significant milestones

summer approaches, and the garden turns into some kind of wild living green beast:

it seems inevitable that i am drawn to reflect on the huge changes that have taken place in my life, recently, and over an extended period of time. i used to hate change, i railed against it and tried to control it, but now i realise life is change. nothing stays still, nothing stays the same. the last week or two has really brought this home.

i am about to do something on this blog that people usually advise strongly against, and i have been thinking about it for a month or more, as a particular significant milestone in my life approached. people advise to not give away too much of yourself on your blog, and certainly to not identify your real-life self in any way. most of the people who read this blog know me, and some of them know already this thing i am about to share, but some dont and i am a bit nervous about how it may change people's perceptions of me. really, i dont think it should, but thats part of the reason im blogging it. people keep too much about themselves secret, and so we live in fear of each other, of what and who we dont know or understand. the other reason im blogging this is because it isnt actually something i should be ashamed of. i am, and should be, proud, and i wonder if the more people talked about this kind of personal stuff, the more we would realise we had in common, and the less judgemental we would all be.

so, lets cut to the chase shall we? november 2nd 2009 represented 15 years, to the day, that i decided to change my life for good. on wednesday november 2, 1994, i walked, voluntarily, in the door of what was then ward 25 at rozelle hospital (i think its been moved to concord now). i stayed there for 7 days and then checked into a long term residential treatment facilty in stanmore, sydney. i lived there for over a year as i kicked and screamed and laughed and fought and cried my way into a better life. i didnt leave there cured, or 'recovered', or even greatly changed. i just stopped using drugs and alcohol. there were so many things i needed to change about myself but to contemplate them all so early seemed overwhelming. sometimes i lay awake at night in a cold sweat of fear not knowing how i would get through the next day, let alone the rest of my life. i was terrified of being alone. i was terrified of my feelings, i thought if i gave in to the pain and anger and hurt and frustration inside of me i would drown. i didnt know who i was, or what i wanted to be when i grew up, i had major issues with my mother, was scared of women, didnt know how to relate to men in anything even remotely resembling a healthy manner, was 26 on the outside and about 10 on the inside. i had no job, no career, had screwed up at uni more times than i could count, had a large amount of debt, was wanted by the law, had bright pink hair, a nose ring, and wore flanelette shirts with either doc martens or bare feet.

but i was alive. and free. by all rights i shouldnt have been. i had flirted with death and the police more times than was wise. i had seen other people disappear down either path, sometimes both. i tried to reconcile with my family but made a mess of that, and i moved in with someone, into a relationship, when all advised against it. we survived 14 years together. sometimes it was a close call. but i dont think either of us would have made it on our own.

but we have. we separated, and both survived. once i had thought a process like that would kill me, but i handled it so well! and now we are living together again, as friends, sharing the custody of our dogs who have brought so much joy to our lives.

i think i regret not having kids, but it was probably a wise decision. instead, i do crazy weird shit with my dogs, and put up with crazy weird dog people, who make me realise how far ive come, how much ive changed. and now i am 'over 40'. i pay tax. i get angry at the world. i fear for the environment, for young people. i wish i could smash the capitalist system and we could all go back to living in grass huts! meanwhile, i live in a lovely house.

i have lots of stuff. i drive a good quality car. i have a great job. i have a phd. on tuesday i am being interviewed for a proper permanent academic position at a university. i have a 1 in 4 chance of getting it. i have so many friends i cant believe my luck. i have learnt to knit. and to be good at it! i have some of my family back. i am loved, and i love.

this is the most amazing part for me. that now, i can cry, i can feel anger, joy, pain, frustration, and it doesnt frighten me anymore. i embrace it, because it means i am alive. 15 years ago i stood at a fork in the road. down one path lay insanity, imprisonment, death. it looked inviting. down the other lay a complete unknown, fear, loneliness. it looked terrifying. but something made me take the second path and im so glad i did.

