Merry christmas

We had a great christmas - traditional for us, doing absolutely nothing. Number two won at 2010s Trivial Pursuit for the third year in a row (it is NOT a game for the over 50s), presents were exchanged, food was eaten and three of us went for an evening walk. 

Number one stayed over for christmas eve and christmas night and it was very lovely to have all four of us in the house again. Boxing Day number two left on an early flight back to Melbourne and the rest of us went out to the Braidwood house to rip the carpet up from the bedrooms before the painters arrive ... it was stinking hot but we got it off the floor OK. Haven't removed the tacking strips yet but that can be a job for another day. Number one thought the house was pretty cool, if a bit peculiar in layout! And picked a room, being the first child to see the place (the two rooms are largely identical, but you know, always nice to get first pick).

The gardens are very shaggy and the house is very echoey and empty, although the tenants left it absolutely spotless. We thought there might be floorboards or something exciting under the carpet ... and there might be but it was a school house for many years so there are very ugly green lino squares emphatically glued to whatever is underneath.

 

We are not that interested in renovating so will happily carpet over it all again. I like carpet in bedrooms anyway, warmer and quieter.

We had a picnic lunch and headed back into Canberra for drinks with friends. Lots of traffic going the other way, down to the beach. Hopefully we'll get some beach days but there's so much to do....

More lino printing

 The face is still improving and I'm taking the opportunity to do house things and a little bit of art on the side. It's amazing what a couple of weeks rest will do - I feel so much better all over, even though I didn't think I was particularly overworked! One of the many reasons why I never made it to be a big boss, I don't think I could physically handle it. And who would want to? 

Lino printing is messy as all get out. I moved from water-based to oil-based inks which resulted in a much better print, but the clean up is brutal, even though I'm using an ink that can be washed up in water (if you're quick! don't let it dry...). 

So I've had a mad fiesta of cutting and printing, and now I've packed it all away until we move house. I will be doing dainty watercolours and perhaps some pencil sketching until we sell this place. 

Some of the prints work much better than others. I  bought some lovely thin rice paper with bits of flowers and leaves in it. It takes a print wonderfully, and you have pink bits.

The better ones are where there is actually some use of the qualities of lino printing - that is, taking what is essentially two options (ink or no ink) and making it mean different things in different spaces.

Sometimes the blank space is darkness, and sometimes it is light.

The ones where it is just a drawing in light (or dark) are less good. 

These are all copies of other people's work with some minor alterations (usually simplifying! The new Pfeil tools are lovely but I am not yet able to get the level of detail that some people achieve). Except for this one, this is all my own idea :)

The movement on the penguins is completely unintentional - just bits where I haven't cut away properly - but I like it! Looks like they're dancing. I am foolishly in a lino printing Facebook group which is international and has the most extraordinarily accomplished works ... as well as absolute beginners which make me feel better. 

I hang them on a little clothesline to dry - takes about two weeks to dry completely - one of the many reasons why it's not suitable for people trying to sell a house.

Definitely better

They were right - about two weeks is the charm and I have been steadily getting some movement back over the last few days. Thank heavens. I have taken leave from work to rest and recover, which was a very good idea, and generally eating slowly and going for short walks. The cat (and husband) have been delighted to have me at home, which is nice.

We did a short quiet trip to Melbourne to see number two graduate from univesity! Can you believe it, three years has passed so quickly from our perspective, although life changing for the student. University of Melbourne has it as a well oiled machine, this was just the ceremony for the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, so the entertainment interludes were of higher quality and the students were a little bit quirkier. 

This is the traditional photo of what you actually see when your child graduates from uni. Not much. Then back to the flat for Thai takeaway, I wasn't up for the big celebration dinner ... number two drove back with us and is staying for Christmas which is really really nice. Before back to Melbourne and on to the next adventure, whatever that may be! A career in the theatre is apparently totally a thing, it just seems strange to my public servant brain. 

Best laid plans ... completely derailed

Here are two photos from Saturday a week and a half ago - firstly a picture of my suitcase for an overseas trip to show what it looks like when you're on an official parliamentary delegation and responsible for the official parliamentary gifts! Everything in bubble wrap is a gift, and I am expected to poke my clothes and essentials for a week away around the edges. Which I am proud to say I did, although it took most of the day, in a wonderful example of tetris packing, including the closed in shoes for the factory visits and the tropical formal wear for the cocktail receptions ... 

But it was all for nothing because this is the next photo from Saturday evening from the emergency department (yes, I took a selfie, sue me). 

I had noticed some strange stiffness in my mouth on Friday morning, but ignored it, then as it got worse on Saturday, then I noticed I couldn't wink at all, then that whole side of the face was completely paralysed, then my speech starting slurring ... so we finally went off to the ED. They had me in a gown in a bed in about ten minutes from arrival and suggested I should have come in immediately I noticed something .. fair enough.  I had already checked in for my flights the next morning so I described what I was planning on doing to the doctor who gave me that special look for the delusional and said "I STRONGLY recommend you do not do that" so I didn't. 

