Tag Dag

I've been tagged by Mel Robson.
Liana and Florence also copped it from Mel. That means we have to write a list of 6 things about us not mentioned before in our blogs. I didn't have much left so bear with me.

1. I once dressed up as a Giant Red Blood Drop to promote the Red Cross Blood Bank. Kylie Johnson can verify this - as I seem to remember she managed to avoid the whole shebang. When I look back at the hideous photos (I had a particularly bad case of teenage acne) I'm not sure I persuaded anyone of the merits of blood donation and may well have done the opposite. Now whenever they call urgently for donors, as the world's ugliest pox-ridden blood drop of all-time, I feel personally responsible for the dwindling blood stocks.

2. Though ovo-lacto-fisho vegetarian, I do occasionally treat myself to a strip of crispy smoked watermelon or a slice of the delicious salty fruit from the pepperoni vine.

3. I used to be a venturer scout. Sharing a tent with 4 other pubescent girls and their many and varied cosmetic products accounts for my allergies to aerosol deoderants, perfumes and hair sprays. That is why I stink so bad and my hair defies any logical explanation.

4. I woke up on Xmas day and my eyes were stuck together with conjuntivitus gunk. I couldn't have been happier though as my highly infectious and unattractive condition permitted me to lie in bed and read outdoor murder mysteries all day long. Once I'd managed to get my eyes open that is.

5. I watch 'Neighbours' every night if I can. I just have to know the crazy antics of Toadfish (is he dead yet?- i missed a few episodes), Stingray, that devil Paul Robinson, stupid Susan and that sleazebag Carl and all the other ridiculous, completely unlovable characters. So anyone calling me between 6.30 and 7pm weeknights will get short shrift indeed.

6. I'm very susceptible to peer group pressure. Otherwise I would have ignored this tagging game. However the tag stops with me. Unless anyone wants to be tagged? Are you up for it Simone?

Back 2 Skool Suckers

Of the current 2 retail crazes I'm finding the back to school stationery festival far more enjoyable than the nationalistic flag frenzy of Straya Day/Survival Day, whaddeva you want to call it.

Could it be a touch of schadenfreude knowing all the little Dick and Doras are finishing their super fun holidays and going back to boring old school to learn multiplication tables and John Howard's new history curriculum? Nah. It is just that I like to celebrate stationery. Before wrecking it. Today I got this rather spiffy giant pencil shelving unit at the local thrift store. It just happens to match Texta velvet touch me pencil pins quite well. Colour me happy Mr Squiggle.

Toast

I don't eat my crusts. Never have, never will.
You can't make me.
Not even when you tell me people are starving in africa.
That the world is running out of food, water, arable land.
So don't even try.
I'm saving them up to string together and enter in Contemporary Wearables Competitions.

Photos of Ayumi's delicious monkey-learning-to-count-crusts plate taken for her Pots in Action page.

Education is the Key

Now there is a right and a wrong way to wear a tape measure.

Looking through a particular magazine post Xmas, I was searching in vain/vainly for an article about MoBWorkspace we'd been hoping for. What I did find was plenty of articles about the businesses who'd taken out adverts, often on the same page and a bunch of ads using tape-measures in entirely the wrong way. It really disappointed me, I thought we might have moved on from this.

Doesn't everyone know by now the correct way to use a tape measure? In a Liana Kabel Measure Up brooch of course. It was on Boing Boing for heavens' sake! Get a ber-loody edumacation!! Plastic Girl, you have much work to do.

Choking Hazard All Ages

I'm always on the lookout for new plastic army men to wreck as the right kind for my flatliners are no longer manufactured. So I came across this rather shocking set of Great Beige Hunters with firearms and Noble Natives with spears and axes in the toy section of my local bargain basement store. I tried to remember what century it was. Admittedly, I am inured to the 'cowboys and indians' sets that you still find on the shelves which are probably just as bad, but I have never seen anything quite as revolting as these. Fortunately they do come with a choking hazard warning. They just got the age limit wrong. These toys may cause choking in decent persons of all ages. If they have an upside, it is that there is at least a female figure included in the set - albeit as "nature-woman-in-bra-with-disproportionately-large-feet-and-hands".

I also found this rather wonderful construction set of yellow and red blokes. Though disappointingly no female role models here, at least there are no guns and genocide.

Lake Manchester

This break we took a day trip to Lake Manchester, a favorite haunt and not an ugly desolate dam like most in our area but one surrounded by bushclad hills. It is one of the quieter places around, built before WWI and it retains the industrial ornamentation and solid dignity of engineering from that time - built to last by craftsmen with quality materials. The nearby picnic ground has been abandoned by family picnickers (they are all at the airconditioned shopping malls) with barbeque areas morphing back into cow paddocks and picnic tables being reclaimed by strangler figs. I once went to a Robert Moore show of paintings in the local hall, the lake being subject matter for some of his works on canvas and fibreglass so I remembered what a great venue it was with it's french doors and wide verandahs.

We had to negotiate a council worker spraying poison on weeds through a firehose but we made it to the dam wall without respiratory failure. The tide had gone out nearly 20metres straight down, exposing the dam floor and bits and pieces of wrecker treasure. Mr Accordian was able to take the photos above and some audio files of the soundscape while I foraged and watched the turtles. We also found an abandoned walking path with overgrown stairs and stone path edges leading up a nearby conical hill with views out to Ivory Rock. The only other people around apart from poison man were a couple of old boys reminiscing about their glory days abseiling down the dam wall, a carload of bogans tearing up the dusty carpark and a surveyor. The surveyor (never a welcome sight in my books) was taking measurements for the dam wall to be raised 5 meters. We wondered if council was also planning to increase the rainfall. It does not seem to have occured to them that we might have hit population capacity for our water supply.

Anyway, this means that another piece of our industrial heritage gets the chop along with half a hill and the decayed ambience that makes this place to special.

I once did a series of brooches and necklaces about the disappearance of grand old industrial machinery inspired by a Glen Willard photo of a locomotive engine. The brooches use elements of the machinery which I copied in silver and fragmented with a similarly fragments printed sprig of rosemary on patinated copper. Perhaps the enduring work of artists and craftspeople can help to document what is vanishing and to sooth souls weary of a modern built environment built shonkily with cheap materials and torn down every 20years or so to be rebuilt in the even crappier style of the day!