Rain, rain, go away

I'm officially fed up with the rain now. Today it started raining some time after 5pm (lucky I took my wellies and a rain coat down to the studio just in case, eh?) and in the intervening 4-ish hours we've had approximately 4 inches (just over 10 centimetres) of rain, in addition to the 33+ inches (over 80cms) of rain we've had this month according to our weather station. I think our position on the side of a hill near the sea definitely affects things: the clouds seem to dump their water on us, en route to Coffs Harbour, as our rainfall is noticeably higher than in town.

On the one hand, this is great! We have no mains connections of any kind so we rely completely on water draining off our roofs and into our water tanks and - extra advantage! - in this sort of weather we don't have to water the garden, no sir. On the other hand, it's a pain in the backside: our dirt track is both washing away and being eroded by a certain lunatic driver who lives next door, which makes getting in and out difficult; we're using LOTS of diesel for the generator, which is an unexpected expense; and everything is going mouldy...

The drainage works we had done at the end of last year have really helped and in fact we haven't had any mould until the relentless downpours of the last two weeks. This time last year I was going frantic, cleaning the furniture off every couple of days and despairing about the state of my shoes - if I've only started moaning about it now then things are definitely better than last year! But it's getting boring now. This morning I was woken by the unusual event of sunshine reaching into our bedroom, which meant leaping up and putting some washing on as we don't have an electric dryer. I managed two loads of washing, both of which dried in the 6 hours or so of sunshine that we had, but this evening I went into the back room and noticed all the cupboards have mildew on the doors, anything wooden has a thin layer of blue mould on it, and even the floor in the pantry is mouldy. Yuk. And there's not a lot of point trying to do anything about it right now: best to wait until later this week when apparently the rain will dry up a bit and we might have a bit more sunshine. Then I'll be able to open all the doors and windows and start washing everything down with vinegar, tea tree oil, oil of cloves and a splash of dishwashing liquid and hope that it all dries out.

Drip, drip, drip little April showers

I wish I knew what bird this is/was! A week or so ago everyone in the house was cranky, but my irritation evaporated when I went outside in a huff to put some rubbish in the bin and came upon this little thing on the ground.

















I think it must have flown into a window and become disoriented; at first I thought it had broken its neck but it was responsive when I picked it up. I think it is a female of one of the local wren species... it was so small - compare its size to the small jam jar lid we filled with water! Anyway, I put it into this basket with the water, on top of the verandah table so that the dog couldn't get at it, and it eventually flew off.
















As for the rest, it's no wonder we've been cranky. We're still waiting to be paid the first instalment of the money we're owed, and it's just plain boring having to talk to people on the phone and explain it all again, and it's tedious pinching pennies all the time. But before you tell me off for whining (sorry!), I'm also aware of how lucky we are to live where we live and do what we do, and in the end my mother's yardstick doesn't apply: nobody died. I have been ploughing through stuff as fast as possible: a bookbinding class for a friend's children one weekend (photos will be up on the Rhubarb&Ella blog shortly), writing mountains of stuff for the school Board's upcoming AGM and Annual Report, refereeing academic papers for a conference later in the year, blah blah blah. I don't know that my fellow Board members are happy with me, * sigh * I've always been under the impression that confidentiality is a huge issue on Boards and within small school communities, but apparently my decision not to name names isn't popular... I'm familiar with the aphorism that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time but right now I'd happily settle for pleasing some of the people some of the time!

There has been one bright spot, though: yesterday I went for an informal chat at the local North Coast Institute of TAFE about the possibility of me teaching printmaking/papermaking/bookbinding there. Whoo-hoo! I'd love to do that part-time so I am crossing all available fingers and toes in the hope that this might turn into actual paid work before the end of this year.

A week of woes... and some bright spots

We've had what you might call "a bit of a week". You may recall me moaning back in December about how dearest husband's clients haven't paid us. Guess what? They still haven't paid us, although Australia's second-largest bank (you know, the one that delivered 30% cash earnings growth to $3 billion to May 2010) has now sent us a contract. They didn't like our contract (you know, the one we sent to them in November 2009. The one they lost. The one we re-sent in July 2010), so they've now sent us a new contract: 20-odd pages of legalese including their promise to pay invoices within 30 days (even though our payment terms have always been - and still are - 14 days). Meanwhile the Irish contingent appear to have trouble using a telephone, and the Canadian insurance company? Well, who knows. What with the severe winter weather around their UK Head Office and the fact that they've probably all been on holiday to see Santa and his elves we have made no progress whatsoeover in even finding out whose desk our invoice is on... So we're down to our last $35.

