A room with a view

I'm loath to put in writing how happy I am here in case it jinxes things!  But as I sat on the sofa this morning, with coffee in hand, looking at my book of French cats, surrounded by my hundreds of books (out of sight on the left), Emma's books and games and card table where she sits and works, and the Persian carpet on which she dances for hours on end to softly playing classical music, I had to admit my cup runneth over.  Of course the view is the icing on the cake. (Oh dear, some mixed metaphors here!)

Too much of a good time...

We had Christmas lunch today, on Christmas Eve.  Barbecued prawns and salmon, fetched from the fish markets at 6am, Wagyu beef, cobs of corn, salad, Eton mess, chocolate cake, champagne, wine and coffee.

After dozing off on the sofa in this pic, I came downstairs and had a proper nap with Muffy then finished my latest book, 'Sea Glass' by Anita Shreve.  (You can see a glimpse of the curtains I made up behind me.)  


The sun is shining and I think it might just be warm enough to have a dip in the pool later on...

Current Sydney weather

Pool two evenings ago, complete with rain spots on lens!  Yesterday, during a brief dry period, I fitted in a bush walk with a friend, who took this of some strange-looking pods:

We are surrounded by bush - you can see for yourself if you google our address.  There are fire trails everywhere, allowing access for fire-fighting vehicles, so we walked along the one that begins at the end of the park just over the road.

Life wasn't meant to be easy...

My car is due for registration, so it's search for all the necessary papers, then try to find the cheapest insurance company for third party cover.  I fill in tens of thousands of questions, none of which means anything at all to me, like the horsepower or even make of my car.  This takes about three hours, at the end of which I chose a number between $415 and $688 - surely a no-brainer, even for a person with discalculia like me.  Then I 'hopped' on the phone to make a credit card payment.  Press 1, or press 2, or press 3, and so on, then waited while they played me a symphony.  'Are you calling from NSW or Qld?'  Again press 1, or press 2, or press 3...  Wait.  Another symphony. (At least classical music is preferable to the radio which one frequently finds - I am going over in my mind what I want to say when eventually a human comes on the other end of the phone, and sure enough, the rubbishy prattle on the radio has taken it clean out of my mind.)  'Do you want to pay for a comprehensive policy or a compulsory third party policy?'  I don't really understand the difference.  Press 1, or press 2, or press 3...What seems like another three hours later another human asks another few hundred questions, then says: 'In 20 minutes you can go online to the Roads and Traffic Authority and register your car.'


There, I know from experience, I will spend another three hours filling in another thousand or so questions.  (I just checked my driving record on the RTA site to see if I'd lost any points from my licence and I of course needed to have an account with username and password.  I dragged out another thousand bits of paper to find this information from last year, then had to change the password I'd just spent ages finding.  I have lost zero points and a lot of patience.)


Philip recently warned me about easy-to-guess passwords and advised me to change them all anyway, so I've thought up the most amazing ones, using about five different languages and numerals, 20 keys long.  The longer, the better, I heard some exert say on the radio one day.  But not surprisingly the RTA will only allow you to use 10 letters/numerals so cut me off before I'd finished.


In my next life I'm DEFINITELY coming back as a cat called Muffy!!!!

Northern hemisphere weather sounds grim, but snow is ever so pretty to look at...

Moving on

In a weak moment some time back I volunteered to sew some curtains for upstairs.  Following my fall, the bloody bits on my hands and knees had healed, but then my attention became focused on pain in my right shoulder/arm.  I had a couple of visits to a physiotherapist, but still found it difficult to make certain movements with my arm, which meant, of course, that I couldn't do the curtains.  So, for weeks on end, five lengths of material and five lengths of thermal lining lay on the living room floor and the sewing machine sat on a card table:

Eventually I struggled manfully - womanfully or personfully - to finish the job and had my home back again!  


Thanks to Olga and Michael for articles and translations about Tolstoy and the teaching of reading in Russia and Germany last century.  I'm preparing a talk to a grammar school in Victoria at the beginning of term in 2012 and this information will be part of it.  This school is going to use Sounds of Reading (my reading scheme).

