Getting organised

I have actually been quite busy the last couple of days, despite feeling ridiculously bad. Thanks to a combination of hormones and too much diet coke I found my self awake far too early on Thursday morning. After lying awake for a couple of hours I decided to get up and go to a dawn service. It was either the cold, lack of sleep or I picked up a bug because I have had a hellish sore throat ever since.

Yesterday I went to check out a quilt show at St Paul’s Anglican Church and then spent the afternoon helping out at the Vision Patchwork stand at Art beat (Ipswich Art Festival). There were markets, bands playing, lots of activities for the kids. (For those Doctor Who fans out there – there was also this – http://www.hireatardis.com.au/.) It was nice to see so many people out and about enjoying themselves. Though I ended up trapped on the wrong side of the street from my car and had to wait for the hour-long parade to go past. I could have tried to walk round it I suppose, but I wasn’t sure how many streets were closed off and I wasn’t really expecting it to go for that long.

I have actually been sewing again and have been getting quite a few smaller things finished. And…wait for it…I actually got round to opening an etsy store. Then I put all the things I had finished up for sale in the etsy store (etsy.com/shop/Helsmart). And while I was doing all things electronic I also added some extra photos to my zazzle store. I am turning into a regular capitalist. If anyone has any tips for marketing on line stores I would love to hear them.

Apologies, because this blog has kind of been a bit all over the place, but I am going to leave you with a rather cool photo. It was taken on the way to the train station on Wednesday morning. I walk for a couple of hundred metres along a path that is separated from the train line by a chain link fence and on Wednesday the fence was covered all over in spiders webs that had been created over night.

Walking to Work

I have a 15 to 20 minute walk from the train station to the office every week day morning (and back again in the evenings). How long it takes usually depends on how many other people are walking the same route and how many traffic lights I hit. I like to kid myself that it counts as exercise, even though I am not even raising a sweat. Occasionally though, the walk throws me a curve ball. This week I had two of them.

The first was a guy lying on the ground at a bus stop. Literally just lying there, flat-out like a plank. At first glance it looks like he was dead, he was that still. So here’s the question. Do I stop and give him a nudge and ask if he’s alright? No one else is stopping, there are two guys sitting next to him on a park bench who don’t even seem the slightest bit concerned and what if he is just a homeless guy who’s quite happy having a sleep on the ground? Well not happy, but that’s the best place he’s got and he’d rather sleep than be woken up.

I’d like to think that I am the kind of person who would stop and help someone in need, but in reality I’m probably not. I’m one of those people who’d end up on the news after heartlessly stepping over the dead person on the street. Mostly because I’m usually so far away with the fairies that I wouldn’t even notice that they were there. But this week I’ve noticed ‘out like a plank’ guy and I kind of feel I should do something, but I’m not sure and I’m curious as to why the bench guys haven’t done anything. Maybe they have already checked and know he’s quite happy lying there? Was he lying there when they sat down or did he lie down there afterwards? Does anyone actually sit down next to a guy lying on the ground without checking on him first? Somehow that seems so much worse than walking by. Not that someone doing worse makes my badness any better, but I take the salves to my conscience where ever I can get them.

Thankfully just as I am almost past still thinking – should I stop, or not – the guy woke up and started to stand up and resolved my dilemma for me. It left me with the sense that I am really a bad person because I wasn’t actually going to stop.

The second curveball was this.

It wasn’t there last week. For a moment I briefly held the thought that the government was being lovely and investing in public art, and then I went and had a closer look. According to the plaque it’s not new. It’s just been moved. So instead of investing in public art they are taking art they already have and plonking it down in the middle of where people walk. It smacks a little bit of shuffling papers on your desk so your boss thinks you’re working.

Ono a more positive note I am actually doing stuff, I have been sewing and have finished three table runners in the last week. Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to do with them.

Not a lot going on

Well actually a fair bit has been going on, but it is all the kind of mundane stuff that would make for a fairly tedious blog. My house has been tidied, my cupboards filled with food (I even have vegetables), the lawn has been mowed, gardens have been weeded and a new Grevillea Moonlight has been planted to replace the front bit of fence which I knocked down last week after backing my car into it for the fifth time.

All is well, except for the fact that I think something has died in my bedroom wall and is now stinking up the place. I have whacked a load of air freshener in there. So now my bedroom smells like something died in a lavender patch. I am hoping it is something small like a gecko which will decompose fast and stop smelling fairly quickly and I don’t have to do anything ridiculous like ripping out asbestos laden walls to find it.

I did have a spurt of energy yesterday and I started pinning a few smaller pieces of patchwork ready for quilting, but I got distracted by a book. I have been reading “Three Crooked Kings” by Matthew Condon and it was surprisingly more interesting that I thought it would be. It is basically about police corruption in Queensland from the 1940s to the 1970s. Having only come to Queensland as an adult I don’t actually know a lot about local history and the book puts in place a context for a lot of things that people regularly refer to like the Fitzgerald Inquiry. It seemed to be making a case that one of the cops who later went to jail for corruption probably wasn’t as bad as he was made out to be. Though saying that he was only a little bit corrupt, and not as bad as the other guys, is probably not much of an excuse. But I don’t really know enough about what he went to jail for to properly judge. It was basically a scene setter rather than a piece of investigative journalism, no smoking guns, but a nice summary of what everyone probably already knows and it managed to sustain a nice pace that kept you interested and reading through to the end.