I could spend days playing with this little music-making marvel…YOU HAVE TO TRY IT!
Clicking on the screen shot will take you to the recording I made… heh heh.
Category Archives: miscellaneous
A quiet spell
Solitude shows us what we should be; society shows us what we are.
—Robert Cecil
Well, I’m back…
When I said it would be quiet around here for a while, I had no idea just how quiet it would get. Not only have I not been able to use my laptop or get online because I can’t power my laptop, but during the Easter weekend my registered domain name expired, and my blog was replaced by one of those scary generic pages that are the internet equivalent of a tombstone…
“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to see if the earthly remains of smallestforest.net will be available for purchase soon… (Dies iræ! Dies illa!)”
It was a bit chilling.
But this has actually been a welcome hiatus. Like a detox for the spirit. I never really realized how much time I spent on my laptop, how much of what I do is subconsciously being auditioned as ‘material’ for this blog, nor how much of my week is spent taking and fixing up the photos, or putting the words together for it. The biggest revelation of all, during the past weeks’ internet abstinence, is that around 90% of what I do online is expendable…in real terms, my life gains so little from all these activities, that it’s not such a big loss when the whole system drops out.
Not only did life go on—minus the internet, minus smallestforest.net, minus e-mails, minus desktop applications and my entire music collection—but it seemed to get more real. I went to a smattering of exhibition openings (I even bought a small illustrated tattoo at Emily Hearn’s Taste of Ink exhibition…Yay!), ferried a new friend over to the boat for an afternoon of art talk, took long aimless walks from Dinah Beach to the esplanade in Fannie Bay just to sit and gaze at the boats in the harbour for half an hour, did stuff in my art journal, worked on embroidery projects, did a couple of paintings, made some air-hardening clay figures on which to draft patterns for some softies I want to make, wrote an amazing 38 pages (!) in my journal, and scribbled so many creative ideas down in my seedbook that I would need to hire a small team of people to carry them all out in this lifetime.
The internet can inspire, no doubt about that; there is so much wonderful stuff on here to fuel the fires of making and doing. But it can also overwhelm me to the point where I am paralyzed, addicted to looking and bookmarking, and if I didn’t regulate it, I might spend more time looking for inspiration, and not enough time alone with my own creativity and a tool in my hand! One of the most productive periods of my life was when we were living in a shack on a remote beach in a very undeveloped part of the Philippines. We had no electricity, didn’t own a laptop, there was no internet, no mobile phone, not even a small crappy camera! Yet Kris and I could barely keep up with all the ideas we were getting for things to build, make, design, paint, or do. It seemed that the more we drew from the well, the faster it filled.
And while I enjoy my laptop, camera, the internet, and a hot shower (!) now that I have all these things, it is really comforting, and empowering, to know that I didn’t need it to have ideas or make beautiful things, didn’t need it to feel like I was among the happiest people on earth, and that everything could be taken away from me, tomorrow, and life would go on, as vivid and rich as ever.
Related articles
- A quiet place (angeltributes.wordpress.com)
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Rugrats and Old Biddies
A speed limit sign on the wharf at our local yacht club, Dinah Beach Cruising Yacht Association…
I thought I’d take a picture before some sourpuss complains to the committee and has it taken down.
Like this:
Bear with me…
Apple 85W MagSafe Power Adapter for 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Minor home tragedy has occurred…my Macbook’s charger got its positive and negative pins crossed, yesterday (ahem, while I won’t mention any names, I’d like to point out that it was the Mr. Handy Man of the house who re-wired the plug…because he said I’d gotten them mixed up and had wired it wrong. Hah!), made an awful sizzling noise, and gave off the acrid fumes of deep fried circuit boards…all in the one second before I could run to unplug the thing.
So. No charger until I order a new one. Mine was modified to plug into a automobile’s cigarette lighter socket and charge straight from a 12-volt DC battery—without using an energy inefficient inverter—by the effing geniuses at MCT, Inc.…seriously, I owe these guys, big time, for the technology I enjoy whilst living on a boat out in the harbor…these are my real heroes, not the pikers at Apple)
That’s nearly 200 smackeroos…thank you very much, Apple, for being such a bunch of snobs and designing the oh-so-exclusive, nobody-else-is-allowed-to-manufacture, fits-with-nothing-else-on-the-planet Magsafe Adapter.
In the meantime, the Macbook battery that they said lasted 8 hours, lasts 4, if you’re lucky. If I wanted to blog or check e-mail and RSS posts, I’d have to row ashore everyday, cycle into town, and plug my laptop into the power grid at the library or something. Weh. I’d much rather stay home and go into seriously intense creative mode. Things are going to be a bit quiet around here until my new charger arrives from the U.S. Sorry ’bout that.
