Crazy as a Cut Snake
Izzie has been a bit of a strange serpent of late. There’s serious drama over at the Dursleys. By next Friday all will be revealed. Until then there is nothing to do but keep the forked tongue crossed.
Combined with some recent posts from Catness and crazy troppo weather, it’s sort of triggered a serpent mid life crisis.
Last year had a lucky escape with a dodgy witchy wart gone feral. It got nuked in the nick of time but in the light of recent events, I cannot help but think that if I had lived in the USA a simple 1 hour nose job would have cost an arm and a leg.
But the autumn equinox brings relief from the sizzling summer and the promise of all sorts of green and growing things.
The whole business of goals and the search for some worthwhile purpose on this earth got the serpent to thinking that all the happiest times had one thing in common without exception - some project to be working on - be it tiny like a simple zentangle, a bit more ambitious like an 8 week online course with homework assignments and deadlines or some crazy hairy scary audacious goal like paying off a $25,000 mortgage in 250 days (it actually took 200 but was overshadowed by the evil scheming of DodgyDonald clone Dolores)
So it might be an idea to dust off and rejuvenate those long dormant spark plugs with some new grand project.
There’s been plenty of those that end up getting written down over and over again in the little green 5 year plan notebook. But it’s time to tweak those rituals a bit
Like Nanowrimo - what is needed is a real rather than an arbitrary deadline.
Next year in early April, I will have been lurking in the Lair for exactly 20 years. It’s a source of shame about how little improvement made to the place since then.
This was made all the more obvious by a recent visit to the amazing Ecoburbia which I first visited in 2013 and has gone from an almost blank slate to an amazingly gorgeous house and garden with rambling vines, chooks and goats, passionfruit vine covered walls and a weird and wacky productive food and flower garden. So so jealousss and realised that there really is no excuse not to be able to do something similar with the lair subject only to the limitations of lack of loot.
So I figures that endlessly shifting goal of a drought proof permaculture garden with lots of fruit trees and assorted attractions to lure in local wildlife should get a proper date on it
Friday 13th April 2018 is suitably auspicious date for such a venture.
Figured also that the inner scaredy serpent is very good at sabotaging all sorts of grand plans so sneakiness and subterfuge is called for.
Itsy bitsy baby steps is the best way to slink past the inner Moaning Myrtle.
It’s 2 years now since slowly and steadily introducing an assortment of house keeping habits and rituals which are pretty much on autopilot. It actually requires less effort to mop the floors, clean the loo and laundry or wipe the kitchen stove and work tops than not to especially as the rituals are timed nicely to match listening to assorted programs on Radio National.
Also what used to take one whole hour when I first started in February 2015 I can now do in 30 minutes so the choice is to either stick to the 30 minutes or add extra things to fill the hour since I will be spending the time listening to the radio anyway and it makes sense to do something useful at the same time
The new habit for March was to write for a minimum of 10 minutes or 300 words every single day. Due to dramas with the Big Mac tossing endless unpredictable hissy fits and staying over at the Dursleys more often than the usual once per two weeks, missed out on 7 days here and there but still managed to exceed the 300 word average.
It is much easier to add an extra 200 words per day than to sit down and write them in the first place so that should take care of Camp Nano in April.
Like Nanowrimo itself - the aim isn’t to write 300 or even 1,666 good words per day but just to show up and get the quota.
Also got freaked out by one very tiny thing. Having dusted off David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” got busy filling the Pensieve with an assortment of unsorted things to do and a whole bunch of cobwebs cluttering up the old grey cells.
One was a wishful thinking shopping list for the garden. One week later having forgotten all about it, had a quick glance at all the lists and there was written the magic word “Zeolite”
The day before I had just happened to walk down the pets and garden aisle of Woolworths to check out the kitty litter to see if they stocked my favourite brand. It was not there but two of their home brands were. One was mainly bentonite clay but the other was volcanic rock from New Zealand. The very desirable Z stuff and precisely the magic ingredient that was in the brand that seemed to have disappeared from all the shops to be replaced by some dodgy made in the USA stuff at twice the price.
April’s new habit will be to spend 20 minutes per day doing stuff in the garden which preferably involves planting something.
It also helps with the grand plans to have seen a real life example of the destination at the end of the long and winding road.
All of the 12 fruit and nut trees planted in winter of 2015 are alive and well and quite a few others have sprouted from seeds since. Mainly baby macadamias and pecans with the odd avocado seed or two which are the most likely to get sizzled to a crisp in the summer heat.
So since the untimely demise of the Big Macadamia in February 2012, no more trees have died on my watch so I guess that was one very big time wake up call.
Now is the season for planting and growing so got to make hay while the sun doesn’t shine.
