pre-portioned birthday cake

Birthday parties for small children call upon a rare blend of courage, organisatonal talent, tolerance, and willingness to get in there and join the revelry! They can often leave the adults stunned by the volume level, and mess, and generally gob-smacked by the sheer exuberance of small children rampaging in sugar-crazed delight. I cope by preparing well, making sure I have everything organised....Hmmm control-freakery coming to the fore. Sigh... But there is a moment of these chaotic events that i simply loathe--the cutting of the cake.  its the expectation surrounding the production of the Piste de Resistance that gets me cranky. That its mummy's job to produce an amazing cake that is the favourite TV character, animal or mystical creature produced in a ton of coloured icing sugar. I like baking, dont get me wrong, its not really the cooking and cake decorating that worries me, its the expectations surrounding the cake as a performance measure of motherhood.

And so this year I tried something different: the cup-cake-pre-portioned birthday cake: and it worked a treat! Just imagine, no knives invovled, the child can take control and hand out the individual cakes, and no trains/fairies/cinderelllas in sight! I could sit back and take the photos and enjoy watching everyone eat their cake. And we even managed to not use plates.

Life and death

Death and life: few topics fail to command attention like these two do, and I feel like I have had every gram of compassion, pathos and empathy weighed against the words of this amazing biography. I finished this book this morning, tears leaking from my eyes and a gut-full of emotion, carried into the worlds of two extraordinary individuals by journalist/author, Susan Wyndam. Charlie Teo is a controversial neorosurgeon, caring for his talented patient ,concert pianist Aaron McMillan who is diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a cricket ball while in his early 20's. The biography traces MsMillan's career (as well as his surgeries, relapses and recoveries) in parallel with Teo's.  I could write a  book review, and found myself just starting to do so (I guess its a style of writing Im familar with) but I think Ill leave that to others who have read the book before me.
What moved me is the dilemma this book leaves you with. If you knew you had a malignant tumour, and that a radical operation could possibly take it out, and prolong your life for a few years-maybe-would you do it? Would knowing that the operation might kill you, or disable you change your mind? How about knowing that there is pretty much nothing you can do about the secondary cancers that would be in your blood stream at the time of operating might lie dormant for a few weeks/months/years just waiting to lodge somewhere and have another go at killing you?

And I realised my tears were for G.  My cousin G (far right) was diagnosed with a brain tumor abour 3 years ago now, and he battled it with a combination of surgery and chemo for about 2 years, with times of remission and hope, and relapses and further hope for recovery once more. How he managed to wake up every morning and continue fighting the cancer in hs system amazes me. I visited him in hospital a week before he died, and held his hand, and we talked about being children together: of playing at the beach, games that never ended, conversations that kept us awake through the night about who we might be when we group up. Bitter thoughts of the deep unfairness of the disease plagued me. Why him?
While the book tends to make heroes out of its central players, there are so many ordinary folk, facing this extraordinary ordeal and the tough decisions fighting cancer brings.

Morning chaos

The preparations have been weeks in the making. Pinyata paper mache: done and decorated. Pass the parcel, organised. Lollies (yes, low sugar and no colourings)  selected and stuffed into party bags. Cakes baked, yes. Icing ready, no problems. Party pies and sushi, ready to go. House is clean(ish) and all awake and fed. The birthday girl bounded into our bed this morning full of giggles and excitemtn at 6am (oh, christ...its been a while since I was up that early) and the house is full of expectant enthusiasm, well lets be honest, frenzied chaos!!!!

With a last minute dash into town still to do, its nice just to sit for a moment, blog a bit, and collect my thoughts with a cup of hot tea. This is Miss S's first big party, and its gonna be a wash-out. Its rained all night, with a constancy Ive not known (Adelaide so rarely brings on the rain this way) since living in semi-tropical Sydney. The lawns outside are super-saturated to the point that the water just cant soak in anymore, and it resembles a 2 inch green-bottomed swimming pool. So it will have to be an inside party. It will be intense, but lovely, as there are parents-a-plenty, and lots of smaller siblings coming. A house-full! I think the lollies will stay in the packets until about 10 minutes before the paty finishes!