In the meantime, go and check out Catherine Frere-Smith’s little embroidered bird softies, which have me in a paroxysm of love and envy at the moment. She was going to be my next über embroiderer, but it can’t wait till my power struggles are resolved…you really should go and have a look at this fresh blog post now.
Like this:
Ah, and there goes my Pinterest account…
Oh, I know Pinterest is already working, and quickly, on the big problems they have been having with copyright issues…so deleting my account wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to rumors of lawsuits or anything like that.
But I was never comfortable using Pinterest…often because I would look at someone else’s pin, trying to find the source for an image (because I want to know who made it), and there wouldn’t be any information or links back to the original. There were just too many unacknowledged images on my boards, too many re-pins that, when I looked into it, didn’t have attribution. It was such a mess (and I was so mortified that I had been doing this to other people’s images!) that I deleted my account tonight. It just seemed easier than going through all my pins, deleting the ones I couldn’t trace to source.
I’ll wait till Pinterest has sorted its shit out before starting up again. So sorry to all the Pinterest followers I’m dropping, but I’d hate to think I encouraged anyone to re-pin an unattributed image that I’d used wrongly.
To be quite honest, I wasn’t using it very much anymore; I found all those images overwhelming. Spend too much time looking at other people’s original work and you might not be able to come up with your own! It was like being raped in the eyeballs by Pantone swatches: cupcakes, quilts, wedding decorations, dresses…all higgledy-piggledy and terribly, well, preoccupied with the acquisition of consumer goods, and with self-delusion: “If I can’t own it, at least it’s mine on Pinterest!”
I found that looking for too long made me start to want things…things that I didn’t need, that I didn’t even really want, that wouldn’t make me happier than I am, and that, when I finally got my hands on them, I probably wouldn’t use after the two-week shiny-new-toy phase had passed. It just does that to you…convinces you that you want/need all this…stuff! There were some good things, of course, but most of it was just ordinary junk, but in pretty colors. Blargh, I’d kill myself if I had more than two things together in one room that used the rainbow as a color scheme. I’m not even sure that the rainbow can be called a colour scheme*…when you’re 14, the rainbow is a color scheme. But I’m not 14. Anymore. And I’m so glad my mom refused to paint my bedroom walls with balloons arranged in rainbow stripes, when I was!
*it’s a spectrum…you’re meant to choose a few hues, and leave the rest. That is a scheme.
As for my own images, I wish I could say something cool about the Creative Commons permission I put on my online images, but it’s all pretty straightforward and uninteresting. Share alike. Attribution would be mighty decent of you. Non-commercial, though I’ll be honest and tell you I can’t be arsed to enforce anything, legally. I did, however, tell a woman to “drop dead” in 2003, and she obliged the next morning. Also, I put on a curse on someone in highscool, and her partner recently killed himself, I was told. Just sayin’. *laughs*
Banksy was cool before anyone else, and nobody does the Copyleft magnanimity better than he does. You’ll find this gem on his website, under the ironically-titled ‘Shop’ heading:
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- Pinterest Could Have Trouble From Getty Images (webpronews.com)
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Who is dreaming whom?
Something that has repeatedly happened to me since I was a child is this: Just moments before sighting a wild animal, I will think about that animal. I have encountered several snakes, an owl, a scorpion, crocodiles, rats, monkeys and something I still haven’t been able to identify (it was following the sailboat at night. It was as long as the sailboat…)
Examples? I was sitting at a picnic table, writing, and the image of a scorpion entered my head. Idly, I’d bend over to scratch a mosquito bite on my leg and, glancing at the ground, would see the scorpion, a few inches from my feet. Several times I have thought of snakes, and looked up, or down at the path before my feet, to spot one right away (one of those times, it was a python, and not outdoors or anything…it was slithering over the top of the books on my desk, right in front of me!)
Today, as I was flipping through my library of photographs in iPhoto, I stopped to look at some (rather washed-out and over-exposed) shots of crocodiles that I have spotted near our houseboat. I reflected that I hadn’t seen a crocodile lurking around Sadgroves Creek in over 5 months, and thought it was about time one made its appearance. We have a reputation (“crocodile infested Darwin,” remember? It’s on my About page) to uphold! Because of the past occurrences, I even said to myself, “Bet it’s out there, now…”
A bit later I got up to roll a cigarette, went to open a window, and there was the croc…right next to our boat, floating brazenly on the surface for everyone to see, and it was directly below my window. It was not such a tiny baby crocodile, either…this one was pretty darn big for Darwin Harbour (there are traps everywhere; the authorities try to keep the city’s harbour relatively croc-free.) At the sound of the window banging open it raised its head just a little, and I swear to God it looked me straight in the eye. Then it hunkered down in the water, made itself a little less obvious, turned around and made off past a neighbouring boat and off into the distance.
