This week, or so it seems, has been full of good and bad things trying to cancel each other out.  Take my new shiny thing, for example.  What could possibly be bad about a tablet that transforms itself into a mini-laptop? you may ask.  It’s a good question and the answer is thus: I managed to acquire a defective model.  Fortunately, I now have my hands on a replacement which is behaving perfectly, by which I mean the battery isn’t dying overnight and the screen isn’t flickering strangely at me.  This may be construed as a serious plus.

The good/bad scenario also plays itself out at work where the incredibly good fortune of being gifted with a second monitor is outweighed by the fact that the graphics card can’t handle the pressure and keeps crashing whenever I use Photoshop.  Fun times indeed.

All in all, it was nice to encounter a good thing that was happy to stand on its own, which came in the form of a blog award from the most delightful Kirsti from Melbourne on my Mind.

Of course, it comes with Rules:

1. Thank the person who gave me the award and link back to them.

Thanks, Kirsti!  Please see your link just above.

2. Nominate up to five others for the award.

Coming up just after the list of rules.

3. Let them know via a comment on their blog.

This shall be done.

4. Post the award on your blog.

Done and done.

And now, I am faced with the difficult task of choosing up to five of my favourite blogs with under 200 followers to recommend here (in no particular order).*

Firstly, we have Jen, whose blog – Flipped Frogs Live Here – is full of rambling on writing, craft markets, angry birds in scarves and much, much more.  Jen is going to be a famous published author one day; you heard it here first.

Next is Gillian with Medical History, a blog you must read because you need to know all about the mysterious ailments suffered by famous figures in history.  Some you may have suspected, others will come as a surprise.  You’ll learn, you’ll laugh, you’ll demand more.  (Gillian is also going to be a famous published author one day.  I am assembling a modest collection of yet-to-be-authors.)

Now we come to Clare, who started her Globe-combing blog when she headed off on adventures overseas.  She has very generously continued her blog now she’s back in Australia and you can expect pretty much anything to turn up here, from her adventures in archaeology, to photos from the middle of nowhere, to links that will lead you to fascinating articles.

Next in line is Laura, whose blog’s title – Girl Plus Everything Else – is one hundred percent accurate when it comes to describing what you’ll find on her blog.  Among other things, Laura shares posts on her life as a vet nurse, including many squee-worthy photos of baby animals.  There is a genuine risk of dying of cute when she posts said photos.

Finally, I nominate Nef and her blog The Blytonly Obvious.  She may not have had a chance to update it recently, but it’s still worth a visit so you can browse through and enjoy the posts she’s already written.  Nef is, essentially, re-reading childhood favourites and examining them with an adult (and rather witty) eye.  She began with the Malory Towers books but is branching out into many others.

Read!  Enjoy!  It’s good for you.

* There’s one blog I’d love to link you all to but I am hampered somewhat in this due to the fact that it doesn’t exist yet.  One day, Bec will make the world a better place by starting her blog of awesome but I’m afraid all we can do for now is simply imagine how things will be when it finally happens.

Once upon a time, I didn’t care that much about footwear, beyond ensuring it was waterproof and vaguely matched what I was wearing.  Then it all changed. Somehow, I became addicted to the sound of a pair of heels tapping with authority over any given floor surface (and presumably slightly damaging same). I fell for the colours, the adornments, the different styles of heel (especially the retro ones).  I spent so much time in one particular shoe store that the girls who work there started to recognise me (slightly worrying).

It was a whirlwind of delight.

If there’s one word that doesn’t describe this shoe addiction, it’s this: practical.  When people ask me how I can stand wearing heels all day, I jokingly reply that they’re sitting-down shoes.  Because when you get right down to it, they are not comfortable.  And lately, that fact is beginning to outweigh the fact that they are beautiful.

I mean, just look at these ones, for example:

They’re gold, they’re satiny, they’re gorgeous.  They were, in short, the perfect pair of shoes to wear to a wedding a couple of years ago.  Well, I say “wear”, but I spent most of my time dancing barefoot.

