Autumn catch-ups

At last the weather is turning towards coolness.   Things are going on as normal around here, though I am just getting over a crappy cold of snotness.

The chookies are having a nice life as usual. Guinevere went broody again, and since none of her fertile eggs survived the heat while she was sitting, I bought her four day olds. Three Silver-spangled Hamburgs and one white Cochin, which were what the local stockfeeder had hatching that day. I like Cochins, but I think Hamburgs might be a bit flighty for me, so we'll see how they go.

At any rate Guinevere is happy, though she only has three now because one chick died two days after arriving. It was a very hot day. I gave them an ice bottle but Guinevere isn't the smartest chook and she didn't take them over to it.  She's a sweet mama, though.

Morgana and her singleton child Mordred are still hanging out together.  Luckily she hasn't gone back to broody again!  Mordred is quite pretty, a cross of Silver-laced Wyandotte and black Australorp, and a hen thank goodness!       

 

As usual, the dogs and cat are hard at work.

You can see these two are related!  :D 

I've been playing lyre and guitar pretty much every day (till I got sick).  I'm getting a few songs up to scratch ready to join in Bardic circles when we go over to South Australia for Damh the Bard and Cerri's concerts and camp. Weeeee!

We bought a caravan and have been getting it set up to drive across the Nullabor. We've never done it, and it seems like something every Aussie should do once, so we're going to do it.  It's a Jayco penguin camper.  I really like Jaycos and it is the thing we looked at that didn't smell of outgassing plastics.
   
The biggest hassle has been trying to remove all the left over perfumes in it.  We've had to buy new foam to put in the mattress and kitchen seats because the one that was in them had some hideous chemical in it to keep it fresh.  Bleagh.  What a toxic world we are creating. The new foam is European standard and has no chemical outgassing or perfumes in it.  Thank goodness!  This chemical sensitivity drives me nuts.

Not that i had far to go to get there, as the next photo shows.

That's me embroidering my design on my ceremonial tabard.  Jarrah leaves and blossom one side, oak leaves and acorns the other, and the Awen in the middle with the colours of blue for Bard, Goldy-brown for Druid and Green for Ovate.  i love it now it's done but I will not be taking up embroidery for a hobby!  Head torch, 2.5 times glasses, and still I tired my eyeballs out.

Kitty liked to help me. Help me not embroider!  
               

Other current projects include a t-shirt design for the Druids of WA group.  We put out the call for anyone in the group to design a shirt, and i figure someone else will make a more serious one, so I let myself be as twee as i wanted, and this is the result.  Now being watercoloured.

Black swan,  black cockatoo, blue wren, and a non-gendered druid.   :)

We had a fun games night here not long before I got the snots. This pic came just before Thor crashed the Jenga pile.  We'd already played three games of Forbidden Desert by then and died every time. Apparently the five player version is very hard to win, so we didn't feel too bad.

I'll leave you with these pics of a creepy place I found when walking a local reserve I'd found in the street directory.  Turned out it was a whole big old granite quarry area, now abandoned, and it was one of those really weird moments to come upon it all out there when I'd expected just ordinary bush.

It had very odd energy and i found myself Druidly blessing the torn up land, and blessing the restless spirits of those who had laboured here, perhaps the convicts who built the railway lines in the area.    

This was the deep and black lagoon I came across.  A hole cut while chasing the dark granite into the ground, and now full of black water even so late in a dry summer.  It reminded me of nothing so much as the pool at the gates of Moria.  Brrr!   Didn't even dip a toe!   

 
  

Me bad!

How do you go from blogging twice a week to blogging never in a few short months?  I dunno.  I am still saving photos, but not blogging.   I know I'm going to regret it down the track because I forget stuff and this blog makes me remember it, and take photos of life too.  I like that about blogging.

Ah well, we'll see. Maybe my holiday has done me good. In the meantime, here's the pics I've been collecting...

Druidy meditations with the help of a kitty.  It is not conducive to concentration when a cat comes and sits on you and peers under your hood to make sure it is you before settling in to purr.  

Pretty Cyrano. 

Me blacking out at a burn.  Those Xanthorrea really go up, but soon they sprout new greenery and away they go again. 

Photo taken by local paper to add a local element to an article about a show on cable tv called Bushfire Wars.  Our shire and brigade were part of episode 2.  We were actually blacking out a fire when they came to take the pic, so we were authentically grubby.  Yes that's me dead centre.  Only lady on the fireground at the time!  

At a training day, slacking off in the back of the truck. 

Blacking out at a hazard reduciton burn with our wonderful new brigade.