I was left musing over whether my crocodilian thoughts had summoned this crocodile from somewhere? Had I perhaps conjured it out of thin air? Or whether my thoughts were simply a response to the crocodile’s thoughts about me? “Come to the window, lovey, I’m waiting just outside! Hey! Hi, there! Have you still got that fat orange cat?”
If these encounters with scorpions and large reptiles were real, was I the summoner, or the summoned? Or, if they were figments of an overactive imagination, were they my imaginings? Or was I theirs?
Like this:
*fingering my worry beads*
Butterflies in the stomach, and I’m not even out of Darwin!
One of the biggest worries on my mind right now, just as I am about to leave for the airport, is that: because I couldn’t get a direct flight to Kuala Lumpur, I booked two flights…the first from Darwin to Bali, and the second from Bali to KL. This is only the second time I’ve flown overseas (we usually travel by sailboat, and inter-island by ferry) so I didn’t realize when I was booking flights that I should allow a good two hours between one flight and the next, to check in and clear security and all that. My departure to KL is 30 minutes from my arrival in Bali. By that time, even without luggage to collect, the gates and check in counters should be closed, I’ve been told. It’s a promo flight, so there’s no changing things now. Hoo, boy!
My deepest, visceral desire right now is to rock back and forth, moaning and groaning quietly.
Thank God I have Brian Thacker‘s book “Where’s Wallis?” with me…his travel misadventures make mine seem light, by comparison. It will probably, in the end, all boil down to paying more money for a second flight to KL, if I miss the one I mis-booked. That’s okay, but I only have 400 dollars, so another flight will leave me quite poor. Will deal with that. Just get me to KL!
But I am trying to stay optimistic about it…I may just get ushered onto my plane by friendly, sympathetic crew who hold up the pilot, at the very last minute. Something dramatic with the whoel airport rooting for me as I run by…arrive on plane, flushed and glared at by everyone else, but happy. It’s a crappy scene from a la-di-da Hollywood movie, totally unrealistic, I know I am deluding myself. But I will move with that happy ending in mind, anyway…meaning, I’ve got my running shoes on, I am ready to kick and elbow my way off the plane in Bali ahead of everyone else, and ready to sprint through an unknown airport, jump hurdles, bellow across the room at the boarding gate security, papers in hand, in a desperate attempt to get on my flight. Ready, in other words, to make an utter disgrace of myself.
*groannn groann groannn…rock, rock, rock*
What’s the worst that can happen? I end up living in an airport, like Tom Hanks? No, it will boil down to monetary punishment, I think, and the sour looks of the unimpressed staff who have to deal with enough shit without this idiot woman who books her flights, one on top of the other, as though she were hopping city buses.
Kris, the most hardcore traveller I know, is unsympathetic. “You’ll learn,” he shrugs. “You’ll find a way.” I am devastated, but I know he’s right. He won’t even loan me another two hundred dollars in case I have to buy another ticket or pay a penalty. LOL Nothing that really teaches you something is ever easy or unpleasant, and I don’t hold it against him at all. I just feel like knocking my head against a concrete wall for getting myself into this mess. It will not KILL me, I’m sure of that, and you’ve heard the old adage, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger…” This I should know, I’ve been in many worse travel situations before…
so why do I feel like throwing up? Keep your fingers crossed for me! Here’s hoping my next post will be from an internet cafe in KL!
Related articles
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- Airport marathon….. – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (travelpod.com)
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Shop update : : down to just one…
(This is boring—and I have procrastinated as long as I could!—but it’s got to be done)
This is just to let you all know that I have closed my Madeit shop. I mean for good…asked the admin to delete my account a couple of weeks ago.
I am so sorry to lose my Madeit shop…I loved the fact that it was an Australian-based site, and that sensible, considerate Australians preferred it because they were buying locally handmade things instead of stuff from ETSY shops overseas. But I have had a nightmare of a time logging into my account this past month…most days I wait for an hour for my account page to load. Some days the page just never loads.
I have no idea what’s wrong…it seems no one else has complained of a similar problem connecting to Madeit, and I am certainly not blaming them for my troubles (if anything, I like to blame evil overlord Telstra’s wireless broadband dongle for everything that’s wrong in the world, including poverty and the miserable quality of clothespins these days…) But it has been very frustrating trying to get into my shop just to perform basic actions like pay my monthly fees or add a product…can you imagine how infuriating it would be if I sold something and couldn’t view the order, or reply to the buyer? I had to close the shop down before something like that happened.
Which means that I only have one outlet for my handmade things now, and that’s my ETSY shop. I hope my patriotic Australian buyers will still consider visiting my shop, even if it’s hosted by a non-Australian website.
But wait! Before you go to check out my ETSY shop, now, I have to tell you that my ETSY shop is also closed—for just two weeks—because I am going to Malaysia tomorrow.
