Good morning my lovelies, I am home all day so I will be over to visit you all today. Not like the past few weeks where I have been at work on a Sunday with minimal internet and then before I know it it is Thursday and I still haven’t seen your photos.

I am sorry about that.

Some weeks I don’t have any words and other weeks, like this one my head is full of stories that I am busting to tell you. I have a post brewing about privacy whilst using  facebook, and reminding our teenagers to keep those intimate photos marked as “friends only” not public. My word internet some of these photos would make Debbie of the Does Dallas fame  blush.

I know I was blushing.

Anyhow enough words from me.

The 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 Selections” title.

Link back here to me.

The Photos

I took these photos on the banks of the Derwent River. On a stretch of rocky foreshore that was about 30 metres long.

This is a piece of metal, probably part of a sign. I brought this home with me to use as a mould for some plates for the “Fired Up” exhibition. I was particularly intrigued with the contrast of the bright orange paint which had barely faded still stuck onto the rusty corroded metal. You can expect more photos of this piece of metal later on.

This is a piece of a coupling thingy that was on our old power pole. It is in the garden for the minute while I decide what I am going to do with it. The spiders like it.

I cant remember where I took the photo of these  reflections or if I have recently published them or not.

And I will finish up with some Lizards. I spend rather more time than I should chasing these guys through the garden trying to get decent photos.

Thank you to all those lovely people who have donated to my Greatest Shave adventure. I would love it if you could give me a shout out on your blogs. I have raised over $1000 so far and I am thrilled to bits to be a quarter of the way there. If you have no idea what I am talking about here is a link to my post, If 500 people Donate $10 each…

I want to raise enough money for an iPad for Annie who has Autism.

Annie and Heidi are the daughters of a friend of mine, Marita Beard who blogs as Stuff with Thing

Both girls have autism. Because Heidi received her diagnosis before she was 6 years old, Heidi received an iPad, thanks to the FaHCSIA Helping Children with Autism Funding.

Because Annie received her Diagnosis of Aspergers when she was older than six, Annie doesn’t qualify for any funding.

I read this post by Marita and watched the 30 second youtube clip made by Annie saying that Autism doesn’t end when you are seven.

And I decided that I would like to try and raise the money to get an iPad for Annie.

Heidi has a 64GB $799 model.

Do you reckon that we can raise enough money to get the same one for Annie?

I reckon we can.

 *Updated* Hey internet We did it! Annie now has an iPad.

Nathalie from Easypeasykids spoke to her local Apple Shop and they have supplied Annie with an iPad at a bit of a discount!

Thank you all so very very much. We raised The money in four hours. I am so very very proud of you internet.

An article written by Julian Burnside and republished with his kind permission

Lest we forget

It is one of the most resonant phrases in our national mythology. “Lest we forget”. We say it, or think it, on 11th November each year and on Anzac day.

But forgetting lies at the heart of this country. We have constructed a myth about ourselves which cannot survive unless we forget a number of painful truths. We draw a veil of comforting amnesia over anything which contradicts our self-image.

Since John Howard saw the votes to be had by appropriating some of Pauline Hanson’s more repellent policy ideas, boat people have been tagged “illegals”. Howard won the 2001 election on it; Abbott persists in it. Gillard and Bowen go along with it like sheep because they have still not absorbed their own rhetoric.

We forget that boat people who come here to ask for protection are not illegal in any sense – they are exercising the right which every person has in international law to seek asylum in any country they can reach.

We forget that the first white settlers in this country were true illegals: sent here by English courts for a range of criminal offences, and the soldiers sent to guard them, and the administrators who, following London’s instructions, stole the country from its original inhabitants who, if possession is nine points of the law, had the backing of 30,000 years of law to justify calling the white invaders “illegals”.

And we forget, too, the line in the second verse of our national anthem: words that might fairly be understood as reflecting the simple truth recognised by the white settlers: for those who came across the sea there are truly boundless plains to share. For refugees locked away on Christmas Island this must throw light on the frontier which delusion shares with hypocrisy.

