Mar 9, 2007

Six Months

City from Mount Gravatt Little Miss Lazybones! I had been up for an hour, done the washing up, watched some telly and time was ticking by for Nursery, so at nine o'clock I sat outside Eloise's bedroom door whistling the theme tune for Peppa Pig (I swap "Eloise" for "Peppa Pig" - shut up).

Smiles and giggles and toast and milk and suncream and tooth-brushing and dressing later, we were on our way, armed with a family snapshot and a few light-hearted words about us. The Nursery had left a note asking us to provide these for a family scrapbook they are putting together. A certain Miss Julie Seldon had assumed that the note was a nag, so there was a certain amount of pressure brought to bear from certain quarters to complete this little taskette.

Onward from the Nursery to the usual Friday haunt up at Mount Coot-tha but again we chose a different walk to go on, which involved exploring a path which led down from the Rangeview picnic area, nestled between the TV stations up there. It was very very steep and didn't really lead anywhere. With all the climbing back up it took an hour and a half, and given the heat, it was sweaty and tiring. The dogs had a good walk anyway.

Back at base, I surfed a while in researching more for camera lenses, and decided to bite the bullet after the disastrous shopping trip the other day and go to a proper shop. The shop in question is on Brisbane's south side and I set off, confident that I knew the way.

Four wrong turns later, three times over the river, one trip up the Riverside Expressway in the wrong direction, and one painful crawl through a major building project in the City Centre, I arrived and - deep joy - they had the lens I wanted which allows me now to zoom to a focal length of 135mm with image stabilisation. Wahey!

I decided to try out the lens up a nearby lookout with views to the City. Unfortunately I had left the Refidex at home when planning the route to the shop :(

So by a process of trial and error, and there was plenty of error, I got up to the lookout. It was a bit disappointing as the city was really quite a long way off, but hey presto! with a telephoto zoom lens suddenly it's very much closer! Wahey!

Nicole finished work around three so we met up for coffee. It's our six-month anniversary of being here today and so, coupled with the fact that I'd forgotten to have any lunch we celebrating by throwing fiscal caution to the wind. Nicole had a glass of wine and a cake, and I had a latté, bruschetta and cake. We'll be paying that one back for weeks.

I picked up Eloise from the Nursery. When I got there she didn't notice me. She was absorbed in playing with four or five other kids on a climbing frame. I watched her for a little while, watching quietly the climbing that was going on and then tentatively imitating it. Though she wasn't really communicating with the other children through words, she gently touched them, and stole their hats.

A note was written on the signing-out book congratulating us on being the first to submut our family scrapbook contribution. Eat that, Seldon.

We topped off our shameless profligacy by having a takeaway pizza for supper from Tomato Brothers.

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