I like to take photos, usually of my children and cats. I’d like to be a lot better at it though. I am lucky to have a really decent camera, that I know vaguely how to use, it does wonders for making my happy snaps look better than they used to. Unfortunately I have a tendency to chop off ears, tops of heads, random body parts … I really want to get better at composition - though I think much of the problem is that children and animals tend to move quickly which makes setting up a shot a fluke rather than the result of good planning. Also, I don’t seem to be able to remember everything “light balance, speed, focus, click” … oops, no head!

And I’d also like to learn some photoshop techniques to make the images look a bit better.

Today is the first Tuesday in November. In just a few minutes, the “race that stops a nation” will happen in Melbourne. For some reason I’ve never quite understood, the Melbourne Cup, more than any other horse race, is acknowledged and watched by most people in Australia. Even people who don’t gamble will partake in the office sweep, some might even have a flutter on the great race.

Back in my life before children when I was gainfully employed we used to have afternoon tea, a sweep, stop work for the race.

It doesn’t register for me now as much - for one thing, my children refuse to watch anything on television that is brightly coloured, animated, accompanied by trippy music and big blobby puppets or otherwise aimed at brainwashing their tender psyches. Mostly though, I just hate watching the how the horses are whipped through the race, can’t stand it. Apparently it doesn’t hurt them and they don’t mind …

It’s not a popular point of view.

I am a lazy hausfrau, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I won’t take two steps for something that can be done almost as well in one.

When I’m draining pasta in saucepan, I’ll just hold the pasta back with a fork and drain the water, rather than getting the colander off my head out of the cupboard. When I let washing up water down the sink, I assess the leftover scum for it’s “squashing down the plughole” ability rather than scooping it up and taking it to the bin.

When I grab an apple from the fruit bowl, I just take the little brand/type sticker off and stick it on another apple in the bowl, rather than putting it in the bin. Which is fine, except that i get to the last apple in the bowl, it’s covered in stickers and it’s such a waste of time to sit there and pull them all off! So I try to peel the apple without taking the stickers off, and the peeler gets clogged up with chunks of peel and bits of sticker … and all my saved up seconds are used up just like that.

I admit that this post is entirely procrastination so I don’t have to face the disaster that is my house at the moment.

I really loathe house work. I like having a clean house, I just hate the doing of it. It is repetitive and thankless. My children seem to consider a tidy room as an invitation to dump as much *stuff* as they possible can on the floor, in as short a time as they are able. Food is alternative floor covering. I obviously only put things away so they have the joy of taking them out again. Any suggestion that they help with the tidying up elicits sudden inability to move hands as required for picking up, or sudden disappearance (generally to another room where they get on with the business of tipping out something else).

Next year we will be living in an apartment and I CAN’T WAIT because it will be much quicker to tidy up.

So today I had one of *those* doctors appointments, the kind women look forward to on a biennial basis, thank you Dr Papanicolaou. I decided to go to one of the doctors at the surgery I’ve used for various appointments for the children since we moved, I chose her because she specialises in womens health. She doesn’t specialise in making things sound nice though …

The procedure itself was fine, but it’s always so surreal,  lying back and trying to pretend you are somewhere else while keeping up your end of the chatty conversation. This one was even weirder than usual … in between comments and questions about why we chose Copenhagen, did I speak Danish etc etc she’d pop in little gems suchs as “I strongly recommend you get a thin smear as well … it does cost a little extra …”  and a short time later “I’ll put you on a different pap test advisory register, they are more reliable … it does cost a little extra …”.

There is something distinctly uncomfortable about being upsold for a pap smear while it’s underway, you feel like you need to agree with everything that’s offered or they’ll use the *cold* speculum. But it was nothing like the freakiness of her announcing “Oh, I might as well have a feel around while I’m in here” and following up with “how are your breasts? Do you want me to feel them as well?”. Um, let me guess … it costs a little extra??

Glad that’s over for another two years!