Carolling

On Christmas Eve my family and I went carolling. Candles and songsheets in hand, we wandered down the street in the growing dark. Across the oval, flames flickering in the light breeze, and wax spattering on our feet as we stepped, we had to dodge the sprinklers as they suddenly came on!

Down by the river we sat on tree branches and kicked our legs, and dribbled more wax on the tree, and on our paper, almost obliterating the words of the songs. And yes, we sang..

I wish I could show what it was like; the lights, the tang of eucalypt, frogs croaking, crickets chirping, mozzies buzzing. The breathing night..

Lover [ly]

I am a little bit in love. Maybe more than a little bit. One of the current objects of my affection is the poet Mary Oliver. So hard to choose which to share here!

Next Time

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.


Black Oaks

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,

or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage

of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another -- why don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Successful night out Diving

Er, diving in what, you might ask?

That would be dumpsters (sorry, just no nicer way of putting it).

But hasn't it always been your dream to sneak through darkening alleyways, wirecutters in hand (just kidding. but not about the alleyways), plastic bags in pockets, rubbersoled shoes, wrestling with wet smelly mounds of rubbish in dark dank dumpsters?

I'm sure it has.

It was actually amazingly successful! We didn't get told off once - the closest we came was a few employees and security guys all coming from different places but heading in the general direction of our dumpster. I and my associate at the time simply picked up our box and waltzed smoothly away.
They didn't stop us.


Here's the loot:

2 bags of fruit/veg: apples, pears, nectarines, peaches, red onions and a cucumber
2 bags of perfectly good (though slightly squashed) doughnuts (from different shops)
a silk scarf in its wrapping
2 pairs new, 2 pairs good condition shoes
a bike seat
2 pkts pasta
1 pkt sugar
carton of sealed bottles of water
set of 4 noodle bowls and chopsticks, still in box
pencilcase, with mostly working pens, pencils, and a pair of scissors
choc-coated liquorice, snakes, and some other weird wrapped lollies
2 small saucepans
biscuit jar with sealed pkts of biscuits inside
coathangers (as many as could be desired!)
sweet clock (just needed batteries)
essence of awesomeness


Freegan Awesome Dumpster Ninjas!!!!!!!
To infinity and beyond! or something.

Ingredients for an Eastern European Christmas Party...

Food:
Borscht (beetroot soup)
Homebaked bread
Golabki (polish cabbage-wrapped mince & rice rolls)
Bigos (meaty sauerkraut stew)
Pierogi/Pelmeni ("pig's ears" - little dumplings. The ones we made had potato & mushroom in them)
Sauerkraut (pickled cabbage)
Mashed Potato & gravy
Pork
Chrusty (deep-fried doughnuty twists, dredged with icing sugar)



Friends:
a fun & friendly conglomerate from the worlds of uni & newie

Drink:
Home [shh..] distilled insanely strong firewater.. or just ordinary vodka if you please
Russian Caravan tea

Gifts: (distributed by freakish furry St Nick)
something for everyone!


The only real thing missing was snow!

Li'l Bro

My little bro draws pictures. He also writes books. I have one of his books.. somewhere. Anyway, this is just to say yes, I think he is cool. Another up & coming artist in my life!!


[If you can make it out, the above is a LOTR review.]

Psych Trivia (ie not-particularly-useful information!)

Stuff I thought you'd like to know...

Bodily features:
Seahorse (hippocampus - a part of the brain which is involved with memory)
Wings (pinna - your outer ears)
Snails (cochlea - inner ear)
Extra 'eyelashes' (cilia - found on your lungs and right up your nasal passage and in your cochlea)

Funny names:
Zajonc
Shams
Schacter
Chomsky
Crick
Gazzaniga
Lazarus
Plutchik
Poggendorf
Stroop (this is really cool, actually. The guy discovered that reading becomes so automatic for us that if you put words in different colours and ask people to say the colour instead of the word, they find it quite hard to do quickly. Especially if it is something like "GREEN" in the colour red. This phenomenon is called The Stroop Effect)

Random, other
aqueous humour - literally, 'watery fluid' - but it has to sound scientific, of course!
"Nodes of Ranvier" - sounds like it's straight out of a fantasy story!
Pacinian corpuscle - in your skin, senses vibration
Angular gyrus - brain area related to language & reading

and, did you know that all the colours we perceive are translated from information encoded from just 3 different coloured (well, 3 wavelengths) cones in our eyeballs!