Andrew crew leading on our first fire call of the summer. 

Andrew trying to find the Oxfam trailwalker trail as a crew safety support officer.

My three new Sussex bandits, Blue the Light Sussex, Powder and Puff the Coronation Sussex.  

My way cool new chook shed built almost totally by me!  

Mama guinevere and her singleton chick, a rooster of course. 

That is one scary fierce mama gaze!

Art, of the back yard.  

What i found next to my ear on the back of the shed door when i peered in looking for something one day.  

Jarrah blossom on a tree I planted some years ago. 

The sun setting high above perth at the oxfam trailwalk. 

Neighbours' bonfire, with high winds, in dry spring conditions.   Yep, horizontal flames are ok aren't they? (Answer: NO!) 

Pretty sunset over perth. 

Tuppy in the cone of shame after having a cyst removed from her eyelid.  It looks great now!

More drawing practice.

Gorgeous wildflowers on Perth scarp.

May you all have a lovely Christmas season, no matter what you call it, and to my Druid friends, I wish a very merry and fruitful Alban Hefin! 

Here's your gift from me, a new story.  It is not Christmassy at all, and yet somehow it is.  I hope you enjoy it!  It's called Mistress Munchkin & the Plutonium Dragon. 

 

Fun with olden daysy stuff

We've been having a good time today messing around with the ways I want to treat my two lyres, which are currently at this stage:

 Holes all drilled for the zither pins to go in to hold the strings.  Phew that was a bit of a mind bender but with Roo's help it got done.

As I said before, I want to use watercolour stain on one and then paint on it, and kolrosing on the other.

I think both will work!

The blue stain is just to die for, and the kolrosing is so lovely.  It is amazing how, once oiled and burnished, you can't feel the scratches full of cocoa or coffee or cinnamon any more.  They become once more a part of the wood, and yet they stay dark!

Andyroo made these while messing around deciding which of our tools worked best and which dark powder to rub in for best effect. How cool are they?

So, I will go ahead and do both as I'd planned, so long as the varnish over the watercolour stain and paint works.

It will be easy to slip during the scratching of the kolrose design, but I think a little roughness is part of the charm of such an ancient technique.

The blue-painted one will now be the boar one, Torc. With 8 strings, it isn't traditional anyway, so it might as well be fully modern, and with six strings, Fréowine will be more trad in style.

Torc's design currently looks like this: 

I'm still not quite sure how it will look when on the lyre.  More working out to do yet on colour use, line work compared to solid spaces, etc.

In other oldy-timey news, we got a couple of photos that were taken at the Norse storytelling night.  I just adore them, especially the one of us both!

They're dark but that suits the theme of the evening.  We off to another one soon, this one about medieval tales of King Arthur's court.  I'm really looking forward to it, especially since some more of our druid mates will be coming too!

          

Satan Smith: Crap Demon Hunter is here, and other news.

Well that was quick in the end. All it took was half a weekend of strangled screaming, a little blood on my forehead, and the book is up and running!  Word for Mac, you are no longer my friend!

The cover art, on the other hand, was fairly trouble free.   I'd love to be able to tell you that I remembered to do progress shots, but I so didn't!  I have the drawings, then the finished pieces.  Sorry about that!

Here is the final result, all put together.

The first book of the sequel is this one; Chicken soup for Satan.  Just in case you haven't read it yet.

It's a fun read and just a little bit scary.  Satan is a bit of an awkward guy who tries to come across as tough to keep him out of trouble.  He has a lovely rescue dog, Ghost.  The two of them move into a share house in the hills above Perth, Western Australia, and that's where the spooky fun starts and Satan starts to come out of his shell a bit too.

The second book begins with Satan still living at Avalon, but Satan Smith and his beautiful German shepherd, Ghost, are both reeling under the changes that have happened at their beloved home, Avalon. 

Just when they’ve started to think they’ll be happy forever, the woman he loves has gone and fallen for another man, a bloke that both Satan and Ghost think is the pits.

There’s also Satan’s new house-mate, who owns a spoiled Siamese cat… and a haunted painting.  Not entirely unusual in your average share-house, but still, it’s unsettling.    

Then there’s the spook who’s haunting his good friends next door and has a penchant for a little more mischief than some gentle chain-clinking and moaning.

Once more, Satan and his loyal sidekick, Ghost, have to rise to the occasion. Can what he has learned from his addled demon fighter Da help him succeed against these new paranormal threats? Will he ever come out of the closet as a folk music player?  Will he be able to keep his fists off the new boyfriend?  Only time will tell!

