On the way to school, the Evil Geniuses One and Two play a game where one tries to make the other laugh.  The other is supposed to remain stony-faced, and often arguments ensue over whether there was a change in expression.  Usually once one of them finds a mirth trigger, they just do it over and over (and over) again until the other one nearly pisses their pants.

Today Liam found a trip wire.  He made up a song that went a little like this:

I’m a magical unicorn, Flying through the sky, Pooping out rainbows, And shooting butterflies.

Which Coco found hilarious.  Of course.  Poo and shooting.  What’s not to love?

And that got me thinking about something I saw a little while ago on Smaggle‘s website.  Smaggle has a Kickstarter campaign going, where she is doing ‘Silly things for a bus’.  We pledge some money, and she will film herself doing something silly, in order to raise money for a bus for the special development school she works at.  So I told the kids about a few of the things she is willing to do, chiefly: to go into an ice-cream shop buy an ice-cream, ask them if they believe in unicorns and before they answer, smoosh the cone on her forehead, and gallop out of the shop.

The kids thought this was so entertaining they laughed the rest of the way to school.  I’m not telling if anyone suffered hilarity incontinence, but I will reveal that Coco did say, “Stop it Mummy, a piece of wee is coming out.”

As they were being dumped getting out of the car they asked if they could buy that unicorn-silly-thing with their pocket money.

My heart almost busted out of me, with pride.  And then I remembered they spent all their money on Pokemon cards last week.  So guess who is now buying a silly unicone ice-cream stunt?

Turns out they may not be so evil after all.  Seems they are geniuses though.

Check out Smaggle’s thingy  HERE.  Maybe you’d like to make her do a silly thing for a bus too. 

Random Unicat is not happy. No money raised.

…From The Ashers xx

If you follow many Aussie blogs you’ll probably already know there was a Problogger conference this weekend on the Gold Coast.

Surfers: The view from The QT

There are people more experienced and more savvy than me who can tell you how it all went down, and I don’t suppose you’d be all that interested in what I learned over the weekend anyway, but I do want to tell you two things, both consisting of equal and opposite energy for me, just like Newton told us it would be.

Firstly, at the end of Day One I was completely bereft.

I thought this was the most soul-destroying seminar I’d ever been to.

Problogger is, as I’m sure you’ll have figured out, about monetising your blog.  Being paid to blog.  I’ve been blogging for just over a year, and I had an idea that being paid to do this might be something I could do.  But as the day wore on, it became patently obvious that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing here, with respect to earning buck$ for blogging.  I don’t have a niche, a specific tone, or a message.  I don’t provide anything useful, nor do I solve any of your problems.  I don’t have products or ideas to sell you. I’m a personal blogger, and that means this space is all about me.  Not really the kind of thing that lends itself to paid content or advertising.  Two other things also became obvious: I have no clue what all the techy stuff is about (SEO, what?) and being a paid blogger appears to involve a shit-load of work.  So two things I do.not.like appear to be important.

So I almost ditched the whole remainder of the seminar to quaff Cosmopolitans by the pool.

Some would say this is a pattern of mine, but I’d tell them to shut up and mind their own.

Luckily, I was there with a mate who knows me better than I know myself most times, and she pretty much forbade me to miss a single Saturday session.  Which was a good thing, for redemption was just around the corner, in the guise of Matthew Michalewicz, heralding the second big thing I needed to know.

He reminded me of many things that I needed a nudge with, and most of all, the concept that when we say we can’t do something, what we really mean, is that the motivation isn’t great enough.  Yet.  I may have said I could not learn all the computery things required to run this blog properly, but as Matthew would say; if my whole family would die if I didn’t figure it out, I probably could.  And fast.

And of course, as always, a concept that applies to you in one area of your life, will cross over into others.  This “I can’t” mantra doesn’t only apply to my bloggy life, but to my work, my family, my finances.  I can.  I just need compelling leverage.  Which also involves going back to the original idea, the thing I’m saying I can’t do, and double check that it is something that I really want, and that it isn’t just some notion that I’ve grabbed from the air, or from someone else’s bag of tricks.  The difference between something I should do and something I want to do.

