Balance

I got him finished today, except for the frame, (the bits at the top and the bottom of the photo are wall or a photoshop facsimile thereof, not painting).

Our resident pelican seems to be on vacation at the moment, in central Australia with lots of girl pelicans and Oprah I'm guessing.

Late last year, as the impact of having to sell the house and having bought a boat in France was starting to have a bit of an emotional impact, I was sitting on our back steps, perhaps my favourite place in the whole house, and having a coffee and a think.

The old pelican walked up the beach and had a bit of a stretch.

He seemed to be trying to tell me, that if one wants to keep one's life in balance, sometimes it's best if one doesn't have two feet planted firmly on the ground.

I thought I'd paint that picture one day.

And now I have.

(and he'll fit on any wall longer than two metres.)

Rain, Rain Go Away

I should be full of beans.

I should be just wanting to get stuck in and do things and I am on the one hand, on the other I just want to lie in bed and doze.

When the rain keeps coming at better than an inch per hour, hour after hour, it's not even conducive to being awake. It almost makes me yearn for the airconditioned, hermetically sealed office with no windows I lived in for all those years. We couldn't tell what was happening outside from within, and our mood never changed accordingly.

There's not enough light in the shed to work on a painting, it seems to be darker than night even with the lights on, and with a half finished painting on the easel, working with the wood machines is out of the question.

I can't even hear the cricket on the radio above the constant din of the rain, wonderful though that sound may be when a more sensible number of drops are hitting the roof. Ahh cricket! There can be no better excuse than sitting in front of a television set than when there is a risk of drowning whilst doing anything else.

I don't like whinging about the weather, and I won't start now other to note that to date, after six days, we have actually already received our average monthly quota of precipitation, and I'm not sure if it's climate change to blame.

Parting is such sweet Sorrow

I know it was Shakespeare who wrote about the sweetness of the sorrow of parting, but if he hadn't I'd have to have stolen it from somewhere else.

Often when we visit friends, or vice versa after an all too long an absence, it is as though the intervening time has stood still, as though some great TV controller has put the scene on hold while attending to a a telephone call, yet when we are reunited it all gets fast-forwarded so that a weekend passes in the blink of an eye.

We try our best to prolong the magic, but there comes a time invariably when we are all standing in a driveway, one party unwilling to get into the car, the other unwilling to stop the conversation lest the former do. New topics appear as if by magic, ones that need days of further discussion and should have been raised two days before, but eventually there is a stop for breath and a shower of rain to ensure the conversation doesn't start again. The car starts, the visit is over, and the journey down the mountain begins, to a place where the climate is exactly different.

"Until the next time", we say, and we mean it!

Three Dimensions

We know a couple of people who will have spent this weekend tucked up in front of their 3D televisions, watching endless shoot 'm ups, oblivious to the world outside. If ever there was a need to draw a line on a piece of consumer technology, surely now is the time, before holography gets here and the virtual worlds that it will bring will truly blur the transition between real and imagined.

The default 3D settings for our life placed us five hundred metres above the place we call home today, where the weather at the top of the Range, from the perspective of one seeking clear sunny days and the temperate warmth of summer, was not up to scratch. Animals with a thick coating of down and a propensity to breed in times of precipitation, would however have a completely different view, albeit because of the cloud cover, not a very long one.

Viewing life in three dimensions on days like today as opposed to watching a digitised facsimile of it, provides, a significantly colder, damper and infinitely more satisfying way of passing an overly humid Saturday. This is particularly so when that Saturday involves a shed crawl. In addition to the well known assertions about messing about in boats, there is much satisfaction to be gained wandering among other people's tools and half completed boats, and bio fuel stills (and alcohol stills for that matter), picking up pistons and having discussions on the finer points of a paint job, or methods of sharpening a chisel. It's probably OK to have the cricket running in the background while this is happening providing it is on an old radio or a CRT screen scrounged from a tip and the whereabouts of the controls long lost under a pile of stuff, if indeed they ever existed.

With real life in 3D, adverse weather gives time to reflect on projects old, and those not started, to run hands over timber freshly milled, and to sort nuts and bolts into old ice cream containers. It allows us to plan things for when the sun comes out, to work out where to put the drain, and to think about fixing the mower after Christmas.

Best of all, with life in 3D no two replays of any given day are the same.

Fog

I've often defended our major banks against the barrage of criticism that pervades our media and public opinion.

They are each after all unashamedly in business, and by most measures they remain moderately successful. The very fact that four of our major banks ranked in the top ten world wide at the peak of the global financial crisis was enough for our government to sing their praises, and introduce temporary protection measures which would strengthen them even further.

However the tide of political popularity is driven by a fickle wind, and within two years, the very same government began to view those saviours of the Australian economy, the banks that actually made a profit, as a greedy enemy. Perhaps, I thought, it stems from jealousy. Most other countries after all were forced to take controlling positions in their major banks to ensure they survived the crisis, but here the government share in profit is limited to the tax it can extract.

Today though, my sympathies lie not with the bank. Today, we received a letter dated the 22nd November advising that our "investment" funds (the ones that we have aside from the proceeds of our house sale to rehouse ourselves in due course) had been invested on the 20th November for a further six months at almost 25% less interest than we had been earning, and if we didn't like that we could kindly contact them within seven days of that date and kindly let them know. Since the interest from those funds is what actually pays our rent, it didn't take a lot of calculation on our part to determine that indeed we didn't like this arrangement one bit.

We let them know, and while in doing so we didn't feel like being as kind as they would have hoped, everything was sorted in a prompt and cheery manner.

For a time the metaphoric mist in which the bank obviously thinks we live turned pink and then red before returning to it's normal fuggy grey, and when it did, we loaded the car and popped up to Toowoomba, for a weekend of clarity.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

I suspect if there's anything more satisfying that making something for a grandchild, it's repairing something that one's father had made for his own grandchild, so that her daughter in turn may experience the possibility of another thirty years of pleasure from it.

I more than suspect.

I know.

When all else fails, take a snap of a frangipani.

When we woke this morning we were at Lily's place. Her mum was asleep and her dad was at work, so we had an hour of precious morning giggle time all to ourselves.

We pinched ourselves and wondered just how that had come to be, but it doesn't matter, we had a whole morning with her and the boys and their mum's, then home when we'd had our fill. Home in the rain visiting a few friends on the way, and suddenly a day had gone with the camera firmly in its bag, and my writing head with it. Was it the weather? Or perhaps it was the headiness that the children impart.

Just maybe the first day of summer brings with it (along with 100 mm of rain), a certain holiday attitude.

I don't know, but I'm sure the world is none the worse for it.