Five alive: friday haiku

 

five years today and here

she knows, 'im big now mummy'

I will love her fiercely

Harbouring

There is something beautiful about the smooth body of water that defines Hobart's cove. One can understand why this site was chosen for settlement. Its one of the deepest harbours in the world, and so aesthetically resplendent.
Our wee family zoomed down the highway from Launceston last weekend to stay with a fascinating woman, with a mouthful of exotica as a name: Undine Francesa Sellbach. She is part philosopher, part cabaret singer, performance artist and teacher. Her house on Hobart's waterfront is a lovely tumble-down-house, filled with art, objects that have been collected across the generations-thoughtfully gathered and loved objects.
It was a pleasure to stay with her and enjoy the view of the harbour, and the fabulously mad array of THINGS that competed for attention in her home.





the beach wasnt bad either!

what to do with all the plastic bags?

One of the biggest surprises for me in my move to Tasmania from Adelaide, is the apparent apathy many Tasmanians seem to show for their natural environment. It seems to me that far too many just take it for granted. Perhaps as it is so abundant and expansive, it is assumed that it is somehow wonderfully resilient to abuse? Maybe the environment is seen as a resource, rather than as having value in its own right? Maybe our capitalist need to profit from the land shifts the way we think about our environment in a fundamental way? Now before I have 100 negative comments on the subject of this blog, suggesting that I have misrepresented the masses, I suppose I should clarify that I am not talking about the many, many wonderful active members of the Greens and environmental lobby groups. They are here and they are certainly doing their bit. Im talking about the vast majority the mums and dads at the local school. The kind of people you meet at Coles on a Thursday night doing the weekly shop.

Unlike Adelaide, where there is a ban on the use of plastic bags in supermarkets, the plastic bag in Launceston shops is still in plentiful supply and I am often a little astounded at the percentage of shoppers that don't bother to bring their own bags when shopping. Id say that only about half of shoppers I see have their own bags with them in the check out queue.

Recently, the Tasmanian Department of Environment was subsumed under the Department of Resources. This act was described by the Premier as a cost saving measure, but seems to betray a modus operandi that is quite chilling. State legislation to remove the plastic bag from our supermarkets is still a while off, and with rather mediocre advice available on how to reduce your carbon footprint, like this, I think we could be waiting a while.

So what do you do in the face of apathy? How do you jolt people out of their familiar and comfortable patterns of living? One can protest, one can lobby, one can lead by example. But there is another tactic which I am seeing as quite non-confrontational, and really quite potent. Art can be used to underline a cause, and can foreground an issue. Theres a Hobart artist, Nicole Johnson, who makes rather lovely vessels and sculptures from plastic bags. Just one of these woven receptacle uses about 22 plastic shopping bags. How cool is that? A self proclaimed environemntal artist, I like the way Nicole is making her point in a subtle way: that something needs to be done with all the these bloody bags that end up as landfill. That we might be able to turn an object of ugliness into an object of beauty. Better still, the vessels are unbreakable, pliable and rather lovely to hold. Ive always hated the non-descript colours of the placcy bag, but in this weaving of the plastic the colour is denser somehow, and a whole lot less insipid.

OMG Decision Maker

Wouldnt it be nice of you had a spreadsheet for major life choices? You know, those impossible junctures in life where you have a few options and dont know which is the best way to head? If you could just pin down the variables, weight them in terms of importance to you, and then just crunch the numbers and TA-DAH!.... you know exactly which way you should proceed in life based on a highest score scenario.

Well, a friend of mine has a friend who is a mastermind in the public service, and she developed this tool to help her make decisions that are complex, with multiple risk factors and fine distinctions between choices that need to be measured. The OMG Decision Maker was born! It's great for those moments when you cant see the forest for the trees and cant hear anything from your gut except the after-affects of last night's curry.

Let me know if you would like a copy!
Ive tried a zillion times to save an image of the excel spreadsheet, but failed dismally. And blogger doesnt seem to like pdf's.