One of us: vale Kathreen Ricketson

Some of you might have heard of the tragic death of Kathreen Ricketson and her partner Rob Shugg in the news in the last day or so. The shock and disbelief that has resulted has been profound, not only for the absolute random horror of the event, and not only because there are now two beautiful children who have no parents, but because both people were brilliant, kind and energetic in the best possible way, and their lights have been snuffed out at a point where they had so much potential ahead of them. I didn't know Rob as much as Kathreen (but I now have a much better sense of him via my lovely Dr Sista Outlaw, as he turns out to have been her first boyfriend); she has always been a good person with whom to sit and drink a cuppa at my local coffee-shop and talk about how to perform this extraordinary juggling act that is life.

After walking around in a bubble of shock and tears for 24 hours, I have managed to pinpoint what was nagging at the back of my brain. It's to do with the number of communities that Kathreen, especially, had built up and actively contributed to. You can get a sense of it on Twitter, where there are myriad expressions of shock and grief, and in the initial tributes to her, which of course will proliferate. She had so many skills: photographer, designer, crafter, writer, but the main skill was her way with people. She was kind, helpful and above all, inclusive. You can see it in the tributes, that all seem to say 'she was one of us, and leaves a hole'. I could never understand how she got so much done in her life, she was indefatigable.

For me, it is doubly tragic that she died now, in Canberra's centenary year, because so much of the focus of the year has been on celebrating great Canberrans, and drawing attention to our 'exports' like Patricia Piccanini. Kathreen was a truly great Canberran and she wasn't an export, because she was determined to make an international life for herself while leading the lifestyle she wanted in a city that she loved. She was an excellent communicator with an amazing eye for design; she achieved the dream of having an external life fully connected with the world while staying grounded locally and being able to immerse herself in her family and enjoy every moment of their time together -- and we all know how hard and rare that is.

Kathreen was an internal asset for Canberra. She proved that living here is not being stuck at the bottom of the ends of the Earth, and there are hundreds of people around the world mourning her today as a result. Not to mention those of us who were lucky enough to encounter her in the flesh. She was one of us, we Canberra folk.

There are many discussions brewing about how best to remember her, and how to help her children. I hope that something particularly Canberran can happen, and in this year, because she was one of our best ambassadors and she will be sorely missed.

UPDATE: Whip Up have organised a trust fund for the children. If you feel that you'd like to contribute, here's the place to go.

Vale Aged Poet

The Spirit to the Body

So – you have served me well and we have been
Comrades in action.
Together took we keen and sharp delight
In racing limbs and outstretched arms and hands,
In every cell obedient to command.
The sudden thrill and ecstasy of head
Thrown backwards to the buffeting of the wind.
I have seen Nature through your eyes,
Its beauty – wind and fire and sun and rain,
Heard by your ears and spoke through your lips.
And now regretting it we two shall go
Splendid into the darkness, naked, free,
But for a little while; then you shall be
Dust blown about the windways of the world,
And I a sigh in all Eternity.

Rosemary Dobson



My Aged Poet died on Wednesday. It was very gentle, very peaceful, and I have no doubt that she had a very good death, with caring people around her. I saw her a few hours beforehand, so I had a chance to say goodbye, and she looked like a little bird curled in the bed, breathing with her eyes closed.

She had turned 92 just the week before, and because she was almost completely blind, I'd taken her the smelliest bunch of flowers I could find: jonquils, sweet peas, freesias and hyacinths. Thank goodness for florists who can access spring flowers in winter! I wanted her to dream of flower-filled meadows, to wake up to glorious scents. It was a good present for someone who had everything and needed nothing.

The poem above was written in her teens, and published in a small book that she set and printed herself at her school, also making the linocut that graced the cover. She always joked that the book should be called Smeop, because she forgot to reverse the title text in her initial attempt. It was published in 1937, when she was 17. That's over 75 years of poetry, peoples, that's a pretty good innings.

Not only had she got past her birthday, she'd also seen her complete Collected updated and republished by UQP this year, released in April. After that, it's no wonder she let go. It was time to catch up with her husband, Alec Bolton, who died in 1996. He ran his own private press, Brindabella Press, which produced over 23 fine press books, and it was through his printing and design sense that I got to know him, and consequently her.

