I was all over the place today.  Crying and not crying.  A throat full of burning lumps like held-back vomit.  Eyes hot and sandpapery.  And that feeling, the heavy-tight feeling, clenching the suboccipital muscles into bundles of gristle, with that impending sense of doom.  But the doom wasn’t impending.  The thing of dreadful fear had already happened.  Still, it was hard to fully inflate my lungs.

I called on BabyMac to find a perfect birthday cake to bake for my friend, ‘cos BabyMac knows a thing or two about sucking the good stuff outa life.

The cake is called Anne.  She’s big and sweet and full of goodness.  Four eggs from happy chooks.  Lashings of magnificent butter worth it’s weight in gold (no, really, it costs the same as gold).  And a shit load of sugar.  My mate would have loved Anne.  Anne has quite a heft about her.  She’s not for the faint of heart.  And my friend was not faint-hearted.  She was a tough bugger.  And she didn’t mind a cake.

So I baked Anne, and I shared her around.  I gave some to my family, some to my neighbours and some to a gorgeous friend.  I didn’t tell them why I’d given them some Anne to feast on, but they sent me back loving messages, and pictures, just the same.  Anne is that kind of cake.  She makes an impact, and I think she likes to get around a bit.  Anne likes making people smile, making them rub their bellies, and push back their chairs as they lick her last crumbs off their plate.  Anne reminds us of what it’s like to be alive, and nourished, under this big wide sky of potential.  Anne reminds us to savour all of the flavours of life, to taste as many different things as we can, and to devour every last morsel.

Turns out, Anne is a lot like my friend.  I think they would have liked each other.

Happy Birthday Hayls.  I saved you a bit of Anne. Bon Apps.

…From The Ashers xx

Thinking of my big hearted friend, today.

Happy Birthday Hayls.

I will play Green Spandex thirty seven times, and probably have a cry.  (I’m already crying.)

Things I would rather be doing:

Choosing you a present.

Talking to you on the phone, or even better, in person.

Discussing what the birthday celebrations are gonna be.

Doing some Jump Dancing.

Teasing your husband because he got you something weird (That of course, you loved. Because: also weird.).

Agreeing with you that your best gift would be to have Ricki here to share the day with you.  If only you could have that.

Shit, I’d even give you a cuddle.

I don’t like this game.

I didn’t like the cancer game either.  I kept on wishing for it to be over so we could get on with our real plans.  I think John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”  The same goes for death, I guess.  I remember you saying once, about someone who had died, and who’s loved ones were consoling themselves with the stories about how they had “had a good life” and that they “died on their own terms”, that they were still dead, and dead for a long time.

It is long.

And yet it’s not even a year.

It feels like a lifetime and a minute.

I don’t know what is worse.

I just bloody miss ya.

…From The Ashers xx

It’s been a funny old week this week hasn’t it?  What with super moons and cold days and a feeling of melancholy lurking around the edges of everything.  Did you hold your people close to you this week?  I bet you did.  It’s time to shake off the week, so here are the Hits:

1.  This little cup.  I ordered it from Nespresso with my coffee supplies this month, mainly because it is called Ritual, and I really love the idea of that, a daily coffee ritual (I’m a marketing person’s dream).  I was planning on gifting it, but then I found it was a SCIENCE CUP.  It came with it’s very own brochure, possibly researched at the Ponds Institute.  It tells me that it has a carefully calculated height and diameter to release the aromas fully, it is slightly curved to allow for smooth pouring of the coffee, it has a concave base for a perfectly formed crema and it is made from light porcelain to keep the coffee at the ideal temperature (WHAT?).  I shit you not, this is a the actual truth (according to the brochure).  So, as you can imagine, I can’t possibly give it away now, because: science.

Perfect science cup, you shall be mine… Allll mine…

2.  I follow a clairvoyant lady on FB, and she sometimes does a selection of cards.  I chose this one yesterday, and I love it.  I think she meant it for all of us.

