Film and Fireworks

Back again from a couple of nights in Adelaide where I spent one evening with friends, one of whom, Rosemary, spoke about her fascinating life (so far) which has involved many things from architecture admin work (with her father's firm) in the early days, librarianship qualifications and professional work, a wee spell of six years in England and various studies in archaeology, and significant research assistant posts at a university well-known to most of our little group. This year we expect to get together only half a dozen times with an agenda whereby individuals will share edited highlights of their careers, and some of the telling may even be factual. Who knows. In April it will be Anton's turn.
I saw two movies: James Cameron's Avatar (3D at the Piccadilly) and the well-told tale A Single Man (at Palace Cinema) for his performance in which Colin Firth has won a Best Actor Oscar. I took in one live performance as part of the Fringe Festival, in the Spiegel Tent (The Garden of Unearthly Delights) which was the one-hour two-hander  by soprano "Lilli La Scala" and her accompanist Daniel Brewster. The show was called War Notes, songs of the two World Wars interspersed with recorded reading of extracts from letters home by soldiers in more recent conflicts, notably from Iraq and Afghanistan. The performance space resembled, very effectively, a  fin de siecle music hall.

Bill and Robert, over from Tassie, invited me to join them for the Festival Opening fireworks display in Victoria Park. We walked across the parklands from Unley to get there. Big crowd. The display was showy if fairly meaningless, and spoiled at the start by Premier Rann's bombastic intro speech of self-promo. Maybe I was just feeling grumpy. Nothing new there.

The Eyes Have It

Expedition yesterday there and back to Adelaide, round trip 472 km because I came back by the longer route via Arthurton and Maitland for the sake of the more winding scenic road in the evening light. Dark by the time I got  home, in time to see something of the winter Olympics - women's moguls, scary.

The visit to the state capital was my six monthly check up with the eye specialist at the Wakefield Clinic. Darn. He wants to do four laser surgery procedures next month, hopefully to better manage my glaucoma: the pressures within both eyes are double what they were at the last check, and I have not defaulted at all on the daily eye drops. So now I have a stronger medication, starting in about ten minutes from now, then morning and evening. But the laser - five minutes each time: OK to drive again from about one hour afterwards - is intended to do some judicial damage which prompts the body to go into repair mode and create new cells in the eye which (we hope) improves the interior fluid drainage. Therefore reduced pressure. Therefore reduced risk of later damage to the optic nerve.

Not exactly what I had planned for March.

While in town I saw the Guy Ritchie (dir.) movie Sherlock Holmes. Robert Downey Jr was a very different Holmes from the classic Basil Rathbone portrayals. I was the only person in the audience (Eastend Palace screen 6) and truth to tell I have not decided if I quite like the film, stylish though it is. I should disqualify myself from any critical opinion of the film because I dropped off for a short but stimulating nap after my early rise, and as good prep for another longish drive home. I only missed the trailers and opening credits!

Wordniks and Silver Surfers

We discovered wordnik.com which is useful and fun. Not a dictionary only but a resource for finding and displaying words and phrases in actual use - especially culled from online sites - even if they do not appear already in published dictionaries.  It's free, always a great recommendation.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

I did a smallish editing job (1,150 words) for a French client. It was accepted and rated 100% satisfactory, but there were glitches with delivery on line, so it was late being delivered. The client was understanding, and had received the text more or less on time by another means (a docx attachment) while the problem was sorted; something to do with an incompatibility  and my Firefox 3.6 version browser  not being recognized.

The last couple of days we're back to over 30 degree temperatures, not such a bad thing, but I like the cooler wearther. Soon enough it will be cool enough to call COLD and I will grizzle about THAT. However, we are blooming lucky not to be experiencing the nasty stuff in the northern hemisphere winter - snowstorms and killer chill conditions.

Our local Telecentre runs Wednesday arvo "Silver Surfer" sessions for us oldies, sharing and comparing computer needs and skills (zero to hero). I'd never gone along before, but the word is that the social synergy is worth a lot, quite apart from the learning (and/or teaching). Great concept.

A party and more music

Yep, another month already. We can stop saying Happy New Year when encountering someone for the first time since Christmas. Happy Mid-Year?  Too soon.

