Incredible but true!

If I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I'd never have believed it.

This is Miho after three hours of painting:

Check it out.
There isn't even a speck
of paint on her anywhere.

I would absolutely have sworn that no one EVER could paint walls etc without getting splattered bigtime, so I snapped this photo so I'd have proof it was indeed possible.

But then she started on the ceiling ...

Yee haa!!!

Yup! That ceiling paint defeats even the most dainty!

Desperate letter to Rayna

Rayna, help! Can't make this bloody house work. Can you identify the problem for me? Talei says the blue around the door is wrong and needs to be truer and deeper.

Is she right?

You can also see here that we're waayyy unsure of what colour to paint the eaves. I'm actually thinking that we should mix my "invented red" at the end and the "Mango" next to it. Can you see that working?

Here's a shot of the place before we added the blue.

You can see this is wrong too, although my mosaic gecko looks much stronger without the blue around the door. However, the blue cannot go because the whole theme is Mexican and that's at the very heart of the scheme.

There were about twenty attempts to get the red right for the door. It was so very tricky that is NOT about to be changed either.

And Jane kept saying before I started "I'm not so sure about that sienna. It's such a difficult colour to get right." so, since I overrode her, we MUST make it all work somehow.

And the really worst part is that Jane said last night "I've always loved everything you've ever done but I don't love this. However, I trust you and I know you'll fiddle with it till you get it right." ... which makes me feel really bad and sooo under pressure to come up with a last minute "Ta dah!!" but, curses!, I'm not sure I have it in me ... at least not without your expert eye!

Please help me come up with "Ta dah!!!"

Later: Rayna suggested I go for these colours. Although I love it, Baby Jane will need to give her approval. Afterall, she's buying the paint.

Another Quick Story

Keith returned to HK last week to start a new teaching year, but I'm still in North Queendland. Baby Jane is currently remodelling her pool's changing room into a guesthouse and made me the boss of choosing the colour scheme and other decorative features and so I'm bigtime playing with it and having lots of fun.

Gosh, I do so miss pottering and doing artworks and all that magnificent type of fun I don't get to do in HK.

Yes, you will be seeing photos of this winsy little house as a work-in-progress only not now since I don't have access to a photo program and so can't upload into here, so you'll just have to drop by often to see all when they do come up. And you may even get to see it when it's all done too.

In the meantime this will have to be short since typing is causing me considerable pain. I stupidly ulcerated my fingers by showing my mosaic-making apprentice Talei all the sorts of things you must NEVER do while grouting your mosaics. Needless to say, the alkaline in the grouting didn't realise it was simply a demonstration and thus has eaten through the skin anyway and so my hands are currently all truly icky and, yes, quite painful, particularly since Talei thinks it's hilarious and keeps tricking me into doing things like clapping or clicking my fingers, or handing me hot cups of tea in handleless mugs, knowing that I'm currently in Art-Mode - aka "distracted" - and thus keep forgetting that all sorts of things cause me a lot of pain.

I truly am an original type of fool, aren't I!

And you know the worst part? It's knowing that I've got two other mosaics to grout before I'm done.

Mmm, the alkaline eats through surgical gloves so they are out of the question! And gardening gloves don't give you the ability to manipulate the grout. How do other mosaic artists manage this?

Oh, I know. They hand over the task to their apprentice! YES!!! That'll teach her to reign in her frequently cruel sense of humour!

Quick Story

We've been traveling around a lot but will wait until I can download my photographs before I tell you what's been happening.

However, in the meantime, here's one story:

Was talking to a doctor friend and told him that I was a more than a little worried about how, these days, I often seem to have blue fingertips and asked him what he thought it could be.

He said it could be several things, and reeled off a whole range of genuinely terrifying diseases and conditions. Just when I was feeling desperately frightened, he says "But the most likely reason for it is that you are wearing Chinese made navy-coloured trousers with an unstable dye job and you dry your hands on them whenever you wash your hands!!!

Love it?

What Kills Us this Week!

