KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

Let's take a break from my IVF and pregnancy experience to talk about stupid home automation. We have lights and hub from the Phillips Hue range on a tech friend's recommendation. The Phillips Hue Bridge connects to and controls the Phillips smart bulbs - there are more advanced options with motion sensors, but we wanted to start with the basics.

I love the idea of home automation in theory. The reality is, that you probably need programming skills to set up actually smart home automation. The current settings and rule options in our "smart" lights remind me of clunky eCommerce store sales rules logic where a programmer built what they could and not what they should, limiting the options to end users like me.

We wanted to set up smart lights that would:

1. Turn on at sunset each day. Tick.
2. Fade and turn off by a certain time of night. Took 5 routines to set this fading effect up, but - tick.
3. Turn on when one of us comes home after dark. No tick.

I didn't think it'd be impossible to set the lights to only turn on when it's dark / after a certain time but apparently, it is. The option was to turn on the lights regardless of the time of day whenever one of us arrived home, or nothing at all. Our house is bright and we don't use lights during the day so we opted for nothing at all. Otherwise, we'd end up turning the lights off multiple times a day instead of turning the lights on occasionally when we arrive home after the fade and turnoff routines have run at night.

Hopefully, the software will improve over time. For now, we've settled with having dumb smart lights with limited usage and Boyfriend Pham just yells at Google to turn the lights on. I'm waiting for maternity leave to remove work apps from my personal phone so I can enable Google Assistant voice activation - currently, they're disabled for work security reasons and I'm too lazy to carry around two mobile devices so I sacrifice my right to Google voice. Dumb, smart me.

When I finally got COVID-19 and home quarantined for the first time last year, I signed up for a month of free Woolworths online grocery shopping. I have not unsubscribed. The $15 monthly subscription for unlimited, free deliveries (when you spend over a certain amount) is worth the 60-90 minutes I save every Sunday morning.

It means more time with Boyfriend Pham to start my day and more time with Dad Pham who I used to visit after the grocery shop. Also, no longer walking around the car park to find an available shopping cart in Inala Shopping Centre has been a dream come true. The poor Woolies trolley team cannot keep up with demand there.

The convenience of adding items to the cart in the mobile or web app as we use them up during the week is great for people with short-term memory brain fart symptoms. You add it as items run out and it saves your cart, then when you go back later to complete your order everything you ran out of during the week is ready to go. Woo!

There are some downsides to online groceries. Sometimes, your items are out of stock by the time the team picks up your order. Other times, they may pick your order but the bag/s do not make it to you. Whether they were given to someone else or left at the store, I never quite know. I've only had one major mix-up where half my order was missing. Other times it has been only 1-3 items. The good news is Olive, their chatbot can pull up your order and automatically refund any missing items. No need to call customer service and wait in a phone queue. But the vast majority of the time, my order arrives as expected so I rarely chat to Olive.

There's also the choice of fresh produce. I personally prefer smaller bananas but I suppose because the app charges per banana instead of by weight, the picker feels obliged to pick the ginormous bananas that I eat in two sittings. But, you know, if that was a dealbreaker then I could just shop in-store or at markets for my fresh produce. I take giant bananas for the convenience.

I've online grocery shopped for over a year and can think of only two times when I had to dash to the shops as an out-of-stock item was critical for meal prep that day.

Another online shopping fail will only affect dopey folks like me who don't pay close enough attention and buy items based on photos. You see, an image of tinned goods doesn't give you perspective. For example, a 125g tin of corn looks the same as a 370g tin of corn unless you read the description or zoom in on the photo of the label. I've had a couple of laughs when I accidentally ordered mini-corn and mini-cheese and giant freezer bags.

Overall, I cannot recommend online grocery shopping enough to save you logistics and time!

Boyfriend Pham and I don't have much in common in our daily lives. We share core principles and values though how we enact them is worlds apart, we share a love of food though mostly different foods; and our favourite colour is green - I've never asked for details but I'd assume different greens based on our history of not having much in common.