And how many of us pause to remember how different it was for 85,000 Vietnamese boat people 30 years ago? They were resettled here swiftly and without fuss, thanks to the simple human decency which Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee showed, and which Abbott and Gillard so conspicuously lack. We forget how hideously we scarred Vietnam; how we showered them with Agent Orange and trashed their villages and disfigured their people. Just as we forget the effects of our collaboration in Iraq. But if we knew back then why people flee the land of their birth, we seem to have forgotten it now.

When today’s refugees wash up on our shores, Abbott and Gillard, Bowen and Morrison all speak with concern about the boat people who die in their attempt to get to safety, but their concern is utterly false. Instead of attacking the refugees directly, which is their real purpose, they attack the people smugglers instead. Because, aren’t people smugglers the worst people imaginable? They forget that Oskar Schindler was a people smuggler, and so was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And so was Gustav Schroeder, captain of the ill-fated MS St Louis which left Hamburg in May 1939 with a cargo of 900 Jews looking for help. He tried every trick in the book to land them somewhere safe, but was pushed away. He ended up putting them ashore again in Europe, and more than half of them perished in concentration camps. Abbott and Gillard forget that Captain Schroeder was a people smuggler.

They forget too that, without the help of people smugglers, refugees are left to face persecution or death at the hands of whatever tyranny threatens them. Let Gillard or Abbott say publicly that, in the same circumstances, they would not use a people smuggler if they had to.

Many recent boat people are Hazaras from Afghanistan. They are targetted ruthlessly by the Taliban, who are bent on ethnic cleansing. The Hazara population of Afghanistan has halved over the past decade, as Hazaras escape or are killed. The Taliban want to get rid of all of them. Gillard and Bowen have overlooked, it seems, that we are locked in mortal combat with the Taliban; they have forgotten that our enemy’s enemy is likely our friend.

The Malaysian Solution provoked another bout of amnesia. Both major parties have forgotten the spectacular cost to taxpayers of trafficking people to other countries, whether it is Malaysia or Nauru. Not to mention the pointless cruelty of it all.

The Malaysian Solution swung into action in early August, when about 50 Afghan asylum seekers arrived at Christmas Island. There were 15 unaccompanied children among them. Chris Bowen would not rule out sending the children to Malaysia. He apparently forgot that he is, by law, their guardian. To his credit, he looks very uncomfortable doing the dirty work, as well he might if he reflects on the speech he gave in parliament on 10 August 2006. It included this: “(boat people) are entitled to have their claims considered in Australia, and if they are granted refugee status, they are entitled to a refugee protection visa from Australia.”

Joe Hockey and Scott Morrison swung into action by criticizing the parents of the children for sending them off in the first place. They don’t seem to understand that most Hazaras can only scrape together enough money to save just one member of the family. The parents they criticize so readily have made the awful choice of risking their own lives to give their child a chance of freedom. But it seems that, these days, nothing is too grubby for the Liberal party.

So here we are: Australia in 2011. For convenience we have forgotten our origins, our good fortune, our blindness and our selfishness. In place of memory we have constructed a national myth of a generous, welcoming country, a land of new arrivals where everyone gets a fair go; a myth in which vanity fills the emptiness where the truth was forgotten.

Or perhaps it’s not a myth after all. Perhaps our national image is true, but our politicians have forgotten what it is. If we value who we are, we should remind them. Because our true character as a nation is being reshaped each day by what our politicians do in our name. Tell Canberra we are better than that, lest we forget.

Those are words you never really want to hear from your adult child. Some days my heart breaks for my girl and I just want to pick her up and hold her close and tell her that everything is going to be okay. But we all know that  would be a lie, because once you are an adult you just have to take what life throws at you, and keep on going, no matter how hard it is.

I watch my daughter struggle with her failing body and I am proud of how Veronica goes about her daily life. I listen daily to Isaac’s ear curdling screams as I talk to my daughter on the telephone. Isaac’s wailing sets my teeth on edge, at least I am able to hang up the telephone and retreat to the silence of my studio.