Even when the shoes aren’t too uncomfortable, I still couldn’t imagine donning them for my two kilometre walk home.  And I can forget about running anywhere in a hurry, unless I feel like breaking my ankles and possibly my neck along the way.

So why do I wear them?  Why do women wear them?  They’re not empowering, not really.  They may look spectacular but they’re just hiding the fact that the balls of your feet are killing you and you can’t walk anywhere with speed.  If anything, that makes me feel vulnerable.

These are the sort of thoughts that fill my head on a regular basis.  Well, that and the omnipresent Why aren’t you writing a book?  You should be writing a book.  Book talk aside, I decided it was time to try and find some pretty shoes that were a little flatter than my current trend and that might, at a pinch, be suited to traipsing across random paddocks in the hunt for abandoned buildings.  It all sounds simple, right?

I found a couple of pairs the other night that I thought would fit the bill perfectly.  It didn’t start well, though: the first place would only allow purchases through a paypal account, which I don’t have and do not intend to have.  Shrugging that annoyance aside, I attempted to purchase the other pair of shoes instead, only to come up with a website error every time I tried to log in.  It seems as though the universe (or the part that dwells within the internet) is not keen on my acquiring non-high-heeled shoes.  I shake my fist at you, universe!

I’m pretty sure this shift in heel height is going to be good for me in the end, but I can’t help feeling sad about bidding farewell to a collection of gorgeous shoes.  Maybe I can create some sort of installation artwork out of them or something.

Let’s take a break from all this talk of writing (thereby avoiding any subsequent talk of whether or not I’ve been doing any of the aforementioned activity) and turn our attention back to photography.  Things have felt a little sparse, photograph-wise.  The Chef has been working all weekends, which is more lucrative, certainly, but it leaves me with very little opportunity to drag him off on random roadtrips with my camera.  I haven’t even spent much time behind the camera at work, unless you count almost all of Friday.  Seriously, two weeks go by without so much as a click of a shutter and then I’m suddenly in demand.

It all means I am presenting you with photos taken over the Easter weekend.  Those who are paying attention will realise that said weekend occurred over a month ago now and will most likely conclude that I am failing miserably in my bid to post photos with anything resembling alacrity.  This conclusion is as reasonable as it is inevitable.

Anyway, to return to Beechworth on the occasion of the Easter weekend.  I went up to spend some time with the parents while the Chef worked (see previous point re: weekends) and immediately set to with my camera.  First in the firing line was a recently-repaired clock (it keeps the time well but hasn’t seemed to grasp the need for the chime to match the hour), the Ma’s Easter decorations and the parents’ cat, Tisha.

You may think she’s looking pensive, but actually, she’s just watching the Da fetch her dinner dish.

Later, the parents continued with the time-consuming task of sorting through old negatives for ones deemed worthy of scanning.  There are literally boxes and boxes of negatives and I am of the firm belief that they should all be scanned, regardless of how long it would take.  The past must be preserved!  Particularly if someone else is doing the preserving!

The television in the photo below was actually made by the Da in the 1950s.  It’s in a museum now (no, really, it is) and readers of The Age‘s Green Guide would have seen it quite a few times last year.

Things tend to be the complete opposite of quiet in Beechworth over the Easter weekend and the cause of it all is the Golden Horseshoes Festival.  The highlight of this not-quietness is the Golden Horsehoes Parade, which is held on the Saturday.  I’d never actually seen the parade before, so I thought I should change that and off I headed with my camera attached, hoping the good weather would hold.

The parade starts with a horse shod with golden horseshoes.  There’s a reason for this, although I’m afraid I won’t be sharing it here, because I’ve forgotten what it is.  Instead, here is the very dapper gentleman riding said golden-shoed horse.  Missing from this shot: the golden horseshoes.

I had found myself a spot towards the end of the parade and soon discovered I was right next to a woman who seemed to know everyone in town (or at least, in the parade).  Almost everyone stopped while she chatted to them, giving me plenty of time to take photos of them thus disarmed.  It was wonderfully convenient.

