Archive for December, 2008

I was casting my mind back to Christmas days of the past, when I was a similar age to the sprog. I can remember well the pre-’santa is actually mummy and daddy’ days – finding it hard to sleep, waking up at the crack of dawn, presents in a pillow case at the end of the bed. So it’s been really funny watching Jack this season. He has his suspicions about the origins of his presents, but he’s not stupid enough to jinx it all by calling fake on the jolly fat man in the red and white suit.

The missus and I got to bed at about 2:00am last night and were awoken by a very excited little boy at 6:00am. As excited as Jack was by the stocking in his bedroom, he still dashed off to the bog for his morning piss – if ever there was a boy that liked his routine, it’s Jack. He appeared at the side of our bed holding his stocking saying, “Santa’s been!” And indeed he had.

Every year we try to make an effort not to spoil our son and every year, like most parents I suspect, we fail. He got in-line skates, a skateboard, a DS Lite, three DS Lite games, books, sweeties, a remote control aeroplane, Pokemon cards and a farting toilet. I always like watching him to see which present will be the biggest hit – this year Liz actually struck gold with her present to Jack of three packs of Pokemon cards, which just happened to include two energy cards and three evolutions. So that’s alright then.

This year Santa brought me an Elgato EyeTV Diversity for the living room Hackintosh and a $200 gift voucher at the local surf shop which I plan to spend tommorow on a ‘shortie’ wetsuit. Liz got a very swish Rip Curl watch, some fetching handbags, some new Crocs, some jewelery and lots of wine.

We drove over to may parents at 10:00am for more gift-giving. By the time we were on the road to Broughton the last of the grey skies from the wet front that passed over us yesterday were clearing and temperatures were lifting. My dad had gone to town on the Xmas lunch (traditional) – by 1:00pm I was stuffed and everyone had collapsed on the comfy chairs on the deck to relax in the sunshine.

I was the first in the pool, quickly joined by Liz and Jack. We had a very relaxing splash around for an hour or so, followed by a light lunch and then we headed home.

Boxing day started out warm and sunny and finished that way. We headed back over to my parents to see my sister and the BIL who’d driven down from the Southern Highlands for the annual gathering of the clan. We arrived at about 10:30, sister was already sitting in the pool, glass of champers in hand and the BIL was already watching Australia get caned by the South Africans in the cricket.

We ate leftovers and swam into the pool until early evening, before heading home. Another Xmas over, the new year to come.

Projectile …
Two days before Xmas, Jack was spectacularly ill. He’d said to his mum that he didn’t feel too great earlier in the day but we didn’t pay too much attention to it because he perked up again. However at about 1am, just as I was thinking about going to bed, I heard the tell-tale sound of vomiting from Jack’s room.

I rushed in just in time to witness a scene reminiscent of Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s most excellent motion picture – The Meaning of Life. Jack was sat on the bed, throwing up copious amounts of orange (why is it always a light orange/beige colour?) puke all over his bed/himself and the floor.

Like most parents I suspect, we’re well versed in post-puke procedures these days. I took Jack into the bathroom, pulled the pukey PJs off him and stuck him under the shower with a toothbrush, while Liz began the clean-up. It soon became apparent that the mattress, unprotected as it was, was a right-off. