Ampersand Duck

Remember to breathe

2008-05-16T15:08:00.003+10:00

Mr Padge, sitting in a corner of the loungeroom, sadly looking out at my tasteful but highly effective shadecloth awning, wishing he could be outside.

On the left, outside sitting on my swaddled compositor's stone, you can glimpse our newest friend, the Arse-Quacking Duck, whom I bought at the Tallong Apple Festival. She's a plastic alarm duck with a motion sensor, and the noise she makes comes out of a speaker under her tail. You should see the cats freaking out as they try to nonchalantly stroll past her and she starts up the arse-quacking. It's hilarious. She's outside and switched off at the moment, because she drives everyone else crazy. Sigh.

Off-path cycling

2008-05-15T21:34:00.003+10:00

I fell off my bike.

There's nothing like falling off your bike to make you feel undignified.

In this case, it was the fault of a woman who let her dog run down a laneway off the leash. Her 'sweet' blue heeler lunged and barked angrily at Bumblebee as he rode around the corner into the laneway, I braked hard (to jump off and defend him) and my bike slipped on autumn leaves and I went arse over tit face down on the ground.

Lovely autumn leaves and grass broke my fall, thank goddess, but it didn't help my recovering neck, and my hands feel a bit tender. And my arse was high in the air, sprawled over the bike, which is not a good look really.

Snaps to the nice young man who stopped and made sure I was alright.

As I fell I screeched angrily at the woman, who was trying to grab her dog (leash in hand), and as we rode off again I couldn't help snapping at her that it would be helpful if she could keep her dog on leash until she got to a park. She looked as shocked as I felt, but I thought that might be a good thing.

I'm sorry, dog-lovers, I have little tolerance for unleashed dogs on shared paths. Once I came off my bike because someone was walking their three little fluffy things and had let them loose, but still tied them together, and they lurched across the path like some zany cartoon trap. As I was dusting myself off, the owner laughed as if it were a huge joke and I gave him a very big piece of my mind in return.

Best Beloved has been grabbed by dogs as he's ridden along, and he has no problems kicking at them in return.

I like dogs generally; I think it's irresponsible owners I have a problem with.

And, in case you hate cyclers on shared paths, I do try my best to be considerate when I ride past walkers. I ding my smiley bell, and I slow down around blind corners.

Anyway. I'm going to bed early to give my hands quality time to heal.

Ooh! A new meme!

2008-05-14T17:27:00.004+10:00

Gawd, how long has it been? (I've been composing a things-your-cats-do meme in my head as I ride my bike; one day it'll get onscreen, unless anyone wants to start it first?)

Apparently these are the 106 books most often listed as 'unfinished' on LibraryThing. The rules are that you bold the ones you've read all the way to the end, underline the ones you read for "school" [I presume uni is included in this], and asterisk the ones you started but didn't finish.

I'm adding italic for those I've re-read. And gosh, I've surprised myself by what I haven't tackled yet. Still, I think I've done pretty well by the list.

Via Pavlov's Kitty, with admirable provenance before that.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West [but do want to read this ASAP]
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead*
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 [I did my HSC in 1984. Say no more.]
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse*
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow*
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Sad Kitties, Happy Peoples

2008-05-14T14:05:00.004+10:00

Checkin' the funnies at lunchtime. A couple of them are so eerily like my cats that it made me wistful:

Mr Padge used to look like this, but he's grounded at the moment.

Mr Pooter looks like this ALL the time. He just needs a dress to make him look like he's actually cranky about something. Dunno why he's always cranky, because he's the only one allowed to go outside at the moment. He's getting to roll in the warm sunny grass.

Padge came home about ten days ago with a huge scratch across the top of his head, from ear to ear, and a lot of hair pulled out, plus scratches all over his body. I spent a lot of the next week carefully washing the wounds with warm water and Pears soap (my vet's recommended remedy) and I think we're in the all-clear with abcesses. But he's not been outside since; we're too nervous to let him out.

So he sits sadly at the windows (if we remember to open the curtains) and watches. Or sleeps. And gets fatter. If making him fat keeps him from wandering and fighting, then that's our choice for his life.

Tonight I'll add a photo of the real Padge, sitting sadly.

In other news, Hil from Spirits Dancing came to have morning tea at the Bookstud this morning, to catch up with me and give sage puppetry/theatre set advice to one of my students. We also have a visiting artist from Thailand who is doing etchings about puppets, so we had a very jolly and extremely interesting morning swapping ideas, theories and showing images. I think networking morning teas are the bomb, and I will try my darndest to have another one sometime. Thanks for coming, Hil!

Letterpress: how to get a piece of the action

2008-05-14T07:42:00.005+10:00

I have just discovered a place in Sydney that teaches letterpress classes, for all of you who email me asking after such things. I haven't managed to get any classes up at the Bookstud this year, because I'm editioning bigtime and it's hard to reset the press and get my head in the right space. So this is a good opportunity for anyone wanting to play with type... it's the Penrith Museum of Printing, and they look pretty friendly. Next time I'm up that way I'll pop in and have a look.

