I would like to start this blog post by thanking you. The words thank you seem so small when I write them down, they don’t really capture the enormity of grateful emotion that swells in my chest every time I receive help from you.

As each email telling me of a donation comes in, I feel an excited *squee* bubbling up and I am so very, very grateful to you.

The section of the internet that I frequent really is filled with lovely, lovely generous people. And due to your help in spreading the word of my shave we are going to be able to help the Leukaemia Foundation help families who are facing the darkest battle of their lives.

Cancer really and truly does suck. It is a terrifying reality to have to face.

It is the little things with cancer that you don’t expect.

I wasn’t prepared for how much I spent on petrol driving to the hospital over and over again, the car seemed to be continually running on empty(as was I) and all other household bills were put on the backburner as the costs of Mum’s cancer came first.

When you live any distance away from the hospital, appointments seem to take up whole days. I don’t think I cooked a meal for my family in the last few months of Mum’s life. I know I certainly didn’t do a scrap of housework.

Small things internet, small things that build up and can cause huge stress in a family.

It is my own experience of cancers destructive impacts upon a family that made me decide to join the Worlds Greatest Shave. I was grumpy with my hair and I saw an ad somewhere for the Leukaemia foundation and BAM just like that I signed up.

Now of course I am shitting myself and trying not to think about the impending haircut, as each time I think about it I start to hyperventilate a little bit.

I am impulsive and I never ever think about the consequences of my actions. I just decide to do stuff. I certainly hadn’t thought about the logistics of actually shaving off my hair until a conversation happened on facebook and I was given a link to this page, Miss Be Shavin’

And before I could say “Roller Derby looks like fun” I had joined up with these girls and the logistics of the shave are all being taken care of for me.

I just wont think about the venue, or the hundreds of people that will be there.

I will do my best Scarlett O”Hara impersonation and think about that tomorrow, internet.

On my birthday Veronica took some photos of my hair for me.

After all that hair modelling I was exhausted and the kidlets and I retired to the couch, with chocolate.

If you would like to support me  and donate a couple of dollars I would be most grateful.

So far internet we have raised Raised: $1,508.00

You can DONATE HERE. *grins*

I think that is do-able internet.

I am sure that between us we can round up five hundred people who are willing to donate Ten Dollars each.

What am I talking about?

In October 2011 I was sick of dyeing my hair purple. My hair grows so fast and I am almost totally grey these days. I seem to be dyeing my hair every few weeks so I don’t look like I am perpetually wearing a skunk hat. Albeit a smell free skunk hat.

So I thought “fuck it” I am going to cut it all off and raise some money while I am at it.

Enter the Leukaemia Foundations World’s Greatest Shave

And so I signed up.

To cut off ALL my hair.

Which was all well and good BACK IN OCTOBER, when March was months away and I didn’t have to think about the consequences of my actions.

There were all sorts of lovely distractions, like weddings and pregnancies and Christmas and exhibitions and MONAFOMA and the list goes on and on.

I had been thinking that if I didn’t say anything about the WORLDS GREATEST SHAVE online I could just accidentally forget to cut off all my hair.

I could say that I had been far too busy and I totally forgot and promise to do it next year and all sorts of other lovely excuses.

But the reality is that cancer doesn’t accept any excuses. And if I am frightened about the prospect of  cutting off all my hair at least I am choosing  this path, not having the choice thrust upon me by chemotherapy or radiation.

So internet will you hold my hand again?

Will you help me reach my total?

Will you write a post for me on your blogs?

Will you donate Ten dollars?

Will you knit me a purple hat to hide under?

You can DONATE TO MY PAGE  FOR THE LEUKAEMIA FOUNDATION”S GREATEST SHAVE  HERE

*** Edited on the 6th Feb. So Far internet, 40 people have donated $1231.00 I am thrilled to bits. Thank you all so much.

***Edited on the 7th of Feb. 46 people have donated $1418. Thank you *grins*

It is winter and my hands are cold.

I am sad and tired.