I took several hundred photos (no, really – several hundred) so you will see I’ve been quite restrained with what I’ve posted here.  The remaining photos may end up on flickr at some point, so keep an eye out there if you’d like to see some more of the parade.  It really was a great deal of fun, even when the people on the bakery float were throwing bread and dough into the crowd.  In fact, the reason the baker on the bike is looking right at the camera is because he was pulling out a piece of stale bread to throw right at me.

Finally, a photo of a backlit dandelion spotted on my walk back to the parents’ house.  I love the magic that is backlight: from one side, a dandelion can be outlined in glorious light; from the other, it’s just a boring old dandelion.

So that was my Easter weekend.  Stay tuned for more stories such as When We Went to Gaol in Geelong and What I’m Doing Instead of Writing.  It’s unmissable!

At work today, we were discussing the deeply philosophical question of what you would do if you won the lottery.  (Other topics of discussion included Why Was Everyone Meowing Just Now? and Will Religion Be Redundant in 2,000 Years?)  Of course, the inevitable question arose: Would you quit your job if you won seventy million dollars?

For me, there’s an inevitable answer: DUH.

It’s not as though I don’t enjoy my job, because I very much do.  The people are a lot of fun (even when we’re not meowing) and my job description might as well have been tailored in close consultation with me long before I’d even heard about it, and yet…  My original plan, way back in secondary school, was to acquire myself a regular paying job in order to provide myself with food, shelter and clothing while I focussed on writing.

I can safely say I have part one of that plan down pat.  That means it’s past time to start on the second part, right?  The signs are positive, I must say.  Earlier today, I was adding a couple of notes to one of my possible writing projects and I was feeling frustrated at my inability just to run off with it and start going to town on the story.  Alas, I’m not entirely sure that would have gone down well with my immediate superiors, so I had to restrain myself.  But that in itself is what is known as a Very Good Thing, mostly due to the fact that studying writing at university sucked the fun out of it and it is a pure pleasure to remind myself that I do, indeed, like the act of stringing words together in the hope of creating a story.

To aid this whole writing for fun business, I convinced the Chef I needed a new shiny thing, thus:

An Asus Transformer Prime!  A tablet and netbook in one, pretty much.  It is quite bizarre to be typing away at something, then pausing to tap at a button on the screen.  It’s all very exciting, though.  I have (possibly inaccurate) fantasies of toting it around with me and whipping it out at the drop of a fantastic idea, all of which will preferably occur within the easy reach of a cute little café.

So those are my twin obsessions at the moment: words and shiny things.  How conveniently they go together!

The other day, the good Jen asked me how the writing thing was going.  She knows me too well, though, does Jen, because she followed up the question with another: Or has your laziness bent kicked in?

Well, yes.

And no.

I mean, I’ve done dozens of useful things.  There’s very little dust about the house, for instance, and I have organised my stuff into magazine boxes and lined them up in a pleasing fashion.  I’ve even dusted off my writing hat and placed it upon the battery-powered TARDIS that makes entertainingly accurate TARDIS-y sounds.  (The Chef has a habit of buying me every TARDIS he ever happens to lay eyes upon.  I’m hoping that one day he’ll hit on the real one.)

But back to writing, or not-writing, as the case may be.  I have, actually, sort of, kind of, slightly, a little bit done some.  If you count copious story notes and snippets of scenes, that is (and I hope you will).  Since I decided to spend my money on Adobe Creative Suite instead of Office, I was faced with a slight dilemma when it came to writing the words down: wordpad or pen and paper?  I chose neither and settled for Scrivener instead, seeing as how I’d heard so many good things about it that it was a case of either installing the trial version or dying of curiosity.

It.  Is.  Awesome.  So far, anyway.  At this point, I want to get into drafting out some scenes just so I can play around with the corkboard section.  I’ve always been jealous of Jen’s corkboard and now I have one of my own, without all of the hassle of pins which will inevitably fall on the floor and end up in my foot in the middle of the night.

It’s all a very long way from my very first word-processors, though, which looked a little like this:

First Choice & WordPerfect 5.1

Ah, memories.  Particularly, memories of stupid First Choice randomly deciding to re-format sections of text and eating sentences all over the place.

