Making Like A Bee

I am so busy.

There is too much to do and not enough hours in which to do it all, or even half of it, unless I consistently work late.

So I am also so tired.

I exist on sugar.

A Rant, A Snivel, A Cough And A Jolly Near Thing

1. The subject of Saturday’s life drawing class was facial expression – how to render joy, fear, surprise, anger, worry etc by study of the various facial muscles responsible for forming the expressions we associate with those emotions.

The model for the afternoon was a very pretty girl who had modelled the week previously during my holiday at the school. I would show you a drawing of her, but I don’t have any that are fit to be seen because, and let’s not beat about the bush here, she was RUBBISH.

There is a great deal more to life modelling than a) being pretty and b) being happy to take your clothes off in a room full of strangers who will stare fixedly at bits of you and mutter over how tricky your hands and feet are.

One also needs to be able to HOLD REASONABLY STILL, damn it. Twitching and fidgeting constantly is aggravating beyond belief, because every little movement changes what we see of the relationships between all the parts of the whole. If you are basing the size of the upper leg on the proportions of the lower arm and hand resting across it, and then the muppet model moves said hand and arm, your careful drawing is screwed.

Similarly, the shape of a person’s eye is completely altered if they were looking sideways and are now looking down, no, wait, now they’re looking up, no, hang on, they’ve closed their eyes… you get the picture. Even if we didn’t.

Furthermore, as you can no doubt imagine, when you are trying to draw a facial expression, the model also needs to be able to ACT. They need to simulate an expression of fear, or surprise, or joy, or sadness.

This girl could simulate two expressions:

i. grimace

ii. gormless

Neither of which were worth committing to paper.

2. When you come to Australia, well-meaning people warn you about the venomous spiders, aggressive snakes, enormous crocs and lethal sharks. But what they should warn you about is the wretched bloody pollen.

I have never suffered from hayfever – in fact, I used to count my blessings every Spring back in the UK while everyone else was seemingly rendered blind and miserable by it.

The pollen of this unique island continent is made of sterner stuff, however, and can fell a whinging pom at 100 paces. I’ve been feeling lethargic and stuffy-headed for nearly three weeks – I can’t believe it took me that long to figure out what was causing it and get myself drugged up.

3. This morning I awoke to this:

Oh, alright, not quite that, I confess Godzilla is photoshopped in, but the skies genuinely were that orangey-red. A massive storm blew dust in from Australia’s ‘Red Centre’; every surface is now coasted in red desert dust. Its almost biblical.

Here’s the view from my balcony and kitchen window at 6am:

3. One of the pregnant women in our office starting bleeding yesterday afternoon. Not good. She’s 28 weeks. We dropped everything and jumped in a cab to the nearest hospital, keeping calm and positive, and were treated very promptly, kindly and efficiently by the staff of the Royal North Shore Hospital (I mention it because it normally gets a bad press) where the fetal monitor quickly found a nice strong, regular baby heartbeat (thankfully) and a scan and blood tests revealed that everything was okay for the moment.

However, they’ll be keeping her in for observation for a couple of days at the very least and she’ll certainly need to have a caesarian delivery when the time comes, due to the position of the placenta. Here’s hoping that the baby can stay inside a while longer, every day more will help his chances.

I am extremely thankful that I become more calm in a crisis, rather than freaking out. It was pretty scary, though.

And you can imagine how, in an office full of women, there was a fair amount of anxious drama to play down this morning. However, it was all well-meaning and I can confidently assert that every single person in the building would go out of their way to provide whatever practical assistance our Mums-to-be might need. I’m very lucky to work in such a supportive environment.

I Have Been Away But Now I Am Back. And Some Pictures.

Last week I took a week off work – where I am employed to commission other people to make pictures – and spent the week drawing my own pictures.

It was:

1. glorious – yay! Not at work!

2. daunting – oh my god, there are some genuinely talented people here

3. reassuring – okay, I *can* draw, even if I still have a lot to learn about the various proper techniques

4. exhausting – standing at an easel, drawing with one’s whole arm rather than in a crabbed hand, and concentrating on mastering new concepts and approaches (especially when you’ve been doing your own self-taught thing for 37 years) is more physically demanding than I had anticipated

5. inspiring – by the end of day one I was looking at everything differently, especially people. Faces and bodies are so endlessly varied and our anatomy is so fascinating. We are amazing.

I can’t remember when I enjoyed a week more.

