Ian's had his op

Have spent the past two days going down to the city as Ian was booked in for his operation yesterday.

Ishbel, Ian and I left the house just around nine yesterday morning. We arrived quite early for the operation as we'd not been sure how long it would take us to get to the hospital, St.Lukes, in the eastern suburbs (Pott's Point). We had a fair bit of hanging about but everyone was very pleasant. Dr Hargraves came out between operations to say hello and for a little chat - told us how the fires in Victoria were affecting his grapes - all that smoke gets into the fruit and you can't make wine from them - apparently!

Eventually Ian went off to theatre about 2:30pm and Ishbel and I wandered off to find a late lunch. We took a while to find somewhere and we did that only after we'd walked around for a while and then we found what she was looking for (chips) near to where we started! We did, however, also find the British Lolly Shop and shared an Irn Bru and McCowans Highland Toffee bar for dessert!! Finding a nice spot to eat our lunch wasn't easy either. As we walked past the entrance to a church, Ishbel noticed the front porch and steps of the church were chocabloc with people lying on mattresses - "who are those people?" - her first experience of homelessness. Not an easy one to explain.

We sat in the car for a while listening to a talking book then went back to the hospital. We could see Ian through the Recovery Room window. We were able to go up to his room to wait for him coming back up which he did about 1/2 an hour or so later. He had a block on his arm so he was in no pain at all but had a PCA (Patient Controlled Analgesia) machine so that he could dose himself if and when he did get sore.

It was when Ishbel and I headed home that the fun began. There are a lot of one way roads around that part of the city so getting home was not straight-forward. We ended up at one point with a choice of taking the bridge over to the northern suburbs and north coast, or the tunnel!! Neither thanks. Went through the city somewhere and ended up going the other way, headed for Bondi. Very wrong! Finally found a space I could stop and look at the map which was difficult because of the glare off the shiny paper. I'd nearly asked Catherine if I could borrow her Tom Tom - wishing dearly by now that I had. FINALLY got to Cleveland Street and on a route I recognised. Yay. It was just around 9pm when we got in at home.

And then we had to turn around and do it all again this morning! At least we didn't come home via Bondi because Ian was able to navigate. We did, though, only get to the hospital in one run because Ishbel had been paying attention yesterday and remembered which way to turn. Good girl.

Ian is back home with a big bandage round his wrist. He has to keep it on until about the 16th when he goes back to see Dr Hargraves and then he will probably get a plaster cast put on.

We'd left Robbie at home ill the past two days. This morning he fainted getting out of the shower. He managed to crawl back to bed and didn't tell me until about 1/2 an hour later. I couldn't make him a GP appointment - they are all booked out so I will have to ring at 8am tomorrow to see if we can get a cancellation. He seems a bit better this evening and is up watching TV just now.

Jamie came home from school this afternoon and went straight to bed, not feeling well.

And Ishbel has been complaining of a sore throat for the past couple of days.

I'm fine! Just might not be at work again tomorrow unless this lot get well.

Ian's weekend with Fraser

Ian was up in Queensland for work at the end of last week and spent the weekend WAAAAAY out West at Roma with Nelly, Jono and Fraser. I've added the pics to the Babies folder in Flickr:



You'll just have to look at the lot: Fraser and Xavier from last October

It's only taken 10 months . . .

. . . but finally we have our lounge suite back!!!

Before we left Macquarie Road (ie. last August), we decided to re-furbish the old lounge suite which we'd shoved in the space under the house 15+ years previously. We contacted a furniture restorer and, with the nod of approval from Karen, chose fabric to re-upholster it too. Then we waited . . . and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. We sat in the new sitting room on camp chairs. Ishbel used the room for cartwheels and dance routines. They all ignored the NO FOOD AND DRINK IN THE SITTING ROOM rule.

This evening it was finally restored to us Colquhouns. It's been taken apart, stripped back, re-caned, French polished, re-built and re-upholstered and looks just wonderful. I'm really pleased with the results. Have a look at the slide-show to see how it's gone from wrecked to stunning:

Now I just have to re-educate the children - they have had such a long time to make themselves at home in the sitting room that they think it's their space - and it SO is not!

TGIF (Thank God It's Friday)

I think Rowan Atkinson must've met Mr Cummings!

In bad taste

My colleague, Patou, is very upset by Michael Jackson's death this morning.

Not because she was a big fan - No. Patou is a member of a group who have an annual tipping competition of sorts - this one earns points for predicting which celebrities will die during the year. And she's upset because she'd not picked MJ! The younger the deceased celeb, the more points earned.

She's been telling us she's been a member of this group for some years and has won on a number of occasions. Before submitting her 10 likely candidates she says, she does a lot of research. She keeps a document of likely contenders for the next year so an innocent remark about the newly diagnosed somebody will lead to hours of research into that person and their medical condition so she can work out whether the prognosis is dire enough to list them. The group members have parties where they dress in black and chat about their wins and losses that year. They argue about whether someone is eligible to be on the list or not.

All a bit odd? John reckons it's because she's French - his hypothesis being that all those hours spent knitting below the guillotine has left its mark on the French psyche!!!

Meanwhile, my friend Steve is sending bad taste Farrah and MJ jokes. Too bad to post here.

Pretty, amazing, scary?

Which?

One for Dad

My colleague Gillian has been restless this afternoon, tossing tennis balls around and tutting or exclaiming over every book she's picked up to catalogue. To put myself out of my misery she has been sharing podcasting with me. From the Web 2.0 course we did late last year, I ran off with blogging and Gillian with podcasting.

