Sirens, blasts, chemical tang: Canberra's having a party

We are stuck at home this morning thanks to a huge chemical fire in the industrial zone near our suburb. We are within the ten kilometre zone and have been repeatedly told to stay indoors, keep all windows closed, and to turn off any air-conditioners and heaters.

It's very exciting.

I was woken this morning about 3:20 by an emergency text message that said

The ACT Fire Brigade responding to chemical insadent in Mitchell. Resadents of Franklin, Crace, Harrison, Watson, Downer, Kaleen, Lyneham, Hackett, stay indoors

All the spelling mistakes are theirs, and apparently lots of people thought it was a spam or scam because 'spelling mistakes are an indicator', but I know that no one but emergency services would have a number like 444 444 444, and everyone knows fireys can't spell (but they are fabulous) so I took it seriously.

About 4:15am we got an automatic recorded message on our phone from the SES, saying something similar.

At 5am there was a huge blast that I heard through our double brick walls, and the sirens started up again (everything before that was pretty faint).

Between all of that, Best Beloved snored like an engine, so I think I got a snatch of sleep between 5 and 6, when he awoke and turned on the ABC for updates.

Like I said, it's very exciting. Here's my favorite photo of the smoke plume, taken by my friend Fiona from her penthouse in Civic:



The red dot is roughly where we are.

Oh, the ABC just announced we're now clear to leave our house. All the dogs in the neighbourhood just started up, so obviously we're all listening.

Bumblebee is ecstatic because all the local schools are closed, which means I can't go to my residency school either. Woo hoo, studio day! Bonus. And now that we've got the all clear, I can get to my haircut appointment this afternoon too. I've decided to banish the Snape look for a while (my hair always reverts to it eventually).

I hope the toxic plume doesn't land anywhere awful. It's headed north and eastish, which means coastward. Watch your water supplies, peoples. The local radio, the tv, facebook and twitter are all a-twitter. I can't get over the masses of people who walked over to the fire to have a look despite all warnings.

I might have a nana nap soon, all this excitement is a bit draining. I spent my waking hours playing games on my iPhone and thinking about how helpless we'd be if this turned out to be something really serious. The first thing I said to BB when he woke (resisting the urge to say something snarky about snoring) was 'let's get some emergency water supplies stored up'. I think he just grunted, but I'm determined to do something about it when the traffic calms down.

Excitement!

hurry up, hurry up

So much for the easy Monday exchange. Thanks to lawyers and banks stuffing up, exchange is slated for this afternoon. It better be, we've booked the truck for tomorrow and the new beds arrive in an hour.

I have primed up my iPhone camera for documentation porpoises.

I have met the pets on one side: two cats and a little yappy dog. One of the cats has obviously learned from the dog, as it is yappy too, and looks like a miniature version of our cats. We'll have a black cat street! Mind you, I think it will be chaos for a while.

Padge has also been ill. I have had to squirt horrid expensive antiobiotics down his throat with a syringe four times a day. I have become an expert at grabbing a huge handful of the scruff of his neck to pull it back for the squirting. It's not pretty, but it's a great skill to learn and I wish I'd been shown it years ago, could have some in handy with Bumblebee :) Anyhoo, the drugs are working, he's perky as hell today.

Fare thee well

OK, I'm pretty much packed and ready to go. I've finished all the little jobs I had to do, and cleaned my studio up so that my friend Nicci can sublet it from me. Now I just have to sort out my daypack, and I'm ready to fly to New Zealand first thing in the morning. My plane leaves at 6:40am, and I don't get to my destination until about 7pm. It's not a huge distance, it's just a lot of sitting around at airports.

Here's my lovely clean studio:



And here, just for the halibut, is the picture that inspired my working name:



It's a flock of flying ampersand ducks, printed in the year 2000 for an entry in the Noma Concours Illustration prize. I made a series of prints that made scenes and animals from wood and metal type. It was a proposal for a children's book, aimed at 3-4 year olds. It got an encouragement award, but it's never been published.

So, unless I get very bored at the airport tomorrow, next time I write I should be in New Zealand, learning how to compress my vowels.

See you in the soup!

Nice things

This afternoon I was contacted by Megalo (the gallery where I'm showing my work) who wanted to know if I could drop everything and go on the radio. Apparently the local ABC had a bit of a cancellation and thought they'd fill it with some Local Art. Hooray!

So here I am in me working gear*, holding a couple of 'nice things made out of old books and recycled paper', just before I went into the studio to talk to the lovely Louise Maher. We had a great conversation, and they've promised to send it to me as an MP3 so that I can cringe along in the privacy of my own studio.

It was absolute gold putting the word 'recycled' into my title. I'm actually recycling papers I've created with my own printing work, but Louise was really more interested in my use of old books, and we talked at length about the Lifeline Bookfair and the way I plunder its treasures only after I've given people every chance to buy the books. I rattled on about how books aren't our primary source of information anymore, and therefore have even more become objects of desire, so extending the life of old books by transforming their initial design makes lots of sense. I also talked about books as primal symbols, and that when you use books in art, you're bringing the viewer halfway towards your art, because they understand what a book should be, and you can work with or against that. (In that line of thinking you can also substitute the word 'painting' and it works well too.) She also got interested in my letterpress work, and we talked a bit about the instant gratification of manual typewriters.

I don't know how those 'radio hosts' (don't think they're called DJs anymore) can concentrate with all the paraphenalia around them. When I was doing some community radio (way back when John Howard was in opposition), we just had a couple of CD decks, a turntable, ads on tape(!) spools and a few buttons and twinking lights. Now there's computers and banks of flashy things and multiple tvs running with the sound turned down. I'd be unable to think straight with all the distraction. I was very impressed.

