This week in the Change Journal I tried out the Eisenhower Principle chapter, which I am familiar with but don’t think I’ve ever actually used. It’s a way of prioritising things according to their importance and their urgency. I’ve seen it used to organise things in a long term way as well as to prioritise things on a daily basis. (James Clear has a good explanation of it.)
One of the ideas it promotes is to try and focus most of your time working on things that are important but not urgent, so that you work on them before they get to the urgent stage and you start to panic. However, we also know that many things that crop up on a day to day basis might be urgent but they aren’t really that important in the long term. And there a lot of things we might do that aren’t urgent or particularly important, such as excessive social media scrolling, which we (by which I mean I) spend way too much time on when we’d be better using your time on things that are important.
Chapter 6 lays out an Eisenhower matrix for each day of the week so you can have a go at prioritising your tasks each day according to their importance and urgency.
I had limited success with this as a daily planning exercise and I think it would work better for long-term planning. I see it more as a way of identifying the things I want to be prioritising and the things I would be better off limiting, and then developing my daily to-do list from that and giving it a way of identifying the top priority things (a la the Circle technique). Something like that anyway. Because, for example, I’m not going to put “check twitter” in the not urgent/not important box of a daily list, but it is something that in a long-term big picture view would go in there.
I’m sure that makes no sense. So I’m calling that chapter done.
I did some work on my resume (thing 18) this week. Due to a recent reorganisation in my team this week, I started a new job this week, which is going to give me some new challenges and, I hope, more of an opportunity to use my strengths and skills. As a result of that, I’m not sure I need to apply for a new job this year, so I’m taking that part of thing 18 off. I’m only going to apply for a new job if something irresistible comes up. I’ve been putting off saying my resume is finished because there are a couple of statements in there that I’m being overly picky about wording and it‘s holding the whole thing up.
I think I just need to do it and be done with it. It’s not like anyone is going to see it right now.
Vegetable of the week
Thing 2 is to choose a different vegetable every week from the book In Praise of Veg and make a recipe from the book using that vegetable.
This week I cooked with fennel, which is anther vegetable I don’t think I’d cooked with before. The recipe was called Fennel Cacciatore with Free-form Polenta Dumplings (page 72), and it’s Alice’s twist on chicken cacciatore. It’s another simple dish, which involves browning the fennel pieces mixing in some olives and garlic, then cooking with tomatoes for about 45 minutes. Alice says you can add chicken if you like or, as I did, cut up some pork and fennel sausages, cook them and add to the sauce.
The recipe also calls for what she calls free-form polenta dumplings on top, which I found a little bit dry, and I imagine you could also serve it with a creamy potato mash.
This was another for the “will make again” list.
Regular projects
There are several things on my 21 for 2021 list that I have made a regular commitment to doing in the hope that this will be more likely to make me do them. I worked on these ones this week.
Thing 5: Spend an hour a week working through my annoying undone things list. How about ten minutes reading one of the books on that list?
Thing 8: Spend an hour a week working on Kramstable’s videos. I spent a couple of hours on one of these videos on Sunday afternoon.
Thing 9: Write my mother’s life story. I went to see my mum on Thursday and talked some more about her school days.
Thing 17: Brainsparker gym*. This week, I completed Module 5. I was supposed to attend the live workout on Thursday morning but I managed to mix the time zones up and tune in an hour after the actual start time. That was 3 am, and there was no way I would have got up for that! I only managed to get up at 4 because I woke up then anyway. But I missed it, and went for a very early walk instead.
Ursula enjoying the wet weather this week
21 for 2021 week 18 summary
Things completed this week: 0
Things completed to date: 2 (1, 20)
Things I progressed: 7 (2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 17, 18)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 7 (6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16)
Things not started: 5 (3, 12, 15, 19, 21)
Blast from the past
Following on from my 10-year review of my blog, here’s the final flashback to my favourite posts from 2011. This one is from 17 December 2011: The unchristmas tree. Coming up to midwinter (okay, that’s a few weeks away . . .), it’s a good one to finish this series with.
I think that means I probably should have finished sorting out my websites to coincide with the 10-year blogiversary (thing 13) but I haven’t. It’s a small matter of getting some words right. (See above comment on my resume.)
What I’m reading this week
On Writing by Stephen King
Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman
Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
Habit tracker
Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 5): 5
Days I did my post-work pack up routine (Goal = 5): 5
Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 2
Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 6
Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 5 work days): 5
Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 7): 1 (er . . . )
Days I shut my computer down before 10.15 (Goal = 7): 7
What do I want to do better next week?
See that number one next to the number of days I did some physical activity in the afternoon . . . ? That.
Working through the Change Journal (thing 4) I’m still working on the journalling chapter (Chapter 24), which relates to the new habit in Chapter 7 that I’m trying to form of doing 20 minutes of writing every morning. I didn’t start a new chapter this week.
I did a lot of work on one of my annoying undone things (thing 5) this week. Following my discovery about how to potentially address my Mac’s issues, I decided to post in the Apple support forums to see what the Mac gurus thought would work best in terms of getting an SSD to replace the useless hard drive. Before I did that I ran an Etrecheck scan, which they alway ask to look at before answering people’s questions. It came back with flashing red lights and the scary message that, not only is the hard drive useless, it is FAILING!
Nothing to see here
The Mac gurus’ advice was to get an external SSD as soon as possible, and one of them sent me some instructions on how to set it up as a startup drive.
After a bit of research, I decided which drive I wanted and went to order it. My delivery options were two weeks to have it delivered to my GPO box or I could pick it up from the post office shop on Tuesday. Two weeks to get it from the post office box or three days to get it from the counter AT THE SAME POST OFFICE.
Okay.
It’s ordered.
The other thing I did from that list was to take Kramstable into the bank and open his new account.
I spent an hour on Sunday afternoon working on Kramstable’s video (thing 8) and I went to see my mum on Thursday (thing 9). We tried to work out from Google maps where her childhood farm was. I got a vague idea but not the exact spot. I didn’t think it would be that hard, I mean if Saroo Brierley can find his childhood home in India on Google Earth, surely we can pin down the location of a farm on South Riana Road. Apparently, we can’t.
I worked on lesson 7 of The Compelling Frame (thing 11) and started module 5 of the Brainsparker gym* (thing 17).
Sunday morning walk
21 for 2021 week 15 summary
Things completed this week: 0
Things completed to date: 1 (1)
Things I progressed: 7 (4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 17, 20)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 8 (2, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18)
Things not started: 5 (3, 12, 15, 19, 21)
Blast from the past
Following on from my 10-year review of my blog, here’s another one of my favourite posts from 2011. This one is from 23 October 2011: Find your passion. The lesson I still need to take from this, ten years later, is
I need a big push to get me started on anything, even if it’s something I love doing. This can only come from me. There are no excuses. I can either take the easy way and procrastinate, do nothing and continue to feel bad about that, or I can push through the pain of the resistance barrier, do something and end up feeling good about what I’ve achieved.
When did I listen and what did I learn this week?
I’ve been working through the Wicking Centre‘s Understanding Dementia MOOC, and this week I learned more about caring for people with dementia and the approach called person-centred care.