i am writing this because i want people to know that there are many like me, who have not walked an easy path, who have strayed from the straight and narrow, but who can, and do, get their lives back together. we are not bad people, we just made bad choices, and sometimes circumstances did conspire against us! i am not now who i was then, but i am the sum of my past and the future still to come. and for others who still struggle, and i know there are many, i promise its worth taking the path into the unknown future. it has so far exceeded my expectations, i cant believe i wasted 10 years in the wilderness for fear of what has turned out to be only beautiful and amazing.

if there are people reading this who need help please reach out, there is help if you need it.

k xx

world dog games

its all over. four long days of travel to and from homebush and acer arena, the site of the inaugural world dog games. there were 4 dog sports showcased, flyball, agility, canine disc (frisbee) and dock diving. you had to qualify in order to compete, both jem and possum tried out for the dock diving and jem decided he no longer wished to jump off a tall plank into 4 feet of water. possum loved it, and qualified, but because her flyball team also qualified they wouldnt let her do both. so flyball it was. they only took 4 teams, and the total team time had to be under 19 seconds. there are currently only 4 times in australia that run less than 19 seconds and possum was already in one of those teams, but because you had to have 6 dogs (4 to race, 2 reserves), and our usual team only had 4 dogs, we put in a make up team with a dog from the south coast and a dog from victoria. it was fun and challenging to have people and dogs we usually dont race with, and they fitted in really well.

there was 2 days of preparation before the event and then two days of performance. you can see a snippet of the rehearsal here, the people wearing red shirts are my team (im one of the people putting the balls in the spring loaded box. this is called box loading. despite what some people think, this is the most important job in flyball, cos last time i looked dogs couldnt load their own balls. right? right). when you see a guy yelling 'possum, come on baby', thats trent and our very own possum. trent got teased about the 'baby' for the rest of the weekend.

we spent most of our time backstage, in our very own team room:


our room was opposite the 'talents' dressing room, the human talent for the event being grant denyer as the host, and leah mcleod doing the commentary. dr katrina was there, and so was farmer dave. hello. grant denyer is very short and very friendly, but looks silly in a dracula costume. josh, our victorian team mate, was quite fond of leah, but she never seemed to want to interview him. maybe he needs to call his dog baby? she did interview trent, you will probably see that on the tv show which goes to air in december.

personally, i prefer production types. here are some of them in the backstage corridor:

there was the usual contingent of film and tv wannabe girlies being runners and thinking they were important, but for the most part the crew were great, very professional and friendly. the production company usually do big sporting events, like the rugby and v8 supercars, so the show-business wank factor was pretty low, and they were good with the dogs. i couldnt get photos of the actual show but here are some of the rehearsals. this is the agility equipment all set up in the arena:

and here are two of the other flyball teams practising:

behind them is the huge pool for the dock diving.

the actual competition part was short but great fun. normally at a flyball comp you run 6 races a day with 5 heats in each race. this time we only ran 2 races per performance (one performance each day) with 3 heats in each race, and we got points for heats run, tied and lost. our team, the hellfire hounds, won all three of our races over the two days and was the top seeded team into the 'final', which we lost to 6Pak, a team made up mostly of the chocolate border collies that we usually lose to in regular competition. all of those dogs have been in a team together before that hold the current australian record. we did beat them in the round robin though, so we thought were in with a chance but they were too good and were the deserving winners. it was close racing though, and just great fun to be a part of.

there are some changes afoot in our flyball world and i have mixed feelings about that. change is always hard and some people handle it better than others. i am not happy about some parts of it, but relieved about others, and there are always new and exciting challenges around the corner.

i certainly hope another world dog games is part of that!

k xx

People Like Us

i have had one of those weeks with Other People that makes you think becoming a hermit might be a viable life choice. thank god for People Like Us, with whom i celebrated my birthday a few days early this saturday just gone (bday is tuesday and next weekend's a write-off so early it was!). just a nice quiet lunch at the burrawang pub, with Some Really Great People.

