Antacid

I've covered a bit of territory in the past 3 days! Berrima for 'Prisoners in Arcady', Canberra for 'Degas' and some of his contemporaries, Target in Civic for suitable clothing* for my daughter to wear in Canberra climes, Yass for bric-a-brac, the AGNSW for the Archibald and Art Express and the psychologiost for my workers' comp assessment! I was not disappointed by any of them.


While Grosset's 'La Vitrioleuse' / 'The Acid Thrower' (above)
may depict my mood for many of the past few weeks, even months, I am feeling a little more positive today. Suffice to say I am optimistic that the unbearable situation at work is over.

'Prisoners in Arcady' is a wonderful exhibition at the neat as a pin Berima Museum complete with archival photographs, newspaper clippings and propaganda footage about German mariners and farmers interned in Berrima gaol during WWI. These men - who were only confined during the night hours - created their own idyll on the banks of the Wingecaribee River by day raising crops, keeping ducks, canoeing & kayaking (one of their craft is on display!), building Bavarian-style chalets and even opening a playhouse and performing touching melodramas! The exhibition was a revelation and the volunteer guide a well informed and engaging man. The Southern Highlands On-line site states that 'Sadly there are currently no reviews for Berrima Museum' - I will be rectifying that!

I had forgotten, or perhaps not really ever fully appreciated, what a very versatile and adventurous artist Edgar Degas was. We (and 3,997 others according to an ABC news report I heard later) visited the National Gallery exhibition yesterday (Sunday 15th March) and encountered his etchings and other prints for the first time. The images of Mary Cassatt and her sister at the Louvre particularly captivated me. The caption writer got it right. Mary is depicted as a thoroughly modern and self assured woman inspecting antiquity with an artist's eye & mind - all suggested just by her posture and the angle of her parasol.

Got home in time to see the concluding part of 'Lost In Austen' which has been a sheer delight and, to borrow from its script, a very witty and sophisticated 'post-modern moment' (or series of) moments from start to finish. Can't heap enough praise on all the performances!

*Neglectful mother that I am I let her pack shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt for the trip. She now has a purple hoodie to match her fringe and various other pertinent additions to her wardrobe including a T-shirt depicting Degas' Little Dancer.

The best of weeks, the worst of weeks

My Graduation Ceremony

What a wag that Winston Churchill was! It is Friday night and the interminable series "I Was Winston Churchill's Bodyguard" is on SBS again (must be the 90-somethingth episode) bringing us Dennis Waterman's unmistakable cheeky tones recounting Walter H. Thompson's tedious, humorless reminiscences in all their stupefying detail once more! Mr Thompson, whom one suspects was not an irreverent cockney of the Dennis Waterman stamp, loves to quote his adored charge on subjects from traffic to communism. We have just been regaled with Winston's droll observation, upon visiting Niagara Falls for the second time and being asked how the experience differed from his earlier visit, that not much had changed and the 'waterfall continues to fall downwards'. Add 'physics genius' to this Renaissance man's other credentials. It really is the most agonisingly protracted and dull series!

Still, nice to have something to bitch about that doesn't affect me personally (I don't much care what trash Robert Powell and Dennis Waterman will do for a buck). It hasn't been a good week in my career, despite my graduation (see picture - guess which is me). I have submitted a workers' comp claim for a situation at work that has been even more drawn out and painful than Walter H. Thompson's serialised memoirs. I have been working around, working in spite of and doing the work of a seriously maladjusted and incompetent colleague for over 3 years now and the arrival of two new people in our team threw a blinding spotlight on how deleterious my various accommodations to the situation had become. My blog is probably not the place to describe the toll this has taken on my health, it's not really entertaining reading. Suffice to say I have been taking solace in food and drink and it shows (check the picture again).

Any way, enough of self loathing or self pity or an unpleasant blend of the two. I hate feeling like a victim and I have to steel myself for a psychological assessment next week. But first I am escaping to the pool and then to Degas at the National Gallery!

International Women's Day

Happy IWD! My employer held a celebratory function for us at lunch time with Mary Jerram, first female State Coroner of New South Wales, as guest speaker. A product of 70s/80s feminism like me, she was easy listening, confirming and validating the stuff I had lived and believe in. Interestingly my gen Y geek girl friend - the one who go me started on this blog - questioned the very notion of a day exclusively for women and was irritated by the cosy bourgeois nature of the event. It is important not to get complacent!

