You might recall that I talked about getting a group of people together in what is commonly called a ‘Stitch and Bitch’ session, to make some little soft toys for the Mirabel Foundation this Christmas. Well, ours was called a ‘Sew and Glow’ session by me, the self appointed CEO of bossing everyone around. Lani was a big help (in fact she did most of the work), so I wanted to call our group Al-Lani’s Angels, but someone thought that sounded more like a brothel (which would have been more fun: people, craaaaft??? how do you do it?), so nix to that, and Sew and Glow were are.

I provided the wine and the nibbles and various bits and pieces. I even got to play my own tunes, which was cool- it’s not often that people will sit quietly for any longer than three tracks, listening to the music I inflict on them. (Perhaps I have found my true calling: DJ Shadowcat could become DJ Stitchcat.)

I did not, however, provide any actual expertise.

The ladies cut and stitched and chatted (if they could over my most excellent music selections) and sewed, whilst I poured glasses of wine and tried to look inconspicuous on account of not having a sewing machine, or any intention of doing any of the actual work.

After a time, I thought I was going to end up pretty inebriated if I didn’t do something, so I decided to make up my own thing.

Because that is always a good idea.

Everyone else had patterns and pins and plans.

I (the one with no actual skills) decided I would just make something up on the fly. I will show you it shortly.

But first I will tell you how it all went down this morning.

The Evil Geniuses were keen to see the fruits of our labour (and I use the term “our” very loosely), so I laid all of the toys out for their perusal. They picked up one and then another, admiring their eyes and their softness, affirming their relative cuteness, naming them, and indicating which ones were their favourites.

They did not say anything about mine.

I let them check everything out, and then asked them which one they thought I made. To my shock (feigned) they guessed immediately. I then asked them if mine was their very MOST favourite. Evil Genius One looked at me in horror, eyes wide with the FEAR, wondering if he should lie, or simply forfeit his promised Friday Lunch-Order immediately. “Ummm, well, I don’t really want to say, because it’s not like sewing is your MAIN thing, I mean, you seem to be good at lots of other things…”  Evil Genius Two just looked me in the eye and said, “Nup. I don’t like it. It’s small and flat and has wonky eyes, and it’s not even finished, even though you were gone for ages. I like the cat. Or the other cat. Or the twin cats. Or the owl, bunny, babushka, boy babushka, even the taggy, better than that…thing. It’s weird looking.”

Okay then. Brats.

Santa is listening you know.

And I just ate your cupcakes when you weren’t looking, sweethearts, so there.

Softies by the professionals

Softie, thing, by me. Everyone is beautiful..
Aren’t they?

…From The Ashers

Okay everyone, check this out: Mirabel is a cool charity that provides support for kids and families affected by parental substance abuse. So every year, they run a bit of a drive to collect cute handmade toys for those cool little kids to cuddle.

I know, I know, at this time of the year it can feel like everyone has their hand out asking for either your time or your money to help out someone who doesn’t have as much as you. And I know it’s difficult to know who to help, hell, sometimes the problems seem so big and so widespread that you can feel like you might be swamped by it all, so it’s easier to just bury your head under a sea of shiny plastic crap.

So I’ve found you a solution: Sewing for Softies.

Gorgeous Pip of Meet Me at Mikes has all the details on her blog right here.

Pesonally, I can’t sew for shit.

I once asked my family for a sewing machine for Christmas, so they pissed themselves all the way to the shops and got me one. For some inexplicable reason it came with a complimentary fondue machine, which incidentally has had quite a run. Here is a pic of my machine:

It makes a nice shelf, no?

It has ugg boots on top of it, which, quite frankly get more use all the way up here on the Sunny Coast.

So being a bit challenged in the manual arts, I have appointed myself CEO of Operations and Snacks, and have managed to get a whole lot of lovely fabric donated by Alisa from Plump, (a ripper of a local lady who is in the business of all things cushions you can see her stuff here or at the Eumundi Markets every Wednesday and Saturday), I’ve set up a venue for a sewing-bee and am in the process of recruiting a small army of sewing-ladies to do the actual work.

Easy.

