minimania

i'm sure it's a misunderstanding. my lovely mama has said she didn't ask for it, but yet there it is on the invoice - 3 years of income tax ready for lodgement plus the deadly little line that is about to do me out of AU$500 or so: "Cancellation of GST registration and finalisation of BAS requirements". my accountant has always been a lovely chap and i'm sure he hasn't turned into the evil accountant of doom just because i'm three years overdue with my income tax. i mean, i'm finally doing something about it, right? that should be a good thing.

it started very simply. i sent off an email with the details for my 2005 tax return so he could pull that together for me. all very straightforward. however, i suspect that wires got crossed when my mother called him to ask a question. i suspect the conversation went something like this:

kindly accountant: well, we could do this and this and this
well-meaning parent: that sounds perfect!
 (... after a pause of some weeks ...)
minim: wtf???!!!!?

it's not the end of the world, really - i mean, i had always intended to cancel the gst registration, but only once i'd sorted out this batch of tax returns and possibly not until the end of the year when we will be shifting all our website hosting stuff across to the uk so i don't have to strain my (non-existent) australian finances past the point of respectable credit record. and i certainly did want all three years' worth of tax to be done by him - but i would have thought he'd find it easier to do them with, say, expenditure details. i know i didn't have much money coming in, but there were still regular outgoings and my closet-cataloguer's soul likes all this sort of stuff to be orderly and complete and everything allotted to its proper account and so on, even if it's 3 years overdue (actually, it's probably 3 years overdue *because* of wanting the orderly and complete etc. takes so frickin' long to do!)

anyway, about to steel myself to call him and find out what actually happened so i can at least stop being so deeply bewildered at what's going on. wish me luck!

update: well, someone beat me to it and he was on the phone and likely to be for a while and with an appointment to follow, so i have had to resort to yet another email. hopefully this one will have more luck than the previous ones...

well, i've finished the knitting part... and now it's time for the unravelling. here it is in all its glory is the bag as it stands at this moment. in 5 minutes time, it will look completely different :-)

complete... for now

i have taken up knitting, after a break of about 20 years (how scary it is to be able to say that - 20 years!). it's what all the cool kids are doing now, and of course i don't want to be left out. so yesterday i went into town. i went to victoria library to borrow knitting books, then to john lewis on oxford street to be bewildered by yarn and needles and things. i was lucky enough to find what is basically the perfect project - i'd been thinking of a scarf, because they can be pretty simple, but wasn't hugely taken with the idea of spending weeks and weeks just of stocking stitch - frankly, it sounded a little dull. but in one of the books i found in the library - debbie bliss's step-by-step knitting workbook if you really want to know - i found this:

bag

it's just a simple little bag, mostly stocking stitch, but with a few rows of moss stitch at the opening (which i hadn't done before so figured it would be nice to try something different too), with a cord made of the same yarn and an embroidered pattern. flowers aren't hugely my thing, so i'm thinking of developing my own design for the embroidery (my granny taught me embroidery when i was a child, so that's no problem) - maybe i could do a banksy rat or something... but first i have to finish the bag! anyway, one of the other good things about this pattern, apart from being small and easy but not dull is that it only takes one ball of yarn! so there goes my other concern - that i'd have to spend a fortune on tons of yarn and then get bored of the whole enterprise after ball one. and it's cotton, which is great if the weather ever accidentally remembers that it's summer.