I have had my head down for some online editing work. It keeps me off the streets and out of mischief.

Wednesday this week we're back to our monthly schedule of concerts in nursing homes in this part of the planet; OK, a circle of 60km diameter will contain all of our audiences. This time I get to sing a duet in Spanish with A.E., the mysterious Spanish lady, known only to, umm, everybody in the group.

The combined Burns' Day and Australia Day Poetry Reading Party was reckoned a success, and we squashed 21 people into my front room. So it turned out a party ... I'd been pretending it was a sedate afternoon tea. Somebody listened to a few Johnny Cash & June Carter songs - and Jacqui has since donated a box of 50+ (different) song sheets with music scores. They were collected by her late husband Mel who was a keen musician. Now these gems will likely be added to the inventory curated by the indefatigable Elsie, and, of course, put to good use.

Australia Day Tomorrow

26 January is Australia's National Day. At my place there have been the usual pathetic attempts to make rooms look tidy for possible guests. The technique (I bet you  know it yourself) is to chuck stuff into one or maybe two sacrificial rooms which will be the no-go areas to visitors - or if they do, it's their own  fault - and  keep a straight face while trying to convey that this is all normal. There will be some grog and cool drinks unless the fridge goes on the blink. The odd nibble. In the grand country tradition our group of die-hard party-goers will in all likelihood come armed with quantities of tucker, known as "bring a plate". If not, no-one will go hungry. Besides it's an afternoon tea-with-poetry readings, not a blooming meal. Gwenda has emailed a program of nine readings as offered by participants. I see iconic Aussie names; C.J. Dennis, Henry Lawson, Dorothea McKellar and Banjo Paterson. The other end of the twin themes (Burns' Day 25 Jan. + Australia Day 26 Jan.) has Robert Burns's  To a Mouse (Tae a Moose).

The early forecast was for high 30s temperature, and currently this has ameliorated to 26 degrees expected.

The weather around the  various state capitals must have suited our cricketers well enough. They have gone 2-0 up in the five match series of ODIs versus the touring Pakistan team.

How lucky we are to be able to think of sport and afternoon teas: it is less than a fortnight since the disastrous  earthquakes which devastated Haiti - but seem to have left unharmed the Dominican Republic which shares the same island - caused  massive loss of life.

vikings and cricket

Nope, the vikings didn't play cricket.

My title for this post to the blog is of the two separate things. Vikings (partly). Cricket - see below.

First, I have made headway with "pre-editing" - checking citations mostly - as online work for the publisher of an academic compilation to be published later this year in Europe: the book is about the period of history in northern Europe, especially Scandinavia, from the end of the viking era until about 1200. The dozen contributors are a mixed lot of nationalities. Simultaneously, another book with the same number of authors (each contributing a chapter), is receiving my attention, and this one's about Renaissance drama. That book's two academic editors with whom I mostly deal are based in Canada and Australia. The first book's two editors are, as it happens, in England and Norway although neither belongs to the country of current residence. It's complicated!

Time out today to catch up on the cricket between Australia and Pakistan coming from Bellerive Oval in Hobart. It is the third of the three Test Matches between the sides, and it has to be said that the home team appear well on top after their huge first innings total (8/519 declared) dismissing the others who did not reach a score enough to avoid a follow-on. However, Aus. Captain Ponting has chosen to bat and with two full days of play to go, Ricky Ponting should have the awkward luxury of deciding just when to declare, and still leave time to bowl the Pakistan side out, to register a three-nil win in the series. My guess: a declaration around lunchtime Sunday giving the opposition a run chase of (maybe a tick over) 400 runs. We'll see.

Gwenda kindly agrees to act as MC on Tuesday week for the curious event planned at my place on Australia day: poetry readings interspersed among chat and afternoon tea. Gwenda's brief is to break up fights, and generally say who's up next, banned, or told to shut up and sit.

Hot and cold. Wellington Boots. Finding Neverland.

Adelaide just had another 40 degree day and today is expected to be as much as 43.  My place, across the St Vincent Gulf from the state capital, is more temperate - summer and winter - usually about 3 degrees better-off either way. Thus yesterday, a mere 37 Celsius. Of meteorological interest, the town of Maitland further north on the Yorke Peninsula seems always to have exactly the Adelaide temp.

