DAY 35: Lighthouses

I have had a fascination with lighthouses which really started in 1997. I've spent a fair amount of time visiting and photographing them as a consequence. In 1997, I had the chance to be at Land's End, the tippiest southern tip of England - it was a very emotionally raw and charged time for me. I stayed in Marazion for a couple of nights and I have to say, all other things aside, that it is such a pretty quaint seaside town, filled to the brim with salty piratey romance and a taste of a bygone era where sailors pulled in and spent the night at The Ferry Boat Inn, perhaps.

Sadly, I didn't get to see the Lands End Lighthouse - didn't even know it was there. Funny, I flew thousands of miles and missed it and it IS a gorgeous one to boot.

Anyway, this love of lighthouses was born from that trip to the UK. It was given life because of my need to be alone, to stand on the edge of my cliff and face the rugged storms and lashing winds that my life was weathering at that very moment. Dramatic? I know.

Lighthouses came to symbolise to me, that no matter what my choices are in life, right or wrong, I can face the consequences alone. I am strong and resilient as a lighthouse is. I can stand on my own two feet and weather all that life can thrash at my feet. I can provide shelter and solace not only to others in need but also to myself as well.

They also remind me that I am very comfortable in my own company, when I can skate around the cornices of my mind and explore all the thoughts and inquisitions that blow in and out of the windows of my soul.

Over the years, the affiliation I have with lighthouses has grown and, for some inexplicable reason, I am most calm and centred around them.

Grant proposed to me at a very romantic lighthouse - Cape Otway Lighthouse - and I still find that so romantic and charming. It is tucked away on a cliff, far away from the madding crowds, a beacon of safety.....and it was there, when we were tucked away, just the two of us that he asked me to make a life with him.

Prior to that and since that, we've made it a 'thing' to visit as many lighthouses as we can. I suspect they have come to mean something to Grant as much as they mean to me.

I am happiest near or in a lighthouse. One of my heart's desires is to own one so that I can have my own private retreat. I know a few have come up for private sale around Australia and although it's never been the right time and place for me to consider it, that day will come to fruition. 

Even writing about this has left me with an unwitting smile on my face. Lighthouses are my peace and serenity.

The rocky ledge runs far into the sea,
and on its outer point, some miles away,
the lighthouse lifts its massive masonry,
A pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day.

Even at this distance I can see the tides,
Upheaving, break unheard along its base,
A speechless wrath, that rises and subsides
in the white tip and tremor of the face.

And as the evening darkens, lo! how bright,
through the deep purple of the twilight air,
Beams forth the sudden radiance of its light,
with strange, unearthly splendor in the glare!

Excerpt from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Lighthouse 

DAY 34: My Neighbours

I chuckle to myself as I say this but today, for the first time in 11 years, I met most of my neighbours!! 11 years?!?!?!

Sue, Stew and Chloe put an invitation in our mailbox for a lunch BBQ, declaring that they'd lived in that house for 12 months and hadn't had the opportunity to meet the neighbours. I didn't want to RSVP and say I've lived here for 11 years and SAME!

Thing is, we live in a beautiful part of Melbourne that is hilly, to say the least, and most of us live on undulating blocks of land. We don't get the opportunity to bump into each other while walking the dog. Who the h3ll (oh gimme a break....this censorship is really tragic!) would walk dogs around our hills without an ambulance following closely behind albeit at a safe distance?

We don't wave to each other as we mow lawns on Saturday mornings because we don't HAVE front lawns. We have slopes. We don't say "Hi" as we wash our cars in our driveways because of previous water restrictions (and my aversion to any type of unecessary housework of any kind) so.....all things considered, we've just never had the opportunity to make friends.

BUT...................

They knew a helluva lot about OUR household! THAT surprised me a fair bit. To be more precise, they knew Alex and Adam. Adam came with me to the BBQ and was greeted by most of the neighbours with familiarity whereas I had to introduce myself as Adam's Mum. Conversation was punctuated with GPS precise positioning as to where everyone lived in relation to where Adam lived (??).

I have to say they are a lovely, lovely bunch of people. Eclectic in the mix which is how I like it. For 11 years I've lived in this house and I really LOVE where we live. However, it's been a very 'keep-to-yourself' kind of neighbourhood - my experience of it anyway and so today felt really really nice. It gave me a sense of belonging and....safety.

I hope we see more of our lovely neighbours and that I don't scare them off and they move away. Hehehe.