I learned that there are many different definitions of person-centred care, but to me it’s about recognising that every person is a unique individual with their own likes and dislikes. They have things that make them happy, they have things that make them sad. And before we attempt to provide care or address behaviours in a person with dementia, we need to know who that person actually is and what matters to them. What is actually important to them? What makes their life worthwhile? What is it that they really can’t stand? Things like their background and their history, what their occupation was, what their hobbies were underpin person-centred care so we get to know them as a person rather than as a “dementia patient”.
I also learned that people with dementia can get offended when people brush off lapses in their own memory as “dementia” if they don’t actually have the condition. Dementia is a terminal condition, not something to make jokes about in that way.
Finally, I learned that what is good for your heart (in terms of exercise diet etc) is also good for your brain.
More Sunday morning walk
What was the best thing about this week?
I took part in an assessment for a community grants program, which I really enjoyed. I felt a bit out of my depth as I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the program and what was expected, but the program team had prepared clear assessment guidelines and outlined their expectations really well. I felt a lot more confident meeting with the rest of the panel and finding that for the most part, my views and rankings were consistent with what others had thought and that I wasn’t way out of the ball park. I also felt more confident knowing I had picked up on points that the some of the others hadn’t noticed. It was great to meet new people and to come together for a process like this and I appreciated the opportunity to be involved. This is a program I expect to be more involved with in the next few months, so it was a great introduction for me.
What I’m reading this week
On Writing by Stephen King
Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman
Habit tracker
Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 4): 4
Days I did my post-work pack up routine (Goal = 4): 4
Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 6
Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 7
Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 4 work days): 4
Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 7): 2
Days I shut my computer down before 10.15 (Goal = 7): 7
I feel Ike I haven’t really progressed much this week in terms of my 21 things. I didn’t do any cooking so I didn’t make a new vegetable recipe (thing 2) and I didn’t start a new chapter in the Change Journal (thing 4). I had planned to do some work on my resume (thing 18) and link that with the chapter on strengths but it didn’t happen. I’m still working through the habits chapter, including the pre-work routine (thing 20).
We went away for the weekend so I didn’t have my regular time to work on the undone things (thing 5), the vegetable garden (thing 6) or Kramstable’s videos (thing 8).
I did, however, find myself in one of the unexplored areas I wanted to photograph (thing 14). I had an hour on Tuesday night to wander around a suburb I don’t usually go to. I didn’t have my camera, so I just took my phone and made some ideas for a future photo walk in the area.
Adventures in suburbia
I took the film from my SLR to get developed (thing 16) and they scanned images came back on Friday afternoon. The pictures look like they were made on a trip to Great Lake in May 2012. The photos that I made last week to use up the film didn’t turn out at all, so I need to talk to the camera shop about what might have happened to them; whether it was the film being so old or whether there might be something wrong with the camera. I hope it’s the fomer!
Regular projects
There are several things on my list that I have made a regular commitment to doing in the hope that this will be more likely to make me do them. I worked on these ones this week.
Thing 9: Write my mother’s life story.I went to see my mum and we talked about how she met my dad.
Thing 11: Complete the Compelling Frame course. I commented very constructively on some photos people had posted in the class Facebook group, and on my adventures into unexplored territory I made some photos for the lesson 5 exercises but I’m not sure how close to the mark they were.
Thing 17: Brainsparker gym*. This week I finished Module 3.
21 for 2021 week 10 summary
Things completed this week: 0
Things completed to date: 1 (1)
Things I progressed: 7 (4, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 20)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 6 (2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 18)
Things not started: 7 (3, 7, 10, 12, 15, 19, 21)
What else did I achieve this week?
This week the Ten Days on the Island festival has been running across Tasmania and I particularly wanted to see Julie Gough’s exhibition, Fugitive History, at the Ross Town Hall. This was part of the “If These Halls Could Talk” series of events that were held in community halls across the state.
We decided to make a weekend of it and go to Launceston for the night.
Ross Town Hall
The works were deeply moving, showing us “the often-unrecorded atrocities perpetrated against Tasmanian Aboriginal people by the colonists of Van Diemen’s Land”.
Part of Julie Gough’s work
It made me think a lot more about some of the things I’ve been learning and reading about recently, and I’m glad we went.
It was raining by the time we got to Launceston, so we spent the afternoon at the QV Museum & Art Gallery looking at some of the new exhibits. Last time I was there in October, there was a lot being prepared and not a lot to see. This time there was a lot to look at.
Nest, by Alastair Mooney, looks at “the resilience and beauty of Tasmania’s native birdlife in the face of human consumption and destruction”.
Nest
Lost Landscapes, by Anne Zahalka, gives new life to old museum dioramas, reflecting the way these displays contain “powerful messages about the way institutions privilege particular narratives about the environment”.
Skin showcases Garry Greenwood’s leather sculptural works that include musical instruments and masks.
Skin
And finally, Herself, which celebrates the range and richness of art by women in QVMAG’s collection. It includes works from female-identifying artists from 1820 to 2020, including Julie Gough, whose work we saw earlier in the day. So that was a nice way to round off the day.
Sunday morning photo walk
Blast from the past
Following on from my 10-year review of my blog, here’s another one of my favourite posts from 2011. This one is from 5 June 2011, where I got to hang out with the wonderful gardening guru, Peter Cundall, who is now 93 years old.
This week, I signed up for the Understanding Dementia MOOC, which is run by the University of Tasmania’s Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre. Through this, I learned that dementia is not a disease itself. Rather it is a condition that is caused by a variety of diseases, the most common of which is Alzheimer’s disease. It is a terminal condition that involves the progressive loss of mental and, ultimately, physical functions, which results from the ongoing and irreversible death of brain cells.
I’m finding it very interesting and am learning a lot.
What was the best thing about this week?
Going away for the weekend.
What I’m reading this week
The Summer Island Festival by Rachel Burton
The INTP: Personality, Careers, Relationships and the Quest for Truth and Meaning by A.J. Drenth
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Walking back to the hotel after dinner
Habit tracker
Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 4): 4
Days I did my post-work pack up routine(Goal = 4): 4
Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 4
Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 7
Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 4 work days): 4
Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 7): 5
Days I shut my computer down before 10.15 (Goal = 7): 6
Week 06/2021: week of 8 February 21 for 2021 update
I did a thing!
I had my exercise physiologist appointment (thing 1) on Friday. I didn’t really know what to expect, walking into a gym to meet someone who I imagined would be super fit and super motivated and having to explain how I had got to be a middle aged sloth with back and neck issues from years of a sedentary lifestyle wedded to my computer. You might be able to understand my reluctance to do this and have put it off for 18 months.
However, there was no need for me to be worried or feel bad about my lack of fitness, which I am very grateful for! After me explaining my predicament, we ran through a few tests of my strength, because that’s a key area I said I wanted to focus on. Apparently, my grip is strong enough to gain me entry into the police force. I doubt any of my other results would satisfy the criteria, but at least I could hold on to . . . whatever it is cops have to be able to hold. It’s probably an easy test that they do first that most people can pass so you don’t feel too bad about your lack of fitness that’s revealed elsewhere as you go through the rest of the tests.
I say “tests” like it’s a formal assessment, but it really wasn’t like that. It was more like a session with my physio, where I had to twist and turn to see my mobility limitations, of which there are quite a lot, and some assessments of my core strength. That didn’t take long, primarily because my core strength doesn’t exist.
I came away with a very small exercise program that I have eight weeks to put in place before I have to go back. I think I can do this!
