Let The Parade Of Desserts Commence!

OMG. I may never, ever eat again. I possibly said that last year, the year before, and so on, so clearly I cannot be trusted on this... but that's my plan. I'm not waiting until New Year, I'm making a Christmas Resolution.

So. Thoughts on Christmas Day...

I love my friends. A huge dinner table for 20, or so, barely seats us all and that includes the inevitable absences. Friends who've moved overseas, interstate, or just have other plans. The rag tag bunch of us now includes many ankle biters underfoot, which has added a further dimension to Christmas. Oliver and I made the lion puzzle, the zebra puzzle, the elephant puzzle and of course the giraffe puzzle, then back through the cycle a couple of times more. At no point were giraffe legs combined with a lion head, frankly between the two of us we put the intelligent into intelligent design.

Not to mention that once the thorny issue of the difference between the words assume and presume reared its head, we couldn't let the issue die without an answer. In a nutshell, they are functionally the same except some of the secondary meanings differ. Perhaps I'm being assumptuous, but I presume you're as interested as we were.

The food. Oh, the food. The glorious, glorious food. Meaghan pulled out all the stops, with Christmas favourites like a huge leg of ham, and some new dishes such as a string bean and pomegranate salad dish that was to die. To. Die. Are five desserts too many? I think it was five. Pudding... pavlova... chocolate cake (with raspberries and raspberry sorbet)... the ne plus ultra of panacotta with jellied mulled wine glaze.... I know that's only four I've listed, but trust me it felt like five.

I did fairly well in the giftage this year. Everything I gave seemed to go down a treat, including a rave review of the scarf. My sister was gobsmacked that I had made something so beautiful (her words), which is high praise indeed. I received a few fab gifts, primarily knitting related; a wonderful ball winder (dirty?), some great books, some scrummy yarn. I see a Boxing Day spent winding some balls. How about you?

So, a nice Christmas. Fairly chilled out during the day, with a lovely social evening. Capped off afterwards with a major food coma and supine staring at The International Dancesport Championships (known as ballroom dancing by civilians) on tv from the comfort of my own couch. Just when you thought it couldn't get any gayer. (Someone tell the Pope, put a fatwa on Dancesport and save the world.) Now it's late and I'm watching a German comedy on tv, which is an über camp take off of Star Trek, with what appears to be an all gay crew. Plus the extremely nummy Til Schweiger.

At least, I think I am. It may be the result of that 4th dessert...

Anyhoo, I hope you all had a lovely day!

One More Sleep

Christmas Eve everyone!



I'm having a quiet one in tonight. All through the house not a thing is stirring, not even a mouse. (Not since I set those traps anyway. Kidding!) Tall & Handsome drove north today to see friends and family and will be away until Sunday, when he's back briefly before heading back home clear across the country. My Christmas plans involve a sleep in and a lazy morning, a Christmas phone call with my family interstate, catching up with friends in the afternoon, dinner... and oodles of good cheer.

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas Eve, wherever you are and however you are spending it. Now get to bed or else Santa will never come!

Done!

I pushed it right to the wire, but my sister's Christmas gift lace scarf is finished. I had a tiny bit of yarn left over, and could have added another 5-10cm to the length, but it got to late last night and I thought "really, in the scheme of things - what difference does 5cm make?".

Plus, today was my deadline to get it into a courier bag and sent off to my family in Victoria, so it was a pretty tight deadline. I've been working on a sleep debt all week so once it got to be late enough that my eyes were crossing from tiredness, I figured it was time to be done with the knitting bit and start blocking it.

So I cast it off, washed it and pinned it out to block into shape. It's not really until you get to this last step of stretching it to dry into shape that knitted lace really comes alive, everything neatens and opens up, and you look at it and think "wow, I made that!".

I hope she likes it!

