Ice Skating Queen

On Saturday evening Ella went ice-skating with her friends from her Tae Kwon Do class. I had thought, from the way the session was presented to parents, that the whole idea was that the children were going to get tuition from their Tae Kwon Do teachers, but no! We all turned up, Mr Tigh (the teacher) donned his skates, and buggered off, leaving around a dozen of the younger children wholly unable to ice-skate. Apparently the parents were supposed to be a) supervising and b) teaching - not really a goer since few of us had either intended to stay for the session or could skate!














I thought the whole evening was about to collapse into a nightmare of disappointed kids, especially since I was supervising Ella's friend Thomas, who was staying over with us after the session, but then the children really surprised and impressed me by saying that they would be fine on the ice by themselves.

As you can see, they had beginner's 'frames' which were like zimmer-frames for novice skaters. Although they look unwieldy, they were wonderful!



















Ella and Thomas skated for an hour and a half with one 5-minute break, before I took them home, warmed them up and put them to bed. They were very tired, and so was I...


















I was so proud of Ella: she spent ages right in middle of things, falling over, getting up again, laughing and pushing off. No tears, no tantrums, no nervousness. I think back to what I was like as a child and there's no way I'd have been that brave. My last (and one of few) skating experiences were as a sixth former travelling by coach to the Southampton Gaumont rink and teetering around the edge in fear, not helped by watching someone lose a couple of fingers in an accident. Slippery, cold ice - works best in a Gin and Tonic as far as I'm concerned!

Big Banana

You've all been on the edges of your seats wondering what Coffs Harbour's Big Banana looks like, and now I can show you! Terry and Joan were lucky enough to be taken up there after school one day with Ella and here are the pics... There's even one of me with Joan and Terry, taken by Ella!

Double Yuck

More rodents, this time in my studio. I thought that if the droppings I found in my studio were cockroach droppings then I sure as hell didn't want to meet the cockroach... and I'm right: I don't have gigantic killer cockroaches - I have mice. Great.

Anyway, since Shellie's yappy (but usually quite sweet) small bundle-of-fluff-type-dog was sick all over the floor of my studio this afternoon, Shellie was disposed to be conciliatory so I don't have to sort out my rodents, the landlord will!

Working it out

Those of you with a keen interest in our cardiac well-being will be pleased to hear that Michael and I spent a tortuous constructive couple of hours in the gym yesterday, familiarising ourselves with some of the weight-training equipment under the watchful eye of the lovely Jacqui, who has designed individual training programmes for each of us. I fondly remember my days with Shane at the Active8 gym on Chandos Road, doing 'hovers' at the end of each session... Hovers, for those who don't regularly abuse their stomach muscles with this sort of thing, consist of maintaining a 'press-up' position for two minutes at a time - or 15 seconds at a time, if you're a lard-arse like me! I actually could do a couple of minutes when I was training with Shane last year, but twelve months off have taken their toll and I can't manage it any more. Meanwhile, the world of 'gym' has moved on and there are even more fiendish exercises now, utilising an inflatable ball... my transverse abdominal muscles (if that's the right term) are quivering at the mere thought, and not in a good way.

While we punish ourselves in the gym, it seems we're destined to punish ourselves with bad news about our property - again. This week's exercise in mild depression is the news that our 10 acres may be the only acreage in Coffs Harbour liable to land slippage! Our surveyor suggested that we might have colluvial soil on the plot and that we ought to have additional (expensive...) geo-physical surveys. Today was the date for the survey, and the geo-phys guys say that there have been 3 significant landslides on the property, and that we can't build our house where we wanted to build it and, by the way, this is the first time they've come across this geological problem in 15 years of surveying in the local area... Now admittedly the last landslippage on the property was approximately 10,000 years ago (roughly!), but even so, Coffs Harbour City Council won't like it. In practical terms what this means is that we will have to build on one side of the property or the other, not across the middle of the plot as originally intended. This means either being slap up against our neighbour, Adam, on one side, but with a good view, or being well away from Adam (my preferred option!) on the other side but lower down the slope and with less width of view of the ocean.

Christian, our architect, is coming over for Sunday lunch with the rest of his family so we'll break the news to him with some wine at hand! I do think, though, that good architecture can overcome problems like these. OK, so we can't build in the centre of the plot; we can still use that land for garden/orchard/grazing, and the chances are that we won't see a land slip there anyway (I know we're not blessed with good luck at the moment, but I still like to look on the bright side). If we build near to Adam's house we will have a brilliant view, and the architecture of the house will have to compensate for our proximity to another building. If we build on the other side, we may have to build upwards to maximise the view (and we'll still have a view, just not as wide), but we'll be a long way away from any other building and we'll save a packet on the cost of the driveway because we'll be that much nearer to the access road.