I’m still working on the pre-work routine (thing 20) through the Change Journal(thing 4) and I think it’s almost time to pick up a new habit. Maybe next week.
I also did some behind the scenes work for my website (thing 13).
Vegetable of the week
Thing 2 is to choose a different vegetable every week from the book In Praise of Veg and make a recipe from the book using that vegetable.
This week’s vegetable was zucchini and I made Alice’s Summer Slice, which is like a frittata that you’d make to use up a glut of zucchini. It was pretty easy to make and really nice with a side salad.
Summer slice (you’ll have to trust me that there’s zucchini in it)
Regular projects
There are several things on my list that I’ve made a regular commitment to doing in the hope that this will be more likely to make me do them. I worked on these ones this week.
Thing 5: Spend an hour a week working through my annoying undone things list. I offloaded a bunch of recyclable plastic that had been breeding in the kitchen for months, maybe years.
Thing 8: Spend an hour a week working on Kramstable’s videos. I did this for my allocated hour on Sunday afternoon. Who said I can’t stick to a schedule?
Thing 9: Write my mother’s life story. I had my regular visit with my mum on Thursday for the next instalment, and I found out where my grandfather went to college. Then in a fabulous bit of research, after locating the uni that the college is now part of (University of Western Sydney), I found some of his records online, including photos of him in the college rugby team.
21 for 2021 Summary
Things completed this week: 1 (1)
Things completed to date: 1 (1)
Things I progressed: 7 (2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 20)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 4 (6, 11, 17, 18)
Things not started: 9 (3, 7, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21)
Blast from the past Following on from my 10-year review of my blog, here’s one of my favourite posts from 7 March 2011 called Pushing papers. I’m not sure much has changed since then . . .
When did I listen and what did I learn this week?
I learned that being irrationally irritated by the sound of someone’s tapping keyboard at work is actually normal for people who have a noise sensitivity like I do. I also learned (after a follow-up hearing test) that I’m not making this up and I’m not being a big sook when I say I can’t stand the noise. Having a low noise tolerance is a real condition, and the audiologist says that it really does affect people’s quality of life. So all this time when I thought I was being overly sensitive and needed to get over it, I’ve actually been blaming myself for something that does make my life miserable at times, and it’s something I can’t talk myself out of.
What was the best thing about this week?
I went to TMAGthis week to see David Keeling’s exhibition, stranger, which was intriguing and thought-provoking, especially the gallery with the “Contested Sites” artworks, which show David’s impressions of the Midlands of Tasmania, “scarred by perennial battles over custodianship and management”.
David Keeling exhibition at TMAG
I also loved seeing David’s selection of sketchbooks.
A selection of David Keeling’s sketchbooks
I also visited the exhibition of the finalists in the Frank Hurley Photography Awards, which was an amazing collection of photographs that celebrate Frank Hurley’s legacy. Until recently I had only known him as the photographer who went to the Antarctic, but his work is much broader than that, and he has a fascinating story.
What I’m reading this week
The Tea Room on the Bay by Rachel Burton
The INTP Quest by A J Drenth
Personality Hacker by Joel Mark Witt & Antonia Dodge
Burning Out by Katherine May
Habit tracker
Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 4): 4
Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 2
Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 7
Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 5 work days): 5
Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 7): 6
Days I shut my computer down before 10.15 (Goal = 7): 7
Continued from part 1, in which I write about the origins of this blog in 2011.
After blogging every day in 2011 and then limping through 2012, I tried to reignite the blog in 2013 because I did enjoy blogging and interacting with the people who read it and took the time to leave comments. So I was keen to get back into blogging more regularly. I realised that daily blogging wasn’t for me so I set myself a goal to blog at least three times a week in 2013. I intended to set some regular things to blog about to make it a bit easier. For example, Monday was going to be the day I was going to write about my journey to quitting sugar, and as the year went on, to improving my diet in general. Sunday was going to be scrapbooking/memory keeping post day.
And I had this list of 100 things to do in 2013 that I was going to review at the end of each month.
I also thought it would be fun to participate in weekly blog linkups like “Wordless Wednesday”, “Thankful Thursday” and “FFS Friday” that I’d seen on various blogs around the place. I don’t recall that lasting very long either.
Later in 2013, I started a 12 of 12 project, which was to take 12 photos of your life on the 12th day of every month.
A random 12 of 12 photo from 12 August 2013
I blogged about trips away, unusual things and challenges I was doing, more scrapbook layouts and random issues like dealing with imperfection (that was a good one). I ran a semi-regular feature for a while called Find Me Friday, where I would post a photo of part of a building in Hobart that I would challenge my readers to identify. I also did a 30 days of lists challenge, which foreshadowed a much bigger project I’d take on a few years later. The blog was still alive, but it wasn’t a regular part of my life any more. And I never did those 100 things in 2013. Or in 2014. Or in 2015 . . .
You can read about where my thinking was around this time, my initial idea for the blog and then the revamped one, here, which is on Blogger, the original platform I used. I moved over to WordPress in September 2013, which is why the formatting of the early posts on here is all over the shop.
In 2016, after having read the book Do Share Inspire: The year I changed my life through TED talksby Kylie Dunn (my post here), in which she pent a year applying the ideas from some of the TED talks she had listened to over recent years through a series of 30-day activities, I decided to start my own series of 30-day challenges that I’d blog about. These included going alcohol-free for 30 days, drawing every day, doing something that scared me every day, and doing cryptic crosswords every day for 30 days.
This was around the time I renamed the blog to stepping on the cracks. As I explained in this post.
“The 30-days project” doesn’t have much of a ring to it. So thinking about some activities I did and some a-ha moments I had at a retreat a couple of weeks ago, I came up with the title “stepping on the cracks”. I realised that whenever I try to draw something, it tends to be straight lines, and that I colour within within the lines and that this art could be seen as a reflection of my personality. I once, when asked to do a doodle drawing, observed the following:
The idea was to draw a shape and split it into sections and doodle or make our mark. I noticed everyone else did round shapes – spirals, circles, ovals, abstracts. I did a triangle. Perhaps that says a lot about me – straight lines and angles. Left brain rules. It also included the words “Don’t step on the cracks” and “Stay within the lines”.
I think I was very dryly reflecting on myself with those two phrases rather than seriously instructing myself to comply with those rules. Anyway, very long story short, being straightlinesgirl is all perfectly OK and isn’t something I need to “fix” BUT there’s nothing stopping me drawing curves or swirls or colouring outside the lines or making a mess. So I think what the project is all about is being who I am, but not letting that prevent me from doing anything else – and seeing what happens when I step on the cracks and colour outside the lines.
This project kind of worked and kind of didn’t.
Some of the challenges were ideally suited to a 30-day format: 30 days of no alcohol, for example. This was because I had a clear idea in my head of what I’d be doing (or not doing in this case) over the 30 days, and my progress was easy to track. I either had 30 days free of alcohol or I didn’t.
Some of the other challenges were more vague and I didn’t have much of an idea what I needed to do over the 30 days. 30 days of clarity, for example. WTF?! I didn’t have a plan or anything to measure my progress by in those ones. And I think I took way too much on for the time I actually had to work on these things. As a result, things were very stop-start over this time and I didn’t stick with several of the challenges I had initially intended to do. So that part of the project was less successful.
