Spring has arrived early in our mountain town, and the weather is perfect. Still cool enough at night to snuggle into blankets, and warm enough during the day to get out and about. The loveliest thing about living in a community like this is the unexpected treats like Family Fun Day at the park, with home made cakes, fun activities for the kids and a general atmosphere of relaxation.

Family Fun Day was held at Weeroona Park, and as you can see here it was a very relaxed occasion:

The musicians were a boy and his dad, and they were excellent. In the background is the cake stall, which did brisk business, and the Rub a Tree activity was very popular. Kids really enjoyed messing with paint:

Signs of Spring were everywhere – even the goldfish in the pond were enjoying it:

The narcissi made it feel as if Spring has truly arrived:

My daughter was one of the lucky prizewinners at the raffle stall:

The art tree in all its final glory:

At the end of a good day, there is always someone to clean up the crumbs:

Today was my 63rd birthday and I’m happy to say I still get Happy 21st Birthday cards from my eldest daughter. She understands me so well!

I had a lovely day, did some retail therapy with my youngest daughter and she cooked and her partner Mani the Chef cooked a delicious dinner and Kat made a wonderful birthday cake. I love blueberry muffins (blueberries are the reason God made muffins) so she baked a big heartshaped one and served it with strawberries and cream.

Sooo delicious!

Such a great day – the grandkids sang happy birthday although little Jubei wondered why my cake had no candles.
I told him the house would burn down!

Recent heavy rains, which caused devastating floods along the Queensland and NSW coasts, barely touched us on our granite mountain. It did rain heavily for almost a week, but most of it just ran away from us – except the creek.

Ths was the sight that greeted residents heading for the centre of town after the rains – barriers up and the bridge closed because it was under water. Luckily, another bridge a block away was still high and dry, so it wasn’t a great inconvenience.

Actually it had gone down a bit by the time I was able to get my camera and take some pics, but this pile of debris shows how how high it got.

The creek was still running pretty fast over the bridge though, so driving or walking across it was impossible.

Definitely not swimming weather!

Sadly, our lovely park just disappeared under the floodwaters. A day or so of dry weather saw the creek back under the bridge again, although still running high, and we were barely inconvenienced, although some houses along the creek were affected. But it was nothing compared to the devastation and tragedy that coastal dwellers endured.

I’ve been trying to catch up on some outstanding projects. I had the idea for this one some time ago, but was finally lucky enough to score a piece of silk in the perfect midnight blue shade so I could actually make it.

The idea was to embroider my natal chart on a cushion cover. I used silver and gold thread (which had an annoying habit of fraying while you are using it, so the whole thing took longer than I thought). First I laid out the silk flat and traced round a large plate to get the circle, then ruled the lines. I used a silver gel pen to do that.

Then I drew in the signs and planet glyphs, and drew lines between to two maot aspects, the Sun-Neptune Square, and the Nodes-Jupiter-Uranus trine.

I used backstitch to embroider the circle, and running stitch in silver thread for the house divisions. I use gold thread for the glyphs, and red thread in running stitch for the square (challenging aspect!) and green for the trine – both silk embroidery floss.

The result has pleased me – I like it very much. I am looking for something to put in the centre to repesent the earth – something blue and green obviously. I’ll share it when I find it.

This actually isn’t too hard to do (apart from the gold and silver thread fraying) and if you want to try it you can get a chart made up for yourself at astro.

To be a writer to begin a journey of romance, adventure, incredible highs and earth shattering lows. It is all there at your fingertips – the power to move, to inspire, or to bore dreckless. To be a writer is to fall in love with words – and to grow sick of them, utterly hating the blank page that refuses to reveal them. It is to burn manuscripts in a passion of of thwarted creativity, and to bitterly regret their loss later on – but mostly, it is to write and write, until your eyes are burning, your throat is dry, your fingers numb.

It’s easy to be a writer, sportswriter Red Smith said, “All you have to do is sit at the typewriter and open a vein.” That’s if you want to be a great writer, the kind of writer that people clutch to their hearts, repeating quotes as if they were the mantra of life.

