Outdoor movies

I went to the outdoor movies with Terena last night, and saw the 2004 Swedish film about a small town choir - “As it is in Heaven”.  It was a beautiful night, and outdoor movies are one of the wonderful things about summer in Perth.   

Christmas party

I hosted my team's Christmas party at home last night. Most of them are in the photo to the left. It was a lovely night - I decided to just have cold platters (shamelessly ripped off from Jane Brook Winery), so that no one had to be in the kitchen, and there were no issues with timing etc. We had three types of platter, one with smoked salmon, one with scotch eggs, and one with cold meats. Each was accompanied with various cheeses, dips, chutneys, antipasto or salads, fresh and dried fruits, and a couple of different breads. For dessert we had simply delicious Amono gelato and sorbet in waffle cones. Again, very easy, and everyone helped themselves.

It was undoubtedly the easiest party to cater for, and very relaxed. I'm really enjoying entertaining in this City Beach house. I had a great time - they are such a lovely bunch. Everyone pitched in to help put food out and to stack the dishwasher and clear away. Today we've all had leftovers for lunch in the library. I suspect there may still be leftovers on Monday for our Christmas eve morning tea.

Decorations and Santa's schedule

We put our Christmas tree and nativity scene up on December 1^st.  Harrison was a great help ;-)  This year he is very aware of the approaching date (he tells us every day that December 24 is Christmas Eve, and checks which date it is today).  He has a wooden Advent calendar with a drawer for each day of December, containing a tiny wooden decoration that he hangs on a peg above the drawers.  I think this is making him very attuned to what day it is.  He’s already visited Santa and asked for a “big James” for Christmas.  It’s funny how for the past 2 years

• he’s had one main Christmas wish all year (last year it was Wags the dog),
• he really wants Santa to bring that for him (no one else), and
• he only has an expectation of one present from Santa (probably because he only ever gets one present from Santa)!  

He’s also trying to figure out the logistics of how Santa fits the toys in the back of the sleigh, and noticing that some images of Santa have lots of sacks, and some have only one.  He’s questioning, too, why so many pictures of Santa include snow, and asking whether we’ll get snow at Christmas.  Who knows, he may well experience a true white Christmas in Quebec city in the next couple of years.

Into the wild

Simon and I had a rare night out last Friday (thank you Marg!) and saw Into the Wild. The main character (Christopher McCandless played by Emile Hirsch) reminded me so much of Simon at 20 (in fact, in real life he was only 2 years older than us)... Quite by coincidence I had just started re-reading Walden, so I was a bit in the zone. Walden is, for those who don't know, where Thoreau went "into the wild" in the 1840s, what Simon and I discussed on the night we met, where he proposed to me, and one of the inspirations for Chris, the main character in the movie, to abandon society and take off.

All through the movie I was wondering if Simon would suddenly declare a burning desire to cut up his credit card, don a backpack and hit the road. Of course, the whole starving to death in Alaska thing did bring us somewhat back to reality.

Directed by Sean Penn, this is beautifully shot, and though it does make Chris into some sort of Jesus creature at times, it's quite haunting.

The machine is us/ing us

Really like this video by Mike Wesch explaining Web 2.0. It was mentioned at the ALLA conference in September and I hadn't gotten around to looking at it until today.

Why don't cowboys have cows?

Harrison and I had very long conversation yesterday about why cowboys don’t ride cows.  I tried my best to explain that cowboys did have lots of cows - they just rode horses in order to herd their cows - but he was quite insistent that cows were perfectly good animals for riding, and that cowboys really should saddle them up…

BDW to UWA

The October 2007 Library News at UWA has profiles of two ex-Blake Dawson Waldron librarians who arrived almost simultaneously at UWA. Funny how things happen. Alissa and I worked together at BDW, and several years later we both end up at UWA together (though now in different subject disciplines).

Election wrap up

The sky is looking a bit bluer the past couple of days... There's serious talk of an apology to indigenous people, and a general sense of hope and purpose.

We hosted an election party on Saturday, banking on a good result for our lefty crowd. We started with election cocktails - the "tree hugger" (with lime and mint), and the "swinging voter" (a strawberry daiquiri). We played election bingo - marking off phrases such as "bogus pamphlets" or "the Latham handshake" as we heard them on the telecast. It was a lovely evening, with lots of food, and lots of conviviality as the result became clear. Even Kevin's ultra long victory speech couldn't dampen our spirits. Our house is great for a party, with fabulous views, a huge lounge room, and plenty of room for kids to run around. It's only a stroll to the beach, so a few of the adults took the kids down to the beach at sunset. All in all a great night.