Boyfriend Pham is not one to do things by halves so when we painted our downstairs feature wall midnight blue-purple, he also painted a feature wall in our bedroom. We've binged quite a few Never Too Small videos on YouTube during the 2020-2021 lockdowns when we started to think smarter about how we use our space. He ended up buying the Never Too Small book by Joel Beath and found inspo in a tiny apartment that had a dark green wall framing balcony doors. It framed the jungle beyond the glass doors and made the view pop.

We own a mortgage debt for a humble townhouse in Brisbane and, well, let's say the previous owners or original builders did a bit of a hack job with paint colour combos. Our bedroom has four different shades of cream and beige across the walls, door, frames and skirting boards. Why?!

Boyfriend Pham plans to repaint the whole house room by room but first, he wanted to learn how to paint by doing small feature walls. His first attempt was the desk feature wall downstairs. Our bedroom was attempt two. We used a grey paint base under the forest green. The dark feature wall instantly changed the feel of the space. It's now cosy and warm and snug as we fall asleep; not beige, boring and bright.

We got new curtains that look nice... so long as you don't look down and see how we hemmed them with double-sided tape. Regrets. We wish we'd sewn the hem instead because ironing the tape ruined our rug by getting bits of glue on it, and also made the curtain hem permanently wrinkled. We did not research curtains at all compared to the weeks and months of pondering the feature wall colour and painting. Oops. We'll replace the curtains in a decade or so, I guess. How long do curtains last? I might know if I researched them. 

I adore Steve Carell. The Office kept me good company while I worked in government and realised The Office jokes were very much based on reality. But one of my favourite Steve Carell moments is from Anchorman - the I love lamp scene. This post isn't actually about my love for Steve Carell. It's about how much I love the new desk lamp that Boyfriend Pham bought for me.

I work from home 2-3 days a week and my desk nook is quite dark. It's not near the one window that would have shed light on it except for the part where it's west facing, doesn't get morning sun and the afternoon sun is blocked by our neighbours' generous garden trees. It keeps the house nice and cool through summer but also keeps the desk nook quite dark. Too dark for Zoom meetings because you can see my silhouette against a bright background and not my facial expressions.

For some reason, the downlights in the room are wired so that if I turn on the light over the desk, it turns on 3 downlights. It seemed excessive and wasteful to have them on all day while I worked on and off in Zoom. In my last role, I had a work Macbook that isn't a decade old so the camera was OK in low light. In the new and not improved Windows environment, the laptop camera and Logitech camera couldn't agree with Zoom to show my face in low light.

I mentioned this to Boyfriend Pham in passing one day and he went and found the Vivo vesa mount desk lamp that mounts to the back of the screen (instead of the cumbersome clip-on that blocks part of the screen or one that grips the desk). This means I can set and forget the lamp - it adjusts with the screen when I move the screen up and down, and doesn't block my view at all. Unlike the cat, who constantly gets in my way.

One of our favourite coffee spots is Passport Specialty Coffee in Northgate, Brisbane. They do divine coffee beans and, I, the person who can barely smell and has reduced taste due to constant congestion from hay fever allergies, can clearly taste the difference. Anyhow, this story isn't about their coffee. This story is about how Passport Specialty Coffee tried and failed to paint their shop interior the colour of Australian passport blue.

Boyfriend Pham discovered this place in a chance drive-by and was very excited to bring me here for a coffee date the following weekend. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the unassuming brick building was how warm and welcoming the vibe was. The place emanates quality and class without a hint of snobbery. They're keen to educate people who want to learn and serve delicious brew to those who simply want a good coffee.

I got a good chance to absorb the space and analyse why I loved the feel so much when we sat upstairs in the mezzanine space to wait for our coffees. I realised it was the deep purple-blue colour of their wall offset by the warm, wooden furnishings and coppery gold trims that made it feel cosy and classy. We spoke to Passport's owners about their wall colour, and they explained they weren't happy with it. It was meant to be passport blue but after five coats on a white base, the colour didn't come out with more purple than they wanted.

I became obsessed with their incorrect colour and have fantasised about having a feature wall in this shade for over a year. Christmas break 2022 Boyfriend Pham turned my dream into a reality after 6 months of research and sampling colours. I wanted Passport purple-blue for the feature wall I look at while sitting at my home office desk.

