A walk to the shops for a can of coconut cream

not our house btw

My running track

 

 

  

I went for a run yesterday. 

I chose my old running track -  a loop behind some scratchy hills that takes you either to a historical spot with families bbqing or a very quiet mountain bike track along the boundary of a cattle station. I chose the quiet route.

I used to run this loop a lot, back in the pre-baby days. I lived about a block from it, and I would head out after work, pushing myself to make it back before dusk turned to dark. 

I would always see wallabies, sometimes roos. Occasionally dogs and even a few scrawny dingos. Black cockatoos and budgies too. 

I surprised myself yesterday by actually running most of it. It's not a long track but I haven't run in so long I didn't trust my body to do much of it at all. 

Who knew a body could do so much. Make a baby, birth a baby, not die in the process, then be able to run. 

It felt good. Hopefully it won't be years before I get my joggers on and do it again. 

 

 

 

Saturday playlist

 
This week I listened to a podcast of an extended interview with Warwick Thornton on Darwin ABC. He's a local Alice guy done really, really good. He's most famous for the film 'Samson and Delilah', which featured this song and made me cry. 

If you haven't seen the film, go and hire it and watch it. It is by far the most realistic depiction of the tragedy of young indigenous disadvantage in these parts. Yet it is hauntingly beautiful. There are barely any words in the whole film. Just stunning cinematography and excellent acting. The boy actor actually lives in a town camp in town. So he's acting...but he's no doubt seen his own version of everything that happens in the film.

Here's a preview:

Get yourself to video ezy now!

Not one for the kids though. No, not at all. 

Festival baby

Music. outside. space. baby friends. dancing. dancing with strangers. attention. dogs. fire. All her favourite things.

She did so well, even sleeping in the pram during the tzu set. She woke when we got back to our camp in the river bed, and stayed awake, kicking and dancing in the snuggly swag with me. The music rushed down the river, bounced off the red cliff into our ears and, finally, at 3:30am, into our dreams.

We forgot how very cold it can be out in the desert at night. And how it is always colder in the riverbed than on the bank. In the morning there was frost on the pram. But the sun soon took care of that, as always.

Now to plan the next ambitious camping trip in two weekends' time. Because that's the whole point of living here.

Saturday playlist

Today's playlist features an icon like no other in so many ways. Who else has that voice, that hair, those dimensions!?

The first song is in honour of my newfound jobfullness. No, I certainly don't work 9-5. It's more like 9-9, full time, 24/7 mama work, then a few hours here and there of other, so called 'real' work, done when I can.

And since I couldn't find anyone to follow in Dolly's sparkly wake, I followed her with...Dolly. Enjoy. 

A music festival in the desert

This weekend is a long weekend up our way. 

We'll be spending about half of it at this festival out east of Alice.

We've been to it once before - the first year it was held. Then we went overseas and missed the second one. Then I was pregnant and didn't want to camp, then we had a little baby and didn't want to camp. This year we're up for it!

It's a great festival, really grass-roots. It's still quite young and very, very chilled out. 

And dusty. I remember the dust.

Frenchy will even be performing with our landlords' band on the main stage later tomorrow night. He has some sparkly (and rather too small) red pants to wear as part of the get up.

We're hoping the baby is as into it all as she was at womad. And we also hope she is happy to sleep like a little snorting log out in the bush with the constant doof doof that will no doubt be ringing in our ears and shaking our swags. I'm not confident she'll sleep well, but it's only one night.

I'll be back on Sunday with some photos.

Til then, have a great weekend and enjoy my special Saturday playlist tomorrow. 

Work, work, everywhere, as far as the eye can see

Hello!

For some reason blogger refuses to allow me to add images to this post. So I shall valiantly stride ahead, image-less, to tell you my tale of...working.

Get excited!! 

I have gone from zero jobs (I quit my old job a month before my due date...I wasn't eligible for mat leave so I just left. It wasn't the world's best job anyway, let's be honest)  to many jobs. All in a couple of weeks. All thanks to living in a small town, with friends and contacts ahoy hoy. 


My main job - aside from, you know, mothering a 14 month old - is writing the annual report for a local indig organisation. It's three months of work, roughly ten hours a week, doing lovely, easy, tangible work from the office or from home. It's just perfect. 


The ole freelancing ball has also started to roll and is gathering speed. Freelancing is awesome work for stay-at-home-mums, if you can find the time. You pick and choose the stories you find interesting, find someone who is interested in your interesting story, write it for them, (eventually) get some money from them, and then think about another interesting story you could do. It has its downsides of course, - like being completely unstable, having zero benefits or entitlements, and taking a long time to get paid. But for me, wanting to dip my toes back into the work puddle, it is great.

And as of this morning I have an offer of a radio gig - my real love. That's the work I did before we went overseas...and spent all our money having a wonderful time, accidentally got up the duff, came back to Austalia, then back to Alice, and took a quick newspaper job for the six months til I gave birth. 

The radio job will be four hours a week, producing a show on Saturday mornings. So the childcare conundrum need not get any more complicated than it already is. Frenchy can baby mind while I use my brain in different ways. I think I may need a thesaurus to help me write radio copy that isn't in baby talk. 


I may whinge about this little desert town a bit but it's situations like the one I now find myself in that make me realise it really is the perfect place for us right now. 


Really. Where else could I have waltzed into these perfectly timed, perfectly flexible jobs. 

For example, the first job came about when we bought a car off friends of friends, got chatting about me considering looking for some work, and found that the woman of the couple might just have something.
 
That something turned into something.

She is also responsible for putting me in contact with a childcare place that no one knew was starting up and hence had vacancies - at a time where the waiting lists for every other centre in town are either 12 months long or CLOSED don't bother trying again this year. But more on that in another post (so far squish goes for a grand total of three hours a week. It might soon increase to two afternoons, for a total of six hours a week. Yes we like to ease into things over here!)

I may have taken on too much - the next month will be particularly busy as I meet identical deadlines for my freelance work. I will need to be super organised, particularly with food preparation. I will need to be super disciplined, and really sit down and spend a few hours at the computer working, rather than blog stalking.  I will need Frenchy to help me out, which he will. He is excited for me.

I am excited. 

Very.  


ps last night I made something for the first time with my sewing machine! A pair of pants for bub, upcycled from an old top of mine. They are not very good but she can wear them to bed. It's a start.