Snippets of a life

• Our rubbish-bin water tanks work a treat - two were filled to overflowing from Thursday night's lovely rain!
• It takes the first rain of the season to remember how not to ride your bike (ie: in sloppy trackies and a white tank. A day spent in classes wearing damp, clownishly baggy tracksuit bottoms and a virtually transparent top could've been better thought out.)
• There is a new kitten in the 'hood. She is small and black and super soft and fluffy, we don't know where she comes from, but she marched up to our two old timers with utter aplomb and demanded company! Ours don't want a bar of it (too small to fight, too big to eat - they can't figure her out) but Dan and I had a lovely kitten-fix. We also had some serious Kitten-Kong flashbacks, picturing her marching up one day towering over Amos and Sabre and their sheepish retreats! (Yeah, it's alright to snarl now when she fits in a shoebox! Toughnuts!)
• My brain is breaking. How many factoids and research papers can one brain safely consume in a 24-hour period? I've got learning a'plenty, but it hurrrrrts! And I'm already bored of being diligent. I want to go to the movies, go to the park, waste my time! Waaah! In fact, this post is a precious moment of scheduled 'relax' time. I have to hit the handouts again soon..... I only have a few more hours of viable brain-activity time left in the day before I truly meltdown.
• I'll make a cup of tea. That's a valid getting-back-into-the-study activity. Then I'll really quickly clean the whole house from top to bottom and alphabetise my shoes and perm the cats and polish the drive, and then I can get back into it...might go see what the new kitten's up to as well...
  

I am...

...the proverbial teapot.
Now that I'm at uni I do this:
runaround in circles like an airplane play relay races make quizzes on the web read photocopies with a highlighter in hand plot timetables write reading logs squeeze modelling jobs in around everything else worry about money worry about teaching prac worry about whether I am committed enough to be a teacher or simply should be committed worry about the future wish I had more time to pursue the etsy projects I haven't had a chance to get off the ground wallow in waves of guilt pick myself up and try again and so on.
Great, innit?!

Now I have to go off and feel guilty that I spent 5 minutes blogging instead of doing something else more worthy.

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?!!!

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.

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.

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!

A darn good long weekend!

A bloody noice Australia Day weekend for me consisted of some retail therapy (couch in previous post; fabulous sixties frock from overpriced Fitzroy vintage store; divine coffee set from a Brunswick garage sale on the way home from yoga and a swim in the sun), some social time (friends for dinner[...and they were tasty! Mmm!]; a farewell BBQ, and a family lunch), time in the garden weeding, creating new beds, harvesting and planting rocket seeds, and visiting (twice!) the Hotrod Show in town. Awesome!!!

The new foster children

Marika's couch came to live with us on Australia Day. We already love it very much. We think the house has absorbed it with ease.

We are fostering the Shag print, which has pride of place in the bedroom...Shag by name, shag by...well, you know the rest!

What the hell...

...let's make it a round three posts!
Here are some of the places I go to feel inspired/intimidated:
lovely stuff
more lovley stuff
And by meadering about through their links and friends I have discovered lots of other treasure chests. I have also lost a LOT of paid work hours. And I don't care. Why's that? Because...c'mon, join in on the chorus here: "I hate my job!"

Inadequate

Just stumbled across this photoblog. Two friends posting daily morning photos. But I think they are both crafters, so most of the things in their images are all lovely and crafty and make me feel bland and inadequate. I want to do something similar - somehow by selectively cropping my life into 500x500 pixels maybe I too can cause others to feel wistful about me.
(I have a vision of spending hours setting up contrived "casual" scenes designed to create envy and covetousness, meanwhile everything actually meaningful in my life falls by the wayside!)
Jeebuz, two posts in one morning. How bored and apathetic can a girl get?

For my eyes only.

I hate my job. I am bored beyond belief. 14 more workdays left, according to the post-it note I just stuck to my screen. Then a week free before I start my demanding Uni course. Between now and then I have to decide exactly how much truth I tell Cuntrelink about my life in order to solicit small monies from them and then fill out the requisite forms in quintipulate complete with DNA sample and 10-year plan; apply for a Working With Children card; organise some modelling jobs to keep me in bread and water; menstruate (and suffer the compulsory and incomprehensible mood swings...check. Doing that now. Clearly.); move a couch; finish the kitchen island so I can reclaim the spare table for a Uni workdesk; and try and remember how to be a nice and lovable person (harder than it sounds).
And I feel like a big fat loser blogging this black mood, but no-one reads my blog anyway so it's only really for me in the end. And it has kept me mildly entertained at work for ten minutes at least.
God. Bored.

One Off the Wrist!