We got sample dark blue pots and Boyfriend Pham smeared patches on the walls but they were all too blue with no hint of purple. So we went back to Passport to learn where they'd gotten their paint. One of the owners, Aaron, kindly dug up the CMYK colour code on his laptop and even printed it out for us. He directed us one minute up the road to the local paint shop PaintRight Virginia. We went there to get the CMYK colour converted into a paint colour after some coaxing from Boyfriend Pham who luckily is a graphic designer and has done print production and apparel production and understands how these conversion things work. We got there in the end and came home with some sample paint.

Boyfriend Pham did more sample splotches and bingo! We'd found our colour. Over Xmas break, we got all the paints and undercoats and tools from the gentlemen at PainRight who stepped us through the items we needed and gave us tips. I then sat on the couch and offered words of encouragement to Boyfriend Pham who did all the sanding, washing, prep, painting and cleaning.

I think the main issue Passport Specialty Coffee encountered was their painter used a white base coat and because we were newbies to house painting, we didn't make any assumptions and asked PaintRight what we should use. The experts told us we needed to use grey and ordered it in for us since it's rare for people to use bold colours in their house - they only had 1L when we needed 2 for another feature wall upstairs. Our wall is a lot more midnight blue in certain lighting but still quite purple during the day without any unnatural light on it. I love the colour because of the way it shifts throughout the day as the sun goes up and down and we turn on our lights.

Once upon a time, my casual clothes were my work clothes because people in the fashion and music industries avoid having to grow up. I've since changed industries and gone from one wardrobe to three. Casual clothes, work clothes and Zoom video conferencing clothes.

When I'm in the office, I wear semi-corporate wear. Pencil skirts, blouses and brogues. It's not mandatory in my office; people wear a range of casual to corporate outfits. Semi-corporate is my preference after a lifetime in casual wear. It's fun to try new things. That said, I don't quite blend in with the rest of the work crew. A project sponsor introduced me to someone recently and explained I used to work in fashion, that's why when you look around the office I stick out like, "Bing!" he points his index finger straight up, with my colourful outfits and make-up. Glad you know you can take the girl out of fashion but you can't take fashion out of the girl.

When I work from home, I wear my Zoom outfits. Zoom outfits include mini dresses and skirts that I used to wear to work because I was into less modest fashion. Now I'm rounder than I used to be the same dresses and skirts ride up more than they used to, and I don't feel professional flashing my undies around the office. But on Zoom? People wouldn't know if I didn't have pants on so minis are good. They also don't know that this is Rei Pham's Zoom position. She will eventually lay down but she likes to start our day off blocking my screen. 

Some folks wear tees verging on pyjamas when they work from home but I did that once upon a time and after a while felt really frumpy. So, I wear Zoom work outfits where I look professional on top to work from home. The only time I've gone extra casual was yesterday when I was recovering from allergies and had all-over body hives and swollen face (a story for another time) - no way was I putting on anything but a loose cotton tee and loose gym shorts.

My casual clothes are now just casual for weekends and the odd weeknight evening out. Though, usually, weeknights are gym gear then PJs. 

I'm at a point in my life (and mortgage repayments) where I can treat myself to healthy hobbies like gym and Reformer Pilates. Though, it took Boyfriend Pham to talk me around to forking out money for classes because my inner-stingy self doesn't like to part with any money.

One of our neighbour-friends introduced me to the local studio. She took me to induction class and showed me the ropes. Literally. Reformer Pilates is done on a machine with strappy ropes. I had always been too intimidated by the machine and the super fit people that are photographed on those machines. The actual people in classes range from super fit down to me - chubby office pleb with weak arms, bad knees and zero core strength.

Neighbour-friend and I went to a few classes together before her work hours shifted and no longer aligned with my office pleb schedule. I've kept up the classes and aim to keep them up so long as I don't make any stupid decisions that send me broke.

Reformer Pilates is expensive at Studio Pilates - 20-something dollars per class depending on the class pass you purchase upfront. I can afford it so I treat myself to classes in their really nice studio, with really good machines, and friendly attentive trainers. I did a trial class at a gym that was way cheaper, but the classes were triple the size, the machines were smaller and lower quality, and it was a drive instead of a walk away. That said, if budget was my top priority, I'd have sucked it up and taken classes at the gym instead of with Studio Pilates.

