Wednesday, December 28, 2011

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!)

Saturday, December 24, 2011

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...

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

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.

Monday, December 19, 2011

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...

Sunday, December 18, 2011

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.

Friday, December 9, 2011

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.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

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.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

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.

Monday, December 5, 2011

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.