Conference in Cambodia

Something different this week! I accompanied a delegation up to a conference in Cambodia - somewhere I'd never been before (and never expected to go to be honest). It takes about twenty hours to get there, through Singapore, but none of the flights themselves are longer than seven hours, so it's not  super long haul.

It was all entirely working, from breakfast meetings to conference sessions all day to dinners in the evening, but one of the days was a tour day where they took us around the truly amazing Angkor temples. I was completely ignorant about Cambodian history so it was very educational for me :) and the buildings themselves are stunning. This is me feeling pretty warm at Bayon.  A couple of climbs up stone steps in the heat and I was feeling like a very fat and pale Australian.



This is Ta Phrom where the trees grow through the ruins ... it just feels like exactly what ruins are meant to be (too many Hollywood movies...). It is dry season so there was lots of dust and not much grass - pleasanter for tourists I think. And of course we went to Angkor Wat, which is enormous and amazing! I am a very lucky duck to get to do these things, not least of which because Canberra had its warmest week on record - four days over 40 degrees - so I was quite pleased to be somewhere only 32 and very efficiently air-conditioned.

Doodling

I am back at work and engaged in the very important task of transferring vital information to next year's diary. Or rather this year's diary. I like a paper diary for taking notes in, and making to-do lists. Not meetings and scheduling, that is much better handled by Outlook, but for writing things down that I need to remember on the day that it happened. Or maybe should have happened, depending on how my week is going. But, looking back at 2018, I have to admit, I am a chronic doodler.

And not a very creative one either. Day after day, week after week, the same lines appear. In different coloured inks because I like to switch it up (in my favourite but battered Lamy) but the same patterns.

Inspired by quilting motifs of course. I swear that it helps me think and concentrate. If I'm not doodling then I wander off mentally, but if I am doing something with my hands then I take in what the speaker is saying. I would rather be knitting of course, or doing some hand stitching, but apparently that is frowned on in the workplace. Foolish nonsense. When I run the world workplace craft will be encouraged, or possibly even enforced.

Happy New Year!

Well, hello there 2019. I do realise it's the 9th of January already but, as you might have guessed, we have been enjoying ourselves at the beach. Or at least I have been enjoying myself very much. The boys have been tolerating it with reasonable good nature, and my husband has been going backwards and forwards to Canberra for work. Except for the one Sunday where he took both sets of car keys home, and came back down for an unexpected trip Monday to give them back. Ooops.




Canberra melted through two weeks of 35+ degrees, but the beach was comfortable and lovely. Lots of swims, lots of booze, lots of food that only required unwrapping and many many books. A few walks to try and burn the booze off, but I don't think it made much difference. We tried to take a selfie. This is after I told him to put it higher so we looked up at the camera and didn't have four hundred chins ... but maybe not that high. There is a lovely beach vista behind us that was supposed to be included.



And here are the thousands that infest our beach for the New Year's Eve sandcastle competition. It was quite competitive this year ... and like every year, I think we should enter, if only we could come up with a good idea! And some enthusiasm.



Two weeks went incredibly quickly. I made the boys do one outdoor thing every day (usually a swim) but they spent most of the time watching DVDs, or on their phones, or watching the Netflix they had downloaded before we left. Number two son had a friend there so they spent a bit of time socialising, but number one son went basically full hermit.

But, as I told him, this is probably the last time we'll make him come on holiday with us. He finishes school this year and should have some kind of job next summer.  I stopped going on holiday with my family at the age of 16 ... and even that last summer I made a group of my friends come camping in the same campground up in Pauanui - I went and stayed with them and tried to pretend my parents weren't there.  I'm not sure how well it worked, from memory Dad used to come up and put our tent pegs in properly.

I came back to Canberra yesterday, spent today doing errands and paying bills, ready for work tomorrow. Very very sad face.

Berlin orange wool and dyed wool

I had some of the springy Berlin orange and yellow and pink wool left over, but not enough for a whole scarf, and nothing that really matched it. So I pulled out some of the skeins that I had made eighteen months ago and never got round to dyeing, and the food colouring, and dyed a couple of yellow/orange/pink skeins in the hope that it would get close to matching.

