the last box

When you are moving, the gods of moving decree that the final box you pack up must contain the following:

electric extension cord
box of tea bags (two thirds empty)
roll of bin bags
bicycle pump
unidentified cable that may be to do with a computer
pair of knickers
hammer
one CD without case
a fork

Here's a picture I took. It's a bird. On a rock. I didn't take the picture recently. Not very recently, anyway. Not this week, or last week, or the one before that.

But really? It's all I've got, today.





Look! Everyone, look! A bird!

the weariness of the long-distance folky

Y'all know, I am a folky. I love folkiness. I embrace it. I would not mercilessly ridicule it if deep down I did not bear for folkiness a love that knows no bounds.

But oh.

Oh.

After all this time, this is where we're at?

There were morris dancers, at our local folk festival, dancing Bonny Green Garters. This is often quite impressive (in morris dancing terms, which of course is all relative), in particular when a very large number of them dance it all together. Here, though, there were precisely four dancers. They did another one called Step and Fetch'er (o gods, ask me how I KNOW) but inexplicably, to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. Average audience: two people.

In a startling oversight, the festival organisers had not employed anyone to sell didjeridus. Luckily, some harpmakers stepped in to cater for all those with a pressing need to spend huge amounts of money on a large and unwieldy musical instrument they will never be able to play.

We must set aside that these women had clearly become as disoriented as a litter of panicked kittens as they tried to escape the Wacky Children's Entertainer wardrobe, for they were by far the most engaging and musical people there.












Food provision: as ever, a 'home made' lemonade stand. "Lemon tree, very pretty/ and the lemon flower is sweet/ but the fruit of the lemon/ is impossible to eat," says Judith Durham, so it must be true. But apparently if you sock it in a polystyrene cup with half a kilo of sugar and charge nine dollars for it, well. Suddenly possible.

Folk Miscellany Bingo; check 'em off: extraordinarily large dog gently terrorising smaller dog; socks and sandals; purposeful bearded man carrying deckchairs, camera bag and thermos; stall selling fairy costumes and staffed by women wearing fairy wings; tie-dyed t-shirt; person juggling craply and dropping beanbags into other people's picnics.

Suspicious absence of anyone playing Michael Row the Boat Ashore on an ocarina, though. Weird. I bet there was one there somewhere.

I just...people, the folk revival was fifty years ago now, and I used to find it reassuring that these things have been the same the world over since god was a boy, but this time? It made me so weary. We gotta do something.

where I am not

Cuileann over at Eating A Tangerine put up some of her beautiful beachy photos, and they made me all sunny and happy. Usually I would try to find something relevant to say that linked to a picture I put up on here, but this time, I just saw her beachy photos, and remembered my beachy photos, and mine aren't as good as hers but here are two anyway, because this is where my heart is:

debut book covers

Because I have plenty of time right now for things that are not work-related, I allowed myself to get completely distracted by this buzzy thing going around - building your own YA book cover.

The Alien Onions pointed at 100 Scope Notes, which has come up with a winning process, involving fake-name generating (to get your author name), random-word generating (to get your title), random-picture-related-to-random-word generating (to get your cover pic), and finally mucking about with the result to patch it all together and see if you can make it look like something you might see on the shelves.

(The process, if you wish to do it yourself - which you DO - is explained at both links above, where they have links to all the randomness sites and also to the rawther brilliant picture-mucking-about-with site, Picnik, where I whiled away several hundred hours a few minutes mucking about with pictures.)

And here are my two efforts:
I had to think hard with 'Air' because I had expected to get some sort of ethereal cloud-type picture, and instead I got a bizarre Miami golf course thing. And thank goodness for picture-weirding effects, because really the image of a cute baby stick insect on someone's fingertip that came up for the word 'afraid' wasn't absolutely the scariest thing I could've imagined.

This was fun. Go do it.