For Melbournites there also seems to be renewed activity at the Melbourne Museum of Printing.

If you're in Canberra and want to see a big of printing action from arm's length, try the Queanbeyan Printing Museum, usually open on sunday afternoons. For a taster on what they offer, we have a delightful collection of photos taken by moi on a Bookbinders' Guild excursion.

PS: I went to my osteopath yesterday and encountered a young woman I now think of as 'Elbows of Death'. She had the sharpest, hardest, most brutal deep tissue massage technique I have ever, in my twenty-five years of bad back and neck, experienced. When I got home I couldn't focus my eyes; this morning I have a mass of bruising in the area between my shoulder blades and below my neck. It'll settle down over the next few days, but until then I'm a bit stiff.

The fellow that swapped with her late in the massage (she got called out to help with another patient, and I wept with joy) laughed when I used my new nickname. 'That's perfect for her,' he said. 'She hasn't learned "medium" yet. She's still focussed on "hard".' Classic.

Monday, monday...

2008-05-12T12:59:00.005+10:00

I feel the urge to repeat how much I like my Monday Book class.

Every week we do some task or another, then at about this time of semester their personal projects start to develop and emerge, and we do a lot of troubleshooting.

This morning one of the students chose Neko Case from my CDs to listen to whilst we finished our clamshell boxes, and then sat down and showed me his work-in-progress, a book/cassette edition about the wonders of Dolly Parton... which meant, of course, that Dolly had to go on the stereo (we got to choose between 60s, 70s or 80s Dolly from his boxed set -- 60s was the decade of choice today).

Which somehow led to Ricki Lee Jones, which led to Jimmy Webb. Such a good morning's listening, all top songsters.

Some of the ideas I get to troubleshoot are fantastic, and working out a structural solution is so much fun. One person is working with air-dried fruit, and whilst we were talking about the doll-book she's constructing (with inner organs of dried fruit), I was teaching the figure-of-eight stitch to other students, and suddenly I had a vision of a tunic-style dress of rings of oranges or lemons using this stitch, which made her very excited and spawned a few other ideas.

When they all leave I'm a strange mix of buggered and buzzing. Luckily Jimmy is still crooning across the room, which is very soothing.

LATER: and another good thing about Mondays is that I get a bit of lunchbreak to cruise the blogs without guilt (a morning of tootling deserves a concrete break) and I find good things: weddings! odd children! and sundry kooky things! (Dorian, the last link is for you, if you haven't seen it.)

I managed to tape Flight of the Conchords on channel 10 last night, and was hoping to see it tonight before or after South Park. But! My evening just got hijacked over the phone. So I'll have to watch both tomorrow night, after I've done my homework. Sigh.

happy Mothers Day yourself

2008-05-11T20:01:00.004+10:00

Happy Mothers Day to any of you that partake in such rituals, and an extra special hello to Jahteh and Lady Duck (and anyone else who has lost their children).

My MD treat was a cooked breakfast in bed then being allowed to have as long as I wanted to print book pages in the BookStud without guilt-inducing phonecalls or pleas to come home. As it turned out, I was horrendously hung-over from a wee dinner-party with my sister outlaw and her current moistie* plus Zoe and Owen and squillions of little boys here at Chez Duck (details of the food to be guested posted at Progrock Dinner Party when I pull my finger out), so I only managed to print 200 pages with many quick breaks to play Scramble and Scrabble and unscramble my braincells, and I was home by 5.30pm, ready for a hair of the dog. It was a pretty good printing day, but not to full capacity.

Best Beloved took Bumblebee to see the Duntroon Dixieland Band at Old Parliament House (I made up a song about it tonight to the tune of 'Spiderpig' (Spiderman) to amuse B and now I can't get it out of my head:

Dixieband, Dixieband
Does whatever a Dixieband does..
Does it swing? Yes it can,
It can swing, it's a Dixieband.
Look out! Duntroon Dixieband...)

and then they went to JB HiFi, BB's fav shop, to spend his birthday money. He came home with series 2 of Jonathon Creek and a couple of other things. Bumblebee, despite having been with BB when he bought it, asked him tonight why he'd bought series 2 and not series 1. We have a family policy of answering dumb questions with equally dumb answers, so I wasn't surprised at the start of this exchange, but I was most admiring by the rest of it:

BB: Well, the makers of Jonathon Creek decided that it was such a good concept that they wouldn't bother making a first series, just jump straight in with series two.

B (clicking): Oh yeah, right...

BB: BUMBLEBEE, do you think I'm making this up?

B: Yeah, of course!

BB: So the makers of Star Wars jumped right in at the first movie, did they?!

B: ...

[He started looking puzzled and scratched his head, until I completely lost it and started giggling.]

It was fun to watch it tonight; I'd forgotten how much I like Maddy as a character.