It kind of matched. Some were a bit closer than others. I used my awesome ball winding thingo again, which made a very professional looking ball. It is reasonably time consuming but very contemplative. 

And it made a very pretty scarf in the end. More orange than anything else, but a bit of yellow and pink. The close up is a bit more bluey than the real scarf, which is more like the full-length one. Another one to be folded up and put on the pile! Far too hot to think of anything woollen at the moment. 

Merry Christmas everyone

We had a very pleasant Christmas with a long lunch at friends, with other friends, and an assortment of teenage / young adult children. It was 33 degrees, but we managed to stay hydrated in traditional Christmas fashion. The food was amazing as ever - our host is a fantastic cook - and a mix up of traditional plum pudding and roasts with oysters, prawns, scallops and a wonderful lemon slice. Mmmmm, food....

We did put the Christmas tree up in the end, or rather number one son did. He decided to only put the gold and red ornaments on this year so it is a more subdued effect than usual. It is elegant until we turn on the garish multicoloured lights. I am more of a "throw everything you can at the Christmas tree" kind of person but I also left it in the box for ten days, so mustn't grumble. I have not bothered cropping out the piles of washing, or the fabulous fireplace. Not that we are likely to use it, it's heading for 36 today then going to get properly hot for the rest of the week! Canberra is very quiet, and very baking.

Alpaca number three

The blue/grey alpaca went on the warp so beautifully that I thought I would do one that was just alpaca - with a more spacious sett and wider, for a shawl. And it worked! I'm so pleased with it.

Not pleased with the photography though. I tried to use the wardrobe door handles again to give an idea of the width and drape, but it just looks strange.



Using myself as a model didn't work very well either! But you get the idea. I have already pulled it out in the evening when the sun went down and we were sitting outside, and it was perfect for that. Light, and soft, but lovely and warm.



Apparently you can try and shape things on the loom to make them a bit more shawl-like. I'm going to investigate further because I don't see how it could possibly work....

Reading

I went down the beach for the weekend, just on my own. It was a bit unexpected to have no social events this close to Christmas, but that's the way it worked out. Number two son had three performances of his Christmas play, but he wasn't super keen for us to come and watch it, so we didn't. He did want us to go and see his Sunday night performance to mark the end of his script-writing course. There were seven teenagers in the course and they did moved readings of all of their scripts - all less than ten minutes and some of them were very good. Mostly funny, some dramatic, some weird. I thought my son's was the best in both plot and words but I think I might be biased.

So at the beach I did absolutely nothing. Didn't sew, didn't turn out a cupboard, didn't go for any long walks. Both nights had massive electrical storms and incredibly heavy rain, but the days were pleasant and I went for two swims. The waves were decent but the water was quite churned up which means you can't see your feet ... so both swims ended after about an hour when I stepped on something that wriggled off. Probably a flounder, but I always think of those massive string-rays around in the river and get nervous.

Between swimming and eating I just lay about and read. It was wonderful. I recently finished Juliet Barker's biography of the Brontes, which is just over a thousand pages of closely written detail about their lives, starting with Patrick Bronte and ending after Charlotte's death. I usually like biographies with less detail and more raciness, but this kept me engaged through the whole thing. I had read Mrs Gaskell's biography ages ago, when I was having a Gaskell moment, rather than a Charlotte Bronte moment, so I've known one version, but not the full story.

Barker's biography covers all of them, but focuses a lot on Charlotte - I suppose because she did the most, and certainly wrote the most letters. I had always ordered the sisters by my preference for the books - Wuthering Heights as the runaway favourite, followed by the Tenant of Wildfell Hall and then Jane Eyre a distant third... but reading the biography  made me re-think and, which is the point of this way too meandering paragraph, realise I had never read Villette.  And that is what I did this weekend, and it was really really good. Spot-on psychologically; which is surprising and humbling, after having read this biography and realising the Brontes were probably not the kind of people I would put up with for very long (prickly, self-conscious and awkward). Hidden depths.