From The Archives

I never knew this picture existed until recently! That's my mum on the left, and my grandma on the right. This was apparently taken before my parents married, so mum would have only been in her very early 20s and it would have been the early 1950s. They are both tiny women, my mum only clocked in at about 5'1" and you can see my grandma is even tinier. Yes, it runs in the family. :)

In later years my grandma was rounder, and a fond memory I have of her from when I was a kid was putting my arms around her waist (they could barely meet) and feeling the ridges of the bones in the corset whe wore almost every day of her adult life. Funny the things you remember! One thing (among many things) that I remember of my mum was her laugh. Which would start as a giggle and up as a kind of hysterical whooping laugh if something really tickled her funny bone. There was quite a lot of laughter in our house, and if you can pass on a sense of humour through genetics then I think our family is proof. We all love a good laugh, and thank goodness for that!

Progress!

I've been a bit more committed of late to working on my sister's lace scarf for Christmas. I'm probably just under one fifth of the way along so far, but much of that I has just been done recently. Christmas sounds like forever away, but I just know it'll end up being here in a few blinks time. I grew up being one of those kids that started the essay the night before it was due, and I do not want to get to December 24th and realise that this old dog hasn't learned any new tricks! Or at least amended his ways.

Reds seem really hard for my camera to capture, but I've fiddled with this a little to try and make it more true to the yarn colour. Just imagine it a bit darker and richer, deep garnet reds through to lighter red tones. Gorgeous.

44 Years Ago

As I mentioned briefly in my previous post, my oldest sister has been working away at our family genealogy. She sent me a link to the genealogy site she has been using to gather the data together, and in just a few minutes of looking through it I've discovered a treasure trove of family information and photos that I didn't know existed.

For instance, this photo:



Yup, that's me and Mum. Sometime in late 1964, or early 1965. Probably 1965, given that I look older than a few months old. Later that year we three kids and Mum & Dad would board a small plane, having paid our 10 pounds contribution towards the Assisted Passage scheme and eventually (after some legendary hijinks, and ongoing plane repairs) arrive in Australia. Best decision they could have made I think.

A couple of things stand out in my family pics a) my parents were kind of glamorous when they were younger, b) they look so heartachingly young when they were courting! and c) all the women in my family look well dressed in the photos I've seen, courtesy of my Grandma who was a dressmaker. Wow!

New Project: Red Lace Scarf

My first attempt at knitting lace! Since I took this pic I have knit about 4 times the length, and I'm really pleased with the result. Eventually it will be a scarf for my sister, but on 3mm needles with super fine yarn that day is someway off! Christmas maybe.

I bought the yarn a little while back at a craft fair, and even though I hadn't knit lace before, and didn't feel the strongest of motivations to try it at this stage, once I saw the yarn I HAD TO HAVE IT. You know of what I speak. It's a very fine 2ply 100% merino wool by Aussie brand Kaalund Yarns. The colourway, Poinsettia.

I took the lace stitch pattern, the romantically named Openwork On Angle 2 (evocative, non?) from a useful little book called "400 Stitch Patterns". I'm just going to knit it until the yarn runs out, and then it will be deemed Long Enough.

Once the scarf is blocked (soaked, stretched slightly and pinned out to dry in shape) the lace pattern will really come alive. The end result is a series of slightly curved zig zags that have a sort of Art Deco look. My sister isn't really a girly, girly lacey kind of gal, so hopefully something a bit geometric will appeal to her.

Part of the fun for me is trying new things, new techniques, and I'm enjoying knitting lace so far. Ok, so in a few thousand rows more time it won't be 'new' but I'm sure the lure of a finished object will keep me focussed for the long hard yards ahead.

Happy Birthday To You

If you've read this blog for a while, or perhaps read my old 100 Things post, then you probably know that both of my parents passed away from cancer many years ago. My mum died at the age of 55 when I was 21, and it's amazing to me to think that she would be 77 years old now. Today.

Wow. Aside from the frailty that came from the latter stages of her cancer illness, the image I have of my mother is fixed in middle age. To think of her as elderly is a mind shift I can't quite make. She was 34 when I was born, the last of the three kids. So she was in her forties for much of the childhood I remember. A short, busty, friendly, popular woman. One who negotiated the relationship with my rather taciturn father with quite a bit of patience, pursed lips sometimes and the rare cathartic plate smash. (She kept a small stack of old crockery under the kitchen sink just for that purpose.) She loved Sean Connery's 'James Bond', English comedies and action movies, and when she found something funny would laugh in a high whooping laugh that still makes me smile to think of it.

