The Wallpaper in our lives
Last Saturday, I bopped along to another of Toby’s wonderful literary salons. A Short 3-hr Brunch Salon for Busy People, on two brilliant short stories: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Alice Munro’s ‘Runaway’.
I regularly rocked up to Toby’s salons when she lived in Paris, but even now that she’s in London she kindly pops over to blow her/and our minds running 2 or 3 salons in one weekend. What I love about Toby’s salons is getting into the headspace of a story or work, even for a couple of hours, with others who love reading, trying to nut out what was meant or what delicious ambiguities we gleaned. You always meet new people or catch up with salon folks you haven’t seen in yonks. After we ‘did’ Ulysses by James Joyce – that took 6 months – we flew over to Dublin for Bloomsday. It’s that sort of mad group that keeps you going living in a sometimes-very-strange culture.
Toby’s a mad keen swimmer. She swims on the Heath in London even now, in the minus Celsius conditions we are living through. She said she stays in the water for 5-7 minutes. Without wetsuits, just a swimsuit and gloves. But if she stops now, her conditioning and ability to stand it will go and she won’t be able to go back in.
Talking about ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, we got onto questions of what is madness? and we found (or is it how we read – that we seek the positive endings to stories that may not have them?) that the woman in this 1899 story isn’t really mad, she’s just being her nervy, creative self. She is also every woman. She also causes her (patriarchal, condescending, alpha-male) husband to faint at the end of the story. It’s a fascinating short story. The more you look at it the more it is doing way more than you thought at first glance. Like any great wallpaper.
We got onto talking about wallpaper in our lives when Toby asked us all to say which images struck us the most. One salonista nicely described how she thought she hadn’t ever lived with wallpaper but then remembered she had – an odd childhood memory of a wallpapered bedroom where it was even on the ceiling. I loved hearing about that.
Darling Hubby had an important wallpaper in his childhood – his bedroom was papered with hot air balloons. I think this is why he left Normandy and traveled and lived outside France and even upon returning to France didn’t return to his home village. Those balloons sent him into the sky.
While, I, growing up, had a very striking wallpaper to look at: black and white 1970s tree nymphs and wood fairies who were pretty much all naked. This was in the bedroom on the island with no electricity, which I shared with big sister Jacqui and little brother Sam, whilst Mum & Dad slept in the next-door bedroom with normal black and white 1970s hibiscus flowers all over it. We got the nudity because it was a bigger bedroom. The older four were relegated to the downstairs ‘rec room’ or already floating elsewhere overseas.
The naked wallpaper was pretty haunting. I saw it in some toilet years later and turned back into a 6-9-year-old playing with lit candles, pouring the wax onto my palm to see if it really hurt, giggling until late at night instead of sleeping, running unsupervised as far as our little legs could take us on the island, getting up to mischief.
We asked ourselves in the salon, What is it that’s driving you crazy? It might just be the wallpaper. In the short story, it’s the lack of creative outlet that forces the bedridden narrator to hallucinate a creeping woman who climbs out of the yellow wallpaper… even though it’s kind of frightening to be inside this narrator’s cracked mind, it’s also exciting to be viewing the world through another lens, isn’t it? That’s why we read literature – to view the world through somebody else’s eyes.
In the salon we talked about how the term ‘madness’ is reached for when we put patterns onto people and they fail to fit into the pattern we’ve imposed.
Another salonista made a brilliant point that in our glossy magazines we’re always being told to ‘go on a detox’, or ‘get away from everything’ in some spa or retreat or bootcamp where we hang up our slippers and submit to a different world & all its rules in order to cope with our everyday lives. Strange that we are still being encouraged to step away from our regular activity and go have a little lie down.
What was really spooky in reading ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, which was written in 1899, was how these enforced bed rest treatments for ‘nervous’ (mad) woman also included masturbating them (!) and making them use bedpans, vetoing any reading or writing or sewing or any activity. The women went mad with this treatment. But also they acquiesced and slid into a near-vegetative state where they seemed to be relieved not to participate in life and to just lie there. (Maybe the doctor or nurse getting them off helped this!). It’s quite mad reading how doctors treated these ‘nervous’ patients. It’s a brilliant story.
I haven’t even gotten onto ‘Runaway’. Read it, it’s incredible.
I hunted until I was nearly mad the other night for a photo of the wallpaper of my childhood, but I didn’t have the photo. My sweet niece did and she kindly sent it to me today. This is her being her genius baby self, with the naked nymphs behind her. The photo was taken in 1981. When I visited our old house in 2007, they had taken down this wallpaper. But it’s still up in my mind.
