The country life (PM)

Way to go, having such a great time in the face of such horrible art!
And way to go, Chickpea, on ingeniously using the Gaia themed workshop idea to spark people's interest in going away for the weekend.
She is like a magical pied piper, luring the people away from the city with the sound of her LOLs.

It just so happens that I went to the country this weekend too. With Neville, Scampy and Banana.
We didn't do any workshops but we did have a wonderful time.
Highlights included:

• Friday night's dinner of rump steak with fried egg on top (I only want my steak like this now)
• the multiple massages Banana gave me to fix my sore back (thanks Banana, you truly are the best)
• the giant bathtub that soaked in all Saturday afternoon
• Neville's purchase of packets of fun size Flake and Cherry Ripe, which I totally smashed
• ongoing hilarity. 

Mate, I actually started thinking while I was away that we should start a Miss Soft Crab savings account and one day buy a weekend in the country. Don't you think that would rule?

The country life (AM)

I don't know what you all did this weekend but I know that I spent 24 hours in the country and if I didn't feel so damned tired from having such a wonderful time I'd be feeling really refreshed and wonderful! What a great time! When I left on Saturday morning I felt normal, fine, you know, normal. By the time we got where we were going and people were asking, "How are you?" I was beaming and saying ,"YEAH! Really good!" And that was just after the drive!

LB, Baby and I went to a little place outside of Daylesford on Saturday for a delightful stayover with Chickpea, Strawberry, Lala, D-Digs, the Harnesenator and E&J. It was a NYE reunion. Chickers organised it and after her initial email attempt to organise the weekend had got no response, she repackaged it like this:

  Mother Gaia WORSHIP WEEKEND 

 Celebrate the WINTER SOLSTICE!!!!!! 

  Realign your CHAKRAS !!!!!!!!!!! 

 Balance your SPIRITUAL MERIDIANS!!!!!! 

 Awaken your KUNDALINI!!!!!! 

You can bet everyone got on board pretty much immediately! There were even going to be workshops.

Lala: A guided mushroom experience

Strawberry: Phatbeatz

Chickpea: Fluoro art

J: Menstruation

D-Digs: Aesthetic Enlightenment: Natural fibre's and their relationship to purification and  harmony and Go-Go for Gaia

Harnsenator: Areola reading

E&J: Sweat lodge construction & levitation

As you can see, it promised to be a pretty wonderful and enlightening weekend. And boy, the mudbrick house we stayed in really came to the Gaia party, check out this "art" that was on the wall. 

It's like a giant, metal, my family sticker! And that is just one of many. It was everywhere. In the house, around the property. My eyes got so full of ironwork art. *Shudder* There was the most hideous cat metal art on the wall. I tried to photograph it but my camera rebelled and the photo didn't work out.

It turns out, in fact, that ironwork art is really big in the Hepburn area. Why they wanna ruin the natural beauty of that place I don't understand. 

And in case you are interested in what my bedroom looked like, here is the chenille bedspread. It really lifted the room.

The only "workshop" I experienced was some impromptu go-go (for Gaia) before dinner. Sadly I was putting Baby to bed during the levitation workshop. I could hear the squeals of delight as "light as a feather, stif as a board" was performed with success.

I did partake in a pretty wonderful and feminist game of scrabble. If you ask me I got the best and most appropriate word. I wonder if you can tell which one it is.

Yesterday I had the skinniest sandwich in Daylesford I have ever seen.

But the nature guys! The nature!

A really great weekend (PM)

Yeah it was! And I didn’t even find a dream coat! And, although my team did win, it was only against Greater Western Sydney. Whoopdeedo.

Mate, it’s almost as if your weekend was the upset of the season!

Sure, we had tickets to see the This American Life movie of a show, so I guess the weekend was always going to be pretty good, but no one could have expected:

·         You would get a dream park which meant

·         You would find a dream coat

·         Your team, the Melbourne Demons, would have their first win of the season against the ‘in-form team of the season’!

·         The This American Life movie would be so utterly awesome and delightful!

All this from what was expected to be a pretty average weekend!