While still reading 'The Life of Tolstoy' I ordered Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels of our Nature' from Amazon US and it arrived in a blink and now I'm just as obsessed with this book (nearly 800 pages) as I am with the Tolstoy one (more than 900 pages).  The trouble with Angels is it is hardback and I can hardly lift it!!!  I need to look up every second word as I go, so either have a dictionary nearby (and all of mine are HUGE) or use dictionary.com on one of my two computers.

And one morning I was listening to a radio interview with an American author, Anita Shreve, so rushed off to the library and borrowed three of her novels.  The one I read first, 'The Pilot's Wife' is yet another story about betrayal by a husband, oh so sad!!!!


Several friends have visited lately, which is lovely.  I'm trying to keep the house tidy by putting things away the minute I finish with them.  My darling Muffy is such a delightful companion, never far away.  I took this pic just a few minutes ago:

For those of you in the northern hemisphere, here in Sydney we are experiencing our coldest and wettest summer for 50 years!  I'm still wearing winter pyjamas and sleeping under two doonas.  I haven't been in the pool once this season.  I don't really mind, as anything is better than 40 degree heat with high humidity, which is what we usually have at this time of year.

Well, knock me down with a feather!!

I started out reading my Tolstoy book, looked up 'kochevka', (a dome-shaped, semicircular tent in which Tolstoy at one time stayed, on the steppes 80 miles east of Samara), and discovered the above creature is a sea cucumber, and that people from Makassar (Sulawesi) were probably coming to drag them from the ocean floor in northern Australia in the 1400s!!!!!!!  They brought Islam to the Aborigines and traded and intermarried with them!!!!!  Now why has nobody ever mentioned this to me before????????????  (Gwynne, I'll bet your George knew!)


From Wikipedia:
Makassar contact with Aboriginal people had a significant effect on their cultures. The visits are remembered vividly today, through oral history, songs and dances, and rock and bark paintings, as well as the cultural legacy of transformations that resulted from the contact.


A Makassar pidgin became a lingua franca along the north coast, not just between Makassar and Aboriginal people, but also between different Aboriginal groups, who were brought into greater contact with each other by the seafaring Makassar culture. Words from the Makassar language (related to Javanese and Indonesian) can still be found in Aboriginal language varieties of the north coast; examples include rupiah (money), jama (work), and balanda (white person), which originally came to the Makassar language via the Malay 'orang belanda' meaning Dutch people from the root word for swamp. 


Honestly, we are so darned eurocentric!!!


How did I get from kochevka to sea cucumber, you may well ask.  Bashkirs (Sunni Muslims  who live on the steppes near Samara), to Islam in India (I heard a discussion about Muslims in India on Radio National the other night and hopped in there for a quick look), to Muslims in Australia...and voila!


9:15pm  I must have the attention span of a gnat - now look what I've found:

Moscow graffiti!!!  Isn't it wonderful!  Google  Moscow graffiti images yourself if you have some spare time.  I've given up watching TV - this is much better fun!  First I found this when I was wandering round the map of Moscow, then spent ages tracking it down so I could save it and get it into the blog.

Now I feel more cheerful!

You know, Winifred, the best thing I ever heard about an untidy house is that it makes your visitors feel better - they can go away thinking how much tidier their house is than yours!  So that's why my house is always untidy!!!

From that to today's photo - at one time, Tolstoy went on a trip from Tula (where his home was) to Moscow, then Tver, then down the Volga to Samara.  Of course, I had to follow it on Google maps.  Do you all know that you can drag the little orange man on the map to wherever you want to go, and lo and behold! there will be photos of that very spot!!!!  Simply amazing.  The other night I strolled round the French village where I used to live.  (No wonder my house doesn't get cleaned, I'm always so tired from my nightly travels!)


Olga, I chose this picture because the building looks old enough to have been there in Tolstoy's day, but it was all in Russian so I can't really be sure.


7pm  I've been in bed all day reading and googling and have just come across this:

If I could read Russian I'd be able to tell you all about it.