so i brought everything home yesterday, plonked myself in the beanbag, took the stitch'n'bitch book in hand and taught myself to cast on... within about 2 minutes. casting on is one of the reasons i gave up knitting in the first place - i could never get the hang of it as a child and it frustrated me having to call on my mother to do it for me every time. the amazing thing was that as soon as i cast on, i knew exactly what to do. i did check the book to make sure i remembered right, but i did - i remembered exactly how to make both knit and purl stitches and was soon beavering away... and soon after that, unravelling away - it seems my former knitting education was deficient in the matter of switching between plain and purl in the same row and i got myself into a muddle with my string. no matter, stitch'n'bitch had me sorted out in no time and i started again and was pretty soon flying along (as much as one can fly with 4-ply and 3mm needles), so that by the time i packed away my needles (forced to stop - knitter's paw set in - obviously this pastime builds up muscles one never knew one had) i had this:

first knitting

i'm actually quite pleased with the evenness of the stocking stitch, although i think the moss stitch could do with being a bit less wobbly, but it's a good size for a test piece (i'm just over a sixth of the way through here - the pattern does both sides of the bag together, then you fold in the middle) and if i feel by the end of it that i could do the beginning better than i have, then i'll just unravel and start over. but so far, i'm enjoying it, it's the kind of activity that forces one to slow down and just relax, which is probably a good thing for me. anyway, i'll see how i progress. tchatchke sent me some great links, including one to knitty.com which has some awesome free patterns but i'm trying not to get too carried away with what i might knit in the future - i need to get through the bag first!

i just had an insight descend upon me as if from on high. i am obsessed with publication. and along with the insight came the realisation of the starting point. it began way back in primary school at the age of about 8, when my class was set a project to produce our own newspaper. being about 8 it was a frog newspaper, called the slippery slimy times and two of my friends and i were assigned the fashion column (this will amaze anyone who's ever met me. fashion is *not* my forte!)

and now this manifests itself in oh so many different ways:

• 4 regularly updated blogs
• publication of my own scores
• plans for publishing other peoples scores
  
• ongoing writing of articles intended for publication
• constant development and planning of new websites
• a website publishing my honours thesis and other articles
  
• a bizarre desire to make full use of the services offered by sites like lulu.com and issuu.com even when i don't have a specific project in mind - i keep coming back to what i *could* do...
• binding up random documents (bank statements, printed-off articles from the web, recipe cards) to create neat and organised books
  

• a book i edited, published jointly by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Music Centre
• my music recorded on a commercially published CD (even if a hard-to-find one)
  
• articles published in music magazines
• a piece published a long, long time ago (and littered with typographical errors by a careless copyist) in The Flute magazine

• editing, copy editing, proof reading, writing, music copying, design and layout for sounds australian journal and other AMC publications, including CDs
  
• copy editing for independent film magazine
• a brief stint working on the website for australian arts publisher currency press.

i don't mean to brag about *being* published, just to say that this realisation has made me think, and now i wonder a bit about where i am and should be heading. yes, i want to write music, but i also have about as strong a desire to lay the stuff out as i do to write it. i suspect that over the next few weeks, i will start to think a little more clearly about this and maybe it'll show me a new way to organise myself. maybe i've been confusing myself by relating score layout with composing. maybe in the many many pigeonholes in my head, i need to make a new label for one and separate out the publication component from the creation component of the various things i do. hmm. that will take a bit of thinking about

it's a lifelong addiction for me. i just can't help it. i'm not really happy unless i'm plotting or doing a course of some sort and i was getting a little fretful because i don't know that i'll be able to afford to do the drawing class i want to do at central st martin's (drawing london on location) and i don't know that i'll be able to sort out and get into the one-to-one composition tuition short course at tvu for this year - i could probably sort it out for the october term, but i suspect i'd have to miss at least 2 sessions due to our plans to go back to australia for christmas, so maybe next year.

then this dropped into my inbox:

tate online courses: artists' techniques and methods

which sounds really interesting, covering techniques for drawing, collage, watercolour, composition and symbolism, oils and mixed media. all for £20 and i don't have to go anywhere! very tempted by this one...

well, i had hoped that gramophone magazine would have pulled itself out of the horrible mire of populism it was sinking into when i cut off my subscription, but it seems not. this month's editorial - http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsletter/060508_newsletter_editorial.htm (as vox seems to have done away with the link button for some obscure reason) - just confirms it. this little gem features:

"Composers today have largely left behind the old credo that audiences are irrelevant to their work. Now they once again write music that catches in the ear, the mind and the heart."

