Finding the bright side in the dark.

I've found the best thing about laryngitis. It's going out into the kitchen, in the middle of the night, wearing headphones, not turning any lights on, having a groove in the dark, singing along at the top of your lungs to your mp3 player.

No-one can hear you! It's brilliant! It's like being home alone, but, we'll I'd say it happens less rarely, but this is the first time I've ever had laryngitis, whereas I've been home alone plenty of times, so there goes that theory. Oh well, it happened tonight, and I was loving it sick. That's the important thing.

Anyway, before I was being Bruce Springsteen, I actually got a little bit of quilting done, just boring wavy lines, but yay progress. Until the bobbin ran out, and I stopped. Because clearly, my sewing machine wanted me to.

It's so nice to be home, on my own bed with it's electric blanket, in my own bedroom where I'm not worried about the sound of my typing waking people who actually sleep at night, driving my own car, and having enough powerpoints for all my tech.

And, since I'm warm and happy and content, I may as well break out a couple of whinges.

Why do all the motels in Adelaide make you check out at 10 when nothing opens till 11 on a sunday? I think it should be like how maccas does breakfast till later on a sunday. In my world, motel checkouts would be at least a half hour later on sundays, maybe a full hour. It just makes sense.

Why on earth do people still listen to the radio? I mean, yes, it's a handy way to learn new songs, but if I'm honest, most of those new songs are shit. Even Call Me Maybe, which I adore, is admittedly, lyrically quite weak. And the jingles, oh, the jingles. My travel companions wanted to listen to the actual radio as we were going through the hills, and the stupid ads were so insipid and annoying that I wanted to pull the car over. I lost the will to live, let alone drive. If I'm gunna be stuck in a car for five hours, I want to be feeling pumped, having fun... not listening to a cheesy rhyme about shower screens. And the fizzy sound. kzzzzztch...Really science, it's 2012. Haven't you fixed that yet? I don't want to have to find a new station every 45 minutes, but the fuzz at the edges of range gives me a terrible headache.

Why does Spotlight have their sales on weekends when I've only got 10 minutes to shop? Why can't they have 30% off fabric next thursday and friday, when I can get to a whole lot of stores, instead of popping into one quickly and grabbing a half dozen random fabrics while everyone else looked at baby stuff? (I'll take photos tomorrow, they've pseudo-assimilated into the stash already, so I need to fish them back out)

Why do I get an overwhelming urge to quilt when I'm stuck in a car 300km from my machine, but as soon as I get home I'm like naaaah...

Favourite Things 5am Saturday

It might seem mean, but since they've spent the last week off in their respective tropical paradises, I don't care. My favourite thing this week has been having this end of the house all to myself. Late night music, going to the toilet with the door open and using the mirrors in their bedrooms at night. Not that I haven't missed them - I have, but they've been on facebook plenty. Casey's on a plane from Adelaide to Darwin as I type, and Becky'll be back in a few days, but it's been all the fun of having my own place while still having Mum and Maddy to talk to, to stop me from going bonkers and talking to kitchen appliances like I do when I'm on my own.

As for other good stuff, well, the fact that I have now got the process of extending jacket sleeves down-pat makes me feel good. I buy a lot of clothes from the kids section but even though they fit in most places, the sleeves tend to be too short on jackets, so I go to the salvos, buy a knit jumper in a similar colour, cut off the ends of the sleeves and sew them into the wrists of the jacket. Voila, longer sleeves.

I'd been worried that my monitor was starting to give up the ghost, but tonight Steven suggested that it was probably just the cable connection, and to give the plugs a wiggle. It worked, and I'm very happy about that.

I hadn't done any serious piecing in a couple of weeks, so to have made myself a simple quilt top tonight feels nice.

I think it harks back to a lot of my earlier little quilts, where selecting the right fabrics meant half the job was done - the layout wasn't all that crucial, it was just about the pretty prints. Weirdly in the photo, the purple looks a lot like the print that it's paired with in its HST unit, whereas in real life, they look nothing alike.

Finally, tonight I was staring into the fridge, thinking I wanted something sweet and chocolatey, but not really sure what. Then, I remembered I still had half a hedgehog slice in my handbag, that I got when I went to the bakery with Maddy after I picked her up from school. And that made my tastebuds, and therefore me, very happy indeed.

In the meantime...

Even though I had a fun weekend, it was also incredily long, and I'm soooo glad to be home to my real bed.

Home.

It's so nice to be home, in my own bed, under my own quilts, with my electric blanket. That 5 hour drive, after getting about the same amount of sleep last night, wasn't particularly fun. But loud music helped, and I only nearly died once. And even then, it wasn't that nearly.

Before that though, I spent a lovely afternoon at Shay's house, walking her through sewing a couple of zip pouches with really no swearing at all, trying to understand a tutorial that was missing about half the steps on a site which I had assumed would have higher standards, and getting there eventually, and then making a little pouch with a recessed zip, just to prove how easy it was. We also spent a lot of time playing with the dogs, being ignored by the cats, and watching my team thrash hers in the footy. Good times, and I can't wait till the end of July when we get to do it all again.

I've put all the new fabrics into their respective bundles, but there's still the other quilts in the finishathon to get through first - I think I have one more to quilt and then it's all bindings.

Ergh. I might have to run away again.

Home: it's wherever your clean undies are.

I am home.

