When we lived in Hawthorn we had lots and lots of possums in our street.  We used to watch them walking along the power lines as soon as the sun went down, and we often heard them running over our roof or along the fences.  A particularly amorous pair lived in the beautiful tree in our backyard and they, er, regularly expressed their feelings for the benefit of the entire neighbourhood.

That’s love, right there.

I’ve missed our little possums since moving here two years ago, although there’s been plenty of evidence that they are around somewhere.  Sometimes I’ll hear rustling in the trees late at night, or the dog will follow a scent trail that comes to a dead end at the foot of a tree.  Despite all of the signs I can only remember seeing two since moving into this house.

I guess that’s why it was so exciting to spot this tiny little ringtail possum through a gap in our broken fence.  He was a perfect little model, and although I couldn’t coax him out of his thorny hidey hole I was happy to have a little bit of camera time with him from a safe distance.

I know that not everybody likes possums, but I think their little pink noses are the best.  My favourite photo from this set is below.

Day 21 of the 30 Day Photo Challenge is gratitude.  There are so many things I could have written about and photographed on this subject – people I’m thankful for, Christmas coming up, etc – but it felt a little bit forced to write about these things because of a daily prompt.

Instead, I thought I’d share something that I was truly grateful for today – the trust and bravery of a tiny little marsupial who allowed me to sit nearby for a little while.  It’s nice to think that he’s just outside my window somewhere.

Today’s drive to work was a little bit unusual, thanks to my my big, heavy camera sitting beside me on the passenger seat.  The theme of Day 18 in the 30 Day Photo Challenge was journey to work, and I really wasn’t sure how I was going to safely operate my manual transmission car and a DSLR at the same time.  Obviously, I only took photos when the car was completely still (and the handbrake was on) but I was still a bit worried that I’d see flashing lights in my rear view mirror!

Fortunately it was a beautifully gloomy, wet drive to work today which made for some lovely moody photos.  I was even lucky enough to spot my last Movember tram for 2011 on the last day of the month!  I will miss that big moustache, and the smiles that it put on the faces of my fellow commuters.  Such a great idea.

All of my photos turned out pretty well, but my favourite is below.

Saturday has to be my favourite day of the week.

It always begins with an extra couple of hours sleep, and when I finally open my eyes a certain boy normally brings me a coffee or two.  Only when I am sufficiently caffeinated do I crawl out from underneath the covers.

It’s pretty great being me, on a Saturday.

Saturday also means it’s time for my art class at Melbourne Studio of Art, and that always puts a smile on my face!  Today we had a painting class with Michael Gray and learned all about analogous colours (ie colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel).  Michael set up a bunch of still life scenes with objects that matched their backdrop colour, so we spent a lot of time on our colour mixing to make all the subtle differences in tone.  We did this same exercise the last time I took this class, and although this was only my second time using oil paints I think I did better this time around.

The time really, really flew this week!  With an extra half an hour I think I could have added a lot of detail to my scene, especially to the shadows and the green leafy bits on the eggplant.  I wanted to do a lot more blending and tidy up my lines, but on the whole I’m happy with the way it turned out.

And besides, that famous Leonardo da Vinci quote gets stuck in my mind when I start to think about this stuff: Art is never finished, only abandoned.  

(No wonder they named a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle after that guy!)

It’s Day 7 of the 30 Day Photo Challenge, and today’s theme was Self Portrait.

(I’m so sorry.  All complaints will be forwarded on to Gemma.)

We had the most incredible weather in Melbourne today, and for a while I forgot that I wasn’t in Queensland anymore.  It was the sort of humid, sticky weather that reminded me of my years growing up in Far North QLD.  Summer in Cairns meant angry skies, soupy air and the hope that it would pour with rain at the end of the day so that you could get some sleep.

The only thing missing was the sound of frogs croaking in the drain pipes!

All day today the weather reports said that there would be a huge storm this afternoon, but I almost didn’t believe it.  Right up until I left work the sky was beautifully blue with hardly a wisp of cloud in the sky.  But down on the horizon, just behind the skyline of the buildings, the sky was jet black.

And it moved quickly.

I caught some of it on my phone when I got home, and I’m so glad I bothered to do so.  It’s fun to watch the little birds hopping on and off the power lines, and seeing the clouds get pushed around in several directions at once.

Just before the storm hit I took some photos of the birds on my neighbours TV antenna.  I liked the original shots a lot, but I love the moodiness that these filters gave the photos.

I’m such a weather nerd.  Despite the heat and humidity it’s been fun to watch the sky change all day, and now I’m looking forward to sleeping to the sound of heavy rain on my roof.