Pinkeye, Redrum, and dead battery
I started looking for a visual of ‘pinkeye’ but if you Image Google ‘pinkeye’ the results are demonic.
I have pinkeye. This is also known as ‘you should have worn sunglasses for that hour and a half stroll in -5°C on Sunday’. My right eye’s seeping pus at night and bright red all day.
So.
Apart from that, we are having a situation in Le Village… called snow + valley = transport nightmare. On top of the uncleared, steep, narrow roads being too scary to drive up or down, my car’s battery died on Saturday night, so I’m driving nowhere.
Which is just as well since my pinkeye makes wearing contact lenses very dicey. And, my glasses don’t work too good. But, it’s not easy getting around by foot here.
To get the Gorgeous Duo to school/creche yesterday was too hard for me to manage. This morning I thought, ‘C`mon!!!! Get your s*** together.’ (This was after walking 3kms last night in -8°C on non-existent footpaths to go see my doctor for pinkeye meds. When the snow looked benign in the twilight/dark.)
Today dawned bright and -11°C so I said to darling Hubby he could just drop me and the Gorgeous Duo at the Wee One’s creche and I’d be fine pushing the 4-yr-old to get her to school, then walk to our house which needs all sorts of renovation before we can live in it to see Tree Guy and Septic Guy and make sure they are fine, then walk back to the creche to do my mandatory parent hours of presence (today being from 9am-11am).
Pushing 4-yr-old in the pushchair on more non-existent (snowed & iced up) footpaths, then the road itself UP the hill to her school was not pleasant. People emerging from houses to get into their nice warm cars heard some grunts and bad language.
Half running from school to get to our house DOWN a hill then UP its driveway, only to find no Tree Guy, only Septic Guy, was a bit demoralising. Then racing back to creche to do my hours of presence was pretty horrible. By then I definitely needed a lie-down, having spent 50 minutes speed walking in -11°C. My pinkeye sang with pain and my buttocks stung. But there were the little creche kids to jolly and play with. (The Wee One had failed to nap at all by the time I limped out at 11am, so I didn’t do great there either.)
Now I have to run back up the hill to go see Tree Guy who apparently WAS there when I was there. Strange not to have seen him in the flesh.
And I’ve found my image for this post.
Here’s the 4 yr old about to run away from a shovel-wielding father, à la The Shining. This was Sunday, when nobody was out for a stroll except us, pushing The Wee One and carrying 4 yr old up three hills and down one hill to reach our newly-acquired-and-source-of-much-renovation-requirements house. Just, you know, to go see it. Cos that’s so nice to do in freezing weather when you have sinusitis.
Here’s where it got a little bit ‘redrum’, the 4 yr old had eaten sufficient qualities of snow to go a little crazy and I started thinking my husband was a little crazy and the Wee One started crying cos her feet were only covered in one layer of cotton pyjama and one pair of cotton socks. (She could probably only feel a burning sensation at that stage.) This image of hubby clearing snow from the semi-not-working gates and 4 yr old running zig zaggy and eventually luging down a steep hill (so steep it’s called Track of Steepnessness in French)…. I just wanted to be home curled around a hot beverage. This is the afternoon I got myself my pinkeye.
So. I have to go now, and race up the hill again to see Tree Guy and give him a cheque and a key because even though ‘he was there’ this morning when I was, he must have been an optical illusion because I didn’t see him.
Thank the Universe that an extremely kind neighbour has offered to DRIVE me back up the hill later to pick up the Gorgeous Duo from school/creche as otherwise I’d been walking another 2 hours in -11°C pushing the impossible pushchair to get them both back home via the non-existent snowed & iced up footpaths.
I’m not sure that school or creche is worth this at all. Except that them being there has allowed me the time to write this post. So…
xx
PS. The Olympic luge queen….
Vampire Princess
Today, first day back at school for 2012, we see a girl who has sort of been Bunkeroo’s friend (the world of 4 and 5 year old girls has its own laws of friendship) handing out a Hello Kitty birthday invite to another girl. There isn’t one for Bunkeroo. The girl comes over and says in French, ‘Bunkeroo, I’m not inviting you to my birthday, but I’ll invite you next year, okay?‘ The girl’s mum just complimented Bunkeroo’s shiny pink dress and we all just didn’t say anything else.
Is it just us, or are the French kind of thick-skinned about this stuff?
