Salt and corrosion

Hello, f-list. I started the day 152m above sea level, and here I am now back at... sea level? I mean, I live on a hill, so it'd be a few metres up, I suppose. Anyway, I'm home.

I had a good road trip. No snow. There are some really lovely rocks on the Lancefield-Tooborac road should you ever be in the area. Lots of them. When we drove past in the afternoon there was a rainbow, right to the end. The end of a rainbow, about a metre off the ground in a paddock. For some reason I thought you could never see the end of rainbow. Or is it that you can't approach the end of a rainbow?

Coming in to Tooborac there is a sign on two boards. It says:

Visit Historic
Tooborac
BIRD BATHS!

The BIRD BATHS! part is on the second board and in a different font, so I'm not sure if they're meant to be read together or not. Either way, the BIRD BATHS! one is an odd thing to be excited about.

My boss said he'd seen a good film recently. An old one. A bit like Jane Eyre. Called A Tale of something. He rang his wife. "What was that show we saw the other day? With that woman and the farmer?" With skill honed over twenty years of marriage, she thought for a few seconds and said: ( Take your guess before you click ).

Did you guess it?

I've just seen an advertisement for a florist offering "on-demand flower delivery". As opposed to all those other florists who deliver bouquets randomly without waiting for an order.

Last year my mother's best friend and her two daughters were visiting the City by the Sea and they went to high tea at one of our fancier tea rooms. They asked my mother and me if we wanted to go, but my mother couldn't/wouldn't leave John for that long. She said I should go by myself, but I didn't. I felt a bit weird about going out and having fun while she was stuck at home so I said I'd stay with John so she could go, but she didn't want to do that either. I think we were having a martyr competition. Anyway, neither of us went, and I regretted that. I regretted it straight away, but even more so once I met them for lunch another day and they showed me photos of it. Éclairs in the shape of swans! One of the daughters is an aficionado of high teas and she compared it favourably (regarding presentation, taste and cost) to high tea at the famously fancy Windsor in Melbourne. So I was kicking myself.

My mother's friend rang a couple of weeks ago and said they were coming back for their annual visit in March and were doing high tea again and did we want to come this time? So we're going. This is what we're going to have (éclair swan not pictured, sadly - I hope that doesn't mean they don't do them any more).

( How is my finger? )

I have been to the theatre, f-list. Whoever programs the season at the local theatre (the Lighthouse, we are supposed to call it now) is really working a theme this year. The last play I saw was called The Merger, about a small country town taking in some refugees in order to get enough players for a football team. The play I saw the other day was Australia Day, about a small country town planning its Australia Day festivities. I have been mulling over why I didn't like Australia Day very much, and I have come to the conclusion that I suspect the playwright hasn't set foot in a country town in thirty years. The play is clearly set in the present (it mentions current events), but the town and the local characters come from a generation ago. In the unlikely event either of those plays come your way, The Merger is my recommendation.

I came home from work one day last week to find a mystery object, a little white box, on the kitchen bench. I knew my mother had been in during the day, so I thought she had dropped it. Only when I rang and told her, she said, "Oh, no, it's not mine. I found that on the floor near the bookshelf." So it's mine, and I've got no idea what it is. What has this fallen off, f-list?

Little white box, with a match for size:


( And inside it... )

( ETA: By popular demand, extra views of the mystery object )

Hello, f-list. My work's tender for our future has been submitted, so life is back to a normal level of busy-ness now. Or it will be. Not half an hour after the submit button was pushed, the network went down with some sort of virus. So, phew, hey. I don't know more about the virus because it happened about an hour before my home time, so I put some things away and did a bit of paperwork then went home half an hour early. Doubtless I will find out all about it on Monday.

Yesterday I went to the touring Craft Alive fair that was being held at the netball stadium. I didn't buy any craft supplies though. How strong! I did buy some handmade clotted cream fudge. Not so strong there.

Yesterday evening I went to see The Merger, which was a one-man play about a small town's effort to save its football team by recruiting refugees. It was really good. In the unlikely event its regional Australian tour comes to your town, I do recommend it. One thing I appreciated was that it was an accurate depiction of small town Australia. Most things set in small towns get the old-fashioned lack of sophistication part right, but miss the new generation, like the coach who farms alpacas. It also got local radio right, because the show kicked off with the in-show local radio's homemade ad for gastrointestinal worm treatment (for cattle, I should say). You don't get that in your big cities.

In other news, this is a bit of fun. I think he had a point about the mug shot photo.

Busy life? You need a _______ that can keep up with you!

That was a billboard I saw at the airport the other day. It didn't have a blank word, obviously. The blank was the type of product you need if you have a busy life. What do you think it was? (Answer below.)

