gemmaravenbird's Blog

It's Tuesday morning in Melbourne, the sun is shining and it looks like it's going to be a beautiful day.  My husband and I stayed up all night and we plan to sleep away the day.  We stayed up all night as we were under the influence of something.  We get paid in a couple of days, so we are living on credit with the taxi company and the fast food shop, our cupboards are bare.  I made a large pot of dahl, but there's only so much dahl a person can eat before you begin to be sick at the thought of it.  Watched Avatar for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I don't know how they did it, the Avatar people look so real and so did everything in it. 

I thought raven was spelt ravern, now I have to put up with looking like an idiot.  I think ravens are messengers from beyond life as we know it, they are in contact with the spirits and with the Gods, they are all knowing birds.  I use them as a protection talisman.  There was a time when everywhere I went they followed me, that's why I adopted them to my heart and put them into my witch name.  I think they purify my thoughts but give me lots of options to think about, when I've made the right decision they let me know this too.  Now that I've adopted them to my heart they don't follow me around, but I always think about them.  They are not macbre creatures that people think they are, they're messengers for people who severly need help and answers, that's the way I was until I discovered them and discovered that I was a witch......

We have just finished two weeks of school holidays, yesterday we started back and today I'm writing a children's book about a young witch and her eventual acceptance into society.  Previously she had been shunned due to the fact that she was too pretty, too intelligent and always wore black.  Her mum is a witch too and they live in a round haybale house.  It's fun writing kids books you can let your imagination go wild, nothing is too much, the more fanciful the better.  I wrote another one a few weeks ago about a girl with a life threatening disease who gets better in the end, I think it's important that all kids books stay positive and uplifting.  I write all of my stories like that, I'm not a macbre writer at all.  If I'm reading a book and there is a bad or sad ending I'm disappointed and upset.  I don't know why anyone would want a bad ending, it seems doomday and bad luck to me.

I'm 42, and feel sick for the first time in years, I think I have my first ever UTI and I feel like shit.  Poor women who get them all of the time, it must be terrible.  I have headache, tummy ache, back ache and I feel sick all over.  Does anyone out there have an old fashioned remedy for me, I'd be extremely grateful.......The other thing I'm having trouble with is a weight issue, I've lost approximately 30 kg, but need to loss approximately 30 more, it's hard going on the second lot, I can't seem to shift it as easily, I'd love some dieting tips.......

It's almost Spring and it is just so cold here.  Our gas heater blew up and we're reliant on a small electric heater and it just doesn't do the job the gas one did.  My poor husband lies on the couch with a woolen blanket and i just brave the cold.  I wish it were summer it's so much easier to cope with.  I like the food we eat in summer time too, salads and fruit and ice cream.  Yum Yum....It's so much easier to walk down the street too, at the moment we're spending $100.00 per fortnight on taxis.  Today we're getting our heater fixed, so i suppose it will be warm next week.  When I started writing this blog I had so much to say and now I just natter on about nothing.

It's two days before payday and we are out of money and almost food.  Tomorrow we are relegated to living off toasted cheese sandwiches, we have one tomatoe so one of the sandwiches will have tomatoe on it, the next one will have onion on it - oh the joy of preparing your days food when you have none.  Tomorrow at midnight we get paid, so we will catch a taxi to the all night shop and buy tobacco and something to eat - it happens like this every fortnight.  Tonight we salivated reading pizza menues that we couldn't afford and ate nothing, there must be something in that that is similar to torture.  We decided the roast chicken pizza sounded the best, and who knows in a couple of days we may actually be able to afford one - have you tried going hungry for a couple of days culminated in a deluxe pizza, there's nothing quite like it, good for dieting though....Peace be with...............

I feel like the luck in my life has completely changed.  Everything has an up note after such a long battle with mental illness, I now think that I can think clearly again.  My husband is feeling the same way.  We are going to re-do our place and make it beautiful, we are going on a honeymoon soon, my dreams are good again and my husband is like a happier person.  My school work is fun, my marks aren't that good, but then again I'm not trying to get good marks, I'm more interested in the information.  I've lost 22kg in ten weeks and am a third of my way to ideal weight - or just a bit more, i have 38kg to loose.  I don't know how I got so fat, but its coming off quickly.  I've made amens with my past and I'm getting a job.  Everything is going swimmingly - ha ha ha.....

Most of the people i speak to in expeience project come from the U.S. and it's summer there for you now, but we're in the middle of winter now - I come from a small country town just outside melbourne, Australia - and it's raining cats and dogs and there has been sleet.  I'm snuggled up in my lounge room with the heater on talking to a friend and my husband.  In a couple of months we are getting a small superannuation payout and we're thinking of a road trip in the U.S., apparently it quite cheap to buy a second hand car there, can you tell me about roadtrips and good places to visit.  I wouldn't mind going to canada either and maybe Alaska, how long do you think a trip like this would take?????

