crawling

Having been ill for a week and recovered for a week I find myself panicking about my up-coming show. I have 7 pieces of work complete, one in progress, one in the planning stage - and that doesn't seem like very many and I've only got 6 weeks to go! I am a shockingly slow worker...

Things haven't been helped by the delays with building our house, lots of Board stuff to do at school and all the usual end of term activities. We had a lovely evening at school on Friday, actually, celebrating the Japanese Autumn Moon festival (not quite on the full moon but close enough!) with Japanese singing, music and a play followed by miso soup and rice dumplings. We took along our big telescope and dearest husband spent a happy hour guiding a hundred children through tracking the moon across the sky and finding the rabbit: the Japanese equivalent of the European 'man in the moon'.

Anyway, I recently showed you pictures of that box full of blocks I received in the post (I've had lots of interesting post recently, including the latest BookArtObject book from Ida Musidora, which is fab) and I've spent a while mullling over what I want to do with it. The upshot is that it's going to be another book about family and I've been putting together the images on paper: inkjet prints of old letters, old text, hand written family trees and drawings... Each book will be slightly different; I'm only making 4 but I think that will be enough. (For me, that is, putting it all together!)


















Actually none of the above made it to the final cut of images but were an important part of the process. I'm not sure what it will look like when I've finished, but that's part of the fun.

I found out yesterday that I've had a piece accepted into the annual Creative Arts Workshop show in Connecticut, USA, that was juried by none other than Hedi Kyle (she of the fabulous book art structures - I think she formalised the structure of the flag book and invented the blizzard book, among others). She seems to be an incredibly modest person but she has undoubtedly had a huge influence on artists' books in the last 30 years and her role in the exhibition is the main reason I wanted to enter. I'm so pleased she selected my work! In fact it is Learned Absence, which I made for BookArtObject, that has been selected so my last remaining book will soon be winging its way across the sea to New Haven with my hopes and prayers that it doesn't get lost en route and a hefty price tag so that if anyone does buy it, I won't grieve too much about selling it! I'm regretting now that I didn't make a larger edition, because every number will have been used up together with an 'artists' proof' and I can't - of course - make any more...

What else? Well I've had my Nature Detective hat on too this week, working out which bird it is that we've seen running across the dirt track in front of our car. It's a large-ish bird and if I was in Europe I'd describe it as being like a pheasant with stripey feathers and that looooooong tail. In fact it's called a Pheasant Coucal and you can find some great pictures of it (albeit in a totally different landscape) on Australian bird life photographer Graeme Chapman's website. I looked it up in my 'Handbook of Australian Birds' which had thus far been no help at all, and found out lots of interesting things. For example, it's actually a member of the cuckoo family and is found all up the East coast of Australia from Sydney north and thence into Indonesia and Malaysia. What's more, it's the only member of the cuckoo family not to parasitise other birds' nests: it actually builds its own, lined with eucalyptus leaves, in the bottom of big clumps of tall grasses. But what made my day was to discover that the Pheasant Coucal is the originator of the most peculiar bird call that I've been listening to at dawn and dusk for the last couple of months! The Handbook described it perfectly: a series of 'whoop, whoop' sounds, starting with two, then a pause, then an ascending series of whoops until.... silence... and then it starts again. It's such a fun sound to listen to, and now I know where it comes from.

Last but not least, I have to leave you with a giant squid!

Oh cr*p

Hmm, not sure of the chain of blame or shame here: you can look at it in so many ways! Was it my fault because I asked Pete the excavator driver to smooth out the ridge so that we make the grade with the Rural Fire Service? Was it Pete's fault that he didn't see the pipe? Or... was it the sewerage contractors' fault that they neither dug the pipe in at the usual 600mm below ground level nor marked it with coloured tape so that any excavator would be alerted to the pipe's presence in the hole?

Well who cares - the whole thing stinks (ha, ha). What I do know is that the ridge is beautifully smooth, the pipe wasn't marked, Pete inadvertantly drove a large piece of machinery through it and the end of the pipe was obscured by dirt and only made apparent in the recent rain and... every drop of water (clean, 'grey' or 'black') expelled down the drain has been neatly by-passing the Biolytix sewage system and instead trickling its way slowly down the hill.