I went to Canberra for a meeting, not last week, the week before. It was -1 degree (Celsius) outside, but they had the heating cranked up so high inside that people were swanning around in sleeveless dresses, so all those of us who came prepared for chilly weather were overdressed.

I am sure that germs live and breed in that sort of artificial heat, so I felt vindicated when I came down with a cold on my way home. The first one I've had in a couple of years, hmph. So that was how I spent my week off last week: snuffling and coughing.

I am currently drinking a cup of lemon and ginger tea. The box tells me it is [b]est served without milk and an upbeat attitude. That doesn't work, does it? 'Without' applies to both the milk and the upbeat attitude. Is there a better way to say it? Best served without milk and with an upbeat attitude? Best served with no milk and an upbeat attitude? (Unless they really are trying to say that it is best served without an upbeat attitude, in which case... well done.)

What else? Oh, I saw a play the other night. Shakespeare, Henry V. It was... well. It was interesting. It was set in 1940s London, and all the cast were students in a bomb shelter, and they were reading Shakespeare to pass the time. So it opened with snippets of other plays (Richard II handing over his crown, Falstaff and Hal in the tavern) to set things up, then they started reading. There were only ten actors. The teacher was the chorus, and one student was Henry V, so the other eight divided every other role between them. Also, because they were students, the actor playing Henry V, for example, was really playing a schoolboy playing Henry V. He pulled it off, but it sort of took away from the impact of playing Henry V.

Halfway through, there was a bomb raid, and a German soldier parachuted in. That was well timed, because they flapped his parachute around to represent the battlefield. One of the characters said farewell to Henry in the play, then another bomb hit the shelter and that student died. So just as Henry triumphed on the battlefield, the student playing Henry killed the soldier. Triumph everywhere.

It was a bit confused. And confusing.

(The actor playing Henry looked really familiar, and I eventually realised he was the character known as Hunky Farmhand in that awful soap my mother liked.)



( Answer )

I forgot about my April book list! And I do mean 'book'. I'll spare you the list of academic articles on organsational design.

April books read

* The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' - William Hope Hodgson (1907)

( The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' )

Last night I went to see the Djuki Mala dancers. They started with a lengthy set of their traditional dances accompanied by didgeridoo, then moved to doing the same dances to other music, like a kangaroo dance set to Bollywood music. They finished with a Motown set: The Great Pretender, Be My Baby, a quick didgeridoo interlude, then that low buzz was stopped by squeaky-voiced Michael Jackson singing I Want You Back. Their encore was another set of traditional dances set to Pump Up The Jam and that song by the man who likes to move it. (You know: he likes to move it, move it, he likes to... move it.) So that was all fun.

In the interests of getting out of the house and doing something, I let my mother drag me along to an Open Garden at Dalvui Homestead today. I liked the tree above. Actually, I liked the whole garden. It was all very pretty. But I particularly liked the tree above.

Somewhere behind a wall that visitors couldn’t pass, there was a collection of birds doing a little symphony. First a goose would honk, then a peacock would… how do describe a peacock’s call? It would trumpet? Then a crow would caw. Honk, parp, caw. You could hear it all over the garden.

I've been happily cross-stitching away at a little project, and I've just realised that I've miscounted quite a vital part so I'll have to take it all out. Grah. I didn't actually throw it across the room in a fit of pique, but I was sorely tempted.

This entry is pretty much going to be Things I've Seen This Weekend.

I had to go to a meeting in Melbourne on Friday. It finished early, giving me a couple of hours to kill waiting for my train, so I went to the National Gallery's winter exhibition, which is called Monet's Garden. More waterlilies than you can poke a stick at, if you were allowed to take sticks into the gallery, which I suspect you're not. I spent a delightful couple of hours wandering about, picking which painting I'd take home with me (another thing I suspect you're not allowed to do). I think in the end I decided on this one of roses, just to be different.

As a companion to that exhibition, the gallery has a temporary installation in the main foyer, called clinamen by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. It's a large blue pond, filled with white bowls that float on an unseen current, chiming when they bump into each other. It's surrounded by wooden seats, so there were people sitting all around it, as though it was a real pond. It was lovely.

( Oh, look, here's a similar work on YouTube )

At the very entrance to the gallery was a new acquisition called Pix-Cell Red Deer by Kohei Nawa, which I liked very much. I thought it was a full-size deer made of glass bubbles, like a giant Christmas tree decoration, but I've only just realised that it's a real, taxidermed deer covered in bubbles.