I miss my Mother more than I could ever have imagined and I am fighting off a bout of self pity.

I don’t ask the question

Who is going to comfort me

Because I know the answer.

I am tired

Tired of the cold.

Tired of never being asked how I am

Tired of people.

Tired of shallowness.

I am tired of being nice and tired of being polite

I think I should just go out and get smashed and run amok

And I would,

Except I don’t want the hangover and the sore head and the blackness of spirit that comes from all that negative energy.

But

At the end of the day I am truly an optimist,

And even in my bleakest moments I can go outside and see something that lifts my spirit.

A tiny abandoned nest in the raspberry canes made me smile.

The thought that small birds had been nesting so close to the house makes me inordinately happy.

Some days it is the smallest things that keep me going.

In a far away country across the sea, my crazy English friend has decide to walk 26.2 miles to raise money for Breast Cancer Research.

26.2 miles is 42 kilometres and Douglas Adams fans all know that 42 is the answer.

Whatever 42 is, it is a bloody long way to walk.

You can go here to donate a dollar or two if you want. Barbara Southby is my friends name.

Closer to home and guaranteed to make you need to do a bit of a walk yourself, Bakers Delight are donating 100% of revenue from sales of pink finger buns to the Breast Cancer Network of Australia

In 2011 it is estimated that over 14,000 women in Australia will be diagnosed with breast cancer, affecting thousands of families and communities across the country.

Bakers Delight is passionate about supporting Breast Cancer Network Australia (BCNA), the national voice of women affected by breast cancer, raising more than $4.5 million over 11 years of partnership. And from 28 April – 18 May more than 613 bakeries across Australia will once again donate 100% of revenue from the sale of their Pink Finger Buns to BCNA.

You don’t have to walk a zillion miles to help raise money for Breast Cancer Research you just have to buy pink finger buns from any of the participating Bakers Delight stores. Easy peasy.

The closest Bakers delight to me here in the wilds of rural Tasmania is the Claremont store in the Claremont Village.

My favourite girls went in and iced pink buns and had heaps of fun.

* images blatantly pinched from my daughter, Veronica Foale’s blog SleeplessNights as it was far too early to ring her and ask permission.

I was one of the speakers on the My Blog My Story panel at the inaugural Aussie Bloggers conference in Sydney 2011.

I have had a number of people ask me to please publish the talk as there was a concurrent session on SEO and monetisation running in another room. This story that you are about to read wont be exactly the same as the one I told up on the stage, but it will be pretty close.

I love an audience and when I finally got up onto the stage to tell my story, my nerves instantly vanished and I had a blast. I spoke passionately and we laughed and we cried together.

My daughter Veronica introduced me with a list of the things that I am. It was a long list.  It included words like, storyteller, environmentalist, film maker, writer,visual artist, curator, public thinker, mentor of young artists and gatherer of people.

I am all of those things and more. Here is, My Blog. My Story.

I am Tasmanian and there is something that you need to know about Tasmania, apart from the fact that we don’t all have two heads (flashes a bit of neck) is that in Tasmania you are either a greenie or you are not.

There is no in between, it is very black and white.(waves arms around for emphasis).

Over twenty years ago I moved from the city to a very, very, small rural community, where 99% of the population were, very, very definitely not greenies.

It is very easy to be a greenie in the city sitting in a coffee shop sipping a latte, it is a tad more difficult being a greenie when you have a log truck hard up your hammer, doing 100 clicks on a dusty dirt road.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate the isolation I felt.

When my daughter was about nine months old a local took me to playgroup, she failed to tell me that it was also a  pre- Melbourne cup do and so I walked into this room full of impeccably dressed women, looking like something the cat dragged in and not one woman spoke to me.

Not. One. Word.

I spent the next two hours playing in the sand pit with the children, who loved me and my odd socks, and I was left wondering if their Mothers had little tiaras on, underneath their fucking hats. Needless to say I didn’t go back.

