Off-path cycling

I fell off my bike.

There's nothing like falling off your bike to make you feel undignified.

In this case, it was the fault of a woman who let her dog run down a laneway off the leash. Her 'sweet' blue heeler lunged and barked angrily at Bumblebee as he rode around the corner into the laneway, I braked hard (to jump off and defend him) and my bike slipped on autumn leaves and I went arse over tit face down on the ground.

Lovely autumn leaves and grass broke my fall, thank goddess, but it didn't help my recovering neck, and my hands feel a bit tender. And my arse was high in the air, sprawled over the bike, which is not a good look really.

Snaps to the nice young man who stopped and made sure I was alright.

As I fell I screeched angrily at the woman, who was trying to grab her dog (leash in hand), and as we rode off again I couldn't help snapping at her that it would be helpful if she could keep her dog on leash until she got to a park. She looked as shocked as I felt, but I thought that might be a good thing.

I'm sorry, dog-lovers, I have little tolerance for unleashed dogs on shared paths. Once I came off my bike because someone was walking their three little fluffy things and had let them loose, but still tied them together, and they lurched across the path like some zany cartoon trap. As I was dusting myself off, the owner laughed as if it were a huge joke and I gave him a very big piece of my mind in return.

Best Beloved has been grabbed by dogs as he's ridden along, and he has no problems kicking at them in return.

I like dogs generally; I think it's irresponsible owners I have a problem with.

And, in case you hate cyclers on shared paths, I do try my best to be considerate when I ride past walkers. I ding my smiley bell, and I slow down around blind corners.

Anyway. I'm going to bed early to give my hands quality time to heal.

Ooh! A new meme!

Gawd, how long has it been? (I've been composing a things-your-cats-do meme in my head as I ride my bike; one day it'll get onscreen, unless anyone wants to start it first?)

Apparently these are the 106 books most often listed as 'unfinished' on LibraryThing. The rules are that you bold the ones you've read all the way to the end, underline the ones you read for "school" [I presume uni is included in this], and asterisk the ones you started but didn't finish.

I'm adding italic for those I've re-read. And gosh, I've surprised myself by what I haven't tackled yet. Still, I think I've done pretty well by the list.

Via Pavlov's Kitty, with admirable provenance before that.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West [but do want to read this ASAP]
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead*
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 [I did my HSC in 1984. Say no more.]
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse*
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow*
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Sad Kitties, Happy Peoples

Checkin' the funnies at lunchtime. A couple of them are so eerily like my cats that it made me wistful:



Mr Padge used to look like this, but he's grounded at the moment.



Mr Pooter looks like this ALL the time. He just needs a dress to make him look like he's actually cranky about something. Dunno why he's always cranky, because he's the only one allowed to go outside at the moment. He's getting to roll in the warm sunny grass.

Padge came home about ten days ago with a huge scratch across the top of his head, from ear to ear, and a lot of hair pulled out, plus scratches all over his body. I spent a lot of the next week carefully washing the wounds with warm water and Pears soap (my vet's recommended remedy) and I think we're in the all-clear with abcesses. But he's not been outside since; we're too nervous to let him out.

So he sits sadly at the windows (if we remember to open the curtains) and watches. Or sleeps. And gets fatter. If making him fat keeps him from wandering and fighting, then that's our choice for his life.

Tonight I'll add a photo of the real Padge, sitting sadly.


In other news, Hil from Spirits Dancing came to have morning tea at the Bookstud this morning, to catch up with me and give sage puppetry/theatre set advice to one of my students. We also have a visiting artist from Thailand who is doing etchings about puppets, so we had a very jolly and extremely interesting morning swapping ideas, theories and showing images. I think networking morning teas are the bomb, and I will try my darndest to have another one sometime. Thanks for coming, Hil!

Letterpress: how to get a piece of the action

I have just discovered a place in Sydney that teaches letterpress classes, for all of you who email me asking after such things. I haven't managed to get any classes up at the Bookstud this year, because I'm editioning bigtime and it's hard to reset the press and get my head in the right space. So this is a good opportunity for anyone wanting to play with type... it's the Penrith Museum of Printing, and they look pretty friendly. Next time I'm up that way I'll pop in and have a look.

For Melbournites there also seems to be renewed activity at the Melbourne Museum of Printing.

If you're in Canberra and want to see a big of printing action from arm's length, try the Queanbeyan Printing Museum, usually open on sunday afternoons. For a taster on what they offer, we have a delightful collection of photos taken by moi on a Bookbinders' Guild excursion.





