Photoblogging the week

a quickie, before I'm overrun by boys and the Folk Festival (Bumblebee's having an early birthday folk-laden sleepover party):


This is me, taking a self-portrait in the toilets of the National Gallery of Australia, the one chance I had to photograph what I was wearing before I trashed myself at the wedding we were attending (we'd got dressed in a bit of a rush). The skirt is Zoe's, the black lace top something I found in Vinnie's years ago. The wedding was lovely; the bride wore a full-length and tulle-filled red tartan number with bright orange hair, and we got to swan through the Paris exhibition in black tie rather than sit through tedious speeches.


My students enjoying our edible book tea-party. For more edible book shots, go here.



My contribution to the tea party: I call it a neckoracle. It's edible, wearable and readable... once eaten, the fortunes get rethreaded on the string to make a second version of the 'book'.


No photies of the exhibition yet, have had no time to take them... but here is I, pretending once again to be Nana Mouskouri. Narelle, the Gallery Officer for ANCA, made a clever zine-like catalogue for the 3 Chords show in which she cut up chunks of album covers to be covers for a concertina-fold price list & statement sheet. I nabbed the NM one instantly, and Byrd helped me laugh at myself once again.

And finally, let me help you laugh again too:


Growing up Minimalist meant she was easily amused. [Unhappy Hipsters]

Pressings: the opening

Hello from my wonderful opening. This photo was taken by Antonia, who is one of the Megalo team. I'm holding up the wrong arm to echo the work, but you get the idea. Sorry for the insane grin, I was a bit nervous. I'm wearing a shift thing that I think of as my 'tuckshop uniform'; it's cut like those uniforms nurses and tea ladies used to wear, but it is black with some funky black & white detailing. I found it at a Melbourne op shop, and thought it fitted my general theme of vintage + recycling.


Another Antonia image, of two lovely Canberra artists: papermaker Katharine Nix on the left, printmaker & illustrator Franki Sparke on the right.



This is the opening according to Bumblebee.

Well, not really. I gave him the camera and asked him not to use the flash, so he struggled a bit with holding the camera still enough to get clear shots. He seemed to perservere, because I have a lot of blurries followed by a few good shots:



Not sure that Sarina (Sarina fair, on the left of the group) would think it was a good shot, but by Bumblebee's standard, it's excellent!



This is Steeev, one of my oldest friends (you might have seen him lurking around Progressive Dinner Party), and Genevieve Swifte, who does gorgeous art and books, with her daughter Disa. At the back of the photo is Lady Duck, looking suave.


A Bumblebee photo; he loved all the little kids who came, I have lots of photos of them all making faces and running around. This is the back of Mummy Crit, with her delicious baby Erik. her other son, D'arcy, REALLY wanted to touch one of my more active-looking books, so I promised him that he could come to my studio after the show and look through it (it's one of the Not For Sale pieces, because it's a personal souvenir of a collaboration).

It was a really lovely evening, and I'm really glad I didn't have any speechifying, because it allowed people to just relax and talk and look at the work, which tried its best to look nice and, I think, succeeded. I'm going to go in during the week and take some 'proper' shots of the work and put them up on my website for a bit of a virtual showing, but I'll let you know when that happens.

One thing I really loved was seeing people looking hard at everything.



I hope they got as much out of the work as I got making it...


Bernice has also done a bit of a post on it, and there's more photos in a flickrset, if you're interested.

Ooh, I almost forgot to acknowledge how bloody amazing Best Beloved was. He didn't get a chance to stop and talk to many people because he was pouring drinks, food-wrangling, washing up empty glasses and plates, and being generally wonderful. He really earns his title sometimes.

Thanks to everyone who came! It was great!

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.

Not much to do with Australia, but it was a good weekend

WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? My father bellowed down the phone.

Here, talking to you, I answer.

WHY AREN'T YOU BLOGGING? YOU HAVEN'T WRITTEN ANYTHING SINCE TUESDAY. ALL YOU'VE LEFT US WITH IS TWO CATS WEARING HATS! WHAT ABOUT THE RESPONSIBILITY TO YOUR READERS? WE'RE DYING HERE!



Sheesh, talk about parental pressure. You'd think this was my homework or something. I've been busy, ok? Osteopath appointments, voluntary newsletters, paid work, studio setting up, movies to watch, partner to woo, overhaul to attempt. It's been a busy time.

The Studio is as set up as it can be until I have the muscle strength to have the press in the same room as me. I'm not even going to put my letterpress gear in there until I can comfortably lift a half-empty typecase, it's just too tempting. So here's a quick tour of Studio Duck, phase one:


Bottom left corner, the 'reading room'.


