in gravyland

Latest Effort for News - Today

(By now you will realise (depending on which post you started at) that I am repeating myself here. Remixing my own life. Think Run Lola Run (which they are doing a live-soundtrack performance of in the Brighton Festival soon.. wwoo).
…..

I think I need to try (yet again) to put some words down. Here goes version 4!

When people used to say? “Gosh you are brave, moving country like that.” I kind of smiled blythely and thought “Ooo, yes, aren’t we.” I thought we had a pretty good idea of what was involved, physically, emotionally, financially. And I guess we did have a fairly good idea - in theory. The reality has been rather more difficult, and it aint over yet.

Basically, it has been a huge thing. The first three months Gra was job hunting. Ouch. Loads of fun stuff too though.. getting to know Brighton, the Laines, the villages, the people.. we got over to Lake Como (Rob’s pad right on the lake and Lisa’s family), France (Jack & Penny’s house near Toulouse) for our wedding anniversary, seeing Slava’s Snowshow for the first time, some mad stuff during the BRighton Festival (eg. Japanese sit-down puppet show comedy).

Continuing to focus on the positives (I’ll save the moaning for later), the countryside around here is so so beautiful. Like a dream. Like a movie. We were out yesterday for UK Mother’s Day visiting Wakehurst Place (Kew of the South). A dream. The older I get, there more I feel it in my bones, in my waters, that I am born to pray at the alter of Gaia. There are particular landscapes, particularly with vista and dimension and water, that reeeeally do it for me. I’m remembering driving through Arnhem Land with Mum & Dad (just before he died). River snaking through sub-tropical desert. And here in the South Downs - something else again. Telly-tubby hills, incredibly beautiful, old villages, winding roads, Cat in the Hat or Nick Cave blaring, endless conversations about this and that, a million questions. Yes indeedy, nothing like a Sunday drive.

I could write forever about the countryside, about the joys of a fire in the garden on a brisk night, about Buddhafields camping, about the excitement around us looking for our first camper van - anticipating the first flush of spring adventures. Easter just around the corner, with a trip to the West well on the cards. Eden Project maybe.

I felt like a cartoon Mum going to a National Trust garden on Mothers Day, after a nice lie-in and breakfast in the bath. Wiv me box a chocs in hand and a quick stroll through the plant section of the massive gift shop on entry, the picture was complete. Found a rose Bea and I used to walk past on our walk to school back in South Fremantle. Abraham Darby. Been looking for one for ages. We made a geocache treasure hunt, which the locals can try out, and it snowed!! As it it did again last night.

So there I was at the end of a long drive through Sussex and a lovely day out, wandering back up the path with my rose in hand, thanking Gra and Bea for a very special Mother’s Day, chuckling at the wholesome Englishness of the picture… despite the hangover from drinking and dialling to Oz and USA until 3am after a night out in Brighton with Gra.

So Brighton suits us well. Primarily for the countryside and the fairly eclectic mix of people you find in such a place. It has great potential for Gra to work from here, considered by many as the new media / internet hub of the UK. That mad virtual world Second Life has just opened their second office here - the other one’s in San Fransisco.

So I guess we have probably found the right place to live a far as the UK goes. We still love going up to London to see the mates there - to get an Aussie fix, as we haven’t found any in Brighton yet. And let’s face it London is amazing. If Gra wasn’t still having to work there in the boring bank job, we would probably go more often. It’s only 45 mins away on the train - but 1.45 door to door for his morning commute. Madness!

It’s been a rude shock to go from Daddy being around, working part-time and flexible the rest of it - to some weeks feeling like we are only seeing him at bedtime M-F. Weekends become a sacred and intense time to make it all up. At least we have developed a new insight to how so many people live, and Friday’s mean more than ever before. We loved going off on our first paid holiday together ever though, and are making the most of the annual leave. Salary sacrificed to get an extra two weeks, thank fuck.

In many ways perhaps Gra’s new job has had the biggest impact on us all, bless him. He really is a hero for going out there 5 days a week to bring home to bacon. I think what keeps him sane is that Scouta.com is going really well. This is the social, creative, connected, humane internet venture he has been wanted to create for years. It’s still got a long way to go, but thanks to a great idea and an inspiring match between Gra and the awesome CEO Richard Giles, they have a lot to work with. It’s got real potential to help people get the most out of the internet and connect with like-minded people. Right up our alley! We’ve already attracted the first round of development funding from an excellent investor who is letting us maintain creative control. The next round, all going well, should secure Gra a fulltime position where he can work from home again or get a little office with a gang of similar sorts down the hill in the Laines. We shall see… Workwise, England definitely seems to be Gra’s kind of place. It has been hard not falling straight into the kind of money and freedom he had before (not by a long shot), but we are managing to pay the bills.

He is such a talented, beautiful man. I so hope this works out for him (and us) because we miss him. And he has so much to give the world with his vision of interconnectedness and making computers friendly, useful and fun.

