A life less digital

Category: About me

  • Do you know who I am?

    There are some questions that I find really tricky…

    What’s your blog about?

    “Oh cool – you’re a blogger. What’s your blog about”? he asked politely. And my mind was blank. After taking a strategic sip of my drink, and pretending to adjust my socks, I replied “Um, just stuff I think about. Pictures of things I like.”

    Loser. (Me – not him. He was perfectly nice.)

    This blog really is mostly for me, rather than any specific audience. A very lazy digital diary. Maybe when the kids are older, I can pass this diary on to them and they can probably laugh and maybe wonder at the online me.

    If my thoughts are little winged creatures flitting around my brain, then this blog is digital fly paper. Sometimes thoughts just fling themselves in to my sticky blog and get stuck. Sorry.

    Where are you from?

    I was trying my very best to be the charming corporate wife. Husband was still in Sydney, and I was in London meeting his new Big Boss. All was fine, until he casually leaned out of his bright purple v-neck cashmere jumper to ask “And where are you from?” I must have looked confused, because he followed up with “What’s your background?”

    I paused and quickly scrolled through the various options in my head – place of birth, where I grew up, race, current address, culture? More mental scrolling… Big Boss and his jumper looked slightly worried that I looked worried.

    “Are you working?” he asked, simply and slowly. Phew… He was just asking that other old favourite: “What do you do?” I launched in to my standard pitch – currently running a household (unpaid), and in between jobs as digital content manager/ writer (hopefully paid).

    I felt as if I had just dodged a tricky interview question.

    Who are you?

    Along with “Release the hounds!” I have always wanted to be able to exclaim haughtily ”Do you KNOW who I am?” No need to explain or describe myself.

    Actually, I do need immediately to explain myself – unless I become an arch villain with a pack of zombie-dogs, I won’t be using those two phrases in the same  encounter.

  • Happy Chinese Australian New Day

    Chinese New Year and Australia Day completely passed me by this year. Instead, we surrounded ourselves with cheese, mountains and snow in France. The most Chinese thing I did was make everyone take their shoes off when they came in to the apartment.

    I hardly tweeted or updated FB at all whilst away. The more fun I’m having, the less likely I am to post about it. My online life looks quite dull, even though I’m doing lots.

    Stupid gloves beat my smartphone

    The colder it gets, I’m also less likely to be updating anything. Several months in to London winter, I still keep stabbing at my phone with my useless gloved fingers.

    Useful : MUJI sell touchscreen conductive gloves. I have tried several times to buy these, but the staff tell me there is a waiting list!?

    Useless : I found a fingerless gloves website that includes terrible ‘fingerless fiction’. Since it’s 2012, why not read their Olympic Gold story?

    Charming : Pictures of lonely gloves at our park.

    Happy Australia Day

    As I missed celebrating Australia Day, here are some Oz-themed pictures…

    Bruce street
    A sensible Australian street name. I love the way it's written in the footpath concrete..
    sun hat with fish
    Amusing sun hats. This was one of my favourites.
    australian shaped pizza
    My friend recently made me a pizza. OMG – it's in the shape of Australia!
    australian stickers
    Some of my vintage 1970s Australian stickers.
    bbq meat
    I took all that lightly charred meat for granted …

  • The sound of one glove clapping

    Lonely gloves on park fence
    Lonely gloves
    Lonely gloves on park fence - it will be
    It will be …
    Lonely gloves on park fence - lonely this Christmas without you
    … lonely this Christmas …
    Lonely gloves on park fence - without you by my side
    … without you by my side

  • Multi-tasking – doing lots of things not very well

    I have dinner in the oven, and I’m breathing, as I write this blog. Is that multi-tasking? I’ve got Facebook and Twitter open too (but I promise I’m not looking at them). Am I being super-duper efficient?

    When I was a project manager, I organised lots of tasks, wrangled resources and constantly communicated to stakeholders. Those important people holding those stakes liked to see that I was Across Everything. All the time.

