Post-Weekend ramble

Well it's Monday again, which means it's my weekend day so it must be time for another ramble about stuff I've been doing and stuff that is coming up ;)

I received lots of amazing things in the mail for Emerald Arts, which deserves (and shall have) a post all of it's very own, but it includes Mixtape zine and bird cages, goldfish necklaces and stories about music and owls.

I went to King Edward park to learn how to paint landscapes (another post again) and attended my Grandpa's 80th birthday at the Newcastle Club at which I made a speech that wasn't too bad at all. Dinner was canapes and champagne, because my family dines in style, but I am a little wheat freak, which means that Mum organised for me to have a meal in one of the little private dining rooms which Ten and Lachy crashed. There is no better food on earth than there, to be completely honest. I had salmon with prawns on top and Ten had Oysters Kilpatrick. Lachy had an enourmous steak that he finished before I was done removing prawns from skewer. That kid inhales food, but he is 6 ft 5 sooo...

Saturday was Ten's school reunion, technically 12 years since he finished, but no one organised that one. The picture above is us at that. I probably look so happy because I spent most of the night carefully dismantling the table decorations.

Don't look at me like that, I had to. They were made up of a bunch of balloons secured to the table by a complicated knotting system surrounding two black books. Upon closer inspection the books had been hand covered in black paper so that the table title (eg "English" or "Science") could be written on the spine. Then the book nerd inside had to know which books we had on our table, so I carefully slid the smaller book on top out, to find it was a novel by Ailsa of Home and Away fame(an Australian soap opera for those of you playing at home).

Of course, once I had managed to find out which books were hiding in plain sight on our table, I had to find out what the others were, so I waited until everyone else was good and drunk, dancing to late nineties classics on the dancefloor, then I went from table to table, stealing the smaller books on top, and brought them back to ours... mostly to the delight of my fellow "Science" table-ers... but they didn't like the Danielle Steele one. Particular favourites were "Ice Station" by Mathew Riley (I may have spelt that incorrectly) and "Queen of the Damned" by Anne Rice, which was such a massively awesome find, very exciting.

Best part was, one of the organisers had been watching my antics. She told me I could take Queen home since they were just old books that no one wanted anyway. Their trash, my trashy literary treasure I guess. YAY!

Sunday (yesterday) was my first Sunday off in a long long time. Between setting up Emerald Arts and going to the markets, Sundays with Ten are a very rare things. So we did some washing and the grocery shopping, then watched Kitchen Nightmares and had delicious snacks. Oh and we made tacos for dinner. It was great. Probably doesn't sound very exciting, but things have been so hectic lately so it was lovely and very destressing to party then have a chill out day together :)

Anyway, off to catch up on my RSS feeds and search the interwebs for pictures of seaweed.

-Emmeline

PS. read this article by Marcus Westbury (our fearless Renew Newcastle leader), it discusses how artists are likely to weather all this stressy financial crisis stuff.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/creative-buds-can-bloom-in-a-recession/2009/03/15/1237054645131.html