it was just what i needed and totally restored my faith in humanity. bells was truly inspiring with her myrtle leaf shawl and we had great fun playing at being stylists. here is a behind the scenes shot:

it takes a lot of work to look that good you know. even miss gracie got in on the act:

thats a tomato sauce sachet shes into there, giving new meaning to the 'fair suck of the sauce bottle' saying. we all met the sock victim too, who was truly lovely. the knitting talk was nicely balanced with discussions of the relevance of new social media, the merits of the iphone vs the google phone (and other assorted geekisms that i didnt understand), and an analysis of john safran's race relations.

but the thing that really gets me about People Like Us is how amazingly thoughtful and generous they are. it takes a lot of effort to get in the car and drive somewhere to meet for a few hours, in the middle of busy lives, and i am truly grateful to have people in my life who will do that. and who bring with them so many beautiful gifts that i feel like the luckiest person in the world. here they are all together:

there was a Tower of Presents beautifully wrapped from rosered, which consisted of an entire tea set with not one but TWO teapots with those groovy little infuser baskets inside the pot. i have been coveting one of those ever since i first saw bells'. there were also three new sets of knitpicks points, which i was in desperate need of (and even more so after last night when i snapped one of the harmony 4mms!). lyn couldnt make it but she sent me a beautiful book by anne fadiman, a collection of 'familiar essays'. its so beautiful, and after reading trashy vampire novels for the last few weeks reminds me how inspiring it can be to read something well written!

the other book you might notice there is a little volume entitled 'knitted lace of estonia' by nancy bush, a book i have been drooling over ever since it came out. everything in it is beautiful, i already have two on the shortlist! thank you lovely georgie. the little baggie with the pears on it is courtesy of missfee, hand made even:

and i think its the grooviest project bag in the entire world, with one long strap that you slip through the short one, and then it sits nicely on your wrist. i already took it on a car trip with me yesterday, and its perfect for yarn that is not tightly wound and needs room to move. it is so beautifully made, lined inside with red, and a pear on the bottom:

when it was gifted it also had this on the bottom:

alchemy mohair/silk. i dont think i ever seen anything quite like it! i am in awe of it, its like a living breathing furry creature that should be patted not knitted! and continuing with the yarn pron theme, i am the extremely lucky recipient of surely the COOLEST yarn around at the moment. from bells, malabrigo silky merino in 'ravelry red':

thats right folks, ravelry has its own yarn, and ive got some! the red is breathtaking, i have it in a basket but i stop everytime i walk past to admire it some more. i want to knit it right now but it needs to be something special, so i will think on it some more.

how lucky am i? this is a pretty big year for me, it has been tumultous, to say the least, and there is big milestone coming up that i will blog about in another week or so, and it makes me realise how i never thought my life would be like this, how i never thought it possible i could live through so much pain and change, that i could emerge stronger and maybe a better person, mostly because i have People Like Us.

thanks guys

k xx

worst. day. ever.

knitting wise that is.

you may have heard me mention ishbel recently? it has not been an easy knit, despite the fact that it looks like it should be, and others have gone before and had no trouble. i am perhaps a bit literal with the whole lace charts thing. i like to get a picture of what the whole thing is supposed to look like, but by breaking the charts up into sections that dont line up, she gives me no idea how the sections flowed on from each other. see what i mean?:

(thats 0 from 2 ysolde. my patience is wearing thin). i ripped back the first section once and had trouble picking it back up, a combination of slightly splitty wollmeise and slightly sticky knitpicks harmony points (i much prefer the nickel). it was messy, but i persevered, figuring i could block it out nicely. i got through the main charts and repeats ok, and it started to click and then i looked down at the last section, which is obviously doing something different to the ones before, and i got that sinking feeling where you just know thats not right. see what i mean?


i thought about it for a while but could see no way around taking it back at least a repeat. and then i noticed this:

that would be a dropped stitch right next to the centre stitch there, obviously part of the messy picking up after the first frogging. i decided to rip it all again. at the same time i thought i would wind up the mess that my centre pulling yarn cake had become. but no sooner did i try to fix it then it became severely entangled. in a very nasty way. attempts at untangling led to tears of frustration. i used scissors instead. then as i was ripping the whole thing, one of the cable ends pulled right out of the join, making that cable completely unusable. i was left with this:

at that point i think my polite thoughts were 'screw you ishbel'. lets just say ishbel is no more.