I can't believe it's been 15 years since I started helping Rosemary sort Alec's papers, and then her papers, a weekly session that moved away from literary help to more simple things like going shopping, sitting out in the sun and reading aloud, and finally holding her hand at the bedside and telling her about the world outside, persistently moving on as she slowed down. I learned a hell of a lot from her: about poetry, poets, the 1940s, art, discipline, dignity and also about Standards, among other things. We didn't always see eye to eye, but those struggles are always the interesting parts of friendship.

I can't think of her passing as a tragedy; she lived long and well and was loved, it's as much as anyone can ask for. My thoughts are with her family right now: she will leave a large hole.

There is a wonderful obituary here. The photo was taken by her son, Rob; It's lovely and informal.

art attacks

I've been trying to write a blogpost since Saturday, but my weekend and early week just keep going and going faster and faster until here I am, and it's lunchtime on Wednesday. My art attacks, let me share you them.

Contents
Friday: Robert Guth at CCAS
Saturday: Material World at ANCA, plus some jazz
Sunday: Guerrilla printing day with Angela
Monday: Edible Books & farewell Lynda
Tuesday: Running away with ourselves
Wednesday: Remember to breathe

Friday
I'm actually not much of a one to go out on a friday night except to the movies but my ukulele group was invited to play towards the end of an end of a PhD event at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Plus it was a chance to catch up with lots of friends from art skool. So we went and won some odd things at the auction (and lost some wanted things that were outbid) and ate the yummy kangaroo doner kebabs and the endless hot fresh sugary donuts that kept pumping out of the donut machine and eventually the uke group found each other, dragged some chairs into a circle and had a play. We're not a very forward group, we fly under the radar a bit. No leaders, lots of attitude, unable to finish a song at the same time, but happy and jolly and with good taste in music. Well, we think we have. We played some Billy Bragg, Lou Reed, the Breeders, the Cure, Johnny Cash... you get the idea. Fairly Gen X, us. Most of the crowd had gone home by the time we started, but we played for the cleaner-uppers.

Saturday
A lovely visit to the Farmers Markets to buy yummies, into the studio for some Making time, and then my friend Angela Gardner arrived from Brisbane to spend a night and a day with me. Angela is a printmaker and poet, and byrd and I used one of her poems for our Demolition piece at Print Big a few years ago. We nattered for a while, and then it was time to go to ANCA for the opening of Material World, the show I'm in where we all had to make site-specific works with found objects. It as a wonderful opening, one of the best I've been to, mainly because it was low-key, friendly, there was heaps of food & wine and a band, and at 7.30 the lights were turned out for Earth Hour and we sat around the fires and looked at the candle-lit art and talked to each other happily. Narelle Phillips, one of the curators, writes up her experience here. She's an ace chick, and working with her is always a pleasure.

I enjoyed people's reaction to my work, once they found it. All you could see on the way in was the dangling bookmark ribbons, but if you went outside for a glass of wine and a bit of cheese and then walked back in, there it was, obvious as hell. Many people just assumed I'd filled the girder with intact books, because it looked very natural and un-artlike. Another friend came up to me and said that it frustrated him because there seemed to be no logic to the shelf arrangement. When I told him that it wasn't mean to be logical, and that the books were often in conversation with each other, he went back and spent TWENTY minutes looking at it. When he'd finished I asked if he was happier and he just shrugged, which I guess means NO, but... win for me, it engaged him for TWENTY MINUTES. How many other works of art can do that? Bless.

Afterwards we dragged ourselves away and over to a fabulous party close to our place, where some friends were farewelling their son as he flies to Berlin soon to complete a Masters in jazz. So there was more food and more wine and a stage where he and his mates got up and played a storm for us. We left at about 10.30, but apparently it all didn't finish until 3am. Who says Canberra is boring?

Sunday
Angela and I had a hope that we could have a play in the studio together before she left. She had a 5:15 flight, and in our favour was the change back from daylight saving, which gave us the feeling that we had an extra hour. We left the party at a decent time, despite the good jazz, to give ourselves a fighting chance of a solid day's play. So we awoke, and talked about texts for a while as BB made us a big cooked breakfast. We sat out the back and ate the big cooked breakfast and talked ideas and then hit the studio.

