Category: blahblahblah

Well 2025 was certainly a year

Google photos decided to show me pics from my Canberra and Brisbane trips from the first half of the year, so guess it’s time for an annual recap of sorts! 2025 was huge for me, brilliant in many ways, lots of good things, but lots of realities of working as me with other people so I also put myself through a lot of hell for those results.

I finally got to meet Avery in person, catching the train with them to Canberra for the 5 years since the covid supplement presser. Thank you to Kristin and the Antipoverty Centre for herding us cats for that one! “We call that social murder” was one of my favourites, as well as me being brave and doing ABC Newcastle on the morning of the press conference at parliament house.

‘We call that social murder’: Five years on from COVID supplement payments, more of us live in povertyFive years ago Scott Morrison doubled JobSeeker payments, temporarily shielding millions from poverty. As costs rise and poverty rates worsen, why can’t the government do that again? Crystal Andrews Crystal Andrews Mar 20, 2025 4 min read Icon Share Comment 21 Fiona Moore of Nobody Deserves Poverty holds up a poster during a press conference at Parliament House (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch) Fiona Moore of Nobody Deserves Poverty holds up a poster during a press conference at Parliament House (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
Get the shirt

I went through several burn out phases this year, and am currently in I’ve quit everything and am trying to resent mode. I loved working with and for AUWU and Antipoverty Centre this year and met some amazing people and learned some amazing things and talked about my pet projects a lot.

I did a pre-conference online workshop with Rick Morton of Mean Streak fame (yeah I still haven’t finished it, though it’s a great read and the SBS docudrama for Robodebt was also INTENSE and there’s another series coming on it in the new year though frustratingly the gov seem to be digging their heels in more and more on treating welfare recipients like dirt)

May saw some exam supervision for the selective schools and opportunity class tests – high pressure for such little kids! (Year 6 and year four kids). Fortunately ours went well (no riot police like in Sydney) with them being all done online on laptops in the venue these days. And I got to catch the new trains which finally started running after so many delays. Gonna miss the old V-sets.

Conference was frikkin intense and I presented on the hidden harms of foodbanks (slides) and ran around like a nutter and yeah, it was a lot and was a lot of positive things, but I’m not putting that much of myself into something like that again. *dies*

It took a bit the recover from the Conference, and then I had a birthday and ate takoyaki. Then a week later I broke both my wisdom teeth and needed one out which was a painful and bloody saga which also took the best pat of a month of the year.

I got heavily into Hello Kitty Island Adventure in that time, which was a good relief from some of the other stuff I was then working though while trying to do my annual Liptember fundraising. Which I made it through but wasn’t able to push nearly as hard as my good years.

Did HSC supervision again. And while doing it and also helping my sister with NDIS and other things were great for feeling like a useful adult with skills, I fell into not being able to maintain it unfortunately.

So we’ve gone into the festive season in home focus mode – back on all my meds including Antabuse, focused on my daily tasks around the home and to look after me. Routine and basics. With festive flair.

I’m running the #PoveratiXmas threads over on Twitter and Bluesky again this year, with the impending age-restriction on the internet looming over the heads with my friends who don’t have ID for whatever reason (cost, being housebound) worried we’re gonna lose them to the whims of the government. Remember that law they only gave 24 hours to respond to? They one-upped themselves in the dying weeks of this year’s parliament with Section 5 being pushed through after being not whispered about in the consultations. This is despite over 40 organisations calling for it to be scrapped and Lidia Thorpe, and others in the cross bench voting against it and fighting to have it removed from the main bill. Now THAT was a flurry of activity that I’m proud of my friends in the anti-poverty sphere for their pushing after dear Tom raised the alarm on Michael Klapdoor’s keen spot.

Thank you all for another amazing year, through all its highs and lows. I’ll hopefully continue to see you all in some form of this weird internet space as society continues to turn in on itself.

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What will 2026 bring?

Get a haircut (not in this ecconomy)

When I lived in Canberra, I’d go to Jus Cuts every school holidays for a hair cut. Often in a lunch break to Woden Plaza, while my schedule was quiet. It wasn’t a luxury, I just didn’t care much for fuss, so it was enough. Then I’d do my box colour, slightly plum or purple and be right for 3 months.

Going to the mall in my lunch break was one of the weird things I needed to do for my autistic coping, though I didn’t know it til I moved to Sydney and my manager told me I needed to have lunch with the other members of the therapy team and I baulked, realising that that 30-60 minutes of lunch was needed for me to reset so I could deal with people for the rest of the day.

This is why stable employment is important for the Autistic or ADHD adult. We need to know it’s okay to spend our lunch breaks regathering, or that Fridays are casual, we need to know we can keep that routine and have that time to decompress before performing our craft (for me Speech Pathology – I was good at it) for the world.

