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May 24, 2007
28.8kbps
28.8kbps until June 1st.
Doei!
Posted by Faith at 02:36 AM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2007
Grandpa with cow
One day in the early 1980's we unfurled our morning Age and discovered this, Grandpa and the back end of a cow on the front page! I think it put my mum off her breakfast but we all thought it was great. Anyway, here he is again, online and blogged! Who'd have thought!
Another instalment in the great Scan-the-Family project. You will be able to see them all under the category of Skeletons.
Posted by Faith at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2007
Don't call me
Yippee!!
Friday I received an email that we have been added to the Don't Call Register. God I hope this works! We did get a silent number when we moved to this house, specifically to address the volume of nuisance calls we were getting from call centres but that has only been partially sucessful.
You see when offered the choice of a new phone number (800 xxxxxx) or an old phone number, (9378 xxxxxx) I fell for the romance of the old one, nostalgic for the days when the prefix in someone's number told you what suburb they lived in. This was a fatal mistake as while our number is now silent it obviosuly wasn't before and there are enough places using older versions of the database for it still to appear on their lists. We have even had a couple of calls from centres who were obviously aware that the number was now silent but were pretending ignorance and 'fishing' in the hope that we would initiate an enquiry that would get them off the hook and allow them to pursue their normal speel with us.
I mean get this;
"Hello, I'm ringing on behalf of Telstra to check whether you are still listed as using Telstra services". To which I responded that I was quite sure Telstra knew whether or not we were using their services and maybe he should ask them.
The Indian centres seem to be the ones that get everyone riled up and I have to say that in terms of sheer volume of calls they are the worst. Their habit of putting YOU on hold is also mind-bogglingly-irritating. What marketing guru came up with that brilliant idea? Hey, we're going to call people when they don't want us to and annoy the hell out of them and just to warm them up a bit we'll first put them on hold and they can wait for us! What amazes me is that people do wait!
But by far the most annoying operators to deal with are those gung-ho aussie boys. Sooooooo facetious, patronising, upbeat and downright ignorant in one package is just plain alarming. No wonder they're working in a call centre.
And damn, the chooks still aren't laying!
Posted by Faith at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2007
The perils of Multiculturalism 2
Yesterday I walked into the little Italian pasta shop on Lygon St, the one where you can buy fresh pastas and sauces they've made themselves. While not exactly regulars, (we are capable of whipping it up ourselves) we have shopped here before on several ocassions without mishap. The old guy shuffled out into the store and I asked him for some bolognese sauce. He looked slightly bewildered but shuffled out back where he vanished for a very long time. When he came back he was holding a dozen eggs! Which he had apparently taken some trouble to put together. They don't even sell eggs!
He had been gone so long and I was sooooooooo flabbergasted and intrigued by this complete miscommunication that I didn't correct him. I then picked out some cheese and spinach ravioli from the freezer and asked again for bolognese sauce. He shuffled out back and quickly re-appeared with bolognese sauce. I went home with ravioli, bolognese sauce and a dozen eggs.
This has to rival the coffee machine/bicycle offer for linguistic confusion.
Posted by Faith at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2007
Wheels on fire
Recently we decided to take Jacob's trainer wheels off his bicycle. Not just so that we could watch him fall over but because one of them was worn out and he was also starting to rely on them too much. Once we mooted the idea Jacob was keen to 'ride like the big boys' and we decided to celebrate the occasion with a new helmet, his old one having a couple of nasty cracks in it.
Having selected a helmet with flames on it, (when saying the word flames you should use hushed tones of admiration, make your eyes large and round in awe and move your right hand in a gesture of something speeding past) Jacob was raring to go.
First we practised what he needed to do when stopping, ie:put his feet on the ground! Then we moved on to the serious stuff. After only a couple of goes with me holding his seat very lightly I was able to let go of him for seconds at a time. We called it a day before he got too tired but decided to have another practice on Saturday when Dad would be home from Perth and we could impress the pants off him.
Saturday morning Jacob couldn't wait to show Dad how he could ride 'by himself'. I thought it might take a bit of a warm up to get to the same point so was pretty impressed when the first attempt Jacob took off, cycling a good ten metres with no assistance from me. After that there was no stopping him! He did maybe twenty passes up and down the laneway we were using, practising his starting and stopping techniques until eventually he finished with a burn-out! Remind me never to mention the drag racing that still goes on in Lygon St to him.
And here, for the rellies, is another eerily silent film, documentary evidence of his riding skills, the new helmet (with flames on it) and the absence of trainer wheels!
Posted by Faith at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2007
A rolling stone gathers no moss........or something
Last week Jacob decided to enliven our Friday night routine by announcing as innocently as only a three-and-a-half year old can that he had put a stone up his nose.