We worked with a new poem that had been brewing for a few weeks. I didn't grasp the meaning at first (sometimes takes a while with poems, don't you think?) which dismayed her, but once we discussed it and I talked about finding and creating a graphic starting point for the meaning, we were off. We set and printed an editioned letterpress broadside in one day! Mind you, the type is still sitting on my press today (I'll dismantle it once I finish typing); it was crazy fun. We're a good team: she arranged the wood type into cloud shapes while I tore up the paper (working out the dimensions as I tore, changing our minds once or twice) then I locked the wood type on the pressbed while she started setting the poem's text. She printed the embossed woodtype while I was her clean-hands assistant, then I set up the metal type while she put away the wood type and mixed the ink. We printed the last layer and finished with time to spare to look at a few other printed things and get to her plane. Phew! Here are a few photos:


Upside-down clouds!


Embossed clouds.


If we'd had more time I would have got this curve much smoother, but I did the best I could in a hurry.


The final work, drying on the rack.


Angela, working the press.


Happy, tired ladeez.

Over at Angela's blog you'll see the same photos and similar words from a different angle. I'm glad she liked listening to Dig Music with me. I've become quite addicted to it, and yesterday came home to discover that I've won a double CD of blues & roots music in a small competition they were running. Yay!

Monday
As well as teaching my normal class, I'd wrangled the students into making some edible books as part of the annual International Edible Books Festival and bringing them in for a 'lunch'. It was pretty rough and ready, since neither Ingeborg (the other teacher) and I had time to organise plates or tablecloths or such things, but the works themselves were delightful, and the ones that could be eaten (some were hypotheticals) were delicious.


I was very fond of these bananas. Have a look at my flickr site for the full range, many put a lot of effort into it. I loved being able to eat a miniature 'Animal Farm'!

Monday evening was spent, as usual, at my ukulele group, but this time we were farewelling a steadfast member who is moving to Melbourne. She is a beautiful singer, and there was much discussion about who could be 'the voice' now. We made her sing all 'her' songs in the songbook the group has compiled; she does a rendition of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You' that is almost better than the original and definitely better than any other cover I've heard. We also played 'Under the Milky Way Tonight' by the Church in honour of Jimmy Little, who'd died that day (or the day before?).

Tuesday
Tuesday I spent some time with a cousin of BB's, down for the Renaissance exhibition and when I dropped her at the bus back to Sydney, I kept going in to the uni and caught up with a dear friend to talk about life, the universe, and doing some work together. We had lunch and started talking about things that got very intense, and I finished by suggesting that we just drop everything for a few hours and go to the uni bar and play some pool. We giggled like schoolchildren as we played, completely invisible to the 20-somethings playing around us, except for the moment when T, a pool shark in her youth, got up on the table to do a particularly impressive backwards shot. That got their attention. It was tremendous fun and I went home afterwards feeling quite revived.

Wednesday


BB's lovely cousin took this photo of Padge.

So here I am, sitting in a quiet moment, ready to get back into the action again. More printing, some Folk Festivalling on Friday and then I'm going to the Blue Mountains for two days to celebrate a 50th birthday and to meet Dr Sister Outlaw's new kitten. I'm looking forward to Monday, pure sleep-in time, and maybe a movie date with my nice cooking man. Did I tell you that while Angela and I were printing, he was in the kitchen making cake, fig & pear paste, something else that I forget and spaghetti for dinner? My, this house buzzed last weekend.

A taste of today

The universe decreed that it was my day for Minding Other People's Children. I did a morning stint of emergency babysitting of sick children, and an evening stint of babysitting some non-sick children at very short notice for a very good reason. I was very proud of myself for the way I got the latter children to bed with only a few gales of tears on their part. It's much easier when they aren't your kids.

In between stints, I planned a small book and did some test prints on the paper I want to use.



Looking at that picture, I can go to bed happy.

Yay for the Lighthouse Keepers

I've never really understood the nostalgia movement that is prevalent at the moment among the Babyboomers and -- increasingly -- Gen X. I mean, if you're nostalgic for the music, surely you just listen to the recordings, which were made in the time you're nostalgic for? Why on earth would you want to pay money to see a congealed lump of wrinklies attempting to be as hip as they used to be?

I ate my words last night when I went to see The Lighthouse Keepers at the charmingly shabby Canberra Polish Club. Admittedly, this was a special thing, in that they have only reformed for three or so concerts, and that's it. They were always a pretty laid-back no-fuss kind of outfit, so you knew that they wouldn't really be attempting to reclaim their youth or anything shonky like that. No, it was friends getting together for a long-overdue play, and if mistakes were made during the playing, then they had a laugh, we had a laugh, and a VERY good time was had by all.




