Am I missing something?

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I’ve been visiting the same bread shop for about a year now, every week. On Friday afternoon, Bronwen and I go to the mall for a beverage, a muffin and a catch up. I hear all about what’s going on in her life and we watch the world go by for an hour or so. Once we are finished with that, we go and see the ladies at Baker’s Delight. Usually we are served by Angela. She’s lovely. And sometimes, for whatever reason, we don’t make it to the bread shop on Friday afternoon and we get our bread on Saturday morning instead. Riveting stuff, huh? Well that’s not the story, so read on!

A few weeks ago, I was offered a loyalty card. I have tonnes of these things from all over the place, so of course I said yes. I love ’em! (see Loyalty for more about this). This card turned out to be more complicated than the others…

Baker’s Delight loyalty card

As a goodly loyal bread-consumer, I collected my stamps $6 at a time as required (two loaves of bread for $6.50, a bargain!). Once I got to the 5th stamp, the Saturday lady (not the lovely Angela, some harpy called Sue) explained to me that I needed to redeem my freebie right then and there. I had to buy my two loaves of bread, and then take my other loaf at the same time. Huh?! Here are the rules in the world according to Baker’s Delight:

  • I collect stamps until I get to the 5th stamp.
  • In order to get my free bread, I must collect the 5th AT THE SAME TIME as I redeem my freebie.
  • In order to do this, I have to spend $6.

So I always get two loaves for $6.50. That’s enough to get the 5th stamp and I can redeem my freebie … another loaf of bread. But I don’t want three loaves of bread. I want to be able to redeem my freebie NEXT time I’m visiting with Angela (or god-forbid, Sue).

Sue kindly pointed out that I could just pay for ONE loaf of bread (at $4.90) and then get something else to ‘make up’ to $6 in order to get a loaf of freebie bread. But why would I do this? I only ever buy two loaves of bread – that’s all I ever want. I’ve never even look at the other offerings in the cabinet. I argued with Sue about the logic of requiring customers to take their freebie at the same time as their purchase (i.e., you can have a free coffee, but you have to buy a coffee first…what if you only want ONE coffee?!). My arguments fell on deaf ears. It is the way things have always been done, explained Sue. Sigh.

This weekend, I decided to humour Sue. I dutifully selected my one loaf, and an additional scone because it was the cheapest non-bread item on the menu. I paid my money, got my stamp and received my free bread. I took my bread and scone, and off I went. Then we sat down and analysed the transaction (I know, but this is how things roll in our house, okay?).

  • I paid $4.90 for my one loaf.
  • I paid $2.20 for the scone.
  • I got a free loaf (hurrah, free stuff!).
  • I spent $6:30 in total.
  • I received a useless scone that I didn’t want.
  • In essence, my loyalty saved me a grand total of .20 cents.

Am I the only one that thinks this is strange? Sue thinks it makes perfect sense. It made me so mad I wanted to rip up the card. And that’s pretty mad for me, especially when, as you can see, I’m SO close to another free loaf.

So now what should I do? Should I continue with the stamps and collect inedible scones? Should I rip up the card? Should I, as Stephen suggested, refuse to go back there until my loyalty is rewarded in the manner to which I am accustomed? It is REALLY delicious bread. It forms the backbone of our weekends. I just don’t know.

Mother May I?

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Stephen and I recently went to Auckland to visit with my brother. Usually, I love going to Auckland – I really enjoy seeing my little nieces and hanging out with my big bro (see Birthdays and Such for more on this).

So this time, as well is the usual crowd, we were visiting with my mother, who was over from Australia to visit with my brother and meet her granddaughters for the first time. Spending time with my mother is something that requires mental and emotional preparation for me. My mother and I have a difficult history. Let me recount some of it (without airing too much laundry). Remember, family-members-reading-this, it’s just my point of view. Feel free to offer your own POV below.

Bebe, Albie, Gerard, Esther

I am the second youngest of my mother’s seven children (my younger brother has a different dad). My mother tells me that she had post-natal depression with each of her children that got progressively worse with each arrival, so I imagine it had reached a fever pitch by the time she got to me. From all accounts, neither of my parents were that excited about my appearance. My parents separated when I was a baby and I lived with my mother until we moved away from Christchurch to Auckland when I was about five. Life was fairly busy between ages 5-10. We moved around a lot, various people came and went, including the rest of my siblings. Honestly, I don’t remember much of it.

The next bit I remember very well. Not long after my 10th birthday,  my mother told me that I was being sent back to Christchurch to live with my father and stepmother – people I really only had a passing acquaintance with as far as I was concerned. I was devastated by this. For a lot of years after, everything in my life was measured by before and after this time. It changed everything I knew about myself (and I was only just starting to figure that out at age 10). I felt unloved and unlovable, rejected. By my mother, but also by my father and stepmother who didn’t seem especially interested in me.