Highly recommend you do a trial class at a couple of different places to see what suits you! I feel strong and more flexible since adding reformer pilates to my life.

Thank you to the wonderful team @theplantlounge in Nundah for splitting our plant baby into two pots, and showing us how to treat her bugs with Neem oil. So Rei Pham could harass it some more.

Our kitten is a cat and no longer into crushing the houseplant, so we look forward to getting more indoor plants from @theplantlounge to make our house feel more homely. ❤️ We now have four plant babies from the Plant Lounge that get rotated from our mildly sunny courtyard into our sun-free living areas. And, of course, are keen to get more now that Rei Pham has gotten used to indoor plants and has stopped digging, eating or knocking the plants over.

The Plant Lounge is online and has a storefront in Nundah that is shared with Vessel Nundah, who provide zero-waste skincare and cleaning products. Drop by the store for a friendly chat with the knowledgable owners or browse online: https://www.theplantlounge.com.au/ 

I have spent this year collecting all the viruses and bugs I avoided during lockdowns and social distancing. I am just coming out of a bad run of COVID-19, then gastro (why is vomiting so ew, where is this gas coming from? I'm not even eating!), then a not COVID-19 virus (where my head and feet were freezing cold then burning up but my body was fine - it was super weird). Days turned into weeks, then weeks turned into over two months of feeling sick. Thank golly I can work from home because that would have been a lot of unpaid sick days. The irony is I caught my viruses each time I tried to get healthier by going to the gym. Joy!

It's not really the gym's fault. It's mine. Over the past couple of years, I've not been taking good care of my health. Generally feeling rundown was written off as lockdown blues but when Australia started opening up again and life returned to somewhat normal, I was still feeling like crap. I had moved away from home turf in the south to the north side, was avoiding medical services because of COVID fear, and didn't have my local anythings including a General Practitioner. So for a number of lame reasons, I didn't get my health checked for too long.

When I finally went to a GP, the doctor did a general health check including blood and urine test. I learned I've been Vitamin D deficient, low in B12, iron, zinc and more. I'm now on a concoction of vitamin supplements and also taking melatonin at night to help me get better quality sleep. I have my fingers and toes crossed it'll help, but it's early days and also hard to tell if I'm improving when I've had back to back viruses.

If you haven't connected the dots already... I keep getting sick because my immune system is shot. Now, I'm not saying this as an employee of a healthcare company that offers pathology services. I'm saying this as someone who believes getting diagnosed leads to treatments that will better your health. If you haven't had a general health check in a while and feeling a bit off, listen to your body and go see a doctor. I wish I'd done it sooner and given my immune system a chance to help me recover quickly from illness or fend off the viruses altogether.

Sigh. You live, you learn, right? 

Adriene is sponsored by Adidas and is probably why all my tights are now Adidas tights

As part of a personal goal to be more active, I've taken up workout at home yoga following YouTube channel 'Yoga with Adriene.' Boyfriend Pham and I do yoga every morning before we get ready for work (full disclosure: only during warmer months because we're soft and won't get out of bed early when it's mildly cool). I learned of Adriene Mishler through a childhood bestie who has been doing yoga on a boat during the pandemic.

For those who are time-poor, funds-poor or both, Yoga with Adriene is a great way to get some movement and 'me-time' into your day. The sessions are often 20-30mins and because it's on YouTube you can progress at your own pace, skip a day here or there when you're just not feeling it, or press pause and come back later if you can't do a whole session in one sitting.

It's a lovely way to wake up the body and settle the mind each morning. Adriene has a really calm and fun demeanour as she guides you through the sessions. She's humble and down to earth, and won't throw about yoga terminology without explaining what it actually means and the intention of all the things. A great bonus is in recent years she got a Blue Heeler named Benji who also has a calm demeanour because mostly he's snoozing in the background of her yoga space.

Check her out online. You don't need anything to try - a towel on carpet could do. But if you find yourself getting into it, I highly recommend getting a yoga mat for comfort. You can always ask your local Buy Nothing Group if you don't have the funds for a new mat.

Not my feet, I have bad sock tan line and chubby legs. Stock photo from Frankie4 of a style I wear.