I discovered the result this afternoon as husband and I struggled down the hill laden with two trees, two buckets of liquid seaweed solution, six recycled plastic stakes, two 'green' water-reservoirs to keep the trees suitably irrigated, compost, a large shovel and a wheelbarrow. Yes, folks, I trod in it before I quite realised what "it" was. In fact I was so oblivious to the totality of the situation that I merely commented on the ground being surprisingly boggy in the area... Dearest Husband had to point out what was really going on.

Yuk!

Anyway, all thoughts of toilets firmly out of our heads we are celebrating the planting of the first tree: a Seville Orange that should keep me in marmalade for decades once it starts bearing fruit, and has been named in honour of my mother, "Sylvia's Orange Tree". Hoorah.

*cough* *hack* *splutter*

Darling daughter hasn't been very well for the last couple of weeks: there's a nasty chest cold going round the school and we've been fortunate enough to host it in our home, complete with all-night coughing fits and riotous temperatures. Now, sadly, it had the bad grace to infect me and I've got it worse than Darling Daughter which doesn't seem fair at all.

Needless to say we've taken the approach that if Darling Daughter is well enough she should go to school, not malinger around the house especially since we're all crammed together in two rooms and there's nowhere peaceful for her to rest here. But lest that seem unduly careless I should say that her teacher is very sanguine about it and there would have been hell to pay if Daughter had missed last Friday's Crazy Hair day.


















There must have been a run on sprayable hair products in Coffs Harbour in honour of the occasion but knowing how much Darling Daughter hates washing her hair (especially when she's got a bad cold) I went for the non-spray option: I divided her hair up into five bunches, plaited each bunch around two hefty pipecleaners and tied the whole lot up in coloured ribbon and plonked fake roses and butterflies on top. I gather her class had lots of fun bending her plaits in passing, although I'm not sure she was enjoying it by the end of the day... but instead of having to wash it all out we simply had to take off the elastics, pull out the pipe cleaners et voila!






















I put the plaits back in over the weekend on the basis that it would keep her hair away from the coughing... and this was sweetened by the thought of having marvellous waves in her hair when we did get around to taking out the plaits on Sunday. This made it a lot easier to have her face painted on Saturday when we went to the annual Bellingen Plant Fair.

















It was such a wet and miserable day that we almost didn't go, and we had to stop off first and buy wellies for everyone, but I'm glad we went. For the last couple of weeks we've been living in a land of thick, oozy red mud thanks to the work of Pete and his excavator and the rain. Pete's been carving drainage benches into the hillside behind the studio/office building, putting in culverts and creating a new dam half way down one of the gullies. It's all been great work and very necessary but the mud has been a real problem. Walking down the slope between the house (where we park the cars) and the office/studio (where we live) has involved acquiring an extra two inches in height thanks to the mud sticking to the bottom of our shoes!

A side-effect of all the excavation work is that Pete has cleared a lot of land of its covering of noxious weeds such as lantana and tobacco bush. This saves us from having to do the work by hand, but now it's been cleared we need to replant it with ground cover plants before it reverts back to weeds. We had a good chat to a bush regeneration specialist at the Bellingen Plant Fair who approved our methodology: we're going to put down lawn grass seed and individual ground cover plants which will give good coverage quickly, and the ground cover plants will eventually smother out the grass. We're also getting rid of our Camphor Laurels by planting native strangler figs on them up in a fork in their branches. The strangler figs will - surprise, surprise - strangle the Camphor Laurels, but it will take time; meanwhile we don't lose the laurel's soil-retaining usefulness. Chopping them down, while quicker, would destabilise some of the slopes. We're going to prevent the laurels from seeding, however, by ring-barking them now: it won't kill them but it will wound them and prevent them from flowering while the strangler figs become established.

I was thrilled to find a Seville orange tree at the plant fair: my mother loved marmalade and I think she would have been delighted to think of me harvesting my own marmalade oranges. Can't wait... meanwhile we have lots of citrus for our citrus orchard: Meyer lemons, Imperial mandarins, a blood orange, a kumquat, a kafir lime tree and a native finger lime. Yum!

















