The Piano Tuner

July 18, 2011April 10, 2012 | Mairead

(More beautiful stuff from the Yarn Room)

The piano tuner was here today. As you might expect he was tuning the piano….. His name is Rob and he’s lovely. Although, I can’t always understand what he says, I think he said something profound today! He’s from the USA and he lives in Mayo and it’s not his accent that I find hard to understand. He speaks music. He also plays the saxophone. I suppose I mean everything about him reflects his music. (Not that I’ve ever heard him play music, except for the single notes on the piano as he’s tuning.)

(Going round in circles?)

The profound thing he said today…… “no piano has perfect pitch”. Followed by “playing electronic keyboards can give you a false sense of expectation because they seem to have perfect pitch… they don’t go out of tune”. I liked that! (Now I might need to put in a note of warning, as I’m not naturally musical – this is what I think he said, ok?)

(Very big pot)

So…. the piano is the real deal, made from wood and string stuff (surely nothing from a cat?) Anyway, time passes and someone invents the keyboard. A plastic copy of the piano. It’s perfect, it’s lighter, it has perfect pitch and it never needs to be tuned. So it’s better than the piano….. or is it? No of course it’s not! Even the very best, most expensive, up to the minute keyboards don’t feel the same (to the piano player) as an acoustic piano.

(Possibly yellow poppies?)

It’s a bit like us, really.

When we’re not perfect, we’re also not plastic, we’re the real deal!

Plastic is so the 1960’s, Mairead.

My dream job

July 14, 2011April 10, 2012 | Mairead

(One paw, two pause…)

We have a George Foreman grill. It’s a thing you plug in and when it heats up you put in your rashers or burgers or some other thing you might want to grill. It was advertised as a healthy way to cook because all the fat from your chosen meat product drips down into a tray and you don’t eat it! Also, in the ads it seemed to be really easy to clean, most of the mess goes into that drip tray.

(A cactus in a salsa jar, kinda poetic)

The reality hasn’t exactly lived up to the dream, though. Possibly it is healthy, but watching fat drip is a real appetite suppressant. And the easy cleaning? It’s not…. easy. Well to be clear, (and this might seem a little moany but I’m telling anyway) the one who uses it most, doesn’t clean it after using it. So it needs heavy duty cleaning ten days later!

(Very wet bumble bee)

And this reminded me of when I wanted to be a receptionist. I was a trainee software programmer and I was finding the work challenging (in other words, I was fed up and miserable). In the same company there was a receptionist and each day she would come in, go to the bathroom, put on her makeup and come out to the reception area with a big smile. She answered calls all day and at five she went home. It looked like a dream job to me. To me she had no worries, she knew what she was doing and she did it well. My fantasy of getting her job went on for weeks until one day I met her in the bathroom and she was crying. I did what you do in these situations, I sat and listened. Well, long story short, it turns out being a receptionist isn’t the dream job I had imagined!

(More nice Irish clouds)

So… maybe the George Foreman grill has lived up to the dream….. but just not my dream. Maybe it’s George Foreman’s dream or the advertiser’s dream or the manufacturer’s dream. Someone else’s dream life may not be a fit for you…. you’re an original, live your own dream life.

Anyone want a slightly used, very dirty, signed, George Foreman grill? Mairead.

Awful Arabella

July 13, 2011April 10, 2012 | Mairead

(Maybe it’s time to cut the grass)

Ok, assignment well on the way to being finished… so I’ll take a break to tell you a story. When our children were little I used to love reading to them. I think it was mainly because it involved sitting down! But also, the rhythm of a voice reading (even your own!) is hypnotic and I was probably glad of the effect it had on all of us.

(Nice looking hydrangeas)

One of my favourite books was Awful Arabella by Bill Gillham, illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (looked this up on Amazon and it brought it all back). I read that book hundred’s of times, no exaggeration. It was very short with two lines and a picture per page, and I still love it. So the story goes, Arabella arrived to stay at the narrator’s home and she was awful. She mis-behaved all day and wouldn’t go to bed and then in the middle of the night she was sick – throwing up type sick. The next day she was much better behaved but in her efforts to be a good girl she made just as big a mess. In spite of all that, when she was leaving the whole family were very sad to see her go.