*I've always wanted to use that line, but now I feel guilty. He's a lovely man, and it was nice to meet him :)

Beware the ides of Calpurnia

2008-05-07T22:11:00.004+10:00

Bad questions to ask a transsexual

This is 16 and a half minutes long, but worth it if you have the bandwidth. I'd been exploring the website Bad Plastic Surgery, and it was sitting there as something funny to watch. It is funny, but not for the reasons they meant. I found myself warming to this woman, especially in the tenth minute (fast forward if you want a quick sample). There's some odd moments, but some good shit buried in there.

I was asked for more cat action...

2008-05-07T09:06:00.003+10:00

This is where you end up when you visit Lord Sedgwick and start clicking through his links (safe for work, unlike many other things on LS's blog).

Remember to breathe

2008-05-06T21:35:00.004+10:00

The fully equipped traveller to the moon should have a pressure suit, an air tank, a walkie talkie set and a pistol.

From The Australian Wonder Book of Knowledge (Melbourne: Colorgravure Publications, n.d. (but well before 1969))

No rest for the wicked with a toy-boy

2008-05-05T21:14:00.005+10:00

I've just spent the weekend in the Southern Highlands of NSW, checking out Bernice Balconey's new hidey-hole, which is small but gorgeous. The weekend away from my studio was a bit of a birthday present to Best Beloved, who turns 37 today (I love being married to someone younger than me). He loves the chance to talk politics with Bernice, and also to pop into a certain Berrima jam shop and swap cooking tips. I love the chance to talk art with her, and not averse to popping into Peppergreens and The Art of Bookbinding. So a good time was had by all. Funnily enough, we always stay in that area around this time of year.

Today's Book Design class was on box-making, and we got halfway through making a clamshell box, something I'm quite able to do on my own but am nervous to make with a group, because my maths is so bad and it shows as I'm calculating bases and sides and gaps etc. Luckily I'm quite able to expose the flaws in my personality and very open to being laughed at, so I don't try and bluff my way through these things; instead I confess all at the beginning of the class and we all have a good laugh and help each other get things right. It makes classes a lot of fun. I can prove my abilities in other ways later on, when I can show how to fold the little tuck in the corners of the bookcloth, or how to glue out a large swathe of cloth without getting glue on the neat side. In the meantime I get to hear a lot of student gossip, which is also enormous fun.

When I got home after doing all the shopping and pre-preparing a self-saucing chocolate pudding to follow the pizzas that I would pick up after my yoga class (the requested birthday meal), I found an email from artist book mistress Adele Outteridge, who shares a love of cats with me, especially cats who torture cardboard boxes. She sent me the link to a very funny cat video called An Engineer's Guide to Cats. Do yourself a favour.

As you were.

Prin!

2008-05-01T12:53:00.005+10:00

"I am the feeling which became a daughter."

OMFG
Armagnac'd led me to this website.

Besides being cute, the English and the photo captions are to die for:

1. You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. "It has changed just for a moment". [ "it being very dear" or ] You will pass pleasant one time.

2. If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo your cat lovelily with much trouble.

3. If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat. "-- be flooded -- a way -- good -- having done one's best -- ! -- "

These goods are Tippett who was able to do for the warm boa material also in cold winter. A Dalmatian handle looks great. A cat will not be felt cold if the circumference of a head is warm. You will tie an attached ribbon gently.

The genius of dressing a cat in a dog fur print cannot be underestimated...

POSTSCRIPT
OF COURSE, the reason why this looked so familiar yet exotic to me is because it's on Miss Lucy Tartan's Treasured Collection of Stupid Cat Links, and has been for years. I only let myself visit Said List (on her sidebar) when I have been an extra-good girl or I'm sick at home needing diversion, because you can be caught in a kitty wonderland for hours. I haven't been either today; I just visited Sills Bend and had my eye caught by the word PRIN. Doh!

Living books

2008-05-01T07:46:00.005+10:00

I've just been browsing through the various emails I get sent every day about book arts-related activities. There's a brand new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (one of my earmarked visiting spots if I ever get out of Canberra) with the unfortunate title of Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book. When I googled the title to get a direct link, it came up first, but the second link was regarding what it might mean if you found blood on your toilet paper after wiping your arse. Charming! Mind you, the exhibition involves a book by Jeff Koons so the two might not be such a coincidence.

The other email made me feel quite wistful. A real estate mogul in Minnesota tried, in collaboration with the town elders, to create a 'silicon alley' section of the city, and when it failed, transformed the project into a Book Arts utopia. Read about it here. Sigh. I wish Australia could do something similar.

Anyhoo, I'm printing pages for most of today, so that cheers me up.

Afterthought: if you've ever wanted to make a linoprint and have never felt brave enough, or haven't made one in ages and want inspiration, strange fruit is the place to be at the moment.

life skills 101

2008-04-28T14:00:00.004+10:00

heh.

Counting the beat

2008-04-27T16:19:00.006+10:00

Last week while the boys were away I launched a major assault on my &Duck website, adding a lot of my artist's books and a few of my design jobs (I haven't finished putting them all up yet, but I got a fair way in). In the process, I pulled down an archive box marked 'books' that had been sitting on top of a cupboard for the past five or so years, and discovered a treasure trove of things I had forgotten about. I'd assumed the box was old books I'd stashed, but in fact it was my storage box for student work and stuff I'd made in Bumblebee's infancy.