Top left corner, the 'clean working room'


Top right corner, the 'print room', yet to be established...


The bottom right corner, the 'homework room', later to be part of the printing area.

If you are studio-buffs and want to know more, click on the images to go back to Flickr and read my notes. Basically, one side will be clean work, the other dirty work, and I hope to have a central bench with drying racks underneath to divide the two spaces.

So I got to the point of getting out some actual pages and folding them on Friday afternoon, and then had to stop and go to meet Best Beloved for a movie. And I haven't been back all weekend! So today will be my first proper working session ever. I've decided that until art school goes back, I will work on the computer in for the first half of the morning (or all morning if I have to) and go to the studio in the afternoon. Hooray!

I knew I had a lot of computer work to do over the weekend, so Best Beloved and I made a commitment to go to a number of movies over the long weekend. We decided to go to the first session of the day, since these seem to be the least crowded, and then you come out of the cinema with the rest of the day ahead of you, which we love.

Friday was the exception, we went in the afternoon to see Frost and Nixon. Loved it.

Saturday we didn't see a movie, but I managed to get BB to drive over to Gunghalin with me and look at a Display Home Village. Miracle! BB is very cautious about debt, but now that I have a 6-year tenancy for a studio, we're starting to think about what to do at the end of it: move house to something with a studio? Extend? knock down and build again? We haven't got the finances yet, but if we start planning and budgeting, we may well have in the next few years.

Well. What a load of crap is out there. Project homes range from scummy badly-designed tiny boxes on tiny blocks up to enormous bloated badly-designed McMansions on tiny blocks. We found one we liked, and that is because it actually had some wall space for bookshelves and pictures. Obviously no-one likes books or gardening anymore. We are hoping that Penny and Kevin can push a few more mandatory green features onto these designs over the next few years. And we've been pointed in the direction (by friends) of some affordable eco-designers who may be able to help when we're ready.

Sigh. Anyway, it was a first step. And they're important.

Saturday night I went to a Girl's Night with some art school mates. Traditionally these consist of nice food, a bottle of champagne each (bare minimum) and some home hairdressing and beauty treatments, accompanied by lashings of gossip. This one wasn't much different, except that usually I'm the odd one out, not liking nail polish or hairdye. I usually sit and watch them play with each other. This time one of them had hit upon a less permanent plaything and brought along her curling tongs. I got thoroughly tonged and sprayed, and ended up looking like an aging 1920s flapper...





Which is all good and well (besides bringing back memories of years of bad perms in my yoof), but then I drunkenly rode home on my bike sometime after midnight, flopped into bed, and woke the next morning with a crazy halo of tortured hair that made Best Beloved (who had been asleep when I got back) do a double take when he opened his eyes. Thank Ceiling Cat it washed out, which is something that never happens when you do drunken girlie perm nights.

Sunday morning we saw Seven Pounds. I hadn't heard much about this, apart from friendly mentions about letterpress scenes. The first half of the movie was extremely frustrating; I knew they were teasing out strands that would be pulled together by whatever fantastic climax we were heading for, but it just felt TOO bitsy. Then the letterpress scenes started, and I stopped thinking about anything but what I was seeing right then and there. By the end I was very impressed by whomever thought about using letterpress technology as a perfect way of showing how that character's working life could be disrupted by a heart problem (not a spoiler!). It just wouldn't have worked if she'd been a computer designer, and it tapped into the recent explosion of letterpress stationery designers, so it wasn't way out in left field for an American film (since that is where the explosion is mostly happening). I loved that line about impression (or embossing) being the only way to prove something isn't digitally printed. Although the idea of her press sitting there ready-inked waiting for her to trot out and demonstrate the process is ludicrous, isn't it, Printing Grrrls?

And Monday morning we saw Slumdog Millionaire, which I think is one of the best movies I've ever seen. I loved everything about it, and spent the rest of the day listening to Indian music on my computer just to keep myself in the mood it had left me with.

And the rest of the time I've been working on the computer, finishing paid jobs, working on voluntary jobs, and eating BB's excellent cooking, including a dinner of goat vindaloo and a lunch of poached eggs Florentine, my favorite.

So there you go, Colonel Duck, that's what I've been up to. And sex. Lots of sex. (well, not lots, but enough to get back in the saddle.) Blushing? Heh.

Kitten Wars: Cat in the Hat

Pooter and Padge decided to try on Aretha's hat: who do you think suits it more?


Mr Padge doesn't seem to like the hat, but he loves the new president.


Mr Pooter just wants that person over there to SHUT. UP. He's loving the Brave New World vibes.





