• This morning I need to step up, bring it, and other metaphors derived from sport/reality TV. #
• I stepped up, I brought it, and now I need to go to the supermarché and buy potatoes. It's a busy life on the left wing. #
• "Stuff is on the ground in my yard! How do you like that, sucker?!" Long time between updates at Achewood: http://bit.ly/bnT7Tv #
• I have done my best drafting arguments all day, and now I am getting jiggy with the commas in service of my colleague's excellent work. #
• Governor's Bay Jay is housesitting in York for three months and is crafting a terrific chronicle of her experiences: http://bit.ly/dst4Dh #
• Birthday Get-Up http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/set?id=15677741 #
• The previous tweet is how I would dress @MeganWegan for International Megans Day, had I leisure and money. Happy birthday, ma'am! #
• RT @tweetmeme Feral beagles terrorize eastern Long Island http://tinyurl.com/ykhqqxn (ht @juhasaarinen). Beagles! #
• Just went to a meeting as a support person. Resisted temptation to introduce myself as Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. #
• I try to tell the truth at Formspring, where you can invite me to tell the truth to you: http://bit.ly/7sRZoE #
• I seem to have finished my work. This is pleasing. #hometime #
• The office photocopier has a touchscreen qwerty keyboard, but it doesn't respond well to touch-typing. #whitewhine #
• I have eaten the mango that @knedd bought me because I kept talking about the mango that I ate in Queensland two months ago. #
• A little of Wilco's melancholia as @MeganWegan smokes her "Last cigarettes/ … all you can get / Turning your … ♫ http://blip.fm/~k9r21 #
• Deleted my Daytum account; I am too busy with meetings and submissions to keep a record of how many meetings and submissions I've worked on. #
• New episode of Axe Cop up today: http://bit.ly/aCN8lr "We got you a baby, King Evilfatsozon". #
• My best wishes to all those withstanding the rush of Sevens visitors this weekend, and to the refugees of that rush. #
• The @knedd and I will also be leaving town, though a different town and for different reasons (http://bit.ly/cRRi6h) #
• If I can't remember the name of my new course, then how will my students? At least they won't be able to call it "literacy studies" anymore #
• Not long now before the @knedd and I sally forth to my ancestral homelands of Waianakarua: http://bit.ly/b4WmOD #
• It's time for a Waitangi Weekend Road Trip, Canterbury-style! However, we will be travelling in the opposite d… ♫ http://blip.fm/~kdj8y #
• …. and with that, @blipfm tells me I am the first person to blip "Today, Tomorrow, Timaru". #dejavoodoo #
• http://twitpic.com/11jvxd – It's a perfect day in the North Otago sunshine. #
• http://twitpic.com/11kynj – Lunchtime in Oamaru's old quarter #
• http://twitpic.com/11l3y9 – A relic from the days of protest. #
• http://twitpic.com/11mpq9 – Dinner al fresco at Moeraki. #
• Off to the hinterland, where there be Norwich Terriers, arrr. #
• http://twitpic.com/11s5gm – A bale-ful family at Kurow. #

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As one who has previously been dressed by proxy at Megan’s blog, I thought it timely that I attempt to return the favour.  

Now I am no fashionista but I do like bright colours with black, and I take inspiration not only from Megan’s own love of colour but also her flair for shoes, accessories and her Venusian curves.  Having beautiful skin and famous hair doesn’t do any harm either.

Birthday Get-Up by harvestbird featuring Brian Atwood shoes

I trust that the rest of you will enjoy International Megan Day as much as she and I aim to do.

I should note, too, that for someone who makes at least part of her living teaching Film Studies, my relationship to the cinema is surprisingly ambivalent. The scale of the spectacle in a movie theatre presents a physical barrier for me. Since my mid-teens I have been affected by irregular bouts of nausea and vertigo watching films of all kinds on the big screen, which, now compounded by pregnancy, makes cinema-viewing at present more or less impossible. So Avatar remains a no-go zone for me, which is why, in part, I’ve tried to come at Giovanni’s discussion from a rather more obtuse angle.

In response to this post:

Lazarus Voodoo, buried under blocks, pushed upward: the stone gave way above his palms. He sprang backward into the light, out of the pit, into the place, into the arms of Mary and Martha and Yeshua.

He never told what it was like down there. After a while, this didn’t matter; there were enough stories of that kind anyway, the dark, the heat.

In response to this post:

Yeshua had family in Florida. The others didn’t especially want to go, but really, for what, for now, was there to stay? So they went, with the clothes they were wearing, Lazarus V. as ever doing his little turn as they got on the boat, looking back.

It was Yeshua’s friends, not Mary or Martha, who’d given L. his silly nickname. Now, there was no reason for it not to stick; he’d come up out of the ground! They called him “Voo” and took him to the movies. “Hey, Voo.” He imagined it was “vous“, some English-language misuse that included his sisters, who came too, came with Voo.