Of course, the shock is not so much at the way the band looks, but at how the other audience members -- your peers -- have aged. We (a bunch of ukulele friends) first sat up on the stage (next to a big table of the band's parents, who have probably earned every white hair on their heads) and looked down at the incoming punters. A bad angle, considering all the receding hairlines and low-tide dyelines. Lots of nonchalance, real or otherwise, and the chairs around the edge multiplied until it looked as though there would never be any space to dance.

I was a horizontal recruit to the band, an awful term, I know, but so true of so many of my favorite things - what is it about the advice of lovers that sticks harder than that of friends or family? Anyhoo, I was a latecomer to LHK, who were on the verge of splitting when I first listened to them, so I kept a casual eye on what happened next, bands like The Widdershins, The Honeys and a fun little side project called Blumenintahls (if you're reading, Blue, it's 'Metal Goddess' I love playing). So I was really happy last night when 'March of the Green Men' was played mid-set. It's a Widdershins song, but was reworked into a King Curly song (LHK's Greg Appel is older brother to KC's Steve Appel) for the album 'Doomsday Piano'.

Here's MotGM for a quirky moment:




The band played three small to medium sets, as they have never had a huge repertoire. But every song was good, and every song held up to the scrutiny of time. They may have been low-key and laidback, but they were high-class musicians working with quality lyrics, all about relationships, happiness and pain. They've got the pop-jangle of The Smiths (and they played a Smiths cover to cement the connection) without the whine of Morrisey (yet Juliet's singing is definitely more sour than sweet) with a gorgeous mix of guitars, including slide guitar and harmonica, so they had a lovely country edge to the pop.

There's a number of their songs on Youtube, including their best known, 'Gargoyle':



Great song, although I prefer many of the others, like 'Springtime', 'Ocean Liner', 'Bad Mood' (my shower song) and 'The Beat (Hey I want my loving back)', which was played right at the end, right when I thought they'd forgotten it, and played it with two drum kits, so it went straight through my body. I danced behind the curtains up on the stage with Lynda (who being ten years younger than I had missed the original scene, and was wistfully enjoying this incarnation) during the first set, and then moved down onto the floor when everyone got the bug, and danced non-stop for the rest of the night. It was wonderful.




They have released an (incomplete) selection of songs on a CD called 'Ode to Nothing', which should be available at your local indy music store (do they still exist where you are? We have one in Canberra, thank Ceiling Cat), and is also downloadable on eMusic, along with another collection, Lip Snipe Groin that has some of the same but also some of the ones they left out.

Apparently they're playing in Sydney tonight, so if you like what you read and you can get to their show, here's the details.

I felt twenty years younger dancing to them last night while I ingested a couple of litres of cider, and I feel twenty years older today as a consequence, so perhaps I've just balanced out, and the experience has left me exactly where I should be, only happier.

Sampled

I finally finished my type sampler.

Open publication - Free publishing - More fonts

(If that doesn't load for you, go here)

I also wrote about it here.

That done, I'm going to head over to Crazybrave Zoe's for an unAustralian hot pot party. Australia Day itself was pretty good; I took Bumblebee to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy shindig but we left before it all got excitingly stoopid. Then there was an afternoon of fine press printing, and then the fireworks I mentioned earlier. Something for everyone, don't you think?

Happy Birthday, baby Bejeebus

I'm lying on my bed with Padge, who is trying to sit on top of me so that I can dry the rain off him. We had a lovely sunny morning, and now we're having a lovely rainy afternoon.

I'm lying on my bed to rest off the Xmas Belly that I built up at lunchtime. We had a stray friend (I almost typed 'fiend') come and eat with us, and while we had a humble yet lavish spread of prawns, bbq'd chicken tikka, mushrooms stuffed with feta, potato salad and a couple of leafy green salads, we washed it down with three bottles of bubbly and followd through with Best Beloved's Authentic Christmas Pudding (the secret ingredient is cumquats) with custard and homemade vanilla icecream.

Errggghhhh.

I got a few presents: a single-cup teapot for my new chai addiction (I'm not allowed to use our usual teapot because the flavour lingers, apparently; the latest Frank Moorhouse, Cold Light and Alison Bechdel's graphic novel autobiography, Fun Home, which I inhaled this morning before lunch and thoroughly enjoyed.