Everything is ready. I've put the numbers on the works, had some more invites printed (I ran out of the meagre amount I printed in a vague attempt to keep things emailable, forgetting that people love hard copy souvenirs), and have bought a load of yummies for the opening. I didn't go the catering route -- just decided to bung on some cheeses and chips and fruit. I did take some time tonight to make some little savoury baked ricotta thingies, just because I had nothing else to do. Luxury!

Now I need my beauty sleep so that I can actually hear what people are saying to me at the opening. Ooh, bum, just remembered that I forgot to book the restaurant for afterwards. Oh well, I'll have to do it at the last minute and cross my fingers! Can't be totally organised, can one?





*Actually, the research chick told me they were going to take a photo for their blog, and I was dressed in my scraggiest flannie shirt, printing with red ink at the time (which makes me look like I've been gashed all up my arms, or like I've slashed someone else), so I dashed home on the way to the radio station and cleaned up and changed into what would ordinarily be my working clothes, anything BUT the flannie! I have standards, you know ;)

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.

Womb with a view

Colonel Duck, on the phone tonight: You've been a bit slack on the blog lately...
Yes, I have.

Talking to someone, a few days ago:
Me: It's the same old, same old, rushing around trying to get everything in order before I hit another deadline. But this time it's different, in that I *really* just have to drop tools and stop.
Her: I bet you're really busy trying to cook meals and freeze them for the boys, too.
Me: ... um, actually, no.
Her: NO? How are they going to cope?

How? They're going to cook their own meals, wash their own clothes, and make their own brekkies, just like they always do. I tell you, I am fully cognizant of the wonderful of being smitten with a man who can do his own washing, cook his own meals and wrangle a child, but never more so than now. He has freed me up fully over the past couple of weeks so that I can just get things done. And after next week, he'll be looking after me and Bumblebee as the primary carer. This is why I dubbed him Best Beloved. He earns it.

So. I can't really believe that I'm only 3 days away from a day that's been looming for so long. I feel a bit foolish, making such a long lead-in to an operation that isn't really that dramatic, but it's taken a lot of planning to make the space in my obsessively busy life, and now that it's here I feel a bit odd. Most people -- who have private health care -- just make the decision and do it within weeks, but we've been talking about this for so long that it's become a Big Thing.

Anyhoo, I've almost finished my duties... I've burned disks of layout work to pass onto editors and indexers, sent off files and invoices, now just have to finish up at the BookStud tomorrow, drop some books off to the Aged Poet on Wednesday, and run a few chores, and then pack and clean on Wednesday afternoon. Stop ingesting at midnight on Wed, then my number comes up 7am Thursday morning.

It really didn't feel real until last Thursday, when I had a pre-op clinic appointment with a leathery Barbie doll of a nurse with a name that is the American word for lollies. She was amazingly weird; very fun to talk to, but hypnotic to watch, with her dark wrinkly tan, fluffy white-blonde flippy hair, thick makeup, lashing of jewellery and teetery heels. Thin as a piece of wire, and skin-tight dress. I felt very surreal telling her that I had *no* idea what I weigh, haven't weighed myself for years. She, on the other hand, looked like she whipped onto the scales every time she was alone in the room, just in case.

She sent me off to have blood tests, and when the needle went in, reality finally connected. That's right, they're going to cut me... it's going to hurt. I got the shakes. I kept the shakes all day, until Bernice showed up with champagne to toast Obama's victory. Irrational, but realistic. I feel a lot better now, but I know it's not going to be the easy holiday I've let myself think it will be.

Still, there are probably worse ways to spend 6 weeks. I've got a fantastic pile of books, two new Nintendo DS games, the entire series of Deadwood to watch (courtesy of the kind people at Artwranglers), and a computer to blog with. Plus cats to train *not* to leap on my lap. Spoiled rotten, truly.

And a mindset to shift. Once I have no choice about my fertility, I have to work on the guilt of having failed to provide such a wonderful man with a baby of his own. He hasn't contributed to this guilt in the slightest, except for a bad habit of wandering around the house with a cat cradled in his arm, murmuring 'now, you have to be sure to support the head' that makes Bumblebee laugh but tweaks my tearducts slightly. No, the guilt is all mine, but I have to learn to knock it on the head, as I've tried my hardest, and also offered him many alternatives: leave me, & find someone fertile; have an affair; donate sperm to some lovely lesbian couple who will give him visitation rights; adopt; donate sperm generally & allow the result to look for him down the road; whatever else he can think of. He's thinking upon it, but his general philosophy is that he has a wonderful partner who pushes him to think differently, and a fabulous stepson who entertains him mightily, plus cats who fulfil his need for nurturing, so who is complaining? See? Best Beloved.

And I have to stop my habit of saying, when I love a man's work, that I'd love to have his babies. I said it aloud to myself on Saturday as I was binding books to the sound of Ben Goldacre talking about Bad Science on RN's The Science Show. Woof! I said, I'll have your babies, as he made some uber-nerdy sexy point about fish oil. Slap the wrist. Find a new statement of admiration. It wasn't very feminist anyway, and I'm sure I started saying it years ago very ironically. Well, I won't be able to have ANYBODY's babies soon, and won't that be liberating? Maybe I can keep saying it, just recover a more ironic tone.

So I've been enjoying riding the bicycle hard around the streets between home and the uni, enjoying walking freely and upright, and looking forward to the moment that the doctor promises will come, when I'll be a New Woman. Woot!

I'm sure I'll get a chance to blog before then, but if I don't, see you in the soup.