Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year

The shortlist for this year's Bookseller/Diagram prize has been announced. This prize, for the oddest book title of the year, has been running since 1978.
This year's shortlist can be seen at the Bookseller website, dated 22 February. Then, with appetite for more silliness whetted, the list of past winners can be seen in Wikipedia. Sadly we are too late to be able to vote for the winner. We'll have to make a diary note and try to be on time in 2009!
What's your favourite title? I think The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification would be hard to go past in the library, ditto Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground.
I got a heads up on this prize this year (I've seen it before) from the excellent Seattle Public Library blog. The article there also refers to a book, Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities by Russell Ash & Brian Lake. Titles contained in this hilarious sounding read (I will be ordering a copy for BMCC Library if we don't already have it) include: The Resistance of Piles to Penetration, Games You Can Play with Your Pussy, The Boy Fancier, Noddy Loses His Clothes (from Enid Blyton's Gay Story Book - of course) and the unforgettable A Glowing and Graphic Description of the Great Hole.
The SPL blog, as you will have seen, also contains the above picture of a book called Knitting with Dog Hair :better a sweater from a dog you know and love than from a sheep you'll never meet, a subject which I remember Sharon and I having a discussion about . . . Sharon spins her own wool you see, I wonder if I should order that one too?

Australian Rules Football

James career as a high flyer began on 12 April, unfortunately only half the other team made it to the ground. The game went ahead with Springwood reserves playing for the opposition, needless to say the result was a little one sided. The "mercy" rule was applied at half time with the score at 148 to 1. The second half was more of the same but unscored.
The second game on the 19th was against more formidable competition, Jamie played in the defence and won many possessions and managed to combine with his team mates to turn the opposition raids. The final score had Springwood ahead by 9 points, but they had been pushed and were forced to maintain their concentration right to the end. Jamie acquited himself well, and showed more confidence and ability as the game progressed, although he did seem lost on occasion he did find a solution and disposed of the ball positively most of the time.

Queen of the South

Last weekend Ian ran in to a neighbour of ours, David, who urged him to tell me that Queen of the South had got into the finals (or looking at their website just just now, is it the semi-finals?).
After thinking "the finals of what?", I thought that maybe he'd asked Ian to tell me because it was such a rare occurrence?
A couple of days later it dawned on me why . . . David's a Dumfries boy. (Although the rare occurrence thing might also be true).

Crump-ettes 2

Here is the class from anther angle.



The girls are up the back in this one.

Crump-ettes

This morning Ishbel and her mate, Ruby, attended a Library event where they were taught to "Crump". It was a lot of fun, even for me sitting on the side lines.

The gentleman teaching them told them that he is 55 (I thought he was 25 years younger) and that he'd got that way through exercise (dance) and never doing drink or drugs. He was quite impressive.

This video shows the girls in action. They are both at the left side of the frame, Ruby with the purple top and jeans and Ishbel (sometimes obscured by another girl) in a green top and 3/4 length trousers.

The video does take a little while to download and you'll need to be patient (sorry) but hopefully you will enjoy seeing them in action.

Click on the arrow button to get it going. It's LOUD so you might want to turn your speakers down or use the volume control on the clip (to the left of the Blogger logo)

Surprising Vocabulary

As I drove her to Tanderra (Vacation Care) this morning, Ishbel was telling me about an incident that happened yesterday when Tanderra were visiting an Aboriginal centre. One boy (let's call him Boy 1) was trying to spoil the artwork of another (Boy 2). When Boy 2 went to tell the Tanderra staff about it, Boy 1 apparently "smite" Boy 2 on the face with a boomerang.
"He 'smite' him?" I queried.
"Yes, it means he hit him across the face," she replied with all the authority a seven year old can muster.

"Smite". Can't imagine where she got that one from . . . Had me giggling.

Which (nearly) all girl crew got a Second place in the RFS Blue Mountains District Championships?

VALLEY HEIGHTS!!!!!!

Here we are: David (promoted to Girl for the day), Heidi, Bec (front), Marie and Jacinta

GO VALLEY GIRLS, GO!

See more photos from the day here

And to think we nearly didn't enter at all. The judges wanted to give it a miss because some presentation was going to be starting or something. When they wouldn't just award us first place, we decided we'd do the Emergency drill after all.

The emergency drill is done when a crew is involved in an over-run situation (the fire is going to come over the top of you). Three beeps of the horn/siren/whistle means drop everything and run back to the truck. We had to get off the fuel - jerry cans, drip torches and chainsaw fuel - and put it away from the truck, grab the First Aid box and climb in the truck. Inside we had to put on our flash hoods and get down as low as possible covered up in blankets. Meanwhile the driver, Dave in this case, is radioing that we're in trouble and calling for help and ambulances (comforting innit!) and he puts on the sprays outside the truck. We did it in 2 minutes 30-odd seconds.

Steve had announced early in the morning that he'd take for a drink for any team that won an award. I think at the time he thought he was fairly safe and the money would be staying in his pocket. We did end up later in the evening at the Lapstone Hotel for dinner and a drink too.

I didn't know we were going to the Championships at all. I knew the boys were going, but I'd turned up at the station expecting to have just another ordinary training day. Ended up going to the Championships and taking part in three events.

We had a great day. It was a beautiful sunny morning and although we had torrents of rain and thunder in the middle of the day when we all huddled under our little shelter, the sun came out again and we had a game of cricket, puddled about in the mud and had lunch.

RFS District Championships Juniors

Here are (2 bystanders) Steve (Deputy Captain), Corey Haslam, Kane Haslam, Rob and Jamie

It was the Blue Mountains RFS District Championships on Sunday and Jamie and Rob were in the Valley Heights Junior team. The Championships involve doing various RFS-type drills against the clock - pumping and drafting and emergency drills being two events.