Down in the dumps today

No matter how hard I try, I can never keep up with the cleaning, let alone all the other things I should be doing with my life.  Tolstoy never had to clean, but it is comforting to know he had as much trouble as I do with the rest of his life.  I'm thoroughly enjoying the book and will soon be finished!  I'm particularly interested in the way people travelled in the late 1800s - in one part it recounts how he left one place at 5am and arrived home at midnight, changing horses once along the way.  And we grizzle and gripe if a train is five minutes late!


I committed the terrible sin of spilling water on this computer the other day.  All my life I've made it a habit never to mix books/computers/anything special with liquids, but I slipped up badly here.  I rang Lina in a panic, but couldn't get her.  When I went upstairs to get Philip - as a last resort - I got into trouble for waking the baby.  No matter if I'd been electrocuted using a wet computer!


Thanks for this pic, Olga, taken at the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, on your recent trip to Japan.  This is just what I need - a nice cup of tea and a good lie down!

I didn't make it clear that the Christmas party pics were taken at Wendy's house, not mine.

It's that time of year again...

Friend Wendy put on a lovely Christmas morning tea on Friday.  On Saturday Emma and I met Lina who gave us treats with our coffee after piano lesson.  I met Lina again on Sunday morning at another fete, but we'd only been there two minutes when it poured rain, so we dashed for our respective trains and went to bed in our separate homes with a book.  Sunday afternoon was Emma's preschool Christmas party, with what seemed like thousands of little angels, reindeer and Santas dressed up to sing songs, freeze in terror, burst into tears or run around and generally ignore the admiring audience with their mobiles flashing away.  There was hardly a Caucasian face to be seen!  The Montessori preschool has all Sri Lankan teachers and most of the kids come from Sri Lanka or India.  Emma speaks beautifully as a result!  Not a trace of an Ocker accent, thank goodness.

I need a full week to recover, but I'm actually in the middle of making curtains for upstairs.  With 5 x 216 cm lengths of material, plus 5 x 216 cm of thermal lining spread out over the floor and a shoulder that won't allow my right arm to work (after my fall) you can imagine what my living room looks like.

In good company

In spite of thinking I have a moratorium on buying books, I slip up now and then, and the other day came home with this (second hand):

I read 'Resurrection' a few weeks back and was very taken with Tolstoy's writing - not surprising, as he is one of the greatest writers of all time - and this led me to ask Mr Google lots of things about Russian history, architecture, clothes, etc.  Fortunately, my Russian friend Olga - where are you??? - was a great help, especially with names.  (He has a descendant who is a famous singer, Viktoria Tolstoy, living in Sweden - a nice little bit of trivia for you.)  'Anna Karenina' is an all-time favourite of mine and I don't think I ever finished 'War and Peace', but am sure I enjoyed as much as I read.


Three doors down, there is a sign on the gate:  Russian Playgroup, and I read in the paper this week that there is now a Russian community centre/Saturday morning school a few suburbs away.  I am tempted to learn the language but that, of course, would be simply stupid, as I really need to get on with my Japanese.


This brings me to the point of today's blog - I learnt in the above book that Tolstoy was a great list maker and constantly fell short of the things he was trying to achieve.  That's ME all over!!!  I have so many things on my lists that sometimes I do nothing because I find it  overwhelming and don't know where to start.  Today is going to be one of those days, I can tell...


The only thing I never fail to do is make my morning coffee and spend about two hours drinking it before I can get my brain into gear.  Lately I've been playing the piano most days, while neglecting everything else.


Post Script:  Olga just emailed, so that is a relief!  She's been to Japan with her husband since we last communicated and has wonderful things to say about the trip.

Yes, it was a lovely day on Sunday

It is wonderful having young friends!!!  I can't imagine why they go out with an old biddy like me, but I feel very special when I'm with Lina, Therese and Angela.  And talk about useful - I don't know what I'd do without all the help Lina gives me on the computer!!!  And after the fete, she and Therese showed me how to use one of those photo printing gadgets.  (I'd always printed my own photos at home, and was very nervous attempting to use one in a shop.  Now that I know how easy it is - and cheap - I'll be printing photos every day!)


This is what I bought at the fete, Winifred - a present for my sore hand which is now better.  I never wear rings, so maybe this is my second childhood!