After I left Auckland, I had limited contact with my mother. I recall her coming to visit with me in Christchurch before she left for Australia, and then a couple of phone calls after that. I guess I was confused and angry, I didn’t want to talk to her. The next time I saw my mother was in 1993 when she came to visit from Australia. I was 20, it had been 10 years. I struggled not to be angry. I had tried to put those 10-year-old feelings behind me in the subsequent years.

Seeing my mother and having those feelings bubble up all over again gave me the impetus I needed to deal with them. It took me a few years more, but eventually I made peace with how and why she left. I understood that actually, it wasn’t such a bad deal. She did what she had to, to survive. And she left me with family. And there were some nice people in amongst that lot.

So if we move forward a few years, my mother has popped in and out of my life irregularly since then. I like that I see her, but I don’t really have a mother-daughter relationship with her. I call her Albie, not mum. She likes to give me advice about how to run my life, how to be, how to conduct my relationships, raise my kids. This I don’t like. She has no right. I know I’m not alone in this – she bosses everyone around. She is very opinionated. I do my best to ignore it. But it grates.

I think my tolerance for my mother is a couple of days every couple of years. After that, I remember why I don’t like to spend time with her and need to get away again. It’s sad really. I would have liked to have a mother, I’d like my kids to have a grandmother, my grandkids to have a great-granny. But at least I have resolved in my head and my heart not to hanker after something that will never be.

So when I say I am looking forward to getting married and becoming a Frayle, this might help explain it. It feels like moving on.

Planning, planning

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The wedding plans have been coming along in leaps and bounds lately, with only three months to go until the big day. In case you were wondering, that is 100 days, or 2402 hours, or 144258 minutes. But hey, who’s counting.

We have sorted most of the big things now: venue, caterer, menu, band, celebrant, order of ceremony, guest list, photographer. Yesterday we bought the flowergirl and bridesmaids dresses for Bronwen, Grace and Megan. Next week I’ll go to a dressmaker to begin figuring out my dress.

Soon we will organise and send out the invitations. We are thinking of waiting until after Xmas to send these (even though this breaks the 3-month in advance rule).

An amazing little computer program called Evernote has been helping me along with the planning. It’s a great tool. I can save all the information we send out and receive into it, and then view it anywhere, anytime – from the web, or my home computer, or my iPad, or my iPhone.

So the to-do list, all the information from the venue, caterer etc., the dress ideas, the vows-in-progress, the budget, the guest list … everything really … is stored in Evernote. And either of us can update it from anywhere and see any changes that have been made by the other person. Brilliant!

Update on lumbar number four

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I’ve seen the chiropractor, Guy, three times now. He’s a nice man, if a little strange. He’s a man of few words, in that soft gentle kind of way. Which freaks me out and makes me chatter nervously when I visit. I wonder if maybe he thinks I’m a bit nutty…

When I asked him if it was okay to do exercise after he’d been cracking my back, he said, ‘yes, no problem’. He looked a little horrified when I responded, ‘Great, because I have an ice hockey game tonight and I don’t want to miss it’. I tried to explain that non-checking hockey is actually much less hard on the body than a lot of other sports, but I sensed his skepticism.

Then the following session I asked if it would be okay to go for a run. He said ‘I could say go for a slow jog, but you won’t be able to, will you?’. Ummm, no. I have two speeds, GO and STOP. And I only really use the second one when I crash.

Anyway, the update. After the first session, the pain shifted from my right hip to my left hip. Weird, but apparently normal. After the second session it shifted from my hip to the middle of my back. And it was OMFG painful. Ouchie ouch ouch! Just as it was feeling better I had the third session. And just the same as the second session, I had one day of no pain followed by LOTS of pain in my back. All normal apparently. Guy seems to think the pain should be gone after two more sessions.

And I think I might just believe him. It does feel different. It’s painful, but much more specific and intense rather than feeling like my whole body is knackered. So that’s progress!

Oh and also, Guy totally fixed my shoulders. They were both hurting, one from hockey and the other from OOS, and now they are completely pain free. Guy says those injuries were easy to clear up because they were new. The back pain is from a 20-year-old untreated injury and my body has been compensating all this time. So he has to work backwards through all the compensations to the crux of the issue. Stephen thinks this is just code for “you’ll need lots of sessions at $50 each” but I think it sounds plausible.

Blah

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I’ve been suffering with a variety of aches and pains lately. I’ve had migraines off and on for the past three weeks. They’ve left me feeling tired and washed out. Added to this is my regular lower back pain, which has flared up for reasons unknown.

A new problem is hip pain. When it first started a few months ago, I just figured I wasn’t stretching adequately after running, but it’s become progressively worse to the point where I’ve had to stop running altogether – since it hurts the most after I run. This makes me so sad. I love to run. It’s great exercise – good cardio, it gets me outside, and it clears my head. I’m really missing it.