After that project ground to a halt, I tried a few other things over the next year or two, including using the blog as accountability for making healthy habit changes by making commitments to a healthier lifestyle and posting weekly updates, but even that didn’t last very long. I also wrote about taking part in Care Australia’s Walk In Her Shoes challenge for a couple of years.
Walk in Her Shoes 2016
Finally, at the end of 2018, I decided to take on the 19 for 2019 challenge, which was a list of 19 things I wanted to accomplish in 2019. (Not 100, which I’d aimed for in 2013). I got the idea from Gretchen Rubin and Liz Craft’s Happier podcast, as they were doing 18 for 2018. Finally, some success! I had an achievable list of 19 things to do, of which I did 14 and I updated the blog a lot more consistently, which kept me on track with the list. I carried it over into 20 for 2020 (and now 21 for 2021) and over time have gradually expanded it to include keeping up to date on habits I want to develop and little things I want to improve.
I’m feeling comfortable with where it’s at now and I have a nice little routine for writing the posts each week and keeping track of everything I’ve done.
It’s been an interesting process to look back on where I was ten years ago and to see how, in relation to some things, not much has changed at all. I thought I’d share my favourite post from each month over the next few weeks, to commemorate the tenth anniversary, beginning with this one
8 January 2011: Tweetup, in which I overcome my fear of meeting people and bravely turn up to a BBQ with People From Twitter Who I Don’t Actually Know In Real Life.
Now on my blog’s tenth anniversary, I’ve been starting to wonder whether its format and title is really what it’s all about or if it needs a bit of a reboot, given the last reboot was in 2016. In particular, acknowledging that there’s nothing stopping me drawing curves or swirls or colouring outside the lines or making a mess but that, when I think about it, I don’t actually want to make that type of art.
Some time ago I was chatting to my GP about getting older and how I want to make sure I stay as healthy as I can for as long as I can. I said one thing I’ve always had a problem with was exercising; that even though I walk a lot, my cardiovascular fitness isn’t fantastic and I know that as women age they start to lose a lot of bone density, which can be, if not prevented, then minimised by increasing their strength. I’ve tried exercise programs in the past, most recently before I got pregnant. Yes, that was 15 years ago. I have no wish to join a gym, I don’t like exercising, I have some very weak points in my back, and I can come up with every excuse under the sun not to exercise. Meanwhile, time marches on and little niggles in my body start to let me know they are there more and more often.
My GP suggested seeing an exercise physiologist to get an assessment of where I’m at, what I need and what I can do that I’m more likely to stick to and that takes into account my weak spots. I had never heard of exercise physiologists before so I had to google what they were. I learned that exercise physiology provides injury rehabilitation and injury and illness prevention through exercise. The aims of exercise physiology are to prevent or manage injury or illness and to assist in restoring optimal physical function, health or wellness. It can include health and physical activity education, advice and support, and lifestyle modification, with a strong focus on behavioural change.
That ticked all the boxes for me. It sounded exactly what I needed. Now the only thing was to do it. It might not surprise you to know that I had this conversation with my GP about 18 months ago and she had even recommended someone to see. I was brilliant at coming up with excuses why I couldn’t do this. I put it on my list to do this year (thing 1) hoping that having it there might act as an incentive to do it some time this year. The first time I went onto the practitioner’s website earlier this year, there were no appointments available but this week there were two or three. I told myself there was no excuse to not do it. So I booked an appointment and it’s done and now I just have to show up.
I’ve been working on the Habits chapter of the Change Journal (thing 4) , one of which is to implement the pre-work routine (thing 20), which I have now done every day for three weeks. It’s probably time to start exploring some of the other chapters in the journal now.
Vegetable of the week
Thing 2 is to choose a different vegetable every week from the book In Praise of Veg and make a recipe from the book using that vegetable.
I decided to make up for missing my vegetable cooking last Saturday and do one of Alice’s veggie recipes mid week. This one was Samosa-mix stuffed peppers (aka red capsicums). I had never made samosas before and I had never stuffed capsicums before. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turns out, nothing. It was a pretty easy recipe and the spice combination of mustard seeds, turmeric, garlic, curry powder (mine is called x-hot) and garam masala smelt so good when it was cooking. The only things I didn’t have were green chillies (accidentally overlooked at the shop) and coriander leaves for the garnish, which brings me to another topic of food waste, which is coming up very soon. I even used the rest of a tub of yogurt that was a week past its best before date (don’t tell anyone; it was fine).
This was really good and a lot easier than I’d imagined
Saturday was regular veggie cooking day. I have had Alice’s yam recipe on the list for a few weeks because Slabs saw them in the shops a while back but I’ve always had a backup in case he can’t get them when he does the shopping. Today was no different and he came home and said I was cooking eggplant. Yay! I love eggplant.
The recipe is Sichuan Sticky Eggplant (page 270 if you’re playing at home) and requires you to cut up the eggplant and let it sit in salt for an hour until it softens. Somehow I’ve never learned from past mistakes of not reading through the recipe earlier in the day so I know how much prep time I need. Dinner was going to be late again.
After that, though, the rest is pretty simple. You make the sticky sauce from a variety of Chinese sauces that until today I had never heard of but now have in my fridge. You dry out the salted eggplant pieces (Alice calls them “batons” I’m not sure how big they’re supposed to be but mine looked a lot like chips), coat them in cornflour and fry them in a shit-tonne of rice bran oil.
I know, right. I said I don’t fry. Seems as though I do now. And I didn’t burn the house down.
Sure, I fry
Then you cook some rice, mix the eggplant into the sauce (which I think I overcooked a bit) and serve with the deep fried sliced garlic and red chillies that you prepared at the start.
The end result
It was really good. I’m going to ignore the sugar content.
Regular projects
There are several things on my list that are going to work best if I make a regular commitment to doing them. I worked on these ones this week.
Thing 5: Spend an hour a week working through my annoying undone things list.) One hour on Saturday morning.) I cleaned out the back foyer and closed some bank accounts.
Yeah, you can see why this was on the undone annoying things list, right?Much better
Thing 6: Grow some vegetables in the garden bed. (One hour on Sunday afternoon for garden projects.) I did a bit of work on Sunday and threw some seeds in. In hindsight, perhaps 3pm in the middle of summer isn’t quite the best time to be doing that. Especially not in my morning walking clothes that I was still wearing, including my polar fleece. Incredibly bad idea.
Thing 8: Spend an hour a week working on Kramstable’s videos. I spent my allocated hour on Sunday afternoon doing this.
Thing 9: Write my mother’s life story. I visited my mum during the week and started to write up what I’ve been learning.
Thing 10: Complete the Compelling Frame course. I’m working through the first lesson.
Thing 17: I did the first lesson in module 2 of the Brainsparker gym* program.
21 for 2021 summary
Things completed this week: 0
Things completed to date: 0
Things I progressed: 11 (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 17, 20)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 1 (18)
Things not started: 9 (3, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21)
When did I listen and what did I learn this week?
I continued to expose myself to Indigenous voices on the issue of 26 January. I was, like many people, appalled at the Prime Minister’s suggestion that 26 January hadn’t been such a “flash day” for the people arriving on the British boats either, as if a few months stuck on a dodgy boat was in any way comparable to the atrocities committed against the original inhabitants of this land, and the continuing disadvantages and systemic discrimination faced by their descendants.