Kevin was looking impressive on the 7:30 Report tonight, too - you can read the transcript and watch the video online.

Liam

Simon’s nephew Liam arrived yesterday and is staying for almost 2 weeks.  He’s just finished his year 12 exams, so this is schoolies week for him, I guess.  He seems quite keen on taking himself off to see the sights of Perth and surrounds.  Simon and I are both working (I have barely any leave accrued yet, and Simon is doing the final proofs of his native title book before his exam marking comes in next week), so we only have the weekends to spend with him.  We are in a good location for a solo holiday though – a stroll to the beach, and a short walk in the other direction to the bus to the city, or to a little block of shops.  

 

Liam is very tall and very, very thin, and dyes his lovely blonde hair black, plus refuses to wash it, so when he turned up with Simon yesterday at day care, Harrison was quite frightened and wouldn’t go near him.  It only took a few minutes for him to get over the initial shock, and they are getting on very well now.  Liam is very good with him.  Harrison took a little bit of persuading this morning that, unlike grandma, Liam was not likely to want a 3 year old crawling into bed with him at 7am, and that he wasn’t likely to be up before we’d all left the house.

Imagination

Harrison loves to take things to day care for show and tell, but he's only allowed to do it once a month, so instead he’s started taking imaginary toys (or as he says “pretending toys”).  He "holds" them in the car all the way to day care, carefully cradles them in his hands as he walks in, tells his carers what his imaginary toy is today and pretends to put it in the show and tell box. At the end of the day he's still acting as though there's a toy he has to put in his bag, or get me to hold while he washes his hands etc.  At home this morning he had so many imaginary toys in his hands that he couldn’t get up into his chair for breakfast.  He puts an imaginary train on the tracks along with a real one, and talks through a whole scenario around the race between the two trains and what they say to each other etc.

 

The other day when I picked him up from day care he claimed to have left Spencer (imaginary train de jour) behind.  I tried to persuade him that I could see Spencer in his bag, but he'd have none of it.  So I tried another tack and said I'd see if there was a spare Spencer in the glove box of

the car.  Sure enough, he fell for that one, and held the "new" imaginary Spencer for a while.  But after 5 minutes or so he announced

that he didn't like the new Spencer and wished he could go back to day care to get his old one. Aggghhh...  

 

It's actually not a bad phase because he can be totally distracted by something that isn't there – I don't have to worry about bringing toys for him to play with when we go out, as we can invent something at any time.  This morning our whole trip to day care was taken up with him describing what colour lollies he had (along with appropriate grunts and groans while he “made” them) then him asking me which one I’d like, passing imaginary lollies back and forth, offering me a drink of milk in case my lollies were too spicy… It’s quite fun.

Christmas plans

Our travel plans changed slightly and we’re now flying direct to and from Brisbane, rather than driving.  I was a bit tentative about attempting to visit Brisbane for just 5 days at Christmas time and coming away sane…  So we’ll now be there for about 12 days, and staying in one place the whole time, which hopefully will make it easier to see everyone, and to also take some time out for ourselves as a family.  It will be nice to plan some excursions that just the three of us can enjoy, like ferry trips and picnics, or a visit to Australia Zoo.  I’m quite looking forward to it. 

 

 

Holiday plans

We’re once again planning a trip east, and juggling the logistics of how to get there.  The current plan is to drive to Adelaide straight after Christmas, leave the car at the airport and fly to Brisbane.  Then Harrison and I would fly back to Perth, and Simon would fly to Adelaide and drive the car back to Perth.  I have almost no leave, whereas Simon has heaps, so it makes sense for me to get back for the re-opening of Uni on January 7^th, whereas he can take another week. Because of my limited leave, we only get about 6 days in Brisbane, which is not ideal, but can’t be helped.   The advantages of this are that

¨      we put some kilometres on the car for FBT purposes (but not too many for greenhouse purposes),

¨      we have some semblance of a family holiday (driving 2700 km in the middle of summer and camping on the Nullarbor – some would disagree about the holiday tag!),

¨      we get to visit family and friends in Brisbane, and   

¨      Simon also loves the long drive and the time to himself.

Spoke too soon

Well, I may have spoken too soon about the buffet at Observation City.  After we had dinner there on Sunday night, Harrison complained of a sore tummy all morning at day care, and didn’t eat any lunch, then he vomited everywhere just before nap time.  He seemed OK after that, and he did eat all his dinner last night.  I strongly suspect that something he ate on Sunday night had gluten in it.