Channel 7 is celebrating IWD by screening Casino Royale with the post feminist casting of Judi Dench as 'M'. I have appreciated Daniel Craig for quite some time and Judi forever but I still can't bring myself to take a seat on the sofa and watch it. It is a genre thing. I think Matt Damon put it quite succinctly when he told The Miami Herald recently: "Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He's repulsive".

So even the lovely Daniel is rendered unmagnetic for me by that fact. And as for Judi, she has been so very wonderful in 'Cranford' the past 4 Sunday evenings that her jaunt as 'M', while a stylist's triumph and performed with her usual aplomb, is dispensable. Another issue is commercial breaks. Having decided I want to see 'Lie To Me' and the US version of 'Life on Mars' I am condemned to telly peppered with advertising and I am not hardened to it yet. It is intrinsically irritating and blows my time management/preferred week night early bed time regime out of the water.

Any way, Friday night seems to have become BLOG night! To say nothing of red wine and chocolate night (oh, let's face it, that's pretty much every night!) I graduate on Thursday. Some sort of account or imagery will grace this blog, I promise!

Talking Turtle

The Global Financial Crisis is tedious. It seems to be giving manufacturers a pretext for sending some of our few remaining domestically based industries off shore, Bonds, Dunlop, King Gee and Grosby among them. One hesitates to use the tired 'Australian icons' tag but I can't help thinking that images of Paul Mercurio dancing a duet with a Chesty Bond torso or a cartoon dog ruff ruffing 'Grosby, they're great, mate' now seem quaintly irrelevant. And Robert Drewe's evocation of the dagginess of Dunlop 'volleys' in the 'The Shark Net' is now more firmly sealed in its time capsule than ever! We have a standard of living in Australia that has attracted migrants from all over the world and now the Pacific Group of companies who produce these products has rejected paying even the minimum wage to keep jobs here and is eroding that standard of living and by extension eroding the cultural confidence that produced Paul Mercurio and Robert Drewe and let us enjoy their art.

I am reading 'Turtle' a first 'novel' (it seems unequivocally autobiographical) by Glaswegian Gary Bryson for our book group. Easily our most rambunctious and rollicking choice to date, full of hebridean whimsy and phonetically written passages liberally sprinkled with 'fuck' (which is apparently already spelt exactly as it's pronounced in Glasgow!) While the book has significantly fewer 'fuck's than many I've read it easily holds the record for the most 'wee's! Bryson reserves his most amusing slabs of phonetic utterance for his mother Trixie and a turtle he discovers in the dilapidated Reptile House at the zoo whom he adopts as his mentor. As well as teaching him to swim the turtle is clearly going to help him exorcise his childhood demons. Here's one of Mr Turtle's messages to our protagonist, Donald Pinelli:

Aye
An it wisny jist the swimmin.
Ah taught ye how
tae hold the sweet breath uv freedom in those
stupit mammal lungs uv yours.
How tae kerrry the whole bastardin wurld on yer back.
Ah mean
fuck's sake, pal,
that's whit bein a turtle's aw aboot.

Can't argue with that! I think I'll romp through this choice long before our March 22 meeting.

Bunny, bunny, bunny

Postscript: the Trading Post is the place for bargain bunnies.
This is 'Waldorf'. S/he is a cross dwarf/floppy. Cute, eh?

Losing Lesley/Leslie

Well, I have finished my assignments but not without life and death drama on my doorstep. The Sunday of the week before last our ginger cat was chasing something small and white around the back yard. It was a baby rabbit ‘about the size of a tennis ball’ (to quote my daughter later). It ran into a clump of fishbone fern and I managed to grab it. Knowing that the people over the road had an adult rabbit we took it over to see if it belonged to them. They told us their rabbit had been missing for many months but the previous afternoon it had emerged from beneath their house with a litter of six! They had deposited two with a pet shop, a friend had taken one and we were welcome to keep the bunny who became know as Lesley/Leslie (as its gender was unknown) for its short 24 hours in our care.

Lesley/Leslie was domiciled in a cat carry basket pending delivery of a rabbit hutch we bought on eBay that night. Lesley/Leslie ate carrots, lettuce, pellets and lucerne and was initially fed water with a dropper but quickly showed him/herself able to manage to drink from a tiny earthen ware dish. By the end of the day Leslie/Lesley had sat on the back of the sofa to watch TV with us and had taken part in a photo shoot on our bed.

