just a couple of things...

been a bit busy here this week....i meant to blog on thursday about something that we did on wednesday night but lost track of time, so will do it now!

so, on wednesday night trent and i had dinner at chez jardin de botanique (thats my made up french). this was the view from our 'table':

then we went to the sydney peace prize lecture inside said opera house to hear patrick dodson talk. his inspiring lecture was preceeded by a fantastic and moving welcome to country, and archie roach and ruby hunter singing, and then followed by the moorambilla voices, the most fantastic little choir ive ever seen, and the kids were so awesome and beautiful they made me cry. i was in a choir when i was young (and have been in one again as an adult) and their joy in singing and performing brought back a lot of memories.

the welcome to country (sorry, i cant find a good link to explain what this means to international readers...but it could be a good research project!) made me very aware of how i feel about living deep in traditional aboriginal land up here - you cant help but feel it every time you look around, and the interesting connection between this and childhood memories is my returning to therapy this week. it went really well and i like her a lot, although i had to put aside my thoughts about her being white south african. this doesnt matter in terms of therapy, but it has been interesting since moving here to see the predominance of white south africans, so much so that the local franklins has a south african food section. i bring this up because it strikes me as ironic that in a country that is forever banging on about assimilation and ghetto-isation of migrants (see recent debate about the islamic school in camden, for example), no one ever said anything about all the south africans living up here. again, i dont care where migrants live or what they do there, so long as they share their yummy food, but as a whitey migrant (polish on my dads side) in a black country, i feel a little uneasy about the good life i have and the 5 acres i'm having it on. i wish more people were just a little bit uneasy about it as well, maybe then a change might come to australia as well....

on a lighter note, yesterday i had the great pleasure of driving 4 hours to be told my cobblestone pullover was twisted. see, i went down to helen's at bundanoon to catch up with george and bells and to meet some lovely new canberra knitters as well, and to try yet again the art of spindle spinning, at which i am irredeemably remedial, and bells asked how the cobblestone was going, and i pulled it out and george and bec say, almost in unison, is that twisted? of course, i had no idea what they meant. i always read that line in the sock pattern that says 'join to knit in the round being careful not to twist the stitches' but that only happened to me the very first time i knit socks on my own and i saw straight away there was a problem. i didnt even think about it on a circular cable. i just joined them up and off i went, and i had done about an inch when it was spotted. i am of course entirely thankful to my fellow knitters, who made sure my cast on and rejoin was not twised, but i cant help but feel that all my recent talk about technique kind of rings a bit hollow today!

i did pick up a couple of things from out of helens little lounge room store, but i was quite restrained - some dark stripey sock yarn, because dark sock yarn is hard to find:

and some 5 ply to make fetchings:

it was a lovely day and i had a lovely drive home and when i got out of the car there was the smell of bush fire smoke (i think they have been back burning this weekend) followed by the most amazing sunset:

everything is ok, today.

k xx