todayiamadaisy | Entries tagged with excursions

This morning my mother and I went to the City by the Sea's Agricultural Show. On the way, we realised that neither of us has been to the Show for fifteen years, when we went because my grandmother had died suddenly a couple of days before and we wanted to see if her final entries into various craft categories had won anything (they had). Fifteen years on, not much has changed. Showbag Alley still smells of hot grease and sugar. Sideshow Alley still has flashing lights and open-mouthed clowns and towering walls of stuffed animals. It is timeless.

We started with the sheep pavilion, where photographers from the local paper's rural supplement were taking photos of a man in moleskins and an Akubra hat posing with a prize-winning, be-ribboned sheep. Variations on that photo occur in every edition of the rural supplement. That led to the wool pavilion, where my mother found herself inadvertently embroiled in the Spinning Wars. There were three women sitting amidst the piles of newly sheared fleece, demonstrating how to spin, you see, and my mother has a spinning wheel but only the vaguest idea about how to use it. So she asked if they were the spinning group that met at Flagstaff Hill (the model historical village), which she always intends to find out about but never does. 'Oh, no,' sniffed one of the women, 'they're not affiliated. We meet in Mortlake (a small town about twenty minutes away) and we're affiliated.' Affiliated with what, we never found out.

Through the next door to the horticultural pavilion, where I headed, as I always used to, straight to the junior section for the Vegetable or Fruit Novelty section. This was the winner:

A turtle made of melon and zucchini, eating asparagus. And why not?

( And more )

I was going to buy a showbag, but in the end I couldn't face spending an exorbitant amount of money on a plastic bag with a few lollies and random plastic tat just so I would have something to write about here. I was inspired by the jam competition, though. I could do that. Maybe I'll put that on my 2011 To Do list.

In other news, I saw a strange blob under a bush the other day and went to investigate. This is what I found:

He sleeps there every day now, but he won't let me pat him.

This morning I went to the monthly farmers' market. It is not a big market yet, but I hope it grows. There were more craft stalls than fruit and veg to look at. It is only the beginning of spring, so there was not much choice about: the tail end of the winter crops, with the spring ones not yet ready.

I bought some carrots and the bustling old woman said selling them said, quite nicely, 'Oh, you would pick carrots, I haven't weighed them yet.' She was quite flustered, poor thing, and asked me what price she had written for carrots on the board. 'Two-fifty a kilo, isn't it?' I looked and said, no, it was only two dollars a kilo, and she looked dubious and stuck her head round the corner to check for herself. At the same time, she weighed my carrots: four hundred grams. By this stage a couple more people had come to the stall and she was even more flustered, and she said, 'Shall we call it a dollar fifty, love?', which wasn't right for either of the two prices. I'm not a haggler, though, so I handed over my money and that was that.

At the next stall, I bought some lemons, five for a dollar, and the woman there said, 'There's only little ones left, so you can have ten for the price.'

So that is life: what you lose on the carrots you gain on the lemons.

After the farmers' market, my mother and I went to the Orchid Club's annual show. I was the youngest person in the room by twenty-four years. My mother was the next youngest person in the room. She entered the raffle: first prize, a framed picture of an orchid; second prize, an orchid; third prize, a pedestal fan; fourth and fifth prizes, orchids.

We also sat in on an orchid re-potting display by a gruff old man in a flannelette shirt. He turned out to be one of the big winners, with a whole table for all his orchids and ribbons. He knew a lot about orchids, but we had to ask him questions to draw it out. One woman said, 'So you don't cut the roots off when you re-pot them?' and he nearly had a heart attack. A shocked 'NO!' was all he could manage. He had been given some medium-sized bark chips to do the re-potting display, but he also had strong thoughts on that matter. He prefers to use small bark chips with his own mixture of coconut fibre and pearlite.

He was cagey about what to fertilise orchids with, saying he makes his own. Someone asked about using chook poo, and he said he didn't like it personally. He used some once, but it went mouldy and spoilt the look of his orchids, so he went into the kitchen and got 'the machine with the blades' (a food processor, we established by naming things with blades) and put the remaining chicken poo through that to chop it up. 'But my wife caught me,' he said sadly, 'and I had to buy her a new one.' I'm not surprised. I liked him, though.