(Love blue)

The last picture in the book sees Arabella on her own waving from the front gate with a big suitcase in her hand and the family at the front door crying into their handkerchiefs.

(Yellow flowers that come back every year without any effort from me – and they’re not weeds)

Now that I think about it maybe I liked it because of it’s message. I must have been reading it for myself, because it’s a great message for any parent.

No matter how badly you’ve behaved you’re still loveable and forgivable and we’ll miss you when you’re gone!

Missing you already, Mairead.

Stuff Happens

July 12, 2011April 10, 2012 | Mairead

(Dogs create stuff)

I have a deadline on Friday to finish an assignment. But I finished it today! Yippee! Then I read the instructions…… it was the first time I’d read them. They would have been very useful, because they were very clear and detailed about how the assignment should be written. They bore little resemblance to how I had actually written the assignment… aaahhh!.

(Nice stuff)

So I’ve taken a little break, written a colourful synopsis of how that makes me feel, including expletives and gone to the supermarket to get chocolate biscuits. Tomorrow I will re-read the instructions and begin again.

(Birds produce stuff too)

Sometimes stuff happens. It’s not the stuff that’s important, it’s how we deal with it. I’m not exactly recommending expletives and chocolate, but they do help me.

Dealing with my stuff, Mairead.

Oranges and Sunshine

July 11, 2011April 10, 2012 | Mairead

(Does that look safe to you?)

We’re going to the movies tonight. To the Mermaid Theatre. Every Monday night it turns into a cinema. The movie is called Oranges and Sunshine. I’ve read the book and couldn’t put it down. It’s about a woman who discovered by accident that little children from Britain were sent to Australian orphanages in the 1940’s, after the second world war. Their parents thought their children had been adopted by families in Britain. The children had been told their parents were dead. She found it difficult to get information but little by little she discovered the details were far worse than anyone realised. It’s a true story.

(More patterns)

Just in case you want to see it, I’ll say no more…. Except, the bit that was by accident is very interesting. She was working as a social worker and she had clients who were adopted and had found or were in the process of finding, or beginning the process of finding, their birth parents. She felt they needed a support group, so she set one up. And it hadn’t been running long when a series of events led to her uncovering the story that’s in the movie.

(Liam brought us a very nice cake box and there was cake in it!)

Anyway, what I find interesting is, this woman didn’t plan to do some great big thing. She was doing her own little thing. Not that setting up a support group is little, it was very helpful to the people in the group. But she ended up being helpful to far greater numbers of people. And if she hadn’t done that first thing……

(No pictures please! How do I convince people they really DO want their picture taken?)

So I was thinking…. there’s probably some small thing calling out to all of us. Some little thing that we’d like to do but we haven’t got the time. Or maybe we think it might be selfish to do it. Or it could be considered a bit silly. But what if doing that little thing could accidentally lead us to uncovering an amazing story…. our story? That’s a nice idea.

Just one small thing, Mairead.

Don’t sweat the meatballs!

July 10, 2011April 11, 2012 | Mairead

(Damien and Nat are organising a Flamenco Festival in Dublin 23rd to 31st July www.dublinflamencofestival.com)

The de-clutter is continuing slowly, and today (Sunday) we went to Ikea. Not entirely sensible, because we might have been tempted to buy more clutter. Fortunately we were not tempted… and we came home with only what we went for… drinking glasses. But we were tempted by the restaurant.

(An Ikea glass?)

Well, Denis was tempted by the fifteen meatballs. Yes, exactly fifteen, there’s a choice, you can have ten, fifteen or twenty. He choose fifteen along with potatoes, gravy and some fruit sauce… Watching the woman speedily scoop the meatballs onto his plate, I couldn’t believe she had time to count them. She didn’t. When we sat down and he went off to get a knife and fork, I counted. Only fourteen…. Oh no, we would have to do something… what? Ask for an extra meatball? Would they need to check the cctv footage to make sure we hadn’t eaten it? As I contemplated our position Denis returned. I told him about the problem. He took out his fork to investigate further.

