About a year ago, I bought the pink beaded fringing in a sale at one of the only two shops for which I will "pilgrimage" into Brisbane's horrible city heart.
As a kid, I caught the bus on steamy Brisbane summer days with my grandmother. Back then no buses had air-con and by the time you got into the city your clothes stuck to you and you stuck to the seats. Back then, my grandmother made me stand for adults.
I caught the bus the other day and school girls from Brisbane State High and Kelvin Grove sat chatting pretending not to see their standing elders. Traditions fade but memories don't.
The Kerri Craig Emporium in the beautiful Brisbane Arcade is a must for fossicking - especially around Christmas time and particularly when the Arcade holds its annual market with little stalls in the corridor from one end to the other.
It's great for anyone who collects fabric and trims and creative inspirations - or new, leather shoes for $10.
I found the heart fabric on sale at Sewco at Mt Gravatt's Big Top - a the January sale with 30 percent off. That's where I bought the pattern some time ago.
The heart buttons I bought three years ago in Grafton, on my way home from Christmas in Pearl Beach.
So I mixed and matched everything to come up with this birthday gift for my niece. Not for sale. Sewing is very much a brain tease and a dexterity test. But it's a pleasure when you have materials to play with at hand.
The other shop in the city I like is the delectable sweets store in the Myer Centre - I think it's called Chocolate Boulevard. They sell liquorice sherberts, liquorice of all kinds and Tiny Tots.
"Capacity is at the forefront of public transport challenges in Australasia" _ Chris Hale, Civil Engineering Office UQ (The Australian Planner: New Approaches to Strategic Urban Transport Assessment)
I often doubt the sanity of "planners" behind our transport networks as I stand in a packed bus on a jammed busway and watch the cars with one occupant move faster.
But since reading the soul searching of urban planners in the Australian Planner I see that it may not be their fault - entirely.
They are just as frustrated about the mess that some might call a network or even a configuration.
In fact, urban planners look down the track and worry about the "oil vulnerability" of our auto-reliant cities - particularly of low socio-economic Australians forced to live on city fringes and in regions.
Some insane scenarios are being played out without anyone questioning the sanity - or so I thought.
I mean regional Australians commute for hours to work in cities because there are no jobs where they live and they can't afford to live in cities - what the? It's all in ABS stats if you care to look.
You might think that petrol prices are high but actually the reason why 7.5 percent of households have two or more cars is because petrol is still relatively cheap.
Households actually minimize travel costs by owning two cars - rather than reducing the amount of driving.
"Our continued dependance on cheap oil and its products has the potential to render our society vulnerable when demand exceeds supply," write three University of Queensland academics in one article. (Oil Vulnerability: The Effect on non-metropolitan areas and master planned estates in SEQ 2001-2006).
The Queensland Government forecast for the peak and decline of global oil supplies is 2013 - next year.
Other accepted studies say it peaked in 2006. And another quoted study says it will happen no later than 2020.
Australia's outlay on oil imports adds more than $9.3B to Australia's current account deficit (2008-2009) - and that figure's going to hit $25B by 2015. So has anyone asked yet what exactly happens if - when - the price climbs because of oil shorages?
The Australian Planner - a subscription trade magazine published by the Planning Institute of Australia - is pretty much an academic journal, so I don't believe all the soul searching ever reaches the light of day in a public arena.
And I can't see many politicians (apart from Christine Milne) lying awake worrying - considering they have limos and credit cards at their disposal.
Volume 47, Number 4, of the Planning Institute of Australia's professional journal is dedicated to Cities and Oil Vulnerability. But what's more interesting is that the Queensland Government - under Anna Bligh - provided a grant to help produce the issue and fund the establishment of an Australian urban oil vulnerability research network.
And I am wondering where the change of government leaves them now. I recently drove through the Clem 7 tunnel (read bankrupt tollway) to skip the morning traffic to find that I had the place almost to myself while overhead traffic was standing still.
You know I don't think that the Australian film industry should think too badly of itself as a failure - when put in context - I think they do much better than transport planners do.
And they don't even have to make a profit to survive - they probably get public service bonuses, as well as credit cards.
I know you will think me odd or at least two-face when I admit to driving rather than taking a bus more often than not because it's cheaper and faster.
