Entertaining

I'm sitting in my clean, re-instated lounge room: furniture back into place, floor vacuumed, surfaces uncluttered.

[Quick! Somebody scrape Colonel Duck from the floor & give him a stiff drink...]

Down in the studio, Jon is working on the press for his Broadside residency. He's been on a steep learning curve, having never printed with type before, and as a painter, he's been resisting the hard edges of the task (like working in blocks and straight lines), but today he's decided to commit to one matrix, and is locking wood type up in a chase so that he can concentrate on playing with the inks in a painterly way. He comes on Thursdays, and Helani comes on Wednesdays, and they both bring lunch to share with me, which is lovely and a ritual I enjoy very much, especially for the conversations we have.

I'm sitting here enjoying the clean space, because the last week has been slightly chaotic - in a good way.

First, of course, we had Thanksgiving: the real deal, because of Julia, my American neighbour and her fun-loving landlord/flattie Lisa. As real as we could get it, anyway. I moved my outdoor table into the big loungeroom and moved the couch out to the other room, and we made one big dining area, with masses of spray roses from the back yard and candles.



Lisa prepared an ENORMOUS turkey that was cooked in my oven through the afternoon:



Julia made pumpkin pies, pecan pies, sweet potato with marshmallow topping (meant to be a savoury!) and an amazing gluten-free stuffing involving cranberries & nuts and yummy things.

Mummy Crit, who was invited because her partner is a very homesick American (and also the fact that she's good company), made a mushroom-bean casserole and brussel sprouts cooked with bacon, plus many tins of root beer (yum!).

Bumblebee peeled 4kgs of potatoes, which I then diced and cooked and mashed, but Crit took over the mashing because I slightly undercooked them and they needed her touch to be perfect. He also made a kick-ass salad (he's getting very good at salad!).

Other people, who were mostly friends of Julia's and hence were either ANU linguists or anthropologists, brought fruit, cheeses and such stuffs.



By the end of the evening the turkey was the only thing that wasn't stuffed anymore. Julia was very happy.



More photos here.


The next day I cleaned up, but decided to leave the tables where they were until Best Beloved got home from the US (while we were celebrating Thanksgiving, he was losing that particular day from his life!). He got home at lunchtime, without his bag, which was lost in transit! Noooooooooo! No presents!

Well, almost no presents. He still had the duty-free bag. Two big bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin (at $25 each!) and a heap of maple syrup flavoured things like biscuits and chocolate. And a wee little Day-of-the-Dead present for me of a little guitar-playing skeleton lady in a matchbox that fitted into his checked luggage.

Poor bugger, he had to travel to NZ on Tuesday, and all his work stuff was in the bag. He hassled and hassled and talked to his airport contacts (that's his public servant special subject) but for ages we weren't sure if he'd see the bag again, or if it would be lost in the great mosh of lost luggage that haunts the world.

So we decided that we had a window of opportunity with the giant dining room and his travelling, and we called up a bunch of people he hadn't seen for a while and we had a bring-a-plate curry meal on Sunday night. We didn't get maximum numbers, but we had enough people to have a very fun night. And all the leftovers and cleaning up afterwards. Mind you, I wasn't sick of the chicken biriyani BB cooked after eating it for three days.

On Monday I had a visiting day: I went {shiver} across the lake! And all the way down to Condor! I visited my dear friend Narelle, who manages the ANCA studios. We've had many catch-ups around my turf, I figured it was time to visit her in hers. It was great fun, with lots of yummy food and talking. On the way back (I hate making an 80km round trip without batching a few things) I visited Elephant's Child, and we had a cuppa and swapped good reading books. Then I dropped in on the Aged Poet for a while and read her some of her own poetry (best thing about a failing memory, you like to hear about your own good work), then headed home, completely talked out.

And then on Tuesday the heavens opened, and lo, thunder and lighting was all around. Tuesday night was a bout of incredible weather, and if you were in it too, I hope you were safe and warm. BB went to Wellington, NZ, but while he was sitting at Sydney airport waiting for his flight out, his luggage was sitting there to, waiting for a flight to Canberra. The poor courier delivered it in the middle of a downpour, with lightning flashing overhead. The bag is now sitting patiently in the corner, full of presents and dirty washing, waiting for its master to come back to it on Saturday.

We couldn't sleep for the lightning, so I let Bumblebee come out of bed and we put a couple of comfy chairs facing the window and we watched the show through our wonderful front window. It was awesome, in the true sense of the word: horizontal lightning, vertical lightning, great growls of thunder.

We reminisced about the story I used to tell him when he was little and scared during storms. I made it up after a visit to Vinnies when I found a weird stuffed toy that was a lion in a safari outfit and no tail; it looked like Steve Irwin as a lion. I used to have a little bag of fresh toys in the laundry cupboard as a distraction if we were having a hard day. On this particular evening, it was thundering wildly and we were sitting on the kitchen floor eating popcorn (making and eating popcorn is another great fear distracter) and I told him that the thunder is actually a giant lion that lives in the sky, and every now and again lightning would hit his tail and he would roar. The poor grumpy lion! we exclaimed together as the thunder grumbled again. And you know, I said, there's only so many times a lion can get hit on the tail before his tail falls off and he doesn't want to live in the sky anymore, no matter how beautiful it is. Poor grumpy lion! And I pulled out the lion toy and said that this lion had come down from the storm and wanted a nice place to live where no one would make fun of his having no tail. Poor grumpy lion! I'll be his friend! B exclaimed. He called him 'Funky' and he still has him... out of sight, but not very far from his bed.

We laughed about the story and did that wonderful thing you can do with teenage boys, which is talking sideways while they think they're doing something else. I learned a lot, and then we staggered off to bed, aware that there was school etc in the morning.

The 'etc' turned out to be my annual chance to go to the art school to have a preview of the graduating show and pick out a couple of recipients for next year's Broadside Residency. I'm looking forward to meeting the two that I picked (I can't reveal them until Friday, when I give them their 'award' at the exhibition opening (I'm also going because Robyn Archer is opening the show!). Exciting! It's a good exhibition this year, I recommend a visit. It's a wonderful thing when the whole school becomes an enormous gallery.

And then last night we had my fortnightly Scrabble-dumpling soiree; fortnightly because it coincides with byrd's child-free weeks, and he and his lovely lady are the staple ingredient of the S-D nights, which have been happening in many shapes and forms since he was camping in our back yard when he had a homeless stint. We used to just drink beers in front of Spicks & Specks, but over the last few months it's transformed into something that is so much fun I haven't even missed S&S. Food used to be a bit of potluck until we hit upon the plan of everyone bringing a packet of frozen dumplings to steam with my big double bamboo steamer and we gobble them with chopsticks and various dipping sauces. Much easier.

We started the evening with an impromptu visit from neighbour Lisa's a capella group who gave us a taste of their repertoire before they do their first public gig later in the week: Java Jive, Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy and Love is in the Air. It was fantastic!

