Yay for me

After two long months slogging away in Wordpress, I've finally launched my new website - www.freezecheese.com.

Yay for me!

I am starting afresh as a freelance writer, something I have always wanted to do but, dare I say it, never quite worked up the courage to do so. It's funny how it's the things so close to one's heart that are the hardest to achieve. Or maybe take the most courage to achieve.

So, I am pitching stories to magazines but also planning small business work - blogging, editing, marketing, and proof reading. 

I am also ironing out a few kinks in Wordpress such as how to transfer my Blogger followers and redirect my site automatically. Bear with me, I will figure it out. 

So, if you come across this page, feel free to click over to my new site. It rocks! And it has all my Chile posts on there as well. 

I will eventually close this one altogether - because the blogosphere is just littered with discarded blogs that their owners (or blog hosts) should really delete. 

I have really enjoyed writing The Three Amigos and am sad to say goodbye. I'm so proud of my work here and my commitment to writing it, even on those days I couldn't think of anything to say!

I hope you enjoyed reading it too. 

Adios. 

Happy birthday, Canberra

Monday 11th March was Canberra's 100th birthday. That's a big milestone.

100 years ago, Lady Denham, wife of the then Governor-General (that's the Queen's representative - a little reminder that Australia is still part of the British Commonwealth), officially declared Canberra to be our nation's capital.

Side fact: According to the travel writer Bill Bryson, in his very amusing book, Down Under, no one actually briefed Lady Denham as to the pronounciation of this great city and so, she kind of said it wrong: Can-berra as opposed to Can-berra.
I thought that was funny.

Canberra celebrated its birthday with a public holiday, aptly named Canberra Day, and a whole horde of events, music, parties, hot air balloons, festivities and fireworks around the lake and beyond. It was a beautiful, warm autumn day, blue skies and a nice breeze over the water.

We toddled down there in the evening just for a couple of hours and the atmosphere was great - cheerful, relaxed and enjoying life. Australians do that well. It made me so glad to be home.

Here's a great article from the Riot Act on the day. And some pictures of the day filched from online. 

 

 

 

 

It's a pity we couldn't see more but that's just life when you have little kids and sleep times are the fixture of the day, around which all other events must be planned.

Also, we were tired. The long weekend was particularly long for Lara and I as we spent most of it in hospital.

My poor little girl picked up a nasty bug that sent her temperature soaring and us running to the hospital on Friday evening. The doctors freaked me out a bit too because they were worried it could be meningitis. Thankfully it wasn't. But we didn't find that out until after a particularly long blood test; they couldn't find a vein in her chubby little arms and feet and jabbed her four times.

After all my trips to Clinica Alemana in Chile, I wasn't expecting to see the inside of another hospital for a while. So, I feel quite a bit guilty that my not-yet-four-month old got sick on my watch. But the emergency doctors and nurses and paediatric staff were excellent. We had our own room and didn't have people traipsing in and out of it at all hours.

And once the fever broke and I knew she was out of the woods, being in hospital wasn't so bad, kind of like an enforced break.

Except that there were all sorts of fun things going on elsewhere.

Such is life. I had lots of time for cuddles with Lara and to be grateful for everything I have. Happy birthday, Canberra.

On loss and love

Last week, a very good friend in Chile had an awful thing happen to her family. I cried when I heard about it and have been thinking of her constantly. I can't imagine her devastation. 

In these situations, words seem so inadequate, especially when written in an email. I feel so very far away. I wish I were closer, even though my friend doesn't want to see or talk to anyone right now. So I don't know if my being physically closer would be for me or her. Grief affects us all differently. 

I really wanted to write and say something supportive and heartfelt. I worried that I'd sound awkward or inadvertently insensitive. I went to the baby forums online and found that my question had been asked before. Dozens of brave and selfless mothers had shared their own stories of loss.

They described different reactions to the people who reached out to them: some embraced family, others pulled away. Some cherished every card, gift and flower while others threw them out, banishing the thought that they should otherwise have been received in celebration. Some said they couldn't stand to be around women who were pregnant or had small babies, preferring instead the company of strangers. Most spoke of being in shock and limbo for a long time wanting only to cry and rage and mourn alone. 

Without exception, all said they needed people to acknowledge the loss of a most special and beloved person. A beautiful baby just like any other. And that what hurt them most was not awkward condolences but people, friends even, who found it too awkward to say anything at all. 

And so, maybe it isn't what you say but that you try to say something at all. That you find some words to reach out and just tell your friend that you are there for them if they need you, or if they don't.

J, I am thinking of you and your darling boy, every day. 

Damn you, Wordpress

Far too much of my precious time of late has been spent on my new website and blog. According to anyone who's anyone, Wordpress is where it's at for the serious blogger, new business starters or both. It has thousands of designs, heaps of features, is easy to use, etc. WP itself claims to be "well known for its ease of installation".

Bulls**t. 

What nobody mentions is that you need a degree from MIT to actually get a decent site up and running. 

