My Saturday

What a day! Minding my business, driving to my writer's meeting, I had a tyre blowout. Of course it happened on a bad stretch of the highway with very little room to pull over. And my shoulder has been hurting for the last couple of days, so I couldn't even lift the spare tyre out of the boot. Luckily for me, a knight in shining armour stopped, helped me nurse the car up the road to a stopping bay, and helped me change the tyre. It's one thing to know the theory, but another to have to do it, especially when you don't have the strength.

So I spent last night doing some calculations on how much I need to spend on my car to get it back up to scratch as my registration is due at the end of next month. Time to get a loan application in but still the cost is very good considering I'm driving a 25 year old car and have had no mechanical repairs required. The costs have all been or will be for tyres and cosmetics. The car should be good for at least another couple of years once I get a new bonnet on it, and a paint job.

The writer's group meeting was really good and inspiring. Five new members - a great start to the new year. And I read my Cinderella story and received good feedback. Encouraged by this, I finished the extended version (i.e over 3000 words instead of 1800 words) today so that I can mail it to the competition this week. Somehow in the melee of yesterday I lost the entry form, so when I get to work tomorrow, I'll send out an emergency email to see if anyone can provide me with the relevant magazine.

L to R: Diane, Jennifer, Carrolline, Roby, Sue

This photo was taken at the farewell luncheon for Jennifer (second from the left). Jen was our president but has now moved to Melbourne so Carrolline has stepped up to the plate to become president.

We also did a 10 minute writing exercise in which we had to include all of the following words: luckily, cultural, eggplant, client and overhead. It's amazing the different ideas that people came up with.



Here's mine:



Sheila trudged through her market garden to her prize eggplants. She eyed them with pride. Surely she'd be in with a chance to knock Hilda McGeachin off her pedestal with these beauties. Bloody Hilda, if she wasn't taking out gold cups and blue ribbons with her steroid-filled tomatoes, she was boasting about the circumference of her zucchinis or the purple hue of her aubergine.

Overhead the clouds grumbled as a rainstorm threatened. Luckily, Sheila had finished her chores for the day, and could take refuge inside with a nice cup of tea. But she'd pull the shade cloth over the stakes just in case. She hadn't been doing a raindance half an hour earlier. No way - she'd been dancing up a hail storm to fall down on Hilda's crop just as she was ready to harvest.

She smiled to herself as the hail stones plonked on her tin roof. That would put a big dent on Hilda's plans to dominate the only cultural event in town. And the tea tasted damn good -- a new herbal mix from her newest massage client. Bit of a looker he was too, could have had some Apache Indian in him. Something like that. She owed him a massage on the house for that hail dance lesson.

I borrowed the character of Hilda McGeachin from Bilby Creek, the setting of Making the Cut.

I have also come up with a few ideas for a monologue. Finally! As this is our big group project, I didn't want to let everyone down by not coming up with something. So I will let my subconscious toss it around a while longer before I start to write.

The house is quiet again. Not so much fighting over the internet or the remote because the teenager has gone back home to the big smoke. (Hee, hee - it's back to school on Tuesday) Here she is avoiding the camera (delayed shutters can be a real pain sometimes) and securely attached to her mobile phone. The contraption will have to be surgically removed one day.