But rather than try to explain what was essentially a visual week in words, here are some pictures…

This is the view into the small casts room, from the entrance to the larger life drawing studio:

This is the ceiling of one corner in the main room. Every available space is basically crammed with pictures illustrating some technique or other.

Another corner, this time filled with various casts of famous sculptures. And yes, that chap is wearing a woollen hat. I have no idea why. Crazy artists, eh?

Lunchtime on Day 1 and this is my easel. And the kind of drawings I usually do if left to my own devices – viz. some contour drawing on the left hand page (where you look only at the model, not at your hand or the page, so you REALLY look without worrying about the nonsense on the paper – jolly liberating) and on the right hand side a rather stiff and unconvincing pencil drawing.

The tape marks on the floor indicate where people’s easels are set up on certain days – everyone is very particular about their position since some of the poses are sustained and repeated over several weeks to enable a finished oil painting to be undertaken.

And here are some of the drawings I completed over the course of the week, mostly attempting to differentiate line, tone and form.

In Which I Am Pretentious

As I walked home from art class today, carrying my 100% recycled paper sketch pad, drinking my decaf soy latte, listening to Francis Cabrel on my iPhone and wondering whether to eat Japanese or Thai after yoga, I realized how unutterably pretentious and middle-class that was.

So I shuffled my playlist on to the Sex Pistols. Which made it worse.

In Which Nature Conspires Against Me But I Have My Revenge

1. I walk to work through a small park. In this park there are trees. In one of these trees is a nest. The nest is situated at the very end of a low branch overhanging the footpath. Every time I walk along this footpath I am now attacked by birds which is heart-thumpingly Hitchcockian. Worse; they are ninja kamikaze dive-bombing birds – their approach is silent, they give no warning tweet to advertise their evil avian intent to peck your brains out through your cranium for your unwitting trespass too close to their eggs.

2. On Sunday I was happily scoffing a plate of eggs and bacon, whilst reading a book, as is my wont. I admit that my attention, therefore, was not wholly on my plate. However, little did I suspect the dastardly plot which was being hatched behind me. A miner bird hopped up onto the back of the chair opposite me, so I kept my eye on him (for tis his brethren who lunge at me from the skies in the park) only for a ruddy great seagull to swoop across the table, all flappily squawking, and make off with a large slice of buttered Turkish toast and half my eggs.

3. Nature may think she has me on the run, starving and with a suppurating head-injury, but no, I am made of sterner stuff. Today, I ate my ice-cream indoors, where it is safe and where any pigeon looking at me askance must do so from the other side of a pane of glass. That will teach them. Oh yes.

Gross Grubs

If you are at all squeamish about revolting-looking invertebrates, look away now:

These fat, white grubs were lurking in the soil of several potted plants on my balcony.

I had my suspicions that something untoward was going on – the plants were surviving but hardly thriving, despite adequate water, food and sunshine – so I re-potted them yesterday into larger pots and did a careful, finger-tip search of the root ball of each plant.

I found about 9 of these little fellows, which I carefully laid out on the balcony rail for the kookaburras, plus another three or four eggs which burst and splattered in my fingers as I sieved the soil through them.

*eeuuuwwwwww*

Ok, where do I start?

I’ve already written this post once and then deleted it…

1. Friday night’s speed-dating event was enlivened by a short, oily indonesian man who stared like a cat watching birds through the window and asked every woman in turn “Do you like sex?”. I kid thee not.

2. I cancelled my planned second date on Saturday with Geologist Guy because the second date with Swimmer Guy on Thursday had gone so well and I didn’t feel comfortable ‘dating’ more than one chap at a time.

3. Swimmer Guy clawed his way back out of the hole he had dug by over-reacting to my desire to take things more slowly after our first date a couple of months ago – our second date on Thursday night was good. He took me to the local yacht club and was amusing without relying on sex-based humour, we won $50 on the triva quiz and he kissed me goodnight confidently and comprehensively but left with a good grace when I made it clear I wasn’t going to invite him in.

So far, so good.

And did I mention that he has appealingly big, strong arms?

We arranged to meet again on Sunday afternoon for a walk and then for him to come over and cook dinner. I made it clear, again, that he wouldn’t be staying over and that we would not be having sex. Not yet. He really was adamant about the cooking dinner thing though, so I figured either a) he likes to cook or b) he likes to impress girls with the one dish he can cook or c) its his ‘move’ for getting into a girl’s home/pants: once in, easier to manoeuvre into staying the night, right?

As it turns out, folks, the correct answer is c.

