In the Garden

I'm not an outdoorsy type of person, let alone the type to enjoy pottering around in the garden.  My few experiences with being responsible for a pot plant has usually ended with the plant's death - I even managed to kill a cactus once.  So, yesterday, when the Terror was trying to convince me it was her dinner time (an hour and a half early, I might add), I went for a wander round our back yard and took the following photos.

The veggie patch:

 Cauliflower, going slightly purple:

 

Teeny green capsicums, I think.

  

A row of cos lettuce.

 I suspect that these may be radishes.  Which look to be about the size of my fist.

Peas!

Pea flowers.

Something else has been enjoying the greenery available.

Bottlebrush.  The birds love these, and in a few months, the ground will be covered in red from where the parrots lop them off the bush.

Yellow flower (I have no idea what this plant is), with a busy little bee.

Geraldton Wax.  Unfortunately, it was hard to get a picture of this where the colour wasn't all washed out.

Pretty orange flowers.  Again, I have no idea what this plant is, and it's actually hanging over the back fence from a neighbouring yard.

I have no idea why there is a plant marker for "Lavender English" sitting in the middle of one of the rose gardens (not that you can tell it's in the middle of a rose garden from this shot).  There definitely doesn't appear to be anything vaguely lavenderish in this bed at all.

A final photo over the house at the back, looking at the spiffy cloud formations.  With a couple of lonely roses in the corner.

Looking up around town - Part one

There is a theory that I've often heard thrown about when people hide either themselves or things.  And that is people don't look above their eye-level.  So, keeping this in mind, I often look up at what's around me (plus, having been one of the shortest people in my classes throughout school helped in that regard).

So, here are a few things spotted when looking up on a Friday night in Perth.

These figures startled me when I looked up in King's Street!

His Majesty's Theatre.  I tried to take a picture of the lions that are mounted at the top of the building on the corner, but it turned out rather rubbish.  It doesn't help that it was getting a bit dark at the time.

Columns out the front of the theatre.  I also like the gates.

I like the art deco style of this place.  It was originally an office block, but has since been converted to a multi-storey carpark.

Molding on the ceiling of an awning outside the Gucci store.

Sun, surf and sand!

It's an odd thing.  I live not more than a 10 minute drive from the beach.  Have done most of my life.  And yet, the number of times I've actively gone to the beach in the last decade, I could count on one hand.  And it's possible that the last time I went to the beach, I was in a foreign country.

There's a few reasons for my lack of beach-going.  One is that I'm not exactly known for my swimming prowess - I know enough to make sure that if I do go swimming, I won't immediately drown or anything like that, but I'm not a very strong swimmer, so prefer to stick close to shore (or go to a pool).  The other is my fair skin.  In a climate like we have here in Perth, it's pretty much constantly sunny, and can get very hot.  Which usually means that venturing outdoors for any period of time with little or no sun protection ends up with me bright red.

So, today being a public holiday in Western Australia, and the weather being fine, sunny, but not too scorchingly hot, I suggested to my mum that we take a drive down to Cottesloe beach and look at the sculpture exhibition down there.

Sadly, when we got down there, the traffic was so bad that the streets were almost doubling up as a carpark (since there didn't appear to be any available parking anywhere).  So Mum and I decided that we'd turn around and go home, to try again another day, and next time use public transport.  Especially since Transperth were apparently putting on special shuttle buses from the nearby train station down to the beach front.

So that it wasn't a completely wasted journey, I suggested that we pull in to Scarborough, where we could have a wander about and go and get some lunch at one of the many cafes and restaurants in the area.

Clock tower in the middle of a large roundabout.

Scarborough beach now has an amphitheatre.  It's really nice to have somewhere shady to sit on the beach.  This shot is from the street side of the beach.  I didn't end up getting a shot from the beach.

It wasn't too busy at the beach.  And the flags to indicate the safe swimming area were really close together. Not that people seemed to be paying much attention to that.

 

The shoreline has been eroded a bit thanks to some stormy weather a few weeks back.

Foaminess!

A rather deep footprint.

The only standing sandcastle spotted (although it is surely only a matter of time before the sea reclaims it).

Jellyfish (probably), washed up on the beach.  Or as Acci's suggested, it's whale snot.

This pair of Surf Life Savers appeared to be having fun zooming round in their boat.

I just love the colours we get here.

Next stop, Africa!

Hmm...wandering along the shoreline in jeans is not the best idea...

After we brushed ourselves off, we wandered up to a cafe for lunch, then went home.  While not the adventure we'd set out to have, we still had fun!

Tai Chi in the Park

Park lessons are always an interesting photo opportunity.  Usually if we're having a park lesson, we're at Hyde Park.

Not only is it a lovely place to do Tai Chi, it's also a lovely place to wander round and take photos.

Tai Chi-ers!

  Wanted!  According to this sign, these turtles are an invasive species.

 

Warning!  Seed pods may fall without notice (except that there is this notice, so it's not really without notice, now).

And this just makes me think of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.  Also, this photo must've been taken in early spring, as this is the Jacaranda Walk.  Jacarandas spend most of their time being rather boring trees, except for a few weeks in late November when they're covered in purple flowers, before turning green for Summer.

We've also had a few impromptu park lessons in the park located next to our usual venue.  See some photos here! 

Other oddities in that park are the bus stop (I sat there for quite a while, but never saw a bus.)

And the No Parking sign.  Inside the park.  Where no cars can actually get in.  There are actually a few scattered round the perimeter of the park.

Today's park lesson was held at a new location called Rutter Park.  It's not a very big place, although it is located right by a primary school and community centre.  And the most interesting thing about this park is the not-so-comfy armchair and lamp.

Up close, it appears that the chair is made out of bricks, with a lovely floral design stamped all over the brickwork.

