Happy today because....

Started by Steve, April 14, 2007, 10:39:40

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Ulrich

Spring comes to Spiddal Metzingen:

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Hahaha, @Ulrich - maybe Mike Scott can sing that version on his next tour of Germany... :)


I'm happy because I've just finished an essay that turned into 4,000 words.  Yesterday it was only 2,000 words and I thought I'd largely finished it.  But that's how this goes.  :lol:

Topic is "A Place Called Home" - a broad sweep into the general topic - for the 40th Anniversary edition of the Australasian Owner Builder, which will be the last issue until someone else wants to take it over - the editor has done this for nearly two decades and would like to do something else now!

I'd already written a DIY piece for that edition on how to properly construct wet area floor drains (because ours actually work and so many in Australia do not) - including how to tile so you don't ruin the even drop you need into the drain - many people care more about lining up to some optical edge than about whether they are going to spend the rest of their lives pushing water down a hole with a mop when it should actually just flow there naturally...

And it still looks nice:



That's when floor tiling had just finished.  I went from flummoxed when starting tiling to thinking lots and then doing a really good job - because I didn't start until I worked out exactly how I was going to do it.



I ended up having fun with the kitchen backsplash:



...and with growing and eating heirloom pumpkins...


SueC is time travelling

SueC

...steers all done.  Clipped the end of the horn off the third one as well just to make sure his doesn't dig into the skin two weeks from now...
SueC is time travelling

SueC

We worked out yesterday that we've finished Map 8 (Albany to Lights Beach west of Denmark) of the Bibbulmun track, as day-walk sections, several times over since we first decided that we wanted to walk every bit of it in our local area, 18 months ago.  So today we're buying Maps 7 and 6, that go west to Walpole and then up to Pemberton in the Karri Forest, and we're going to have over 100km of fresh sections to walk where we've never been before.  :heart-eyes  It just means driving a bit further out.  And that's on top of doing the six official Stirling Ranges peaks at least once a year, plus the Porongurup trails, and various other local trails - but there's a difference between old friends, and exploring completely new places.

Yesterday we found a track we've never walked before, which was scenic but too flat and boring to hike, so we determined, after 2 hours on that trail, to come back with mountain bikes for that and the other 100-odd km of flat rail trails in this region, that we've not done because we really dislike flat walking in mostly straight lines.  The dog will be able to come along as these are bushland trails away from traffic and you go hours before you meet anyone on them, if you don't go during school holidays. :smth023

We happened upon the Wilson Inlet at one point - here's some nice photos, sadly taken with an iPod camera because we'd left the proper one at home.  The complete set as always is reachable by clicking on any photo to go to the source page.



SueC is time travelling

Oneiroman

When I saw your mention of Pemberton it reminded me of a weekend trip I made just after I arrived in Perth in March '82 with a couple and their daughter and a visiting American academic.  We travelled through Mandurah and Busselton down to Cape Naturaliste before heading inland to Bridgetown to spend the night in a caravan.  I won a darts match for the one and only time in my life in a local pub.  The following morning we headed to Pemberton and climbed the Gloucester Tree.  Well, the American and I did.  Our guide, a Kiwi who fancied himself as a rugged bushman chickened out, blaming it on the fact that he was wearing flip-flops (I think you call them thongs).

On another occasion he took me out for a night paddling a kayak from the University of WA up the Swan River to central Perth.  After two minutes I thought my arms would drop off but once I got used to it it was fine.  I started to mess about a bit and he was almost screaming at me to stop in case he got his t-shirt wet.  Why do lots of blokes from the antipodes like to come over so macho when they often turn out to be wimps?  When I was in Arnhem Land my host took me up a local river in a small power boat and thought it was hilarious to goad some of the huge crocs lining the river bank by drifting in as close to them as possible.  Being a Brit I kept a stiff upper lip even when a giant maneater shot into the river nearly capsizing the boat.  He stopped laughing then.  I won't tell you about the time in Wyndham when a massive goanna that used to march around the campsite as though he was the owner tried to get into my tent one night.

I have found out quite a few things on the internet that I had no idea about at the time concerning my visit to Australia.  I think I mentioned in another post the Hunters and Collectors song '42 Wheels' about an incident at Uluru I narrowly avoided and that l also found out that The Warumpi Band's song 'My Island Home' is about Galiwinku (Elcho Island) which I paid a brief visit to in 1983.  I've also found videos on YouTube made by or featuring some of the characters I met in my travels.  One bloke I met in Sydney called Ace had his five minutes of worldwide fame when a programme was made about him and a friend who purchased a lion cub in Harrods in London and later had it released into the wild in Kenya.  When a clip from this of the pair hugging the fully grown lion was uploaded to YouTube it "went viral" - https://youtu.be/cvCjyWp3rEk - although when I met Ace he was a rather refined "aesthete" type rather the the gung-ho ocker that some of the other characters I met were.  In reality most of the people I encountered were extremely friendly and welcoming.  The outback was nothing like it was portrayed in 'Wake in Fright'.