I have learned a lot recently and I have a lot of time spent in ignorance to make up for. As in any area of growth, however, it won’t achieve anything for me to be mad at past me for what I haven’t known or understood. I can only change me now, and acknowledge that I have a lot to learn, a lot to understand and that I have to do more of what needs to be done starting now.
I saw this quote from James Clear during the week, which I think I need to keep in mind at all times, because worrying about what other people might think is something I do very well and it often stops me from doing the things I want to do.
When I notice myself worrying about “what other people will think” I find I’m usually not worried about any single person’s opinion. If I pick a specific person, I‘m rarely concerned about what they will think. What I fear is the collective opinion in my head. It’s imaginary.
Saturday sunrise
What did I do for the Earth this week?
I recently saw a reply to a comment on Instagram post from someone who said they were committed to never throwing out food. The reply was along the lines of what that person did in their kitchen really wasn’t the biggest food waster. True, but if everyone thought like that and didn’t care how much food they threw away, there would be a huge snowball effect, right? In her book Simplicious Flow, Sarah Wilson says if waste food were a country, it would be the third largest producer of CO2 in the world after the US and China, and that the number one contributors to this are consumers.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I did find out from here that
On average, Australians throw one in five shopping bags of food in the bin—that’s about $3,800 worth of groceries per household each year.
Australian households throw away 2.5 million tonnes of edible food each year—that equates to nearly 300 kilograms per person—and the average Australian household sends roughly 4.9 kilograms of food waste to landfill each week.
In Australia, 7.3 million tonnes of food is lost or wasted each year—enough to fill 13,000 Olympic sized swimming pools. Households are the biggest contributors (34%), followed by primary production (31%) and manufacturing (24%). 3.2 million tonnes of this is sent to landfill, and 75% of all food that is sent to landfill comes from our households.
Rotting food in landfill produces methane, which is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. For every tonne of food waste in landfill, a tonne of CO2-e greenhouse gas is generated.
When we waste food, we also waste the natural resources that go into making it, like land, water and energy.
Sorry, instagram commenter, I think what that person does, multiplied by 25 million people, could make a pretty big contribution to reducing emissions.
There is a whole world of opportunities here to make a huge difference to my footprint on the Earth and that is my focus moving forward. I realise I also have to stop collecting tips to reduce food waste and start not only buying smarter but making better use of what I buy.
I saw a post recently from someone who said you can regrow spring onions if you just chuck the bottom of them with the roots still attached into the ground. Apparently, the tops will regrow and you can keep cutting them as you need them, and this person said they never buy spring onions any more. I had some left over from my eggplant dish, so they are part of the veggie box now. I will wait and see if this works.
After the hot afternoon debacle, I went out later when it was cooler and threw some (very past their use-by date; one packet said to sow before 2010) basil, coriander and spinach seeds in and left it at that. I pulled the cover over the veggie bed, not that it’s much good as all the plastic has deteriorated and it’s mostly holes, so I don’t hold out much hope of it shielding them from the 31 degree sun tomorrow. But since the seeds are so old, they might not grow anyway, so this was really just to see what happens.
I rode my bike to work
Summary of the week
What I’m reading this week
Hollow Places: An Unusual History of Land and Legend by Christopher Hadley
Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad
A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough
The Queen of My Self by Donna Henes
Habit tracker
Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 5): 5
Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 2
Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 7
Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 5 work days): 5
Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 7): 7
Days I shut my computer down before 10.15 (Goal = 7): 7
I enjoyed having a break between Christmas and New Year that was long enough to do a thorough review of 2020 and of what I achieved, what I didn’t achieve and what I want to focus on in 2021.
The sun rises on 2021
One of the things I did was to consider what my Word for 2021 might be. Finding a Word for the year is a practice that I have unsuccessfully dabbled in for a few years now, the idea being that you choose a word (with some supporting words if you want) that will help you shape your year and remind you what you want to focus most on. You can use it any way you want, so it’s a very forgiving practice. The process I started to use is outlined in Susannah Conway’s Find Your Word 2021 workbook, but before I got halfway through the work, my Word for 2021 had come to me.
Listen.
This year, I want to make space to listen. This means many things to me, but it particularly means to listen to myself, which is something I’m not good at doing.
As I was flicking (aka mindlessly scrolling, you know, that thing I’m trying to do less of) through my social media feeds, I saw a lot of positive posts that were glad to see the back of 2020 and hoped for a better 2021. Looking at these posts, I couldn’t help feeling that this wasn’t right and that things aren’t going to be better in 2021. I knew I had to stop and listen to this feeling because it wasn’t just a passing feeling. It gnawed away at me over the week and the voice within me kept getting louder and louder.
What it said to me was that, even though I’ve not been personally badly affected by any of the truly awful things that are going on in the world right now, I have been incredibly fortunate when so many haven’t. And, while it would be easy to stay asleep to the realities of what’s going on, I’m really just dodging bullets and I won’t be able to do that forever. It will catch up with me. My voice was telling me to wake up while I still can.
As I scrolled, I started thinking how, in the past few years, many people have chalked up the shitstorm that was the preceding year as “a bad year” and have expressed great hope that the next year would be better. This is understandable: A new year is an obvious time for a reset. I’m doing it right now. But increasingly, the next year hasn’t been better. Every year the threats posed by environmental collapse, war, poverty, famine, bushfires, old white men in power are increasing, not to mention effects of the pandemic that keeps on giving. Who, in closing the door on 2019, would have expected that? This stuff is not going away just because the western calendar has moved on to another number. And in the same vein, hearing people say that they hope that life returns to “normal” post-covid sets alarm bells ringing within my soul. We can’t sustain what we once called “normal”.
I find it very easy to shut down when faced with what’s going on and retreat into my “I’m okay, everything will be okay” bubble, thinking that someone will do something, surely one day the people that can make a difference will do something, they won’t let this happen to us.
But they haven’t shown any inclination towards doing anything so far. To me, it seems like most people with any influence over what happens to this planet don’t care and won’t do anything in case it upsets big business, or whoever else they are beholden to. The western world is drowning in consumerism that encourages us to buy more stuff to keep “the economy” strong, demanding that the planet give more than it has to give, and the mainstream media does nothing to dispel the many lies out there. And so humanity hurtles towards its doom.
Kramstable asked me why people aren’t doing anything if our current course of action means humans could be wiped out, possibly in his lifetime, as some of the worst-case scenarios suggest. Other than being horrified that a 14-year-old was wondering if he would even get a chance to get old, I didn’t have an answer for him. (On reflection, there is nothing horrifying about this. Greta Thunberg was only 15 when she started the school strike for climate movement.)
I know that the big guns aren’t going to change anything. They will let the world burn. I partially understand the reasons for this. The system we live in is broken but it’s the only system we know so we cling to it and we hope that things will go back to normal, which is basically the state that created the situation we are now in.
I told Kramstable that I didn’t truly understand why what’s happening is happening or why people seem to be prepared to take no action when they know what the outcome is going to be. Perhaps they don’t really believe it. Perhaps they figure they’ll be dead before the worst of it affects them so they don’t care. Perhaps they think some supernatural being will step in and make everything all right, at least for the worthy ones.
I felt utterly helpless thinking about telling him that I had no answer to his very reasonable question, and I knew that at that moment I had a choice.
