Communing with nature

Where does the time go? Out the window, it seems.

When I started my residency at the primary school, I asked all the kids to ask the weather to only rain on Mondays (that's the day I work indoors, at the art skool) but so far it seems to rain every Tuesday. Yesterday was abysmal, cold and wet, and I have to work outside, under a shelter thankfully, because there's just no indoor space for me.

I've updated my work blog, to talk about my pen & ink week with the kids. Unfortunately the latest upgrade of Wordpress has borked a few things, like spaces after punctuation are gone and the titles repeat themselves so that they sound like that goose from Charlotte's Web. I'm trying to fix them, but there's no time! No time! Have to keep moving along, so much to do.

I found a wee crack of time last week to drive across town and meet Elephant's Child. Canberra is an incredible city; in most cities you spend 25 minutes in your car and move about 2 kilometres. In Canberra, if you spend that much time driving, you've gone 40 kilometres. Apparently we drive more kms per capita than Northern Territorians. I find that shocking, but I digress. I drove what seems to be a long way because I rarely venture outside of my suburb cluster, but it's a journey most people take every day to work and back.

Anyhoo, Elephant's Child is, of course, delightful, and we managed to whittle away a hour or so talking about important things like books, cats and community service after we'd done a plant swap (which was the motivation for the visit). I would have liked to have talked more about books, but I came away with a borrowed copy of Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, so that should be a good conversation starter for next time. And there's always on-line.

I have managed to cross a few things from my bloody To Do list... I finished my latest Book Art Object offering (I'm just waiting for the recipients to get them before I show it; the wait and then reveal seems to be the funnest part of the process), I'm on the last stage of the residency process, and now the next big hurdle is getting the Impact conference done and dusted. October, month of rest, is on the horizon!

Oh crap, look at the time. Have to wing pedal* my way to school and set up my printshop again. Yesterday, despite the weather, I had an amazing exploratory day working out a system of printing with the children. I love the way their creativity is boundless. I came home exhausted, of course, but I learned more in a day than I ever did at art school :)




*Did I ever mention that I recently read Claire Corbett's When We Have Wings? OMG, if you've ever dreamed about flying... read the book. Do yourself a favour!