    I used to think I was an ace multi-tasker, but now I’m not so sure…

     

    Multi-tasking that I do well

    Watch television AND sew stuff AND listen to husband debrief about work. Easy – it’s my wife-work.

    Attend my daughter’s first school Christmas play AND have a vomiting flu. This is how it goes: watch adorable children in charming play; discreetly dash off to vomit in school toilets; smoothly slide back in to my seat to applaud.

    Make breakfast for kids AND pack school lunch AND fill in school forms AND check homework. It feels as if I’ve achieved so much by 9.00 am!

     

    Multi-tasking that I don’t do well

    Driving AND talking on the phone. I have never learnt this essential modern life skill. I can’t imagine how people send text messages whilst they’re driving. Many years ago, I was equally amazed by boyfriend-who-is-now-my-husband rolling his own cigarettes in the car whilst steering with his knees.

    Reading email AND checking a mobile AND talking to a colleague AND filling in a spreadsheet AND discreetly updating Facebook AND being on hold with IT helpdesk AND drinking very hot coffee. It may look impressive, but I’m really doing all of these tasks quite averagely.

    Eating on the sofa AND watching yet another bloody cooking show on TV. No matter what I’ve made myself to eat, my tastebuds get all disappointed if I’m watching a TV chef make truffled starfish and chestnut kebabs.

  • You ungrateful cow

    That’s a big ungrateful “Moo” from me

    Would you like a whinge with your excellent coffee today? I would. It’s almost a reflex:

    “No sugar thanks. (The man on the bus smelt like old sausages.) Full fat milk please. (I hate filling in forms.) Just a regular size coffee today. (Charity muggers are taking over the streets.)”

    I am making an extra special effort to find some things that make me smile, and that I can be grateful for.

     Culturally-sensitive Wombles

    I got this dark-furred Womble from McDonalds many years ago. It made me laugh. [I love the Wombles, but why are there so few girl Wombles? Can’t find any mention of asexual reproduction of their species on the Web. ]

    Dark fur Womble toy
    Now if only they made an Asian Womble too…

    Defrosting the freezer

    I love the triumphant feeling of hacking off a Really Big piece of ice from my frosted up freezer. Such a satisfying sharp crack as it breaks off.

    Freezer ice chunk
    Champion ice chunk from my freezer.

    Beautiful words

    The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock by T. S. Eliot.  Here’s one of the bits I love in this poem:

    “For I have know them all already, known them all-

    Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

    I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

    I know the voices dying with a dying fall

    Beneath the music from a farther room.

    So how should I presume?”

    I found a weird old 1999 Hypertext (old skool WWW-speak) version here http://www.usask.ca/english/prufrock/index.html. Click on the first link under the ‘Contents’ heading. Or there is a celebrity version with Anthony Hopkins reading it on YouTube.

    My sticker collection

    I found my old sticker collection! I hoarded these stickers for years, and am gradually, grudgingly passing them on to my daughter. My mum-self is so pleased to see how excited she is by them. My childhood-self years still thinks they are too precious to actually stick to anything…

    Sticker collection in box
    I used to love that Knitting Ring too.
    ice cream sticker picture
    How my old stickers have a new life now.

    And here’s one I wrote earlier…

    Pretty things offscreen. The more of my time that is sucked up by websites, email, television and mobile phones, the more I appreciate solid physical beauty.  Here are some pictures of pretty things I have seen offscreen…

    Pictures of words. Someone has poured concrete in to my sinus cavities (I have a cold). This is a lazy ‘picture post’ today.  I am too tired to write many words, so here are some pictures of words that have made me smile …

     

  • The best Steve Jobs tribute merchandise. Ever!

    So, I was walking around M &Ms World in Leicester Square, when I started thinking about Steve Jobs.