I probably shouldn’t admit to spending ridiculous amounts of time playing with the Create a graph section in First Choice… but I will.  It truly was ridiculous.  I’d make up random sets of data just to see what they looked like in graph form, then tweak them so they looked better.  Basically, that was how I used to procrastinate in the days before the internet.

You didn’t get to choose your font; italics, bold & underline were represented by colours; you could only have a maximum of two documents open at once… and there was a lot of blue.  A lot of blue.  It’s a world away from opening up a crisp white page and deciding my default font has to be Palatino Linotype because all of my favourite books are set in that font.  (Yes, I do check the type-setting details of the books I read.  That’s normal, right?)

Is anyone else of a writerly persuasion using Scrivener?  If you have any tips or tricks to share, I’d love to hear them.  Meanwhile, I’ll concentrate on getting past my note writing phase so I can actually try out the story-writing tools on hand.

Somehow, it appears to be Friday.  And I mean a real Friday,  unlike the fake Friday I thought we were having on Tuesday.  That’s what happens when you have a public holiday in the middle of the week: it all gets very confusing, especially if said public holiday happens to feel like a Saturday and you keep having brief moments of delight at being half-way through a weekend that are abruptly cut down with the realisation that it’s not actually Saturday and you have to go to work the next day.

If you managed to make your way through that mostly comma-less sentence, please take this moment to breathe.  Better now?

And now, In honour of this actual Friday, I thought I would share four of my favourite pictures on instagram this week.

Firstly, we have Ryrie Street in Geelong.  There’ll be more on this one soon.  Much more, since the Chef and I were both armed with cameras during this particular expedition. While we were in Geelong, we happened to stop for lunch at the same shopping centre where the Failboats took a break on the first leg of our Adelaide roadtrip.  Ah, the nostalgia…  I am now filled with a burning desire to go on another roadtrip with said Failboats, although we’re somewhat hampered in this by the fact that a) we live in different states, and, b) we need to attend to our day jobs in order to afford such extravagances.  This real life thing is rather annoying at times.

Secondly, we have pretty flowers scattered on the ground.  I saw them on my walk to work but decided it was too gloomy at the time for photos.  “I’ll wait for the afternoon light on my way back!” I said.  To myself.  In my own head, just for clarity.  I don’t generally go around talking to myself out loud – that’s just crazy.  However, by the time the afternoon rolled around, the anticipated light had been replaced with rain, which was a slight down side.  On the up side, the rain had shaken a lot more flowers onto the footpath for me.

Thirdly, my cat Pickle continues to prove why she should be Australia’s Next Top Cat Model.

And finally, a pomegranate that the Sonia brought home.  It has now been turned into a sort of pomegranate saucy-syrup type thing.  Its future after this is uncertain, but may involve some sort of dessert.

The Chef is working all weekend, so I suspect there will be little in the way of photographic opportunities.  I should put the time to good use and do some writing or something.  It would be the perfect time to make a start on the literary masterpiece that could fund another Failboats roadtrip or two.

If there’s one item of clothing that stands out from being a kid, it’s gumboots.  Oh yes, gumboots.  Clumpy, rubbery, home-to-spiders gumboots.

Take, for instance, a school excursion to Sovereign Hill when I was little.  I can’t remember a single thing about the actual park; all I can remember is that it was muddy, so I was made to wear gumboots and I hated every second of it.

Then there was the moment of uncertainty and vague horror every time you slid your foot into said boots, hoping against hope that your toes wouldn’t encounter the squishy lump of a huntsman spider curled up inside.  Because that happened.  Many times.

But the most memorable gumboot moment of my childhood was captured in the photo below.  The scene was a parade of some sort at primary school – possibly something to do with book week, although I’m not sure – the mists of my past are becoming dulled with the passing of time or something (along with my ability to keep my metaphors un-mixed).  I had decided to go as the fairy Silky from The Faraway Tree so I was all dressed up in white, floaty clothes and a pair of wings the da had made from wire coathangers and cellophane.  The finishing touch?  I’ll let you see for yourself…

Yes, gumboots.  Because all fairies make sure to wear appropriate footwear for the weather, especially if their wings don’t work that well.  I know this for a fact because I thought my wings were absolutely spectacular and spent a significant amount of lunchtime seeing if they would work.  Alas, no flying occurred and I had to remain earth-bound and gumbooted for the entirity of the parade.

