Battling Back Pain

Over the last few days. Chris' back problems have been exacerbated, so much so that he now has three problems areas instead of just the lower back one.  This has been caused by holding his back too stiffly to try to lessen the impact.  Unfortunately the strain of holding himself upright has caused muscle spasms further up his back  and into his shoulders. 

So after three nights of sleeping upright on the sofa and sick to death of being in so much pain, we are off to the doctor again today. Please God may we get some relief for him.

The house is an absolute tip and nightmare! LOL - there is stuff everywhere as Danika unpacks and we pack to make room for her things.  It is a manoeuvre of mammoth proportions as we change beds, move rooms and try to do all this while making sure that we get Chris as comfortable as possible and plan an engagement party.

Danika says in a few years we will look back on this and laugh! I reckon it wont take that long, maybe next week :)

The three ladies in the house have all at some time succumbed to the emotions of it all, which was probably inevitable given the circumstances and what we all have just behind us and just in front us to contend with. 

It is all coming together nicely though, yesterday was the worst as we changed the beds over and that involved taking apart and moving three queen sized beds and taking two big chest of drawers down stairs.  Thank God again for Jonathan, moving that about. 

I slept on Danika and Shaun's bed (which was wonderfully comfortable); Emily and Farooq slept on our bed; Chris slept on the sofa; and Danika and Shaun slept in the sewing room.  Jonathan is the only one who slept in his own bed in his own room ! LOL musical beds :)

Today is another lovely sunny day which bodes well for tonight with the engagement celebrations. It will be a lovely time to catch up with friends and family members who are in from interstate. 

More about that tomorrow....or the next day :)

The No Title Post :)

Like all of you, we have been busy over the last few days. 

Last Friday, we decided to take Farooq and Emily to Hobart for the weekend.  Farooq has not visited our fair capital before and it was a great excuse to get away and have a mini break before the real fun begins with inundatedness of everything Christmas.

Unfortunately, Chris has come home very miserable.  He has had a back injury imposed on him by some half wit workplace assessor who clearly had no idea whatsoever how to conduct such an examination correctly or even responsibly.  The idiot was getting Chris to pick up 20 kgs of weights in a milk crate with his arms stretched out in front of him. Did I mention the guy was an absolute drop kick.  If I sound cranky it's because I am furious and trying hard to hide exactly how furious and frustrated I am !!

Poor Chris :( He has been extremely lucky to have maintained a great health rap so far, with no ongoing issues of any kind and now to be in extreme pain through no fault of his own  but due to someone else's incompetence! Well!

Plus we have so much to do and so many places to go that involve a few hours in the car, so you can imagine how much that is going to hurt. 

Anyway in the wee wee hours of Saturday morning, I had to get the ambulance to the hotel to take Chris to the A&E as he was in so much agony and I could not move him.  So, unfortunately, that kinda ruined our little trip to Hobart.  Thanks again Idiot Workplace Examiner!

So the kids went out and did stuff while Chris and I went to bed and tried to get a few hours kip.  They visited Salamanca Markets, which is of course a Hobart Institution and drove up Mount Wellington.  They took some great photos too.

They told us they did have a good time though, but it was not what we had planned and hoped for. 

Today we have cause for celebration however - Daughter D and SIL to be S arrive on the boat tonight!! YAY, wave your arms in the air like you just don't care! Can't wait. 

Daughter E is busy baking and  son  J and SIL have mowed the lawns and tidied up the garden a bit. So I think that we are pretty much ready now. If we can just get Chris right.

Tomorrow I will stuff  the turkey and get the lamb ready; get all the vegies prepared and make a couple of salads.  Of course we need to have pavlova and a trifle.  So may well start on those tonight. What isn't done by tomorrow, we will just have to do without.  As long as we have food on the table and everyone is seated and together ~ I think that is all that matters.  

So I want to wish you all the very, very happiest of Christmas Joy.  I hope that you all have a fabulous day and enjoy the company of people that you love  and care for.  May God Bless you all with the true spirit of the season. xxx <3 <3 <3

Something to smile about and something not worth the smile

First up I want to say THANK YOU!!

Thank you to each and every one of you who read my little blog posts.  Thank you for taking the time out of your busy days to spend a few minutes here.  This blog is something that I have been wanting to do and mulling over for a few years now but always put it off for a few reasons.

