I love vot­ing. I always have.

In  fact, I dont think I have missed any elec­tion from the time I could vote.

Its not that I think my vote is extra spe­cial for the elec­tions, its that it is impor­tant to me. Even though my voice may be a tiny squeak in the sym­phony of pol­i­tics (if that even), I pre­fer to make it instead of being silent. I will vote even if none of the par­ties are wor­thy of my vote — I will cast a protest vote, but I will cast one.

And today was time to cast. Since I am a very respon­si­ble blog­ger and fol­low all the rules of good blog­ging, all of them, I will of course not engage in any polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions or dis­close my own polit­i­cal stance. I will be a lovely fresh green Switzerland. Of course.

The excite­ment is full and in our fam­ily we dont walk with bore­dom on our faces to the polling booths, we run to them.

We wanted to walk the way there, in honor of our stance, but it was rain­ing and Little B has a bit of a sore throat, so we set­tled for the car.

And then we were there, our oasis of elec­toral power.

For those that are not decided by this point or have trou­ble remem­ber­ing names and such, there are help­ful ‘infor­ma­tional’ materials.

I dont know who this guy was, but we loved his slogan.

Oh, Joe…

Welcoming com­mit­tee of vol­un­teers for the var­i­ous par­ties, who give out How-To-Vote cards.

Voting in Australia can be a bit funny, so those cards are sup­posed to help vot­ers in the process. You pick the one of the party you want to vote for and they let you know how to do it. So you dont mess it up

Then we waited our turn in the school hall..

I got my wal­let in a ready posi­tion to whip out my dri­vers license and prove vote worthiness.

Miss Fab was my stand-in voter and marked the papers for me. While Little B, did it for Mr.Blab, who were using the booth next to us. I love the car­ton polling booths. I won­der what they do with them afterwords.

The lit­tle one waited patiently.

Then its time for the all impor­tant casting.

And more casting.

And that is it.

That is all it takes.

Then it was time for celebrations

and exu­ber­ant behaviour

suit­able for any proud voter.

People have fought for this right and women like me and the girls have not enjoyed it that long. Give or take 50–60 years. Scary when you think of it.

We cer­tainly dont take it for granted.

We are pas­sion­ate and hope­ful these elec­tions, despite the worst and most unin­spir­ing cam­paign­ing ever.

Except one part of it. Funnily enough it was made for the Gruen Nation show (our favorite) and it was not an offi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the party.

Not say­ing any­thing though.

We are Switzerland. Remember?

Signed,
Respectable blog­ger who never engages in polit­i­cal discussions.

In the­ory, drop­ping every­thing and going off on a trip for a year sounds straight for­ward, almost effort­less. A lot like throw­ing the garbage, I guess.

In real­ity, or at least our real­ity, in which we have to suck out all the value we have out of every­thing we have, with all the time we have, its not quite so effort­less. It involves a lot of boxes, a lot of dig­ging, a lot of sort­ing, a lot of think­ing in big puz­zles. Then these puz­zles have lit­tle puz­zles in them that need sort­ing and make the job even less light and easy.

The big job of sort­ing out the garage con­tents has started. There are a lot of boxes with all sort of things in them and as much as we have avoided meet­ing them in per­son in the last few years, now its time for face to face, heart to heart. It goes a bit like: You go…you stay…go…OUT!…mmm…dunno…Oooooh, I for­got about this…

A lot of liq­ui­da­tion needs to hap­pen, before our trip can become a real­ity. There is a lot of work ahead of us and even if we dont end up going, it will feel so good to have this out of our heads.

Digging through things bring up mem­o­ries as well, which is the nice part about this whole mess. There IS one, thank­fully. If we make money, that will be the sec­ond one. But for now, spray­ing refresher on the mem­ory banks is quite enjoyable.

Like the pipe that marks the start for our love story:

Or the top of the cake for my 30^th birth­day. The best birth­day ever, orga­niz­ing lov­ingly, thought­fully and per­fectly by Mr.Blab. I had com­pletely for­got­ten that I save it, so I had a good pause and re-winded the events through my mind as I stared at the con­tents of the box.

The girls have started a pile in their room that will go to rais­ing money. I have pre­pared the train table to be ready for a new home and hope my friend is still inter­ested. There are other boxes fill­ing up with unused toys, clothes and what­ever really.

Its not only money rais­ing activ­ity though. Its money sav­ing as well.

If we go, we will need to store the left over fur­ni­ture and stuff until we come back. This costs money and more than you would be think­ing. Obviously, the more one stores, the more one pays.

And in the end it turns out that what­ever we decide to keep: first of all, will not make us any money, and sec­ond of all, will cost us money. It will have to be well worth it. Which is actu­ally a very nice way of look­ing at the stuff that sur­rounds us. I so hope in the end we fin­ish this crazy process with a small pile of things we truly care for.