DAY 33: Shagging Muppets

You know what floats my boat? Trying new things. New experiences.

We went to see Avenue Q with Dave and Sheri (and their friends, Kim and George, too) tonight and I LOVED it!! It was inappropriate (of course) but it was a type of theatre that I have never seen before. I like expanding my experiences so this was such a good night.

It is based on a musical Sesame Street-type of background where multicultural muppets live in a street called Avenue Q. However, this version of Avenue Q is definitely purely for grown ups!!

Excellent night, if you get the chance to see it. It puts a smile on your dial!

DAY 32: The Magic of Momentum

How wonderful is it when things move, progress, go forward and leave the pier of stagnancy? How wonderful is it when you put sand in the funnel, give a little push and you get those figure eights that Professor Julius Sumner Miller managed in the late 70's?

I am happy today because something I've started has gathered momentum. Still can't say what it is but the day is drawing nigh when I unveil my brainchild.

It started with one small idea moons ago and serendipitously has grown into something beautiful, something larger than I expected. All shall be revealed soon but, for now, let's depart the stage of mystery and move on to the mysteries of motivation.

I'm gonna share with you some of my genuinely favourite quotes that have become mantras to me over the last few months:

·         A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. Ayn Rand

·         If you can dream it, you can do it. Walt Disney

·         If you want to conquer fear, don't sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. Dale Carnegie

·         Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other. Walter Elliot 

·         You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. C. S. Lewis

·         What you get by achieving your goals is to as important as what you become by achieving your goals. Henry David Thoreau

If you're sitting there and thinking, "I should"....or..."I wish I did".....or..."What if" then my advice to you is DO IT! I don't ever want to look in the rear view mirror of my life, wishing I gave it a shot. Don't you do the same anymore.

I'm grateful for all the magical things that have guided me to this point, to the beautiful supportive people in my life who have whispered "You CAN" in my ear. You don't know how addictive faith and confidence is.

  

DAY 31: Exploding Thermos

Today my sister's Facebook status read "I just hid behind the door to scare a co-worker... ' cept it was a patient who walked out...." and I haven't stopped laughing at this since I read it. Which reminds me why I am grateful for alll the funny things that have happened not only to me but my family, my friends, in fact just about everybody I know.  Now I don't know if they're actually funny occurrences (one 'r' or two??) or whether I find them funny but either way, they make me laugh and that's what's important.

DISCLAIMER: There is EVERY possibility that you have been the victim of my laughter and in no way would I have intentionally wanted to hurt you because you did something so stupid that it made me laugh long after the incident happened.

My family has a habit of attracting 'stuff'....situations that always happen to us that are very very funny. I haven't pondered whether, if these things happened to other people,  they'd be just as funny or whether my family, being the quintessential Addams family of slapstick dysfunctionality, make it funny.

You've read the blog about Happy Birthday Julie. That's nothing. Let me give you some examples:

THIS WEEK: The Exploding Thermos:

I was being very (re)creative and made potato and cauliflower soup after tasting it at the Gown of the Year Awards night in Melbourne. After having tried my culinary skills and impressing myself, I thought I'd take some to share with my friends from work. I filled my trusty thermos right to the top with my deliciously hot yummy scrummy soup. At around lunchtime, I thought to myself "Shaz, whack the thermos out on the desk to remind you to serve it up for lunch"....and so I positioned said thermos on my boss's desk, trying to earn some brownie points. He was out seeing clients and would return to some hot home-made soup and that would take care of my bonus for this year. Up here for thinking....

I started to hear a squeaky high-pitched noise eminating from my thermos and didn't think of it. Should I say right now it was around the time of the Bali bombing and people were nervous being in and around banks. I decided to ring my boyfriend (now my husband) and was chatting away to Gee when suddenly there was this massively loud explosion. I swung my swivel chair around long enough to see a huge mass of my soup being propelled into the air, lose momentum and then plummet back to the ground, hitting it with an almighty thwuck!

In what was a slo-mo action shot, soup was flung up all the walls, all over the furniture, the computers, my bosses gorgeously upholstered chair, in between the keyboards. My eyes just bulged and I sat there, amidst an horrific Exorcist-like display of potato and cauliflower soup artistically flung like a Pro Hart canvas all over our very swish offices.

It was a thick soup - not a watery soup - so it stuck to every surface like glue. I don't like referring to my soup in glue-ish terms but there you have it.