(Snaps to Ann oDyne, who added to the joy at Sorrow at Sills Bend)

the lost hours

I meant to post yesterday, all about how great Bumblebee looked for his end-of-year disco. The theme was famous characters, and he chose, of course, Dr Who, David Tennant style:


Without glasses, and with brand-new sonic screwdriver, bought by me.


With glasses; it's a wee bit fuzzy, but the one in which he looks the most authentic, I think.

I meant to post about Bernice's car trying desperately to break down as she gave us a lift to the school (BB having taken the car for another purpose), the same car we gave her last year with the express warning that it is a cute moneypit. Well, it is dead now, and we all mourn.

I meant to post about going to my doctor, and that fact that there I was, on me back, legs akimbo (even though my dictionary tells me it can only be done with the arms, but that's how it felt), him with a torch, and he says 'this is your 6-week check-up, is it not?' and I replied 'no, it's been about 4 and a half weeks' to which he replied 'really? You're healing very well, then!' Huzzar! I can swim in a couple of weeks. I knew that bikini was a good idea.

I meant to post that I didn't get the Melbourne residency I was hoping for next year. It was only a little one, but it would have been fun to do some work away from Canberra and catch up with the interesting people I know in Melbourne, which is SUCH a print-and-book city.

I meant to post that I have found a lovely bookkeeper who seems able to sort me out, even though I don't know if she knows what she's getting into...

I meant to do all these things, but then in the last-minute haste to get my papers together for the Nice Bookkeeper, I discovered that my mobile phone contract had expired, and I decided to drop into the Mall and see what I could see.

An hour later, I came out clutching an iPhone 3G, dizzy with excitement and fear. I got home, fell onto the computer to do some research (that I probably should have done before I bought the thing) and started playing. Next thing I knew, the boys had arrived home and it was dinner time. Holy data packages, Batgirl!

It's a thing of beauty, and means that I should be able to blog and email from anywhere, including the Woodford Folk Festival (no more waiting in line for 30 minutes at a crap PC!), and it solves the problem of whether I should or should not get a computer for my studio. No! It shall be a computer-work-free zone, but I can still order things and check things when there! Double hooray!

I would be grateful for any important tips & tricks about the phone that anyone has. I've run across a few really good ones (like the fact that unless you switch it off, it has a setting that tracks the location of each photo you take, and chomps up the download accordingly).

The next two days are, effectively, Christmas for us (sans any tinsel or trees). Colonel and Lady Duck are hitting town for presents and a nice lunch at a restaurant with us tomorrow, and then on Sunday we start the trek northwards to Brisbane and Woodford. I'll either be out of touch or blogging a lot, depending on how bored I get :)

it's raining (again)

Dorothy Porter died.
I finished the Blue Poles jigsaw.
It's raining today and Bumblebee is meant to be at the pool with his school.

The first is tragic (54!), the second is a relief, and the third is not unusual. Of the probably 7 December trips to the pool made by B, at least 4 have been cold and/or wet. I'm pretty sure the school's cancelled the excursion -- I don't listen to whichever poxy local radio station with ads that they inform, and I can't get through to the office, so I've just sent him along with the gear in his bag just in case, but it looks pretty pool-unfriendly out there. I'm sure they'll just watch videos all day or something equally pre-Christmassy constructive.

Bumblebee's drama performance on Wednesday was fab. He has a gorgeous drama teacher who looks like Robin Hood from the latest BBC series plays piano along with their dramatics, which is a rare and precious gift and they love him for it.

This is what our version of Sylvester McMonkey McBean (from Dr Suess's The Sneetches) looks like:



He's a lean, mean, money-making machine!

And this is the way Bumblebee photographs me finishing a puzzle:



Not the best portrait of me, but he was very keen that I include it. In the background on the right you can just see the awesome Hello Kitty! shrine pop-out birthday card my lovely Sacha brought me back from Japan. I haven't got around to putting it away yet, it's just so over the top.

So now we can free up the table for maybe a day or two of eating meals before it gets covered in jars and stuff to take to Queensland. Then we'll go back to hunching in front of the news with plates on our laps. I'm trying to sort out my home office today, because I'm meeting up with a real live Bookkeeper next week to attempt to make a clean start to 2009.

I'm working my way through my deep-litter filing system, not very systematically, making more piles of vaguely grouped papers. Every now and then Padge comes in, drenched with rain, and tried to be helpful. So not only are my financial and other records going to be interleaved with black cat hair, but they will also be covered in smudged and watermarked cat paw prints. I do hope she's not allergic to cats!