Perhaps you might consider doing the same in your town? Maybe you have some crafty friends that you can bribe with the promise of sweet treats and crisp glass of bubbles for their troubles? And if you live on the Sunny Coast and would like to be involved in our night, then message me and I’ll send you the details.

Let’s see if we can make some little kids smile big toothy grins, with gifts made with love, this Christmas.

…From The Ashers

Vinyl.
Apparently U2’s free album is on vinyl. And it’s in the Top 5.
Even though we already all have it. For free.
What??

I don’t really like U2 that much.

I mean they’re okay, I have a couple of their albums from another life ago, but I haven’t really thought of them much since the 80s. I like the 2Cellos version of ‘With or Without You’ and that song Bono wrote for his Missus on their anniversary ‘The Sweetest Thing’ is easy on the ear, but that’s about the extent of the notice I’ve taken of them since screaming out the words to ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with my friends on the way home from softball carnivals, drunk on dust and sweat and victory.

I noticed them when Apple dropped some of their songs from the clouds and into my devices at little while ago. That was weird, wasn’t it? I got strangely grumpy for a minute or two, but mainly because I have no idea how technology works, and I didn’t like the idea of some brainy kid in Cupertino messing with my stuff. Then I realised if they wanted to, they could mess with my stuff any time they like, and hey, it’s free music. I tried to listen to the music from someplace else, but it felt just like that, songs that were meant for someone else’s soundtrack, someone who was having a different life to me.

So that was that. I’m sure those U2 fellas are okay with my ambivalence. Other people seem to like them just fine.

This week U2 were on the Graeme Norton Show. They played a song, and they were good I suppose, but most of my attention was directed towards Stephen Fry and Ironman and the stories that Robert Duvall had to tell about Brando, from the Godfather days. After a while U2 came and sat on the couch with the people from the movies, and everyone dutifully shuffled over, because the dude from the iTunes logo was in the house, and he’s pretty famous, right? Everyone deferred to the U2 boys and they seemed genuinely nice, and perhaps Robert Duvall looked a little confused, but hey, he can’t even remember the names of all the movies he’s been in, so that wasn’t much of an issue.

Eventually they mentioned that the junk-mail album is quite a pared-back sound, not full of digitised mixing, but something that sounds just as good acoustically. Cheeky Graeme jumped right onto that, and asked Bono if they could play songs from it with just acoustic guitars. He said they could, and, as if from the clouds, acoustic instruments appeared.

OH.

MY.

I think I said that I didn’t really care much for U2. Well that was a statement from before.

They played ‘Song for Someone’, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so exquisite in my life. I’m not sure if it was watching those four men becoming boys in front of my eyes to work it all together like some piece of precise machinery, whether it was the emotion thrumming and coming off Bono’s whole being, or whether it was the unexpected the sounds that he can make with his voice, and nothing more.

The show finished, Graeme waved goodbye, and the credits rolled, and I just sat on the couch, staring at the blank screen, wondering what had just happened.

How did U2 know to make a song just for me?

I think I like to believe that each one of us has a purpose in this life. Not necessarily something God-given or anything like that, but that we each have something meaningful to contribute to our own lives, and if we are lucky, to the lives of the people we love. I like to think that we all have some special thing that is just us. Just for us, and something that is uniquely ours. I suspect that is why in our quietest moments we can feel a yearning, a feeling that we have something, some spark, some distinctive thing, that separates us from the person next to us, even though we share almost the exact same genetic make-up. I think it’s the reason we strive. We want someone to notice our thing. Maybe even love us for our thing.

Sitting there on my couch, late on a Sunday evening, I felt privileged to share in Bono’s thing.

It was a bloody good thing. The sweetest thing.

Do you know what your thing is?

…From The Ashers

I AM READING THE BEST BOOK IN THE WORLD.

I know. Big statement.

And it might not actually be the best book in the world, but man oh man, it has gotten me fired up. I usually like to read fiction, with the occasional biography smattered in there for balance, yet over the years I have read my fair share of titles from the Personal Development and Financial sections of the bookshop. I won’t say I ever actually like these books, but I dutifully read them, because, well, you’re supposed to aren’t you? I think that’s what grown-ups do.

