Sideways Rain

It truly is raining sideways as I sit on campus, researching and writing. Not the most fun kind of writing, but it IS taking me outside of myself, closer to a new professional life, I hope.

Every day I think of something to blog, see something in the world. Do I come here and write? I do not.

Beans in the Garden

I join the blissfully content mothers, who plant stuff in their gardens, nurture it, watch it grow over late-afternoon cups of tea, have their children pick it, cook it - and they eat it!

Today, the Pumpkin picked the first 12 beans from the bush beans, the ones from seedlings, not my own seeds from 2 years ago. My own ones are much slower, but also growing well. They will find their way into a stirfry and be shared around.

THIS is what's good about being home.

My baby is five, and still cares for me..

Got that Nina Simone song in your head yet?

The Pumpkin is five, taller, thinner, has a new haircut, and is almost ready to be 5 himself. There was a great outburst not long ago: I want to be 4 forever, tears, inconsolation... It turns out he's sure he can't go to His Christine anymore, and will have to stop sucking his thumb when he's 5. Yes I know.....So I reassure him, often for days... that it's not a line to cross over just like that.

And today on his birthday, I see him and wonder if in fact, it is a line: I'm viewing him differently. A great piece of my work is done: the outside world will have him, with school and all. I know we took him to Cork and all those other places in Europe - and the USA and then Samoa two weeks ago for good measure. But. He most looked to me for what's what in the world. And his dad, the Leathermanman.

We went to the beach early, then home to play with great new toys, and had a fire in the back garden at the end of the day. Last year, he asked for pizza for dinner, and got it in our small apartment, with special friends in the autumn. This year it was dumplings with his godparents, who had cycled over on a warm evening. So we had Asian pork dumplings, stir-fry greens with oyster sauce and BBQ duck around the fire. Oh we're back in Australia all right!

The Tyranny of Dinner

In a week of atrocious sleeps, sick children, wild cold winter rain storms, and school stop work meetings, I'm finding the jump from one role to another almost impossible. The brain cells do not seem to absorb the language of the graduate school right now and none of my previous jobs seems to have gone elsewhere - see title.

I realise how much I've been wanting things to change as I stand in front of the fridge, with the need to produce dinner for the family, at about 5pm every evening. Wonder what would happen if I just did not do anything about it at that time of day? Sick of it being my responsibility every single day...

That said, the subjects I've got are THE reason for doing the Masters in the first place: Change Management, Leadership and Knowledge Management, all three of long-term interest, since Corporate Vision days. Maybe I'll get to use some of the old stuff; academic referencing could be a problem, with so much change since then!

This too will pass, this too will change, as I stop being around quite as much. Oh patience. Right now, maybe a good sleep would brace me better. It is Week One as a graduate student, part time mum again. Does 'mum' get to be a part time role I wonder?

So my besty phones this morning...

..and says, 'help' you speak German! " One of my paintings has been doing really well in Germany, as the cover of novels and now a magazine! What's it all about?" See for yourselves: Cicero the magazine . Her image is on the cover of the June issue, with a great rave about her.

How is this magazine viewed in Germany? I'd not heard of it. Berlin readers, pls comment - it's published there.

What it's about is: the globo-tribe, mobile, available to go anywhere, coming from anywhere, and my incredibly talented, hard-working, painter friend swimming easily in its currents. Oh and did I say she's gorgeous?

Define home

Among only 'bout 1000 jobs around the house, yes our own house, back in our own street, I miss this geographically-free space of the blogosphere. There's a liberation in this space. I feel very much at home out here, as I do in the galleries, museums, public gardens and bookshops of the globe.

That said, it has been rewarding to get in and DO here, and it is, slowly, feeling like home again. One day last week, turning over the sods to reinstate our vegetable patch, I dug up a silver earring hoop of my own. So that's what coming home means, you dig and turn up your own stuff - from 2 years ago. And the soil which turned up to fill the bed is curiously inert, lifeless by contrast, not a worm in there. Lucky for the racecourse nearby which has a great big painted sign on its corrugated iron fence: free manure. You shovel and haul it yourself. Six sacks done.

And in Cork, the families are getting ready to go back to school after the long summer holiday. On Monday, I will miss them again, as I so often have been.. I see some of them in the streets here sometimes, or think I do.

Our new school is great too, we are happy at the change, with the Bean settling well into his age cohort now. The furniture is assembled, boxes despatched, shelves restored, office set up, letters sent, start-up costs paid, uni courses enrolled in, tip run done, garden jobs done. What's left? Oh just the rest of our lives.

And on Monday, I resume my own postgrad studies. A door closes on a wonderful year of lightness, of returning to myself, of pursuing long-held dreams.