A week later

A week later and much has happened.

For starters, clearly I have fallen off the NCLM caravan. I tried to make the time, I really did, but to no avail. I discovered my life is just too full to be able to manage 1-2hrs per day at the computer, as much as I enjoyed finding out about other people and their stories. I will endeavour to return all comments left, but cannot promise they will be within any particular specified time frame.

Things are moving quickly with my tutoring job and I have spent a lot of time this week on research and development of a tailored program, with help from B’s teacher and a literacy specialist. He is still keen as mustard and his mother has found someone else who wants to avail themselves of my services, so it looks like I might be getting even busier.

I managed about 5 loads of washing this week, vacuumed the house and cleaned all the lounge room windows. Oh alright, only about 12 of them. I couldn’t be bothered with the other 14 as they needed a ladder. Yesterday I listened to an interview with Philip Pullman on His Dark Materials Trilogy as I ironed a week’s worth of shirts and trousers (now I am only a week behind instead of 3 weeks behind). Today I managed to get 7 assorted varieties of broccoli plants in the ground in between cleaning C’s house, filling the car with petrol, checking the mail, doing a quick shop, putting a script into the pharmacy, having my beta tested (YES, STILL!!) and rushing off to my tutoring job (15 min drive) after stuffing my face with a quick smoked salmon- and-avocado-on-corn-thins lunch. But I didn’t manage to catch the nursery woman with whom I have placed my fruit tree order although I phoned her twice. Oh well, on tomorrow’s list it goes….

Nothing is happening on the bathroom renovation front, but because of this, we have a nightly visitor to our upstairs (outside) bath/shower. The resident possum has decided he likes to eat soap. Of course, it is locally hand made goats milk apple and cinnamon flavoured soap, so I guess we can’t blame him. However, after the first couple of 11pm forays and *crash!bang!wallop!* there-goes-the-shampoo-again events designed to wake us with a start just as we were settling in for a deep sleep, we brought the soap inside each night (except once when DH forgot). Sadly, the possum is now a victim of very effective partial reinforcement conditioning, and returns with quotidian regularity just in case he gets lucky. We have now had to bring the shampoo inside also. (Because he knocks it over in the bath, the lid pops open and it leaks. Expensively). Which is all very well until you get out there in the dark and freezing cold, finally get your kit off and are now wet all over, when you remember you’ve forgotten a certain important something. Namely soap and shampoo….

To other matters: The books by my bedside table do not seem to be diminishing in any great hurry. Last month I counted 21. Yesterday I also counted 21. Yet in the last week alone I have finished at least 4. This is my dilemma:

I order books in through the library when I come across good reviews or recommendations. Sometimes they are so new the State library system has not yet even received them, sometimes other people are reading them and sometimes other people are reading them and there is also a long queue behind them. So I go on a waiting list.

Now, it is a bit of a lottery as to when any book one has requested becomes available, and they generally pop up like unexpected treats over the course of any given week or month. But I had a dearth for ever such a long time (perhaps a month?) that I was driven to the point of putting even MORE requests in. Hoping something, ANYTHING would be available in the coming week. I am not sure why, as I already had a great pile of books of my own waiting to be read. And if that were not enough, which is most certainly should have been, this interval also neatly coincided with my birthday. For which I received at least four books (five if you count Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook, and I do – I have often been known to take one of these tomes to bed for reading pleasure), of which I am still reading/dabbling in concurrently Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur and Rogue Economics by Loretta Nopleoni. [I finished The Observations by Jane Harris in one day. Greedy? I think I might have to admit to it.]

And so it transpires – you know what’s coming, the irony – that everything is turning up at once!! Not a day passes that I don’t receive a phone call “This is the library, we have a book for you to collect.” Or “This is the library, we have another book for you to collect.” [I also order talking books, to transfer onto my laptop and reroute wirelessly through my stereo to play while I am ironing, or cooking, or doing other domestic duties that require my eyes and hands but not necessarily my ears. I just finished 44 Scotland Street by Alexander Mc Call Smith, and Eating For England by Nigel Slater arrived the following day. I haven’t begun as I am too bust getting through the backlog of podcasts from ABC radio National and then there’s the Classic Tales Podcasts to see about…]

So I have finished and despatched Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling while traipsing through How to talk about books you haven’t read by Pierre Bayard a few chapters at a time. Today I collected Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill. Phew. So, back to 21 again. Among those I own myself (or have borrowed from friends who don’t mind waiting a while before they see it again) that I am itching to get my eyes on a little further down the pile (and in no particular order) are:
The Hidden Connections by Fritjof Capra
The Science of Happiness by Stefan Klein
Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

Which I will intersperse, for levity, with:
Mrs Kimble by Jennifer Haigh
Mr Golightly’s Holiday by Sally Vickers
Rashomon by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

And at this stage I won’t even mention the other eight or nine languishing at the end of the pile. (Or the twenty or so others that lay in wait on the shelf above my bed…)

However I will mention that last night I dipped into The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. I have not opened this book for nigh on ten years. DH was reading it off and on for a while, alongside his Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. He asked me if there was anything we could do for my Aunt as she lay dying, and when I replied that she was dying, what could we do for her? he passed me the book. I flicked through to the section on the process of dying and saw that there was indeed something I could do. I imagine Christians might call it praying. The Yogis believe that meditation offered to a dying soul can ease their passing. And so I lit a candle (my favourite and most special candle I had been saving for I did not know what occasion) and I lay down and drifted to sleep after about an hour of meditating just for her. It was so deeply peaceful. The candle burned to the end. This morning, she was gone.

I have not yet had time to cry.

She will be dearly missed.