i did have a bit more success with the gusset and heel of the second toe up sock over the weekend. unfortunately, the same can not be said for our team at the flyball nationals, which suffered some equioment and dog failure. we ran the third fastest time of the comp by 5/100ths of a second (18.039) but just couldnt win enough races and came 4th (out of 4) in division one. (there were 7 other divisions but you only race teams about your own speed and division one is the fastest). a disappointing result, but a fun weekend. we will try and regroup for the WDG.

meanwhile, i think i need a cup of tea and a good lie down. both shawls and 'people' are driving me crazy today!

k xx

dog season

no no not for hunting, for dog sports. summer is crazy when it comes to dog sports. and it kicks off this weekend with the national flyball championships. they are in sydney this time, so not too far to go, but its a lot of racing with early starts. we are hoping to avenge our 'technical' loss of last time, where we won the most races but got dudded by a tallying loop hole. that hole has been closed now, but we will be hard pressed to beat our main rivals. sometimes flyball at that level, when youre the fastest teams in the country, can get kind of stressful. its not supposed to be. its supposed to be fun. but you put competitive humans in the mix and it can get downright nasty. funny the dogs dont seem to notice that stuff.

for some reason most of the dog sport stuff in this country happens in the summer, which is stupid cos its not like winter is cold and snowy, whereas summer is just mean. so we have some kind of dog thing on almost every weekend between now and xmas. including, in two weeks times, the world dogs games. not that there's anything 'worldly' about it, as its just aussies competing, but someone wants to talk it up obviously! possum tried out for the dock diving and did really well, but they wouldnt let her compete cos shes in the flyball. grrr. we are one of only 4 flyball teams competing there, and its a 4 day tv event thing, with $10k up for grabs. just to up the ante a bit. again, the dogs dont seem to care about that bit. they have more important things on their mind:



so i will be M.I.A for a few days. hopefully next week i will have good news to report. and even better will be if i get time to finish some socks! southern summer of socks is on again, and i need a head start!

k xx

not-celebrity masterchef

over at 2paw, she of the labradors has been testing out curtis stones' coles $10 recipe promotion. they look like guff to me, in that i cant see kids eating anything with mushrooms, and you can get more food for less if you DONT shop at coles. my example. here is a recipe from donna hay's 'no time to cook' book:

while i do think ms hay (who apparently doesnt like to eat in public, see her episode of aforementioned show) is a little bit all style and no substance, unless you like steak and prosciutto and tomatoes, this is my new favourite recipe. its pancetta, sage and ricotta pasta. basically, you cook up a whole heap of pancetta with some sage leaves, crushed green olives, chilli flakes, lemon rind and lemon juice and then put ricotta and parmesan on top when youre done. but i add garlic (um hello? pasta without garlic? what the?) and i warm some ricotta in the pan as well:

she makes it with rigatoni but thats too much gluten in one bite for me. i have opted for the linguine and the thin spaghetti on two separate occassions, and i think the spaghetti won tonight:

the sharp lemon juice cuts through the chilli and the smoky pancetta, and its just scrummy. i added cherry tomatoes too tonight, but they didnt make much difference. roasted first would have worked better. and this cost way less than $10 and would feed an army. i am lucky to live in a town with a large proportion of southern europeans who know how to run a deli. the pancetta was freshly sliced and cost less than $3. the ricotta was freshly made on the premises and cost $4 a kilo. yes, a kilo. the recipe needs 150g. the olives were probably the most expensive thing, but you only need one spoon full, again around $2 worth. and the spaghetti, $2. sage and lemon about $2. spices already on hand.

actually, the most expensive thing (and not included in the budget) is the very special pecorino on top. $69 a kilo (thats why you only buy 100g at a time!) but god its good. so im no celebrity, or a masterchef, but some tv cooks need to get their heads out of their you-know-whats.

