February, 2012 - Sounds like wish

22 February, 2012

366 unusual things: days 49-53

18th Feb – Doing some exercises in the book How to think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven steps to genius everyday (Michael Gelb), I noticed after a few pages that the cover of my notebook, a gift from a son, says ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius’ (Oscar Wilde).

19th Feb – Removed a metal and glass shower door and replaced it with a rod and curtain. The splash of the shower is no longer tinny and echoey, but soft like rain on porcelain.

20th Feb – This morning a Housing tenant, the one who exposed himself to the ATM camera at the local shops, is getting into a fluoro yellow hatchback in a fire-engine red business shirt, a blonde woman at the wheel.

21st Feb – Today I noticed that I have 22 followers, many of whom I’ve never heard from. They follow me like shy phantoms.

22nd Feb – A few weeks ago I ordered some fabric online for the first time. I wanted this dark red organza with orange and yellow checks, as it is in the sample online.

But this is what I got: a bold gold cage embroidered onto look-at-me red. With turquoise and cream triangles. It was one of those ‘ha ha ha, well, that didn’t work’ moments.

22 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 22nd Feb, Where I work

I sometimes work in various people’s homes as a tutor, so I can’t show you those places. But most of the time I work at home. I run a household and I translate. At the table on the deck out the back I translate passages by hand, and then at the desk at the front of the house, I type it up. In the first stage, I need four items: a French novel, a French-English dictionary, a pad and a pen. When I’m working at the outside table, this is what it looks like:

21 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 21st Feb, Fave photo of me

Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais, Auguste Rodin, 1889) in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Australia here in Canberra is my absolute all-time favourite sculpture. For me, the burghers can make a bad day better. And a good day ticklish.

I sometimes come to the sculpture garden just to sit and write. Behind these gum trees there’s a lake and beneath them are bushes where blue fairy wrens jump and scrummage on the ground around the benches. Magic. I stop at Rodin’s burghers on every visit and think about the action and life he sculpted into inanimate rock. This is not ‘still life’ like most sculpture. I love that about the French.

This photo was taken a few winters ago.

Burghers of Calais, Auguste Rodin, National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden

20 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 20th Feb, Handwriting

I remember the moment I saw this verse in a calligrapher’s studio. Some friends were, at that period, busy making money, buying possessions and reading books about getting rich. The verse made complete sense and I bought a framed version immediately. Recently, a German calligrapher, a pen friend, asked me to send him a handwritten verse, so I picked this one to write out for him. Here’s my practice version of what I sent:

19 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 19th Feb, Something I hate to do

I have over the years tried to teach myself to read music, play the guitar and the piano. I can never remember what the written musical notes mean, I hate hitting wrong keys or plucking the wrong string, I hate my incompetency. Neither my brain nor my fingers want to do it and I refuse to try again. Yet, blessed beyond my dreams, I have sons who can play pieces like Beethoven’s Sonata Quasi una Fantasia, which I more easily remember as Moonlight Sonata.

Here’s Luke at his piano yesterday:

18 February, 2012

366 unusual things: days 44-48

13th Feb – Realised today that some people won’t read blogs. Even if they’re writers.

14th Feb – In my bed tonight I’m hearing, from the room in front of me, one son teaching himself a new song, singing and playing on his guitar erratically, and from the room behind, recorded heavy metal music played by another son on his computer.

15th Feb – At the National Library this morning I drove around for 15 minutes before finding a park. I was there to read a hard-to-find book, but the spaces were all filled by tourists come to look at exhibitions.

16th Feb – Editing an article about a Melbourne coffee shop, I hesitated at the term café latte. English-speaking coffee namers seem to prefer the French word café, not caffè as it is in Italian, and latte from Italian but not au lait from French. French coffee in Italian milk.

17th Feb – Met a woman who met a man online. She has just arrived in Australia to live with him. He’s a vegetarian minimalist. She likes meat and furniture.

18 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 18th Feb, Drink

A bit of research on Google revealed that this ad for Abbots Lager was painted near Tobruk, Libya, in January 1941 by the 6th Division of the Australian Army. (‘Journey to Tobruk: John Murray – Bushman, Soldier, Survivor’ by Louise Austin).

My father wrote under the photo: ‘Australian beer is best’.

Abbots Lager sign painted by 6th Division, AIF, 1941

18 February, 2012

Weekly photo challenge: Down

I looked through the album for anything that triggered the thought ‘down’. There are resting camels, soldiers downing grog, sinking ships, broken planes, a fallen propeller, and this one, a skeleton picked clean. The seat can still hold a pilot!

The caption in the album is ‘Wrecked Bomber’.

17 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 17th Feb, Time

This clock tower is in Beirut. The caption my father wrote under the photo gave the town of Tripoli as the tower’s home, but a search for it on Google images showed me where it really is. It was built in 1934 and survived the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s. Four new clock faces with Roman numerals have replaced the faces you see here. The tower is no longer encircled by concrete, but flower beds.

The Australian troops trained in Palestine on their way to Egypt and Libya. In the war album there are a number of photographs from Lebanon, indicating they must have had rec leave in Beirut.

15 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 16th Feb, Something New

I received a few gifts on the weekend. One of them was this candle holder from one of my sons. The candle is also new. I took several shots of it burning: lights on, lights off, flash on, flash off, a compact digital camera, a larger DSLR. This photo is with the latter, lights on, flash off. I couldn’t hold the small camera steady enough and ended up with blurry candles. The DSLR shutter was quicker so the image isn’t bad.

The candle was about twice this height when I began shooting it…