Tag Archives: to-do list

Woman on a mission

Hello blog! It’s nice to come back to you; it’s been ages! For much of the first half of this year my emotions and energy were directed elsewhere following a family bereavement. My reaction to the deep well of sadness was to keep myself busy – a classic avoidance technique – and my activity centred around my house, my place of sanctuary, stability and safety.

As well as prettifying and enhancing my home environment – the soft furnishings part of renovations I had done in 2013 – I also had a strong urge to get every area of my life in order. My to-do list ranged from searching for a new dining room table and chairs to getting the outside of my house painted, making a will, getting my passport re-renewed, reviewing my home loan, ordering new curtains for my bedroom, re-designing my garden, de-mothing my wardrobe, and a fair bit of de-cluttering and paper shredding.

As a strategy for coping and holding it together, it was fairly successful, but I can’t pretend it was restful. The impulse was not just to block out the grief but to keep my life moving forward. Maybe if I stood still for any length of time and got too enmeshed in my feelings, I would get stuck and stagnate. And then what? When someone close to you dies, you are super aware of your own mortality. Who knows how long any of us has got on this planet? Especially in today’s world of political and environmental instability with a Twitter-addicted, trigger-happy ego maniac in the White House. 

I was a woman on a mission flogging somewhat obsessively round furniture stores starting with the big brands progressing to more quirky shops selling custom made furniture, pre-loved and vintage. Then there was the quest for curtains and bringing home fabric sample books and agonising over colours and patterns, plodding through the legalese of the first draft of my will – it’s still incomplete as I find it hard to imagine a time when I will no longer be around. It all feels a bit surreal deciding who gets what and where I want my ashes scattered – perhaps half here and half in England to honour both of my homes, or is that too much to ask of my Trustees – and do I need to leave them an airfare as part of the package? With inflation factored in, how much should that be? What will the world look like by then – I am hoping it is a good 30 years off.

Oh, and then there was the punishing obstacle course travel insurance claim related to changed travel plans back in January. In this case, I had to produce a 2-year medical history of my recently deceased father, along with a form signed by his doctor to prove he had not been expected to die when he did. Talk about salt in the wound. That was one of about eight documents I had to assemble as proof that my claim was kosher. My father’s medical history ran to 96 pages – happy reading insurance people I thought with a tinge of schadenfreude. Doggedly (sorry, Bertie, for putting negative connotations on a canine word) I stuck with it and won.

My focus during this time tended to be inward rather than outward; I didn’t feel drawn to socialising on any grand scale, just quiet catch-ups with close friends although, conversely, I did have a little flirtation with internet dating (not my thing) but I had taken out an expensive subscription in October and thought I might as well give it a go. One weekend in February, I met three different characters (that’s a blog post in itself) but I realise now that I was merely box ticking and doing it for the sake of it. I much prefer meeting people in the real world; it’s so hard to get a sense of someone from a profile. And there seem to be so many frogs out there. Ironically one of my nicknames for my father was Toad. Not as in fat-bodied, warty and crusty – my father was anything but, in fact I used to call him Dapper Dad – this was an affectionate moniker that had more of Toad of Toad Hall about it.

However, I did settle on a dining room table, one I had found quite by chance one weekend in mid-February in Cowes on Phillip Island. Happy to discover it was still available in May, I snapped it up. I ended up ordering chairs online from a store in Sydney – first having dashed to Schots Emporium and Goldilocks-like tried out a number of styles for comfort. Amazingly my blind date chairs (you can only glean so much from a photo online) were a perfect match with the table. A marriage made in heaven. Perhaps the moral of the tale is that when you are not looking too hard, the right thing turns up.

The tryanny of lists

I’m really no good at DIY but I am good at lists and ticking them off. Although there’s always a list forming in my head, I have been a bit less ‘listy’ of late, so it was with renewed fervour that I raced through a to-do list this week, so much so that I couldn’t stop.

Life always gets a bit intense before I go overseas – I’ve got about 12 sleeps to go – and the devil is definitely in the detail. Today I tried to print off my train ticket from Vienna to Zurich (a bargain 49 Euros for a seven and a half hour scenic journey – if you can work out how to print off the ticket…). So drawing on my (rusty) university German, I called the OBB, the Austrian railway, and got through to a most charming woman. I managed to explain the problem and found out that I had chosen the pick up at the counter option rather than online printing. Everything was going swimmingly until I realised I didn’t know how to end the conversation. Luckily the woman got in before me and I remembered it’s Auf Wiederhoeren – meaning until we hear each other again – rather than Auf Wiedersehen (as in pet, anyone remember the British comedy?) – until we meet again. Another thing for the list: brush up my Deutsch!

Back to the DIY: one of my jobs has been to re-paint a couple of shelves in the bathroom as the paint had peeled off in two sections where a bottle of essential oil had spilt. I duly went into the shed for the vile oil-based enamel paint that the rip-off painters (see https://thisquirkylife.com/2014/06/24/renovations-stopped-play/) had used back in July. Then I put on some really old clothes, set up the dust sheets, did a bit of light sanding, pulled on a pair of special gloves (last time I got paint all over my hands and even my nose!) and did a reasonable job only spilling a bit of paint on the glass shower screen. Once completed, I felt proud to have done the job and celebrated by taking Bertie to the park. I met a fellow dog walker and apologised for smelling of turps. She said she couldn’t smell anything but noticed I had quite a bit of paint in my hair… It never ceases to amaze me that I am perfectly competent in many areas of my life but develop Mr Bean-like tendencies when it comes to home maintenance.

In between the freelance writing, I’ve also done some cooking (got my former (elderly) neighbours for morning tea this weekend), cleaned my high maintenance black and white bathroom floors, went to ALDI, op shops, second-hand furniture shops, prepared my spare room for next week’s Airbnb photo shoot, cleaned up my garden and leaf-strewn carport and took photos of my house to show folks back home. I also put up three small pictures in my guest bathroom (a few holes short of precise but my bodged attempts were easily covered) and then zipped off to JB HI-FI for new back-up drive (the old one died) and an HDMI cable so I can watch films playing on my computer on the TV screen. All very satisfying stuff but rather helter skelter, achievement-driven and rushed. So I’ve been delighted by the series of beautifully written and well observed blog posts from a friend who is a WWOOFER (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) in Japan. She’s living with a very eco-minded family who have a deep connection to the land, observe rituals and live with precision, total attention and mindfulness, qualities that are uncommon in today’s ego-driven materialist world. Her blog is called A Man, A Woman and Four Languages, and I thoroughly recommend it.

“Yesterday evening I was given a lethal hatchet knife to slice up spring onions. But my 3mm slices weren’t good enough; 1mm was what was required. Not for the first time I felt very uncivilised. So, this morning, when Rie asked me to arrange some umeboshi plums from the bin where they’d been soaking in brine, to a flat basket, to dry, I made sure that they were arranged exactly as briefed. Which meant really slowing down, and concentrating. It’s the same with the gardening, because of the approach to weed control”

How do they get anything done when it all takes so long? I asked her over email. She replied “most of their life centres on the basics of growing, cooking, cleaning, washing, heating, maintaining. And these tasks aren’t chores to be completed as fast as possible; they are the stuff of life, i.e. the end as much as the means. ….doing jobs as quickly as possible isn’t the point.

I really must hurry up and look at self-publishing my book titled, SLOWING Down in the Fast Lane: From Adventure to Zen and Everything in Between.