How school assembly made me cry (a bit)

I went along to the whole school assembly and sat cross legged at the back of the gym behind the rows and rows of little kids. All trying to distract the person in front of them without the teacher seeing - surreptitiously tugging a shirt or whispering something in an ear.

 It is a school which is in one of the poorest areas around Hobart - so many of the kids have such complex needs and many are living in poverty.

The assembly today was a celebration.

These kids had been engaged in all kinds of commuity (local, national and international community) building activities and heaps of charity sort of work - from raising money so an orphanage in Cambodia could set up a fish farm to 'save the bandicoot' and so much in between. The teacher coordinating all of this had entered this small school into a competition to win a whole bunch of money that could help the school continue this kind of project work with the kids.

We were gathered and the waiting. The teacher told a suspensful story of sending off this form and waiting and waiting and hoping and hoping and all the kids were listening,  and waiting and hoping - and finally  "we won!!" and everyone - the teachers and the kids and the community representatives who sat up the front - cheered and beamed and clapped and whistled and the man from the bank awkwardly said his part and handed over one of those oversized cheques and 'oooohs' and 'aaaahs' sounded from the crowd - $50,000! for THIS SCHOOL!.. and the teacher unveiled this MASSIVE cake decorated in school colours, that sat grandly upon a trolley and all of the kids, despite knowing they should be sitting and listening quietly sprung up and looked and talked excitedly about how it was the biggest cake they had ever seen. the cake was to be cut up and shared with everyone, to celebrate what the school together had achieved.

It was just beautiful. It was all this beaming and laughter - watching the bank man and the teacher pose weirdly in mid-handshake holding oversized cheque while some photos were taken.

It felt like a community and it felt amazing to simply bear witness to such celebration

Album Launch!!

SPRING!

It's totally spring...

I had my doubts last night with all the blustering going on, but today it felt, it looked, it smelled like spring! hurrah!

I didn't get outside for much of it (why don't they cancel everything on days like today?), but what I saw was glorious.

A blog to talk about the weather, the interweb sure needed that.

This is what I learned today:

* that kids are incredibly fragile and remarkably resilient all at the same time

* that avocado goes funny in a roll after half a day

* that I need to be braver

* that a bath is, more often than not, the cure for everything

* that I am allergic to full time work

P.S. The photo is of a gingerbread cookie (with the best design of the day.

It's Still Raining

and I don't know if it is the rain, or the wild wind which forces the rain sideways, or maybe there is actually, secretly, a full moon which has sped my brain up and filled it with foolish notions, but full up it is - and just in time for bedtime.

it is the last day of winter, apparently. the blossoms have mostly been blown off their perches and the leaves have grown in their place - with incredible speed. my broad beans are about 3 inches high - slowly but surely they rise up. the possums don't seem to want to eat them (my friend says that's cause broad beans are disgusting) but they have munched the lettuce and the peas as soon as they were able. 

this full brain and distracting rain - falling in huge, noisy sheets on our roof -has got me thinking. about family mostly, about how far away they are. and how i really and truly am on an island. how, if everything changed, the end of the world and all that, i might be stuck here, an ocean dividing me and my mum, me and my dad, me and my brothers. the end of the world pops up in my head far too often. 

the possum is up and about. it's foot falls on the ceiling above sound disconcertingly human. plod, plod - like two human feet pacing above. how can a four pawed marsupial make such foreboding sounds? the screeching is worse. someone told sam that they try and piss on you, so whenever we go outside in the dark now we are thinking of this. another friend said it might just happen accidently as they try to escape up a tree - this sounds more reasonable but doesn't fit with my image of this brooding, antisocial possum whose urine stains the ceiling and whose frantic nest-making wakes us at 3am.

the weather in hobart is magnificent. sure it feels like it has rained for a million days, and it's cold and my breath turns into white clouds inside my house. 

but it is magnificent. 

a wild night offers up an impressive snow fall in the morning - a white capped mountain that glows fluro pink in the dawn. days of rain that dash any hope of clean, well, dry clothes turns the rivulet into a huge and urgent river pouring through and then dissapearing underneath the city. me and my friend play pooh sticks - racing twigs on the water - only to have our vessels disappear beneath the torrents. you can hear it roaring below when you walk over a sewer grate.

maybe it's the weather, maybe it's the inactivity of the day, maybe it's a song busting to get out.....either way, my head is full up with colour and questions and melody and apocolyptic worries...i don't think i'll sleep until my love returns home, a real someone who can ground these lofty imaginings and warm up this last day of winter.