by Kimliatach A walk to see first nation rock art with family and a little woodwork today. Collected another piece of the paperwork puzzle required for transferring a car registration from QLD to NSW this morning which involved the use of a surprisingly old mechanism.
Some painting yet in store this evening.
Interesting read about the failure of our present government to do well… much of anything.
No Surprises.
There is no future in deregulated capitalism.
A photo posted by @liatach on
by Kimliatach Another day cleaning and preparing for visiting family. My father and stepmother arrived safely in time for a good dinner with generous wine accompaniment of wine. Plenty of rich conversation and attention lavished on children.
A really great read relevant to my listening these past days found this afternoon.
by Kimliatach Attended my first mass today. Church is church, they sang some songs, children fidgeted and ritual cannibalism was practiced.
What struck me though, was why is it that Australian churches are so ugly?
Maybe I’ve been listening to too much De Botton but the construction and layout of a space is very important to how we treat it and how we feel within it. Australian churches are from my admittedly limited experience overwhelmingly ugly. Resembling as they so often do, municipal amenities buildings with ‘modern’ pipe framed steeples, or fiberboard 70’s spaceships dropped from considerable height. I have been in a generous estimate maybe fifteen Australian churches in my life and maybe to or three times that many elsewhere in the world. Perhaps my visits have not been characteristic but they are my anecdotal experience.
The Church I was in today is a lovely red brick classical nave with white crenelated turrets and a vaulted wooden ceiling. But… everything within it was shabby, kitch and often fake. Clearly the church has in the past had a wealthy and active congregation. These days however the impression is of hastily completed repairs and half measures, dodgy AC units sitting out of plumb on walls whose paint is marred by the cord marks and paint chips left by the removal of the previous and the the sagging conduit lazily tacked on to provide power. The tacky and now probably half a century old electric votive candle stand. The mishmash of Christ imagery. Here a screen printed British medieval madonna and child on a one piece vac formed plastic frame and canvas. There are poorly painted three quarter scale plaster of Christ offering benediction luridly painted but for his alabaster skin in a manner that recalls the recreation of how the Greek classical sculptures may have looked. The signs of the cross hung at uneven spacing around the hall. The whole set dish cast in waxy green/grey resin. All of left me kind of saddened at the state the building has been allowed to wallow into. Where is the glory?
It is not fair to compare the local church with far more impressive European equivalents many centuries older than the local but I still found the whole experience underwhelming. Compounded no doubt by having to repeatedly shush impatient and bored seven year olds around me.
I am looking forward to some days back in the secular system in term two. As grateful as I am for the work I’ve had and the days I’ve already locked in at the catholic for next term. I am very clear that religious education is not my home.
A reminder that the game I am working on as well as some others from the mind of Jack will be available for playtesting this weekend at this event.
No creative output so far today other than designing a new art activity off the cuff in class this morning. The plan called for colouring pre-printed .jpg artifact ridden grey mandalas during religion time. I had students draw their own by tracing around the edges of interesting shaped objects within the classroom in black marker to make mostly radially symmetrical patterns which they then coloured in. Some pretty results though I didn’t think to take photos unfortunately.
by Kimliatach One of those days where every thing is stretched thin. Fighting infection in the cut on my left pointer knuckle. Kindergarten takes such enormous focus of attention. One client canceled due to illness at the last minute. Nine thirty at night and only just now beginning a post after which I can either go to bed, play or create.
I have managed to get a sketch card done most evening lately and so I am plodding away at the 44 evolutions deck. The Castle terrain card is taking enormous effort to make even small progress on but by little steps it progresses still. Haven’t touched my story book in more than a fortnight. Planning another path and some sawhorses outside, next big build will be a cubby to attatch our slide to. Likely also build on a quad bike crate. That project will take a while to come together though.
New tutoring clients lined up for later in the week which is good news. Two weeks of holidays approaching most understandably want a break, which combined with the lack of school work is will putting pressure on the finances. More costs cropping up at every turn too. We have to transfer registration of our car to NSW prior to departure an expensive and tiresome process including fresh blue and green slips as well as fresh and more expensive insurance.
Started listening to ‘The Art of Travel‘ which is quite lovely but not, at about the half way point, as entertaining as ‘Consolations‘. Caught up to episodes of Sense8 I’ve seen before and have slowed down on them, as extraordinary as remembered and a pleasure to see what I had missed. Looking forward to finding time to read the ‘Fight Club 2’ comics.