With said degree in hand, yes, WP is a piece of cake to install, manage and edit. Super fun even. 

Let's back up a bit and put all this in context. 

I'm not talking about the dramas of choosing a web host, setting up a domain name and transferring a blog from Blogger to Wordpress. That is also an enormous and frustrating pain in the bum. And I should say here that I'm not a complete stranger to web editing and development either. I taught myself HTML and edited the website for one of my jobs in Vietnam. I know about FTP servers and cpanels and hosting.

(And if you think I'm talking jibber jabber, fear not, it gets worse).

I read an article about transferring Blogger to WP. Complex but I figured I could sort it out. What I didn't realise was that there were several activities within the steps and so each step took me many hours to work through. Of course, it didn't help that I decided to start this process when I had the most time, namely over the new year break. Evidently my web host's '24/7 support' didn't extend to public holidays.

Then I got to the part where you choose a theme. A theme is the layout of the website, what it looks like on the screen - how many columns, where the pictures go, the colours, the fonts, etc. WP has a default theme, Twenty Twelve, but there are hundreds of others to choose from, 1,694 to be precise. And they're all free.

Twenty Twelve

Pretty amazing, eh? You'd think I'd be able to pick one easily enough. So many of them are very pretty with great photos and neat tricks. 

Pinboard

PageLines

Photologger

The problem is not the shortage of theme choices but that all the choices have one thing in common - a complete lack of control and finesse for the non-techno person. It is assumed that if you want to take full and proper advantage of WP you'll be able to debate the finer points of HTML, PHP and MySQL over breakfast any day of the week.

Basically, WP users have three choices:

a) This is the easiest path. The vast majority of WP bloggers search the theme pool, pick one and stick with it. Or they just go with the default option of Twenty Twelve. They don't need to change anything about the design and they don't want to. It suits their needs and looks pretty, so good for them.

b) Don't try this one at home (take it from me). The people who really love and make the most of WP are IT superstars. They pick a theme they like, fiddle around with the HTML and PHP coding and hey presto, have the website they want with all sorts of fancy features.

c) This is the most effective and sensible solution - pay for what you want. If you want a great website but thought PHP was a hallucinogenic drug, hire a developer to do all the work for you. This is what most businesses and serious bloggers do. It's just too damn hard and time consuming trying to do it yourself. 

So what's my problem?

If I was planning an ordinary blog, I would pick option a) of course and I'd thoroughly enjoy sifting through so many interesting themes until I'd found the prettiest one. And if I wasn't broke and a bit of a finicky person who likes to learn how to do everything myself, I'd go with option c). As it is, I'm a bit stuck.

I know exactly how I want it to look - clean and simple. I want control over small details such as font, colour and format. The simpler the theme, I think, the more important the details. 

But do you think of the 1,694 themes I could find something to fit the bill? Hells, no. It is incredibly frustrating that with all those fabulous themes, almost none of them allow you to personalise the theme beyond picking a colour and the background image.

After much, much searching (and I really resent this waste of time especially when I do most of my work while baby is sleeping or at night when everyone is sleeping), I did find this one theme that allowed a lot of changes. A monumental amount of options in comparison to almost every other theme I've seen which allow maybe, two options. That theme is graphene. 

I was oh so tempted to keep this theme solely for the options it affords. It was very exciting to have so much flexibility. But to be honest, I don't have a lot to put on my site right now so I don't need the cool features like the slider and all those drop down menus.

Apart from the theme search, what is really annoying is that WP requires a thorough and painstaking search of the 'help' forums (my sarcastic inverted commas there) to figure out how to do anything. Such as changing the colours, the size of the fonts, inserting social media links (facebook, twitter, etc), changing the date format, removing the categories etc.

I have a wishlist as long as my arm and another the same length of concerns. I don't know what will happen to my Blogger followers. Some of my current links and comments are missing. The pictures look strange because they aren't centred. A whole bunch of posts have no spaces between paragraphs, how dumb is that? I have to add the space (br /) in the code for each paragraph. When I imported my posts it duplicated them (which isn't supposed to happen) so I now have 850 posts and have to manually remove all the extra ones. Grrr. 

Blogger, I miss you already and I haven't even left.

Basically, it's all just hard and very time consuming. And the clock's a-ticking. Anyway, I must stop fussing over details and just publish the damn thing. Then get on with the point of it all - the actual writing. 

By the way, if you haven't fallen asleep by now, thank you. Here's something more interesting to read - my review for The Blurb this week. Don't bother with the movie; my account of it is time better spent. 
   

Wistful thinking

I confess of late that I have been shooting wistful glances at child-free women. The ones strolling through the supermarket or casually browsing in a bookshop. Faces calm and rested, wearing nice clothes and neat hair, with just a handbag over their shoulder and perhaps a takeaway coffee in hand. 

Not like me in other words. Haggard and dishevelled, with baby poo stains on my clothes and hair messily pulled back in a bun from when I stepped into the shower and then forgot to do anything with it afterwards. Not me, furiously jiggling the pram, too distracted by baby's howls to buy what I need and so often walking out of the shop without having bought anything. 

