Not the sock addict

Ever the masochist I decided to knit myself a pair of socks. Why? You may well ask, but it boils down to two reasons: firstly I'm buggered if I'm going to be defeated by a knitting pattern and second, because I thought it would be interesting.

I have now completed one sock and I am pleased to report that my Swiss friends (are all Swiss people avid sock knitters? I don't know) tell me that I got the pattern right, AND it fits. And since both my feet are more or less the same size I entertain great hopes that the other one will too (if I ever get it finished).

























If these were to be sold on the open market I think they could be the most expensive socks ever, this side of Himalayan hand-sheared baby-goat stomach-fleece with added spider gauze... I'm not the world's fastest knitter and what with that fact, general blindness (if I have to look closely at the pattern I have to take my glasses off - it all adds time), and the requirement to consult more than one pattern for the tricky bits I think we're talking 10 hours hard labour per sock. If we go with a general (un)skilled pay rate of $20 per hour we're already talking $200 per sock plus materials. If any of you covet my socks I will be VERY HAPPY to part with them for the heavily discounted sum of $300 plus postage...

At the bottom of one of the patterns I consulted there was the highly optimistic sentence: "welcome to the new addiction of sock knitting". I think not.

The Joy of Books

Life is clearly not as boring in Toronto as I'd been led to believe ! ;) I can't believe how much work must have gone into this...

Life Savers

Dearest husband sent me a link to this, and I just think it's funny! A great example of a serious message with a light touch... am I the only one who remembers Vinnie Jones playing football?

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!

Wot I've been up to recently

I've been a bit quiet for all sorts of reasons. Technically we've had a bit of a laptop malfunction - it can happen to anyone, you know! - and while I now have internet access again I don't yet have email on my laptop and have been borrowing dearest husband's every now and again to catch up. So if I've been a bit tardy with replying to you, now you know why! Normal service will, I'm sure, be resumed soon...
















We've just enjoyed two and a half weeks of Easter/Autumn school holidays which coincided with dearest husband's birthday so we sneaked a surprise birthday celebration in on Easter Sunday under the guise of egg hunts and lunch - and it's darned hard to sneak anything up on him so I feel justifiably proud of myself! To save money I made the eggs, melting down several bars of chocolate that were lurking in my cupboard, thereby saving my waistline from excess! This is the result: the eggs were too large to hide so instead I hid little drawings of the patterns on the eggs, and the children hunted for the drawings and were able to identify "their" egg in the basket at the end. I also made the adults play for a change: they had to hunt for riddles that were clues, taking them from one place to another before they finally found their eggs in an egg carton on top of the microwave! The catch for them was that they got hand-marbled, blown chicken's eggs with no chocolate in sight, but since we served lunch immediately afterwards no-one complained. And the food was delicious, too... all our guests brought a plate of food to share so we had roast lamb, lemon-roasted potatoes, home-grown roast vegetables, a herby quinoa salad, fresh bread rolls, quiches and cheeses and dips and lots of other things, finishing off with fruit and I made a simnel cake.


















Now that the party's over I've got back down to some serious work and have been putting many hours in at my studio, working towards the show. Nothing finished to show you yet, but it's coming along! I've been having fun with all sorts of things including my Christmas present which was a Dremel tool...














And finally, last but certainly not least, I can tell you that we were paid by that nameless Australian bank! They managed to keep us waiting again, phoning dearest husband the week before Easter and assuring him that the money would be in our account before the bank holidays but of course it wasn't. We emailed them on the 27th - his birthday - to follow it up and it finally arrived and was visible via internet banking at about 5pm, much to our relief. I was so relieved, in fact, after six months of nothing in my wallet and fielding dozens of phone calls about unpaid bills, that I was ill and had to go to bed... clearly I've been more stressed about things than I thought! But anyway, it was a great birthday present for M, and perhaps that was fitting timing. We're not out of the woods yet (I stand no chance whatsoever of clearing our credit card bill or fully paying our builder, poor man) but we're closer than we were and at least I know we can pay the mortgage until October when the next instalment arrives. Meanwhile I've taken all my paperwork in to TAFE so perhaps I shall earn some money soon, if I don't have a nervous breakdown about the exhibition first!

My art for today!

Since darling daughter broke her wrist three weeks ago I've been promising to paint her cast and since tomorrow is the first day of the new school year, today had to be the day... When I got back from Lismore this afternoon the paints came out and now a school of fish is floating gently up and down her arm, with plenty of room in each for her friends to sign their names.

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.

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.