Sometimes it’s good to get a whack of perspective when I’m being a big whining baby.

And a free book.

Thanks Matthew xx

Is there anything you’ve been saying you can’t do (that you claim you want to do)?

What do you do or say to yourself to get your mojo back?

…From The Ashers xx

I love Surfers Paradise.

I love the buildings that are trying to reach the clouds, and keep the beach a secret.  I love the lurid pink neon, and the noise of traffic and tension.  I love the seedy bars, and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not? and the smell of salt and carbon monoxide mixed together.  I love the tattoos, and the bustling energy, and the women who look twenty-two from behind and sixty-five in the face.

But I don’t love the cafes.  And that’s okay, because I don’t come to the Goldy for fine food and wine, I come for fun, and a taste of something a little wilder, and little bit more edgy than my perfectly arranged seaside town.  I come for a little bit of naughty.

Today I found a little gem that I didn’t expect.  Nestled between restaurants in the Soul Sea Temple complex is a special slice of Melbourne-Up-North.  Complete with a roof of tiles that could be from Flinders Street Station and walls of concrete that could be from the City Square, is Cafe Elston.

Cafe Elston

Industry lights

The staff are so pretty they could have been ripped out of an ad for Beat Magazine, with their carefully coiffed hair and beards and freshly inked forearms.  I could have spent most of the afternoon trying to read their cutely colourful body art, but there were Bennys and cheese boards to be eaten, Espresso Martinis to drink, and cupcakes to gorge on.  Even the beer list was something to savour, with ice cold White Rabbit and My Wife’s Bitter to slake a karaoke croaky throat.

Botanical Benny

It was love at first sight when I saw Cafe Elston, which bloomed into true love when I was presented with the delicate blossoms of dishes created by some arty chef in the kitchen.  I suspected they were constructed by a mincy little pixie but when I glimpsed him a couple of times during my extended stay, the incongruous was almost jarring: tattooed and blokey and more at home at a Nirvana concert than making fiddly floral food art.

Cheese Board

Butterscotch Cupcakes

Thanks Cafe Elston.  You have managed walk a fine line between urban and garden, with surprising prettiness and cheeky Surfers fun.  A playful slice of Paradise that has an attitude I want to hang around with.

Perhaps the Gold Coast is shedding some of her slightly tattered glittery clothes and acting her age.  I like it.

Have you been to the Gold Coast lately?

Where is your fave place to hang out on the Goldy?

…From The Ashers xx

So I’m here.

On the Gold Coast.

By myself.

I was by myself for three hours in the car, and then again when I arrived here, and all of the long, ripe Gold Coast night, and now again this morning. And it is very interesting.  So even though I will be amongst a massive gaggle of bloggers all weekend, and my beautiful mate from Melbourne, who I don’t see nearly enough, will be coming up to join me this afternoon, I’m still alone.

In that the things that will be required of me will be whatever I want.

Just me.

I have a very easy life, and a family that indulge my desire to write these things here.  I have a job that I love, and I get to live in a beautiful place of warm open skies.  I have kids that are funny when they are awake and sleep like hibernation every night.  I have a husband who is a champion among men who is by my side every step of the way.  So you wouldn’t think that there would be anything missing from the landscape of my world.

So perhaps it isn’t something missing, instead, something to be added in.  Perhaps I could sketch in a little area down around the bottom right corner of the landscape, a little area of space that could have just me in it.  Nothing else.  No bells or whistles or sparkly widgets and link-ups.  Just a squiggle representing itself.

Last night I had a beer and ate some cashews and just sat in the thick silence.  I looked at Twitter to see what the other conference attendees were up to, and a few friends messaged me to see what I was doing, so there were spurious connections with the outside world, but mostly I just opened up the balcony doors and listened to the tumble of the waves and the echo of the cars below.

There’s something wonderful about just sitting isn’t there?

My mind wandered around, looked for things to latch onto, and then let them recede.  Just like the ebb of the waves.  Still there, still relentlessly swirling, but not requiring any input from me to maintain their impetus.  And there is something extremely comforting in that.  The world will turn and turn and turn, regardless of whether I’m plugged in, or checked out.