I waxed lyrical in my last post about how friendly and welcoming people are living outside Paris, but, I dunno, maybe that all could’ve been handled with some sort of tact. Wasn’t French the language of diplomacy for a few centuries there?
I don’t think Bunkeroo look much notice of what her friend was dishing out. She didn’t mention it. I didn’t mention it. A 5 year olds birthday party isn’t the world and Bunkeroo has her own ready-made best friends in the form of her little sister Vroom-Vroom and her 21 cousins… but, still. It’s a shame because that little kid is missing out on having a real Vampire Princess at her party.
That’s right, my two daughters are really Vampire Princesses. Guess who informed me of that?
They drink blooded water in the bath, they eat mushed blood and blood sauce and roasted blood for dinner, washed down with blood that looks and tastes an awful lot like Grenadine and Evian. They are special Vampire Princesses because they can be awake at day, but they also like to be Nocturnal, and stay up for Midnight Feast, which is of, you guessed right, blood.
They eat blood on toast for breakfast (a.k.a. Marmite), they suck blood lollipops and they drink bottles of warm blood with a drizzle of honey for bedtime. They like stories about princesses more than stories about vampires. They can fly and can be invisible if they don’t want Papa Vampire to see them. Their Mummy is, of course, a Vampire. And they have a Vampire Kitty called Emily who sucks blood out of mice.
All this is not to be confused with the Imaginary Papa who doesn’t go to work, but stays home all day to cook and drive the girls to school, nor the Imaginary Mummy who cooks pasta and rice and writes books all day (gee that sounds like Real Mummy), and the Imaginary Best Friend called Makkan who just hangs out at school or wherever she’s required to be.
This is all healthy, right?
As is not getting invited to a silly birthday party?
All character building, yeah??
I’m putting this post in the ‘Rejection is all in your mind’ category. Or I may have to put on my cape and round up Imaginary Mummy and go kick some imaginary derrières.
Rebooting
I have got to finish my book – since that wonderful week of writing I haven’t yet finished sorting out the mess called a manuscript.
I tried to write all last weekend. What happened was I ended up cooking, cleaning, entertaining, going for walks, drinking vino, sleeping, watching British comedy and stressing, a little.
The day escapes me. By the time the gorgeous duo are in bed I’m almost ready for bed myself. Although I’m trying to enjoy the babyhood of Vroom Vroom and have fun/stop growling at Bunkeroo. There’s very little time to write.
I’m not sure if I need a boot up the backside or a live-in nanny. I pretty much know the answer, actually. Still… mums of 3 manage more than I feel I do.
The photo above is of a bootie – made for Vroom Vroom by a friend of my mother-in-law. We lost this bootie two weeks’ ago on a stroll through the main drag of the village when Vroom Vroom had a foot out of her blankie. I was quite sad to be one of those mums who loses handsewn gifts and I berated myself for not even noticing Vroom Vroom was bare-foot in autumn.
Then, on another walk, the girls and I found the bootie. Sitting on a low wall in front of one of the real estate agents’. This is the second lost thing restored to us in the last fortnight… I went for a walk with some important papers (for the pharmacy) stuffed in my back pocket (not the smartest of me) and after an hour hiking up and down the hillside I realised I’d lost the papers. I berated myself bigtime as the papers mentioned dates of birth, bank account details, social security numbers, all good stuff for identity thieves. Within an hour the papers were popped into our letter box.
After living in Paris for a decade, this sort of thing is very strange to me. I can’t quite believe how decent and kind people can be. But the folks around here seem to be just that.
Today, dropping Bunkeroo up at school for the afternoon, she started crying as she approached the gate.
‘Why are you crying?’ I asked her, dropping to her level so she’d feel better. Vroom Vroom dangling in the Baby Bjorn.
‘Because I’m so happy.’
I personally believe the kid was very tired and should’ve eaten dessert as I’d offered. But I wiped her nose (on my shirt, I had no tissues), she blew the biggest bright green booger out, which I had to consign to the concrete path as I had nowhere to put that – I don’t know how she breathed through it.
‘Can you stop me crying?’ she asked.
I wiped the tear off her cheek and zipped up her jacket. When I asked if she was O.K. she said she was great and carried on into the playground where some older girl came to collect her to go play.
We all have these moments. Suddenly we feel like crying when there’s nothing immediately wrong, it’s just all a bit much for us. This is how I feel about Draft 6 – it makes me want to cry but I’m also happy with it – except for the crap bits – and I’m O.K. but I just need a moment to clear my head and then I can go on.