Now what about me, you might ask. Being fairly new to the job of School Mum, I had thought, naively, that when they got to school you had all the freedom in the world. Which I guess you do, relatively speaking. Other than needing to find work that, ideally, finishes by 2.45pm and gives you 12 weeks holiday a year plus let’s you take time off whenever you or your child is sick. And let’s face it, it’s been rather a long time since I held down a job job hasn’t it. Anita Roddick has not managed to find me yet for the offer of a part-time dream job, so I am back into what I do best. Coming up with ideas on how to make the world a better place and attempting to manifest too many of them.

The year started with a personal confidence boost on the £ front with me earning my target for the year by negotiating the sale of freo.com, which we have had for nearly 10 years. That meant we could get through Christmas, get to Australia for Mum’s 70th birthday and now - get into the market for a wee campervan. So that made me feel a lot better about where most of my time has been going lately… have finally summoned up the courage to go back to study formally - at the University of Sussex. Began a brand new MA in Person-Centred Education. Education for human becoming, not just concrete learning. Part-time over 2 years. It’s a profound experience and begins with the process of reflecting and writing a learning biography. How have you learnt? What have you learnt? With only 5,000 words to contain it, there is a real job to do in focussing it. I’m decided to look through the lens of curiosity.

Have been documenting the journey on my blog at www.barkingowl.com/learning which in itself has been a reflective and creative process. We have been really lucky to get the support of the Guerrand-Hermes Foundation for Peace to co-create the MA. They have given the three of us in the first intake a grant towards fees and a great deal of extra involvement. It’s feeling a little more like the ideal of an Oxbridge programme and is actually a very open thing. No filling of empty vessels around here. I think the hardest thing is not knowing where it is is going, plus the work itself and opportunity cost. I am not likely to embark on a traditional teaching career, as tempting as that sometimes seems, so I have to keep trusting my instincts on what will come from it all. If you are interested, do check out the blog. It is a fascinating course. To give myself the chance to really think deeply about a subject I am so passionate about is a joy. There is a meditative space I get to that flows and flows.

Plus I am… helping on Scouta (PLEASE join up, spread the word, interact, give feedback and play!), doing some business coaching, planning some practical classroom experiences (teaching blogging for personal and work life, forming conversations with yourself and your customers, friends, constituents, stakeholders etc, writing for human becoming!), and facilitating the creation of a learning community of alternative schools in the Brighton/Lewes area (a grant in the pipeline from Guerrand Hermes for this).

Not to mention what all us super mums do, with the day-to-day organisation of a family, Bea’s activities, social life etc. All takes a lot longer in a new place. So much to find out! The simplest thing can take twice as long just because you are having to find your way around a new place, new systems, new relationships.

It’s been 10 months. We arrived mid-May 2006.

This is getting a bit long now, so I’m going to summarise things a bit. You can also check out the blog Gra has been maintaining called www.gravyland.net which Bea and I are hoping to get to if I can keep her off Barbie.com when we sit down to it!

Basically, we love it here, but it is expensive, tough making new friends and contacts all over again (think Fremantle, Margaret River, back to Fremantle, now here), and all the the other paperwork stuff that comes with moving. Knowing where and when to buy a house does our head in, but we have decided to take a break from thinking about it while the weird market does whatever it’s going to do and we get a better feel for how long we want to be here. At this stage we are saying three years minimum, which make a lot of sense. Then we shall see. Conversations about secondary schools also does my head in, and makes me think of Oz as a much better option. But one step at a time please!

We have met some brilliant people, there’s no doubt about it. But we gave up a lot too. Bea misses Jasmine so much of course, and we all miss our family and friends. But in some ways these relationships have deepened through a change of dynamic. I feel closer to Mum now than ever before. Her 70th was such a lovely occasion to celebrate a wonderful woman. My MA has forced me to reflect on a lot, one part of which has been my inheritance through Mum - books, curiosity, music, etc.

This summer we aim to take the camper to Northern Spain for a jaunt around Bilbao (Guggenheim), San Sebastian and the Pyrenees. I would love to do a weekend or two somewhere exotic with girlfriends, when weekends stop seeming so bloody precious en famille.. like any day now! And we will of course be going back to the Buddhafields for camping. The Bunters are coming out to stay, the Brighton Festival goes mad in May, the van will be calling for all sorts of jaunts as the weather improves and yum yum.. many other plans besides. Really need to make the most of being in Europe as this was one of the major reasons for moving here. Loving the connection with all things European.

The Bea Bopper is beautiful. Very alive, bright, reading like mad (just starting to tackle chapter books on her own), still film crazy .. loves Mirazaki (Totoro, Spirited Away) and has a sweet friend at school who does too. We started working on a fantastic film script together on the weekend that came out of a conversation with Lisa about when go and kidnap her to get her back. Lisa has been living with us for 6 months and comes from Northern Italy, near Lake Como. She is a total darling. HAs brought so much into our lives, but is going home soon (6 month aupair position). We will have a German girl called Karen living with us from August for even longer, and she is also a very special young woman. Oh, also need to to tell you about Max the Cat. Wow. Super affectionate. Feel much more complete as a family with him. But still hoping for another child this year. The house we found is superb. Big, old, full of character, great garden, great area.