I suspect that the back and hip pain, the migraines, and the shoulder and arm pain I’ve had for ages from OOS are all related. So I’ve booked in to see a chiropractor, following advice from a trusted friend. My basic assumption about this kind of practice is that it costs a lot of money for not much result – I’m a skeptic. So we shall see if it gets results. At this point I’m willing to give almost anything a try.

TLA

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I was thinking about PIN numbers the other day and wondering…when is an acronym no longer an acronym?

“Acronym: an abbreviation formed using the first letters of the words in a phrase”

There are lots of acronyms that I use everyday that I don’t really think of as abbreviations. It seems to me that some acronyms eventually become words in their own right. Think about some of the TLAs you use regularly:

PIN

ATM

DVD

LOL

FAQ

HIV

WOF

IOU

ETC

There are so many. For some of these, I have to really think about what the individual letters stand for.

So here’s what I was thinking about. It’s grammatically incorrect to talk about using an ‘ATM machine’, or your ‘PIN number’. You don’t use a Personal Identification Number number.

Saying ‘PIN number’ really annoys some grammar Nazis (not me, hence this blog). Is it now the case that a PIN has become a pin number? Has it ceased to be a reference to a TLA and become a word in its own right? I think it has.

The way that language changes over time is really interesting (to me anyway). As a self-confessed grammar Nazi, I’d like it if people always used the right word and correct accompanying punctuation. But at some point the overwhelming mass of people wrongly using a particular word or phrase actually changes the accepted norm for that word.

Take for instance ‘alright’. When I was a girl, ‘alright’ was more correctly written ‘all right’. During my childhood I was aware that either spelling had become acceptable. And nowadays it would look strange to write ‘all right’ when you meant ‘alright’. The same is happening with ‘alot’. Many people think (wrongly) that this is one word. It’s not. Never has been. But following the tendency for little words to snuggle up to the words next door to it, it is slowly becoming more normal to write ‘alot’.

When I see this happening, I have to accept it. The most wonderful thing about the English language is that it is flexible and adaptable. And so must we be.

And the same is true of the humble TLA. They become words. It’s just the nature of things. So if you’re the type of person who cringes every time you hear someone refer to their PIN number, do the mental lower-casing. It will make you a happier person.

What a week!

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This post is mostly for future-me to reminisce, feel free to skip over it if you’ve heard it already!

So last Friday afternoon, Stephen and I headed off for a fun adventure to Lake Tekapo. We were going to participate in the 8th annual Southern Cross Ice Hockey Tournament – a fun weekend designed to wrap up the women’s hockey season.

Bebe in action

And as my Christchurch compatriots well know, things did not go entirely as planned. We were shaken awake at 4:40am by what seemed like a fairly big earthquake. And unlike my fellow Christchurchians, we went back to sleep without giving it another thought. I was next awoken about an hour later as people started texting to see if we were alright. Other than being woken up in the middle of the night twice (!), we were fine, of course. But that was my first inkling that something was wrong. I jumped on the iPad and dialed up the New Zealand Herald website. Nothing there. Then I tried Twitter. It was going OFF. There had been a major earthquake in Christchurch.

I spent the next couple of hours playing hockey (in the early morning light, beautiful), worrying, and trying to get hold of all my beloved ones to make sure they were okay. Which they were. Everyone safe and accounted for. Not so my poor city. As it emerged in the days following, Christchurch was badly shaken up. The 7.1M earthquake was shallow, and because parts of the city is build on swamp land or sand, it wobbled like jelly, taking brick buildings and chimneys with it.

So here is the event from my point of view.

It felt surreal. I felt it, but not the terror that many people must have. I was far away, safe, having a fun time. I was also distracted by the fact that Grace’s water had broke and she was waiting patiently to go into labour. Returning to Christchurch on Sunday night I went straight to the hospital where, three hours later, I watched my new granddaughter arrive. It was just beautiful. Soft lights, music, peaceful (other than poor Grace’s yelling). What an amazing thing to experience. Earthquakes were a million miles away.

Meagle, Bronwen, Bebe, Arlia and Wyatt

It wasn’t until I drove home that it started to sink in. No hot water upstairs – the water tank had burst. No clean drinking water until further notice. Luckily for me I cheerily flew off to Wellington the next morning for a two-day meeting. I followed along on Twitter again, but felt removed.

So my first real experiences of the earthquake aftermath were the aftershock I felt on Wednesday morning (sounded and felt HUGE but was only a 4-point-something), and driving through the rubble in the centre of the city on Wednesday afternoon.

