"God's Debris" (The book I just read ;-)

An hour or 3 ago, I mentioned that I read a book ... a bundle of printed pages actually - it was a free e-book that DH had printed off (when one wants a book to take to bed and read - easier to read a bundle of pages than it is to do the other option we have and take a laptop computer to bed! ;-)
I just did a search and found where he got it from - http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/11/free_ebook_of_g.html
- yes - it IS the same bloke who writes the Dilbert cartoons ... but this book is nothing like those!

anyway ... the snoring one woke up and told me I should to go to bed ... LOL

and it is getting rather close to sunrise ... oops!

goodnight

Weird ...

Actually, this post is weirder than it was going to be when I first decided to post it ... because while I was logging in to post what is now the second half of this post ... I just had to have my usual peek at a couple recently updated blogs, and the latest couple of "blogs of note" that are listed on the log in page, and I found this ...
http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/
... that is definitely weird (but - if you have read any other posts in my blog, you will know that I LIKE weird ;-)
This is almost one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" ideas ... put a red paperclip on your website and offer to swap it ... swap it for a fish shaped pen, swap that for a door knob ... etc until his last swap got him a small delivery van/truck!! I think there are a lot of people doing that sort of thing now ...

hmmm ... I wonder what I can put up here to swap ... a green paperclip came to mind, but I want to start with something a bit more original ...

... and his Mum has a blog too - http://funfuncolleen.blogspot.com/ - lol (her "Cuban diet" and the snowflake story are both worth reading)

He also has another blog ... just as weird/interesting as the other one - http://www.messageinabarrel.blogspot.com/
someone else did think of that one first - there is a 200 year old "post office barrel" on Galapagos island ... where people can drop in postcards, and they can take out postcards and look and find one addressed to somewhere they are travelling to/live near and hand deliver it ... it started off as a "mailbox" for sailors to drop letters in and collect and deliver letters that were for sailors/their family/etc in ports that their ship was going to be visiting ...

now ... I suppose I had better actually post what I logged in here to post!

My DH (Dear Husband) has subscribed to a free e-newsletter thingy, called Universe Today (www.universetoday.com) ... and when he reads them he then dumps them into my "Andrea" folder for me to read (the "Andrea" folder is my "inbox" - we have different e-addys but the mail all comes to the same computer and gets sorted into folders using the "message rules") ... anyway ... today I found an interesting article (or two) in there ... they are also on the website (in fact only the short version is in the newsletter - you have to visit the website if you want to know more)
This - http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/suitsat_satellite.html?2612006 - is an article about "the world's weirdest satellite" - they have turned an old space suit into a satellite and are going to chuck it out the airlock of the International Space Station in a few days time ... and for a day or 2 (until the batteries run out - lol) it will be transmitting a signal that people can listen to here on Earth ...
hmmm ... I wonder if have an FM radio that picks up 145.990 MHz ?

Of course, while I was there, I had a look at a few other articles ... was just wondering about this the other day, and here ( http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/advance_mars_rovers.html ) is the answer - one of those Mars rover thingys has been driving around on Mars for 3 years now! (and the other one has been going for over 2 years - pretty good seeing they were originally designed, and expected to last, for only 3 months!)
... I am not sure I like the lastest proposed Mars mission though - http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8637-wrecking-ball-could-break-the-ice-on-mars.html - "hey - let's drop a quarter tonne copper ball onto the surface of Mars and see what we can blast off from the surface" doesn't sound like an environmentally sound thing to do to a planet ... LOL
... it kind of sounds a bit like a cave man wandering over the hills from his cave and finding another cave, and wondering if anything/one is in it, so he chucks a rock at it!
(it also sounds pretty normal for our species - humankind is good at practicing archaeology with a buldozer ... LOL)
hmmmm ... maybe, for the sake of mankind, I hope there are NOT any intelligent beings living under the surface of Mars ... because if our way of saying "hello - anybody home?" is to chuck stuff at them - I don't think they will want to be our friends ...

I suppose I should go back to bed and get some sleep ...
yes - I actually went to bed at a decent hour, read a short book ... actually it was a pile of printed pages (an online book that DH found and printed out because it is a bit hard to take a computer to bed for bedtime reading - lol) ... I finished the book at about Midnight ... then I couldn't sleep - DH was snoring ... sigh ... so I got up again ... if he has trouble getting me to wake up/get out of bed in time to go to the market as early as he wants to in the morning - then that is HIS problem ... lol

I might see if I can find that online book first ... and check a couple of other e-mail folders (the e-mail from the yahoogroups I am on gets sorted into it's own folders too) in case there is any interesting e-mail in them ... lol

more dead trees!

... there is something interesting about the shapes of trees against the sky ... and it looks rather dramatic when it is dead trees against a grey sky ...

(these are more burnt trees at that river crossing - I stopped to take "one or 2 photos" - I took one or 2 DOZEN! ;-)

btw, I think that white dot is probably a rain drop on the camera lens, or something like that ... although I suppose it COULD be a UFO that I didn't notice flying around there at the time ... lol

I like messing around with photos ...

This is part of a photo I took at that same creek I took the others I just posted ...
(it is a burnt tree)




This is the same image a few mouse clicks later ...




Looks kind of spooky eh?
image editing software is so much fun
... it's handy having a husband who likes to collect software ... lol

what the ... ?

I just had to share this ... it is as weird as I am ;-)
someone I know (from a yahoogroup we are both on) posted this - the department: PoD - on her blog ... seems her "hope on a rope" has started sweating - LOL
methinks I had better tell her to sell it on e-bay
- if they can sell an image of Mary on a bit of toast, or nutri grain that looks like ET ... then why not a miraculous sweating "hope on a rope" ... lol
btw - this person posts some amazing photos on her blog - that is the main reason I keep going back and looking at it ...
(and she also sometimes writes and posts haiku there too)

growing back ...

