So much more than coloured pencils and gel pens

I had an ah-ha moment today!
Some years ago I joined in the craze for colouring in. I never did much of it as a child and so was intrigued by the move to 'adult' or 'mindful' colouring. My involvement was aided and abetted by my beautiful daughter.People say to me, 'I met your beautiful daughter today,' to which I respond, 'Which one? I have two beautiful daughters.' Invariably it's the local one. But I digress.
The younger beautiful daughter gave me a colouring book and some wondrous Derwent pencils such as I hankered after as a child but never had. Mind you I think I really like Faber Castells these days but then of course there are the Jasart and the cheap shop tins and the gel pens and the Derwent Inktense (Said daughter gave me those as well.)
So  tentatively I started colouring. For three years or so I enjoyed a colouring group meeting in The Lakes coffee shop (this is not an ad but I do recommend it) on the shores of beautiful Lake Bonney. The two friends who started it taught me that there are no rights or wrongs about colouring and not to be afraid to make mistakes. Smudges can be part of the whole piece.
And so every day I sit and colour. Sometimes it's fairly automatic colouring of patterns or mandalas. Other times it's half way artistic. But it slows me down and gives me time to think, to dream, to connect with something more than me. Sometimes it's mindless and sometimes mindful, whatever the day needs.
And then this morning in amongst my colouring I was reading from Joan Chistitter's book The Monastery of the Heart and found this.

So the colouring fad may be past its peak - not so many pencils and books in the cheap shops now, but what it does for me is the thing. I'd include it in the list here amongst sacred images, music etc. It helps me to be still and aware of the very presence of God. Phew!! And to be mindful of the needs of those around me.

NOTE: big thanks to those two who showed me the way in colouring. You know who you are. Both names start with C.

and to my daughter who maybe realised just what I needed. Her name starts with B...

What an inheritance!

It's five years since my Mum died,aged 95. This is in memory of her. [Photo: Mum and Dad sometime before 1980.]

When we moved to the country the first time - in 1971 - we were amazed at the number of nicknames. I knew Aussies called people with red hair Blue and tall people Stretch and  shortened or lengthened names to become Bazz or Freddo or Jilly, but here everyone seemed to have a nickname.
I never did know Spont's real name and only knew that Splint was Ian because that's what his wife called him.
In some cases nicknames to be a family institution. We encountered Ferg. Fair enough. It was short for Fergus. Then we discovered his sons were also Fergs. I think they had real names because at least one of them was on my class role as Neil or at least I think that was it; he was always Ferg....

I've never really had a nickname at least not one I ever heard the schoolkids calling me. I do know my Mum once told the gardener that I was BB (Bossy Boots) because i sorted out about paying him when she was no longer doing well. My family called me Glen and my sisters flirted with Spud for a little while when I was a small child, but neither of those was for public consumption.

Recently I caught up with my oldest grandchild. He's nearly twenty-three and we were joking that he is now older than his father was when he was born. When we talked of the possibility of great grandchildren (not yet!) the darling boy looked  at me and sweetly said, 'Then I guess you'd be Old Gran.' Phew! I'd not thought of that.

He was the first great grandchild for my Mum. When he was very little she leant over and said to him, "I suppose I'm your Old Gran then,' and it stuck. Our grandies all have memories of Old Gran and they are fond  memories. Even when she got to be old she knew they were special and she loved to see them. She was generous and caring.

So I may not have a nickname but I would be proud one day to be Old Gran. What footsteps to follow. What an inheritance...

Paired off

I was putting on eyeliner and the phone rang. I went to check and was soon engaged in conversation with a friend. It was some time later that I realised one eye had had the treatment and the other one hadn't. It got me to thinking. Why are we so insistent on things matching?
Pairs of socks, pairs of earrings, pairs of shoes. I know some people who just buy heaps of black socks so they always have a matching pair. I worked with someone who went off to do  some training only to discover that she was wearing one black shoe and one navy blue one. They had slightly different height heels, so she used it as an excuse to go off and buy a new pair in the lunch hour.
On the other hand - or foot - our children had a teacher who had a fleet of court shoes of the same style in different colours and she chose to wear one red and one blue or one yellow and one green.
So maybe I'll deliberately do make up on one eye and not the other or wear earrings that don't match . Endless possibilities.

Later. Just a thought: Many of us wear rings on our fingers. My wedding ring is on my left hand but I don't have a matching one on the right hand. I wear a total of six rings and they are all different. How does that work?

What do you call...

No this isn't the lead in to a joke but a serious question. What do you call those little bits of paper that float around on my desk with important bits of information? True confession here: I hate filing and so recently when I stared clearing paper on my desk it was easy to throw away the stuff that was no longer relevant. Not so easy to  know what to do with the cute poems, cartoons and nice messages from family.
Then there were the scraps of paper. Important things like the name of a guy who is good at fixing grout according to friend, the hairdresser who might work miracles with my hair, the name of the new people I met - and their cat (It's really important to remember the name of people's cats), the note to check for the payment from that sort of dodgy lot who offered the refund. And so it goes.
Yes, I know the young and trendy write that stuff on their phone and I have been know to do that, but technology can let us down in a spectacular manner - see an upcoming blog about that and a previous one and another one a while back and...