So now it’s Sunday, and things are finally starting to feel normal again. The aftershocks seem to have slowed (all-told we’ve had over 400; I felt two of them). The city has reopened and clean-up is underway. It’s sad to drive around and see buildings coming down.

I went for a run around my suburb this morning. We live right by a river and a lake, so there was a lot of silt from the burst banks. The water in the lake and the river had risen sharply with the quake and all the water had spilled out. It seems to be back where it belongs now, but there is a lot of damage as a result. There are huge cracks in the pavement and roads and plenty of evidence of liquefaction (what a weird process that is!).

Liquefaction volcanoes

And port-a-loos everywhere – one every few houses. This was part of the emergency response. A lot of houses were without running water, so the civil defense arranged portable toilets to be placed in the streets for people to use. Clever. Speaking of which, the emergency response was amazing. Most people had power and water restored within hours of the quake, and those that needed their houses assessed had this done within hours or days. People who needed tradespeople were taken care of. It will take a long time to clean up the mess, but I was amazed at just how fast the process was begun.

Sometimes people grumble about taxes and levies, but after an event like this, I can see what I’m paying for. Immediate and comprehensive disaster relief, compensation for lost houses, wages, business. It will cost us billions, but we will be okay. I love my little socialist state.

Jump right in

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Here’s a question: when it comes to bad news are you a ‘”I want to know everything” or a “Don’t tell me, I’d rather not know” kind of person?

I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. It’s coming up to the first anniversary of Simon’s death, and it makes me remember back to his diagnosis, going through the process of finding out how sick he was, treatment, ending treatment, giving up.

One of the biggest factors in the ending of our relationship was that we handled the bad news so differently. His reaction to finding out he had lymphoma was to assume it would be fine and leave it at that. I wanted to know everything about it. I read everything I could about the cancer – causes, treatments, success rates, morbidity rates. Sometimes I had to stop when it got too scary (10% survival rates, no known successful treatment), but I always went back to do more research as we reached a new stage in the diagnosis-treatment process. It was a comfort to me.

Simon got his comfort from not knowing. He preferred to know as little as possible. He trusted his doctors to make the best decisions about his treatment, and he had no interest in discussing other options. He didn’t want to discuss death. It wasn’t going to happen. I heard him once telling someone on the phone that he had “mild cancer”.

So you can imagine it was difficult, for us both. Here’s me, busily becoming a lymphoma encyclopaedia and wanting to talk about it all, and Simon trying his hardest to pretend it wasn’t happening.

And how we each dealt with this devastating news reflected fairly accurately how we approached life in general. I’m an all-in kind of person. I like jumping in and worrying about how to do it later. Simon was a ‘slow and steady, read the manual before he opened the box’ kind of guy. We infuriated each other a lot because this. I’d be racing off to try some new thing, he’d be hanging back saying “can we just THINK about this for a minute”!?

I miss Simon a lot, and I think the thing that makes me saddest is that he didn’t accept the fact of his mortality, and so it was something we couldn’t share. I’d hope that, faced with the same situation, I’d handle it differently. How do you think you’d handle it?

Committed

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I just finished a book by Elizabeth Gilbert (she of Eat Pray Love fame) called Committed. This autobiographical book is essentially an exploration of the idea of marriage that ends with Liz convincing herself that it’s okay for her to marry the love of her life. At the start of the book, having been married and divorced, Liz is adamant that she will never marry again. She even has a pact with her lover that they will never marry. In the end, she is married to him.

It’s a topic that’s been in my thoughts a lot lately. Why get married? I’ve been married. When my marriage ended in 1995 I decided that marriage really wasn’t for me, and that I’d never do it again. I still felt this way five years later when I met Simon. And he was fine with that. He didn’t want to marry me either. At this time in my life, I’d describe my feelings about marriage as ambivalent. I couldn’t see the point of it. I thought to myself, ‘Why get married at all when you can live with someone and have all the same rights as a married couple anyway?’

Then my life changed again. It happened in increments. Simon and I separated and I reevaluated some of my attitudes about life. I decided that I might like to get married someday, if the right man presented himself. I don’t even really know why this shift in thinking happened. Possibly as a reaction to the breakup. I was saddened at the ease with which we could extract ourselves from each other’s lives.

And then I met Stephen. Just before I met him (I’ve mentioned this before) I made a list of what I wanted in a man. One of those things was to be with someone who was open to the idea of marriage. I think it was probably on our 3rd or 4th date that Stephen said that he preferred to be married. It was one of the deal-sealers for me (along with numerous other things).

And now I find myself about to marry the man of my dreams. I try not to think about what it all means too much. Every now and again a stray thought creeps in …”why do I want to marry this (or any) person?” … “where did this desire to be married come from all of a sudden?” … “what if it doesn’t work out?”. I put them aside because I know they don’t matter. What matters is that what I’m doing feels right. Exactly right.