Diabolical Clay

Updating my blogroll is one of those jobs that I never seem to get around to. There is always something else to do and copy/pasting all the links is a fiddly, clicky job.

Recently because of a computer glitch, I couldn’t access my gmail account. Not being able to access my emails was annoying and inconvenient but not being able to access my reader, where I store all my lovely blogs was worse. Much worse.

After a few moments of thinking, ” Dont panic! Don”t panic! I am a teapot!” and with the dreadful question of how am I going to read your blog posts filling my head? I remembered my blog roll, phew bloggy disaster disaster had been narrowly averted.

I spent an hour this morning updating my blogroll and it is nowhere near finished. My current blogroll is truly only the tip of the bloggy iceberg.

So can you help me out my dear bloglings can you check and see if your blog is listed on my blogroll and if it isn’t, can you please leave me a comment and I will add you straight away.

Don’t be shy.

Hello my bloglings, I need your help.

Next month I will be in Melbourne for a long weekend. We were supposed to be going to Raymond Island for a wedding but that has been cancelled. The Spouse hates travelling, loathes big cities with a passion and with his grumpy hat firmly on his head has decided to stay home with the dog.

I have given The Spouse’s plane ticket to David’s girlfriend, Bubbles and I am really looking forward to spending four days in Melbourne with the kids.

The last time David and I were in Melbourne was five years ago with Mum.David was 11 and we did all the normal kid focused touristy things. The zoo, Vic market, the aquarium etc.

This time I will have two teenagers with me who are interested in street art,food,clothes,good coffee and music. We will be using public transport and I wouldn’t mind checking out some markets on the Sunday.

I was thinking of exploring the laneways and visiting Chinatown.We will be having a look at Lygon street as well as going to the National Gallery and the Museum.

So this is where you come in. What do you suggest that we see and do on our four day trip? What hidden gems are there for some Tassie country kids to see that will blow their minds?

And for those of you not from Victoria here are some photos I took this morning on my walk.

Here is one of my finished sculptures in the garden, I have filled this with water and once some algae starts to grow inside the pot I will put some tadpoles into it.

I still have absolutely no idea what I am doing with the new camera. I fiddle about with the settings and point,click and hope.

We had a couple of inches of snow up here the other day and because my children are grown up I didn’t have to go outside in it and freeze my tits off and pretend to enjoy myself as they pelted me with snowballs.

I could just open the kitchen door a tiny bit, aim the camera at a likely looking object and voila my work here is done.

Later on in the morning after Veronica had chastised me for not getting any decent photos, I went outside and had a bit of a play with the macro lens.

There is something about this photo that I like, I am not sure what it is but it makes me smile. To my friends in America and Europe may all your snowy days be as warm and dry as mine.

I need to state from the outset that I have a vested interest in the Australian Blogging Conference as my daughter Veronica is one of the organisers. I am also speaking on a panel, so maybe that makes my perspective a bit skewed.

But, I have never let vested interests or skewed perspectives stop me before, so onward and upward.

The overwhelming response to the inaugural Australian Bloggers Conference has been positive and if the ticket sales are anything to go by there will be a lot of personal bloggers gathered in Sydney next March.

Sadly,along with the positive responses there are always the inevitable knockers and naysayers. The bitter bunnies who are so choked up with bile that all they can do is throw verbal stones and barbs at those bloggers who have dared to actually stand up and do some hard work and organise a conference.

The naysayers are loudly complaining that the Australian Blogging Conference is all about Mummy blogging and that the attendees will be a very narrow clicky group.

I call bullshit.

I pulled this straight from the Aussie Bloggers, website

Aussie Bloggers Conference is a conference ‘by bloggers for bloggers.’

It is the first ever blogging conference focusing on the mum, parenting and personal blogging communities of Australia. We’ve long wanted to see a blogging conference in Australia and now, sick of waiting for ‘someone else’ to do it, we’ve created one ourselves.

Organising a conference in a city like Sydney is quite expensive and there is a considerable financial committment required from the five organisers. So as to keep things manageable the organisers had to choose a blogging niche and theme for the conference. I think that they chose a niche which is quite broad in its appeal.

I think that the title “personal blogger” encompasses us all out here in the blogosphere. Aren’t we all writing from a personal perspective? Whether our blog is about politics, photography sustainable living, art, craft, food, family, fashion, Human rights or a combination of some or all of these topics. Surely our blogs can all comfortably fit within the umbrella of personal blog. Unless of course your blog is written by a robotic ninja then you are in a design class all of your own.

I would like to remind the knockers that as the conference is only a day long event there were only so many topics that could be covered on the day. In order to find out what people were interested in there was a questionnaire circulating before the conference programme was announced, with nearly two hundred respondants.

There are still places open on the panels, so instead of whingeing that you aren’t included, get your submissions in and be a part of this exciting conference celebrating Australian bloggers and blogging.

.

I have been trying to go for a walk up the road every morning.  Here are some photos that I have taken in the past couple of days.

I have just finished Robin Hobb’s latest novel from The Rain Wild Chronicles and every time I read her work, I see Dragons in the sky for days afterwards. This was the sky this morning at about 5.40 am.

This sunrise silhoutte was taken Thursday morning, I love the way the light moves through the leaves of the gum trees.

I like the shot in black and white as well.

I was photographing the reflections in a dam.

When I disturbed a pair of black mountain ducks.

I like the texture of the bark peeling away from the trees and I am not sure which of these photos I like the best.

Other than that, I haven’t got a lot to say, time is moving along at a cracking pace and I am constantly surprised by how fast the days are slipping through my fingers.

How are things with you?