This was seconds after I had ordered the pizza and poured my first glass of wine before collapsing on the couch to wait for Ron to get back from Perth. Ron had been away all week and being a single mum for a week, the same week that the book I was working on had to be absolutely-positively-finished-for-the-printer, I was looking forward to relaxing.
But no, Jacob had put a stone up his nose. Hours ago apparently, while at creche, and he was adamant that it hadn't come out. I couldn't see anything but no, he hadn't sneezed, no he hadn't swallowed anything strange and yes, it did hurt. When he pointed to where it hurt you could actually see a small swelling there as if the tissue was inflamed.
So, Ron still in the air, it was off to the Royal Children's Hospital Emergency Department. Three and a half hours later, having seen a nurse, been to the GP clinic, had an x-ray, and been back to the GP clinic we returned home, by now accompanied by Ron, with one exhausted and hungry (in case they had to sedate him) little boy.
There are two things Jacob is now absolutely sure of. He will never again put anything up his nose and he DOES NOT like hospitals.
The stone was never found. It may still turn up, it may have been long gone. It was in there at one point as the tissue in his right nostril was inflamed.
Posted by Faith at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2007
Funky old men
Saturday night Ron and I ventured out for our one evening at The Melbourne Jazz Festival. While we would have preferred something at one of the smaller venues we settled in the end for Pharoah Sanders, Ben Lieberman and the McCoy Tyner Trio at Hamer Hall. It seemed a good compromise of getting to see more than one artist without stretching the limits of he-who-must-be-babysat.
We needn't have worried about the venue. Pharoah Sanders had the seated crowd clapping and singing along and for the rest of the evening the staid rows of concert hall seats were rocking as everyone whooped, swayed and jigged. OK, it wasn't the same as a more intimate venue but it certainly exceeded expectations for such a formal one. The foyer was buzzing during intermission and there was a real 'vibe' about the whole event.
And the three stars, Sanders, Liberman and Tyners were just about the funkiest trio of old guys I've ever seen! The sight of them all shuffling and limping from the stage at the end was hard to reconcile with the passion with which they played. Sanders especially was dead set on getting down. Getting back up took him a little bit more effort but he was still smiling!
Posted by Faith at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2007
Here's one I prepared earlier
For the past year, in between house-hunting, moving, hosting Dutch in-laws and all that sort of stuff, I have also been busy translating a Dutch novel into english. Or to be precise, translating a Dutch novel into Dunglish from where Margot at Scribe helped me wrestle it into english. And now it is practcally finished, which is both an enormous relief and a bit sad.
I can't tell you how much fun and pain literary translation is. Simultaneously.
A bonus was getting to work with Margot and the author, Ariella, from both of whom I learnt an enormous amount but also just enjoyed getting to know on a personal level.
The novel is The Butterfly Month by Ariella Kornmehl. It will be published by Scribe in July.
Posted by Faith at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2007
Who you gunna call?
For one brief moment I thought all my prayers had been answered but then read the small print on the side. The bit about restaurants and hotels only.
Posted by Faith at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2007
Glam pusses
I've never been a slippers person, always quite happy to get around in bare feet or go the whole hog and get dressed but recently I succumbed to something over-the-top and glamorous from Peter Alexander. I still wasn't convinced that I'd actually wear them though.
I needn't have worried. The slippers have come into their own as very glamorous chook-wear. First thing each morning I shuffle bleary-eyed down the garden path to the chook-shed, feet snuggily encased in extravagant bows and baubles. I'm sure the joie-de-vie with which 'onze dames' unleash themselves onto yet another day's worth of unsuspecting worms and snails comes at least in part from my footwear. And how fitting they are too, for chooks themselves blessed with such extravagant plumage.
Posted by Faith at 02:27 AM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2007
Yes, we have no eggs
Our chooks are not laying.
They are keeping the lawn down, the vegies fertilised and the garden well-ventilated. They have also learnt how to scare off local cats and pigeons with Ninja-Chook manouvres. They are huge, fat, fluffy and happy. They are now about seven months old. But they are not laying.
Debra from Book-a-Chook assures me it is the abnormally warm weather we are having. The warmth sending the chooks into a late-moult (true) and chooks don't lay when they're moulting. Andrew of Andrew's Feed Store in Sydney Rd suggested we try putting them on a higher-protein pellet (they eat very little pellet food, surviving on our garden alone most of the time) to try and kick-start the laying thing. Happily, he now has a 100% certified organic layer pellet so we will be giving that a try. The organic plot thickens!
Posted by Faith at 06:27 AM | Comments (0)