Cats are supposed to have nine lives. Not sure about bunnies. Lesley/Leslie survived being let out for exercise before school on Monday morning and was retrieved with the help of our neighbour's (a different neighbour’s) landing net. About 1 pm that day my son called me at work to say he’d let Lesley/Leslie out for more exercise and this time the little mite had darted under the house!

Although we spotted that little rabbit several times that evening our attempts to catch him were in vain. We set the alarm for dawn the next day but when there was no sign of Lesley/Leslie, went back to bed. That gave our ginger cat just the ‘window’ he needed. The first neighbour reports that Simon (not Simone, we know the cat’s gender) chased the bunny till it lay exhausted on the nature strip outside our house & when she went to scoop it up it made one last dash for cover. That’s the last time anyone saw Lesley/Leslie!

We, and especially my daughter, have been experiencing the Five Stages of Grief bunny style:

1. Denial and Isolation – it was her sole crusade to find the bunny and she produced a marvellous ‘LOST’ poster. No-one else’s matched her sense of loss and no other bunny was comparable to the missing one.

2. Anger – her brother’s poor judgement in letting Lesley/Leslie out was bordering on criminal and his lack of contrition or participation in the search deserving of verbal and possibly physical abuse.

3. Bargaining – would my husband and I get home early enough to try to find Lesley/Leslie? Or at least to try to catch a sibling?

4. Depression – she has been very, very sad.

5. Acceptance – we are getting a replacement rabbit this weekend!

Please look after this blog

I must apologise to my reader (hi, Glenda) that I haven't posted anything to my blog for a while. All my word power, approx 70K worth, has been harnessed in writing assignments for a diploma course I've been meaning to finish since early 2008. The qualification has been superseded and I've been shamed into completing it or else risk the ignominy of losing the work I put in and of being a lousy role model to the many people I have recruited to the course in my professional role.

I've submitted 2 of 5 assignments that were outstanding (as in 'overdue' not as in 'exemplary'), that makes 3 more I have to do between now and 9 Feb. So there won't be much new content here for a couple of weeks unless I get heavily into diversion therapy! I will post a pic of me with my diploma (or at least an anecdote about the graduation ceremony) if I actually get all the work in.

Completion is not my strong point - I like the freshness of a new experience, the cut and thrust of classroom debate. Chronicling the steps I took to arrange catering and bums on seats for a project to educate lawyers about their potentially psychotic clients or identifying and listing hazards in my workplace doesn't do it for me!

I have had an interesting discussion (sadly, off blog) about marmalade. A friend makes blood orange marmalade which is apparently delicious. I have to try it! Thinking of marmalade makes me think of bears: Paddington Bear from darkest Peru (hence the image above) and Winnie the Pooh, whose immortaliser AA Milne also wrote The King's Breakfast:

The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"
The Queen asked the Dairymaid,
The Dairymaid
Said, "Certainly,
I'll go and tell the cow
Now
Before she goes to bed."

The Dairymaid
She curtsied,
And went and told the Alderney:
"Don't forget the butter for
The Royal slice of bread."

The Alderney said sleepily:
"You'd better tell
His Majesty
That many people nowadays
Like marmalade
Instead."

The Dairymaid
Said "Fancy!"
And went to
Her Majesty.
She curtsied to the Queen, and
She turned a little red:
"Excuse me,
Your Majesty,
For taking of
The liberty,
But marmalade is tasty, if
It's very
Thickly
Spread."

The Queen said
"Oh!"
And went to his Majesty:
"Talking of the butter for
The royal slice of bread,
Many people
Think that
Marmalade
Is nicer.
Would you like to try a little
Marmalade
Instead?"

The King said,
"Bother!"
And then he said,
"Oh, deary me!"
The King sobbed, "Oh, deary me!"
And went back to bed.
"Nobody,"
He whimpered,
"Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!"

The Queen said,
"There, there!"
And went to
The Dairymaid.
The Dairymaid
Said, "There, there!"
And went to the shed.
The cow said,
"There, there!
I didn't really
Mean it;
Here's milk for his porringer
And butter for his bread."

The queen took the butter
And brought it to
His Majesty.
The King said
"Butter, eh?"
And bounced out of bed.
"Nobody," he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
"Nobody," he said,
As he slid down
The banisters,
"Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"

So (b)logging off for a while to write more assignments, sample marmalade and finish this month's selection for our book group 'Brick Lane'.

Isn't saying 'President Obama' a joy?