Struggling

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I’m currently in struggle town. We have to move by 16 June – sort of against our will. Our landlords have decided to sell the apartment and they will obviously be aiming for the owner-occupier market rather than the investor market. Obviously, because they are booting us out to do renovations so they can sell it without our stuff smearing the potential buyer’s dream.

So we have to move our stuff, and we haven’t found a place yet. So we’re moving into temporary accommodation, which is a huge impetus for us to clear out all the crap we’ve accumulated in three years and six weeks in this apartment. It’s actually the longest we’ve lived in any place together.

I’m finding it really daunting to figure out where to jump in. Our place isn’t tiny but it’s not huge either, and we are using all the bedrooms, so there is no space for us to accumulate stuff as we sort it. And sure enough, just as I sort something, one of the children decides to go through it all and mix it up again.

Ah the joys. I can’t wait for the next six weeks to be over.

Clearing the draft folder

I’m going on a mission to un-draft the posts sitting in my draft folder. This post was written in January 2007, about the rather alarming experience of flying back from Kazakhstan to Ukraine on ‘UM’ Air (I kid you not). I don’t know why I didn’t publish it, and any reason I did have is now long gone. Enjoy!

Flying in the Former Soviet Union

I really enjoy reading this really funny blog, called ‘Carpetblog’. You can check it out here. Carpetblogger has a lot of really apt, practical insights into life in the Former Soviet Union. And she’s a seasoned FSU-er, having lived for a few years in Azerbaijan, then for a year here in Kyiv.

Well, she decided to defect to the normal world, and, two days ago, tried to move to Turkey. OK so, she didn’t just ‘up and decide to move’, but really, she planned very hard… only to have her plans go awry.

You simply must read all about it here.

Now, Mr_Moi and I recently had our very own fun experience with Former Soviet travel. You can scroll down on the Carpetblog link above to read about it, but, for your convenience, I have also pasted it here…. Enjoy! And never complain about Qantas again.

Ahh UM Air (Ukrainian Medditerranean Airlines). Such a ‘woe’-nderful airline. Not only do you get to fly on a 1989 DC9 with Spanish signage inside (luckily I know what a salida is). But at 2am when you’re about to board a hop from Almaty to Astana, then back to Kyiv, you’re told you have to pay money because they made a mistake on your ticket.

But this is after they have issued you a boarding pass. So, while sitting in customs listening to your name being paged, thinking “I have a boarding pass. I have so dodged that bullet”, the ticket-dyevushka chases you down, accompanied by an interpreter whose two languages do not include english, with some Kazakh passport control goons in pursuit. She drags you back through passport control, where you have to surrender your passport (those Kazakhs aren’t about to let you back into the country, ‘officially’), and tells you to pay $100 US dollars to put a 2cm by 5mm sticker on your ticket.

But! No one knows where you have to pay the money. They finally find you a KASA (cashier) in the remotest corner of the airport who will indeed accept your money, but despite very prominent signage to the contrary, she won’t take any credit cards, or US dollars (oh that was one funny screaming match).

Then your flight is delayed by four hours, and for some reason your flight path to Kyiv from Astana, which are on practically the same latitudinal position, diverts south over Georgia, the Caucasus and the Black Sea and takes seven hours instead of four.

At least they gave us beer for breakfast.

(Oh… another characteristic of travel in this part of the world is that most planes don’t have inflight entertainment. So the 7 hour flight was painful. Beer was a welcome diversion from watching the air hostesses text messaging).

Do you have any scary flying experiences to share?

The problem with Twitter

Let me just say first up that I am not really a fan of reality television. I abhor the over-dramatisation, usually the hosts are not great television talent, and quite frankly – if it was the contestants’ collective dream to make it big in their chosen field, they should have studied, trained and worked in that industry rather than waiting for an appropriate reality show to come along.

So that bring to me to The Voice. The other night as I lay in a dark room with my phone’s display set to the lowest brightness, I opened my Twitter, as it has been supremely helpful in preserving my sanity and patience when passing the long minutes and hours of trying to settle little ones to sleep.

Imagine my surprise when Every. Single. Tweeter in my timeline (and I follow over 700 people) were tweeting about The Voice. It was RELENTLESS. It was also FUTILE from a tweeting perspective – Twitter became simply noise rather than the conversation. I have always thought Twitter is about a conversation, not noise. No-one was reading the tweets and responding, they were just crowding out the medium with their comments.

WHY you ask?

Well, I’m assuming it was so they can get their Twitter handle up in lights – i.e. displayed on the broadcast as a ticker on the bottom of the screen. Wow. What a claim to fame.

So, there’s that problem I have with it. I mean, who cares?! Honestly?!!

Secondly. A lot of bloggers and tweeters go on and on about how they will not give their blog away for free. They are approached by PRs to do reviews and sponsored posts, and how they won’t do this for free anymore because they have more worth than that. And I wholly support this! While I’m not and don’t intend to be a blogger who does sponsored posts etc, I fully support those that do, and I really believe that they have brands and should protect them.