Fast forward to 2007 and try to imagine how I felt when my adult daughter tells me that she is moving even further north, further into the heart of  Hilux country. As I was saying that is nice sweetie, inside I was going Noooo fucking noooo don’t do it. (covers face with hands to emphasise the horror)

The difference between my daughter’s situation and mine was that Veronica discovered blogs and blogging, and she connected with other isolated women with screaming, sleepless children. The connection with these women saved Veronica’s sanity.

Like anyone who has found something life changing Veronica wanted to share and filled with an evangelical fervour she made me set up a blog as well.

So you can all blame Veronica,(points) it is all her fault that I am here today.

With Veronica’s help I set up a blogspot blog and launched my thoughts out into the ether. I started to add photographs to my blog posts and I discovered two photography memes that I hesitantly joined. (This is where I plug my meme Sunday Selections, it is a great way to meet people. Come and play with me.)

Suddenly I wasn’t lonely anymore and the isolation that had seemed such a huge barrier vanished as I was connecting with like minded women and men all over the world. I could talk about politics and my concern for the state of the environment without getting into an an argument. I knew that if I jumped onto a plane to Alaska or Belgium,I had friends there and that knowledge was very comforting. My world had shrunk.

Whilst I was making friends all over the world my husbands disapproval grew. The Spouse really, really, really, disliked me being on the computer and he worried that you, my dear internetz were going to steal my identity, lift my credit card from the back pocket of my laptop or shock horror (pantomimes shock and horror) you were going to entice me into kinky cyber-sex. So I had to steal time to blog, or keep my ears peeled for his footsteps so that I could jump up from the computer and pretend I was doing something else, like (shudders) housework.

At the same time as my husband was worrying about identity theft, I was studying ceramics and struggling with my own identity. After a group discussion in one of my classes I decided that I really was an artist, not a student (does bit of a shimmy and waves arms about for emphasis) And I started to call myself a ceramic artist on my blog.

You know if you start to tell people that you are an artist, they actually believe you.

In 2008 My mother was diagnosed with Lung Cancer.  A diagnosis of cancer within your family is very isolating, as people do not want to talk about cancer and they most definitely do not want to talk about death at all. (starts to cry) There is a strong stigma associated with Lung Cancer,  it is a smokers cancer,  a brought it on yourself, sucked in you deserved it kind of cancer.

My Mother was a non smoker.

So I reached out to my online community and you all held me in your cyber arms and gave me the strength to keep on going. (thanks kleenex for being a very handy sponsor)

In 2009 as my mother was dying in palliative care, my phone rang off the hook. In order to shut the fucking thing up I gave my blog address to Mum’s friends, co-workers and all our relatives.

The fucking thing went viral in my small community, every man and his dog had my blog address. I didn’t think about the ramifications of that until much later. For the moment I was just pleased that I could get information out there as quickly as possible and that my telephone was reasonably silent.

After my Mum had died I grieved her on my blog and once again the internet came to my rescue an example being the huge box of chocolates sent to me from a blog friend in Florida that the postage alone on was $100.

So it is late 2009, I am grieving my Mum and I am trying to come to terms with the fact that my blog is now no longer anonymous and a strange thing starts to happen. I don’t know if it is the passage of time or the fact that artists are allowed to be eccentric, but some of the women that shunned me in the very early days actually offer frosty smiles and small nods of their heads when they see me in the supermarket.(looks incredulous)

Wow.

Early in 2010 my blog is nominated for Best Australian in the bloggies and within the internet this is kind of a big deal. When I show my husband the nomination he is totally chuffed. I overhear him telling his mates that his missus blog is best in Australia.(pantomimes a proud husband strutting) The bloggies nomination has removed any perception that my husband might have had that I was a total and complete nutter for writing on the internet. He still knows that I am just your ordinary every day nutter.

I was very proud to finish in second place in the voting behind the awesomely talented The NDM

Because of the bloggies nomination, I don’t have to blog in secret anymore. I can structure my time so that I can write in the mornings and my blog has become part of who I am.

Here I am in 2011 up on stage in front of a room full of bloggers telling you all my story.

