To answer Achelois there isn’t a shop at the sanctuary though I will be able to have a stall and sell my work there on the day. There will be stalls from groups like the Understorey Network and Weedbusters etc. I was a sensitive child as well  Achelois, now that you have reminded me of that, I am thinking about the dead albatross bowls from the perspective of a child and maybe they might be a bit too much. I will see.

The annual fundraising open day for the Chauncy Vale Wildlife Sanctuary is this Sunday the 14th of February. I will go down there and hand over my proposal. I will check out the age range of the visitors, see where they set up the stalls,just basically do a bit of light reconnaissance. I will come home and in order to get the ideas straight in my head I will write about it here and then I will start making. Yay.

Another point I need to keep in mind as I am working towards this event is the very real possibility that I could design a wonderful one off series of work especially to be viewed in situ and the whole day could be cancelled due to it being a day of total fire ban. Australian summers certainly keep you on your toes.

River and Mrs C also wondered whether my work would be safe  there.That is a risk I will have to take and one that I am comfortable with.The whole process of making ceramics is fraught from start to finish, there are so many things that can go wrong as you are making that I dont even worry about it any more. I just offer it all up to the universe and what will be will be.

I want people to be able to pick up my work and look at it closely so I will make the dragon eggs sturdy enough to be handled.I might even throw a couple of cracked ones into the nests as well.

Robin Hobb answered my question about her dragon’s eggs, I suspect that they’d be rather like turtle eggs, with shells more leathery than brittle. And camouflaged to blend in with the sand and protect them from predators.

Now I am thinking of leathery bands of texture on the eggs as well. Oh I am getting more excited about the dragon eggs than anything else. This year is going to be a good year but I will need to remember my key words, Focus and Resolution in order to take advantage of all the possibilites this year has to offer.

So tell me what you think about the colour and size of the dragon eggs, send me off on a zillion tangents with your suggestions.How would seeing a giant nest full of eggs make you feel? I have been hopeless answering my emails lately as well, sorry about that. I love reading them and I really mean to reply but I  am off with the faeries at the moment with my head full of dragons and dinosaurs and beautiful blue bowls and oh look at that cloud where’s my camera…

So here is a map of Australia. Tasmania my island home, is the green bit at the bottom.

I live on a 5 acre bush block high in the hills, about an hours drive north from the capital city Hobart. My husband built our home, room by room from bush poles, recycled timber and bricks. After twenty years of constant building and renovations we are nearly finished.

As I am sitting here writing this and trying to think what to say next, I can hear yellow tailed black cockatoos squawking in the trees. A pair of green rosellas have landed on the balcony rails, looking to see if there is any wheat left over from the chook’s breakfast and a pair of  fairy wrens are pecking at the insects trapped in the spiderwebs on the windows..

Of a nightime I can hear Tasmanian devils squabbling in the gully down the hill and brush tailed possums raid my fruit trees. I sometimes am lucky enough to catch glimpses of wallabies, in dawns early light. The tadpoles are just changing into froglets and as they emerge from the water my camera is always close to hand.

I am thrilled to bits to be a finalist for the best Australian and New Zealand weblog awards and I am very pleased that you are all here reading my words and looking at my photos.

Cheers Kim.

Yesterday was De-Lurker Day.  The day that bloggers like me ask the burning questions. Who are you? How did you find me? What is it that keeps you here? Where is my chocolate? Well maybe not where is my chocolate because I know that it should be in the fridge. David knows better than to eat my chocolate without nearly nagging me to death for it first.

I am intensely interested, some might even say a tad obsessed with you, my dear readers. I had someone from Queensland read here for a couple of hours with 59 page views. On the one hand it is rather nice to know that my babbling kept someone interested for that long but on the other hand it is also a bit spooky because they came via a relatives facebook page. What were they looking for?

Lots of my family read my blog and never ever comment which is also kind of weird? Why dont you ever comment?

Some of the google searches are interesting as well, I especially like the “frog on ceramic rock” searches that then stay for three or four page views. They make me happy.

I get lots of people looking for accidental UFO’s and photographs of Zombies. Then there are the slightly disturbing searches looking for sexy grandmothers and fun with pigs in the mud.

*updated someone just arrived here looking  for ‘peanut zombie pics’ hmmm.

Which brings me back to you, how did you find me? What was the first blog that you read? What are your favourite blogs? What do you enjoy about blogs, bloggers and blogging?

Come out and say hello or send me an email if you are too shy. frogpondsrock(AT)gmail(DOT)com

Cheers Kim

My all time favourite American blogger though is Jenny the bloggess. I lurk over at the bloggess giggling my head off at her writing. I very rarely comment because she receives hundreds of comments and by the time I get there, there is nothing left to say.