SueC

Ah, @Oneiroman, so you got to Australia half a year before I did!  And if you came back to the Busselton/Margaret River area, you'd not recognise it.  Busselton was a sleepy fishing town; now it's endless faceless suburbia.  Nearby Dunsborough used to be just a village with a famous little bakery and a beach; when I tried to find that tiny main street with its little bakery again in 2005 (after not seeing the place since the late 80s) it was gone and in its place was a wide bitumen road with generic shopping malls such as you can see anywhere in the corporatised West; and the Legoland of modern Australian suburbia spread out far and wide from that as well.  :1f632:  :'(

Margaret River was a specialist dairy area when you saw it; then the little dairy farms were bought up by cashed-up Perth yuppies as holiday homes for their vacations, and the agricultural community pretty much died.  Some of the best soil in Western Australia now grows sprawling lawns which support nobody with food, and which people mow with ride-on fossil-fuel-powered gadgets, where once the herbivores grazed.

From Bridgetown south is still lovely; all the way to the South Coast.

Perth has quadrupled and looks like a miniature LA and Mandurah is now part of it - all freeways and sprawling subdivisions.  I've been avoiding it like the plague especially in the last ten years.  Everywhere on the coastal plain is air pollution and traffic noise, all day and all night - nowhere you can go where it's quiet and the air isn't contaminated. 

The Gloucester Tree is still there, and I've never climbed it - I can't deal with sheer drops.  Tried to once on the general principle that you should stare down your phobias, but nearly blacked out 10 m up and decided that genuinely wasn't a good idea.  With a harness I'd do it, but some reactions are so biologically inbuilt you'd lose your life in the wrong situation if you tried to defy them without a backup.  Others, like heebie-jeebies about public speaking, are easier to fix.  The heights thing doesn't affect our mountain hikes though, and didn't stop me from getting comfortable on a scaffold when we built our house.

It probably isn't a great idea to goad large crocodiles - they do regularly eat people, plus it's generally a good idea to leave the wildlife in peace, even if it isn't carnivorous.  Sounds like you were a bit of a terror back in the day.  I do note your point about Australian male machismo; especially in the era when you visited - and yes, the same sorts are very susceptible to the "man-flu" etc.  :beaming-face

Sounds like you made good use of your time and have vivid memories of WA.  Landscape-wise, it was better then (less destroyed and depleted and built over - it really is shocking in Australia; it's so rapidly growing in human population still and we've long since exceeded sustainable carrying capacity here, ditto the planet, but that's another topic); culturally there's been some improvement - especially in terms of food, and the ability to get "ethnic" ingredients (which, when I arrived, included oregano!!!).

How cool you've been to Elcho Island.  I've never been up north anywhere in Australia; furthest north was Yanchep (in WA), Wilpena Pound (outback SA) and the Central Coast (NSW) - Brett and I have both tended to go south, and have spent a lot of time in Tasmania.  Much cooler there.  But we love the documentaries from the areas we've not been.

And that lion video was fantastic - thanks for sharing the link. Made my day.   :)

My official happy-today for this morning is that I've at this stage got energy for dealing with my long list of chores to do outdoors!
SueC is time travelling

dsanchez

Just got a SMS that I will be getting my Astra/Zeneca shot this Saturday. Yay!
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

SueC

Onya, @dsanchez!   :smth023  :smth023

"Onya" is the abbreviation of the Australian expression of approval, "Good on you!"
In Australia things tend to get shortened:  Mozzie instead of mosquito, arvo instead of afternoon, barbie instead of BBQ.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

I wonder how @dsanchez's arm is.  Hopefully the nurse didn't hit the nerve.

Happy today because the rain moderated for long enough to be able to get out and do a section of the Bibbulmun we've not done before, near Muttonbird Island.  It was a walk through woods and dunes to the coast, a descent down to Muttonbird Island, some rock-hopping to get around the point to Muttonbird Beach, and then returning along the dune-woodland trail again.  Seas were phenomenal today - we get the full benefit of the Roaring Forties here on the South Coast...









