who knew cats could do this?

We have two cats and we leave the back door slightly open during the day so they can come in and out, and close them in at night. Although they spend most of the day in the house lying around, as soon as they suspect it might be door-closing time, they head outside. It’s become a bit easier since daylight saving ended because it’s dark by the time we give them dinner so we can close the door while they are eating.

They love the food we have for them at the moment and nag me for it all day. So I was a bit surprised when I did feed them that Junior wasn’t there. And then even more surprised when Charley wandered outside after only eating half of hers. And then Junior was there, chomping away.

They swapped places all evening. They made sure at least one of them was outside at all times. Once I noticed this I realised that they’ve been doing that a lot lately.

I’m so proud of them for making our life just that little bit more difficult.

on gagging the ex

My ex?-partner, C, is a libra. My daughters tell me that libras love company and the three libras I know well cannot get enough of being with people. That’s very flattering when you are in the early stages of a relationship and can’t get enough of being with the object of your affection.

C used to sit on the side of my bed with his early morning cup of coffee for a last snippet of conversation before he left for work. We used to sit on opposite sides of the little table in my room and talk and talk while he doodled cartoons and, you know, boy stuff. Guns and shit. He used to ring me every day, or several times a day, just to talk some more.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that there are two versions of C that became affectionately known as C3 and C4 (due to the explosive nature of C4), those days would have been a romantic dream. And the dream still exists. C still loves my company as much as he ever did.

Which is pretty astonishing since I have succeeded in establishing a few rules these days around our encounters:

1. C4 is not allowed within 500 metres of me. It’s no C4 or altogether no C in my life. He can choose.
2. No conversation on, about, or remotely concerning camouflage, boots or 4wd vehicles.
3. No conversation about guns and shit.
4. No conspiracy theories or predictions of global doom or gloom.
5. No conversation about anything that doesn’t interest me.
6. No more than one (1) phone call a day. Texts, unlimited.
7. No talking while the TV is on.
8. No talking while I am reading a book.
9. No talking while I am on the internet.
10. No talking while I am working.
11. No talking when I am asleep.

I might as well tape his mouth when he walks in the door. Why does he still want to come here? Why do I still want him to come here, more to the point?

Obviously I’m quite happy for him to leave and would be ecstatic if he found a new lover before I move to Adelaide because I don’t like feeling that he will be lonely and not have anyone to TALK to. But you know what’s weird? I still love having him around. I still have a lot of affection for him, love the aura he brings into a room. It would be so much better if I could seriously use the aforementioned mouth tape, but it’s lovely anyway.

Point being, Hilary’s Heaven will have no one in it all day until approximately 7pm. I love my own company, love silence and thoughts and shit, love the uninterrupted pursuit of my own projects. And then I feel a bit of a nudge from my company-meter as the sun goes down.

I am not a libra. Or did you already guess that?

and now I reveal my favourite blog

You won’t believe what seems to have remained my favourite blog since I first discovered it. I say this without fear of offending you, my friends, since none of you are trying to achieve what this blog achieves. You know how there are blogs you love to visit when you are in a certain mood, and some days you want to visit all the blogs on your list plus explore a few new ones, and sometimes you don’t feel like reading much but there are those two or three that you know will have just the right tone for today? For every day? This is one of those two or three.

I know, it’s probably not like that for all of you who can use an RSS feed. Usual story, this old computer won’t go there. So you are all getting the benefit of an actual visit from me even if I don’t comment, even if you haven’t written anything since the last time I visited.

OK, drumroll. My favourite blog is: The Chronicles of Feral Beast. An 11-year-old boy! I look forward to going and seeing what he has written every day. My initial motivation was to read how an autistic boy views his world since our Jaylen doesn’t speak. It’s so much easier for us speakers if we can occasionally get it in words rather than Jaylen’s language which is, perhaps, energy transfer or telepathy. Or sign language.

But also there’s something wonderful about the autistics I know, which are the two mentioned above. There is something crystal clear about their aura, something utterly untainted. They might be bruised by an event or find things in their environment that disturb them, and they might react with bemusement, confusion, possibly even tantrums or withdrawal. But the one thing they never do is start playing the game. If the problem is rectified, they return to their crystal clear, untainted, open and trusting selves.

Feral Beast is a very clever boy who is interested in all things scientific and historic, and who writes fabulous stories of fantasy and suspense. He had a fairly unpleasant few years in a normal school until eventually his mother Jayne started teaching him at home. It’s the ultimate heartwarming, happy-ending story, quite a tear-jerker, but he just says:

I think you wont be crying on my blog anymore.
I don’t want the blog to be a soppy one.