I stopped buying Christmas presents years ago - except for the grandchildren and the odd friend who insists on giving me something - and used to give money to a charity to buy a goat for a village or something like that, but this year I don't even think I'll do that.  At the end of last year I was so overwhelmed by the mail and phone calls from charities that I got very annoyed and crossed them all off my direct debit list, and now just drop their begging letters in the bin. Once they get your name and address, they cling on like a terrier and I resent that.  Oh dear, I'm sounding like an old grouch, aren't I!

Christmas Fete today at Eryldene

Stand sideways and you'll look thinner!  We all did, but I don't dare include the others on the blog - not cropping was more than my life is worth.  Mind you, I'm old enough to be the mother of Lina and her two friends whom I accompanied to the fete, so what do they have to worry about???

There were more than 50 stalls with wonderful Christmas goodies...

Some of the garden at Eryldene, a National Trust property, just up the road from Lina's place.

View from the front.


Yesterday morning it was pouring rain and we thought there was little chance of seeing the sun ever again, but it appeared in the afternoon and today dawned bright and clear.  The temperature was 26 degrees.


I have to tell you I got all four photos in at once, which I thought very clever.  However,  they are in reverse order.  Nobody's perfect.  I actually tried to get five in - here's the one that missed out:

Bird call

Truly, the internet is mind-boggling!  Look what I've come across - you can not only get pictures of birds, but hear their calls:  

http://birdsinbackyards.net/images/audio/eudynamys-scolopacea.mp3

In Newcastle I only ever knew this bird sound as belonging to a storm bird, but Mr Google tells me it is actually called a common koel and this is a pic of a female.  I've never managed to see either a male or female, but know they're about as they call all day long. 


Thanks for your suggestion about youtube, Winifred - I'll certainly try that!

I don't ever remember Sydney looking so beautiful...

This is the fifth attempt at getting a jacaranda picture in here!  I didn't take it myself, but chose it from the many glorious pics on Google images.

No need for words.

To the theatre

A week or two ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I went to this inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst (walking distance from CBD) to meet Newcastle friends, whose daughter was in a play in this very street.

Her name is Letitia Sutherland and this pic was taken when she was in a play with students from Edinburgh University.  She is really a wonderful actress.  (As you will have noticed, I don't usually put pics of people on my blog, but this is on Letitia's website and is a publicity shot, so I feel I am permitted to use this one.)


I have to admit I didn't put the street photos in at the time because I couldn't find them in Picasa, which plays the naughtiest tricks on me!  But, just now, while I was looking for something else, they popped up!

Oh dear

By Sunday morning the scraped areas at the bottom of my right hand were oozing pus and my shoulder was stiff and painful.  Philip took me to the chemist, who suggested I see a doctor and told us where to find one open on Sundays.  The doctor asked me why I hadn't gone to her yesterday, but I hadn't thought a few scrapes warranted that (even though I was feeling very sorry for myself).  Apparently an oozing wound can lead to a more dangerous infection.  I'm now well-bandaged, as you can see, and on antibiotics, and after my daughter-in-law's sister, a naturopath, gave me a treatment with a strange Russian gadget like a shaver, the name of which escapes me, I have almost normal movement back in my shoulder.


I managed to take this pic with one hand, thinking as I did of a young woman featured in a TV program after she lost BOTH arms in a terrible tractor accident.  Can you imagine anything like it? Her wonderful husband was looking after her and I hope he continues to do so.


I will attempt to back the car up the drive in a while and go to my exercise class.


Winifred, you can google absolutely anything and click on 'Images' (top left) and find any photo, drawing or cartoon you want!  That's how I found yesterday's pic (though I fell face-down not feet up as shown!!!)  And of course, I know what you mean about children - grown or otherwise - doing as we want them to!

Another surprise

Oh dear, this morning I hadn't got far on my walk when I tripped over!  I sprawled heavily onto some very rough tar beside the road, skinning one knee and two hands and jerking my shoulder. I bled profusely and started to cry and a kind bike-rider came to help me up and see if I needed any more assistance.  I hobbled home and rang the front door bell.  A very surprised Philip opened the door to a frightening sight!

