And so begins 2011

Ahoyhoy! Sorry for the absence but we have been out in the internet-less desert lands of my hometown. The temperature started at 31 degrees on the day we arrived and steadily increased to be 40 degrees on the day we left. Unbelievable. We arrived back in Sydney yesterday - Crunk did the whole thing without a hitch - just in time to drink a lot of cider and ride our bikes down to Ashfield Park for midnight. Happy new year!

Will do a more thorough post after we've been to see The King's Speech, and Harry Potter 7A, and eaten more junk food, and been swimming, and had more wine, and sat around on our arses watching episodes of Giles & Sue Live The Good Life until I'm crying with laughter. Man I love being on holidays.

Christmas

Anyone for Yule Log?

Ducky-wuck: before.

Ducky-wuck: after.

Voila! Dinner is served. With crispy potatoes and honey mustard carrots.

Don't forget the orange sauce.

Dinner: after. Cider courtesy of Monteiths. Also, if you're wondering why we have 3 rubix cubes on the table, it's because 2 of them are salt and pepper mills. The third one is an actual rubix cube put there to confuse people.

Merry Christmas! Best one ever.

Come on! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!

Merry Christmas! I'm sitting in the kitchen wearing a brand new 'Scotland' apron (thanks Adam) which I have already managed to coat in such things as flour, icing sugar, chocolate, oranges, and duck juices. This morning I made my first 'Yule Log' (up until yesterday I'd never even heard of one) but turns out it is mostly just a swiss roll. I've now got a 2kg duck slow-roasting in the oven thanks to Crash Test Kitchen - so if it doesn't work, I'm blaming them. It came with vegetable stuffing already included thanks to the excellent folks at Gus's and I'm planning to do up an orange sauce with some roasted vegies to boot. It's a little nerve racking, this being my first Christmas dinner, and me having no back-up plan if it fails, but I figure, how hard can it be (she says flippantly, ignoring everything she has learnt thus far)? The trickiest part is making sure the oven temperature stays true.

I actually forgot how awesome Christmas is. Ben is working which is a big pile of plops but we had a lovely morning opening gifts and skyping with the Scottish contingent. Life is wonderful.

Keep your fingers crossed for my poor little ducky-wuck, and I'll keep you updated.

Joyful and triumphant

Last Saturday, I did my first public performance with the Glory Bound Groove Train. It was not in a pub, as promised, but a proper Christmas mass (sort of). Leichhardt Community Church held a fundraiser for Cambodian orphans of HIV/AIDS with the coming together of four local congregations of different denominations. It was a small but beautiful church, filled with people, many of whom were performing themselves over the 2-hour long event. The prepatory email from choirleader beforehand noted: "Will it be daggy? -yes. Will it be fun? - daggy IS fun." I enjoyed this sentiment.

Ben got quite anxious in the lead up. Neither of us had spent any real time in a church for a veeery long time, not for anything other than weddings or funerals anyway. I got weirdly excited about it. I've actually never attended a Christmas mass, and this one was going to be mostly carols! I told him he didn't have to come if he was uncomfortable, but he was steadfast, and determined to stay for at least our second stint - the choir sang at three different points during the night.

We had to learn "Prepare Ye The Way of the Lord" on the fly when we arrived. Fortunately it has only one line, and being an alto, my part was the melody which I already knew. After asking for peace on earth and good will to all humanity, the carols began. Such a small but resonant building filled with powerful voices was quite overwhelming. Other performers contributed. There was a bluegrass trio, three precocious brothers playing guitars and belting out self-composed Christmas songs (like Hanson, if they were John Williamson's kids), some soloists. We got up after this to do "Out of The Depths" - a solemn, majestic hymn-like song, "In The Morning" - a more uptempo call-and-response number with the lovely Lisa taking solo position, and "Soon I Will Be Done" - a proper gospel spiritual with hand clapping and a good old "ohhhh" hollered in the middle for good measure. It was magical. Ben said that some people actually walked into the church off the street because they were lured by the singing. As we sang the opening number, I could hear the voices swelling and soaring around the room. Was what I was feeling a response to the music, or to the whole experience? Religion is a touchy issue at best, and having not kept more than a private vigil to it since my Catholic school days, I couldn't help but try to interpret the emotion. However, I've been known to get blubbery listening to the likes of Hot Chip sometimes ('One Life Stand' is actually really powerful, okay??), so I tried to just go with it and not get bogged down in logic for a change.