The other day was 11/11/11 and astrologers informed me it was the day to reboot our lives.
Reboot. Lost booties found again. Books that keep being rewritten and rewritten.
I think it time to just get the book out. Like that big bright green alien life form in Bunkeroo’s nose. Sorry that’s a terrible simile. But, maybe, applicable.
As viewed by a four-year-old
Today on a walk up one of the steep tracks (chemin as they call them here), I took a photo of the old bench in the fenced lookout spot with proper steel (?) legs made by a family company in Paris, and Bunkeroo expressed her desire to take some photos.
Here are her photos.
This is Bunkeroo’s little sister looking at her big sister with that funny black thing that Mummy uses.
(I was wiping drool.)
I like this a lot. This morning in the library we read a book about modern art and she was quite impressed with the big abstract works. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this one.
She said this was ‘beautiful’ and I had to explain what graffiti is and tagging and why. I would like to start a website called www.butwhy.com where short explanatory videos could be always ready to answer the bl**dy questions!!!!! Today, also at the Library came the crushing realisation that volcanos and lava are not nice. She truly believed they were until this morning.
She’s right in this case, this graffiti is quite beautiful.
Then she took one of me. Note that baby sister is carefully cropped out of frame. Or maybe she is a total literalist because I said, ‘Take one of me.’
Either way it’s a nice photo of me. There aren’t many people with the patience to take those. I move too much. As does Bunkeroo. We should learn to stay still a little more but it’s hard.
There were 4 variations of this composition, which we could call ‘Fence & Leaves’ – this one is blurrier that the others, sorry, but I like the angle she chose.
She also got an extreme close-up of her finger, which amused her no end, but I’ll spare you.
And she, too, took a photo of the old bench with the steel (?) legs made by some family company in Paris – Allez Frères rue St. Martin – it looks like if I zoom zoom in. The ‘Go’ brothers? Strange. I’ll have to recheck that next time we go walking.
She also took a close-up of Vivie’s hood with the Winnie the Pooh ears, but that was at my encouragement.
There’s also one of the clouds in the blue sky.
Then I took one of all 3 of us. She offered to do it, but I explained that I have the longest arm. She didn’t ‘but why’ me on that one.
I’m really thankful to have had these two beautiful creatures.
xxxx
TGIF but have I finished?
It’s Friday!
My writing week is up… have I finished? Yes and no.
Yes in that I rewrote the heck out of my mss and according to the Variance Excel spreadsheet I reached my target (well, pretty much, it’s 76,000 words not 80,000 but who cares). And no in that I still have to re-edit a lot of the chapters. But I feel so much closer than I did last Saturday.
I learned a lot:
- you are writing while you do the dishes – I had some great ideas standing over the sink – which is the ugliest sink ever. We don’t have a dishwasher anymore so doing the dishes makes my nails split but gave me “insights into things”.
- I wasn’t really writing while I went for walks but it helped to blow fresh air into my brain
- drinking 20 coffees is fine, but drinking water is more important whilst writing. Or else you just sit there dehydrating.
- music can distract because you keep thinking ‘what better music could I put on now?’
- Turn off the phone & Internet and keep them off if you want to write a single word!
- going out for takeout is not writing but it saved time to write more instead of cooking…
- Bunkeroo did not miss me for one second. Vroom Vroom probably missed me a lot but wasn’t sure exactly what it was or what I am or what she is so she’s probably had a confused week. 6 months old is that kind of age. So is 4 years old.
- I missed Bunkeroo & Vroom Vroom, but in a benign way where Hubby and I made jokes about shocking things parents might do if they’ve sent their kids away for a week – like binge drink and take up smoking – that was a joke though, don’t worry!
- I was so grateful to have other writing thoughts crop up during the week, no doubt they did because I was a) getting 8 hours sleep – blisssssss! and b) a week of writing gives your brain free time to dream up other writing thoughts. I will now try to turn some of these thoughts into money-makers.
- “income stream” is a fancy word for making some money. I would like to have such a thing. I’m pretty much over being a zero incomed person.
- the village we are in is super pretty….
You can’t see it but the Eiffel Tower is a tiny needle on the horizon.
- Bunkeroo likes to pat these lions, as she liked to pat the lions carved into the doors of Kenzo on rue Vivienne in Paris.
- The church that was built in the 11th Century.Most sidewalks are too skinny for the skinniest of pushchairs.When you walk down the 100 Steps it’s easier.