Simple pleasures.  I’m all about those.

The other day I discovered a new app for the iPhone called iTimeLapse Pro, and I decided to give it a spin today when I got home from work.  This cute little app automatically shoots a series of images at whatever interval you specify, and when you’re done it renders them into a video!  It has built-in sharing for YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook etc and you can add a soundtrack from any mp3 in your library.

You might have already seen my previous sunset videos (the best one is here) using the video function on the iPhone camera.  The effect is absolutely beautiful, but I was never able to shoot more than about 50 minutes of video before it reached the maximum filesize.

iTimeLapse compromises a little on smoothness because you’re compiling still images, but it allows you to capture a much longer period of time in your video.  The timelapse video above was shot over a period of about 3 hours, and if I had chosen a shorter song (or rather, a higher framerate) the effect would have been much smoother!

But how could I pass up such a beautiful song?  It’s by QLD singer Emma Louise, and it’s called 1000 Sundowns.  Perfect.

Here’s the same video with a higher framerate.  It’s a much better result!

My only complaint?  The app automatically focuses and exposes each shot, and there’s no way to override it.  I’d have liked to have exposed for the brightest part of the sky to eliminate the overblown white patches, but the machine took over.  It’s definitely something to consider when deciding how to best set up your project.

Definitely worth a play if you’re an iSlave like me!

Today was Week 3 of this term’s Introduction to Drawing & Painting class at the Melbourne Studio of Art, and I think it was one of my favourite classes yet!  When I heard that we would be doing our first painting class I expected it to be a lot like the one we did last term.  In that class we painted a still life scene using black and white acrylic paint.

I remember being incredibly proud of this painting last term.  There was a distinct moment towards the end of the class when I figured out what I was doing with the medium, and I managed to get quite a lot of detail and blending done in the last 15 minutes.  Considering that this was my first time holding a paintbrush since I was 13 years old I was pretty pleased with myself.

This week our teacher Michael Gray told us that we’d be working with oil paints, and for a moment I was terrified.  Hadn’t I only just figured out what to do with acrylic paint, finally?  Isn’t oil painting for grown-ups?  I guess I had always assumed that oil painting was for the pros, and that you needed to know some sort of secret handshake to join the club.

It’s funny how we make up these arbitrary rules when it comes to creativity.  Before I moved to Melbourne I was a singing teacher at my local TAFE and it always amazed me how different my adult students were compared to the kids that I taught privately.  Children came to their lessons with no preconceptions of what they were capable of; for the most part, they assumed that they could until repeated experience proved otherwise.  It made for an incredibly powerful and trusting learning environment, and those kids progressed very quickly.

My adult TAFE students didn’t believe that they could sing, but they came to my class because they liked doing it anyway.  Most of them could recall a time early in their life where they used to sing all of the time, and most could remember in vivid detail the embarrassing story behind their decision to stop.  The first few weeks of those classes was always about breaking through their assumptions about what their voices could do.  From there, the transformations were incredible – and it all began in the mind.

So I had to laugh at myself a bit today for reacting as I did to the news that we’d be painting with oil paints.  Why had I decided that I didn’t deserve to be using them yet?  What about those classmates of mine who had never painted before – would Michael be cruel enough to throw them to the wolves?  He seems like such a nice guy!

Michael is a nice guy, and he also has a lot of faith in our capacity to learn new tricks.  I think that the entire class did an incredible job for their first painting class today – don’t they look amazing as a group?

So here’s my very first oil painting.

In some ways oil painting was very different to working with acrylics, and in other ways it was exactly the same.  I loved the way that paint could be pushed around easily once it was on the paper, and how easy it was to blend.  I found it to be much more forgiving, mistakes were more easily corrected.  I’d have loved to have kept working on this still life but we ran out of time!

I might be the newest member of the fan club.

My little city really knows its stuff when it comes to sunsets.  I love living at the top of this little hill and being able to catch the light show from my kitchen window each afternoon; sometimes they’re really spectacular.

Meanwhile, I’m just really super duper glad that it’s Friday night.  My workplace is in a state of complete chaos right now and my brain only has enough space for pretty things.

Like sunsets.

I wrote my list for Santa today.  My mum (who seems to be some sort of intermediary for Santa?) said that it was “Very comprehensive”.  I guess I should work on shortlisting some names for when that bunny rabbit arrives!

I’m probably going to need some sort of fencing to keep it separated from my new pony.  Lots to think about over the next seven weeks.