So here I lie, feeling bloated and thoroughly spoiled. I've talked to my son on the phone (how I wish he were here!) and my lovely parents (they'll be here in a couple of days, so I'm not so sooky about them).

And so I wish you all a wonderful Christmas. I hope it's fun-o-rama.

The morning after the night before: a photo essay

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.

All Hallow's Sugar

That's better... a bit of sleep was all I needed. I've been having weird stomach pains and bloating (sorry, TMI, I know, but I guess if you've been a long-term reader, you'll have read worse) so I'm slowly testing out what might be the cause. I'm off alcohol for a while, and I'm trying to cut down on sugar (I don't think it's the culprit, but now's as good a time as any) so I think I had a low sugar moment last night. Best Beloved is praying I'm not gluten-intolerant, he loves his bread and pasta. I just want the ache to end!

It's been a pretty sugary couple of weeks, drinking with family and friends and then the heady rush of Halloween. I was invited to a couple of Halloween parties, couldn't make one because of visiting family, but I did get to the other, handily situated next door. I've never been into celebrating American traditions like Halloween, Valentine's Day or Thanksgiving, but it's different when you live next door to a lovely American and she's homesick for her fun.

It was a small but faithful party, complete with costumes and activities. My favorite cake-maker, Sam of Amore Cakes (at the Farmers Market), had made a batch of Witch's Fingers, pale shortbread fingers with almond slivers for nails, and I bought some for Julia, which went down a treat.


Here she is as Athena, complete with owl companion and our gift.


This is Lisa, Julia's housemate, originally from Tasmania, dressed as The Bad Apple. Scary!


Here we are, dressed in our Folk-Festival-bought masks, using them to be the Sad Cow and the Zombie Country Mouse.

We carved pumpkins,



ate devils on horseback and bobbed for apples.





The apples, once wetly won, were cut into chunks and dipped into caramel, or 'carmel' as Julia's north-western accent makes it. Yum! That, plus all the 'candy' and the exquisite pumpkin pie with maple cream, shows you how sugar-loaded I've been.

Bumblebee wore a cloak that I'd made for him on the weekend. His old cloak had been given to a smaller body a few months before and he really missed having a black hooded cloak. I seemed to have a 'free' day on Sunday (actually, when you're self-propelled, no day is a free day, but I felt I needed to spend some actual time doing something for him) so I proposed we shop for material and make a cloak.

Blimey, that was a tough day. Note to self: NEVER GO TO SPOTLIGHT ON A SUNDAY. We're both still rolling our eyes at standing in a 4-metre line to buy 6 metres of cheap black poly-cotton. Then my sewing skillz proved to be quite rusty, so I spent much of the afternoon unpicking and resewing, and was still up at midnight and then up at 6am the next day to finish it in time for that evening's party. That made Best Beloved roll his eyes, but I felt great when I saw him wearing it with a variety of masks.

So I had two fails during the week. One was as a sewing queen, and the other was at bobbing for apples. Here's something you probably didn't know about me... I hate putting my face under water. I've battled it for years, and I'm much better these days, can duck down in the pool and stuff, but I tried shoving my head into that wheelbarrow to get an apple in front of a crowd and realised that I was just not very happy about it. I don't have a problem with losing face, so I just stood up and confessed that I couldn't do it, and thankfully it was a nice group of people who didn't call me a wuss etc. Apparently there were people hiding in the house to avoid even having a go, so that made me feel ok. And they even let me eat the carmel-dipped apples :)

I did carve a pumpkin, so I did make some contribution to the evening's festivities!





(and this is what happens when you put pumpkin scrapings near my husbang.)


This weekend I'm attending The Gathering, a local conference for bookbinders from all over Australia and even a few from overseas. Should be fun... but first I'm going to a movie tonight (by myself, because BB will be flying back from business in Cairns): Anonymous! Yum, eye-candy galore. That's the best kind of sweetie.

Shaky

Ergh. Am emotionally exhausted.

We finally got to have a Friday-night-movie date night last night, to see Source Code (which I highly recommend, am in now officially in lerv with Duncan Jones), and then when we got home we had a big fight about something stupid, so that bedtime was late and terse until we snuggled up against the cold and said sorry. Fights don't last long, but the shockwaves linger a while. We're not fighting types, and certainly don't find them invigorating like some couples do.

