very blustery and overcast day, with plans to conquer the rest before the summer is out.

St James tidal pool, pictured on a very different day!

I've been a really great friend.
I've lifted kids and baked birthday cakes and helped arrange parties and run errands and delivered wine and covered bills and been (very freely) available for drinks and hang outs.
This all sounds fairly smug, but I don't believe in altruism and will happily admit I've gained so much from all this. Not self-satisfaction, but genuine happiness in being of service to those I love.

My people have been so solidly there for me the last few tumultuous years, all while going through some pretty horrible stuff themselves. We're all juggling so many balls, all feeling like we're dropping most. It has been such a gift to have the time and resources to help catch some, to do small things to help, to do big things to share.
How lucky to have beloved people in your life to do things for?

I've fostered an appreciation for the small things. How a weekend can be a weekend when you're not spending it catching up on everything you've not been able to do during the week. How dinner prep can be so much more satisfying when you're not slamming it together too late and too distracted to do it properly. How chats on the couch with my girls can wander on uninterrupted into all kinds of topics when nothing else is calling me away.

It's been so lovely to be here for them, my sweet girls. It's been so lovely to be able to give them the best of myself. Well, most of the time.

And finally, excitingly, some real progress on our planned home renovation! We have an architect. We have plans. We have moments of utter weakness at the challenges of packing this place up and subjecting ourselves to dust and builders and massive logistical challenges. But we have progress, and 2020 is set to be the year of the house.

Exciting times.

colour me sunday

We did some gardening and Frieda made a nest on the lawn with some branches.

Stella preferred the 'less scratchy' stoep, and made up her own bed there.

I finally (nearly) completed my DIY project - painting some of the cubbies in this bookshelf different colours.

I also succumbed to that incredibly cheesy, but fun, decor thing of colour coordinating the books (well, trying to - I need more blue books!). 

Chopping veggies for stir-fry in the late afternoon sun.

A gentle, colourful Sunday was just what we needed.

blind date

Today I started, and completed, a home DIY project.

I say I, but in fact I had help.

On the weekend I took down the horrifically ugly kitchen blind, worn and torn and caked with 35 years of cooking grease (you can just about see it, as well as the exquisite tiles this kitchen is blessed with, here).

I dug through the fabric stash and found this piece from IKEA, sent to me by Julie in 2008! I've had it all this time, never finding the right application, but clearly it was waiting for the day it perfectly matched my orange 1970's kitchen units and spoke directly to the vast array of birds (including many herons) we see out this window. Stash synchronicity - don't you love it?

My Mum then stepped in, with smart advice about using Vilene (miracle of the gods!) and her sewing supplies (I have none) to measure and cut and stitch. We whipped it together this morning (thanks Mum!) and I came home to iron it and tack it on.
I even cut the tacks to the right length!

But of course it wasn't that simple, and of course it wouldn't actually roll when I put it up, and of course Husband had to spend an hour this evening swearing and battling the 35 year old mechanism to get it to work.
It's never as easy as it looks for SouleMama is it ....

However it is there, ready for the spring sun which sears through that window just when we're preparing dinner. It's the only time of year we really need a blind there, but it's crucial. And now it's pretty too.

A very productive project at a time when I really needed one. Life's been feeling a little aimless of late, it was good to get something DONE.

just gopher it

After my recent moan about productivity, or the lack thereof, husband suggested that I try picking a project (off the list of many), declaring to the girls that that's what I'll be doing for the day, or weekend, and just going for it.
He had a theory that, if forewarned, they'd respect my 'work', and give me the space to do it.
I rolled my eyes.

But then one Monday morning in early December I did just that. All the walls in this house need painting, but there's a little alcove wall in the dining room which was particularly bad, and I decided to paint it.
I announced at breakfast that it would be so.

And by later that day, much to my astonishment, it was.

Lesson: threshold anxiety is a real thing. The proximity of small children is a handy excuse to justify that anxiety. Women are, I think, more prone to this than men - what if it doesn't work out? What if it's not perfect? What if it was the wrong choice? What if someone needs a poo halfway through?

In my experience men are more likely to just ... gopher it ... and as Julochka noted of her husband's ambitious and very successful sawmill project, we should take a lesson from this: deciding what we want and then going after it.

I too will try and remember this in 2013. With the amount of unknown this year holds I think it'll be a good one to arm myself with.

productivity

There can be few occupations as unproductive as raising small children. Yes there's joy and drudgery and heaps of entertainment and utter exhaustion and the (arguable) benefit of being able to do it in your pyjamas etc, but productive?  Not very.
Some would argue the proof is in the very long baking pudding, but even that you can't count on. Some of the best serial killers had at home parents.

I still can't quite get my head round how I can be so busy, for so much of the day and yet have so little to show for it in the end. A good home-cooked meal which everyone ate is often the highlight of my productive satisfaction. Add a spot of de-cluttering and I'm in ecstasies of achievement.

So when I manage to do this in a weekend, this one small thing, I'm beside myself.

Before: this very, very old desk - which used to be my change-table (as in to change my bum all those many years ago) - and spent 8 or 9 years rotting in our garden shed at the previous house ...

After: a good clean and drawers all freshly painted.

It's not a thing of any great beauty, and for that reason I can't promise I'll get round to painting the rest anytime soon, but it suits my small deskular needs and I couldn't live with that green for a moment longer.
I even rubbed soap along the wooden drawer rails inside and can happily report that old trick works wonders. Added bonus that the desk now smells clean and fresh as well as looking a whole lot better.

The room in which it stands was the previous owners home office, complete with wood paneling and cork floor for that fetching headmaster's office look. For now it's my study, and our art room, and perfect for flinging paint and good ideas.