Anyway, my mother and I agreed that our morning at the orchid show provided at least three dollars' worth of entertainment (that was the entry price). We enjoyed it so much that we decided to go the Agricultural Show at the end of the month. I haven't been to the Show for years.

Drama, f-list! Yesterday morning I was up at an unreasonable hour to catch the early train to Melbourne with my mother and a couple of her quilting friends for fun and frolics at the annual Craft Fair. It was cold and damp and pitch black, but apart from that it was a nice morning and the trip started well. We barrelled through the blackness for about twenty minutes when there was a great THUD and the train rocked and then stopped. My mother was leaning forward and she was thrown back in her seat; the man in front of us spilt his coffee. I mean, it was hardly the Great Twenty-Ten Train Disaster. There was a baby a few seats away who slept through the whole thing. Anyway, after we stopped the carriage was silent because, mild as it was, it was still clearly not something that was meant to happen. The conductor announced that we had hit something and the driver was out checking the damage. Once he had said that, we found we could all talk again. Five minutes later, the conductor was back, sounding apologetic: the train had hit a cow and the locomotive was defective and he would organise coaches to pick us up as soon as possible.

Apart from a collective groan when he first announced it, people were quite good about it. I think because it was black outside and we had no idea where we were, we were all quite happy to sit like sardines in our tin. After a bit, the conductor came back to say that coaches were on the way from the City by the Sea and would reach us in about forty minutes. Also that, because we weren't at a platform, we would have to use the ladders on the side of the train to get onto the ground when the time came, but, not to worry, the staff would help. And that things would be quiet for a bit because he and the driver were going outside to see where we could assemble to meet the coaches. We watched their torches recede into the darkness, and the only authority standing between us and anarchy was the man who runs the buffet car. Fortunately, he kept lawlessness at bay with free hot drinks.

The conductor and the driver came back with bad news. We were two hundred metres from the highway the coaches were travelling on, but that two hundred metres comprised a muddy, cow- (and cow poo-) filled paddock. A similar distance away was a dairy (presumably belonging to the farmer whose cow we had just run over), which the buses would be able to access; however, the lane we would walk down was flooded (and they were wet to the knees as proof). If we walked down the train tracks there was a road junction, but that was over a kilometre away, which would be do-able but not ideal on a rainy winter morning and with quite a few elderly passengers. One man with a rich, deep voice said, 'Every lady should sling a man over her back and tramp across the paddock,' because there is always one who fancies himself as a wag.

Eventually we could see the lights of the coaches in the distance, tempting us with their nearness, and the conductor came back. First light was near, he said, which was true as the sky was navy rather than black and we could now see trees in silhouette, and once there was better light the driver would be able to do some emergency repairs to get us to our first stop at Terang, where the coaches would be waiting in the car park. We eventually set off extremely slowly about ninety minutes after we stopped. As the conductor walked by, one of the passengers asked, curiously rather than aggressively, why we could get to Terang by train and not all the way to Melbourne, and he said cheerily, 'No brakes.' Ah. Anyway, we got to Terang safely and onto the waiting coaches and were in Melbourne just over two hours after we were meant to get there. So it could have been worse but I was sorry we didn't get a chance to climb on the emergency ladders. That would have made this entry worthwhile.

( The day was less dramatic )

I thought that going to see our new office would be the most exciting thing that happened yesterday, so I wrote about it during my lunch break. Foolish, foolish daisy. After lunch I started a new cheque book, which is excitement in excelsis, and at about four o'clock Brian said, 'It's too nice an afternoon to be at work, I'm going for a fly. Do you want to come?'

Forty-five minutes later, we were tootling about above the City by the Sea in Brian's 1944 two-seater plane. There was a slightly worrisome moment when he said, 'I've got to start it manually, so if it starts moving before I get in flick this switch down,' but fortunately that didn't come to pass. We flew east overland, then west home along the crumbling coastal cliffs and found my house (visible by its shiny silver roof among a sea of dark tiles, and by the spreading magnolia tree behind it, with five white flowers dotting the canopy) in the eastern quarter of the city.