Eight hours later the grazes are still stinging and I can barely raise my right arm.  I've spent the day reading one of John Mortimer's books and have been laughing my head off.

Winifred, please make sure your Philip makes contact with me as we must meet, if only for a short time, during his hectic visit to Sydney.

Life is full of surprises!

Right out of the blue I flew to Melbourne (Qantas) early Monday morning and returned Tuesday evening (JetStar)!  Through a teacher friend I'd come across an amazing woman called Liz Dunoon, who's published a book called Helping Children with Dyslexia (with a foreword by Sir Richard Branson, no less!!!!).  She'd checked out my Sounds of Reading website and rang and invited me down (at her expense) to stay overnight at her place.  We talked about reading non-stop and exchanged lots of ideas, which was wonderful.


I found the do-it-yourself online ticketing a bit frazzling, but Lina came to the rescue and calmed me down.  I left my car at her place and she caught the before-6am train with me into the city and put me on the airport train.  Both flights said they were leaving from and arriving at international terminals, which wasn't true - they just do that to amuse themselves, I think, and force potential travellers to waste hours online and making phone calls.


In fact, I think I spent more time online getting the tickets than the actual flight, which is only a bit over an hour (if you don't count a long delay because there was some muckup with baggage and a holding-pattern, waiting for our turn to land).  It took two hours to get from the airport home!!!!

So beautiful...

These winter berries arrived from the northern hemisphere just minutes ago.  Computers are as amazing as they are frustrating!!!!  Imagine my being able to see the view out the front of your place, Winifred, from my desk on the other side of the world!!!!!!!  Thanks for sending.


I'm glad you like my rug, Lina.  I'd better vacuum it and the rest of the place now.

So tired today...

I think I'll just lie on the sofa and gaze at my new Persian rug.  (Maybe the design is Persian-inspired, but it was made in Belgium from man-made silk, in other words, viscose!)  Whatever - it is very soft and Muffy, Emma and Hugo all like crawling/rolling all over it.


Yesterday I drove what seemed like halfway to Melbourne to pick up the microwave/convection oven that never worked.  It is VERY stressful in three-lane traffic, 110 km there and back. Manami and Hugo came too and he cried all the way there.  We also went to a new Ikea shop to buy some curtain material for upstairs.  I'm far too tired to try the oven out today and will be most surprised if it does actually cook anything.  I have no faith in warranties from big companies.  If the service company had come to collect it, I would have had to pay $85 (each way).


I hope the dentist didn't hurt you too much, Winifred.  Re the school fete - I was expecting just a few stalls, too, and was most intimidated by commercial ferris wheels, etc, all with blasting music.  It was almost impossible to bear, especially in 30 degree heat.  The teapot and cup thingo was lovely, and at quite a distance from the noise, but it was too hot to try anything else.

Oh, I do love Sydney!

Walking round the local suburbs is sheer joy!  Lina and I took Emma to a school fete the other day and she enjoyed a ride in a cup.  The top pic is one of my favourite streeets and the bottom one is my favourite shopping centre (where I frequently go for a coffee and French pastry).

Honestly! I get so frustrated...

It's not fair that some people (you, Michael) are so clever and others (me) are so dumb!!!  This wouldn't work for me yesterday but today it does, because you've sent it again.  To make things worse, yesterday while I was struggling for hours to order Emma's piano books (and still haven't figured out how to do it), Philip had taken the day off work and was upstairs!!!!  I was livid when I found out, and told him I needed help to order his daughter's books, but he blithely ignored me - his normal reaction - and I haven't seen him since.  Grrrrrr.


I've just tried to open your blog, Winifred, from the link you gave me and it tells me the very same link does not match any documents!!!!!!!!!!!  There are definitely gremlins in this pc.  And, as I write, a message has popped up telling me it's going to restart in 25 secs.


Later.  I finished my coffee and sat in the living room listening to a mostly Mozart concert, which is very calming. (I'm playing the piano again, after a break of some months.  Still at grade 1, but the theory is slowing sinking in.)


