February 2011

Sunday Selection #8

by frogpondsrock on February 27, 2011

in fauna and flora,friendship,photography,sunday selections

This week my daughter Veronica announced her engagement and within a matter of moments of that announcement, my inbox was full of congratulatory messages from my online friends. Thank you all very much.

It has been a busy week this week, I have been taming the chaos in my own studio as well as helping to organise the polytechnic ceramics space, down at the Art school in Hobart. I will be in at the Art School one day a week as a senior polytechnic student for all of this year and I have already started to make new friends.

As I was walking up to my studio yesterday there were a pair of yellow tailed black cockatoos in the yard. The Black Cockies are a frequent visitor to my place as I live in the hills, in the middle of a dry sclerophyll forest. What was very unusual about this visit was the fact that there were only two cockatoos, normally they are in a family group of between 7 and 11 birds.

We had to cut a tree down to make way for my studio, The Spouse, David and a friend milled the tree into timber that The Spouse is now using to make my work benches. What we couldn’t mill up, the boys cut into firewood. The black cockatoos are eating the grubs in the firewood.

One bird always acts as a sentry and keeps  a look out while the other birds feed.

Here are my photos, I hope you enjoy them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyone can join in with this Photo Meme, “Sunday Selections” but I do ask that you only add your link if you are joining in with Sunday Selections, as links that are off topic or spam will be removed. Also be careful when you are adding your URL as the Mr Linky will remember your old URL and we will click onto an old post.

Here is the weekly blurb.

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that  otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think  that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I  have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selection” title.

Link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.


 

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Congratulations Veronica and Nathan.

by frogpondsrock on February 23, 2011

in Family,Joy,real life,Veronica

My daughter Veronica told me last night that her partner Nathan proposed to her yesterday.

Veronica accepted Nathan’s proposal of marriage.

I never actually gave their relationship much thought before, it didn’t bother me that Von and Nate weren’t married.

But do you know what my dear internetz?

Ever since Veronica told me the good news, I have had this excited feeling in the pit of my stomach and I keep on having a quiet little giggle.

Squee.

My little girl is getting married.

I am thrilled to bits.

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Sunday Selections #7

by frogpondsrock on February 20, 2011

in blogging,Fun,photography,sunday selections

I am having heaps of fun hosting this meme and would like to take this chance to thank everyone for joining in as well.

For those of you who are new to blogging, a meme like this is a great way to find bloggers with similar interests. When I first started blogging in 2007,  I had a hard time finding bloggers that I could connect with until I discovered a couple of photography memes. Wordless Wednesday and Weekly Winners were the two that I did the most regularly and I made a lot of new friends and I also learned heaps about photography.

Joining in with other photographers, I learned about depth of field and shutter speed and though I understand the basic principles of photography I am still a point and shoot photographer. I see something I like and just point the camera at it snapitty snap snap without much thought.

The most important thing I found about doing the photography memes was that they gave me the confidence to actually believe that my photos were any good.  So without further waffling on from me here are this weeks Sunday Selections.

This was the moon last night. I didn’t mess about with tripods or anything as I am far too lazy impatient for that. I just went outside and took some photos as the moon was rising. When I moved around I could capture the moon through the trees and the last photograph is my favourite.

Anyone can join in with this Photo Meme, “Sunday Selections” but I do ask that you only add your link if you are joining in with Sunday Selections.  Also be careful when you are adding your URL as the Mr Linky will remember your old URL and we will click onto an old post.

Here is the weekly blurb.

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that  otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think  that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I  have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selection” title.

Link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.


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A bit of a catch up post.

by frogpondsrock on February 19, 2011

in cancer,ceramics,Grief,real life

I think the radio interview went well, I was incredibly nervous but I didn’t swear or say “um” a lot so that has to count as a positive doesn’t it? The radio people are going to email Veronica an mp3 file of our talk and once I work out how to upload it I will, then you can judge for yourselves.

A retiring potter, Monika, has given me the contents of her studio. I filled the back of my station wagon up with boxes of oxides, glaze materials, throwing tools, scales and the assorted paraphenalia of a working potter.

Coming only two days after the theft of the ceramic eggs this was a very emotional gift for me to receive and when Monika gave me her gas kiln as well, I started to cry a bit. Monika gave me a hug and she told me that she could see I was passionate about my work and that she was so happy her tools were going to such a good home.

These wooden throwing tools are such a personal gift from one potter to another and I can feel the positive energy radiating from them. They fit my hands well and I am itching to get my wheel set up.

