Feel the love!

I'm really getting into this living-in-Hobart thing! My Tassie blog project is starting to bulge already with all sorts of local goodies, and looking back through it I feel excited and proud of what my home-state is coughing up!
There is so much more upcoming over the next few months... folk festivals, wooden boat festival, Taste festival, 10 Days on the Island...plus we're going on a clan holiday to some supposedly fantastic holiday "shacks" (think faancy!) in Bicheno. Can't wait to post gorgeous photos of that! (Can't wait to have gorgeous experience, more's the point!)
Meanwhile, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around our place... the first time we've really decorated or "done" Christmas together at our home. The out-laws are all flying over for a few days so it will be a prety big week all up! Woohoo!

Inspiration.

It's been kind of a big week for me. Someone very important to me had a medical miracle performed on him...well perhaps delicate neurosurgery is all in a day's work for the neurosurgeon, but to us he is a god. Recovery is going well, and it has renewed my sense of rightness in being here.

And on a much lighter and fluffier note, I was inspired yesterday by a market of crafting mothers, and will try my damndest to be a part of this venture next year. Read more about it here.
We're off to another market today, a design market in the IXL Courtyard at Hunter St. Can't wait to see what there is... hopefuly not too many Huon Pine pepper grinders. The world only needs so many of them!

Culture shock.

I've moved interstate, back to Tassie where I grew up. I'm having good days and bad days about it. The good days are looking up at the mountain looming over the city from every vantage point, seeing my mum and dad and other relatives easily and without that intensity that the fleeting visits of the past necessitated, and knowing how much good stuff is a short drive away (though I haven't yet taken many short drives to the good stuff). The bad days are feeling a keen longing for Melbourne, for markets with choice and ethnic variety, for running into people I know as I walk down the street, and for that exciting sense of anything might happen, anything might be discovered that I still got frequently even after a dozen years living there. I have to be honest though, part of my melancholy is a longing for the life and the me before I had a baby - cycling to life modelling jobs or the pool, doing two hours of yoga uninterrupted if I felt the urge, poking around the op shops without navigating a hummer of a pram (I love my buggy, don't get me wrong) and timing my pottering by the tolerance level of a bored baby. But of course, and I really mean this, I'm not just being tokenistic, I wouldn't exchange my motherhood or my boy for ANYTHING, and having him is easily and unquestionably the best thing I've ever achieved. I also am able to recognise that another contributing factor to my homesickness is that I left a well-entrenched and longtime sense of belonging in Melbourne to come to a place that is both familiar and strange (in many senses of the word), one where despite my family links, I feel a distinct lack of belonging. So far. This will change once I have found a playgroup I like and some simpatico mothers to hang out with, and also once I increase my human-powered mobility (never mind the petrol prices, I'd rather use the car as little as possible on a day to day basis. Bodies were designed to move themselves about.) via some sort of baby-seat for the pushie. Then I can ride to the city, the docks, the art school to meet Dan when he is studying, the Botanical Gardens, the museum. We kind of fluked it when we ended up moving to Glenorchy. It turns out I can walk to the library (a great one, too, with the best Rock 'n' Ryhme I've ever participated in), supermarkets and fruit market, pool and basically all the local amenities worth using within half an hour, which satisfies my daily exercise fix. But Glenorchy is no Preston, despite being a northern suburb, and Hobart is no Melbourne, no matter how you look at it. I'm just going to have to come to terms with that.

Birdy Num Nums?...I think not.

Birdy Num Nums, a parent-, child- and pram-friendly cafe on Nicholson St, North Carlton, has been my recent cafe of choice to meet people with my hummer of a pram and squirming child. It is a bit of a legend among Melbourne mums, so I thought I'd try it out in my last weeks in this city. Big disappointment.
The first two times I went I only had milkshakes or iced chocolate - not too hard to get right. Yesterday we went for lunch, and in a spectacular show of mediocrity, everything that eventually made it to our table was very poor! Crispy squid on a Vietnamese salad was soggy calamari on a small wilted heap of salad mix with some token grated carrot and crushed peanuts. An insulting $16.50. All coffees and the chai were appalling and the other three mains all looked very lame as well. The dry, wizened mushrooms with my friend's eggs made my heart sink. Not to mention the waiting staff, who all seemed to be on work experience. Not what I would've thought was the wisest choice for a weekend lunchtime.
I was so utterly disappointed, perhaps most so with myself for staying, eating and paying.

Birdy Num Nums? Bloody Yuk Yuk.

Back to (back) bibs.

Reversible unisex bibs made for some friends having as yet gender-unknown babies. I actually bought the fabric new, which goes against the way I want to produce these, but I was in a hurry to make them and not having anything suitable in my stash I had no choice.