I'm doing a course in writing, and as an after thought i decided to do writing children's chapter books as one of my options.  Well i must be a kid at heart, because I've been reading a few (for kids between 10 and 13) and I can't get enough.  Ive had an epiphany, I think this is what I want to do more than any other form of writing.  They allow for your imagination to rule, I;ve been trying to write an adults book in magic reality, but when i think of it, the magic in it is really quite childish.  I must have a kids brain because I love magic and fantasy, I don't particularly like things going wrong and i believe in a good ending.  When i moralize in a book it's from a childish perspective, i must never have grown up.  I'm forty two in years but much younger at heart, I grew up very quickly and never really evolved from there, oh what a pain in the arse I must be.........

Yesterday was a day I've been putting off for months, I had to go to the dentist to have seven fillings.  There is nothing worse than watching that three inch needle approaching your mouth, and because she didn't numb my mouth first, I had to sit through seven injections and it hurt.  My eyes were watering and my nose was screwed up like some sort of boxer dog.   The worst thing is, I have to go back in three weeks for seven more fillings.  I swear I'm going to clean my teeth three times a day from now on.  The only consolation I got was the dentist, a lovely Indian woman, telling me that I was a good girl - it's nice to be called a girl when you are in your forties.  Still it's better to have your own teeth, even if it does mean pain every few years.  The dentist was impressed because my decay was green - gross isn't it.  Apparently this is the residue of the marijuana I used to smoke.  So all you dope smokers out there, it's more than likely that you have some green decay....

My hubby and I are on social security pensions and today was like Christmas, we received our $750.00 loans.  I thought about buying lots of things but most of the money went on bills.  I bought some clothing, but when I got it home, some of it just didn't look any good, so I'll have to take it back and get some more appropriate stuff.  I might go to the op shop and buy some stuff, it's usually better than the new stuff anyway.

Last night I had a cathartic cleansing range of ideas float thru my brain and emanate into the core of my being.  Today has been the same.  I feel relieved and I know what is going on now, life seems more complete and easy to understand.  I think things will be ok now.

I absolutely love Mondays, it's the one day of the week that i get out of the house.  I do an art class Monday afternoons and i love it, if it weren't for the Monday afternoon art class my ony outings would be to collect the methadone twice a week or to do the shopping once a fortnight.  My life isn't very titillating when it comes to getting out, we just don't have the money.  I'm going to try and get a job a day a week, this will bring in some extra bickies and maybe we will be able to eat out once a fortnight or something like that.  The day of work once a week will be a good opportunity for an outing too.  I have to admit, the last couple of sentences have made my life sound incredibly insular and boring, but it's not tat bad.  I have my school, my book, my art work. my fantasies and my husband.  Living on such a small amount of money allows us to have some creative cookery and there is always the cat to pat.  Anyway art class was great today, my new lino print looks pretty good and I've brought another peice home to do something byzantine, an art form I've always admired.  Today at art class, i wentinto the bathroom to wash my lino, the door was ajar so I thought nothing of it, as I turned the water on i heard someone say my name, i turned around to find Tim sitting on the toilet, why he had left the door open i don't know.  For a moment I didn't know whether I should keep doing what I was doing or to leave him in privacy....I couldn't work out why he had left the door open, then it occurred to me that there had been people in there just a second before me, so he must have had to sit there the whole time with people washing their prints....When I got home I thought that my hubby would have cooked dinner for me, but he was still fast asleep where I had left him four hours previously, I had to cook the dinner and because we had no chilli powder for chilli con carne we had to have boring old spaghetti bolognaise....Things are that bad sometimes....

I don't know how to stop schizing out lately, and I've obviously been depressed because I haven't been writing.  Even my school work is suffering, i don't know how to fix this, I was so inspired and now all I can do is sit around and think about nothing.  To tell you the truth, all that I can think about that has changed is the fact that I am coming off methadone.  I hadn't really given it much thought, but that is all that has changed.  I've been on the stuff for years due to back pain and I recently decided to come off it as it doesn't stop the pain and it makes me eat like a pig and be physically lazy.  I've been coming off it for about four weeks and I've lost 12kgs and I feel a lot more physically well, but mentally I'm schizing out and not motivated to do my writing.  I guess now that I've pin pointed the problem I won't let it affect me anymore, it's just that a bit of the joy (mental) has gone even though I feel more zooped up and want to get some part time work etc.  I need to get my motivation for writing back, the lazy I'm chilled me has gone....