Authentic little old lady in a fox coat who had just spent 10 minutes extracting money from the machine.
- Path at the end of Chemin de la Côte
- The 100 Steps – are as steep as Sacré Coeur
Cemetery shot for a certain niece
Austin Kleon
Breakfast of champions - Marmite on toast & Coffee#14
Been writing all day…. went for a walk… and now just had a little techy break of reading the Publishing Deals of the Day and saw:
Designer and author of NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT Austin Kleon’s HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST, based on his blogged manifesto that has gone viral and attracted more than 1.5 million visits so far, expanded with new insights, drawings and exercises into a comprehensive guide to being creative and original in art, work and life, pitched as THE ARTIST’S WAY for the digital age, to Bruce Tracy at Workman, in a very nice deal, by Ted Weinstein at Ted Weinstein Literary Management (World).
It sounded intriguing and I liked The Artist’s Way, so I looked up Austin Kleon’s blog which is really cool.
This is the manifesto that went viral: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.
Read it, it’s great.
Back to writing now.
Somehow I’ve written a shorter book than I thought it would be…..eeek!! What to do??
Woolf in the room
When in doubt think of poor Virginia Woolf
Okay, so I’m in doubt… so I need to think about Virginia Woolf.
She was plagued by demons of mental instability; her husband published her works; she drowned herself. She had no children. She thought her writing was crap with a capital C.
This is one of my favourite coffee mugs, given to me by a dear friend and fellow writer but a friend whom I believe doesn’t actually believe in me as a writer.
That’s Coffee#7 inside it, and that photo was taken yesterday. Today I’m on my ‘I HEART NY’ mug with Coffees#8, 9, & 10… or is it #11? I’m losing track of a few things.
I have some crucial chapters to write from scratch and it’s hard to get into the flow.
Last night I got a rejection at 11:30 p.m. from an agent who has had my (previous draft) manuscript since April the 7th. It only took 6 1/2 months to read my 75,000 words. She had some quite kind praise and a few interesting suggestions but the phrase ‘I just didn’t love it enough‘ was where it all went the way of a rejection rather than acceptance.
Opening the email, seeing how LONG it was I thought she was writing to take me on as a client.
But she just didn’t love it enough.
I am deleting the word ‘just’ from my manuscript because it’s truly an awful word, meaning (among other meanings) only, merely. Someone only not loving your work enough merely not loving your work enough is such a kicker. And feels like a cop-out. Like it’s not her, it’s me. It’s like your boyfriend breaking up with you by saying: ‘I love you but I’m just not in love with you‘.
Enough said about this rejection, as I’m going down a dark tunnel now.
I had better delete the word ‘enough‘ from my manuscript, too. 
So, let’s think of Virginia Woolf, poor girl. She had a tough time. On Maisonneuve they posted a lost rejection letter VW received in 1926, which reads almost as if it was invented:
David Balzer, Esq.
Editor
The Stanchion Press
Great Obelisk Place
London WC1
November 19, 1926.
Dear Mrs Woolf,
Thank you for submitting to us your manuscript, To the Lighthouse. After careful consideration of its literary merits and market potential, we have decided not to pursue publication.
Allow me to elucidate. I believe strongly in the old axiom of showing and not telling, but, in this case, I feel you do neither. Do not confuse innovation with imprecision! You over-use the ugly impersonal pronoun ‘one’, for instance, and employ a battalion of semi-colons. You similarly cram your prose full of indefinite referents like ‘this’ (or, ‘all of this’), ‘that’, ‘it’, and ‘the thing’ (or worse, ‘the thing itself’). I presume you are trying to conjure up something about life and love and their ultimate significance, but consider the following sentence: ‘Marriage needed — oh, all sorts of qualities ( … ) one — she need not name it — that was essential; the thing she had with her husband.’ ‘The thing’ here might mean anything — might easily, in fact, be construed by the reader as sexual intercourse, which you doubtless do not intend (your characters hardly touch each other). You’ve given the Ramsays eight children; may I ask, Mrs Woolf, where they came from?
The narrative voice in this manuscript is likewise incongruous; at times your speaker (he? she? it?) seems to be the Ramsay house itself, and houses are not normally given such powers of perspicacity. For clarity and excitement’s sake, I suggest you attribute your musings to an actual figure, to be divulged dramatically at the conclusion. You might place a madwoman in the attic — a previous lover of Mr Ramsay, for example — who secretly scribbles down the story and plots revenge. (This madwoman could also be charged with the murder of Mrs Ramsay, thus explaining her haphazard removal in the bizarre ‘Time Passes’ section.)