One unfortunately blurry one of the massive boiling seas:
















iPod camera again as I wasn't taking the good one in the drizzle, so the resolution isn't great.

If anyone wants to see all 36 photos, just click on the first one to go to the photopage.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

I'm happy because we set a personal best for the longest distance hiked in one day today - we did 25km on the Bibbulmun track from Parry Beach to Boat Harbour and back - a beautiful, wild, remote coastline, and the track wasn't exactly flat either - really strenuous walk and even the one flat part, a beach before Boat Harbour, was hard work because it was "aerosand" - you sink in like in soft snow...

We've done around 20km several times before, mostly with a mad colleague of mine who was getting fit for climbing Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa, but that was 12 years ago - in recent years, our longest walk was 18km.

The ocean was insane with waves again today - typical winter pattern for us with the Roaring Forties etc.  Have a look at these waves... and there wasn't much wind at all today, by the way, this is just what blows in from where there is lots of wind between us and Antarctica...









We did have some complications, like being caught in a 45-minute downpour near the start that was literally like standing at home under the shower - Australian weather can be pretty wild.  So we got soaked to the skin even through our water-resistant thermals and soft shell (which thankfully still keep you quite warm when wet, sort of like a wetsuit) - and our boots were full of water, so we had to stop several times to wring out socks and insoles... and we still had hours of walking to go at that point...



One of the most beautiful walks I've ever done...





















We took so many photos - if anyone wants to see them all, just click on one of them and go to the Flickr photostream.  The coast here is so spectacular...
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Super happy because we gave ourselves a kick up our backsides and got ourselves to that concert I was deliberating about yesterday.  I'd been under the impression Steve Kilbey was going to do acoustic versions of two of their early albums, with string backing - since he wasn't coming with the current incarnation of The Church, who by the way have made 25 (!!!) studio albums (I can see I've got a few holes to fill in their back catalogue... :1f62e: ).  On reflection we thought that was worth going to.

And this is what we actually got:  Full electric concert with a cellist and a violinist (both electric) standing in for synth!  In a 600-seater, which due to the pandemic and to perhaps a lack of interest in alternative music amongst the older people in Albany was less than half full.  That didn't dampen anyone's spirits, however - fabulous, enthusiastically received concert in an intimate venue with amazing acoustics.

I didn't have The Church's 1981 and 1983 albums because that was just a little before I got interested in music; the first one I've got by them is 1985's Heyday, which is excellent.  But, as it turns out, so were these predecessors - this concert was a real treat...  Here's a sample song off The Church's debut Of Skins and Heart:


This was all lushly presented live - the two string players really added something to the overall soundscape - and soundscape is what The Church did so incredibly well through the 1980s, and what sat so beautifully against the plasticky, trashy pop backdrop that was a large fraction of the 1980s mainstream.  I've got journals from the mid-80s in which I decided to host my own music awards, and in them, The Church got Best Australian Band both times  I held those - to my mind, they had so much more depth than INXS or the Hoodoo Gurus or even Hunters & Collectors (not to mention Pseudo Echo and their ilk), and were multi-dimensional in ways that few other Australian bands were (and Nick Cave hadn't grown up properly yet).

Hearing two early Church albums I'd not been familiar with (save a couple of songs off them) showed me all over again exactly why I took to this music back in the day.  I sat enthralled in mesmeric, often gorgeous, sometimes experimental soundscapes, and let Steve Kilbey's richly resonant voice wash over me.  The lyrics have always been above-average as well, which really helps to get people into my good books.  The band played two full albums plus encore, but I could easily have listened to twice that this evening!

Steve Kilbey also amused the crowd with stories in-between songs; most of which centered around his memory of all the bad reviews they got by various critics.  "This (Electric Lash) was called 'the stupidest song ever' by such and such a critic... - and this song was lauded as a better effort by us; he said that we should leave 'haunting' up to people who are actually good at it."  (Heartfelt boos and hisses from the audience at these poisonous comments, one of which had been from the NME.)

He mentioned that gated drum reverb had been an issue on the next album they presented, Seance - and they do it without live.  Here's a nice sample off that album (which some critic had apparently called an "unnecessary stoner jam"):


With the added strings the intro to this piece was extraordinary, quivery, electric...this is why I listen to music...