Then I woke up and went to the local farmers' market and bought nice things, including two big yummy slabs of Amore cakes (Autumn Spice and Lemon Buttermilk & Raspberry, for enquiring minds). I ran into a family friend and was told a distressing thing about the health of ff's spouse, even closer family friend, then walked around in a daze for a while. When I got home I discovered that I'd left the cake box somewhere at the markets, Ceiling Cat knows where. Tracking the memory of what my hands were holding, I think I put the box down either at the fish stall or the herb stall. In either case, no-one yelled or ran after me to pass on the box. I hope whoever finds it enjoys the excellence of Sam's cooking.

So breakfast was still nice, but cake-free, which left me feeling not only wobbly but bereft. Now I'm going to the studio for a while to distract myself, and Colonel Duck is kindly coming up from Bega to do some chainsaw gardening for me. By the end of the weekend I'm hoping to have finished bookshelves to paint, and new bits of the garden to work over. That will solve the shakies, fingers crossed.

Oh, forgot to say that Bernice is back in town. Go and say hello. Play nice, childrens.
PS: Her post seems to have disappeared. I will hassle her. Maybe it's Blogger's fault, they've been half-arsed all week.

Waftings

Yes, still itching and peeling, which makes it tricky when I work with PVA glue like all day yesterday, because at the end of the session I don't know if I'm rubbing off dry glue or skin... but getting much better, no doubt. Skin-wise, anyway.

I discovered that if you do a boring repetitive task (like glueing 50 pieces of paper to other pieces of paper, putting them in the nipping press then out and under light boards) you should listen to Mike Oldfield. His formula of making music is to start slow and gentle and then gradually build up momentum until you get to a Big Ending. It makes each small task seem very exciting, like you're working towards something that will eventually sit up and yell EUREKA! When, of course, the music finishes and you're still beavering away with the gluepot, it's a bit of an anti-climax, but it was fun while it lasted.

I was listening to Mike Oldfield because the CD laser in my studio stereo is borked, and when we were moving I found a few boxes of old cassettes, so I'm working my way through them, falling in love again with my weird music loves of twenty-odd years ago, like Mike Oldfield, Robert Cray, early Billy Joel (before Christie Brinkley messed with his brain) and Ruby among other strange mixes.

Mr Mark, who built the bookshelves and kitchen in our last house, is building us bookshelves as I type - big tall beasties, because the ceiling is very high in this house. They're quite imposing, and I can't wait to see if we have room left over once I unpack the books. Mind you, as much as I'd love to spend this weekend getting the books out, I have to wait. We have to paint the bookshelves and let them cure before the books get to them. Mr M says to leave them a month. A MONTH! Others say at least three weeks. I think last time I waited a week until I lost patience & shelved them, but I will try my best for the sake of the books themselves. The problem is that I can't start preparing and moving my studio until the books are out & up. Sigh.

Happy birthday to Best Beloved, who turned 40 yesterday. We decided that he would do something big for his birthday in the fullness of time (Conversation ranged from buying a piece of art he liked to getting some panniers for his bike. I think he's finally decided upon doing a pizza oven workshop later in the year.) so in the meantime I bought him a few little token presents... and then forgot where they all were! Dammit, senior brain already. So I contented myself with cooking him a nice meal and then bringing out a homemade self-saucing chocolate pudding with a candle in it, only to have (of course!) the candle melt from the pudding end and subside into the pudding as I was putting it in front of him. Sigh. Oh, how we roared.

Bumblebee is mumbling and cranky because on Tuesday he had braces plonked (carefully) on his teeth. Here's the photoessay:


Before.


During.


After. Poor lovey, look at his eyes. He'd just been through an hour of hell.


Natty dentist, sorry, orthodontist who wears funny bow ties and vests to amuse teh childrens and then gives you huge heart-stopping bills.


This is the weird bit about the experience. It was like an episode of a reality tv show, with foundation-caked bottle-blonde chickybabes at the Ortho's beck & call. It's the only time I've ever felt that 'Reality' in tv terms merged with 'real life' as I know it. He obviously like to feel that he's in that universe, with these women at his beck & call. Mind you, all the people who actually did the work prepping B's teeth were very nice middle-aged women whom I'm sure would have fixed Mr O with a withering gaze if he'd dared to suggest that they went a bit blonder. Heh.