Then we went further west to Port Fairy, where a second worrisome moment occurred: after a brief explanation of rolling and pitching and moving the rudder with the foot pedals, Brian said, 'Take the stick and fly us over Julia Percy*. Keep the nose level with the horizon'. So I did. It was more sensitive than driving a car and I very quickly had us flying out to sea and I was quite disturbed by how attractive I found the ocean. It would have been so easy to dive down and plunge into oblivion. Once I had that thought, I decided it was time to tell Brian he could have the controls back. So we did a couple of rolls over Port Fairy, buzzed my uncle B's house and landed.

And then I went home for dinner.

* By which he meant Lady Julia Percy Island, not some random woman.

A man in today's paper was called Berwyck Poad.

Today I went to the annual antiques fair, which is normally held in the Greyhound Racing Club rooms at the Showgrounds. This year they had a scheduling conflict with the annual amateur gemstone collectors' fair, which obviously booked the Greyhound rooms first, so the antiques fair had to go to the St Pius X Primary School hall. I used to go there for exams, so, yes, what a blast from the past that was. (Elsewhere in the City by the Sea, one could go to the annual vintage car exhibition, so, clearly, this is the place to be this weekend).

Anyway, the antiques fair was a pleasant morning outing, with some really lovely pieces and some old tat. Something for everyone, then. I hadn't planned to buy anything, but amongst some vintage prints I found a lovely Ida Rentoul Outhwaite one from 1918 that just sort of jumped into my hand.

It's currently sitting on a side table with the photo of the shipwreck I got for Christmas and a wirework Eiffel Tower that I got a couple of Christmases ago and, do you know, I think they look quite good together. I may leave them there.

( ..at least until I find a frame )

Today I also bought a birthday present for a birthday in April. I am just that organised. Ha. Not really. It is my mother's sixtieth birthday this year. Her friend Lyn turned sixty a couple of years ago and her daughter organised a huge surprise party. I asked my mother did she want the same (obviously without the surprise) and she did not. What did she want, then? Nothing, apparently, nothing special. 'I'll just have an egg,' she said, which is family code for being a bit of a martyr (that is what my grandmother used to say if my mother offered to take her grocery shopping. 'Oh, I don't need anything,' she would say pathetically. 'I'll just have an egg.') I persevered and said I had to get something special because it is her sixtieth and because her friend Lyn would think I was a bad daughter compared to her surprise-party-organising one. Under that level of pressure, she thought she might like to see Tom Jones in concert. I said I would buy her tickets but she had to get herself to Las Vegas, and she said, no, he is touring Victorian wineries in March. I assume he is singing in them, not just holidaying with people watching him. Whatever he's doing, I've booked two tickets for my mother and John to attend. And for the actual day of her birthday a month later, I might just get her an egg.

Also, it has been hot the last couple of days, so this afternoon I made some Brazilian lemonade. It is good stuff and refreshing, and whoever thought of putting limes and condensed milk together should be commended. If they could work out a way to incorporate salt and vinegar chips, it would pretty much be my ideal dish.

There's a car dealership across the road from my office and today there was a flash new black Mercedes parked out the front, emblazoned with THIS CAR IS A LEMON in lime green paint. It was gone when I got back from lunch, much to everyone's disappointment. We were hoping for shouting and gesticulating.

Yesterday I was pressed into service (by my mother and a visiting friend of hers) as a chauffeur along part of the Great Ocean Road. Because I was going where I was told, I didn't stop and take photos of things I would have liked to take photos of, so you'll just have to imagine an apple green Kombi van abandoned in a sea of knee-high yellow grass, a crow sitting on a rusty irrigator and the Nirranda Hall Available For Hire sign, painted in fancy lettering in hard-to-read pale blue. Instead I did what you're supposed to do on the Great Ocean Road and took pictures of old rocks in the water.

