Monday, February 26, 2007

Oh baby, let the rain fall!

Dan did what we've been talking about doing ALLLL summer... and it took all of ten minutes in the end! With a little creative licence over our rental house, and a small amount of remodelling (no-one will miss a coupla feet of downpipe!), we now have, in addition to the present rainwater tank of roughly 200L capacity, an extra 18oL of rain harvesting potential! I think watching me run around in sopping pajamas on Saturday morning gathering small tubs of rainwater and filling every available vessel with it was the clincher! He then proceeded to do manly things with sawhorses and tools! I had a turn, just to say I helped, but after a few (wonky) slides of the plane, I announced that I was bored and wandered off to the study to organise stationery!






















I may be a bit limp-wristed with tools and furniture-making, but I make a mean chicken tagine!

(It's also becoming clear that I am now a student with time on my hands! Wait with baited breath for the procrastinatory [spelling? actual existance of word? care factor?] blog-posts as deadlines arise...)

First day at Big-School!

I am a student again!!!!
Except, the lecturers keep telling us to start thinking of ourselves as teachers. So, I am a student-teacher! Eep!
Okay, I know it was only the first day, so there's not yet any pressure of assignments and teaching rounds (and trust me, I shall be shitting my proverbial pants when the time comes!), but I had a great day! It rocked! The bike ride along the Darebin Creek trail, the meeting of friendly new people, the sitting in lectures and trying to extract the most succint and pertinant elements to scratch down in my now appalling handwriting (typing has improved vastly at the expense of my penmanship, I fear!)... the not being at work anymore! Yes, I've moaned on about that job for long enough, and being free from it really IS as good as I thought it would be! Even the impending poverty isn't too daunting just yet... (yeah, yeah, give it time!)
And just a thought from the nerdy-spock mature-age student... if you're going to be 45 minutes late for a 1 hour lecture, do you really think it's worth stumbling in? And can people PLEASE TURN OFF their freakin' phones?!!!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Road-Trip























Heat roils up from the tarmac, shimmers in waves from the car and hangs heavy in the air. Trailing a hand from the open window and tracing the brown horizon line with a moist fingertip, I can almost feel the claydust and dessicated grass husks sticking to my sweating skin. Hot wind rushes in and cracks my parched lips. The swill of water in the bottle is hot and tastes of plastic. The dry hills roll past in thirsty waves of hard-baked earth and stubbled fields, drooping grey trees and crumbling gutters of erosion where once creeks and rivers ran.
Victoria. February. Hot.
Heat from the sun, crisping my skin like cooking chicken. Heat from the air, sucking moisture from every breath. Heat from the motor, thrumming under my feet through the hot metal. The heat and the endless black track reeling in below us and streaming out behind are so mesmerising that passing slow trucks and cars pulling caravans feels like a game. It's hard to believe we are flying along at a real speed, one wrong move away from crumpled metal and blood and death. This isn't a badly air-conditioned game of Daytona.

We went to the NSW coast for a family wedding. We drove inland on the Hume to get there as directly as possible. Four hours of monotonous arid Victorian countryside, the drought in all its brown-skinned, blue-eyed tragic glory. A night in a caravan park in Albury, lolling in the pool - sheer luxury - then limbs flung asunder in the stifling tent, listening to the trucks passing by the whole night through. (If you close your eyes and imagine really hard, it almost sounds like the ocean!)
The next day, the rest of the journey... more dryness, then a few hours from the coast the drought hid itself ever more slyly until we were coiling down ferny mountain roads, breathing in warm, moist rainforest air and marvelling at the green - a salve for our eyes. The NSW coast... what an eden! Picture-perfect green hills, lush juicy grass on the roadside like set decorators had just been through, parrots, white-fenced stud farms, the stuff of dreams. The idyllic countryside from the stories of my childhood, usually set in England, was laid out like a fresh picnic on a crisp cloth.
The weekend itself was lovely, although the eden, with its ceaseless humidity had me constantly clammy-feeling. But there was bonding with family, jive-dancing with my awfully proper British Airways pilot uncle, holding of the baby until my arms cramped, sleeping in twin beds (just like Basil and Sybil...not a highlight, nor portentious I hope!), thrashing and being thrashed in the robust surf (my $20 kmart bikini struggled to rise to the challenge!) and the general feeling of holiday, albeit crammed into one weekend. We did the return trip in one long day, getting increasingly snappish as the heat, the fucking heat, drilled into our very cores.
At one point, the comment was heard to be made, "Why would you buy land in Victoria? Victoria sucks dicks!" No, not an overly mature commentary on the state of the state, but one that felt succint at the time. And I have to say, these past months enduring this horror of heat and beating sun have me muttering more and more, "Melbourne - I can't do it anymore, the heat, it's doing my head in".
As it is today. Again.

Please let it rain.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

S is for Self-Absorbed!

Following Penni's lead, (and at my request!), here is my list of 10 things beginning with S that I like:
1:Stella. She is my little alter-ego, my co-traveller, my voice to the world. And segueing nicely on from her, are 2:small-scale versions of bigger things. Really, Stella allows me to indulge my love of miniatures whilst kinda calling it my arrrrrrt! (Self-promotion is also apparently a favourite of mine!)
3:sushi - the food of gods. I have been heard many a time expressing the wish to live only on sushi. Which I imagine might actually get a bit boring.
4:shagging...well, admit it, who doesn't?
5:slow-food - like lamb shanks and chicken tagine and winter soups. So here already the sushi theory falls flat on its head.
6: stretching - most specifically the yogic type.
7: and in a similar vein, swimming. Nothing beats the peace and solitude of ploughing up and down the pool through dappled blue light, counting laps, counting breaths, clearing the mind.
8: Speaking other languages. I know some German and Spanish, but will just as happily read aloud for my own aural pleasure the French instructions for a hairdryer or Dutch applecake ingredients.
9:Singing. In the shower. In the car. Alone at home. The toilet of my old sharehouse had great acoustics. Karaoke, under the right conditions.
10:Sandals. Actually, not all sandals. One particular pair - the leather ones Penni brought me from Greece years ago. They have become THE shoe for this summer. I only wish she had bought me three or four pairs at once. I LOVE THEM.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Button me up!

Today is a day for doing STUFF!
I am flat-chat creating badge images. My lovely little badge-maker is really going to come into its own soon, with Stella badges to go with a new batch of Stella cards, and a few other sets of badges in a very different style for sale on etsy.com and hopefully some local Melbourne sub-culture stores. Although, I have come to the sad realisation that 100 badge parts doesn't go far when you use a few experimenting and stuffing them up. I need to order the big guns, so I can start to really crank them out...and hopefully sell the little sods!