Oh oh oh

I hope you've done as little as I've done this week. Or that you get to do very little over the next week. It's very nice, chilling out.

And that you have a lovely Christmas eve.

I'll be back tomorrow with a Christmas post.

Charming.

Best Beloved has been away this week. He's gone off to northern America, skipping through various parts of the US and Canada for work. Most of it is meetings, but he gets a day here & there to see things, and he's an expert speed tourist, so he'll cram a lot into a day. Last weekend he went to the Getty Museum in LA, and last I heard was looking forward to the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

I took Bumblebee back to Colonel Duck's farm to see Lily the lamb, who is nice and fat these days.



The tree that they are sitting under is very typical of the area, it's an apple gum (I think, from memory) and they cover the slopes here. When the wind blows (and it blows A LOT), limbs come down, so I don't tend to spend a lot of time under them, having been emotionally scarred by poor Judy's death in my childhood.



Back at home again, there's been no real food in the fridge, since I've been away from the markets for two weekends and I don't count Woolworths as a provider of real food. Nearly every night has been a non-cooking night:

Monday I had to assess over 40 students for their complimentary courses of either book, etching or screenprinting (we three teachers combine as a panel and do all of our students together), so I was absolutely buggered and couldn't do anything but buy fish & chips.

Tuesday my lovely Dr Sista Outlaw was in town and staying with me while she attended (for her work) the opening of the National Museum of Australia's heartbreaking Inside exhibition. Her job at the moment is working on the NSW arm of the new Find and Connect website. So at the end of that day we went around to my local yumspot, Wilburs, and had pizza and wine (well, she drank, I'm off grog for the month or so) and caught up with Zoe.

Wednesday was a bit of a lost day, spending most of it with Dr SO and an old friend of hers, and then hosting my regular fortnightly scrabble-dumpling soiree. It's a great night: people bring packets of frozen dumplings and whatever they want to drink, and eventually we play scrabble, or not, or read poems, play chess, watch Spicks&specks, whatever the dynamic of the night wants to do, as the mix of people is always very different, depending who I've talked to that week or who gets brought along. This time we had a couple of fellows at the start, but they had to run off, so we ended up with seven women who all wanted to play scrabble and have a good natter at the same time, so we put two boards out and pooled all the letters and had a big single game. It was very civilised, really. You could choose either board in your turn, and both boards were used quite equally. Lots of dumplings steamed & eaten, lots of good conversation.

Thursday was again a not-studio day. I yearn for the studio, but sometimes it just has to wait its turn. I had to ride my bike into the city to meet up with the other people involved in the ArtsACT Artists-in-Schools Residency this year. I rode because most of the city was pretty chaotic with the visit by POTUS (or Barack Obama to you non-acronyming non-Canberrans) whom I completely missed seeing, because I'm never at the right moment at the right time for anything like that. I was in Bega when the Queen visited too. I did hear all the planes and helicopters yesterday, but that's as close as I got to the action. The meeting was great fun - we all got to tell stories of our early childhood teaching encounters and give feedback about the grant stuff.

After that I went home and did some intensive gardening, pulling out a small tree (I'd noticed the same tree in other people's gardens around the corner and NO WAY was I letting it get that big, ever) and doing lots of weeding.

Oh -- and throughout most of this activity was the ongoing stoooooory (in Muppet tones) of Bumblebee's homework. More like SAGA. He had has two major assignments due, and the first finally got done (it was like pulling teeth), with the second one more enthusiastically tackled when suddenly we discovered a THIRD one that had been forgotten and was a day overdue when remembered. ACTION STATIONS. We (WE) got it done, and now he's back to researching the Samurai era, which is much more fun than creating a travel brochure for Rwanda (DON'T GO THERE, he put on the front, after looking up DFAT's current travel advice for the country :) )

So, Thursday. Oh yes, in the evening I went to Megalo's African Famine Fundraiser night, where lots of very good art was for sale to raise funds for CARE, to be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Aust Govt. The speeches were amazing: Jon Stanhope, looking very well and fit, talking about Human Rights and the Arts; a speaker from CARE, who realised she was banging on a bit by about the 6th page of her talk and cut it down quickly, but I was actually completely engrossed in her statistics and facts... more people then the entire population of Canberra living in one refugee camp, among other shocking things. And then another young woman (I am SO BAD with names) speaking really eloquently about our capacity to engage with these events when they are ignored by mainstream media, and how to incorporate a charitable sensibility into your everyday life without giving in to periodic guilt (in other words, how to help consistently, rather than reacting to emergencies). She was amazingly good. I hope Megalo made a decent amount for the fundraiser. I bought an Alison Alder screenprint, called Drought, which seemed very fitting.

Today... I have to run around some more, but I'm hoping the weekend will be studio-based. The cats keep nagging me to go in there, because they like to watch me work (eyes like whips, the two of them). Actually, poor Pooter hasn't been 100% well this week. On Sunday night he came down with a raging fever, all limp and droopy and off his food, with red-hot paws and ears. I put him on the bed beside me, and slept lightly, checking on him, and by morning the fever had broken and he was bright-eyed and demanded FOOD, and lots of it. Phew! I was all gooey over him until yesterday, when he pooed in the bath. Charming.

More mutiny

I got the family up on Sunday and we ran away to the coast for the day. Not downwards, towards the parental Ducks, but across, ignoring the boganity of Batepersons Bay and then slightly up, first to South Durras and then to our favorite place in the known world, Depot Beach, where BB and I were married.