And down the bottom was... gasp! This:

Bought in England in 1979, this innocent notepad became my weekly obsession. I unpacked it in 1980, in steamy Townsville, where Colonel Duck was posted. Each Sunday evening I would sit cross-legged in front of the tv, and turn on Countdown. In the last ten minutes, I would scribble down the top ten as they were announced. I did this from September 1980 through to June 1981, when I ran out of room. I didn't start a new pad, instead I think I got a boyfriend sometime around that period, and therefore got the start of a life.

But it makes me all misty-eyed to look through the pages... what follows is merely a selection:

One of the things I love about these lists is the mix of music. None of this separation between mainstream and indie music that you get these days. I'm sure the lead singer of MiSex (who, BTW, my mother nearly ran over once in Townsville when he was supporting Split Enz, to my teenage awe and embarrassment) was trying not to vomit as Gavin announced this choice run-down of hits.

Check out the humour in 'MONGO ROCK'. I couldn't tell you if that was deliberate -- probably not, knowing the wide-eyed kidlet I was -- but it's ironic, because if I were asked to nominate the worst Australian performers of the early 80s I would, without hesitation, say Ross Wilson and Pat Wilson. And I only pinpointed in my mind why this afternoon as I was driving Bumblebee back from Cooma ahead of wild weather: smugness. They acted like they knew what Australians SHOULD be listening to, and bestowed that music upon us as if we should be grateful. And I hated them for it. They're probably very nice people, but I loathed everything Mondo Rock released, except 'State of the Heart'. And Bop Girl is going to pop music hell hot on the trail of Oh Mickey. BLAH!

The Leo Sayer Hit is actually More Than I Can Say, but I fluffed it and obviously never went back to it. That's always been my way... onwards, onwards, time for picking up the mess later (*snort* says BB and my mother).

Classic young teen, I flirted with coloured pens for a while. Can you believe the Slim Dusty number 1? It stayed in the top ten for a long time, as did Joe Dolce's Shaddupa you face.

But peoples, beware of using coloured pens for your precious documents, for this is what happens to the back of the paper!

My mother nearly fainted this week, with Dr Hook on the show. The only other time she swooned like that was when Shakin' Stevens was hosting. I can't remember this Abba song: On & On & On. Let's have a listen, shall we?

Oh yes. Frida's had better hair days. Not one of their best hits, is it? They sound as synthesised as that Cher hit a while back.

I love the way I keep writing Molly Meldrum in as if there could be a chance he wouldn't be there the next week. No wonder my parents thought I'd be a librarian. And -- *swoon* -- Suzi! I'd started spending my pocket money on singles around this time, and my collection closely correlates with many of the songs in this book. Well, the only other way of hearing new songs in Townsville was some horrible American relay broadcast on the local radio station on Saturday nights, running through the top 100 hits for that week. I didn't discover the cool stuff from this period until I got to university and got to plunder everyone else's record collections.

I can't begin to tell you about the thrill I got when I rediscovered this little gem. I thought I'd lost it, years ago! I think I'll make a proper solander box for this. Sigh!

Lest we lose sight of this

2008-04-25T10:18:00.003+10:00

Dear RSL,

As much as I respect and honour the efforts and sacrifices made by our soldiers and nurses during the various conflicts our governments have wantonly entered us into, I do wish you'd get your hand off it regarding what is and isn't appropriate on ANZAC Day.

The idea of hot air balloons being offensive to the memory of Our Dead Boys is ripsnortingly absurd. Surely it is a perfect metaphor for the amount of hot air that arises when debating matters of war?

I popped down to the shops today to use an ATM machine and noticed that while many shops were closed, all the cafes and fast food outlets are open. Surely the idea of being able to buy fries with your poppy is more offensive?

And while we're at it, surely the pubs should stay closed. I can't think of anything more offensive to the memory of the Revered Dead than a bunch of people getting completely whacked on such a sacred day, can you? Especially now that the government is clamping down on binge drinking.

I personally think that many things are appropriate on ANZAC Day, since surely being joyously alive and enjoying yourself freely is a fitter tribute to a large amount of people who tragically lost their ability to do so so that we could do so...

Yours respectfully,

Duckie

Ooh, ooh, oooooh

2008-04-24T07:34:00.005+10:00

Bumblebee watched Grease the other day, and it reminded me that I haven't finished showing you my Folk Festival collection of Grease covers.

This is a lovely effort, and one for anyone who likes bands like The Audreys and The Waifs. It's the Ellis Collective, who decided not to do a campy corny cover, but to transform one of the campy corny songs from the movie into something gorgeous. And it worked. I've been singing this in the shower ever since the concert.

Also my camerawork had improved by this stage of the concert. It's still crap, because it's my little digicam, but at least you don't have to twist your neck this time!

