33 Week Challenge Week 5: Sunrise over Sea

Challenge no. 15 – Watch a sunrise from Mt. Coot-tha

Well, I’ve seen a few sunrises in my time, but mostly from the wrong end. That is to say, in my youth* (for I am aged and nostalgic now) I stayed up late enough at parties to “shinerun” as some people I knew called it, to celebrate the end of a party with the sunrise. Most of the time, however, we were too drunk or too tired to actually watch the sunrise, and it was more sort of: “ok, the sunlight’s on the street, NOW can I go to bed?” I did once shinerun and watch a sunrise on a New Year’s morning once. That was pretty good.

*actually, I did this last weekend.

Again, in my youth, I worked in a Donut King and later at a coffee shop. Shifts started at 6am so depending on the time of year I may have seen a few sunrises, but a lot of the time I was in the shop before it happened, or on a train, and usually, still asleep anyway.

This Saturday just gone was the first time in my life I got up specifically to watch a sunrise. Now, in my more comfortable years, I have a job that starts at a normal time and a desire to sleep in as much as possible – it really has never occurred to me to *want* to get up for such a thing. I mean, how good can it really be? I’ve seen the sun. It’s all orange and glowy, how good can it really look when it comes up. And that’s the thing, it’s not really an event, we living in these modern times know it isn’t “coming up”, it’s not the gods deciding to let us live for another day by bringing the sun out of the underworld, it’s not a new sun each time. In fact, it’s not even going around us, we’re going around it, and we couldn’t see it earlier because we were facing the other way in our daily rotation. It’s the same sun as yesterday, as every day, it’s the same sun that’s currently weakly shining behind a bunch of clouds and doing nothing to warm my freezing house. Saturday morning wasn’t special, it was just another orbit, another rotation, in a cycle that’s been going on for billions of years. 6:35am was just the time that the sun shone on Brisbane again.

Can you tell I’m an atheist?

Look, the point I think you know I’m trying to make here is that it was still beautiful anyway. That’s what I love about not believing in stuff. I find the very nature of our orbit and our rotation and the sun itself beautiful. I don’t find it beautiful because god made it so; I find it beautiful because it is.

You know what was not beautiful? My face at 5:30am… which is when I woke up. Somehow, even though I knew I was getting up to see a sunrise, my body still couldn’t compute why it was so dark and why I was making it get out of it’s warm blankets, and then, much to it’s horror, outside to get my hoodie off the line. Before 7am my body and brain are two separate entities. This produces what I like to call my ‘zombie face’. It’s a sort of dry, yet drooling face, with whispy hair and a droopy eye. It’s the kind of face that makes my loving and long-term boyfriend say things like “for a pretty girl you really can be really very ugly sometimes”. Boyfriend has seen this face a few times. One time we had a flight to New Zealand that we had to get up at 5:30 for. When he tried to gently wake me, I punched him in the nose. The face had taken over.

This is a photo of me at 5:45 in the morning, I appear to have hidden most of the zombie face by raising my eyebrows and trying really hard, but I can see that it is still there, waiting to scare small children.

So I drank a tea in the dark, donned as much warm clothing as physically possible, and tried to wash the zombie away. Chris, my sunrise companion arrived and drove us to Mt. Coot-tha for my first, deliberate sunrise watching experience.

And yeah, it was beautiful. For those who know the geography, despite Coot-tha being a fairly poor excuse for a ‘Mt.’ we could see all the way out to Moreton Island and the ocean beyond. The sun came up there, and despite (or perhaps due to) the thick cloud cover, we saw massive beams of sunlight hitting the long white dunes out there. It looked a lot, as Connor, another sunrise buddy said, like Jesus was walking on the water out there. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong side of Moreton Island to stage his second coming, so no one will ever know. There was a mist over Ipswich and out to the Dividing Range that slowly lifted as we watched and a reflection of the sun’s light on clouds out to the West. It was genuinely, well worth the effort of getting up and subjecting others to the zomb.

Here are some photos I took on my phone:

And here are some actually good ones Chris took:

 this one is amazing

Connor and I looking at the thing

wow, right?

Good Morning!

An amazing added bonus was that I then had a whole day in front of me. We ate breakfast at the café at 7:30am and I was home by 8. I was so very awake for my karate class at 10 and by midday decided I would use the time to watch the entire Eccleston season of Doctor Who.

Which, I think, leads me into a couple of quick updates about some other challenges I have recently started.

Becoming a Doctor Who fan is coming along nicely. Ok, I’m fanatical to the point of being dangerous to myself. Since my last blog post I have watched the entire 5^th season. Here is my reaction to the final episode:

Episode 13: The Big Bang

Tiny Amy – hello!

If there’s no stars, is there a sun?

Time travel is fun!

Seriously, fuck off Dalek.

Ooooh, Sun explained. Thank you.

“It’s a fez, I wear a fez now.”

Ooooooooooooohhh

*cough* the bride’s gone crazy

Doctor in tails!!

I think that was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

After this, I fought with myself about going on to the 6^th, made the decision to instead go back to the start, watched the whole first and half of the second seasons. At this point, I sort of don’t want to do anything else and am wondering if there is some way to get paid for watching Doctor Who. I had to use significant will power to write this post instead of continue watching. I’m not too worried though, this sort of obsession is normal in me, the need to watch it at all the time will fade, as it did with videos of Neil Patrick Harris, Paul McDermott, The Doug Anthony All Stars and Harry Potter (the books, don’t worry). I’m still a massive fan of all those things, I just need to O.D. for a while and then it will become a part of me, like those things did.

Yes, I know.

