Far away in time...

Sigh. Well, that was a lovely weekend. Here's a quick glimpse:


This is the view from the bedroom window of our cabin. Unfortunately I took it at the wrong time of the morning so you miss the view right down to the beach. The trees on the right belong to the clearing where we got married. It's the same cabin as well... not an anniversary, just a favorite place.


This is Depot Beach, as you walk down the path towards it from the cabin. The figures you can see are (not in order) Bumblebee, Best Beloved, Bernice Balconey and her lad, all playing piggy-in-the-middle frisbee on the sand. I joined in and spent quite a lot of time as piggy, because I am shite at frisbee.


This is a rare sighting of Bernice, admiring the view from the neighbouring beach once we'd walked there. It's very confusing -- Depot Beach is 'next' to Pebbly Beach, which is a lovely sandy beach, but in-between the two is an extremely pebbly beach, made up of nothing but stones, but it's not officially Pebbly Beach. Please explain.


This is the view she's looking at. This photo is revisiting this photo (a bit).


And just to be fair, here is a rare sighting of a relaxed &Duck, pleasuring a fellow feathered friend. She has a day-old new haircut that is looks nothing like it did the day before.*


Feeding birds and kangaroos is a vital part of the Depot charm. Here is Bernice's young-un, about to lure a bird onto his arm by lifting his hand slightly. At Depot you can walk about pretending you're a pirate, with yer trusty parrot on yer shoulder. Arrrr!


Or under your legs. Depot birds are not shy, and don't really care if you're sitting on a step. If there's seed under your legs, they'll go there. (I called this photo 'bird between the legs'. I'm curious how many views it will get from horny searchers.)


The kangaroos aren't shy either. This one wouldn't let me go until she'd had her way with the seed in my hand. Let's have another look at those claws, shall we?


Over a day later, I still have the claw indents on my wrist! Cheeky sod.

So we ate well (very well), we drank well, we slept well, I read two complete books, and now I have NO EXCUSE. I am rested. For now.

I hope your weekend was spiffing as well...





* My fab hairdresser and I are working on a plan to lengthen my hair (I am growing it, which is another entire blog post). When she asked me what I wanted next, I replied ' Russian Constructivist bob. Think Natalya Goncharova!' 'Wah?', she said. 'Sigh. Cate Blanchett in the latest Indiana Jones movie.' 'AAAHHHH! OK!' she said. I still have too many layers to make it a proper bob, but it won't take too long to get it there.

Remember to [BIG BREATH]

Well, it's not me. And I don't care. I'm not 14 and I don't feel insecure when I read it, but it sure makes me hate whoever mounts that crap on Facebook.

[TAKES A DEEP BREATH]

Just had to share that with you.



Anyhoo my lovelies, I'm off tomorrow to climb these steps again for a week at the Sturt Winter School. I think I'm ready, but I'm on my rollerskates and have very insistent flu symptoms, so it could all go horribly wrong.*

The first line of the Winter School promo says it all: Rug up and get creative this winter! All I can think about is the bloody communal bathrooms with stone floors and no heating. Although I did discover staff bathrooms on my last day of the Summer School and will be hunting one down in whichever boarding house I'm allotted to.

I won't be online at all, as I discovered last time that there is an extremely vigorous net nanny on every computer at Fresham within reach of innocent schoolgirls, which brings me back to that horrid Facebook ad above. It's not perverts you need to protect kids from, it's those revolting snipes at users' self-esteem. Built-in internet bullying... good on ya, Facebook! I'm going to think very carefully over the next week whether I want to stay on it, fun games or no.

[TAKE A DEEP BREATH]

So yes, I'm just about to sit down and sort out my materials. Best Beloved is cooking up an Indian storm, and we're quaffing a rather gorgeous red given to us by a loved person who has very good taste. Bumblebee has escaped down to Colonel Duck's prickle farm, where apparently he learned to drive the ride-on mower all by himself today. He told me he's allowed to drive it anytime, as long as he lets an adult know first.