Growing your own vegetables and raising your own meat takes the pressure off an overstretched budget. Not for my girl it seems, as some low-life bastard stole 17 of Veronica’s ducklings this week and an unexpected  frost wiped out Veronica’s entire veggie garden.

Totally destroyed it.Completely rooned. Dead.

In the scheme of things it isn’t really a big deal, but when you think that the produce from that garden was going to help stretch their limited budget, it is a big deal. Tomatoes this year have not gone below $4 a kilo and pumpkins and bananas are fast turning into  luxury items. Petrol is up to $1.50 a litre and steadily rising, electricity charges are rising as well. The list goes on.

The final straw that prompted the words, “I am at the end off my tether Mum” was the death of Veronica’s iPhone, caused we suspect by two small children and a cup of water.

Veronica has written a post asking you, the internet for some help. I know how hard it is for my girl to ask for help, so I am asking you to help my child as well.

I have put a paypal widget thingy up on my sidebar, if you could please donate $5 to help my girl I will be very grateful.

Edited: I have been at the polytechnic all day today and then had a Tasmanian Ceramics Association meeting. I only arrived home a few minutes ago at 8.30 pm and I am totally overwhelmed at your generosity towards my girl. I dont have the words to express my gratitude at the moment but you can all be certain of one thing. I will pay this forward.

THANK YOU

I haven’t shared any photos of the Tasmanian sky for a while now. The weather has been so ordinary that the day finishes with a long twilight lately, rather than the lovely fiery sunsets that we were getting last summer.

So here are my selections for this week, some sunsets from the summer of 2010.

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.

Hello, Veronica here – frogpondsrock will be in a state of flux for a little bit while I try and work out an internal issue that won’t let me change themes without serious issues.

Forgive me!

Hi, it’s Veronica from Sleepless Nights, filling in for Mum for a bit.

When I last saw Mum, she had printed out all her Weekly Winners, sticky-taped them to a giant board and was standing at the top of the driveway, trying to hail a passing satellite in order to broadcast them to you.

Yes, her internet has died. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know when she will be back, as her computer tells her it is a Network problem, yet her provider tells her it is a computer error. A fine case of pass the buck, which unfortunately Mum is losing out on badly.

So! Hopefully Mum is back soon, otherwise she might just end up pulling out all of her hair and murdering my father and brother (not that they don’t deserve it sometimes).

****

In other news and shameless blog whoring, I somehow managed to end up as a finalist in the 2009 Bloggies – Best Australian Blog category. I know! I don’t know how I managed it either!

Disbelief aside, I would be so grateful if you would head on over and vote for me. In fact, I would probably even be tempted to post photos of my 5 day old son just for you if you voted for me.

Please?

******

Edited to Add:-

Yay!!! I am back online *phew*. I finally got through to a good technician, one that actually knew what he was talking about. Thankyou Manesh.

More photos of the new baby, Isaac will be published soon. Well as soon as I unstick them from the whiteboard,  Gosh satellites are speedy little buggers.

Cheers kim

As promised here is my post revealing the mystery item. I asked you what you thought this was.

Your answers ranged from, water over rocks to poo.. In a moment of weakness I gave everyone a hint, saying it was something to do with food.   Alas no-one even came remotely close… *sigh*

It was of course a piece of nori..Yes the stuff you use in sushi..yum..

cheers kim xxx…

I seem to remember saying this:-

Yes that’s right, No more Mrs nice guy..Muawahahaha… The next mystery object is going to be so tricky that your eyes will bleed…”insert evil giggle”

Well then my bloglings what do you reckon this is????

Frogpondsrock is undergoing minor CSS changes due to ‘Pink for October’.

Please don’t freak out if the colours keep changing while you are reading this.

Cheers, Veronica

PS: Due to toddler distractions, this could take longer than I thought. Please don’t email Mum and tell her that her blog was all wonky coloured all day. Please?