Stop or I'll shoot you with my twinkly lead pencil rays

The other night at dinner with my basketball team, we were discussing the things people tell kids to make them behave. Someone remembered being told that if you piddled in the swimming pool, a bright red ring would form around you and everyone would know what you had done. No one likes swimming in a pool populated by little kids, and this seemed like a brilliant and effective ploy.

One day in grade one I was sitting at my desk, staring at the twinkly effect of sunlight reflecting on the tip of my lead pencil. The teacher told me to stop doing that because I could damage my eyes. Of course I stopped! I imagined that some kind of beam of light could suddenly zap into my eye (like a laser! I don’t think I knew what lasers were back then).

I idly pondered this for years, wondering what she could possibly have meant. I even wondered if it was actually a danger associated with real LEAD pencils, not the graphite ones we now call lead pencils.

It really wasn’t all that long ago that it finally dawned on me, I must have been holding the pencil pretty close to my face, and she thought if I was bumped, the pencil might poke me in the eye. How mundane, compared to those dangerous beams of twinkly light.

When you’re a kid, people tell you things and you only remember part of it, or they tell you things that don’t make sense. Even though you don’t have a great understanding of the world and how things work, you do have an active imagination and some sort of logic system going on… and that can lead to funny results.

Other people's craft projects!

If that sounds like torture to you, you'd better stop reading now. Next in this ongoing exposé of my inspirations - knitting blogs! Like WendyKnits, and berrystained, and QueerJoe. Most tend to link to each other (just check out the right hand side of Carrieoke's blog for a huge list) and I've been wandering around them for hours at a time. I love being able to see the projects coming together. I've also picked up a few tips, and its reassuring to see that so many other people have many projects going that take ages, or don't get finished. The best blogs are not just about showing off perfect finished work, but also reveal the process, including mistakes and failures.

And on the topic of having too much to do, including self induced pressure to get projects started/worked on/finished, check out Loobylu's recent posts. I can relate to the sentiments, and I have to applaud the spirit, thought I am clearly a good deal lazier. You go, girl!

The Beautiful South

I could go on all day listing bands and musicians and singers I like and find inspiring. Right now I have The Beautiful South in mind, because:
a. I love their quirky, biting, not-quite-what you're expecting lyrics.
b. They do many songs with both male and female voices trading back-and-forth and/or duetting, which I like, and which you don't heard enough in pop. This is what first attracted me, when I first saw them on TV playing one of those huge English festivals (possibly Reading, I can't remember).
c. They know their way around a catchy tune.
d. They've just announced a UK tour for this November and December. I will be in the UK most of October. Guh.

If you clicked on the link above you would have found that their official site is one of those nasty slick ones with too many moving parts and menus that hover. Makes me feel dizzy. Why do bands do that?

beautiful books

Continuing on the theme of things I find inspiring:

Books! But in particular, beautifully made books for people who love books. Recent examples include the Dark Horse Book of Hauntings and its companion volume, the Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft. They're comics collections featuring a great lineup of authors and artists. Everything about these books is delicious: the covers feel nice, the paper is heavy and smells good, the colours are rich, the paper is not too shiny, the size is easy to hold in your hand. The covers are spectacular, old-school detailed line art. Inside is a varied but coherant collection of different stories and art, all of which I enjoyed. Check them out at Impact Comics... or if you're nice to me I might lend you mine.

Tell your friends

Kam and Mal, Canberra’s own comic supremos, who once worked and lived in a legendary shop that shall remain nameless, now welcome you to…IMPACT COMICS! They’ll be selling you all the latest comics direct from the USA, and of course all the other goodies you’ve come to expect: graphic novels, action figures, toys and all that highly-prized cross-promotional spin-off stuff that’s sure to look just right on your mantelpiece! With that same great service and that weird sense of humour, IMPACT COMICS offers collectors a brand new place to shop – and mail orders are welcome!

Promo spiel written by the talented Ron Schroer.

Impact Comics will be open from Monday 6 September. They'll be trading seven days a week, including late night shopping on both Thursdays and Fridays.
Located at 43-45 East Row, Sydney Building - upstairs above/inside Revolution CD. Ph / fax 6248 7335

No website yet (coming soon) but you can email Kam and Mal.

Oh yeah, if you have Monday's Canberra Times you can see a funky photo of the boys and the door (featuring Spidey) accompanying a small article in the 'Times 2' section. I also posted the news to Riotact.

Impact Comics, coming soon

As ber-T pointed out in his comments on my recent post, yep, Impact Comics will be opening soon! I'll post the exact date as soon as I know it. The shop is upstairs above Revolution CD in Civic, and should provide, at least in my opinion, a much better way to spend your money than the Church of Scientology, who have just vacated the space. Email Kam and Mal for more info or to place your order.

Circulating lately in my thoughts, in a not-entirely-organised manner, have been concepts like creativity, and inspiration, (related of course to the elusive wahoo). So I thought I might try having a blog theme for a while, of things that inspire me. First up: an example of Wil Wheaton's enjoyable, natural writing. Some of his best pieces are when he writes about his relationship with his stepsons. It's too late at night, I've just tried and deleted about five different descriptions of what I like about Wil's writing. Obviously I need to work on my critical descriptive skills. Just go and read it!

When's the last time YOU went wahoo?

Has anyone seen my wahoo?

I don't know what happened to it. It's always been there waiting for me when I get to the skifields. This time, I didn’t really find it at all.

