Sanity is over rated

Ways to help ourselves in the time of covid19:

Avoid expert guidance from wealthy influencers who live in massive houses when you’re stuck in a small flat

Turn off the TV when the corona virus celebrity advice special comes on

Avoid listening to politicians who talk endlessly about the economy. We’re a community

Borrow a dog or a cat or a rabbit and stroke their fur to lower blood pressure

Wear your pyjamas all day if it helps

Send a postcard to a nursing home wishing the locked away oldies and nursing staff well

Check on your neighbours

Burn your bra

Enjoy your sleep in

Shop local

Cherish your time off the treadmill

Dream a little dream

Watch Gene Kelly dance in Singing In The Rain


Appetite, a universal wolf

Dear corona peppers, welcome to the world of living on a very tight budget AKA single motherhood.

Even though I’m busy preparing burnt offerings and microwave friendly salads, I’m offering you my FREE tips on feeding your family on a VERY limited budget.

Suggested menu:
1. Take it or leave it

2. ‘Imaginative’ recipes from ‘150 Ways With Baked Beans cook book

3. Repetition is king; 16 year olds love the same boring dishes; I’m a monster of the mash, a shaman of the sauce bottle, a magician with mince.

4. Tell your kids your family has been invited onto a reality TV cooking show, then vote yourself out of the kitchen. Hide.

5. Now is a good time for your kids to learn to cook

6. Teenagers are expensive and cat food is cheap; making a ‘special meatloaf’ is not wrong.

7. Like it or lump it

8. Borrowing herbs and veggies from your neighbour’s garden to feed your kids is helping your neighbour harvest.

9. Remember the child standing in front of the microwave gets the most.

10. It is not a crime to send your 16 year old to the local RSL with a fake ID to win the meat tray because the slab of dead animal will feed your family for a week. Do it tonight before the government closes all clubs.

Vive le revolution


2020 vision

The Pollard definitive guide to enjoying 2020:

Pat puppies and kiss kittens

Don’t vote for morons

Eat, drink and be merry

Don’t buy ‘beauty’ products

Stay off the internet

Help a refugee family

Read books

Unsubscribe

Stop buying plastic crap

Thank firies, ambos and nurses

Check your emotional baggage

Get fresh on the dance floor

Support the Uluru Statement

Be kind, even to dickheads

Don’t use the words onboarding, textural or disruptor

Buy the Big Issue

Sing every day

Bring home the facon (don’t harm piggies)

Love your friends

Swim in the ocean

 

 

 

 


Single mother To Do List

Feed munchkins

Laugh with best girlfriends

Verify your identity

Be fabulous

Embrace single motherhood

Pay all the bills

Find all the thrills

Bring home the bacon

Find app to block people in real life not just social media

Eat fruity wine and fruity fruits

Rage against the pale stale males in government

Stand up for girls

Find someone to collect my emotional baggage

Dance like instagram is watching

Drink tap water

Pat the cat

Thank your knees

Eat all the cheese

Hunt and gather

Educate people on the difference between your and you’re and he is and his

Sing like I’ve got 45 million YouTube followers


Daddy’s girl

Dear father who art in heaven

Happy 93rd birthday. Today I wish your body had stayed around longer. You were a devoted da and a workaholic. I love you Jack Pollard. You taught me:

*To do what I love for a living – Dad wrote/edited over 100 books

*Travel opens your mind

*A sense of humour will help you in the darkest days of your life

*A good swim in the ocean can clear your mind

*Hard work is good for the soul

*A tough childhood doesn’t define the rest of your life

*Even if you haven’t had your own dad, you can achieve a lot

*Dancing a slow tango in the kitchen is magical

*Kids raised by single mums are tough

*A full fridge means you are doing really well

*Stray dogs are worth rescuing

*Some days we must get up and go to work even when we think we can’t

*Singing love songs is great for families

*Lovingly made freshly squeezed orange juice is better than an expensive restaurant breakfast

*Taking your kids back to your old childhood haunts opens their eyes

*Listening to the stories people tell you will help you learn about the world

*Love is a verb

*Singing to your kids at bedtime may soothe them or freak them out

*Saying yes to new adventures is scary but

worth it

*Everyone looks good in a snappy suit

*Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

17 long years without you have gone by in a flash. I would sacrifice a few of my fingers and toes to see one of your cheeky smiles, hear your laugh and have a hug.

My dad was the Prince of Kings Cross


Back to school joy

In 2019 I am transforming into an alert single mother because my child will be alarmed. No more teen tantrums to endure! I’ve decided to send my wandering youngest child to school in China, where she can wear a lovely new uniform. Even thousands of miles away I can easily track her whereabouts. I need to find a translator so I can read her school reports.

Big mother will find you #beyondtheschoolgrounds


Tell me Kondo, Kondo, Kondo

Marie Kondo san

Vinnies and Salvos may not agree but I’d like to say,

Doomo arigatoo gozaimasu

I hugged my teenager and she didn’t give me joy so I sent her to live with her father

I spent Christmas with my relatives and they didn’t bring me happiness so I moved away

I laboured through a summer party with pill popping friends who became obnoxious, so this year I won’t be answering their calls

My daggy trackie dacks don’t spark joy but the fact that they still fit me after three kids does so I’m keeping them

Folding up Dutton, Morrison and Abbott at the next election will help my thoughts become clear

Parking cops don’t speak to my heart, out they go

Throwing out “joyless” items originally struck me as a first world problem. But the end result may be that the world is made better


2018 – The Year of the Plonker

2018, the year that cannot end quickly enough for me. What a clusterfuck.