So, it's been a week of sore teeth and lips and lots of cool Greek yoghurt and soups. Poor thing, the pain will subside, and two years down the track he'll hopefully look even more gorgeous.


byrd and I have been hanging out together a bit lately, with us feeding him and his lovely new ladylove on Monday night and then him helping me to move a letterpress cabinet on Wednesday. Jolly times, except that he has a raging headcold and now I have it. Ta, luv. While we were bringing the cabinet in from Hume, we dropped into the tipshop at the Mugga Lane Tip. It's the most revolting tip shop I've ever been to, no organisation, everything exposed to the weather, and most things completely trashed. I bought a dead remote with a thought for making it into something else, and they charged me $3 for it! Cranky-making.

I'm ignoring the world at large. There's many things to say but I don't want to say them while my braincells are being suffocated by snot.

I'd like to welcome Leonard Elvis Jones into the world, the new resident at Sorrow at Sills Bend. Great name, great parents, most excellent cat uncle, all a child needs for a good start in the world.

Bugger it, I have to get out of bed to go to work. I'm going to skulk in a corner and write my new typography course and try not to snot on anyone. Then hopefully I can come home and paint bookshelves while I can't smell the fumes.

wot i dun lately

I've been a bit busy. I really, really miss having a decent camera, and I haven't really made enough money to warrant buying a new one. Want to help me buy a new camera? Visit the Duckshop! Sigh.

Anyway, what follows is from my iPhone camera. It doesn't have a flash.



Breathing, on the front step late one afternoon, sucking back a cold one with a mate. Cockies flew raucously overhead. Good times.



Watching and listening as legend Professor Jack Golson talked up legend Professor John Mulvaney at the launch of Prof Mulvaney's new book of memoirs. I used to be Prof M's secretary, and am very proud to be excellent friends with him and his lovely wife, Liz. It was a launch stuffed to the gills with interesting people, and the stoopid Coop Bookshop only brought one box of books along, which sold out within minutes. Prof rang them the next day, enraged, and demanded that anyone who requested one in the next couple of days got them at the Launch discount price ($10 off). I went in to order one and lo! they did so. Heh.



I've been working on a catalogue design for Thomas Middlemost of the Charles Sturt University Wagga art collection, for a print folio exhibition called Fair & Square. Due to all sorts of printing house bumbles, the printing & binding was completed on the morning of the opening, so I had to spend Friday morning sticking on enough of the custom-printed letterpress ampersand stickers to get through the opening & initial mailout, then I picked up the boys and we personally delivered the catalogues to Wagga CSU (we were going to the opening anyway, but hadn't planned to be couriering the boxes!)



There were 14 different ampersands used for the stickers, so choosing a copy was a bit like a personality test, great fun at the opening itself.



All the boxes in the boot of my car. And that's the last photo of the event that I took! I forgot to get my camera out the rest of the evening... It was a Rona Green-organised print folio involving at least 30 printmakers, with some of them at the opening, and then a lovely dinner at a restaurant called Magpie Nest. Rona gave us all badges at the opening, so we felt like a real gang.



Next day I visited the Wagga Regional Gallery where I saw the excellent Recycled Books travelling exhibition (not to be missed! Probably coming to a regional gallery near you) and then was shown the aftermath of their flood damage. They have to replace the floor of the entire main gallery... ay ay ay!



And then we did some op and antique shopping. Bumblebee found a dinner suit that fitted, I found a few old books and tins, and Best Beloved bought a vintage apple peeler and corer.

We only stayed the one night. Apart from the few days I spent being born there, that's the longest time I've ever spent in Wagga. It's a nice town. It has almost as many roundabouts as Canberra!







Today, Bumblebee and I learned how to make rice balls, thanks to this post. We fell in love with them in NZ, and you can't get them at Canberra sushi shops. They are such handy lunches.



At the same time, the cats helped BB with the washing.

I went to the studio and caught up with a printing fellow I met in Dunedin, John Holmes of the Frayed Frisket Press (in town for a medical conference), and then played with the wonderful wood type that I asked printmaker Ros Atkins to engrave for me:





Apologies for the quality of those last shots. I really miss the macro bit of my camera.

I also rearranged some of my type from large loose cheap typecases to nice condensed cases within cabinets, in a desperate bid to declutter:





Tomorrow I'm teaching my book class how to make a hardback sketchbook in one four-hour class. Normally it's a tight but do-able class, but I've got a very large class, with a few dreamers, so wish me luck...