Time is flying, like my leisure, out the window

Yesterday was the two-weeks-until-leaving-mark. And I was suddenly hit with the 'two weeks today, I'll be...' thoughts.

Feels silly to be making a fuss about going to NZ, when lots of people I know go much further and to much stranger places. One of my friends is in China at the moment, and her partner has been getting bits of her emails, like censored letters sent home by the army. Scary.

Thanks to Caffeine Faerie, I know now that there is an arse-kicking Farmers Market in Dunedin. Won't it be nice to just go to a market to cruise, have a cuppa and sample some wares for brekkie instead of rushing in, doing the whole week's shopping and rushing home to get the family's breakfast? Yairs.

I'm surrounded by piles of paper, each pile a little bit closer to fine, each promising that once I have paid the proper attention to them, I can go travelling with a clear conscience. Some of the piles are going up to my studio this afternoon, to be put into other piles and somehow neatly put away.

I am *so* unorganised. I get everything that I have to do done, but I never get time to look back over my shoulder until the piles of abandoned projects and files threaten to topple forward onto me.

And my vague idea about having a quiet time when I get back from NZ until school starts next year has completely flown out the window, on huge glittery bat wings like the mythical creature it was. Suddenly I am spoken for, in many ways:

-- two workshops
-- speaking at the NGA Printmaking Symposium
-- making a BIG, nay, HUGE wall piece for said printmaking Symposium, thanks to Megalo sending me an invitation I can't refuse.
-- working with the Majura Women's Group as artist in residence
-- having three people come to do residencies with me in my studio. One of them is Pete McLean, who is my other broadside residency recipient. The other two are travelling from Qld, separately, to use my equipment and pick my brains.
-- I will be hopefully finishing a chapbook with John Pratt that we started a few years ago.

Is that going to be enough to go on with? I think so. I hope so.

In the meantime, the cats are happily enjoying the fact that we are all home because the car is making horrible steering column noises and is stuck at the mechanic's shop for the weekend. Bloody car. I hope it doesn't eat up our holiday money. Because I want to go somewhere where I can be snowed in and just read and eat and flop. Waneka sounds like just the place. The boys can go here and I can sleep.