in which I ruminate on offending a farmer and cats in oxfam bags

I appear to have offended a farmer (see comments to previous entry) though only because I believed his or her comment to have come not from a farmer but from one of the two or three occasional commenters who regularly frequent this blog. I apologise to the farmer for calling him/her an idiot although I would prefer not to drive a tractor thanks, in fact I think it would suck. For me.

In other recent news, Bela got inside an Oxfam bag. Mia and I watched most of the first season of The Sopranos and I made a pretty good looking loaf of bread. Oh, and Saturday night.

First was Debbie's exhibition of drawings at that gallery over the road from the Standard in Fitzroy. The drawings were incredible! I remember a while ago she said she was doing some drawings for an exhibition and I kind of had nothing to say as I had no awareness of her artistic bent (I was sure she had one, but I had no idea of its type). Most of the drawings were like picture book illustrations in a picture book where you'd say, too bad even if I do know someone whose birthday is coming up, I'm buying this book for myself. There were some great drawings of axlotls and also some really nice ones of the big animal face sign (as you can see I am vague on the detail though I believe Wayne D has written about this before) in Elizabeth St. And also some animals looking through holes in walls. And Mia brought a terriffic fox one which Shane rather ludicrously described as being a bandicoot. Then we went to Peta and Greg's. Greg has a toothache, Peta made some pumpkin seeds baked (?) in soy sauce which were excellent and Paul and Karla came round and I bored Paul talking about Paul Fussell and Ern Malley (did you know they went out?) and then we went to Shane and Olivia's I'm not sure why but it gave me a chance to present Shane with Kirstie Alley's book How to Lose Your Ass blah blah blah which he seemed to respond too positively to so I took it back. Then we went to Colin's 40th. We gave him a present, Barbara Dane's album I Hate the Capitalist System, mainly for the title, because Colin does hate the capitalist system. So do I actually, but it was his birthday. The party was at the Trades Hall and there was 80s music and a big video screen, and I had a fairly detailed discussion with someone who I won't name we were talking about Broadmeadows station precinct as an activity centre because she was involved in a competition design for the future of B'meadows station area and I was saying how I thought it was a great idea to do a land swap to get a visual connection between Broady central and our open space and how great our space was and that it had a wetlands and she said 'how hard is it to make a wetland? You just let everything get wet'. And turned around and started talking to someone else. Funny. Then we went to a party at 6Hope St, in the house Mia lived in 10 years before, chiefly to have a look around. The theme of the party was The Jungle and there was someone who looked about 10 dressed as a big banana and I was sitting on the arm of a couch and some person with plastic adders in his hair kept banging me on the back with his snake heads. Mia said the carpet used to be orange. The living room had a huge range (the house was probably about 1920) that stretched the length of the wall and contained an old stove at one end, a cupboard in the middle that must once have been something else, and a fireplace at the other end. Very unusual.

Anyway considering I have a massive amount of marking to do I have got quite a bit of that done and more besides.

It was exciting to see that someone out of Troyka are starting a Troyka site (see other comment on previous entry) though there's not much there at the moment, just some pictures/handbills/reviews that take a long time to load if you have dialup.