I’ll leave you with this, because nothing quite captures the essence of Christmas like a knitted Nativity scene in the front window of a country craft shop (double click to enlarge it so you can enjoy the fine handiwork).
Ah, family traditions. Believe me, a Danish Christmas is not for the faint-hearted. To cope with the preparations, my brothers and sister and I split the cooking tasks. Initially, we renegotiated who was to do what every year – the pork, the red cabbage, the caramel potatoes - but over time, we’ve settled into a routine. I’m the ris a' l'amande maker. It’s not an easy job, and it is not a job you can rush, but when I get it just right, and everyone is scoffing til they burst, aaaah, the triumph.
Of course, I may have a fight on my hands claiming ownership of such a fabulous piece of snoozing equipment:
In other news, my vamp story was pretty swiftly sent back with a big, electronic no-thanks stamp on it. That's okay - the time period I set it in makes it suitable for another anthology, so I'll polish it over the next 4-5 days and send it off again. 
While others will wax lyrical about the Naked Gun series, for me, Leslie Nielsen was first and foremost the dashing space ship commander in Forbidden Planet. He was, I thought, everything a dashing space ship commander should be - handsome, brave, and able to shepherd a screaming woman through a collapsing mad scientist's lair.
I saw this movie at the drive-in when I was a wee, scifi loving sprog, and it scared the crap out of me.
Cooper was crazy for the catnip today.
Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? 
I was sooo looking forward to this week’s Thursday night movie, as I do any upcoming SF film, but I’ve now filed it in the ‘time-I’ll-never-get-back’ folder of life. This is the kind of movie that some people will use as ammunition when they bag SF.
The local library had a Monster Book Sale today - the chance to scoop up hardback editions nicely covered in plastic for the price of only $1.00 each - so guess where I’ve been this arvo?
But the very first book I pounced upon was Naomi Novik's Victory of Eagles, so now my post-trail-riding-plus-three-long-days-at-the-Arvo-Job brain (which also decided that this week's movie should be RED rather than Gainsbourg because it wasn't up to accessing long ago French lessons or negotiating subtitles, but a bit of Bruce Willis blowing up things was just the ticket) is telling me to sit in the backyard in the beautiful Spring weather (outside reading is a joy I’ve rediscovered since moving to the country) and just go adventuring with Temeraire and Captain Will Laurence. I’m trying to negotiate the doing of a few chores before this Napoleonic bliss-out, and I think I will win because one of them is the baking of dill and onion bread that will go extremely well with dragonish daredevilry and cups of tea, but we’ll see.
On the first, and worst (weather-wise) day of the ride, not one person opted out of the ride. As we, or rather the horses, climbed mountains made of rocks and mud, and then slid down the other side, as we hunched against winds and sleet and cold, as we felt rain slip inside our drizabones and our boots filled up with water, not one person whined or did a prima donna turn.
Instead, everyone joked about the situation and made the best of it. Tales were told of other rigorous rides, songs were sung (Slip sliding away...), and when the weather turned really bad, everyone just hunkered down and rode through it. Then, when we reached the King Valley camp at the end of the first day, soaked and shivering as they were, everyone took the waterlogged saddles (so heavy!!) from their mounts and made sure their horses were okay before dashing to change clothes and warm their outsides with fire and their insides with food.
After Saturday’s extreme riding (apropos which we came up with a business idea for a new sport that involves horses, rolling down mountainsides, and giant, rain-shunting bubbles, which we will, of course, base in New Zealand) the weather improved, and the occasional showers were a trifle compared with what we had already been through. Bonded by adversity, we set forth once more and over the next two days forded swollen rivers (no-one fell off, though a few horses submerged their riders before regaining their footing), picked our way down steep, narrow, muddy trails, had saddle and bridle malfunctions in the most awkward places, and were much amused by the requisite person-hanging-onto-a-low-hanging-branch-while-their-horse-walks-on-without-them episode.
Trail riding isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun time, but I love it (that’s me, in a photo taken by my sister).
Submissions: 5
It started thus, with clouds descending upon us.
Then it started raining. And it kept on raining, and raining, and raining. Our days ended thus, with the mass drying of drizabones, and the wringing out of everything else we were wearing:
This was good - atmospheric, scary, and respectful of the original though it explained more of the stuff that we enjoyed figuring out for ourselves,
this was better, mostly because the secondary characters around the children were more fleshed out and sympathetic, and provided a more textured community setting for the kids' actions. There was also more dark humour.
Adorable, eh?
*Addendum: these were not planned pregnancies. Butch, the stallion, jumped the fence and made a night of it.
So the long, long days at the Arvo Job are finally over, and last night I saw The Tree.
It was as quiet as, so I fired up the computer, did a few hours of so-so writing (a few hundred words of a sad (bleak?) love story and the overhauling of an amusing (?) poem that I'll send off tomorrow), made deadline plans for the rest of the month (finish four stories that possibly suit upcoming anthologies), and also fitted in a nice walk, reading (The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen - far too awkward a book to read while commuting) and domestic stuff like washing (still loving that I get to hang bedclothes out in the fresh air), baking (buttermilk scones, prune and walnut bread) cooking (a huge bean and vegie bake for portion freezing), and bonding with cats who are seriously cranky about me being away at the Arvo Job so much this fortnight.
Submissions: 5
My sister and I are preparing (nifty camping / saddle thingies to buy, tents to air out) for a 3 day ride in the Victorian Highlands in November.
And gotta-buy-that-book inducements like good covers and blurbs are important, as our guest speaker Sean McMullen pointed out, because you have to convince someone to not only part with their hard earned lucre for your book, but also to invest an afternoon or more to read it. 
Once I wanted to ban the bomb
This is me and Sylvester, a big, boofy, very fast boy, and the Great Ocean Road beach that we’ve just been galloping flat out along.
Me and my sister Cindy, who is on Ginger. This was probably our last beach ride for 2010 – soon the holidaymakers and tourists will fill the beach with their towels, fishing rods, surfboards and Frisbees, and we wouldn’t be able to hoon and splash around.
Excellent people, excellent riders, excellent beach, excellent fun.
So many people are blogging about AussieCon4, and most of them are insiders with far better photos of the behind the scenes happenings and major events, far more intimate meetings with interesting people to tell about, and certainly a higher grade of gossip than me, so I’m just going to do a ramshackle rundown of a few everyday things that happened to me, amused me, or in some way caught my inconsequential attention. There will be much gratuitous name dropping as well.
2) The Write the Fight workshop was fun because we got to get up for a change and jump around and pretend to hit each other. Predictably, there were a few guys, some in berets, who were eager to impress Alan Baxter by expounding their knowledge of commando techniques for quickly killing people or by trying to grab his leg when he was demonstrating kicks, but he very deftly and graciously deflected their attempts at hogging the limelight.
4) While standing in a long line waiting for the above mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson to sign my Blue Mars, I got to chat and joke with folk from Finland, the UK and Western Australia. We felt sorry for poor KSR, but not sorry enough to remove ourselves from the queue, and explored the possibility of just asking him to simply spit on the title pages of our books. It got a bit gross. I suppose you had to be there.
8) Peter M Ball signed my copy of Bleed. I tried to ever so casually mention that we shared the TOC of Moonlight Tuber #1, but my brain inexplicably latched onto Midnight Echo, so I babbled something about Midlight Mumble Mumble instead. Peter was a real gentleman and very gracious about it.
9) Have I mentioned the Build a Lego Dalek workshop? It was fun.