Syd-en-ey

Had a trip to Sydney last week… my last law librarian jaunt.  I went to the law librarian’s conference (and gave a paper).  It was nice not feeling I had to go to all the law stuff – there were interesting papers on things like climate change which had a scientific bent.  One lesson learnt was not to rely on the venue having the same version of powerpoint as you.  I am usually an anti-powerpoint person and make the plainest presentations I can, but lately I’ve become a fan of timed transitions, and done things like have large black and white photos timed to fade in and out in the background as I talk.   This time I’d just used one or two “features”, and a groovy handwriting font on one slide, but when it came to present, they had an old version of powerpoint, so none of it worked!

 

I stayed on for the weekend with Michele F.  She lives in Newtown, almost on King St in a small terrace.  She and Mul are immersed in the inner city lifestyle.  It was a bit of a Ford family weekend, as Lisa has moved to Sydney, and Mary and Allen were also down visiting.

 

Simon took Harrison to the Perth Show on Sunday (he insists on calling it the Ekka, which I’m sure does not go down well with the locals).  A good bonding experience for the boys.   We decided at the last minute to go to dinner at Observation City (Scarborough) last night.  This is the secod time we’ve taken Harrison there and been brave enough not to pack any food for him.  They always have multiple gluten free dishes, including 3 or 4 desserts.  I think we’ll become regulars, just because it’s so convenient.  And they only charge $3 for him, which is a bonus.

New, new job

 

After saying in July that I was moving jobs to Curtin Uni, quite a lot has changed.  I never did make it to Curtin (and they were extremely accommodating of me, which was great), and am now the Science Librarian at UWA.  This is, of course, also where Simon works (but safely across campus), and where Harrison goes to daycare.  I'm loving the 10 minute commute!  One of the exciting things about this new role is that we're building a new science library and merging 4 different science collections together.  Something I'm not unfamiliar with from my days at ECU!  So I'm thinking about service models, 24 hour accessibility, multimedia rooms, training rooms, call numbers, spreadsheets, desk design, shelving, seating etc etc etc

Before and After

I put those two "chocolate" pictures of Harrison together - on the left is him just pre-diagnosis in October last year, weighing about 11.3kg. On the right is him in August this year, after 9 months on a gluten free diet, and weighing about 15.3 kg. He is still quite underweight for his age, but he is catching up on the height he lost.

Denis and Tracey

I just spent 4 days in Qld for Denis and Tracey's wedding. The weekend included a cooking class for VJ, Trish and me at the Spirit House, Yandina. It was a fabulous day, and the food (of course) was sumptuous. So Kate and Karen had better prepare themselves for some "from scratch" Thai food when they come to dinner at our new City Beach house! Paul and Anna were having lunch at the Spirit House that day, too - though luckily for them they didn't have to eat our cooking.

The wedding was beautiful. Weather was warm, many guests stayed at the Kenilworth pub or camped at the showgrounds (where the reception was), so it was a very social extended event. I think they bought 25 dozen eggs, and about $900 worth of meat, and that was just for the before and after barbeques. Tracey's sense of style was very evident, as was her attention to detail. The bridesmaids and flower girls (4 of each!) had a different dresses designed by Tracey. There were buses organised from Nambour (where a lot of guests were staying), and past various B&Bs where other guests were staying. It's a good thing Tracey is studying event management I think!

For the record

Doesn't seem like much is changing, though the stress levels are markedly reduced.
Sat 11th - Simon worked all day.
Sun 12th - Simon worked a few hours from home (but was in communication with us, which is an improvement)

Moving again...

Yep, it's only a year since we last moved, but we're on the move again. This time to a house with a backyard for Harrison to run around in. That was really our only criteria for a house, and it was surprising how difficult it is to find rental accomodation that includes grass. Actually, this one includes weeds, but with some TLC we're hoping they turn into lawn!

It's a fabulous location at City Beach - walking distance to the lovely Boulevard shops, and with a bitumen walking/cycling track from literally across the street through bush to Floreat Beach with its cafe, playground and barbeques. I can see us strolling down to the beach for a coffee and a walk on Sunday mornings. The house itself is an older style house, with very old kitchen and bathrooms, but there are 4 big bedrooms, 2 1/2 bathrooms, a big rumpus and store room under the house, and most importantly, the kitchen and living areas over look a sizeable backyard. The bonus is that two bedrooms and the living areas all have magnificent ocean views.

We move around the 25th of August.

For the record

Not great process... 4th August, Simon worked all day. 5th August, he worked for the afternoon.