But back to Bea. She is a handful, no doubt about it. Yes yes, just like her parents. But we don’t need to hear it. She has made a new friend recently who is even more spirited and strong-willed and passionate than she is, which was a laugh and relief to see. But there is still an inner stillness that see finds, and so much love and sweetness. Her enquiring mind gets a great deal of stimulation through the lives we lead and school itself, but she does spend quite time on her own and is not at school to chill out on her own in the book corner whenever she gets the chance. As Donny would have said, “she’s a real unit”. Such an imagination!

So much has happened in a year!

Much love, as always

Libbles

xxx

What we support

I finally made an updated list of the causes that us Barking Owls support over on the new Barking Owl weblog::

Oh, yes, yet another blog. This one is about blogs and people and serves as Barking Owl’s corporate blog as well.

Experiments in Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done is the title of a book by David Allen that teaches skills and systems for working through the long lists of things we all have to do in an ever-more chaotic world. In this post I’m going to talk through how the book and the ideas behind it are changing the way am organised, and what tools I am using and trying out.

If you are looking for a gentle introduction to Getting Things Done, have a listen to Richard Giles’ Gadget Show Podcast interview with David Allen.

This book is a good one. I haven’t read it all yet. So far I find it is sensible and practical and an easy read. It deals with people like you and me as real fallible people with scattered minds and gives concrete things to do to create stress-free productivity.

(Note: in Australia, the book is called the slightly different How To Get Things Done.)

Even before my copy arrived I discovered the rather wonderful weblog called 43 Folders. 43 Folders is named for the number of manila folders to make a 12 month tickler file system. It talks about tools and techniques for implementing the Getting Things Done (GTD) systems on a Mac under OS X.

In GTD, it is really important to have a place to record the next actions (ToDo items) that you need to take in a reliable system. You don’t want to be relying on your memory, or on some system that you don’t trust. You want a way to record things that makes it very easy to put things in reliably, and makes it easy to get things out reliably. If you can trust that when you put things in they aren’t lost, and it is easy to put things in, you have the beginnings of a solid ToDo or next actions list.

I’ve adopted a pair of tools to handle this for me. My portable tool of choice is a stack of 3″ by 5″ index cards held together with clip and a pen or pencil. This is known as a hipster PDA. It is a very flexible way of quickly writing down things that are easily lost. Once written down, these can be merged later into the master system, or just thrown away when things are done. It works best if you write one item per card. This is so cheap and easy and flexible beyond belief that it is hard to beat.

So that handles the mobile todo system. On the Powerbook I’m using a slight advance from a plain text file. I’m using Keith Martin’s PyGTD, a python script that works on a set of text project files and combines them into a todo.txt file. It uses dates, importance, and urgency among other things to calculate the order of todo items and allows modifications of the todo.txt file to feed back into the project files. Entry is very quick, being simply adding plain text into a project file. Modifications are the same. Very quick. Fast feedback. No mouse clicks.

To enjoy PyGTD you are going to want to be very comfortable in a text editor. I’m using BBEdit to edit the files and activate the PyGTD script via a single key-press, but BBEdit is expensive overkill for this task. Look for another text editor that can easily run scripts.

So that handles the ToDo list side of things. Once you’ve got a system like this running that you can trust, and you can chuck things in easily, you are halfway there. But, my email was getting out of control, so I’ve simplified that as well by adopting some email productivity tips from 43 Folders. The most important thing here is (I find) to turn off automatic email receiving, and only check your mail when you are prepared to process what is coming in. That stops the email mounting up in a discouraging pile automatically all by itself. I feel back in control of my email now.

I’ll report more on how I go here as I get these systems bedded down. So far it feels really good. Also, I’ll report on my list of favourite OS X productivity tools. There are some real gems out there.

don’t press the big red button

LiveJournal had a power outage. Looks like somebody hit the big red button in the data centre and everything stopped. It took a while to bring things back up again.

Then Brad Fitpatrick wrote a detailed explanation of what happened, and I find it interesting for two reasons:

• Firstly as an example of business blogging where telling your customers what really happened and how you will fix it gives visibility and comfort. See some of the comments below the post.
• Secondly as a lesson on how best attempts to make systems redundant often ends up not working. They had put some good energy into building a distributed system that would support failure of one part, but when the whole lot got turned off at once, it was difficult to get it all started again.

Link via BusinessLogs

Writing for the Web

I found this nice whitepaper from BusinessLogs called Writing for the Web that talks about writing a business blog. It covers: writing style, content & style, knowing your audience, length, voice, scanability and humour. Worth a read if you are considering blogging for business.