You'd think that all this malingering with a cough would have given me the time to make some work, wouldn't you, but I have to say that I've been feeling far too ill to work. In fact it's all I can do at the moment to type - and you can't see how many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors I've had to fix up as I've gone along! But anyway, I am thinking about working and the arrival of this box of wooden blocks has helped. Dearest Husband brought home a marvellous cube from a conference sometime last year. The cube is made up of 8 wooden cubes covered in folded paper, and the folding and cutting of the covering paper allows the cube to 'open up' and reconfigure itself, revealing as it does so the inner faces in different formations. It's not the same as the rotating tetrahedron I recently used to make a book in that it isn't endlessly reconfigurable: you unfold the blocks up to a certain point and then you have to fold them all back together again, but the movement is intruiging, nonetheless.
















I've had a go using some old prints on thick etching paper and realised quite quickly that I need to use thinner paper: I understand the principal now and just need to use thin paper and more accurate cutting skills to make it work. What's exercising my mind more is a coherent idea behind the imagery... I'm sure I'll get there in the end.

Meanwhile I think I've got to the end of my ability to sit in this chair and type for today. It's time for soup and then bed again! This cold reminds me of being ill as a child (I used to get several episodes of this sort of cold every year and spent weeks off school). I'd be confined to bed in my room on the back-garden side of our house in Bognor Regis, listening to the local chooks pecking around and waiting for Mum to come up occasionally and feed me mashed banana with brown sugar and lemon juice if I had a sore throat. As I remember it I was largely left to myself, and daytime or nightime lost their meaning as I slept when I felt like it and read books the rest of the time... In my memory it was quite peaceful, a bit boring, and I remember spending a lot of time looking out through the small window across the landing at the top of the stairs, which gave me a peek out into wider world.

At the moment my temperature's climbing upwards again and I can feel my pillows calling to me. Fighting with breathing is doing wonders for my meditation skills: I have to concentrate fiercely on the whole of each breath in or out to stop my lungs from closing up and starting another coughing fit...

p.s., (posted Thursday) after a week of spluttering it all got too much: I had a meltdown last night and decided to see the doctor today (everyone wishes I could sleep properly because I'm disturbing them as we're all in the one room at the moment). Contrary to expectations the whole issue was taken seriously so I'm tucking into a good strong dose of Roxithromycin (one tablet with green tea on waking, half an hour before food...) and if my temperature doesn't come down within 48hrs then I get a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia. I don't think it will get that far myself, but I'm looking forward to a better night's sleep tonight and - who knows? - possibly some energy tomorrow.

Plodding on

Did I mention that I went to see AC/DC in February? It was my 44th birthday present from Dearest Husband and we had great fun although I have to say it's possible that the band is a little past its prime... or could that be me? I last went to see them at Wembley in 1990 although it was a different perspective from the mosh pit all those years ago. This time we had seats, there were safety briefings and a special bus service to take us to and from the hotel in Baulkham Hills. Yes, Baulkham Hills. Sydney CBD has 17,000 hotel beds and they were all booked: Mardi Gras, AC/DC and Chinese New Year all coincided on one slightly damp weekend in February, which meant we hoofed it up the railway lines to Parramatta and thence into a taxi for a further 40-minute ride to the hotel. We were that far out of town.
















Needless to say I didn't get the felt flower, the pearl buttons, the embroidered felt purse and the tatting at the AC/DC concert. They are, in fact, the product of the school craft group.

Geeze I love the Craft Group ladeez! I never really had the benefit of a circle of supportive girls/women growing up. By the time I'd ploughed my way through school bullying and adolescence I was firmly of the opinion that the vast majority of females were complete ^%$#@s and that the male of the species had a more straightforward agenda (ironic given the facts of my first marriage, but that's a whole different story). I had no close female friends until I went to university, and I've not really experienced the mythical female sisterhood thing until the last few years.

