No offence...

So I hope you're not offended! I don't think I've made a secret of the fact that I don't have a spiritual bone in my body... have I? Well you know I have had a particularly crap series of exchanges in the last few days about nothing to do with art, but a lot to do with slaving away in a voluntary capacity at my daughter's school and I must admit that I find myself up to my eyeballs with annoyance at 5:45 on a Friday afternoon. The bottom line is that I'm not a New Age hippy. And I haven't yet had a beer.

* Breathe *

I've had fun and games health-wise recently, the upside of which is that a CT scan has shown definitive proof that I have a brain, so there. I have started falling over again, and it's nothing to do with beer! I had a year or two of doing it after darling daughter was born but what with the overwhelming crapness of the entire pregnancy/birthing/feeding experience it rather disappeared into the chaos of everything else going wrong and was dismissed. Not so funny that it's started again. No, I am not drunk (although I'm looking forward to a beer in a mo). No, I'm not on drugs (well, only paracetamol for my badly bruised knees!). And no, I'm not blindly tripping over. Thankfully it turns out I don't have either an aneurism or a brain tumour (I was assured by the medical receptionist that although I haven't scored a doctor's appointment yet - that's next week - they would have rung me by now if they'd found "anything serious". Phew).

What I may be experiencing are 'Stokes-Adams attacks'... which don't sound like a whole lot of fun, but then, since I lose consciousness and don't wake up again until I've almost hit the ground, it isn't a lot of fun anyway. Apparently what I need for a definitive diagnosis is for a passer-by (you know, the helpful bystanders who rush to your aid when they see you fall over... not) to observe and then communicate to a medical person a) whether I went white before I fell and b) whether I went bright red when I regained consciousness a mere second or two later. Since we're all out of helpful bystanders, I don't know. Last time it happened darling daughter was holding my hand when I went down like a plank (I go straight over forwards, very dramatic!). Geez Louise, my shoulder hurt almost as much as my knees afterwards, but the poor girl was so shocked she was wholly unable to recall the necessary clinical details....

What to do in such trying times? Laugh really, really hard! I had a couple of hours of laughter with friends last night - thank you E & L! - but I've also been having a laugh about a new age-y advert I saw in a recent edition of the Organic Gardener magazine. If your glassware is looking tired and you're all out of energy, perhaps your water needs re-structuring? I quote from the advert:

TC Energy Design products are masterpieces of form and harmony – beautiful mouth blown glassware uniquely shaped to revitalise and restructure water. Created from musical compositions converted into spatial dimensions and moulded into balanced, harmonic glassware, the shapely form of the glassware generates an energising resonance pattern that restores water with subtle waves of harmonic sound. The special design of TC products revitalises water, reminding it of its origins and restoring the integrity of its structure within 3 minutes

The company is TC Energy Design and in case you like their logo, I can share with you that

the protected logo by TC design has been developed from a 12-dimensional basic structure. According to the scientist and mathematician the holistic existence is based on a 12-dimensional hierarchy. Geometry is thereby an essentially efficient module, from which life’s efficacy can be derived and defined. The symbolic powers of the naturally harmonising forces inherent in the TC logo sustain the biological valency of the TC products too

There's a lot more on the website that I don't understand... probably because my rainwater supply isn't very well-structured.

I must say that I live in a part of Australia where this sort of thing is very widespread. It's like being the rational filling in a sandwich where the top slice of bread is the healthy local population of extreme evangelical semi-Baptist creationist anti-abortion anti-gay churches (so many to chose from!) and the bottom slice of bread is the healthy local population of nouveau-hippies... Anyway, I sent the website link for TC Energy Designs off to the Feedback page of New Scientist magazine, and got back via email today a link to a Tim Minchin rant which has made me feel MUCH BETTER! I almost fell off my chair but decided I'd be more comfortable staying put today, thank you. I've never seen or heard anything by Tim Minchin before, but I'm an instant fan... I just need to warn you that you might be offended if you listen to him, if I haven't offended you already!

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.

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.

Encore merde

Alas, my plate is thoroughly, utterly, completely ruined... and I did such a nice drawing in the soft ground! Still, after a drink at Bar Fiasco I'm slightly more sanguine about it than I might otherwise be and am considering the possibility of doing a collograph to replace it.

MERDE

Sometimes I am a complete idiot - not very often, I hasten to add, but today is one of those days.

Softground etching: lovely result, easy process, few golden rules, but one golden rule is to leave it in the acid for a short period of time because the ground is quite fragile and easily degrades. Putting it in the acid, making a phone call, dealing with several emails and then inputting my accounts probably wasn't a good idea, was it? Two hours later I realised my mistake and went back to find a very sad-looking plate. More anon after I've printed it anyway and discovered the extent of my stupidity!