In the theatre he slept, hidden behind his glasses. Maybe his sisters did as well. The green came through his eyelids into his REM, into his dream, imaginary water.

In the foyer, Mary handed over her glasses and whispered, “I don’t remember a thing”. Martha took his hand. “I wonder if we’re going blind.” Yeshua and his friends were already in the carpark, beyond the bright lights of the interior, looking for their ride home.

• I went to three meetings on two campuses this morning. They see me rollin', they hatin', etc. (not really). #
• Have reduced 29 urgent messages in my work inbox to a manageable eight. I am the queen of the well-tempered reply. #
• I didn't celebrate Wgtn Anniversary and I am not celebrating Australia Day. @snapper86 & I need to start some sort of protest holiday club. #
• Persuaded harvestdad to take me out for Korean hotpot, his first Korean meal. ChurchCorner is a low-rise gastronomic wonderland & cheap too #
• This submission may not do the trick, but by golly it will be free of comma splices and sentence fragments. #editorialfervour #
• Someone mentioned monkeys in a work email, which sent me in search of this clip from early Mighty Boosh: http://bit.ly/8Filng #
• Today I saw a long top over leggings, masquerading as a dress over leggings, worn in a context that surprised me. #notpants #
• It occurred to me this morning that I am using all the skills I gained in my undergraduate degree in my union work. Take that, BA-deriders! #
• I'm off to facilitate meetings for the afternoon. In my absence, feel free to ask me a question: http://bit.ly/7sRZoE #
• Am going to have to close the doors on account of the dogs having twilight maddies; the bad barking kind, not the good running around kind. #
• Arthur saw an empty cement bag in the driveway and now no-one except Fern can be consoled about this inanimate invasion of territory. #
• Dogs back at usual levels of adorability while I work at home this afternoon. The hell hounds whom I crated last night have vanished. #
• I have been thinking about The Donnas, and how they were at the forefront of the adult-women-who-enjoy-unicorns… ♫ http://blip.fm/~jwe3t #
• http://twitpic.com/103qg2 – Undoubtedly spurious but made me laugh. Denominational smackdown! #
• Long legal letter ends with a typo — "wit" for "with" — and suddenly the whole issue is gangster! (Summary: hate the game, not the playa) #
• Will those of us who still giggle at the name Wii (despite its pivotal role in How We Met Our Husband) ever assimilate iPad nomenclature? #
• http://twitpic.com/103wak – The dogs keep a silent vigil while @knedd clears up some spilled food in the kitchen. #
• The pathos — or is it the beauty? — of Mozart when you are a dog: http://bit.ly/bA90tO #
• I am for all intents and purposes a Mass Effect 2 widow today, although the @knedd still responds when I speak, so it's not too bad. #
• I'm impressed by a game in which there is a credible female avatar with a soldier's, rather than a porn star's, physique. #masseffect2 #
• People who complain about tweeting about housecleaning do not know the schadenfreude of having finally got that sh*t sorted. #
• Haloscan is shutting down. I haven't used their comments system for years but it made enabling commenting on diaryland diaries possible. #
• Fern the Norwich Terrier might regard with interest the globosity of the lynx spider at @TheAtavism: http://bit.ly/965GjS #
• This story made me feel by turns hopeful and fearful: http://bit.ly/9iiiwh. #
• The sliding scale of constructive criticism (via @knedd): http://bit.ly/bilM96 #
• Project Undercoat continues apace in the spare room, thanks to the evolving brush & roller-wielding skills of @knedd. #