I'm glad you thought my description of the football was funny, Winifred, as I think it's a pretty funny game!!!!  The players must have a very high frustration tolerance, is all I can say.  And don't mention cricket, as to me that is even more of a mystery, but much gentler on the players, as they don't attack each other.


Muffy does have a way of telling me what she wants for breakfast - if it's dry stuff, she miaows loudly and if it's moist, she bites my feet!

Might as well stay grumpy all day

Had a bad day yesterday and things haven't improved!  Yesterday I cut out a dress for Emma before I realised the pattern was far too small, so might just as well throw it in the bin.  This morning I started off trying to do an Amazon order for two piano books for her and I'm blowed if I can do it!!!!!!!!!!!  Book #1 is fine, but, no matter how long I search, I can't figure out how to order #2.  (I had already completed a long list with Allegro Music Online, only to find out at the very last question they don't deliver to Australia.)  And there doesn't seem to be a shop in Sydney that stocks these books.  Just now I got your email, Michael, and in spite of the fact you made it easy for me to put in the blog, it won't work!!!!!!!!!!!  I can only import images, it seems. (But I'm sure you'd be able to do it.)

Yes Winifred, Lina and I had a really enjoyable day in Glebe.  She's like a daugher to me - I'm older than her mother!  And yes Frank, Anna Funder got her idea for All That I Am from the former East Germany.

I forgot to tell both of you sport-lovers that the other night I actually watched the rugby final in NZ, believe it or not!  Mind you, I would call it wrestling or all fall down.  What funny rules they have - you run two metres holding the ball, wrestle somebody who tries to grab it from you, fall down together, then everybody in the whole team falls on top of you in a heap!!!!!  I looked up the dictionary to see whether it was league or union, and read that one team has 13 players and the other 15, but every time I tried to count they'd do a close-up shot before I'd got to the end!  (Somebody told me later it's union.  I think we call soccer, league, union and Australian rules football here in Australia.)

I just responded to Muffy's demand for breakfast.  Last week the vet told me she's getting too fat, so I should cut back the amount of food I give her.  She's on a special diet for her bladder, and has both dry food in a packet and moist stuff in a tin.  This morning she wanted moist, so I tried to read the suggested amount on the label and of course the font is so small (about one quarter this size) which meant I was unable to read it.  (Thought I'd put this as another grumble for the day.)

Glebe, another suburb

Yesterday Lina and I drove to an inner-city suburb called Glebe (where I once lived).  We walked up this street:

The purpose of the trip was to go to a talk by Anna Funder, who was signing her new novel, All that I Am.  (I read her first book, non-fiction, called Stasiland and think she's positively brilliant - and beautiful, too!)

This is the upstairs section of the bookshop.  (I found all the pics online and this was taken some time ago with another author speaking.)

We finished off a lovely day having a bite to eat and drink in this Turkish cafe:

No idea who the little girl is - I just put this one in to show you the decor.


Just one more, before you beg me to stop.  We then went next door to another Turkish  cafe to have a cup of Turkish coffee and admire the gorgeous ceramics for sale, like this one:

This kind of tourism saves lots of money on airfares and accommodation!

Off to the movies

I seldom go to the movies, but plan to see Woody Allen's latest, Midnight in Paris, this afternoon. I loathe this man's morals and hate to think I'm contributing to his income by seeing any of his films, but I will make an exception just to see some shots of Paris.  There is a cinema complex here in the local mall:

I'm not feeling very energetic these days.  I think I get more pleasure from simply driving round locally than anything else I do - and this doesn't cost a penny (except for petrol).  Here's a home in one of my favourite streets:

I found the pic on http://palatialliving.blogspot.com/2010/03/mid-week-house-snooprevisting-sydneys.html if you'd like to see some more.

Another little trip

Yesterday Wendy (a local friend) drove me to a beautiful spot called Bobbin Head, which is quite close to home.  We had lunch here:

Later we wandered round the marina:

Yorkshire Dales in winter

Oh yes, Winifred, this is soooooo romantic for me!  Do these pics bring back memories?

Did you live on a farm like this??????

Have just watched All Creatures Great and Small for the umpteenth time.  Do you folk in the northern hemisphere see any TV programs from Australia?