I have a tendency to ignore my ailments until they're kind of a big deal, like that time I used to wake up feeling tight in the legs and struggling to walk down the stairs every morning and then hurt my lower back when it could have been prevented if I'd just went to a physiotherapist and learned how to stretch out my hip flexor. Yeah, like that.

These days I'm trying to be less of a stiff upper lip, suck-it-up, tough-it-out type. When I noticed an ache in my left big toe joint and the beginnings of a bunion, I chose to not follow my dumb instincts to ignore the pain just in case it goes away on its own, and instead sought professional help. A podiatrist kitted me with custom orthotics and explained how my pigeon-toed left leg was putting massive pressure on the joint. Over time I'll get arthritis where the bone is grinding but if I wear the orthotics and do daily toe stretches it'll help delay the onset of arthritis.

Fun fact from the podiatrist: You inherit your walk from your parents! I must have inherited Mum Pham's walk because she had severe bunions. Looking back I wish I knew she was in pain, and could have had surgery to fix her feet, and we weren't broke and we could afford surgery - ah, wishful hindsight.

Obviously, I used my new orthotics as an excuse to cull my shoe collection of anything too narrow to fit orthotics. I gifted newish shoes to my local Buy Nothing community, and binned crappy old sneakers. Then Boyfriend Pham took me on a shopping spree because I was sad and shoeless. 

Boy-oh, shoes with arch support are expensive. He drove me to two Frankie4 stores to try on shoes that fit my orthotics. I purchased two pairs - each cost 2.5x what I'd normally pay for work brogues. I also got Birkenstock Arizona to wear around the house - they're only 20x the cost of a pair of cheap, plastic slides. Once I learned my orthotic shoe size is 39 instead of my previous 38, I also tried Bared Footwear online - they have stores in Melbourne, but not in Brisbane...yet. 

While I cringe at the $1500+ I dropped getting custom orthotics and new footwear because I'm a tight-arse, I am grateful to be in a position where I can afford healthcare, and supportive footwear. Things Mum Pham didn't get to have, but raised us kids to work hard so we had better options in life. Also, today is the anniversary of Mum's passing so that's probably why I keep thinking of her even though I'm writing about my feet, which look like Dad Pham's.

Rei Pham is a dog cat. It's been one year since this fur ball stumbled into our life, and in that time she's showed some weird-ass cat behaviour. Though, if she were a dog this behaviour would be absolutely normal. 

First, she likes to play fetch. Her favourite toy changes but the game is the same as with doggos. She brings us a toy mouse or avocado plush or her current favourite felt ball, and drops it by our feet or on us if we're in bed, then looks at us meaningfully (I won't say pleadingly because she's a cat after all) until we notice and throw the toy for her.  She'll then  chase it down and bring it back to our feet. When she was younger, she'd drop it in our general vicinity, but she has since learned to drop it in arm's reach to speed up the game.

Rei also likes the catch variation of fetch. Catch is a fun time with a cat because they can jump so high and distort themselves into such weird and wonderful shapes before twisting and landing back on their feet. I would be worried about breaking a dog if I tried to get them to leap as high or far or awkwardly.

One dog trait that came out after she finished teething and got stronger teeth is she absolutely delights in chewing things to shreds. She does scratch like a regular cat, but her favourite activity is chewing cardboard and spitting it out. We discovered this when we got her a Kmart cardboard cat scratcher. She went to town on the cardboard chewing it until it was no more. She is half way through her second one now, with one more spare in storage along with another new cardboard toy design. 

Before Toombul flooded, I'd regularly stroll through the Kmart cat section to see what variation of cardboard toys they have. We've gotten her two cat towers and combined them into a mega-tower but she didn't tend to play with it unless we played with her. She did start to chew parts of the tower but I guess it's just not as satisfying as the dense cardboard of the scratcher. 

Boyfriend Pham likes to tease me about my life being miscellaneous. In high school I couldn't decide between arts and science so I did both. At uni, I couldn't decide what to specialise in and ended up doing a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Interdisciplinary). Do you know what the interdisciplinary really means? Miscellaneous.