Blame Veronica (points at daughter, again.) it is all her fault

There is a post script to this story. I have made you all some hand made ceramic beads but I wasn’t able to get them fired in time to give them to you so please leave a comment telling me you were at the conference or email me and I will post them out to you.

Cheers Kim.

I think the radio interview went well, I was incredibly nervous but I didn’t swear or say “um” a lot so that has to count as a positive doesn’t it? The radio people are going to email Veronica an mp3 file of our talk and once I work out how to upload it I will, then you can judge for yourselves.

A retiring potter, Monika, has given me the contents of her studio. I filled the back of my station wagon up with boxes of oxides, glaze materials, throwing tools, scales and the assorted paraphenalia of a working potter.

Coming only two days after the theft of the ceramic eggs this was a very emotional gift for me to receive and when Monika gave me her gas kiln as well, I started to cry a bit. Monika gave me a hug and she told me that she could see I was passionate about my work and that she was so happy her tools were going to such a good home.

These wooden throwing tools are such a personal gift from one potter to another and I can feel the positive energy radiating from them. They fit my hands well and I am itching to get my wheel set up.

I am starting to tame the chaos that is my studio space and “The Spouse” has been flat stick these past few weeks building me benches and work tables.

My electric kiln was delivered on Thursday and I am busting to get it sorted and wired in so I can really get to work. It weighs about 500 kilos and is top heavy. The kiln needs to be lifted off these pallets and then put back down. A mate around the road has a tripod thingy used for removing car engines and The Spouse has some endless chain. So hopefully the kiln will be in its spot ready for the electrician sooner rather than later. It will still be a tricky job though and I wont be up there watching the boys do it in case I jinx them and the kiln falls over. Yes I am superstitious.

It has been so bittersweet finally getting the studio organised and strangely enough as my bank balance is rapidly approaching the zero funds mark I am feeling happier. Every time I accessed the studio money I was reminded that I was spending my mother’s life. Every cent that I have spent was the culmination of my mother’s working life, everything Mum had worked for was taken away by her premature death from a cancer that she should never have had and as I spend the ashes of my mothers life, I would give it all back in an instant to just be able to speak to my Mum again.

Yesterday morning was cold, so cold in fact that I decided to light the fire. The newpaper that I grabbed to start the fire was dated  June 10th 2009.

I looked at the date and it took me a second or two while I stared at the date to realize that Mum was still alive on the 10th of June 2009.

I sat in front of the fire and skimmed through the newspaper, reading articles that Mum and I had shared. Old news of the world that gave me a tenuous link back to my mother.

I have some of Mums perfume here and I sprayed some scent on the back of my hand trying to capture the smell of my mother  it was the wrong perfume though and instead of comforting me it gave me a headache.

Later on in the morning I was clearing a space in my super cluttered bedroom so that the electrician can change the meter box on Friday, ready for the power hook up to my studio.I found a small bag containing Mum’s wig, The wig in waiting we called it The smell of my mother was strong in this bag and after burying my face in the rough hair of the wig for a few moments I got on with the job at hand. As I was moving boxes of Mum’s things out of the way and idly wondering how long her stuff would remain in boxes, wondering whether I could get the Spouse to make a storage space in the roof of my studio. The thought of Mum’s things sitting in boxes covered in dust brought me undone again.

This morning as I am sitting here writing about my small woes the news of the Queensland floods just keeps on getting grimmer and grimmer.

8 dead 72 missing in Toowoomba

So my thoughts are with everyone in the midst of this National disaster and if anyone wants to help they can go here to find the relevant authorities.

Today is one year since Mum died.

It has been a very long year.

I am okay now. My grief ebbs and flows but it isn’t as all consuming as it was.

Thank you for holding my hand this past year.

So naturally the overflow has to go somewhere and I either pour it into my work or dump it here.

I’m sorry or you’re welcome would seem to be equally valid responses.

At the end of that last sentence I wandered off and fed the chooks and now I have lost my train of thought.