I had a happy realisation while painting those drawers too (for isn't that the real benefit of doing something vaguely creative/crafty or DIY-ish, the time it gives your mind to wander and think freely?), I've got two and a half years until I turn 40.
And I pledge to myself that by then I'll be doing something a whole lot more 'productive', whatever that may be.

floored

We bought them sight unseen.

My clearest memory of the show house was my husband walking from room to carpeted room bouncing gently on the balls of his feet.
'They're there,' he grinned. 'They're there and they're going to be beautiful.'

Once again, he was right. He has a good hunch for things.

We moved in a week before our wedding, and while I faffed with flowers and last minute arrangements, he channeled any pre-wedding jitters into tearing up the carpets, working late into the night before our big day.

the only - bad - before picture we have of this room when we first saw it

The next evening he carried me over the threshold, to a house filled with siblings and friends, flowers and joy and ... great big exposed tracts of glue-stained, dusty, hairy ... floor.
Extra-width Oregon Pine floor boards, gasping in the light they'd not seen for well over 30 years.

And so the work began. Carpet glue is a bitch. Ancient beetle-damage is a bitch. Sanding is a back-breaking bitch. But we did it.

And my god they are beautiful.

It's sobering to think we'll probably never live with such beautiful floors again. There are lots of wonderful flooring options out there for sure, and we're excited about experimenting with some of them (if/when/hold thumbs we move), but I don't think anything will ever come close to the warmth (to the touch and the eye), character, sound, feel, smell of original Oregon floors.
And I don't think we'll ever imbue so much love into flooring again. I'd have scoffed if anyone had ever told me I could love a floor, but I do you know. From the bottom of my feet.

This blog is about to get house-heavy. As we contemplate moving on, and look back at all we've done here, all this house has meant to us, I'm going to get sentimental. Brace yourselves.

I made some stuffz

Okay, so I haven't just been watching crap TV and baking and building an empire and spending lots of time on Pinterest.
I have been doing lots of all the above (you know that thing about the more you do the more you can do? It's true. Also, the less sleep you get. Yawn.), but I also had one of those moments where you realise that there's no point in collecting lots of (p)inspiration and not doing anything with it. So I made some stuffz.

This bracelet, from Honestly WTF ... (I loved her colours)

...  this shirt ... (for a special occasion)

... and these, because why wouldn't I?

Don't say I don't ever do nothing.

make it grow

Our house is well over 100 years old. We've lived in it for nearly 8.

The week we moved in, just a couple of days before we got married, Husband pulled up all the carpeting (beat that for a pre-wedding stress reliever) and the work pretty much hasn't stopped since ...
We've come a long way.

But the nature of a project like this is that one's never really finished, there's always going to be more to do. Equal parts inspiring and frustrating.

Our favourite thing in the world is Starting A New Project.
Second favourite: Making it Happen.
Less favourite: Completing Project.
Worst thing ever: Snag List.

And so we live with various projects in various stages of completion, with tools always unpacked 'cos we 'just need to finish up ... ' Sometimes it makes me MAD and sometimes I kinda like it.
I think it's good for our girls to watch and learn from us fixing up our own home, but often I wish parts of our house were more kiddie-friendly, slightly less 'don't touch that!'.

But on to our New Project. This one is for the girls. We're making a garden.

One week ago: Weird, virtually unused corner of hot, over-grown crazy paving next to the pool.

 (dontcha just love those air-bricks on the right ... ?)

Same view after last weekend:

The plan is to fence off the pool and plant a small (4x4m) but to be deeply appreciated patch of lawn. A bit of green space for the kiddies, a bit of head-space for the grown ups.

Still not sure what to do about those air-bricks though ...

7 dec 2010 (oops!*)

It's pretty busy over here. (*ja, that busy slash sleep-deprived. 6 dec. 6 dec!)

Husband's got some DIY on the go.

Frieda's making more gift tags than gifts we're likely to give. Ever.

Stella's working damn hard on pushing out some more teeth.

And I'm stuck into a few crafty Christmas projects, which makes me happy.

(Hey, anyone up north feel like sending me some red & white candy canes with which to make peppermint bark? No problem if they get crushed in transit ...
I'll return the favour with some cute African Christmas decorations. Hmmmm?)

all in a nap's work

In my extremely exciting recent post about Tidying My Desk (it's a thrill a minute around here folks), I made reference to still wanting to do a couple of things to my work space before I'd regard it as Done.
This is one of those things: a reference / mood / inspiration / wtfamIgoingtodowiththisohwaitI'lljuststickithere board.

Which I whipped up during Frieda's afternoon nap on Sunday. I'm nothing if not swift. It helps when one has a DIY-handy husband who is a total hoarder (as is self) and ergo have a house full of tools, random stuff like manky polystyrene offcuts and an outside loo full of wood offcuts. Doesn't everyone?

(Uh-oh, please note curiousity making a concerted effort to ensnare an inquisitive kitty ...)

It all came together beautifully, and swiftly (did I mention that?).

Step 1: stick manky polysytrene offcuts to each other and cover with The Perfect Paper

Step 2: saw strips of wood to desired length and hammer full of tacks

Step 3: press strips tack-down into polystyrene, thereby making a temporary supportive frame (and here's the ingenious part) which one can simply pull out when one would like the change the paper.

 

 (I know it looks skew ok, this is the back see)

Aren't you amazed by my brilliant design? Let's hope I'm as successful with those cupcakes ...

Final product installed. With addition of a ribbon strung in front to hang more crap beautiful inspirational images.

And while there's been some offline (read: real time) criticism of my counting my caprese pasta as one of my 100 things , I do believe I'm totally justified in counting this! Number 27 !