3.  As you RRs know, we said goodbye to Watters this weekend, but he left us with a most precious gift, in the form of this card.  So cute.  I am pleased and honoured that we were able to be part of teaching a kid about some of the greatness that resides within.  We don’t always know how we will fare in the face of new challenges and situations, and Watters, at 11years of age did it with grace and an infectious sense of fun.  His Mum sent me an email thanking us for giving him an experience that was “bigger than him”.  Mwah Mrs.Watters.

4. Free shit.

Sometimes in my line of work people bring me stuff.  It can be amazing produce from their garden, little gifts of chocolate or wine or beer, or even little things they see when at the shops and know that I’ll love.  Anything from essential oils or scented candles, through to picnic blankets, and did I mention beer?  I must have been particularly nice this week, because I received a bounty: a box of choccies, a bottle of wine, some special peppercorns, some champagne flutes, some lemons, and these babies:

Yeah, I know, I have the best job in the world, but even better, I have the best patients in the world.  If any of you happen to be reading, you rock.

5.  Stairway to Heaven.  Liam is learning it on guitar, so we have been listening to it on the way to school every day, and have used old video of ‘Money Or The Gun’ with all the versions of Stairway, as a musical education.  Embarrassingly, I realised I’ve never played them The Doors, or even the B52s, so we have had a musical education this week, ripping out the old vinyl.  So much fun.  A good reason to have kids.

How was your week?  Any hits involving hits?

…From The Ashers xx

I have a confession to make.

The kids and I started doing a hybrid-style yoga thingy that I made up a few weeks ago, in an effort to counteract all the forward head carriage that I am worrying and worrying about in children these days.  All the devices.  All the gaming.  And all of that four or five kilograms of cranium sitting forward of it’s optimal position.  Putting all that strain of the anterior structures.  Messing with optimal neural function.

It’s my latest thing, this anterior head thing, so I decided to start in my own home, and get the kids yoga-ed up.

The first thing I found out (after noticing that I am, in fact, quite shit at yoga) is that I can’t touch my toes.

I know.  The shame of it.  The smug little chiro doesn’t have normal range of motion of the lumbar spine.  Great.

Flash forward a few weeks and the Evil Geniuses have long since grown tired of this early morning yoga-ish idea of mine, but I can’t let it go.  So today I was out on my balcony in the drizzling Sunrise cool, when an extraordinary thing happened.  I was doing my modified Sun Salute, and by modified, I mean the only bit of it I can remember from ten and a half years ago when I did some pregnancy yoga classes.  Back when my mind was still intact, and I could in fact, touch my hands on the ground.

I was looking out towards the beach, observing the grey sky, and trying to be at one with nature.  To expand my mind, but not to engage in any thoughts.  To be at peace.

In reality I was making a list of the tasks of the day, wishing the clouds and the winter away, and thinking how, yes I was doing a kind of yoga thing, but that it wasn’t enough.  That ten minutes a day didn’t really cut it.  That these meagre stretches weren’t enough to reverse a decade of bodily neglect.  That I wasn’t stretching enough, meditating enough, doing enough, being enough.  That I had too much to do today and I wouldn’t get it all done because I didn’t have enough time, enough energy, enough ambition.

It didn’t matter that these ten minutes were ten more than I did a few weeks ago, I still judged myself unkindly and harshly, because I wasn’t enough.  I wondered if I would ever be enough.  Have enough.  Do enough.

And it got me to thinking and sifting through all of the internal dialogue to find all of the times in my life when I have said, “Good on you, you have done all that you could, and that is enough.”  There weren’t many times.

So as I stretched those contracted hamstrings, I started to stretch those neural pathways that keep me in stuck in place, the ones that belie that no matter how much I do, it just won’t be enough.  I breathed deeply into the tight muscles and the tight mind, and said out loud.  “I am enough.”

And as I did, my fingertips brushed the tiny, fine hairs on my toes.  Almost, almost, almost touching my toes for the first time in many years.

I looked up, just in time to see the sun break through the silver clouds.

Today is a new day.

A new reality.

And I am enough.

Are you enough?  What stops you from feeling enough?

…From The Ashers xx

So many blogs about Robin Williams today.  So many heartfelt sentiments.  So much discussion about suicide and depression and speaking out about our emotions.  So much, that I don’t feel like I have much to offer as a unique perspective, but somehow I feel want to say something, to mark this strange day.