I was driving home, "the back way" from somewhere on the other side of town, the other day ... I got lost in thought and missed a turn off (it is an easy one to drive right on past if you are not looking for it) ... but I found some nice yummy gum leaves for my pet stick insects, and the view was worth the half a km detour ...
This is looking toward Canberra, from some of the areas that were burnt in the bushfires 3 years ago ...



That big black tree has lots of green leaves sprouting from it too (most are out of the top of the photo, but there are a few you can see on the side of the trunk) if you click on the photo and look at the full size version, you can see the Telstra tower on a distant hill (near the middle of the photo)
They have also built a bushfire memorial near there too (this is actually not far from the worst hit part of town), but I only found out about that a couple of days after I drove past (I think they probably had the opening of it on the 18th ... which I think was the day I drove past ... I noticed some makeshift sign actually, but didn't pay any attention at the time ... but I did get a not so close up look at it on Sunday - from the back of DH's motorbike as we whizzed past it on out way out to Tidbinbilla Tracking station (a favourite place for his group of mortorbike riding mates to ride out to for coffee/etc - lots of nice "twisties" in the road out there - lol)

On the way home I also stopped at the creek where I took that photo of the dog impersonating a drowned corpse, that I posted here the other day (the turn off I missed was the one to that river crossing ;-) ...
It had been raining, so there is a LOT more water flowing ...



I think the rock that the dog was lying on in that other picture ( see http://aykayem.blogspot.com/2006/01/this-is-not-what-it-looks-like-lol.html ) is under the water somewhere at the bottom right hand corner of this picture ... lol
During the bushfires the vegetation around this creek burnt right down to the waterline (and I mean that litteraly - it was a few weeks after the fires when I took that dog photo there - and the only bits of green were a few blades of grass that had just re-grown right next to the water) ... but, as you can see in the photo, it is slowly growing back ...

This is a photo of some of the logs that are piled up on the upstream side of the causeway, from when the river must have been flowing even faster some time (they are piled up on the other side of the cement causeway that the road goes over - which was behind me when I was taking the other photo) ... it had been raining and the colours and textures of that wet, and partly burnt, wood are amazing ...

yes, I did make a "bushfire quilt"

Yes, I did make a "bushfire quilt" ...



It is only small, and not as good as I would have liked to have the ability/time to make ... the one in my imagination looked a lot better ... lol
... what I was trying to do was create something that re-created all the thoughts/impressions/etc from the fires, and the weeks afterwards ... the smokey sky, fringes of burnt trees that are still on top of some of the hills 3 years later, the red sun in a smokey sky, the brown hills, the burnt black fire break, etc ... (and, of course, that "rain" of burnt leaves that we had a reminder of the other week ... the other week we only got little burnt bits of ?grass - 3 years ago during the bushfires we had whole big leaves and in some areas of town there were even whole branches, and in some places they were arriving still on fire ...)

What is really weird, is that I also finished a big quilt that year (I did them both in time to exhibit in the Canberra Quilters exhibition ;-) yes - me finishing a quilt IS weird, but that is not what I meant - the weird part is how this quilt is an example of how sometimes things seem to have an odd way of working out, in ways that we never could have imagined, but kind of like they were meant to be like that all along ...
- it was one I had started as a mystery quilt a couple of years earlier and then added to (so it was doubled in size!) and then I had put it aside and not quilted it yet ... because I had not been sure what to do for the quilting ... but when I dragged it out a (month or 3 after the bushfires) and noticed what colours it was - inspiration came!
... by pure chance, the quilt happened to be green and brown (like the colours of the coutryside/etc in the drought we had been having) and a reddish orange, like fire ... so I quilted yellow in the middle, for flames, black around that, for the stuff that got burnt, and blue around that - for the water that put the fires out and the rain that we needed to end the drought ...

It is a bit hard to see the quilting in this picture, but here it is anyway -



I have done what I usually do with pictures in here, and made them links to the (usually bigger) original - so that if you click on the picture it will take you to a bigger version where you might have half a chance at sort of seeing the quilting/etc - lol)

btw ... did I say it was a big quilt? - it was actually huge - it was 2metres square! LOL

I usually give my quilts a title too ... I called this one "Earth Wind and Fire - The Winds of Change"

3 years ago today - a collection of thoughts and memories etc ...

A week or 2 ago, I promised I would post this ...
... I kind of got busy for a few days, then decided that I should post it on the 18th - and that is today ... so here it is ...

This is a (rather long!) collection of bits and peices from all the e-mails I saved durning the Canberra bushfires in January 2003 ... I probably would have blogged this at the time, if I had a blog ... actually that was most of my reason for finally starting a blog - so I had somewhere to put this kind of stuff all together in one place ... and I had been intending to put this lot in here sometime anyway
... I thought about it, and started collecting all these bits together (in an e-mail in my drafts folder actually - lol) the other day because I was reminded of the fires/etc with all the smoke and the falling burnt bits we got - blown in from some distant bushfires to the North and/or West of Canberra ( see my blog post from that day) and I decided to finally post it here (because if I had had a blog back then, most of this stuff probably would have been IN it - LOL)
... I was going to do it a day or 2 after that other post, but then I got busy for a few days ... then I decided to wait until the 18 and post it exactly 3 years after the whole thing started ... it is now the 18th (It was 18th January 2003 that the fires bunt into Canberra) - so here is my little collection of bits -

The person who writes that blog I just posted about ( www.jennybowker.blogspot.com ) was living in Canberra when the bushfires came - and something she wrote was the first thing I had saved - I don't think she will mind me posting it here, after all - she did post it on a yahoogroup that had more than 1000 members! (and she probably would have blogged it if she had a blog back then too ... lol)


I am sandwiching a quilt - or trying to - to keep busy.

