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.

Friday Fun

How do you even start to think up this stuff?