At one bay we saw two ducks and their ducklings paddling in the shallows. I didn't know ducks went in the ocean, so there you go, I learnt something. Back at home, I looked them up in my bird book and found they were a type of duck known as a copper-breasted shelduck and their quack sounds like 'ong ank, ong ank'. That reads more like something a donkey would say, I think, but why not try it out on the next duck you see and open the lines of cross-species communication?

Yesterday I decided that I shouldn't waste my day off today flopping about the house thinking how hot I was (much as I enjoy that), so I peeled my mother off her couch (my dislike of heat is an inherited trait) and took her on an excursion. I pointed Freddie (that's my car) east and we went along the Great Ocean Road all the way to the Otway Ranges National Park, where we spent the afternoon prancing about in the treetops at the Otway Fly. I'm not sure why it's called the Otway Fly. Well, the Otway part is clear, since that's the name of the forest, but the Fly part is a mystery since no flying is involved. But there you go.

Anyway, the Otway Fly is in a cool temperate rainforest (according the brochure), and you walk along the forest floor for a bit before going up onto a walkway 25 metres above the ground. It's quite interesting and, crucially, slightly cooler than not being in the forest. This is a grove of mountain ash (the world's tallest flowering plant (I'm reading from the brochure again here) and a type of eucalypt, not an ash at all), as seen from 25 metres up. The flowers are about 75 metres higher again.

( Trees and ferns )

Sadly, despite keeping my eyes peeled, I did not see the 'distinctive, endemic and carnivorous Otway Black Snail' as promised in the brochure (although judging from the photo, I could find a regular snail in my garden and paint its shell black to achieve a similar effect). And after all that, a Tiro Lightly Carbonated Italian Red Orange Drink purchased at the café and gift shop on the way out was like the nectar of the gods.

On the way home, we passed a road called Wait-A-While Lane, which sounds like a jolly place to live.

Home again, we stopped at a shopping centre so my mother could get some groceries. It was a bit odd, being in air-conditioning and white tiles so soon after being in a forest.

All in all, a good day, except that I succumbed to prickly heat and now have a red rash on both cheeks, spreading down my neck and décolletage. Hmph.

Yesterday afternoon I braved the elements - and the non-existent risk of being blown to kingdom come - and climbed Tower Hill, a small and extinct volcano not far from the City by the Sea. There are several ways to do Tower Hill: the lazy way, by driving through the park; the easy way, by following the marked paths; or the less-easy-but-still-not-particularly-difficult way, of wandering about in the forest (which is quite safe - although it's all very quiet and feels isolated, nowhere is very far from civilisation in the form of the brilliantly named Bimbledong Road). I quite like the wandering about option. Once you're into the trees, it's oddly still and timeless and the silence is alive. There's a weird feeling of being at one with nature and yet completely alien. That wasn't what I did yesterday, though. It was muddy, so I stuck to the paths.

This is the approach. The hill isn't much of a hill, but it made me puff. Even the real hikers have to stick to the path here; all that bracken is growing in squishy marshland that is ringing with the sound of frogs.

( But wait, there's more! )

The same person who once gave me a book listing 365 things to do in order to feel great has since given me a book called 365 ways to change the world. Do you sense a theme here? Anyway, the idea for April 28 was Experimental Travel and, since I'm always up for being told what to do by a book, that's what I did.

By experimental travel, it meant doing something to see the world differently, whether you're on holidays or in your home town: going on a walk taking alternate right and left turns, for example, or mounting an expedition to K2. Not the mountain, but the map reference.

It was the trek to K2 that I undertook today. I got out my two maps of the City by the Sea (one is a street directory and the other is a tourist map) and plotted my course. I have to admit, I was sort of hoping that K2 would be somewhere near where I live, but on both maps K2 was right on the other side of the city, in the wilds of the west. So I drove rather than trekked, but that didn't make my excursion any less arduous.

The City by the Sea doesn't really have a bad area to live, but west has the industrial estate, and the meat works, and a swathe of Housing Commission homes. Which is not to say that the east (where I live) is anything special (it isn't), but the west is just a little bit more run down.