I thought that there would be very little interest in what I had to say and I don't mean that in a fake humble way, I just mean that not every one is like me and has a fascination with the ordinariness of daily life. Even though I find other peoples lives rivetting in their individuality, others may enjoy a more cosmopolitan view of things. 

The other reason is that I was always too busy and or tired.  But that will not change in the near future so best get on with it. 

I wonder too at the value of opening up to the general public a personal insight into my life.

Can it be too much? I do tend to wear my heart on my sleeve (my emotional reactions have always been on my face for all to see) and boundaries are there for the crossing.  Am I leaving a great big vulnerable gap open to inspection that may come back and bite me on the arse. Time will tell, I guess. 

However! Since I commenced to put my thoughts into this online journal, I have had some really encouraging feedback. Better than that, it has facilitated others'  memories of their school days or childhood. So we are both winners out of that.  Long time friends are also reporting to getting to know a side of me that they never knew existed.
Good or bad?? I don't know.

The blog also holds a record of this time; all the joy, the hard grit and what was going on during this huge time of transition for my family.

I started back in October thinking that if only the family reads it, at least they will have an idea of what we are doing. Then I started to digress - hard to comprehend, I know! Me losing track, no way.  Anyway after just 36 posts, yesterday turned out to be momentous occasion.

2000 page views in just under 2 months!!!

WOW! I am so happy; who woulda thought it.  So thank you all. I hope that I continue to write about stuff that you find entertaining and/or relevant. 

 Now for the bad news and disappointment:

As you know I have been looking forward to my husband coming home from Karratha for Christmas.  Well yesterday was to be the big day.  It is a 12 hour turn around from Karrratha to Launceston. It literally takes ALL day to get here.  You could fly into Hong Kong quicker.

So Chris arrives into Melbourne tired and achey (he has a bad back at the mo) to be told that his 7 p.m. flight with QANTAS has been canned because they didn't allow for a flight crew on that particular Qantas Link flight. He had to go over the aerobridge and stay the night at the Park Royal.

I was already tired enough to weep after a really busy day and then to get that on top of it all, I just went to my bed.

The upshot, and there is always one, isn't there? - was that he got to sleep in one of the most comfortable beds that we have ever had the pleasure to lay our weary bones on.  The beds at the Park Royal at Tullermarine are the bomb, divine! So lucky Chris with his bad back, at least he had a good nights sleep.

Today it is a gorgeous sunny, light breeze, blue skies kind of day ~ perfect for flying down the river. So with a fair breeze and a good handful of grace and hope, we will pick him up this afternoon some time, if Qantas can be bothered, I suppose :)

In other good news, Daughter D and SIL to be made their way safely to Coober Pedy last night, so they are getting closer each day.  It is an awful long way from Jarlmadangah in the far northern Kimberley to Launceston, Tasmania. They have sent home some amazing photos, thanks to Viber and Facebook - but that is their story to tell.  I am just thrilled that they are on their way. That first smooch is going to be a beauty!

I hope that all your Christmas plans are falling in line with your level of enthusiasm and time frame and that you are not too frantic in the Pre-Christmas rush.

Oh Christmas Tree

Every Christmas Tree tells a story, well ours does. Actually it tells many stories.  Each selection of baubles, trims and decorations reminds me of a time, situation or a gift that marks a special time in my life. The decorations on our tree are nearly all old or gifts.  I have not bought new trimmings for the Christmas Tree for many years.  The little treats that are put on the tree each year are a conglomeration of memories since the early 1980s.

The tree itself was bought when the kids and I lived in Sutton Street in 1992.  As a child we always had a fresh tree and I continued that practice myself for a long time until one year I thought it was such a waste to cut down a perfectly fine tree just to put it up in the living room for a couple of weeks.  So I bought the impersonating variety and have used that every year since. In  the New Year it all gets packed away, back into the children's Christmas pillow cases, which of course are no longer left at the foot of the beds on Christmas Eve :)

So last night, I assembled our tree.  I did Viber Daughters D and E asking if they thought it was necessary this year, considering all the packing etc that is going on. Daughter D wrote back in most unusual haste - Absolutely!  So up it goes and here it is:

The Angel right up there on top, of course, is always the last thing to be put on.  I bought her a few years ago after our last little angel left the family, goodness only knows what has happened to her. Maybe she just flew the coop one night to grace some other family's tree. The new one is beautiful and is packed away each year in her own protective box.