This is where we are at the moment. There are a few things going on in the back­ground too — like search­ing for stor­age, sort­ing out shares and taxes, look­ing for con­nec­tions around the world. I am also still try­ing to fin­ish up the update of this blog, the one that has been long awaited by me , because oth­er­wise it will have to wait even longer. I am most cer­tainly not bury­ing myself in codes and blog deci­sions while on a trip. Not by choice, anyway.

The dream is still alive. Lets see what will hap­pen to it.

Everything is awak­en­ing in the gar­den — the almond tree is blos­som­ing, the flow­ers are col­or­ing the green of the grasses around the place, and sway in the breeze, as a choir, singing tunes for spring to find her way back here.

I noticed it the last few days and yes­ter­day in the late after­noon I grabbed the cam­era and went out to see if I can find some­thing interesting.

My assis­tant fol­lowed me around and smelled him­self silly on the trippy plants.

And when I stopped tak­ing pic­tures, he was not happy and demanded I get my act together and start snap­ping again.

Slave dri­ver!

Until he was dis­tracted by another flower in need of sniffing…

He is the only male with a short atten­tion span that I find endearing.

I also love how he snug­gles in me, rubs him­self on me like a cat. Now that I think of it he is the only male that would be allowed to stick around after such behav­iour, as well.  Double standard?

You bet!

Back to the issue on hand, though.

Sorry win­ter, but you have noth­ing like this:

So, bon voyage!

Arrivederci!

BUH-bye!

☼

P.S.

Mr.Blab: We have flow­ers?! 

There are mother sub­sti­tutes and there are mother addi­tions, such that value add to the per­sona that car­ries the name mother. Today I will talk about the latter.

Please wel­come to the stage my granny robe, yes, the one I have been talk­ing about lately, yes, the one that doesnt seem to be able to stay in the back­ground, like a good robe that I have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with should. I have and will admit to you that I wear it around the house, but dont ask me to make appear­ances on TV or to open any schools with it, cause that is beyond the pub­lic­ity I want to give to my addic­tion to its warmth and unbeat­able soft­ness. Oh, the soft­ness…  And I will not be win­ning any sex-appeal con­tests with it either, I am aware of this and I have not lost my mind…at least not because of this.

I am addicted to the robe, that is clear, while my son is addicted to the strings of the robe, the ones that hang on each side and help to close up the robe on the inside. I think the sec­ond addic­tion was caused by the first, although I am not sure it really mat­ters, the issues are on hand. Fact.

It all started inno­cently, as do all addic­tions I am sure. He would cud­dle in me, and me is most likely wear­ing the granny robe. His hands would won­der about while nurs­ing, and prob­a­bly got a han­dle of the lit­tle silky strings on one of their expe­di­tions. End of story.

At first he would just hold them, then he started being all cre­ative and twist­ing his fin­gers through them and now he has per­fected his spe­cial move where he wraps his fin­gers in them.

The strings are requested every time he snug­gles in me — Uh! Uh! Uh! — or he just goes for them as I am walk­ing around — GRAB! The strings have entered our nightly rou­tine as well — get dressed, kiss every­one, run to the bed­room in a race with the oth­ers to see who will switch the baby mon­i­tor on (Dod wins most of the time), enter under the cov­ers, I lay down, he requests the strings, a boob in the mouth and lights are out.

I call them mother addi­tions, because they are not val­ued when they are not attached to me. For exam­ple, I was hold­ing him on the floor and needed to go to the toi­let, so put him down and slipped off the robe, hop­ing he will be happy there with his strings, while I visit the loo. Things looked promis­ing, almost meditative…

„Maaamaaa!” — the pit­ter pat­ter of lit­tle feet fol­lowed me in the toilet.

Despite his love of the things, he doesnt melt down when they are not avail­able — I do wash the robe from time to time, although not as often as I should prob­a­bly. He requests them and if I say I dont have them, he just hums in agreement/understanding and thats the end of it.

This is all fine and sweet and often adorable, but the worst part is that this robe has carved itself a spot in our fam­ily his­tory. Now my guilty plea­sure in a granny robe will be for­ever writ­ten there, as the strings will go straight into the boy’s memento box.

As soon as he lets go of them, that is.

Here is another idea for you. Make a bag from a lovely woolen scarf. How? Follow these directions.

1. Go to the local op-shop and find a beau­ti­ful long woolen scarf.

2. Pay the $2

3. Leave the scarf in the laun­dry, so you dont for­get to wash it, before let­ting the kids wear it.

4. Get your­selves a Mr.Blab (dont skip this step!) and let the said per­son loose around your house.

5. (this step is auto­matic, so dont worry about it) Mr.Blab will need to do some whites and will grab the scarf and chuck it in with the rest of the stuff, thus felt­ing it.