I just needed to walk on a wintery beach. Beaches, in my humble opinion, are best when you can walk along them with a crisp breeze around you. I also badly needed to scour all the sloughing skin from my post-scabies feet and I didn't feel like booking myself into a solvent-smelling nail joint to do it.

There was greasy salty fish-and-chip eating; there was walking,



with and without seaweed;

there was hole-digging



there was stone-skimming



and there was the time when I thoughtfully put down my book to take a photo of all of us



it was a really good book, too, so that was quite a sacrifice.

Did I say stone-skimming?



I've been sitting and reading in the same spot while Bumblebee stood at that same spot and threw stones lots of times now.





Sigh. Time flies.

By the end of the day we were tired and happy and my feet were silky smooth and craving moisturiser. We went home and cooked up a quick Indian storm followed by apple pie from the Braidwood bakery, and we were all in bed by 9:30pm.

I'm working full-time this week at the Art School, and working all weekend in Sydney teaching at the Warringah Printmakers (feel free to join that class if you're in the vicinity) and then full-time all next week, so Monday will be the only day off I have and that will be spent driving home from Sydney... so I made sure to make that day at the beach count.




For all those Canberrites who love to wear brooches, get thee hence to ANCA tomorrow night for the opening of PIN Wonderwall, with around 70 artists making pin work and most of it at very reasonable prices. The show continues for another ten days, but I can't guarantee that there will be much left to buy... tomorrow I reckon the red dots will be faster than chicken pox.

Easter, day 2

I went to the festival quite late today. I didn't get to the studio. My health is a bit erratic, funny skin things happening. I will go tomorrow, by hook or by crook.

Today's festival highlights (I forgot to take my phone, so couldn't twitter my fun):

A duo called Bygone Errors, who played innuendo-stuffed music hall era songs and told very bad jokes (Why does a bike not stand up by itself? It's too tired (two-tyred). Boom boom!) They were very funny, and there were a lot of older people in the audience who knew the songs, so much jolly singalonging ensued. BB's parents arrive tomorrow, we're going to take Grandpa to see them, he'll love it.

Watching the Fiddle Chicks play a superb rendition of Frankenfurter's song 'I'm Going Home' in the Infinite Rocky Horror tribute heat. It had deep shades of Ultravox's 'Vienna'. The Rocky Horror theme isn't working very well this year. It's hard to camp up something already so campy, and straight or soulful renditions don't work that well either. Most of the acts are playing 'There's a Light (Over at the Frankenfurt place)', which, I've worked out, is because it has the most life-affirming hippy lyrics (There's a light // in the darkness // of everybody's life). Blech.

But the Fiddle Chicks made it work.

And then, the piece of resistance for me (although I've come home to bed way before the night is over) was Shane Howard (from Goanna), his lovely daughter and his guest vocalist, Amy Saunders from Tiddas (not Martha, Crit!). It was a superb session of original new material, finishing with a fabulous rendition of Solid Rock with a guest didge player, William Barton. I must have heard that song endless times on the radio, but it brought tears to my eyes tonight... whether with joy or nostalgia, I don't know. Barton's didgeridoo playing was spine-tingling.

OK, time to go to bed in anticipation of Easter Eggs! As I said on Facebook, I did the wife-of-a-busy-man thing this year and bought my own egg. But I made damn sure that it's bigger than his. :)

Gold

Goodness, I keep forgetting to blog... that's because I came back from Mackay and stopped thinking and doing, and started exploring Facebook while I lolled (in the more traditional sense) and got sucked into all kinds of silly but fun games like this:



This is a snapshot of my Farmville farm, with a little folly of boulder and daffodils on the left, plus animals and plots of rice and raspberries and sundry other things. Contrary to real-life appearances, I love gardening, but I don't have the time of energy to do it, and have always set it aside in my mind as something I will do later when I have more free time and fewer fine motor skills. So Farmville is appealing to my green yearnings and Social City is... dunno, but for now it's fun. And, as usual, I'm doing things way after everyone else has lost interest in them, which is a problem when it comes to having 'neighbours' or fellow participants...

Speaking of lovely greenery, I've been doing a fair bit of driving over the last week or so. I went to Cooma to deposit Bumblebee with Colonel and Lady Duck, and all along the drive I saw the most magnificent golden leaves on the poplar trees, glowing in the sunshine along the roadsides.



That shot (taken precariously whilst driving near Michelago) doesn't do the glory justice. I do so love Autumn.

I also, in the last week, got my first and hopefully only GOLD TOOTH. Up the back, so I don't glint alarmingly when I smile, but I flash when I yawn. Apparently as a chronic tooth-grinder, gold is safer and will last longer under the pressure. The gold crown is covering a cracked tooth, probably from said grinding, so I really should do something to relax my jaw when I'm sleeping/working, the two main trouble times. Although how to relax further when you're already asleep is beyond me, really.

I've run out of time tonight (probably because I keep checking my Scrabble/farm/city), but tomorrow I will come back and talk about Mahri Autumn, which is another thing altogether.

Drawings

I've been sitting here at work feeling fuzzy and waiting for things to happen: students to arrive, films to arrive to make into plates, meetings to get under way. In the meantime, I've been looking at stuff on the internet, and today's theme seems to be drawings. Here's a selection of things that delighted me (click the images to take you to their source). Many thanks to the various bloggers who featured them first...


Lady Thornthrop is terribly concerned about the plight of poor children





The fish in the water will swim through your head