That'll do I think.

bits from some of the arty folk I am lucky enough to be friends with

[sorry about the quality of the photos]

Yeah, one of those cliched posts about student life!?

so we all know students are strange. but we also know they are entirely predictable.
[This is one of those time where the psychology people would say 'ah ha! see - there are two opposing statements - you must conduct a foolproof research study to discover which statement is actually true!'
And the anthropology people would say 'ah that's interesting, let's find out more about what these particular student people do, they sound interesting..'
The linguists might say 'it's interesting that she does not capitalise the first word of her piece, and how she begins her second sentence with a ... let's find out more about how people of her social group speak and write and put together a summary of their grammar and a lexicon.'
The historians might say 'what context is she writing from? do you think she has a bias? How valid is this account?'
The literary types might add 'and can you see how she expresses this? How does it compare with so & so's approach...']

Let's go with the anthropologists.

so.. these particular students have been known to:

-go to classes not their own, to pick up some 'free education'* [it's funny being mistaken for 'real' participants - I ask "what's the question again?" an outsider "ah, so I see you haven't started the essay either!" er, no, and I don't plan to..]

-go to class to avoid doing assignments (it's true!).

-some don't start essays until the wee hours of the night before, while others begin weeks in advance.

-the latter tend to be jealous of the former's laidback attitude, while the former envy the discipline and studiousness of the latter.

-if you go to bed early in a student house, odds are the others will all be staying up watching movies, studying, playing music, cooking, or just hanging rowdily.

-if you go to bed late, the odds are that the others will be waking early and setting off avalanches in the kitchen.

-you are likely to experience all sorts of interesting smells in bathroom and kitchen, and have opportunity to chart the progress of various moulds and mildews in both the above areas.

-you will always have company to whinge about lecturers, tutors, and assignments with. Except for those last hateful days or weeks or term when someone (or some many) have infuriatingly beaten you to the assessment finish line.

-you will become very familiar with the library, info commons, student hubs, and cafes - particularly around those fateful 'end times'. There will be the purposeful hum of activity (it smells like nervous sweat, overheated computers and coffee beans).

-you will never need to go far to find someone to procrastinate with/to, especially if you have wireless and a laptop (damn you facebook, blogger, myspace, MLIA etc!!)


This is the extent of my observation so far. I'll let you know if anything more comes up.

ps. And just for the record, although I would prefer to avoid cliche, it's difficult for a very good reason: it's usually cliched because it's true!


*this has even been known to happen with students who don't go to their own classes!

The Rose Thief

Well, the title is self-explanatory. Perhaps I should just admit guilt and move on.

There's an eerie orange glow in the sky tonight. And the air is cool, though a bit sticky.
I'm not trying to give excuses. I just picked one. And then another. And then I thought "my goodness, I'm a rose thief!" so I picked a few more.

I'm soft though - I only took from bushes which had some to spare. And you could say that night is a bit of a soft time to be taking roses. Those with real guts steal in daylight. Though if we're speaking of softness, why bother with stealing roses at all?

But the dark has its own magic...


I couldn't really tell the colours, so I chose by scent. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Sunset Date

I saw the sunset tonight, for the first time in ages. Last year I often used to go on little 'sunset dates' - just me, the sunset, and whatever sunset-watching place I chose.
I haven't found many good places near home this year. There's a major hill about half an hour's walk away which would be brilliant. I'll have to go on a hike there some evening soon.

Anyway, I was out wandering tonight and the sunset was beautiful. Not a hugely glamorous 'look at me, look at me' type one, more a quiet glowing, growing, and fading. There was a soft blue pirouette of clouds across the west, and the sun sank golden through them. For a while there it looked like an otherworldly landscape, a cloud in front rising up all dark like a mountain peak in the sky, with shafts of light spilling round it and washing out to blend with the blue.
It grew orange for a while, strength started to ebb, then just when you thought it was over shot a bit of pink back into the lingering clouds, like a last little wave.

belated blackstump stories - or why never to travel in convoy!

This is going to be more about the journey than the arrival, ok? Cos we know know that's what really matters.. [or so some would have us think!]

We planned to set off at 10am on the Friday, meeting at Burrabadine around 9:30 to pack the cars. Actually, the first hitch of the weekend was hearing the night before that the bus we were planning on taking had a cracked head, so we couldn't take it. So a bunch of people had to bring cars instead.
It was nearly 10 before my gang even got out to Burrabadine. We had all been up early and were pretty much ready to go.. when Dad decided to change the oil and mess around with the car for a while. And then we still had to connect up the trailer.
We got to Burrabadine and joined up with the swirling masses there. Bags, swags, tents, pillows, boxes of food and goodness knows what were going everywhere! I ended up just standing back and watching. They'd get packed in one trailer just to get moved to the boot of a car.. and then out again. It was beyond me! In the end we were ready to head.
But wait! A petrol stop in Dubbo before we could actually get away. I think by then it was 11:30, try 11:45 by the time we actually left town.