anyone care to tell him that that happened about 20 years ago?

what else am i to do? i'm supposed to be working from home today - came down with an horrendous fluey cold the day before yesterday, which is on the way out now (it's been a super-speedy bug - from feeling fine to feeling like death warmed up to being back on the road to recovery within 36 hours) - and i sort of am, except that while trying to open the photoshop document i'm working from in pshop, pshop told me that my scratch disk was basically full and would i please make some more room, so i started shifting a bunch of old photos from the windows disk across to the mac disk... whereupon parallels objected and told me that my users/caitlin directory was too full to be of use any more, so I'm now moving files from the mac disk across to the network drive to let parallels work and make room for the files which have to come across from the windows disk to let photoshop work. *sigh*

nothing much else to report - i've been working on a simple website for an australian film, black water springs, which has taken up most of my spare time for the past couple of weeks, and have embarked upon a longer-term project to actually get my australian tax returns from the last three years finished and submitted. one is done, but i have encountered a hiccup with the next one in that the entire year's bank statements have softly and suddenly vanished away in a bunch. it seems obvious that they're all together in a folder somewhere, but the question is, are they here or are they at my parents' house in sydney? hmm. hoping they'll turn up very very soon, or that i can find a way of getting around them not turning up at all.

not very much else to report - am on the mend, cold-wise; am still addicted to dried mango (must... stop); still not writing anything (although the tax thing is intended to hopefully clear another mental block in that every time i think about writing anything i keep thinking i should do my tax instead); am back at LBi again and enjoying working with my friends again; am contemplating taking up yoga sometime soon; oh, and i have started my course of manual lymphatic drainage, which doesn't tickle and hopefully will do some good at clearing out my system.

sorry it's all so dull. will try harder to bring on lion tamers and accountants next week.

it seems the weather has decided to treat us after last year's non-existant summer and the whole of this week has been hot and glorious. perhaps a little on the warmer-than-comfortable side for little old me, but it's been so long since we've seen the sun that i really don't care. i half-killed myself walking to russell square the other day (had a desperate need for dried mango - i am so addicted) - i rather miscalculated the energy-draining effect a very hot day has and that on top of being not quite on form again after the concussion, well, it was all a bit much, but still sooooo nice to be out in it.

today, therefore, i am in our garden, watching the peas grow, sitting in my deckchair, with my laptop, gently working on a site i'm doing for an australian film company. i have 19th-century opera on my ipod and having just finished a very summery lunch of brown rice mixed with avocado, deseeded cherry tomatoes and thin slices of capsicum. the sparrows are going twit in the hedge and there is a gentle breeze blowing the pear tree about a bit - just enough to cool, not enough to chill. does it really get any better than this?

oh, and to top it all off, this morning I hit 71.9kg - i have now officially lost 10kg since christmas and am halfway to my ideal (healthy) weight. wheeee!

and it's not my fault, i promise. this year is turning out to be a year of firsts - in february i experienced my first faint, and now i get to experience my first concussion - woo! um. so how did i gain this premiere concussion, you ask? well, i was so engrossed in my book (o'reilly's rather helpful adding ajax, since you're so very interested) that i kind of didn't notice we were at earl's court station until the doors were about to close, so i bolted for the door, hesitated a second to make sure the doors weren't about to close *on* me; they weren't, so i hopped out onto the platform where i was promptly cannoned into by a fellow commuter who seemed to come out of nowhere at immense speed (but apparently, i was told later, was bolting from the train that had just come in on the other side of the platform). his (presumably very heavy and hard, judging by the bruise it left above my knee) bag whacked into my left leg, unbalancing me and sending me spinning off down the platform. i realised i was going to topple over and there was basically nothing much i could do about it; then i realised i was about to topple over towards the train, which is never going to be a healthy thing to do, but i managed to spin myself a bit more before heading for the pavement. i don't *think* i actually hit my head on anything, but there is a small blank space between the point where the other guy ran into me and realising i was about to fall over, so it's possible i did hit something, but anyway. (in defence of the guy who ran into me, i do dimly recall hearing an "oh sorry!" as i went spinning off, but as the doors were on the verge of closing, he wouldn't have been able to get out by the time i went down, even if he wanted to). fellow travellers flocked to my side and then vanished again just as quickly when i said i was ok and it was obvious i could stand. i was, however, feeling terribly confused and disorientated and more than a litlte queasy. but i got over to the other platform and managed to get on the ealing broadway train alright, meandered vaguely down the hill and home safely where i spent the evening on the couch not really doing anything other than ordering three (yes, three) cookbooks on amazon.