A few things were given different arrangements - Memories In Future Tense, he said he preferred 3/4 not 4/4 and as a sort of 1930s Hungarian barn piece, and so they went on to play it like that, and it was excellent.  The alternative arrangement also didn't have what he called the signature 1981 guitar sound, which he demonstrated on his bass.  One song off their debut album he refused to play altogether, and said to make it up to us he'd play two B-sides instead.  Much comedy was extracted from his explanations about vinyl, Side 1 versus Side 2 ("...but of course that means nothing anymore, nowadays it's all random!"), etc - and at one point he said to a guitar player, "In the 80s blah blah..." and got, "But I wasn't alive in the 80s."  :lol:

Somewhere in the middle of the concert, an audience member exclaimed, "Now I can die happy, Steve!" - and Kilbey joked, "What? I'm as deaf as a post - and also as blind as a bat!" - turning to the wings of the stage, bowing at 90 degrees to us, and telling us we were such a fabulous audience.  :rofl  He mispronounced "Albany" as quite a few Eastern States blow-ins will, and got some giggles which immediately informed him of the mistake - it isn't said like "Albury" - and he then went on to make favourable comparisons between our lovely seaside town and that landlocked place in Victoria ("and what sort of a name is Wodonga anyway?").  It's great fun when you're at a gig where there can be these kinds of conversational exchanges with the crowd.  :)

Interesting things happen when a singer plays bass instead of guitar - listening closely, I could hear that it affects the singing - since he's playing rhythm, and pretty complex forms at that, rather than accompaniment, and it seems like he has to fit his singing in between his playing because of this.  It makes for interesting stops and starts and timings in the singing.

The encore presented three commercially successful songs by The Church which, bless their hearts, were still alternative songs - The Church never made pop:  Metropolis, I'm Almost With You and, of course, Under The Milky Way.

To make it perfect, I'd have loved another encore with Pharaoh, Happy Hunting Ground and Tantalized in it - but they clearly can't rehearse the whole back catalogue for concerts, especially with alternative musicians standing in for original band members.  These did a great job, by the way - the guitarists not quite as sharp as the original playing, but of a high enough standard to sound fabulous.

I actually took some photos which I'll share tomorrow, but I'm too tired for that now!  :1f634:
SueC is time travelling

SueC



Shaun & Adrian Hoffmann (guitars), Steve Kilbey (vocals, bass), Shaun Corlson (drums),  Rachael Aquilina (violin), Anna Sarcich (cello); guest drummer "Lockie" behind string section, did one song outright on his own kit, and got an extra cheer and his name called out as they made their way off the stage post-encore - and he paused, smiled and gave a little bow.





We had the good fortune to be sitting right by the string section - both of us find strings extra-fascinating.  Brett says that the first time he saw an electric cello at a gig, he thought it looked like a instrument from the future which had been beamed back in time...

Just from a low-range phone!  And really just so we could remember it better...
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Well, I'm happy because I've NEARLY finished roasting and freezing three massive Musqué de Provence Pumpkins that weighed 20kg each, which is ridiculous because they're supposed to get to 10-15kg.  Usually they store well, but all three had been nibbled underneath by slaters before harvest, so I had to preserve them quickly - and we're also eating lots of pumpkin soup, I've made pumpkin bread, tonight we had pumpkin/feta/cashew pizza, and I'm making citrus/pumpkin/almond cake this week... and the dog is getting a bit of pumpkin with her dinner at the moment, and we did split up half a pumpkin into nine wedges which were doled out to friends to try...



Also happy because the four new calves we got in have accepted their shelter and are curled up happily in a bed of food in it tonight while the storm is raging outside - we've got a severe weather warning, with a sheep weather alert, which means stock losses due to hypothermia can be expected, with sheep or other animals of around that size exposed to these conditions.  (It may not be below freezing here, but between the rain and the Roaring Forties you can be chilled to the bone in no time where we live.)

This is a snap from when they'd just arrived yesterday off a neighbouring dairy.  You can see two in the shelter and two hiding in the tree lucerne on the right (edible leaves, yum yum and they're going for it, and there's also some corn plants in the foreground for them to try because I'm harvesting our last batch of eating corn at the moment).



Last but not least, we managed to nip out this morning for a 90-minute seaside walk when there was a bit of a weather break between the two cold fronts.



This is at Muttonbird Beach, and there was this surfer out there we swore was motorised because he kept zooming from one end of the beach to the other:



Jess was chasing waves as usual.



Here's a film of her doing that on an inland lake a few years back. The bigger the surf, the more she runs, so this is a mild case of wave-chasing for her!

SueC is time travelling

MeltingMan

After my second vaccination (June 15th), I am allowed to eat again in the fast food restaurant. I do that now and then. 😎
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

Ulrich

Happy about my hike on Sunday, with 13km the longest so far in this year!

Towards the end, the reward was this nice path alongside a little river (canal):

The holy city breathed like a dying man...