note to self

stop lifting elephants..... i've done my back again so will not be spending much time in front of the computer this week.

after much prodding and making me lean in painful directions the doctor said - 'it's your disc'. which is what i had said when i walked in. on the other hand, for the drugs that i now have it was $65 well spent

on a brighter note, one of my favourite words has been given a front row seat in the dictionary

meh to discs....

where did it go?

what happened to my weekend? how did it get to be sunday night so quickly? what did i do with those 48 hours?

there was a lot of activity but nothing i can point to and say - here it is, the fruit of my weekend.... there was much washing of clothes, cooking, shopping (of the grocery kind and of the kids' socks and underwear kind) and some housework. i did read the paper - the whole paper. which is an event of much marvelling these days. usually i can't be bothered doing more than reading the headlines online but i bought an entire saturday age and read it.

anyone still awake after reading this account of not much at all can see what we had for dinner tonight (see, it was worth staying up for, wasn't it?).

roast chicken (an anonymous chicken bought for the purpose, not a recalcitrant chook) and roast veg.
here are the veg glistening with oil, about to go into the oven. the chicken was stuffed with cumquats (or composts as w mysteriously calls them), garlic cloves and a handful of rosemary and oregano
and here is a small bowl of sugar coated fennel or comfits. i bought a lifetime's supply of them from the indian grocer in high st
will try and do something more interesting before my next post. i did think about my stellar quilt but no action.....

friday in the garden

thursday night, cooling down

another ackworthy day of 35 gazillion degrees and a hot north wind and that wind full of dust. i had 2 meetings out of the office today which meant trudgy trudgy through the heat and dust so i felt a bit sandblasted by the end of it all. not to mention 2 hours of earnest meeting which can be reduced to the following bureaucratic equation:

intense hand-wringing + 'something must be done' = one sub-committee

this evening though has been restorative:

• felafel burgers for dinner (cunningly constructed to smuggle salad into the unwitting young)
• the cool change blew in around 8 o'clock and with it some calming rain
• and after young w was put to bed, 13 year old a and i had some idle chat that ranged across the 20th century starting with lsd and hash through orwell's allegorical style to the rise of communism, the cold war, the nature of dictatorship, free will and the proper fate of tyrants.

i think he should chair the next meeting......

random blathering

item 1 - it's hot - the first hot night of the summer and we're all a bit shattered. the first evening we have needed the air conditioner in the back half of the house and the fan in the front half - both freaked out poor billthedog no end as he slunk from one end of the house to the other

item 2 - here's the new mirror - a huge convex lens for the front room which urbane scrumping and urbane scrumping senior hung on the weekend
item 3 - guru art quilter maggie grey's new book 'textile translations' arrived! which was exciting enough but even ore wonderful and staggering was the fact that i ordered it on thursday night (Melbourne time) it was posted from the UK on friday and arrived here yesterday. that's faster than getting a letter from my Mother 2 suburbs away (which has been known to take australia post 10 days) i am deeply impressed by the royal mail.

item 4 - little news on the creative front. i have knitted another inch on my frill mitts (see and buy here - scroll down to the october 4 entry) . they are proceeding in a majestically slow fashion as i only really get to knit on the train going to work. it's a great pattern - straightforward and pretty without being fussy. and i'm knitting them in louisa harding's kimono angora which is just gorgeous to knit - just not in 35 degree heat.....

item 5 - linda gave me another blog award - thanks linda :) more on that tomorrow (although i didn't sign up for NaPoBloMo i did the first week without trying and seem to have got into a rhythm. this may get boring for you if not me... feel free to come back in december :))

item 6 - trying to live plastic free or even plastic freer is hard. half-time report coming up soon

remembrance day

(image from here )

90 years since the end of the great war - the war to end all wars.

my grandfather, his brother and brother in law all went off to fight - papa and uncle arthur to gallipoli and then france and my uncle leslie to france. william (my papa) and his brother arthur came back having miraculously survived the unspeakable - both were gassed, arthur had survived a bullet wound to the head and both had been awarded medals.

some time later william wrote of his experiences at gallipoli - you can see some of the pages of this journal here

leslie wasn't so lucky - he had been a conscientious objector and ended up going off to fight after one too many anonymous white feathers. white feathers notwithstanding he was no coward and won the military medal and bar for the kind of reckless heroics that war was famous for.

he fought in france and was shot and wounded - he died of wounds a few weeks before the armistice. the letter to his young wife speaks of his bravery and sacrifice.

like so many others, he didn't live long enough to have children or grandchildren to remember him on remembrance day.

stumbling

(because i had an unwisely large gin and tonic i am incapable of doing much more than playing with stumbleupon - a new kind of internet magic where i found a nest of ee cummings poems - here...)


i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
not fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and its you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or the mind can hide)
and this is the wonder thats keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)