The real reason I avoid the west is that the streets there are twisted - curving and changing names and turning back on themselves - and that plays havoc with my poor sense of direction. Even with the map it took me several attempts to find both locations. At one stage, I drove down a street and passed four separate entrances to Davis Street, which doesn't seem like it should be possible.

( But I got there in the end )

I've just seen a person-sized roll of bubble wrap in the photocopier room! Who wants to wrap me in it and roll me down the stairs? Pop, pop, pop!

That would certainly wake me up. I'm not normally a bleary-in-the-morning person, but I had a long day yesterday. A good day, but long. My mother and some of her friends from work have an unofficial little quilters' club, and every year they gather together friends and family to go to the Melbourne Craft Fair on a group discount. I was in two minds about going this year; the first year I went was great - it was all so new and so exciting with so much to take in - but I've been a few times now and I don't think I could take a whole day of it. So I said that I'd go for half a day, then find something else to do and meet them back at the train station later. My mother surprised me by being quite keen on that idea; not just for me, that is, but for her as well. Her friends are semi-professional quilters (one of them makes a quilt a week!), so they get a lot out of the Craft Fair; she, on the other hand, is an enthusiastic dabbler. And then it turned out that the National Gallery has a big Art Deco exhibition on, so the problem of what to do with the other half-day was solved.

So I had to get up at an unreasonably early hour to catch the morning train to Melbourne. I don't know about you, but when I know I have to get up unusually early, I can never sleep soundly. I woke up at three and stayed awake until the alarm went off at four-fifteen. That's so early that I was up before Miss Pink, which never happens; when I turned the kitchen light on, I could see her on the living room sofa, curled protectively round her heat pack like Smaug the dragon, eyes shining yellow in the dark.

( The day )

Such an odd day: get up too early, sit too long, walk around for too long, then sit too long to get home again. Back home well after ten, I was met by an irate pink cat sitting next to an empty food bowl, even though I had put extra food down for the day. Finally, I sat down on the sofa next to Miss Pink, now fed and happily curled round her re-warmed heat pack, and poked my sore toe. Some pus popped out from under the toe nail.

So that was my day.

Finally, if you were to head to the rather excellent cover song blog, Fong Songs, you would find a week's worth of posts of Muppet covers. And who wouldn't want that?

I voted mid-morning. I do enjoy voting, no matter what the outcome. Today's excursion revealed that the children at Our Lady Help of Christians primary school are studying Australian History. They had made a big poster to decorate the walls of the corridor, illustrating "The Things That Made Australia". These things predictably include Captain Cook, convicts and kangaroos, as well as, less predictably, thongs. This last was illustrated with a picture of Havaiana thongs... which come from Brazil, just so you know, Shelley of class 2/3.

After voting, I went to the Rose and Cut Flower Show in the church next door. Not something I'd normally go to, but it was clearly being held to catch the voting crowd, so who am I to deny them? It turned out to be well worth it, because the kids had continued their tributes to Australia in floral arrangements. Most of them were content with adding toy koalas to eucalyptus branches, but one girl had surpassed herself. Hers had a big label, "LIFE AND DEATH WITH JESUS AND GOD!!", and was one half dry sand (representing drought) and one half foliage (representing new growth). And then I went to a first birthday party (I know, I know, my mad social life).

And the election outcome? Well, it's hard to say what was the best bit. Perhaps it was when it became apparent that Labor really was going to win (for the first time in eleven years)... but I think it was actually when it became apparent that even the Prime Minister himself would lose his seat. There was much rejoicing in my house when that happened.

I've been interstate today, out of Victoria and into the wilds of South Australia. Into a different time zone, even. It's only two hours to the state border and another half an hour to the towns I went to, but in that time I crossed so many types of terrain: I went from the sea and flat, livestock-filled plains, through blue gum plantations, to vineyards, then to undulating volcanic hills, then home through pine plantations and stony rises.

