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  • On an island

    A few weeks ago, we went boating for my sister in law’s birthday – putting down the Pumicestone Passage and anchoring (ie. beaching the boats, and hurling the anchors onto the sand – does that count as anchoring?) on a little beach on Bribie Island.

    There was fishing:

    And a grand total catch of one flathead, which was promptly barbecued and eaten. I also made a birthday cake – a Chai Cake with Honey & Ginger Cream. A three layer cake, as ever since making the wedding cake I can’t seem to move away from triple layer cakes for celebrations. It was a nice cake, but it didn’t blow my mind – I thought the honey flavour in the icing was a little strong, and the cake itself was the teensiest bit dry. The chai spices are gorgeous though, and it held up well, despite being transported on a boat and cut on a beach.

    The excitement of boating and birthday cake was topped off by the discovery of a horse skeleton.

    Isn’t that the most picturesque horse skeleton you ever saw? I presume that there are some wild horses roaming over Bribie Island. It seems more likely than someone galloping romantically down to the shore, having their horse expire under them, and shrugging to themselves, “Oh well – guess I’ll have to walk home.” But I suppose anything’s possible.

  • Hosanna

    Tony Backhouse conducting at a gospel workshop over the weekend. I love singing gospel, and really enjoy his workshops – not only the chance to sing with a big group, but also with such a great choir leader. There’s nothing like that feeling of singing gospel and having the group really getting into the groove in the vamp section, the words and rhythm gradually changing, and everyone moving together. Fantastic.

  • Down by the sea

    We just spent a few days staying by the sea at Bargara, which is a small town near Bundaberg, about four or five hours drive away. We stayed in an apartment looking out onto the ocean, slept with the windows open to the sound of the waves, and spent a lot of time walking along the shore. I also played a lot of ukulele, which is really the perfect instrument to play on a balcony looking out to sea. It’s the right setting. Possibly not while playing Hotel California though.

    We went and checked out some wetlands in Bundaberg, which didn’t have a huge diversity of birdlife to my amateur eyes, but did have lots of ducks, a family of swans, and a darter drying its wings in the early morning sunshine.

    I am finally getting used to my new glasses, which have thicker arms than the ones I’ve had for the last 15 years or so, and initially made me feel as if I had blinkers on. I love them – I quite disliked my old glasses when I was in high school, and didn’t get any fonder of them as time passed. So it’s nice to finally have a change, after putting it off for so long.

    Apart from occasionally throwing admiring glances at my spectacled reflection, I spent the rest of the holiday trying to perfect those pesky jazz chords, reading Gail Carriger’s Soulless and Robin McKinley’s Chalice, watching the first season of Six Feet Under and re-watching Sharpe episodes. The Sharpe series is where Sean Bean is charging around in the Napoleonic wars being northern, despising most of his fellow officers and having it off with just about every woman who happens upon the British army. Most entertaining.

    We also set up a new recording studio area in the granny flat, so that my poor little laptop will no longer have its processing powers pushed to freezing limits. The flat has been dubbed the Rat Room, due to its current residents. They have had several lovely snacks out of my live trap without triggering it so far, the little bastards. They must think I’ve decided to provide them with a regular nightly buffet, which just happens to be plated up in a cage. I’m going to adjust the sensitivity of the door and try it again. One day, my ratty friends. One day.

  • Intruder

    One of our little kookaburra family has got all territorial prior to breeding season, and has been attacking our windows. There’s nothing more relaxing than being woken up at 6am on a Sunday morning by a crazed kookaburra hammering its scarily large beak against the glass, like it’s trying to break the window, get into the house and kill us all. Well, there probably are more relaxing things, but I can’t think of them right now. I’m sleep deprived.

    In an effort to stop the kookaburra attacking its reflection, I have taped alfoil on the outside of the kitchen windows (which is a great look, and has transformed the kitchen into a dark alfoil cave), which was somewhat successful, but has just forced the kookaburra to move onto other windows. Including the one in our bedroom. I suppose I could cover the entire house in alfoil. Or wait for the breeding season to end. One or the other.

  • The key of C – the people’s key

    The conclusion I reached after spending three days at the Cairns Ukulele Festival was this: ukulele players are lovely people. I reached a number of other conclusions, including “I need to learn how to play Don’t Worry Be Happy”, “I love conga lines” and “I need to buy a banjolele”. But the one about uke players was the main one. The entire Festival had a fantastic atmosphere, with people chatting away happily to anyone else carrying a ukulele case. James Hill, the headline performer (with his partner, Anne Davison, on cello) was truly fantastic. I love that moment when someone finishes a song and everyone around you quietly says, “Oh, wow…” before applauding like mad things. Check this out – Oh Susannah done as a tragically slow song on ukulele lap steel.

    Right, banjolele. I went and visited Music City which, since I lived up north, has developed a speciality in ukuleles (which makes Cairns a perfect place for a ukulele festival, I suppose). I drooled for a while over the entire wall of ukuleles, and was particularly taken by the banjolele, which is pretty much what it sounds like – a banjo the size of a ukulele, with four strings, tuned like a ukulele, sounding like a (little) banjo. Wouldn’t Duelling Banjos played on ukulele and banjolele be a marvellous thing? Although I’m sure if I search for it on YouTube, someone will have already recorded it.

    I also did a workshop with James Hill, and as a result have been working away at a new chord shape, which will give me such exotic chords as Fm7 and G#m7. Which are very jazzy chords. Jazz is, I am told by James Hill and therefore believe, the perfect sort of music for ukulele. I am trying to learn the song we touched on in that workshop, a jazz standard called Avalon, but I think that’s going to take me a while. Not only does it consist of all new chords, but a new strumming and kind of rhythmic muting. I need more callouses on my fingertips. When I get it right though, and learn to slide back into each chord shape without having to laboriously place my fingers in the correct spot on each string every time, it’s going to sound brilliant.