And it isn’t. A soppy one. His life is full of fact-finding missions and excursions, fabulous books and TV shows full of challenging ideas, and games and stories. Life sparkles there. I never seem to tire of it.

to laugh or not to laugh?

Here’s an unmodified snippet of an interview I did with my daughters for another blog:

Me: Has being a stripper changed your attitude to sex?

Sarah: (thinking)

Jasmine: AHEM. WooOOOoooah. Ba-a-a-a-ah.

General snortage and mirth.

Me: Splirt*. What was that? Splirt*.

Jasmine: From a movie . . .

Me: Splirt*. Which one?

Jasmine: A sheep zombie movie. It’s called ‘Black Sheep’. Splirt*. It’s a New Zealand movie and the sheep turn into zombie sheep. And if you get bitten you start to turn into a sheep. Splirt*.

General snortage and mirth.

Me: And then do you go, ‘WooOOOoooah’?

Jasmine: No. Then you go, ‘Ba-a-a-a-ah’.

Everyone: ‘Ba-a-a-a-ah’. (But kind of random and unsynchronised.)

Jasmine: So you change ‘WooOOOoooah’ to ‘Ba-a-a-a-ah’.

Sarah: I don’t think so. (She’s still answering the QUESTION!)

Jasmine has her own particular brand of humour and this isn’t even a good example of how it works but I thought I’d put it in for your edification. Point is, in the comments to my last post A-mum described herself thus:

*hanging head in shame*

to which I wanted to reply, ‘YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!’ a la Jasmine humour. Now we all know there is little or no risk of A-mum ever actually feeling any shame about anything, but I do feel a compulsion to explain first just in case. This might be a useful post for future linking purposes when I want to make rude comments to people and will thereby be able to blame Jasmine for the offence. Cool. I knew there was a good reason I had daughters.

Well it goes like this: When you are joking you might say, ‘You should be ashamed!’ when you really don’t think the person should be, and when you are not joking you might say, ‘You should be ashamed!’ when they have actually done something quite shameworthy. It’s important that the intonation be exactly the same in both examples. So Jasmine humour is quite an acquired taste because until you acquire it you really don’t know if she’s saying something offensive or funny.

Joshua totally gets Jasmine humour and has laughter as his default setting in all conversations with her. Joshua humour is almost the same, but that’s a story for another day. Me, I’m her mother and for many years I had No Idea. I would forever be saying, ‘Is that funny?’ Either that or continue with the conversation based on the information she had just given me until eventually she would stop me and say, ‘Mum. It was a Joke.’ These days I can usually get it by assessing whether she’s likely to mean what she just said and if not, laughing uproariously. Also snorting mirthfully and splirting. It actually is quite funny once you get the hang of it.

So, A-mum, you should be ashamed.

Get it?

* ‘Snort’ doesn’t quite cover it because this is supposed to represent that particular brand of laughter involving snot, spittle, tears and, if you haven’t been to the toilet recently, our old favourite little spirt of wee. A snort comes mainly out of the nose, but a splirt is a many-orificed thing.

my life on the sunlounge

It breaks my heart to see people worrying and running themselves into the ground in order to make their life better. I used to be there but my understanding of the way the world works makes it unnecessary for me to do it any more.

This is down to my understanding of the Law of Attraction as explained in the teachings of Abraham, or in the movie (or book) ‘The Secret’, or as constitutes the central theme of Suzie Cheel’s blog ‘The Abundance Highway’. The idea is that we create our own reality in every detail by drawing it to ourselves through our vibrations. And our vibrations are determined by our emotions which are, in turn, affected by our thoughts.This has always been the case, according to Abraham, but we have never opened our eyes and noticed it before.

So you affect change in your life by changing your habitual thoughts to ones that feel better. We already do this automatically most of the time. For example, if someone says something that mortally offends me I will try a few thoughts, with some sense of urgency, until I find a feeling of relief. It might be, ‘Well she’s a bitch anyway and I hate her more than she hates me,’ or perhaps, ‘Everybody knows she’s jealous of me and only wants to bring me down a peg,’ or, ‘Huh. I can just loosen up and that comment doesn’t actually make me feel bad anymore.’ It doesn’t have to be a ‘good’ thought full of sweetness and light to be a better thought. It just has to feel better than the previous one. You can’t go straight from utter depression to lightness and joy. Try it sometime. You’ll find a pretty sour smile plastered across your face, if not a snarl. But you can work your way up through increments and get as high as you want, as high as you can be bothered to.