The second book is still fast and fun, narrated with the wry humour that is all Satan's own.   I'm told by my first readers that it is even better than the first and they had a lot of trouble putting it down.  Escapism at its best, with a cat, dogs and horses to make it even better!

In other news, the chookie babies are still growing. It charms me that they choose to come and settle for naps right at our feet out in the garden.

Pretty, sweet Guinevere

Adventuress Morgana and Bad Sir Grummore

Google offered me this arty version of one of my pics of Guinevere.  I like how the pattern of lacing shows up in black and white. Not sure about the black eyes though.  A possessed chicken?  An idea, perhaps, for my next Satan book?  Eek!

We've been working very hard the last few days with the amazing Thor the Inexhaustible to clear up the chook pen area so I can get the fence back up before the foxes notice.   That Bushy Yate tree made a heck of a lot of firewood.

I'm trying not to feel too bad about cutting it down. It was probably 25, planted by my mum, and about to drop its multiple trunks in all directions, as it had already proved.

With the last branch we managed to get the gate, which had been unscathed up to that point. Yay for us!  Luckily we only broke the lintel. 

  

It took a lot of work just to clear all the debris and 'bommyknocker' seed heads from the chook pen and surrounds when we were finished, but we're nearly there now. 

It was harder because the mower's trailer succumbed to its earlier unplanned modification by the Bushy Yate, so we had to wheelbarrow it all down to the bonfire pile, which is now ginormous!      

Today Thor and I got one row of heavy chook wire back up so at least the old girls will be kept in in the mornings, though the babies will probably fly out.  We'll be going higher as soon as we've got the materials.  After that I'm going to start on a chook shed to replace the damaged chook-dome.  It never ends!

Ah well, rest when you're dead, right?  Have a fun week!  Don't forget to buy my books and read them.   Here's the new one:  Satan Smith: Crap Demon Hunter.   As my sister, Jen, said, "Wow he really is a crap demon hunter!"  Luckily, though, he knows it!   

   

  



 

Chickens and Lyres

Ah well only one day late this time!

I finally got a couple of better pics of my chookie babies...

Pellinore and Guinevere

  All five about to make a hasty exit off the table because Rover has arrived!

Rover looks a bit scruffy.  She has been moulting lately.  She's still terrifying if you are a baby chookie!

Eeeek!  Flee! Flee!

The self-seeded fig tree out by the front gate has been attracting plenty of birds.  (And Tinas!  Yum!)  This morning there were quite a few 28's (Ring necked parrots) eating figs as we came back from our dog walk, and later it was full of magpies instead!

Can you see the 28 in the fig tree?  (I'm guessing 'she' because she has a pinkish area above her beak where the boys are blue.)   She stayed back when the others flew away because her fig was just too good.  They are mostly green with a yellow band round the neck, black head, and some blue, black and aqua in the wing feathers and a blue tail.  They are quite common, but I still appreciate their varied calls and beauty.         

Here you go, I zoomed the pic above for you and changed the colours so she shows up.

Their bright colouring is surprisingly good camouflage.  They are colloquially known as 28's because their alarm call sounds like they are shouting, "Twenty-Eight! Twenty-eight! Twenty-eight!"

Fréowine is going to be surprisingly bright too.  I am eyeing off watercolour dying for this second lyre.  It might be going to be blue, if the test-dying of the wood looks good.  The soundboard is safely trimmed and now I am at the sanding stage.  I still don't know what design is going to be on it.

My marvelous OBOD Ovate tutor, Mike, who just happens to know Anglo-Saxon, tells me that Fréowine translates directly as 'wine friend,' meaning someone you would go drinking with.  I think that is a great name for a lyre, but what decoration does it call for?

Am trying to justify the expense (to myself) of buying a pyrography pen for doing the design work this time!

 
 Or should I try to do Kolrosing, scratching the wood, then filling with charcoal, oil and wax, as was done on the original Trossingen Lyre?  Each new thing to learn is always interesting!

     
This image comes from the site of Michael J King, whose pattern we are using to make my Sutton Hoo Lyres.  One day I will try making a Trossingen and a Kravik style one too!  He is always helpful to people 'doing it themselves'!

I am enjoying the music of this artist, fellow Druid Gwilym Morus, right at this moment, as I type:

So peaceful and hypnotic, a little bit wistful and then suddenly full of optimism, mostly sung in Welsh.  This album, Awena, is currently free to download.

So generous!  If you download his music and enjoy it, please do buy some more, or plug it to your friends!