Sunday afternoon’s walk became an invitation to join him for his 5 year old niece and 8 year old godson’s birthday party which, since I like kids, I accepted. Then he asked if I could get the presents, as he was playing rugby all afternoon. Er, okay, sure. Then it turns out that the party is at his parents place, where he also lives (in the pool house) and that I’ll be meeting them and his aunt and uncle and several cousins. WTF? Too late, though; by the time I find that out we’re already in the car on the way there…

“It will be fine,” I tell myself, robustly. “Parents always like you, you’re polite and friendly. And kids always like you, you know about dinosaurs and don’t talk to them as though they’re retarded. Anyway, its only for a couple of hours. It’ll be fine. There’ll probably be cake. Just text a friend with the address, so someone knows where you are, k?”

The party and the kids and the relatives were all lovely, as was he, mostly: he is more physically demonstrative and affectionate than I’m used to. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, I just don’t feel comfortable being constantly cuddled, nuzzled and kissed by someone I’ve only met three times.

Anyway, post-party we bought groceries and headed back  to my place to cook dinner. Which he did beautifully.

Then came more nuzzling and tampering and (you may want to stop reading here, depending on how squeamish you are about other people’s intimate relations) the whole rigmarole of why he should stay over because my place is close to his gym and ‘nothing needs to happen, we can just cuddle’ blah blah blah.

Yeah yeah, what am I, sixteen? I’ve heard that one before, mate.

So, here’s a question for you: is it just me, or is it rather disturbing for someone with whom one has not yet had sex to talk – in quite some detail – about venturing to a swingers party together?

Yep. That’s what I thought.

Sheesh, can I pick ‘em, right?

4. On the plus side, I’m meeting Engineering Designer for a first-date drink tomorrow night. He and I had a lovely, easy phone conversation on Monday night. He may not make my face ache from laughing like Swimmer Guy, but at least he didn’t ask me whether I’d be up for a threesome…

apparently, there are photos afterall…

Pictorial evidence: one of my Wombats team mates took these photos before the City to Surf race a couple of weeks ago. So, although there are no official photos of me, here are a couple of unofficial ones.

In Which, Yes, Men Are Like Buses

So, I seem to have three dates lined up this week.

Second date with Tall Geologist on Sunday. Probably a movie. We had a lovely first date brunch last Sunday. He was interesting and confident without monopolising the conversation or being at all cocky. I felt very comfortable.

Swimmer Guy contacted me again at the weekend, too. Remember him? He’s the one who invited himself over to my place after our first date and then had a paddy when I un-invited him. He has since apologised and asked me out for a proper date on Thursday night at the Yacht Club, so we’ll see. I’m considering wearing a tshirt emblazoned with ‘Two Strikes And You’re Out Buster’. Possibly that would be too subtle.

Then there’s Cremorne Chap. We’ve made vague plans to meet for the first time on Saturday for a coffee. But I’m thinking we probably shouldn’t really bother because, while he looks the most handsome of the three, he also seems the most motivated by mammon which isn’t my vibe at all. Apparently he owns his own harbour-front house and drives a shiny car… all of which leaves me entirely cold, frankly. Still, he can at least spell and hold a conversation so maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt; I’m reliably informed that many women are actively seeking such evidence of financial health and how is he supposed to know that I’m not one of them, right?

I’m going to a speed-dating by candlelight (I’ll take all the help I can get, darkness is my friend etc etc) event on Friday with a friend, too.

And just to complete the ‘men are like buses’ truism, we have a new freelancer in the office. English, like me; tall, like me; and outdoorsy, like me. We had a jolly nice chat at lunchtime, he’s rather attractive and – surprisingly – single. Hmmm.

Today

1. Today I have the world’s biggest spot. S’riously. It has it’s own moon. I have just spent a good twenty minutes wondering which of the Greek and Roman pantheon are not already namesakes of astronomical bodies, in order to name it officially.

2. Today our International Vice President: Sales shook my hand and congratulated me on being a good team captain of our office running squad. Then our CEO said I was a natural leader. I was simultaneously pleased and embarrassed. Although I have no idea where I would lead people… possibly to the nearest garden centre, in hopes that one of them had a car. I need pots and compost.

3. Today, as I walked home from work, I asked myself what I fancied for dinner tonight. The answer was fresh raw peas, a Fuji apple and some dark chocolate digestive biscuits. I decided to grant myself this indulgence, instead of making a ‘proper’ meal. It is delicious.