Keeping up on my professional readings on data which WESS crew will know I just love. This report is involved in a bit of the fuss in Australian education at the moment.
Adding a couple more photos to yesterdays epic, showing design details.
by Kimliatach Finally!
I am now permitted to work in NSW public schools. I still have to undergo a suitability interview but interim approval has been granted for a period of six months.
It has been a long wait. I have a lot of work lined up at the local Catholic school over the next three weeks but I am hoping to begin picking up more in the public primary and high schools as time goes on.
An altogether exhausting day. Started at five thirty this morning meeting a butcher delivery truck on his pass through town to collect some lamb the in laws had butchered. A long day in class with double wet lunches and an intense tutoring session have left me wrecked. Lunch is packed ironing done for the morning, I am not long for bed with no meaningful creative output completed today.
More of that lovely #moth from last night. #lepidoptera #macro #insect
A photo posted by @liatach on
by Kimliatach The first overcast and genuinely cool day so far this year.
Still went swimming for L’s lesson, had F with me too so no laps, but lots of fun. Accomplished a bit of wiring and preparation for welding in the yard. An interesting two hours tutoring.
A local authority called hoping to hire me, then gave the State education office’s application department a bollocking on my behalf. Hopefully my NSW registration will be forthcoming soon.
Working on sketches and I may even be ready to have another pass at the castle card while binging TV with N on the other monitor this evening.
Lovely find this morning. I think being Arts teacher for a whole school would be heaven.
Also this fun thing:
#coloring continued. #colouring #shauntan
A photo posted by @liatach on
by Kimliatach Last minute relief call in to take a kindergarten class at 9 AM this morning, caught me off guard and without a packed go bag, disappointing canteen lunch and a begged antihistamine from a colleague got me through the day. Host teacher has a cat. As evidenced by dander all over her laptop keyboard, which was not noticed until too late, thank goodness for cheap and ubiquitous antihistamines. School saved me from another day spraying in the fields, left me shattered all the same.
Spent last night exporting print quality copies of all cards completed so far. Tonight I am sparring myself another evenings work on the castle card and instead beginning putting all the titles and feature texts into the evolution card templates in readiness for the larger thumbnails I will create for them over the coming week or two.
My insect Insta photos have started attracting more attention. I’d probably have significantly more followers if I didn’t habitually block bots and follow spammers.
A photo posted by @liatach on
#cicada wing found in the dust. Image is approximately 5mm. #insect #macro #hermiptera
A photo posted by @liatach on
Almost forgot a link. Wait but Why has a new and informative take on the ‘Monty Hall Problem‘ up.
by Kimliatach Tonight we bought tickets!
Our journey will begin mid May flying north to a changeover in Tokyo Haneda then over the pole to Heathrow and from there on to Glasgow. We will be returning late September via Singapore. Thanks to a very able attendant at Flight Centre we were able to lock in the bargain flight we found using this with slight alterations so we have no airport changes and no unpleasantly long layovers. Feeling rather excited to finally be locking things into place. We tried very hard to find a way to spend a few days in Japan but in the end it wasn’t achievable. We will get less than three hours to stretch our legs before the long haul over the pole.
The new laptop arrived and it is a beauty. It has so little bloatware I don’t even need to do a clean windows install to begin with which is nice. I’ve barely begun transferring things over or installing software and I need to get cracking making this lavish purchase work for me. Much as I would to see how well it can hack Witcher 3 at max settings there is no time like the present.
Disappointing results from Super Tuesday in the US making a Trump vs. Clinton election ever more likely and frightening because I don’t believe she can beat him. I cannot adequately articulate the unspeakable horror of a Trump presidency…
Even Tony Abbott’s performance as PM would pale into insignificance by comparison. I believe Sanders could beat him and he is not out of the race yet but the handicap is now very, very large.
I’m not allowed to buy things or I would be backing the hell out of this.
by Kimliatach Spent last night at the farm so we could do a job that requires working in both the evening and the morning.