I immediately rang my boss and urged him not to come back to the office. He knew better than to ask why and so he didn't. BUT.....the Executive Director was still in and he HEARD the explosion and came running.

Picture sheepish Shaz, still sitting, hands tucked between my knees, looking up at the roof which now had a hole in it from the lid of the thermos, looking left at the artwork on the walls that were now displaying large chunks of pureed cauliflower and then, quietly to the right, where soup was still steaming off the wall (and I was biting my lip right about now a la Norman Wisdom style).

The short end of it is that the professional cleaners were called in to undo my artwork and they recommended that the industrial boys be hired for THIS job. $3,000 it cost to clean up my mess....... and the only thing I could say to the Head Honcho was that he should have been relieved that I didn't make curry for everyone.

I shan't regale you with the special version of how the soup actually got into the airvents in the ceiling and, as it had fresh parmesan cheese in it, went right through the heating in the building. In an attempt to neutralise the stench of warming parmesan that was permeating through to the seconf dloor, I raced out to get some NilOdor, stood on the deska nd liberally splashed it int the vents. Needless to say that the building stuck like a male toilet trough lolly for days and days and that became my nickname thereafter. I shan't mention that at all.

I DID win the Tool of the Week Award - a very prestigious award for the halfwits that work for a large national bank and I would have carried it forward another week had it not have been for Lucky Greg who thought that warming a BBQ chicken, still wrapped in foil, in the microwave was a great idea and set the microwave on fire which set the sprinklers off and we all had to be evacuated.

DAY 30: My Home Town - Melbourne

Glorious Melbourne! She is a fickle woman with multiple personalities, multiple moods, multiple smiles for her multiple lovers. Turn a corner and you're in a new world, new culture - even the weather seems different and, being a Melburnian, we give, we change along with her, knowingly.

I work on Spring Street at the top Eastern end of Melbourne. The 'Paris' end of Melbourne, as it's known as. Here, the shops are spaced out and seems less congested or are the streets just wider?

Parliament House looks authoritatively down Bourke Street and sideways on Spring Street, laying out before it like a smorgasbord platter. The trams come and go, unknowingly and unaware of the people, the traffic - it has it's course and it comes and goes and rarely looks up to see if anything has changed.

At the top end of Bourke Street are two famous restaurants that are famous gathering places and haunts of the Melbourne Mafia or Underworld - "top notch posh" restaurants coincidentally also frequented by politicians, celebrities, who's who. One world trying to slink in and out in anonymity, the other sitting on tables on the sidewalk, hoping they'll be recognised and their egos inflated for yet another day.

As you walk by, the tone moves from public service to a more cosmopolitan al fresco air, where you know you can get anything if you knew who to ask. A part of you wonders if today's the day you'll hear the rat-a-tat-tat of a machinegun firing off from the rear window of a black Mercedes as it drives by, taking the target and you, unpreparedly, to a darker place where there's silence. As you walk by and hear the swish of a breeze ruffling through the oak trees lining Bourke Street, you realise that you'll live another day and that, probably somewhere down Lygon Street in Carlton, the reverie is being lived out for real and you'll watch it in horror on the 6 o'clock news tonight, safe at home.

You walk past the construction workers, packing up for the day. They briefly look up, hoping you're a taut secretary with the highest heels that tighten your calf muscles and, sadly, look back down again because you're wearing your sneakers with your corporate suit and haven't delivered one of the few special treats for them, working in the city.

You straighten up your backpack and walk briskly past them, towards JB HiFi, denying the temptation to meander in and just see. Nobody just meanders into JB to just see.... you know that the minute you're within coo-ee of the big distinctive yellow doors, you know you're walking back out with a CD or DVD you're not sure you really wanted but was too cheap to leave languishing amongst all the other outdated CDs and DVDs. But not today.

Today, Melbourne's warm summer has got you magnetised to the pavement because that's where the most sunshine is right now. You turn into Swanston Street, heading towards Flinders Street Station, and into a row of cheap Asian clothes stores. The type of stores that young teenagers with their first pay packet race into, to buy copies of originals from Myer and David Jones that they can't afford just yet. You smell the acrid odour of the horse and carriages sweat and pooh, waiting for tourists to buy a clip-clop trip around the CBD. you know why they call it the 'Paris end' where you've just come from....because this doesn't smell like the parts of Paris you've visited. This smells of the toil and sweat of hard-working people, cracking nails and breaking backs to make a living to pay for that little plot of soil and bricks and mortar they call home.