I worry that our food is killing us and poisoning our children. I look at the number of children with life threatening allergies, with different behaviours and with birth defects. I wonder what exactly is normal behaviour? I worry that our drinking water is so contaminated with pesticides that nothing is safe to eat at all. I think about the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 and that bothers me a whole lot more than the Y2K bug ever did.

I worry about the unexplained deaths of bats, bees and frogs.

I worry that Tasmania has an incredibly high rate of death from cancer and then I wonder if that is linked to pesticides that are still in use in Australia that have been banned in the US, Europe and Great Britain?

I worry about endocrine disruptors in our food.

I see the signs of a poisoned planet in our frogs.

In our native animals.

In our children.

I worry that all the signs are there, that we as a species are hurtling towards disaster and we are too self absorbed to notice. I worry about HAARP technology, I worry about the oils spills that aren’t reported and I worry that the incredible amount of salt in chocolate will make my blood pressure go through the roof.

Luckily for me I have my blog so I can just dump all these worries here onto you as well and then I can wander off outside and look at my terribly neglected vegetable garden and think about doing some work before spring.

I am finding it too difficult to maintain the veggie garden properly in its current state so “The Spouse” cut an old water tank in half for me and I am in the process of filling it up with compost, sheep poo and mushroom compost ready for spring planting. We are going to re-design the garden so that all the beds are raised, which will make gardening a whole lot easier.

The newest chook pen is right next to the veggie garden but the chooks have abandoned it. *sigh* I kept on forgetting to lock the girls up overnight and when I had the piggies, Mother hen decided to move her brood to a native cherry tree next to the pig sty and that is where they are  roosting now.

They are also laying their eggs somewhere miles away down the bush and “The Spouse” is quite grumpy with me. He really dislikes chooks and I am eternally promising that this time, I will lock them up and that I will clean up after them and that their eggs are delicious. Except I forget to lock them up and “The Spouse” finds the chook shit on the verandah before I do and I am sure the eggs are very nice except I can’t  bloody well find them. Sneaky, secretive things chooks.

It is hard being me and “The Spouse” reckons it is even harder living with me.

Luckily I am easily distracted and even though I think deep, depressing thoughts about the environment, little things make me smile.

What do you think the fourth seagull from the right is thinking? Hmm wondering if maybe he could become an accountant?

Last week Brenda asked on her blog, Mummytime, “where do you hope your blog will take you?”

This morning I followed  a twitter link to a blog post that asked why do most artists blogs fail?

I commented with Interesting point but it all depends on how you measure success. I am an artist and I have a successful blog as well.

So this morning the ideas have meshed and I need to ask the question,

“How do you measure success?”

This time last year I measured my success by my ability to keep those I loved, alive and safe from harm.

I failed to keep my mother alive. The cancer that consumed her was  too strong and the strength of my love was not enough to save her.

My love was strong enough to let her go peacefully though and Veronica writes about it beautifully here.

I failed to protect my daughter from my brother and in his pain he lashed out bitterly at my girl and wounded her deeply.

I am an only child.

I am an orphan.

I am motherless.

I am successful.

We have survived the first year and my son is alive.

I kept my son alive in those dark months following the death of his Grandmother. It was touch and go there for a while and I watched him like a hawk.

I didn’t restrain him when he punched the walls.

I screamed back at him when he screamed his anguish at me. I held him as he cried like a baby and my tears mingled with his, I fed him pizza and let him sleep and protected him as best I could.

How do you tell a 15 year old that grief will pass when you are so immersed in the same grief and the tunnel is too long for even the tiniest glimmer of light?

I managed to get through this last year because of my blog. I could write out my grief here. When there was a deathly silence after the funeral and only my closest friend rang me, I came to my blog for solace. When my head was going to explode with all the words I needed to say I came to my blog.

And you listened. You sent me chocolate and clippies, classical music and cards. You commissioned my art work and made me think of renewal. You posted photos on your blogs for me and You held me close and let me cry. You filled my inbox with  emails and when there werent any words You hugged me and now we are here together.

My blog is successful and that is down to You.