Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Real life just makes me tired

    I write here, a lot. In fact, WordPress tells me that I have published 1061 (now 1062) posts here in the last four and a half years. Hundreds of thousands of words, hundreds upon hundreds of stories.

    But some things are not my story to tell and so I walk away from the computer, tired with real life and unable to sink into storytelling like I otherwise might.

    There’s things going on at the moment, family things, and while I could blog them if I get permission (and may, yet), it’s Nathan’s story, not mine.

    I’m tired, Internet. I’m tired of dramas and pitchforks rabblerabblerabble and feeling like everything I mention online requires weighty substance. I’m sick of justifying why I’m not blogging about charity X Y and Z, or why I’m not donating time, or making more noise, or Doing Good Works.

    Can’t I just write stories, without feeling the pressure to give them a moral resolution.

    (Yes, yes I can and I will burn my guilt on the pyre of your pitchforky flames)

    And in the scheme of things, are our Internet rabblerabblerabble’s terribly important?

    Tired.

    Out of energy.

  • Why Pinterest is damaging the Internet

    Pinterest seems to be the new OMG HAVE YOU SEEN IT thing lately, which, okay, fine.

    It took me a while to get into it and then only a few moments to forget about it again. This probably says more about how my brain works than any particular thing wrong with the premise of Pinterest. I’m not a designer home kind of girl and pretty things usually just make me grumpy that my house is falling down and my finances are limited at best.

    Every few weeks though, I would click through to Pinterest to see what was happening in the gardening and food sections. Gardens and food are something I can do and there were some nice ideas.

    Ignoring the fact that I seemed to see the same pictures pinned over and over and over and fucking over again, I was able to peruse photos of walkways and overgrown vegetation and delicious foody things.

    Until, one day, I found something that looked interesting. So I clicked on it, to find it’s source, so that I could read more about it.

    Source: Google.com

    Huh. Just one image, snagged by a Pinterester, using Google image search. There was no accreditation for the original photographer, and nothing available to tell me what on earth it actually was, or how to cook it.

    Slowly as I found myself clicking on more and more things, I was finding more and more images grabbed from Google, with nothing about the original author.

    And okay, I get that kittens or fuzzy bunnies or whatever maybe don’t technically NEED a source, recipes.

    Artwork, crafts and awesome ideas however, definitely DO.

    It’s like a giant game of Chinese Whispers, once things have been pinned half a dozen times, no one knows what it was originally about.

    I am a big believer in not watermarking images, instead choosing to resize to “Internet friendly, but you can’t print it out”. I think watermarks distract from a photo and make things look messy.

    But Pinterest makes me want to start watermarking things. It also makes me want to put a giant padlock on my site and disallow third party search engines from collecting images that Pinteresters could then pin, with no thoughts of accreditation.

    Also, I think Pinterest enables people to use images in blog posts and then only give source credit to Pinterest. I’m sorry, but “found on Pinterest” is not source credit.

    NO, NO IT ISN’T.

    I’m calling you out Pinterest. I think you’re damaging for artists, for craftspeople, for food bloggers, for photographers and for people with interesting ideas that they kindly share with the Internet.

  • Apparently, they can only squeak and whine

    I just shouted at my daughter for chopping a lemon into pieces with a filleting knife. While I’m proud that she didn’t chop her fingers off, I’m rather unimpressed that she destroyed my next-to-last lemon.

    At the same time, Isaac ran away outside, holding a bowl of water and pretending he didn’t hear me asking him to lay down and get changed. Again.

    I’ve got no idea what he is doing with the bowl.

    For that matter, I’ve got no idea why Amy wanted a lemon.

    Considering they’ve decided to converse solely in puppy whines (making me tell Amy more than once “If you continue to sound like a puppy, I’ll put you outside like one”) and squeaks, I’ve probably got no chance of finding out.

    This has been my Sunday.

    How was your weekend?

  • I really don’t feel guilty about this at all

    We were in the garden the other day when Amy spotted two snails having sex.

    “Mummy, what are the snails doing?”

    “They’re making babies.”

    “How do snails have babies?”

    “They lay eggs.”

    “Oh. And then the babies will hatch and eat our plants?”

    “Probably.”

    Five minutes later, the snails were slowly going their separate ways (they must have been at it all night to be done so quickly) and the ducks were at the gate looking hungry.

    So I picked the snails up and threw them to the ducks.

    I’m pretty sure they died happy, if we ignore the moments of terror when first they flew, (snails are not designed for flight, by the way) and then were eaten by hungry ducks.

    This means war.

  • The state of the uterus: 9 weeks

    Does anyone else find the comparing of fetuses to food objects creepy?  “This week, your baby is the size of a large GRAPE!”

    I’m sorry, a grape? REALLY? Is that the best you can do?

    It’s creepy.

    Things since I talked about the pregnancy last time:

    I continue to manage my nausea with anti-nausea tablets and I have not thrown up for a while, if we don’t count the retching out of my bedroom window the other day. If I forget a tablet however, I am in dire straits, needing to take myself to bed with a bucket immediately.

    I’ve lost 3kgs since falling pregnant this time, but my weight is still above 60kgs, making this my healthiest pregnancy yet. (With Amy, I fell pregnant at 60kgs and gave birth weighing 57kgs. With Isaac, I lost 6kgs in the first trimester. Yay for managed nausea!)

    I ate three thin slices of sausage last night and felt … okay.  It appears my meat aversion may be limited to beef, chicken and blowjobs. A piece of lamb on Australia day upset my stomach pretty badly, even thought it tasted great. It might have been because it was the first non-fish protein that I had eaten since the wedding.

    My blood pressure is driving me mad, sitting somewhere just above dead and making me race for the extra salty potato chips in order to bring it back up above “please don’t let me pass out in the supermarket” levels.

    Exhaustion remains, mostly because I am sick of feeling so fucking sick. I was pregnant, I miscarried, and then promptly fell pregnant again, not giving my body any time off. Fourteen weeks cannot come soon enough (although if this pregnancy is anything like Isaac’s, there will be slight nausea easing after 10 weeks. I can only hope.)

    Really, that’s it. Everything else is pretty normal – except my breasts.

    Have I talked about the massive breast expansion of this pregnancy?

    WOW. I am overflowing out of all of my bras, despite moving up a cup size just before getting pregnant (for the first time). I remember the painful aching accompanying this from Isaac’s pregnancy, but considering I conceived him only shortly after weaning Amy, there wasn’t much my breasts could do. This time, they’re HUGE.

    I have awesome cleavage right now.

    I’m just saying, there are some perks to feeling so crappy.