escapism

The weather has been a little too much of late.



If you have never been in 41 degrees, you cannot imagine what it is like to be in 41 degrees. The air is like a desert bubble that clings around you, oppressive and suffocating. Haze and dust obscures the distance, and your immediate surroundings wobble and wave like you are viewing them through water. Being outside makes your head swim and your eyes sticky. The bushfire risk level is set at the grimly informal 'Catastrophic'.
That was the second day of 40+ degrees in less than a month, and the rest of the time has maintained a near-constant high 20s - mid-30s. Hot, endless, relentless heat.

I can't sleep at night, only in the early hours. I am zombied-out all week, then when the weekend comes I sleep endlessly and when I'm awake I am woozy and empty-headed.
This week looks set to be cool so I'm hoping to recover in 20 degree days and chilly nights.



We've both had various stresses of late so have been trying to take time to get out of the city and break routine a little. Last week we tripped out to Watson's Bay, where we sat under the trees and read and relaxed and got fish and chips and ice cream and coca cola.







An outdoor wedding was taking place just off to our right, and they had their photos done along the esplanade.

Today (Sunday) we tripped out to beautiful Balmoral, one of my favourite suburbs of Sydney. Lise, a friend of ours who's a PhD philosophy student at Macquarie uni joined us for a while and we sat in the shade, then retreated to the Bather's Pavillion for darjeeling and coffees.









Yesterday, we spent a long time in Redfern at my current favourite Sydney cafe, Baffi and Mo. Then I spent a delightful evening barbecuing prawns at Katherine and Darren's in Petersham.

Now I need to STOP watching Kill Bill Vol. 1 and go seek out my poop hat for slumber.

Flat photos!

Here's some (bad) photos of the new(ish) flat in Erskineville.





The living room, and doors out to the balcony.



Kitchen.... small but a lot of cupboards so not too bad.



To give a better idea of the layout. View from dining area towards living area and kitchen.



Dining area/books/piano.



Dining area back towards kitchen.



Mark's office, featuring the new Norman Foster desk!

There's no bedroom photo as yet because it seems to be in permanent state of disarray. It looks like the office but bigger and with a bed in. There's also a bathroom and utility room, but boorrrriiing.

The balcony you can see in another post below...

Lovable balcony

My chair



Mark's chair



Me in my chair

I do love the balcony. It's super hot tonight, about 36 degrees today, but there's a bit of a breeze going now and it keeps vaguely trying to rain but failing.

We got those outdoor fairy lights last year sometime but never put them up, so it's nice to use them! They make me think of Paris a bit, not sure why.

My foot has improved well after mosquito trauma, and I hope to maraude a little this weekend.

mosquito hell

We are meant to be off out on a fun Sunday marauding adventure BUT all has turned to misery. I sat on the balcony last night for barely 5 minutes when I felt a tingle on my foot. Looking down, I saw a MONSTROUS mosquito, about the size of a 50p, hopping happily around and treating my foot like a soda fountain.

This morning my foot and ankle were super swollen and I could barely walk properly. Mark went to the chemist and got me superstrength anti-histamine, and it's gone down a bit, but I still have a big fat foot and it looks like I'm stuck on the couch for the day :(

Tonight with Trevor McDonald....

I completely need to write the blog more regularly so that when I do go to write in it I am not overwhelmed by all the many many things I need to report about.

Some things that have happened recently are:

Vintage Fair at Canterbury Racecourse - huge fair of vintage clothing, homewares, accessories etc - loads of stalls and lots of fun to look around! I fell in love with an antique pearl and silver ring but at $450 it was a bit out of my price range :(

Der müde Tod - I know I mentioned this before, but to elaborate: this was part of the Sydney Silent Film Festival, for which somehow we managed to gain free tickets for a showing of our choice. We chose Fritz Lang's 1921 film Der müde Tod, called Destiny in English-speaking world for some reason. The greatest thing about it was that it was with live musical accompaniment from a pianist, which was awesome. It's actually a really good film, really spooky and with really good special effects considering the time it was made! It's the story of a young couple, who are very happy until Death comes to take the man. The woman bargains with Death and he says that if she can save just one of three people from their fate of death she can have her lover's life back...

Opera House open day. On a Sunday of horrendous torrential rain we battled on over to the Opera House for their doors-open day, in which you can walk around the whole place - all the venues including backstage areas - for free.

We made sure we sat in all the seats we wouldn't normally be able to afford (haha) and it was good to see inside the Opera Theatre!



The Opera stage is set for the Mikado.



In the Concert Hall.

Wicked

OH MY GOODNESS Wicked was amazing!! I had to think about whether I could afford to go, but it was SO worth the money. It's such a fun story and it's fun to spot all the references to the original Wizard of Oz story (including the origins of the cowardly lion, tin man and scarecrow).



In the bar, they were serving 'Oz-mopolitans' in light-up green glasses!!! We could not resist.



Katherine and Caroline, my Wicked companions.

Melbourne Cup. Tuesday 3rd November.

Australia is properly into racing season, and the biggest event of the season is the Melbourne Cup, which is possibly also one of the biggest sporting events of the Australian calendar. At 9.30am I found myself in a betting shop, with Karl and Sally helping me to place the first proper bet of my life - $10 on a horse named C'est La Guerre. I then entered the sweep at work and got Master O'Reilley. Unfortunately, neither horse even placed! What a fail. And thus ended my short-lived gambling addiction.