Meanwhile.... back in the real world (you know, the one in which bills have to be paid), darling daughter went ice-skating for her pre-birthday treat last weekend and fell over.

We went from this:





















To this....














In about half an hour. She fell minutes before we were due to leave the rink, and was so quiet about it that I didn't even know until her friend mentioned it in passing. Having recently done my Senior First Aid Certificate I know all about Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation and did all the right things and it didn't seem to hurt much but the next day it was significantly worse and we went off to hospital for an X-ray, which confirmed a buckle fracture of her right distal radius and resulted in a plaster cast... Of course we spent the next day in hospital for a couple more hours having the cast split because it was too tight.

The upshot of darling daughter's fractured wrist is that she can't attend Camp Creative this week, where we'd managed to score a place for her on the highly desirable Spaghetti Circus school. This was her birthday present (her birthday is tomorrow) and she's been looking forward to it for six months, since I had to book and pay for it last June. One broken wrist = no Spaghetti Circus = one devastated daughter.

Then we had the amusement of waiting for dearest husband's plane to arrive on Monday evening. He'd been flown down to Sydney to do a promotional video (yes! He's going to be a techie internet star! I'll post the YouTube link just as soon as I get it!), and was flying back on the last plane of the day. For European readers I probably need to explain that Coffs Harbour Airport is unfeasibly small: we're only just beyond the point of being able to meet your friends and relatives on the landing strip (OK, slight exaggeration)...

The last plane of the day touches down at about 7:50pm but hadn't arrived when we got there. The weather was FOUL: driving horizontal rain and howling winds so you couldn't see anything. Instead we listened to the aircraft's engine as it came in to land... saw the lights briefly... and listened to it aborting the landing and taking off again... THREE TIMES.

Poor darling daughter was beside herself: tired, her arm was hurting, the weather was horrid and now it looked like Daddy's plane was either going to crash and burn or fly back to Sydney. Sometimes being almost 9 years old is very hard. After the third attempt at landing someone wearing a sou'wester (haven't seen one of those in years) wheeled out a big flashing red light onto the tarmac which was apparently meant to enable the pilot to see the ground. What we really needed was Bruce Willis to leap out from under the runway and light flares. Anyway, we went for a little walk to see if we could find anyone who could tell us what was going on (answer: no, they were all barricaded into a room behind the check-in desk and wouldn't come out), and when we came back the plane had miraculously landed. Hooray!

So the week hasn't been totally dark: we had a lovely evening with friends yesterday to celebrate a birthday, the sun is actually shining today which means I've been able to put on some washing, Daddy got home OK and I've been out in the garden weeding and planting. But I have to say that my stress levels are only going to normalise when someone pays a bloody invoice.

Struggling

I am absolutely struggling at the moment.

Part of the trouble is 'new studio syndrome', which I commented on earlier when Willis was nagging me about it. I thought I'd got away with it but it has turned around and bitten me on the backside! When you start doing things like cleaning the toilet because you're afraid of doing some work you KNOW you've been badly bitten... Well my studio is spotless and I'm driving myself nuts wibbling around and being ineffectual.

















Various other things (i.e. not directly related to cleaning or art) are also stressing me out: money, builders, the strange damp patch that's appeared in the pantry ceiling, money, failure to be awarded a residency, general sense of uselessness, sudden departure of my new chicken, enormous quantities of weeds and lack of hours in the day to deal with them, yada, yada... I bore even myself when I get like this.

The solution? Well a sudden influx of cash would be nice, but in the meantime I'm reading a wonderful book by Matthieu Ricard called Happiness: A Guide to developing Life's most important Skill, which is attempting to persuade me that the sudden influx of cash idea is a) misleading because it won't actually make me happy and b) that happiness is an inner condition, not a series of external factors and that I can learn to be happy without the cash. Hmm. I'll have to persevere with the exercises, then. I've clearly got a long way to go.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE STUDIO? My other strategy is to START WORK, viz. the photo, which is of a series of painted splotches, droplets and washes in a series of sketchbooks. One of my (many) anxieties concerns the pristine nature of blank sketchbook pages so I'm taking a leaf out of Sue Brown's armoury of techniques and challenging the hegemony of the blank page! OK, Sue does it in style with emulsion paint, ink and bleach... my first tentative experiments in this area are tamely made with dilute acrylic paints but somehow it felt good and rather bold to splash around on the page without any clear idea of what I was doing.