I managed to win a prize, so I guess my wings (and the fact that I didn’t go as Cinderella, like the three girls behind me) managed to outshine the gumboots.  Or maybe the judges just liked the idea of a practical fairy.

The Chef and I like to play the Olde Timey Game, which is neither as exciting, nor as game-like, as you might imagine.  Basically, it involves pointing out any given modern thing in an otherwise historic setting.  “Oh look, an olde timey stop sign!” or “Oh look, an olde timey plastic bag!” are the sort of things you’ll hear when the Olde Timey Game is in effect (which is pretty much always).  Yes, it is exactly as pointless as that.

Thus, when I discovered there was a market in Gisborne called the Gisborne Olde Time Market, I knew we had to go.

Three weeks ago (yes, I am continuing my trend of posting photos as promptly as possible), we finally had a chance to go to this monthly market and it was awesome.  I’d never been to Gisborne before, but I want to go back because it is just adorable and full of lovely little places to eat (although we managed to find one of the more mediocre offerings – it’s a talent).  If you want something, you’ll find it at the Olde Time Market.  And on the off chance you don’t find it, you won’t care, because you’ll have found half a dozen other things that are equally as good, if not better.

While it’s easy to want to buy everything, we somehow managed to restrain ourselves (possibly due to the fact that our car can only hold so much and there were some rather large things available).  The fudge was sadly disappointing, but the basil-infused olive oil was completely amazing and was only trumped by the chilli sauces from Jungle Rain.  Oh yes.  People at markets keep toying with my heart when they suggest their reasonably-OK chilli sauces are hot.  Watch out! they’ll say, You should be feeling the heat now.  Meanwhile, I’m trying to disguise the fact that all I’m feeling is a vast sense of aching disappointment at the complete lack of palate-scouring heat in their sauce.

With Jungle Rain chilli sauces there was no lie.  They were hot and amazing and mixed with things like strawberry or pear.  How we held back from buying a complete set of their sauces, I will never know.  All I know is we need to arrange a regular (possibly weekly) supply of these things for the rest of our natural lives.

I also bought a jaunty hat made from Harris Tweed.  Did you know there’s a Harris Tweed Authority?  Neither did I, until I took a picture of the tag in the hat.  I wish I’d also taken a picture of the guy from the Gordon Hat Shoppe because he was amazing and, not content with being about as full of personality as you can get, added to this by being in possession of a beard of outrageous awesomeness.

Finally, you know any given daytrip of mine is not complete until I’ve found an abandoned house of some description…

This is Macedon House and I found it purely because I decided to take the carpark on the right instead of the slightly closer one on the left.  It’s so gorgeous and it’s just falling apart, even though it’s heritage listed and is one of Gisborne’s earliest buildings.  If only I could adopt all of these sad, cast-off houses and homesteads…

We have to go back soon so we can a) acquire more chilli and strawberry sauce since the Chef decided to leave our bottle at a friend’s place, b) find somewhere a bit nicer for lunch this time, and, c) discover whether the amazing beardy guy from the hat shoppe would pose for a photo or two.

Once upon a time, I was writing a story.  Yes, it’s all true – this writing business is not as fictional as… the writing business.  There was a time when I took words and put them together in a vaguely meaningful fashion in an attempt to form stories.  At this particular time, I was powering my way through a story until I just stopped.  It didn’t matter what I tried, no more story was forthcoming. I had literally run out of words.

Right now, I have the opposite problem.  It feels as though I have enough words in my head to fill a shelf full of books.  So many words.  So little room.  So much time needed to waste on trivial matters such as sleep.

Clearly, I need to do something with all of these words, so it’s convenient that  I have encountered three things in the past week that all have a bearing on this writing thing.