How is it that relationships and childbearing/rearing have become a competitive sport? I'm too tired to bore on about it and I've got nothing new to say. It's just great now to spend a couple of hours each week with lovely women who are funny and wise, sad sometimes and angry, but also generous, gifted and caring. We sit around for an hour or so drinking coffee (or chai - unless, to Amanda's amusement, you're like me and think chai is an invention of the devil if not imbibed from a food stall outside in India's monsoon heat) and whatever scrummy baking one of us has come up with before we get on with our purpose, which is to produce crafty items to sell in aid of the school.

Today we had fun doing more wet felting, making sheets of coloured flat felt that will be made up into all sorts of things. Steiner educational philosophy has spawned a whole industry in making 'Steiner-compatible' toys. I object to the freaky faceless dolls, and I'm too impatient to sew endless stuffed animals so I confess I'm the subversive in the group: coming up with new ideas and refusing to make gnomes. We're cooking up plans to sell new and different things at the Spring Fair, and meanwhile we're planning to form a recorder ensemble: first practice session next week!

OK, enough rambling from my temporary desk. I wanted to work on stuff for my show this evening but I can't because I've set up camp in the bedroom and of course darling daughter has now gone to bed. More about the new work next time...

Ooh, ohh, forgot to make a link. Dearest husband was shaking like a jelly the other day when he should have been working and when I asked him if he was feeling unwell he said no, he was reading a blog called Bad Hostess. Naturally that meant I had to read it too. If you don't find rude words and crabby opinions amusing and you're unfamiliar with Australians and Australian culture then perhaps it won't be your thing, but if that sounds intriguing, read on! She's much funnier than I am.

Mud

Uuuurgh. I'm surrounded by the stuff and I'm convinced some of it has migrated up my legs (from my muddy feet, you understand) and into my ears and thence into my brain... Perhaps it's mud, perhaps it's germs, but whatever the reason I am feeling saggy and soggy and very, very tired. All I really want to do is to curl up in a chair and read a book while stuffing my face with the gorgeous dark chocolates with cream centres that I bought last weekend in Sydney (where we went to see AC/DC, did I mention?).

I do not, repeat do NOT, want to do any actual work. Or washing. Or ironing. Or cleaning. Or thinking. About anything.

Forward thinking

The way in which creativity seems to work in me is very circuitous. Occasionally I try to prevent my own worst excesses by doing a little bit of forward planning, and this is one such occasion. When I arrived in Coffs Harbour in October 2006 I visited the Nexus Gallery in Bellingen on one of our very early weekend drives around the local area, and when I found out that I too could exhibit there I put my name on the list. I was warned there was a long lead-time, and it wasn't until the second half of last year that I got a letter in the post (amazing that it found me, given how many times we've moved in the intervening period!) to notify me that my dates are 9th May to 4th June 2010.

No problem, thought I. BookArtObject was getting off the ground (I can't remember the exact timeline for that but if it hadn't actually started it certainly existed in my head) and I'd got a few other things I needed to finish off, plus I knew we'd be going overseas for several weeks, so I allowed myself some room and promised I'd start work at the end of the year. I hadn't banked on moving house again so my good intentions were hijacked and I haven't been able to start anything new until now.











I've been jolted awake recently by a phone message left by the Gallery to tell me that they needed 350 invitations for a mail-out by the end of February and, as I didn't get the message until almost the end of February, I had to do a pretty fast turn-around! Luckily I have a fabulous friend called Anna who is a graphic designer and she took my photo and the details and transformed them into elegant invitations in only a couple of hours, so I was able to deliver the invitations in time. As I had 500 printed I also have enough to plant around town and deliver in person to my favourite people.

Meanwhile, a plan for work is slowly forming in my mind... I have lots of ideas to do with cut paper, and fortunately I do have a few pieces of work that haven't been shown anywhere near here and can legitimately go into the exhibition. I don't think I'm going to have much to sell, but I am hopeful of a good show!




Mmmm... These ants are big, have BIG jaws, and jump!

While I've been cogitating we've been dealing with lots of mud. Recent rain plus the amazing activities of Pete and his digger mean that we are surrounded by thick, oozy clay, necessitating multiple pairs of shoes. I.e. shoes for wearing in the house are carefully carried up the hill while wearing shoes suitable for sticky mud, and I also have 'car' shoes for driving in. More pictures will be posted on my Lookout 31 blog in due course, once I've recovered some energy. I'm fighting hard against the beginnings of a cold, in the knowledge that half the parents at Darling Daughter's school have succumbed to what is a nasty 'flu-like bug and I DON'T WANT IT. Thank you.

