toot toot, chugga chugga

yes folks, it's that time of year again.... the big red car rolls into melbourne just before christmas every year, and every year w and i go along and sing and dance and have a fabulous time. well i do and w looks cautiously enjoyful of the whole thing.
this year urbane scrumping joined us and was pleasantly surprised at how far the wiggles had come since 1997 when he took the then 2 year old a to see them at a canberra primary school hall. no more cardboard cutout big red cars and they had multiple changes of costume although all in their signature colours, of course.
i was so happy i bought the ears
and the t shirt

i did buy a light up wand and a helium balloon for w - it wasn't all about me!

launched!

today we launched the project my manager and i have been working on all year: Dardee Boorai: the Victorian Charter of Safety and Wellbeing for Aboriginal Children and Young People.

dardee boorai means 'strong children' in the language of the gunnai people of gippsland. it has been a fantastic project to work on - lots of consultation with Aboriginal communities and strongly influenced by the Aboriginal advisory committee as well as government.

here is a photo of my desk from my december 4 day of photos - you can see a mock up of the dardee boorai poster in the bottom right hand corner. (as you can see my desk is an oasis of peace and order)
and here is the whiteboard that was the engine room of the charter :)
no photos of the launch i'm afraid - i was too busy wrangling participants. but the highlights for me were the traditional dances performed by the kinder kids (so 4 year olds) who go to the Yappera Children's Service where we held the launch and the 3 busloads of delegates from the World Indigenous Peoples' Conference on Education who were doing a site visit to yappera as part for the conference and who joined us for the launch. so now copies of the charter will go back with them to Canada, New Zealand and Belgium as well as all over Australia. because our charter is the first human rights charter for Aboriginal children and i'm really really proud of that.

you can check out the charter and (sometime next week) you can see some video footage of today's launch here

woooo-ooooooooo!

i quoth for the first time in my life at a concert. urbane scrumping and i went to a day on the green last night and saw mark seymour, the angels and the hoodoo gurus and it was wooooo-oooooooo!
i sang, i danced, i jumped up and down, i shimmied and i had a fabulous time :)
it poured with rain off and on but stopped for most of the sets. and US and I were equipped with plastic ponchos that US' parents had bought in peru to venture into a waterfall so we only got damp around the edges.....
and those who know me will know what it means when i say i had 3 glasses of red - in picnic wine glasses so probably 2ish normal glasses. i usually go cross eyed and blurry after 1 glass so this was a bit of a binge for me. but i stayed upright and danced along the top of the alcohol.

best bits

• crowd singing to the classics - 'throw your arms around me', 'holy grail', 'wipeout' and of course 'am i ever going to see your face again' (for those outside australia the angels sing this and the audience refrain is 'no way, get f***ked, f**k off')
• smiling at US through the sheets of rain
• looking around at my fellow demographic as we sat on our picnic chairs, covered in plastic sheeting and singing songs from the 70s and 80s and thinking 'this is what the retirement homes of 2050 will be like'

but oh my knees!

morning window-sill

morning window-sill
Originally uploaded by textileseahorse

6am thursday 4 december. first photo in my 'day in the life' thang. not sure it will be - mixed media, flickr set, photoshop matrix?

possums

westcountrybuddha asked why the possums were being kept out of the trees in the parks. well, the answer is that they were too sucessful - there were so many possums that the trees were suffering and so some of them (trees not possums) have wide metal collars around the trunks to prevent the possums from climbing up and committing great depredation. in new zealand they have become a real environmental problem.

the same thing happened with fruit bats about 5 years ago - they were having a fabulous knees up in the botanic gardens and completely destroying the trees. so they were moved first to the fitzroy gardens and then to yarra bend. soon they will be visiting my fig tree for light snacks.

there are still enough trees for a sustainable possum population and you can often see them in the evenings. this little possum was lying on the grass as i walked through the park a few weeks ago.

trees

i'm going to be taking a lot of tree photos for the next little while and posting them on flickr. i thought i would spare textileseahorse readers unless there are particularly interesting ones (tree photos that is, not readers) but there is a piece brewing in the far reaches of my creative brain..... keep an eye on flickr if you are interested - they'll all be in a set called 'looking up trees' - natch..

this one is a date palm (i think) in the treasury gardens on my way to work yesterday morning - the metal band is to stop possums climbing up. quite a few trees around melbourne have these collars but enough bare necked trees remain to keep the possums happy

dinner

was squid ink spaghetti and baby octopus sauce (garlic, ginger and chili fried in olive oil then simmered with a tin of tomatoes, just as the pasta is nearly done, tip the baby octopus in and voila - yumbo-bumbo)
and some twilight shots