Then a few of us played Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist parlour game where you fold a paper into four strips, and one person draws a head (leaving neck lines into the next section), folds it over, and the next drawing is of the torso to the waist (leaving lines again), then the next is the pelvis to the knees, and then the lower legs and feet. Sometimes we got a bit confused about direction, so things ended up having feety things at both ends! And we also had to add a little bit of text to make it fun.

Here are a few examples - the scans do no justice to the colours! Hoon (byrd's lady, and an old friend/housemate of mine) did some colouring-in of the drawings through the rest of the evening, when she wasn't dancing to Jeff Buckley, something I've never seen anyone do, but then she's someone who is always gorgeously different.







If you look closely, you'll see an upside-down portrait of me done by byrd, and Bumblebee's 'love lightning'. It was a lovely evening. I fell off the wagon (only one day early), and we all drank wine and played Scrabble until far too late.

Hence the reason why I'm sitting quietly, having finally put the big table outside, finally done a big vacuum and put the couch back, and put the umpteenth load of dishes in the dishwasher that has been working very very hard this week.

And this is why I'm not entertaining again for a little while. At least until next fortnight, when the Scrabble board starts to rattle in the cupboard in excitement around lunchtime.

Poo bum

I thought, since I've packed up all our internetty connection thingies* at home, that I'd be able to download some of my documentary snaps at work & show you yesterday's massive bedmaking effort.

But poo bum, no. My work computer has been overhauled since I last worked here (6 months) and all the useful things have been removed, and no software has been updated. All I can use is the internet. I can't even download photos. Sigh. Getting that all fixed will take a lot of time and phone-based earache and energy that I just can't spare right now.

As I type (quicky between chores), Best Beloved and byrd are packing all our furniture into a hired truck and hauling them one kilometre up the road to the new house. I'm best at work, out of the way, we both agreed when we decided, late yesterday, to go ahead with the move even though our dratted house buyers HAVEN'T exchanged yet. We figure, since they have requested permission to move in before Settlement and pay us rent etc, that they are serious and won't fall through.

So. Today, after work, I ride my bike to the new abode! I saw hot air balloons this morning on the way back from driving BB to Fyshwick to pick up the truck. Good-o, I thought: it's a Balloon Day. Excellent omen.

Yesterday our new beds were delivered. We borrowed enough money to buy a couple of new things, like beds and a BBQ (things that are better bought new, not secondhand) and the rest of our purchases will be secondhand, like couches and dining chairs -- Zoe is lending us a lovely cedar dining table that is sculking in the corner of her house, aching to entertain. Colonel and Lady Duck bought us an outdoor table setting as a house gift, bless them. It arrives today too, flatpacked and ready to assemble.

Bumblebee's new bed is a King Single, and only needed its little feet screwed on to the base (which is also a bed in its own right, so the two halves can be pulled apart for sleep-overs). Our bed, however, was delivered flat-packed (apart from the mattress) and needed to be assembled. So that was yesterday's task for me.

I will insert before and after photos here when I can upload them. Suffice to say that there is a special circle in Hell for people who write construct assemblage instruction sheets. All the bits were there, but the instructions were supremely unhelpful, and in fact quite obstructive. I eventually just glanced at it to make sure I wasn't doing anything downright dangerous, and worked it out for myself. I like assembling things; I have friends who ring me up to build their Ikea whatevers etc for them, but I do get very cranky with bad instruction design.

I now have a magnificent (and solid) King Size gas-lift storage bed, fully made up and ready for us to fall into, exhausted, tonight. I feel righteous. The flat-packed outdoor setting will be a lot easier, I'm hoping!

So the cats are nervous, sticking together in worry and not sure whether we're abandoning them, or if we'll be taking them to the vet later or something. I can't wait for them to be prowling around the new rooms. Every window sill is wide enough for them to laze upon! Kitty heaven. As the nice man who came yesterday to install the catflap said: 'you don't find houses like this anymore.'

SQUUEEEEEE!



* I've been the resident amateur IT person at every workplace I've worked since the introduction of the Mac Classic. I put it down to my use of simple and accessible technical vocabulary.

Caretaker mode

Week two of caretaker mode, where we have to be careful about how much mess we make in any part of the house and garden. For people like us, who trail grunge as we walk, it's excruciating. Moving into our next house will be like releasing your overfed gut from a tight belt or taking off a tight pair of shoes and walking barefoot on a cool wooden floor.

Actually, even though I don't wear tight shoes as a life philosophy, walking barefoot on the cool wooden floors of this house is just sooooo good when the weather is this hot and sticky. Since the next place is carpeted, I'm storing up the nice feeling while it lasts.

Lots of sniffs but no bites as yet. We're having another open session on Wednesday, and we might have a bit of something fun in the Real Estate section on Saturday if my agent gets her indominable way. She's a fighter, I tell you.

Yesterday I got to spend the whole day in my lovely cool studio... sigh of relief. As those of you know who hang out in studios, or even with a kitchen table, you can't just plunge in to being creative, unless you have something burning to be done. I'm feeling a bit disconnected, so I decided to do something that would just take a day, and be completed by the end of the day... doing with a sense of purpose, such a good feeling.

I made jam labels for Best Beloved's produce:




I decided to play with the cats as an identifying symbol of our household, and so created the 'Two Tails' motif. I'm probably going to make an Ex Libris for us out of the label design on the far right. They're a tad clunky, it's my first play with linocutting for ages, and I printed them using my nipping press. Still, it was a happy day's work.

Bumblebee gets home today after four weeks of only being home for two days at a time. He doesn't start school until next week, so we can have some fun together this week (as long as we don't mess up the house!). I took him to see the Space Invaders show at the NGA last week, which we both really enjoyed. He was very impressed at seeing byrd's work in there. It's a great show, only running for a few more weeks if you like a bit of street art.

I'm teaching a few times next month (as in February, tomorrow): a one-day class at the Belconnen Arts Centre on Asian Stab binding (and will be back there in March for a day of Altered Books) and a 2-Saturday class at Megalo doing a broad survey of simple bookarts bindings. Both classes will be a lot of fun, so if you fancy a bit of making, come along. At the very least I need to earn some money! New houses aren't cheap :)

Ergh, time to go outside again. Why can't we just skip February and head straight into Autumn? I adore Autumn, it's the most glorious time to be in Canberra (besides Spring).

Oh -- went to see Another Year (by Mike Leigh) the other day. At the same time, Best Beloved saw Black Swan. I was too chicken to go to it. We both came out wishing the other had seen our movies. So on the way home we told each other all about them. No spoilers for you, but both are really good. The Coen brothers' remake of True Grit is even better.

Do yourselves a faaaaaaavvvvooooouuur.