First stop: Wellington, to pick up a camper. (only 40mins on, arghh!)
Then a toilet stop in Orange.
Then lunch and another camper pickup in Bathurst.
Then fears that one of the cars wouldn't make it. And another stop.

Going through the Blue Mountains, the convoy got totally separated. First there was the fog, then.. I'm not sure, couldn't see!

What I do know is that our car beat everyone else there, arriving at 6pm that night (so much for arriving and setting up tents in daylight!). And it was raining.
The other thing I know is that the last car didn't arrive until after 9... the poor things went all the way into Sydney and back!!

Blackstump was fun. Wet, muddy, pizza-filled, coffee-sozzled, but fun. There was even a few bands I liked. ooh, and a big impromptu singalong on the final night - where more & more people trickled in and joined the rowdy balladeers in the Supper Club tent into the wee small hours. Too bad we couldn't remember all the words to most of the songs!

The trip out from BS was also eventful. We rolled up our soggy tents, mats and clothes, and set off together, deciding to give this convoy-thing another go.
We'd just got on the road when something popped in one of the cars, so, determined not to be separated, all (7?) of the cars pulled over to check it out. Water topped up, we were off again.

The rest of the trip is a blur of phones ringing, stops because we thought cars were breaking down (well, one car), more phones ringing, people-swapping, dozing, m&m eating, more phones ringing "we're getting petrol" "we need a toilet break" "are we stopping for food here?"... you get the idea.

We finally got to Dubbo, and then straight out to the place where we planned to camp for the next two nights. Tired, hungry and a bit grumpy, we set up tents (in the dark again - getting to be old hands at it by now).
Finally, at 10pm, we had dinner (God bless the lovely lady who cooked it for us!) So. good.

There was a bit more camping, swimming in the river, catching mussels, spooky wide game-playing (ask me about the Terrors and Crawlers another time. Oh, and hefty guys acting the Princess!!), campfire marshies, songs and stories. It was great.

So there you go then. The epic Stump camp adventure.

Heavy with Wonder

Some reflections from the jewish theologian/poet/mystic/historian Abraham Heschel:

Heavy with Wonder

"To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.. The tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. Its flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it contains is inscrutable. Its silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away.
Sometimes we wish the world would cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur.
Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder."

Like a Bell

"Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind - these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell. It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives."


[I asked for Wonder, A Spiritual Anthology - Abraham Joshua Heschel. Edited by Samuel H. Dresner]

Why you should go for a Walk

You should go for a walk because:

-you might find a mulberry tree, or other fruit tree to surreptitiously sneak a sample from (yes, it's at the top of my list)

-you might find a cool leaf or feather

-you might find a damp drainpipe to sing songs in

-you might find a big group of people playing cricket on an oval, sausages spitting on a barbie, onlookers wisely huddled in the scrawny eucalyptus shade

-you could be blown about on top of a hill

-you could swing on swings in a park

-the musty murky bits could get cleared out of your mind

-you could find an amazing variety of bits of broken glass, cans, and faded chip or lolly wrappers

-you could have a secret little dance, all to yourself (oh wait, it's meant to be a walk!)

-you could get rained/hailed/rainbowed/shone/spat upon (don't worry, that particular one hasn't happened to me yet)


all this could be yours, AND MORE!

That's the thing - you never know...

ps - and there's that little thing called exercise, but that's not as interesting in itself as all of the above.

Luscious Lemon Butter

For any who are not acquainted with the goodness that is lemon butter (also known as lemon curd), it is a deliciously tangy but creamy concoction which can be used as a spread a bit like jam (or eaten by the spoonful straight out of the jar, if your self control is of a similar level to my own).

I made a double batch a week or so ago with some homegrown lemons, and thought I would share the recipe here. It's a morphing of my Grandmother's & another friend's, so thank you to
them!

Lemon Butter

4 eggs
1 cup lemon juice (fresh!!)
zest of 2 lemons
1 1/2 cups white sugar
125g butter

Whisk first 4 ingredients together, add chopped butter, place in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water, and keep stirring until it thickens (this will take a little while).
Ladle into sterilised jars, and away you go! (It will thicken a bit more when it's cooled).