This truly was the year of the tools coming out from under their rocks.

Trump
Israel Folau spreading hate
Julie Asbestos Bishop behaving like the hypocrite of the century, acting like a martyr when she let Bernie Banton die in agony waiting for compensation
Barnaby Joyce
Lleyonhelm
Lindsay Lohan and her “women look weak” bollocks
Malcolm Gunning from the real estate agents group who thought that people should get a second job to buy a home
Steve Smith and David Warner
The Wallabies
Potato Dutton thinking he had a chance at the top job. The man has a head like a dropped pie
The guy who wanted to ask me out on a date but then mansplained the term ‘mansplaining’ to me
Too many women and children murdered by men they knew, including beautiful Olga and her kids
Scott Morrison’s embarrassing moments happening almost daily from October

Extreme weather conditions worsened across the globe and still moron politicians deny climate science

There have been 94 school shootings in the US this year

The year when the two most powerful comedy shows weren’t funny; Nanette by- Hannah Gadsby and Sascha Baron Cohen’s documentary on America

We lost beautiful artists this year

Aretha Franklin, Neil Simon, Tom Wolfe, Mirka Mora, Dolores O’Riordan, Richard Gill, Stephen Hawking, Charles Blackman, Judy Blame,, Anthony Bourdain, Kofi Annan,
Eurydice Dixon was taken from us

Heroes

Robert Mueller
Emma Gonzalez and her classmates
Jameela Jamil

Tham Luang cave divers
Chrissie Foster

Christine Balsey Ford

Saxon Mullins

Sisto Malaspina

The year I learnt to say no more than yes

I was ghosted by a friend

This year a school bully told my child that she should kill her self, my two other kids suffered health problems and I went to hospital twice, but we are blessed to have our health system and we have held onto our sanity (just)

Shakespeare wrote about Donald Trump in All’s Well That Ends Well:

“A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.”

May 2019 bring wisdom and a strong wall to keep the idiots at bay


Black hole Friday

Apparently, on Black Friday spiritual satisfaction can be gained through sales. This morning I woke to find that I missed the weekend to give thanks, but Black Friday frenzy can be enjoyed even on Cyber Monday. I’d love to turn Monday into Friday, but beware if you are tempted to take advantage of a late offer on the Black Friday sales, think about America. Fighting, shooting, looting, one person shot dead, sounds like a fun day out spending money we don’t have on shit we don’t need to me.
Cyber Monday has a high rating on the official Australian who gives a rat’s arse-o-metre. Don’t be tempted. it’s not your last chance. Like John Farnham comeback tour tickets, you know deep in your carb-loaded core that all this stuff will be online again. Over purchasing as a religious experience landed America a buy now, pay later president. We don’t need to copy them.

The family with an obsession with K’s will also tell you repeatedly that using a credit card is a talent. It isn’t. We don’t need new pots, we buy crap to fill the gaping hole in our feelings. Finding a bargain won’t make us happy. We need to make mindless consumerism as popular as Dolce and Gabbana in Shanghai. Supermarkets don’t have a happiness aisle selling unicorns. I’ve checked.

Getting into debt is not the way to fulfillment. When we are rich in shopping bags, we become poor in mental acuity. Like a Hillsong church, rich consumerism has only lead to poor spiritualism. Your mindless purchases may include all natural, non-toxic, free shipping. But happiness is sold separately.


Meaningless slogans in fancy fonts

As the world falls apart, women are murdered, idiots are in power and politics seems like a bad reality TV show, I’ve developed effective new coping strategies. Mindless midnight social media browsing is great for self-esteem, time wasting and spying on my teenage children. Online advertising, however, can sometimes interrupt my bliss. This week I saw an ad on Instagram with a picture of two men dressed like accountants sitting at a computer below the words:

Revenue modelling with accurate customer journey alignment.

Fork me. I’m not up on the current marketing vernacular, but can the business world please learn to speak English? If they want to flog their dubious schemes with very little cash flow it may help if their unsuspecting customers could actually understand what is being flogged.

Here are some tips for those of us who would like to get ahead in the online world of peddling the latest get rich quick schemes:

Using lots of jargon will definitely break your customer’s spirit

Just because you have the technology to make a selfie video doesn’t mean you should. Now that everyone has a camera people are unfortunately living with the delusion that what they have to say is interesting. If your video bores me to tears, I’m definitely not looking at your website. The world doesn’t need more mindless advice, more banal lectures, more monotonous podcasts, how to vlogs and more wearying webinars.

Philanthropy must be encouraged; as I try to be community-minded, I’m proposing mandatory jail sentences be introduced for companies using the following words and phrases in their promotional materials:

Drill down

Growth hacking

Resonate

Robust

Disruptor

In and of itself

Growing your brand

Upskilling

A culture of tedium and being annoying is not an effective marketing tool. As I age, I’m growing nostalgic. Remember when we just went to work and didn’t have to read inspiring online stories of personal development?

Advertising can be simple