[TAKE A DEEP BREATH]

So have a nice week, do lots of internut persnickery without me, and I'll be back before you can take a full yogic breath.

I'll just leave you with this:



And this one, because I'm wishful thinking...






*I have brought out the big guns: olive leaf extract and lashings of my special sick soup. Take that, evil germs and bugger off.

Remember to Breathe

It's Zoe's birthday! She's feeling the strain of nursing sick kids (including big kids) for weeks on end, so how about you pop over to either of her blogs and tell her how wonderful she is.

In the immortal words of the Bard:

Love's in need
Of love today
Don't delay,
Send yours in right away...
(doo doo do do doo doo)


()

Remember to breathe

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.

Remember to breathe

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))

Ooh, ooh, oooooh

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:

Remember to breathe (and soften)

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.

Remember to breathe

This was taken just over a year ago, when Canberra centre was hit by a freak hailstorm. The consequences weren't fun, but it's the memory of the hot sun and the freezing hail drifts that I wish to evoke, especially for comrades in South Australia at the moment. We're baking here in Canberra, but we're not as badly off as you.

So here's some hail in your glass -- bring on winter!

annual spring clean

I just couldn't help myself. I've gone Beta. Now I've got a very hungry son waiting for me to stop tweaking so that I can make him dinner.

Dinner plans have devolved from stir fry to meat pies & salad.

But I'm happy with the de-clutter. I need to do the same with the room I'm sitting in, but this is a good start.

I'm also randomly going through my old posts and adding labels/tags/whatever (this will last until I stop procrastinating and get back to work). The lack of comments in those early posts is due to my pathological template changing, not because nobody commented. I still have all the old comments backed up on a disk somewhere, because some of them -- most of them -- are classic and better to read through than old letters.

sixty seconds of breathing

I've probably said this before, but I hate washing up at night, because all I can see in the window is me, doing the washing up. At least in the daytime you can see out to the (cough) garden, which is an almost pretty bit of wilderness.

So it was lucky tonight that Best Beloved did the washing up, or we would have missed this, spotted out the window:



An odd bit of cloud at the end of our street, white and puffy and joyously fluffy, having a bit of an inner dummy-spit with lashings of lightning. Quite spectacular in a quiet sort of way. Bumblebee enjoyed it (if you turn the sound up you can hear him exclaim at one point). The video doesn't do it justice; the night sky was quite clear and cool, apart from this bubble of activity.

You need to just sit through the sixty seconds of it I shot; it's very soothing :)

Postscript:

The same cloud, the same evening, with better sound effects :)
Possibly the guys from the group house across the road from me...

Remember to breathe

I've just finished writing my 15 minute powerpoint talk for Mackay, and burnt it onto disk and backed it up on my thumby, and made a resolution never to leave powerpoint until the afternoon before I have to travel because it sucks up time more than a blog does. I've mostly finished packing but now I have to do one more round of the house thinking about what I actually need rather than what I think I need which is what I did for Tasmania and I ended up carting a stack of useless clothes around when all I needed was frigging jeans and t-shirts but that's what you get for packing at the last minute. I have to get up at 5am tomorrow because I'm getting a really early plane so that I can make it to a masterclass by 10am and I'll be spending tomorrow as a student, doing linocuts and stuff and now I'm worried that I haven't packed the right gear for the class. I realised when I was almost finished packing in a really minimal way that I was really proud of that I'd be going to at least two openings plus a conference dinner so I actually do need some smart clothes as well as conference lounging clothes so dammit have to rethink the whole thing.

BREATHE, GIRL!

I'm sorry that I haven't come back and done the annoying tourists. I haven't even had time to go over to Zoe's and tell her about the blogmeet which is something I really wanted to do before I left again but that's cats, as BB says. He's in bed right now because he needs his beauty sleep before he drives me to the airport at frigging 5.30.