Swings and roundabouts, as usual.

Other news: Joan and Terry stayed with us for 7 nights and loved it up here. They say that they can now see why we chose to live up here rather than closer to the rest of the family. Joan didn't suffer from asthma at all during her visit, and Terry's gout was a lot better, despite eating some foods that would normally cause him trouble. I have photographic evidence of both of them getting their feet wet on the beach! Hopefully they'll come back and see us soon.

Ella, poor thing, has her first chest cold since she got here, probably because of the shocking downturn in temperatures. The other night it dropped to 10 degrees outside, and during the day it's often been only 20 degrees. Awful! You may laugh, but I've had a hot water bottle for the last two weeks...

Oh yuck

Michael has just informed me that the reason why the sink in our bathroom has been draining so slowly is that it was full of dead cockroaches and cockroach poo... He got fed up with it and poured a quantity of drain-cleaner down there to loosen things up!

I'm still trying to work out how cockroaches get into the dishwasher... This morning when I opened the door there were two small LIVE ones! Usually they're definitely dead by the time the cycle stops. YUCK!!!

We are very pleased with ourselves

... because yesterday we went to the gym in Coffs Harbour for the first time! The first of many times, naturally; as the buoyant newsletter stuck up inside the toilet doors reads, "80% of success is just showing up"...

Our fitness assessments are next week, along with designing our gym programmes, but in the meantime we're getting used to 'just showing up' for an hour of cardio work twice a week. We've paid for it all for a year, and plan to go on Tuesday and Friday mornings after we've taken Ella to school and walked Toby on the beach. That means we get it out of the way before work starts, as it were: the time difference means that Michael's phone and email are quiet in the morning and only start to hot up in the afternoon!

The Eagle has Landed!

Hi folks, yup, Michael is back in the country... Thank goodness for that. Other causes for celebration today: I finished inaugurating our business accounts (I've been filling the waiting time between phone calls for the last few days with entering tedious accounting transactions using a programme called 'MYOB", which stands for Mind Your Own Business. Very amusing, these Australians), and a gallery phone me this morning to ask if I'd consider selling some of my work through them... Not bad for a Wednesday!

Cleanliness is next to godliness (apparently)

... maybe the cockroach is now really clean?

Periplaneta australasiae

Here's a philosophical problem for the modern age... You put your dirty dishes in your dishwasher, add dishwasher detergent, close the door and start a wash programme. When you open your dishwasher the following morning, you pull out the bottom rack and discover one or more distinctly drowned large Australian cockroaches, or, sometimes, various cockroach body parts. Question: are your dishes really clean?

Bye bye Boris

I'm not usually one for commenting on things political, but I did like this article from the Sydney Morning Herald after the demise of Boris Yeltsin... Sorry it's a bit late to be topical, but I've had my mind on a few other things!

Japanese children's day festival

Before the airline/airport fiasco, Ella and I enjoyed a sunny Saturday lunchtime picnic at the Botanic Gardens in Coffs Harbour, as part of a Japanese childrens' festival. Apparently Coffs Harbour has an 'exchange city' in Japan, and the citizens of Sasebo gave the city 80 "koinobori" last year.

I quote Councillor Bill Palmer, Chair of Council's City Services Committee, "Children's Day is a national holiday in Japan and it's marked by families flying giant carp windsock-type kites from flagpoles next to their homes for about six weeks around the date. The holiday apparently comes from an ancient Chinese story about carp which swam up a waterfall and became dragons. As a result, the carp - or koi - became symbols of perseverance. As well as flying koinobori, Japanese families traditionally also eat special rice cakes for Children's Day - chimaki and kashiwamochi. Chimaki is a chewy rice cake served wrapped in a bamboo leaf while kashiwamochi is a chewy rice cake with sweet, red azuki bean paste inside, served between two oak leaves.

What the council didn't say is that the festival is largely to do with a celebration of boys, not girls, but we chose to ignore that element of the celebrations!