I was aghast to find I could drive and park for the day at Kelvin Grove for about $10 all up probably, compared to $15 catching two buses - and being stuck in massive crowds and traffic jams.
I would say our mass transit network is a complete failure. What do you say?
He gave a highly entertaining and enlightened talk on what needs to change to integrate the education system into the 21st century. Johnson works with governments and educators all over the world.
His company, the New Media Consortium, is a non-profit group that explores the use of new media and technology.
He has a unique, global perspective and his experience of tech started with building radios with his dad to taking video calls from his two-year-old granddaughter today.
So what does he think effective education is?
You need to make their jaws drop in awe. Effective education makes kids jaws drop. In India, he knows a teacher who runs a mobile science van. Kids do hands-on activities, such as making a plastic bottle shoot a paperball.
The teacher shows them how "pressure" inside the bottle shoots the ball of paper at them and explains that the same pressure gets planes off the ground.
Johnson has adopted this teacher's mission to build curiosity in children. To this mission Johnson adds the need to teach mutual respect, and the ability to collaborate. But curiosity is at the top of the list of non-negotiables.
The lesson for people doing the "strategic thinking" to design an effective education system for the 21st Century here is this:
It's not about building a better 20th century, or a better 19th, or 18th - it's about the 21st century.
"What are we focused on?" he asks. "Our strategic thinking is based on a world that no longer exists," he said.
To paraphrase him, "Are we looking to the cold, dark past or into the light of dawn of a new future?"
Sometimes, he said, in order to see the rainbow you just need to change your perspective. Just look out the window, he said.
"The net is like air for children today." His two-year-old grandaughter calls him via video phone and learned her way around an iPad in the twinkle of an eye.
"Facetime Grandpa!"
"We need to build a world as it needs to be for them, that's a very different thing to the world we wish it was for us."
And there's more to this looking at things differently business. What is the network?
Is it the 1.3 billion mobile phones sold every year? Is it the html browsers?
Like do you really think that "The Network" is the National Broadband Network, or the five cables under the oceans that connect Australia to the world? (Singapore has 22 by the way)
"The network is us." He didn't realise this point until his 27-year-old son, who teaches high school in Korea, told him. The network is not cables and computers and phones - it's us, people, we are the network.
There were 6 billion active mobile phones in the world in 2011 - 76 percent have html browser - 96percent have basic browsers - but that's not the network that came into play to make an Arab Spring. The government actually turned that network off in Egypt and the "actual" network kept going - you can't switch it off.
Sometimes you just need to be looking out the window to see the rainbow.
Johnson showed a map of the world taken from space and all the lights show where electricity burns. Then he flashed up the same map showing all the geographical mobile phone connections - guess which one burns brighter?
The reach of the mobile network is BIGGER than the electric grid.
The "network" was radio when he was kid. He made radios with his dad - that was high-tech in the 1950s - FDR fireside chats. His father explained how radio waves bounce around the world so they can listen to the Casius Clay fight in Paris in the wee hours of the morning.
Then television came along. They watched the top-rating show on a Wednesday night The Beverly Hill Billies.
Marshall McLuhan warned - "The network is changing us."
And in 1963, the most trusted man on television, Walter Cronkite, rocked the country with the announcement that the president had been shot in Dallas.
"The entire country stopped for three days in a profound collective mourning," he said.
"We didn't really know what it was that we were experiencing."
So he decided to study computer science to explore the network.
Some practical points that need some thought to factor into "stategic thinking":
Today people expect to be able to work, learn and socialize where ever-whenever
Only five cables connect Australia to the rest of the world - Singapore has 22 communication cables
the internet is no longer about the Gigabytes anymore it's about mobile
it's about The Cloud stupid
openness is the new value - it's not a trend.
80 percent of our lives is not spent in school - so how important do you think "informal" education is?
Has your mouth dropped? Because mine did as I listened to the man.
And then he ended it with Benny E King's Stand By Me and he stood silent on stage. He put himself through uni playing jazz and he's a photographer who gets up early to photograph dawn.
Seems to me that he's building a picture of the dawn of the 21st Century here. Will you stand by him?
Doesn't do justice to the golden rays splaying out behind the Queensland Art Gallery. Blink and you'd miss it. Fail to turn your head and you'd be none the wiser. Had the bus not stopped it never would have existed. Kinda explains a lot about point of view.