Microwave jam

In my new life “on the block” I’m starting to live differently. This has all sorts of manifestations, from turning into one of those people who changes from outdoor to indoor shoes (because we’re surrounded by a sea of mud) to sweeping the floor everyday (see mention of mud, previously).
















I am also much more aware of our waste since we no longer have a refuse collection service. We’ve bought a couple of small bins that sit out the back, one for plastics and tins and the other for non-recyclable items, plus we have two big boxes to separate out glass in one and paper in the other. Much of the paper is now being recycled by us rather than taken to the recycling depot because we need it for both the worm farm and the compost heap.
















It is something of a joy being able to take our food waste and mix it with grass clippings, wet cardboard, old newspapers and detritus from the guinea pigs out to the compost bin and watch it degrade! The process is rather faster than we expected in both the worm and compost bins because of our collection of friendly soldier fly larvae. We opened the worm farm last week and it looked like something out of a horror movie: the few remaining worms had hidden in the damp but dense coir compost bedding at the bottom of the box, leaving the rest of the space to the seething mass of grey, white and brown segmented larvae that were wriggling everywhere. They’re large, soldier fly larvae, and get their name from the fact that they were commonly found in field hospitals and in the trenches... not very nice, really, but in fact they are amazing composters. Once we’d closed the lid of the worm farm and run back indoors I looked up ‘big maggots’ and ‘worm farm’ on Bing and immediately got results that suggested to me that they aren’t all bad! Soldier fly larvae don’t feed on worms, but have voracious appetites for all sorts of food waste (including the meaty kind you don’t usually put in compost bins). So they hadn’t ravaged the worms, they’d simply out-eaten them! Moving half the colony to the big compost bin and restocking the worms with an extra thousand friends should help, and we can safely put more food in the worm farm to keep everyone happy.
















Voila! We have on-site recycling of ALL our food scraps via the compost heap, and recycling of all our paper and cardboard via the compost heap and the guinea pigs to add to the fact that we’re completely self-sufficient in water, sewage and electricity. In fact despite recent deluges our solar system is still running with the batteries at over 90%, which suggests we could survive about a week of really foul, dark weather before the diesel generator would have to kick in – and that’s with the current amusement of our ground-mounted arrays pointing in different directions. I hope that someone from the installation company will be coming out today to try and sort out the problem, but one of them is having a little trouble following the sun...

I keep dreaming I’m in a slightly mad episode of The Good Life, sadly without Felicity Kendall’s looks or Penelope Keith’s wit. Today’s adventure into self-sufficiency involves the discovery that one can make jam in the microwave. I may never use my heavy, old-fashioned jam kettle ever again (which is probably just as well since it’s lurking somewhere in the shed and I may never be able to find it!).


















The recipe is simple: 500g fruit (plus the juice of a lemon for every 200g of strawberries if you’re using them), softened in the microwave for 4 – 5 minutes on High. Add 2 cups of sugar, stir it in, and then cook for about 15 minutes on High, stirring occasionally; you may need to adjust the cooking time depending on your microwave. Make sure it doesn't boil over! Do the usual set test with a cold saucer and cook for longer if needed until you reach setting point. Today I’ve used up a large punnet of fairly tasteless strawberries that were a very disappointing buy from our growers’ market last week, and 5 nectarines that were on their way out. These quantities made enough for one large (think Hellmann's Mayonnaise jar!) size, which was enough to fill the large pyrex bowl used to cook it in, although it did boil over once (I had fun spooning up the spillage). Now I'm not a preserving expert (see Ronnie's post on the subject, which made me feel tired and awestruck while reading it!) but this little effort does taste good, and has given me ideas about using other slightly elderly fruit instead of putting it on the compost heap.

Back pain

Yes, I've been bitten by something again - despite the usual precautions! This is just small 6" sample but there's lots more... and yes, it itches like hell.