As I've blogged before, the British Library have a Henry VIII thing going and I've had the podcasts coming into my RSS feeder for some time but hadn't done anything with them because my little cheapie MP3 player is stuck on scrambling everything and I hadn't the time or the wits to sort it all out. Last night I decided to give the Henry VIII podcasts a go and spent a blissful hour or so listening to (the rather snide at times) David Starkey declaiming Henry's early life - with lots of digressions. It was a bit uncomfortable at first. Our computer box sits on the ground and the cord for the ear plugs Rob had lent me wasn't very long and I quickly got a sore back. Ian came to the rescue, remembering we'd bought a new set of headphones when we bought the new 'puter and I was soon sitting upright and enjoying myself.

However, being a rip-roaring insomniac these days, I thought it'd be nice to be able to plug in the old MP3 and listen to it in the dark as Gillian does without disturbing anyone else. And so I came to put her to work. In the end it took no time at all to sort out my MP3 mixing woes and it's easy as to download files onto the MP3 player.

Gillian put me on to the BBC podcasts site where there are literally hundreds of podcasts to choose from. Look what I found for Dad: Scottish Football podcasts - and you could listen to the
English Football in Mandarin if you wanted to!

A nod to the ancestors . . .

This article in The Independent caught my eye because it's about the Orkneys. With such a title it's a shame the book in question is to be scrapped.

Ikea announces its intention to take over GM and sell cars

We are in deep shit!

Weekend report

Got our computer back on Thursday. They still hadn't looked at it (a week later) when Ian called after work. As he told them, they'd had it longer than we had at that stage. They said they'd get on to it and rang back later to say it was good to go. Seems ok so far but we'll see . . . any more trouble and I'll insist on my money back.

Friday night we went up to Jamie's school to see the musical. Jamie is working as stage crew. The musical they are doing is "Into the Woods" (Wikipedia entry) and it's a 'fractured fairytale'. It involves the Baker and his Wife who, in order to have a baby, need to go into the woods and collect one red cape (from Little Red Riding Hood), one snow white cow (Jack of the Beanstalk's best friend), some hair yellow as corn (from Rapunzel) and a golden slipper (Cinderella's). All the fairytale folk are in it; the Big Bad Wolf and Grandma, Prince Charming and his brother, the Wicked Stepmother and Stepsisters, the Giant.

A friend's son is playing one of the princes ("I'm charming, not sincere"). He's a tall, handsome boy with curly hair and dark eyebrows which he put to good use, hamming it up with the audience. Adam planted his feet on that stage and owned it; he was very funny. He and the other prince, a friend of Jamie's, sang a duet that quite stole the show (unhappily, Jamie said last night Adam was off-key for that song which brought Matt undone too and it was not good). The cow was also hilarious.


(Hope that works, if not go to: YouTube video )

At the end of the show everyone went home happy. The Baker and his Wife had collected everything and were to have their baby and the Princes had found their Princesses, Jack had been reunited with Snowy White the Cow.

Only it wasn't the end of the story. Just the intermission. After the break, the Princes were not so enamoured of their Princesses (Rapunzel was constantly in tears), the other Prince had a crush on the sleeping Snow White only couldn't get near her because of the dwarf guarding her, Charming fancied the Baker's Wife, Little Red Riding Hood's Granny had gone missing (again) and the wife of the giant that Jack had slayed was on the rampage looking for Jack.

It was all good fun and Ishbel has a crush on Adam now I think although her highlight was seeing Jamie each time he rushed across the stage, moving props.

Saturday had Ian and Jamie up at the crack of nothing to be across town for his AFL game. Jamie apparently played well and got a Coach's award : "James Coquhoun played his best game of the season and is this week's deserved recipient of the prestigious "Green Car" award". You can read the full Under 18s match report here. (No idea what the Green Car thing is . . .)

Rob went off up to Katoomba yesterday afternoon to the annual Winter Magic Festival with some friends. He stayed overnight at Leigh's house, Ian and Jamie are just away to fetch him home just now.

They are also taking home Ishbel's friend, Britney, who stayed the night. Only lots of threats (from both sets of parents) got them asleep before 10pm. Ishbel has had a lot of sleepovers, either here or at her various friends' houses lately, I think we may have to have a break for a week or so; she's just not getting enough sleep.

This afternoon I am off up to Katoomba for my book group meeting. We are having a fundraiser quiz for the MS Society in addition to our usual book chat. The fundraiser is called Throw the Book @ MS and all we had to do was register with them and they sent out all the questions. We held the quiz night with my Springwood book group at the beginning of the month and raised over $150. Unfortunately, we had to pay back Catherine $77 of that for wine prizes that she'd bought so next year we'll either not borrow, or make donations of prizes.

That book group we opened up to friends and family. We charged a $5 entry fee then I managed to squeeze extra money from people by charging 50c each time they called out an answer (they had to ping and then wait for me to invite them to answer), charging 50c each time they got a wrong answer and by charging $1 if they wanted to buy an answer or point - they were collecting sweeties - each correct answer, or $1 fee earned a sweetie with the team with the most sweeties being declared the winners. The Katoomba group weren't wanting to open up the meeting but we decided on a $10 entry fee and when I told them how I'd squeezed the extra out of the others they agreed to the extra squeeze so hopefully we'll raise a fair bit more for MS.

I started reading one of those Cyprus books of Shirley's this morning. I hadn't got around to it before because of the reading I need to do for two book groups. I've only read a few chapters but I must say I'm enjoying them. I'm looking forward to getting on to Google Earth this evening and having a look at the villages she talks about. I suspect things are not quite so quiet as 1984 when they first moved back. Harry's pictures are great, but I would have loved some photos of the house they built and some of the village characters. I'll email Shirley later on and tell her I've started reading.