a couple of sleepy little dot points

From the 'explains a lot' department: the moon was full on Thursday night, and beautifully so.

• A double birthday morning tea; more food arrived shortly after this photo was taken but the yellow-to-tan-to-deep-brown palette remained unbroken. It's what everyone is hankering after. What is it with these feasts? We each individually supply much more food than one person can eat, and inevitably the bulk of it ends up as a contribution to the dietary wellbeing and enjoyment of the people who work in the offices on the distant side of the building. I am no exception: I brought in sixteen Wagon Wheels.
• After nearly two years of wheedling up the line, and indeed writing, submitting and receiving a grant to pay for the thing, we finally acquired a long-wished-for badge making machine at work. It works gratifyingly well.

These are faces that I cut out of a 2010 issue of the National Archives of Australia journal which was in a chuck-out pile under my desk. Now that I have got access to a badge maker I doubt I will ever throw away any mildly interesting piece of paper



This is a post-it note on which I wrote ROXY MUSIC, but as you can see, I wrote the letters too big and so the badge reads _OXY MUSIC or possibly _OXY VIUSIC, I am not best placed to determine which. My colleague L said 'that's the cover band.' First badge-maker failure, I suppose, but I didn't throw it away, it will make a great Christmas gift for somebody special.




I had two full pannier bags of clothing needing to be washed to take home with me from work on Friday night - normally I don't let it accumulate and I just have one at a time. I think this is why I didn't notice when one of the bags fell off my pack rack somewhere along the journey. (I also must not have hooked it on properly, and for that I am going to indulge myself in the luxury of utterly irrationally blaming somebody else, namely the colleague who spoke to me in a confusing way just as I was leaving the building and at the same time fiddling with my headphones and my gloves and swipe card.) So I didn't notice I'd lost a pannier until 40 minutes and 10 km later when I was collecting Len from after-school care. And so as soon as I was able to leave the house I got back on my bike and retraced my route looking for the bag. I had to go by bike because it's not possible to travel that route by car. It was a dark and stormy night and I am always pretty rooted by Friday evening, and this week I had a couple of nights with not much sleep and I was also still hung over from an exceptionally enjoyable session on the previous evening. So, you know, although I thought I'd better try to look for it, I wasn't much in a frame of mind to really expect to find my bag, which contained a beautiful handmade merino scarf I'd bought at the Salamanca Place markets, a quilted linen jacket I made myself, a skinny rib grey wool jumper, a jacket refashioned out of a vintage kimono from the Taisho period, my favourite jeans, a very simple t-shirt that several people have told me I look good in, a pair of tan leather ankle boots, and a cashmere ballet cardigan. But find it I did, propped under an elm tree in St Kilda Road. It's all just stuff and losing it would not have mattered, but you see, it felt so great to make the effort to find it and then to have that effort rewarded. Moral of story? There is no moral because, as you are very well aware, life is completely meaningless and explanatory mechanisms like destiny, luck, agency etc are the merest fictions. But some fictions are better than others, right?