This post made me giggle my head off and this post  made me leap out of lurkerdom and request a James Garfield card too.

This arrived in the mail the other day.

Look at the smiley face of James Garfield there, what an impressive boar he must of been.

So once I had stopped skipping around the house giggling like a loon and clutching my James Garfield card to my chest. I decided that James Garfield needed a knighthood.

I dug out a spare sword I had kept, just in case I needed to bestow a knighthood on anyone and I dubbed thee Sir James Garfield, Lord of the Stye.

Just in case you are wondering. I am definitely qualified to bestow this honour on James Garfield because I am good friends with a queen and he said go for it,be my proxy. So Jenny if you are reading this the paperwork is in the mail.

On a whim I decided to go and show my little piggies the recently knighted Sir James Garfield, Lord of the Stye.

From their reaction you would have thought that a rockstar had come to visit. There was much piggy squealing and snorting and in amongst the grunts of delight I gathered that Sir James would have been well pleased with his knighthood had he been around to actually enjoy it.

The behaviour of these two sex obsessed Superb Fairy Wrens to be precise.

These two little wrens have been flying around the house for three days now,singing their little hearts out. They spend ages trying to chase off their rivals which also happen to be their own reflections. Silly birds.

They are singing outside the window right this minute.Their chirpy twitters make me smile and I have had my camera close to hand for the first time in weeks.

This photo also reminds me that I might just need to wash some windows.

But who can be bothered washing windows when there are kites to be flown?

The rainbow coloured kite made me smile. I had bought the children various kites over the years but we have too many trees and the wind is too swirly for successful kite flying here at home. So it was with great delight that Veronica’s paddock proved to be the perfect spot to fly a kite. We all had a turn and it was lovely fun.

]]> http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/09/horny-birds-and-a-rainbow-coloured-kite/feed/ 17 http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/08/porcelain-slip-cancer-and-a-giveaway/ http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/08/porcelain-slip-cancer-and-a-giveaway/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:28:31 +0000 frogpondsrock http://frogpondsrock.com/?p=2553 I have been experimenting with porcelain lately. Porcelain has a lovely transluscent quality and porcelain pieces, done well, have a subtle glow about them.

It is also bastard stuff to work with. It rips, it collapses, it shatters if you breathe too loudly and then once you have finally gotten it into the kiln it warps and distorts.Gah.

I have decided that porcelain is far too temperamental  for me at this stage in my life.It just doesn’t do anything for me artisitically, other than mess with my head. I need simple things at the moment. I need things to work as they are supposed to, with a minimum of fuss.

The last few months of Mum’s life were a whirlwind blur of doctors appointments,scans, radiation and all the minutae assosciated with cancer treatments. Nothing was simple or straightforward. Cancer is messy and awful and unpredictable.

Cancer also causes pain. Lots and lots of pain.

Friday 4th June (from Mum’s diary)

Ok this was the worst morning, reduced me to tears trying to get out of bed but I finally made it…

Looking back it really seems such a shame that we wasted so much time. We lived from scan to scan. There were four weeks in April/May when Mum was  feeling really good and she was almost pain free.We wasted those four weeks, waiting about for doctors and having the bone mets in her spine zapped. With the benefit of hindsight we should have just taken off to Sydney then and had all the useless treatments after Mum had done everything that she wanted.

Caring for someone with a terminal illness is very difficult. It puts things into perspective and skews your way of thinking. I would have walked barefoot, through the fires of hell if I thought that it would help my Mother. But in the end nothing helped my Mum and I am here, bereft.

So life is far too short to be messing about playing with temperamental clay. Time is too precious to waste fiddling and faffing about with pretty clay that will just break your heart when you get it out of the kiln.

I need some inspiration.

The last time I needed inspiration I had a giveaway. A giveaway that my friend Jientje, from Heaven is in Belgium won (yay). When I had my last giveaway Jientje said that she would love something inspired by my photographs of the Tasmanian summer sky. That comment of hers then inspired my ’skydancer’ series of tall cups.

So now it is up to you my dear internetz. Inspire me. Leave me a comment telling me about something that you would like me to make for you. And I will try to make it. Bearing in mind that it will have to be posted to you so it cant really be a seven foot tall sculpture of the Goddess, or a 42 piece dinner setting for seven.

I will then use the random number thingy to pick a winner.

I have just reached 100 readers (woot) So this is also a chance for my readers that don’t normally comment to click over and leave me a comment. (pretty please)

Everyone and anyone is welcome to enter.You could be from Tasmania or Timbuktoo, I don’t mind. You could be a friend, a stranger, a relative of mine or even a colleague.You just need to be prepared to wait a bit for your prize. Petra waited 11 months and 29 days for her platter. Jientje won her cups in February and I will post them off to her in about two weeks time.