That Tuesday was also an insanely hot day. It hit 37 degrees in the city and was really unbearable. It was windy and the wind was hot, exactly like standing in front of a huge fan heater, if you can imagine such a thing. This unfortunately coincided with two non-air conditioned, rush-hour trains breaking down on the Harbour Bridge and being stuck for 40 minutes. This created quite a kerfuffle with a lot of criticism of CityRail for still running the 30 year old, non-aircon trains in excessively hot weather during rush hour, as it obviously creates a health risk. There were a lot of people arguing that they should have evacuated passengers from the stuck trains. I went home on a non-aircon tin can train, not in rush hour so it was empty, and I still felt ill after 10 minutes, so I can't imagine what being stuck for 40 minutes was like.

That is all for now I think. I just went to check to see if I've been paid (I've been living on $10 since Sunday..boooo) and found my tax return had...returned!!!! AND I got $1500! Brilliant! Rich beyond my wiiiiildest dreaaaaams!!!

frolicking

I am sleepy, and am yet refusing to go to bed because I am punk innit.

A few weekends ago, back at the beginning of October, in fact the weekend before we moved house, our old friends Sam and Georgina came to stay. They are currently inhabiting Auckland, just the other side of the pond from us, and dropped in on their way back from a holiday in Fiji, all brown they were. Well, Georgina was brown, Sam was more pink.

On our first evening together, a wednesday, shortly after their arrival, Mark took us all to a philosophy of maths lecture. Yes, a philosophy of maths lecture. Opera house? No! Harbour Bridge? No! Philosophy of maths lecture. Philosophy. Of. Maths. We foolishly agreed to this and along we went. Actually, it was ok. It was part of a public lecture series and was easy to follow and quite interesting. The questions did drag on a bit though.
The trouble with allowing a long time for discussion in a public lecture is that you do get some rather bizarre questions from members of the public. Mark says that it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between a brilliant question badly put, and just a bizarre question asked by a crazy person. So in a public lecture when the speaker doesn't know everyone, it is always best to assume the former, rather than risk offending the person. In case they are a maths genius who just doesn't know how to form a sentence. Unfortunately this does sometimes mean that daft questions slip through the net.

After the lecture, we gandered down King Street into Newtown for a meal at Kammandhenu.



I love Kammandhenu. Last week we accidentally unintentionally ate there 3 times. But it is so good and so cheap. Yay Sri Lankan/Indian/Malaysian fusion.

All dosed up on dosa, hoppers, roti and lassi, we then pootled a few doors up for a cocktail at Madam Fling Flong before retiring home to slumber.

The following day I had to go to work, but everyone else went to the beach at Manly :( Unfortunately it was a crazily hot day and it made Georgina rather ill, so we headed home rather earlier than planned. This did mean however that due to a lack of food, we ended up being forced to check out the Italian restaurant in Meadowbank, down at the Shepherd's Bay centre. But wow! We got some pizzas and they were amazing! Some of the best pizza I've had in Sydney. The service was also really friendly. It was generally an all round surprisingly good meal! This knowledge turned out to be useful as during the week we moved, Mark and I got takeout pizza from there everyday for about 3 nights in a row!

On Friday I worked again, but afternoon only and we had plans for the evening. We joined the lengthy queue for Mamak after some beers in the city, and had yet another brilliant Mamak meal. Mamak always seems to impress our visitors greatly as well! We ended up trying pretty much one of everything, including old favourite cone-shaped roti tisu, and we all enjoyed the rojak salad so much we got overexcited and ordered another one!



Me and Georgina full of the delights of Mamak.

Afterwards, we headed down to the Clare Hotel on Broadway for some beverages and just made the last train home!

Saturday was unfortunately a bit of a write-off due to the weather. It began to get rather wet on Friday night, and we woke up on Saturday to torrential rain. Unlike English rain, when it rains in Sydney it rains with attitude. You literally cannot go outside because you will get soaked in 3 seconds, even with an umbrella. And it won't 'brighten up in a minute' either. Rain rain and rain and rain a bit more.



We caught the train to King's Cross and ran to Bill's as fast as our leggy pegs could carry us. And we still arrived SOAKED.



Normal.



Frightening.

Fortunately, a lovely Bill's brunch soon cheered us up and dried us off.
Unfortunately, it was then time to go outside again. We headed back to the city, but after a couple of hours of hiding in shops were feeling pretty miserable. So we decided to give up, bought Peep Show series 1 from JB HiFi, went home and cooked a big chilli, drank wine and watched DVDs all night! Brilliant.

The next day Sam and Georgina flew back to Auckland, which was sad :( It was so good to have them over, and we are already planning to join them for a bit when they begin their tour of New Zealand in the New Year, in their new camper van!


Now I must head off to get my Poop hat on. We had to get up rather early to watch a Fritz Lang film named Der Müde Tod. It was the wrong time of day for Fritz Lang really, but was rather good! More soon. Nightypoos.

PS all photos other than the two at Bill's are by Sam or Georgina!

New house !!!

Here is our new building in Erskineville. It is great!!!



It's a converted factory, and they left the chimney on top. I think it's quite a new conversion, only done a few years ago. It's a small block, only I think 40 apartments in the building, and only 12 apartments per each staircase so each communal area is only shared by a small number of people.

Our unit is off the main road, which is nice.



Our balcony is the middle floor, which is good because it means it's covered over by the one above, thus less exposed to rain and hot hot sun.