That was yesterday evening, when I managed to pull out the paint, deface three sketchbooks and clean off two copper plates. Today I've been slightly more productive: I've gessoed some hardboard ready for painting (god - I haven't painted in years... * moment of fear*) and pull a single monotype. Actually that did feel good: I suffer from the anxiety that anything I might have racked up in the way of skill or experience will have evaporated in the long gaps in between working; it hadn't. I knew what I was doing and it wasn't bad. I'll look at it properly tomorrow and might try the image again.

The thing is, I know that all I really need to do is to get stuck into it - I just get paralysed/sidetracked/diverted away from it - hence the brilliance of the website pointed out to me by LouLou!

Part of the problem is that I'm having a bit of a panic about a big show coming up next year. On the one hand I'm plodding through the practicalities (dates, times, deadlines), and I've even come up with a name for it ("Speaking in Tongues", given my current preoccupation with text and the development of language), and on the other hand I'm having heart-failure about the thought of putting together a coherent body of work that anyone will actually want to see.

All there is to be done is - as ever - to move forwards, building things up as I go.

Then it got ugly

Sometimes life is a complete pile of poo and I wonder why I bother to get up in the morning. Today is definitely one of those I-am-totally-fed-up-with-coping sort of days. I trundled off to see our lettings agent because she wanted to speak to me and discovered that we have a choice: either we sign up for a full year's lease on this place (with penalties for breaking the lease) or we have to move out on January 9th 2010. Obviously we can't sign up for another year because at some point next year we hope to move into our own place, so we will have to move. AGAIN.

Since arriving in Australia just over 3 years ago we've already lived in 3 different houses, so this will be our 4th... and we'll be moving at the hottest time of year, when Coffs Harbour is full of holiday-makers and short on accommodation, and we have to find somewhere that will take our dog. Did I also mention that I'll have to pack up my studio for the umpteenth time and kiss goodbye to any chance of doing any meaningful work...?

Just for the rest of today I'm going to pretend it isn't happening, because I really feel that I can't cope right now. I'm going to give myself some time off, and then I'm going to get angry (I'm quite looking forward to that bit), which will delay the necessity to DOooo something about it for a few hours longer. No use thinking about it now because I've got to take darling daughter to her piano lesson. In the rain. Grrrrr.

First the bad news

I didn't realise that my darling daughter thought that the following scenes of devastation were her fault until we got home from our European tour on Friday, when actually she is the heroine of the piece!

Can't remember what I've said before (jetlag is my excuse, as if I needed one) but the potted version goes like this: just before she and dearest hubby came out to join me in the UK, darling daughter was in her downstairs bedroom, watching with fascination as a large water-filled bubble appeared under the window... After Daddy had been summoned, who called the agent, who called the emergency plumber it was established that copper water pipes buried in the concrete floor of the upstairs bathroom had finally burst.














The escaping water did what it does and found various escape routes, mostly in between the waterproof membrane that covers the concrete floors and the lovely wooden floor boards laid on top, but some flowed into the cavity in the external walls and into her bedroom where it seeped everywhere, very quietly!





















Prior to their departure they had to endure holes being cut in interior walls and drilled into the exterior walls, but it was only once they'd left that the full extent of the damage became apparent: every wooden floor in the house (and there are many!) will have to be replaced, and our en-suite bathroom has to be ripped out and replaced...















So when darling daughter and I landed in Coffs Harbour on Friday after over 30 hours travel back to Australia we went to a hotel for the weekend, and as of yesterday we are the less-than-impressed inhabitants of a slightly damp, roach-infested holiday "cottage" in Sawtell. Jim, the builder, assures me that we only have to endure it for 2 weeks. Fingers crossed; that would be great, but the landlord's agent rang me earlier to ask me to come in for a 'quiet chat' early next week and so I'm not entirely sure what's going on!

Rain, rain, rain

It's been a fun-packed couple of days on the weather front as gale-force winds and torrential rain sneaked in and have surprised us. For the first time since we moved back into the outskirts of Coffs Harbour in February we had an electrical blackout yesterday evening that lasted well into this morning. We were a lot better off than we would have been in our previous house: at least here we have mains water so if the power goes out we can still flush the toilet and have a shower. And did I mention that the roof here doesn't leak..?

My clever husband has set up a UPS on the server so that it can at least shut down in an orderly fashion having saved our data, and we have a gas lantern, plenty of torches, spare batteries and a little gas ring burner with spare canisters as well as a gas barbeque so we're not exactly roughing it if the lights do go out. The weakest points of the house are things like the freezer and the fridge, in which food obviously begins to deteriorate over time, and the fish tank: although the water temperature and the air temperature aren't radically different so our tropical fish won't die of cold, we're not sure how long they'll last without oxygenation of their water, although they survived over twelve hours this time around with seeming ease.