Enjoy:

Regaining momentum

2008-04-23T20:04:00.008+10:00

My days of glorious solitude are up. Everyone came back, including Bernice Balconey and her brood of one, enriching my life with light and laughter. I do like days and nights of being alone, but only, I suppose, because they are precious and few. Mind you, I think the cats feel I'm short-changed when I'm alone, because they brought me presents of rats each day. They don't do that with a full household.

While they were away I cracked my printing problems, and the world is shiny and lovely again. I was in a bit of a rut for a while, which I tried to conquer by keeping busy in a chore sense, but nothing beats the thrill of solving an overwhelming problem. Makes me all light-hearted, which gets me through the manic obsessiveness of print production time.

It helps to have something I can listen to obsessively as well. I've said repeatedly that I print to the eclectic sounds of Machine Translations, but even they have to be given a break occasionally; a couple of years ago I was hooked on Kate Bush, last year it was The Postal Service and DNTEL, and now it's Joni Mitchell & Herbie Hancock and Eleni Mandell. I discovered Eleni on eMusic, and downloaded her more recent country-style albums (Miracle of Five, Country for True Lovers) and fell in love. But then I tried her first two albums (Wishbone, Thrill)... they'll all be on high rotation for the next few months. She's got a marvellous voice, sort of Lucinda Williams without the angst, and she's heavily influenced by Tom Waits without being Tom Waits, and I'm completely hooked.

Having a constant musical companion whilst printing is like having a studio cat, without the chance that it will jump up on the press and get mangled. It's soothing and stimulating simultaneously, if it's the right music. It has to have a sense of sitting in the background, but always be there with something interesting to offer if your mind happens to tune in for a moment. It's wonderful when you find something that works.

Here are some pics of my efforts over the last couple of days (when I haven't been kid-wrangling, like today):

This is a placement sketch to help my imposition (which way up poems go on the page, as I print four at a time, with another four on the other side of the page, to be folded down into a book section).

This is the poem, printed. I love this poem. For many reasons, one of which is that it mentions balloons. Hold that thought for a minute. (Apologies for the distortion in the scale of the type. It's photographed from an angle, not scanned.)

Because of the length of the book (over 40 poems), it would be impossible to set by hand unless I bought some new type overseas, and I can't afford that. So I'm printing the book using photopolymer (or Nylar) plate. This is what a whole book looks like, which gives a whole new meaning to the word STACK.

And this is what the plate looks like, on the press, inked. It's essentially a relief plate, like a lino or woodcut plate. It's soft plastic that is UV-hardened through a negative. Looks very similar to letterpress when printed... very similar but not quite the same to the trained eye.

Aahh... there's nothing better than a stacked rack -- of prints.

Today I spent the day with Bumblebee and his mate, making the most of my one full day between his arriving back from his dad's place and his going to Colonel Duck tomorrow for a few days. Everyone wants a piece of him in the holidays. he's never been to a holiday program.

We tried to attend the annual Balloon Festival (there's that balloon thought -- quick, catch it!), and got there about 8am, which is late in balloon terms, but not THAT late. We arrived to emptiness and nothing. BOOO to the new organisers of the event. There was a poor lassie singing on a stage, all miked up, singing to nobody, and no balloonists in sight. So the boys resorted to using their brand new phones. I enjoyed the nice reflections.

Later in the day we saw 'Horton Hears a Who'. I love the philosophical bent of the book, but they buggered the movie up with reactionary kangaroo plots and other stupid Hollywoodnesses. The animation was excellent, I have to admit. I wanted to poke my finger into Horton and feel it sink in, and my favorite character was Katie.

Afterwards I felt that the boys needed to run and jump and play, but all they wanted to do was loll and flollop.

So I gave up and took them home where they spent the rest of the afternoon adoring the cats in the garden and loungeroom while I worked. Sigh.

Tomorrow I drop B off in Cooma and head back to the studio to keep printing. I have to maintain the momentum now, or the book will never get done. And then I can spend the rest of the year practising the gentle art of bookbinding...

take note[s]

2008-04-20T21:29:00.003+10:00

I know that some of you are authors. Or at least aspiring to be.

Read this.

And if you have any time or energy, do share links to favorite corny author photos.

Catching up (ladybits alert)

2008-04-20T08:35:00.006+10:00

I'm sorry to leave you hanging... this is the first chance I've had to get back to the blog since the last post!

Bumblebee is away with his dad, Best Beloved jumped a plane to Devonport (for work) at dawn this morning and I've now got three days to myself... which I will hopefully put to good use. I am planning to be in the studio printing, and going home via the movies. No cooking, just leftovers and takeaway, no cleaning until the very last moment before everyone gets back on Tuesday afternoon (bringing with them Bernice Balconey and her offspring for a sleepover).

I hope.
I'm in the BookStud now, finding my makeready (the work you do to set up the type and press to get a good print) extremely frustrating. Lots of eeny-weeny measurements that seem perfect one moment, and completely out the next. GAH! So I am going to take a blood-pressure break and tell you about Bumblebee's birthday.