So come on my lovelies, help me to dream about clay again. This giveaway will be open for one week from today. I will announce the winner next Sunday, the 16th of August.

*edited to add You can comment more than once if you like, you can come back and comment every day for the week if you like. With a maximum of seven comments per person seeming  fair enough.

**Comments are now closed. Good Luck to everyone and thankyou very much for making me smile.

David went Tuna fishing on Saturday with a close family friend and his sons and they caught a 98 kilo Tuna. Here is a photo taken with Dave’s phone. My son is 6 foot 4 so that gives you an idea of how big the fish is. See those chomp marks near the Tuna’s tail? A Mako shark came up and had a bit of a nibble. Luckily the boys managed to land the Tuna before the shark came back for more. Well done lads!!!

I have been tagged by two Mom’s who blog. Ree the hotfessional and Hyphen-Mama.

This meme was started by Catherine,Her Bad Mother and David from It’s not a Lecture who wanted to see if they could go around the world in 80 clicks. So the rules include linking to them(done that) and nipping over to their blogs and leaving a comment that you have done the meme, so that they can follow the clicks(about to do that right now) around the world.

So here we are on a small island underneath Australia talking about 5 things I love about being a Mother, Hmm…

For me, being a Mum is all about the Five A’s

Art, Accidents, Acceptance, Avoidance and my special favourite Amnesia..

Lets start with the Amnesia shall we?

I suffer from child induced Amnesia. I was slowly recovering from this common form of Amnesia when I became pregnant with my second child.  Sadly, once my pregnancy was confirmed, all hope of normal brain function returning flew right out the window.

My memory shrank in direct proportion to the growth of the child in my belly. Examples of this sometimes very useful form of Amnesia still pop up with alarming regularity in my life today.

I am generally reminded how useful this Amnesia can be, by one of my offspring  managing to bring a conversation around to a point where they say, “Mum, remember that you said that I could have a pet snake/pony/dye my hair green/live in France for a year/pierce my eyebrow/bellybutton/nose.

I will graciously agree, that why yes I do recall agreeing to buy you a swimming pool/ant farm/lasergun/popcornmaker/fake lifesize dinosaur bone. And that the very next time we go into town we will have a look for these essential items.

This is where the children used to wander off, secure in the knowledge that I would cater to their every outrageous demand and my amnesia would kick in within a few minutes and everyone was happy.

Art: Look at this little gem..

Accidents: Life is full of accidents. My two favourite accidents are now  20 years old and nearly 15.

Acceptance: I learned very quickly to accept that I was turning into my Mother. Phrases that as a child, I vehemently swore I would never, ever ever, say to my children were suddenly tumbling from my lips, much to the annoyance of my own offspring,  I constantly spouted familiar phrases such as…

” Because I said so”,

and

“Because I am the Mother, thats why”

and the perennial favourite,

“The wind will change and you will be stuck like that forever.”

Avoidance: please refer back to Amnesia..

There you go my lovelies, the Five A’s of Motherhood. Now I get to Tag some other Mothers who will then tag some more Mothers and off we go Around the world in eighty clicks. YAY

I tag:

Barbara in Britain who has two small children and a lovely wry sense of humour.

Jientje from the aptly named Heaven is in Belgium

Mrs C from America who has six children and writes with honesty and humour.

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.
The Moon is a card of magic and mystery – when prominent you know that nothing is as it seems, particularly when it concerns relationships. All logic is thrown out the window.
The Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. This is a card that has to do with sleep, and so with both dreams and nightmares. It is a scary card in that it warns that there might be hidden enemies, tricks and falsehoods. But it should also be remembered that this is a card of great creativity, of powerful magic, primal feelings and intuition. You may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial; if you have any past mental problems, you must be vigilant in taking your medication but avoid drugs or alcohol, as abuse of either will cause them irreparable damage. This time however, can also result in great creativity, psychic powers, visions and insight. You can and should trust your intuition.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

If Amy was here she would be giggling with me and asking, “Chase Amy? Chase Amy?” and I would chase her. I do a  bad, zombie impersonation, (without the groaning and the blood and guts) but with ‘Duuur Duuum’ sound effects  when I chase Amy..

But that is a tangent for another day… We have a winner, we have a winner, YAY! YAY! YAY!

For those of you who weren’t paying attention,  I had a giveaway for my birthday to cheer myself up.

Aaaand Jientje from Heaven in Belgium has won it. YAY!!!!!!

I am looking forward to making a set of drinking vessels (largish cup thingys without handles) for Jientje. And now just because I can here are some photos I took earlier on this week..