Archives for March 2006

What a busy few days

March 13, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

Tonight was the first night since last Wednesday where I’ve been able to sit down after dinner by myself and just relax. I’ve been a busy girl.

Thursday night (after another day off work because JJ had gastro – again) I went to see Here Lies Love – a David Byrne/Fat Boy Slim musical collaboration about Imelda Marcos. It wasn’t too bad. David Byrne’s narration inbetween songs needs some work because I could hardly hear it over the background noise of the bar fridge, people talking and him just speaking softly and at times, uncertainly (or nervously?).
Thursday night part 2 – Went into the Persian Garden which is the hangout place for the Adelaide Festival. It’s got a very peaceful atmosphere and is very relaxing.
Friday night – babysitting duty. I had a friend of JJ’s over and another friend’s daughter.
Saturday morning – 5.30am the two young kids woke up and I told them in no uncertain terms they had to go back to sleep. 6.30am they came in and asked for breakfast. They got breakfast about 7.30am.
Saturday evening – went to a friend’s place for her birthday drinks. JJ went to bed there early so I was able to sit around and have adult time.
Sunday night – went to WOMADelaide – a wet WOMADelaide. Was great to get the very last minute opportunity to go.
Monday (today) went to the Adelaide Fringe Family Day.

Tonight – I plan a fairly early night before going to work tomorrow.

“So mum, am I a brother?”

March 9, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

JJ and I were in the bathroom last night getting ready for this bath when he says, "Am I a brother mum?"

I stood there quietly for a little while. He is a brother, only he doesn’t know it yet. He has a half sister and a half brother (same father as JJ’s, different mothers) living somewhere in England, that I know of, but how to explain this to a four year old. I’ll leave the explanations of his siblings to a later date when he’s a bit older.

"No, darling, you’re not a brother. You’re a son."

"I’m a son."

He was quite happy with this for a small amount of time.

"Will I be a brother one day?"

"Only if I have a baby."

"Will you have another baby?"

"I have to meet a man first."

"When will you meet a man?"

"Mummy’s trying", I muttered under my breath.

International Women’s Day

March 8, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

International Women’s Day rolls around again. What is it and what does it mean – Wikipedia?

What’s happening around blogs regarding International Women’s Day?

I’m sure there will be more as the other side of the world celebrates this day.

Minette Walters at Adelaide Writers’ Week

March 7, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

Today I took some flexi from work and went to see Minette Walters talk at Adelaide Writers’ Week. I’m a crime fiction buff and I like listening to writers talk about their writing. I got there a bit late – too late to get a seat under the marquee and actually see her face but I could see a silhouette in the distance and I could hear her fine.

Her first book was called Icehouse and it took her agent two years to finally sell it to Macmillan. She was lucky in that her husband was supportive, financially and emotionally, during this time and she’d also started her second book so wanted to concentrate on that if she could. With the 1250 pound advance she got she bought the entire set of Encycolpedia Britannica and used these until she discovered the internet.

She asked the audience for a show of hands as to who didn’t use email yet. I saw at least five people raise their hands and she told them that they don’t know what they’re missing and they should immediately go and use email, and the internet, as it’s such a rich source of information.

Minette described using email within her stories as a way of concisely driving the narrative forward. If she’d used dialogue and description instead of emails in the story it would have taken four times as much space to say the same thing an email did in one page. I can’t remember which book this is in.

She also said that by using emails in addition to the rest of the narrative she, in a way, illustrated her books. The sections that were emails were laid out as such in a different font to the rest of the story so they were immediately visually separate from the rest of the book.

Adult books published before the First World War often used illustration and when the War came along, wood had to be imported therefore paper availability was minimal and illustrations were left out. For example, the original Sherlock Holmes books were illustrated so we have a picture of him in our minds that we can capture in a glance that a couple of pages of words cannot do.

During these meet the author sessions people can get up and ask the author a question and one person asked her what motivated and drove her to be a writer. This is always the sort of thing I want to know about writers.

Minette said that she thinks writers have egos the size of the marquee she was sitting under (a large marquee) even though they might not show it. They have these large egos, especially published writers, because they’ve written something and think that people might buy and read it. I don’t know if this is true or not, perhaps it is to some extent. I think it’s also the need to write, write, write – which she didn’t mention. She did mention, however, that she’s always loved reading and loved books.