Run, river, run

I'm lying on my old mattress, the one I used to sleep on before Best Beloved moved into my life, and it now lives at Colonel and Lady Duck's prickle farm. I'm down here to teach a bookarts weekend, which I've just done. It was fun, but really hot and sweaty. The mattress is great, and I have the whole bed to myself. Luxury!

There hasn't been much time to do anything else except teach and lie on the mattress, since I've also been writing the paper that I've been trying to write for weeks, that is due by COB tomorrow. Tomorrow I drive back to Canberra to finish decluttering the house in time for the Cleaners to clean, and then on Tuesday we're having our Official Real Estate Photos taken.

Gosh, I'm feeling so ruddy GROWN UP.

I think I've finished the paper. It's for the Impact 7 conference in September. They want the paper now, to be submitted and peer-reviewed, so I'm not too worried. I figure if there's something screwy about it, the peers will pick it up & tell me to make changes. And I will.

Before I left home on Friday, I finally finished all the painting of bits of the house that needed refreshing... nearly all of it, really.

Did I tell you that the goaty smell in Bumblebee's room wasn't actually teenage goat smell, but a school bag or two full of rotting uneaten lunches? EWWWWWWWWWW. My punishment is to not care that his new room has floral curtains when we move in. He can have black curtains and a Sith bedspread when he has proved to me that he can [a] make and eat his own lunches and [b] use a bin if he has leftovers. He's also been given the Monkey Painting to live with for a while.

The Monkey Painting is a special member of the family. Best Beloved, when he was about eight, admired the stuffed monkey of a family friend. So the nice old lady, instead of giving him the monkey, painted. a. picture. of. it. and gave it to him for his next birthday. WTF? It became one of his treasured possessions. So now we have a very odd painting of a stuffed monkey that stares at you inanely from the canvas. Up to now I have hung it in the loo, where it grins down upon you as you wee, and to avoid the stare you have to look at the Times Table poster underneath it. It's done wonders for our maths skillz.

But. Until he's learned his lesson, The Monkey Painting will live in Bumblebee's new bedroom, staring at him until he empties his schoolbag each afternoon. I think it's going to work. I hope so, and then I'll have to find another place to hang it, somewhere out of the way but suitably visible so that BB doesn't think I hate the painting. I don't, but it's slightly creepy in a 1970s clown-on-black-velvet kind of way.

Anyhoo, the title of this post celebrates the fact that the Bega River is running, the first time I've seen it with water in it for YEARS. It was so hot today that a couple of my class participants ducked off at lunchtime and had a swim in the river. I didn't join them because if I had, I probably wouldn't have returned to the class. We were in the Bega CWA Hall, a delightful venue complete with a caretaker living in the back flat, who had been living there for TWENTY YEARS. wow.

OK, bedtime for bo-bos. Tired. Verry, verrrry tired.

Almost there (ii)

Have resolved to stop feeling cranky about what I'm doing. My friend Jo's latest post and all the news that is around us about the flooding has brought it home to me that what I'm doing is absolutely minor compared to what is ahead of a lot of Queenslanders. At least my house isn't full of mud (although what was behind our kitchen bookshelf was quite alarming).

Bumblebee is back for his two days of home but isn't very useful (he's a tad cack-handed in a gawky teenage way) so is watching Stah Waz to stay out of the way and doing occasional forays to the shops for me. The car is at the garage and it's raining so we're stuck at home, a great excuse to try to finish all the indoor chores.

Better get on. I'm sorry about the floods, hope all my Qld friends are coping. I'm thinking dry thoughts for you.

Almost there

Trying to remember to breathe...





...but all I'm breathing is paint fumes.

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.

Happy New Year

Welcome to my eighth year of blogging. I hope you're all enjoying the new year so far.

Our new year started with being woken by fleas in our bed.

Apparently fleas like a quiet house. I've had two tales told to me by members of each side of my family (old and new) of going away and coming back to a house so full of fleas that [tale 1] their feet were black with fleas as if wearing ankle socks and [tale 2] they had to sleep on a shelf of a wardrobe with the door closed to escape them. Apparently vibrations keep them (fleas, not both sides of my family) from wantonly breeding, but that sounds a bit suspect to me. Probably more to do with the lack of attention.

Anyhoo, we woke up resolved to do something about it. Going to Woollies at opening time on New Year's Day is now my favorite time to shop... so quiet! And all the people who are there are clutching their heads slightly. Almost as good as Best Beloved's mother who apparently went shopping while the whole world was watching the moon landing. Again, I'm a bit skeptical of that tale. Who was serving her?

We pulled the bed apart and cleared all the floors of the carpeted end of the house, kicked the cats outside, and set off some flea bombs. This, of course, meant that we had to go out for a few hours into the killing heat, so we went to the movies.

We saw The King's Speech. It was in Dendy's largest cinema, and there were no spare seats. The audience was vocally appreciative, laughing and cheering and at the end clapping. I think it's not only that the movie is excellent, with wonderful acting and a spiffing script; it does more to generate a sense of pride in being Australian than any Australian film could. I can't speak for any other audience member, but I related to Lionel's egalitarian spirit, his larrikin (sp?) streak, and his cheekiness. Colin Firth was his usual loveliness, especially when he swore. Sigh.

We came home feeling karmically unbalanced, having unleashed noxious gases upon hundreds of little bodies. But a solid vacuum and a bedding change later (plus a good cold shower), we feel much, much better.

Good enough to keep packing & cleaning tomorrow.

Photos are off, luv. I did lose my camera. Yes, I know that my iPhone has one, but it hasn't got a flash or macro. I'm officially in Object Mourning.

terribubbly sad but happy too

To be honest, I didn't know that Ruth Park was still alive until yesterday when she died. She's three years older than the Aged Poet (who is 90), so she had a lovely long life (although I hope she enjoyed her Extreme Old Age more than the AP is).

We are huge fans of The Muddle-headed Wombat. I packed the books away yesterday so I can't give you an example of the wonderful writing. Best Beloved was reading them aloud to me when I was sick recently and he does all the voices so well. In our minds Padge is Wombat and Puss is Pooter. Secretly in my mind, I am Mouse, Bumblebee is Wombat and BB is Puss.

Her novels and autobiographical work are wonderful as well, of course, but if she'd only ever written TMHW, it would have been legacy enough. Thank you, RP, and RIP.





The most excellent news is that after some high-tension negotiation argy bargy, we got to a price we could pay on the house we like. We haven't exchanged contracts yet, so cross fingers for me that all goes well until then. The best bit of the agreement is that we will get access to the new house's garage between Exchange and Settlement to store all our boxes etc so that the old house can be clear and uncluttered for the Open House time! *big sigh of relief*

I was out last night, and I'd left a tense and gloomy household, because of the argy-bargy. They were supposed to be cooking dinner, but nothing much had happened by the time I left. Then I got a text saying BRING PIZZA AND CHAMPAGNE. Shazam! I happily did so, knowing that the world had just turned on its axis.