We were good mates she and I, and if we ever fought we always ended it by agreeing that we were friends again. Happy Birthday mum, I miss you.

Ballarat

As I mentioned previously, I spent part of the Christmas break with family in Ballarat, about an hour outside of Melbourne. Ballarat has an interesting history [Note: warning aesthetes, ugly website. You might like this one better.], it was a wealthy mining town in the late 1800s and the site of one of Australia's most famous civil insurrections, the Eureka Stockade. You can see the wealth that was centered around Ballarat from the magnificent buildings still standing in the town centre.

Ballarat Train Station.

Ballarat has about 90,000 people these days, and is growing rapidly as house prices are making it a more attractive proposition for families in Melbourne. (You can buy a heritage listed 3 bedroom house for less than the cost of a single bedroom apartment in Sydney!) A new rail link has cut down the travel time to Melbourne to about 1 hour on an express, so many people are now doing it as a daily commute.

This style of architecture was often referred to colloquially as Blood & Bandages.

To be honest, it's too small a town for my taste, but it is very pretty and would be a nice place to raise a family I would think. I was especially taken with the broad streets lined with beautiful Victorian style homes, with verandahs and iron lacework. So pretty! As my sister pointed out, it's also like the Day Spa capital of the world or something. Once she mentioned that I couldn't stop seeing them...

I think that's a point in its favour, don't you?

Modern sculpture in the city centre.

Some of the streets of Ballarat are so intact architecturally, that with minimal dressing they have been used as film sets for movies set in the Australian goldrush era.

The beautiful Mining Exchange building.

I also fell in love with some of the Art Deco facades still exisiting in the town centre, like the one below.

The Block Arcade facade.

My sister used to be quite the photographer back in the day, so she was very tolerant and understanding of me charging up streets to photograph some building facade I spotted. I think secretly she was just pleased that I was enjoying the town where she has decided to live and raise her kids. She has certainly been able to afford a lifestyle that she wouldn't have been able to afford elsewhere, the kids are in a good school and her career is charging ahead.

Can't argue with that now, can you? Plus, all that Day Spa access...

[Click on any of the pics to see them full size on Flickr.]

Chistmas - The Picture Edition

I spent this Christmas with my sisters in Ballarat (about an hour out of Melbourne), and stayed with the younger of my two sisters and her family. Oh, and her menagerie of two cats and two dogs. One thing my parents did was raise us all to be obsessive animal lovers! I mentioned the other day that I shot lots of pets and buildings this Christmas, well this is pretty much the pets side of the Christmas photo shooting.

I don't think I'd been in the door for more than about 10 minutes before I was buried under 4 furry bodies. My sister's big labrador has interestingly followed the lead of her little Shihtzu, and somehow considers herself to be a 'lapdog'. Ooof.

The venerable aged Nigel (L) and the uber lapdog 'she who must sit upon' Choochie (R)


Sweet (and somewhat needy) LuLu (L) and the pretty girl cat, that turned out to be a boy cat, Zeus (formerly known as Xena) (R)


My sister has a Santa fetish, just a few of the 16 I counted on her mantle (L), James unwrapping a Nintendo DS with much happiness (R)


Connor unwraps an electric guitar (which he plays surprisingly well) (L), while Nigel passes comment on the wearying nature of Christmas (R)

Watching my nephews enjoy themselves was a large part of the fun. Connor does a passable "Smoke On The Waters" on the electric guitar, and James pretty much disappeared with the Nintendo DS, only to reappear for meals.

Once Christmas day was over I went into Ballarat to have a wander around, check out the post Christmas sales (a bit underwhelming, but it's a small town after all) and shoot lots of pics of the lovely Victorian era architecture. Ballarat was a major focus of the Australian goldrush, so was a very cashed-up city in its day. Big wide streets and elegant public buildings, most of which have thankfully been retained. Pics to come!

Christmas, 2007 Edition

I hope you all had a nice a great Christmas and enjoyed the break!