6. It will take you a few min­utes to fig­ure out what in the world is the stiff woolen rec­tan­gle on the dry­ing line.

7. Laugh.

8. Now you can dis­pose of your copy of Mr.Blab.

9. Toss around the piece of what looks like unus­able use-to-be-scarf. Looks nice, but what can you do with it? Fold here, fold there — a hat, a col­lar, a weird short vest…a bag?!

10. Crochet han­dle out of wool and felt it.

11. Stitch the sides of the bag. Sew a but­ton and cut a hole for it.

12.  Put a bar of choco­late and a book in it, wrap it and give it as a gift.

___

As I always try to remind the kids, mis­takes can often turn into great things.
All it takes is for us to look for them.

This day, like many oth­ers, started with an activ­ity we like to call build­ing forts, but in real­ity its prob­a­bly more a case of bring every­thing you can to this one spot and throw the stuff that doesnt fit on top of the other stuff and then make sure you havent left any­thing in the other rooms, or else bring that in too and plop it on top. Then crawl through it. See! A fort! Not many peo­ple can get through it.

Dont for­get to park your horse some­where too.

Maybe because the start was all messy, or maybe because the house is beyond messy lately, as we have been try­ing to sort through long for­got­ten piles of things, but I was faced with more stuff later. Ok, we have col­lected an embar­rass­ing amount of clothes through the years. Not for me and Mr.Blab, but kids clothes. A lot of it has come in handy and been used on all the kid­dos, but it was in need of culling, so that is what we did. A bag for giv­ing away, a bag of there may be a buck in this , which hope­fully will raise our spend­ing bud­get for this trip that is start­ing to set­tle into our hearts in a way that will be hard to shake off lightly now. And a bag of there may be two bucks in this, which might go up on Ebay or some­where that dont rip you off for not being lucky enough to sell.

Corn was had too.

Bags of frozen corn and peas are a neces­sity here. The kids love them, some­times just frozen, other times slightly unfrozen, but never fully defrosted. Never.

They can be enjoyed walk­ing around in a con­tainer given to you by busy sis­ters, aka. what­ever they could grab in a quicky. This approach is rather leisurely and affords the con­sumer the abil­ity to sprin­kle the corn on the car­pet with ease, which extends the plea­sure gained from the activ­ity. Step one — shove in mouth. Step two — seed the carpet.

The girls, on the other hand, had given them­selves a lovely serv­ing dish. Genius, if you ask me. It was elon­gated with two com­part­ments and thus per­fect for both of them to enjoy AND reach the snack from the ends of the table. They spent most of the day play­ing games, after ris­ing out from the fort that is.

Since it was movie night, I had the ran­dom idea to bake some pies. Small pies filled with choco­late and topped with the fresh straw­ber­ries we had wait­ing in the fridge. The prob­lem was that I had never made such a thing, I rarely bake, really. This has never stopped me, so I dug some recipe out and went for it.

I blind baked, peo­ple, in some pan I found in the back of my pantry, since I have no pie pans…doh.

The girls enjoyed the play dough.

Sausage roll, anyone?

So, I burned the crusts.

I wasnt pay­ing atten­tion to the lit­tle fel­las and they turned on me. But let me tell you, the choco­late fill­ing was deli­cious, and so were the sweet flavour­some straw­ber­ries and the fluffy freshly whipped cream.

We enjoyed those with our reg­u­lar bowl of popped corn and Mr.Blab’s choice of movie — South Pacific.

I snapped a few screen-shots for you.

After awhile I noticed something.

This is an inspi­ra­tion board for future gay-parade cos­tume designers.

Its inter­est­ing how quickly tastes and aes­thet­ics change.

What was main­stream yes­ter­day is on the fringes today.
And vice versa.

During the long, 2.5 hour movie, I also man­aged to cro­chet the han­dle of a bag I was doing, as a birth­day gift for one of Miss Fab’s friends. I will get into that in a dif­fer­ent post, though.

After the movie, late into the evening, we dis­as­sem­ble the floor set up of pads, pil­lows and blan­kets, as we dont use the couch for sit­ting pur­poses — the couch is for climb­ing pur­poses only. I played the video that was opened on my lap­top „Dancing in the Moonlight” and Little B, in true for her style, went for it. She still has the free spirit to feel the music with­out any inhi­bi­tions and we love watch­ing her. It almost makes me feel more alive, wit­ness­ing her danc­ing spirit.

To com­plete the pic­ture, I have pro­vided you with the actual back­ground music

Have a won­der­ful day and lets all be a lit­tle bit less con­cerned with who is watching.