That's not to say that I had a bad time. I had a very enjoyable week off work. I stayed in beautiful Thredbo village in the lovely Bernti's Mountain Inn, instead of driving back and forth from Jindabyne every day as in previous years. (Except last year when I was the lucky guest of the Brindabella ski club at one of their lodges in Guthega, where I could literally ski in the door at the end of the day.)

I ate some gourmet meals, as well as a couple of very nice pizzas. I had time to read, and knit; I watched Big Brother while pretending not to, I drank good coffee, I found out not all schnapps is horrible, and I breathed mountain air. I spent time with good friends and made some new ones. I woke up in a heated room every morning, something I sorely missed on Saturday morning in the freezing air of my bedroom at home!

I thought I might have started to find a bit of the magic on Wednesday morning. Tuesday had been a pretty good day. We did a lot of skiing and really worked hard. We had booked a private, 'early bird' lesson for an hour at 8:30am, and it was exhilarating to be one of the first on the lift and to get some 'first tracks'. And it's easier to concentrate on drills and technique when there aren't many people around, and your legs are still fresh.

So on Wedesday morning I was feeling lighthearted and skiing with friends. Then I unexpectedly fell over. On what was not even much of a slope, I crossed my tips, then righted them, slid my butt right down to the snow while still 'skiing', an oh-so-classy move which is sometimes recoverable, thought I was going to recover, then suddenly found myself sliding on my side towards a tree. Amazingly I didn’t hit the tree, stopping with my head a short distance from the trunk, and branches just above me. I had felt my knee twist a bit but it wasn't too painful. After getting my breath back and starting to laugh at myself, I got up and kept skiing, although a bit more cautiously. My knee seemed to be ok. But the hint of wahoo had gone into hiding.

That afternoon, we were sitting down, right at the bottom of Friday Flat, and I got a phone call from my friends. It turned out they were within sight, near the bottom of the lift, so I stood up to wave to them. Then I found myself flat on my back on the ground. I had dropped the phone and it turned itself off. I was laughing so hard I couldn't get up, and desperately tried to signal to Jane to wave to the others. I think that might have been my newly tricky knee.

That evening I discovered that my knee didn't feel so good walking. Or, bending at all really. I kept skiing the rest of the week though, because it actually didn't hurt to ski. I did try to be even more cautious than usual, though, to avoid another fall. I also tried to remind myself to look around, enjoy the view, and just enjoy the feel of being in the mountains, as I always have before. But I couldn't really get past a frustrated feeling.

I think I concentrated too hard on what's wrong with my technique, and most likely expected too much improvement for five days. After joining a group lesson on Monday and being very impressed with the instructor (thanks Kate!), we booked a series of private lessons for four mornings, and we went to the group lesson from 11:30 to 1:30 each day as well. I tried really hard to improve my skiing, but I don’t think I had enough time to make so many changes and really consolidate them. A week is not a long time to teach your muscles several new tricks. By Thursday I was just feeling really disheartened about my skiing and how far it is from what I want it to be. My legs were getting tired pretty quickly because I wasn’t moving efficiently, and then the tiredness made me lose technique even more.

Ever year I say I should take some notes. Here is my list of things to remember for next time I go skiing:

- angulation: bending at the ankles, knees and hips, progressively curving uphill; and
- inclination (‘tipping’): top half of body tipping downhill in response. (Dragging the uphill pole is a good drill to try to get into this posture).
- don't swing shoulders around. Imagine legs and feet turning independently under the body.
- get early edge - start edging before actually turning – the turn starts in the flat part of the ‘S’
- most or all weight should be on the downhill ski. (I’ve forgotten the name of the drill for this, which is to make turns with uphill foot raised in the air a bit, and slightly crossed above the other.
- starting for the day: get into a balanced position by jumping a little.
- good stance: rounded upper back (like a string pulling from between tops of shoulder blades), hands pole width apart, legs wide.

I don’t know if these are really expressed correctly or would be good advice for anyone else. They’re really just reminders for me of the things I learned, or re-learned. It’s quite likely that some are things I’ll have to do differently once I progress further, and that’s partly what’s so frustrating: knowing there’s such a long way to go.

So what happens now? Over the years I have been skiing, I’ve had many more WAHOO! days of skiing than mediocre ones. Really, that’s why this is suddenly an issue, because skiing’s never left me feeling blue before! But I’m still bitten by the bug, well and truly, and I still want to be a good skier. I’d love to be able to go heli-skiing one day. I guess I’ll just keep plugging away every opportunity I get, and think about creating a few bigger opportunities. Like this one.

Goodbye Impact records

Better late than never, I draw your attention to this by Kam, and this by Mr Bertie Mabootoo, regarding the end of the Impact Records era.

It's a real shame, and Canberra will be poorer for the loss of a very rare thing: a large, successful, independent music shop. And of course, Impact didn't just sell music and DVDs, as anyone who ventured in to check out the chaotic feeding frenzy that was the 'closing down sale' would have discovered. There are several profitable bits of the business, like comics, books and T-shirts, that JB have no interest in, and have basically chucked down the drain. I guess there's a plus side to that, which is a few extra opportunities floating around town.

Of course I know that business is business, and life goes on. But it's been amazing to see the level of reaction around town, even from people who never or rarely actually shop there. Impact is an institution. Right now it's a very tough time for everyone associated with Impact, especially the staff who loved working there and (to put it mildly) don't know if working for JB is likely to be fulfilling in the same way.

Newcastle is so cool, Part 1.

Mum can see whales from her office window!

uneven!

I just realised that I have one toasty warm foot and one cold foot, though I'm wearing the same socks and ugg boots on each. It's a very disconcerting feeling.