bilateral kellerberrin

Feels like I can hardly keep up. My own computer has packed it in, so I am over in the gallery office doing this typing. It’s 10.36am, and Kellerberrin is “action-stations” this morning. People bustling everywhere and cars all over the place. Pat said it’s because of the speedway this arvo, and also there is the shire election happening. She gave me a huge bag of just-spun wool, and another smaller one from Di, for our Pipe-Vest project. It’s nice stuff – natural colours, wound in loose bundles (do you call them “hocks?”) .
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Yesterday I hung out with a character called Peter McCabe. He was standing in the doorway of the craft barn, watching the world go by.
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Well it was sunny and warm yesterday. The wonderful “opening rains” seemed to have run their course. Unfortunately I spent most of the day indoors in front of one of these infernal machines trying to sort out logistical issues with the Expanded Cinema event I’m planning for the Kellerberrin Cinema. Seems like there is no-one who has a 16mm-350watt-xenon-arc-lamp-projector in Western Australia. Well, I reckon there is one out there, and we will find it! (Incidentally, if you are reading this, maybe you googled “16mm-350watt-xenon-arc-lamp-projector” to see what price you could get for yours, as you want to sell it in the “quokka,” look no further, you have found a buyer right here).
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Joining up to a bootcamp in the city. I’m late with my enrolment and that’s ok. But i want to go do a different “campus” so I trek across through a park. It’s getting on in the morning and I’m worried I’m going to miss out. I bump into Travis at a train station. He’s older and chubbier than he was at school. He’s got lines on his face. I congratulate him on his forthcoming appearance in the play “my right arm” but unfortunately I’m not going to be able to make it. I rush off, but Pip’s power hose in the lane wakes me up before I reach my destination…
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Men on the roof this morning. 8am. I checked the time as it seemed odd. At first I thought it must be Felena, but I’m sure she would have told us in advance. Somehow, in my semi-conscious state (perhaps 6 on the “Glasgow Coma Scale”?) I associated their rooftop stomping as having something to do with the leaks we’ve sprung since yesterday’s deluge. The gallery also had a big leak. The cinema has a major water damage issue on the way. And my craft barn bedroom flooded when water came right in from the laneway and under the door.

Two men walking down the laneway. They are talking about having their picture taken. One of them exclaims “But I don’t want anyone to know my photo.”
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Jo says we are silly to drink spring water. She reckons it’s just a marketing ploy, and that you shouldn’t believe that bottled water is any different from the stuff that comes out of the tap. She drinks tap water exclusively.

Greg says that when he first moved to the area, they made him sign a form declaring that if he drinks the tap water, he won’t sue when he gets sick from it. He reckons that the water from the tap is not fit for human consumption. (Greg prefers Pepsi).
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The roof is leaking. Of all the places in this vast craft barn, it drips on my left shoulder as I sit at the computer. I shift a foot to the right and place a wine cooler under the leak. This is definitely the rain everyone has been waiting for.

Anne was on her way to the Co-op to swap over our spring water bottle when this morning’s deluge really hit. Outside the butcher shop, Mark and Toby were trying to stop Pip’s wooden planks from floating away. Toby asked Anne why she needed to go to the shop for water, when it was falling out of the sky. He reckoned the rain water would be great to drink. So she placed the 15 litre bottle under the gutter overflow and it slowly filled up. We stood out there, adjusting its position to best accept the wobbling stream. There were bits of spiders web and stuff floating around in it, from the gutters, but we figured we could filter them out after.
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Two jokes from the dinner table:
1. Re the dole: David said, “well, the hours are good, but the wages are crap”.
2. Re New Zealand’s reputation of sending bludging immigrants to Australia: Tim said, “when someone migrates from NZ to OZ, the average IQ of both countries rises”.
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I dream about “spitfires” – hairy caterpillars which form linear trails across the footpath. But the spitfires in my dream have formed a beard-shaped clump hanging from a tree. I run around asking people how to get rid of them.

As I write this, it’s raining. It started softly last night after midnight, but only enough fell to make a few small puddles. David Blair came by this morning with the key to the cinema (he’s finally changed the locks!) and said it wasn’t yet enough for the farmers to start up their seeding tractors. But shortly after he went on his bustling way, it began to fall again, light and sweet, the drops just drifting to the ground. Maybe this is, after all, the “opening rain” Pauline described, and which everyone has been waiting for.
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It seems like ages since I was last down at the Cunderdin DHS (District High School) boring Trevor’s intrepid gang of multimediainformationcommunicationtechnology students to tears with my pointless art activities. Yesterday was the return.

At the end of my show-and-tell session before the holidays, I asked them what sort of things they might be interested in doing with me for this month of workshops. A lot of them mentioned games. Since then I’ve been collecting shabby board games from wheatbelt op shops. I’ve accumulated quite a bundle by now…
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