THE FIRST

Because I dangled it in front of you, I'll give you a quick overview of B's actual birthday.

I'd gone to the obstetrician that morning, and it was a week before his due date. He made a joke that if B turned around, I'd be right for a natural birth. Not having prepared for a natural birth, having been told all the way that it was going to be very tricky if I did, what with my weird insides and masses of fibroids, I reacted quite violently to this suggestion and told him that if he left me to have a natural childbirth at this late stage I would personally wrap the cord around his neck. He laughed nervously and said 'see you in a week!'.

Here's the little tucker in utero, looking just like himself, except with a touch of the deep-sea creature about him. They did a few of these scans, to make sure he was ok amongst the fibroids, but at no point picked up that he had a dicky heart...

Anyhoo, I came back from my appointment, and went for a walk with a friend to the local secondhand bookshop. While we were looking at books, I had a contraction. I'd had a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions, so it didn't bother me. All afternoon, though, I kept having them. My mother was my planned birth partner, and she was ready to drive up from Bega. My father was staying with me for a business trip. (I was a single almost-parent already, by choice. I only wanted one child in my life.)

I rang the hospital, but they weren't fussed and told me to hang about at home. Colonel Duck was getting nervous -- he's licensed to shoot people, but the idea of birth makes him go green around the gills. He tried to distract me by buying fish & chips and putting on a video of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (borrowed from the local library, and complete with subtitles for the deaf: 'Music swells. Bird goes tweet'). It was quite fun for a while, until the pain ramped up, and the hospital said come in for a check.

CD bustled me into his Little Red Ute and we drove to the hospital, with him nervously sucking and clacking his dental plate all the way. We rang Lady Duck, but we couldn't tell her to come yet because everyone seemed to think it wasn't time. I begged to disagree, and after an hour of people faffing around me and a whole whack of indecisiveness, someone finally checked between my legs properly and discovered that the baby was trying to shove his knee through my cervix. Oh! Emergency caesarian time!

CD rang Lady Duck, who jumped in the car. Unfortunately two hours of driving wasn't going to get her here in time, so I told CD he'd have to come in and hold my hand. He nearly fainted at the thought of it, so I asked him to ring my friend (M) I'd been shopping with that morning. She took 15 minutes to get there, by which time I'd been given an epidural and I'd yakked fish'n'salad (I couldn't hack the chips earlier) all over the nurse.

M did a sterling job, holding my hand and making jokes. I was shaking violently, scared that I'd feel the first cut, since the epidural had masked the pain but not the physical sensation of cramps. I asked them across the green sheet if they'd started, and they said 'yes, we're halfway through!' so I started to relax a bit. Then there was the most extraordinary sensation of a huge weight lifting off me, and I heard a squalk... OMFG, I've had a baby.

They passed the baby over to M, and we both sucked our breaths in, as he looked EXACTLY like his father, and neither of us thought that was a particularly good thing at the time. Then I said 'oh, it's Bumblebee', and the moment was broken and we fell in love.

It took ages to sew me up and do all the things they have to do, and I forgot to send word out to Colonel Duck, who was pacing a rut in the corridor. By the time I did remember, Lady Duck was there, and they had first cuddles as we emerged.

He wasn't a well baby -- he'd tied true knots in his cord, and was starving and eating his own brown fat, which is why he'd gone into distress. He was also jaundiced, and small.

On the way home from hospital -- tiny! I had to cut off the cuffs from his little home-dyed babyskins to make them fit.

But he was/is mine, and he's a bloody trooper. We hoped he'd plump up once he got home, but he didn't thrive, and it turned out to be his heart. For that story, go here. That kid has been close to death so many times and survived that I've stopped fretting.

THE LATEST

You can see why Bumblebee is utterly indulged by his grandparents and I. He's not spoiled, mainly because we don't have enough money to give him everything his friends get, but he keeps up enough.

So. He got a mobile from his grandad this year. It's not too fancy, with enough credit to let him ring me if he needs to, but not too much so that he can learn how fast it runs out. He messaged me yesterday to tell me his dad had taken him to Sydney. I love knowing stuff like that.

His nanny made him a cake for his party:

Isn't it lush? Choc sponge layers with fresh cream and sliced strawberries between, topped with all sorts of nice things.

It was a Lasertag party. I've never seen so many happy boys in one place.

This is the geekboy demonstrator showing off the new equipment. Flashing lights and noises... they were in heaven.

He gave a few of the teams some strategic tips, but only if they asked the right questions. The place was pretty scraggy on the outside, but once they got inside...

...it was the place of their (electric) dreams.

Team Red. Note extreme seriousness. Gawd I hope he grows out of this phase... I prefer swords to this stuff!

I love all the names they were given. They also got scorecards at the end with statistics on who shot who.

Once geared up, they ran around a darkened maze, shooting each other and the bases. I stayed outside and watched the screen, but I could hear the music and the yelling through the walls.