We have just cleared all gutters. We have strong wind, 38 degrees,
and fire ripping through the Namadgi national park and only one
set of hills from Canberra. The wind is so strong it is bending the
trees double and ash and black leaves are thick in the sky - like a
dark snowstorm. I can now see a red glow over the hills, like a
blood red sunset, but it is only 3.00 in the afternoon.

The sky is dark murky orange and it is as dark as 8.30 at night -
really eerie. Funny how something primitive reacts to a wrongness
in the light - I am really uneasy.

That was why. Phone just rang. My daughter is on emergency alert
and so is my sister. Both are on the edges of grasslands and
paddocks near the fire. My husband has gone to help my sister to
wet down the roof and fill gutters with water. My son is collecting
kids and dogs from my daughter.

I really don't like this.

Jenny
http://www.jennybowker.com


There are a few Canberra people on that yahoogroup she posted to, so there was quite a lot of talk about it ... this is part of something i posted to that list later that evening (the first half was an update of what I had heard on the news and a couple of websites that had info, about the fires, on them at the time)

...... I was going to do some more of the sorting out in my sewing room
today ... but I kind of spent all day ducking up the laneway where I can get
a good view of the fires that are nearby (to see if any were heading our way
or not), and clearing up some junk around the yard so that it won't catch
fire if we get falling embers and stuff (some black leaves/etc fell on the
concrete outside this evening, but lots of places are getting burning stuff
falling out of the sky, from the approaching fires ... I think that is how a
lot of the fires are spreading so fast)
On a positive note ... the fires seem to be bringing out the good side of
people ... all the wonderful volunteers fighting fires etc, and also the
community spirit that seems to be bobbing up in the streets ... people here
in Dunlop keep wandering outside, and up and down the street, to get a
better look at how close the fires are coming ... and everyone is stopping
and chatting to everyone ... like we are all one big family ...

Andrea,
up too late, as usual,
in Dunlop.

this is part of an e-mail i sent to Mum (again - the first half was updates on what was on the news etc ... and the end bit was about the kids and other stuff that wouldn't make any sense to anyone else reading this except maybe Mum - lol)

... ... and there are roads closed
all over the place, and a couple of suburbs have been evacuated ... but
Dunlop is still ok ... the fires, and even most of the smoke/etc, seem to
have passed us by ... and even if the wind picks up again (it has died down
now) and blows the fire this way I think we will be ok here ... too many
houses and not enough trees/etc between here and where any fire could come
from ... I am a bit worried about Janice and at least a couple of scquilters
though ... Kambah is in a bad way, and some other suburbs I know scquilters
live in are even worse off ... and the weather is probably going to be a bit
better tomorrow, but hot and windy again on Monday ... and probably Tuesday
... etc ...
btw ... I know I am up too late ... but I am too wide awake to sleep at the
moment.
I keep thinking I should be out there somewhere helping ... but I guess
there is not much I could do at the moment ... maybe I should have joined a
bushfire brigade, instead of just thinking about it? (I decided not to quite
yet, because the kids are still a bit young to leave home if I get called
out at night or something and I am still not back in the morning when Brian
has to go to work ...


of course the last I had heard from Janice in kambah (who I mentioned in the e-mail to Mum) was just before the fires hit -

Subject: A quick update from hot smokey Canberra

I was shopping in Tuggeranong and there was an announcement over the PA that
the area of Tharwa was being evacuated due to the fires.

I have just found out through someone on another list that the suburb of
Banks is on high alert and like to also be evacuated.

You cannot see far for the smoke, and there is a really eerie darkness
tinged with a yellow glow. It is not even 2:00pm and I have the lights on
inside.

The temperature is well into the 30's and we are expecting 38 or possibly
even 40 degrees (this is in Celsius for anyone outside of Australia).

Our electricity is playing up, with the lights dipping a lot so I had better
get off the computer.

On top of that it is so hot that the computer is overheating.


Like most people that day - she didn't have a clue what was coming!

I was glad to see her post on a crochet yahoogroup the next day - but boy did she have a story to tell! ...

Hi all,

I am at a friends place and have access to the Internet at last.

Dave and I experienced the full firestorm as it came through Kambah
yesterday. We live on the slopes of Mt taylor, which suddenly -
literally suddenly - errupted int flame. We were out the front
hosing the house when it came through and we and all the neighbours
thought we were going to lose everything including maybe our lives.

Then the mini cyclone (aftermath of winds form the fire storm) hit
as we were trying to evacuate and there were trees falling on houses
everwhere.

We had a few belongings in our car and two of our 6 cats, plus the 4
almost 5 week old kittens. We drove over to Wanniassa (with great
difficulty (the next suburb)- thank goodnenss we have a 4 wheel
drive, where our friends live. Then it came over
the news telling Kambah residents to go home and salvage what they
could.

We came home and expected to have no house, but it was still there,
but we could see smoke coming from the back. The house behind us had
a tree on fire and the house there was just catching alight. The
people weren't home and Dave just jumped the fence and got the fire
out - otherwise that house, and most probably ours would have been
lost.

The next door neigbours house and shed was on fire so Dave and some
of the neighbours started on that - then all the house along the
back had their backyards bursting into flame. This went on for a
couple of hours and I just stayed with our house putting out spot
fires that kept occuring in the back yard.