So I now have a little pile of scraps of paper held together with a paper clip. Seriously, surely there is a name for them.

Suggestion:  Conforgetti - little pieces of paper about not forgetting.
All other suggestions will be considered.

How are you and all that jazz...

Louis Armstrong's song Wonderful World has the lines
   I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
   They're really saying I love you
Really?
It's just a greeting, isn't it. How do you do? or How are you? or How ya goin'?
They say it at the supermarket as they cruise past with no intention of waiting for the obligatory
 'Fine thanks.'
 I have a friend who always says, 'I'm terrific.' Really ? Is he the supreme optimist?
Winnie the Pooh has a line that goes something like, 'When people ask me I always say Very well thank you and how are you today?*
That's the expectation isn't it?
But what if the answer is really, 'Shit', A friend tells me he used that answer and the person who asked how he felt was astounded.
Sure I have been known to use how are you as a greeting and then later into the conversation say, 'Well how ARE you?'
So do we need to take time to really let people tell us how they are? And if so to be ready to listen. I didn't make tit to morning tea after church this week because someone began to tell a freind her story and I was there too. Long after the other woman left I was still hearing the story and sharing a little  of my own.
So now I do know some of how that person is, and I do care about it and what she is facing, and I do want to pray for her and keep in within my thoughts. She laughed and smiled and is determined to be positive, but maybe some days are shit and she needs to knwo that she can tell us how she feels.
So maybe Louis is right that to asking how you are is a way of saying I love you.

*Here is the correct version!

 ' If people ask me,
    I always tell them:
  "Quite well, thank you, I'm very glad to say."
   If people ask me,
   I always answer,
  "Quite well, thank you, how are you today?"
   I always answer,
   I always tell them,
   If they ask me
   Politely...
  BUT SOMETIMES
  I wish
      That they wouldn't.'

AA Milne

All gone...

Last week I decided to delete a photo of a list I'd taken for future reference and in the twinkling of an eye deleted all the photos on my phone camera. Oops! How? I asked myself that many times. Didn't it warn me with that 'did you really mean to' sort of question? Was it just too weary as it was about to run out of battery? Were the gremlins inside my phone being spiteful?
So what to do? Well, it turns out I still had the downloaded stuff and the favourites like my son and his fifteen (at last count) motorbikes, the family Christmas photo, my grandroo Roody and so on. I had saved some to Google photos and was able to retrieve some back to my phone for bragging purposes - this is my granddaughter in the wondrous dress she created last year for the young fashion designer awards, this is the colouring in I did, the focaccia bread I made, the rose in the front yard. You know how it goes.
Then I mined messages - in and out - for important photos shared. It seems most of them were not that important.
Now a week later, it's fine. I'm not sure what else I've lost but I'm okay.
It got me thinking. I have about a handful of photos of my Mum (born in 1919). There is a cute toddler, one of her with her hair all the way down her back before it was cut in her late teens, a wedding photo and a few with us as babies. (Less of me since I'm the third child.)  In her day cameras were rare and photos were often taken by professionals or in a  studio. It seems common for there to have been a photographer in the street as I have a few pictures of family members walking arm in arm along a city footpath.
So what will happen to the zillions of photos we snap every day? How many will survive? The technology with be obsolete. Will we print them all and will they last? Who will sort through them all when our time is up?What will remain
One of my friends is on an overseas trip. It's fun to see her photos on Facebook. Tourists seem to take so many photos since most of us have a reasonable quality camera in our hand as part of our phones. I remember seeing a tourist take photos of about twelve historic plaques. Would he read them when he got home. Surely he wouldn't expect someone else to look at them That would be even worse than my dear Dad's boring slide evenings (one of our family friends curled up and went to sleep as soon as the lights went off.)
Now I have discovered it's so easy to take a photos of a notice or a recipe in a book and I even know one person who takes a photo of the page number where she is up to in a book, Those things will be deleted at some stage perhaps, but what happens to all the photos? Maybe memories .....

Have a good weekend.

' Have a good weekend,' they say. Well thanks, but...

I didn't do that well when the first baby came along. It seemed Ike a 24/7 job when I had been used to sirens marking the lessons and breaks during the day and, despite a hefty load of marking and lesson prep, there were weekends that came right after Friday.
I found it so hard that I contemplated writing a book called  No weekends to warn others of how they might feel when it just went on night and day -  the feeds and nappy changes and burping and crying. (Often it was me crying not just the baby.) Fortunately others have written the book and people are more aware of post natal depression or simply not coping in those early weeks.

Now I read The Advertiser on line where the morning blog tells me we'll cope together with Monday. What's wrong with Monday? And then tells me we're half way through the week on Wednesday and on Friday we're nearly there. What? I'm retired. I don't work Monday - Friday 9-5 as this assumes. Neither do a lot of the rest of the population, I suspect ,what with shift work etc. So one day follows another. I recall my parents in law saying that they only thing that distinguished one day from another was the fact that Thursday was bin day. Right!

I find myself again in the world of no weekends and long weekends are nothing to look forward to.
So when people wish me a good weekend I try to smile benignly. And yes, Thursday is bin day.