Not surprising that after a lot of chopping and changing jobs, the one that's kept me around for years instead of months has been miscellaneous projects. Whatever the business needs done, I figure out a way to do it. When the business is growing and changing at warp speed I never get a chance to get bored. The trouble is, notebooks don't cut it when you're juggling over a dozen streams. I jump from one topic to another, sometimes something new every 30-60 minutes for a whole day, which means notes get lost in notebooks.

My solution? A planner. My planner isn't for planning though, it's for logging all the things I haven't gotten to yet... but organised in a way that makes it easier to find when I eventually have time. The ring-binder means the pages are not set in stone, and I can shuffle my notes around to group with other notes of the same stream. It's been a game-changer for me - no longer flicking through pages and pages (colour-coded so I knew which project or area it related to, of course, I'm not a complete noob) to find what I needed to reference. With the binder and its dividers, I can flick to the right spot instantly. 

I loved my A5 Kikki.K planner so much I got one for my team member so she too could enjoy the flexibility of a planner instead of a notebook. Once you're done with a page, you can file it or bin it. With a notebook I suppose you could do the same but the tendency is to keep carrying the deadweight with you until the notebook is filled. The 5 or 6 dividers that come by default with Kikki.K also did not cut it and I bought a 12-divider set. I've optimised my planner to keep track of the maze that is my professional life and I am damn proud of it.

I do realise I am so Mum Pham. She had a leather bound planner that she carried with her everywhere. She kept everything in it from recipes, medical history and her English studies through to our meal plans, key anniversaries and contact numbers. Even if mobile phones were a thing Mum Pham bothered with, she would always prefer pen and paper. And now I carry on her tradition of being obsessive about a planner. 

I have finally found an alternative to plastic loofah-style body sponges that doesn't shred my skin to pieces or leave feeling unclean. I've tried soap sacks that were soft and soggy, and some coconutty scrub things and none of it was for me. I went back to plastic loofahs but felt a pang of guilt whenever I thought of turtles mistaking them for jellyfish so I went on the hunt again.

Konjac sponges are weird at first. They're hard as a rock and you have to soak them in water to soften them. I have gotten into a routine of turning on my shower, and holding the sponge under the water while I wait for the water to warm a little. But once you get used to doing that, it's great. It works for liquid body wash but to reduce household plastic, I use mine with a bar of soap. It suds up nicely for a clean wash. Recommend to people who want to ditch plastic shower loofahs!

I'm rather enjoying this new(er) small earring trend. Big acrylic earrings seemed to be all the rage before that, and while I used to love me big, bright and wild earrings, these days I want smaller and easier to manage earrings. Especially since I've heard horror stories of people splitting their ear lobes getting big earrings caught on things. Yikes. 

Mainly my change in preference stems from laziness. I can't be bothered with fashion that isn't super-comfortable anymore.  I've long since farewelled heels because walking shouldn't be hard, playsuits because I don't want to get half-naked to pee, and rings because they get in the way of things or maybe I get in their way - it's hard to tell sometimes. 

I got these cute little dangle hoops from Fora Jewellery. They're nice and easy to wear, and silver and black go with any outfit.  I've culled my earring collection right back to these dangle hoops and two sets of studs in case I lose one of the studs, which I am prone to do. I should probably get a second pair of dangle hoops for the same reason. I am just not reliable with small, dainty items. 

My right ear piercing from February this year still hasn't completely healed - there's a recurring pimple at the back of the lobe. I've had a horrible, infected healing process but am still thinking of maybe getting more piercings for my next birthday. Dumb move? Perhaps. Will I still do it? Probably.

I've moved desks recently because work is expanding and taking over different buildings and I've now moved into the furthest building. In my role I run and participate in a lot of meetings. Meetings that are in the main building where I am not. For a little while I've given up my hot teas and coffees so I can awkwardly carry my laptop and organiser across two cark parks into the main building. But I find it's not a fun time without drinks in long or early morning meetings.

I remembered I have a KeepCup from when I used to get takeaway hot drinks. I fell out of the habit to save money to buy a mortgage debt, and my KeepCup has been sitting in storage for a few years. When I finally got to using it to carry a hot drink from building to building it spilled over my fingers and when I took a sip from the lid, I could taste the deteriorated plastic. Ew. So I went home and looked up spill-proof thermal cups because in addition to not spilling things on myself, I also wanted my new vessel to keep my drink hot. I sometimes get into the zone at work and two hours later my tea has gone cold.