Then suddenly it died down and at about 6:00pm we realised we had no
phone and no power. Thankfully we were able to account for all 6
cats.

We still have no phone and no power and we are back at [their friends
place].
As there is no threat back at home tonight so we are
staying here tonight as tomorrow we are expecting a possible repeat
performance with temps in the high 30's (Celsius) and high, hot, dry
winds and we need a good nights sleep, food and showers.

Janice in Canberra

Here is an update I sent to someone who e-mailed and asked if we were OK (this was the afternoon after the first/worst of the fires hit Canberra)

We are ok here in Dunlop ... we don't have any bush close to us here ...
just getting ash and burnt leaves falling from a smoky sky, and listening to
all the horrible details on the radio/etc, and feeling a bit like I should
be helping but there is not much we could do ... but I think there are a few
other scquilters who might be affected ... I know of at least one
who lives down on the edge of one of the worst
hit areas ... and a few more who live in areas where the fires have not gone
through, but are full of smoke and the power/etc is out and the roads all
blocked/closed ...
Andrea,
listening to the choppers fly overhead ... (we are between one of the big
fires, and the lake where the water bombers are filling up)

... the "scquilters" I mentioned are the people on that yahoogroup with over
1000 members (the one I mentioned at the start of this blog post - the
person who I was replying to was also on that list)

here is half of another e-mail i sent to Mum (the other half was a reply to
an e-mail she had sent me a few days before)

... things a really bad with the fires in Canberra now, but we are still
ok out here ... just raining ash and burnt leaves every now and then out
here ... the last couple days have been kind of weird ... burnt leaves
raining from a hazy sky, sunlight has a red tinge from all the smoke ...
choppers flying around ... and people wandering around the street looking at
the hills, and total strangers chatting to each other, about the latest news
and all the "ifs and maybes", as if they know each other ... is kind of
surreal ... We are kind of in a good spot here ... close enough to see some
of the fires in the hills/etc, but just far enough away to be safe ... glad
we are not in Kambah actually ... the power is out down there, and one
suburb down south has been virtually destroyed (one that had pine forest on
2 sides of it) ... someone Brian knows (part of a group of them who go on
motorbike rides together) lives in that suburb (Duffy) and he watched both
his neighbours loose their houses while his was just ok ...
btw ... there was also a fire on Mt Rodgers this morning ... which is the
hill on the other side of Fraser/Charnwood ... probably deliberately lit too
... the choppers water bombed it and got it out without any houses/etc being
lost ... (but that meant that there was an hour or so when there were 2 less
choppers available to dump water on the other big fires ). I actually
got a glimpse of the big one dumping it's load of water (they drop it from
fairly high up) ... that was before I had heard about it on the radio ...
and I pointed it out to Brian (who was just heading off to the shop for some
rolls for lunch) and I said that it looked close to us ... and he said that
it would be over above the fires in Mitchell ... (and they say women can't
judge distances ). I was up the end of the laneway that goes onto
Kerrigan street when he came back past and he stopped and wound down the
window to tell me that he had heard on the radio that it was Mt Rodgers ...
but by then I had already heard it too ... and I had just seen a water
bombing chopper do 2 circles around the area without dropping it's load, and
then high tail it off towards the fires in the hills ... so I knew the fire
on Mt Rodgers must have been under control (and then I heard the same on the
radio a bit later).
Canberra is going to be quite a mess for a while though ... the fire damaged
the big sewerage treatment plant (which is not far from here ... over the
hill near Holt/etc, where the fire burnt some houses etc too ... ) and
everyone is supposed to not shower or use washing machines etc today and
wash dishes/clothing in a bucket and pour it on the garden to avoid putting
as much down the sewer as they can ... our washing machine water goes on the
lawn anyway ... they are supposed to be going to have it back up and
running tomorrow though

... yes they did have it fixed the next day ;-)

I also sent and recieved a LOT more e-mails that day (the Sunday after the
worst of the fires hit on Saturday) and the next day - a lot of people were
posting to a few of the yahoogroups I am on - passing on news about people,
and sharing stories of what they have seen/lived through, and told people
what stuff they did/will pack in their cars if they have to evacuate from
their homes ...
one funny thing though - Mum didn't go online and read the e-mails from me
until about Monday or Tuesday - and it wasn't until she saw the news on
Sunday evening that she even knew we had bushfires in Canberra! ... I guess
that explains why she didn't ring me until Sunday night! LOL (and then when
she did ring - I was trying to ring her at the exact same time and we both
got the engaged signal - lol ... but we did get to talk a bit later when
one of us rang again ...)

This is the last part of an e-mail I sent in the early hours of Monday
morning ... it was a reply to yet another person from that scquilters
yahoogroup - she e-mailed me to tell me she had heard from her relatives in
canberra and they were ok, and, because she lives on the other side of the
country I told her what I knew about the fires and about Canberra people we
both knew on the yahoogroup... and I ended the e-mail with this ...

... not sure I would go to sleep if I went to bed early anyway ...
everything is so crazy at the moment ... in some ways/some areas life goes
on just like normal, but in other areas/ways things are all upside down ...
it has been really strange, sort of out here on the edge, where we can see
the fires over in the hills, and could see the smoke as the fires burnt on
the edge of Holt ... and seeing choppers flying overhead on their way to
waterbomb the fires (or on their way back to fill up from the lake) ... and
hearing all the fragmented news reports about areas where I know people ...
and knowing that while I was standing taking photos of the smoke clouds and
fires in the hills and sunsets, there were people fighting for their houses
and their lives ... it was all kind of surreal ...

