This time i mean it...

So far this week i have told everyone that i am very busy marking assignments. this is true. and i have marked quite a few. but at least sosme of my business relates to finding things to do to avoid the aforementioned assignments. For example, so far this week i've:

• read the local free paper cover to cover
  
• voluntarily stood in not one, but TWO, layby queues
• picked up the kids from school every day (particularly time consuming on Monday when they weren't actually at school...)
• purchased an entirely new bedroom sheet/doona/pillow set (complete with cushions, bolster pillow and european pillows)
  
• engaged in intensive online research to find out what, exactly, a 'european pillow' actually is
• started a blog
• counted all my puffins
  

But TODAY IS THE DAY. 20 assignments minimum before i give into this powerful urge to organise the herbs in the pantry alphabetically and by colour (with a separate category for spices, naturally). and what is saffron anyway? herb? spice? food colouring? okay self hop to it.

Oh, and what i was supposed to say...

I have been told i need to become a blogger. I have been told this by smart people with laptop computers, electronic diaries and salaries larger than mine. also by people who are funny and smart. and by some who are the equivalent of those phone selling people: people who just nag and nag and nag and nag until you give in and buy the damn exercise machine.... but mostly just by helpful clever people with their own blogs who answered my call for help when i was told by folk i work with that blogging was the new email. or the new black. i forget which. anyway: i am going to try it (cause it seems like cheap therapy if nothing else) and as it was way too much pressure to have to s peak for AN ORGANISATION (the original suggestion) i am contenting myself with blagging to myself on line. no one will know. no one wil hear. and that is good for a novice. (if a blogger screams in the forest and no one reads, what sound does the scream make????)

so thanks to the smart folk. and the tolerant.

There once was a puffin...

If i've ever been asked to name an animal that i really identify with (and actually now that i think about it i HAVE been asked this on a few occasions generally in one of those 'work out your attitude to life, romance, sex by answering three simple questions' activities that seem to abound at tupperware parties and teenage sleep overs) ...anyway, on any of the occasions when i have been asked this i am absolutely confident that i never gave the answer 'puffin'. Cat would probably have been my most common answer. Very occasionally i might have upgraded this to lion if i was feeling particularly assertive and/or hungry. But puffins would have never entered my head. this isn't that i don't admire the puffin. on the contrary. anything that is so short, and so cute and has to work so hard to fly (honestly it is ridiculous: 1000 flaps a second at least) is worthy of my admiration. and to be honesst i've had a soft spot for the puffin ever since my dad read me a poem ab out a puffin when i was just a kid. but until about 6 years ago i doubt that anyone else knew of my affection for this bird. then one day an elder sibling gave me a picture of a puffin that she'd found somewhere "remember how you loved that poem" she said? and touched that anyone in my family remembered anything about me (other than some more scandalous adventures that i'll save for another entry) i put the picture proudly on display in my little office.

and so it is said that from small things big things grow. some grateful students drew me an original puffin. a thoughtful colleague found me a lovely puffin calender. someone else chimed in with a puffin mug. sometime later another relative handed me a copy of the original poem (who knew it would be in the childcraft encyclopedia??) and before i knew it all through the building i was known as puffin girl--pg for short--and the proud owner of approximately 22 items of puffinalia. this might not seem like a lot. but believe me, puffin artefacts aren't like dolphins or black and white cows. you have to search pretty hard to track down puffin stuff in Australia. and i think i am fairly grateful for this. don't get me wrong: i love my puffin pals--my puffin tea towel; my imported -from-england-ceramic-puffin; even my hideously expensive crystal puffin. (admittedly i am rather more ambivalent about the puffin earings and the puffin candles but still they don't take up much space at the bottom of that draw...)But i am, from time to time, surprised and amazed that without ever once asking anyone for anything at all related to this most comical of sea birds, i have become a collector.

this is particularly shocking as i spent much of my youth trying to be a collector. i tried very hard to be deeply interested in stamps. in yo yos. in bubble gum cards. but i just coudn't be bothered really. and yet here i am. LR PuffinStuff. and i think the reason i really like them is that no one can take life too seriously if you start thinking about puffins. honestly. have a look one day. they are the comics of the atlantic (the john cleese, rowan atkinson, monty python type of comic). and its nice to know there there.