It will keep for a month or so in the fridge (maybe more).

yum :)

View from lunch

It's nothing more than the happiness of sunshine and sparkling clothes. Feels caught somewhere close between spring and summer.

poetry class still rules...

So we took our poetry class to the pub.
We drank beer (most of us)
read poems (some of us)
talked about poets (many of us)
listened to the lecturer talking about poems
and poetry
and love-hate-family
and general possibly-related-but-probably-not-really stuff.

We plan to do so again sometime
[why not every time!!?]


The Six Strings

The guitar
makes dreams weep.
The sobs of lost
souls
escape through its round
mouth.
And like the tarantula
it weaves a large star
to trap the sighs
floating in its black
wooden cistern.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

Small friend

i have a small friend who i get to hang with every week.
he is very fun.
his skills have increased by leaps and bounds just in the short time i have had the pleasure of 'sitting' him.

he can now climb everything in the loungeroom - except for the mantlepiece (though he has not left it untried!) - no coffee cup is safe, nor handbag placed however high.
no plate or keyboard, phone, computer plug..

if i do not pay him enough attention, he will fix me with a mournful gaze and sign for a drink - upon reception of which, he pushes away scornfully. afterwards he allows himself a cheeky grin.

his vocabulary is also growing at a great rate. there are a few small quirks - like persisting in calling both parents 'dad-ad-ad' - and he has quickly worked out how to turn new knowledge to his own ends..

apparently just the other day he was in bed protesting his imprisonment most passionately. his protests went ignored, until there were soft calls of 'poo, poo..' a parent came quickly - only to discover a very small boy crying wolf: the nappy was empty.

small friend wakes from sleep so cheerily content.
eyebrows raised, eyes wide, mouth a narrow 'o', he flaps his arms wildly when excited.

small friend is quick to rush to the pram when the words 'outside' 'walk' or 'pram' are mentioned. even hunting for keys does the trick.

small friend has the sharpest eyes and ears. he will spot a bird when it's just a dark stripe on the horizon, and point with wondering excitement whenever he hears their song.

small friend acts the baby bird himself - ducking to get food from his elders, mouth wide open and limbs outstretched.
small friend totters round the yard with fangs of baked bean sauce dribbling down his cheeks...

small friend is growing too fast!

parrty week

Another week in the life of yours truly, which happened to be of a rather party-ish nature:*

Sunday: Community BBQ lunch at a friend's place on a dreamful, summery afternoon
Monday: Essay-writing party(?!) - no, this wasn't actually a party, but there was a short diversion which involved driving around the neighbourhood with my housemates collecting 'useful' things from other people's hard rubbish deposits!
Tuesday: A spontanteous pre-birthday cake-eating party
Wednesday: Birthday dinner for a housemate o' mine
Thursday: Terrific and Tantalising Tea party - so much tea, so many teapots, so little time..
Friday: Another Birthday dinner for my housie!
Saturday: Soccer 'Ball' - celebratory season ending dinner, presentations, champagne and dancing into the night - woot!


*disclaimer: it may appear that I am always riding merrily high on a torrent of good spirits, wild abandon, and, er, feasting. Well, this disclaimer is just to say that I'm not. (well, the last mentioned is practically eternal, but apart from that -). Sometimes (strangely, it often seems to happen when I have a major assignment due the next day) I am very much not so, and would like to curl up in a corner and die quietly for a while. Actually, I think somewhere towards the end of the above week, I did just that. Fortunately for me, the sun never stays away too long..

spring.. round about where I live.

Peas please!

Dandelion clocks - telling time the faerie way

Couple of handsome birds out for a stroll..

Freesia. [if only you could post scents..]

Look! Blue sky!

Waiting.. and forgetting to hope

Two days ago I had a suprise. Have you ever experienced hoping and waiting and working and getting frustrated and angry and annoyed and nearly giving up but hanging on all the same, and waiting some more.. until you almost give up hope that what you are hoping for will ever come to pass?

I have.

And this time, I think I actually had given up hope, but continued partly out of stubbornness because I believed it was right and partly because I thought it might do some good. It wasn't huge in the broad scheme of things (yes, I am planning to infuriatingly not share what), but it was long, and it makes a difference to me.

And it seems to have come through.
But I hardly believe it, and I hardly dare to start building dreamy castles in air, but there you go.

Hope. May I not give up on it.

ta, God.

Spring song

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the boidies* is.
They say the boid is on the wing.
Ain't that absoid?
I thought the wing was on the boid.

My Grandfather always used to say this - at least, I remember him oft repeating the first two lines.. I tried to find out who it is by - apparently it's by Anonymous. There is much internetal discussion about the correct version and possible author/s.

