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Internet, I give you the baby birds that are screeching above my desk. BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO SUFFER WITH ME.
These working conditions are intolerable. I’ve tried complaining to the groundskeeper and maintenance man (Nathan) but he tells me his hands are tied and I need to discuss the issue with pest control (The Cats).
Either way, nothing is getting done and my ears are hurting.
With a wedding set to happen in 23 days, I’ve realised that days are not as long as I thought they were and that months will fly by if you give them a chance. Just because whining grumpy children make seconds feel like minutes, they don’t actually appear to have the power to extend time.
I’m not sure if that is a good thing, or a bad thing.
It’s probably good.
From being a little stressed about wedding things a week ago, now I’m feeling quite zen about the whole thing. Sure, I need to buy stacks of paper plates and work out where I can buy wooden forks from, but the spit is organised, an old family friend has gifted me the sheep to go on it and I have friends and family descending on the house the day before in order to help with preparations.
If we can’t get things organised with all of the extra hands, then we deserve to have things left undone.
There are a few things that I absolutely need to do before the wedding and one of them involves buying a new bra.
[insert music of doom here]
I hate bra shopping. Hate hate hate. But as the ever so lovely Renee pointed out when we were discussing bras at the Problogger event (as you do) – I need to be wearing a different size bra. I gained weight and it seems that a good portion of that weight landed on my breasts. Nathan is thrilled to bits about this, but I’m not convinced.
The other thing I need to do is start seriously preparing my children for the sheer amount of relatives that we’re going to have up here – something that I’m not sure the kids are going to cope with. Isaac hides in the bedroom whenever his cousins come to visit, and he LIKES them. Amy sort of understands that the wedding is a party, but she just wants to put up the wedding tent and “live in it Mummy!”
It’s going to be interesting, at the very least.
And, both children need a haircut. Amy will be fine, but Isaac has a tendency to scream blue murder and require a straitjacket type approach in order to get his hair clipped.
I visualise lots of flying time in my future.
Anyway.
I’m getting married Internet!
PS, I have completely forgotten to invite a bunch of people. This is a bad thing.
I was down in Salamanca for the markets on Saturday, and it was recommended that I go and see the stall that Summer Kitchen Bakery run. Hiding at the very southern-most point of the markets, I found them in their caravan. We got to talking and I asked the lovely Maria if she would like to be part of Showcase Tasmania.
I didn’t have my camera with me, or I would have taken a photo of the inside of the caravan. Firstly, the shelves of fresh bread – then the pies and pastries sitting up the front. Finally I would have photographed the crowd in front of the van, neatly lined up and waiting for a chance to buy some bread.
I had been told that they baked the best bread in Southern Tasmania and so my standards were high when I walked away with a lovely heavy loaf of sprouted rye bread.
Getting home later, I sliced it and wasn’t disappointed. Even with only butter, the flavour was amazing, soft and sharp and very very moreish. I was hungry by that point and so made myself a plate of odds and ends to nibble on.
Including blueberries from Blueberry Boost and cheese from Grandvewe.
It was delicious and so I kept eating it. Of course.
But, I think the biggest critics of any food are my children. They’ve both got sensory issues surrounding food, which makes feeding them the most frustrating job in the world.
Amy declared the bread delicious and ate most of her slice, with soup. Isaac is a tougher kid to please and I was shocked (pleasantly) when he ate his entire piece of bread and asked for another, to dip in his soup.
I was impressed.
Summer Kitchen Bakery don’t have a website, or facebook, but you can find them at the Salamanca Markets every week. If you’ve not tried their bread, you absolutely should and you can tell them that you heard about them on Showcase Tasmania if you like.
I got some amazing news today. Throw your hat in the air and shout kind of news, run around the house squealing, tell everyone in sight kind of news.
(No, I am not pregnant.)
It was amazing news. I poked Nathan until he woke up – lazy bones was napping on the couch – and told him. I rang my parents, and spoke to my father and told him the great news. Mum wasn’t home.
I was so over the moon that I caught myself for a split second starting to dial the number for my grandmother.
And then I burst into tears because she is dead and I can’t ring and tell her. Suddenly I wasn’t so excited, I was just bone crushingly sad.
Death is hard. Death hits you at the strangest of times, when things are going well. You’ll be travelling along, and things will be just fucking perfect and then your brain will collapse in on itself and you’ll be left sobbing. Death is so final and I think that is the hardest part to live with.
I cried for an hour and then I rang my mother and we celebrated and cried together, because that is what you do.
Knowing that Nan would be excited and proud isn’t the same as ringing and speaking to her. Knowing that she would be cheering me on from the sidelines is nothing like sitting down and telling her about it. It’s just not the same.
Things are going well for me. They’re going really really well. I got another couple of businesses to sign on to Showcase Tasmania, I’ve got a few more interested and in the process of confirming and deciding and (the biggest thing I suspect) it’s finally Not Winter anymore.
I am happy. I am truly truly happy. And in the same breath, I am so terribly sad, because I am getting married in a month, my blog is doing well, things are happening for me and my grandmother is still too dead to share this with.
And that is the problem right now.
***
Ghosts and the possibility thereof aside, death is death. It’s final and I can’t change that.
I should hopefully be able to share my news with you in the next week or so. I am really excited about this, but you know, pass the tissues. I’ll cry and dance at the same time.
The key to success is failure. It sounds weird and like I’m going at things backwards, but this is one thing I have learned that holds true through everything.
I was reading Shae’s post about her epiphany and I was struck by how similar her thought processes were to mine. It’s easier to pretend that you don’t care about your blog, than to put it all out there and run the risk of failing. After all, failure is something that we hate and something to be avoided.
But is it really?
Every time I have done something, on this blog or in real life, that has failed, I’ve learned something. Sometimes it’s small things like how fast to whisk in oil so that my mayonnaise doesn’t split. Sometimes it’s when to keep my mouth shut to prevent my family hating me for twelve months because of something I wrote. Every step forward I make has been inspired by a string of failures.
This blog is no different and in fact it is the thing I fail at the most. I’ve never expected myself to be the perfect mother, or the perfect homemaker, but I did expect myself to be the perfect blogger. To be able to comment back every time, to read everyone and to write beautiful words that will resonate with everyone, every single time.
Blogging doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that.
My blog is becoming more successful. Showcase Tasmania is doing well, my subscriber numbers are slowly climbing and my traffic is sitting at a level I am comfortable with.
To get here, I’ve had to fail numerous times. For every five pitches I send, four businesses ignore me. For every contact I make and click with, there is someone who thinks I’m an idiot. For every blog post that does well on traffic, there are two that don’t.
Funnily enough, I’ve found that it is the small failures that I learn the most from. Working out what I did wrong and how to not do it again, I learn what I should have done instead. Sure, it’s trial and error a lot of the time, but that is life, isn’t it?
Failure is scary. No one wants to fail. We all want to be successful, all of the time.
However, I’m not sure that you can have success, if you didn’t build it on the back of failure.
And the only thing I can see that all successful people have in common is: They refused to give up and stop trying.