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last house tour installment.  You might recall that I spent most of the last post complaining about our worn-out couches, and now I can happily tell you that we’ve chosen their replacements!   Only one of them was in stock, so we have to wait a couple of months for the second to be made and shipped to Australia.  I’m really happy that I took so many photos of our previous setting so that I can show you the before/after shots when our living room is complete again.  Hooray!

Here are the first two parts of the tour in case you want to catch up:

Part 1: Entry & foyer
Part 2: The living room

And now, on to the dining room.  The photo below was taken from the living room.

This is one of the prettiest rooms in the house, and also the one that took us the longest to figure out.  For starters, the layout of the room is pretty unusual (there’s a floor plan at the end of this post if you want to see for yourself) and its features are so perfectly suited to its original era that it would be easy to accidentally decorate it like your nanna’s house.  Especially if you’ve inherited pretty silver platters and crystal like me!

For about six months this room was nothing more than a walkway between the living room and the kitchen.  Bit by bit we’ve pieced it together, and I love how it has become a jumble of colour.  The room looks completely different from each angle and I never get bored of it.

If money was no issue this room might look quite different.  It would be lighter and brighter, and the chairs would be recovered with something fun.  Nevertheless, I’m really happy with what we’ve been able to achieve within our budget and I think we’ve managed to avoid making it too nannatastic.

I’m so happy that I have photos of this room from our very first day in the house to remind us how far we’ve come!

When I am feeling really inspired (like, for example, right before I’m about to photograph my dining room and publish it to the world) I fill the middle of the table with flowers from our garden.  We have a row of old rose plants along our fence line, and every so often I bring some inside where we can enjoy them.  I almost always regret doing it though because they last so much longer on the plant.

Our table and chairs were a steal from a Lifeline op shop (thrift store) when I first moved to Melbourne.  I’ll never forget handing over the $150 for the set and loading it all up into my uncle’s trailer.  Such a bargain, especially as it extends out even further with the extra leaf in the middle.  We’ve fed 10 people at this table!

One of the reasons I love this room so much is because of the beautiful pieces we’ve inherited from family.  A couple of months ago I wrote a big post about my Gran’s desk, and around the same time I was also given this beautiful bookcase with leadlight doors that my Gran’s brother bought as a young man.

It’s perfect for the little alcove beside the mantlepiece and I’m sure it’s something I’ll always keep.  Right now it’s holding our board games, vases and serving dishes.

Our sideboard was a gift from Mum & Dad.  Dad had it made when they lived in Hobart as newlyweds, and when they told me that they had outgrown it I very happily took it off their hands!  I’ve always loved the deliberately mismatched drawers and the Tasmanian blackwood shines up beautifully.

The most unusual feature of this room is a funny little bay window, just big enough to hold my keyboards.  We have really deep window sills all through this house, and if I ever build my own place I will definitely do the same.  They are so practical!  Although, with the lack of storage space in this house it has taken a lot of willpower to not fill up these beautiful window sills with “stuff”.

I’m really looking forward to showing you what lies beyond the door in this last photo, but it will have to wait until the next installment.  You see, our kitchen is without question the absolute worst room in the house (and possibly even the world).  It filled me with despair for months!  We’ve put a lot of work into making it functional, but it’s never going to get its own feature in Vogue Living.

I’ve come to terms with our kitchen, and can maybe even embrace its quirks.

Did I mention that our kitchen is pink?

Our kitchen is pink.

Yup.

Melbourne has been good enough to grant me a couple of extra weeks of cool weather this year, and I am eternally grateful.  The next few days will be scorchers, but it was nice to get just one more wear out of my tights and cardigan today!

When I came home from work I noticed that our outdoor setting was bathed in warm sunlight, so I grabbed my laptop and a glass of wine and soaked up the rays. The cool breeze took the edge of the heat and I was in heaven. I wanted to stop time.

We had a pretty sunset, too. Maybe not as good as the last time I recorded a sunset from our dining room window, but still beautiful!

Music – Sunny Road by Emiliana Torrini

(I think I’m just about ready to share the next part of my house tour with you, so look out for that in the next couple of days!)

Art installation at the National Gallery of Victoria: Demon Babies

I wanted to drop in here briefly and say hello!

I’m doing jury duty this week, and yesterday I was selected for a trial that’s expected to last a few days.  It’s been a really interesting experience so far but there is a lot to take in.  By the end of the day yesterday my brain was full.

I’ve been telling everybody at work that I wanted to serve on a jury and get a book deal at the end of it.  I was really looking forward to having Anne Hathaway play me in the movie adaptation, but I’m just not sure that the plot is intriguing enough for Hollywood at this stage.

It would probably make a killer Year 10 short story assignment though.  Minus the continuity errors.

Back soon with real news, I promise.