Cake! Love a bit of cake. Cake! Ca-aaake...

Hooray! Poppy and jonquil season, which make August just that bit more bearable. If I could have my 'druthers, I would travel away from Canberra in February and August, because the former is just a bit too much Summer, and the latter one month too much of Winter.

Anyhoo, enjoying the first poppies of the season has become a bit of a tradition around here. The smell of the jonquils as I sit and type is glorious, and every so often a poppy pops and starts unfurling, much to the delight of the cats (and myself).

Yesterday I was feeling unhappy with my ladybits (yes, AGAIN. I have a very short cycle these days) and even unhappier that I was ejected from my snuggly bed by BB, who doesn't understand that the first day of a bleed outweighs the fact that Saturday is the only day he gets breakfast in bed (as a friend said, it's a bit like paper-scissors-rock, debating reasons not to get of bed first on a winter morning).

So I went to the farmers markets in a very grumpy mood and proceeded to spend a quarter of my grocery budget on flowers and cake. Then came home, festooned the house with flowers and ate cake with lashings of tea. Not just cake, friends. They were slices of Amore Cakes, the best bloody cakes in the southern hemisphere, and only available in Canberra at these markets and possibly the Kingston Markets. I bought a slab (no such thing as a dainty slice of Amore) each of: Macadamia & Ginger Cake, Raspberry Slice, Sour Cherry Cake, Lemon Polenta Cake, and Toffee & Chocolate Cake. All under $4 and all about the size of your outstretched hand. None of them good for your waistline, but very good for the soul. We've been eating them slowly through the weekend, chunks at a time, and the cake tin still looks respectably full.

I also spent most of the day yesterday with Bernice, working on our collaborative project, trying to solve problems with printing with a mangle, and getting partway there but not all there. (I work occasionally around John Loane, who prints all of Mike Parr's huge prints, and I think I'm going to pick his brains next (very Zombie-like) about how to get the rest of the way through our large-scale intaglio printing adventure. I suspect it's going to involve changing the paper we're working with.) So we got back last night not as UP as we would have been if we'd cracked it. Never mind, half a bottle of wine worked for me to restore the spirits.

Bumblebee is meant to be with us this weekend, but he went a friend's beach house for a birthday sleepover, lucky boy. He went to his school disco on friday night (dressed in Sith Casualwear, of course, minus the lightsabre) and watching him greet his friends -- once we'd got past the increased security measures, each child accompanied by an adult to get in the door and brandishing their permission slips bearing parental signature and emergency contact number -- was akin to watching the T-birds from Grease greeting each other after the long summer holiday. Hilarious attempts at Cool Enthusiasm.

On thursday I attended one of the art school's twice-weekly public lectures (Art Forum, all welcome), this time by the curator of Knit 1 Blog 1, Barb McConchie. It was great; as she gave her lecture about discovering the world of knitting blogs, she got the technical assistant to sit next to her and use the projected laptop to click through blogs. His challenge was to move only through knitting blogs, and to never visit the same one twice for the whole hour. Heh. I think he could have done it for two days and never run into the same one twice. It was great to see how many international craft blogs link to Canberra's own Whip Up blog.

There was something else I wanted to write about but it's totally escaped my brain. Hmmm. Nope. It'll come back sometime, no doubt. Sometime when I'm NOT near the computer.