    [Note – I was only there because my young child-free cousins were using my kids as an excuse to not look like weird tourist-LOSERS. ]

    M & Ms World is an evil 4-floored pit of colourful, candied consumerism. I chose not to buy an M &Ms tie, basketball or pack of underpants. But, I did start thinking about what kind of Steve Jobs tribute merchandise I would create …

    We all have too many mugs and t-shirts. Steve Jobs was an Innovator. So if I could turn M & Ms World into Steve Jobs World, I’d have floating chrome shelves full of:

    iJetpacks. Affordable jetpacks for the common man. Because jetpacks are cool. And once we strap one on and press ‘Go’ , we won’t be able to remember why we even bothered walking to work.

    iWalnuts. No more messy wrinkled shells. No more nutcracker hassle. Just smooth, polished orbs of nut, with pressure sensitive opening and soft-close concealed hinges. Delicious with iCheese (due out in 2012)!

    S & Js candies. Little apple-shaped chocolates in a colourful crisp candy shell.

    iWheel. A new generation in wheel design. Four distinct corners have been added to the boring old circle to give it a modern, sharp look. The four corners represent the corners of the earth and unity of North, South, East and West. It’s a subtle design tweak to create a new design classic. [iWheel-compatible roads are currently only available in USA, but are global rollout schedule will be announced very soon.]

    Do you have any other suggestions?

  • It’s a (pink) girl’s world

    I try very hard not to fall in to the blue/boy and pink/girl trap. I hate the fact that some very ordinary things are being gender-coloured. See exhibit A: Pink Globe.

    Pink globe
    It's a (pink) girl's world

    Is Lego just for lads?

    My boy has always been showered with Lego gifts. Cars, rockets, spaceships, planes, robots, trains… But when it came time for his sister to experience the  world of high-quality plastic studded construction bricks, she was not impressed.

    I wanted her to use her imagination to build wonderful freeform creations  from generic secondhand Lego. She wanted cool Lego sets like her brother, but they had to include pink, sparkles, babies and ice-creams. Sigh…

    My solution – I scoured eBay for girly Lego. It took ages, but I think I’ve found the solution.

    The Lego spaceship
    The Lego spaceship
    Little Lego car in corner
    Little Lego car in corner
    Lego on pillow
    Good morning my lego love
    Hello Kitty tea set with Lego
    Hello Kitty tea set with Lego
    Lego with playmobil ice cream shop
    Lego combined with Playmobil ice cream shop

    Girl power

    Here’s one of my favourite pics of a strong female role model for my daughter …

    Princess leia in bread
    The Princess of carbs

  • Retardex – not as stupid as it sounds

    I was very rude to someone last week. And I did it impulsively on Twitter, so it’s up there for all to see.

    Actually, I was very rude to a suite of oral care products, rather than a warm body… but it still made me feel a teeny bit guilty, when they replied very politely.

    Me (flippantly) on Twitter: Retardex is an awful product name. Is it aimed at stupid people with bad breath?

    Retardex marketing person (nicely): we know it’s not the best name, but visit http://www.retardex.co.uk/why-name-retardex for the history. Nearly 500k customers in the UK though 🙂

    The response from Retardex was fast, appropriate, and minty-fresh. (As they have a page explaining their unfortunate brand name, I can see that I am not the first person to comment.)

    It’s not you. Wait a minute, yes it is …

    Having recently moved countries, I am still in the boring set-up phase. I’ve been quite shouty on the phone with various phone, bank and TV companies.

    And each time I have upset my assigned customer service representative. A typical exchange might be:

    Me (shouty) on the phone: I don’t know why I’m calling. I called because you keep sending me text messages to call you. Why don’t you know who is sending these messages? Your message doesn’t tell my why I need to call. Can you stop these messages?

    Customer service representative (annoyed and a bit snippy now): It wasn’t ME…

    Me (shouty and interrupting): OK. Of course. Not YOU – it’s the system, the process, the computers, the morally bankrupt society without strong gender-appropriate role models! Just fix it.

    So, weirdly, I feel a bit silly for being rude to some expensive toothpaste, but not at all guilty at making friendly Fiona or smiling Sam hate their jobs.

  • Will you be my friend?

    The fastest way to make friends is to have a brief chat, run around a park for a bit, then exchange phone numbers.This method seems to be working quite well for my son.