I always enjoy the signs that towns put under their names, stating their sundry claims to fame. Passing through Digby today, for example, I discovered that it is "the birthplace of Victoria", while Penola is both "the gateway to the Coonawarra" (a wine region) and "the home of the Blessed Mother Mary McKillop" (Australia's first - and only - saint). I feel these are all more significant than a town near here, which proclaims itself to be "the olivine capital of Australia" and illustrates this sign with a picture of a green rock. I admire the honesty of that; they could have claimed to be the olivine capital of the world - who would know otherwise? - but they chose the noble path.

Anyway, Penola (pop. 1,200) is nice; much nicer than I expected. I mean, I'm not planning to move there any time soon, but it has a gentle, nineteenth-century charm built on solid blocks of limestone. "Did you come down from the Mount?" someone asked me, which made me feel all Biblical (she meant, "had I come from Mount Gambier?", which I hadn't). The question gave me a disorientating sense of the local geography, because Penola is north of Mount Gamber, so to me the question should be, "Did you come up from the Mount?", but obviously to her the fact that Mount Gambier is physically higher that Penola was the more important factor.

I lived all my life until 1:44 pm (South Australian time) not knowing that a town named Kalangadoo existed.

I drove south (or up, if you prefer) to Mount Gambier (pop. 28,000), somewhere I haven't been since 1989. Since you can't go to Mount Gambier and not look at the Blue Lake (I think it's the law), I did so. "Yes," I said to myself, "that's definitely a blue lake." ( See for yourself )

I realise my judgement on this may be influenced by the fact I live somewhere that doesn't have a lot of them, but I like pigeons. I like, say, pandas and other environmentally specific animals too, but I must admit a special fondness for pigeons and the like, creatures that can adapt to live anywhere. Waiting at Melbourne's Southern Cross station last night (which I did for an extra hour, thank you very much V/Line) I watched the tides of people rushing to their trains with pigeons bobbing happily at their feet and thought, isn't that nice? How clever and resilient they are to find a way to live among the signs that say "Do not feed the birds".

One pigeon had something wrong with one of its feet; it came limping over to get some crumbs from under the bench opposite me. The woman sitting on the bench kicked at it, without connecting, to shoo it away. Later, she bought a cup of hot chips and I thought it was a shame the pigeon didn't come back and kick her. Perhaps I should have, on its behalf, but I don't think she would have understood why.

Because of the train delay (a signal failure near Geelong, with two trains filled with poor, lost souls stuck on the lines for an hour) when my train eventually got going, we did so on the goods line. We spent the first hour and a half going through a huge storage area, with red packing crates towering above us on either side.

Back home again, I've been enjoying my new sofas.
( Look! )
How sad I can't sit on both at once. The old furniture is not fit for anywhere but the tip, but until I can arrange to get it there it is still here. One of the old armchairs is in the funny little L-shaped nook of the passage, in front of the old, solid chest of drawers that houses all the bed linen, and I've discovered I like sitting there very much - it's right next to a window that looks out on the immediate back garden. I'm now contemplating moving the chest of drawers somewhere else - but where? - and getting a small-but-comfortable chair to put there permanently. The other armchair and the old sofa are outside, under the roofed part of the patio, covered with old blankets. Miss Pink has hardly moved from the old sofa since she first realised it was out there; she certainly hasn't touched the ground - to come in, she jumps from the sofa to her sun lounge to the armchair to her ramp.

Finally, I have a blister on the ball of my left foot. It's more annoying than painful, but, still, I'd rather not have it.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: bird song from the garden

The first weekend of spring means one thing, and that is fifteen minutes westward - ho! - to Port Fairy for the second-hand book fair (but only after showering and drying myself with my delightfully thick and fluffy new towels). I live in hope of one day finding a dusty Antonia Forest novel tucked in amongst the Enid Blytons, but this year, as ever, left disappointed on that front. With an eye to holidays coming up in a few weeks, I shelled out a shiny gold dollar for a Georgette Heyer novel (ah, guilty pleasures), then two shiny dollars for Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, and made my cousin Jeanette laugh when I saw her investigating a stack of Biggles books by saying, "I am Mrs de Winter now" (knowing that Jeanette, being only a couple of years older than me, also read and watched Rebecca for Year 10 English with Mrs Ryan).