  • Reading the Hugo Packet – Part 2

    Part 1 is here.

    This week, I’ve almost finished one of the novels – Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is about a fantastically disturbing future Thailand, bleak and compelling.

    I’ve also finished all the short stories except for Kij Johnson’s Spar, and none have particularly grabbed me. I want to move on to the related works next, especially The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms by Helen Merrick, as I’ve heard lots of good things about it on Galactic Suburbia.

    I’m partway through Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, and unexpectedly enjoying it – I must admit I was really put off by the main character’s name, but it’s well worth overcoming the initial cringe.

    Distracting me from these in-progress books is the latest Charlaine Harris book, a series which is unfortunately getting a little too terrible to even enjoy as a trashy indulgence. But now I’ve started, I have to finish it (it’s something to do while waiting for the third season of True Blood).

  • Eclipse

    There was a partial lunar eclipse last night, so I thought I would take some photos of the moon, which I have never done before. It’s more complicated than I had thought – my cheap 70-300mm lens didn’t cope very well (and really, I don’t think 300mm is quite long enough) and my tiny tripod was frustrating me.

    Crouching on the gravel in the dark, I also had difficulties getting the exposure right. Not to mention the clouds. I ended up with about two shots I was happy with – next time I’m definitely going to use a better tripod (no more crouching) and wait for a clear night sky.

  • Reading the Hugo Packet – Part 1

    (The eagle-eyed will spot that this photo has nothing to do with the Hugo Awards. But I think it’s pretty. It’s the sort of photograph that causes my husband to sigh and say, “Oh, another arty one.” He doesn’t like small points of focus. I think they’re fabulous.)

    I made up my mind to go to AussieCon4 this year, bought my membership, bought my flights to Melbourne, and then gleefully downloaded the electronic Hugo packet – copies of most of the works nominated for the Hugo Awards this year. The awards are presented at AussieCon and members are eligible to vote, so the idea of the packet is that you have access to all the works so you can make an informed vote. I am frantically reading through lots of glorious stories so I’m ready to vote by the end of July – I already know there’s going to be a lot of tough decisions in each category.

    I had already read some of the short stories/novelettes (I listened to Eugie Foster’s Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast on Escape Pod, which was fantastic), and one of the novels (Robert Sawyer’s Wake), so I have a bit of a head start.

    I’ve read all of the novelettes now, and I really enjoyed quite a few of them, including Nicola Griffith’s It Takes Two and Eugie Foster’s story. I’ve also read one of the novellas, The Women of Nell Gwynne’s by Kage Baker, which I did like but didn’t feel there was much to it (in a way that I can’t really articulate better than that).

    I’m listening to The City & The City by China Mieville at the moment, and am halfway through reading Vishnu at the Cat Circus by Ian McDonald. Next I think I want to try a few of the graphic novels, but haven’t figured out a comfortable way of reading PDFs. Perhaps there’s any easy way to put them on my iPod.

  • Birds

    Looking back over a year’s photographs, I can usually tell when my mother and her partner have come to stay – I generally take a lot more bird photographs. It’s a lot easier when Mum and Allen are pointing them out for me so I can take the photo, and then identifying them for me. Effortless birdwatching.

    Mum was sporting a new camera this time, the Nikon D90 with that beautiful 18 – 200mm lens, which I was particularly envious of every time my birdwatching lens, the budget 70 – 300mm, groaned away trying to focus. I feel a bit sorry for that lens, everything is such an effort for it. But I do appreciate the distance you can be from your subject with the 300mm reach, as well as the $150 price tag. And if I take enough photos, and the light is right, I can still get some gorgeous shots.

    That’s a grey fantail in the backyard – a lucky shot, as it was perched so nicely in the light, and flew away a moment later.

    One of our kookaburras – we have three that live around the house, which I think are a pair with perhaps last year’s baby. I think the last residents of the house used to feed them, judging by the number of perching posts and feeding spots around the house, and the way the kookaburras like to sit and watch you when you’re sitting on the verandah, slowly turning their head one way and the other but always keeping you in view.

    This Variegated Fairy-wren was another lucky shot, at Berrinba Wetlands in Logan. This was about the only clear and nicely composed shot of about 20 that I took as she flitted around from branch to branch. I think I really only got this because she had paused and was trying to eat the moth or insect that she’s got in her beak.

    We had a great afternoon in the Berrinba Wetlands, which is a fairly new and busy park – not so much a birdwatching park really, despite the wetlands, but a great park to go to with kids and bikes, as there’s lots of wide paths for riding and picnic spots. I’d like to go walking there again, perhaps in the early morning, and see if there’s a greater variety of water birds (as we only saw a few ducks).

  • Winter colds

    I am getting over my second cold of the year, after slowing the healing process by the scientifically proven method of resorting to the cocktail recipe book.

    People in books are always drinking hot toddies and feeling tremendously refreshed and invigorated, and I agree that the mixture of whiskey, lemon juice and honey does tend to take your mind off the fact that your head is filled with so much mucous that you can’t actually breath. Unfortunately, this effect tends to wear off, leaving you feeling much worse than before. My mother advised me that perhaps leaving the whiskey out of the recipe might result in a drink better suited to curing yourself of a cold, and I tend to agree. Although I don’t think it would have quite the same spirit-lifting qualities.