Happiness...

... is your very own corn on the cob, apparently!

Harvest

While I've been on school holidays I've been taking Munchkin-D to or from nursery four days a week (Granny does morning drop-offs or evening pick-ups, I do lunchtimes for both). On the way we talk about what we can see. Munchkin-D is fascinated by anything you can tell him about the world around him. Lately, with the season changing, we've been discussing berries, nuts and the changing leaves. He has been asking about fireworks for months and can reliably tell you that after the leaves change and the apples are ripe we will see a sign saying "fireworks sold here" and then it will be time for the fireworks. He has also informed me that one day he will be a birdy and eat the seeds out of the berries. The things that come out of that mind... he amazes and delights us every day!

Today we found some conkers by the footpath and gathered up three of them. Being an antipodean I never collected conkers as a child, and I've never looked closely at them before. Munchkin-D and I spent some time looking at their marvellous colours and shiny smooth skin. Then we took them home and put them in a bowl with some of our other autumn finds - a dried rose and a beech nut that was closed when we picked it up, but which sprung open overnight.

We have a little apple-tree in our backyard. We haven't tried the apples, but something will have to be done with them soon as they are falling off all over. We didn't take care of them this year, but we're planning to grow veggies next year and will try to manage our apples too. By then I should be able to eat apples fairly regularly without messing up my diet.

Today really feels like autumn - it's windy with passing rain. I can't help feeling a bit thrilled.

I got chatting to our upstairs neighbour last week. He is semi-retired and does a lot of gardening - his little backyard patch is perfect next to our scruffy plot! We talked about plants and our life histories and that sort of thing. He knew Mary, the elderly lady who lived our flat before us, and told me that one of the roses on the fence-line, which I had assumed was his, was actually on our side and had been brought there by Mary from her former house. It's a big, scraggly thing needing a good trim-back, but as we chatted I saw a few late buds on it and decided to leave pruning until after they were done. I was glad I did, as this week three or four stunning, fragrant pink-red roses sprung into bloom.

You can see how big and thorny that bush is - it will get a good trimming after the roses are done!

Growing up in Australia we constantly hear that our wildlife is bigger and scarier than everyone else's. This is mostly true, but back home I have never, ever seen a slug the size of this one...

It was about 8cm long! After taking its picture I ran in to grab my wildlife book and identified it as Arion ater, a Large Red Slug (... appropriately enough). 

I have been coming up with a plan for our garden. There's a very overgrown Hebe that I want to take out, a holly and a fuchsia to move elsewhere and a dead tree to remove, which will open up the garden bed down one side for veggies. I want climbing cherry tomatoes up the fence, and our staples in the rest of it: broccoli, cauliflower, courgette, aubergine and peppers, and a few other things, perhaps peas, spinach, chard, and some herbs. I'm really looking forward to the challenge.

Lastly, this afternoon we were walking back from the shops, all three of us together. Ellie and I were pointing out various berries and plants. I pointed to one and said "this one is hawthorn!". Munchkin-D's interpretation, shouted: "this one is AWFUL!". Ellie and I nearly died laughing. He is a joy!

New look, proposal and more ...

As you can see, I have spent the past two hours giving the blog an overhaul. The old template had gone a bit wonky thanks to blogger updates, and it was time for something new. As well as installing the new template, I've refreshed my links list and added 'About' and 'Contact' pages at the top. I also now have my very own 'favicon' - if you un-favourite and re-favourite the blog you should see a teeny-tiny pink rose on the tab in your browser instead of the orange blogger symbol. I hope to eventually come up with a better favicon using my graphic art skills, but a miniature of my favourite photograph is good enough for now!

I had a request on facebook to blog about "the proposal". To be perfectly honest, it wasn't a big flashy moment, but a very quiet and private one. In true Christine-and-Ellie style it was quite pragmatic and ended with a shared laugh. We both know how special what we have is, and this was a logical step. We're in love, we're getting married... pretty much all there is to it!

