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Keeping Up with the Jones – A Strange Thing Happened When I Found Art

There was a time when I was youngish and shallow, when I sort of lost perspective about the important things in life. I guess I was embarrassed and also so very tired. I was embarrassed about my weight, my strange and difficult children, my parenting skills, my lack of career progression, and most of all, I was embarrassed about the suburb I lived in and my shitty little house that was so untidy even my mother didn’t like to visit me (cue violins playing).  Read more

Posted on by Reflections of an Untidy Mind

Unconditional Love

Whoever said dogs give unconditional love, never had a Finnish Lapponian Dog (Finnish Lapphund as we know them in the English-speaking world) or a Finnish Spitz.  Anyway, here is my cartoon celebrating unconditional love between (wo)man and dog.  The drawing needs work, but you’ll get the general idea.  Life is never boring with this pair.

Unconditionallove
Tantrums and Treats

 

Posted on by Reflections of an Untidy Mind

Red Dog Delight – See How He Shines

Weekly Photo Challenge – Glow

Thought I would have a go at participating in the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge.  Here is a photo of my dog.  He just shines in the late afternoon sun.

glow
Fynnie, the Finnish Spitz, doing his thing
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How I Found My Inner (Visual) Artist

I want to give hope to all those people out there, who, like me, have felt, and still feel, that they don’t have an artistic bone in their body.  As a kid, I used to like drawing.  I drew butterflies, dogs and horses.  They were all out of proportion and simple; just a kid’s drawings really. I wasn’t gifted but I had fun. When I reflect back on that time, half the fun was in day dreaming about my drawing, or starting with a blank page and just seeing where it would take me. Pencils were everywhere and anywhere, left lying around when the drawing was done. There was no packing up art supplies. There was no helicopter parent offering a critique or having special art time with me to foster my ‘creativity’, whatever that means.

Then I went to high school and I thought I would try art class as an elective. I know a lot of children thrive in art classes. But for me, it was torture. Read more

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The Case for Supporting Same-Sex Marriage

I have been giving a great deal of thought to the forthcoming postal survey – not to the pros and cons of the survey itself but to the question the survey is asking. Should Australian law be amended to allow same-sex couples to marry? For me this question is both universal and personal: to deny same-sex couples the legal rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples offends my sense of justice, but also, a couple of years ago, one of my children came out. Unfortunately it seems that a polite exchange of views between the opposing parties is no longer possible. It saddens me that there appears to be nothing that my LGBTI friends or I could say that would make a difference, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Read more