House blues

Most of my friends will smile and nod when I say that I've always said I love moving house. And I do. I've done it a lot, I've always said that it's a chance to declutter and renew your sense of self, to start fresh and reinvent your life.

Up until now, every move has been from a rented house to a rented house. Pack, clean the walls, patch a few holes/cover up red wine stains, ring the service providers, move on. Brilliant. But...

Getting the house (lived in for a record 13 1/2 years, and thus much more cluttered than the usual 2-year stint) ready for sale in under three weeks while your partner is back at work, your son is commuting between his father and you every three days... is not fun. I try to make it so with a bit of Facebooking, but that just sucks me in to world of fun that I juts should be ignoring for a while. There's also the normal commitments to meet like a workshop in Bega to teach (booked before the sudden move decision) and a conference paper to write.

I have the building inspector coming this Monday morning, unfortunately just before the bathroom sealer person (the sealant had a 5-year warranty, and was misbehaving after only 2 years, so is being replaced, yay), then the window and carpet cleaner coming on Friday, Best Beloved will be mulching the garden while I'm in Bega, then the industrial cleaners coming on the next Monday, the photographers coming on the Tuesday, and then the house goes in the papers and on the interwebs.

Le puff, le pant, as Pepe le Pew's friend used to say.

OK. I'll stop whinging. There's a lovely big house up the road that is empty and waiting for me to sign the dotted line and move in. Without that thought, I'd be going crazy.

The good good news is that my cousins had their twin baby girls and are in Mumbai as we speak, living on similar nerves and adrenalin, aching to take them home and start a new life. So exciting for them! Welcome to the world, girls! (I couldn't help myself being pragmatic within my comment to them; when Bumblebee was in hospital having his first heart surgery at 3 months old, my mother had a cold, and she wore a facemask into the ward to protect him. She had so much praise from the doctors and nurses, because very few people think that their germs mean anything in a hospital environment. I hope J understands that I'm not being a party-pooper.)

Oh well, back to the sanding (I love my drill!) and the painting. And the Scrabble. And the helpful cats who bring me presents of mice and disembowel them close by to show me how helpful they are.

caught speeding

OK. Now I really know that I have to SLOW DOWN and stop trying to think about or do zillions of things at the same time.

Firstly, I completely forgot about a meeting I was supposed to (albeit quite informally) chair on Monday. That was embarrassing.

Then, when I had the rescheduled meeting today, I realised when I arrived that I had forgotten to inform one of the other committee members that it was even on.

THEN. Tonight, Bumblebee and I rocked up, revved up, to the cinema to see Twilight and New Moon back-to-back as a promo for the release of Eclipse and were pulled up, short, in the lobby, at the absence of excited teenage girls.

That's probably because the promo was LAST NIGHT. Not tonight. Sh*t B*m P** B*gger W*nk.

I felt like the baddest mother in the universe, or at least the ditziest. And decided that the $40 I'd blown in cinema tickets should be considered a speeding ticket... that I deserved.

Bumblebee was very gracious. But disappointed. As was I, not by the prospect of watching the bloody movies, but by spending some fun time one-on-one with him doing something that he liked, as opposed to hauling him to my studio or some opening.

Sigh.

We ended up having a bowl of soup at a nearby Asian cafe and then seeing Toy Story 3 3D, which we both thoroughly enjoyed, especially the evil monkey. All the way home we chortled over our fav bits, and did evil monkey impressions along to some tacky disco song on the radio, so when we got home we felt like we'd actually had the evening we wanted. And he still got to bed at a decent time.

I hate letting people down. And feeling like I'm not all there.

I'm going to try to remember to breathe a bit over the next few days... and we're going to rent New Moon over the weekend and watch it so that we can go to see Eclipse next week. With a crowd.

Sigh.




PS. Isn't Best Beloved back? I hear you wonder. Where was he? At home, dear ones, with his particular brand of grumpy man-flu. Oh yes, it's truly been a faaabulouus week. Not.

Another blues song day

Was woken up this morning,
By the feel of kitty feet --
I'd slept right through their breakfast,
They wanted stinky meat...

So they stomped,
And they moooaaaanned...
And they moooaaaanned...
And they stomped,

So I got up.

Sigh. I thought this week was going to be a doddle, especially with Easter at the end of it, but it's just getting crazier and crazier.

After I fed the kitties and let them out, I got a text message to remind me that I was supposed to be speaking to a group of Professional Practices students after work about how my artistic practice is informed or enhanced by my interaction on the internet. Ooh, yikes, I'd forgotten about that... and I have family coming for dinner! Ay yay yay.

Anyhoo, remembering that I have to do that means I've been sitting here all morning in between running after students (I'm also standing in for our normal printmaking technical officer while she's off in China, lucky lady), trying to muster my thoughts about you and I. 'You' being, yes, all of you, and all the wonderful experiences we've shared.

And I'm feeling guilty, because I haven't shared much more in the last XX number of months than jolly personal stuff and excuses for being busy. No lyrical waxings about the joy of using my hands in my making processes, or how much I dislike the cover of the new Steve Carroll book, or where I'm up to with my latest fine press book and its satellite exhibition... and for that, I apologise. I'm going to make a resolution here and now to write something decent at least once a week, and by that I mean 'professionally relevant'.

Next week I'm going to spend a few days in Bega with Colonel & Lady Duck (Bega readers, this is probably the only notice you'll get before I get there!), so I might spend some time then making a meaningful connection between a keyboard and my brain. I'm making this promise because that's connected to something I'm going to talk about this afternoon to a room full of glazed end-of-day eyes: one of the reasons why I blog is a desperate attempt to force myself into action, because if I tell people I'm going to do something enough times, I sort of have to do it. It doesn't always work, but it works more than fails, so I persevere.