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• Big day at the dog show. Norwich Terriers winning left, right and centre. I should have run a book. #
• Trying to persuade Evie that even if she wants to be a lapdog, that doesn't mean she can sit on the laptop. #
• I'm at Main South Rd, -43.535928 172.560242 – http://bkite.com/2sbsd #
• Main South Rd – Main South Rd – Sockburn – It's nom time in the land of dog dinners: a frenzy followed by eery qu… http://bkite.com/2sbss #
• Now I can enjoy my coming 35th b-day free of tacky reification. RT @grabaseat: our grabaseat Cougar contest closes midnight tonight. [...] #
• Finished Season 3 of Mad Men with @knedd last night, aware that yelling at Betty Draper has become a disproportionate part of my recreation. #
• RT @sockington: I HAVE SOME CREAM #
• Though not visible under clothes, the passenger-bump is now substantial enough not to fit under my desk. I may soon need to type on a tray. #
• 20 Kirkwood Avenue – Ilam – It's the caffeination hour at work, when I face up to the tasks that need to be compl… http://bkite.com/2ss94 #
• 20 Kirkwood Avenue – Ilam – When I learned to type, I did not envisage a life as Queen of Work Email. – http://bkite.com/2str3 #
• 20 Kirkwood Avenue – Ilam – Enough is probably enough. Time to hie me to Sockburn, land of dogs. – http://bkite.com/2sung #
• The whimsical "near-enough" check-in locations on @Brightkite have sent me back to it. You can find me here — almost! #
• More on how is babby formed: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/18/ #
• Main South Rd – Sockburn – Now that I'm settled in, why not ask me anything: http://www.formspring.me/harvestbird – http://bkite.com/2svxg #
• Putting formspring link up at @brightkite not best idea. Have deleted account due to anon qns trying to guess where I live. #mymistake #
• Rock of Love Bus on MTV; I never get tired of the line "I've never even been engaged!" as marked of social failure. #
• Attempts at a second blog post this evening thwarted by my version of wordpress playing up — and my accidentally deleting a draft. Feh. #
• Gosh: http://bit.ly/5mXB0o JAL is the employer of a number of my former students. #
• Today's earworm: Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine Verlaaaaaaine (http://bit.ly/7TeCCX) #
• RT @FakeAPStylebook: Use standard abbreviations for foreign money: [...] AUD for Australian dollars, CBP for Canadian beaver pelts, etc. #
• Cobby Little Ratting Terriers: my dogs at Christmas (if you haven't seen the Facebook pic). http://flic.kr/p/7×3BPj #
• I think I'll have to read this: http://bit.ly/4MS6IM. @robyngallagher, maybe it will appeal to you too? #
• We were warned about this by @Homage, but it doesn't make it any less scary: http://bit.ly/7d7p6l #
• Kate McGarrigle has died: http://bit.ly/7JuN07 #
• Took my bitches for a scan. None in the oven for Evie but Fern has four fetal whelps (aka puppies) including one wee on-screen backflipper. #
• http://twitpic.com/z61ro – Both of us are in pup but only one (touch wood) is having four. #
• Dog/human pregnancy equivalence: 1 dog week = 1 human month. Fern currently 5 weeks 3 days. She has some low-riding saddle bags. #
• Is your inquiring mind at leisure? Why not ask something of your friendly h-bird? http://bit.ly/7sRZoE #
• I need to finish clearing out the spare room. As a result I've procrastinated my way through many loads of washing & filled the dishwasher. #
• Two new posts today: Kei Hea Te Pene? http://bit.ly/5E8ovL and Summer Husbandry http://bit.ly/5Eb3V7. #
• Clearing up in the spare room took fewer than 30 minutes; a waste of good procrastination! #
• Went to Drexels for breakfast with the @knedd. Excellent food for the pregnant woman whose appetite is currently like a shearer's. #
• The passenger demands continuous fruit, vegetables and protein. You'd think it was a mammal of some kind and not a magical robot-unicorn. #
• Fush and Chip Crane has Landed: this photo from @wellykowhai's stream I like perhaps inordinately. http://flic.kr/p/7xL1B1 #
• I have a dead arm and @knedd has a three-weeks' fractured toe. Both these injuries were sustained from walking, sober, around the house. #

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The señor, harvestmother and I will do everything we can to keep her comfortable and safe leading up to the labour.  The next step will be a move to larger meals for her, which can only meet with her tacit approval.  Experience in breeding is no assuager of the hopeful anxiety that accompanies labour and whelping and these will be several cautious weeks. Our current nickname for Fern is “Foo” (or perhaps “Fu”), an abbreviation from a previous elaboration. She is a tough and determined customer, Miss Foo, the airway irritants of summer notwithstanding.

The other half of this equation has done his work already; this English dog of considerable handsomeness and splendid type now with the run of the house at the home of Ashburton Jay and the show ring beyond.

I look at that cheerful face and the more pensive visage of my girl and hope for good things. I have a passel of first-rate vets and a weight of superstition. Time to read again The Whelping and Rearing of Puppies and to wait and see.

Ten years ago I wrote a novel, for which I had positive feedback both from my reader-commentator locally and from the publisher who rejected it.

Eighteen months after that I spent another eighteen months rewriting the story, to the extent that it was a different novel with mostly different characters, settings and events. This was also rejected, again in a kindly manner, by the same publisher and by the agent whom I shopped it to thereafter.

A little under six years ago I got an assessment for the manuscript, along with some excellent advice, and began rewriting, again with extensive points of difference, perhaps a year after that. The voyage to that point was accounted for in this article in New Zealand Books.

For the next four years I worked on another complete revision, very slowly and very part-time, until around a year ago I was within perhaps three or four thousand words of completion. And there I stopped, and spent a year not finishing the thing on which I had spent so long working. The ending, plotted, simply didn’t come into print. As the year passed, I felt myself move further and further away from my material. Following miscarriage and marriage, it was as if I were looking at something that someone else had written, about experiences and people that were no longer my inventions, and in which I no longer felt the same emotional investment.