So I'm suspending my studio activities for a month (unless something really urgent comes up) and devoting my energy to packing, painting, patching, and what ever else comes up. Apart from Christmas, of course. It's going to be extra relaxing, because we know how much work is ahead of us. W00T!

Not Wordless Wednesday

Although here's a little snap that could be wordless:








Oh, it's all excitement here.



Not wanting to jinx the process (I'm a practical person with odd little superstitions), we've put an offer in for the house we fell for, and have had a fairly positive response, with a few little points to negotiate (like the actual price), so it's full steam ahead for gussying up the Private Jetty for sale.

I've been trying to meet all my normal commitments whilst furiously painting bookshelves and packing books and knick-knacks to unclutter the space. I packed four boxes of little bits & pieces and afterwards couldn't even tell the difference, which was a bit depressing. Boxes are arriving en masse today so I can start packing up the piles of books that came from the main bookshelf in the loungeroom (that I've been meaning to paint for seven years, since it was built) and then we can move freely in the space again. One of the terms we're negotiating is to be able to use the garage space of the new house (which will eventually be Studio Duck) between Exchange and Settlement to store our boxes while we sell this house. Thankfully that shouldn't be a problem, according to the agent.

On the weekend I was sugar-soaping a few spots in readiness for paint and decided to use the rest of the bucket on the window-frames. Every spot I touched seemed to flake off, and I had a spot of the wobblies. Poor BB came in from the garden where he was doing a sterling job of de-ivying and de-cluttering and I had my first meltdown of the process, which was quickly defused by the swift administration of a chocolate brownie. Phew.

Ceiling Cat, bless sugar soap.

I'm so glad I'm not a painter as an artist. I really don't connect with the medium.

Of course, there has been help. Colonel Duck is here doing a marvellous job on the garden with his magic whippersnipper and DIY skillz


(that's the nicest view of his bum that I could get out of three photos)

I'm very grateful, and have been plying him with tea and fruit cake and risotto and wine, etc.

And of course, the cats are helping.



Mr Padge walked all over the (removable) shelves I was painting out the front and got white paddy paws, and Mr Pooter sniffed the shelves and ended up with a white Hitleresque moustache. All washed off now, but fricking hilarious.


Here's something to make *you* laugh. It made me laugh like a drain, and was a great way to bring ancient Egyptian history alive for Bumblebee:



(For anyone without access to pictures, like Thirdcat, it's a clip about Oprah Winfrey giving thousands of her most devoted fans the chance to be buried with her in a vast tomb called the Oprahmidion (built by said fans), along with all her favorite products to be used in the afterlife. Comedy gold.)

Passive aggressive non-art making

Wow, last weekend was exhaustipating.

I wanted to just be in the studio this week, binding a batch of Transmigration to fulfill a purchase order (only buying one copy, so there's a nice fresh batch if anyone's interested), but of course, life got in the way, so while I got the batch done, I didn't get a lot else done. Bumblebee's laptop died, 6 months after purchase, so luckily it's within warranty, but the kerfuffle getting it to the techos and then the extra kerfuffly kerfuffle trying to pick it up again hasn't endeared me to the magical world of PCs, no matter how much I love The IT Crowd (that link is to a fun TIC game). I should have bought him a Mac, the techos are closer to home.

Combine that with the Aged Poet needing extra attention, various chores I had to run and some extra argy-bargy when Bumblebee accidentally took my studio keys to school with him and I had to jump through hoops to get them back because high schools don't like parents just wandering into school to talk to their children (unlike Primary Schools, which think you're an anti-social weirdo if you don't pop in once a week... year 7 is a transition for parents as much as the kids), not much art-making got done.

[breathes in]

[breathes out]

Which reminds me of that fabulous Ben Folds Five line: all this breathing in, never breathing out... (from the song FAIR)

And then yesterday I spent the morning helping Bumblebee clean his room. Five shopping bags full of rubbish, two vacuum cleaner bagless cannisters full of crud and a number of plastic boxes full of toys deemed too young for him (one of which is scrawled over with thick black marker saying DO NOT THROW OUT DO NOT SELL), a window open and the removal of sundry dirty clothes (socks thrown behind the bookcase, etc) and fetid towels, his room has finally temporarily lost its goaty reek and you can actually see the floor.

It was with a huge sigh of relief, then, that I went to the studio yesterday, closed the door on the world, rolled my sleeves up and spent a few happy hours playing with type, paper and yellow ink.

You'd think it would be a simple task, but yellow ink needs very clean rollers to print clean and bright and not a dirty olive colour. In fact, the day before, I'd inked up Kitty the Press with said yellow ink, and been very disappointed, even though I'd cleaned the rollers and all the bits around them scrupulously. I decided to abandon the machine's rollers and went out to the local art store (Maureen's, not Eckers-crap, of course) and bought a brand new spotless hand brayer. It is now my Yellow Roller. Not a spot of anything else will touch it.

And thus I progressed from this:



to this:



And I hope you can tell the difference in brightness and clarity. I was completely inspired at the Print Symposium by Tim Maguire's amazing CMYK work, and am embarking upon a spot of colour play as a result. This particular piece is for the latest Book Art Object project. One layer done, five to go.

Today we decided to have a family day, so I stayed away from the studio, even though I'm longing to get back to play with magenta ink. We haggled all day over things to do together: no-one wanted to ride at the lake, all the good movies were over by the time we thought of it, with no afternoon sessions, and we didn't want to stay home and attack the garden. Then I remembered that the Old Canberra Inn, which is basically our local pub apart from anything in Dickson, has free pool tables on Sundays. Bonus! Within half an hour we were happily playing pool, helping ourselves to the free jukebox with its bikie-inspired playlist (I taught Bumblebee the informal and very rude chorus to The Angel's Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, to BB's vaguely disapproving look, and fell in love over again with Ian Moss and Don Walker, wishing that Jimmy had choked on his own vomit sometime in the 80s), but still, in the back of my mind there was a 'I could be printing right now' sensation. I swallowed it, but it's slightly bitter as it goes down.

I came up with a wonderful music trivia question, and you're welcome to use it if you have to compose trivia nights or whatever:

What have these three songs got in common:

and you play excerpts of 'Bow River' by Cold Chisel (or 'Saturday Night'), 'Errol', by Australian Crawl, and a third one, which you can make tricky by adding your own third or you can make it easy by making the third one a Ringo Beatles song.

Answer? They are all songs not sung by the band's lead singer/s.

What do you think? Got any better or additional examples?



Sigh. Now Bumblebee looks like he's got some horrid throat swelling thingy, so I've dosed him up with garlicky chicken soup and am mentally preparing to not go anywhere tomorrow except the doctor. Sigh. I'll get back to the studio sometime. At least it's waiting there for me, patiently.

Next weekend I'm teaching a book class at Megalo, and there are spaces, if anyone's interested. I'm trying to rustle up participants, because the more people there are, the more I get paid, and I'm not earning anything regular until I start back at the BookStud next year. So if you know anyone that would love to learn how to make booky things, let them know. My bills will be most grateful.

Best Beloved just said goodnight, as he's having a Sleep Head-start (I've worked out a great system: if he goes to sleep solidly first, I can creep in and read an e-book under the sheets for a while, which beats him whinging at me to turn the light off), and as he kissed my neck he said 'mmm, you smell nice, what is it?'

'Hogget.' I replied. It must be, because I slow-cooked it all afternoon. It was delicious, cooked with green olives that had been marinated in preserved lemon & garlic. I guess there are worse things to smell of, but it's not very romantic.

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.

Another week that was

So. This week I taught a winter school of typography and general inkiness, 9.30 to 4.30 every day, with a lovely group of keen women who worked their butts off and produced nice things. That, combined with a couple of social events and a very surprising overnight adrenalin rush when our national leader changed gender, has resulted in my general puddleness this weekend. I am lying in bed writing this, after eating a nice Eggs Florentine made by a happy-to-be-home BB.



My type school ladies, setting type whilst listening to Kevin blub.


On Friday, after meeting my pupils at my studio for a quick tour and then wishing them safe trips home (one of them VERY kindly gave Bumblebee a lift to meet his father for the weekend, saving me a wet and tiring drive), I managed to scrape together enough energy to stumble through Woollies and buy a large amount of comfort food and (luckily) cat food (otherwise I think they would have eaten me up in the night) then get home and collapse on the couch, only rising to open another packet of something.

Best Beloved has been in Fremantle all week. I think I've mentioned before that he's studying to be a Superdooper Public Servant; he's been stuck in classes inside a windowless seminar room inside a hotel all week, and missed most of the political excitement, which seems very weird. If I were teaching a course like his, I'd have stopped class for the morning and made them analyse the situation as a group. Or at least celebrate or something... anyhoo, this has meant that Bumblebee and I have been batching it, living without routine or plan.

Bumblebee, because of my course, has had to be a latch-key kid all week, and had asked me what reward I would give him for getting mostly As this term. (He did get one B, but that was for the class where he made fresh profiteroles, so we now believe him when he says his French teacher dislikes him.) After giving him a talk about how proud I was but that doesn't translate into monetary value, I hit upon a fun thing that would slake his thirst for reward and solve the afternoon problem: we went to the local video shop and rented a week's worth of really cheesy movies. He was so happy.

We also shared the cooking, and ate fantastically. He's learned to make stirfry and burgers and we made minestrone together and I whipped up a lovely red beetroot risotto to celebrate a ginger PM.

So Friday night I forgave myself for eating two-minute spicy Thai noodles with a bag of marshmallows and a bottle of cider.



Did I mention... [whips back to the blog to check] no! Gosh, it's been a busy week. Last Saturday I took Bumblebee to the Craft ACT Bingo Night. He's never played bingo before, and I'd been introduced to it by Nana Annie when I was about his age: sitting in a hall with masses of people much older than me, the smell of handcream and excitement in the air, the sound of lightly thumping bingo markers and the tension-filled tight sucking of air through false teeth as the cards fill... it gets in your blood, it does.

This was a bit different... much younger crowd, for one thing. I regretted not bringing my bingo stamper, which is like a flat-ended texta perfectly designed to mark a dot on the card in one motion so that you can play multiple cards swiftly. I didn't regret bringing the boy, because he;s a lucky type, wins lots of things, and while I may be a cheery soul, I am not a commercially lucky person. I don't win things. When I am away on trips, Best Beloved and Bumblebee have a history of winning things (they've won a breadmaker and an icecream maker!) so I thought I'd test the theory that it's due to the lad. And it is. Sitting next to him, I won some fab jewellery and he won a handbag! Mine was a line bingo and his was a door prize. yay!

Snaps to Nana Bingo, played by the wonderful Barb McConchey, for making the evening amusing and urging us all on to greatness.



Then on Wednesday night we had a small but lovely launch for Those Who Travel, the book I helped produce over summer with Patsy Payne and Sarah Rice. Helen Maxwell, who closed her gallery earlier this year, has developed a lovely working relationship with her ex-next door neighbours, a funky furniture store, and they allowed her to have the launch in the store, which was fantastic. Lots of lovely things to sit on, precarious moments with red wine, and a launch speech by artist and writer Kim Mahood, who said lots of beautiful things about the book. We have adjusted the price a tad, and sold 4 books on the night, one to the National Gallery (w00t!). Bumblebee came along, wearing his new (vintage) brown leather bomber jacket, looking very cool, and spent the night pretending not to stare at the gorgeous daughter of a friend of mine, and she spent the night pretending not to stare at him, even though they quite happily Facebook regularly... ahh, I wouldn't be a teenager again if you paid me.

What else? Well, as you can see somewhere on the right there, I managed a bout of Twittering on wed and thursday, because that's where the action was re. the political scene. I had Bernice Balconey staying with me on Wed night, so she was jumping around in excitement and explaining things to me between brow furrows and squeals. The next day my whole class wanted the radio on, so we set type and listened to everything, blow by blow. My goodness, interesting times. Even if Julia ends up to be more more Margaret Thatcher than Helen Clarke, at least we can say we've had a female PM for a while... at the same time as a female GG. W00T again!

Also -- it's Zoe's birthday today. If you haven't already, send her a twit/FB poke/blog comment to send her your salutations. She just got her dream job, working for Stephanie Alexander, so while she hasn't been blogging, she's at least been floating.

Enough for now. I only have a day or so to go at the Book Stud before I have 6 months away from it... and I'm going to spend the next month finishing little jobs, cleaning the studio furiously (my friend Nicci is going to sublet it) and preparing for New Zealand, which looms close!

Postscript: here's a laugh. Here's something serious to think about. Or you can read the original.

Post-postscript: oh! Oh! oh! Big snaps to Penthe, you can now laugh even harder, LOLcatting at the change of leadership...

Late summer cleaning

I think I've mentioned before that I'm a bit of a stasher; I'm dreadfully disorganised, and tend to keep things in piles, plus I'm an impulsive spender, so if I come across extra cash, I'll stash it. My home office filing system could only be described as a 'deep litter' method, akin to a forest floor, and the last year, since the focus of my work has shifted to my studio, everything has just got deeper and messier.

Well. I was meant to teach all last week, but the workshop in question fell through due to lack of many things, from institutional organisation to a quorum of students (I'm going to try again in June and call it a Winter School), so I suddenly found myself with a week up my sleeve.

I could have dashed down the coast for some R&R, or I could have spent the week printing and catching up on my commitments, but I decided to pretend I'm moving house and clean a whole lot of stuff up. To make it real, really real, I got out my credit card and hired a 4m skip for a week, thus giving myself a proper deadline and a big space to fill with crap.

