Faa laa laa laa faaarrrkkkkkk

I know it's only Thursday, but it's the end of a very long, busy week for me, and tomorrow I start a holiday which I hope will be full of fun and rest. As I type the house is half destroyed and half packed; small backpacks everywhere filled with life's little essentials (my booklight, his gameboy, books, sunscreen etc); large backpacks stuffed with clothes for hot weather and one or two things for a cool evening; boxes of sheets and towels (note to self: DO NOT FORGET TOWEL); CDs carefully selected for long journeys (we're going to listen to the Harry Potter 6 audiobook until I get the urge to write hate mail to Stephen Fry); and two nervous cats are pacing the floors, knowing that we are doing something but not sure if we're taking them or not.

We're not. We're off to Queensland, to stay with a dear friend for Christmas and then entering the wonderland that is the Woodford Folk Festival. A week later we'll emerge, dusty and tired, and spend a bit of time around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. We promised Bumblebee a day at Warner Bros Movie World, and not just a day, but a day where Best Beloved and I are not allowed to whinge about line lengths and general tackiness. This is his reward for pulling himself up by the bootstraps at school.

We have a lovely friend who used to share a house with me years ago, and she works long and thankless hours as a nurse and lives with her mother to save money, and every half a year or so she ups and goes somewhere exotic. She's a fantastic housesitter; the cats adore her, and we don't have to clean the house too much for her, because she's used to my messy ways and still likes me. Gold, absolute gold. She'll be arriving tomorrow for three weeks of lots of public holiday shifts to work, but inbetween a house with no mother and as many DVDs as she can watch beside the rotating fan, covered in cats. Her idea of bliss. The only downside is that she'll have to live through the noise of Summernats, but she doesn't seem to mind that.

So, just for future reference, so that I can see how mad I was when I look back at this post in years to come (I haven't had time to jot things down in my diary), here's a list of what I achieved this week:

1. I repainted our car.
The original design was by byrd, and as much as we all loved it, I needed a pick-me-up. I couldn't move house or redecorate (although I did find a comfy secondhand couch the other day which has transformed our living area), and I've done the haircut thingy, so the next best thing was a car makeover.


This is what it looked like before I started spraying. I bought ten cans of good graffiti paint from an excellent new shop called Writer's Block in Curtin (get thee hence for all ye HipHop supplies, dudes) and at first decided to follow byrd's shapes but in a new colour scheme.

However, it all got a bit fun, and I started getting really seduced by the colour combinations... and this is what I ended up with:



Hmm... a LOT more crazy. Sorry, byrd, I lost the plot. But I'm very happy with it, and I can see why people just keep spraying. It's pretty addictive.

I did keep a byrd souvenir:



I kept the birdie on the right hand side, which is one of my favorite byrd images. I've been getting a lot of good feedback from people about the car; it's going to be fun to drive it up to Qld and back... if you see us, come and say hello.

2. I made a killer costume very quickly
Bumblebee had a class play they were performing for the end of year (they've been studying drama this term), and costumes were encouraged. He was playing 'Daddy Spider' in a play about Little Miss Muffet. On the morning of the play I whipped this up:



It's so annoying when all the photos of him smiling were fuzzy, and the one where he loks glum is sharp. He loved this costume, really. He wore his batman suit with a black t-shirt over the top, and then I filled two pair of stockings with rolled-up tissue paper and tied latex gloves stuffed with plastic bags onto the ends, and tied the end of each to each other and to his arms, so they waved around when he moved his arms. Gloves on his hands and feet made it all look pretty hoopy. So simple, and so effective! Made up for months of no effort on my part.

3. I did a shitload of work
All my design clients needed something done by Christmas, so I've been glued to my computer working on a catalogue for the art school, a scholarly journal, and a dictionary of Italian cinema. All finally finished at 6.30pm this evening.

Faaaark goes the crow. I've had enough. I'm on the road tomorrow with the wind in my hair. I'll continue to blog periodically, including my yearly commmentary on what's happening at Woodford (lots, according to my programme. Hooray!).

In the meantime, I wish you all a very happy and safe Christmas. I hope you get to do what you like best. And thank you all for being such good comrades within blogosphere. I hope 2007 continues our virtual adventures together.

Hooroo!