Sweet sweat

Big fat nothing. Every time I think about blogging my mind dissolves into an oily black puddle. All that's got me started tonight is that I don't want to lose my one remaining reader - thanks HR mommy! Do I piss people off even on the internet? For a while there I thought I had real friends in blogland but one by one they've dropped away, presumably for their own reasons, but maybe they just got bored with me or I annoyed them in some way. I hate thinking these thoughts but they've gotta be thunk, otherwise how will I improve myself?

Anyway I've been flat out like a lizard drinking. Croc Festival in Hall's Creek all last week. Beautiful drive through semi-desert scenery - nice hotel, shocking, dusty, spiritually and economically impoverished town and sad people. But the kids make it all worthwhile. This week is a big thing in their deprived lives; they get to have fun, meet other kids, get up and dance on a real stage and hopefully realise that there's a whole other world out there they can explore if they only make the right choices. Those choices are a lot slimmer than most of us have and it will take a big effort and a strong will to make it, but hopefully some of them will and some of them will have been inspired by their week at the Croc Festival.

So I flew happily back to the promised land, into the frenzy of the Darwin Festival. Wonderful balmy star-filled nights listening to a free concert on the Esplanade on Saturday night featuring the best Aboriginal bands in the country and tasty, cheap Asian food from the vendors, then Sunday night the army band played in the Botanic Gardens to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII in the Pacific. In a burst of political correctness, this day is now known in Australia as VP day (victory in the pacific) whereas, until recent years and certainly contemporaneously it was known as VJ day - victory over Japan!

The concert featured Marina Pryor, often billed as Australia's first lady of the musical theatre. She was sensational. Ever the sucker for a romantic song, I had tears running down my cheeks when she sang "I dream a dream" from Les Miserables ... and was on my feet to the rousing strains of "We are Australian" which should by rights be our national anthem.

Since then it's been work, work and more work - yet another event- this time a science fair attracting 2500 children over three days. There's a lot of stuff going on at work and I may be making some big changes soon but I'll tell you about that another day.

I've got tomorrow and the whole weekend off, a play to see tomorrow night, maybe a fiddlers concert on Sunday night and I really think I need to do some of the three-week pile of ironing on Saturday instead of catching the ferry across the harbour on a work social outing... but we'll see. Then there's the 4 out of 5 DVDs hired last week that I have to watch by Saturday... don't like my chances of achieving that particular goal.

I'm glad I decided to pay my respects to blogland! Goodnight friend.