They emerged from each game red-faced, adrenalin charged and shouting constantly. For anyone planning to have one of these parties, take these tips:

They really only want to drink water and light fizzies. They guzzle down chips, but don't try more elaborate party fare because they're not interested, just needing a quick snack so they can keep yelling and pumping their fists. A slice of cake, another drink, and they're off again. Take earplugs. Have a Bex and a good lie down afterwards.

It was, perhaps, the easiest birthday party I've ever hosted. But I was still exhausted afterwards, from the noise and lights and testosterone levels.

I went to see 'Lars and the Real Girl' a couple of days later, and it was the perfect antidote. Highly recommended.

Back to the makeready. Wish me luck...

PS -- JUST FOUND, thanks to Helen. Heh.

The Toymaker

2008-04-15T19:28:00.004+10:00

When I was researching my origami and pop-up class, I stumbled upon the delightful world of The Toymaker. This person loves to draw, and loves to make, and has built a website to delight even the hardest cynic.

If you click her link above, you'll find the page of free downloadable paper toys, to be printed in colour and constructed. I'm going to make the Tyrannosaurus Rex one for Bumblebee for his birthday tomorrow (not enough time to make an original card, am still wrapping presents and constructing party bags -- paper bags, very sick of plastic bags chucked the instant the lollies are eaten). He's having a LASERZONE party, ten boys running around a darkened maze with all manneer of weaponry, pretending to slaughter each other. Sigh. I hope he's not too old for a dinosaur card.

Apparently The -- American -- Toymaker is travelling or has travelled around Australia recently. She has a charming map that she's drawn to show her destinations. I've included it because I love 'Glandstone', a very sweet typo.

Bumblebee got his first salon haircut yesterday. He picked out a photo in a men's hair magazine and the hairdresser made him look EXACTLY like it. Today, of course, it looks utterly different, and he was a bit disappointed. Welcome to my world, I said to him. Mind you, it still looked fabulous. Can't go wrong with a bone structure like his...

Ahh, birthdays. I never knew until I had a child that children's birthdays involve a certain amount of the parents reminiscing about the birth. Have I ever blogged B's birth? hmm... I'll have to check the archives.

Remember to breathe (and soften)

2008-04-13T17:37:00.006+10:00

An hour or so after writing that last post, I caught up with a mate and listened to his problems. I can't go into them, but think of a marriage breaking up, include all the work and childcare commitments involved, then invert the usual male/female dynamic and you have his life at the moment. And he's coping really well with it. It gave me time to sit and think about something else for a while, feel something positive like sympathy and empathy, and by the time I rode over to the dinner party I was feeling almost calm again, or at least less obviously angry than I had been earlier.

It was quite a jolly dinner; the food was fabulous, thanks to BB, and one guest had brought her 12yo daughter who entertained us all with amazing, skillful and absolutely straight-faced card tricks. I wish I'd have that much self-possession at her age. I quelled the residual anger with LOTS of wine, and spent the night in a fitful, drunken sleep, waking with a dry mouth and sore jawbones from a mega-grinding night.

So today I have been breathing. My mantra is from my yoga class: soften. Every time I feel my jaw clenching, I say 'soften' in my head and it all drops loose. I don't think it enough, but it's helpful.

Here's some nice pictures:

The trees in my yard (I really can't say it's a garden anymore) are turning glorious colours. Aren't they clever?

The ant seems to be enjoying itself.

This afternoon I went to a four-year-old's birthday party and ate lots of chocolate crackles washed down with a hairy dog champers. I came away with a pirate skull tattoo bracelet, which delights me no end.

This one is for Colonel and Lady Duck, who bought me this bookbinder's sewing press when they were in New Zealand a couple of years ago. For a long time my family made jokes that it was another of my dust-catchers. But! See! It works! I'm using it! I can sew eight bookblocks at one sitting! And you get lovely photos like these:

This last one is what the books look like when you take the sewn pile off the press. The next step is to separate the individual book blocks out and cut them apart, hoping that you haven't vagued out during the day and sewn them to each other.

Anyhoo. I hope that softened your jaws a bit as well... hoo roo.

My head is reeling

2008-04-12T14:59:00.004+10:00

I was having a glass of wine on the front step last night with Zoe and mentioned the ball of anger that sits in my chest like a permanent fixture. It swells and subsides, but it's always present, has been for most of my life. It's waiting. I can see it erupting later, when I'm not so committed to having a productive life.

But there's days when it sits in my throat, like this morning while reading the papers, and this afternoon when I tried to sew bookblocks whilst listening to Radio Eye. It was an hour of stories about abuse to women of various forms (honour killings, sexual abuse). I'm so angry, and I don't know what to do with it.

I'm going to a dinner party tonight. Best Beloved is catering it as an Indian Feast, his wedding present to a couple of good friends. I've cooked some of the food, and I'm meant to be dressing in my Indian gear and contributing to the feast by serving the food. I'm scared I'm in the wrong mood. I don't know if I can be jolly, let alone even civil.