IN OUT IN OUT

Anyhoo, this picture is something nice to look at until I can get on line again, which may be tomorrow as my digs have internet but may be when I get back because there will be lots to do.

KTHANXBAI

XXX

Remember to breathe

When the whole household is sick, when deadlines* are to be deaded before bubbly can be opened, and when Xmas is looming like yet another deadline, this is where I go in my head.

May it calm you down as well.









* Not you, Waratah!

write your own adventure

Now that I've dealt with my hangover (cooked breakfast, lashing of tea) and printed a page edition, I can sit and reflect.

Firstly, what they said. And them.

As I've been printing, I've been listening to the excellent Go-Betweens tribute album Write Your Adventures Down, because it fits today so well. Queensland rocks today, and the joyously optimistic yet realistically world-weary lyrics are spot-on.

Here's my two-cents, for what it's worth.

I am so so so excited. It's got nothing to do with whether the next three years will be good or bad. I don't care if small businesses suffer or if everything said last night in the heat of victory was hollow and shallow or deeply enriching and virtuous. I actually don't have any faith in the Labor Party being any better than the Liberals.

What excites me is that we started to write our own adventure. We took a step into the unknown. we made a leap of faith. we used our imagination, even if just a little bit. We took a punt.

If we now live in a less stable universe, isn't it a little bit exciting? The signs were all reading that the next few years is going to be hard economically even with a Liberal government. So why not travel along a while on the edge and see what happens?

I repeat: I'M SO PROUD OF YOU FOR NOT TAKING THE SAFEST ROUTE.


Bernice Balconey emailed me last week and asked if she could visit on election night. She was a frigging bunch of nerves, she said, and whatever happened she wanted to be amongst friends. We all went to Zoe's, and Chez Crazybrave was chockers with people who obviously all felt the same way. The nervousness was palpable, and as the evening went on people started breathing -- and drinking. Then there was kissing, then hugging. You could hear the cheers from the tally room from where we were, barely a kilometre away.

On the way home I thought: there's a lot of sex in the air tonight. If anyone's sober enough to manage it!

I woke up this morning and Best Beloved asked me if it was all a dream. It was fantastic to be able to say 'no, darling, it's all real'. I've been making tight-chested squeaks all day, like a schoolgirl in front of her teen idol. The first squeak was within seconds of waking: a female Deputy Prime Minister! The second was a few seconds after that: a Prime Minister living in the Lodge! And so forth, all through the morning. Little things that make me happy. REMEMBER TO BREATHE.

Bernice got up and walked into Dickson to get the papers. The first person she passed smiled at her, so she smiled back. She tried it on the next person, and got another smile back. Apparently she then started saying 'good morning' and getting good results. She was so high when she returned that she spent some time on my front verandah calling out 'great morning' to anyone wandering past. Love is all around, at least in the inner north of the ACT...

On tv, we watched the news. First the election results. Then a cruise ship had sunk in the Antarctic (Did you know, said Bernice, that thousands of people are cruising the Antarctic every year? They've doing so much damage. This might scare the buggers off a bit...) and then a fire in Malibu, damaging the property of numerous wealthy occupants (What is this? said Bernice gleefully, international Make A Leftie Happy day?)

And now Peter Costello! Can today get any better?

Mind you, as Bernice and I discussed this morning, the mantra is, and shall remain:

Remember to breathe

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Colonel and Lady Duck's garden is glorious in Spring.




*woops, I got in trouble for saying it was my mother's garden when my dad apparently does all the work in it these days... sorry, Colonel Duck!

Remember to breathe

Today, I am chuffed to offer you one of my favoritest news stories presented by one of my favoritest comic artists, Mandy Ord. Glorious!



If you like her work, she's started a blog. And you can find her in various comic shops, usually in compilations. But I hear on the grapevine that she's working on a graphic novel, which makes me very happy.

