Nov 15, 2015

Jazz, in the Loosest Possible Sense of the Word



Eloise is a member of the school jazz band. Watching a performance of the jazz band is a strangely surreal experience, as the various members of the ensemble, and there are many, struggle to play their instruments in time with the teacher, who plays his guitar rather than conducts. And as they are beginners, it's fair to say they struggle to play their instruments at all. In combination with this, there are several singers who struggle to stay in time with everyone else, and everyone else being out of tune with each other, they struggle to stay in tune with them.

The resulting dirges can only really be described as cacophonous. Truly, mind-bendingly, teeth-jarringly cacophonous. I have a video. I could post it. But I won't.

Generally they perform each year at the Customs House in the City apparently but this year they'd been gazumped by a fee-paying wedding so to the Brisbane Jazz Club we wended our wary way on a bright sunny day.

The performance was in an open-air area right by the river. The sun was beating down. The tide was high. When a city-cat went past its wake would lap at the feet of the performers. Some canoeists ambled by, the buzz of traffic filtered across the river from the city. All was calm and well with the world.

The calm was shattered by the Macarena, or something loosely resembling it. It struggled to recover amidst a spattering of well-intentioned applause, only to be beaten down again by a song which proclaimed that it liked to wave its hands up in the air sometime; many in the audience felt like waving the white flag, I'm sure. The Time Warp took us by the scruff of our necks, put its hands on our hips then did unspeakable things to our ears.

They're only beginners.

They are only beginners.

Nov 11, 2015

Nov 8, 2015

Cake-day



I may previously have alluded to Nicole's prime motivation around our children's birthdays, which is to bake cakes of stupendous complexity and art.

Due to work commitments we were unable to schedule Nicole's birthday party until a week after the actual birthday that was supposedly being celebrated but regardless we had a cake to make and more to the point to decorate.

This year's theme was the Octonauts (not Frozen, take note) and we made icing-sugar citizens of the deep to accompany Peso the Pungent Penguin, Kwazi the Cretinous Cat and Barnacles the Bollocks Polar Bear down our gullets and into the Midnight Zone of our digestive tracts.

They'll all look the same coming out, possibly not that dissimilar to how they looked going in, for works of art they were most definitely not.

Especially Kwazi, who looked like he'd had an unfortunate encounter with Salvador Dali's Sausage Making Machine.

Nov 2, 2015

Birthday Number Three



Is it wrong to put a toddler into Childcare on its birthday?

Lyra probably understood the general concept of birthdays this time around, insofar as the toddlerof logic of event = outcomes goes. For birthdays = presents and that's all that counts.

For Nicole of course birthdays = cakes, but she's so much more advanced, isn't she.

So present-opening wasn't undertaken until the evening, and many presents there were to be opened, thanks to Lyra's generous grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends. Oh, and immediate family.

Three glorious years. Here's to three more. At least!