I love the great flowers I have in the garden in winter. From the dinner table we can see them - the winter iris is a prolific flowerer and so beautiful. They don't last long inside once cut though. I have been saving them from the rain by bringing them inside. The daphne smells fantastic and I will have to cut some to bring so I can smell it in the warmth. It is still pretty chilly outside even though the sun looks so inviting.

I bought two hazelnut trees (need two for cross pollination) and a Morello cheery tree today at the nursery. I have planted two of them so far and will have to do the other one next weekend when I can pull out some plants to fit it in. More information about hazelnut growing in Australia can be found at the Dept. of primary Industries. Interestingly there were only two varieties in the nurseries I checked out today and neither of them are named on the agriculture website. Hopefully they will be suitable cross pollinators - they were Lambert and Red Aveline. I figured as they has both they would be suitable. Oh well. I am too impatient to order a tree in specially. I will grab a picture of them to liven this website up a bit - too many just text posts, its a wonder you are still reading this.

Here it is:

New trees

You wouldn't believe it! After the trouble with the triangle amethyst stone with a fracture in it and having to cut back the pavillion - now I have transfered it and a large piece has just split off. I think I will have to give up on it. The stone is just not structurally sound enough. It is very disappointing as I have put many many hours into it already and the colour of the stone is lovely. Instead I dopped the blue synthetic CZ, for my sister. I also started a square barion cut out of the green synthetic quartz that I had already dopped. It looks interesting. At least these stones as they are synthetic shouldn't give me any problems. I'll have to be a bit more careful with the natural stones I chose to cut I think, so I don't waste my time.

Last weekend we went to the Popular Writers Festival in Sydney. It was quite good. Not many people there but a good bunch of authors. Ian Irvine, Traci Harding, Tara Moss (does crime novels), Karen Brooks were probably in the best sessions about childrens fantasty (does it mean they will become adult fantasy lovers?) and creating great female characters. There were also sessions on biography and history etc. but we didn't go to those sessions. It was nice to have a break in Sydney not that we had much time for anything else but we did get some fudge shopping in and a few nice walks along Darling Harbour. The weather was much warmer than in Canberra so that was the biggest plus. It was interesting how one of the authors takes three months off each year to write, while others write full time or in the evenings while working. It just depended on how they prefered to write. I have a feeling that I am the take time off to write kind of person cause I don't seem to get much done during the evenings after work. Too lazy - especially in winter. I think I need longer than a couple of hours to get into it. I think I am just making excuses to get away with watching desparate housewives :) Anyway I am not fussing about it.

For all you budding sci/fi writers out there check out Clarion South. It sounds like a great intensive program that could teach you a lot about writing and editing. I went to the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild meeting last week and Trevor mentioned it. He was on the 2005 course and found it really valuable. The deadline is 30th June, if you are interested. There are also a couple of blogs from course attendees that you can read to get a feel for what the experience would be like. Check out Deb's pages. It really is depressing how very difficult it is to make money out of writing books. I will have to be realistic and just do this for the pleasure of it, the community of people and the experience. If I can ever earn money to take some time of work it will just be a bonus.

Check out Ian Irvine's webpage and discussion of the industry.

This weekend the Lapidary Club had a faceting weekend where members came to the club on Saturday and Sunday most of them bringing their own machines. I went along on Saturday and used the club machine. It was good to get some solid faceting done but unfortunately at about 3pm a small crack that I had noticed in the stone, that would probably not show up in the finished stone, sucked in the black coloured polishing material and was certainly very very visible inside the stone. So I had to start nearly again and cut it down to a smaller stone :( In the end I am pretty much back to where I started with it after a days work. Oh well these things happen with natural stones. It is looking like it will be a lovely colour. I took a photo of it before the weekend but it didn't really come out that well. It is hard to show the triangleness of the cut.

Afterwards we went to the Hellenic Club for dinner and socialising. Nathan went to the snow instead and had a great day said the weather was fantastic and sunny. We will probably go again soon and I will ski. We haven't decided if we will fork out the horrendous amount it usually costs to stay at the snow for a night or not yet.

Went to Adelaide for work last week and had some nice dinners and lunch in the Barossa valley. It was a really good trip and I learnt a lot.

Well this long weekend was going to be a trip to Sydney, then a trip to a nice B&B, then a trip to the coast and then a writing weekend at home. In the end, it turned out to be a mosaic weekend with a bit of cooking, gardening and shopping thrown in. I did a few hours on the lizard mozaic which is starting to come together. I found a few tricks that will make it easier for me in the future. The best tiles are clay based - they break more easily. Tiles that are thick and cement like are very hard to break. The best size for breaking appears to be three centimetres wide by as much as you can long. You then break with the hand nippers across the pices to create a 3cm by 1cm piece. Then you can easily snap off three 1cm by 1cm pieces. A 4cm piece tends not to split with the hand nippers straightly. I like the mosaics with square pieces (rather than random shapes) but it is tricky getting the pieces the same size. It definitely helps if you can especially for the boarder which is laid Optus regulatum (with the gaps between pieces lining up for each row). I plan to fill the centre around the lizard with a curve (Opus circumactum) laid tiles which will not need such evenly shaped pieces. This creates as overlapping shell like curves.

Check out this website for a description of the different mosaic tile laying patterns.

I have finished Jill's stone! It took a record 4 nights at about 10 hours of work. Cubix Zirconium always comes up so sparkly. It was also nice to feel confident about a standard round brilliant and see how much I have improved. Next challenge will be a triangle in amythest and Alison's stone a pear shaped blue CZ. The gem show is happening next weekend at EPIC in Canberra - so I will be able to pick up a setting for Jill's stone. I hope you like it Jill. It's about 7mm if you want to get an idea of the size.

I bought a new book at the Getting Publsihed Seminar and it is turning out to be very good. It is called Fiction first aid by Raymond Obstfeld. It has helped me with my setting and descriptive sections so far and is very good at giving examples for different problems and how to fix them. It saves me trying to analyse how authors do things by myself. He recommends a lot of editing revisions and I can see that I need them! I am focusing on one section only at the moment and trying to get it in a fit state to submit to the artsACT grants process in 11 days. It will be a lot better than the last time I submitted it but I fear there is a long way to go.

Olivia and Adam had a healthy baby girl, Piper Kate on 16th May. Good luck with the sleeplessness.