Firstly, a thought came to me with all the subtlety of a note wrapped around a brick and tossed through the windowpane of my subconscious.  You’re not giving writing the seriousness it deserves, said the note.  It’s a fair call but it’s not as though I’m singling writing out: I tend not to treat anything with the seriousness it deserves.  Nevertheless, the paper-wrapped brick thought had a point.

Next came a post from Danielle on dreams and how the steps to achieving them are every bit as worthy as the dreams themselves.  This seemed to have an uncanny link to my aforementioned revelation: by constantly thinking of writing as a dream or some sort of magic goal, I was under-valuing the worth of the experience itself.  In other words, the paper-wrapped brick thought was proving to know more than a made-up inanimate object had any right to know.

Finally, as I was browsing the SFWA website because someone on the internet had told me to, an article title leapt out at me: How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to Writing 10,000 Words a Day.  At this point, I’d be happy with 2,000 (it would be a vast improvement over the zero words I’m currently writing each day), but I was keen to see how such an amazing improvement could be wrought.  The answers are so wonderfully logical and, more importantly, easy to adopt.  And I do wish to adopt them, please.

The result of all of this is that I am currently excited yet serious about writing.  Maybe I could actually achieve some things if I got my act together and followed the good advice that people are generous enough to share with the world.  Maybe I could actually write a short story from the notes and scenes I scribbled during various PD sessions on Monday.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

As for that story I mentioned back at the start, I’m afraid it remains at a standstill.  I wrote myself into a brick wall and, instead of doing the logical thing and back-tracking until I find the right way, I kept banging my writerly head against it in the hopes that I’d break through it before succumbing to a concussion.  It’s a stand-off of the stubborn kind.  There are more of those in my life than there should be, really.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go off and see if I can decipher the notes I scrawled on Monday.  With any luck there’ll be a story hiding amongst them somewhere.

Way back when I started on twitter, I really wanted it to be instagram.  There was only one problem with this: instagram didn’t exist at the time.  Seriously, though, the most fun I ever had on twitter was the day when I decided all of my tweets would be images.  I had so much fun setting things up and using various methods to add words to my images – it was a challenge and it was more fun saying something with a photo than with 140 characters’ worth of text.

Things between twitter and I have cooled significantly since I went on my week-long ban from social media.  We haven’t really been talking.  Whenever we get together, there’s a sense of obligation in everything we do.  It feels like we keep saying the same things to each other over and over again.

So when instagram suddenly popped up and mentioned it was available on android phones, I jumped ship without a backward glance.  Here’s a brief taste of the fun I’ve been having:

1. We went to see Labyrinth at the Astor Theatre on Saturday night.  I was ridiculously excited about the idea of seeing it on a proper big screen but something struck me about half-way into our trip to the cinema: big screen + David Bowie’s selection of tight pants = possibly an alarming combination.  And I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, as pretty much the entire cinema erupted into laughter every time he strode into the scene, preceeded by his pants.

But it was Labyrinth on the big screen and it was made of awesome.

2. The Photogenic Cat.  The Chef and I have two cats in our life: Pickle the calico and Missy the ragdoll.  They’re both gorgeous but if you were to meet them face to face, you’d probably pick out Missy as the prettier one, with her stunning blue eyes and floppy ragdoll cuteness.  But put them in front of a camera and it’s Pickle who’s the star.  She poses like a champion.

3. & 4. Some time ago, my almost-sister-in-law, Sonia, acquainted us with the stunning news that she’d never been to a farmers’ market.  This seemed both appalling and inexplicable, given that we live in Melbourne where can you pretty much find a farmers’ market simply by turning around.  The Chef and I decided this needed to change and we finally had a chance to set things right on Sunday, when we took Sonia to the Yarra Valley Farmers’ Market at Yering Station.  It was an utterly perfect Autumn day and we managed to struggle through the crowds of people and get to the goodies.  So many goodies…  We had a limited budget for the market because I know the Chef too well: he would have bought one of everything otherwise.

Is anyone else part of the instagram obsession?  I’m Katiefoolery on there, of course.  Feel free to add me so we can stalk each other through photographs!