handy

If you are changing the headlamp bulb on your car, and someone comes to offer to help, what do you do?

Because there’s only one blown-out headlamp bulb, and there’s only one spanner. So the option isn’t really ‘help’, so much as ‘doing it for you’.

It’s nice when people offer help. They’re being nice. It’s what nice people do.

But you don’t need the help. You’ve got a spanner, and a bulb, and the know-how.

My new neighbour came over when he saw me under the bonnet of the car. To help. (I suspect, when he saw the very short-haired girl who looks like a boy, wielding a spanner and capably doing basic mechanical things on a car, he may have Surmised some Things. Surmisingly.) Anyway though, we talked for a bit. He has a daughter in Melbourne, so we talked about Australia. While we talked, I changed the headlamp.

There was a pause. Then he said, “Well, you’re a handy girl.”

I’m not. I’m not a ‘handy girl’.

But I’m someone who can read instructions and learn to do things. And if I can do them, I’m unlikely to hand them over and have you do them, is all.

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.

Dear Author

Welcome to our Society! We are thrilled to have you as a member.

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For a Year is a thriving organisation. Since its inception in 1991, when our esteemed chairman, Peter Mayle, took off to Provence, we have been growing and growing!

You may wish to look through our catalogue. It includes titles such as Eat, Pray, Love (spiritual journey); Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (cookery; and now a major movie!); The Year of Living Biblically (following the Bible’s tenets to the letter), and Just Do It (an inclusion that divided the admissions committee, as the author had sex every day for only 100 days rather than the traditional 365). We will shortly be admitting the previously-rejected Sean Aiken, as his One-Week Job Project (doing 52 different jobs for one week each) is finally due to be transferred from an organic endeavour of youthful idealism into the proper print format recognized by the Society. We also have high hopes for the Around Oz On A Battered Fish bloggers, who drove around the coastline of Australia in an environmentally-friendly car powered by waste vegetable oil (except when they had to use diesel!).

Our selection process is a rigorous one, and we are proud to have rejected My Year Of Just Doing My Job, Raising The Kids, Getting Groceries, And Looking After My Mum Etc.

Forthcoming titles include Underequipped and Ridiculed: A Year Painting Rowboats In A Landlocked Finnish Village; Living Canadian: 365 Days, Eh?; and Twelve Months of Relentlessly Quoting the Goons.

You will be pleased to hear that both of your proposals have been accepted by the Committee! Your initial idea to take a year off to write a book, and then write a book about the year in which you wrote a book, is inspired. And your second, to spend a year reading 365 books people have written about things they did for a year, and then write a book about it, shows admirable commitment to the Society’s cause, alongside a healthy grasp of a very comical metatextual conceit! Dear Author, we are impressed. A position on the Society’s Steering Committee for the Promotion of Doing Things For A Year seems likely to be in your future.

Membership expires on an annual basis.

Sincerely,

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For A Year

meanwhile back in the AFL...

I am sorry to report that the Adelaide Crows have 'devoured' my new bezzies, the 'undermanned' Fremantle Dockers.

I KNOW. Try to contain your sorrow.

The only real way I have to keep up with all this pain and heartache is through WA Today's online reporting. It seems pretty comprehensive. It uses the words 'obliterate' and 'humiliated', which can't be good. I suspect Shoutah, having run through his entire extensive vocabulary of insults for his beloved team, is at the very least going to be unable to go in to work this week, and at worst has lost his everloving mind, lifting a ceremonial two-by-four of shame and murmuring a soft, sad, '...like a pack of galaaaahhhhs...' before beating himself square about the chin with it.

But look at this:

"Fremantle's final score was the lowest in their (sic) history, comfortably less than the 3.7 (25) compiled against Geelong in round 20 of 2004, and the 117-point deficit equalled a round six drubbing by West Coast as their worst loss.

Their halftime return of 0.1 (1) was the most meagre in a league fixture since Fitzroy went scoreless against Essendon in round one 1995."

I could not love these sentences more, nor be more curious. What in the name of all that is good can it all mean? What other team sport has scoring represented by dual numbers employing both decimal points and brackets? What mystical equation brings us from the one number to its enbracketed relative? It's like a freaking MENSA question: "If 3.7 is to 25 as 0.1 is to 1, then 4.5 is to ... as 2.2 is to ...?"

Just about the only word I understand in the whole of the above is "Essendon", which is only because an acquaintance's dad played for the team in the forties.

I remain undaunted. Through WA Today's report, I've picked up a few more bits of correct terminology - it seems each quarter is actually called a 'term' - and I can begin to fill in position names, replacing the English rugby/ Canadian football tangle of wingers and quarterbacks in my head with correct AFL nomenclature:

"Fremantle entered the game minus a host of big names, none more significant than that of their gargantuan ruckman Aaron Sandilands."

Aha! I shall diligently scribble 'gargantuan ruckman' in my notebook. Right alongside 'youthful hobbledehoy' (to be found in the forward line) and 'inscrutable filibuster' (on the flank).

The Dockers website is also a mine of useful information, quoting the coach:

"...an inability to move the ball forward efficiently and combat Adelaide's structures were the most frustrating aspects."

Really? Not 'moving the ball forward efficiently' was frustrating? Well, I imagine it would be, since that is more or less the entire point of the game.

I LOVE this sport.

it's time to play the music

Sometimes, there is quite simply nothing in the entire world that is better than the Muppets.

but how much is that in weight?

I can't put my finger on which bothers me more; is it:

a) that the best quality of this is how much it weighs?

or

b) that the best description they can come up with is "food"? ("So, what's in it?" "Oh, y'know. Food.")


The P'zone. Presumably by introducing an apostrophe, they saved money on letters, and passed on the savings to us, the valued customer, to give us A POUND OF FOOD for ten bucks. And you can't say fairer than that.

Over to you. Fire at will in the comments; which is worse?

A POUND

or

Of FOOD?

too much to ask?

Yesterday, this happened. All in one go. It was so quick and fun and easy. Start to finish, straight through.

(I can't foot model, because it's sized for an eight-year-old. Although it looks a bit bootie-ish, when it's on a foot, the foldover top does that very shallow ankle sock thing that is very cool. Also, I was accused of buying horrid plasticky yarn because of the candy colour. I am here to tell you not only is this lovely lovely wool, but it has aloe vera magically infused into it by the aloe vera pixies, so it is a Good Thing and Nice Yarn and you can throw it in the washing machine to boot).

So today I started the second sock.

Now some people, when they use these self-striping yarns, don't see a need to match stripes; stripes fall where they may. I am not one of these people. Socks gotta match. They're socks. Matching is what they do. They're called a pair of socks. And the truth is, a self-striping pattern on yarn repeats itself, so all you have to do is take the trouble to find where the repeat is, and start there. Which I did. Light pink bit, followed by red bit, dark pink, light pink. Cast on.

Yeah. You see it too, right?








I didn't see the red bit didn't match until I was way down. But, I thought, must be me, because look - further down the pink bits match up perfectly:








So, I thought. I can just unwind a bit of the top to shrink the red bit, because the rest clearly matches.

Then I got to the pale pink bit here:

So, I thought.

So.

So I picked the incredibly wrong bit of the pattern to start at. I unwound the ball to find where the repeat really started, so I could just start again there.

I could not find it. I decided to just continue knitting, because then I would see where the repeat was, and I would make that the start, and undo the inches I already did, and carry on from there.

Dudes, there is no repeat. I have knitted a thousand yards of sock, and the pattern hasn't repeated. This is completely inexplicable to me. I even turned it upside down, because I thought that might make it match. It doesn't.

Socks match.

What is going on?

What am I to do?