Plus Melbourne is full of beautiful autumn leaves even though it’s winter. Word to your mother autumn!

And, word to your mother last weekend!

And word to your mother, Matey, for just taking the weekend by the horns hand having a great one the shit out of it.

A really great weekend (AM)

I know you guys don't come here on a Monday to hear about what we did on the weekend. The weekend might as well be a million years ago, right? It's yesterday's news.  Plus, sometimes the stuff we do on the weekend and then write about on Monday can be really boring. I know it. You guys know it. It's the elephant in the room (if we were all in a room).
Despite this, I really want to talk about a couple of really wonderful things that happened on the weekend. I'm sorry if this bores you. To the readily bored - we'll see you guys tomorrow. To the rest of you, get ready to be mildly entertained.

OK, first things first, a little background. The other day I was telling J that I really need a new winter coat. One that is kind of mid-length. Not long. Not short. Mid-length.

This is a mid-length coat.

This is from The Sartorialist. 

We workshopped what this might look like, and came up with something like this:

Now normally we would never workshop something like that. I mean, we are mature adults (if you factor in our ages). We have better things to do (we don't). One of us is a parent (that's a true fact). But for some reason, we just felt like collaborating on the imaginary design of a coat that I don't need. I certainly didn't expect to find exactly that coat. I mean, that coat is an ideal. It's not real. It's a fantasy. It exists in my imagination as the benchmark against which real coats are measured, and eventually through this process, an acceptable substitute  identified. I would never dream of finding that coat. I'm not crazy, guys.

Anyway, flash forward to Saturday afternoon. I was on my way to Richmond and I decided to drive along Lygon street because I thought maybe there would be a park outside Monk House and I could go in and see if they have a nice coat. Of course that was never going to happen because there are never parks on Lygon Street. But I figured I might as well.

Readers, there was a park right outside Monk House. I ducked in. Pretty much the first thing I saw was a coat that looked like this:

It's pretty much the exact coat we imagined. Only green. 

I kind of felt like it might be a joke, like how the eff could I be so lucky to get a park out the front, and find the exact coat that we had designed in our imaginations. That shit doesn't happen. Not to me. I started getting giddily excited, and then freaking out. This sometimes happens when things are going too well for me. I figure that the universe will punish me for my hubris and something will go horribly wrong. I reasoned that it would probably look shit on. That, and the fact that it's just a coat, so I wasn't really in too much danger of a nasty universe correction.  I relaxed a little and took it to the change room.

Readers, I don't want to sound like a real love-o, but it kind of looked awesome. Like, better than pretty much all the other things I have tried on. Ever. Happily I couldn't afford it because I have to take my car to the fix-it shop this week and it turns out that mortgages are really expensive. I put it back on the shelf and left to go to go on with my day.* Even though I didn't buy it, I basically felt like that was unbelievable luck.

After my day's activities, I headed home for a quiet night in. I got a DVD. I had some cake to eat. It was going to be a rad night. Of course, the Dees v. Essendon game was on, and I figured I might as well watch the first quarter, just to check in with my little guys in red and blue. Of course Melbourne were going to lose the shit out of the game. Essendon are the in-form side of the whole competition at the moment (they're one of them). There was no way the Dees could beat them.

Readers, I'm sure you know what happened. The mother flipping Dees beat mother flipping Essendon by a goal in what Richo and Lingy were calling the upset of the season. I can't really talk about it without my little heart speeding up and a general feeling of elation coming over me. It felt like winning a premiership might feel, which of course I can't comment on because I was born after 1964 which is when Melbourne won its last premiership. But none of that matters. The Dees beat Essendon guys. They totally did it.

So as you can see, my weekend was composed of these really wonderful things. And that was just one of the days! Sunday was almost as good, as I went to see the This American Life  live show at the Nova and my smile muscles are still hurting from that. The thing about all of this is that it wasn't even one of those weekends that you know is going to be rad because you've planned some great things or what have you. It was just going to be regular but it turned out super awesome. I hope it lasts readers, I hope it lasts.  


* J met me at Monkhouse on Sunday and after  about 10 seconds of trying the coat on again, we agreed that I should put that beautiful baby on layby.