Disclaimer: It might be easy to say all of this when this is the view from my bed:

Problem: the sun is too, umm, sunny to get a view of the beach for a photo.

How about you, do you love your time alone?

Tell me your number one way to sketch out a space for yourself.

…From The Ashers xx

It’s been a busy week around here with me working FULL TIME (I know, unheard of!) as well as fitting in being a FRONT PAGE celebrity in the local paper…  By the time you read this I will be safely ensconced in the bath seminar room of the QT, enjoying a weekend at the ProBlogger seminar, getting pissed and going to karaoke bars with Nikki enriching my mind with ALL of the things a pretend professional blogger needs to know.

So here are the hits:

1.  YOU.  As you RRs would know I plagued the blog with posts about the ridiculously low blood stores this week, going on and on and on about it, until you were all so sick of hearing about it, you went and gave up the claret.  Well done.  Maroochydore Blood Bank rang me and said they had a bumper week, and even though it’s still not enough, it’s something.  So goodonya you lot.  Coco and the rest of The Ashers thank you from the bottom of our corpuscles.

2.  My big, almost ten year old boy, Liam.  As you might have figured out by some of my posts, he hates his sister and even once wrote a note plotting out his vengeance.  See exhibit A.

Exhibit A

Despite that, this week he started up a blog of his very own, and THIS was his post on Day 3.  Warms the cockles of me old heart, I tells ya.

Oh, and feel free to checkout the whole blog.  He’s at DJ Asher.  He would love to get some comments… Like the one he got from his Uncle Darren, who said, “I usually don’t read shit blogs like your Mum’s, but I’ll read yours.”  Liam thought that was hilarious.  Don’t worry, I banned him from the computer for a week for that. (I can’t have him being more successful than me you know.)

The dude even added his own little category of YouTube videos, unbeknownst to us.  How?  We don’t know.  And so the world turns….

3.  This yummy spread.  How good is it when you have older patients who bring you in awesome stuff they’ve made?  Bloody good, is how good.  I got this baby from a lady this week.  It’s delish, AND cute, with a sweet little love-heart topper.  Who even does that these days?  Grouse old chicks, that’s who.

Mmmmm, lemmmon

4.  And whilst I’m going on about food, how good are these?  Have you had one?  Of course you haven’t because you can’t have just one.  You have to eat the whole damn packet.  A perfect sweety-salty treat to keep me going on my long afternoon shift.  It’s just a shame they cost a bomb (considering my consumption rate).  They aren’t as expensive as printer ink, but they are close.  Get yourself some anyway.  Just tell the kids they are healthy and then you can eat the lot yourself.

Pumpkin = Healthy

5.  The QT.  It’s very colourful, and a bit too crazy for my eyes to take it all in at once, but I think this extremely comfortable bed is going to suit me just fine.

So soft

The only drawback so far is that the minibar stinks of cantaloup.  I don’t know how or why, but it’s doing my head in (as Smelling All Of The Smells is my superpower.)   My $9 Corona has a distinctly unsavoury odour.  But I’m soldiering on.

Well that’s it from me…  Have a great weekend.  I suspect I will.

Send me your Hits if you have the time.  I’d love to hear what you’re up to.

…From The Ashers xx

As you RRs can tell, I’ve devoted this week to posts about transfusions and all things bloody.

The reason of course is that blood stores are at critically low levels this week, and as a mother of a vampire who drains these stores every three months, I have found myself in a strange situation where I am, by proxy, an advocate for the Blood Bank.  Of course Nath and I give blood ourselves every three months, so we give back the amount that Coco withdraws.  But still, not everyone has the luxury of being able to do that.  And so there is a deficit.

We do what we can to spread the word: we give talks at Thank You functions, we appear in the Blood Bank magazine, we go in the paper whenever they ask us, acting as part of the propaganda machine that runs these kinds of things.  And hopefully, now and again, we touch your hearts in such a way that you will be motivated enough to take an hour or so out of your day to donate 300mls of your most precious of fluids.

So here is another post from the vault, a more recent one, about Adaptation.

And remember, blood stores are critically low at present.  If you can donate, please do.

This week.  

Call 131495 to save three lives.

…From The Ashers xx