I've since scored some cool pieces of fabric from a local charity op-shop, one where you can still come away with a bag of stuff and only $3 poorer...a rarity in these days of op-shops knowing their hip value!

The definition of tragic and pointless:

A fat guy in a fluoro vest wandering morosely up and down in front of a 24-hr McDonald's shifting lawn clippings and leaves about with a leaf blower...ON A VERY WINDY DAY!

And what's more, some idiot pays for this service!

Tagged!

I got tagged to answer (answer? fill out? how does one respond to a meme? what is a "meme" exactly?) by this lady.

So here are my responses...

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Oh god. Erm...
Possibly moving from a share-house in Northcote to another in Clifton Hill; halfway through my BA in Linguistics; smoking a lot of dope but planning to quit; going to raves and indulging in other substances; wearing lots of glitter, bindis and fluoro accessories (dear God!); making a set of costumes for my ex-sister-in-law's dance production; pining over my socially-awkward archaelogist housemate, and generally thinking I was pretty clever and street-wise! (Which clearly I so wasn't!)

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:
1. hot jam donuts
2. white christmas
3. lashings of gorgonzola (more of a non-tight-budget world)
4. pork crackling
5. King Island Belgian Chocolate cream dessert (Dad bought me some after Jethro was born...mmmm!)

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
1. seasonal fruit
2. toast with avocado and black pepper
3. sushi rolls
4. turkish bread, dukka and olive oil
5. jerky

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. build our house and fit it with the best of everything we want (yoga studio, totally self-sufficient, orchard and gardens, lap pool...)
2. buy a really cool car and get it greened up so I could drive it guilt-free
3. buy a few homes around the world, including one in Rio, so I could be near my brother
4. do something philanthropic, like set up community wind-farms or solar-power a school or something
5. um...I dunno, it's been so long since I fantasised about having squillions of dollars. I just want enough dollars to get by without stressing. So, maybe another atruistic thing. Definitely something towards a more sustainable environment.

Five jobs that I have had:
1. chamber-maid (for one lousy, tedious, stressful day!)
2. child-care worker
3. dish-pig
4. life model
5. graphic artist

Three of my habits:
1. finishing other people's sentences (often wrongly!)
2. looking for errant curly hairs on my scalp and plucking them out (like a simian looking for lice - one of my least attractive traits!)
3. making to-do lists

Five places I have lived:
1. a dome in Hobart
2. North Fitzroy with her
3. Northcote
4. Clifton Hill
5. Preston
....basically, within pages 29-30 of the Melways!

I'm s'posed to tag five others to do this, but I can't really think of five other bloggers, so I might just let it end here.

I expect I'll get 7 years bad luck or something.

More white noise in the blogosphere.

I have created yet another blog.
Why?
Because I'm anal, and I like to keep things organised nicely. This blog is for fads and general life rambles and activities, Stella is for Stella pictures, Buttons is for badges and the new one is for my list of things good about Tasmania. This new venture is my self-prescribed therapy for dealing with increasing feelings of angst and panic at moving house/ moving state/moving back(wards?) / moving to an island.


The idea is to catalogue all the great cafes, shops, venues, natural wonders and gold in them there hills that I come across once I move to Hobart, as a reminder to myself that whilst it may not be Melbourne (which is a good thing, really!) it does have plenty to satisfy needs for good food, cultural diversity (I'm not sure about this one, but I'm hoping!) and entertainment.

I secretly hope that it might even become a bit of a hipsters guide to Tassie! (Which would mean more secret hoping that I am actually a bit hip myself!)

Today's efforts...

I love this one especially!

Bib la difference!

I have fine-tuned the shape a little, narrowing across the shoulders, taking off some length and closing up the neck-hole slightly. I'm quite happy with this version, and will make more like it.


I've got a cool piece of fabric with a Japanese-y cartoon print called The Itazura Kid (a recycled garage-sale pillow-case!) in mind for the next one.

Conquering the world, one bib at a time...

My son is a chucker.
A spectacular, monumental, volcanic vomiter. Mt Vesuvius, I like to call him. He rips through outfits with waves of hot clotted yoghurt, and recently has begun to follow up with a steady stream of clear spit. (Teething, everybody likes to say knowledgeably. Whatever.)

Consequently, we've been using up the few hand-me-down bibs in our possession faster than I can wash them. We had an excursion to a DFO on the weekend to see if we could find some bargain bibs, that weren't these piss-weak little newborn's spit-catchers and chin-cloths, and that didn't cost the earth. Oh, and that didn't have hideously ugly and naff graphics on them. (My preference was to find them at op-shops, but they are rarer than hen's teeth in my area, and those I found were pretty disgusting.)