Oh, the places I’ve been

March 6, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

I was visiting Bitch PhD’s blog where she’s shown the countries she’s visited and thought I’d try the same. Apparently the countries in red below shows that I’ve seen about 18 countries or 8% of the world. So much still to see. You can do this for yourself over here.

Whenever I’ve travelled overseas I’ve kept a written journal – this was before the days of the blog. I have started retrospectively documenting some of my travels. I’ve done the first part of my trip to the USA and some about bus trips in India. I’d filed these under retrospective, but I’ve also made a new travel category for this blog.

It’s one of my plans for this blog to do more of this – I’ve just got to drag myself away from the television at night to do it. I’m getting better at this but when I get myself a laptop I can probably do both.

The phenomenon that is Bob Log III

March 4, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

About two years ago Bob Log III was in Adelaide and played at Jive to a fairly small crowd. My friends and I who saw him were in awe of him and when we found out that he was coming back to Adelaide for the Fringe we eagerly booked our tickets to go and see him again at Jive last night.

To try and describe Bog Log III. He describes himself as a one man band from Tucson Arizona. Don’t let the one man band description put you off though. He’s got a very rich sound for a left foot playing the bass drum, the right foot playing the cymbal and drum machines and the hands playing the guitar. I’m not much of a guitar expert but he’s a pretty damn good guitar player. I would describe his music as blues on speed.

But to the look of this one man band. Bob Log wears an all in one lycra bodysuit. He also wears his sound apparatus – a bike helmet fitted with a telephone/microphone for his sound and because the microphone is fitted through his helmet it provides a distorted sound so the lyrics can be a bit hard to understand. You can, however, understand what he’s saying between each song, things like ‘It’s really hard to see what’s going on up here’, when a girl through a half-filled plastic cup of beer onto the stage after Bob Log had requested a drink. She did it twice and when he finally realised what was going on he got his spotlight torch and shone it up on her. Bob Log also described us, his audience, as his apparatus in his Tucson Arizona accent – very endearing even when he’s paying the audience out.

Back to the music. He started off by playing his guitar while running through the audience, even upstairs. He then hooked up to his microphone which plugs into the back of the helmet and sat down at the rest of his band. As the last time as soon as he started playing I couldn’t sit down. It’s not the type of music where you can sit at the table and watch, you have to get in amongst it. It’s really funky and passionate and my friend said afterwards she felt absolutely post-coital. He’s quite sexy in a weird kind of way.

He does involve his audience in a couple of his songs – Boob Scotch being one. Would you like to be known as the girl who went and put your boob on Bob’s scotch up on stage and then Bob drinks some and passes it around to the audience so they can have some as well? No girls in Adelaide put their boobs in Bob’s scotch this time. Probably because the audience mainly consisted of men and mens boobs wouldn’t do for the boob scotch job. For another song he gets two girls from the audience to sit on each knee which of course he’s using for the drum and the cymbal so girls jiggle quite a bit.

He even had the Town Bike dancers with him this time. The Town Bikes are two girls from Melbourne who had some very fine costume changes and danced to about four or five of Bob’s songs. Altogether, a right fine cabaret type act if you’re into Blues on Speed and it’s good to see he’s now got more of a following in Adelaide.

Plans can change just like that

March 1, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

This morning I was woken up again (second time this week) at 5.30am by the car across the road starting up. The car has a slipping fan belt so makes that really high pitched squeaky noise. Because it’s a really ‘well maintained’ car it takes a little while to warm up so the driver sits there and revs it for a while, all the while the fan belt keeps squeaking away. All this means I’m awake one hour earlier than my alarm is set for.

Not long after this JJ came into my room complaining that he was sick and wanted some medicine. He quite often does this so I just told him to go back to bed. He kept on whinging that he wasn’t well and that I should give him some medicine. I told him that if he was sick he wouldn’t be able to go to the zoo today. His childcare had a trip to the zoo planned which JJ has been looking forward to for some time.

I got up as normal, had my shower, got JJ to get dressed and went to the oval to walk Monty. JJ wasn’t his usual self and was still complaining of a stomach ache so I gave him some Panadol just in case that might help. He stayed in the car when we got to the oval – he normally runs around as much as the dogs do. When I got back to the car after doing three laps he’d thrown up his Panadol. Okay, the stomach ache was real then.

Unfortunately he’s missed out on the zoo trip. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet that he has missed out because he’s been too busy throwing up in the bucket to worry about it. He will come good this afternoon probably and then I’ll hear about it.

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