So if you always have a problem with money - there is never quite enough, or it is always a struggle to pay the bills - you probably have a pretty negative attitude to the whole subject and have a habitual low vibration about money. Me, I tend to have ‘just enough’ which is better than a few years ago when I usually had ‘almost enough’. Quite a significant difference in the scheme of things. So I’m patting myself on the back. I must have improved my thinking. Wooohooo!

That’s a very brief lesson in Law of Attraction, so go and find out more if it interests you, but my point is that if I don’t like the life I have, the way I would find my way out of it is not through working three jobs that I hate and pandering to people I don’t really like. It is mostly about, you know, being cool, chilling. And following the feel-like-it principle. But that’s another story which I will explain another day.

Hardest thing for me has always been to stop beating myself up for finding stuff hard. Which quite simply achieves nothing. I still do it sometimes - it’s a well-entrenched habit - but there’s no anxiety about letting it go because I know the world will still turn if I don’t do it.

Then it’s a matter of Stopping Doing Stuff. Stop stressing myself out with schemes to fix it. Just thinking about them drains my energy. I often find that my life isn’t nearly as hard or taxing when I stop adding in projects intended to make the future easier. Make now easier. Don’t do them.

And then I might get a chance to notice, in my new-found leisure time, that the current situation has some redeeming features. I usually find everyday activities that I love, that I can do, you know, every day. I’m starting to breathe. Always a good sign.

And finally I might daydream about a better situation than the one I have now, daydream on the sunlounge in the afternoon that I used to spend on one of those three jobs. If the daydream is a happy one - and that’s the whole idea - then my vibration is a match to that very future, or something along the same lines. It’s the daydreaming on the sunlounge, rather than the three draining jobs, that has the greater power to bring that kind of future into my life.

That’s how I see it which is a pretty good view of things because, even if I’m wrong, I’m having a relaxed life getting nowhere. It’s a pretty fabulous wrong track to be on.

eight. eight tips

8. I love that feeling you get when you are (presumably) losing weight. It’s a slightly empty feeling. Not gnawing hunger - I don’t like that feeling at all - but just a lightness and lack of congestion in the stomach.

I try not to eat after about 7pm. Or 8, depending on how my day is going. And I try and have the right amount to avoid feeling hungry before I go to sleep, but to feel light-of-stomach. That won’t happen if I’ve been stuffing my face all day, even if I stopped mid-afternoon, but as much as I can, I like to feel like that.

I don’t find this difficult. It would have been when I was a teenager, when it didn’t matter how full my tummy was, the idea of eating still held enormous appeal, if not compulsion. But, fortunately, I had the metabolism to match.

7 diet tips from my body

I spent most of my adolescence and a large portion of my adult life on diets. Sometime in my early forties I found I had just had it up to here with self-denial and started eating whatever I felt like all the time.

Guess what. I gained weight. But I didn’t care so much and had a determined belief that it shouldn’t be necessary to deny ourselves for a whole lifetime to maintain a comfortable body size. It must be possible to listen more carefully to our bodies and find eating habits that promote health.

Over the past four months or so I have started losing weight again. About time is all I can say. I was getting to that eyes-popping-when-shoelace-tying stage. Among other things. For example, for those of you who have never ventured into the waters of obesity, or at least the shallows, if you wear skirts with bare legs, well, you only do it once. After that you learn to adopt the bike-pants-under-skirt approach to fashion. It’s that or terminal chafing.

So, having spent seven or eight years listening to the still, small voice of my body, here are seven pertinent things it has taught me:

1. I don’t always feel like eating chocolate. Who’d a thought?

2. I usually get hungry at three or four in the afternoon so I eat something. If I am living with someone who insists that we share a meal at dinnertime (not mentioning any names) I stuff in as much as I can fit of a big meal then and go to bed on a full stomach.

3. I don’t like going to bed on a full stomach.

4. I don’t like going to bed completely starving on account of I always read myself to sleep and tend to salivate at any reference to food.

5. I crave vegetables more than I get to eat them on account of I don’t like cooking. Unless it’s Not Compulsory which is rare for women, especially mothers. I now live with one of my grown-up daughters and we each look after our own meals and only ask the other if she wants some too when we are preparing or ordering some, if she happens to be there. So it’s Not Compulsory for me now, and I cook more often.

6. I don’t crave salads very often, but I like a bit of crunch with lasagne or other lunchtime food, so I usually have a cucumber and red capsicum in the fridge for the purpose.