And have you no pity for poor Mr Ramsay? Surely you can identify with his writerly pretensions and brooding insularity. What’s more, you give all your men — the paunchy Tansley, the doddering Bankes, the opium-addicted Carmichael — such a rough time of things, except for young James, who has repeated thoughts of stabbing his father (you know your Freud; I’ll grant you that). As for Mrs Ramsay, does she really deserve such illustrious credit for the daube de b’uf? Doling out pieces
of servant-prepared meat and glaring at one’s husband from across the dinner table are not, in my opinion, actions that warrant an apotheosis.
Perhaps at this point you are feeling a little like your Lily Briscoe, imagining me an invidious Tansley dismantling your artwork. Do not, Mrs Woolf, confuse my objections with sex bias. Your novel may be as delicately wrought as a Seurat, but no one wants to look at a Seurat for as long as it takes to read two hundred pages.
Self-publication may be your best hope. If your own milieu is anything like that of your novel, I trust you will have little trouble making connections or garnering finances.
Yours sincerely,
David Balzer
His ‘Allow me to elucidate’… what a jerk!!! I happen to love To the Lighthouse. We studied it in one of Toby Brother’s literary salons, it may have been the first salon I attended. It’s a book that gets inside your mind. On her site, Toby quotes:
Eudora Welty writes in her forward to To the Lighthouse: “Radiant as [TtL] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”
Back to my tricky chapters, my vision of reality. And I will remind myself that writing is just something I love to do, enough.
L x
the Wonder of a Variance Excel Spreadsheet
8:06 a.m. Monday 24 October.
Coffee #5, Harrap's English Dictionary, a bottle of Vitamin D and yes, that's a lava lamp.
It appears I’m going great guns here – 23,950 words into my manuscript and it’s only been about 40 hours since the Gorgeous Duo left the building.
I’ve even had time to:
-iron 10 shirts for Hubby
-watch the All Blacks beat France in the Rugby World Cup Final
-read a 1/3 of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – loving it
-contribute to my oldest bestest friend’s fab new blog thecommunalpantry.com
However, Monday morning sees me in the middle trenches of my blessed manuscript. I know I’m a shitty, distracted person when I write. I get snappy and seem to not be in the room. Why do I write, I ask myself?
-if I don’t write, I go a little crazy
-if I do write, I go a little crazy
but at least, if I write, there’s something to work with afterwards, something that might reach someone somewhere and settle inside their heart and they’ll think – me, too, I know how that feels – or it may make them almost laugh when it almost really shouldn’t be funny. That’s why I write.
One of my big brothers, who looks out for me, sent me an Excel spreadsheet to help my writing. I’d like to say this tool is working wonders. Maybe it is.
| Lizzie’s progress variance report… | ||||||
| Words | ||||||
| AM | PM | Evening | Total | Target | Variance% | |
| Saturday | 0 | 7 000 | 2 800 | 9 800 | 11 400 | -14,0% |
| Sunday | 0 | 5 000 | 9 000 | 14 000 | 11 400 | 22,8% |
| Monday | 0 | 11 400 | ||||
| Tuesday | 0 | 11 400 | ||||
| Wednesday | 0 | 11 400 | ||||
| Thursday | 0 | 11 400 | ||||
| Friday | 0 | 11 600 | ||||
| Saturday | 0 | |||||
| Cumulative Target | 23800 | 80000 | -70,3% | |||
Cute, huh?
Speaking of cute…
Today, Vroom-Vroom is 6 months old.
She’s so brave and sweet. When I ring she tries to eat the telephone. I know that’s her way of saying, ‘Hi Mummy, I love you, too‘.
Happy Half Year, Baby. Let’s hope you aren’t psychologically scarred for being sent away for a week at this wee age. You’re probably not scarred. You’ve got your big sister Bunkeroo with you and you’ve got your thumb.
Onwards…
The Clock
Start the clock, people!
It’s 2:29 pm on Saturday 22 October. Darling Hubby has left for Normandy with Bunkeroo (now 4 yrs) and Vroom-Vroom (now 6 months’ old)…. the babes are gone for a week — one whole week — so I can write.
the gorgeous duo have left the building
Goal: rewrite my manuscript in 7 days.
God did a load more.
Wish me luck.
I can do this.
Coffee #1 drunk. Must ignore how dirty keyboard is. No time for cleaning!
Love, Lizzie xx