    We’ve been in London for only a few weeks, so we don’t know a lot of people over here. While I wonder how to make connections, my son meets children in the park and asks “Can I come over to your house to play?” Simple, really… I wish I had his confident approach to networking.

    I’ve been wondering who ‘my tribe’ here will be:

    • Lady of leisure? One day maybe – right now, kids are eating dinner from a small rickety garden table and I’m wrestling with the new art of vacuuming stairs…
    • School mum?  Not yet – it’s school holidays, and I still haven’t officially heard when the kids start school.
    • Art gallery fan? Perhaps, if I was without the children. I took them to the Tate Modern, and all they wanted to do was eat snacks at the cafe. I pretended that the only way to get to the cafe was via some of the exhibition rooms, just so I could trot past a few pictures. (They were asking me why it was taking so long to find the cafe.)
    • Aussie expat? Not right now – I’m more interested in becoming a local, rather than celebrating the joys of distant Sydney. Plus, like a new mother, I am getting a LITTLE bit sick of advice from strangers.
    • Digital hipster? Not any more – I had lunch in a fashionable cafe in Shoreditch last week, and I felt like Dr Who going back in time, avoiding my past-self. Casually self-important young men glanced at iPads. They wore neatly buttoned checked shirts and not-too-tight plain coloured jeans. Pretty girls in ugly glasses and Scandanavian A-line skirts flicked through magazines and tapped away on iPhones. I knew the 90s music they were playing (My Bloody Valentine; Mazzy Star), and the coffee was good, but I am now a mature-age student at the school of cool.
    • Chinese immigrant? hahahaha – I have been struggling to cook edible rice in a pot (I am really missing my rice cooker!) My non-Asian husband does a much better job at it.

    Maybe I should browse online for people who will overlap me in a Venn diagram of interests. Meet up instead of just emailing and admiring from a distance. Or maybe I’ll try my son’s approach?

    Goodbye from the Orchard Twins

    I assembled this card just before I left Sydney, and took  a dodgy phone picture. The card is by ‘Art and ghosts‘ and I added the vintage Scrabble tiles.

    Goodbye card with scrabble tiles
    The card is by 'Art and ghosts' and I added the Scrabble tiles … I(http://artandghosts.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/the-orchard-twi.html)
  • Where do you go when you press Home?

    Where do you go when you press Home?

    Does your life have a ‘Home’ button? I’m back home (Sydney) after a brief visit to London (new home). My old house is empty and my new house is waiting for me. I’ve never been very attached to a particular location.  Home is wherever I am with my own little family.

    Technology is helping to create a homesickness prevention barrier. I’ve made heartfelt promises to email, Skype, tweet and update many many people. And when I have time, I will even put pen to paper.

    I am a busy body

    The busier I am, the less time I have to tell people how busy I am. Twitter and Facebook are not part of my core communications strategy matrix. (Can you tell I used to work in an agency?)

    Some of the things I might have mentioned if I’d been social online in the last weeks:

    • Black cabs only take cash? WTF?
    • I may have missed the wedding, but I do have a Catherine & William commemorative Oyster card.
    • The estate agent looks young enough to be my son. His suit has too many nifty seams to be professional.
    • Camden Market is horrible. Too many giant horse-themed sculptures.
    • Kids would rather smash gravel with hammers than talk to me on phone.
    • Want to take video of the local streets, but worried that I look creepy.
    • I got little pile of crisps/ chips with my sandwich! One of the major reasons for moving to the UK…
    • Have never asked to move seats on a plane because of another passenger’s smell. Until now. I was very discreet.
    • First words from son upon my return: “My snot is the same colour as your top.” I did get a hug after that though.

    Here’s one I wrote earlier

    • Welcome home away from home “So how does it feel to be home?” I’ve come home to Melbourne. A city that I grew up in and left behind. I’ve left my London home. A city that I settled in but, in the end, wasn’t somewhere that I wanted to settle down.
    • Gluten-induced homesickness Fresh sourdough toast with jam and ricotta has made me ponder moving back to Sydney. A fig Danish pastry has triggered layers of crispy homesickness. A pork and fennel sausage roll has almost brought me to tears.