Growing and looking after a herb garden nearly fell apart when I discovered that something had eaten all the tops off my seedlings. Seriously, the looking after part is so much more difficult than the planting them part. Like children, really. I put off dealing with this for a few days and then went to the hardware store. I wasn’t sure if it was bugs or possums/rodents but it seemed easier to try killing bugs first, so I got bug spray. Spraying this on my herbs led to the surprising discovery that there were a bunch of, now rather unhappy, bugs hiding in the dirt. The herbs are doing ok, but I keep forgetting to water them so we’ll see how they go.

Writing a blog every Monday for the NYWM is going fine; this is the second of four that I need to do in June, so half way there! I feel sometimes as though I’m cheating, as some people are doing things like writing 1000 words a day or finishing their novels. But at the end of the day, I actually love writing this blog, and this challenge thing has been really excellent for me. Making the commitment to NYWM has helped me stay on track and the Monday deadline makes me feel like I’m a real writer who has to produce material every week…. Even if it is about my zombie face and the earth’s rotation around the sun. I hope you’re enjoying it too.

Stay classy, bloggeroos, stay classy.

33 Week Challenge Week 1 – NYWM and Herb Babies!

And so it begins: my foray into starting stuff for no good reason. First let me tell you that I kind of did 2 things this week. So I don’t know if that just stuffs it up – or whether it gives me a nice bit of grace for the week where I’m sick (inevitable at least once during winter) or the week where I suddenly get busy with gigs and work (hopefully this will happen at some stage) or the week where I can’t be fucked (guaranteed). In all likelihood it won’t matter because I’ll get bored at some point and give up anyway.

This week I did number 1 (plant and look after some herbs) and number 12 (register this blog for National Young Writers Month). The list is not yet completed, I will be updating it here – feel free to continue to contribute.

Challenge Number 12 was suggested by Alex Neill, whose blog I have been following for a little while now. She’s pretty excellent. She writes for GNW-TV (which makes her a god in my mind) and also writes another blog about TV that features Dr. Who a lot, which should put her in good stead with a lot of my readers. You should check her out. Alex is a rep for National Young Writers Month, which is a month in which young writers… write. Ok, I’ll admit, I don’t know a lot about it yet, but I’m about to find out. Every Monday in June I’m going to write a blog about my challenge adventures and the good people at NYWM are probably going to berate encourage me along the way. I’m hoping this will get me into a good routine for the rest of the year.

So ultimately, number 12 was pretty easy. I just had to fill in a form. NO WAIT. I still managed to fuck that up. Name: easy, contact: easy, state of residence: easy, writing goal: fail. I wasn’t quite sure what to put down and spent too long typing something and then deleting it (should I have a word count goal? Should I choose now what challenges I’ll do? Urgh, look a typo – the writers will judge me!) and then suddenly, just as I hit on the right thing to say… I must’ve accidentally clicked submit. So now my writing goals say something like, “to write a blog every MOndf….”. YEAH! I’m going to write a blog every MOndf and there’s nothing you can do to stop me! So challenge 12 is done, if poorly. Challenge 13, actually seeing Young Writers Month through, is another story entirely. I’m sure there are some amongst my readers (Hilde?) who might enjoy this too if they were so inclined.

Challenge Number 1 I came up with all by myself. But you know what’s kind of boring/ not a good blog post? Planting herbs. Nice work, genius. So I will record this challenge primarily in pictures.

First, I went to the shop and bought a pot, some seeds, and a whole lot of dirt. I did not think to buy a trowel (I hope you’re paying attention class, as this will come up later). Stoked with how easy it was to get these items, and with myself for actually doing this just one day after making the decision to do this challenge, I set off home with a spring in my step. I did not take a picture of this moment, as within 12 seconds of leaving I realised just how freaking heavy my newly acquired dirt was. The next 5 minutes were fairly heinous. I was trying to write this blog in my mind and you should be grateful I’ve had almost a week to think about it; otherwise it would have been something much like this:

Ow

Fuck

Heavy

Fuck dirt

Ow heavy dirt

Heavy ow fuck dirt

This is the dirt/pot combo in question:

They look so innocent don’t they?

These are my herb babies:

Adorable no? Wait, flip them over…

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FREAKING INSTRUCTIONS??!!

I didn’t take any of this into account at the shop, so I’ve managed to get herbs that like different environments to each other… and also want a lot more room than my pot can offer. Still angry/hot from my dirt walk I made the decision to ignore the majority of these, arguing that I said I was going to start planting herbs, I never said they had to be happy or healthy herbs.

I took this picture to demonstrate that I was wearing leggings as pants while doing this. Please refer to my first ever blog post on the subject… and understand that I was hot and angry, and no one else was home, and this was a perfectly acceptable time in my life to not wear pants.

Even the bastard dirt has instructions! RAAAAAGE. Haven’t plants been growing in dirt for millennia? Can it really be this hard?

I poured the dirt in to my pot. This is when I realised that I didn’t have a trowel. I used my hands and got absolutely filthy in the process.

This photo also captures the moment when I went “huh, these coriander seeds look heaps like…. Coriander seeds. Oh.” That is to say, that I have cooked many times with coriander seeds but it’s never occurred to me that they would look the same if you bought them in a packet to plant. Derp.

I planted all my little baby herbs at intervals that suited me, not them (they have to learn to respect me), patted them down, and then came up with a cute way of marking where they are:

And that is the story of how I planted some plants. I’ve remembered to water them every day this week, so provided that keeps happening you’ll get some photos of their progress as time goes on. RIVETING.

Stay tuned next week – I still don’t know what challenge I’m going to do. So it’s a surprise for me too!

L