and now i will curl up on the couch and see how far i can get on the second kai mei:

i have swapped shawls for socks this week. unlike some, who are turning into shawl-knitting machines.

k xx

everybody's sellin' something

somewhere in capital (cant tell you where exactly as i am using volume 1 as a door stop), marx stole an idea from carlyle and argued that under capitalism all human relations are reduced to the exchange of money - the cash nexus. of course, its a generalisation, and i know you're all going to tell me how this just isnt true in your everyday life and how glad you are you have relationships that arent about money or exchange or commodities. of course you are. i am too. most of my knitterly relations are not reducable to the cash nexus, excluding of course stash enhancement, which falls under the other marxist rubric of use-value, rather than exchange value, anyway. (seriously, dont click on the links, its wikipedia for a start and i'd fail me for referencing from there, and its dead boring reading). my point is, we buy yarn because we likes it and we wants it.

but im talking about the way we relate to people in our everday life, and im going on about this because lately i have seen an increase in so-called 'social networking sites' like facebook and twitter, which are supposedly for 'friends', being used for blatant self-promotion usually for commercial purposes. i had a whinge about this last night and was informed that this was the way of the world and the things that people needed to do now to build their careers, businesses etc. no doubt that's right, and i know the speaker doesnt entirely approve, but even if it is the way of the world, i dont like it.

i know this is a very delicate area on ravelry for example, where people must tread carefully (and rightly so) when selling their home made products etc, and i know its a cause of concern for many yarn-dying, spinning people who also have knitting friends. introducing the cash-nexus into those relationships is difficult, and people struggle, but if you do it openly and honestly, i think most people want to support their hand-making friends, and its not that kind of stuff that bothers me.

its just this constant use of facebook groups and twitter-spam, by companies usually, that is really getting up my nose. you can be a fan of anything on facebook these days, and sometimes thats cool. im a fan of gene genie and buffy, for example. but im not a fan of products, and i dont and wont join groups or become fans of things that want to sell me something. facebook has an advertising capacity. i hate advertising of all kinds, but i think commerical enterprises should cough up and use it, just like many yarn sellers do on ravelry.

because i can tell you now, you introduce that kind of cash-nexus into personal relationships, you end up with no friends pretty quickly. like the twitter follower thing. i found out today i was following a few people who i didnt know, and werent following me, and when i clicked on their names, they had some sort of commerical enterprise they were flogging on twitter. needless to say, im not following them anymore (i dont know how i even began following them!) and then there's the endless search for more followers, more friends. guess what people? having 160 followers on twitter, 145 of whom dont know you from a bar of soap, does not make you popular, or famous, or important.

so im actively resisting. my blog, twitter and facebook are locked down pretty tight. i dont want any freaks or weirdos from my past finding out anything about me, thanks very much, and i use these media purely for staying in touch with friends. im not saying thats the RIGHT way, im sure there isnt a right way, but i can and will resist the commodification of everyday life where and when i can.

however, when it comes to yarn, exchange away i say. a particular yarn exchange recently (how was that for a segue!) has yeilded much pleasure in the knitting. its the reject-wollmeise being turned into an ishbel:

i am doing the larger size but just doing chart a, b, a, then straight into c, d and e and i think i will have enough yarn. i was kind of meh about this pattern when i first saw it but then i saw jody's and fell in love. i do have to whinge about it tho - the charting is SOOOOO annoying! because she breaks it down into sections, i cant get a visual sense from the charts of what the pattern is supposed to look like. and it is totally NOT intuitive, and is not the same on one side of the centre stitch as the other. so i can not be sure that this is what its meant to look like:

but its pretty enough to go on with i think! and you know what, its not even for me! it will be given away with no expectation of anything in return except for the pure joy of seeing the receivers face.

yeah i know, im a saint.

k xx

ps i changed my blogger id back to plain old kms. the drk thing was starting to feel wanky and its been more than a year now since i got my phd. i can quit shouting it from the rooftops i think! and yes i know my spelling sux today. sorry.