Saturday, January 19, 2008

The year ahead

Oops, I forgot to blog for a few weeks. Tassie was great. Go here why don't you? For less than $1000 a week you get your own beach access (which involves crossing the dearest little bridge), all the toys you could want, your own park with two swings, a walk to the best fish and chips you will ever have (from the Blowhole caravan) and a really, really comfortable little house with all the things you could possibly hanker after in a beach house.

So anyway, goodbye 2007, already forgotten. Hello 2000 and what now? 8? Jeepers creepers. Remember when the 21st century was this strange far away place with flying cars and aliens living among us and everybody wore silver PVC jumpsuits? Now it's just, well, this. And I'mm33. Pah. I am unsettled by odd numbers.

So this year I will:
*Have three (or four) books to write.
*Do a backroads tour in the Wimmera region in March for about four days, as well as judging a short story competition, which makes me a VPP (very powerful person). If you want to win you can try sending cash and chocolate to me through the mail. I can't guarantee anything, but hey, it certainly won't hurt your chances.
*Have to get my license. Yes. I am about to join the ranks of the driving. Do you think it's terribly lame that I got to 32 without getting my license? I first got my Learner's permit in 1991, when I was sixteen. So that means I've been learning to drive for about 17 years. On and off. But I've never needed a car before now. I always walked, rode or PTed everywhere I wanted to go. I moved out of home around my 18th birthday, and just about everyone I knew lived within a fifteen minute walk of my house. Besides, considering I've never really had a proper job, I couldn't afford a car.
*Drive Fred to her new kinder. The kinder is in Panton Hill and is about a 5km drive away. Walking is kinda out of the question unfortunately. We actually could have sent her to school this year but we're doing what everyone seems to be doing and waiting another year. The cut off date is 30 April and Fred's birthday is the 21st, so she would have been very little. And I don't think she's particularly ready for school. In fact she's not. At all. There's a little light in Fred, a sort of strangeness, that needs to get stronger before she goes to school or it might fizzle out. I don't want her strangeness to go away.
*Finish my masters...I finished my thesis this year, but I still have one subject to do, called writing for the unconscious, where they knock you out with a blunt instrument, drug you, put a pen in your hand and give you little electric shocks to reanimate your hand. Nah...I think it's all Freud and Lacan and penises and mothers and stuff. Which you know, might have been handy to do BEFORE I wrote my thesis on Freud and Lacan and penises and mothers and stuff.
*Lose weight, get fit, go somewhere.

9 comments:

  1. Is Nickle Do near a place called Doo Town? I seem to remember it from a previous Tasmanian odyssey? I'm trying to convince G to visit Tas again soon but he won't.

    We're keeping race out of school until she turns five (another April birthday). Imagine being a four year old with six year olds in your class... it would be too hard. Rambling...

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  2. it's fun that you're back

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  3. Anonymous12:45 AM

    hi penni - i have missed your blogs :) happy new year!
    simmone

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  4. Hey you. Welcome back. Happy birthday, New Year etc. glad Tas treated you well. Must catch up before I forget what you look like. We're in Sydney now, will be back 28th Jan. Will organise a time after that.

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  5. Anonymous10:23 AM

    whee! welcome back!

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  6. Nickle Doo is indeed in Doo Town. Tassie beach is so not like Victorian beaches and so worth doing, we stayed in the North West too and the beaches were incredible plus we had the beach to ourselves most of the time. Lots to find. I saw an amazing skeleton of a seabird, with clean white bones but wings fully intact, feathers and all. It was an astonishing sight.

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  7. We enrolled willow and then decided to "hold her back". I hate that phrase, its like you are restraining them or sitting on them. Well, I might be with willow, i suppose, but she needs another year to run in a garden.
    Somebody said to me "She'll cope!" but for me a 4.5yr old shouldn't *have* to cope with anything.

    Happy B'day. 33 sounds great to me, a really good bingo number "all the 3's!"
    I'm 29 soon, and we are plotting a whizz-bang 30th for '09, as I've never had a "big party". The best bit so far is I don't have to invite in-laws.Its so exciting, you'd better Save The Date!

    I'm now a fully Q'd driver, I can even drink drive (to a degree). Do it, it gives you the independence to, well, get about and do things. Think of it this way, if Martin had not been there when Una did her squished finger thing, what would you have done?
    Yes see, be capable!

    Yes, independence. Now all I need is to earn my weight in money in a "career" and then I'll be a real feminist like my mum always expected.

    My 7 month old baby has teeth and is climbing furniture and growling like a tiger. Its too fast.

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  8. Tas sounds fantastic. That's the holiday I'd like, I think.

    I know what you mean about not wanting your young one to lose their strangeness too soon. It's a precious thing.

    And I'm also 32 with no drivers' licence. Do you feel better?

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  9. Anonymous4:45 PM

    I've only had my license for two years! For much the same reasons, it's a Tassie thing I think because as you said in Tas everyone lives within a 15 min walk from each other. Or at least they did, now they have to live in Moonah.

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