I also said this on the end of another e-mail that I posted to that scquilters yahoogroup

... it may be several days before we hear any news about some
people ... Canberra has suffered a LOT of damage ... and it may take a while
to get things back to some semblance of normality in some areas ... I just
hope we have seen the last of these fires ... but with the more hot windy
weather on the way ... who knows what will happen ...

Andrea,
up too late, as usual,
in Canberra ...

... btw, a while ago I had a look over the back fence, and I can still see
the fires
glowing up in the hills ... looks kind of eerie ... in fact the last couple
of days have been rather weird ... kind of surreal ...

( I wonder if I can work a quilt idea into that? ... maybe even one that I
can use for Nola's second challenge ... that has to have a lot of red in
it ... I wonder if I can make the theme fit? ... I know - I am weird )


yep - I was already thinking of quilt/etc ideas! LOL

The other funny thing was - they actually called in busfire brigade units from Sydney and even from up in Queensland, to come to Canberra and be there in case the fires got bad again (there was more hot weather and high winds predicted for the week or 2 after the fires first hit) ... and some members of the bushfire brigade that Dad is in (on the Sunshine coast of Qld) came down to canberra for a few days ... and guess where they ended up? - yep - just over the road burning fire breaks on the edge of the grassy paddocks here in Dunlop! LOL
I noticed the fire trucks arrive and start burning fire breaks and was doing my usual - taking too many photos - when I noticed that the fire truck I had lined up in the viewfinder was from Maroochydoore (a town near where Mum and Dad live) ... so I looked at the other trucks and saw they were all from up there - so I went over to say hi (they were all having a drink/etc break before they started burning the fire break) ... and told them who my Dad was ... we had a good laugh ... then one of the blokes alked up and handed me his mobile phone - and Mum was on the other end! - he had found out who I was and rang Mum and Dad's number! ... small world eh? ... I e-mailed them a heap of photos - I am sure they apprecialted that because they didn't have time to take any themselves ...

I do have more assorted e-mails in my collection ... mostly stuff people have posted to the various yahoogroups I am on ... about the latest news and weather reports/etc, and fires in other parts of the country (yes - a lot more places than just Canberra had fires that January) ... and about how they slowly started to hear from people and that people they knew were ok ... and about how the good side of human nature came out ... strangers helping people they had never met, such as people opening their doors to families, from their street/etc, that they had never got to know before, who had lost houes in the fires, and quilters offering to make and send quilts to those who had lost homes ... in fact that is a whole story in itself - working bees were organised and there were more than enough quilts made/donated so that every Canberra family who lost their house/etc got at least one quilt, often more. I know a quilt doesn't replace loosing everything, but it is a practical way of comforting people and showing them that others are thinking of them ...

I had probably better stop adding stuff to this anyway - this post is going to be a mile long!

except I will add this bit ... I have found a lot of bits like this in all those e-mails I sent places -

I have to find my sewing room in all the mess (been sorting it out ... again
) and I need to finish a couple of my more urgent UFO's/etc first ...


yes ... I was trying to get my sewing room sorted out then, and I still have not finished that 3 years later!
(I sort of do most of it, then start making quilts again! ... then my fabric/etc stash grows and/or I realise things don't work well enough how they are arranged, so I move the furniture around (re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic? lol) and start again ... I just need the rest of the world to stop for about 6 months, while I catch up with it ... LOL)

I think I also need to go to bed!
(I want to get up and go out somewhere in the morning ... and it is getting a bit too close to the time I have to get up ... oops ...)

Something I forgot to post a week or 2 ago

I was going to post this a week or 2 ago but I got side-tracked doing something else and kind of never got there ...

I had been looking at www.jennybowker.blogspot.com (which I try to do fairly often) ... actually what I was mainly looking at was all of her photos on flickr (she puts a few photos on her blog and if you click one of those it usually takes you to a pile more on her flickr thingy) ... and what I was going to post, a week or 2 ago, was a copy of my comment that I left there ... it is on this post (if you are observant you might notice the typo in there, that I corrected before I copied it into here ;-) ... of course there are most likely more typos/mis-spellings/etc that I didn't correct - LOL)

Why am I copying a comment that I put on someone else's blog here? - because it is about how the photos inspire me with quilt ideas - LOL

Here is what I said ...

Wow ... as always - very interesting reading ;-)
- I have just been looking at the sets of photos
Those round things (in the set with the slippers) are interesting ... not sure if they are bowls or bags or hats or what - but i really like them!
The doorways/arches/etc - they all look good on their own, and also all the little thumbnails together make an interesting effect - a few quilt ideas there? LOL
Hmmm ... 8 or 9 of those arches/etc and 3 or 4 of the exteriors would make a very interesting set of quilt blocks!
... actually some of those archway photos, with arches within arches within arches reminds me of what i was reading somewhere online the other day, about the droste effect (named after some Dutch brand of cocoa where the box had a picture of someone holding a box of droste cocoa with a picture of someone holding a box ... etc)
The last set of photos - the interiors - a few quilt ideas there too!
- all that red ... it kind of looks like a cross between redwork and who knows what else - and i like it!
... gee I wish I had the time and money to travel to all those places!
(oh well ... maybe the lotto ticket DH bought today will win ... one can always dream ;-)

Unfortunately we didn't win Lotto ... sigh ...