Then there’s the rest of us. We catch fire on occasion, get decent gigs because we have worked hard and paid our dues, now and then someone says, “I wish I had written that,” and we glow with pride. Greatness may be beyond us, but we all have a story to tell, and a unique way of telling it. And that is also what it means to be a writer.

In my cultural tradition, storytelling is an essential activity, and good storytellers are revered. Whenever family and friends gathered together, the stories would flow, and I grew up listening to them, as some listen to mythic legends of ancient worlds. To be a storyteller, it seemed to me, was the highest of aspirations.

True storytellers carry their stories in their heads. Writers, I discovered, live in a paper world. Yes, even in the computer age, there are piles of clippings, hard copies, editorial correspondence, copy paper, notebooks, jotting scribbled on odd scraps like the backs of business cards, and yellowing old print outs. “Yup,” a colleague once said, observing the bulging file boxes, “you’re a writer.”

These days you can add computer add ons, disks and hard drive folders. Paper or virtual paper, it’s all the same. Writers are packrats, saving words like some people save candy wrappers or beanie toys. They might not be worth much to anyone else, but they are precious to us.

To be a writer, you need to know words. You need a good dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus, because the right word is not always on the tip of your tongue. You can get them online, but there is something about seeing on them on your bookshelf that is so comforting. For most of us, they are old friends. If you write – or hope to write – journalistic pieces, you need the Associated Press (AP) stylebook. You need to know how to write the way journalists write.

You need a notebook with you at all times, whether it is electronic or paper and pen, because ideas strike in the coffee aisle of the supermarket or while you are waiting in line at the drugstore. Ideas strike when you are driving, while you are in the shower, while you are watching the kids at their school sports day – Mom? She’s the one scribbling in her notebook.

Sometimes there is nothing nicer than to take your notebook to the nearest Shopping Mall and record what you see and hear as life goes on all around you. Other times you need solitude – go away! I’m writing! To be a writer is to crave experience, but also to need quiet time to sit down, digest it, and write about it.

To be a writer is often to be labelled `weird’, or just plain nuts. Now and then, people get wild eyed around you – “Are you going to put me in a story? Will I get paid?” to which the only honest answer is, “No, you’re too boring.”

To be a writer is to have weird experiences though – stories that come true, stories that seem to drop on your out of nowhere (as Harry Potter dropped into JK Rowling’s head while she was travelling on a train), and stories that defy everything you ever thought you believed. Cynics write incredibly heart warming sentimental pieces, to their own amazement – practical souls suddenly find themselves weaving complex imaginary worlds. Writing gets more out of you than you ever knew you had.

Yes, to be a writer is to go on an amazing journey, it is an incredible adventure. And if it isn’t, then maybe you should try something else.

I am a great proponent of taking your own pictures for use in graphic artwork or blogging. It’s so easy to do with a digital camera and it solves copyright issues. I love my digital and take it everywhere.

A while back I was thinking about taking my camera out and getting some interesting shadows, textures and shapes. But no matter what I did my abstract images never seemed to inspire me. What was my problem, I wondered?

I have a four-year-old grand daughter called Adria, who loves to borrow my camera and take picures. She is careful with it, usually taking snaps of her parents and siblings that turn out quite well. But often she just takes snaps of anything that takes her fancy, and while some of it is hard to identify, the results have been amazing.

This ghostly image is one of her Aunties – already it has me thinking stories.

I now have a file called Adria’s Abstracts, where I dig around for story ideas and graphic art components. For example, this one would make a great background:

And this one suggests a space story – it looks like a wormhole:

So what is Adria doing right that I was doing wrong? I think I was just too conscious of `being artistic’ and trying too hard. Adria is utterly unselfconscious, and just snaps away for the love of it. So her abstract images have an uninhibited sense of joy about them, they are not studied in any way. I’ll be sharing our collaborations in future blogs.