The skip company delivered the skip exactly where I wanted it: a straight walk from the back door, but behind a large bush so that it was, if not exactly hidden, at least not obvious from the street. I didn't want my neighbourhood to use the skip for me (it's happened before). It was an open skip, as I needed to spend a whack more money if I wanted a lidded one.

And then the sky opened up. More rain than we've seen in years. It rained and rained and rained and I tried to peg a tarp over the skip but then it rained and rained and rained, and finally I thought 'f*ck it' and let everything get sodden. One of the appeals of the skip company was that they sift through your discards and send things to various agencies: recycling, tip shop, etc. But it came to a point where I knew that everything I was chucking was just becoming landfill. It rained so hard, at one point I thought the skip was going to be a swimming pool.

Oh well. We put on our heavy wet weather jackets and trudged between the house and the skip, the shed and the skip, the garage and the skip. We pulled open a rotting old cupboard in the garage, full of old art materials and textiles and paper stock that had been shredded by a large rodent. Then we pulled the cupboard apart and found the rodent, dessicated and skeletal. And beside it a chewed packet of rat poison that someone, maybe even myself, had thrown behind the cupboard. I guess it worked.

I threw out years of drafts of books that will never be republished, from back when I was a desktop publisher. Out went old disks, blurry photos, boxes of uni bricks and folders of notes and bad essays (I kept my favorite essays and articles). Weird plastic containers, etching plates that will never be reprinted (yes, I'd used both sides), bags of smelly things and old toys too brittle to pass on to the children I know.

It was brilliant. I found stashes of money so old that I can't remember when I stashed them. Today I bought a dress and had my haircut, using stash money.

I discovered that our spare room has a floor. For two nights we had the airbed up, accommodating friends in a space where they had a choice about whether the cats could be with them (the loungeroom doesn't provide an option). Now the floor is messy again, but it's the final push: putting the things that are staying into plastic boxes to store out in the newly spacious shed, and taking the office furniture out to be replaced with a modest desk (for laptop usage -- I'm picking up my Macbook on friday) and a bed for guests. A *real* spare room!

Next week uni starts, and this weekend I'll be learning how to marble paper, but sometime after my work schedule settles, I'll be ebaying all the stuff that needs to go: my old computer, the screen, my roller blades (only used twice!), etc etc. Which may go some way to replenishing my sessional-break-starved bank account. I hope.

In other news, Bumblebee is still loving high school, apart from the vaccination he had yesterday when he swears the nurse hit his armbone (he doesn't have much flesh). Next week, CAMP! Fun for him, and a rare free few weekdays for us. No timetable fretting. Bliss! We went to his year 7 class tour last night and met all his teachers. I like his science teacher as much as he does. He's started youth theatre tonight, which should make his happiness complete. Ooh, look at the time. Have to go, time to pick him up.

nostalgic guff du jour

My cousin scanned an old photo album and put the images onto facebook. There were many that made me wistful, but this one just makes me smile wryly.

We have a few photos from this particular series, and the occasion is Colonel Duck's graduation from military college back when he was Cadet Duckling. There's one photo that's always been on the mantlepiece, of just Colonel and Lady Duck standing together, skinny he in his uniform and her, dewy in her white satin dress. Woof, they looked young and hot.

Isn't mum gorgeous in this photo? I used to think that the mantlepiece photo was their wedding photo, and until I was old enough to understand, my mother didn't disillusion me, because it's probably the closest thing she got to a wedding celebration anyway, since they'd been illegally and secretly married for eight months already (and she'd done the deed in a hot pink mini-suit, which was really much cooler than a white satin dress anyway) and at the end of this big swanky grad do she had to go home and hang out with me, who was with one of my usual family babysitters. So I'm guessing she enjoyed this evening as the last time she'd ever have to hide my nappies on the hills hoist (apparently she would peg them to the line on the inner rings and then put vast amounts of the family washing -- mother, father, three sisters, grandfather -- around the outer rings to hide them), and after this night she'd actually be able to cohabit with my father. Back then, cadets weren't allowed wives & kids or cars; these days they can have anything they want, and they can even live off-campus with their wives or husbands. Tuh! What is the world coming to?

The other thing that makes me smile wryly is my grandmother, on the left. This is the famous Nanny Annie whom I invoke when I clean my house furiously. Today my father and I worked out that in this photo she is only one year older than I am today. That is a sobering thought. My grandmother always seemed OLD, and I can't relate to her ever being my age! The three of them look a bit tense; it's probably been a long evening...

LATER: I keep noticing little details. Check out Nana's hands, curled into fists: she was a miner's wife from dusty Kalgoorie, and I'm sure she was nervous about such a ceremonial occasion. Also mum's wonderful black satin gloves. I wonder if she still owns those? And Nana's gloves -- I'm presuming they're also black gloves, unbuttoned and curled back? Were black gloves a requirement or did my family decided to be co-ordinated? So many questions! Time to phone home again :)






My pillows should be on their way home today. I can't wait for a good sleep, my head feels claggy. For those who are interested, I rang Lady Duck, and apparently the brand is 'Aussie Pillow Fibresoft' -- it's a microfibre pillow that I bought at Domaine (or Domain, or however that chain of homewares stores is spelled). The pillow itself has a satin seam around the edge of the pillow, and it's a slightly cheaper alternative to duckdown or goosedown. It might be available in other stores, and there are probably other brands that are similar...

Remember to breathe

I'm pretending that I'm moving. It's messy, and it's going to get worse before it can get better, but I need to purge. I want less crap in my life.



The cats aren't helping.

UPDATE. I've decided upon a hot weather action plan. Pretending to move in the mornings and evenings, while the house is cool, and pretending to live at the studio during the day, where it's always cool. Destruction and creation, awesome way to pass the summer days.

not quite, but

no, not sick, not dying, just spending lots of time in the studio, cleaning and sorting and making.

Yesterday I channelled Annie (my very clean late nana) again and cleaned out my paper drawers so that I could actually store paper in them. Up to now they've been holding all my old art student work, actually the stuff that survived the last cull, but this time I was ruthless (or Annie) and chucked out nearly everything that couldn't be made into a sketchbook cover. I only kept three life drawings and two prints. And now I have a dedicated boxboard drawer, plus one for white paper and one for coloured -- luxury!

Today I'm waiting for the closest thing Canberra has got to a press mechanic to drop by. He said Mon or Tues, and if he doesn't show today I'm going to be sad. For the art school presses we use a guy from Sydney, but i don't think I can either afford to bring him here or wait for his next art school trip. I have leftover wariness from the process of moving the press -- I'd been waiting for a recommended group of removalists to show up & quote for me for weeks, and they just never showed, but then someone else recommended the beautiful Beethoven guys and they were fantastic. I'll just hope that this fellow is more the Beethoven than the other bunch.