The Botanic Gardens will bear further exploration as it was really quite impressive, especially when you think that Coffs Harbour isn't really that big! We had our picnic next to a big lake with a red-painted oriental bridge straddling it, and it was very beautiful. There was a display of Japanese drumming, a stall for the kids to make Japanese carp kites out of tissue paper (very successful, despite their apparent flimsiness!), and traditional dancing and games, including the very amusing chopstick-and-jelly-bean races. We had fun.

Feckety-feck-feck-feck

Oh yes, disaster has struck. Again. There will be some of you out there who think that we live to lurch from one crisis to another, and we really don't! I think that we've got a big invisible sign over our heads pointing trouble in our direction... This time the poor victim is Michael, whose passport and wallet have been stolen en-route from Boston to Sydney via Dallas and Lost Angeles. I thought initially that the theft took place in Boston airport, but I got the wrong end of the stick due to a bad telephone line (that's my excuse). It seems that Michael realised the passport and wallet were missing as he got off the American Airlines flight in Dallas and immediately. He had checked that they were with him as he got on the plane and he believes that someone took the opportunity to snatch them as he was being jostled trying to put his hand luggage into the overhead lockers... He contacted a marshall and airline staff as he got off the plane and the plane was searched, but no wallet or passport were found.

So this was 07:30 Sunday morning my time when Michael rang me from Dallas just before he boarded his flight to LA. At that stage my task was to cancel our cards and try to find out from Thai International Airways whether or not he could fly back to Sydney. It took SIX AND A HALF HOURS of me phoning around to discover what would happen next. Cancelling the cards was easy, and American Airlines were happy to take Michael to LA because he'd already cleared security and had his bags checked through so they knew he was who he said he was. Amazingly, our travel insurers and Thai International were closed for the weekend, as was Western Union Credit transfer, so I couldn't get much in the way of help or information from anyone.

I had the happy thought that he might need a room at LA airport for the night if he couldn't get on the flight, so my first hotel contact was the LA Intercontinental, of which Michael is an Ambassador Club member - a membership that supposedly buys you preferential treatment and a first class service.... not. They wouldn't help at all because he wouldn't be paying the bill (I would, from overseas) and he wouldn't be able to provide any ID. So much for that. However, we shall be forever grateful to the lovely Tammy at the LA airport Holiday Inn, who bent over backwards to help. She made sure the airport shuttle picked Michael up after he'd waited FOUR HOURS for Thai to off-load his bags, she arranged a meal and drink to be waiting for him in his room because he would arrive after the kitchen had closed for the night, and she then committed to explaining things to the duty manager next day, with a view to contacting the hotel's Financial Controller and finding a way to charge $100 or so to my credit card so that Michael could also have a small amount of cash. She was SO helpful and I shall very much enjoy singing her praises to the director of the InterContinental Hotel Group Asia Pacific, while at the same time castigating him for the crappy service I got from their flagship hotel chain...

I'm so glad that Michael wasn't spending all last night in the airport in LA, with no food and no drink. Although the Holiday Inn isn't great (it's at an intersection of two very noisy highways, for example) it is at least a roof over his head, and Michael now has his luggage, his laptop, clothes and the ability to charge anything he needs (except cash) to the room bill, which I'm paying.

It seems that Michael probably won't get back to Australia until near the end of this week, as the Consulate has to re-issue his passport. I naively thought that they could give him temporary travel documents, but apparently that isn't the case any more, and with Australian passports having biometric elements in them, the process may be a long one. A more urgent problem is cash: I chose the airport Holiday Inn because Michael could get the free shuttle bus rather than having to thumb a lift (!), but it leaves him many miles from the Consulate and from banks etc. I will say that our credit card issuers have tried to be helpful: unfortunately Westpac in Australia wouldn't have been able to get him a replacement card any earlier than Friday, but Barclays Bank appear to have come up trumps and may be able to arrange for him to collect cash using a password rather than photo-ID, and it may be possible for them to arrange that through an agent near to the hotel. I'm waiting for Michael to phone me back to tell me what's happening.

Thank goodness for Skype: while many of our numerous calls have had to be through landlines and mobile phones, at least Michael and I have been able to communicate with each other through Skype...

I'm exhausted, and I'm sure Michael is too. I had to get up at 02:00 and 04:00 this morning in order to phone the hotel's front desk and make sure everything was all right, so I'm knackered from that - and I may have to do the same thing tonight in case there's anything Michael needs before he has to leave to go to the Consulate. We'll see what happens next.

My thanks to the unlucky few who got calls from me last night and in the wee small hours (Australian time) this morning, in order for me to have a good moan. Bless you!