Needed: Time

I've just come in through the back door from riding my bike home in the cool Canberra night, and I'm too awake to go to bed yet, thanks to the marvellous talents of Eric Bibb and Kristina Olsen and the silken ambience of Tilleys cafe. Oh boy, they can sing. I adore Eric and know his work well enough to sing along to nearly everything he played tonight (especially 'Needed Time', which chokes my chest every hearing), but Kristina is something else again, and I would have been more than happy to spend an entire evening listening to her bawdy, brave, excruciatingly funny and often intensely sad songs, complete with excellent joke telling and a love of life that is extremely infectious. She's playing again at the National Folk Festival at Easter, and I won't miss a gig if I can help it.

I was accompanied by Owen, Mr Crazybrave. He was holding the flag for Zoe, who decided not to sacrifice her newborn for the chance to catch Eric live at Tilleys. Eric did say he'd be back, so she'll get another chance, and hopefully at a more convenient stage of her life.

That topped off an interesting (child-free) weekend. Friday night BB and I went to see The Illusionist, a fin de siecle Viennese visual feast starring Ed Norton, whose movie choices rarely let me down. It's a spiffing good tale.

Yesterday I spent the day with Bernice Balconey, doing some slow making on a collaborative piece of art about Gwen Harwood. It's going to take a while to complete, what with both our busy-nesses, but we'll get there, and we're both feeling a tad elated by what we got through yesterday with our problem solving and testing.


Bernice Balconey (incidentally, pronounced with a 'cone' in the centre, not like something jutting out of a building) models a lovely piece of Gwennie.

And in between all that fun I worked like a dog on the computer, correcting and inputting text and laying out scholarly journals, etc etc etc blah de blah.

And in between all that, and during some of the mellower songs tonight, I tried to plan a post I desperately want to write about The Solid Mandala, a post which will have to wait until I've finished all this urgent bloody work if I want to make it at all considered.

Oh, BTW, all you lovely ladies who have tried to put me on your Google RSS feeds, I'm sorry, I'm trying my best to work out what is lacking in my blog -- I've ticked all the right boxes, but I don't seem to feed out. Any tips from uber geeks (as opposed to under-geeks like me) would be very welcome.

Ok, tired now. I have to teach tomorrow and I need some sleep. I shall have sweet dreams of Eric and Kristina, and I wish you all sweet dreams as well.


Postscript: I didn't have sweet dreams, I had a series of intensely frustrating ones about an ex-boyfriend who used to drive me (and his friends) crazy before he killed himself and gave us all some breathing space. I haven't dreamed about him in years, and buggered if I can work out why he reared up his ugly-cute face last night. I woke up quite flustered. Anyhoo, I digress. My lovely commenters tell me that my atom feed works perfectly, and I know I work in Bloglines, so perhaps it's the fault of Google.