Saturday, my mother called and said she was taking her elderly neighbour, Jan, to the Warrnambool Floral Art Show and would I like to come? So that was educational. I did not know there were so many ways to use dried lentils in a flower arrangement. Also, you can cover foam shapes with leaves pinned down to look like feathers. One arrangement had these interesting chunky orange beads hanging from it, which closer inspection revealed to be peeled carrots. You know, the stubby little ones. So that was fine, until my mother said, 'Oh, you could make a necklace out of them, with a parsnip as the centrepiece,' and poor Jan got the giggles and some of the floral art ladies glared at her. Don't laugh at the carrot beads, f-list. That's something else I learnt. Oh, also, that there is a place called Dunmunkle. I don't know where it is, but it has its own floral art club, so there's that.

One of the categories in the floral art competition was called Two Seasons, in which pairs of floral artists had to do a matching arrangement in which each represented one season. So someone did summer and her partner did winter, that sort of thing. I was standing behind two women looking at one arrangement. One of them was obviously one of the judges, because she was saying to the other one, 'And this one we didn't award at all because it was clearly two autumn scenes.' She was so angry about it. (To be fair, it did look like two autumn scenes.)

We arrived just as the mayor finished awarding the prizes. The mayor! On a Saturday afternoon, the mayor put on a very nice suit and rocked up to a church hall to hand out gift certificates for flower arrangements. I've never been terribly impressed with our mayor, but I've got to give him points for dedication there.

Today I have been to Terang, half an hour out of the City by the Sea. It is local football finals weekend, apparently. I don't know. There seems to be a higher than usual amount football-related guff in today's paper, at any rate. Driving out of the City by the Sea, some street signs and traffic lights were decorated with blue and white streamers, and others were decorated with black and red streamers, which I took to be a football-supporter thing. Only then on road sign outside Terang was decorated with red and blue streamers, so that was a bit confusing.

The reason for going to Terang was that my mother announced that she has grown tired of making patchwork quilts. This is a shocking development and I would have been concerned that she was, in fact, tiring of life itself had she not finished the statement by suggesting that she is seeking other sewing-based thrills, viz. would I like an overnight bag and, if so, would I care to come to Terang and buy the fabric? I'm still not sure why we had to go to Terang for that, but it was a nice morning out.

Terang is too small to attract the national retail chains, so it is full of little shops that evolve to fill various niches. We didn't cross the road to find out what Hatz Off sells*, but we stopped into Boxes & Blooms, which sells: tomato and cyclamen plants, Pandora charm bracelets, mugs and more Schleich horse figurines than you could poke a stick at, which seems like an unusual set of merchandise, but best of luck to them.

As well as the material for the bag, I also bought myself the owl version of these things (just the timber frame, not the kit with the charts and such). I could hang it off my new bag when it's done. What should I stitch on it?

This week's random word: ( 21. Abaft )

Next week: plain



* The internet tells me it's a hairdresser.

My mother and I went to a vintage hat exhibition on Sunday. At least, it said in the paper that it was a vintage hat exhibition, but when we got there it was a vintage hat and fur exhibition. I can just about deal with old fur coats; I wouldn't wear one, but it's been a hundred years, so the animal it came from would be long dead even it it wasn't made into a coat*. The stoles with the little faces are too much for me, though, so the exhibition was vintage hats and DEATH as far as I concerned. I concentrated on the hats.

The exhibition was in aid of the Port Fairy Senior Citizens' Club, and it was charmingly locally-minded. The exhibit labels were handwritten and said things like:

This hat belonged to Rhonda Allardyce's mother, Joan, who first bought it in about 1939. Thanks, Rhonda.

Yes, thanks, Rhonda.

On the way home, we had to stop to let an echidna cross the road. So that was nice.

If you want to travel first-class on the train to Melbourne, you have to buy a ticket in advance, and for that you get allocated a seat. If you buy one on the day, it's cheaper, but you have to take your chances in the economy carriage.

This weekend I was talking to someone who said with a carefree laugh, 'You'll never guess what I did! I bought four first-class tickets for the evening train last week, but when I got there, haha, I'd really bought them for that morning. The train our tickets were for had left twelve hours earlier! Hahaha!'

I said, 'What did they do?' Because if it was a plane, they'd shrug and say she was out of luck, but the train people are more accommodating.

She said, 'They said we could go in the first-class carriage and see if there were any spare seats, or go into economy if we couldn't find first-class seats, and to be more careful buying tickets next time.'

'And did you find first-class seats?'

'Yes! There were a few spare seats in the carriage, so we got to two people to move so we could have a block of seats together, and it was all good.'

See, I was sympathetic until I found they had asked people to move. Apparently I like mistake-makers to be penitent, not pushy.



* Unless it was a giant turtle, I suppose, but you'd hardly make a coat out of them.