I shouldn't really be doing this since fretting about the latest Killer-Thing is a particularly HK-type occupation, and, as you know, we're not in HK at present. We are, in fact, in Australia, traveling around North Queensland, in the very part of world that has, by an enormous margin, the most things that can kill you and in the most horribly painful ways possible - seriously! - but, like Australians themselves, we aren't giving the subject the slightest thought!

Nonetheless, I'll just use this opportunity to thank that person back there in HK - you know who you are - for, very sweetly and with utmost consideration, sending me a list of "Things that Can Kill You in North Queensland" ... a very, very long list indeed ...

And also to thank Jason, also in HK, for sending me this link that you may like to view too:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy_TB6onHVE

Jason, sweetie, it was most thoughtful of you and I'm really being a right ingrate saying this ... but "Get stuffed!"

Later:

Decided that this subject was too good to be so perfunctory about, so here's more:

When talking about things that can kill you horribly I should make it clear that, here in NQ, we're not just talking about such ordinary typical-Australian things like giant crocodiles, sharks, octopus, cassowaries, killer-jellyfish, dingoes, snakes, spiders, killer-disease-carrying mosquitoes, etc, etc, etc! Oh, and not forgetting the sweeping waves of killer epidemics of icky diseases like Ross River Virus, Lymes, Japanese Encephalitis, Dengue, Q-Fever, Barma-Forrest and lots of other things that are so like malaria but are given different names so Australia can say "No! We don't have Malaria here! What are we? Third-world or something!"

We are talking about things that, in other places, don't ordinarily kill you; things like fish and insects and leeches and fleas and ticks and other tiny more-usually-just-annoying things. Oh yeah, and butterflies here are poisonous too and how wrong is that! You know, here, along with the snakes and spiders, everything has the power to not just kill you, but to over-kill you. Seriously! Every toxic thing - and most things are - has between 10 and 100 times the venom to kill a large-sized man.

It's always been a puzzle to me why this should be. Mother Nature isn't known to waste anything so why all this SERIOUSLY SERIOUS OVERKILL??!!!

Although it's always possible that, some time past, all these creatures went into some evolutionary overdrive about which one of them could kill the others worst, but I'm slowly developing an entirely different theory:

See, practically the entire East Coast and Top End of North Queensland is one giant, primordial rainforest that has been around for over 22 million years and has never seen an Extinction Event! This means that this giant mostly-unexplored forest is still full of cyclads - dinosaur food - and other extinct-elsewhere species of plant-life, and therefore, to me, this means that there is no reason to believe that all the creatures that have evolved in the area over the last 22 million years wouldn't still in there somewhere, alive and well, and we don't know about it simply because we just haven't found them.

AND, logically, since everything in the area has between 10 and 100 times the Kill-Venom for a large-sized man, in that primordial forest there has to be creatures that are between 10 and 100 times the size of a large-sized man.

What do you think? Am I on to something here?

There's a reason why I believe they aren't extinct. I myself have seen a mihirang. If you don't know what that is, it's the ancestor of the emu and it looks exactly like a giant, deformed, albino emu on steroids. Everyone I've ever told about this sighting (and there were nine of us who saw it that day) says either of two things: people who don't work in the field of palaeontology say "What crap! They've been extinct for over a million years!", or, if they are palaeontologists, say "You know, there are literally thousands of reported mihirang sightings over the years. We really need to organise an expedition into that rainforest to find out what exactly they do have in there!"

Guess there's something about knowing that everything has 100 times Overkill that seriously deters even the most intrepid!

So there you go! I think there's a world in there that would really interest even the most unintrepid palaeontologist. And since they've recently discovered that New Zealand's tuatara is a winsy little dinosaur instead of the lizard it was categorised as being, it's perfectly possible that NQ is literally rampant with once-thought-extinct species!

Still on the Road!

Still travelling. Still unable to post often. Still, I have a heap of great stories that I'll eventually get around to putting up for you.

Oh, and here's a story for now: Fashionista Ella was drooling over my clothes so I said - stupid! stupid! stupid! - "OK, you can have anything that looks better on you than it does on me!" ... stupid! stupid! stupid! ...

... naturally, there went my wardrobe!

Although doing things like this is common within my family, I think, after a certain age, and dealing with the next generation, you should stop and think before one makes these sorts of offers!