| Rain, rain, rain! |
[Feb. 5th, 2017|06:45 pm]
Catherine
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| [ | mood |
| |  busy | ] |
It has been a hot, sticky weekend but now it is raining. I just went outside and stood in the rain doing minimalist yoga, just for the pure pleasure of getting wet and very slightly cold. Well, cool. Not really cold.
I'm still making salads for my lunches four days a week. I feel as though this is eating my Sunday afternoons, so I may have to find a better way of organising this. They are good salads, but somehow more time consuming than they should be. But then, I've been feeling rather slow-motion on weekends, which might be the problem. Not too many points this week, though - I squeaked up to 28, courtesy of yesterday's hot weather. But then, I was rather sick on Wednesday, which prevented me from getting as many points as I would have liked. I do wonder at what point I'll be able to climb up the four double-flights of stairs to my office without being puffed at the end...
I'm considering getting the 'Habitica' app, which basically gamifies your to-do list by rewarding you for completing tasks, because I am getting very tired of salads for lunch, even if they are nice ones.
In line with my decision to try to do One Thing per week in the political world, I rang three of politicians on my lunchbreak on Monday about refugee stuff, and also emailed my local MP again. The chap at Dutton's office sounded like a bit of a prat, but was quite polite, which was interesting because I've been reading that people are getting rather rude treatment when they ring - I am inclined to think my upper-middle-class accent and posh phone manner may be helping there. Perhaps I sound like someone who might vote Liberal? No particular joy from the three calls, but I did get a very long and quite personal/impassioned email from my local MP, Peter Khalil. He's new to the job, and a former refugee himself, and feels *very strongly* about refugees and how we are treating them.
The most interesting part of the email to me was the bit after the standard boilerplate about how obviously Labor's policy is better than the Coalition's, and here it is for my information, where he said straight out that while this *was* better than the Coalition's policy, it doesn't go anywhere near far enough, and we need to increase our intake, and take a leadership role in the region and stop doing terrible things to people on Nauru, and that he is going to lobby for this within the party. I've never had an official letter from a politician that criticised his own Party before, and I'm quite impressed. I also rather suspect that he wrote this email himself – I don't think it's a unique email just for me, and I imagine it's a form letter to anyone writing about refugees – but I'm pretty sure it's a form letter he wrote. It had that slightly awkward English that is not ungrammatical or wrong precisely, but which is the hallmark of someone who doesn't do a lot of writing for a living. No professional communications person writes like that - it was more like an email from one of my scientists who has English as a first language, but doesn't really take joy in it, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, I was fairly impressed, and he may even be getting my vote come the next Federal Election. Whenever that is. My money is still on 'in less than one term'. And I expect we will have at least one more Prime Minister between now and then.
I had my first practice with the Melbourne Bach Choir this Thursday. We'll be doing the Saint John Passion on Good Friday at the Recital Centre, which should be a lot of fun. It's strange singing in such a huge choir after so many years in tiny ones - there must be at least forty altos, and as many sopranos, and while we have fewer men, I'd be surprised if the choir wasn't more than 100 people. I'm liking the conductor a lot, too, and I think I'm going to learn a lot from him about conducting community choirs, as well as just different ways of teaching particular concepts. The choir is an audition choir, but not everyone can sight-read, so we tend to go through individual lines more than I'm used to. On the other hand, there is an expectation that people *will* practice at home, and there is a strong sense of focus - sections improve pretty fast. I'm highly amused by his insistence on running everything at full speed once through the first time we sing it. Given that Bach has some very fast and convoluted choruses, this is a recipe for madness. The goal is to stay together, even if most of the notes are wrong. Which they mostly are...
Interestingly (and a little sadly), I'm finding it very relaxing to sing with this group. I hadn't realised how tense I was during choir practices at Wesley until I finished this one and realised I wasn't tense. It's not about the music, either. I think there was a certain amount of politics (inevitable in a small church choir), and a certain amount of personality conflict, and there were particular things I was finding frustrating which seemed to be unfixable. Which is interesting, because I also have very good friends in that choir, and know nobody in the Bach choir. So this might be a good break for me on a few levels.
(I am sure the Bach choir has its politics, but I suspect the sheer size of the group make politics a bit easier to stay out of...)
In writing news, there should have been a new story this weekend, but there isn't, because I am now stuck in the middle of four separate stories and can't find my way out. This is disheartening. I can't get my fiction-writing brain to function properly at all just now.
In reading news, I've just finished The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovich, which is the most recent of the Rivers of London books. I almost gave up on Aaronovich after the last few books, because I was so very cross about what he was doing with Lesley, but I really enjoyed this one, especially Guleeb, who I hope we will see more of. I also devoured the new Eloisa James novel, Seven Minutes in Heaven, which was fluff, but enjoyable fluff, and has made me realise that I need to go back and read her Desperate Duchesses books again.
And none of this is writing a story, is it? But frankly, all I actually want to do now is sleep...
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cheerful
tired
sore