Remember to breathe

... especially when you're 84 like sculptor Jan Brown, who made most of the objects you can see in this photo. Except for the Christmassy thing at the front and the real bird looking in at the window, which Jan and I found highly amusing when I popped in to see her last week. I've mentioned Jan before; walking into her loungeroom is sometimes quite unnerving because of all the birdy eyes looking your way.

Anyhoo, this birdy arrangement is for Sacha, my lovely bird-loving friend in Brisbane who has had the most revolting few weeks, including the sudden death of one of her beautiful (and young) cats. And for anyone else who needs well-wishing. I wish you well.

Remember to breathe

This morning the banksia tree decided to have a dance with the camelia bush behind my home office's roman blind. It was so lovely I sat and watched it for ages and then decided to capture it for future dreaminess.

It reminded me a bit of Laura's kitchen blind, which would probably evoke similar dreaminesses.

Remember to breathe

Take a moment to breathe -- and enjoy the flea circus.

via Ample Sanity (again! Thanks!)

Remember to breathe, Fluffy

Fluffy is under her doona and has turned her comments off because she feels bad about feeling bad. So I'm posting a flower for her, and for anyone else having any kind of tough time at the moment.



I know it's a bit withered around the edges, but it's a real flower, still planted in the ground when I took the photo, and obviously only just past its prime. Don't you think the colours are gorgeous and cheery?

I'm not making a connection here about being past your prime; I'm sorry if this reads that way. This flower is from a friend's garden, someone who suffers from a major depression. He tends to hide himself away when he's down, which happens to be most of the time. He's one of those people whom you can't ring to arrange to see -- he won't come to the rendezvous point. You have to just drop in on him at the house. If he's low he won't answer the door; if he's ok he'll open the door, lead you through his incredibly dirty and cluttered house (piles and piles of the most interesting things you've ever seen: old tools, books, crockery, antique toys, hats, spoons, machinery, with only narrow paths to walk through) into the garden. No; into HIS garden.

He has a green thumb, and that man can grow anything. He has transformed a bare block into the most amazing space full of colour, movement, prickles, fruit, frogs, fish, ferns, herbs and most anything else you can think of. He has a water-recycling plant made of pipes and blow-up baby pools and certain water-plants, so that he doesn't use a lot of town water. Unable to bear working for the Man, he now sells potted-up plants at markets to supplement his government hand-out.

I don't think he's wasting his time with his plants, and if he didn't have them, he'd probably be certifiably mad by now. They keep him alive as he keeps them alive, and they fulfil him as the creative person his family always had hopes of him being. And he's cheery in his garden. It's his own private universe, and the rest of the world can sod themselves.

Fluffy, you are an extremely resourceful, creative and generous person. I don't know about your resilience, but I'm hoping that it can be bolstered by rest. Stay under the doona as long as it takes. Tiny Man will cope with a mum who lets him under the doona too and reads with him, or just flops on the couch and watches tv for days. He'll just do his own thing for a while, and he'll eat baked beans on toast forever. The down times need downtimes. Eventually you get so bored with the smell of stale doona air that you get up, have a shower and go and do something for a break from having a break. And then hopefully the fun starts again. Or not. Maybe you just get a slightly more even keel.

Anyhoo, just wanted really to say hang in there, kiddo. And this goes for all of youse.

Remember to breathe

I forgot to remember to breathe, and it shows, doesn't it, with all that crabbiness of the last few posts. I'm sitting at my art school computer, and I don't really have an image that I can post nearby, so I offer humbly some space...




















... and my favorite find of today's crop of ebay searches: a name.

MANLY BANISTER

Isn't that a great name?

I thought it MUST be a pseudonym, but then I found an article written by him where he tells of creating a flotilla of pseudonyms to fill the first issue of his mimeographed zine (note to anyone thinking that 'zine' is a modern term). As if you could make up a better one than his own name! I am all curiosity as to what those pseudonyms were, and if I ever get time, will hunt down a copy of the first issue of The Nekromantikon to find out.

If anyone out there know anything about any of this, please share!