Yes, it's all in the wrist (and shoulder, glutes, quads & mind)...the wondrous joys of racquetball! Rac-quet, yeaaah [high whiny air guitar solo to the tune of some eighties soft-cock-rock anthem]!

On my first ever time on a squash-court I managed to lose a ball into the fluoro lights, up into the gallery and smack bang into my boyfriend's nads! Awesome! Not the world's cheapest way to work up a sweat, but the fun-factor more than justifies the dollars.

You reap what you sew...

And here are some of the xmas things I made for the kiddies...

In Pursuit of Cool

I love these cannisters. Love. Them. Found in a second-hand dealer in Cygnet, Tassie at Christmas-time. I think they like being near the trippy sixties wallpaper in our kitchen.











This gold pair we actually bought before we even moved in together - our first joint purchase!















This is a cool shallow plastic bowl we scored at the Anglesea op shop late last year. Great for light summer salads!

Another Anglesea score - a fibreglass platter.






One of a set of six placemats, from same Cygnet treasure-den. Akin to the wallpaper, methinks!

Hello.
2007, eh?
Chalk up another year then.

So, December was customarily busy and overstretched, but I actually managed to achieve some set goals, which pleeeeased me. I made (read: bought and hand-decorated) a T-shirt for Dan from an idea of a year ago. Talk about closure on that one! I also made, from scratch - pattern and all - a couple of kooky rag-dolls for the little girls in my world, complete with painted, big-eyed faces. Bratz, eat your hearts out! And knocked off two lovely stuffed bunnies from another internet crafter, again working out the pattern myself from two jpegs. (Not overly ethical, but they weren't for sale or anything, so I figure that covers me.) Was quite pleased with the result, except that my construction efforts were a bit freeform, and one of the creatures has been renamed Bummy Rabbit, for his unique face! (Pictures pending.)
After a gruelling round of barbies and kris kringles (thanks Santa for my lovely herbs!), we headed down to Taswegia for my family's series of dos. Two and a half weeks later, after some serious drinking (my long-lost cousin from the UK led me astray... margaritas and glow sticks were the order of the day!) and eating of much creamy things and meaty things and learning to love sudoku and going through the up and down agonies of whether to buy land down there (nothing yet, but it looks like the way of our future), we crammed our bags to the absolute max of wieght restrictions and staggered home laden with Tassie op-shop scores (more pictures pending), a handmade tagine, my new favourite toy - a badge-maker- and a severe case of culture shock. The wall of heat and smoke-haze that we walked into upon returning to Melbourne (truly living up to its nickname of Smelbourne) was overwhelming and distressing, especially after the relative cool greenness of Tassie. A tree-change to my old home-town looks ever more appealing with Victoria's current state in mind.

And what of January so far?
Well, I got a first round offer to my first preference Uni, and went off to enrol the other day. It looks to be a pretty big year - lots to learn, little income, little free time... but I think I can manage it. This also means I am at last leaving my brain-numbing job!!! After talking about it for over a year! Whoohoo!
I have mental lists of all I want to do this year (you might call them resolutions): in addition to Uni (at which I plan to excel!!!), I want to re-establish my fitness routine, make a stack of cool badges and start selling them, grow veggies (think I may have already killed some of the silverbeet from neglect though! I wasn't vigilant enough with the water yesterday in the 40 degrees heat.), harvest more rainwater, do more sewing, wear more sun protection, do more regular breast checks, spend quality time with friends and generally be an all-round great gal!

I'm sure I can muster up the oomph to do most of those things!

Five reasons for why my blog-work is late:

1. The (wonderful) Wagons. We saw them the on the first night of summer, at the groovy, atmospheric, and once Nazi-frequented Speigeltent (according to Henry Wagons). A fantastic show, with dark and moody country music, sometimes funny and sometimes painfully awkward patter from Henry W., a delightfully irreverant hiphop song in the encore, and a so-cheesy-it-hurts-my-arteries interval version of Believe It Or Not (I'm Walking On Air)! And may I say, a washboard never sounded so good!

2. 32. No, not the meaning of life, in fact ten less than that, which gives me a decade to work it all out. My 32nd birthday. Also my brother's 37th birthday, although he reckons he waited for me to catch up at 32 and is still there, but I don't think it works like that. My brother is currently overseas, and although due to fly home on our shared birthday (a fluke date) last Saturday, he remains in Brazil, tumbling head over heels in love. I had an email from the lass the other day - she sounds lovely and equally enamoured with him, which pleases me, but it's the first time in memory that I haven't spent some time with my bro on our birthday, and that makes my bottom lip quiver a bit! In fact, until I was finally able to reach him on his OS mobile on the morning of the birthday, it had been precisely a year since we had spoken. Waaaaaaay too long between drinks. And yet, like it was only yesterday.

