L'Oratorio d'Aurelia

Went to see this wonderful whimsical circus-type performance last night. Aurelia - emerging from the chest of drawers above, is French, and has worked on stage with her family almost since she was born. Her mother, the youngest daughter of Charlie Chaplin (!), designed and produced this amazing show.

"The show looks like the world of a mischievous child, full of freakish creatures, both comical and frightening.

It’s a surreal world that some have compared to the paintings of Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte. There are many poetic elements in it, like the scene in which Aurelia plays an old Italian song on alarm clocks old and new."
(quote from an online review - http://www.theworld.org/2009/07/29/aurelias-oratorio/)

Well worth catching if you can ... :)

Happy Weekend!

Well, things are looking up again .. for me if not for Jedda who is locked into the house for the next few days! Went to a lovely yoga class yesterday afternoon. It ended up being a led one (not Mysore) and various poses were left out to accommodate everyone there. I started off being annoyed by that, but luckily let go of it and it was just what I needed. I wasn't feeling very strong (too many missed practices!) and - well it was just what I needed. Jedda, I hasten to add, is still on the mend. Her voice is coming back to normal, and she's more active (and more demanding!) So that's a big relief.

Today some friends came to lunch. One of them, Ross, had offered to help me with one of my 2 garden projects - converting the pool into a garden pond. He had managed to find an old plastic garden table that was being thrown out, which we'd agreed I'd need to place pots on. So he turned up with that, plus some fish and plants he'd take from his own garden ponds (his garden is just a wonderful tropical paradise in a suburban backyard - amazing!)



Here he is placing one of the plants on the table ...

And this is the view I have sitting at the breakfast table ... (without him of course!)




We all had a lovely time eating and drinking and enjoying the day.

And finally, below is a photo taken last weekend (seems like an age ago now!) when I was in Sydney, and Mum and I went to lunch at Jo and Emma (nephew and girlfriend)'s new flat with the million dollar view over Sydney Harbour ...




That's Jo and Peter (nephews), Mum and my brother-in-law John.

Oh what a week!

My poor little pussycat Jedda! I was away last weekend in Sydney (maybe another post!) and she was in the 'pet motel'. Got back, collected her and let her out in the garden for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon before bringing her in. Next morning I noticed she was a bit subdued but thought she was just pleased to be home. When I got back on Monday evening she wasn't there to greet me - as she normally always is. Found her in the bedroom, picked her up and she made this really strange, low sound. Gave her a bit of a tickle, and found a lump on her throat, which turned out to be a paralysis tick!

Well, I managed to get it off intact, and then thought - what should I do now? My local vet had gone home for the day, so I went to Google, and discovered that I really had to take her to a vet. Found one that had an on-call vet, not too far away, and off we went. I ended up having to leave her there for 3 nights! Her throat had got a bit paralysed and she had been starting to stagger. I finally picked her up last night, and ended up taking a 'carer's day' today to look after her. She's still liable to chuck up, choke, and her voice is really quite low still! I don't even know if it's ever going to get back to how it was before ... :)

She is definitely better tonight than she was when I picked her up yesterday - thank goodness. Don't even ask how much it costs to have a cat in a vet hospital for 3 nights - horrifying!!

My friend Ronnie was blogging about how important dogs are to humans. Well, cats are the same (but different of course!)

A few photos

The front-door fish ... :)

Just got back from a day at choir camp - held in some boy scout camp up in the north of Brisbane. It started on Friday night but I usually only manage one day. It was fun, though by the end of the afternoon we were really stumbling through ... you should have heard us attempting to learn the final piece for the day! Not a pretty sound ... ! This (below) was the final rousing rendition of Laudate Nomen Domine (taken as a choral anthem by Australian uni choirs) - just a few of the choir in the photo.

I had to struggle at yoga yesterday afternoon. Was pretty tired after a long and tiring week I guess! But I am noticing that having decided to stop spacing out so much during practice I'm getting to the end of my practice quite easily in the time I have. Quite amazing to think that a few weeks ago I wasn't able to do all the poses because of time constraints!

And finally, here's a picture of sleepy-head Jedda ... :)

Happy (poetry) days

My friend Angela is having a very happy time having won an Arts Council grant that sent her on a 6-week stay in a cottage somewhere in Ireland to write poetry! I've been following her blog - http://light-trap.blogspot.com/ which is full of misty photos of Irish scenery and happy poetry readings both in Ireland and London ...