We came home empty-handed and slightly disillusioned until it was suggested that I have a crack at making some, and miracle of miracles, I actually just got on with it there and then and whipped up TWO! As I whirred away on the sewing machine, I mentally built a reclaimed fabric bib empire, complete with minions, a bald cat to sit on my lap and a good stock of evil mwahaha-has.


So, here are my two steps towards world domination. Only prototypes, as I discovered on putting onto my lad that they are just a wee bit broad and long, although through the course of an evening wearing one he still managed to saturate it while remaining fairly dry beneath. Which I think may be a marker of success.

Where history lives.

My partner and I recently made the radical decision to move interstate. We bought land in Tassie and plan to leave Victoria in October when our house lease ends.

Contemplating the big shift from mad, bad, dangerous to know and open 24/7 Melbourne (Smelbourne to its mates) down to small, cold and islanded little Hobart (Slowbart to the bitter 30-something expats that make up half of Melbourne's population - or maybe just to me!) presents me with various issues and emotional hurdles to be overcome. I grew up there after all, and you don't leave your home-state without good reason.

One such pang hit me today when walking home from the supermarket, with my little glassy-eyed, spittle-blowing, Melbourne-made son in tow. I passed a guy who reminded me vaguely of someone I once knew, a friend of an ex-Clifton Hill housemate, and I suddenly realised that in returning to Hobart, the run-ins with people from my past will no longer be with people I have met and known as an adult, but more likely people I went to school with (a whole other kettle of blog-posts!). These incidental meetings serve as reminders of my various other incarnations. I see someone I knew during my undergrad and remember that I spent the best part of the late nineties taking drugs, drinking beer, dancing in my bra at the Evelyn, and other such niceties. A friend from my Dip Ed last year brings me out of my spacey maternal reverie to remind me that I am a qualified teacher. Someone from the creche I worked at years ago passes me in Northland (I look the other way like the scumbag snob I am) and I am transported back to the days of plastic bowls of macaroni cheese, snotty faces and heated disputes over the dress-ups.
What I'm leaving behind are the tangible remnants of my history as a grown woman. I came here at the age of 21, and feel very much that I have lived my whole adult life here. I think on some level I am afraid that by leaving the place I also leave behind my history and therefore my actual self. But these are all just memories after all, and I take them with me wherever I am, regardless of the faces from the past swimming up out of the crowds to remind me. It's not like I have my memory wiped when I cross the Bass Strait... they stopped doing that years ago!

In a way, it's fitting that I am coming full circle and returning to the place of my very happy childhood with a happy child of my own. And what real loss is there in not chancing a run-in with my ex-boyfriend and showing off how far I've moved on since him?! That would really just be an empty and narcissistic exercise anyway!

Though having said that, I'm sure there will times in Tassie when I try and impress new friends with my past as a life model or raver or illustrator (HAH!), because at the end of the day, I actually am just a little bit empty and narcissistic!

Today is a good day to dry.

I love the old Hill's Hoist.


Okay, some might say that it isn't necessarily the prettiest piece of industrial design, but it serves a great purpose and I can't imagine what you would do without one. I have to admit, I do rather like the aesthetics of them myself (form following function?), and I find the sight of a line full of clean laundry snapping away in the breeze and sending off waves of sun-baked cleanliness a lovely thing to behold. I don't know anyone who would deny the pleasure of climbing between clean sheets dried in the sun and wind. That fragrance goes up there with fresh-baked bread, newly cut grass and baby skin as top-ten all-time best smells.
Maybe it's a particularly Australian thing to do, but I was flabbergasted to read this article about how it is so rare to hang laundry outside in Canada that it's a newsworthy event when someone does it unashamedly! There are even tips at the end of the article about how to dry laundry without using a dryer, like putting your delicate smalls on a rack indoors to "avoid embarrassment"! Cos having clean undies is pretty mortifying. I'd rather everyone thought I never washed mine at all, or just threw them out after each wear!

I know dryers can be handy, but really, most of the time they are totally unnecessary for most people. Especially in a country forever gripped by drought!
Besides, some days, if it weren't for the endless stream of laundry to be hung, I might never leave the house!

Fad no# 24: TTV Photography!

I have had good intentions of blogging more often since I've been at home with a baby, but frankly, I'm fucked if I have anything interesting to say most of the time! And on the rare occasion that I might think up a thought worth writing, I lose it in the quagmire of my fritzed short-term memory before I can find ten minutes to post it when I don't have a baby dangling from one of my sad udders!
But last weekend, while feeling particularly sorry for myself, I was ambling about my saved websites and rediscovered these lovely images. I assumed they were taken using some fandangled fancy camera, or printed on some fabulous type of paper, but when I did a whole five minutes research (my old friend google), it turned out to be a very simple technique, that even very simple folk like me could muck about with at home!
So...what is TTV photography? Basically, shooting with a digital camera through the viewfinder of an older camera. And that's it, as far as I can gather. Dead easy. And effective! I wanked about one afternoon, in failing light what's more, and came up with a few okay pictures, I think, after a bit of diddling with the contrast in photoshop to make up for poor light and such.
So here are some that I was pretty pleased with, given it was my first crack at it and it was getting dark and I was dicking about at home and while walking the baby and, erm, the dog ate my homework. (Just gotta cover all bases!)