... so I still have to go back to work at the end of this month (I go back a few days before the kids go back to school)

I need another 6 months holiday - I still have the rest of that sorting out to do ... I still have to put that fabric IN to it's new cupboards/etc ... and I still have a pile of boxes of stuff to sort out - half finished projects and the bits I dragged out for those, and for stuff I actually did finish, and all those silly fiddly bits that I don't quite know how to catagorise and sort into various piles ...
(for example - does one put elastic lace in with the elastic, or the lace? LOL ... actually that is probably the only one I did have an easy answer for - in with the elastic because I don't have a lot of that so it will be easier to find ... but the shiny gold elastic trim stuff that I bought to maybe use on crazy quilts/etc ... well actually I bought it because I liked it and it was weird and interesting ... do I file that in with my crazy quilt embelishments/etc ... or in with the elastic, which is mainly just boring old clothing elastic, where I will probably forget I have it when I dig out my stuff for crazy quilting/etc? - LOL)

aaahhhhrrrrgggghhhh!!!!!! - no wonder I am so disorganised! LOL

this is not what it looks like ... lol

This is not a dead dog! LOL ... just a rather tired puppy who has spent an hour or 2 running around somewhere he had not been before, with people he had not met before, and come to the creek and spent half an hour or more swimming around in the creek with the kids and I ...

(I think he only had a 1minute sleep and was up and at it again ;-)

... this photo was taken almost 3 years ago - and this tired "puppy" is still very much alive ... a little while ago he was licking my elbow and making it very hard to drive the mouse! ... but at the moment he is sleeping in the passage behind me ... and he still likes to sleep in positions that are very good impersonations of "road kill" - LOL

btw ... I have just put some other puppy photos on Spot, the blog ... for those who like pictures of cute (but sopping wet and muddy:-) puppy dogs - lol (I found this photo while I was looking for more soggy doggy pictures - but this one looked a bit too disturbing to put on there ;-)

and now ... talking about a "tired puppy" - I had better go to bed before the sun comes up! LOL

goodnight ...

Illusions, and other stuff

From the strange -
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html - a whole heap of rather interesting optical illusions (and watch out for those creepy eyes that follow your mouse cursor - LOL)

... to the absolutely ridiculous -
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4057591681481453187 ... cowboys herding cats!?

and ... the real reason I am posting to my blog right now (the first 2 things were from an e-mail someone on the Scquilters yahoogroup, and something I found on a blog that was "featured" on the blogger sign in page when I logged in to post this here ;-)

Someone I "know" via e-mail (another person on the Scquilters yahoogroup ;-) has a new blog, so if you are into all things textile related here is another one to look at -
http://krishnaelliscreations.blogspot.com/

and if that isn't enough textile related stuff for you - a couple of the people whose blogs I read are on this artquilters webring -
http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=artfulquilters;action=list
... there are quite a few interesting blogs on there - I wish I had time to read them all!

er ... where did the evening go?

Something I made the other day

This is a little purse thingy I made the other day (8th January actually - the day after I made that towelling backpack)

I made it because I felt like it, but I also made it for a valid reason - Dear daughter's Scout troop are on their "Sydney trip" at the moment (the one she needed the towelling back pack for) - they left a couple of days ago ... and I made the purse because she needed a little zippered bag of some sort, because we let her take the old digital camera with her to take some photos (and so the scout leader can take some too - his camera is broken), which meant that she needed a little bag or something to put the spare memory cards and batteries in (so they don't rattle around in the bottom of her day pack and get lost or damaged) ... so I decided to make her one.

It kind of ended up being a bit more fancy than it needed to be - I was just going to grab a scrap of fabric and put a zip in it and sew it into a little bag/purse ... but I found this bit of light brownish fabric and thought about how good it would look with aqua and brown thread on it ... and decided to get fancy and do it - after all - Dear daughter doesn't need it once the trip is over, but I do need a new coin purse :-)

All that aqua thread and the sandy brown colour kind of reminds me of the sea ... I have not even been to the beach this Summer ... sigh ... maybe I should name the purse "longing for the beach" or "the beach waves at me from afar" or something like that - LOL

btw - that furry thing against the top of the purse (and under the corner of the purse) is a cat's tail! - Pixel decided that she would claim the pile of wooden shelves I had under the pergola as her own personal sleeping spot ... and it also happened to be the nearest flat shady surface I could find to put the purse on to take the photo :-)

Oh - one good thing today - I finally got around to getting those 2 "new" (second hand) cupboards into my sewing room this evening! (now I just have to sort out the rest of the piles of junk, and work out what piles of fabric to put in what cupboard/shelf and put it all there) ... to make them fit I had to move another big set of shelves to a different postition ... and to do that I had to empty them - luckily most of what was on them was in big cardboard boxes ... so - there are now big cardboard boxes stacked up all around the dining area! (next to my sewing "room" - which is actually about 1/3 of the l shaped open space that the dining area is in - it is marked as "rumpus" on the house plan ... the other 1/3 is "living" - which we use as a lounge room, to watch TV/etc) ... I kind of had to stop moving stuff around at about 9:30 or 10pm - Dear husband went to bed and moving shelves/tables/boxes/etc was going to be a bit too noisy ... so I came in here and got lost in cyberspace again :-)

eek ... where did the evening go? someone has stolen 2 or 3 hours from me! - LOL

goodnight

... actually - before I go -

Uploading and adding photos doesn't take long, so I may as well add a photo of Pixel lying on "her" pile of shelves:



The purse is in this photo too ;-)

that roll of stuff behind her on the pile of shelves is actually a largeish sheet of bubble wrap (that just happened to by lying around when I needed it) with some grass/reeds/etc rolled up in it - I picked the reeds from next to a nearby dam - they were dried up dead ones, not live green ones, and the grass was mostly kangaroo grass that was lying cut on the ground where they had slashed a fire break around a grassy area where I was walking the dog the other day - I collected the grass and reeds because i thought they might be good to make a basket with - I have used stuff like that (and other plant material) to make various baskets before, and want to do some more sometime - once I get most of the sorting out done ;-)