My daughter Kat took this picture of last night’s `smiley face’ in the sky – amazingly,she did it with my fairly ordinary Canon Power Shot! She fiddled the settings until she got what she wanted – something I probably would never have thought of!
The face is formed by Jupiter and Venus as the eyes and the upturned moon as the mouth in the sign of Capricorn. It’s said to be a good omen – though it has been seen as a grumpy face with the moon turned down. It will be five years before such a configuration occurs again.

Some snaps of our Halloween party:

My daughter did the decorating, hanging her home made pumpkins in the trees

She made everything here, including the skeleton on the door and the lettering in the window Such a creative girl!

Here’s a close up of our merry skelly.

Granddaughter Adria making hearts that look like spiders – my daughter Kat ran up her costume on the day.

Grandson Jubei in his costume (also run up by Mum) as a character from Dragonball Z

Son-in-law Mani doing his Sweeney Todd routine.

The table got the treatment of course – the skull lights up, but that didn’t show up well in the pic.

With an artist and a chef in charge, you’d expect the food to be creative, right? These are Halloween capsicum `pumpkins’ filled with mozarella cheese and shallots. They were yum!

The Candy!!!!

When my kids were young, Sesame Street was the most politically correct children’s programme on TV – or so we thought. Kermit sang the virtues of learning to love yourself, the whole show radiated tolerance and universal understanding like a giant lighthouse, and kids started school already knowing how to read, count and live with their emotions.

But now, it seems, we were wrong to put so much faith in its clean scrubbed goodness. Sesame Street is not what we thought, it is riddled with incorrect thinking, inappropriate behaviour, and every character exhibits behavioural disorders that should have been corrected with medication.

Virginia Heffernan, of the New York Times, reports that reissues of the early videos of Sesame Street come with Adults Only warnings – “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

You can read the article here and if you google the subject, you can read the many horrified responses. But a surprising number of comments agree that Sesame Street just isn’t suitable for children. One of the major sticking points is a segment in which a little girl is befriended by an older man and taken home to meet his wife, who gives the child milk and cookies. Life was so much safer and simpler in the 70s that parents never bothered to warn their kids about stranger danger, apparently. So Sesame Street, by airing this little fantasy, could corrupt them and place them in harm’s way.

For Pete’s sake, do they think we were idiots? Do they think our children were idiots? Do they think that the kids, and us, their parents, couldn’t tell the difference between the safe, happy, rosy world of Sesame Street and the real world outside our front doors? How did we cope without constant TV campaigns about our responsibilities? Oh yes, of course, we didn’t have to worry because it was a ’simpler, safer, more innocent time”. Rubbish!

But, oh yes, I remember now – back in those days we were were expected to raise our children ourselves, to teach them manners, respect and safety. And, what do you know, our children actually listened to us and not a TV show. We didn’t get our parenting advice from the TV either, or from child `experts’ but from people who had been through parenthood themselves.

But times change – again. What we thought so avant garde is now regarded as just more evidence of our hopeless inadequacy as parents.

So instead of Sesame Street, which cruelly taught our kids to eat cookies, smoke pipes and obsessively count everything, we have Sponge Bob Squarepants and other ugly assorted prgramming which teaches our kids what an awful world it really is and how they can never hope to do anything to change it – let alone educate themselves.

Even sadder, to me, are the complaints that Sesame Street is too `slow paced’ for today’s kids. Infact, it was founded on the knowledge that children have short attention spans, and responded better to `sound bites’ of information. But while it assumed that children get bored quickly, it didn’t assume they were stupid.

We are in a time when everything is a disorder, and everyone a victim. It isn’t normal to feel sad or angry, to question people who speak rubbish, or to make up our own minds about anything. My kids were not raised that way – and, appropriate or not, they remember Sesame Street with real affection. They enjoyed their childhood, and now they try to raise their own kids the same way. In fact, they’ve already been showing their kids old episodes on You Tube – the little ‘uns love it, of course.