I went to a Problogger Seminar a few months ago, and one of the keynote speakers was a cool guy called Matthew Something-Foreign-Sounding.  I liked his presentation, in that it wasn’t so much about blogging itself, but about why we do the things we do. He talked a bit about motivation. He gave an example of asking some woman to do something she didn’t want to do, for money. And no, it wasn’t some shonky ‘Indecent Proposal’ moment, it was about seeing how much he would have to offer her to do something she was afraid of (I think the example was to jump off a tall building…or maybe eat spiders…my memory is hazy, but bear with me).  The important point was that she wouldn’t do it for ANY money. So then he said, “What if the lives of all of your family depended on it?”  And of course that was the kicker. She said she would do the scary/crazy thing.

So it seems we all have a price. We all have that something that will define what we will do, even be compelled to do, once all of the cards are laid bare.

I’ve been thinking a bit about that lately.

I have a whole bunch of things on my goal lists, to-do lists and inspiration lists. The trouble is, a lot of the things on my lists are a bit shite. I have them there because I think they should be there, not because I really care about them, at least not in the day to day running of my life. “Pay off the house” is on the list, but really, I don’t give it much thought. It will be paid off, one day, but I don’t really do much to try and speed up that process. Especially if making an extra repayment interferes with me buying a case of that Veuve that Uncle Dan’s has on sale right now for 53 bucks a bottle*. I also have other such uninspiring things as “Do BAS” and “Paint the skirting boards” on the lists.

See? Bleurgh.

So boring you probably stopped really reading back at my mention of Indecent Proposal, and started imagining either Demi or Paul (or both) nude.

Enter Matthew Michalewicz. At the seminar he gave us a FREE book. I nearly didn’t take one because 1. I don’t like books that look like they might include work and 2. Free book = Shit book, according to Alison’s Book Rule #476.

But I did take one, mainly because he seemed nice and mostly because I thought I might hand it on to someone. Someone who likes shitty, hard-work and probably-harder-to-read-and-most-likely-self-published-books. That someone is not me.

The book has resided on the top, then after a while in the middle, and most recently, at the bottom of my bedside-table book stack tower. Until last Sunday night when I decided enough was enough and the pile had to go. I was about to relegate THE BEST BOOK IN THE WORLD to the book graveyard: the drawers under my bed, where all books go to die. Or be eaten by cockroaches.

It was saved by the title, and maybe a little bit by the fact that the cover art reminded me of Days Of Our Lives, and it made me wonder what Marlana, Bo and Hope are up to after all these years. But it was mostly the title. I wondered what he was on about with all this “half a second” palaver, I mean, I’ve got forever. Haven’t I?

I was intending to save this post until I’m finished the book, and I was going to give you the good oil, the Cliff’s note of personal development books, to save you from reading the whole thing, but I’ve changed my mind. The thing is, you NEED to go and get yourself this book. And you need to read it. And you need do all of the things Matthew says to do. I’m about half-way through, and I promise you, these words have gotten me more excited about goal-setting and having a life by design than I have ever been. I’ve been to many seminars about this kind of thing, and at the crux I guess there isn’t much that is blindingly new, but the way he has put it all together…man. Just get it, and read it. You’ll see.

So here’s the book:

Best Book in the World

And here’s the website and the facebook.

As Molly would say, “Do yourself a favour.”

*FACT. This is not a sponsored post (worse luck) but this is the actual price at the time of writing. Get there right now, I say. Or pay off your home-loan. Both work.

**Oh, and Matthew didn’t sponsor me either, but you never know, maybe he’ll offer me some of that money-to-do-a-scary-thing. As long as it doesn’t involve being near birds. Alive birds I mean. Dead are fine.

It’s 7.45am, and this is me.

Still in PJs, bucket of coffee in hand (it IS international coffee something-something day today you know) and on the couch. We have all breakfasted on eggs and smoothies (not green, and definitely not in jars), the second load of washing is on the line, I’ve replied to all of the emails and texts about work, so I should be basking in my industriousness on day off.

Yet somehow I am feeling strangely guilty.

The kids are at my feet playing Lego together, making up some block shaped other-worlds of their minds. They are happy.

