MrsBrown's philosophy of life and stuff

Last week sjkasabi and I decided we needed to get onto Facebook so we could find an old friend. BTW, I avoided that by using MsNotaGoth's account and the results were inconclusive. I found her (the old friend that is, not MsNotaGoth) through Google, but not enough to know what she' s doing now, only what she was doing in 2001. I was amused to realise that I knew I had found her when I found a photo and had only seen her hands and wrists. She has incredibly skinny hands, wrists and feet. I think she might be in Canberra, but home with children, 'cos one of the references I found was a submission to the ACT Government on children's health.

Anyway.

Today I recieved an email from another school friend. Someone I haven't seen since I invited all my school mates to MrPeacock's first birthday party. She didn't give me much info in her email, but Google rescued me again and I think she has been operating in friendship groups with people I know from the SCA. I know that's not surprising, it's more surprising that I haven't run into her before now.

I feel really uncomfortable with this. What am I supposed to do now?. It's exciting and all, but there's a reason I didn't keep up a friendship with this person. I don't know what it is, and it might just be the whole becoming a mother at 20 thing, so that actually, her 3 year old daughter and my 3 year old daughter would get on like houses on fire and we could talk about music and she could come to singing at my place and it would be fabulous.

Or else I could spend time agonising about what to write her and then she'd spend time writing to me when actually we've got nothing but our school history in common and it would be just hard work.

Sometimes I hate being shy.

or thinking too much

I had a lovely time reading about her life though.

It's Friday night (actually sat morning, but I haven't been to sleep yet) and I'm doing my normal, "I'm tired so I'll go to bed, but it's Friday night so I'll stay up 'cos that's what I should do on a Friday night."

It's my Dad's fault. As a teenager, I would hang around after ALP meetings, listening to the adults talking politics (Federal, State, Local and Personal) and blinking furiously because I've always been crap at late nights. Then, at about midnight, Dad would say, "go to bed mrsbrown" (except my real name, 'cos the internet hadn't started yet so I didn't know I needed a blogonym) and I'd stay up for another hour to spite him. I never did that to my children, so they tend to go to bed when they're tired, or as part of a plan to do stuff in the morning. Sensible people.

Anyway, staying up late nowadays is all about rebelling against my boring life, where I don't have anything better to do on a Friday night than obsessively update my friends page and write crap for you to read when you get up (because I'm sure you're all more sensible than me, even if you do live boring lives)

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about my surreal week at work.

Based on conversations at work yesterday, in the next 8 months I will have time to be Baroness, steward a Kingdom coronation event, plan my house renovation, dream about owning land to build stuff on and make stuff.

In between I'll just be going to work and coming home again.

You might be interested to know that the SCA server won't be working until Monday, so you'll probably get less email than usual. Pass it on.

And you should take a look at http://abjet.net/sca/

ooops, forgot to press post last night

I once had to give a 5 minute talk about myself. It turned out that I am was all about rationing the things I do in my day, so that I have enough energy to make it to the end. Carefully planning whether I should catch a tram or walk somewhere depending on what I had planned for the evening.

Later in that personal development course I learnt that I could keep doing stuff even when I felt tired. I could even walk 14 hours a day and have enough energy to cook dinner for 7 over a campfire [1]

I know a bit more about myself and energy now:

If I exercise regularly I have more hours in my day to do stuff, 'cos I don't need to flop on the couch in the evenings.
If I have too many things on in a weekend I'm likely to get up one morning during the week and procrastinate leaving the house. Luckily I can now work at home on those days[2]
If I'm doing something exciting and challenging that fills my weekend, I'm surprised at how well I feel on Monday.
If the exciting and challenging project continues into the evenings of my working week, I can just keep going for about a fortnight, but I will collapse at the end and have trouble moving again for a few weeks.
I have physical and intellectual energy and, while one influences the other, they're not the same. So telling myself that I could walk for 14 hours and still do stuff necessary for my survival, isn't enough to keep me at work for 14 hours, even if I do have a deadline.
Hanging out with my friends frequently gives me the energy, that I didn't think I had, to do stuff afterwards.
Since being Baroness, I can do more than I thought I could and work on more projects than I thought I could. And I like the feeling I get when I move from one project to another, even though I'll get hijacked by my brain and stop.
Just keeping on going, and forgetting about how much energy I have, I get more done and I like it better.

and the kicker?

When I'm worrying about rationing my energy, I use it up and get less done.

To illustrate; yesterday I wandered around the Healesville Sanctuary and got home feeling like crap. I went out with my friends anyway and got home at 1.30am feeling better than I had when I left. This morning is my only free time, so I carefully slept in and then read some book 'cos it's my only opportunity this weekend. Now I'm writing this, 'cos lying in bed often loosens my muse and I like the achievement of letting it loose. I've been interrupted several times by the small child in my life and now I'm angsting about both finishing this and getting on with being sufficiently organised to have a reasonable time this arvo. Soon I'll do the Baroness stuff I want done so I can hold my chin up at Bash. I'll then spend the arvo at Bash where I'll put on my happy face and probably have a good time. It's time with friends and frequently energising, even if I'll get home and wish I'd spent more time at home this weekend. I've got someone coming home with me, but he'll only get an hour of my time, 'cos then I have to go and have dinner with my mum and sister. That will also be better than I anticipate and I'll probably get home feeling good. Until I realise that I have to work out what to wear to work tomorrow.

