Too good to be true

After two years of gainful employment I am soon to be thrown back to the jobless wolves snarling at each other in their quest to bag the elusive part-time-relatively-well-paid-professional job.  When I casually told people I worked four days a week, school hours, mainly from home, for a global consulting organisation they would eye me with suspicion as a clear weaver of fiction, as this really did seem to good to be true.  And alas, it now is.

This is my lovely home office, where I sit surrounded by my vintage tat, music, decent coffee and commuting time of about 2 seconds from the rest of my house.  And I can hop up every hour for a mandatory stretch and to hang out a load of washing.  Nice huh?  

Unwilling to up my hours to FTE (that's full time equivalent, don't you know) I've been told my contractor status means my employee attractiveness is now well on the nose.   Seat overheads - that's cost of carrying me as an employee - not jaunty parasols to embellish my workspace - means part-time is commercially unviable.  Of course if I was a permanent employee I'd have some bargaining power to receive the lip service benefits of inclusivity and flexibility heralded by large organisations today.   But I'm a contractor, and unless I go full time, cannot become permanent.  So there's the rub.   

Not that I want to get on my soapbox (hello?  are blogs not the new soapbox?) but I do feel that I'm now living the workplace experience of the millennium, the expendable casual worker who can be dropped at the, well, drop of a hat. Such is the experience of a parent trying to balance the challenges of having a career, making some money and being around to hear the stories of the  school day, get a proper meal on the table and get everyone to their afternoon activities.

Rant over.  But I pass now to Mr Bragg, who recently treated Melbourne commuters to this rendition of his view on the matter.   

ttp://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/bragging-rights-for-the-poorly-paid-20121018-27u2f.html

Retrophilia

I do miss being in England and regularly reading / hating / thoroughly enjoying the work of Ms Julie Burchill. Particularly in the Guardian. She is so cleverly adept at dividing her readers by being brash, subversive and thought provoking. Like this for example.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/16/romanticise-the-past-julie-burchill

I too have been thinking how the whole vintage theme has so deeply entered the vernacular of the contemporary consumer.  Julie calls this retrophilia.  It has now completely lost its post-modern origins and has become instead just modern.

But a kind of cover version of someone else's modern, which is even worse. Or downright insulting to those that have experienced far more hardship than we can ever imagine, as she quite rightly points out.

Lemon heaven

Is there anything more joyful than enjoying produce from your own garden? I think not. But these lemons are bittersweet (pardon the pun) as they are the last of the harvest from our ancient lemon tree that we had to cut down to make way for the new garage/studio.

But don't worry, I've planted a new lovely lemon tree in my front garden, so hopefully our lemon-free window will be small and narrow.

Out the Back

As the diggers move in to start work on our garage, the shabby comfort of our lovely old back yard has begun to dissolve. All of the sudden I've come over all nostalgic for the beautiful squalor that is our untouched-by-improvements back yard.

A lady called Margaret Gallagher lived in our house all her life until a few years back, so much of the fabric and layers of life here are hers.

Once all this goes and we build the garage, extend the house, most of her traces will be gone. I'm torn because I have such a love of history, particularly everyday domestic history that paints the pictures of women's lives before mine.

Then again, a new kitchen bathroom and somewhere to park the car will be so nice. Time to get visual, which is what I should really blog with more cause I love taking pictures.

Cover me

I'm going crazy with media today. Time to throw off the shackles of guilt around sitting at a computer all day and just go with all its joy and treasures.

Here are two recent songs I'm loving, well their not that recent but new under my radar. Bon Iver (god knows what he is saying most of the time but jeez he sounds amazing) doing this haunting cover of a Bonnie Rait song.


And Birdy doing a cover of a Bon Iver track.



Why labour over being original when you can do amazing things without having to invent the wheel?

Then again this original artwork for Bon Iver's cover is pretty special.

I might need to think about that today.

Life moves on

So long since I've blogged, but no time like the present to begin again. Life moves on, in more ways than one. Sadly my dear father Ray passed away last month, aged 82.
When I had to put together some pictures on a board for his memorial service, there was one photo of him that I needed to find. I’m not sure why, but I always loved this photo taken just after he married my Mother and became my Father in the mid 1970's.

Ray came to Australia in the fifties with the British Atomic Testing team to work at Maralinga for six years, after which he settled here and began a career as a meteorologist. We lived in Darwin, Alice Springs, Port Hedland and Perth, moving around with his work. This photo was taken in a friend’s back garden when we were living in Perth between posts away. Maybe it’s the novelty boot-shaped glass from which he is enjoying a cold drink on a summer’s day that caught my attention as a child. It’s funny that he is having a beer here, because Ray was not a great drinker and his life was far more about simpler things such as gardening, the weather, pets, pots of tea and his role with the Uniting Church as a lay minister. The long socks, sandals and shorts he is wearing in this photo were his uniform for many years in the summer months. He had a great sense of humour however and was in many ways like a big kid all his life, which is probably why I loved him so much when he became my Dad.

I now have this photograph framed at home and looking at it brings my own mortality to mind. It seems like yesterday he was a middle-aged man enjoying his new life and family in Perth. But in fact, it was less than a month ago that I sat with a frail elderly man as he passed away. The years in between seem to have condensed in my memory. How fleeting life can seem.

Ding ding, round two

After six months of blog lock down I am duly motivated to post once more. Why? Well sheer boredom might be one reason, as the novelty well and truly wears (wares?) from my new life as a Perth city working person: it seems I was never destined to be an English teacher after all (clearly).

Even the joy of some new clippety-cloppety shoes and different food every lunchtime is starting to fade. The truth is, working life is hard graft - not cause it's hard, but cause it is just is...(in the esoteric sense) day after day after day.

After eight years (give or take) as a full-time-at-home-mother once more I am part of the big wide world beyond cupcakes and pickups. And boy does that cosy-slipper life look attractive, once more, from tuther side of the toe-pinching shoe fence.

Life has taken me on adventures far and wide in the last twenty five years, intellectually and physically, and yet here I am again, where I started, trotting along St George's Terrace in search of the perfect sandwich, or running to catch the train home. Determined to reject the dominant paradigm (even then) I eschewed the uni route at 18 and took to the pavement to earn money. Pah, I soon learnt that was a foolish move and after a few years of 'word processing' (what WAS that you may ask) gratefully left the business world for the glorious sloth and wonder of student life. But the memory lingers and being here once more is like a thread to my past, a tentacle of memories, a sobering reminder of the reality of everyday life, for most grown-ups.

But earning dosh is nice, and husband is now shuffling around the kitchen in his slippers, enjoying the freedom. A bit too much, frankly. As I try to cooly appear not too bedazzled by the advances of the working world, technology, lunch options, he sits at the kitchen table emailing me errands to complete at lunchtime, while the gathering dust and pants accumulating in washing baskets await my return home. Phew, at least some things remain reassuringly the same in such times global and career change and advancement.