After lots of tests and scans they diagnosed bell's palsy, which is a surprisingly common facial paralysis, often of unknown cause, although stress is involved and also vaccinations! As a conscientious public servant I had got myself vaccinated for EVERY possible disease for my trip to places without hospitals, and it must have tipped me over the edge. Work sent me some flowers which was very sweet and this is me smiling happily with them. But just on the one side.

The only cure is rest and time (and a short course of steroids) so I have been sitting at home, slowly coming to the realisation just how mental the last couple of months had been, and perhaps I shouldn't do things like that to myself and expect not to have some consequences. It can last days or months, but most people start improving at the two-week mark, so fingers crossed. In the meantime I spill a lot of coffee on myself and try not to talk to strangers because I sound (and look) ridiculous.

Still working, still not having fun

The two last parliamentary sitting weeks of the year are bringing their usual chaos and confusion ... and it's been hot! Over 30 degrees for a week now, which is a lot, after the last three very mild summers. I went to the beach on the weekend, had lots of swims and a very lovely time. The water was freezing still, but the air was hot. Loved it.

I went to the doctor for a regular check up and my blood pressure is too high, my cholestrol is too high, I am too fat and generally need to sort myself out. Which is all very true, I have been parking most health things until I retire next year and have more time. It's not bad bad, just should be better. My doctor retired, so now I have this dreadful woman who never stops talking and doesn't let me get a word in. I will keep her until I have the time to find someone nicer next year ... definitely looking forward to a bit of a break.

Working and not having fun

The downside of having a retired spouse is that they can do what they like all day, and I can't. Not for one second suggesting my spouse is a layabout - he is very hard working and productive - but it is hard to trot off to the office when he is going to Bunnings. I want to go to Bunnings too. The shed boxes of mystery continue to appear, here's an ultrasound of number one, I think at 12 weeks. Geez we stared at this trying to look for a family resemblance. It's a blob! But it's our little blob.

We painted the laundry on the weekend - it has been a semi-approved disaster zone since the day we moved in. Which is fine for the cat litter tray and all my dyeing but we thought a coat of landlord's white would make a big return for not too much effort. And we were right! It's amazing, should have done it years ago. It's still clearly not Vogue Laundry but it doesn't scream 'swampy nightmare of filth' anymore. Which is what we wanted ... and we are patching the hole in the wall too.

I have happily been doing more lino prints, although I forget to take photos. They don't seem to be getting much better but my technique has definitely improved. I have a noticeable arthritic pang in my right middle finger bottom joint after an hour of cutting, which isn't great. I choose to blame it on my computer at work (it's not my computer at work).

Urban sketchers

November's urban sketchers meet-up was down at the Mawson shops - a suburban shopping centre that has a lot of middle eastern grocers, some cafes and an excellent fruit and veg shop. It also has seats, a fountain and enough nooks and crannies to sit and sketch without getting in anyone's way ... dodgy 70s design.

I ignored all of that stuff and did a phone box. I wanted to capture the sheer agressive pinkness of these free / wifi phone boxes - they are really bright. And graffitied. It was an interesting exercise to get the lines down right and then squelch the colour on.

That didn't take two hours so I went back to the fruit and veg market and tried to something completely without lines - not really my style usually - so I put all the colour down first then arranged the more architectural things around it. Not wonderful but it does what I wanted it to do.

As usual there were many wonderful variants as people see wildly different things and then record them in wildly different ways. And, in other departures from normal practice, I went out to lunch with the group afterwards! I joined in on something! SO proud of myself. It was really nice, they are a relaxed chatty group.

Then I went home and turned out the linen cupboard (we have way too many quilts). The cat helped.

Lino printing

For a few weeks now I've had an itch to start doing lino printing - don't know why, I don't know how these things happen, but I felt the need to explore and so I did. Got myself a starter kit from Amazon and a few Youtube how-to videos and away I went. Badly. In the interests of full transparency I will show you how crappy my first few attempts were. These are all about 10 x 15 cm, so quite small.

The first one was a fish. You can tell it's a fish, but that's about it. I'm just pleased I didn't cut myself.

Then a little cactus in a pot, with a flower. I very much enjoyed printing lots of little cacti, on different coloured paper, with different weights and gloss. It's fun.

The cat was a concern. The original mouth looked terrible so I cut it out again and made it look worse. Very disturbing when you see it in multiple.

I am clearly entering a period of crazed hyperfocus so I've ordered some better quality tools, oil-based inks, a lot more lino, a lot more paper and a nail brush (it's hideously messy) and will jump down the rabbit hole both feet forward.