We have had a really fun weekend of activity in Brisbane, so it’s not as if they have been cooped up in the house. I just asked them if they want to ‘do something’ or are they happy to play, and they said, “Stay here. Play! We love home days.”  I made some adventurous suggestions, just in case, and they declined. They just want to stay in their PJs and play here.

Yet somehow I am feeling strangely guilty.

What is this guilt, where does it come from, and why do I question it?

I suspect it stems back to my first boyfriend- Rod says the first cut is the deepest- and without ever knowing it, he made some incisions that have never really healed.  That boy was kind, and he would be surprised and probably even saddened to know that some of his words still open me up from time to time. There was no malice intended- we were just figuring ourselves out. And of course, we aren’t together, which means that we were of different philosophies anyway.

Today, as I sit here, the very picture of comfort and repose, I have a snippet of a sentence worming it’s way under and over the sulci and gyri of my grey matter: You NEVER want to DO anything.

And I guess in a way he was right. If doing means going out, running around, seeing things, walking places and immersing my physical body in unfamiliar places, then yes, I often doing want to “do” anything.

So many of the things I like to “do” involve me sitting still, looking slothful. So many of them are constructs of the mind. I love to read, to write, to meditate, to dream, to play mind games with myself, to think about the future, to dream, to remember things and people in my past, to make up stories, to reflect, to make connections, to dream, to recite song lyrics as poems in my mind, to take photos in my head, to design new businesses for other people to do, to dream. Always the dreaming.

And dreaming takes time.

Do you have time to dream? Do you have a dream to share with me today?

…From The Ashers xxx

If you follow many Aussie blogs you’ll probably already know there was a Problogger conference this weekend on the Gold Coast.

Surfers: The view from The QT

There are people more experienced and more savvy than me who can tell you how it all went down, and I don’t suppose you’d be all that interested in what I learned over the weekend anyway, but I do want to tell you two things, both consisting of equal and opposite energy for me, just like Newton told us it would be.

Firstly, at the end of Day One I was completely bereft.

I thought this was the most soul-destroying seminar I’d ever been to.

Problogger is, as I’m sure you’ll have figured out, about monetising your blog.  Being paid to blog.  I’ve been blogging for just over a year, and I had an idea that being paid to do this might be something I could do.  But as the day wore on, it became patently obvious that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing here, with respect to earning buck$ for blogging.  I don’t have a niche, a specific tone, or a message.  I don’t provide anything useful, nor do I solve any of your problems.  I don’t have products or ideas to sell you. I’m a personal blogger, and that means this space is all about me.  Not really the kind of thing that lends itself to paid content or advertising.  Two other things also became obvious: I have no clue what all the techy stuff is about (SEO, what?) and being a paid blogger appears to involve a shit-load of work.  So two things I do.not.like appear to be important.

So I almost ditched the whole remainder of the seminar to quaff Cosmopolitans by the pool.

Some would say this is a pattern of mine, but I’d tell them to shut up and mind their own.

Luckily, I was there with a mate who knows me better than I know myself most times, and she pretty much forbade me to miss a single Saturday session.  Which was a good thing, for redemption was just around the corner, in the guise of Matthew Michalewicz, heralding the second big thing I needed to know.

He reminded me of many things that I needed a nudge with, and most of all, the concept that when we say we can’t do something, what we really mean, is that the motivation isn’t great enough.  Yet.  I may have said I could not learn all the computery things required to run this blog properly, but as Matthew would say; if my whole family would die if I didn’t figure it out, I probably could.  And fast.

And of course, as always, a concept that applies to you in one area of your life, will cross over into others.  This “I can’t” mantra doesn’t only apply to my bloggy life, but to my work, my family, my finances.  I can.  I just need compelling leverage.  Which also involves going back to the original idea, the thing I’m saying I can’t do, and double check that it is something that I really want, and that it isn’t just some notion that I’ve grabbed from the air, or from someone else’s bag of tricks.  The difference between something I should do and something I want to do.

Sometimes it’s good to get a whack of perspective when I’m being a big whining baby.

And a free book.

Thanks Matthew xx

Is there anything you’ve been saying you can’t do (that you claim you want to do)?

What do you do or say to yourself to get your mojo back?

…From The Ashers xx