In the face of such helplessness, it would be so easy to go back to my bubble, to keep working on the petty little issues that occupy my mind at the moment and to let whatever happens happen. (Okay, they aren’t petty to me, but on a global scale, they’re inconsequential, and the fact that I have the capacity to work through them tells me right there the level of privilege that I currently enjoy). That’s the path of least resistance, and I have to ask myself if that’s what I want, because it’s an option that is always open to me. I could basically go to sleep. Or perhaps go back to sleep. I could stay in my bubble and focus on my own issues and ignore what’s going on around me for as long as I can.
I could also rage and despair, and feel helpless and scream out that it’s not fair, and keep asking why doesn’t Someone do Something. Another option. Not a very constructive option and the outcome would be the same as the least resistance option. I’d just feel a whole lot more stressed and fearful while achieving the same result.
Or I could do something.
I’m currently reading Sarah Wilson’s book This One Wild and Precious Life, which suggests there is hope. But we have to change ourselves. If I want things to change, I have to change. In the book, Sarah argues it’s our responsibility to stand up and fight for our world, to do something, to practise what we preach, to “wake up and to come back to life and to do what matters”.
I’ll come back to this book in another post because it has a lot to take in and I’ve been making lots of notes from it and tossing ideas around in my head. But I have to do more than take it all in. It is a call to action.
I look back to that conversation with Kramstable and I wonder how in good conscience I can complain that other people aren’t doing anything to address the situation we find ourselves in if I don’t do anything myself. How can I look him in the eye and say that no one is doing anything when I’m not doing enough to fight for my own future, much less his? It would be so easy to blame the government, the Murdoch media, people who use disposable coffee cups, people who drive their cars everywhere, people who think changing a word in the national anthem will make us a united country . . . and to sit back and whinge about everything that everyone else is doing or not doing.
I’m part of this too. My choices are contributing.
I can either put up and shut up, or I can start listening to the voice inside me that doesn’t want to give up. The voice that says I need to take personal responsibility and start taking real action. I need to listen to that voice, I need to listen to the world and I need to learn. I have a lot to learn, about what’s happening and what’s needed, but that isn’t enough. I have to do something with what I’m hearing and what I’m learning. Because if there was ever a time that action is needed, it’s now.
We often avoid taking action because we think, “I need to learn more”, but the best way to learn is often by taking action. —James Clear.
Thinking, as I usually do, that I need to know everything before I do anything is one way to not take action. Sitting down and writing about needing to take action is another way. Neither of these things change anything. But, as I read about what’s happening in the world and what this means for our future, if I really take it in, I am really scared. I’m fucking terrified. Part of me doesn’t believe this is actually happening, despite all of the evidence around me that it is. Part of me does want to crawl back into my privilege bubble and go back to sleep.
Trying to squash those feelings or pretending I don’t have them won’t help. Acknowledging them, accepting that I have them and embracing them, then taking action in spite of them, is the only way to deal with them. As Sarah writes, we can be more than one thing. It follows that we can feel more than one emotion. It’s okay. It’s okay to be scared and it’s okay to be in denial. It’s also okay that the super critical voice in my head that constantly tells me I’m no good is screaming that I shouldn’t be writing stuff like this because I don’t know what I’m talking about and that I’m over-reacting, that nothing bad is going to happen. That is especially okay because the louder and more insistent that voice gets, the more I know that it’s freaking out and wants me to stop, which really means that I’m on the right track and I need to keep going.
It’s okay that right now, writing this, I want to burst into tears and I don’t know what to do. But I can find out, and then I need to do it.
Sarah’s book is a start, and now I’ve read (most of) it I know I mustn’t go back to sleep. It’s discouraging to think of the many times I’ve committed to making changes, made a start and gone back to my old ways after a few days or weeks. But nothing bad has ever happened to me as a result. Super critical voice is telling me that this is just like one of those times. Nothing will happen to you if you fuck this up. But if you say you’re going to do something and then you don’t, well, aren’t you going to look like an idiot then? Best to calm down, shut up and go back to writing about how you can’t stop scrolling through Instagram. Everything will be fine.
Yeah, thanks for that, SCV. Not helpful.
This time last year, I was in despair about the bushfires that were ravaging our country and I sat, feeling powerless and guilty as so much precious vegetation and wildlife was destroyed, some of it never to return, terrified that the fires would come my way eventually. I can remember someone saying to me that feeling guilty or living in fear wouldn’t help and that instead, I could turn these feelings into action, to do what’s good for the planet and to keep fighting for it. That sounded positive, so I signed up for a challenge that suggested one change you could make every week to make a difference. I gave up on week 2 because it was too hard to decide which not non-ethical financial institution I wanted to transfer my money into when I divested from one that supported fossil fuels.
It would be funny if it weren’t true.
Meanwhile, a year has passed, the world is still getting hotter, Australia continues to support the fossil fuel industry and avoid its international obligations, Arctic sea ice keeps melting. Oh, and we’ve been hit by a global pandemic. I had committed to changing and I had done precisely nothing, exactly as I had done in the past in the multitude of my own personal challenges.
But unlike in those challenges, the stakes here are real and I don’t know how to convey to myself that this isn’t a practice run. It’s not a new habit that I might or might not take up with no harm done if I don’t. This is the real deal and there is no Plan(et) B.
There’s a quote often attributed to Anne Frank that goes something like how wonderful it is that no one need wait a single minute before starting to change the world. I’m not sure what part of her diary it’s from but I’ve seen it used in many places. What it’s saying to me is that I can’t sit around and wait for someone to tell me what to do. No one is going to do that. There isn’t a checklist that starts off with “stop using disposable coffee cups” and ends with “planet saved”. Permanent lifestyle changes are needed, not things that can be ticked off a list to make me feel good. But I can’t sit at my desk making lists of all the things I need to change and make a big, detailed plan of how to change my lifestyle spanning the next three years, with everything in perfect order. The world doesn’t follow a Gantt chart and climate change isn’t going to wait for me to get my shit together. I need to go and do something. Now.
(Also, you may recall, I am brilliant at making plans but terrible at carrying them out, so that wouldn’t work anyway.)
I think right now, there’s no wrong thing to do, no wrong place to start. There is just simply so much that I need to change. And there’s so much to do that nothing will be wrong. Anything will be right. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know everything I need to do right now. All I have to do is know the first step. And take that. And then the next one. What I need to do next will start to become obvious the more I do the more I listen and the more I learn.
I’m going to start listening more, educating myself, feeling the fear that comes from what I learn, and using that to drive me to make changes, to speak up and to take action.
As I thought through all of this, I cycled back to my Word for 2021. I wondered if “listen” was the right Word for me or if it should be something like “awake”, “learn”, or even “action”, since that’s what I have to do. But my own voice, the one I’m terrible at listening to, kept insisting that “listen” was the right word. So I honour that voice and, with a view to listening more to myself and to the world, that is my Word for 2021.
Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year 2021 workbook asks you to describe the year just gone by in three words. It’s left open to you how you interpret this: you could, I imagine, choose three words that describe the year from a global perspective, from a personal perspective or anywhere in between. There’s one word I’ve heard more often than I care to remember that has been used to describe 2020 that I never want to hear again and I have no intention of using it. It starts with unp . . . .
And that is the last I will say about that word.