House things

In between the racing around we are slowly but surely getting closer to selling the house. We've signed a contract with a real estate agent for the sale, which was an interesting process - ruled out a few very quickly but ended up with a couple we would have been more than happy with, so just picked one pretty much at random. None of them seemed too bothered by our house, which is good, and all had much the same idea about what it is worth and how to sell it. I think that is a good sign, that we have a ordinary house, that people expect.

This gem came up in the school books. The main memory of Parliament House was the duck poo! Fair call, there is a lot of it.

These also appeared in a kid's room. I am not sure what they were for, hopefully not running a meth lab. I have a vague memory of an eco-science course (one child did physics and advanced maths, one most definitely did not) that involved lake water, which may have needed little tubs. Maybe.

And my husband concreted the floor of the hot water cupboard, that was just gravel and dirt. The whole laundry is very dodgy and we are going to paint over as many of the problems as possible, but thought having a floor on a cupboard was a good start. We are going to buy a shelving unit, put it in there, put our laundry powder on it and hope that the lack of light will not give anything away. 

Racing around

It's been non-stop here - for me anyway - with work travel to Nowra, then straight down to Melbourne for a long weekend, then into a sitting week. Nowra was fairly boring - it's about three hours from Canberra on the coast, about two hours north of the beach house, so different roads to drive down. Interesting drive I suppose, but Nowra itself is nothing to write home about. 

In fact it was so boring that the only photos I took was when we stopped at Fitzroy Falls on the way home. Very spectacular but I didn't get too close to the edge. In this photo I am carefully blocking the view of the falls that are right behind my fat self. You get the idea - long way down.

Then off to Melbourne next day for number two's graduation show! (This is us having a cheeky cocktail by the river, unrelated to the show). Can you believe it, three years is over, and the graduating Theatre class wrote, directed, acted in and designed three short theatre pieces. It was great - a bit more experimental than we're used to - but if you can't use audience interaction, screaming and full-frontal nudity in a grad show then where can you? Thankfully those three things did not occur at once, which I don't think we would have been able to handle with equanimity.

Poor number two was down with tonsillitis but performed at the show we went to, before having to dip out of the next one. That did mean we got a chance to hang out though which was lovely ... it's a bit of an unsettling stage of life when uni comes to an end - not helped by the flat breaking up as well. Poor wee sausage, it was good to be around and provide food/panadol/moral support.

We took a day to go down to the Mornington Peninsula - about an hour and a half drive from Melbourne - and see something new. 

Mainly we went to Heronswood House which has awesome gardens ... but not TOO awesome, it felt very achievable, even though it's not. We definitely got many ideas above our station in life. This fluffy stuff is a fennel variant. I think it's so pretty, and largely unkillable.

Saturday we spent an afternoon at Rippon Lea which is more of a stately home in Melbourne itself - just around the corner from where we were staying - which was also very beautiful but slightly less relateable.  

We enjoyed it but didn't take the four thousand photos that we'd done the day before for plant identification purposes :) Not sure if a rocky slope facing the ocean is a good model for our inland clay, but we will keep with the current garden philosophy 'if it dies it dies'. And we have no ambitions for an artifical lake of this size.

Bicheno

I realised I didn't write down the second half of our Tasmania holiday, so I'll put it in here in case I forget. We had originally thought about going a bit west and doing walks around Cradle Mountain which is supposed to be beautiful. But we couldn't make the itinerary work so gave up and decided to explore the east coast instead. And, best decision EVER, because the weather when we were there was appalling in the west and not too bad on the east coast where we were. I had never seen a specific 'bushwalker's alert' on the weather report before, but they had one for Cradle Mountain. So we will do that another trip, and probably not in September. 

We stayed in Bicheno, which is a small seaside town, in a lovely house backing onto the ocean with beautiful views. We spread out our stuff for a few days and listened to the sea. 

We did all the usual things - walks along the beach.

Lobster rolls.

Wine tastings.

We also went on a fairy penguin spotting tour in the early evening - this is when the wee penguins come out of the water (hunting and eating) to cross the beach to go back into their burrows and lay their eggs or feed their chicks depending on the time of year. There were dozens of them and they are extremely cute - waddling and flapping - but I found it all strangely stressful. This is the most dangerous time in a penguin's day and all the behaviours - grouping, freezing, shouting at each other - are designed to protect them from predators. They are clearly going through it, and I found it hard to enjoy. Anyway, here is the traditional appalling photo of penguins running at speed in dim lighting. 

Random arty things

Between being sick and travelling I haven't had much stamina for anything difficult or time-consuming on the art front. So I've been doing lots of doodles or splotches or copies that make me happy enough to be moving paint around, but don't require too much thought. 

This was using a palette knife on watercolour. Very much something I would never have thought to do, but surprisingly cool. A palette knife is very unwieldy with watercolour and you get unexpected results.

I did these just because I know they will work. And the colours are pretty.

A Brian Huntress head.

And a Gary Fredericks person. My people look more like people when they are wildly wrongly proportioned than when I try and be accurate. Why is that?