It's been a week since I last wrote and to tell you the truth I haven't much to tell except that I've been busy in my head.  I have a condition where what goes on in my brain is like a constant melodrama and that's pretty much where I've been.  My husband has the same condition so that when we both go off it's like a clash or sometimes a melange (sp) of melodramas.  You'd be amazed where I go to, for the past week I've been fighting a kind of internal war with very real characters, the problem is, i don't know whether it is true or not.  In my lifetime, I've met some pretty amazing people, and had some pretty amazing things happen to me.  At the moment, I think I'm some kind of saint with witchcraft skills and ideals and that my husband is some kind of dark Lord.  I hear voices that confirm this but don't think I can put it down to schizophrenia, people say things to me that confirm my beliefs all of the time and sometimes when my husband sleeps he says things in his sleep that correspond to what I am thinking and his head morphs into lots of different shapes.  It's all very confusing.  Does anyone else have this type of thing happen to them???

I can fix the BP oil leak, you need a very big, very old church bell, you cover the leaking pipe with that.  Those things are so heavy and there are no strong currents down that far.  Out of the top of the bell you have some form of tubing syphoning oil to the top under pressure.  There you go fixed.  Then you pray to God that the damage done can be fixed, it's a kind of religous spell.  You then cover the whole lot with potatoe sack size sand bags, followed by same size bags of river pebbles.  You then pay me a Kings ransom for coming up with the idea and sack all of the incompetent bastards at BP>>>>

Yesterday I had someone read my book for the first time, it's still more like an outline with barely filled in bits, but the basic story is there.  The girl who read it, said she really liked it,, and she gave me some hints on how to improve and how to end my novel.  She is running a writing course so I give her quite a bit of credit.  I want her to edit my novel when I do the second script.

My husband and I got cold and flu tablets for our cold.  They made me physically sick and sent my husband into psychosis, i don't think it's worth taking them.  I think we are better off being miserable.  I was especially miserable today when I found a job I could do in psych services, it was to do with project management, I then realised i would be better off on the pension.  Looks like I'm destined to stay on the pension.

I've still got the cold and now my husband has it too.  I told him not to kiss me, but he did and needless to say, now he is sniffling and joyless and most of the time asleep.  He thought because he has had the cold and flu shot that he would be immune to the lergy, those shots are good for the flu, but do next to nothing to ward off the commn cold.  Yesterday I blew out this huge glob of green, yellow and blood stained mucus, I think this means I have infected sinuses, delightful isn't it?  I'm trying everything in my power to get rid of the damn thing, a Polish friend of mine swears by melted butter, garlic and warm milk, it sounds like the base to a cheese sauce and tastes like one too, not too bad to drink, but I don't know how effective it is. My personal rememdy is to fill myself with as much natural - from fruit- vitamin C as possible.  If any ne has a remedy pleasse drop me a line as I hate feeling sick, besides that I have so much homework to do and it doesn't lean well on the side of concentration.  As well as all of this, I watched Eurovision yesterday and as usual found the songs lacking, the highlight for me came when that guy jumped on stage and danced well with the choreographed dancers, at first I couldn't tell if it were just part of the act or not, especially after the second singer came on stage, I thought hey is this for real or not - that's what I think of Eurovision.......

My husband would argue that there is anything common about me, but I do have the common cold today and feel common and sick and in common law i think that if i killed somene today, i could blame the common cold and probably get away with it.  Did you know there is a wind in france that when it blows is so strong that people get off when they kill when it is blowing as it is said to provoke normal people to do abnormal things.  i think the common cold should be treated the same way, i mean i feel feral today.  We went down to the chemist to get some cold and flu tablets and they wouldn't let me book them up, needless to say with no cash on us, i have to suffer.  It makes me want to murder the pharmacist, but I won't i don't think, he isn't worth the trouble.  I would hate to be him, imagine being like that, he knows we are going to pay our bill, he just has to wait a couple more weeks, it's just a nastiness inside him to do that to me, he is a little man.

It's Monday again, today I went to my art class and had heaps of fun making lino prints.  It''s strange to think I've been going to this group for eight years, it only seems like a couple of months ago that I started.  The people there seem to be in a kind of time warp too they just don't age. 

Tomorrow we've advertised our keyboard in the local paper for $50.00.  We're hoping it will sell very quickly as we need the money to buy some staples. ie milk and cigarettes.  It should go quickly as it is near new and when we brought it it cost $250.00.  I had planned to be musical, but never got around to it, I have too many other things to do with my time.  Besides, I like to sing, one day i may have some singing lessons, I can't reach to low notes or the high notes, but make something of the inbetween.  My hubby can improvise on the guitar very well, I've heard him play some very beautiful one offs, I'm always telling him to record them as he quite often forgets stuff that sounds really good.

When i was little someone told me that rain was the tear drops from the gods and angels in heaven.  It meant that they were upset with all the bad things humans did.  Today there were lots of tear drops from heaven, perhaps they were there because of that impossibly bad BP blunder with the spuming oil well.  Perhaps they were there because of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq.  Or aybe they were there for all the terrible things that happen to innocent people everyday.  My husband says that tear drops are to wash away our fears and bad memories.