I had an OT colleague who went for a run around the oval next to the old school we worked in, self-regulating, so she could be the professional all the parents needed once we clocked back on.

I loved my misfit, public servant colleagues.

So I got my hair cut today, and my face waxed, as is needed when you’re a  stepgramma. $100 or so down, but I feel better for it. It’s nice to look after yourself, even if it’s painful.

I think I’ll get my sister to repurple me this time, so she can do the bleach. I need to be there for her, given the NDIA being cunts and not even respecting her request for an appointment to be made before calling her to reject the extra support we wanted for my nephew.

100 days left in 2025

One of the many emails I deleted this morning said there’s 100 day left in 2025. Unless the rapture’s tomorrow, but then I’ll still be here and you probably will be too, so we might as well plan as if there’s still 100 days to go.

I lost another month through other things, not sure if it’s worth even looking back at what I was hoping to achieve for September, we’re already in the downslide – I’ll be supervising HSC exams again this year, including some that will be on computers at the school. So I’m doing some of the training to make sure I’m across that. Which should be fine. But that will all come and go.

I’m making sure I get my meds and appointments all sorted. Making sure my dinners are ordered. I still haven’t gotten to the optometrist this year even though I first planned to in January. I’ll probably also come up on the public dental waitlist in December or Jan, hopefully they’ll agree to take the other wisdom tooth out and that will hopefully go more smoothly.

We got to sign on for another year at this house, so we’ve got a least til end of November 2026. Which means I can think about fun things like fairy lights for Xmas, and putting out my meerkats. We also replaces the corflute in the window with the air con with some wood so that should help with cooling efficiency this summer.

White mug of milo with purple text speak because your voice shakes
Speak because your voice shakes

So yeah, just touching base.

How are you?

Help a girl out or treat me?

I just lost a month (and had my first tooth out)

Like seriously, a few days after my birthday I broke a wisdom tooth. I only even had the bottom two, and broke the other one a month before that but since it didn’t give me any pain I wasn’t eligible to get into the public dentist earlier so was just leaving it since aside from being a tongue magnet since it felt different, it was fine. But then I broke the left one, and damn that one hurt. So I called up public dental and got an emergency voucher for a local private clinic for the next week.

Had a fun few days trying to balance pain relief, but then I got seen, and she recommended extraction and said she could do it right then. So I agreed and off we went.

Problem is, I’m apparently a bleeder. And she’d gotten partway through and the blood just started and wouldn’t stop. So she stitched me up with 1/4 of a tooth left there so she could focus on the bleeding :/ Said she nearly got the Ambulance. Yeah that wasn’t fun, nor was the two weeks after til it’d healed enough to go back in for the rest.

But it’s gone now. And I’m gonna hold off til I come up on the general public dental waitlist and then will probably get the other (also broken but not painful at this stage) tooth out. Yay.

I’d also got blood tests the week of my birthday one going on the Friday after failing on the Thursday. Going back with 2 litres of water in me after getting up for fasting tests. Just tried to get some blood out of me now to check out what might be behind the extra bleeding, but no dice – I’ll go through the week after drinking a tonne of water again. At least this doesn’t have to be fasting. I reckon maybe my veins fear I could bleed out so they wanna protect me.

Ugh.

Anyways. Raging against the NDIS changes, and all the news about mutual obligations/TCF illegality but now my tooth is settled I may have capacity to blog about them

Maybe.

In the meantime I’ve spent 77 hours in Hello Kitty Island adventure, mostly streamed if you wanna check it out!

Self care / self soothing

Love yas!

The last V-Set ran to Newcastle last night

Vet train at Newcastle interchange station

I was born in 1982, a couple years before the line was electrified all the way to Newcastle, so I’ve been catching V-sets since 1984. To Sydney, for day trips with my parents, my Aunty and cousin. Back where there were smoking carriages and I remember trips so full I sat on my Aunty’s lap in the smoking carriage all the way from Fassifern to Central.

I used to be terrified of crossing between the carriages. Something you had to do to find a seat or visit the extremely cramped toilets. I had to overcome that fear when I started catching them to highschool in 1995. But then we’d hang out the carriage doors and windows of the old single decker electrics that you could see the fast moving sleepers through the holes in the floor.

A classmate jumped out of one of the diesels up Maitland way and was lucky to live. Ahh the fun of manual doors.

I’ve ridden the new ones a few times. Here’s some footage from the inside. I don’t like the fixed one-directional seats. I do like the charging ports. They should have given us wifi. Oh and I liked that they tell you which side to exit, but apparently they get it wrong sometimes so that’s kinda worse than not saying it at all!