adornment

Oh look, another post all about me.

I had ankle surgery 3 weeks ago (yes, again, this time the other foot - what the actual....?), and the evening before I took off all my jewelry and marveled at the amount of hardware I carry around on a daily basis.

Bangles (all on my right arm), earrings, finger rings, toe rings.

The toe rings I've been wearing since 1998 and in all that time they've only come off for surgeries and late pregnancies.

And I have one solid silver bangle I've been wearing for decades which won't come off. I left it on with instructions to cut it off me if necessary.

The point is, I like to decorate myself. And in recent years that has extended to tattoos.

Have I been teased about having a midlife crisis, just like if a man my age brought a vintage red convertible sports car? Yes, yes I have. 

And you know what, while an overly dramatic term (a 'crisis' for gods sake), the concept is pretty sound. Yes, one hits a stage in one's life when one realises that if there are things you want to do you should actually do them now. Because yes, life is short and you never know what's around the next corner (so burn the fancy candle, use the good dishes, eat the imported chocolate etc etc), but also because the longer I stay on board this earthly ship the more I realise that what's important are very, very few things - love, family, friendship, happiness - and what's not important is really just for fun.

Painting a picture on my calf is for fun.

Which leads me to my next point. 

I have so many marks upon this 48 year old body that I have not chosen. Scars from childhood, child birth and more recently TWO (seriously, what the actual....) ankle surgeries. Eczema, acne, weird moles, insect bites, cat claws, that one time the nail which scratched me was rusty... let's not even talk about wrinkles.

Choosing some art to live alongside these feels like quite an empowering thing to do.

This is my modernist take on the fynbos I have lived amongst my whole life. A homage in part to the delicate ink dot cartography I watched my father do by hand when I was a child. A Miro inspired floral bouquet with a small nod to Orla Kiely.

This is my leg and this is the art I have chosen to adorn it with in this, my mid life.

the grit

A friend told me my blog has been looking a little squeaky-clean of late. Enviable family holidays away, gorgeous sunny birthday parties in the middle of winter, daughters who read all day and stay out of my hair, birthday lunches with lovely ladies ... yeah, it's been a wonderful few months ... but we all know life ain't like that all the time right?

I just don't really like to moan, don't like to come into this space with the blaah. Not that I haven't in the past, but the thing is, what do I want a record of?
The warm 'n fuzzy moments of my life - the big events, the everyday love, the heart-stopping moments of ordinary awe and immense gratitude?

Or, do I want to remember how in the last few weeks I've also ...
... had two jobs canceled (turns out they couldn't afford the full ass) and all the related financial stresses
.... been back and forth to the vet 5 times with my beloved Lego. She's had a big skin sarcoma biopsied, then removed, then re-stiched, then re-bandaged and re-medicated. Her little brother was responsible for the second round of stitches and bandages. Resulting eventually in this:

... managed The Cone: rearranged furniture, placated a seriously unhappy pup, had my shins smashed into over and over, kept the food bowl filled just so so he could use it and any number of times been called on to extricate him from some cone/bush/chair jam, once involving dog shit
... tackled our first case of head-lice in the family (not bad for 8 years of parenting huh?), which involved copious research, laundry, tumble-drying EVERYTHING, quarantining 2 black bags of soft toys, spray, comb, shampoo, check and repeat. Over and over and over and over and over.
... managed my annual seasonal asthma issues, lots of wheezing and discomfort and fretting at 1am about dying of emphysema until I get myself to the doc and hand over a lot of money in exchange for the welcome news that it's really not that bad, and the right (expensive) meds to manage it. Boring.

So ja, I could've blogged about all that for some perspective right? Life is not all hoorahs and polished apples.
But we know that, you know that, and I know that despite there being some challenges and tedious days of soul-destroying adulthood, my life is pretty damn fine.

It's more than fine, it's mine - and it's the best life I could be living right now.

bitches without borders

A friend who lives abroad messaged me on Facebook this morning to share the link to a blog she'd discovered, a smug, twee, self-aggrandising blog of the kind we just LOVE to HATE.

Mean hey? Narrow-minded and callous and nasty of us wasn't it? Yeah.

What made it even more fun? The blog author works in my friend's building! Yup, it's internet GOLD: discovering the awful blog of an awful colleague. Doesn't get much better than that.

The blog wasn't as bad as this one, but pretty damn close. And we've spent the day in a fine old feast of reading and international bitchin' and googling and bitchin' some more.

My kids have eaten toast all day, I've got a backlog of emails I need to attend to and I just had to rewash a load of laundry because it's been sitting wet in the machine since this morning.

I imagine my friend has been similarly unproductive.

We've basically spent the day leaning over our cyber-picket fence having a good old bitch about the suspiciously-perfect-lady-down-the-street. I love the internet.

What was that about the season of goodwill? I'll get back into that tomorrow.

pre-menstrual

Full and tender, I carry this cup from room to room. Nothing must jar it.

Not the indignant shriek of a child, not a stubbed toe, not the last drop of milk in the house one drop too little for my tea.
Not a dog underfoot or a page printed skew or a hair in my shirt tickling me.

Sometimes it's a heavy chalice, set with jewels and laden with images of womyn, carved with stories of childbirth and fecundity throughout the ages.
Other months it's as inconsequential and irritating as a discarded styrofoam cup on the side of the road.

But when it's brimming, it must be carried with two hands and a studied frown. Nothing else must be poured into it.

Not a concern for the future, not someone else's bad luck, not a newspaper headline which brings tears and the perilous danger of giving a fuck.

This cup must be balanced and managed and held, until it is ready. And then in a wave of relief and blood, I can put it down and get on with my life.

'app'surd

I recently got a new phone (Samsung Galaxy S3 woot! woot!) and started the process of getting my apps in order.
I spent most of last Friday night upgrading, re-installing and downloading some favourites, exploring some new ones (such a rocker, I know). It's been fun.

As with everything in my life though I haven't found the time to do all I want to do. I still have some standard message notification tones, don't know whether I've gotten an email, a text, a Whats App etc. It pings and I run to it, stroking it's cool, lithe casing (because of course I haven't found the ultimate sleeve yet) and trying to convince myself it's not somewhat ridiculously big (it is really).

But I quite like this two-yearly upgrade. The perfect opportunity to change and refresh my digital life. I haven't installed Google Reader yet, and am really enjoying reading blogs online and actually commenting - remember that? I haven't installed Twitter so only check that when I'm sitting in front of my PC, and as a result only really check the accounts I'm particularly interested in.
I haven't installed Evernote 'cos I'd stopped using it a number of months ago. Trimming the deadwood all round.

There are however some drawbacks, I don't have a proper calendar app yet and twice this week have managed to forget events or double-book myself. Amazing how reliant I'd become on my phone to keep my life in order.
And on that ... another unexpected result is that I've no idea when to expect my next period. I'd left that wholly in the hands of a 'period tracker' app - just clicking on the start and finish tabs and forgetting about it completely in between, until the app told me to expect the next one.
I've stared long and hard at our family (paper) calendar trying to remember when I had my last one but have drawn a total blank. Guess I'll just have to wait and see and maybe tune into my body more closely to let me know when it's imminent. So old-fashioned.

God, talk about a 1st world problem.