It is amazing, though, how vulnerable we all are to climate and geography and Australia certainly provides its inhabitants with many challenges in both areas. Last time we had a prolonged bout of really heavy rain was the week we moved house (of course!), when we had 23" (almost 60 cms) in 3 days. Road surfaces and storm drains just don't cope with that amount of water in such a short space of time and the centre of Coffs Harbour simply floods, while surrounding rivers burst their banks and whole areas are cut off. There isn't much one can do about it. There are those who will read this and doubtless think that civil authorities are short-sighted and badly prepared, but I'm only just beginning to realise how tenuous any sense of established 'white European'-style civilisation is in this country.

I hear, with astonishment, that what is now the Botanic Gardens in Coffs was - until 1981, so only 28 years ago - the site of the "night soil trenches". Yep, you heard me: human waste from septic tanks was collected and buried in trenches close to the town centre until less than 30 years ago. Emerald Beach, a nice village a few kilometres up the coast, with lovely houses, a beautiful beach and unbelievable views, only got mains sewage facilities 5 years ago. Mains electricity is almost (I say almost) everywhere, but mains gas is virtually unheard of and only possible in the big metropolitan areas. I grew up with above-ground power poles but these days in the UK most towns have spent 25 years and more burying their services so that it was a big shock moving here and seeing power lines everywhere, with the poles also carrying phone and data cables. Surprise surprise, when the wind blows, the rain comes down and branches fall off neighbouring trees the power poles frequently come down with them, leaving people with regular blackouts and phone outages. If you live on a property with bore or tank water rather than a mains water supply - far from ubiquitous - then a power outage usually means your water pump shuts down unless you have a solar-powered pump, so no water for flushing or washing until the power company finds the fallen branch and repairs the line.

M assures me that metropolitan areas (and let's face it, the vast majority of Australians live in big cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) have all the facilities I'm accustomed to from living in Europe. But outlying areas have been strapped for cash for years because so few voters live in those constituencies. Coffs Harbour might be the largest city in the thousand or so kilometres between Brisbane and Sydney but it's really very small; it practically counts as being in the bush, so conditions here really shouldn't be a surprise.

I have had to find a new attitude to go with living here. Australians allegedly moan about whingeing Poms and to an extent I see the frustration. If I was living in Sydney, with all the services on tap and a big infrastructure to support my lifestyle then moaning might accomplish something as well as afford me a pleasant passtime, but here it's pointless and annoying. You just get on with things.

In fact it's not all bad losing power. I can't waste time reading the news pages on the BBC website when I should be doing something else, I can go to bed when it gets dark because I can't see to do anything else, and we can play simple games of cards or just talk to each other instead of stressing out about 'more important' things. It's probably good for me.

I've just aqua-planed my way back to Korora after picking up our daughter from school and fruitlessly seeking a way to get to the large Bunnings Warehouse just south of town. Major accidents have blocked the Pacific Highway to both the north and south of town so the place is backing up with large B-double articulated trucks; rain has closed the airport, the link road to the airport and most of the sideroads off the Highway (including the road out to our block so interestingly if we'd been living up there we'd have been cut off from town by flooding!) and is encroaching on the centre of Coffs. We had to turn round half a dozen times, trying to find alternate ways to get to Bunnings until we could see, from a distance, that although the lights were on in the store there was a moat of water around it that must mean staff and customers are stranded. Close by, floodwaters have cut off a large High School so that parents and school buses were one side of a large and enlarging body of water while the 300 or so children were a kilometre away on the other side. On the way back up the Highway I stopped to buy spare batteries for the torches, bread and milk, butane gas canisters for the gas ring and petrol for the 4WD just in case we're stranded for a couple of days, and then we came home (with the back wheels of the 4WD sliding out from under us as we negotiated the windy hill back up to Korora). My darling daughter is - unusually on a school night - watching television for a while, since we will probably soon lose satellite reception, internet connection and power and our opportunities for entertainment will be slightly curtailed! And I feel fine. This is just how it is, and frankly we are going to be living a kilometre and a half up a dirt track some time in the next year or so, and I'd better get used to it, because it might be me stranded on the other side of body of water. I plan to have plenty of spare batteries, tow ropes, D shackles, torches, gas lanterns and other sensible stuff so that I don't whinge while I wait for the flood waters to subside.