fast forward to thursday morning and i arise, limping, with an enormous bruise above my left knee and the poor wrenched muscles in my left leg and arm all protesting against any sort of movement. i managed to get breakfast and lunch all ready and staggered into work. needless to say i was not quite as effective as i would usually be, so come early lunchtime, i took myself and my confusion off to the nhs walk-in centre down the road from the office (noting, with a little concern, on crossing the road that i couldn't really tell which cars were moving towards me and which were stationary) where the nurse told me that i seemed to be concussed and i should go home. so home i have been ever since. improving now, thank heavens, but still a little confused in the head and unbalanced when moving around.

Cooking Without

i know i haven't really been writing much lately. the first six weeks of the new nutritionist-imposed regime turned out to be very hard work indeed, and the last few weeks (covering Easter and my cakeless birthday) even more so. so i was disinclined to talk about it much cos it just made things worse. i am now in phase two, though, and doing pretty well (although, after a pretty much blemish-free record over the first six weeks, i have now blotted my copybook with a few small easter eggs during this concussion incident). phase two is much the same as phase one, except that i am now allowed some protein at lunchtimes which makes a *huge* difference in dealing with my dodgy blood-sugar levels. i am being encouraged to try to cook more pulses though, which i'm trying very hard with (hence one of the books i ordered - cooking without which apparently has some good recipes for pulses in it) but nothing changes the fact that a dinner without meat just doesn't make me feel fed. full, yes; fed, no. i am such a carnivore. so far i haven't really seen any change at all in my energy levels, which is disappointing and i suspect may mean that wheat isn't the answer - so yay! toast! but then raises the question again of what *is* causing it? however, i have scored big-time with the weight-loss, which was a goal of the whole enterprise but actually a less important one because i figured if i could deal with the energy levels then i wouldn't always be snacking to keep awake which would be bound to help with the porkines. but i have made real progress - from 79.1kg when i started about 7 weeks ago, i am now down to 74.1, just 0.1kg off my second weight goal. i have gone from a well-filled size 18 down to a 16-needing-a-belt and can now do up (and in some cases actually wear in public) all of my size 14 trousers from a couple of years ago. all of which i find quite amazing, and certainly very encouraging. especially in the light of my attempt at the csiro diet which it seems is just not right for someone of my metabolic and blood sugar peculiarities and under which i struggled to lose even 2 kilos over about 3 months (and then promptly stacked on 4 kilos or so as soon as i started work). so i'm very pleased with this progress.

some interesting things we've discovered:

• soy disagrees with me. it makes me feel slightly queasy and makes my skin break out
• i really really really need protein at lunchtime and preferably at breakfast too
• it is possible to have too much salmon
• watercress is horrific, but baby spinach rocks
  

i've actually found a lunch i can eat without feeling too sorry for myself - brown rice with avocado. woohoo! and yesterday's homemade-hummous experiment went well, so now i have a big tub of hummous, ready to be mixed up with some soy yoghurt for afternoon tea. thank heavens. something with some flavour at last. now i need to find something to do with mackeral. or sardines. no clue what. we don't have these fish in australia so i have no recipes and not even the vaguest idea of what they might taste like. any ideas that don't involve wheat, dairy, salt or sugar, or any kind of alcohol or vinegar? hmm?