In the distance, you see the famous 'M' of MacDonalds, Macca's and Hungry Jacks looming in the distance and, a smirk of pride that you are not one bit tempted because this is not your kind of food. They don't sell vegetarian sushi and wholemeal tandoori wraps or spicy lentil soup with coriander and fresh crusty bread rolls. They don't sell rich hazelnut and dark Italian chocolate tarts in delicate yet rich buttery pastry shells. No, this isn't where you buy Vietnamese salads or Teri Yaki rice paper rolls or, God forbid, organic Sri Lankan chicken curry with rice and Fijian water so it's with pure safety that you walk on by.


St. Paul's stands in all it's newly scrubbed and renovated majesty. Then you see the worst thing - drug dealers and homeboys, sprawling on the lawns of St. Paul's with their hooded jackets, headbands and sunglasses, gesturing fingers flailing their own language to each other. It's hard to say if they're going to stab someone or whether they're going to hug them....or both. The steps of St. Paul's is defiled with the city's seedier side, tarnished with the reality of life while a solitary figure in the background, waves a Bible in his hand and preaches to no-one in particular. No-one's listening andhe knows it. Yet this is his message or maybe his penance and he progresses unwavingly...........and there is Flinders Street Station.

The iconic ambience of the station is temporarily set aside for now because it is has to perform its daily duty of shuttling commuters to and fro......train in.......train out....train in......train out.....train cancelled.....train in.....train out.....train cancelled.....train late.....to their homes, where they flop on their couches and exhale.

DAY 29: Bibliophile: Not An Obsession With Bibles, Okay???

I have always, as far as I can remembe, and will continue to have an addictive relationship with books . I love books! They represent so much more to me - another dimension, another world, a chance to reinvent myself and take the role of the main protagonist and go somewhere for the duration of the page count. It's a chance to live, learn and travel to new places, even if it's only in your mind.

In all my time of discovery, I have introduced myself to thousands of books and they have either become my new best friend or they've been piffed on the hard rubbish of my life.

I try to make friends with every book I open - each book has an unique personality, much like a fingerprint and I try not to pass judgement by purely looking at it's cover and creating my own perception of what it really is about on the inside - a bit like people, really. Sometimes I'm really good and my book surprises me, pleasantly and then I pat myself on the back for having the depth of perception to choose it, not for what it looked like but for what it was, inside - oh, clever little me...

Other times, I justify the 'bad pick' because (wait for it) it was a wolf in sheep's clothing - it certainly wasn't ME choosing it purely on the basis that it said "erotic"....or...."sexual tension" on the back cover, certainly I wouldn't be as superficial as that. It certainly wasn't the Rubinesque Renaissance beauty on the cover, draped in burgundy and gold with voluptuous thighs and pert breasts.....would I choose a book purely because of the promise of romance and deviance? I think not.

Which is why I choose biographies, for the most part. What type of biographies? Oh, the ones about people's lives - duh.

At the top end of Bourke Street there sits an old iconic bookshop with the most delectable and inviting titles in the window. The Hill of Content has a history in Melbourne that I have only just discovered and in keeping with it's quaint title, has a certain 'olde worlde' charm once you step over it's threshhold. It has an ambience of antique paper and pipe smoking, an immediate relaxed and peaceful feeling overcomes you once you trail the shelves for titles not always found in your Borders, Angus and Robertson, Collins-type bookstore. Ironically, the Hill of Content was bought by Angus & Robertson in 1951, after the owner no longer wished to run it because his son died.

As you quietly ascend the crimson-lined albeit worn out carpet and the dark carved timber stairs with it's Victorian-style balustrading to the first floor, a sense of anticipation creeps in - you just don't know what's waiting for you upstairs and......with a sense of relief, it doesn't disappoint. Bound copies of the classics, one-off editions of artists catalogues, beautifully bound classic literature for the discerning reader.....my heart stepped up a notch, pounding. It was like finding the most precious treasure, right here, in my own backyard.

Eyes devour titles delicately stacked sideways - the nose takes in the beautiful, comforting smell of "oldness" - like being at Grandma's house after she's baked a home-made apple pie and the heart takes flight. For here, in this little bookshop, which has it's own history, there are new friends - yet to be made. New acquaintances to get to know and new souls to take back home with you, knowing that this new friendship .......is a keeper.

I have found a peaceful oasis where I know I will revisit and visit again. This place has beckoned for weeks and months and today I gave in and was rewarded handsomely.