All that to say.. Welcome spring - in all your lush greenness and spicy scents!

*boidies=birdies

sometimes I wonder how tightly my head is screwed on

Foolish things I did today:

• Handwrote notes on a page without realising they were already typed - on that very same page!

• Signed the name of the person I was writing a message to.. instead of signing my own name.

• Admitted I sometimes have ants visit my desk.. and hunted for squashed ones to show what they smell like.

• Thought a friend said they had my shoes in their handbag.. and didn't find that statement at all suprising.

• Stayed up writing this list..

That's all I can recall for the time being. I'm sure there will be postscripts!

Waking up on two legs

"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighbourhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
...
Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe. The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.
Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."

[An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. HarperPerennial, 1987]

I love how Dillard describes this coming-to-awareness. Beyond the waking as a child, I know the strange feeling of suddenly noticing oneself - that feeling when you step back, step outside yourself and become your own self's observer, just for a moment.

"Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fly off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on a coconut palm's trunk until you fall asleep again, and the winds let up?
...
Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country."

May I stay waking, and ride it well.

Poetry class rulz ok?!

So, in "Poetry in Action", we engage in various actions or behaviours, as you might expect:

-hunting down exciting poetry, eyes and ears open, hands clawing and unclawing, teeth bared..
-reading exciting poetry
-arm-waving
-inventive pronunciation attempting
-space-staring
-listening to exciting poetry lecturer rave on.. [seat-wriggling, note-scribbling, head-scratching, eye-blinking etc]

(His other joblife is at the fish market. He loves fish. And fishing. He also loves poetry - any kind. He loves reading and writing it way more than writing his thesis - which is sad for his poor neglected thesis, but not for everyone else!)

One time we even got to write some. Some was about a tree.

Mountain Ash

tiny spark spears forth
from earth
pillars stripped back
in old sky.

crisp of sheen the
shining neck
towers gently,
beckons.

by unraked sea
in time of triumph
whisper softly
one leaf I stole.

and caught by curves
of echoed cliffs
trunk hallows fragments
of lost wind.

From, little things, ...

wondrous growth
green and blossoming
shooting
burgeoning
swelling fruit so lushly marvelous..

And then we eat it.
chomp down on living miracles
!
Yep, so there's awesome caulis, sweet little bok choys as pictured above, spinach, 'erbs, and last, but of course far from least:

Potatoes!!!

Gosh, gardens are exciting.

Week of Nights: A Retrospective

Evening activities of last week.. There ended up being quite a few, if I remember correctly!

A fairly low-key start, with a Soup Night I think.
Swiftly followed by Superiffic Soccer Game Night (with a win!).
Next was Magical & Marvelous Music Night - where we were thrilled by the playing of a talented friend.
Then came Magnificent Midnight Muffins Night,
Bountiful Birthday Dinner (not mine) and Cards Night (although I must admit that no cards were played, the intention was there!),
Particularly Pleasing Poetry Night (as mentioned in a previous post),
and finally, Night 7:
Crazy Carpark Soccer Night!!

So there you go, a week of Nights...

Seuss's Artistic Antics

On Sunday a couple of friends and I went to see an exhibition of Dr Suess's work. Otherwise known as Theodor Seuss Geisel, this gentleman is well known for his massively popular children's books (apparently he published over 60!) - Cat in the Hat, anyone? Or - One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax, The Grinch that Stole Christmas, Horton hears a Who!, Yertle the Turtle - just to mention a few...

But that's not all, oh no it is not!

He also was a political cartoonist for many years:

And did many fantastic paintings, most of which were never seen nor heard of until after his death...


Afterwards, there was some frolicking in the park. Quite a few raised eyebrows (and hopefully smiles too) as we acted out "Oh, the Places You'll Go!". Well, we had fun!

Poetry night the First

in Just

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's spring
and the goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

ee cummings

A few friends, a many poems read performed and mused upon.. satiated with scones and the infinitely varied flavours of the world through wordy encounters..

and a little last to end with a laugh:

I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life.
It makes them taste quite funny
But it keeps them on the knife!

anonymous

threads of the untidy event

Starting is always the hardest bit, isn't it? (apart from finishing, perhaps - good thing I don't have to think about that at this point). So if I just start, then everything will be ok? I hope so.

Why would one start a blog? There are a billion and one blogs out there, and I really don't have much idea about this whole thing..
Oh well. I'll just start.

for fun and frolics
thoughts
the world
for song and stories
life and living..
threads of the untidy event.

[thanks Pablo Neruda]