For the past couple of days, Rita has been laid low by a persistent cough, which has slowed her down a bit. Probably a result of too many late night concerts in the open air last week! But I’m going strong, and today I finished preparing the front fence for painting. Yippee!

Having received my Voting Papers yesterday, I spent some time looking at them today. The House of Representatives paper was relatively simple, with only 10 candidates. So having put a number 10 against one of the candidates (locals will know who that might have been!), and a number 1 against my preferred candidate, I then spent little time ordering the rest. However, the Senate Voting Paper was another thing. It was over a metre wide and contained the names of 116 candidates!!! I’m sure glad that I had some time to study it and was not confronted with it for the first time on election day in a voting booth that is well under a metre wide! Luckily, unlike last election, I didn’t have to number all 116 candidate (without mistake); I just had to number at least 12 (which is what I did). Many of the parties/candidates were easily eliminated, but I had to do some thinking about the rest. One that caught my attention was VoteFlux.org. Since it looked like a website name, I Googled it and found the website which explained the party (couldn’t easily do that in a voting booth!). They have no policies, but are espousing a different form of participative democracy, where their candidate will vote on each bill that comes before the Senate in accordance with the expressed wishes of their constituents. These wishes are found as a result of a smartphone App, which members of VoteFlux can use to express their preferences on the bill (membership of VoteFlux is free and open to anyone, not just those who voted for voteFlux). It’s a bit like the Swiss system where the citizens vote on bills, but this uses modern technology. There are lot of questions about how this system would work in practice, and I doubt that they will get enough votes to gain a Senate seat (since most people won’t see their name until they get to a Polling Centre and then won’t be willing or able to Google them like I did), but I figured they were worth a shot with one of my 12 votes.

Since we needed to clean out the ground floor rooms in preparation for the Barge Arts Expo next week, Rita and I tried to move a chest that Nico and Miyu had placed as a coffee table in the lounge room, but it was very heavy. So we looked inside, and found that it was full of old glass vases, pickling bottles, lamps, clay pots and some rolled-up papers. We took the glassware out to clean it, and found some amazing pieces. My favourite was an old glass liquid fuel lamp (maybe paraffin) with delicate painting on the bowl, and with price-tag for 55francs still attached from the Grand Bazaar, Moissac (the shop run by the original owners of la Maison in 1906). A very fragile but lovely work, so we were very careful with that piece.

We then continued searching through the treasure chest, and found an old gardening calendar from 1911. It’s probably been in this house since that time. Many items were wrapped in yellowed newspaper, so I searched for a date to determine when the chest had perhaps been packed with these items, and found that it was January 1936. One of the many little treasures we have found in la Maison.