I thought the whole day was just for the Juniors . . . but no, they had to compete against Seniors and Valley Heights were the only ones with a Junior team.

More photos from the day: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11895723@N05/sets/72157604529588690/show/

Footy footy footy

We had our first weekend where each of the kids had a footy match. While I took Ishbel to her soccer match at 11:30am - Ish's Bower Birds won 5-1, Ian took Jamie for his AFL (Aussie Rules) 11:30am match. His team also won - very comprehensively - indeed when the score was about 148-1 in Jamie's teams favour the "Mercy clause" was invoked and they stopped counting the goals!
Robbie's rugby union team lost 65-5 -ah well.

Jamie's AFL slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11895723@N05/sets/72157604534123995/show/

Hazard Reduction

Finally got to do some firelighting!
After we'd finished at Springwood Foundation Day yesterday a gang of us went up to assist with the end of the hazard reduction (HR) at Faulconbridge. I was very pleased to be able to go because I'd had to say no to going the day before - book group were meeting at my place and we wouldn't be finished till late and I had to be at home didn't I?
When we first got to the control point I thought it was going to be another dud call and we'd get stood down without having done anything. We were told to wait 30 minutes while the Parks and Wildlife people put in aerial incendiaries. We then had to wait a further 60 minutes to see if we'd be needed.
Finally we got sent in to do some mopping up - just going in with hoses and putting out logs and things that might still be burning. However, our Deputy Captain, Bert, didn't think much of the job that had been done - still lots of unburnt scrub - so he set us to work with the drip torches and we made fire!! We only did an hour or so before we got sent home.
Today I went off to a normal First Sunday training session and found we were off to the HR again!
We got sent off down of a long road which ended at a house. We'd been told to ask if we could park the truck in their back yard, permission for which was duly granted. Dave drove onto the back garden, only to find it a bit soft so he turned the truck around. In doing so, however, he nearly got bogged and we've left several enormous, 50-60cm deep gouges in some poor family's back garden. Ooops!
Again we were tasked with taking a look at yesterday's work. Off down the hill we trooped, admiring the lovely track that one of our number, Josh, had helped cut last year. A fair way down we found some unburnt stuff and Josh and I got sent ALL the way back up the hill again to get the drip torches.
Down we went again and Steve soon had Josh and I at work, lighting up the bush. However, we'd been a bit slack when returning to the station last night and hadn't refilled the drip torches so it wasn't very long before we had to head ALL the way back up the hill to refuel.
And back down we went.
I had no idea what hard physical labour I'd signed up to. Steve seemed to make for the middle of each patch of scrub rather than go around it. We were bashing through some pretty dense scrub. It would catch on the drip torch, trip us up and poke us in the ears as we struggled through.
By the time we were heading ALL the way back up for the third time I was thoroughly exhausted and could barely move one foot ahead of the other. There was the opportunity of staying on for more in the afternoon but I'd had it by then and I'd been holding Steve and Josh back so I gracefully declined. As well as the tiredness I'd pulled a muscle in my calf early on in the day and I wasn't really fit for any more today.
We found several of the incendiaries while we were down there. Tiny little white balls, slightly smaller than a ping pong ball they get injected with fuel and dropped from a helicopter. I was surprised at how small they were. No wonder we hadn't seen them dropping yesterday afternoon.
I've taken a few pics with my phone over the couple of days I've been out but I haven't got the wherewithall to download them from the phone to the computer just yet but will post them under the RFS slideshow when I do.

Springwood Foundation Day

It was Foundation Day in Springwood on Saturday. The main street is blocked off and stalls go up on both sides of the street all the way down its length and there is a fun fair and a couple of stages with community groups giving performances - school choirs and bands, various dance troupes, etc. We Springwood Colquhouns were all involved one way or another.
It was a glorious day - it always seems to turn out nice for Foundation Day - I nearly wrote there were blue skies, but that's not entirely true, there'd been a hazard reduction (burn off) at Faulconbridge and Linden the day before so there was smoke coming from the west. In the east there were blue skies.
First out the door on Saturday morning were Heidi and the boys. We had to be at the fire station by 07:30. We were doing crowd control duty. It wasn't toooooo onerous. There was a fun run that came through mid morning and we had to run the tapes out and man the barricades for that but then we had several hours to kill, so we wandered around in little gangs getting cuppas, watching some of the dancers and singers and eating - Heidi with Marie and Bec, two of the VHRFS ladies, Rob with his mate Leigh (also VHRFS) and Jamie caught up with some of his school mates.
We were back on duty around 1pm for the big parade coming through. Keeping back the larger crowds then was not easy. I watched Marie as she marched up and down her patch telling people to get back and make way for the trucks - she'd get them moving back in front of her but they would surge back forward once she was past - it was like watching King Canute try to keep the tide from coming in!
Ian and Ishbel meanwhile were kitting themselves out in Scout gear. They were in the march and then helped out at the Scout BBQ for a while.

20th Wedding Anniversary

It's our 20th Wedding Anniversary today.

Ian asked me if I wanted an eternity ring the other day but I politely declined (for the time being) there's plenty more useful things we can be spending our money on. Perhaps for the 25th . . .

Just as I was getting my cup etc ready for morning tea today Margaret came down from the library with a huge box. For me. In it were 12 long stemmed red roses.

I keep having a go at Ian for not buying me flowers then when he does he gets a row for spending large sums of money on them. When will he learn the occasional $10 bunch will keep me happy? When I berated him again this morning he said it was a good job he'd told the lady he didn't want to spend much!

Tonight we all went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant in Glenbrook. It was very nice but our eyes were bigger than our stomachs and we have brought most of it home to reheat for tomorrow's dinner.