There was a time when the sight of a cement truck driving into our front yard would have had my son jumping up and down with excitement. As a small boy he was obsessed with heavy machinery and I well remember his blissful excitement, when the council workers left a front end loader and grader in my front yard overnight when they were doing up the road. This time it was me that was excited because the cement slab for my studio was poured over the weekend.There really isn’t any way I can make a photo of a cement slab look attractive so I have included a photo of the cement truck for all you mothers of small boys out there instead.

I have bought my ticket for the Aussie bloggers Conference in March next year and Veronica has booked our room, so it looks like I will be meeting some of you lovely people very soon.

I am speaking on a panel at the conference, the subject of the conversation will be,

” My Blog My Story.”

I am a gregarious extrovert, prone to dramatic statements and theatrical gestures. I enjoy being the centre of attention and always have a lot to say about most subjects. But to be honest with you I am shitting myself. When I think about having to talk in front of over a hundred people I start to have a little panic attack. Even now writing about it, my heart is starting to beat a bit faster and I can feel the butterflies.

So help me out my lovelies, what sort of stuff would you like me to talk about? I have the bones of my conversation worked out but together we can flesh it out a bit.

The Australian bloggers conference has been organised and the website with all the details is now live.

The conference will be held on the 19th of March 2011 at the Grand Ballroom (Level 1) of Bayview Boulevard, 90 William Street Sydney NSW. The conference  is the first ever blogging conference in Australia, focusing on the mum, parenting and personal blogging communities of Australia.

When I first started blogging, Australian blogs were very thin on the ground and when I told some of my family and friends that I was writing about my life on the internet the reaction was always the same. Friends thought I was mad and “The Spouse” worried about me. Colleagues rolled their eyes at me because a proper website was acceptable but a blog, even the word sounded dodgy. Everyone knew that “The Internet”, was full of porn and scamsters, there were dire warnings not to talk to anyone on the internet. Everyone knew that I was going to  get  ripped off, have my identity stolen and go blind from seeing all that porn.

Luckily I had my daughter, Veronica to talk to, as she was the one who talked me into starting my blog. Together we found a whole community of bloggers out there and the rest is history.

Three years down the track, Australia is starting to catch up to America in regards to blogging being an acceptable mainstream thing to do and there are wonderful Australian blogs everywhere you look.

Veronica and I had always been a bit green with envy, when the American bloggers talked about blogher and all the fun they had meeting their bloggy friends at a blogging conference.

Now there is an Australian blogging conference and we dont need to wistfully read the stories about blogher fun. We will be the ones writing the stories and finally meeting our blog friends.Yay.

Photo montage created by Kate

When former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd apologised to the Aboriginal people of Australia, I cried. I was, in that moment so very proud to be Australian and I felt that there was hope for the future of this country.

During the recent election campaign, Tony Abbots sloganism and simplistic chanting of “Stop the Boats” and “No Big New Taxes” brought me back to earth with a thud.

Scratch the surface of white Australia and you will find  racism in all walks of life. From the milkman who mutters,”bloody Abos,” to the white school boy at Cronulla with the crude slogan on his t-shirt, We grew here, You flew here to a Prime Ministerial wannabe with his appalling catch cry of, “Stop the Boats.”

And it makes me tired.

Here in Tasmania, the Aboriginal people are a marginalised people trying to save their shattered culture. The enduring myth in Tasmanian society is that there aren’t any Tasmanian Aboriginals left at all, that the line stopped when Truganini died. The differences in our society are highlighted very clearly by the treatment of two groups of protesters at the hands of the Police here in Tasmania.

Aboriginal protester Sara Maynard was arrested for trespass while  protesting at the Brighton bypass construction site last year,

Ms Maynard said it took her a long time to recover from the trauma of being strip-searched before facing the Hobart Magistrates Court.

“I was told that if I refused they would hold me down and take my clothes off for me,” Ms Maynard said yesterday.

“When you’ve got five men standing around and I’m the only female there … it was quite terrifying.”

She refused to be strip-searched in a cell with cameras, so was forced to undergo the procedure in a toilet by a female officer.

Gardening guru Peter Cundall was also arrested last year for protesting on the steps of Parliament house in Hobart. Mr Cundall  is quoted as saying he was appalled by the treatment meted out to Ms Maynard. Mr Cundall also said that he and his fellow protesters were treated like royalty, with the police making it very clear that they didn’t want to arrest the 58 anti pulp mill protesters and treating them with the utmost courtesy.

Sigh, and there you have it in a nutshell.

Until we the ordinary people of Australia stand up and say this is wrong, this sort of appalling behaviour will continue on through the generations.

My friend has started a blog and I would highly recommend that you read this post, A day in the life of an Aborigine.

I woke up this morning to find three comments from the delightful Issac a student at one of Canberra’s houses of higher learning, ANU. Obviously Issac’s work load is very light as he spent a bit of time on my blog leaving inane comments and looking up my personal details in the yellow pages directory. You will make a fine lawyer, son.

Thankyou for leaving my address in the comments section of my blog Issac, it was most thoughtful of you to remind me where I live. As one ages, it is these sort of tricky details that tend to get forgotten.

I am not sure what it was Issac thought he was gaining by leaving my home address on my blog. I have been blogging under my own name for a long time now and most of my details are available online anytime that you care to look. Also when the Tasmanian election campaign was running, I published the full details of my name and address on my twitter account in order to comply with section 191 of the electoral act.

But it does raise questions about privacy on the internet, safety of ones family if you have small children and the possibility of identity theft. I am not fussed about my own privacy as evidenced by some of my posts, where I have bared my soul here. My children aren’t small and vulnerable to kidnappers, though some days I would consider paying someone to kidnap my teenage son for a week or so and as for identity theft my credit rating is crap.

How would you feel my lovelies if some tosser published your details in the comments section of your blogs?