A knitting pattern for when you really feel the urge to throw something against the wall, like when the supposed leader of the free world sides with dictators and fascists and insults a brave man fighting for his people’s freedom. 🤬 Oh, and it’s free. Bonus.
Author: Kris
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Pressure Cooker Lamb and Barley Stew with homemade bread
Not really a summer dish, but very tasty! Rodd’s best loaf of bread yet…
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GPN Tutor Practice Party
I went along today to the tutor practice session for next week’s Girls Programming Network event. The last time I volunteered with them was pre-pandemic, and it’s amazing to see how far they’ve come! But damn, at one point I realised I was literally 20+ years older than the next oldest volunteer. It feels like yesterday I was the youngest person on the dev team, and now I’m an elder stateswoman. When did THAT happen?!?
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Board roles
I recently changed my LinkedIn profile to say that I’m Open to Board Roles, and a few recruiters picked up on that #opentowork photo frame immediately. No, I’m not looking to go back to work! Still very happily retired. 😄 I am specifically only interested in board roles, and there’s no way to flag that without also putting up that photo frame.
Being on a board is something I’ve been thinking about for several years, after a mentor raised it as a potential career path for me. There’s a real lack of tech industry experience and tech skills on my boards, and women are also woefully underrepresented. I have considered doing the AICD course, but yowza! it’s expensive to do just in the hopes of getting a paid board role someday. I had coffee with a friend recently who’s on several boards, and she advised that the course isn’t needed right away if I start by aiming for non-profit, volunteer roles. And right now, my focus is very much on doing whatever I can to make the world a better place.
If you have no idea what being on a board actually entails – because I certainly didn’t! – Anil Dash has a great article about it.
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Licensed fanfic
I discovered recently that the Roald Dahl Story Company has officially started commissioning new books “inspired by” Dahl’s characters. I guess there are only so many ways you can repackage the few books he wrote, and the next logical step is to start churning out official fanfic. It’s just another of their decisions in recent years that I find a bit disappointing…
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Quick book reviews
Two more library books done and dusted this week!
First was Miranda July’s All Fours, which I’d been waiting for months to read. I expected this to be sexxxxy; instead I just found it gross and sad. It didn’t help that I went in with a certain amount of identification as a middle-aged perimenopausal woman, but I found the main character really dislikeable and selfish. Which is fine; women can be jerks. But I found myself just not wanting to be in her head. There were multiple points where I found myself literally going “EWWW!” and cringing. I didn’t find any of it sexy, at all.
The second was The Story of a New Name, the second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. This one I loved. It continues the story of Lena and her friend Lila as they follow very different paths – the former finishing high school and going to university, while the latter enduring a marriage to a man she hates. It has cliffhanger moments that made me gasp out loud – that ending!! – and others that had me shaking my head in sadness. (Ugh, the night beach scene on Ischia.) And it’s so incredibly specific, which oddly makes it feel more universal. I think I identified most strongly with Lena’s feelings about going away to college, and her anxiety about never quite fitting in with people who came from intellectual families or those with generational wealth. She achieves more success than anyone ever expected, but it isolates her from the world she came from. Even her accent marks her out as not belonging in either place. (Yeah, it me.) And Lila – my heart breaks for her while she also infuriates me. I love her stubbornness and her survival instinct… and I get that the options for an uneducated Neapolitan woman in the 1960s were limited, but she could also be heartless and cruel. I was stunned by her choice on Ischia. It led to so much heartbreak. And of course, there are no good men in these books. None. Every one is a brute in his own way, trampling and using the women around him. Is that because of the culture in that time and place? Or is that really what it’s like? Did I somehow end up with one of the only good ones, or is there a latent brute lurking there too?
Obviously I need something lighter as a chaser now, something with characters that I actually like and who give me hope for the world!
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Sydney Easter Show volunteering
Guess who just passed her RAS volunteering interview? I will officially be volunteering for half a dozen shifts at this year’s Sydney Royal Easter Show. I told my friend Jody that I was going to do two shifts in the “Farmyard Nursery” and she was like, “Did you think that through?” 😂 But really, it was that or the Poultry building, and I’m not a big fan of chickens…
Be sure to let me know if you’ll be visiting on any of these days!
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Beers
Tonight was The Crafty Pint Presents: Ale Trail Blind Tasting Face-Off at Hopsters. We tasted twelve different beers. “You need to re-set your nose!” Rodd said. “Best way is to smell your own arm.” WHAT?! And yet by the end we were all doing it. 😂
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State Library of NSW
After Hadestown we popped into the State Library to check out the Peter Kingston exhibition. It’s well worth a visit! Afterwards we wandered the other galleries and peeked in at the students in the Mitchell Library Reading Room.
I also couldn’t resist swinging by the Shakespeare Room, since Tim Richards mentioned it in his newsletter recently.
