Warrandyte dreaming

Christmas and the various days before and since were fabulous. My brother, his wife, their baby and their dog all arrived and suddenly the house felt very full and very festive. The babies got along extremely well – favoured activity seemed to be crawling madly at each other across the room and smooshing faces together in a kind of pre-kiss baby greeting. I spent the day before christmas baking gingerbread cookies and Brioche bread both of which were suprisingly successful. The brioche bread used 6 eggs and 300gm of butter so you can image the rich yellow colour it turned out. The babies started unwrapping gifts (with a little help from their sleep deprived but still cheery parents) around 7.30am on Christmas morning and they both had to have a nap at half time and then resumed unwrapping presents until lunchtime. Fortunately they really didn’t have a clue as to what was going on so there is no danger of them becoming spoilt brats (yet!), although Amelia J has learnt how to say “MO!” when she wants more, and “NO!” when she doesn’t. New Year’s whimpered in – I was in bed around 9.30pm reading and heard a few fireworks going off around 12.
In other news I have been having a bad ebay experience involving art fraud (well, collectible poster fraud). I am still in negotiations with the dealer and to be fair to him it might all work out. In any case, my ebay habit which was at a kind of mindless frenzy in December has calmed down a little.

I have been ploughing through The Boyds in my spare moments, really enjoying reading this artist-family saga. The author, Brenda Niall, was my tutor for a term in Australian Literature at Uni. She was a wonderful teacher, but on one fateful day I had to do a class presentation on Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown. Great book but that presentation still rates up there as one of my all time awful life moments. I experienced the worst of dry-mouthed, palm sweating, shaking limb kind of fear as I forgot absolutely everything that I had planned to say about the book. I can still very clearly recall the blank faces on half of my class mates and the other half squirming around in embarrassment for me and most clearly I can still see the notes I had hastily jotted down swimming off the page in my lap.

But back to the book; I loved the chapter about Penleigh Boyd who was painting early last century and built his beautiful bride (an artist’s model who he met in Paris) a house out at Warrandyte called The Robins. I started fantasising about living out in Warrandyte and did a quick search on a real estate site for houses in the area only to find The Robins is up for sale! Of course, believing that this is somehow fate telling me that this house was meant to belong to us, I will have to go and buy half a dozen tatts tickets. It’s either that or sell 96000 cards. Hmm.