It's almost time to stop and have my (newly) habitual lunch in front of the tv. Shall I spend an hour in front of my beloved VH1 (they've got me hook, line and sinker, it's great as a background to many activities), or shall I start another DVD from the pile of RomComs lent to me by a friend? Again, choices, choices...

in making mode

I got back from the coast on Sunday evening, after a few days of complete restfulness. There really isn't much to do down there (unless you can run around and drive places) apart from reading, eating and watching things. Here I am, sitting on the concrete under the house, watching other things:


Looking to the left. Colonel Duck with trusty hound. Note the army greens hanging on the wall behind the gumboots.


Oh look! Bumblebee has come to ask if he can use the ride-on mower.


Uh oh. Lucky has discovered me while they get the mower out. I have to throw the ball, but it's much more fun holding it until he thinks I've forgotten about it.


Looking to the right. Mr Pooter likes to sit in this cool shady spot where Lady Duck does her plant potting.


Mr Padge walks past. You can see why one of his nicknames is now Curltail. Sometimes, when he's moving fast, he looks like a kind of pug dog, but don't tell him that.


The cats and the dog get on very well. Mr Padge and Lucky are probably looking for the ball I threw when they weren't looking.

And that's it for the photos I took, because I never remembered to take my camera anywhere. Apart from this, as I was sitting in the car waiting to be driven home:


Boooiiiiyyyyy faarrrrrmmmm!

Poor buggers. They hate the travelling, but they love being at either end. At the start of the journey from home, they sort of hold their breath until they get past the point of Turning to the Vet, and then they relax and start moaning half-heartedly. As soon as they get to the farm, they rush around checking out their favourite spots and getting under things and coming out covered in spiderwebs. They're Lady Duck's favourite dusters.

We (the cats and I and anyone who wants to come along) always do a circuit of the house garden, through the orchard and down the hill to the olive grove, then up the hill through the citrus trees and back to the house. This time we saw an echidna that started burrowing as soon as it heard us. Mr Pooter went for a closer look and ended up jumping a mile in shock. It was pretty funny.

I caught up with a couple of friends who dropped by (separately) to see me. I've known them as individuals, but they've recently met each other at a art class in Bega and like each other immensely. I'm completely chuffed, because they're both talented artists who have buried themselves in family and the demands of living in the country, and they will egg each other on to get creative. Those sort of friendships are so valuable, especially when you have things besides art in common. Their silver jewellery work is showing at the Spiral Gallery in Bega as I write, if you're in the area, and it's really good.




I'm getting better and better by the day. I'm at the stage where I can feel the improvement, a bit like a mortgage when you stop paying enormous amounts of interest and start making inroads into the actual debt. Visitors are most welcome.

I've realised that I can't do my usual excuse of 'I'm too busy to send Christmas cards' this year, so today I'm going to sit down and make some cards. Yesterday I made a heap of paper beads; I've admired the ones I've seen others make, including one of the students this year, so I decided to try myself. It's harder than I thought to get a good result, but by the end of the afternoon I'd made a string of paper pearl-like beads out of old sheet music, and my head was spinning with ideas that will stop spinning eventually and I'll come up with something do-able.

Tomorrow I have to make my way over to Bumblebee's school for both his ex-curricular drama performance (The Sneetches) and his end-of-year concert. Annoyingly, there's two hours between them, so I'm going to drive the car for the first time to get to the earlier gig. I have permission to drive but not the inclination, the same with alcohol. I had half a glass of wine on Saturday night with the home-made pizzas we cooked in Colonel Duck's new home-made outdoor pizza oven, but I spent all night nursing it and didn't like the taste. This is VERY unusual for me, as I'm a wine guzzler. Maybe it's an after-effect of the general? And yes, it was a wine I've enjoyed before.

And I hate being a passenger, always have done, but I don't feel in a hurry to drive myself at the moment. I think it's because I'm still slow and get pains when I react fast to anything, and a car sometimes requires fast reactions. Still, it's only across the road and up a bit, I'm sure it will be fine. I have to start sometime.

We've been gathering bits of costume for B's role as Sylvester McMonkey McBean: a blue satin bowtie from Colonel Duck, a fake moustache, a utility belt armed with a wrench and a carrot or two for comic effect. I'm sure he'll ham up the part suitably; he's a big admirer of comedy, and especially slapstick, and has been watching a lot of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clousseau over the past few days. I'm looking forward to watching him reinterpret a few Sellers moves.

So no more procrastinating: card-making awaits. Thank you to SuzeOz, who challenged me to my first game of Wordtwist, which I hadn't let myself play up to now. If you want to start a game with me, go ahead; I SO need the practice!

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))

Catching up (ladybits alert)

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

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

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

THE FIRST

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


THE LATEST

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

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

His nanny made him a cake for his party:

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Back to the makeready. Wish me luck...

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