After that Mic Conway got up and did an insane mix of ukulele, vaudeville, magic tricks and tap dancing. I could not believe my ears when he did a performance piece on an evolutionary race. This really was progressive religion (and thank God for it). I was absolutely entranced by the whole thing and wondered how a guy who had won an ARIA award was now singing "Puttin' on the Ritz" inside a small community church. Brilliant.

More carols followed, more soloists, an offering and a prayer, then we returned to the altar to sing our last two songs: "Trouble in my Way" - another call and response with the basses taking the coveted solo, and finally "Every Time I Feel The Spirit". I was scared our clapping was going to steer us all over the place (rehearsals have been hit and miss) but we kept it together and closed on a high. It was such a fantastic thing to be a part of and I was so proud of us all. Even Ben said he'd enjoyed singing along with the carols.

All that prolonged singing in a range higher than I'm used to made me a bit woozy and I had to go straight home rather than stay for the supper after the show. Ben and Crunk came to collect me and I was fast asleep within about 10 minutes. Must have been all that cleansing of the soul.

Tardiness

Can I ask for a show of hands please? I have received 2 more postcards since the second deadline. I already have 29 challenges due to my need to have an overall game plan. Things are tough at the moment, but I also want to have good fodder for the book - drawing the line is an emotional battle, and I know that sounds overblown and dramatic but that was one of the surprise results of the experiment. The reactions that brewed.

I don't know what to do. I am taking suggestions. Please leave your comments...

Dee vs Crunk

Since a friend gave Crunk a once over (explaning everything the garage did wrong and what glitches we may still have to contend with), my piece of mind has been somewhat more at rest. At least we now know that he should, in theory, make it all the way out to the sticks and back for Christmas without anything breaking and leaving us stranded on the side of the road.

Newly invigorated, Ben is coaxing me back behind the wheel. He discovered an industrial area where we could practice driving on a quiet circuit and get used to changing gears. A big deserted carpark proved a good place to learn how to get the clutch and accelerator to speak to each other again. Mostly I am fine with changing up, but get a bit flustered changing down - it's trying to do this just before turning into a corner, for example, that makes my brain go "oh ok, that's just way too much to process all at once, so uh, I'll be over here singing early 90s TV themes if you need me. 'Kay? ". Thanks, brain.

Ben probably deserves a medal for stepping into Instructor boots with no prior experience. It is kind of nice to do this in a car that doesn't belong to the driving school, and doesn't have a second set of controls. I can be confident that I am directly responsible for everything the car is doing, and I can experiment in my own time. Yes, I had to stall the car 28 times before I figured out the magical clutch/accelerator combo again, but now I know I can do it. Of course you can take your foot off the break when you leave your other foot on the clutch and want to start moving. That's kind of the whole point. But starting and stopping fluidly is my largest hurdle at the moment and small milestones feel very big.

My curbside parking leaves a lot to be desired, but that's another milestone for another time.

Yes, I can see why you named it after a Scottish castle...

We walked from The Spit to Balmoral on Sunday. Sort of. We walked it… just not along the coast. Ok, so maybe I should have read the instructions more thoroughly. Or maybe they should just write “YOU CAN’T DO THIS WALK AT HIGH TIDE” in huge letters across every page of the walk guide.

Ben and I packed a nice picnic and took the epic hour-long journey to The Spit. Once there, we had the same problem as we did the first time we started a walk from there. No signs. No indicators. No idea. How hard could it be? Just hug the coastline, right?

Not really. The first thing along the coastline was a boatclub, then private properties. We took a road heading up, with a view over the excessive wealth of north Sydney. Eventually we noticed some pretty young things and hep young cats in towels and sunglasses heading down a steep road. I asked if we could get to Balmoral from there. They said this road would lead to Chinaman’s Beach, but walking to Balmoral was a bit of a risk at high tide unless you wanted an adventure. We’d have to cling to cliff faces and stumble over rocks with water up over our ankles. I wasn’t prepared to physically hug the coastline. The book hadn’t said anything about that.


So instead, we went down to Chinaman’s Beach, walked along it, and up a path at the other side. We ended up back on a main road, and had no choice but to follow it all the way to Balmoral. It was a stinking hot day and the walk hadn’t been very pleasant. Fortunately Balmoral Beach is a bit lovely and we pulled up some blanket under the shade of a fig tree on the promenade for a good spot of dog watching. We tag teamed at swimming. My first ocean dip of the summer: brisk and seaweed-y.

In short, apparently this walk works a lot better if you start at Balmoral, and don’t go at high tide.


The next leg will probably take us all the way to Taronga Zoo. Let’s just hope we get a couple of cooler days at the start of new years (not likely, but a girl can dream).