Since it was a beautiful spring morning we made a detour on the way home and took a turn round Tower Hill, the volcano that will apparently erupt and kill us all some time this millennium. Happily, that time was not today. Animals seen: no kangaroos, no koalas, no swans, lots of little, flittery birds and more emus than you could poke a stick at. One emu loped through the car park, pausing to stare into an idling car at eye-level with the delightedly terrified children in the back seat.

Once home, I had a chance to read the special Human Resources liftout in today's paper, which featured an article on the importance and desirability on "non-salaried solutions" (like concert tickets or an office masseur) to make "your employees love you a little bit more". Ugh. I'd rather be paid more - or at least work somewhere that doesn't feel the need to be loved.*

* Disclaimer: my current employer does not offer "non-salaried solutions", is not needy, and is an all-round super place to work. The above comments were offered in a general sense only.

Current Mood: quixotic
Current Music: Bird song from the garden

My neighbours were digging in their front garden when I went out walking this morning so I stopped for a short chat. While out purchasing new plants, they had stopped off at the Logan's Beach whale nursery and they were consequently giddy with excitement. "Two whales - and dolphins too, jumping around them!"

What, dolphins as well? There's never dolphins when I go to look (which is, admittedly, not often). Happily, Logan's Beach is not far from my house, so, deeply envious, I made a detour to the lookout platform on my way home from the supermarket. Result: two whales, three surfers, a busload of cold tourists and a fisherman carrying a skate, a rod and a bucket. Definitely no dolphins. Hmph.

*****
According to today's paper, the US government has a Office of Lessons Learned, which I think is a brilliant idea. Everyone should have one! I hope Condoleezza Rice returns home from her recent travels abroad and reports this valuable lesson: even if you're one of the most important women on the planet, cow-patterned tights are never a good idea.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Bird song from the garden

I discovered two days ago that Sydney's Powerhouse Museum had a William Morris exhibition late last year. I could have gone over my long Christmas break. Was it too much to hope that it would still be running? Yes, of course... because it has been packed up and moved to the Melbourne Museum. That's in Melbourne, of course. Three-hour-day-trip-away Melbourne! But only until February 12.

All of which is just to explain why I was up at a most ungodly hour to catch this morning's train to Melbourne. The train used to be run by a private company and ran express from Geelong to Melbourne. Since being taken back by V/Line, it now stops at four stations in between, adding a considerable amount of time to an already lengthy journey. I answered a phone survey on this very topic a few months ago, but they obviously didn't rush to V/Line with the news that I was displeased with this change.

They have also renamed Spencer Street station as Southern Cross station, which (a) I already knew and thought was pointless and (b) really is pointless, especially when the official platform signs say "Southern Cross (formerly Spencer Street) Platform 5". I'm sick of things being renamed and rebadged for no good reason. Spence - sorry, Southern Cross - is being revamped with a wavy roof and when the train pulls in it's like being swallowed into the belly of a beast and looking up at its ribs.

At the museum, the ticket lady kindly pointed out where I needed to go to see William Morris, then said, "But first you really must go to the Forest Gallery and follow the path round to the second signpost and look up. It'll make you go 'aaah'." She shrugged her shoulders and wrinkled her nose with glee. Ordinarily I would think that sort of thing is the museum equivalent of "Do you want fries with that?" but those instructions were so precise and she was so excited I gave her the benefit of the doubt and went to the Forest Gallery's second signpost and looked up... and went "aaah." In the forest, there is a mating pair of tawny frogmouths with two chicks, and being nocturnal they had decided to sleep the day away on top of the pillar. All four of them: two adult birds and two little balls of grey fluff. So cute.

I spent the rest of the morning wandering around the Morris exhibition, said hello to Phar Lap (Morris is just next door to him) on the way out and caught the lunch train home. Blistered right foot aside, a good day.

