We spent a pleasant evening in Sydney with friends sitting on their high rise inner city balcony sucking up the stunning Sydney skyline while sipping expensive champagne. Earth hour, I note, was a bit of a fizzer. Most of those office block lights stayed on. We turned ours off and ate spicy pumpkin risotto by moonlight, enjoying the antics of the fruit bats overhead.I’ve been so busy these past few weeks. Overloaded with reading, my own writing, other people’s writing, the selection and shaping of stories and the administration that goes with such things. Graphic design and photographic work for writing-related events, all mixed in with the general business of living. I swear I go in to my day job for a bit of time out & R&R! Something definitely wrong with the picture somewhere.My story ‘Dead Low’ was accepted for Midnight Echo 6, the science fiction horror special issue.…
Vacuuming around my father
I’ve been trying to teach my father how to use a laptop computer for about six years now. Maybe seven. Just simple things like creating documents, saving them and printing. He can’t retain the information – and not because he sustained a brain injury last year. It might as well be astrophysics, rocket science, alchemy. He can’t learn it. He won’t learn it. All I can do is try.My father hates the modern world, modern comprising pretty much anything that’s taken place since 1965. He spends his time destroying things he’s collected all his life. Letters to and from relatives, paintings by his brother. Old sketchbooks of what he considers minor efforts. His own paintings too.Dad is eighty, the last survivor of four siblings. Today when I went up to take him lunch and do a little bit of housework, he informed me he’d destroyed a box of his sister’s…
whiling away teh hours
So let’s see… activities across the last few days have included a visit from Canberra’s lovely yet rarely-sighted-in-the-wild Michael Barry and his family, lunch in leafy Kirrawee with Keith Stevenson and Nicola O’Shea. I’m still recovering from the industrial grade Jamie Oliver chocolate mousse they served as desert. I think I’ve passed the diabetic coma danger zone but I’ll be sticking to the boiled carrots and lettuce soup regime for the rest of the week just in case. Keith’s accepted my short story ‘Beautiful’ for his next anthology Anywhere But Earth, so I’m pretty chuffed about that.We saw ‘Predators’ at the cinema. The movie was fine but the print so dark, grainy and fuzzy that I really have to wonder why we bother with cinema when we have a crisp and clear plassy & blu ray set up at home. Plus, our loungeroom usually contains fewer bogans and better quality…
gold!
Last night we went up to Sydney to see Spandau Ballet, supported by Tears for Fears at the Entertainment centre, courtesy of our friend Angie who had managed to score a bunch of freebies from a relative in the music industry. We went because we like Angie and the tickets were free and it was Friday night, goddamn it and we spend way too many of those parked on the couch infront of our bigarse plasma TV. I expected to be amused. The amusement actually started that morning when I went to get my nails done. When I told my beautician our plans for the evening she said ‘ooh! that sounds good — I’ve never been to the ballet’. She’s 30, meaning New Romanticism, with all its coiffed hair and frilly shirts was way before her time.I liked both these bands when I was younger, but I’d never have called…
neighbourly!
One of our neighbours just dropped round to ask if he could borrow a cup of sugar. He even had a cup in his hands! This is a guy who voluntarily mowed our lawns for us awhileback when Rob had his arm in a sling. I’m happy to live on a street where acts of neighbourly interaction are the norm.
stuff
Another fun packed weekend. Dinner on Saturday night at Mac and Suzy’s place with the gangAt which I decided to announce my exciting news – I’ve scored myself an agent! Details are posted over here as part of my interview in the AsIf snapshot project if you’re interested.Sunday the gals and I piled into a water taxi and chugged our way across the waves to Balmoral Pavilion for luncheona seriously civilised way to travel! Photos here. Behind the boat you can glimpse the gargantuan Diamond Princess cruise ship – what a whopper!Today Rob and I were invited to present an author talk to a group of senior ladies at a church hall in town. They were a fantastic audience, utterly captivated by the intricacies of the writing lifestyle. None of them were fans of science fiction, primarily because they weren’t all that familiar with either what it was or where…