library time

Tomorrow I start the the first of ten puppet shows in the Brisbane City Council libraries.  With Domino the Jester.  That's right - Dizzy is on tour.  Well, around the suburbs of Brisbane.

I feel a bit nervous, but also pretty excited.  It is a great opportunity.  I have wanted to be a puppeteer for a long time, probably since doing my first show over the back of the couch when I was eight.  I think as a career that earns you some money and helps with piano lessons and food to eat speech therapy is better - but there has always been that little nagging in my head that I want to be one of the people working on the Muppet show or Sesame Street.  Probably not that achievable while being a mum, youth pastor's wife and based in Brisbane.  But taking Dizzy around Brisbane is a fun thing.  And able to be done during school holidays.

Being 37 and realising a little part of a dream is a great thing.  I hope I remember my lines and the show goes great.  I will take some photos and report back!

geo caching

While we on holidays in Armidale we were introduced to geo caching by my sister-in-law. Basically this is like a treasure hunt.  For adults.  With GPS systems.  I don't think it is that nerdy...not really.  At least we were out in the great outdoors finding places around Armidlae I had never seen before.  And tramping through the bush.

What you do is register on a website and then find the spots where there are geo caches near you.  Then you enter the co-ordinates on your GPS system and follow it to the exact location of the cache - where you may find a little container with a logbook and maybe some toys and maybe a little key ring that has to keep travelling around the world.  There are apparently a million and a half caches around the world.  Our family has located four. It is kind of weird to think that all around us, hidden in secret spots, are little containers waiting to be discovered. 

To add to our possible nerdiness we also used walkie talkies from Aldi and made up code names as we geo cached.  Fun times.

Learning how to follow the GPS.

And we are off like a frog in a sock.

Tracking through the bush.

Finding little containers under logs - watch out for spiders!

Yay we found one.

 Geo caching - fun for all the family.

magpie puppet

I wanted a magpie puppet to use in some storytelling shows in 2011.  After lots of searching on the internet - there were NO magpie puppets available (well, for less than the $400 it takes to make a customised puppet.)  So, I asked my sister-in-law if she was up for making one for me.  Without a pattern.  Reverse engineered from a current puppet I have.

She said yep, let's give it a go.

So here is how we (I use that term loosely - I mostly watched, affirmed her choices and broke the bobbin on the sewing machine) made a magpie puppet on the three days after Christmas in 2010.  In between watching cricket, geo caching (future blog posts on this) and children wrangling.

Step one - take a close look at the puppet you want to copy from.  Poor Mr Orange got turned inside out so many times he probably felt very violated.

2. Make some wings from black fabric (we found a great shiny flat fur fabric at the local shop in Armidale.  It looks like flat feathers) and fill with flat foam.

3. Make the body out of the fabric and add a tail filled with flat foam.

4. Make a prototype of the head - try this three times until you get a beak kind of shaped head.

5. Then make the head in black fabric with a red felt mouth.

6.  Cut a ping pong ball in half and fill with silicon.  Just for fun.

Ok, these are the eyes.

7.  Attach the head to the body, with the wings joining in as well at the neckline.  It was a tense moment as my SIL sewed this inside out - had she pinned the wings on the right way...?

yes
She is a legend.

8.  Attach the eyes where I had added red and black felt to bring them to life.

9.  Add some white felt to make it look like a magpie - we had to consult the bird watching book, and while it is not totally accurate, it is fairly magpie-like.

10. Finally (drum roll please.....)

Meet MARGARET!

She was originally called Maggie during the construction period, but as she was completed, her personality started asserting herself.  She prefers Margaret, and she loves to feather her nest.  She has scatter twigs, and a subscription to "Nest in Style".

She defends her territory fiercely and she always has an opinion on most topics.  She will pick up tiny objects and scraps around her nest area and convert them to works of art in her craftastic space.

 Welcome Margaret.  Looking forward to getting to know you better.


Thank you to my excellent sister-in-law Katie, without whose skills this project would not be possible.  The total estimated cost of this puppet was about $20.  And three days work after Christmas.

book hand

I am in Armidale at the moment - on the cold slopes of New England.  At Christmas time I am wearing jeans, jackets, scarves, and huddling under the doona at night.  I love being here, but there is one thing that is a problem in Armidale in the cold, and I have not found a solution for it yet.

Cold book hand.

You know, when you are reading a book in bed at night, which I do every night for about an hour, and the hand holding the book gets really cold.

It sounds very trivial I know.  But it concerns me. 

But maybe I am in a place where cold book hand can be a concern.  I am very blessed and grateful for all the things I do have - family to love, books to read, a house to live in, Christmas ham to eat tomorrow, and friends to play with.

Maybe I should get a glove and stop complaining about cold book hand.

connected

Lightning strikes.  That was what caused out router, network card and modem to frizzle up and collapse in the storms in Brisbane last Thursday.  So I was disconnected from the net  for five days.

It has been liberating and frustrating.  I didn't realise how much I look at the net - check the weather, do banking, check my ebay sales, check email communication, blog, facebook, look up stuff like where are the Christmas lights, watch i-view....

On the other hand, it has been quite good being a woman of mystery for five days.  No contact via electronic media.  I looked up our paper white pages for a phone number (for the optus guy to come and fix our internet!).

I read a lot of my current book (A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin), and went canoeing in the great outdoors.  I cooked and chatted and tidied the house.

But now I am back on.  Hooray.  I think if in the future we have little ear pieces with connection to the internet and we wore them all day - I would probably be one of those people who would wear it. 

I like being connected.

mickey stories; chapter six

I have small friend called Mickey.  I write about him because he is interesting and a bit cheeky.  And because his life needs to be documented.  Possibly for the authorities.

This story is from last year when he was four as recounted by his slightly horrified mother.  Please keep in mind he is not a malicious or destructive person, just a curious one.

Mickey was put to bed at his normal bedtime one night.  Later, as his mother was going in to bed she popped her head into his room to check all was okay and kiss her cherubic boy goodnight.  What she saw was.....
Mickey surrounded by a pile of white fluff.  "Look Mum" he exclaimed, "a cloud!"  She worked out that he had taken a picture frame off the wall, smashed it, got a big shard of glass, and then proceeded to shred his pillow to make a cloud on his bed where he was sitting amongst bits of glass and destroyed pillow.

Mickey's mum, possibly in a much calmer voice than I would use, instructed Mickey to stay still while she cleaned up the glass around him.  Then I think she stayed with him until he was safely asleep and unable to think of more scenery to construct in his room.

Mickey still has toys and a bed in his room.

But I have not seen any more pictures there.

The end.

Christmas lights

Tonight we were out trawling the streets of Brisbane stalking houses and stickybeaking everywhere, invading privacy and trampling the grass, yahooing and cavorting through the suburbs.

We were looking at Christmas lights.

That strange obsession that people have to cover their houses in flashing lights and colours and Santas doing all sorts of crazy things, and then they let other people come and look at it all.  We must have seen thousands and thousands of dollars worth of lights tonight.

It appeared that bubbles were the 'it' item for all the cool kids at the lights party - nearly every house had a bubble machine working in the front yard filling the air with soapy wonder.

My two girls loved looking at the lights, but I tired of it quickly, and almost felt a little seizure coming on from the flashing sparkles.  We went to two streets in Belmont and Tingalpa where nearly every house on the whole street was decorated and people wandered up and down marvelling.  I felt solidarity with the dark house, the non-participants - the neighbourhood pressure must be enormous.

I like lights.  But like the very bright shiny objects they are, they are a huge distraction from what Christmas is celebrating - the slipping into the world of a tiny baby who was the very light of the world himself.