I am starting to tame the chaos that is my studio space and “The Spouse” has been flat stick these past few weeks building me benches and work tables.

My electric kiln was delivered on Thursday and I am busting to get it sorted and wired in so I can really get to work. It weighs about 500 kilos and is top heavy. The kiln needs to be lifted off these pallets and then put back down. A mate around the road has a tripod thingy used for removing car engines and The Spouse has some endless chain. So hopefully the kiln will be in its spot ready for the electrician sooner rather than later. It will still be a tricky job though and I wont be up there watching the boys do it in case I jinx them and the kiln falls over. Yes I am superstitious.

It has been so bittersweet finally getting the studio organised and strangely enough as my bank balance is rapidly approaching the zero funds mark I am feeling happier. Every time I accessed the studio money I was reminded that I was spending my mother’s life. Every cent that I have spent was the culmination of my mother’s working life, everything Mum had worked for was taken away by her premature death from a cancer that she should never have had and as I spend the ashes of my mothers life, I would give it all back in an instant to just be able to speak to my Mum again.

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Talking on the radio

by frogpondsrock on February 16, 2011

in Family,Fun,potential insanity,real life,thinking out loud,Veronica

I have that line stuck in my head now but I cant remember the song it is from. Old age, people, old age.

Anyway the point of this post is to tell you that I will be talking on the radio this Friday morning. My daughter Veronica rang me yesterday to let me know that we will both be talking to ABC local radio presenter Ryk Goddard about our experiences as Mothers.

I think the point of the interview is to compare the differences with two generations of Mothers.

There aren’t the glaring differences with Veronica and my experiences of motherhood as there was between My mother and myself. Things had changed radically from the 60s style of motherhood to the 80s version of motherhood but not much has changed really from the 80s to now.

I think you could say that with a lot of aspects of womanhood as well. There was the great fight for womens rights in the 60s and 70s but by the time I was a grown woman in the mid eighties I took all my freedoms for granted and I was spoiled for choice. I had easy access to birth control, I could go to any university I wanted to, I had plenty of job offers on the table and I was about to start a horticultural apprenticeship, when I chucked it all in to become a stay at home mum.

Once I held my new baby in my arms I chose to be a stay at home mum and choosing to be that stay at home mum was a lot more difficult than I expected it to be.

Financially it was a nightmare. The Spouse was a deckhand at the time, a third generation fisherman and it was always feast or famine living with a fisherman.

He was at sea when Veronica was born and managed to get home to meet his daughter when she was three days old. He had gone back to sea again before we had even left the hospital to go home on day five.

When Veronica was twelve months old our rental house was sold and we moved away from the city to live closer to the block of land my Mum had given me. We ended up living in a converted bus in Mum’s back yard for eighteen months, luckily it was a very big backyard or Mum and I would have driven each other crazy.

I remember having an epiphany one day down at the wharf, holding my small daughter in my arms and us both waving to The Spouse as he sailed away. The feeling I got as I watched these small men in this small boat venture out onto this huge grey ocean was one of impending doom. Veronica and I waved until we couldn’t see that tiny speck anymore and then we did what countless generations of fishermens families had done before ue, we went home to wait.

I made The Spouse chuck his job in when he returned home. I argued passionately that the money wasn’t worth it for the risks he was taking and that he needed to stay on dry land or else. The Spouse wasnt prepared to risk the “or else” and he stayed home with me. Within a month of  “The Spouse stopping work we had moved the bus up to our own land, funny how living in your Mother in law’s backyard quickly loses its charm when you are actually there every day. It was a hard transition for a man with salt in his veins to make and one day I am going to make a large sculpture of Poseidon and have him here looking down the valley shaking his trident angrily at the circumstances that left the sea god marooned so far inland.

The skipper hit a rock, off South Cape on the next trip with a green crew and they were unable to save the boat.  The crew were fine but it proved my point and The Spouse has never returned to the sea.

So here I am sitting at the computer twenty odd years later reminiscing and trying to work out what on earth I am going to talk about on the radio. I did things so differently from my peers. We eschewed the mortgage and the 9-5 lifestyle in favour of an alternative lifestyle where we built our house room by room out of recycled materials. This wasn’t done to fit in with some utopian dream of ours, it was down to simple necessity. I had chosen to be a full time mum and The Spouse found it very difficult to hold down a job that wasn’t at sea.

We were also young and full of beans and had all the time in the world.

I think that on Friday morning I will do what I normally do, I will just wing it, I will work it out as I go along, I will follow my daughter’s lead and I will hope like hell that I dont babble.

It will be just like everything else in my life.

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