She's not actually coming back to Australia (and work) till next January - lucky thing!!

Breaking the silence

Don't know why I haven't been posting - nearly a month now since I last posted. Life is carrying along happily, and pretty mundanely to be honest! No big exciting things happening ... :) I did have a very nice yoga class on the weekend, and feel pretty good about that side of things. Work is going well - though I'll be really glad when it gets to be light at the time I have to get up (5.30am). Did some gardening on the weekend - planted some tomatoes and another strawberry plant. And other veggies planted are doing well.

I've got a couple of garden 'projects' that I'm hoping to finish, or at the very least get underway before Christmas. One is to mosaic an old round cement slab that's sitting in my front garden. It's about 1.2m in diameter. I know I need to do it before summer gets to its height (January/February) as it'll be too hot to work outside then. I went to the library on the weekend and got some mosaic books out, looking for a design/ideas. Then I can work out how much I need in the way of different coloured tiles etc, and start to collect them.

My other project is the swimming pool. My swimming pool is an above-ground one, that is decked in around most sides, and only accessible via the house verandah. A few months ago it started leaking a bit (again!) and the people who look after it told me that the tree roots that have been trying to get in from underneath are too much of a problem and I needed to replace it (and remove the tree-roots). About $1000. Then it turned out that I'd have to replace the supports as they were rusting away ($$$), and the pump no longer works properly, and ($$$$$) ... So I decided the swimming pool had had its day; stopped paying the pool guys to come and clean it every month and just left it (covered).

I had the idea to convert it to a garden pond, but it seemed like it might be too much work. And then someone else said to me that she'd deck it all over (having removed the pool itself plus water) and have a large entertaining area there. Now that seems like a good idea, at least for when I sell the place (which I will do eventually). But right now I'm saving to go on an overseas trip next year and I don't want to spend money on something like this. So, after consultations with another friend, for now I'm going to encourage frogs etc. into the pool, get a few low-maintenance water plants into it and see what happens!

I find it's good to put a kind of deadline on things - gives me something to aim for. I don't know how far I'll get along with these projects, but I'm pretty sure that if I didn't say to myself - do this by Christmas when you (I) will have family and visitors around, it's quite possible nothing would happen!

Hmm - seems like I did have a few things to write about after all !

Swine Flu in the Help Desk!

I work in one corner of a big room that contains the University's ITS (Information Technology Services) Helpdesk. I and one other guy do (among other things) the staff support for the use of Blackboard (the University's Learning Management System to deliver online courses for students). We don't answer the phone like the others in the Helpdesk area, but logged incidents (see my ITIL training coming to the fore!) relating to Blackboard are passed on to us.

Don't know why I felt the need to give that great explanation!

Anyway - on Friday afternoon, one of the casuals who works on the helpdesk (answering the phone) got the results of tests that said he had Swine Flu! I guess I ought to be a bit worried by this, considering my somewhat compromised immune system - it might be thought that I was particularly at risk. But - maybe I'm being foolish, maybe it was just a big Friday afternoon-type feeling, but my main emotion was amusement! We were all jumping around, keeping him at a distance while he tried to wipe his desk and headsets with some anti-bacterial wipes, all the time proclaiming how embarrassed and sorry he was! We just kept on joking and wiping things that were anywhere near him! It just seemed a great distraction for a Friday afternoon!

But really - I do feel my immune system is coming back now. I've actually stopped counting the number of weeks since I've had to be on antibiotics! (Last count was 7 weeks - maybe last week, maybe the week before!) And also - they reckon that kids and young adults are most at risk. Neither of those descriptions really cover me〈grin〉. Also, I've read that 'older people' (!) may have come across some type of flu remotely relate to this one, which would give 'them' some immunity to it!

Whatever - I am 'over' the big fear/concern about Swine Flu that we all had a few weeks ago. Now my main feeling about it is that maybe it's good to get it this time around when it seems to be really mild, in case it does mutate (as the 1918 flu epidemic did) into something much worse. I do intend to get vaccinated against it when the vaccine comes out - if I haven't caught it in the meantime!!

And I've had a lovely weekend. I've been working on a website, and doing a few things in the garden. I've felt strong and well - it's a very nice feeling!!