The whole time I'm doing all that, I'll be worrying that I should be having quiet time to store up for my work week, which includes 2 major projects, a bunch of interruptions I know I'll have, a new employee I'm responsible for and ongoing negotiations with the owners of the company I currently work for. There's no time to stay home on the couch this week. And I have a big weekend next weekend.

So, how much energy do I have available for all that? hmmm, maybe I should take it one thing at a time and enjoy as much of it as I can.

But how the f%^k am I going to get through next week?




[1]that's one pot with boiled pasta, milk powder, chicken seasoning and plastic cheese - not so much dinner as food.
[2] But probably not this week

Maybe I could do this when Sneetch has finished school.

I wouldn't mind the move to the country and it looks like a great way to manage the financial side of such a move.

I've also occasionally thought that teaching wouldn't be bad, but doesn't pay as well as what I do now.  But living in the country might be cheaper, and I could rent out my city house to maintain the mortgage.

It might just be an interesting two year holiday, or the start of something completely different.

The stuff I need to do this week;

give notice to the storage place
make 3 hoods of warmth, including an infant one
make a loft bed for MsNotaGoth (so tempted by an Ikea bought option, but so don't have the money)
empty my desk and move it to MsNotaGoth's room
Move the desk from the back verandah to the study
take photos of the Ford, so I can...
Put an ad in one of the online car sales places
book for Festival
tell stewards how much space we need to camp in (very late!!)
Lie on the couch a bit more writing drivel and checking my email and friends page obsessively


The stuff I need to do next week;

move the beds from my house to my mum's new apartment
the stuff I didn't do last week
make something for LardFest (optional)
Start design for cupboard in study to store stuff from the storage unit
Transfer ownership of our new car
clean up my bedroom
bottle mead
start beer brew

Stuff I need to write down so it's out of my head and I can stop obsessing about it;

I need new clothes, mainly tshirts, tops for work, shorts for riding to work in, maybe a skirt or two.
I need to remake sleeves for my 15thC cotehardies
I need better headdress arrangements
I think we need to start thinking about new coronets, I lost another pearl on the weekend and being stood on wasn't good for it either.  It would be good to have them for the 20th baronial birthday, but we need to get started on designing them.  BTW I should sort out a steward for that event, or at least a venue.
I need to consult with montjoye about sewing rabbit fur onto the houppelande/coat I have planned for Festival
One of these days I'll make the time to draw up the house plans I think I'm almost happy to go ahead with, but not before Festival and not in the three months after Festival 'cos I always collapse in a heap then and then the weathers miserable, and then it's my 40th birthday and then it will be the silly season and then it will be the three months before Festival when I get heaps done, but not stuff I don't need for Festival...
I'd like Rose to have her own bed for Festival, one that can be pushed under our bed during the day

I think that's all of the thoughts that have been swirling in my head lately.  I think I can do at least 3 of the things on my first list this evening, so I'l start!

20 years ago (1987)
I was pregnant, living in a share house in Fitzroy, failing most of my engineering degree subjects (for the second time) and spending my weekends riding my bike around Richmond with my mother and partner looking for a house to buy.

15 years ago (1992)
I was pregnant, only failing two subjects (although i knew better this time and applied for special consideration). The house we bought had been decimated and we were camping in the two storey extension without plaster on the walls or a whole kitchen.

10 years ago ((1997)
I'd been pregnant earlier in the year, but had sensibly aborted. I was home full time looking for Engineering work after being retrenched from my first graduate job. We were living in the new house we bought after I got my first graduate job. The old house was finished and sold in a hurry when I got retrenched (yep, we owned two houses in Richmond for a short time). I got my big break in November and started on the career road I'm still on now.

5 years ago (2002)
mr-bassman and I were in our year of handfasting and I couldn't believe that I could possibly still be in romantic love after 22 months. (It's still weird after six years together). I went to work and I came home, I adjudicated on children's squabbles and lived a quiet life. Did we make a tent that year?

1 year ago (2006)
Just getting used to the much bigger SCA commitment we'd made, struggling through through the work and small baby stage. I think we finished renovating the laundry at about this time of year.

Gee I had a nice time tonight.

There was dancing, with plenty of time for chatting with people and a level of comfort with the people there that I didn't feel like I had to be "on" for the evening.

Also, we talked about exciting plans for the next fortnight AND next year.

I'm looking forward to making mead ale with honey paid for courtesy of Melb Uni C and S. That's the way to do it! AND there'll be a bunch of people to do the heavy lifting do it with.

And then for Petit Vriens we had 6 dancers and 7 musicians, 'cos mr_bassman had his drum collection there. And then I danced and my friends joined me.

I need to go out for a walk at lunchtime more often.

Women with teenagers dress in frumpy clothes because all of their funky clothes get appropriated by their teenage daughters. The mothers think, "I don't wear that very often anyway, she can have it" and then they blink and there are no funky clothes left.


Now that our family room has been renovated (we kept it a secret so the kids didn't find out before they came home) we're spending more time talking to each other. We still want to spend time in there, 'cos that's where the heater is and, hey, it's a nice room now. But there's no computers or television, so we chat.

Msnotagoth is camped on the toilet floor, vowing never to drink 7 Ruski's in 2 hours ever again.

She can't be feeling too bad, she's having a great time keeping up a running commentary to MrPeacock and his friend.