Well, I did my before-brekkie stint at 6.45am outdoors before the heat realized I was there, and mortared a few more concrete blocks in my Great Wall of Will retaining wall:  my physical therapy for the day, good idea until I do summat dumb such as dropping a block on a toe. No, it hasn't happened. I do own a good pair of steel capped work boots - axe and chainsaw jobs for sure - but for these early morning jaunts it is old slip-on shoes or the true favourite, wellie boots.

They drive me mad, because every time I kneel in the dirt to use the trowel at low-level mortaring, the leading edges of the wellington boots scoop up what feels like a mugful of dry earth and gravel. And each time I empty a boot out, it is amazing that the amount is only, say, half an eggcupful.

As a bear of little brain, I might eventually work out the solution: DO NOT WEAR THE RUBBER BOOTS. I think this love of the boot must be a leftover from the pair I bought long ago in northern Sweden which were so comfortable that I wore them for many years for things you don't expect to do in rubber boots:  trotting up Scottish hills, even (a failed experiment) for cross-country ski-ing. Why so comfy? They had perfectly fitting smooth WOODEN insoles. Blooming marvellous. I tried them as fireside slippers, but the smell of burning rubber was a distraction. OK, no, that one's a fib.

The local deli is sold and the premises will become a vet clinic in February. Small towns are amazing. Ours has 650 denizens according to a guide book, so it is no surprise that the deli-seller is uncle of my former tenant up in the afore-mentioned town of Maitland, and the vet is pals with some of our recreational singing group. Everybody knows everybody else (you know the saying). Is this a Good Thing? Probably not!

Where was I?  Oh yes, the deli has a closing down sale on its DVD hire stock: I acquired my own copy of the hauntingly stylish film Finding Neverland whose leads include the extraordinary Johnny Depp as J.M.Barrie, the classic beauty Julie Christie as the formidable grandmother of the Llewelyn-Davies brothers, and brilliant young actor Freddie Highmore as Peter the brother on whom, supposedly, the Peter Pan character was based in Barrie's stage play just over a hundred years ago. The screenplay  gives Highmore the punchline. On the play's successful opening night, a society lady gushes, on meeting the real Peter after the show, "Ah, so THIS is Peter Pan!"  "I'm not Peter Pan," says Highmore's character forcefully. "HE is," gesturing to Depp's too-handsome J.M.Barrie, that complex little Scot from Dundee.

Great thing about so many DVDs are the special features. For Finding Neverland we have interviews with more than one of Barrie's biographers, including Andrew Birkin whose writings on the playwright's association with the Llewelyn-Davies family make compelling reading.

German logic, Japanese From the Top Down

Bill blogs from Tasmania that he has finished another paper model. He has constructed some beauties, mostly of German design, he tells us. This new one, however, used a Japanese design. The table-top models are usually of famous buildings such as certain castles or cathedrals, or in this case the Palace of Westminster in the U.K.  That's right.  Well, the curiosity mentioned by Bill the Builder is that while the German designs always expect you to put it together from the base up ("more logical") the Japanese instructions require a top-down procedure. Models can take days or even weeks to assemble carefully. Think of a super-large jigsaw puzzle.

I have not the slightest idea what special insight to draw from this nugget of information.

Hogmanay heat. Hello 2010

To a Scot, New Year's Eve is known as Hogmanay. But how very un-Scottish that poor Adelaide today has 41 degrees Celsius. And across Gulf St Vincent, here it only a cool 38 degrees. I guess anything less than blood heat counts as cool. Oh good.

But at least no problem staying awake until midnight (long past my bedtime).  Nobody can sleep when it is so warm. Air-con? Can't afford to leave it running ALL night, mate.

Post Christmas

To continue the fishy theme of the last blog post, I felt like a puffer fish blown up to five time its normal size, after I over-ate outrageously on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as guest with two indulgent hosts.

Today is Sunday 27th. I took me until now to un-bloat. I am working on the wording of a New Year resolution along the lines of  "must stop snacking between snacks" before I become globular. Not the same as global.