Why is it then that so many bloggers are happy to tweet was is essentially ongoing promotions of this television show? Everytime someone tweets with the hash tag for this show, they are promoting it. For free.

My issue doesn’t end there. I have an issue with the Nine Network. It’s MISOGYNISTIC. THEY HATE WOMEN. Evidenced in recent years by their treatment of their female staff in the Everywhere Eddie days. Continually evidenced by the fact that their workhorse show is Three and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory – neither of which have strong female characters. It’s also the homeland of NRL which is the biggest women-hating sport of all time.

I don’t mind a bit of healthy Twitter banter about a TV show, but not this ridiculousness of talking over the top of each other, living tweeting every single minute of the show. Just sit back and watch the show!

Now I don’t usually bang on about this kind of stuff. I’m not even a feminist, really. But the commercial has taken over Twitter and the tweeters, all in the name of us vying for our name in lights… Sure our name might be on telly but there are repercussions.

Meanwhile the Network is rubbing its hands together and earning SO MUCH MORE ADVERTISING MONEY because it’s such a talked about show. So their little trick is to make us tweet – the carrot being that our name will go up on the screen – and then they put their hands out to their advertisers and demand more $$.

Tweeters and bloggers – remember your brand. Next time you want to talk about a telly show, just think about the reasons why, and what you’re giving away for free. 

Dora envy

Miss 3 is obsessed with Dora. It’s not an obsession of my doing.

A bit of context here:

The Top End of the Northern Territory is hot. It’s always hot here. It’s simply a matter of whether it’s hot and humid or hot and dry.

Every. Single. Day. Of. The. Year has forecast temperatures of 33C. Even in the dry season – which is our ‘cool’ season, the overnight minimums rarely dip below 21C.

This past wet season was unseasonably dry and and sunny. It was also very humid, very hot and the UV index was often off the charts even at 5pm. At the Sproglette’s daycare, they monitor the UV index and there were a number of occasions where it was too hot to play outside in the late afternoon after their ‘structured learning’ was complete for the day.

So they sat inside and watched movies. And quite often, Dora was the DVD of choice.

The Sprog has been talking about Dora for a few months now, but I didn’t realise how out of control her obsession was getting until she came home from daycare wearing Dora underwear. Underwear that I most definitely did not purchase for her.

Me: “Where did you get those undies from?”

Sprog: “Kayla leant them to me.”

Me: “Really? Really truly? Does she know you have them?”

Sprog: “YEEEES! She GAVE them to me! They were in her bag and her bag was on the shelf!”

Me: “So she didn’t really GIVE them to you, did she?”

Sprog: “…..”

Sprog: “I LUB Dora!”

Not a great friend am I

It occurred to me today that I’m not a good friend.

I get very self centred and find it all too easy to focus on the things that are going wrong in my life. When I was working full time, pregnant, and often caring solo for the Sprog when Mr Moi travelled every week, it was all ‘woe is me’.

Now I have two kids and find some things more difficult and some easier. But since becoming Harrie’s mum, I’ve more than doubled my friends in Darwin (and I haven’t made that many friends – I just had very few to begin with).

Today I was at the park with one of my friends (someone I met initially through work, where we discovered we had mutual friends in Melbourne) who recently had a baby. She was chatting with another girl there, saying that she’d found it difficult to meet friends in Darwin (incidentally, she moved to Darwin a year after I did).

I looked at her in shock and commented that she had so many friends (because she does – a wonderful bunch of friends who I’ve met on occasion) and she said, “Yes, but it was really hard work”.

And I’ve been thinking about that statement since. See, there’s a couple of things at play here. I’m not lacking in confidence. I’m not in your face, either, but I can socialise with people, I enjoy conversations and learning things from these conversations, and even though I don’t love being front and centre in public speaking type situations, I’ll do it if I have to.

But I don’t think I’m a terribly interesting person, especially in recent years. So when I meet someone I like who I’m sure I could be great friends with, I lack the confidence to be a bit pushy about getting them into my life. I always manage to talk myself out of inviting people over for dinner (or morning tea, being on maternity leave) or arranging to go out for lunch- I think, essentially, because I don’t think I have that much to bring to the table as a friend. I’m lacking in a strong ‘friend currency’.

I’m not sure when this started, but it’s certainly amplified since I’ve become a parent. Especially where potential friends who have no children are concerned.

And now I look back on the friends I DO have in Darwin and I realise that I’m hard work for them. It’s usually my friends who organise an outing, asking me to come along, rarely me as the initiator.

Saturday nights used to roll around and the Mr and I would discuss what we could possibly do – we never stayed in. Now Saturday nights roll around and there’s nothing to differentiate it from any other day. I never thought I’d be like this – I always had a joie de vivre, but as a new mum arriving in Darwin and finding it hard to meet people, I entered a funk and in some ways I still haven’t gotten out of it.

I’ve become a person I never thought I would – part of that is what being a parent is about. But part of it is me being lazy and dejected. There’s no real conclusion to this ramble, except that now I realise what a drip I’ve been, I guess it’s time to rouse myself out of it. Any suggestions?