I have less than two weeks before I go to the Sturt Winter School, and then I'm flying to Brisbane to see my darling friend Sacha and attend a conference all about books. Then I have another week, and then my open studio, and then I have a month until my first solo show. EEEK! So my entries here will be even more sporadic than usual. Sorry.

Even BB and Bumblebee are getting out of my way -- they're going on a roadtrip next week around the mountain country, visiting caves & snow and beaches and whatever, just the two of them, equipped with audio books and gameboys and no doubt an icecream every day. Sigh. I think I'll book a cottage by the sea for October, when I can relax again.

In other news, Bumblebee has been gorging himself on Michael Jackson videos and songs. I managed to record a three-hour 'Top 50 MJ' fest on VH1, and B is discovering the lovely high highs and absolutely low lows of the MJ oeuvre. We had a big discussion about living out your fantasies on screen, and I think he's starting to really understand the difference between constructed reality and lived reality (unlike MJ!). And we're having great discussions about why certain videos work and others don't. There are some ripper live clips, I can see why his concerts sold out instantly, but FIFTY of them? That's a bunch of vultures in charge, poor bugger.

IMHO, the best MJ album is Off the Wall, but even so, I'm getting pretty sick of it now. Damn, I'd just weaned B off these albums before MJ died, and he was showing some progress, he was hooked on 'Ziggy Stardust'. Now we're back a few steps. But only for a while, I hope. All this too shall pass. I keep repeating that, constantly.

goings and comings

Today Bumblebee and I had a mental health day. He stayed home from school to nurse his hacking cough, and I spent the day de-cluttering. It was ace.

I went through the house and found all the books that were lying around waiting to be read, and made an on-the-spot decision about whether I would EVER get around to reading them. Then I went through my shelves (not BB's, I wouldn't dare) and culled all the books that had accumulated that I didn't want to read again.

There's been a big pile of old clothes lying in the door of my study for AGES. That was sorted into various piles: hand-me-downs for littler boys, a bag for Vinnies, a bag for Aussiejunk.

And then we took them away and gave them to various organisations. And felt great.

When we dropped into Vinnies at Dickson we discovered an excellent winter sale. We found Bumblebee a very cool demin jacket and I got two nice cardies. We felt ok about buying them, because we had space.

Then when we went to Woollies to buy toothpaste (something the local organic vegie store doesn't provide), they gave us a big slab of chocolate cake each as part of some Quaint-arse frequent flyers promotion. Bumblebee was stoked, and claimed it was our reward for finally doing the clean-up.

I was so inspired, I went home and wrote some important emails I've been forgetting about. I applied for a residency in New Zealand, I followed through on a tip about the chance to buy some new type. Both of which are chances, but you've got to be in to win, haven't you?


Inspired by those, I made some useful phone calls. I'm a phone-shy person; I hate making calls and I hate talking on the phone for ages, it makes my ears sweaty. I used to have eczema behind my ears, and I think a lot of my aversion stems back to that time. But today! I had one of my EUREKA! dreams the other day, about how to find a press mechanic. So I acted upon my dream and found a fellow who is going to visit my studio early next week. HUZZAR!

So there is a chance that my press will be operational by the time I have my studio warming -- which, by the way, has changed dates. I remember promising the 4th of July. But that date went squidgy when I discovered that it clashed badly with a paying function in the complex's gallery -- a function that ISN'T very compatible with a joyful launching of a space.

So the new date is 1 August:



I'm sure I won't have the press running, even if it is operational, but it would be nice to have it a bit cleaner than it is now (it's already cleaner than it was when it moved in, thanks to Bernice's dexterity with sandpaper and oil). I won't be able to do much at all other than stand around waving a glass and talking to people as they wander in and out, but what fun! This date also coincides with an exhibition in the ANCA studio by John Loane of Veridian Press (he prints all of Mike Parr's prints, as well as many other Aust art biggies), so it's a double-barrelled fun time.

And according to Progressive Dinner Party, it is time to plant garlic! I just bought some local garlic the other day, feeling like I wanted to grow some, and now I find that my urge is BASIC and ANCIENT and INSTINCTIVE. I love it when I get things right. Now I'm going to act like a real woman and make some vege nachos with real (pressure-cooked) kidney beans. W00T!

A week's worth of post

Wow, where did that week go?!!

It seems like every time I sit down with the intention of writing, an email arrives asking me to do something, or a real life distraction captures my attention. I think I'm only going to catch up by using the dreaded dot points...

-- Bumblebee was very excited about going to his grandparents last week. He kept himself busy for the ten minutes or so that we were in my (poor, under-utilised studio) with one of his favorite toys, the whiteboard:



-- And so went to Bega, where I discovered that Colonel Duck's new satellite internet connection is only marginally faster than his old dial-up, except that now their phone line is freed up when they're using the computer. So checking my emails took ages, and I just couldn't be bothered wrestling it to get a post through. So there went my resolution to write something deep and meaningful. Instead, I lost my self in Byatt, various trashy mags and op shops.

-- While in Bega, I persuaded the local museum (a.k.a. my mother) to formally lend me their wonderful trays of woodtype in return for an annual poster:





(If that last photo looks vaguely familiar, it's because when the trays were donated abandoned on their doorstep (as I've mentioned before), I was asked to help them sort it, and I took some photos that with a bit of Photoshoppery became my current blog header!)

The coloured bits are coloured because whomever used them last didn't clean the ink off their surface. Tuh. Still, very pretty, no? Anyway, I got them not a moment too soon, because they were dying in a dusty backroom, wrapped in plastic and going a tad damp and whiffy. Using the type is the best way to keep it alive, and I'm more than happy to use it for the benefit of the museum whenever they ask me to. Goodness, I'm so happy, my heart keeps leaping with joy at the thought of all that woody goodness, saved from a dusty death.

-- And then, still in Bega, I wandered into the Regional Gallery to say hello to Megsy in her bright new shiny job, and was pounced upon by Gallery (and Library) staff who had 'only just been talking about me the day before'! I was asked to give a public talk and a weekend workshop about artists' books and ways to incorporate them into an artistic practice, to coincide with this year's Meroogal Women's Art Prize. Wow, how cool is that! It'll be happening in early June, so if you're interested, I'll mention it again closer to time, or you can contact the Bega Regional Gallery for details (although they haven't been finalised just yet!).

-- STILL in Bega, it was Bumblebee's twelfth birthday on Thursday. I get a little lump in my throat just thinking about it, and impending doom as he hurtles towards his teenage years. He had a lovely birthday, wot with the archery set given to him by Colonel Duck (along with a target fashioned out of an old trampoline) and a long romantic silver velvet cloak given to him by myself and my lovely sister-in-law (from the Folk Festival, of course). He spent the next day or so dressing up and stalking around posing with the bow and long hours at the target, practicing his shooting (and getting better each time!).


Feeling dramatic and romantic...


