Gillian Polack's Blog, page 328

gillpolack @ 2010-01-16T22:34:00

There won't be time for me to post tomorrow. Two graves will be consecrated and two family get-togethers and no doubt there will be drama and melodrama untellable (because it's private unless I am the guilty party, sorry), so I thought I'd report in now.

Mum and I have sorted bookshelves and basically got the big room upstairs (as opposed to the less-big room upstairs) into order. We discovered just how many different German dictionaries and Polish dictionaries and Italian dictionaries a fat...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-16T10:16:00

Yesterday was busy. I caught up with my unexpected work and then Mum and i had lunch with a cousin and an aunt. I got to hear about Grannie Annie (not my grandmother, my cousin's - Annie Harris MBE turned up in paper sorting later, so I'm reading the booklet about her today - her name is still spoken with awe and always, always as "Grannie Annie" or "Annie Harris MBE" - there are no other variations). My brother and his wife arrived from Brisbane and joined us for afternoon tea, as did two...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-15T10:09:00

One day I shall get leave that lasts more than two days (or even sick leave where I don't have to work). This is not that time.

I got the last of my work out the day before yesterday, and the first crisis appeared magically in my inbox today. It's one that entails a fair amount of work at my end, too. If I give up my quiet-get-well time, I should have it to the next stage tonight sometime without sacrificing my family and friends.

Holiday, though? I guess I'm not in a holiday time of li...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-14T23:58:00

My niece and I were all prepared for hard work as official helpers in cleaning graves, but my mother has discovered the joys of Windex (designed for glass, not graves) and it was really a one person job. We checked out most of the family buried in Springvale, including both my fathers.

We discovered that Uncle Abe's tomb has been riven from side to side. We have no idea how, but his children knew about it and have the matter in hand. It was rather distressing to see, but it appears that U...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-13T23:04:00

Today was one of those quiet and gentle family days that I seem to see so rarely. Mum and I ran messages and chatted and drank much tea. We talked a great deal about my two fathers.

I finally told her why the very first restaurant meal I ever had (in a bistro in New Zealand) was so very different from anything she'd ever cook. My first father hated eating out. He wasn't nearly as worried about kashruth as Mum, but he did prefer her cooking to anyone's. So the simple steak dinner I had that...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-12T23:43:00

Some bits of today were wonderful (Sharyn and Chris bought me lunch and all I did was fling bad books their way and hand over a bunch of work; Mum picked me up at the station and we spent a lovely evening just chatting); some were less so.

Let me sum up the less so, because it was an interesting set of circumstances. Between the ever-increasing heat and how much work I had to do before I could leave, i didn't get any sleep last night. I left home at 6 am and got to the bus stop and no-one kn...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-11T22:52:00

I have a new method of beating heatwaves. I need one. It's getting on towards 11 pm and the Bureau of Meteorology (my trusty friend) tells me it's still over 28 degrees. They also insist a change is coming, but might take a little time.

What I intend to do is leave home at about dawn and travel south for a day and see if it's cooler there. If it isn't, I shall say wildly inaccurate things about Melburnians and the hot air they produce. If anyone complains, I shall announce (yet again) th...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-11T01:28:00

Why is it harder to blog when engaged in manic form-filling than when engaged in almost any other manic activity? Why do my attachments to said forms currently number more pages than the forms themselves? And why is summer hot?

All these imponderables and more flood my life.

I'll leave you with the difficult questions: I'm going to read a book. If I don't read a book then forms will invade my sleep. Hopefully the forms will be gone tomorrow, or ready to go tomorrow.

Proof-reading isn't go...

gillpolack @ 2010-01-09T22:07:00

I can't think of anything I want to say. Forms and summaries and notes and sorting out my life so I have some clarity when I visit my fathers: all these have drained me of thinking.

I have a new icon for FB. This means I'm finally in a position where I can decide all over again if I should put an icon in LJ or not. If friends want me to, I shall.

While I remember, thank you everyone for those book recommendations. They're a very good start. I shall use them to create a proper bibliography....

Warning: dentalzone and zombiezone. With added paperwork. Enter at your own risk.

I am up to my earlobes in paperwork. In a few minutes I shall be ploughing through a four page bibliography (single spaced because it's much less scary in single space)- and checking for duplicates and then I shall mysteriously fix my scanner and create duplicates of asterisked items. I might tell you what this is for before the end of March. Or I might not, because it might not happen.

I'm not a pessimist, really, I just have no way of evaluating things right now. While the background p...