I’ve chosen three words to describe the year from my own isolated perspective from the bottom of an island at the bottom of the world. They are:
Unexpected
Inconsistent
Introspective
Unexpected because I didn’t in my wildest dreams imagine that the world would be thrust into a pandemic that shut everything down, took so many lives, and shook everything up, leaving people jobless and causing so much worldwide despair, uncertainty and confusion. On a personal note, I didn’t expect the issues I was having in my workplace with noise to be (temporarily) resolved by having to work from home. There were other unexpected things too, not all good, and not all for this blog.
Inconsistent because, while I made a lot of progress in some areas I wanted to work on and I achieved a lot, I didn’t do as much as I’d hoped in other areas. I completed my uni course, and I had some good results at work but, there were other areas I was less successful in developing (no judgement here, just stating a fact) and they continue to haunt me. A lot of that is connected to me not being able to stop procrastinating and giving into distractions. And not getting into an exercise routine that works for me.
I struggled to find a third word but I chose Introspective because I started to work on some long standing personal issues in my head that are preventing me from being the person I want to be. It was hard work but rewarding, and I think I am starting to discover small chinks in the façade I’m trying to break down.
I would also add interesting to the mix . . .
I started the year with beautiful sunny Sunday morning photo expeditions, a couple of times with a good friend and other days by myself. It seems like so long ago now . . .
Sunday morning explorations with my camera
A major focus of my year was my uni program, of which I had three units to complete. The first one was intense, involving a lot of self examination and analysis, which left me feeling drained but also with some very clear ideas of what areas of my life I specifically needed to work on. I finished the course in October and received my qualification in December and am very glad that’s over but also grateful for the opportunity to have done it and learned so much.
I managed to keep reasonably healthy in 2020, not least because I have now gone for nine months without drinking alcohol and, as a formerly very regular moderate drinker, I’m particularly proud of my efforts to do this. I read the book The Alcohol Experiment by Annie Grace, and it totally changed the way I looked at alcohol. I’m not saying I will never drink again but for now I’m very comfortable with my decision not to.
This book changed my life
I had a potential issue with my eyesight that I had to have checked out a couple of times during the year but it all seems to be okay for now and the professionals are monitoring it. I got a hearing test at the start of the year, which revealed I have a low noise tolerance, which makes sense of all the issues I’ve been having at work and in other situations. I’m not sure what we do about this but a retest later in the year showed that my sensitivity had increased and I still don’t really know how to manage it. I kept up with my dental checks and my physio visits to resolve long-standing neck, back and posture issues.
I’m grateful there was never a time during the lockdown that I wasn’t able to go out on my regular morning walks. That would have made it a lot more unbearable.
Morning beach walks, muwinina Country
I started riding my bike to work, which became a whole lot easier when everyone had to stay home because of the pandemic and, as I said at the time, while I didn’t love riding in the traffic, I didn’t necessarily want the roads to be clear because no one was allowed outside. I stopped doing it as much (at all) as the weather got colder, the buses stopped charging fares and, eventually, when I was working from home full-time. It’s something I will start to pick up again when I go back to work after the holidays.
Bike riding to work
Another habit that I actually stuck with was reading, and there were a couple of things that made this possible. First, my goal was to develop the habit, rather than to set a number of books I wanted to read, which the pressure to read a certain amount off and allowed me to just focus on doing it. Second, keeping my no alcohol month going the whole of the year led to me going to bed earlier, which meant I could read in bed before I went to sleep. As of today, I have finished 34 books, which is 13 more than in 2019 when I set myself a target of only 12 books to read and never really stuck with it after I’d finished the 12th book.
The most powerful book I read in 2020, Truganini by Cassandra Pybus
I didn’t do as much work on learning Photoshop as I had intended at the start of the year when I signed up for a bunch of courses. Even though my uni work took up a lot of time, I still had a lot of free time that I could have done this work and I’m not sure what was stopping me. It’s not like I have to do the courses all at once or that there’s a time limit. I can do them in my own time, and maybe that’s the problem. I’ve worked well to deadlines where there is a clear assignment to complete but with these courses there are no assignments, just instruction and it’s up to you to play around with what you’re shown and see what you come up with. This is one of the areas I’m disappointed that I didn’t achieve very much in, and I want to do more in 2021.
I completed the major photography project I wanted to do this year, which was to spend 50 days making a photo a day with my 50mm lens. I’m really pleased with that project and it’s made me appreciate and understand that lens a lot better. I certainly won’t be keeping that one stashed in the bag again!
50mm photo of the Aurora Australis, the day before she left Hobart for the finial time
I had a couple of exciting moments in my photography in 2020 too. In January, one of my photos was published in Australian Photography magazine.
My first photo published in a national publication
I was equally chuffed when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court asked if the court could use one of my photos of the court in their Christmas cards this year.
Supreme Court 2019
And just before Christmas, I found out that one of the photos I had taken of the Hobart Magistrates Court at the Open House Hobart weekend had been chosen as a winner of their photo competition, which was a lovely way to end the year. I’ve really enjoyed my photography this year.
Hobart Magistrates Court 2020
I was lucky to be able to get away for a couple of short breaks during the year. We had a trip to Bridport in the July school holidays. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid and couldn’t remember it at all, so it was great to be able to explore a part of Tasmania I wasn’t familiar with.
Old pier at Bridport on pyemmairrener Country
In October we had a night at Port Arthur, a place I am always somewhat reluctant to visit because of the many sad layers of history held by the area. And then, as a reward for finishing my uni course, I took myself off to Launceston for a photography retreat and I had a wonderful time photographing some of my favourite buildings and walking all day.
Tessellated Pavement near Eaglehawk Neck on paredareme Country
Kramstable adapted really well to online school and I was impressed with his commitment to his work, his ability to self-direct and to manage his workload. The schools did a huge amount of work to ensure that kids could continue learning during the lockdown and I have nothing but admiration for them for what they achieved. Thank you seems like such a lame things to say to convey how grateful I am for what they did. It has been wonderful watching Kramstable learn and grow this year, and for it to start to become more obvious what his strengths are and where his passions lie. The high point of his film work was his nomination as a finalist in one of the categories of this year’s My State Film Festival. It’s also exciting to watch his work and interests develop outside of school. Seeing his dedication sometimes makes me wonder how my life might have been different if I’d had such a passion as a teenager and had been supported to pursue it in the same way I hope I’m supporting him.
Sadly, Bethany the Australorp chicken and Rex the rabbit died earlier in the year. Two new chickens joined the flock in November, Dorothy and Shirley, who are black copper Marans and are very cute. After a month in a cage in the chook yard, they are now finding their feet with the big girls, some of whom are none too pleased to have them there.
The new chickens
Aside from the working from home, covid didn’t have a massive impact on my life. I don’t like going out much, I detest shopping, I don’t play or attend sport and I don’t enjoy being around large gatherings of people. I spend a lot of time at home anyway, and I love it. So I pretty much did what I always did, it’s just that I didn’t have a choice any more. Regular Friday night dinners at the bowls club were replaced with trying out various takeaway and home delivery options from local restaurants and pubs. I actually reversed my no caffeine strategy and started getting takeaway coffees from my local cafe (I am sorry for the plastic, but they weren’t allowed to use keep cups). I’m not sure why. One day I felt like a coffee and it was a valid reason to get out of the house and one day tuned into a couple of times a week, turned into every day. And when they were allowed to reopen, it because my go-to place to write. And a place to work when I needed a change of scenery.
