- Finally made the perfect pork crackling. The secret is to cut the crackling off the pork when the roast is finished cooking, and put the crackling back into the oven to continue cooking by itself for 15 mins whilst the pork rests.
- Watching Junior Masterchef is bad for the self esteem. Those kids put me to shame.
- Crocheting Cthulus (as in multiple).
- Reading Stephen King’s ‘Under the Dome’. It’s a doorstop of a book. But it’s like putting on a favourite, daggy, comfortable old sweater. A return of the ‘old’ Stephen King we know and love. A comfort read (I know, as if ‘horror’ should feel like a comfort read!)
- One more day until I can enrol in my comparative religions class for ‘summer school’. Am I insane, getting excited? I will think so at the end of the semester I know that one thing for sure!
- Nat still hanging on in there, ‘for grim death’ keeps popping up in my head after that phrase, with feelings of horror attached. Nobody should have to endure such a long and terrible death.
- The grief is stopping me in my tracks. It’s hard to put one foot in front of the other. Not just hard, nigh on impossible. My mind cycling through well-rutted neural pathways. The horror, the despair over feeling she is not getting good palliative care and not being able to do anything about it. The wanting to scream at the nurses that she is NOT a geriatric resident with dementia, she is a cancer patient, so don’t treat her just like one of the oldies. She would be getting better medical care in the hospital and I find myself, ironically, wishing she was in there instead of the nursing home. The regrets and the usual useless wishing that the clock could be turned back and everything done and said differently. Regretting past is useless as it has gone, worrying about the future is useless because it hasn’t happened yet, but bloody hell, living in the present is worse than either of the other options right now. How trapped does she feel? Constant nausea. Panic attacks sitting on my chest just waiting to get out. I can’t even hold her, in those crappy hospital beds with the rails up on the sides.
- Swallowing words, keeping silent, anathema to me. Cannot stand to be voiceless, a byproduct of being bullied throughout school life and now overcompensating with wanting to stand up for myself. But standing up for yourself is ‘just not done. Small talk only please. We do not want to hear the truth.’ Bullshit and inanity are preferred. You can keep your superficiality. I want none of it.
- A whole lotta loss going on. Letting go is good. Some of the loss is long past due and brings feelings of relief. Some of the loss I just don’t give a feck about anymore. It’s the impending loss, the waiting for the loss of my sister, that is unbearable. It sits in my throat and I wish I could vomit it out.
- God help me, my mind keeps going over the facts of Nat’s very last oncologist appointment, where she was offered more oral chemo. Not that it could cure her, but give her some time and some quality of life. She said ‘yes’. My parents said ‘no’. My head keeps saying DON’T GO THERE! Does she feel betrayed? I pray, who to I don’t know as I don’t believe in an anthropomorphised, interventionist god, that never happens to me. That my wishes aren’t overruled. Again, horror. THIS IS LIVING A HORROR STORY. And I wonder if this is living in a horror story for me, what is it for Nat?? It renders me speechless with sorrow.
- Today was a beautiful day. They don’t get much more beautiful. Sun, cool breeze, flowering jacarandas, pale yellow gladiola, evening dinner on the veranda, but I’ll never use that brownie recipe again 🙂 (No, the brownies were not for dinner!)
- I MISS HEM!! Where are you girl? And one or two other long lost people.
- Facebook is Evil. We used to moan about email and sms texts killing communication. But they are nothing compared to Facebook and the ‘like’ button. Where you can hit ‘like’ instead of actually saying something. Where people keep up with each other by reading status updates of a line or two. I’m pretty fed up with the ‘place’. Communication between human beings is dying. Now, we hear ‘can we get back to emails?’ in nostalgic tones. Hear hear. You KNOW its bad when you catch yourself on other sites wanting to show you read something and care by merely clicking a ‘like’ button that is not there. Lazy lazy lazy. Or even better … an honest to goodness PHONE. God forbid we ever talk to each other! We’ve turned into a society where we don’t even have time for reading or writing an email. Now that’s lousy. Really. It is. A friend once wrote a poem about friendship that I have always remembered a couple of lines from–“When you love someone/you Pay Attention”. We simply do not place much importance on paying attention to the people that really matter to us anymore.
- As I’m more and more inclined to not be on facebook, I notice other friends become increasingly reliant on it. Every movement, every meal, is placed up there on their wall. Lordy.
- Where am I? Where AM I?? I can’t find myself any more. I can’t find the whimsy and the moonlight and the poetry and the oceanic me. I can’t find the feminine the spectral the otherworldly. I can’t find the me that used to write as I used to three or four years ago (and yes I need to let go of the belittlement that caused that loss). Oh yes I can be silenced. You did a good job.