Return of the great adventurers

Happy new year, everyone… 

The grand adven­ture was grand but it is good to be back in Mel­bourne… with our lovely kitty and our beau­ti­ful house, both of which were looked after incred­ibly well by horngirl  (thank you!!).

Des­pite every­body’s dire warn­ings, the flights (Melb to Bris, Bris to Syd, Syd to Melb) didn’t hurt at all, although my feet swelled up pretty badly on the middle one, pos­sibly due to having walked all over Wood­ford for the pre­vi­ous week.

The heat didn’t inca­pa­cit­ate me at all – I love heat; I got my belly covered in henna – photos to come; lots of lovely people cooed over my henna-dec­or­ated belly; I saw ter­rific music; we ran two fairly suc­cess­ful work­shops of cit­izen media; and I spent time with people I only get to see around Wood­ford, like Geoff Wilson and Melinda Reed and Angela Deane and Lily Col­lard and now Rachel di Re. Amus­ingly, I dis­covered that my old friend from primary and high school, Lesley Jones, has been going to Wood­ford for the last six years. Why? Because her part­ner and the father of her two kids is Lino from Wait­ing for Guiness. We think the only reason I haven’t run into her in the past is because she has spent most of the pre­vi­ous fest­ivals in the chil­dren’s fest­ival, but now that Joey is 9 and Oscar is 6 or so, they were out and about more.

Doug man­aged to come down with a stom­ach bug early in the fest­ival, so his enjoy­ment was tempered some­what and we didn’t end up having many big nights. We had a quiet New Year’s and didn’t make it up the hill for the sun­rise cere­mony, but that was fine by both of us really, as much as I would like to think I could haul myself up there, it prob­ably wasn’t a good idea. As it was, we could hear the shaka­ha­chi flute and the Tibetan singing waft down into our tent and lay there as the sky turned pink look­ing out through our little window.

The big night for me was the night before that, actu­ally, the 20th birth­day party for the chai tent, where I danced to Jam­bezi, and then Trans­fu­sion (a new outfit from the Dva guys) and finally Wild Marmalade. I staggered back to the tent by 2am, very tired but very happy.

Then of course, we went to Sydney for Coopstock, which this year was every single Oscar-win­ning anim­ated short in chro­no­lo­gical order. It was ter­rific. There are some clangers in there, but there are also obvi­ously some abso­lutely bril­liant pieces, such as “The Old Man and the Sea”, “The Dot and the Line”, “Herb Alpert Double Fea­ture” (and Mat­thew went to con­sid­er­able effort to get this), “Sand Castle” (beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful film), “Crac” (lovely, touch­ing film about the life of a rock­ing chair), “Tango” (amaz­ing piece of cho­reo­graphy!), “The Man who Planted Trees”, and “Ryan” (an incred­ible, con­front­ing biopic). That’s not to men­tion all the well known Pixar and Aard­man shorts and other nifty items like “The Chubb Chubbs”.

Some of you know that a few years ago, crystal_storm , razorgirl_au  and I star­ted a tra­di­tion of choos­ing a word for each year rather than doing res­ol­u­tions. That tra­di­tion has now spread fur­ther afield, as many of you com­men­ted with your own words on last year’s post, which I love. My word last year was “grace”, which, inter­est­ingly, is a word Doug has been using to describe how I’ve handled the chal­lenges of this preg­nancy. I think I have brought more grace into my life this year: I am calmer, and more at peace with myself than in any time in my memory. 

My word for this year is “open”: open­ing phys­ic­ally to give birth, open­ing emo­tion­ally to love this new addi­tion to our family, being open to change, being open to challenge.

Feel free to join in our tra­di­tion and share your word if you choose. Love to all!