Pixel has just lost "her" sleeping platform too - the shelves are in the cupboards now! ... I guess she will just have to find something else to sleep in/on (she already has a few places she worms her way into in my fabric/yarn/etc stash! ... and today I saw her climb in to the top of a box of fabric I have put next to where the shelves were - I better go and make sure the top bit isn't something that I don't want cat hair and dirt all over! (because it might be a day or 2 before I get the fabric from that box into it's new home)

In case you are wondering why Pixel looks so skinny and scruffy - she never used to be scruffy when she was young, but she is now rather old - we got her as a kitten just over a year before we had our son - and he has just turned 15! (the day I made the little purse actually) ... so Pixel is 16 years old!

and now it is definitely bed time!
(once I have checked what is on top in that box of fabric)

goodnight

Spot, the blog

Why a blog called "Spot"?

Why not?

When I was learning to read at school, we had a reader about some kids, and a dog called Spot, when my kids were little they used to like books (and the TV show) about a different dog who was also called Spot.
On the TV show "Star Trek" the android, Data, has a cat called Spot.

So ... after some absent minded daydreaming earlier this evening (about how my other blogs are here on blogSPOT) ... I decided to have a blog called Spot

If you really want to look at it - it's here - Spot, the blog

Yes, that was what I came in here to do about 3 hours ago! LOL

... actually, what I was originally going to do was see if i could get the URL www.spotblog.blogspot.com (that was sort of at the beginning of the daydream ;-) ... but it was taken ... so was www.spot.blogspot.com ... grrrr - both of them were so out of date it is obvious the owners never use them any more ... not that the owners ever used them for much - one has a page with a few posts on it, the other has one post with about 2 lines in it!

more things I found when I was supposed to be doing something else ...

This evening I should have been doing some more of THAT sorting out/etc (before I run out of school holidays to do it in) ... especially seeing I spent a few hours getting lost in here this afternoon ;-)
... but ... I came back in here to do something I thought of before i forgot it again ... I still have not done that something - LOL - but I did find another interesting blog and the person who writes that also has an interesting website with fractal art on it ... http://www.cootey.com/fractals/index.html

Fractals have always fascinated me, ever since I first saw one (and that was probably way before I even knew what "fractal" meant ... ever seen a new fern leaf still in the process of unfolding? ;-)
I used to waste quite a few hours sitting at the computer playing with one or the other of a couple of programs that drew fractal images ... but that was back before i knew how to use e-mail or newsgroups or anything like that ... lol (and before I did quite so much quilting/crochet/etc textile arty stuff)

The person's blog is also quite fascinating too -
http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com/

So ... how come I ended up there instead of doing the "something else"? ... well ... when I go to the site where I log on to post to/edit my blog, there are these links at the top ... to blogs just updated, and featured blogs ... and some reason I decided to see what else was in the list of featured blogs ... and the title of that one caught my eye ... LOL

Oh ... by the way ... if, by some miracle, someone is actually reading this blog ... and, by an even bigger miracle, they have been here before and actually been game to come back - yes it does look different - that is mostly what I was doing in here all afternoon! LOL

So - "what is different?", you ask?
- The template is different - so the blog looks different - it now has a "side bar" with links and stuff on it, and the background colour is totally different (sorry if a couple of the colours in the text of previous posts are a bit hard to read ... they showed up ok on the other colour ;-)

And ... there are some adverts on here ... I don't mind - because I PUT them there!
feel free to click on them and help support my fabric/yarn/bead/etc addiction ... although I have this sinking feeling that it will probably take 10 years for it to even make me enough money to buy a 50c ice cream at that fast food place that starts with an M (M was the first letter of the alphabet that my son learnt too - one guess why!)

There is also a google search button - so you can search the www

and I updated my "other" blog too (in fact I did that first - seeing it is my "test" blog that I created mostly so I could use it to test things out and see what they look like before i dive into this one and do something orrible that I can't undo :-)

er ... I suppose I should check/read my e-mail

... later ...
(now I want to go and do what I actually came in here to do ... )

The bag I made today

This is that towelling bag, the one I made for DD, that I mentioned here earlier today ...



... now she wants another one in white! LOL

I keep finding interesting blogs to read

Last night I was reading a blog ( http://origidij.blogspot.com/ ) which belongs to someone I know from a couple of yahoogroups we are/were on and she mentioned what someone had said (about how an artist can't really separate their art from their life - I agree with that too) ... and she had the link to that someone's blog - so I went for a look, and got lost for a while - lol ... and i even left a comment ... if you want to read that blog, or what I said - my comment is on the bottom of this - West Country Mother's Thoughts on Stuff: Footnote - Big Yuck! ... and I think there was a "home" button to get to the rest of her blog ... or just do what I do to find the home page of a site and go to the top of the browser and delete the end of the URL back to the first / and hit enter ;-) ... or (I noticed this later and added this bit when I was editing the post, to fix the link so it was blue) - just click on the title up the top of the page - LOL

The trouble is - while I am reading all these blogs, I am not putting that stuff in mine! (the stuff I said I would the other day ... lol)

but ... I did do something useful today - my daughter needed a "day pack" for her trip to Sydney (with her Scout Troop) ... so, after listening to her describe some towelling backpack bags she had seen and liked, I made her this one from a $1.50 hand towel ... much cheaper than buying one with that trademark "tick" on it - lol

I will post a photo shortly ... I can't do it here/now because I am posting this using that "blog this" thing that is also at the top of this blog ;-) - and it doesn't have the thingy to add photos ...