Yeah, yeah, I know my children are the light of my life, my reason for being, the best thing ever, blah blah, but oh... sometimes I just wish I were child-free with zero responsibilities beyond paying the rent. I would have time to run a brush through my hair, look in the mirror before leaving the house, shop, read, sleep, and eat without wolfing down my food. I also flatter myself that my standards of self respect would mean I wash the baby poo out immediately from my clothes (if such a substance ever happened to land there), instead of sometime, whenever, just not right now. 

Actually, this morning I took Maya and Lara over to a new neighbours' place and introduced ourselves. Looking in the mirror afterwards, I saw that I was wearing daggy grey trackpants, birkenstocks and a navy singlet with my bra straps showing. In fact, I may not even have done my bra up properly after nursing (whoops). Lara regurgitated her milk onto me while we were there and I still stayed another ten minutes. Sigh. I can only hope my winning smile and cheery personality meant such follies were overlooked.  

We are also going through rather a trying time with Maya. A time that means she resists doing everything we ask her to do. And does so with a very cheerful no! and an expression of complete innocence. It is is exhausting. I feel that I am forever arguing, persuading, cajoling, bribing and threatening her into doing things all day long - eating, dressing, walking, sleeping, cleaning, etc. Even things that I know she wants to do, like put on her new favourite shoes to go to the park. I don't want to go to the park, I'd much rather stay home, yet I find myself asking her 25 times to put on her shoes. Each time she replies with "What? What, Mummy?" and I have to repeat myself all over again.

I also do a whole lot of shushing her because Lara's asleep (or trying to sleep). I must say "please be quiet because Lara's sleeping" at least 300 times a day. To which she replies "Okay Mummy, sorry Mummy" and then ten seconds later is shrieking again like a banshee. I know she understands me because she parrots that demand back to me when one of her toys are 'sleeping'. 

I don't want to always be telling her off or getting cranky with her, and at the same time I feel bad that I'm spending 90 per cent of my time and energy on Maya. It's hardly fair to little Lara. Luckily she doesn't notice or mind and it won't be long before she's crawling around after Maya anyway. Until then, they are very sweet together, Maya adores her and tells everyone Lara is her baby sister (particularly when we pick her up at jardin and the little kids swarm around us like bees). She even shoos me away at times, "Mummy, this is my baby".

I told my friend Richard of my child-free envy and he said he sees the child-free women looking wistfully at the young mums. I don't know about that. Kids are a pain in the bum. Even when they're also completely adorable with chubby, kissable cheeks. 

Oh, what's that noise?

We've just returned from three days in Sydney. It was great fun, just like a mini holiday. I even felt relaxed by the end of it. 

The weather was great, as Sydney weather almost always seems to be. Mostly, we went to the beach where Maya had an absolute ball. 

But then, she is having an absolute ball every time we go anywhere, or do anything. It's partly that she's old enough to appreciate places, and also that everything is so new. In Santiago, there isn't really that much to do for kids, not really. Except go to the park or an indoor play cafe or a friend's house. I got so tired of going to the park; after about a year I really loathed it. 

Perhaps the highlight of Maya's Sydney holiday were the planes. I've never seen anyone get that excited about an aeroplane. 

"Oh! Oh! What's that noise? It's a e-le-plane! Oh, what shall we doooo? Where's it going?" were the words she said every time she saw a plane in the sky. We were staying not too far from Sydney airport. Which means she saw about 3,000 planes. 

And then followed a discussion of what the plane looked like and where it might be headed. 

Occasionally Maya said it might be going to Chile. I think she thinks her old house in Santiago is just around here somewhere. I've tried explaining that we have left Chile and are now in Australia but all the different houses and places have been a bit confusing for her. Sometimes, when we're out in the car she asks, "When are we going to Maya's house in Chile?"

She also still asks for Jenny, or talks about her along with the rest of the family. I am glad Maya remembers Jenny and that she doesn't ask for her in a sad way. I guess she thinks she will see her again soon. 

It's a bittersweet time. 

The bug that was

The other thing that can happen when you load your plate up high is that you wear yourself out and get sick. 

Which is of course what happened to us. 

Az and I have had a bad gastro bug for the last six days. I'll spare you the details. Thankfully, Maya and Lara have been fine though I certainly do not recommend convalescing whilst trying to breastfeed and care for a newborn baby, and keep a very exuberant toddler fed, dressed, bathed and occupied throughout some very long days.

I've written this post many times in my head but I haven't been able to face looking at a computer screen for any period of time, except to stare slack-jawed at the odd episode of Big Bang Theory and give the occasional silent chuckle because it hurt too much to laugh out loud.

Poor me. Let's forget all about that sorry chapter. 

Meanwhile, we push on with home renovations and settling in. It's fun. The only part that isn't fun is watching our rapidly depleting bank balance.

And my first review in my review writing career has come out. I think it's quite good, if I say so myself.