It feels nice. To just be able to chill, to no longer have the pressure of trying to enjoy myself and have fun in crowds of people who are also under the expectation of having fun.

I had a couple of issues, mainly the stupid tooth and a nasty bout of indigestion. Turns out hot cross buns aren't great at sopping up the alcohol in your tummy.

I had lots of fun though, especially today, since the weather was quite good considering the earlier outlook. I even got sunburnt, but that's not so good*. We sat around an esky and pretended it was a firebucket (it's fire-ban season), and talked about random shit, and there was seven of us in the back of a landcruiser, having a tickle fight. We drove home in a convoy, and my little car with it's four-pot 1.5L engine not only kept up with, but on occasion thrashed the considerably larger V6 competition. I got to 6000 RPM. We three girls took off our tops and drove alongside the boy's ute, honking and waving, but they didn't even notice we were down to our bras. We sang loudly and badly, and stopped at the Dergholm pub for a couple of hours on the way home. We mocked the way the exhaust on my sister's boyfriend's ute hung so low it dragged on the ground, making sparks every time he hit a bump. And we got home, and had a cuddle with our Mum, and brushed our teeth, because I'd only taken those silly disposable things, which aren't that good. They were a free magazine sample though, so I should have expected that.

On the crafting front, the swag quilt paired with the big brown pillow quilt (you haven't met, but she came from Target for about $15, and the has a cover so she turns into a big pillow. She has a twin, who is Casey's) was excellent, but I'm not sure that flannelette was the best option for the pillow. I don't have flannelette anywhere in my bed, and it felt a bit weird.

I had the swag in my little $10 tent, which I'm glad about since it drizzled for a few hours in the early morning. My tent wasn't that watertight though, so it dripped on my pillow a bit. Still, that's better than actually getting rained on, I'm sure you'll agree.

I'll gunna have an off night from the sewing, since I have to get into monsters tomorrow, which will involve a lot of getting stuff out and cutting curves with actual scissors, and painting on facial features and setting eyes, which is a change from squares and straight line sewing.

In the meantime, I'll be chillaxing in front of Time Team Season 13 if anyone wants me.


*Only a little bit on my nose; I suspect I wont peel so much as flake and my nose does that usually anyway. But I'll have to put up with a day or two of sweaty nose, and I hate that.

Disclaimer: Slightly political. Read at own risk.

If I ever think what I've written is even slightly preachy, I will delete it. Being preached at is one of my absolute least favourite things, and, since I'm all for the "what goes around comes around" theory of everything, I make a point of not doing it.

Today though, things are a bit different, I have myself a soapbox, and I'll be hopping up on now.

My name is Sara. 23 years ago I was born in a hospital at the top of a hill. With the exception of probably an accumulated 6 months or so on holidays, I've spent my whole life around that hill.

That hill is Mount Gambier. Obviously, it's only a very small mount. It barely deserves an ain at the end. But the city surrounding this little mountain is home to around 24 thousand people. Another eight thousand or so live in the surrounding towns, making it the largest regional centre in South Australia.

According to wikipedia, the Mount's major industries "are agriculture, forestry, trucking and tourism." Wikipedia is wrong about a lot of stuff, but they're right on this count. We have lots and lots of farms with plants and cows too. Mount Gambier has more truck licenses and truck registrations per capita than anywhere else in Australia. We also have two of the big three trucking companies (K&S and Scott's). Last night it seemed like every second customer I put through was a tourist. And nearly 5000 people's jobs are tied to the local forests, which all on their own make up about 40% of the local economy.

This map doesn't have all the place names that the other one does.

But you see all those dark green bits? They're pine plantations. There's one about a kilometre from my house. You can't really come to the area without passing through them. That's how you know you're home - the asphalt on the road turns from red to blue, it gets colder and there's pine forests everywhere. Hayfever is really bad but pinetrees, growing them, cutting them down, turning them into woodchips, and board, and toilet paper at the local mills and factories, are so very much a part of this area.

The State Government owns these pines through Forestry SA. But they have decided that in order to fund election promises and keep the state's AAA credit rating, they may sell these forests to investors. Currently, Forestry SA has deals in place with the local mills and the toilet paper factory toward Millicent to supply them with wood. Most of what is grown in this area, having been planted some 37 years before by local people, cut down by local people and trucked by local people to local factories is then processed by local people. The value of the local pines themselves is only half their potential value, and that value could be lost if the pines are sold to foreign investors, who then simply take the logs overseas, where they can be processed in their own countries at lower cost for greater profit. With no cheap local logs to source, even more mills would close down, even more jobs would be lost.

A lot of the people I went to school with have moved away to the city. I was going to be one of them. But luckily for me, before I did, I realised, this is my home. I am far too local to leave. I find it sad enough that people who want to move away do so, but the prospect of locals who want to stay having to move away, because the jobs aren't here for them, the money isn't here for them, the services aren't here for them, it breaks my heart a little bit.

I go about my business in the Mount with the most powerful sense of this is where I am supposed to be. This is my town. This is my home.

If the politicians think they can sell it out from under me, they have another thing coming. Because there's another 20 thousand people who feel the same way. My home is not only my favourite thing. It's a favourite thing of most of my family, and so many of my friends.

Cold weather, blue roads and pine trees. I don't know that someone from the outside would even notice them. But that's how I know I'm home.

And there is no feeling nicer than being at home.