All the fun of the Fair

The Fair comes to Coffs Harbour every January and in the short time we've been here it's become a ritual to go right at the end of their visit so that we can enjoy family arguments about how much money we're spending, who wants to go on the scary rides and no, we're not buying show bags...


















































As a first class wimp, my interest in the whole shebang is purely photographic!

Still here, but not fully functional!

I just posted some amusing photographs of the before and the after in what will eventually be our office/studio, which is where we are temporarily living while the 'big' house is built. So much for the pristine state of things when we first arrived! But the main thing is that we have moved house, so the awful part of that process is over. No more packing, no more shifting furniture (for a while, at least) and no more cleaning up your former rental property so that you can see your face in the toilet lid. Hooray!

The only downside to moving into our office/studio building is that we are a little cramped. Now I have to confess to the fact that we own FAR too many things, so it's mostly our own fault. But sadly my 'studio' for the next few months is going to be in the 'garden store' room with a roller door, at the end of the building... We've bought a collapsible gazebo thing that we're going to erect over the garage door to give me some shade from the sun beating down onto the metal door and wall cladding in the morning, which will be a relief, and the gazebo will do double duty as it will also partly shade the inflatable swimming pool (12' across) that is part of darling daughter's birthday present. The wet-edge infinity pool will have to wait until our scheduled Lotto win later this year, I'm afraid.


























As you can see, my darling press is sharing the space with the washing machine AND one of the builder's diesel generators, which can't be helped. The purple pipe running out of the garden store room is the outflow for the washing machine (strangely you don't have a washing machine outflow plumbed into a garden store under normal circumstances so we're improvising), trailing across the sand out the front (base for the pool) and over the edge of the hill!

So far, so good. Only a few outbreaks of temper in the last two weeks, which I count as a blessing and a miracle all in one given the grim resignation with which we approached the task of moving house and the fact that dearest daughter had to endure the whole thing with us as all my cunning plans to entertain her elsewhere fell through... We're tired, frequently sweaty and totally over the whole process but we have survived relatively unscathed and that celebratory bottle of champagne we drank a few days ago went down very nicely, thank you.

Much excitement..

We're sitting here on our first night staying up on our block of land, having spent the day moving furniture essentials (you know, beds etc!) into what will be our office/studio. It's a lovely temperature and no rain today after a week of heavy showers that played havoc with our removals plans. We can hear frogs and crickets, saw an echidna on the way back to our old rental house this afternoon, and found a rhinoceros beetle blundering into our outside lights... so it isn't peaceful in the countryside, but lots of fun! I'm typing away, illuminated by our new LED recessed downlights which look just like halogen spotlights but are brighter and consume a fraction of the electricity. It's going to be a big adventure getting used to the tank water and solar power, and learning to drive up and down the dirt road safely. Yesterday I was still feeling incredibly nervous about it all, but today has been great: exciting and energising and fun. Just got a lot of clearing up to do at the old place...

I may be out of contact for a few days as we try and get our computers and phones sorted out but hopefully we'll be back soon, with photos! Happy New Year.

A Christmas poem

I've been reading and re-reading the BookArtObject set text by Rosemary Dobson as I assemble boxes over Christmas because I've pasted the poem in full in the bottom of each box. It has made me think about poems and the fact I don't often read them, and I thought you might like a poem I saw in Lesley's Printed Material blog... Lesley, I hope you don't mind me quoting you!

Feet that could be clawed but are not...
Arms that might have flown but did not...
No-one said 'Let there be angels' but the birds

Whose choirs fling alleluias over the sea,
Herring gulls, black backs carolling raucously
While cormorants dry their wings on a rocky stable.

Plovers that stoop to sanctify the land
And scoop small, roundy mangers in the sand,
Swaddle a saviour each in a speckled shell.

A chaffinchy fife unreeling in the marsh
Accompanies the tune a solo thrush
Half sings, half talks in riffs of wordless words.

As hymns flare up from tiny muscled throats,
Robins and hidden wrens whose shiny notes
Tinsel the precincts of the winter sun.

What loftier organs than these pipes of beech,
Pillars resounding with the jackdaws' speech,
And poplars swayed with light like shaken bells?