(Blue benches along the pier in Dun Laoghaire)

And he found the missing meatball… along with its friend. He had been given sixteen meatballs! Noooo, now we had a different problem. How would we return the extra meatball? And which one was it anyway? I seemed to be handling this problem on my own and expected some help from Denis. But he hadn’t let me down, he had formulated an inspired plan and had even executed it, while I was panicking.

He ate the extra meatball!

(Orange worms spotted near the pier….)

And it made me wonder…. is it possible that we sometimes make a mountain out of a meatball? Maybe it’s just a meatball? What if all our problems were just meatballs?

It’s just a meatball, Mairead.

Start at the end…

July 7, 2011April 11, 2012 | Mairead

(Like a bird on the wire……)

I was reading the book Do the Work by Steven Pressfield while we were on holidays and I’ve been thinking about it again today. The part I’m remembering is the bit about Start with the End. We do something similar in Success Teams.

(Big stones turn into little ones….)

The idea is, you ask yourself what you want to be true at the end of a project. So let’s say the project was… the printing I was doing yesterday. What do I want to be true at the end? At the end I want a hand printed piece of material that could be hung on the wall. That’s the external reason. But there’s also an internal reason.

(The stream flows to the sea…..)

So I ask the question – what’s it all about? What is it about this finished project that grabs me? What is it that makes me glow, or sparkle or shine or sing! That’s when the internal reason appears. For my printing project…… I wanted to create repeating patterns. I wanted to use paint because I love the way it starts like a blob and then flows. I love the way you can roll it onto a piece of wood and the wood becomes wet with the paint. I love that pressing the painted block onto the cotton material leaves an impression……. And then repeating it makes a pattern and I sigh…. that’s it.

(And the waves roll in and out… )

Going into this much detail with the ending makes a lasting impression on your unconscious, so that it’s almost as if the project was already done….. and it was… in the future! And that draws you towards it… compels you towards it. Imagine if the thing you wanted was drawing you towards it? It would become possible. The thing you want is possible….. how cool is that? Then, you can take the first step…..

The end, Mairead.

Thank you Aunty Phil!

July 4, 2011April 11, 2012 | Mairead

(Butterfly in Powerscourt Gardens)

The Happy Pear cafe/restaurant/vegetable shop in Greystones has come up with another healthy idea. They are asking people to donate their old bicycles, no matter what condition. They will fix them up and then make them available free-to-ride around the town, just like the blue bicycles in Dublin and other cities. Then you can leave your car on the edge of town and borrow a bike and ride around to get your groceries or to just meet friends.

(No pictures of The Happy Pear – a happy cabbage instead?)

That got me thinking about when I first came to live in the big city (Dublin) when I was nineteen. My mother organised that I would live with my aunt, who was (and still is!) just three years older than me. I had just got into a computer course with a small software house and she was at university in Trinity. She travelled in each day on her bicycle. At home in Cashel, I used my bike once in a while and usually only rode it on the footpaths…. nevertheless, it was decided I would need my bicycle. As my course was on her way and I didn’t know (for a while…) how to get there, we rode together most mornings.

(Old stone wall on the Aran Islands)

It would probably have been the bravest thing I ever did, if I thought it was dangerous. But I didn’t. My aunt taught me how to weave in and out through the traffic – there were no cycle lanes then. She taught me that it was essential to be at the front of the traffic when the lights went from red to green. She taught me that I had as much right to be using the road as the cars, buses (no bus lanes either) and trucks, and she taught me to believe that. Because, once I knew I belonged on the road, the other road users knew it too and they gave me space.

(Old stones on the beach)

She did all of this without telling me anything. But in her every behaviour she told me by example.

Be the example of what you want in the world, Mairead.

PS. Thank you Auntie Phil!