Baiting feral predators with 1080 is not pleasant work. Boring, smelly and ultimately rather sad as it is not a pleasant way to kill. It involves driving along slowly dragging a scent trail using a very fragrant carcass and stopping every two hundred hundred metres or so to bury a bait in the trail. In the morning we collected the untouched baits, about half of the total laid out were undisturbed. The bait we were using is engineered to be particularly attractive to foxes. By the spoor found this morning we think foxes took quite a few though it’s always possible one fox ate a few in a row, it looked like a pig maybe took a couple and a goanna made off with another. The lizard should be fine, the pigs and foxes not so much.
In the process we did witness one one of our target species, a fox, harrying a flock of sheep and lambs. Still not comfortable with it.
This morning I also helped to butcher a lamb. Well mostly I held the trays and scrubbed the equipment down afterwards. The body had been skinned and quartered and was semi frozen so cutting was done with the butchers band saw. It was quite fascinating, like a 3D MRI revealing the connections between the lumps of meat we buy. Our freezer is now full to bursting of family raised lamb and it is kind of curious to think we will be eating that one animal for weeks to come.
The HDD hasn’t saved my computer. Freezing and bluescreens have become common. I’ve finally reached a decision and have opted to use a small inheritance to replace my laptop. The hunt is now on to find a suitable replacement in budget. The tyranny of choice applies here, I know from experience I need to narrow selection down to two or three options at maximum so that I can be happy with my purchase.
Still looking for a suitable premade contract. Hesitant about putting to much effort into painting on this computer at the moment as it is locking up pretty often.
by Kimliatach A workout, another trip to the NSW transport office as they forgot to photocopy the licence they cut a hole in yesterday and a lesson for two brothers this afternoon.
The new solid state hard disk arrived with the morning post. So far three attempts to clone the old drive have failed due to system restarts. A few more tries are necessary before we give up. Investigating things for my ‘Best Man’ responsibilities this evening.
An hour or two each devoted to the Castle card and my story book today. Found reference images for every illustration page of the book. Sorted out the line weight issue and fixed an area as well as making progress elsewhere in the image.
Watched ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ last night. It was certainly quite funny at times, but I was hoping for better. Maybe I just don’t find that kind of thing as amusing anymore. Plenty of the gags rely on the gruesome nature of vampiric survival and lots of those fell a bit flat with N and I. The rolling set fight scene was pretty impressive and the characters were very well realised. Maybe earlier in the vampire hype train it would have been better received.
Up to episode three of ‘The man in the high castle‘ judgement reserved for now.
Homophobia is looming large in the media this afternoon as our prime minister has made the deplorable decision to give into the lunar right in his party and initiate an investigation into The Safe Schools Coalition.
I was bullied in school. Specifically I was called ‘gay’ from year 6 until I left to attend Tafe after year 10. That was a pretty miserable time and although I no longer bear a chip on my shoulder about them I have little desire to know or rebuild relationships with many of my high school peers. I know others who still bear the emotional scars from high school decades later. The fact that I am not and have never identified as gay didn’t help matters any at the time. Nor for that matter did the fact that thanks to my upbringing I didn’t consider being gay as in any way wrong, I had gay relatives and family friends after all. The bullies found a label that worked and stuck to it. Nothing, even obvious evidence to the contrary swayed their opinion of me. Bullying wasn’t at the time even acknowledged as a thing schools should be acting on, this was pre-columbine after all. The pendulum has certainly swung on that one. Though having done quite a lot of reading on the topic the best management strategy I know of is “The Method of Shared Concern“. Like many such issues prohibition and punishment doesn’t solve the problem.
Homophobia is still rife in Australian education systems. There has certainly been a growing acceptance and permissiveness for bi, gay and lesbian students within the cities, trans and other students less so. However even at the primary level it is not yet accepted as ‘normal’ and children so desperately want to be just that. Rural areas are seemingly a few years behind culturally.
I now take it as a practical law of nature that the more rabidly homophobic a public figure is the more likely they are to be compensating for an insatiable lust for buggery. I have zero problem with politicians having wild kinky sex in a manner that fulfills them. But I take deep issue with hypocrites who use their positions to hold back social progress and actively limit the rights of other citizens. Someday I feel sure, Senator Bernardi will be exposed and I will toast his downfall.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for young men in Australia. Attacking the organisations working to foster mindfulness, inclusion and acceptance in our schools is shameful behaviour.
But then what else could we expect from this government (Sally McManus’s page came down under a sustained DDOS).
Turnbull is after all selling the same policies as his maligned predecessor, he’s just a better salesman.