What do you do with a throbbing ball of anger?

I am full of questions, and the overwhelming one is this:
How can anyone think that a woman escaping an abusive marriage is a worse shame to a family than the shame of a community knowing that you are a family that kills a family member?

I have to breathe deep. I need some equilibrium.

PS. My ball of anger is, I think, why I love Helen Garner. I relate to her angriness. I loved her novel. It's not for everyone, but it was a good couple of hours for me.

Catching up

2008-04-09T21:26:00.003+10:00

I haven't spent all my time since the last post playing Scramble, no no nee no.

Busyt busy busty. Gawd, I don't think I'll correct that particular typo, because it's eerily true. My left boob has been large and hot (in the non-sexy sense) for at least a week. But you don't want to know things like that! You want book sexiness and cooking loveliness or some such thing. OK!

YUM

Let's start with Sunday breakfast. This incredibly dodgy photo (my hands are definitely going -- my typing is crap and my photography is shaky) is a gorgeous sorrel and potato omelette with rocket on the side. It's become Best Beloved's latest scrummy Sunday breakfast offering. He cooks potato chunks in the microwave, then sautes them with mushrooms, butter and fresh sorrel leaves and puts the mixture inside a thin omelette. Ohh, the lemony tang of the sorrel is delightful!

We've been buying our vegetables more often, rather than just once a week at the Growers' Market, because there's a new local shop that sells local produce for local people (hello, hello, there'll be no trouble here). It also stocks produce from further afield, but the proprietors always mark the food miles on the labels. Some is organic, some is not, all is fresh, and the prices are very reasonable.

It has a fancy name, and someone may be able to translate its obviously relevant, caring and beautiful meaning to me: Choku Bai Jo. Unfortunately the only way I can make myself remember it is by thinking 'Chokos by Joe', as if it were a weird rural fashion label.

They stock lots of lovely Asian vegetables and herbs like fresh sorrel, but we're so hooked on sorrel that we've planted at least three batches in our wild back yard, having been told that once it's there we'll never get rid of it. Well, anything that can survive extreme neglect apart from two avid weeks of gardening at the beginning of spring is alright by us.

If you're interested, Choku Bai Jo is at the NORTH Lyneham shops (not the Lyneham shops), and they are open during decent hours for workers: 3-8pm weekdays, 7am - 12noon on Saturdays.

READING

I don't know about you, but a new Helen Garner book (let alone a novel!) is on par with a new Harry Potter book for me. I finally managed to get to my COOP bookshop this afternoon and buy a copy, and I'm already 40 pages in. I hope you realise how much reading time I'm missing out on by writing this post! Most excitement.

BOOK CLINIC

The other fun thing that's been happening is the institution of a formal chance for me to allow people to release their inner book... the studio I maintain at the Art Skool is tucked in a quiet corner, and no-one except my once-weekly book design students and the printmaking students know it's there. At a recent staff meeting I heard that someone suggested the studio be used as the 'sick-room', since it's being under-utilised!! Someone who has obviously not been up there since the old regime of being out-of-bounds to undergrads (three years ago!).

So I decided to be pro-active and slightly cheeky, and announced a weekly drop-in Book Clinic for Honours and Postgraduate students from all workshops. For a few hours of two days a week, people can drop in and get ideas, tips & tricks, help, a cuppa, and help to keep the space relevant to the entire school.

Yesterday I had four people dropping in, and it was great fun. It's amazing how many people love the idea of making books, no matter what art they practice. Each person came in tentatively, with a vague idea of what they'd like to do, and left completely keen and enthusiastic. I'm keeping a log of visitors, so that I can throw the statistics around next time they're needed...

MAILOUT

I'm finally at a stage where I can promote my Nan McDonald book, and I've printed 300 letterpress brochures to put about a bit. I'm compiling a couple of lists for my press, one virtual, one snail mail. If you'd like to get emails from me about my publications etc, please email me on ampersandduck[at]gmail.com. My snail mail list is for serious buyers and supporters, and if you want to be one of those, email me with your mail address and I'll put you on the list.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of brochure:

I will make it into a PDF and send it to the Australian Artbooks email list. If you want to be part of Artbooks, go here. It's the best way to know about artistic booky activity around our country.

PUSSY CAT HEADS & TAILS

Mr Padge is healing nicely after blowing out my credit card. His head looks scarred but presentable, and his tail is, well, curly. It doesn't seem to bother him much, but he's always been a pretty laid-back cat. Mr Pooter is on my lap as I type, an when he sleeps his little top fangs creep out over his bottom lip like a buck-toothed vampire. Uber-cute.

Have to go. Just itching to go back into Helen's world, fall asleep to the tone of her voice. Love that woman's writing, no matter how crabby she gets.

popping up again

2008-04-06T15:18:00.002+10:00

Having a papercut/origami/pop-up session tomorrow with my book class, and while doing a bit of research came up with this choice morsel:

Paper Toy - Celebrity bloopers here

I love the puppeteering at the end. I can't wait to see if I can get the whole class to do it...