My three days of labour between Boxing Day and New Year were a study in tedium, so much so that now, a mere long weekend seperating me from them, I have only the vaguest recolection of what I did. I probably went for a run, continued my reading of the murky backwaters of the internet and chatted some chat about nothing in particular to my contract colleagues.
Highlight on the home front was the arrival of a Samsung 32inch LCD TV with a 'piano black' surround. Looks rather sexy in the way that new things don't actually look sexy at all. It looks more like a super crisp pictured TV made from recycled Darth Vadar helmet. Hot (or maybe cold) on it's heels came the sexy new fridge. Brushed aluminium door and the size of a small family car, it just about fits in the hole our kitchen has for a fridge. It was always going to be tight; te frindge is 790mm wide and the gap into which it goes is 800mm. But our house is old and the kitchen floor is not flat. So the fridge sits at a slight angle. But it's in and Sal, after her initial palpatations, is happy. It arrived on Saturday, just in time to be filled in preparation for our hosting a New Years Eve and Day gathering of friends (2) and family (11).
If anyone knows whether that previous full stop should be in or outside of the bracket please comment.
My time-ordered-memory is shot to pieces, so this is going to go all over the place. When Sal's folks left us last week they left Oscr the labradoodle with us. It was great to have him at our place, a practice run for having our own dog. Apart from a bit of whining at night when he was sent to bed under the house, and his on-off stealth attempts to probe ever further into the house, he was no trouble. At Mike and Maureen's he is a yard dog. They have a decent sized garden and he lives there, rarely going for walks. So he was uber-excited on Saturday when Sal and I took him for a walk to the Harbour throuhg the gulley. At the sports fields he showed again how good natured he is, visiting any person and dog he came within sniffing distance of, soaking up the loving (from the humans, not the dogs) and having a great time.
Of course being in the botom of the gulley meant a walk back up. We were offered a lift to the nearest cafe - atop a hill, the harbour naturally being at the bottom - by an elderly Hungarian woman, herself walking a spoodle (the waiting list for the labradoodles is apparently rather long.)
You see that fill stop I typed inside the parenthesis, automatially. Anyway...
We thanked Hungarian Lady, declined the offer and walked up the hill instead of back through the gulley, passing houses ranging in style from nice, quaint and cosy to full-blown James Bond arch-nemesis Super-Criminal lair. Plenty of those dotted aound the harbour. Oscar faded, was glad when we stopped for coffee and when we got home he pent most of the rest of the day asleep, waking only to move from one sleeping spot to another.
That was Saturday morning to early afternoon; late afternoon was shopping for Sal and a run for me. I ran to The Northbridge Pool. Passing more and larger houses than we'd seen in the morning. The pool is a harbour pool, so is a net-attached-to-small-pier area of the harbour with some pontoon style lane header/footers. It is open from October to March and I will certainly go swimming there. As certainly as Sally will not (cold/murky/yucky and so on.) To complete the exercise bit, run du jour on Sunday was a 1hr 45min trip around Castlecrag's even larger houses and a couple of trips thorugh the gulley and a bit through Artarmon. I made it up as I went along once I discovered hat I was not heading for the reserve I had hoped to run through. Then New Year's Day was a single trip to the Harbour and back. In the pissing rain. Still nice though, and I used it to set a baseline time for what I think will become my regular quick out-and-back run.
New Years Eve was a quiet affair. Well, relatively quiet. Jo, Nige, Jax and Jesse and Mara came over. Nige and I took the easy option for Sydney's annual firework spectacular. We wandered down the street and up someone's driveway on the high side of the street. We couldn't see the bridge or water, but go a nice view over top of trees to the display, 5-6kms away. That was the 21:00 display; the girls took Jax in the car to get a closer look. Nige and I were joined by Jamie, our next door neighbiur, his ma and his dog. Boom, boom, flash, oo-ah! Then back inside. The girls came back and went to bed, the menfolk watched series 2 of The League of Gentlemen and waited for the midnight display that was another spectacular 13mins or bangs and flashes. And it became 2007.
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