not just another brick in the wall

i've been in Perth for a few days...that's about as far west as you can go in Oz

before getting your feet wet

shortly before i got thoroughly soaked in a relentless downpour

i saw the writing on the wall

three tenths of the square root of Pi times __u__k all...

today we were crutching sheep and marking lambs. relatively mindless tasks that allow for lots of thinking and musing time

i began to think about possible formulae that might avoid the actual counting of lambs during marking

you know, if there are a certain number of green rings used what might be the proportion of males to females and how might they be allocated. this of course took me to remembering the wonderful Canadian author Stephen Leacock

and his musings on the fate of A, B, C & poor D as well as 'monkey's mother' and the length of her tail.

not to mention this brilliant story

Puzzle III

(With apologies to the Strand.)

A rope is passed over a pulley. It has a weight at one end and a
monkey at the other. There is the same length of rope on either side
and equilibrium is maintained. The rope weighs four ounces per foot.
The age of the monkey and the age of the monkey's mother together
total four years. The weight of the monkey is as many pounds as the
monkey's mother is years old. The monkey's mother was twice as old as
the monkey was when the monkey's mother was half as old as the monkey
will be when the monkey is three times as old as the monkey's mother
was when the monkey's mother was three times as old as the monkey.
The weight of the rope with the weight at the end was half as much
again as the difference in weight between the weight of the weight
and the weight of the monkey. Now, what was the length of the rope?

My Solution: I should think it would have to be a rope of a fairly
good length.

when i was quite young i managed to reach a figure but now i don't remember how i got there.

but all this musing then took me on to other things. on a recent bus trip in the U.S. my seat mate confided that she was afflicted with ADHD. i asked her what the defining behaviour patterns were.

and when i came home i looked up the symptoms [out of curiosity]

and it pretty much reads like a description of my life

but i wondered, why take drugs to obviate this? i like being the way i am.

admittedly school was a nightmare from which i absconded as much as possible [ with exception of PLC in Melbourne]

and i have trouble staying in conversations in which i am not rivetted

televison puts me to sleep very quickly

and my "office" floor is kneedeep in receipts

files need to be visible in order to stay on the radar

sigh.

but on the bright side there is always some new and intriguing train of thought to follow

dull moments are enlivened by [possibly] mad imaginings

and life is anything but boring

this [to my mind] is as it should be...

have a nice weekend.

runNing with scissoRs

for a long time now i've been making objects as 'blanks' [all white] and then dyeing them

lately

i've been forcing myself

to

run with scissors

and reverse the order of things

landscape drawings with eucalyptus

Blogger Buzz: Concerning the Historie and Nature of Blogs of Note

Blogger Buzz: Concerning the Historie and Nature of Blogs of Note

alchemy

yesterday i collected up an armful of sticks and lit the fire out in the studio for a nice boil-up. just for a change i decided to collect water from the various vessels that had been standing about in the open - and so had been kindly filled by the heavens

one of those vessels is made of copper

the dyebath comprised various prunings [lavender and roses], tempered by a pocketful of windfall eucalypts and a handful of Oxalis pes-caprae [that's soursob if you're Australian, Bermuda buttercup if you hail from across the ditch]

a pile of bundles were cooked and then allowed to cool in the brew overnight...on fishing them out this morning i discovered that the shiny new clips i'd used as resists had been beautifully coated with copper and even the black bulldog clips had acquired a very nice patina

nature's alchemy at work

i rather like my colours dark and murky, influenced by a few fragments of iron in the dyebath but had a sudden attack of hysterical giggles as i laid the samples out for a look.

i've only had two [publicly] grumpy students in the last 12 months. one walked out of a workshop in the first hour, claiming she "could have done this at home". fair enough, but if it had been me i would have stayed and gotten my money's worth...the first hour in any workshop i run is largely taken up with establishing dyepots, allocating space, saying hellos and how-do-you-dos and talking about the work ahead.

the other made the comment that her husband could have achieved the same effects using the cloth as cleaning rags in his workshop. sounds like a very talented chap, i think he could be on to something there....just imagine a huge pieced cloth, stitched together from oil-soaked rags.

i can picture it hanging in the Venice Biennale in some deliciously dilapidated old building...wouldn't mind seeing my own work there, either!

the way of the duck [and an angel playing piano]

yesterday was a truly splendid day

it began well

i awoke breathing

[always a good beginning]

the sun shone and twinkled

on ice-rimed grass

and the spring blossomsnow

was everywhere

we wandered to the farmer's market

a happy saturday habit

where we found

among other things

ducks

cartoonist Michael Leunig has good advice

'study the way of the duck'

these ducks had good ways

obviously

they needed to come home with us

and join the other rescued ducks

who knows what fates might otherwise have overtaken them?

someone might have thought they were food

not recognised their real purpose as great teachers

and philosophers

so here they are

with their new friends

i mentioned earlier that it was a splendid day

a wonderful day for weeding

finding small things that had been buried in the garden

and forgotten in the general buzz of things

there are few activities quite so satisfying

as carefully weeding out grass

from in between the freesias

while an old

and slightly tubby

Border Collie snores contentedly nearby

observed [a little disdainfully]

by a small fluffy CatfishWeaselBear

[for enlightenment scroll down the right hand side

to the image labelled 'Martha']

at sunset my parents and i

washed our hands and faces

put on clean socks

and tucked fresh hankies into our pockets

got into The Beastie

drove to Adelaide

and sat rapt in the audience

as David Helfgott

played piano, like an angel on speed

a truly splendid day

ps dear Mr Leunig, i know your images are copyright but i hope you don't mind me borrowing them cos they do link back to your site...

coCo aVant cHanel

here's a film well worth seeing

Coco avant Chanel

some new work

i've barely finished stitching this piece and haven't really had time to make friends with it properly and already it's rushed off to have fun in Sydney without me

it's made up of silk fragments dyed in Lier, London, San Francisco, Wellington, Warrnambool, Columbus and of course Hope Springs.

it's a document of wandering, hand-stitched together using linen thread

if you're in the Sydney area you can see it at

Planet

114 Commonwealth Street

Surry Hills

trails of entrails

i'm in the national capital this weekend...unusually not for work but in order to celebrate the semi-centenary of a very dear friend.

wandering about this morning trying with no little difficulty to navigate the labyrinth of convoluted paths that encircle the city it came to me that not many people really know the true story behind the designing of Canberra.

dear friends, i'm here to enlighten you.

Canberra is popularly believed to have been designed by Walter Burley Griffin.

i'm inclined to think the true story goes more like this. Mrs Burley Griffin [well, actually the architect Marion Lucy Mahony] had a large Persian cat called Pinky. one day when Walter had wandered into the kitchen in the middle of a tricky session of designer's block to fetch himself a calming cup of tea Pinky strolled into the studio in search of amusement.

she sat up on the drawing table and enjoyed a quick wash. regrettably her tail rested on Walter's watercolour palette [remember these were the days before CAD when plans and elevations where all rendered by hand]. just then Pinky espied a sparrow through the window. morphing instantly into killer-cat slink mode she swivelled across the page and hurled herself at the offending avian.

moments later the drafting assistant entered the rooom, spied the watercolour swirls on the paper and decided to ink them in. and there it was, cat-made marks in psychotropic swirls , just waiting to be embellished with trees,parks and houses.

thank goodness it was only a cat's prints and not the soothsayers casting of the entrails of a sheep....our demented deviations might have been a lot longer