7. Relating to 5, I like thinking of what I would like to eat more of, rather than what I think I should eat less of.

on the horns of a dilemma

Sarah has been discussing her two-man dilemma with me of late. (I could have called it a two-horned dilemma, bwah ha ha, but this isn’t that kind of blog. Okay, I’ll put it in the title.) She had a new lover - perhaps she met him about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Let’s call him M. They got along fabulously well and she was in that delirious in-love stage for a while. Then it suddenly went a bit sour as that particular delirium is wont to do. She had an event of emotional turmoil that he was involved with and he became uncontactable.

Whenever she spoke to him she gave him a piece of her mind about how he could desert her in her hour of need and, as soon as he could, he ran away again.

Early in this uncontactable stage, she met a new man whom we shall call H. He is a capricorn as is she and I and her dad. Both my daughters are total astrology freaks at the moment so everyone is categorised according to their star sign (and moon sign and ascendant and any number of other things).

Apparently capricorns can go 2 ways. There is hardship somewhere early in life and then we become extremely empathetic, humane and warm because we understand what it is like, or we can choose bitterness, resentment and a give-up approach. Well H is the latter kind of capricorn but Sarah totally understood where he was coming from and crept under his armour every time. He fell in love, needless to say, and she was a bit besotted too - I can’t remember why. He wanted to know if she was single and she said actually I don’t know at the moment. I’ll have to get back to you.

Me, I was a campaigner for non-monogamy in my promiscuous days. I wouldn’t have had to choose between the two. They would have had to choose whether to share their hussy or run away. But that’s a story for another day.

The love affaire with M has been on and off a few times. He gets back into Sarah’s good books and then disappears off the radar again. But it’s the same with H. He goes off to the country for 5 days to visit his mum and his phone is out of range. Or he goes to stay at a friend’s in Geelong and leaves his phone at home.

‘I don’t care what they want to do,’ she tells me, ‘But I don’t want to try and have a relationship with them if I can never contact them. I want to find someone else if that’s how it is with them. How do I keep attracting this kind of man?’

‘I have a theory about that,’ I say, and naturally she is all ears. ‘It’s not that this is what they are inevitably like, it’s that this is how they are being for you at the moment. You are trying to get that no man can nurse you through a traumatic time better than you can do it for yourself. The longer you try to force a man to make you feel better, the longer you will have unavailable men in your life. Once you get it, they’ll be falling over themselves.’ Just my little prediction.

She liked it. She left lighter than she arrived, even if she didn’t think she was quite ready to ‘get it’ yet.

roof hopping

The timber paling fence down one side of Sarah’s back garden has the rails on her side rather than the neighbour’s which makes for perfect climbing conditions for Jaylen. At one end he can climb over into any of three other back gardens and Sarah can’t easily follow him. At the other he can climb onto the back verandah roof and then the main roof of the house next door. Since she is in a group of four terrace houses, he can go quite a distance without coming down.

Which he did a few days ago. A man three houses down came home to find Sarah knocking on his door and then looked up to see a small child, foot dangling over the edge of his verandah roof searching for a foothold. WOOOAAAH, is more-or-less what he said.

Sarah and I have been fixing bamboo screening along the inside of this fence to prevent climbing. We ran out of screening before we got quite to the end so there is still a section Jaylen can climb up. Then he’s happy to bend over the top of the bamboo slats so he can walk along the top fence rail and climb over wherever he wants. I’ve left it with Sarah to buy more screening. I don’t want to be everyone’s handy-man.

Jaylen just thinks it’s all fabulously hilarious.

my proofreading course

I did a one-day proofreading course on Saturday. I enjoyed it. I would love to be able to change my career by the time I move to Adelaide and make an income from proofreading and/or copy editing. Freelance. At home.

I am not someone who can stand to have her time ‘owned’ which is how I feel if I am supposed to be in an office from 9 to 5 every day. Some people thrive in an office environment, but I have a huge compulsion not to go. I feel as though I am driving into a cyclone-strength headwind when I am driving to work. Which is to say it goes against the grain.

You’d think proofreading would be a bit boring, more boring than drawing pictures all day. And it might be, but at the moment it feels comfortable. Words and language are my thing. Pictures never were.

You’d be surprised how much more there is to proofreading than meets the eye. For example, in a magazine there are headings, sub-headings, side bars, captions, break-out boxes, section heads, and on and on. A proofreader has to check that all these are done in a consistent style, in the right position with the right content, and then check for typos and grammatical errors. It’s not like being a school teacher and marking spelling mistakes on essays.

So it seems a long shot that I might get some work in this on the basis of one day’s study and no experience, but I’m going to give it my best shot. It’s not that I don’t know all I need to know - I think I have all the information I need - but I think it will take a lot of practice to become fast enough and accurate enough to do it at a money-making pace.