The Google voted Frank Green the best spill proof lid and even better, their new ceramic range also keeps your drink hot for hours. I've yet to test this though because after a fun hour of mixing and matching all their many lid and base colours, and looking at their collabs with Disney and other fun designs, I settled for a mono-lilac colour and treated myself to having my name lasered on the cup with a love heart emoji. Cute. It arrived just in time for lockdown and quarantine and restrictions so I haven't actually used it in the office to take hot drinks to meetings between buildings without spilling liquid on myself. Yay!

I love the Frank Green design and am glad I invested money in a new, spill-proof, thermal cup. The only downside is the ceramic range is an awkward 10 ounce size. Coffee shops make 8 ounce and 12 ounce drinks - not sure why they landed on the 10oz. Perhaps so you'd get an 8oz and not overfill it? Odd. Besides the sizing, everything else about it is great! I didn't want the size up 'cause it's as tall as my Contigo Travel Mug that I use for water, which is a bit too big for a little tea or coffee. Highly recommend if you're tossing up between KeepCup and Frank Green - clumsy me will go Frank Green anyway with its screwed on lid and push button lid.

UPDATE: The Frank Green ceramic thermal range keeps your drink hot for hours. I've discovered the lid is easy to take apart to clean! But a little hard to put back together because so many components. I am quite pathetic at anything handy or practical though as Boyfriend Pham can attest to - I excel at the thinking puzzles in escape rooms, he excels at the physical puzzles - so I don't think most people would struggle to put Frank Green lids back together.

Not my kitchen, nor my dishrack. Work's so busy literally cannot get my act together to snap my own pic.  #retaillife

Boyfriend Pham are finally settling into our own home after 10 months. We've overcome the mortgage freak out everyone has when they first go into massive debt. And now we're starting to put some thought and money into how to make the house we love more liveable and comfortable day to day. 

Obviously, first we had to give Rei her outdoor cat enclosure. Then we've been working with Boyfriend Pham's friend on custom garage organising fit out, which I'll post once lockdown / restrictions end so he can come over and install it. And now we're ready for smaller upgrades while we save up to replace all three cracked toilets. 

One of my new favourite things is our Joseph Joseph dish rack. We had a $2 wire rack from Kmart that was functional but not super practical. We bought it when we stocked up our apartment with the main priority being cheap in case we broke up (we did move in together after only a few months of dating and we're both risk-averse). It served us well and it found a second home via Buy Nothing which is great!

Now we have a fancy, modular, adjustable dish rack. We have a cutlery holder - how novel! - that can be taken out of the rack to make more room. The whole rack can extend to double its size when you've done a big cook up, or it can be made smaller when you only have a few things to dry. My favourite feature - besides the rubberised spikes that mean nothing tips over, is the drain. It captures all drips and runs down a ramp into your sink so you can shuffle the dish rack off to the side of the sink to make more room and still have the water drip into the sink. Best purchase we've made for our kitchen so far, makes washing up less of a chore.

And yes, I realise how domesticated I've become. 

You know that feeling when you first download a new app and you're trying to puzzle out how it works? Or you’re a Mac user trying to navigate a Windows machine and vice versa? That confused feeling when tech illiterates can't get new technology working in their favour is how my immigrant parents felt when they fled home turf and wound up in wildly different countries to the community and culture they knew.

I was too small minded and inexperienced in my angsty teen years to respect my parents had risked their lives and left all they knew and loved behind. Instead, I found it frustrating my parents needed help navigating Australian society and that we were disadvantaged children of poor migrants, who didn't know how to make the system work in our favour.

Neither of my parents worked once we got to Australia. In Germany, Dad Pham was in the workforce until schizophrenia crippled his ability to hold down work, and Mum Pham was bullied out of a pharmacy by racist colleagues and customers. In Australia they went on the pension, and so didn't learn anything about the working environment to pass onto us kids.

It took my boss sitting me down and asking me what I wanted for myself a couple of years ago to make me actually think about career. I'd worked with him for years and he pointed out that I have exceptional achievement drive when it comes to my work, but zero achievement drive for myself personally. My immediate response was my parents are Buddhist, they raised us to appreciate what we have and to not want. Wanting things is a very Western culture thing. Though, I suppose, I live in Western society so I went away from that meeting and had a think about what I wanted for myself.

