Rubbish Bin Art

In the suburb where I grew up, there is a cul-de-sac where. if you go walking on a Friday morning, you will be treated to a free art exhibition.

As you can see from the photos below, the residents of this little road have jazzed up their rubbish bins. The first time I saw these works of art, I wondered if maybe an entrepreneurial teen had offered to decorate his neighbours' bins in exchange for a fee, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case as each of the bins are so different from each other and it's hard to imagine they were all done by the same person.

I then wondered if perhaps the residents had some sort of an arty party one day where they all got together to give their bins a lick of paint. The street does seem to be a bit of an artists' hideaway; several of the houses have studios on their properties and one even has an old railway carriage.

This seems to me the most likely explanation, but I suppose there is always the possibility that one Friday morning, one creative mind wheeled his spruced-up bin onto the curb and all the other residents had a case of artistic envy and quickly followed suit.

Whatever the circumstances, it's definitely a fun street to walk down on bin day ...

This last one would have to be my favourite ... just in case painting a bin is not creative enough, this household crocheted a 'bin cosy' for theirs! 

                               

Which of the bins is your favourite?

Have you ever painted a bin yourself?

Have you ever crocheted something for an inanimate object? 

100 Word Story - Reader's Digest Australia Competition

I've wanted to take on the challenge of writing a one hundred word story for a few years now and recently, I saw in the Reader's Digest Australia magazine that their 100 Word Story Competition is on again. The prize for the overall winner is $1000 and since I have taken my car to the mechanic and my teeth to the dentist both in the same week, I decided that now is well and truly the time to enter. I had thought that the challenge was to write a story of 100 words or less, but it turns out that it must be exactly 100 words. After adding and taking away words half a dozen times, here's what I came up with:
  
                               
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She sits in front of the cake, eyes gleaming, totally present in this moment.

Her family gathers around her, smiling, taking photographs. They wouldn't have missed this party for anything.

One of them lights the candle, another turns off the lights. Her gap-toothed smile broadens, she starts to drool. Someone leans across with a napkin and wipes her chin.

She's can't express her gratitude with words, but they can see how much she's enjoying herself.

They start to sing. It's time to blow out the candle. Just the one, to symbolise a century; one hundred would have been too many.


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The Reader's Digest 100 Word Story Competition is open until the 31st December 2014. You can enter your own story here. Hyphenated words count as one. Good luck!

Have you ever written a 100 word story or any other very, very short work of fiction?

How to Get a Baby to Sleep - Wheelbarrow Style

Last week, Annalisa and I were visiting her grandparents and were out playing in the garden. She walked over to the shed, where she knew the wheelbarrow is kept, pointed to the door and said "Brrrrm" (Brrrrm is her word for anything that has wheels). I'd given her a ride in it before and she must have remember how much fun it was. So I got out the wheelbarrow and gave her a ride around the garden. 

But after only a couple of laps of the house, she started to get sleepy ...

 And then a minute or so later, I looked down and saw this ...

This was the girl who has taken an HOUR to get to sleep in her cot the previous afternoon!

So we took a bit of a tour de jardin in the spring sunshine. I couldn't believe how peacefully she slept in there.

  

Eventually, I stopped wheeling her round and left her to finish her nap by the lavender.

  

                                                         
Have you accidentally discovered any other weird and wonderful ways to get a baby to sleep?