Drawmo 12: A New Hope

It's not easy being green premenstrual with a broken press. The lowest lows, the highest highs, and hormones in between. No wonder Best Beloved caught an early plane to Melbourne yesterday. He's at some sort of airport conference; every time he goes to one of these things he comes home laden with promotional crap, just because they gave it to him. Gah. There's only three of us in the house, five if you count the kitties, and he brought home NINE baseball caps last trip, all embroidered with logos of flight or oil companies. I wanted to have a ritual burning, but it would have increased my envo-footprint more than the making of the caps did. Double GAH. He's under stern instructions to resist, this time. I don't want anything else in the house with a picture of an airplane on it, unless it's a ticket. For all of us.

Anyhoo, today was the first chance I had to ring someone about fixing the press. All weekend I'd feared the worst -- obscure parts needed that would take months to import from some museum in Germany (it's an obscure German press). Instead I got three cheery fellows from ANU Facilities and Services who whooped with delight at seeing such a grand old lady (the press, not me) and rolled their sleeves up. They poked and prodded and debated excitedly about seals and fluid thingies and dryness before one of them cried EUREKA and held up a shard of hollow pin, something that had shattered and wasn't connecting to the doobie (see Naomi? It is a usable word) that went around and thus the rollers couldn't be supported. Nothing to do with oil!

Then there was a tense waiting period when Bloke 1 ran back to their workshop where they had a storage room of Half of the Things You Need and the Other Half the Things You'll Never Need Again (their words). This pin would come from the latter category. While we were waiting, Bloke 2 (a first-year apprentice) watched admiringly while Bloke 3 negotiated dinner at his girlfriend's mum's place later in the week ("Geez you're slack, I'm surprised she still admits you're her daughter. How about I cook? I can do lamb with heaps of garlic and rosemary. Yeah!") and I doodled:



It's a Waiting Doodle. I do variations of it when I'm stuck somewhere or listening to something. This one started a lot darker and blobbier, then I rubbed out and as things got better over the morning it got lighter and bubblier. It's small, only about 3cm across.

Bloke 1 came back with the exact size pin. There was much cheering and rejoicing, especially from me. They had other urgent things to do, so they just fixed the most pressing urgent problem and promised to be back in the next few days to give it a proper oil change and service. I think they like her. She's pretty endearing, albeit Brunhilda-ish.

So I could print my colophon this afternoon! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Happy girl. Doesn't take much. And now my project is back on track. And I got to have a lovely day yesterday with Bumblebee, wallowing in chocolate. And there's a new Machine Translations album out, which I bought yesterday, which is terrific, apart from the best song being spoiled by a bloody ghost track. (I hate the construct of ghost tracks. All that bloody space and you can't listen to the two songs independently. But the ghost track itself is lovely.) And two of my loveliest cousins bought me a book voucher for my birthday (love vouchers of any kind, thanks!) and I used it yesterday to buy Garth Nix's Abhorsen so I'm finally finishing the trilogy. So again, all's right with the world, and I'm a lucky, lucky woman.