I've never had career development as a personal goal. My personal goals have always been things like being kind, finding positive ways to view life challenges or mundane things, learning from every experience. Career development is something I thought people with career paths did. You go to uni to study a thing, then you do the thing, and progress to more of the thing. I've been jumping all over the shop from high school math/science to creative uni studies to journalism then digital content then ecommerce then miscellaneous projects. 

I went back to my boss and told him I enjoy the project work I do, I am good at willing things to happen, and to develop my career I wanted to do what I do but for the whole company in a more official capacity. It took 18+ months to make it happen, but you are now reading the blog of a Project Management Office (PMO) Manager. Not too scrappy for a kid raised on Government handouts who went to a public school in low income area, where I got voted most likely to succeed which sounds positive until you learn parts of my peer group dropped out of high school and others had to be coaxed, pushed and prodded across the finish line.  

I am learning lots in my new role, and have lots more to learn, but it's exciting to have direction and focus. I wish I had personal career direction before my 30s but, hey, it's never too late to start. I'm proactively coaching the younger people in my life to be more progress driven, prepare themselves for growth and better opportunities - basically, teaching them how to work the system in their favour. I'm hoping anyone reading this will ask themselves what they want, and have a think about how to get there. If you want to talk it through, hit me up.

Dad Pham is forever saying how lucky we are to be living in Australia. He's damn right, we are. Little Sissy Pham and I visit dad once every week, and when I was a single lady with no boyfriend or cat and living 20 minutes away, it was easy peasy to spend all day with Dad and help out. I used to take him grocery shopping in the morning then spend the afternoon cooking a Phamly feast, then chill out until late. 

These days, I always take him grocery shopping in the morning and do his dishes, but lunch is potato chips from Big Brother Pham's pantry or 2-minute noodles from Dad's, then Dad kicks us out between 1.30pm to have a nap. Or if he doesn't kick us out, I head home around 2.30pm to do my own chores, and cook lunch for the week, prep our dinners, and do some work emails and set up my work week. Sundays are not fun days. Basically, Dad Pham needed more support than the half day once every week we are able to give him. 

The people in Dad's community recommended the Australian Government's My Aged Care support. One of their services is in-home care, which is ideal for Dad because he's nowhere near needing full-time care, but he's not doing so great on his own. He doesn't have energy to tidy up around the house and it's always a little messy. He doesn't have much appetite, doesn't cook regularly, tends to snack on junk food than have meals. General household and life chores are slipping.

My Aged Care has been a complete blessing. The government provides different tiers of funding depending on the level of care you need, which can be spent with any approved in-home care provider so we were able to select Sunnycare, a company that has Vietnamese-speaking workers. Ideal! Dad's English is also failing; he's starting to lose words in Vietnamese let alone English, his third language.

Dad's less lonely during the week as he has in-home care every couple of days, the house is generally tidier because they help clean the bathroom and kitchen, and organise his belongings - all the little things Dad has stopped doing regularly because he gets tired so quickly now. They also take Dad to the local shops when it's a cooking day to buy ingredients, which means Dad doesn't need to wait for me to come on Sundays to buy heavy grocery items he can't carry home on the bus.

Visit https://www.myagedcare.gov.au to see if they have anything suitable for you. While they do have some translators, if you can take time off work to attend the assessment with your loved one it means you'll get assessed sooner because they don't have to wait for a translator to be available. Worth the half day off I took to interpret for Dad Pham. 

The first batch I made, being a jerk who doesn't read instructions, I tossed the tablet in cold water and I suppose I could have waited a few hours for it to disintegrate but, being an impatient jerk, I put it in a glass jar and microwaved it so the water was warm enough to dissolve the tablet in minutes. It was a lot of fun watching the bubbles fizz up. You can purchase glass bottles with plastic pumps from them, but I am reusing my plastic pumps. I'll upgrade to glass in about 400 years when my plastic pump bottles start to crumble.

I wonder if they regret calling their business Tirtyl (pronounced 'turtle') because it's a pain in my butt to tell people about them verbally. It's much easier to write.