And it's all sitting on a lovely mosaic floor!

I love coming across this sort of thing in parks.  And to find that they've not been horribly vandalised and trashed (although the arm chair does show a bit of a burn mark on the back rest there...) is always a plus.  I know I've not been to many of the parks in my suburb lately, but I don't recall any of them having stuff like this.

And the important final part of any tai chi class...the post class gossip!

 Sadly, the hot topic for today has been our Sifu's bad health - he's been in hospital for the past week with a nasty infection in his foot.  His family are supposed to be flying here from China this week so he can have someone to look after him at home.  It's sometimes hard to remember that Sifu is 80 years old - he doesn't look anywhere near that!  I'm hoping that that is a testament to the health benefits of Tai Chi - the looking good for one's age, not the infected foot, that is.

Tricky Titles

There are times when journalists seem to pick misleading headlines for their articles, leading to a bit of confusion to someone like myself who really only skims headlines in a news feed.

For example:
"Phone box crash sparks chain of events"

Oddly enough, this delightful headline had me imagining that the Doctor has crashed his TARDIS once more.  And this time in Australia!  Sadly, the reality is a bit more prosaic, with the story turning out to be about some hooligan having driven a car into a public phone box (I'm surprised that there are any about to be driven into in this day), causing the box to fall onto another couple of teenage boys, injuring them fairly badly.

This next one was just a result of timing - also, this is something that happened six or more months ago.  I've had it noted down for absolutely ages, but never dated it or saved links to the articles concerned:
"Dingo Charged With Assault"
 When I first read this headline, my first thought was of someone charging an actual dingo.  This was because a few stories earlier, the headline was in relation to Lindy Chamberlain once again going through the courts to get her daughter's death certificate amended to show that the child had been killed by a dingo.

However, it ended up relating to Aussie celebrity Ernie Dingo who'd gotten into a bit of strife at a public appearance after hitting a kid around the same time.

On a related note, just listening to someone talk can also lead to those sorts of misleading conclusions.

Such as:
David Suchet on the Orient Express is a wonderful little doco where Mr Suchet goes on the Orient Express and explores the history of the train prior to his portrayal of Hercule Poirot travelling on the train and solving crime as he is wont to do.

One of the little tidbits of information given, was that there was a spy who once travelled on the Orient Express disguised as a butterfly collector.  However, for some reason, my brain was working at some warp speed that let me imagine that the spy was actually on the train disguised as a butterfly before Mr Suchet had finished the sentence.

Alan Davis on an episode of QI had the same problem when they were all discussing aeroplane-towed gliders.  His mind apparently spun off to imagine some weird hybrid aeroplane toad.

I can't help but wonder if other people have ever done something like that.  Also, that there are times when our brains can work so fast, we can imagine strange scenarios in the space of two words.

If the Apocalypse comes...

Last night, I went to make my usual evening cup of tea.  When I opened the pantry, I was a tad startled to see this:

That's three (3) boxes of 100 tea bags of Earl Grey tea, one (1) box of English Breakfast tea, the tin on top of the stack of Earl Grey also contains most of another 100 bags of Earl Grey tea.  The clear container is plain black tea, probably about 50 bags(?)...and that purplish tin that you can spot towards the back contains a bizarre concoction of green tea an rice.

So, if the Apocalypse comes, come round to my place, and we can sit round watching it while sipping tea.

Musical musings

Ugh...I can't believe how long it's been since my last post...thanks, Blogger Dashboard...

I have no real excuse beyond the fact that I have a feeling that a situation at work was making me feel rather disinclined towards writing anything, although I do have a couple of notes stashed away where I had thoughts about writing up stuff for the blog, and never felt motivated enough to do so. Fortunately, the work thing's sorted out, now, and I was thinking about my blog the other day, and how as it's entitled "Smerk Musings", I should put out some thoughts.

Anyhow, musical musings for now. Music's been on my mind the past couple of weekends, as due to the misguided aggression of the in-built computer clean-up tools on antivirus software, and a user issue of not understanding fully how these things worked, ended up resulting in my digital music library getting decimated.

Fortunately, my CD collection isn't huge - I've probably only got around 100 or so - if that. And I haven't been brave enough to make forays out into buying music online. Mainly because my current MP3 player is not an Apple-based product, and therefore doesn't play nice with iTunes (or is that iTunes doesn't play nice with non-Apple MP3 players?), and haven't exactly gone searching for other online stores, anyhow.

Another plus point that made the job a little less mammothy was the fact that most of my CDs had been ripped on another computer (my little laptop doesn't have a CD/DVD drive!), so the majority of it had been saved to an external hard-drive and is mostly intact. I still found a couple of instances where a song had been deleted from the external hard-drive, or I'd ripped a CD using another computer to a little flash drive, which due to the size of the things, I obviously deleted the music files once I'd transferred them to my computer.

Anyhow, I ended up managing to sort everything out, and get everything labelled correctly (it's very frustrating to find that a number of albums with wrong artists attributed to them, or is that just me being pedantic/OCD?).

So, I can now see that (according to the way Windows Media Player orders things):

- Artists: *NSync with "Bye Bye Bye" (just the one *NSync song, I swear!), to the Zutons with "Runaway"
- Songs: "#1 Crush" by Garbage to "Zyryab" by Paco de Lucia
- Release years: 1973 (Beatles best of 1962-1966) to 2010 (Triple J's Like a Version volume 6) and a large number where I couldn't spot the release/copyright year on the CD or CD sleeve
- Length of song: 0.15 for the Bazmark Fanfare by Baz Luhrmann to 21.46 for Infinite Joy by Ken Davis

All in all, I apparently have 134 hours of music...doesn't seem like much, really.