Well hey there imaginary internet friends!

It’s been quite a while between posts and over a year since any sort of regular posting.

I’ve not only been away from blogging, there’s been an accompanying lengthy, but very necessary, time away from most things internet**

As someone much more insightful than me observed – the internet used to be a place we went to escape real life, now real life is a place we go to escape the internet. It’s a bad scene, man.

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I’ve just completed another year around the sun and it’s felt like one of those really long years where a ton of both good and bad happened, but also one of those years that’s flown by. Which to be fair is pretty much all the years.

In 2024 (so far) in absolutely no order (this was originally a semi-colon separated list, but definitely benefits from being split out into bullets):

• Joan and Ovi visited!
• I got into weaving in a moderate way
• Much wide-spread misery at SML (entirely due to awful senior leadership)
• Japan
• upped my knitting skills with a couple of bonkers and complex (to me) shawls
• battled with mediocre health and poor energy for a long while
• Thailand
• little-to-no blog reading (I hope you are all living your best lives)
• roof repairs and maintenance
• ate my feelings for a few months, now off the snacks
• a whole lot of youtube watching
• had the venous lake on my lip zapped, moles on face and long-term sun damage also zapped (I am not vain person, but this has been brilliant, my skin glows)
• Bessie became a niche sports podcast star
• no yoga (I do miss it)
• my mother died (we’d been estranged and no contact for 25+ years – there were a lot of feelings to process)
• started a daily journalling practice
• decided on a target retirement date (mid-2028, baby!)
• returned to running (very slowly and carefully, with a heavily modified couch to 5k) – screw that physio who told me I was too old to run
• no sound baths (love and miss that kooky esoteric stuff)
• started wearing a night guard for sleeping with excellent results (turns out I was tightly clenching my teeth while asleep)
• Brisbane
• close friend decided she no longer wanted to be in my life (sudden, unexpected and weird – and threw me off balance for quite a while)
• COVID
• new car
• Melbourne
• fun experiments with a new-to-me ancient point-and-shoot digital camera – sometimes I don’t vibe with the perfection the iphone brings (totally influenced by youtube)
• booked a hiking holiday in the Black Forest for 2025
• regained quite a lot of health – I suspect I was just totally burned out (in the medical sense) and CFS was one of those zebra-not-horse misdirections.

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I’m really not sure what my intention is for the future of the blog. It’s an excellent historical record which we refer to with reasonable frequency, but I’m increasingly less comfortable with the idea of my thoughts and feelings being so easily accessible.

After a solid year of dithering, I’ve just renewed hosting for another year. I had the idea of updating the broken images, pdfing or e-booking it all and taking offline before the next renewal. I’ve also ruminated over starting something entirely new and retiring the carolbaby persona, but I’m not sure if I want to continue to put myself out there at all, regardless of name. There was also the slightly mad (and admittedly unoriginal) idea of sending out a photocopied blog-post/letter to anyone who wanted it, but I quickly rejected that as massively impractical!

I’ll continue to reflect on this all – hopefully without spending another year over-analysing and ultimately doing nothing!

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And will I be back here? I’ll see where the wind takes me!

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** Though in the interests of accuracy, there’s been a whole lot of youtube consumed during this time – it definitely has become my internet destination of choice. Be assured I have no intention of becoming a youtuber, this is a completely passive activity!

Hello wonderful Imaginary Internet Friends! Thank you for your lovely comments and kind thoughts while I’ve been MIA.

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You may recall that late last year I was feeling extremely meh. The bounce-back in that post lasted only a very short while, so I took myself to SuperHappyFunGP – who sent me for a load of blood tests.

In good news my thyroid levels are still A+ (thanks Eltroxin!), but I had quite the Vitamin D deficiency. I am totally not surprised at this – like most Australians I have had sun exposure = bad drilled into me for a long while** and currently much of my life is spent Extremely Indoors.

I’m now taking a Vitamin D supplement and doing my best to get outdoors every day and sensibly get sun on me.

SuperHappyFunGP did confirm that I am post-menopausal (no surprise)^^ and (surprise) flagged that I possibly have mild Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. We discussed general sleep and energy management.

I’m not quite unconvinced I have CFS. As an example – while on our absolutely magicalAF winter wonderland holiday we did tons of activity and I felt wonderful. But now I’ve been back for a month and reflected on how we spent that time – we also did lots of lazing about reading and generally chilling in between all that activity.

Now we’ve settled back into life, I find myself pretty tired generally and utterly exhausted after my two in-office days. February is not a great month, I don’t think the heat and extreme humidity is helping me. Thank TheUniverse for air-conditioning.

I’m a little more sold on this energy management idea. And even if I don’t have CFS – whatever helps, right?

And it might seem totally counter-intuitive, but I’m also trying to get out and about a little more because I’ve really sunk into an extreme rut. I definitely benefit when there is more variety and new experiences in my life – but at a slow and sensible pace!

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** though unfortunately this was not the messaging in my formative years where it was All Sun All The Time.

^^ He was planning HRT pending blood-tests, not required because of these results – I’m glad to not return to wild hormones!

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Happy 2024 Imaginary Internet Friends!

I hadn’t quite anticipated vanishing for 2 months, but on reflection the unplanned break was really beneficial. I had no idea how much I needed to rest and to reset a whole bunch of things.

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And this happened:

Matterhorn!

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This year I’m trying an experiment.

For the first time in a very, very long while there will be no annual intentions, no goals, no plans, no streaks*, no challenges. I’m going to just roll with whatever comes at me, which is very much in line with my life goal of Being More Penelope.

* except of course for my obsessive DuoLingo streak.

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The Universe sending me nudges …

A Relaxed Woman

“Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? At-ease women? Women who don’t dissect their days into half hour slots of productivity? Women who prioritize rest and pleasure and play? Women who aren’t afraid to take up space in the world? Women who give themselves unconditional permission to relax? Without guilt? Without apology? Without feeling like they need to earn it? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman like that. But I would like to become one.”

― Nicola Jane Hobbs (via the excellent SwissMiss)

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Saving the earth one washed ziploc bag at a time.

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A little blip in the daily posting routine there.

I’ve been feeling quite low and maudlin for the past few weeks. Everything has felt hard – like wading through treacle. I have no business feeling like this because objectively this year has been great with very many good things happening. This actually makes feeling low worse because then I excoriate myself for not feeling more upbeat and thankful. Oh Brain!

I mean it could be a billion things – biorhythms, stars or chakras out of alignment, overheated thyroid meds, some distant planet in retrograde, not enough exercise, moon phase, microbiome off kilter, a curse, too much computer, too little computer – really who can know?

Sometimes you just need to wallow for a bit. Reader, I really let myself wallow.

I woke yesterday feeling much more positive with renewed energy, which is quite a relief.

Onward!

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Barbie vending machine – World Square

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Saturday afternoon outing: Tessie Overmeyer Trio and Shannon Barnett quartet at St Stephen’s Uniting Church – part of the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival.

What an amazing venue for music! And there are regular performances there. Who knew? I will definitely return.

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Spotted on today’s walk:

+ a jumping fish!

+ a dude riding a unicycle

+ a bearded hipster dude wearing red and black lumberjack shirt cracking whips. Fluorescent yellow whips. In kind of a whip-cracking burlesque dance fusion.

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The thing about tracking your walking is that you realise how very sedentary you have become.^^

And of course you are reminded how very easy it would be to (re)develop a full-blown tracking obsession.

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^^ If I hadn’t started the 100 days of walking, this would be pretty dire. As it is there’s definitely room for improvement.

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