Here's another thing I'm going to say out loud so that it happens: I'm going to have a good Easter break. It's going to be my mantra over the next few crazy days...

Oh -- and if you happen to read this today, and have anything constructive to add to my thoughts about internet enhancement of artistic practices, leave a comment!


PS: and after all that, I forgot to add this link to a blogpost by Jeff Peachey that I absolutely adore, read when it was first mounted, forgot about, and have now rediscovered. And have remembered to add. yay! As you were.

Running through the week

Puff! Puff! Pant!

Some weeks you feel like there's time to sleep. Other weeks whack you on a treadmill and laugh as you try to cope with running uphill on the spot at high speed. This is one of the latter.

I spent Saturday at a workshop run by American book-meister Ed Hutchins, learning really fun paper animation techniques. Not film animation, but more pop-up book methods. It was lots of fun, and I have a book of samples to show for it, but I can't show you because I took it in to the Bookstud to show my students and forgot to bring it home.

Saturday night I HAD to go to two parties. I know you won't be surprised when I tell you that I am a First Class Party Piker, especially when I've used up my daily quota of acting pleasant. But when one party is a farewell for someone going overseas and you won't see them again for ages, and the other party is the 21st of someone you've fondly watched survive adolescence, piking is just not an option. Unfortunately party 1 gave me vodka lime cocktails and party 2 gave me champagne, and when I mix grape with grain potatoes I get a terrible hangover.

So Sunday was pretty miserable, even though BB and I snuck away to a movie to find some time to hold hands instead of look at the backs of each other's heads (me on a computer, him at the stove). We went to see Dean Spanley, delightful movie, only spoiled by an old lady sitting behind us on her walker, surrounded by rustling plastic bags hung onto the handles, who made the following litany of annoying noises:

RUSTLES (chips, plastic bags, etc)
VELCRO HISSES
ZIPS (up, down, up, down, u- no, down)
CREAKS
POPS (a cork! tally ho!)
CLINKS
TUTS AND SIGHS
MOBILE PHONE (talked to someone up to instant of movie starting, and again the instant movie finished)
And -- no joke -- spent a weird period during the movie ads seemingly going through the cinema's bin.

Very odd.

I did manage to get to the Lifeline Book Fair briefly on Friday afternoon for an hour (only spent $25!) and then again briefly on Sunday afternoon when I just crammed masses of nice bindings into shopping bags to be taken away and carved up to make other bindings. (The nicest unwanted bindings were in the Dutch/German/French section. Other cultures are so boring with their bindings, saving all the decoration for the paper dustjackets. The D/G/F section was full of fantastic board embossings, gold blocked decorations and painted paper quarter bindings. And many have uber-exotic font choices as well, perfect for my current collage obsession.) I didn't look for reading matter. So I didn't find any :)

Anyhoo... I am trying to meet ZILLIONS of layout deadlines for various books, journals and community groups whilst setting up my part of an exhibition --

ANNOUNCEMENT!
WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH IS NOT ONLY COLONEL AND LADY DUCK'S WEDDING ANNIVERSARY BUT ALSO THE OPENING OF THE ART-I-TECH EXHIBITION AT THE ANU SCHOOL OF ART FOYER GALLERY AT 6PM. A showcase of art works by the school's excellent [insert creative collective noun here] of Technical Officers, including myself.

-- and preparing my head for participation in this coming weekend's TWO FIRES FESTIVAL at Braidwood, NSW.

Also trying to plan the school holidays around everyone's different access needs and working schedules, and realising I have to take Bumblebee shoe-shopping in the next 3 days so that he has something besides crocs to wear at next week's SCHOOL CAMP! And do a stocktake of his clothes. He turns 12 in a couple of weeks, and he's taller than ever. PUFF! PANT! Ye gods, it's frigging APRIL next week... someone turn the treadmill off! Please!

At least I have managed to update my website about the lovely works in progress for my upcoming Books to Hold or Let Go exhibition at Craft ACT. One thing off the checklist tonight.

I have resolved to write more about the actual arty farty stuff I've been doing lately. But not tonight, Josephine, not tonight.

Blues song day

There are many different ways to start the day, aren't there? There are two distinct ways among the many that I always take note of:

1. Balloon Days
You wake with no sense of anything special, just a normal day, and on the way to school/work/the shops you see a hot air balloon in the sky. The sight of it is so uplifting (see what I did?), that you just know the day is going to be a good one. This only works if you live in a city that has hot air balloon freaks in it. I suppose the balloon can be substituted by a special bird or car or something personally symbolic.

2. Blues Song days
This name is a bit misleading; it sounds as though the day is going to be miserable and bluesy. But no! It just means that you 'woke up this morning' (classic start to a blues song) knowing that it's a special day, for good or bad or indifferent reasons.

Today I had a Blues Song start to the day. I woke up this morning from a bad weird dream; just before I woke I was sitting in a weird little Datsun-type car, full of honey cornflake biscuits, with bamboo blinds on every window. A lot had happened before that point. I opened my eyes, and couldn't close them again.

Sunday is sleep-in day, sacred in the house, because there's no work, no school, and no markets. I love sleeping in, because all other days I am woken before 6.30am to eat breakfast with an early-waking man. To wake before seven on a day when you don't have to is tragic. So I lay there, thinking, trying not to think, trying to get dozy, but in such a weird wistful mood from the dream that I couldn't remember, I knew I had to just get up and do something meaningful with the day.

I spent an hour sorting out photos on my computer, which has too much stuff on it and not enough free memory to compete with the cat hair stuffing it has acquired over the years. When I got to the images of our Tasmanian holiday, I knew what the day was going to be for: writing the post I'd been meaning to write all year, about reading whilst travelling and how that affects your travel.

So I did.



And now I feel better.