Welcome to 2015

Happy New Year! I greeted it as 2014 turned into 2015, up the top of our driveway, watching the fireworks over the distant city and the valley around us.

A morning swim before the Sun strikes the pool and forces us to seek shelter from its cancerous rays. Then, while Mother-in-law looked after Alex, B and I headed off to Miranda to watch the final episode of The Hobbit in "The Shire". Probably the best of the three movies.

On our arrival home we confirmed that there was no gas for the BBQ, eating cold prawns and salad for our first dinner of the new year rather than miso marinaded steak. It was a pleasant meal in the heat.

Then an evening swim in the pool, the waters above 30C, colourful fairy lights and lanterns above us and the Moon flickered behind the drifting clouds edged by the last of the Sun's light.

And as the day draws to a close, flashes and thunder as a great grey cloud chases away the heat of the day.

Welcome to 2015.

Maniac day

You know you are getting old when your day goes like this...

• Son wakes up and wants to play the new dance game you stayed up late installing for him the night before.
• Go to swimming lessons. Assessor says your son is ready for the next level.
• Have a quick lunch at McDonalds to celebrate and it's not even 11 am.
• Then head off to Chinese School in Miranda for a presentation day where your son performs along with the rest of his class.
• Half an hour later you are at a birthday party at Monkey Mania in Bankstown 
• Two and a half hours later after he's been running, dancing, sliding, driving and screaming you step outside into a torrential downpour and your shoes get soaked.
• Come home and cook miso steak stirfry.
• Your son keeps dancing in front of the PS3 until it's his bedtime.

... And you seem more tired than he does.

Heat and fog

One of those odd November days with temperatures in the high thirties. A pity the pool was ready. Thanks to quite a few days of high winds, the flowering gums and unusable pool vacuum pipes the pool has taken on a greenish tinge. I bought replacement pipes and $250 worth of chemicals and managed to suck up the leaves on the bottom. But after scraping the algae the suction ceased and the pump kept shutting down. So now the pool looks even worse.

Alex fell in while helping me. He got quite a shock, but seemed more disappointed in himself that he made a mistake and couldn't help further.

I fell asleep watching cricket. It was cricket weather and indeed why cricket is the perfect spectator sport for a hot day, background entertainment for brains slowed by the heat.

It cooled down with the arrival of a breeze in the late afternoon. Low cloud skidded along across the river, an unusual sea fog according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Higher cloud seemed to threaten storms that never eventuated, as aircraft passed overhead in the golden light. Quite beautiful, but the weekend is not long enough.

Of Hiroshima and war

While we are on the topic of Hiroshima I recently read one of the books we bought from that city's Peace Memorial Museum on the atomic bomb.

Shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War American journalist John Hersey visited Hiroshima and interviewed some of the survivors of the devastating nuclear bomb blast that destroyed the city. His account was published in The New Yorker and then as a book, Hiroshima, which is still in print to this day. It is freely available online.

I urge everyone to read it, so that they may understand the horrific consequences of using nuclear weapons and of war itself. And if you can visit the museum in Hiroshima so that you can see it with your own eyes.

I cannot regard war as noble and glorious. Soldiers should be seen as firemen, not tools of politics and power. People we respect for risking their lives to defend us from an event that the sane among us would never wish to occur. Just as nobody should unleash a destructive fire so too should we condemn those that would inflict war upon the world.

From Hiroshima

Something old
Something new
Nothing borrowed
Something blue

And blessed by a bird

Eucalyptus flowering

The valley walls of the Georges River have puffy cream clouds interspersed with their usual dark green. After each windy day the surface of the pool is covered with thousands of filaments, the stamens that make up the flower of a eucalyptus.

I don't recall a season where the flowering is as prominent as this. Throughout the bush and suburbia that makes up the local area, this one species of gum tree is in flower. The air is scented sickly sweet, almost like the smell of a rubbish bin.

I think the season is coming to an end, the stamens turning brown and stripping away, the night air infused with the pleasant scent of flowering gardenias as the days turn as hot as summer in the turbulence of late spring.

Rollercoasters and Dodgeball

I swear my birthday parties were never this big. In this first year of school it seems like you have to invite the whole class and then some. But when you watch them play or at school it's really like a big family. Maybe better than a family, or at least less troublesome!

On Friday I managed to catch the weekly school assembly and it was amazing how Alex's class have grown over the past year. So confident with their public speaking and I'm very impressed by how they seem to get on with the older kids as well.

We booked a supervised session at the local sports centre and the twenty or so kids played a variety of sports, from the planned dodgeball, to touch football and "stuck in the mud" where you have to crawl between the legs of any tagged player to "unstick" them.

After selecting the sports centre I had glimpsed a bit of the Dodgeball movie, inspiring the choice. When some wheelchair basketballers entered an adjacent court I thought Patches O'Houlihan had arrived to throw spanners.

After a sweaty hour they were led back to the tables for a party meal of chips, sushi (supposedly for the adults but the kids hogged most it), cocktail sausages in pastry and fruit.

The piece de resistance was, of course, the cake. We had said we were going simple this year, but Alex requested a rollercoaster chocolate cake and we couldn't resist going to the fondant again. Not that impressed with the result, but it did the job and made for a lot of bright blue tongues (after they were first turned red by raspberry slushies).

Absolutely exhausted as usual. Don't know how to start the week when we've barely had a weekend. Maybe next year it'll just be family and a few close friends... maybe...