Well, it's just been hectic around here, that's all I can say. More schools - Bacchus Marsh, Bungaree, and Lal Lal. Sundays at the Harvest Festival (Bacchus Marsh) and the Autumn Festival (Ballan) A Saturday morning at Darley Market. A couple I met and wrote a poem for at Darley then showed up at the Bookbarn on Harvest Festival Day. A day later I was offered a gig at their Retirement Resort Cocktail Party! Really looking forward to that. Along with the School Holiday Program session, that completes my poetry-gathering.

Although I might just take clipboard and pen to two events on Sunday 14th April anyway. In the morning I'll join the Friends of Werribee River in cleaning up around an iconic part of the river, Harry's Hole. Apparently this pool was once used for swimming sports. Despite erosive floods and invasive weed, you can still see where parents sat to watch their champions.

Then in the afternoon I'm off to Melton with A-Choired Taste of Gospel to sing for our friend Jill who is dealing with the after-effects of a damaging stroke. She has particularly asked us to visit her rehabilitation centre as she so misses singing with us. We miss her too; her voice was the highest soprano and clear as a bell.

A-Choired Taste of Gospel also played a role in the Harvest Festival, being part of the program of the Festival of Hymns & Sacred Music. The new Moorabool Light Orchestra was just brilliant, and I got goosebumps during their performance of Amazing Grace.

Easter has been a gift for my writer-self; I've spent two days starting my memoir about my time in Zambia all over again. This time I'm making it a straight narrative, and the chapters fall inside a structure created by school terms. I finished Term 1 1976 with 5 chapters, and then a chapter on Term 1 Holiday. Our term breaks were all at least a month long - plenty of time to get up to mischief!!

In The Midst Of A Silly Season

I planned today as an Unplanned Day; in other words, I am doing what I feel like, when I feel like it. For someone as action-oriented as me, this takes some discipline! Can I really do Nothing? And what does Doing Nothing look like? Even staring at the sun-filled back yard I notice my mind is chattering away about what to do and when. 

Anyway ...
I gave 86 pages of ms and 5 other short-but-related pieces to my Probable Almost Certain Coach, left it in an envelope on the back porch on Saturday 22 December as she was way over east - Scoresby? - that day. Having printed it and re-read it beforehand, I saw that now there is the "Scholastica story" to write. That is, the story of the development of my relationships with Africa and Africans, particularly my students.

And that's still first draft stuff. This memoir is going to take years, as I'm clear the pages I gave my coach are not all that well-written. Drama missing, narrative trajectory ... all that and more!

I helped dig up and move rocks on her property one Saturday,  to prepare the ground for new planting. The choir has sung its offerings at Aged Care hostels, an Indoor Carols By Candlelight, and the local host church. My brother has cleared my garden and paved areas and taken a huge stack of junk to the Tip (oh, I mean the Transfer Station: such an interesting euphemism for rubbish dump, reminiscent of the increasingly common term for dying - "passing" or "passing over").

We have eaten and drunk our fill, the whole family, and today I do whatever takes my fancy. I am aiming to print all my 2012 photos (which I've just filed under "For Printing") and complete the "Diary" Album for this year by 1st January.