Etc.

Don't think it's all been fun and fickle frivolity around here this week. I have been working hard embracing my domestic chores:

(Just for the record these were made by Sweet Envy in North Hobart and NOT by me)

Yesterday, it was 16 degrees in Hobart....so I managed to get not one, but two loads of washing line dried, folded and put away. Unheard of for this time of year. And then, on my way down the hill to lunch, I dropped into the accountant's office and signed off on the paperwork to complete our tax reporting for not last financial year....but the year before. This induced feelings of euphoria......it was a two glasses of wine lunch. But that's OK as in the last seven days I've done eight Bikram Yoga classes.

And I've finally gotten around to picking cumquats. With one kilo of fruit I made three more jars of Moira's Cumquat Compote:

Still the tree is heavy with fruit, so my work with cumquats is not done yet. I'm thinking marmalade.....I once coughed up $16 at the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder in Melbourne for a jar of Stephanie Alexander's Cumquat Marmalade to see exactly how she cut her fruit. I know now. And of course they are delicious squeezed into G & T's......if you have any other suggestions for cumquats, let me know. 

I got another invitation in the mailbox. This time from The Leukaemia Foundation for the '2012 Light the Night' Launch Cocktail Party. It made me cry. Almost four years ago my Dad died of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.....a rare and very aggressively cruel form of blood cancer. When he was diagnosed he was told that without intervention he would be dead within two weeks. Two weeks. He participated in a drug trial and had chemotherapy. His two weeks turned into five months, for which I am so grateful. It doesn't sound like long, yet it's funny how time, as you've known it before, becomes a strange concept when you are living through such a harrowing experience. It was long enough for him to meet his new granddaughter and to give my sister away at her wedding.

My memories of the 'Light the Night' in Hobart three years ago are so vivid and raw. It was almost a year to the day after Dad died. It had teemed with rain all day. Yet the clouds cleared just as the procession of illuminated lanterns spilled out of the Hobart City Hall and seemed to float around the waterfront. It was eerily beautiful....for one night, so many people's harsh experiences with Leukaemia were somehow transcended into remembrance and hope. I'll be there again this year.

R

Addicted.

I knew better yet I just couldn't resist. While packing school lunches this morning I ate the merest sliver of baked chocolate cheesecake even though I knew I was going to a 9.30am Bikram Yoga Class. Big mistake. By Standing Head to Knee Pose I felt the full consequences - faint, nauseous and tingly in my extremities all at one. It is a bad, bad feeling.

So now I have declared a moratorium on doing our tax until after the school holidays which start this afternoon. I'm not going to kid myself - four children and time to do tax...it's never going to happen. Sometimes I think about back in the day when I used to manage the Trust Account for our business, how did I ever do that? I've never been gifted at maths  - l'll fess up that I did veggie maths at school. Then I  console myself that I did manage to get a First Class Honours Degree........the problem being that it is in Art Theory.

Anyway I digress. I have been musing about addiction and what I might admit to being addicted to. This is what gives me heart palpitations and sweaty palms if I go cold turkey. You are welcome to either laugh or cry.

1. Green Tea:

To be honest, most days I knock back five or even six cups. I know this is too much because if I don't drink it, I get a headache. Don't be put off by my teacup, it is a 'breakfast cup' and has the dimensions of a bucket. Actually, I used to like coffee (a good old Australian flat white). Actually, that would be an understatement. We took an espresso machine to hospital when I had Mimi. And then three years ago an old school friend and I went and had a week at The Golden Door in the Hunter Valley. There was a time when we would have roared with laughter if someone from the future had told us that we would move heaven and earth to have our families looked after so that we could detox, diet and exercise our heads off. We used to be a tad hedonistic when we got together (she has lived in Melbourne, London and Launceston to my Sydney, South of France and Hobart). So, for a whole week, we gave up caffeine, alcohol and red meat and got up every morning in time to do tai chi while the sun rose. For about six months I drank no caffeine and then it started sneaking in in the guise of green tea. Alcohol, unfortunately was another story, I'm ashamed to admit that we broke out the bubbly on the flight home from the Golden Door, much to our fellow inmates glee!

2. Bikram Yoga:

I try and go to Bikram Yoga classes at Studio Newtown at least five times a week. Otherwise, I get the above listed withdrawal symptoms. I have been a convert since my first class in Hobart three years ago. As it is an international phenomenon, I have been to Bikram Yoga classes in Hobart, Sydney, Bali and I tried to go in Paris yet was turned away as it was only five weeks since my fourth caesarian. I tried. I have also been to garden variety yoga classes in Bali, in the gorgeous gardens at the Ayana and overlooking the ocean at the Karma Kandara and in India, on the roof of the Lake Palace and on a hilltop at the Devi Garh. Not last year, but the year before, when I was pregnant and living in the South of France, I used to lug myself into the cobbled streets of Beziers at least twice a week to go to classes at the Yoga Centre. It was a world away from extreme, sweaty, scantily clad Bikram Yoga (which was three hours away in Marseilles). Genevieve must have been in her sixties yet looked twenty years younger. In class, her hair was always 'coiffed' and she wore full 'macquillage' and colour matched her toenail polish with her yoga outfit - her fingernails were always an immaculate French polish. Are there any other Bikram Yoga practitioners out there reading this reading this to appreciate the humour?! I learnt the French words for every body part along with stock standard yoga poses - Chien qui Tombe, anyone?


Earlier this year I did a week long seminar with Bikram Choudhury himself. You can read all about it in graphic detail here, here, here, here and here. Say what you will about him but he really is a walking advert for the yoga that he sells - can you believe that he's over seventy (that's him in the middle of the picture in the speedos with his hair in a bun)? I think I'd rather have yoga than botox any day.

Bikram Yoga is a ninety minute open eye meditation where you also get to work your body inside and out. As extreme as it sometimes seems, in class, I have NEVER seen anybody come to any physical  harm. At my last Body Pump class at a gym in town, they had to get an ambulance for someone who was having a heart attack.

3. Gowans Auctions:

Thursday is viewing day. Yesterday, I had to fight every fibre of my being to stop myself heading out to Main Road, Moonah to check out what was on offer - maybe this week that unknown 'thing' that I didn't realise that I couldn't live without just might be there. My reaction caused me to investigate the whole addiction question. Let me tell you, in my life, on Thursdays all roads lead to Moonah, either by car or, I have even been known to rollerblade from the Cenotaph along the Cycleway, which conveniently runs just behind the auction sheds.....with a double pram. Last Thursday, I mistakenly took the children and bought a Wendy House. It maxed out the credit card. It has to be the ultimate way to go shopping, the stock changes every week and then there is the rush involved in trying to choose the price. Unfortunately you can't always call it cheap thrills as it can be ruinously expensive....and everything in between. Last week you could have bought the entire six volume set of Gibbon's 'The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' or a brand new, stainless steel, freestanding Smeg cooker, if you were so inclined. I bought the Wendy House:

Note to self, remember NOT to take the children out to Gowans. However, I might just have a quick look at the catalogue for what's up in next week's auction.....online.

R