Monthly review at the coffee shop
I realise that I am incredibly lucky that this was my experience when so many others suffered greatly and many continue to do so. I am so grateful for having the job I have and that the Tasmanian Government did what it needed to do to keep our state safe. I haven’t stopped being grateful for being in the position that I’m in this year.
It was, indeed, an unexpected year.
A weed is just a plant growing in a place someone doesn’t want it to grow in
Unravel Your Year asks you to consider what the gifts of 2020 were. I know for many, this would be difficult. I offer the following.
2020 brought me the gift of afternoon walks. Instead of being at work all afternoon, packing up and catching the bus home, I packed up my home office and went for a walk every day. I watched the afternoon light dance on trees, rocks, water and the opposite shore, and I made photos of what I saw. I would never have been able to do this if I hadn’t been working at home.
2020 brought me intense self reflection and the deep inner work that I need to do to start to heal myself.
2020 brought me a confidence boost that tells me maybe I do have an artistic side.
2020 brought me a brain that is no longer befuddled by alcohol, and the clarity and health benefits that go along with this.
2020 brought me respite from a work environment that was becoming increasingly stressful and difficult for me to cope with. My stress and anxiety levels are lower than they have been for a long time as a result.
A friend recently posted that we all need a little more yellow in our lives. I agree. You can never have too much yellow!
Goodbye, 2020.
You were not the year I expected you to be. I know the challenges you have presented, both on a global level and to me personally, are not going to disappear when the clock ticks over to 2021. In reality, the date on the calendar is just an arbitrary thing anyway. The sun is going to come up tomorrow, covid is still going to be here and I’m going to have the same struggles I have today. The climate emergency hasn’t gone away and there’s a lot of work to do. However, the end of the year is a good time to have a bit of a reset, to re-examine my priorities and goals, and make sure the course I’m on is still the one I need to be on.
Thank you, 2020, for the gifts and the opportunities you have offered me. I ticked 18 things off my 20 for 2020 list. I haven’t made the most of everything, but I think I’ve made some progress and I have learned a lot. I intend to continue to learn in 2021.
One thing I know, 2020, is that I won’t forget you in a hurry.
What did I want to do better this week? I wanted to track how many times I mindlessly picked up my phone and scrolled through stuff for no reason.
So, how did that go then? I forgot. Again. Also, to be fair, I was sick most of the week and the phone was a welcome distraction.
On to 20 for 2020 I went through the exercises from Indistractable (thing 13) to identify what I actually wanted to do out of it. I came up with two prompts that came up early in the book that I have now incorporated into my daily journalling. They are: • One thing I did today that moved me closer to what I really want and the benefit I received from that action. • One thing I did today that moved me away from what I really want and the foregone benefit of taking that action.
I think they are really useful prompts that (should) make me think about the actual consequences of doing things like scrolling on my phone, as well as the identifying the benefits of doing something positive.
I’ve now distilled everything from the book that I want to do into a (fairly) short list and I’m going to be working on putting those things into practice over the next few months. For now, I’m happy to call that thing done.
I also finished my 50 in 50 project (thing 9) this week. Day 50 was Wednesday, which was the first day I was sick, so spending most of the day in bed, I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to take photos but I did it and you can read the wrap-up blog post about it here. All the photos are on that blog too, split into weeks, if you want to have a look.
I’m proud of this work. There are a few dodgy photos in there but there are more good ones than bad ones. I’m really pleased with myself for putting in the effort, taking a photo every day for 50 days and wrapping up the project within a week after I’d finished it, rather than letting it linger as I so often do. I think it’s important for me to acknowledge an achievement like this and to recognise the work I put in to it. So well done, me!
And while I’m on the subject of acknowledging achievements, my graduate certificate (thing 8) was conferred on Friday and I now have an official transcript of my study in that course. I’ll get the piece of paper early next year, but I don’t need that to make it official. I really am done with that thing!
What did I achieve this week? My regular check in: I kept up to date with my weekly photojournal and my Hobart Street Corners project.
Apart from that, I took it easy.
Waking up with a sore throat on Wednesday made me a candidate for a covid test, so I went along to partake of that experience and had to stay home until I got the result. The testing seems pretty efficient at the moment. I called them at 8.00 am to register my details, got a phone call to book in for a test a bit after 9.00 and had the test at 10.40. It did, I have to say, feel somewhat odd rocking up to the test centre, which is designed as a “drive-thru”, on foot. I felt a bit like I was in that skit from many years ago of people who formed themselves into a car-like alignment and went through the Macca’s drive-thru on foot. The test wasn’t the most pleasant thing I’ve ever had done to me, but it was mercifully quick and I was sent home to rest and wait for the results, which came through just after 7.00 pm.
It seems very incongruous to have the testing site, with people masked up and in protective gear, so close to the waterfront precinct where people are going out, eating, drinking, seemingly oblivious to the reality that the virus is still around and that it wouldn’t take much for it get out again (just look at NSW this week, for example). It’s like there are two worlds here: most people’s world and covid-world.
What didn’t go so well? I’m not sure if this is a useful thing to ask this week.
What do I want to do better next week? Keep pushing with the morning planning routine at work, since I did it exactly zero days this week. To be fair, I didn’t work two days, but there’s no excuse for the other three days other than “it feels weird”.
What did I want to do better this week? I wanted to track how many times I mindlessly picked up my phone and scrolled through stuff for no reason.
So, how did that go then? I forgot.
On to 20 for 2020 I’ve been focusing on my 50 mm photo project(thing 9) this week. I got a bit behind in editing so I spent some time catching up with that.
Day 34 of the 50 in 50 project
What did I achieve this week? My regular check in: I did my weekly photojournal and worked on my Hobart Street Corners project.
Apart from that it’s been a pretty slow week. Last week I was talking to someone about Christmas trees and I said I hadn’t put mine up last year until a couple of days before Christmas and had assumed no one was interested. Then Kramstable asked why we hadn’t put up the tree and it was done in very rapid time. The very day after that conversation, he asked when we were putting it up. So we did that together.
Oh Christmas Tree . . .
As you can see, I put a lot of effort into it.
I went to the optometrist during the week to get all of my scripts reviewed. This resulted in me needing new computer glasses, new normal glasses (my current pair is over six years old), and handing over a lot of money. It was one of those times when I didn’t realise how much I needed new glasses until I saw what a difference a tweak to the script would make.
What didn’t go so well? I’ve just learned about a new way to plan my work days, which may or may not be helpful for me. It involves sticky notes. I’m going to try it over the next couple of months and see if it helps me.
The idea is to follow the routine exactly as written for two months to implant it in your brain so that it becomes a habit. I did it for one day and it felt awkward and forced and I didn’t do it the next day. I’ll blame being really late for work the second day because I was at the optometrist and I’ll try again next week.
What do I want to do better next week? Force the morning planning ritual.
Summary for the week
Things completed this week: 0
Things completed to date: 15 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21)
Things I progressed: 1 (9)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 5 (7, 11, 13, 17, 22)
Things not started: 1 (19)
Days I did the morning planning ritual (Goal = 5): 1
Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 6
Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 0
Days I shut my computer down before 10.15 (Goal = 7): 7
Days I went for a walk in the afternoon (Goal = 7): 3
Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 5 work days): 5
stepping on the cracks 