My Christmas, in a nutshell:

• Perhaps not unusually at Christmas time, I ate like I just found out food was about to be discontinued. My sister is a pretty good cook, and the menu was so heavy in my childhood favourites that I was powerless to resist! Powerless.
  
• It was actually cold on Christmas Day where my sister lives. I'm so used to sweltering on Christmas Day that it felt weird to have to go hunting for a jacket to wear.
  
• I shot a heap of photos while I was away. The two things I took endless pictures of this holiday? Architecture and pets. My sister lives in an extremely pretty ex-Goldrush town (Ballarat) which is full of beautifully preserved Victorian buildings and wide, wide streets. Then I stayed in Melbourne just around the corner from the funky Chapel Street, with my friend Robbie. If you look up above the shops at street level, Chapel Street has some amazing vintage buildings.
  
• Oh, and both Robbie and my sister both have super cute pets which of course needed to be photographed! (Pictures to come)
  
• I dazzled my family with the sheer fantasticness of my gifts this year. Bluetooth phone headset? You got it. Ceramic hair straightener thingy? It's yours. That Nintendo game you really, really wanted? Enjoy!
  
• I got a DVD I already own, a pack of two t-shirts (quite nice, but I don't really wear t-shirts)), a book (historical trivia, looks mildly diverting) and a nice teapot and cup set (nice, but I don't really drink tea). I appreciate them all, really I do, but note to self: send wishlist next year!
  
• I broke the journey home by stopping to see my good friend Robbie, and it was glorious. We had dinner and nummy nums wine at one of the few restaurants open on Boxing Day, but didn't have a late night as Robbie had to work the next day. I spent the day having a relaxing wander around the city and Chapel St (funky shops, cafes and small bars), getting inadvertantly sunburned. Then Robbie made dinner and we sat outside in the shade of his courtyard with Gin & Sodas with Lime, until it was time to head off to the airport.
  
• No hottie in the seat beside, but I did get 3 seats to myself. Score!
  
• I came home broke and relaxed. The broke part has lasted but the relaxed bit sort of went out the door when I discovered my flatmate had left me the gift of a sinkful of dirty, smelly dishes, a dishwaser with a pile of food in the bottom (likewise smelly), two empty toilet rolls sitting on the bathroom sink and the news that he is unable to move out by the deadline of Tuesday. Sometimes I hate my life. (OK, I know that sounds kind of trivial, but given that neither my flatmate or his frequently present boyfriend do any cleaning around the house, it was just the straw that made the camel's bloodpressure escalate. Plus the delayed moving out thing seriously screws things up.)

So not the best end to my little holiday, but the prevailing mood for my trip was fun. The hassles with my flatmate involved a brief white hot flare of anger, that has now largely subsided. Not enough really to dent the enjoyment of my time away. I'm now off until the 2nd of January, and after pottering around the house and doing some work on the garden today, I think tonight will be catching up with friends and maybe a movie.

And you? How was your break?

Home For The Holidays

Not my home, but my sister's home that is.

So I booked my flights and I'm now headed to country Victoria for Christmas. $259 return, which is money I'd rather spend on gifts but isn't so bad. I'll get to catch up with both of my sisters, and my two nephews will get to see both gay uncles this year (my brother-in-law's brother is a big 'mo too). Fun!

You can get kind of meh about Christmas without kids around. And when I say you, I mean me, natch. I can get so caught up in the stress, hassle and financial holy shit, I spent how much? of Christmas that I can forget that it's also a shiny, happy time of year. Seeing the fun that kids get out of Christmas is an antidote to any grinchyness.

I'm also going to stay for two days (one night) in Melbourne on the way back to catch up with my dear friend Robbie. We've been friends for more than 20 years now, and even though we generally only catch up a couple of times a year, it's one of those wonderful friendships that never seems to change. Robbie's been putting some of dear grandmama's old money trust fund to use *cough*luckybitch*cough* on a long holiday in Africa, so we'll have lots to catch up about.

Now that that's planned and I'm finally starting my Christmas shopping later this week (don't judge!), it's finally beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.