Sleepless Nights

Month: September 2010

  • My office, let me show you it.

    Continuing on my theme, let’s have a sticky beak at my office.

    Okay, so office is a little bit deceptive. It’s actually the dining room, where I’ve got my desk and bookshelves on the opposite side to the dining table. It’s all open plan, so from where I sit at my computer, I can see the loungeroom and kitchen. This doesn’t prevent Amy getting into mischief while I work however.

    My desk – with wordpress open on the screen, I wasn’t *meant* to overexpose it. You can see how messy it is, all the bills end up here, along with books and other bits and pieces. The house is always clean, but it’s cluttered and untidy. Maybe because it’s a home with people living in it, not a show home. Tissues sitting on my speaker because when the kids run around, I start sneezing. A webcam/mic for Skype, books on top of my computer tower [Elizabeth Knox: The Invisible Road, A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, and Isabel Allende: My Remembered Country, there is also I Am Ozzy hidden next to my computer tower] and my notebook next to my keyboard.

    Further over we have the rest of the first bookshelf, another tall one from Nan’s house and a TV without a set top box, that Isaac uses to climb on and pull all the books out of the shelves. FUN.

    Behind me we have MORE bookshelves! (surprised yet? there is also another one in Isaac’s bedroom, full to the brim). Missing are my Robin Hobb books (see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo leaning over dangerously?) because they’re at Mums. Isaac has also been at work pulling out books from the bottom right.

    The dining room is falling apart a little. This is the room that had the indoor pond and we’ve not concreted the floor yet. The walls are warped. Quite warped.

    The long term plan is to concrete the floor and put up plaster on the walls so we can repaint. It might take a while while we get the money together though. Why do things always come down to money and how difficult it is to work around a 4yo and a 19mth old?

    Sigh.

    Until then, I’m fairly happy. Simply having a DESK is a step up, up until a few months ago, I did all my work on my lap, on a rather slow laptop.

    Ahhh, those were the days.

    Nowadays, I even have a heater, right next to me. Luxury, right?

    So there. A little peek into my hideously messy office. Hehe.

  • How to make blogging easier.

    I suffer from blank page syndrome. As soon as I sit in front of the computer, I forget everything I was going to write about. The blinking cursor appears to mock me, until I click away and do something else. 20 minutes later, as I’m washing dishes/reading a book/changing nappies I’ll be struck with a brilliant idea for a post! and then it takes me 20 minutes to get near the computer again, at which point I’ve forgotten it again.

    Which meant that most of my blog posts were done on the fly, just jotting down whatever was in my head.

    It worked and it didn’t work badly, but I was forgetting so many things.

    So I bought a notebook. I know! Insanely simple. You probably all do this already.

    It’s nothing special, but of an evening, in the 10 minutes before I go to sleep, I try to jot down as many post ideas as possible. Things I want to write about, things I think you’d be interested in reading about, just general stuff.

    And then the next day, when I’ve got time, I sit down with the book and remind myself what I was planning on blogging about.

    It’s meant that I’ve been able to write and then schedule blog posts, which in turn takes the ‘I MUST POST’ stress off me and means I actually remember to blog things. Which is kind of extraordinary for someone as disorganised as I am.

    I’ve been blogging for three years now, why didn’t I think of this sooner? I’m a bit of an idiot sometimes.

    Plus, having posts scheduled means that they go up at the same time, all the time, rather than one post being published at 7am and another at almost midnight. I can write when I want and everything seems to fall together better.

    Also, it seems that writing is like sex. The more you do it, the more you want to and the better you get. So I’m also writing more, even if I’m not posting more.

    What do you do to stop blog fatigue and come up with post ideas? Do you plan your posts ahead, or do you write them on the fly, when inspiration strikes you?

    (Not saying one is better than the other, just saying that planning and scheduling ahead seems to be working better for me than writing on the fly. Of course, it takes some work to get ahead, I actually used some reposts and some guest posts to get myself ahead and scheduling. So you know, feel free to steal my idea.)

  • A duck egg treasure hunt

    I have duck eggs hiding everywhere, increasing in number, one day at a time. We went without any ducks laying (where I could find them) for three weeks and suddenly, I’ve got duck eggs showing up again, in increasingly strange places.

    There are 11 in the blackberries (5 pictured, it’s an old picture and the eggs are mostly covered in leaf litter and feathers now).

    I stole some, so that my father can have duck eggs for breakfast. He rather likes them.

    It’s like a treasure hunt, as I discovered another nest in the shed, next to the building materials and my BIL’s car. It’s got 17 eggs in it and so far, aside from a few foray’s into sitting, no duck has decided to turn them into ducklings. Grumble grumble fucking grumble.

    We have a ramp. Before we moved in, we think it was used to drive motorbikes up. Since we’ve been here it’s a ‘castle!’ for Amy and she runs up and down it. Underneath:

    Another egg.

    The piece de resistance though, is this.

    You can’t see any eggs?

    No. Me either. Not until the duck, whose tail you can see, hops off the nest, leaving behind sixteen eggs that she is hatching – ducklings due this afternoon, or tomorrow sometime. I’m a little excited.

    I did a walk around the yard this morning, only to discover a new nest, in an old chook shelter that we haven’t cleaned out yet. 4 eggs and counting. Two nesting boxes also have freshly laid eggs.

    However. I know that at least two ducks are laying somewhere else. God knows where. No doubt they’ll disappear one day, only to appear 5 weeks later with a shitload of ducklings. One duck was spotted coming in from the paddock across the highway (currently full of ewes and newborn lambs) and another from the paddock bordering our property.

    It’s like Easter! Only with less chocolate.