We've now got a few things booked, and I have lots of paper samples on order. I've been busy designing our own wedding stationery, which we will either print ourselves (depending on printer prices) or get printed at a local print-shop using paper ordered from a supplier. I'm learning a lot about the paper types available in A5! Laid and wove and silk art and hammer effect... fascinating. Can't wait to see the samples.

School goes back next week, so I might be supplying again as early as Wednesday. I feel unready to go back, as I always do. I've been lucky enough to have a proper holiday this year, with only house reorganisation and cleaning to get done, and getting back into the swing of working is going to be hard. Having an income again will be nice, though!

Autumn is gathering pace here. We went for a ramble the other day, the three of us, to see what we could see. The first fallen leaves are gathering on the ground. Conkers and beechnuts are ripening and coming down. We spotted the berries of holly, yew, elder, bramble and numerous others as yet unidentified. We even ate some blackberries - D's first, and he was rather impressed (especially as I've been drumming the "wild berries are good for birdies not for people" lesson into him on our daily walk to nursery hehe). I had a few too, my first fruit since starting the low-carbohydrate diet in February. They were amazingly sweet (except the couple of not-quite-ripe ones I accidentally chose, which were delightfully tart). We had  a lovely time and D is becoming amazingly confident in his knowledge of plants. Hearing him describe how to treat a nettle sting with dock leaves is too precious!

I've now lost two stone (28lb/12.7kg), bringing my weight down to 143lb (65kg/10.2st). I have 14lb/6kg to go until my weight is back in the healthy BMI range. It's now time to start reintroducing a few of the restricted foods and seeing how my body copes with them. I have found low-carb eating so beneficial that I never want to go back to eating sugar and grains on a regular basis, but I will be glad to have fruit, plain yoghurt, carrots, sweet potato, legumes and dark chocolate back. They'll be reintroduced slowly and carefully with lots of monitoring, and in conjunction with an increase in exercise, specifically cross-fit style body-weight training. Prepare for a lot of moaning about sore muscles! But it will be worth it.

I think that's all the news for now. I am making it a goal to update once a week from now on!

Engagement :)

I'm sure it's old news to everyone who reads this, but E and I got engaged a few weeks ago. We have a provisional date booked - July 14th 2012 - and the beginnings of a format. The civil partnership ceremony will take place in our Hertfordshire town, in the local registry office's larger ceremony room, followed by a big party at a community centre not far away. We're doing it all on a budget and enjoying finding creative ways to save.

Some things we've already discovered:
- The problem with wedding dresses is that they are intended to make the wearer the centre of attention... a problem when you've got two brides! We are solving that by going with non-traditional dresses, but that's the last I'll be saying about our dresses until after the wedding. They are a surprise!

- Photographers' websites are awful and the worse the website, the more expensive the photographer.

- All of our local florists order their wedding flowers from Interflora and therefore have exactly the same range. We're going to have to go in and talk to them about bespoke arrangements.

- How hard is it to get flat wedding invites these days? I don't want to post ribbon bows and crystals to Australia!

- Our plan for inexpensive catering is making me very happy.

- People are lovely and so far no-one has done a double-take at the Civil Partnership deal (and some suppliers actively advertise their willingness to service them).

The wedding's still more than 10 months away so the planning is in its early stages, but I'll be sure to keep you all updated as my adventures progress. It's not every day one gets to plan a lesbian wedding!

Scare Factor

A while back, E and I discovered that we have an odd hobby in common. It essentially consists of looking at photos and accounts of ghost sightings until we frighten ourselves almost to the point of illness, then needing to look at Cute Overload or something until the sick-with-fear feeling goes away.

We know it's silly. We don't even believe in ghosts particularly. Neither is the point :P

This predilection for scary stories led me to spend almost an hour on Friday in a tiny Hertfordshire village library perusing the ghosts of towns throughout the county, which left me primed for what happened on Saturday.