Time for a photo

There is too much boring looking text in here at the moment - time to post a photo ... now what can I find in a hurry at this hour of the morning?



I took this photo of Dear Daughter hugging the dog the other day ;-)
... I think that might be bits of ash on his nose - it was the afternoon when the bits of burnt grass were falling from the sky (from bushfires near Junee and/or Crookwell - not sure which ones the smoke/etc was blowing over from)

btw ... the photos from the first few posts on here are working again now ... but only if hardly anyone looks at too many of them - yes - looks like it was a problem with the hourly bandwidth limit thingy that they now have on geocities pages, where those first several photos happen to be (my geocities statistics actually show if it is exceeded - it hadn't been exceeded earlier this evening before I started messing around in here, but now they show it has been) ... so sometime in the next day or 20, I will see if I can edit all those posts and put them in here the way I did this one just now

but what now isn't working ... or at least it didn't for the last post I just sent here - is the comments link is missing ... I hope that is just a glitch (maybe because I used the "blog this" link on my other (test) blog to post about that to this blog and maybe it didn't like it? LOL)
(that was my other reason for posting that photo now - I wanted to see if the comment link shows up this time)

er ... Dear Husband must be just about to get up for work shortly - I had better go to bed! LOL

(I am still on holidays ;-)

goodnight

Testing, testing ...1 ... 2 ... 3: Testing testing ... 1, 2, 3

I was going to post that other stuff here ... but I ended up creating another blog instead!
- Testing, testing ...1 ... 2 ... 3: Testing testing ... 1, 2, 3
What I posted there, and probably most of what I will ever post there, is a whole heap of nonsense that nobody else will understand (in fact most of the second post on that blog - is even nonsense to me!)
... I only created it so I had somewhere to play around with changing stuff like different layouts for the page and different background colours and stuff - I wanted a "junk" blog to do it on so i wouldn't change something, on here, that I couldn't change back again ;-)
... so ... (if I get around to it) ... there might be a couple of changes to the look of this blog sometime soon (or late ;-)

although it seems there is already one change - I noticed it while I was messing around trying to put a photo on my profile
- none of the photos I have on my geocities site will work as links on blogspot!
... and, unless it was just a temporary glitch, they don't show up in this blog any more - the first half of the posts this year were sent in before there was a way to stick photos directly into my blog, so I threw them onto my geocities site and linked to them there
... so if the photos still don't work next time I look
(that is what I expect - I bet geocities don't like people linking to their user's sites just to load photos and have done something to stop them, that or the hourly bandwidth usage thing they now have is causing the problems),
then I will have to go in and edit all the posts and stick them in the way I do them now
(thank goodness this "vehicle of self expression" is easy to "drive" - LOL)

Deja Vu?

I actually went to bed before midnight tonight ... but I then I got up again (at about 1:30am) because it was hot, and then when the change in the weather finally arrived (not long after I went to bed) it was a kind of weird gusty wind that resulted in the fact that I was still wide awake and all this stuff was buzzing around and around in my head ...

Almost 3 years ago, there was a series of events that culminated in a disaster that changed many people's lives, and changed Canberra ...
Instead of Canberra just being "that capital city that the government built, that we happen to live/work in", it became "home" ... and something was threatening to take it away from us - the bushfires came to town!
(for those who don't live in these parts, or have been under a rock for the last few years , there were several bad bushfires in several areas of Australia in January 2003 ... and on the 18th of January, with stinking hot weather and strong winds, a rather large bushfire burnt it's way into seveal suburbs of Canberra resulting in the loss of 4 human lives, countless animal lives, quite a lot of houses and large areas of forest and bushland, and for some people it was a nightmare that still wakes them up at night ... there is a website with a LOT of photos taken during and just after the fires in Canberra - someone created it and started collecting photos quite soon after the fires, and the site is still there - http://canberrafires.xsnet.org/ )


Today we had a reminder of those events ...

yes - it is that time of year again ... stinking hot dry windy weather and there are several bushfires burning in various parts of Australia ... and one bushfire was close enough (actually a "safe", for us, distance away near Crookwell), and in the right direction from us, that we had a lot of smoke blow over Canberra in the afternoon, and on our side of town at least, we were also treated to a rain of bits of burnt grass and stuff ...

... I think it has probably brought back some memories for a lot of people ... it has for at least one other person I know, and it did for me - and I don't even live in one of the areas that were worst affected, so I didn't have to go through the nightmare that people in some areas of town did (an afternoon where the fires burnt houses around them, and the smoke made it dark as night, and they had to put out fires in their yards all that afternoon and then either evacuate themselves to a refuge or friends place or live for up to a week with no power or telephones ...)

Of course there are some people who either just have or are still now going through the same kind of thing - there are several bushfires that have destroyed houses/property/bushland/etc and/or are still raging in several areas of Australia ... I guess it is kind of a fact of life here, that in the hot dry summers we often have bushfires ...

During and after the fires in Canberra, I wrote a few strange e-mails/etc, about what was happening and how I felt at the time ... and I have also kept a couple of e-mails that were written by friends who wrote about some things that they probably never want to have to see/live through again ... and when I started this blog, at least some of those were one of the things I was planning to eventually put in it ... so maybe now is as good a time as any?


it is now more than 2 hours since I started typing this stuff - lol
- I have been getting "lost" reading all those saved e-mails ... it kind of interesting, and weird, reading all that stuff again now ...

I might stick a few bits and peices of that stuff in here shortly (or if not now, then sometime in the next day or 3 maybe) ... but first ... I just remembered something else i was going to post about too (because i had one part of it saved in an e-mail in my drafts folder so I could find it and copy it into here ... lol)