PS: I went to my osteopath yesterday and encountered a young woman I now think of as 'Elbows of Death'. She had the sharpest, hardest, most brutal deep tissue massage technique I have ever, in my twenty-five years of bad back and neck, experienced. When I got home I couldn't focus my eyes; this morning I have a mass of bruising in the area between my shoulder blades and below my neck. It'll settle down over the next few days, but until then I'm a bit stiff.

The fellow that swapped with her late in the massage (she got called out to help with another patient, and I wept with joy) laughed when I used my new nickname. 'That's perfect for her,' he said. 'She hasn't learned "medium" yet. She's still focussed on "hard".' Classic.

Monday, monday...

I feel the urge to repeat how much I like my Monday Book class.

Every week we do some task or another, then at about this time of semester their personal projects start to develop and emerge, and we do a lot of troubleshooting.

This morning one of the students chose Neko Case from my CDs to listen to whilst we finished our clamshell boxes, and then sat down and showed me his work-in-progress, a book/cassette edition about the wonders of Dolly Parton... which meant, of course, that Dolly had to go on the stereo (we got to choose between 60s, 70s or 80s Dolly from his boxed set -- 60s was the decade of choice today).

Which somehow led to Ricki Lee Jones, which led to Jimmy Webb. Such a good morning's listening, all top songsters.

Some of the ideas I get to troubleshoot are fantastic, and working out a structural solution is so much fun. One person is working with air-dried fruit, and whilst we were talking about the doll-book she's constructing (with inner organs of dried fruit), I was teaching the figure-of-eight stitch to other students, and suddenly I had a vision of a tunic-style dress of rings of oranges or lemons using this stitch, which made her very excited and spawned a few other ideas.

When they all leave I'm a strange mix of buggered and buzzing. Luckily Jimmy is still crooning across the room, which is very soothing.


LATER: and another good thing about Mondays is that I get a bit of lunchbreak to cruise the blogs without guilt (a morning of tootling deserves a concrete break) and I find good things: weddings! odd children! and sundry kooky things! (Dorian, the last link is for you, if you haven't seen it.)

I managed to tape Flight of the Conchords on channel 10 last night, and was hoping to see it tonight before or after South Park. But! My evening just got hijacked over the phone. So I'll have to watch both tomorrow night, after I've done my homework. Sigh.

happy Mothers Day yourself

Happy Mothers Day to any of you that partake in such rituals, and an extra special hello to Jahteh and Lady Duck (and anyone else who has lost their children).

My MD treat was a cooked breakfast in bed then being allowed to have as long as I wanted to print book pages in the BookStud without guilt-inducing phonecalls or pleas to come home. As it turned out, I was horrendously hung-over from a wee dinner-party with my sister outlaw and her current moistie* plus Zoe and Owen and squillions of little boys here at Chez Duck (details of the food to be guested posted at Progrock Dinner Party when I pull my finger out), so I only managed to print 200 pages with many quick breaks to play Scramble and Scrabble and unscramble my braincells, and I was home by 5.30pm, ready for a hair of the dog. It was a pretty good printing day, but not to full capacity.

Best Beloved took Bumblebee to see the Duntroon Dixieland Band at Old Parliament House (I made up a song about it tonight to the tune of 'Spiderpig' (Spiderman) to amuse B and now I can't get it out of my head:

Dixieband, Dixieband
Does whatever a Dixieband does..
Does it swing? Yes it can,
It can swing, it's a Dixieband.
Look out! Duntroon Dixieband...)

and then they went to JB HiFi, BB's fav shop, to spend his birthday money. He came home with series 2 of Jonathon Creek and a couple of other things. Bumblebee, despite having been with BB when he bought it, asked him tonight why he'd bought series 2 and not series 1. We have a family policy of answering dumb questions with equally dumb answers, so I wasn't surprised at the start of this exchange, but I was most admiring by the rest of it:

BB: Well, the makers of Jonathon Creek decided that it was such a good concept that they wouldn't bother making a first series, just jump straight in with series two.

B (clicking): Oh yeah, right...

BB: BUMBLEBEE, do you think I'm making this up?

B: Yeah, of course!

BB: So the makers of Star Wars jumped right in at the first movie, did they?!

B: ...

[He started looking puzzled and scratched his head, until I completely lost it and started giggling.]


It was fun to watch it tonight; I'd forgotten how much I like Maddy as a character.






*I've always wanted to use that line, but now I feel guilty. He's a lovely man, and it was nice to meet him :)

Beware the ides of Calpurnia

Bad questions to ask a transsexual

This is 16 and a half minutes long, but worth it if you have the bandwidth. I'd been exploring the website Bad Plastic Surgery, and it was sitting there as something funny to watch. It is funny, but not for the reasons they meant. I found myself warming to this woman, especially in the tenth minute (fast forward if you want a quick sample). There's some odd moments, but some good shit buried in there.