Category: Daily Life

I like my new MP3 player, a copycat iPod shuffle, smaller than a matchbox in size. It clips onto my clothing and I wear it driving in the car, or while I’m doing housework.

Most of the music is rock, a little bit of metal and a few mellower sounds. A nice mix, haven’t tired of it yet.

Albums/artists on my player:
Suburban Songbook/Bob Evans
Radio Songs (best of)/Cold Chisel
Pure Cult (best of)/The Cult
Very best of/Deep Purple
Essential (best of)/The Divinyls
Amplified Heart/Everything But the Girl
The Real Thing/Faith No More
Version 2.0/Garbage
In Blue Cave/Hoodoo Gurus
Matchbook/Ian Moss
Nude & Rude (best of)/Iggy Pop
Various/Janis Ian
Another Side/John Barrowman
Significant Other/Limp Bizkit
Metallica (best of)/Metallica
Diesel and Dust/Midnight Oil
Songs from the South/Paul Kelly
The Singles (best of)/The Pretenders
Rocks Vol. 1 (best of)/Queen
Metal Assault/Various artists
Used and Recovered by/Various artists

I have moved my recipe collection over to Cook-e-licious. I am going through all my old recipes, listing my favourites. Most of them are really simple, easy to prepare meals. They are a bit easier to search through over there.

Jo and I spent the day in Toowoomba on Saturday. Armed with our digital cameras we visited some of the city’s gorgeous parklands and gardens and took plenty of photos.

The weather was very hot, but there was a breeze which felt lovely when we sat in the shade. My pics from the day can be viewed on Flickr.

Toowoomba is set to host a three-day Easterfest next month, its 10th year of the music extravaganza.

The job I’m trying to escape from: had a shirty email from a customer who mentioned he hadn’t been able to get through to us by phone. Funnily enough, I had just listened to a cranky recording on the message bank. Oh the restraint I had to use with my reply:

If you were the caller who a short time ago left the comment that he wasn’t going to leave his name and number because we should have been available to answer his call, we apologise that an operator was not free at the time you rang.

It’s been quiet for most of the day, he’d only tried once. Unfortunate that the phone was busy at the same time. Seems crazy to leave a cranky message like that, when it would have taken the same effort to leave his name and number in a reasonable manner. Too practical I suppose.

An even more unreasonable and cranky reply arrived by email later, confirming that it was indeed he who had left the message, and that the company was doomed because potential customers would go elsewhere and our service was lousy and blah, blah, blah. Free business advice from someone who has no idea, wonderful.

On Tuesday this week I drove into Brisbane for a one-day grantseekers workshop organised through work. The slow drive each way in peak hour traffic was an ordeal, but was more than compensated by the knowledge gained from the workshop. It was a good complement to the one-day course attended late last year, and has spurred me to implement a grantseekers program at work.

Most of the work in grantseeking involves finding grants that are available and suitable for our organisation. A lot of grants will only fund a particular purpose or need. Very few will fund core operational costs of an organisation, they are usually project oriented. About the only thing grants all have in common is a requirement to demonstrate benefit to the community.

I shall be doing regular bouts of research, then posting lists of upcoming grants around the workplace. The idea is for everyone to help identify projects and opportunities in their particular area where we might apply for a relevant funding grant. I will then assist with the preparation of our submission, foster our relationship with the grantmaker and get things moving along.

Since mentioning this new program to a couple of my colleagues I have already learned of a couple of areas where grant funding would be ideal. It is quite exciting to envisage this approach helping with the development of various new programs and creatively finding ways to offset some of the costs with running the organisation.

My friend Lee-Ann won a couple of free tickets to the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art and very kindly invited me along. We were very lucky, the tickets didn’t cover the evening’s music event – but we took a chance, played dumb and were allowed through. Was great, Glenn A Baker was there, gave a presentation on Warhol’s influence on music (primarily through his backing/management of the band, Velvet Underground).

Warhol’s art and concepts were interesting – his originality is astounding; he seems to have had the ego to match – example Velvet Underground promotional posters had Warhol’s name plastered all over them, often in larger letters than the name of the band.

Warhol was fascinated with glamour and fame so celebrities were often the subject of his works of art (example the famous Marilyn Monroe prints). Saw a video of Warhol from 1981, he was doing a glam shoot of himself in drag! The resultant photos looked quite spectacular but in the video he did not come over as very appealing, a bit of a fuss-pot who wanted his eyebrows painted on just SO (well I guess he was the artist, not the make-up guy). He was also into social commentary – the Campbell’s Soups cans, mass production and marketing.

The evening was good for people watching too, interesting to hear some of the reactions – mainly in the realm of “he was weird!”. A diverse mix in the crowd, pretty young things, older people, family groups.

A couple of surprising things I discovered about Warhol, he collected children’s toys – creating an exhibition especially for kids, and he was a practicing Catholic who went to church almost daily. He was quite a private man and much of his private life (eg. sexuality) is speculation. He died in 1987, my final year at highschool.