Wings that could be hands, but are not...
Cries that might be pleas but cannot
Question or disinvent the stalker's gun,

Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air
Before, in a maze of space, you disappear,
Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills.

Carol of the Birds by Anne Stevenson
From 'Light Unlocked' Christmas Card Poems published by Enitharmon

I suppose it means something to me partly because the birds are Northern European ones with which I'm familiary, as is the landscape. But anyway, I liked it! It's not quite the same looking out of my windows and seeing parrots and honey eaters feasting on grevilleas in the sunshine, but that's the magic of Christmas in Australia in the summertime - something totally different.

Ye gods and little fishes

I may have mentioned the rain here before, non? Yesterday - Christmas Day - was lovely in and around Coffs Harbour: about 28 degrees C, sunny with just a few clouds intervening between my delicate English skin and the UV rays. We went to Arrawarra Beach after a later breakfast (smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. Yum), walked the dog, collected shells and had an altogether leisurely day. Things weren't all quite as anticipated as the oven in our rented house gave out half way through cooking the Christmas Duck which was a bit of a pain, but essentially we had a great day.

This was a good thing because today is the day we start packing and moving, and with this in mind we loaded the trailer, hitched up the 4W drive, and sauntered off to our block with the idea we'd start unloading some stuff into the shed. Ho ho ho.

The rain started, the clay turned to mud, the 4W drive couldn't get up the steepest, claggiest slope on the 'goat track' up to our block... the engine started straining, the car started slipping back down the slope, the trailer jackknifed, the car didn't want to stop...















It looks nice in the sunshine... it looks damned nasty when shiny with a lick of rain!

Dearest husband managed to bring the car to a precarious halt, darling daughter got out and sat on her backpack on a safe bit of grass, while I packed stones under the rear wheels of the 4W drive. Luckily husband had packed a 4lb lump hammer which came in useful trying to prise the trailer off the tow-bar... and luckily the connecting mechanism wasn't damaged, despite the dodgy angles and the potential for the metal bits to have bent. The trailer then had to be manhandled as far as possible before we all crossed our fingers and had to let it go, chuntering down the hill under its own steam! And luckily it managed to swing round and front itself into a patch of long grass near the bottom of the slope, leaving enough room on the 'road' for dearest husband to be able to slide the car back down the slope, engage the engine and do a 6-point turn. Then I slid into the driving seat and was directed backwards to meet the trailer and we managed to hitch it all up again and drive home, tails between our legs. So much for unloading in the shed! However, I do think we were very lucky indeed: it could all have been so much worse.

And the moral of the story? Um, not sure if there is one, but it probably goes something along the lines of "don't buy a rural block and expect to be able to get up there in the rain" or perhaps, "there's no point in thinking about doing fancy things in your new house until you've spent several thousand dollars hiring a grader and buying loads of gravel to improve the road"! Merry Christmas, everybody.

Peace and Good Will

I've sent precisely one card so far this Christmas, not because I'm a bah humbug sort of person (no, I'm not, REALLY!) but because we have to move house soon and I've not got a lot of energy...






















Inspite of my failings in the festivities department we wish you well over the holidays and hope that the end of this year and the start of a new year bring you happiness, contentment and peace. We're wishing for the same things ourselves.

ITTTTTTTCHY!

Ah yes, ticks! They are one of the hazards of life on the North coast of New South Wales... and on Saturday night it seems I was visited by one in bed. I have over 70 bites on my left arm, plus the ones up my back, chest and the side of my neck... I haven't found the culprit but everyone tells me these look just like "grass" tick bites.
















Of course grass ticks aren't actually a species of grass-dwelling tick - they're the larval stage of some types of tick. There's no specialist treatment, just endurance of the agonising itching, albeit with the help of anti-histamine tablets (day and night), hydracortisone creams and - I've been recommended - 1 cup of Bicarbonate of Soda in a hot bath, which is next on my agenda!

A treasure box

You may remember that when we got back from Europe in October (oh how long ago that seems now!) darling daughter and I went away on her Class Two camp to Woody Head. When we got back, weighed down with various collections of shells, seedpods, bits of rock, ochre and leaves, I set about thinking of a treasure box I could make for the class. I thought it would be nice if they had something in the classroom that reminded them of the fabulous time they had, both visually in terms of photos, but also through touch and smell and their own retelling of the story of the camp. This is what I came up with:






















The box is made from A3 grey board, although naturally it is larger than A3 and the cardboard needed to be laminated in order to get the right size...






















