Yesterday we attended a memorial service conducted by the palliative care people.
While we were waiting for the service to start I looked around me at a sea of faces. People of all ages who were there because someone they loved had recently died. You could feel the sadness in the room and we were all silently sitting waiting for the service to start.
The service opened with a short prayer and someone read a poem. A little girl across the room from me started to cry and her tears set me off.
My husband sat beside me openly crying. My son sat on my other side, holding my hand and keeping himself rigidly under control. My daughter looked ready to shatter into a million pieces and my grandmother quietly wept.
As I sat there with tears streaming down my face a woman smiled at me through her own tears and I wondered who she had lost? I wondered if it will always be this hard? Will this ache, this longing for my Mother always be so strong?
Two hundred and twenty names were read out but I was only listening for one.
The exhibition went really well and all the work looked lovely. Veronica took lots of photos and I will post some of them here once Von has edited them.
This was my first exhibition where the work was actually for sale. I sold an albatross bowl and a bottle on the night and I was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest in the albatross bowls.
One young lady came up and told me that my artist’s statement had really moved her and I wished that I had gottten her details because I would like to make her something.
I learned a lot from this exhibition and it was very interesting watching how people reacted to my work.
I think that I will always have problems with pricing my work as my natural impulse is to just give it away. I need to find a balance between the two and this is where ‘The Spouse’s” influence comes in to play. All our married life together he has watched as I give everything I make away. From jars of pickled onions to dead albatross bowls pfft out the door it goes, I wanted to give an old mazda sedan away once but “the spouse” wouldn’t let me.
I think it will be the same with my work, “The Spouse” reminds me that it costs money to produce and that I need to recoup my costs at least. I know he is right.
I need a robotic stunt double to do the morning shift for me.I am sick of saying the same things over and over to my teenage son.If I had a robotic version of myself, I could take a nice little holiday and give my vocal chords a much needed rest.
Robo-Mum could be programmed to stand at the doorway of my teenager’s bedroom repeating, “Get out of bed, get out of bed now!” every five minutes from 6.45 am to 7’15.
Then Robo-Mum would casually follow the teenager to the bathroom door and start repeating,”Move away from the mirror, get into the shower” from 7.20 to 7.30. Once the water had been running for 5 minutes, Robo-Mum would start chanting,”Get out of the shower.That’s long enough and my personal favourite, Do you think water just falls from the sky?”
Still stationed at the bathroom door Robo-Mum reverts back to the, “Move away from the mirror” cry at 5 minute intervals until her tune will change to the more frantic chorus of, “Hurry up, breakfast is ready,you are going to miss the bus.”
Robo-Mum will be skilled at juggling all the normal morning demands and wont even bat a robotic eye,when informed that the teenager needs some obscure item from deep within a Brazilian rainforest cave for a science project right this minute. Robo-Mum will just magically pull the obscure item out of her arse along with unlimited amounts of ready cash.
I doubt that David would even notice that I had employed a robot to do the repetitive hurry ups, the clean your teeths and the you are going to miss the bus, phrases that I say eleventy billion times every single fucking morning. Aaaaaaaaaaaaarggggh!! He might be a tad surprised at the money out of the robots arse trick though, because I am sure he thinks it grows on trees.
It has been very busy in the frogpondsrock household lately. Well to be be completely accurate I should say, The Spouse has been very busy, while I have just been jumping around, hugging myself with excitement and being a bigger nuisance than normal.
I am getting two eight week old piglets in early January and I am drooling with excitement. The thought of home grown pork has me skipping with happiness. Whilst for some strange reason all The Spouse can do is groan loudly and mutter phrases containing key words such as, bloody women, hard work, enough to do and no idea.
Two piglets squeeeee!!! I will keep you posted.
We went and picked up three new chooks last weekend that were offered on freecycle. The Spouse groaned and muttered about bloody chooks, shitting everywhere,whilst I promised fervently that I would remember to lock them up every night. The spouse then muttered something under his breath about not making promises I wouldn’t keep. He does a lot of muttering, that man.
These three older hens are used to being handled so it will be lovely to see how Amy interacts with them. My resident hen is very skittish and runs away and hides in the bush, when anyone other than me approaches her. So I am really looking forward to having some tame hens about the place again.
Pork farmed in horrible conditions. Stop buying cheap supermarket pork.
It is working for the battery farmed hens. A major supermarket chain recently announced that they would stop selling eggs from caged birds. We consumers did that, by not buying battery farmed eggs it became economically unviable for the supermarket to stock them.