To say thank you to a man who spoke to me as a young person in Dead Poet’s Society and Good Will Hunting.  Who brought me those stories at a time when they were just what I needed to hear.

A man, who it appears was wracked with internal conflict I know nothing about.  It seems to me, that might be just how it is when people are fighting their own internal battles.  When they try to explain, it just sounds like gibberish.

I hope that one day soon, that won’t be the case.

RIP Robin.

…From The Ashers xx

...she shivered with anticipation as she realised that he wasn’t getting ready to play gently in her lady-garden, but that she was about to be punished, with a spanking…

Nah, just kidding.  We aren’t going to be talking about spankings but spanxings.  There isn’t much I won’t do for you RRs (well, maybe except for spankings), so I have done the research, and I’m back here with the report.  Don’t ever say I don’t tackle the big issues for y’all.

It all came about when I was shopping for a new outfit for THAT TALK, and the excellent chicks at Country Road were giving me the big ups, telling me how gorgeous I looked in this outfit, how cute I looked in that, and no, my bum did not look big in the other.  So big were the ups, that it came as quite a shock when I poured my all of my adipose tissue into a saucy little number that my new best friends said I would look so hot in, and they all stood back and said, “Hmmm.”

Looks were exchanged.

I could see there was something that someone needed to tell me, but I had no idea what it could be, when I was looking sooo hot.

At last, amidst nudgings and throat clearing, the speaker was chosen.

“Ummm.  I think you just need the right underwear.”

I craned my neck around (which I will admit made my chin to neck region look very taut and took years off my profile), to see the dreaded VPL.  I was already wearing the ‘right’ underwear.  Seamless.  Flimsy.  In fact, my best no-line knickers were apparently making lines, or more like, those little accent thingies (cedillas?), as they rolled in and out my undulating derriere.

Like this ~~~~~~~~~~

Interesting, but strangely, not really the look I was after.

So what was this mysterious, and so far elusive ‘right underwear’?

“You need Spanx,” by stylish new friends said, “Get thee to Myer immediately.”

And so without further ado, I did as I was bid, and found myself at the mercy of a matronly type who peered at my flabby bits and hanging down blobs, over her spectacles, grabbing here, pinching there.  Not since that fateful day in the gym when the trainer used the callipers on what he euphemistically called my ‘skin folds’ and deemed me to be 33% composed of fat*, had my tuckshop arms, upper thighs, back and muffin-top undergone so many nips.  With many “Hmmmms” and a few “Ahhhhs” she stepped back and had a really long look at me, eyes travelling up and down my body.  I’ve felt more comfortable trying to jump the queue to a nightclub and letting the bouncer cop an eyeful.

“Okay, you need these and maybe this”, she said, handling me some bike shorts and a singlet in that fetching shade of beige reserved for medical apparel.  I held them up.  Yes, definitely medical, in fact, they looked Paediatric size.  “Go on,” the matriarch said, “go and squeeze yourself into them.  Let me know if you need… mumble help.”  I swear she said Vaseline.  I think she was smirking.

I won’t bore you with the hot and sweaty pushing and pulling and stretching and breathing-in details, but it came to pass that I purchased these:

for research purposes…

They cost almost as much as the dress, which still hasn’t been worn, because the very day I was putting it on as quickly as possible to avoid anyone in my house walking in and seeing the horror that is my post-menopausal life, Nathan walked in.  And Nathan saw.

Saw me in all my latex-clad beauty.

He took one look, laughed, and left the room sniggering, but not without saying over his shoulder, “Nice Tour de Noosa shorts.”  I thought a pretty good swear in my head that ends with ‘off’ and thought other vengeful thoughts about how much marital bliss I would penalise him for, for that comment.

And then I looked down and my nude-coloured, shiny, bulging thighs.

I think I might be the one who isn’t getting any.

Have you been Spanxed yet?  What do you think about ‘shapewear’?

*I shit you not, 33 PER CENT!!  What the?  I weigh around 57kgs, and 33% of that is fat.  That’s around 20kgs of FAT.  By the look on the trainer’s face, that is quite a lot.

…From the Ashers xx