* A piece of graffiti on one of new non-express station's walls. I was wondering how the artist came up with that tag when I realised it was actually "Aero Freek". When will vandals learn to spell?

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: the 7:30 Report

I've been out and about today; far, far away from the City by the Sea and into the foothills of the Great Dividing Range.* I like looking out my window and over the Southern Ocean, but I must say it would be nice to look up sometimes and see mountains silhouetted blue against the sky.

I always enjoy going past Mount Elephant. I think what I enjoy most about it is that there is a neat little sign on the side of the road, pointing towards "Mount Elephant", just in case you haven't noticed the elephant-shaped mountain in the middle of a large expanse of flat land.

I also always enjoy going through one of my favourite place-names, the incomparable Woady Yaloak.** I want to live in Woady Yaloak! Only not really, for Woady Yaloak the place is nowhere near as interesting as Woady Yaloak the name, which is a shame. Woady Yaloak is a name that shouldn't be wasted. Then again, it's good to find an unexpected treasure like that in the middle of nowhere, so perhaps it's not really wasted at all. Elsewhere I saw a sign for a place called Piggoreet, but I didn't have time to go there. I don't think I'd like to live in Piggoreet anyway.

I lunched in Ballarat, a city I've never really liked for no good reason. Now I have a reason, because I was ripped off by a parking meter. It said on it "80 cents an hour", but when I put in two dollars I only got 30 minutes. Hmph. There was also an appallingly named hairdresser, but that's for another post.

And, and... I bought a book. I've been looking for this for ages. A long time ago, I read Made in America, Bill Bryson's history of the development of American English. Near the start of the book he was writing about words the Pilgrims brought with them that then dropped out of currency on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the words he gives as an example made me sit up and say, "My grandmother said that!" It made me happy to know that a word thought lost had somehow survived and made its way to the antipodes and the colourful vocabulary of my grandmother. I've always remembered that moment of pleased discovery... but I promptly forgot the word itself. Whenever I've thought to look in a bookshop for the book to remind me, it's never been in stock. So I snapped it up when I saw it today.

And the word? Slobberchops, being a messy eater. A most excellent word.

* Well... since I'm home again, it wasn't that far. But it was quite a long way.

** Pronounced "Woad-y Yell-ock".

Current Mood: recumbent
Current Music: the TV in another room

I've just been having a tidy-up of the emails in my secondary account (the one I use for LJ) and I re-read

tabouli's comment insinuating an impending visit to my fair home town - the "city by the sea", as tourism commercials proclaimed it in the 1980s (conveniently ignoring the many other sea-neighbouring cities that exist around the world).

So for any reader who may be heading to THE city by the sea, I offer a tourism suggestion: as you approach the city centre from, say, Deakin University (but closer to the city centre than to Deakin), driving on the highway, you will pass a motel with a plaster whale out the front. A large bright blue whale, which is a hideous eyesore of a fake beastie. There are also metal whales' tails poking out of the garden. If that's not exciting enough, if you wait long enough, the whale will spout water out its blowhole (and over you, if you happen to walk past, as I frequently do). Guaranteed to be the most exciting thing you will experience on your visit.*

Bon voyage!

*as long as the rest of the visit is very dull.

Current Mood: quixotic
Current Music: Bird song from the garden

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Page Summary

My Stately Bidding
My Familiar Forms
Sardines
In llama land
Limes and condensed milk
Rocks and ducks
An outing
A walk in the woods
Expedition K2
Home again, home again, jiggety jog
I will not gloat
On the road
Pigeons and chairs
Spring is sprung
Having a whale of a time
Nero Freen *
Slobberchops
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Salt and corrosion

The infamous old enemies of the crime fighter

Entries tagged with excursions

My Stately Bidding

My Familiar Forms

Sardines

In llama land

Limes and condensed milk

Rocks and ducks

An outing

A walk in the woods

Expedition K2

Home again, home again, jiggety jog

I will not gloat

On the road

Pigeons and chairs

Spring is sprung

Having a whale of a time

Nero Freen *

Slobberchops

Community Service Announcement