I think that it might have been last year that Daughter D made us all one of these gorgeous little Christmas Stockings. D and her partner celebrated Christmas and NYE in New York, so these little stockings took pride of place at the front of the tree, so that every time we passed the tree we had a little piece of her to look at and wonder what was she doing right now on the other side of the world. As you probably know, I do love to sew and make things, so to see the girls take after me in this way, is just a song in my heart. I know that this joy will be a pleasure that will give them many, many hours of solitary comfort. The extension of that joy will be passed onto the recipients of their creations and like me, will leave a legacy of their love stitched into fabric for many years to come.  

These dear little chaps were purchased in Hong Kong about 16 years ago, maybe on one of our first trips there. Chris and I went about five times to HK over the Christmas period in the mid 90s. His business closed for the annual break at Christmas and we used that time to catch up with business contacts in HK and then holiday in South East Asia somewhere. One year we were actually in HK for Christmas Day. That was different - yum cha for lunch and then shopping at the Prince of Wales markets; this was prior to the British hand back of Hong Kong to the Chinese. The lights in Hong Kong were unusually fantabulous at that time.  We had never seen anything like it; whole buildings decorated with a million lights depicting all sorts of festive images. 

I will never forget the look on the girls faces when we took them one year.  As we made our way into the city from the airport, the girls, only young then, were awed by the sight of all the lights. Hong Kong (and now China) really is the ultimate in light displays - well that I have seen anyway! We bought about a dozen or so of these little embroidered figures at one of the markets in Kowloon and have used them every year since. 

These cheap red and gold balls, styrofoam covered in foil, were bought into the decorations mix when we lived in Burnie at View Road.  View Road was the home Chris and I bought when we first moved in together.  Chris thought that it was best we started our life together in a new house rather than he move into mine, or I move into his. So we combined our worldly goods and that's where it all started, nearly 18 years ago. These Christmas balls were purchased at the local nursery, a thriving hub of all things house and garden. In fact I think that Chris and I paid for that chaps first overseas holiday with our patronage :)

These foil balls go up every year, complete with Rosie bite marks  - a lesson learned when you have a cat who loves shiny things - don't place them at paw height! Gorgeous Rosie, she loved those balls!

These dear little wooden birds were another gift from Daughter D, as you can see back in 2011. We have one each. D and her partner travelled home to Tassie from the Kimberely in far northern WA for Christmas that year.

Is there anything better at Christmas time than waiting at the airport for that first glimpse as they come up the stairs towards you?  I think not! That look on your loved ones face as they come towards you, arms outstretched, face full of delight, eyes full of love.  A mirror of your own sweet pleasure.  A memory, a feeling to cherish always.

When Daughter E was just 18 and a half, she moved to Melbourne to study Interior Design at Swinbourne University. The youngest of our children, she forged her own way with courage and strength. She studied hard, worked, made the most of opportunities and fell in love. That love lead her to move on to Sydney, where she again worked hard, studied to finished her degree and built a lovely life with her beloved. One of the part time jobs that she had was at the flagship Pandora store in Pitt Street, Sydney.  This Pandora Christmas ball is a reminder of that time and the huge effort that she put in to make a success of  her time in Sydney.

I have three of these cute little angels ~ enough said really :)) 

There are many other little treasures on the tree, like the tinsel, milk tops and pasta string that Daughter D made at school one year; the glass ball that a friend made for Daughter E in 2001; hand made fabric hearts with Lindt Easter Bunny bells for decoration (I wonder where on earth all those Lindt bunny bells came from?????); funnily enough a metal Lindt ball that was filled with chocolate, a gift from Chris; Christmas Dickenson era cardboard cut outs that I bought from Grace Bros in Canberra - another life time ago.  I guess you can see the Lindt theme running through my festive celebrations, LOL.

So now all that is left for the tree is the present placement underneath. We have cut back this year and I know we say that every year, but this year we really have.  Only one $40 gift each.  I will admit that it has been a struggle, especially when I am in the shops and see something that would be just darling for one of the girls or one of the granddies. Step Away From Temptation, Kathy

Roll on the 16th - that will mark my first trip to the airport! Can't wait. They will all be coming home in dribs and drabs but I will take that, just please God bring them all home to me safe and sound. I can't wait to get my hands on them.