The Sneaky Tricksy way of getting stuff done.
Next best thing to having a private army of Zombie minions
Combined with some recent posts from Catness and crazy troppo weather, it’s sort of triggered a serpent mid life crisis.
Last year had a lucky escape with a dodgy witchy wart gone feral. It got nuked in the nick of time but in the light of recent events, I cannot help but think that if I had lived in the USA a simple 1 hour nose job would have cost an arm and a leg.
But the autumn equinox brings relief from the sizzling summer and the promise of all sorts of green and growing things.
The whole business of goals and the search for some worthwhile purpose on this earth got the serpent to thinking that all the happiest times had one thing in common without exception - some project to be working on - be it tiny like a simple zentangle, a bit more ambitious like an 8 week online course with homework assignments and deadlines or some crazy hairy scary audacious goal like paying off a $25,000 mortgage in 250 days (it actually took 200 but was overshadowed by the evil scheming of DodgyDonald clone Dolores)
So it might be an idea to dust off and rejuvenate those long dormant spark plugs with some new grand project.
There’s been plenty of those that end up getting written down over and over again in the little green 5 year plan notebook. But it’s time to tweak those rituals a bit
Like Nanowrimo - what is needed is a real rather than an arbitrary deadline.
Next year in early April, I will have been lurking in the Lair for exactly 20 years. It’s a source of shame about how little improvement made to the place since then.
This was made all the more obvious by a recent visit to the amazing Ecoburbia which I first visited in 2013 and has gone from an almost blank slate to an amazingly gorgeous house and garden with rambling vines, chooks and goats, passionfruit vine covered walls and a weird and wacky productive food and flower garden. So so jealousss and realised that there really is no excuse not to be able to do something similar with the lair subject only to the limitations of lack of loot.
So I figures that endlessly shifting goal of a drought proof permaculture garden with lots of fruit trees and assorted attractions to lure in local wildlife should get a proper date on it
Friday 13th April 2018 is suitably auspicious date for such a venture.
Figured also that the inner scaredy serpent is very good at sabotaging all sorts of grand plans so sneakiness and subterfuge is called for.
Itsy bitsy baby steps is the best way to slink past the inner Moaning Myrtle.
It’s 2 years now since slowly and steadily introducing an assortment of house keeping habits and rituals which are pretty much on autopilot. It actually requires less effort to mop the floors, clean the loo and laundry or wipe the kitchen stove and work tops than not to especially as the rituals are timed nicely to match listening to assorted programs on Radio National.
Also what used to take one whole hour when I first started in February 2015 I can now do in 30 minutes so the choice is to either stick to the 30 minutes or add extra things to fill the hour since I will be spending the time listening to the radio anyway and it makes sense to do something useful at the same time
The new habit for March was to write for a minimum of 10 minutes or 300 words every single day. Due to dramas with the Big Mac tossing endless unpredictable hissy fits and staying over at the Dursleys more often than the usual once per two weeks, missed out on 7 days here and there but still managed to exceed the 300 word average.
It is much easier to add an extra 200 words per day than to sit down and write them in the first place so that should take care of Camp Nano in April.
Like Nanowrimo itself - the aim isn’t to write 300 or even 1,666 good words per day but just to show up and get the quota.
Also got freaked out by one very tiny thing. Having dusted off David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” got busy filling the Pensieve with an assortment of unsorted things to do and a whole bunch of cobwebs cluttering up the old grey cells.
One was a wishful thinking shopping list for the garden. One week later having forgotten all about it, had a quick glance at all the lists and there was written the magic word “Zeolite”
The day before I had just happened to walk down the pets and garden aisle of Woolworths to check out the kitty litter to see if they stocked my favourite brand. It was not there but two of their home brands were. One was mainly bentonite clay but the other was volcanic rock from New Zealand. The very desirable Z stuff and precisely the magic ingredient that was in the brand that seemed to have disappeared from all the shops to be replaced by some dodgy made in the USA stuff at twice the price.
April’s new habit will be to spend 20 minutes per day doing stuff in the garden which preferably involves planting something.
It also helps with the grand plans to have seen a real life example of the destination at the end of the long and winding road.
All of the 12 fruit and nut trees planted in winter of 2015 are alive and well and quite a few others have sprouted from seeds since. Mainly baby macadamias and pecans with the odd avocado seed or two which are the most likely to get sizzled to a crisp in the summer heat.
So since the untimely demise of the Big Macadamia in February 2012, no more trees have died on my watch so I guess that was one very big time wake up call.
Now is the season for planting and growing so got to make hay while the sun doesn’t shine.
The Sneaky Tricksy way of getting stuff done.
Next best thing to having a private army of Zombie minions
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