Fad no# 23: Time-bites.

In my new reality, the one I've been occupying for the last three and a bit weeks, time is measured into frugal, 10-minute bites. If I can complete any one 10-minute task in a day, I am a satisfied camper! Hang washed nappies - 10 minutes. Shower and dress - 10 minutes. Fold clean nappies - 10 minutes. I might start a task requiring longer than 10 minutes, but will go into it knowing and (more amazingly for me!) accepting that it might get cut short at any point and not be taken up again in this 24-hour period. Which all means that I have to be okay with getting a whoooole lot less done than I used to. And I thought I was unproductive while I was pregnant!

Oh, except this isn't unproductive at all. I am keeping a whole human alive!

We have lift-off on Push My Buttons!

Go here to see the first of the button badges...

and...

...he was actually due today!

A Labour of Love!

How timely, that the day after I resign myself to a 40-week pregnancy, the baby decides now is as good a time as any to get out there and into it!!

Saturday, January 12:
3am. Waters break.
2.09 pm. Little boy born.
2.10 pm. I say "Fuck!! Oh fuck!! What do I do?!!"

So what do I do?
I feed, sleep, gaze, stroke downy skin, and endlessly ponder the state of my beleaguered bazooms.

My lovely little J E P.

Putting the 'crap' into 'carp'...

How do you like my 2008 diary cover?
Last year was first in a good decade that I didn't do anything to cover my plain blue diary, and whilst it turned out that I survived with it like that, I prefer a diary that is a bit memorable and unique. So this year, I thought I would attempt one last creative project before baby-land.
I can't take the credit for the originality of the artwork - I basically did a fairly dodgy knock-off of a piece of tattoo flash from the net. My painting skills were very rusty, and while they developed along the way, on the whole it is a decidedly slapdash affair (note the streaky shellac!!)- but hell, it's only a diary! It only has to last me the year!

Fad no# whatever...Nostalgia TV

In the infinity that is the last weeks of pregnancy, the Groundhog Day of weird aches, spasms, bodily fluids, naps and tears, I have found solace in rewatching a favourite from adolescence: Press Gang! The dialogue stands up after all these years, the characters are strong, the rapport comes across as genuine, and the spark between the gorgeous Julia Sawalha and Dexter Fletcher (who I must admit, still does it for me!) is as fresh and dynamic as ever! God bless the local library's teen section!
If my library stocked early Grange Hill, Degrassi Junior High (the original) and the Goodies, I would be a happy couch potato!

Ah...
Dexter....

Eating humble pie!

I am hereby officially retracting my previously disparaging comments about blogging... as I think it very likely that I am going to take it up again myself! I realised, reading back through old posts, that I rather enjoy the process of composing a post, of posting pictures of stuff I like or have done, and generally journaling stuff as I see it. I think that in the time that is coming, that of new parenthood, I may feel the need to use my brain occasionally for more than just working out the shopping list or sorting the laundry. Of course, I have creative plans to be getting on with as well, but for those in-between times, I might as well keep my language skills above 'A-goo! A-booh! A-brrrrrrrr!' and the like (baby-talkin'... for those who might be reading and wondering if I have already lost my mind!)

And in the meantime, until I think of some clever and funny things to write about, here are some pictures of stuff...

My excellent Xmas presents from Dan: a fabulous badge-frame handmade by Him (no, not god), a spiffy Crumpler camera bag, and the coolest retro radio!!!


A self-portrait I made for a subject at Uni... quite pleased with this! One of the few bits of art I made in 07, what with doing lesson plans and teaching rounds!



A cut-paper collage birthday card I made for Dan... note how I cleverly (read: utterly stupidly) made the hammer the wrong way around - unless you're s'posed to strike things with the claw?

I never said I was a GOOD poet!

Late pregnancy haikus:

High summer in urban Melbourne...

Chilled water, ice and fan
Next door's aircon blows warm winds
Panting on the couch

Conversations with strangers...

How long ya got, love?
Size of you, must be a boy!
Gotcha names picked yet?

Me and it...

Hullo Fidget-Kid!
Don't poke me in the bladder!
Wait til Dad gets home...

Housebound...

Surf the internet
Check my facebook, write emails
Wander 'round the house


See, I am clearly pretty bored! Have a sneaking suspicion that a haiku requires more than just filling in the syllables.