Category: Uncategorized

Some things:

* I was going to tell you the story of the flowers (see below), but as it turns out, it is not at all what I thought it would be, and so it requires more work.

* I wrote you the excellent story of an encounter I had in the playground earlier today, but wordpress lost it – suffice to say it ended with me thinking ‘well, I hope my children teach your children to say f**k’

* This weekend, I will not be reading Philip Adams’ column in The Australian magazine thingo. No, really, I’m not. I hadn’t read it for months, and then I read the one he wrote about John Button. Doesn’t he bore himself with his constant ‘anyway getting back to me’s? And yes, I get the irony of a blogger accusing a journalist of being a narcissit. But, like, at least I let other people get a word in.

* Facebook has pretty much weirded me out. But what will I miss out on if I leave?

* I’m not going in the ABR reviewing competition. You can still do it if you like, but since I’m not in it, it means you might come second. Second seems to be the reserved spot for me. Actually, I’m not feeling too down on myself about it, I’m just marvelling at my consistency (of which I have been reminded twice in this week alone).

* I do not have to go and scrub the laundry or the kitchen floor or the bathroom this weekend. The house is on the market (I am not some kind of landed gentry, I’ve just been co-ordinating a real estate ‘project’ – not my specialty if you know what I mean).

* We went to Target to buy socks and undies for my boys. Have I ever told you how much I hate shopping. No? That’s because words fail me. Shops suck. Especially shops which drip synthetic onto your skin as soon as you walk in the door and which always seem to have all their stock strewn across the floor. Why is that? If I wanted to sort through shit strewn across the floor I’d stay at home.

* I considered applying for a job. A really interesting job being the Arts in Health co-ordinator at a hospital. I’m sort of qualified for it. Sort of. But it’s three days. I just can’t fit it in. What with one thing and another. Plus, I do have to spread my opportunities for rejection around carefully (see point about coming second).

* There is more, but it gets progressively more boring after this…

do have a good weekend, won’t youse?

Amongst the seaweed cliffs, your feet are in the water, the wind is in your soul.

All that is hard is behind you.

Ahead, endless hope.

You are alone and on the edge because you want to be.

Why did you let yourself forget that you can feel like this?

Turn around again, you can do anything, be anyone.

Don’t forget the whispers.

Bring them home.

There’s lots of things I’ll miss about the holidays, but this isn’t one of them.

What was I thinking?

Also, as you may remember, I’ve been spending time cleaning up my computer so that it stops stopping and so that I can get some more photos on. But the wordpress photo uploader really isn’t working that well. Are there things I should know?

I’ve been doing a bit of an update of wordpress. Not to 2.5, because I’m using fantastico on cpanel, which hasn’t upgraded that far yet. Did I blind you with my science? You know I don’t have a clue about what I just said, don’t you?

Anyway, it’s going quite well so far. For example, my blog hasn’t totally disappeared. Though several draft posts are nowhere to be found. They were probably crap anyway.

The real thing I’m hoping to do is have better photo functionality. Do you like the way I used functionality? That’s my first time. I love the sound of it, even though I strongly oppose the use of such ridiculous words.

So, here’s a photo. I just found it while I was doing aforesaid backups. I went to London a couple of years ago. By myself. It rocked.

Are you impressed? I’ve said fantastico, functionality, and I’ve been to London.

 

At the moment, I am backing up my photos, so that I can delete some from my computer, so that my computer is no longer so close to full that it keeps breaking. Over the last few weeks, I’ve even deleted the acrobat reader programme, just to try and leave some space so that I didn’t have to attend to this awful job.

Part of the problem is that the photos are not organised. They’re just in dated folders. This seems no way to begin the long-term storage process. But if I wait for the day that I get around to organising them properly, then…well, as you know that day may never come.

Meantime, I have oodles of spiffy new photos taken with the spiffy new camera the mister gave me for Christmas (he is ace at presents, he really is). None of them have made it off the camera, because the computer doesn’t even have room for the software.

So, in the spirit of getting things off my to-do list, I am just doing things. Whether or not the pre-conditions are perfect.

‘At the moment, I am backing up my photos…’ it sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But it comes with all those messages with which I am sure you are familiar. Messages about ‘media’ ‘not recognised’ about ‘disk full’ and ‘windows is shutting down’ and this little yellow dinosaur icon which appears when my computer is thinking thoughts it apparently can not think.

I don’t need to tell you any more about my state of mind, do I? And yet, I feel the need to bore you with myself a little more. After all, I have nothing else to do, but wait for the next odd error message. So, just now, I said to my boys: ‘maybe you should play outside, because this job is giving me the ‘sh’ word’. To which they could only say ‘do you mean the shits or the shut ups?’ And to think, we’ve got three invitations to play in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, we have taken the dog back to the vet to get his stitches removed. As the vet observed ‘castration hasn’t calmed him down yet, has it?’ And then, he looked, as my youngest boy hit my eldest boy with the door snake which I think is there for waiting dogs to play with. I wish I could tell you that he (the vet) looked at me, eyebrow raised significantly. It would give meaning (unkown, but meaning nonetheless) to an otherwise pointless post
But he did not.

Must away. Current project is burned. Apparently.

At half past five when I went in everyone seemed tired. Shoulders stooped, heads down, and no-one ran for the flashing red man.

There was hardly any talk.

But when I came out at half past eight and it was nearly dark, glasses clinked, plates chinked and people laughed out loud.

I was thinking of giving womadelaide a miss this year. It’s expensive. Especially with kids, because you don’t really get to appreciate the music as much as you should.

But then someone told me the fire sculptures are back again this year.

So maybe I will go after all. The fire sculptures rock. And – bonus – the fire sculptors are French. Watching French fire sculptors sculpt fire.

If only all our days could end like this.

Now that the garrett has a window, I’m moving in, which means the boxes have to move out, which means I’ve been having a nostalgic, melancholic, rapsodic kind of afternoon uncovering such relics as the one you see posted here.

I’m very scared of ladders, so I won’t be hanging corflutes, but I tell you I’m ready for the letterboxing and handing out the how to votes. And you kids, you should get ready too, because you will be out on your bikes with me. If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for youse.

Also, I am just listening to Alexander Downer on Amanda Blair’s program, and it occurs to me, he is a very clever man. You see, he is threatening to become South Australian Premier to make sure that everyone votes to keep him in his federal seat. Cunning plan, m’lord, but you have to wake up pretty early in the morning to put one over me.

My camera has really never recovered from that first evening we saw the wallabies coming to drink, and in all the excitement, it – the camera – got dropped. But over there in the distance, that’s Port Pirie. Where I grew up. I flew past it last week. On my way to Whyalla where I made a lot of jokes at my father’s expense, and it went down a treat.

And that’s something I’ve never done. Fly to Whyalla, I mean. Not that bit about making jokes at my father’s expense. That’s something I do nearly every day. It’s how my family works.