I have two nights more at this place. Thursday afternoon I go to a little motel to stay the night.
Friday at 7.30 AM the removalists are arriving to pack up and drive approx ten kilometres down Old Cleveland, take a right at Carindale, a couple of lefts past the mall and a right into my new street. Then the unpacking.
I’m being saved from all this as I happened to pick up a virus somewhere, and will be completely useless without having somewhere to frequently sit or lie down.
My job for the last few days has been to pack up the Lego. Well, there are definitely going to be a few changes happening in how I store things. Luckily thebrickarchitect.com is rejigging their label system which will be a wonderful resource.
And there will have to be some serious rebuilding, because of course several builds did not take kindly to being packed up. Unfortunately, as you can see below, Jed has stormed out of the scene, taking Jackie’s crane on his truck out of the picture!
Now came a bad time in the house. No peace in the daytimes. Builders tramped past all day, talking and laughing when I scurried for my water bowl or my litter box in the laundry.
They took over the garage and used it as their base. I watched them stormy-eyed as they trekked in and out through the screen-door with tools and materials.
I blinked. Didn’t hear the click of the lock that time. Started watching carefully. Listening too. The men grumbled.
The pernickety old woman came in with an armful of dry washing. “What’s the problem?” she said.
“We’re spending too much time looking out for that animal,” said one of them. “It’s maddening having to open and close that damned screen door every trip.”
“Can’t you board her somewhere?” said the other.
I didn’t wait for my human’s answer. Nipped to the screendoor …
My new not-yet-totally-complete robot posing against the experimental terra-forming.
The robot is from the Dreamzz series, set 71454. He’s called Z-Blob but I will be thinking up a name appropriate to the role he’ll be playing in the the ongoing storying.
The terra-forming needs over-painting in places, and a way to attach the long sides to each other that will allow changing the pieces around. Maybe.
In the story, there’s a city in the background on the other side of the mud-flats and river channel, that I’m still cogitating how to make. Paint and draw? Collage? A 2D Lego build? What do you think?
Me, Hand-of-God, sleeping in the contested red chair. On a towel because I shed black and white hair.
Last night, creating that havoc I promised, I ran and slid and skittered in the moonlight and shadows on the slippery wooden floors.
I took a running jump and leapt to the top of the tall wooden shelves in the living room. Lucky for me that they’re fastened to the wall. Dislodged books and ornaments thumped and clattered to the floor.
After each big noise I expected the pernickety old woman to come running from the bedroom in her nightdress. Shouting, maybe. I didn’t know her very well yet.
She stayed stubbornly in her room, the door stubbornly shut.
Is she deaf? I suspect that now. After a while I stopped my argy-bargy. It’s not much fun when there’s no reaction.
The pernickety old woman spooned in her usual breakfast fare while standing at the kitchen bench. Drank her tea as if she listened for something.
“Be a good cat today, Maggy,” she said.
But … yesterday’s doings were small stuff compared to my adventures to come! And there are no photos of any of it. Just our memories.
To help me be good, the pernickety old woman spread an old towel in the red velvet chair. “Sleeping is good,” she said.
Fine. I settled.
Then a man’s voice called from the front. “Okay if we bring a ladder in?”
The pernickety old woman went to the front door to talk with the man. He brought in the ‘ladder’ whatever the thing is. They decided that he could set it up under the guest room ‘manhole cover’. Another thing I’d never heard of.
A lot of to-ing and fro-ing followed, stumbling, swearing and apologies, and knocking on the wooden walls. The pernickety old woman stayed in the corridor while the person and his apprentice hauled in gear from their truck parked on the front lawn.
After a long time of barely dozing, I woke with a start. Silence in the corridor and guest room. I could hear the pernickety old woman talking at the washing machine, telling it what-for. My chance.
I soft-footed through the corridor. In front of me in the guest room stood a metallic set of saplings, with little shelves rising between the front pair, toward a yawning hole in the ceiling.
The aromas coming from the hole spoke of mice! And rats! And even birds! I climbed of course, and from the top little platform, jumped into the roof space.
While I explored up there, the men came back from their ‘smoko’. I ran to a little nook I’d found. Hid there, with my black back toward the men, making an extra shadow.
They worked at their mysterious project for hours. I have no idea what they did. High-pitched power saws came into play. They used chisels and hammers to ‘smooth edges’. Finally they left. They pulled the manhole cover back over the hole.
Then I heard the pernickety old woman calling me. “Maggy! Maggy! Where are you?” She rattled the kibble bin. “Dinner time!”
She stood at the back door. I was over the front corner of the house. She didn’t hear me and her feet went into the house. Small thuds. Cupboard doors clattered.
The roof space darkened with night. The pink fluffy floor was littered with tools and boxes. I explored a little longer but the animal aromas were overburdened with the chemical smell of the pink fluff and the tools.
So I hid away. What else to do? I listened to the night. I watched flitterings and an owl stalking a little bat. Eating it.
Then I saw where he’d come in. I growled, just a little. Owl took off, back into the night, flapping slow silent wings. I began to wait for dawn.
Hi, I’m the Hand-of-God. So called because I was born with a hand-outline, two hairs wide, on my back. But which was only my second name. At the cattery they called me Zorro.
The hand is hard to see now because I grew, and grew, and expanded and the hand expanded too, and became a blob.
Which is how the ignorant old woman now looking after me, calls it.
Hand-of-God? she says. You wish! Go on! I dare you go do something that God told you needs doing.
She obviously doesn’t know God is another name for Life, or Nature, if you’re pernickety like she is.
That night I hunted and ate all the cockroaches in the house. If that isn’t nature, what is?
What else can a Hand-of-God do locked up in an old house?
It’s useless to be thinking about the future when you are starting out, on anything. You start your working life putting up signs, you have no clue that one day you might be working on high rises installing in glass walls with the help of a robot.
People starting out as writers are the same. I started with writing poetry. I had no idea then that one day I’d take on an sf trilogy.
Nearly everybody here in the Discord’s Writing Cartel has a world/universe that they are either writing into or using as scene setting for any number of creative projects. Yesterday I watched a short film on Youtube, there are people developing games, writing novels, short stories, you name it, it’s being written.
Every one of these worlds/galaxies/universes are huge. Many of us have spent every spare moment of our boring work lives thinking up detail. There will always be areas in any of these worlds that will stay private to their creator, and other areas that will see heavy traffic of stories.
We’re all doing it for the love of it. World building is one of the most satisfying mind games we all engage in, relaxing and psychologically uplifting. Next comes the harder thing. Convincing other people to put their own worlds aside for an hour, and engage with us in ours. So we write stories, develop adventure games, produce visuals, film about our worlds.
The Discord Writing Cartel community is all about sticking our toes in the waters of our worlds, writing though the shallows, and finally committing ourselves to writing fully fledged stories to share first with each other, then with the world.
Only then, with that last word, can you start thinking about how much money you might make. Though, of course, these are just my own thoughts. Take them well salted.
Completely distracted today by an idea. My son is 34 and my grandson is 2. My son messages me with photos of fungi. I send my grandson photos of my cat, and of interesting stuff I’m doing.
So, the idea. I got my son’s Duplo down from the attic, built a staircase to get the Duplo figures out of their box, should they be bored in there, and took photos. Sent them.
Have yet to hear of the junior’s reaction, his parent sent me the usual.
Rita de Heer 