KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

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. 

The Xmas Eve feast that cancelled Xmas for the extended Phamly.

The first full week I've had off work all year and, of course, the very first event I go to on my very first day off on Christmas Eve had a relative who tested positive to COVID-19. I am writing you from Day 3 since close contact, Day 2 of isolation because I didn't find out until Christmas night I had to isolate and get tested. Boyfriend Pham and I went to get tested the very next day. Being Boxing Day with all bar a few testing centres open, the queue was hectic. We got to the drive-through testing pop-up just before it was set to open, and it was a 5.5 hour wait from start to nose/brain-poke. We were prepared for the long wait, and brought our books, snacks, and water to keep ourselves from getting stir-crazy inside the car.  But it was still a bit trying in the Brisbane heat and trying not to kill my car's battery with the constand stop/start.

While we wait for test results, we are reliving our daily routines of the original 6-week lockdown. Home quarantine is much more pleasant in a 3-bedroom townhouse with courtyard overlooking luscious green trees, than a 2-bedroom apartment with balcony overlooking a busy street. Still, Boyfriend Pham is one of those people who is constantly doing something and can't be still for too long so the most challenging part of this 4-day quarantine is keeping him busy. [Edited from 7-day to 4-day: Originally thought we had to stay in for the full 7 days and take a second test, but because we weren't seated at the same table at family feast, I only needed one negative test result! Which makes me question the logic of casual contacts testing on day 1 and getting negative results by Day 3 if the incubation period is 4-5 days after exposure. But oh well - it's what the rules say. I'm free!]

Me? I can sit and read or write or death scroll or binge-watch my days away. With him? I need to get up and do morning yoga, coffee and reading on the balcony / cat enclosure. Tidy up the house. Play with the cat. It's nearing lunchtime? Great, time to cook lunch. Half way through the day now. Afternoon is spent doing at least one productive chore - be it, cleaning, baking, study, research, gardening - otherwise Boyfriend Pham will feel his day has been wasted. Play with the cat. YouTube break! Pre-dinner workout in the lounge room, followed by dinner and then it's time to relax on the couch and watch our latest TV show or a movie. Play with the cat. Bedtime. 

Not the relaxing, movie-going, massage-having, good-food outing holiday I had in mind but, such as life, hey?

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.

No, I'm not pregnant. Little Sissy Pham is! Well, was by the time I got to posting this. She popped in October, and I can confirm having watched her pregnancy journey from start of this year until now that pregnancy glow is utter crap. It's like the adult version of learning Santa isn't real. Why do people try and make out like the rawest, weirdest, grossest human experience is all rainbows and glitter? It's not. It's a mess of life- and body-changing hurdles that you overcome or suffer through waiting for it to be over. And it doesn't end once the baby's born. It just keeps going and going.

Maybe in the past social norms pressured generations of parents into pretending everything was absolutely splendid because that was a sign of good parents to-be. Or maybe the patriarchy prioritised male everything so beyond impregnating women, they didn't give a crap about what women went through until it came time to deliver the baby. The middle 8-9 months in between is glossed over.

When Little Sissy Pham shared that she was pregnant (a huge tell at my birthday this year when the wine fiend had mocktails with me), I called my future nephew a parasite and people were appalled. It's not factually accurate since they're the same species, but reproduction sure looks and smells a parasite. Little Sissy's body was a host to this fetus and its placenta, which were literally trying to suck the life out of her for the entire pregnancy. She was constantly sickly, exhausted, uncomfortable and oh so whiny the whole time, because her uterus was the only thing defending her against the horrible parasite growing inside her.

I'm sure some women truly enjoy being pregnant. I've yet to meet any, but they probably are out there. Mum Pham always told us kids all three pregnancies were easy, but I was too young to ask her if she enjoyed being pregnant. Now I'll never know whether she was one of these unicorns who enjoys pregnancy, or forgot how awful the experience was by the time I was old enough to speak to her about it, or if she straight-up lied to my face because she wanted grandchildren.

I've yet to meet someone who loved having their energy, blood and nutrients drained out of their body.  Mostly I hear of friends and now Sibling complaining a lot and loudly. Is it 'cause we are a softer generation? Used to creature comforts and low pain thresholds? Or is it because now society is starting to listen to women's opinions, this 'real talk' is no longer behind closed doors? In any case, pregnancy sounds horrible and I'm amazed humans have reproduced so much considering the general grossness of the experience from conception to birth.

Nephew Pham probably won't be so thrilled at being called a parasite once he's old enough to understand the word. And probably equally unimpressed that now he's on the outside of Little Sissy Pham's body, I call him a leech because he sponges off her and his dad. 

To all the parents out there, I salute you for enduring such a nightmarish life experience. I don't understand why anyone does it more than once but I'm glad my parents did, otherwise, they would have stopped at Big Brother Pham and I wouldn't be here to feel dazed and confused by the circle of life.

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. 

I was very happy and very glad to make it to Melbourne for a whirlwind trip in June this year. I was there for 48 hours and made zero other plans (sorry any Melbourne friends reading this) besides the 90th birthday and conspiring with my cousin to surprise my Aunty on my one free night. 

I stayed with childhood bestie, B (back when I used to have best friends, now you're either a good friend or not a friend) in her mum and the Birthday Boy's house in inner-city Melbourne. Their glorious two storey old Victorian home is where I spent most of my time when I wasn't at school or at home. The sights and smells brought back nostalgic memories of many years in my child to teen-hood. I hadn't realised until I stayed here again (this time in the guest room instead of B's bunk bed... partially because I'm an adult but mainly because her bunk bed is no longer around) that this house was my childhood sanctuary. The feeling of calm and nurturing that little me would have been too oblivious to observe and appreciate did not go over my head this time. 

Kitchen where I spent many hours of my youth

Birthday Boy was like surrogate father to younger me. He'd take care of us after school, made sure we did our homework and had snacks. When we got to high school because neither of my parents drove or had a car, he'd carpool Little Sissy Pham and me to school. He was always generously looking out for us growing up. I didn't clue on to the fact he needed us kids just as much as we needed him. 

The Maritime Union of Australia hosted Birthday Boy's big bash. It was a momentous occasion where they acknowledged the wrongs of the past that saw Birthday Boy ousted from the union and no longer employed. The timing happened to align with B bringing home a few kids from school who Birthday Boy took under his wing as part of his full-time stay at home dad duties. 

I was honoured and humbled to get an invite to his birthday, along with a function room full of other guests he'd positively impacted over the years. I wouldn't risk a COVID-19 lockdown and quarantining for many people, but Birthday Boy and B are extended Phamly. Worth the trip. Wish I could have stayed longer but I had a postponed 2020 wedding to fly to Cairns for. That saga will be another blog post. 

The always well-stocked fruit bowl from where I tasted nectarines and peaches for the first time