We were up in Birmingham for E's university graduation. We had been up very early, endured a long train trip, sat through a long ceremony, ate a very satisfying repast then trundled all through Birmingham's city centre including seeing the Staffordshire Hoard in the museum (which was awesome, btw). We rounded it off with an attempt to visit the cathedral, which was closed. So, there were were, strolling back through the churchyard towards the station, exhausted from our day and really wanting to be home already. I spotted the grave of a little boy who had died aged two, murmured sadly over it, then moved to the next one... only to have teeny toddler hands appear on either side of the headstone.

o_O

I only blithered for a moment or two before I realised that they were the hands of an actual child playing hide and seek...

Note to self: no more scaring for a while!

Lesbian

A few people have privately pinged me about the fact that my info, both here and elsewhere, now says 'lesbian' instead of 'bisexual'.

A lot of pondering went into that change. I identified as bisexual for eleven years (secretly for the first ten years) so it is a label that I had come to find comfortable. However, the more I thought about it the more inaccurate and inadequate it became. Similarly, although I used to feel ambivalent about the exotic, othering 'lesbian' label, it had become familiar and I was ready to accept it. Identifying as bisexual felt wrong, while the lesbian label felt right.

The kinds of questions I'm being asked about this are: Have you changed from a bisexual to a lesbian? Or were you a lesbian all along? If so, what about that 10-year string of heterosexual relationships?

They're good questions, and I have been trying to answer them myself. It's difficult to consider one's own past objectively, but I have tried to be at least critical of my experience so that I can answer accurately.

It's true that until this year I believed I was attracted to men as well as women. I was convinced of this despite all available evidence, that being that my relationships with men routinely sucked and were devoid of physical and emotional satisfaction. (Yes, I do mean all of them. Sorry, any exes reading this, but them's the breaks. And really, if you're smart enough to read this blog you must have realised just how badly matched we were). I persisted with the pursuit of a safe, respectable heterosexual relationship despite proving to myself time and time again that they just didn't work for me. There were other issues at play in some of my poor partner choices - emotional baggage not related to my sexuality - but normalcy was part of it. I didn't want to rock the boat, so I kept on trying, one disaster after another.

I don't think I was ever truly bisexual. The frequency and potency of my attraction to women has been largely unchanged since my childhood (even when I thought I was just desiring a close friendship) and it has blossomed since I accepted that this is the only way for me. Without the red herring of "needing" a normal heterosexual relationship I can't imagine why I ever wanted one in the first place!

I'm wearing the 'lesbian' label with pride and joy today, where once it used to both frighten and tantalise. And I am very, very happy to own that element of myself. It feels like coming home.

Yes, yes, update...

Sorry it's been so long... I've been mired down in marking assessments and writing job applications, so getting a blog post out has seemed nearly impossible.

Today I'm just sitting around exhausted because I've spent the afternoon doing a demo lesson and being interviewed for a teaching position which, I learned an hour later, I didn't get. I'm not too disappointed - it was only my first interview of the job-hunting season, and I had very positive feedback despite not quite squeaking in to the position on offer. But I feel a bit deflated and thus blogging seems more appealing than the big pile of marking in my bag!

So... what's new...

E and I are moving in together in July/August, hence the job search. My current position ends at the close of the summer term, and it makes much better financial sense for me to move to her town rather than for her to move to London. I hate job applications and the whole process is making me quite fretful and cross, especially as I have to deal with the awkwardness of taking days off to go to interviews. I'm spending a lot of time quite exhausted and dreary, and can't wait for the half-term break next week. It will be a real relief to be getting all these things done without actual work getting in the way! I have piles of marking to do and reports to write and IEPs to renew and ARGH.

The good news is I've lost a stone and I'm back in size 14 clothes for the first time since I was about 23. I'm feeling rather good about that! Two stone to go (a stone is 14lb/6.3kg, for those not familiar with this quaint yet satisfying English unit of weight).

I have no inflammation according to the blood tests, so I'm just working on easing the pain at the moment. I need to go back to the doctor for another physio referral and to find out why the muscles in my upper arms have suddenly turned bumpy, but I think I'll now wait until I move to do that. For the time being, it's going alright.

So everything's ticking along, and hopefully I will manage not to drop with exhaustion before the summer holidays hit...