Each piece - walls, floor, lid, partitions - had to be cut twice, glued, weighted, sandpapered smooth, filled and painted white before being covered in thin Thai banana paper with wild grasses in the mix too.
















Class Two wrote accounts of their trip on thick drawing paper, with illustrations on both sides but words on only one side. The paper was folded along one edge so that I would have a margin I could use to stitch the stories together in two accordian books.

















The inside of the box base was painted with natural ochres I ground up from the rocks I collected on the beach and mixed with an acrylic medium, then the whole box was varnished, ochre paint and paper, in order to make it a bit more durable under the stresses of 22 pairs of hands!
















This is the finished box before I inserted the two accordian books, which I secured to either side so that they sit flat on top of the collection beneath. The 'handle' on the lid is a twig I picked up on one of our walks, sewn on with sage green linen thread to match the leaves in the paper, and varnished as well so that it feels smooth to the touch. Today I presented it to Ruth, their class teacher, so I hope they like it.

A first on Double Elephant

I just want to say here that I rarely watch any clips people send to me and I've always been a snob about YouTube, but my friend Jan over at Snippety Gibbet put this up on her blog, courtesy of a friend, and I love it...




I love papercutting, despite being a complete novice at it myself, and I find this video clip amazing. And how great that New Zealand has a national 'Book Council'...

ps. adding a video was MUCH easier than I thought it was going to be!

Squeaks

Yes, yes, yeeeeeeeeeees, I am a great big softie under the apparently scary exterior (that's what my family says, anyway). These are the two latest additions to the family:





Bubbles




and Squeak

So far as we are able to tell at this stage, Bubbles is female and Squeak is male. They come from our friends Adam and Adrienne, who ended up with a litter of 9 guinea squeaks, 7 of which were albino 'Himalayans' with creepy red eyes so we chose the 2 coloured ones instead.

Darling daughter managed to keep her hands off them for 2 days after they came to live with us, which was a truly heroic effort on her part! The result is that they were able to get used to their deluxe guinea squeak accommodation and then slowly get used to us. Squeak lives up to his name and chirrups and snuffles and squeaks when you visit him or pick him up. Bubbles is a cool kid, seemingly very calm and happy to be picked up (which is just as well since darling daughter swoops on the poor things rather alarmingly...). They have a daily routine: clean food and water before DD goes to school in the mornings, a squeeze from me mid-morning as I transfer them to their holiday home on the grass for a happy day munching, and then we play with them when DD gets home from school before putting them in their hutch for the night with a gourmet salad to keep them going until morning. Oh to be a guinea squeak!

More paper lust

It's paper pornography, but since I was busy unrolling them and putting them in a big flat case for storage I thought I should photograph them as I go! Except for the beautiful French paper with the flowery inclusions in the final photograph which I bought in London, all the papers were picked up in Italy.

Rain, rain, go away

Have I mentioned that it rains quite a lot in Coffs Harbour? Apparently we usually get 125mm in November, and 13 days of rain in the month. Not too bad. Well according to the Bureau of Meteorology we've had 464mm (almost half a metre) of rain in the last 2 days, with 354mm in the space of 6hrs on Friday evening alone. And it's only November 8th.

We haven't been badly affected: darling daughter's school remained open, as did local shops, and so although driving has been hazardous it hasn't been that bad. About 45 families in central Coffs Harbour have been evacuated due to flooding but it isn't as bad overall as the March 31st floods, thank goodness. We don't yet know what's happened on our block. We were up there on Thursday morning, before the rain started, and the building work was coming on apace. We were there with the electrician, placing power points and a TV point around the walls of the office/studio building, and watching the roof joists going up on the main house. But on Friday the builders weren't able to get up there and I'm not yet sure if that is because the road was blocked, covered in water or washed away again... fingers crossed it's not the 'washed away' scenario, because that will be a huge financial headache as well as delaying the building, which isn't good news!