3. Went to the in-laws house way down on the coast for four days, to get the hell out of Dodge and breathe some fresh sea air, ramble about looking at petrified forests,limestone caves, Blue Lake and generally get well-fed by the folks. There's nothing like getting out of the concrete jungle and into the world. I especially liked when Daniel almost put his foot through a huge mound of rotting whale blubber on the beach! (No, Zoe, it's definately a rock, look, I'll show you... URGH!!!!!)

4. Christmas ... bloody Christmas. I love the giving and the planning of the giving and the making of the giving, and if I find a just-the-right-thing, I love the buying of the giving, but I don't love that I never seem to have enough time to enjoy all those aspects and it all seems to turn into a frantic babble of second-bests. And permit me a short vent about christmas in the corporate environment: we have a non-compulsory-but-if-you-don't-play-you're-a-bit-of-a-scab kris kringle at my work, which on principle I am refusing to join. I neither want to give or receive a thoughtless $10 present to/from someone I barely know for the mere sake of bowing to formality. Even in trying to be a bit of a scrooge at this time of year, I find my list of people I'd really like to give at least a little something to is plenty long, so anonymous work colleagues be damned I say! (Ebenezer...yes.)

5. Life. It's a funny old thing. It keeps on getting in the way of all the wonderful things I think I want to do. Like sewing myself a special sun-shade shirt (not just an ordinary shirt, but something groovy and yet protective), making lino-prints, lampshades, badges, Stella pictures, pickles, and of course a cure for cancer.

So they're my reasons for being absent of late, though am I only telling this to myself anyway? Have I stayed up too late essentially talking to myself?! Am I the crazy lady at the intersection of the internet superhighway?! Can anybody give me a lift?

Technically inept!

Dagnammit... I seem to have arsed up my page, sending the profile and links down to the bottom of the page in Explorer (though it looks fine on Firefox at home)... Am a bit scared to fack around with it too much in case I make it irretrievably worse. Daniel... will you help me later? I'm a spaz.

Moments of small joys

Well, it's been a long time between drinks, I tells ya! I guess I've been busy... and lazy... and uninspired. But the inspiration flowed again with a vengeance on Sunday, after I had been to see the fabulous show Eyes, Lies and Illusions at ACMI. Over 500 examples of pre-cinematic optical toys and illusions from the private collection of German experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes. It really is a spectacle of staggering proportions, with a walk-in perspective room, peep shows, a live zoetrope, shadow puppets, flick books... the works. We were lucky enough to attend a couple of seminars, one of them a re-enactment of an old-time magic lantern show and the other a presentation by Werner Nekes himself. There's a few school-aimed workshops on over the coming months as part of it too, and a walk-in camera obscura in Federation Square that we missed this time, but will make a trip back to the CBD to experience for sure! Also, around the traps (we stumbled across ours at Polyester Records on Brunswick St) you can find free flick-books from ACMI advertising the exhibition... look out for a brown paper envelope with Don't Panic scrawled reassuringly over it's front in red... it'll be with the other free promotional stuff in shop windows.

I've also recently had a great food experience that was a long time coming, and is worthy of sharing... Dainty Sichuan Food (formerly of Smith St, Collingwood, now in Corrs Lane in the city). My friend and ex-housemate raved about this place ages ago, and it inspired him to teach himself Sichuan cooking, with great success. After revelling in the joys of Twice-Cooked Pork and Pock-Marked Mother Chen's Spicy Bean-Curd, I was moved at last to seek out the inspirational eatery myself to celebrate Dan's period of voluntary joblessness! Dainty Sichuan isn't fancy, and nor are it's prices, but the food packs a mean, keen chilli and Sichuan pepper punch that leaves your taste-buds reeling, your mouth tingling and sweat pouring down your face!!! I can highly recommend the Spicy Garlic Eggplant (I almost had a When Harry Met Sally "I'll have what she's having" moment over it!!)! But wear good runners with a grippy sole if you plan to go - most of the dishes arrive at the table buried in a pile of oily fried chillis, and in the the process of extracting your meal from the heap, a lot of chillis and their oily coats end up on the floor. A hasty and cursory sweep isn't quite enough to render the floor hazard-free, so watch you don't come a cropper! The cowboy boots saw me skating precariously to the toilets... lucky I've got good balance!!

Fad N0#21: Yes-man

That's me...just can't say no. Just agreed to a modelling job I don't really want to do, entailing missing a yoga class, because I have a soft spot for the dear old bird running the class and she needed a replacement desperately. At least I was strong and didn't put my hand up for extra days at my real job... part-time isn't very when you keep going in on your days off. Note to self: find harmonious balance between people-pleasing and self-pleasing. (As opposed to self-pleasure, which is on my other blog! Tee hee! As if!)