Paws for a moment

The temperature continues at several degrees above average. The sun is hot and the very air embraces us like a warm, slightly damp cloth.

Matilda, not really designed for heat, what with black fur and all that, has been shedding hair for weeks, creating drifts of the stuff in her wake. Post-walk she's just flopped down in a corner or a shady spot in the garden and panted. When she finds water, she likes very much to stand in it.

Tomorrow, though, it will rain.

Almost Summer

It's almost summer, and the temperature is climbing past 30 degrees. So what better time to break out the woolly hat!

Kids These Days

The backstory here is that we've had a few parties to go to this weekend, and one of them was a birthday party for Jessica who lives around the corner from us and who is in Eloise's class at school.

The Jessica Family wheeze for her birthday parties is to produce a CD for all the invitees which contains songs which are requested by them. So they nominate their favourite song of the year, and all the songs go onto CDs then the partygoers get them back.

Jessica's party was at the Skate Centre yesterday - and yes, I did skate - and Eloise put on her CD today whilst I was doing something or other of a domestic persuasion.

So I heard this song emanating through the house, which I happen to know is a class favourite as well as being totally unappreciated in any context other than being a bit catchy and something that everybody is apparently supposed to like. I have tried to explain who Mick Jagger was/is, but just got blank looks.

Anyway, I poked my head around the corner to see Eloise in action, and whipped out the camera phone.

Jacaranda

The Jacarandas have been out in force this year, perhaps reflecting the general moistness and the explosion of vegetation everywhere. It has been a good year to be a flora. Although November is shaping up to be the dryest on record, with the Official rain guage having registered no millimetres, in defiance of the nocturnal emission that awoke me a couple of weeks ago but which had evaporated by the morning.

Notwithstanding all that the blossoms of the jacaranda tree, prone to emerge in October stroke November, evoke cliches of chromatic unrest, striking and rioting as they are and do.

They rain from the trees as they go, leaving magenta shadows beneath the trees which soon fade to a sharp-smelling yellow-brown.

You might observe, incidentally, the monstrous pile under construction behind this tree, an edifice of monumental size which leaves not a square metre untapped for lifestyle exploitation, spreading the identikit tentacles of boutique urbanity with its grey-and-white homoge to build-it-quick and sell-it-fast. The real estate ad features computer simulation pictures.

Waiste Not

It was the annual rubbish pick-up weekend in our little nook of Brisbane last week. This is a tradition whereby those who don't have the facility to take large pieces of rubbish to the tip can leave them by the side of the road and the Council will collect them.

Perhaps it's an unintended consequence, but what in fact transpires is a mass recycling activity, with people cruising the streets inspecting the stacks of stuff to see if there's anything worth salvaging.

Eloise got a hula hoop, and wasn't afraid to use it.

We took a ride up the street and bagged ourselves an old but functional stereo stack, record player, cassette player and all.

The irritating thing was that some dastardly dastards of debris redistribution thought it would be a profitable enterprise to extract the oh-so-valuable copper from anything electrical. They achieved this by chopping the mains lead off everything they could, thus rendering the appliance practically useless to anyone else.

So we had to forego what may or may not have been a working whipper-snipper and any number of other things that had been crudely emasculated.