...undermined a tad by the green crocs. The day before he'd been in all-black, with black boots and the cloak, and wishing he hadn't cut all his hair off. But I forgot to get out my camera that day :)


Note the target in the background. It was fantastic when he hit the centre, but if he hit the sides things got a bit weird.

He also made his own cake, with the help of Colonel Duck, since all the women had scarpered off to town to talk about important things like wood type.



They had a lot of fun with food colouring. The outside was yellow with myriad colours.



The inside, as you can see, was red and green. We invited some friends over with their delightful children to share the cake (and the latest gossip) and discovered that the cake was actually really yummy.

We had more friends over for dinner, making our own pizzas in the home-made pizza oven, washed down with copious amounts of wine, and ended up in fits of laughter while B shot his arrows down the driveway with sparklers attached to the ends of the arrows. Kept him busy, kept us happy, and only one arrow lost in the dark.

-- Back to Canberra, to find that if the house wasn't cleaned very soon, my marriage was going to implode. So Saturday was spent channelling Annie.* The thing I hate about cleaning -- REALLY cleaning, not just giving the place a once-over -- is the fact that when you look hard at something you try not to look at, it grows exponentially. I wanted to vaccuum, for the first time in ages. But I thought I'd better clean the kitchen benches properly, so that if things fell on the floor, I'd get them with the vaccuum. And then I needed to wipe the shelves above the benches, and then I noticed the windowsills, which led to me cleaning the windows. I moved across the benches and picked up the toaster, which meant I had to clean the toaster. Oh, ecetera frigging ecetera. Finally, late in the afternoon, I managed to vaccuum, and then demanded that we go to the movies so that I wouldn't notice any more dirt. There was plenty around, but I knew that if I broke the obsessiveness, I could go back to just walking through the house blissfully NOT seeing.

-- So we went to see Good. And lo, it was good. And put me back into a mind for thinking about things I really WANT to think about, like memory triggers, and the way music can take you places you've forgotten about, or even into books you want to read.

Have I mentioned how much I loved AS Byatt's The Children's Book? Oh, how I loved it, let me count the ways. It's the book I've been wanting to read for a few years now. Stuffed with facts and references to an era that intrigues me, it is nonetheless extremely readable, and very hard to put down. It is set in the thick of the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th century in Britain and Germany, and takes you through to the end of WWI, over two generations. She is such a clever puss, she keeps the subject firmly in that time, but evokes such pertinent parallels to Babyboomers and Gen X as she does so. I can't really say more than that, since the book isn't released until next month, but I highly recommend it when you get the chance. I came out of that book in a spell which housecleaning absolutely trashed, and felt that I needed a voice of reason to snap me back into the world. I settled upon a re-read of Helen Garner's The Feel of Steel, which has formed an excellent buffer between Byatt and my next book, Tracy Crisp's Black Dust Dancing -- managed to get a copy today! Hooray!

-- On Sunday we entertained the still glowing newlyweds from Sills Bend, fresh from hanging out with obsessive Regency dancing obsessives. We love entertaining in the morning, it's when your friends are looking their best, all freshly slept and hungry. Best Beloved does a marvellous brunch menu of Eggs Benedict (or Florentine if our guests are vegos) followed by fresh coffee and cranberry crumble muffins (whole cranberries and a sweet crumble topping). It's pretty delicious. Zowen** came too, bringing as an offering an amazing mushroom/tofu baked dish with a zingy relish. Food heaven. Then I gave Laura & Dorian a tour of my still sadly-neglected studio, and then we went and mocked a lot of portraits for a while, which was excellent fun. I haven't had so much fun in a gallery since Fluffy and I mocked a whole heap of steel engravings in Melbourne a few years ago. Dorian decided not to take his faux top hat home with him (he would have had to wear it on the plane) and donated it to Bumblebee's hat collection, which made my young'un very happy, and it was in fact used today for his holiday learn-to-be-a-clown workshop.

-- And finally, there's only weeks to go until the opening of my bookbinding exhibition at Craft ACT. All the books are pouring in; I gave a pretty early deadline because I knew there would be stragglers, but also because I wanted to see the work properly before I started writing the room brochure essay for the show, and now we'll be able to install slowly and carefully. So I've been getting lots of exciting parcels, like this one:



Bugger brown paper packages tied up with string; this one was wrapped in softly shining gold paper, and then a package tied up with soft leather thonging! very lush, and indicative of the gorgeous book within. I'll save that for a future post, when I can showcase some of the books together. How excitement!

When I first put the exhibition idea together, I fully planned to not only include the edition binding of Poems to Hold or Let Go, but also to create my own individual binding. But time and opportunity have rushed past, and I resigned myself to just being the 'provider' of the book, rather than a contributor in my own right. But the other day I unearthed a box of materials that I'd stashed, and came upon a stack of beautiful momigami paper that I'd made as a student. WIZZ! went my mind, and now I'm determined to make a special binding of my own. I think I've nutted it out; I'll document my progress and show you when it's done. And when I do, I'll tell you what momigami paper is. But for now, I'm posted out, and you've probably had enough too! Good night!





* Evoking the spirit of my late Grandmother, who was a dedicated and obsessive cleaner.

** The easiest way I know to say Zoe and Owen and their two sprogs.

still running, this time uphill

GAH

I've had one of those days that start badly and get better as it goes and then goes pear-shaped again later on.

While my printer is churning out charming little promo slips that I whisked up tonight in time for the Two Fires Festival tomorrow (speaking at 11:30am, have to drive there first) and then almost lost when my software crashed, let me tell you about just one of my tits-up moments:

Another thing I do when Best Beloved goes away is live like a gypsy. Bumblebee and I eat fast, makeshift meals, most often straight out of the saucepan. Pots and pans pile up, the floor goes unswept, and the bed unmade. The day he arrives home, I do a HUGE wash-up and a lick & spit of the house.

This morning I filled the sink with hot, bubbly water, moved around a bit to gather the dirty objects (think opening scenes from Withnail & I, with a bit less mould) and turned back to find all the washing-up water over the floor. OH NOES! The sink has lost its seal! And no time to fix it or get a plumber!

The one good thing was that cleaning up the water meant a clean kitchen floor.

Later in the day I had the bright idea of doing the washing-up in the laundry sink, so BB did end up coming home to a clean kitchen, but also to a very stressed wife, who immediately ducked out the door and up to the studio to gather things for tomorrow.

Don't get me started on heart attacks when looking out the School of Music cafe to see a parking inspector wandering dangerously close to the carpark I'd plopped into without a permit (he didn't get me, thank you Ceiling Cat).

Or the fact that we have discovered that Bumblebee now fits my shoes, and has gone off to school in my nice black Baxter boots, bringing them back all boy-scuffed. Unfortunately most of my shoe wardrobe consists of men's shoes, so I'll have to hide my favorites until he grows out of them (in about two months).

OK, printing done, time for bed.