is all about self promotion. Sort of.

Op Shop Tours Australia is the site I’ve been building for friend, Joane O’Callaghan, who (whom?) I helped last year as part of The Bump In Project. She’s not only a fantastic singer and cabaret performer, but she does these op shop tours - think shopping bus tours for vintage and secondhand stuff - around Melbourne and Adelaide. As part of the upcoming Melbourne Comedy Festival you can take part in her tours, or you can take one during February! There’s even some during March as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival. 

The site is pretty neat: it uses the same blogging platform as what I use… it even uses the same template, just with the colours reversed and some tweaks made by me. The design isn’t mine, but I did have to transcribe it from a flash file, so it took a lot of work. Luckily I know roughly what I’m doing, and Joanne’s been very happy with it. 

Anyway, if you’re in the area and interested, do check out her shows. Or at the very least, click on the link and check out the site 

… Also, a short note to say that there’s a lot of puppetry events and news going on, which I’ll be posting throughout the week. I’m guessing it will take up most of my normal posting, but am working on the video. It’s hard to be motivated, what with the heat and crappy technology and all. Instead, I’ve taken the opportunity to work on my next moppet pattern, which I’m actually feeling suddenly very motivated to do. I’m thinking on Wednesday I’ll post about it; I’d like to have this next one tested like I did the last, so I’ll release part of the pattern at a time to a select group of people. So you may have a chance to test it for me . More news on that later.

Speaking of heat; this weekend has seen a horrible thing happen in Victoria (my state). There’s been an unusual rash of bush fires (like California, we get our share during the dry seasons every year, but this crop has been devastating). It’s affected numerous towns, in some cases completely destroying houses and has even caused more than 80 deaths, perhaps more over the coming days. It’s absolutely tragic; and more proof that we’re living unstably in this dry country.

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