Now I’ve decided to stop trying to finish the manuscript, at which I feel a slightly pathetic sense of relief and liberation. My ambition to tell the story has eroded and my imaginative interests moved on. Furthermore, my sense that some part of my self-esteem rests in finishing the material for publication has dissipated completely, even as other projects have arisen to hold rather more effectively my attention.

I need to make some plans for the other writing I’ve been doing alongside not-writing the manuscript, and I have an academic commission to finish over the next six months too. The fact of continually working away on these pages has given me an ease in the essay form that I never quite achieved with fiction. I am tempted to focus on and exploit that rather more — or not. I understand that what I wanted, all along, was to achieve formal elegance, and that this need not be focused in one form alone. (Exit, pursued by a bear.)

The señor and I have been fortunate to enjoy in situ the baked goods of Amanda, whose Christmas baking continued the theme of abundance.  While I retched and complained through the holiday season, she and her daughter were producing the house at right, whose reproduction here I hope she will allow.  As one of a cluster of baked seasonal houses I saw online, it inspired in me a curious sense of generational solidarity.  I may be sitting on a couch with my dogs and their dander, but my peers are tending their vegetable patches, mixing their biscuit dough and crocheting up a storm.  It’s a feeling of togetherness but also the feeling that I don’t have to do everything myself.  (Having a partner who has all but annexed the kitchen is one likely root of this beneficence that I extend into the ether.)

Meanwhile, Catherine at Sum in Horto similarly holds my attention with a flowering, fruiting kitchen garden.  There seems to me something not only sweet but elegiac about growing things in progress, particularly during this last year when subtexts have flowed close to the surface in life.  I keep coming back to look at this image (again, reproduced with the hope of permission).  Tender, tiny, quiet grown things, made at home.

Some kind of key to my thinking might lie in Bronwyn Lloyd’s exquisitely-turned post made at the beginning of the week, who has this to say about her reading of a poem from Joanna Paul’s volume Imogen:

Through the process of writing about it I learned how Joanna channelled her grief into art in order to understand the nature of loss. … [T]he composition of her words and phrases express[es] ideas about presence and absence, and reveal[s] that creativity itself can fill the vacuum of loss and sorrow.

and finds in the completion of her PhD

the realisation that motherhood and maternity should not only be considered in terms of flesh and blood offspring, but can be expanded to include creativity in a much broader sense.

I am in the midst of abundance and the memory of recent loss, a hopeful but uncertain future (shared too by two of my dogs who may themselves be in pup) and a past whose little ghost doesn’t so much harry the present as insist, quietly but persistently, on the fact of its existence.  The señor mows the weeds and the grass alike and I take a short car-ride to the Couplands Bakery for the odd biscuity treat.  But there are networks upon networks around us, making and growing and harvesting and reading and making again.  Look at what lies just over the hill.

Surprises so absurd
They leave the singer dumb,
A stockfish for a word,
One word, wherewith to thank
These quaint, as from her crucible they come.

Most curious of all, to my language-logging mind, is the way in which what was a metaphor, whose self-effacing qualities provided an aspirational example, is now the literal title of a tumblelog of fashion faux pas, in no way connected with the former operator of the original URL.  This is not to say that I don’t value the social service of pointing out the affront to aesthetics of those who sport tights as the rest of us sport tracky-dacks, but it is to say that something is lost in the change.

Perhaps one day if there is no more Harvest Bird, some avian-loving user will fly in and do something similar with this domain, but I doubt it somehow.

• [dubh:] Seems @munki’s http://notpants.tumblr.com/ has taken a fairly literal tack lately. #
• [munki:] I deleted that tumblr account. Seems like someone else has registered it and turned notpants pants. #
• [dubh:] Oops. Not in any way affiliated with you. I thought it was stretching the bounds of irony a bit… #

The fibreglass butterflies ascend
the front of the unit. There is a

flower-shaped windmill with a
happy face, planted in the ground

below. It rattles when it spins.
A small ceramic gardener displays

a length of butt-crack; china
flowers and toadstools inter-

mingle with the pansies and
lobelia. Once I saw a golliwog.

Hand-painted pins and badges stick
to the side of the letterbox like

fungus, though the back flat’s
portion is completely bare.

Tourists draw up in rental cars
sometimes, mostly visitors from

Asia. They take pleased photos,
stare at the proliferation. You

can imagine the owners’ hands by
night, extending through the front

window, affixing objects man- and
home-made with all the happy slap

and pop of a kitchen fridge-magnet,
a plastic suction-cup.

(Sadly, since the death of one of the owners, the house-and-garden that inspired this post is no longer clad in such an extensive range of folk decorations.  You can just see a remaining butterfly on the top right of the front wall in the slow-loading image below.)

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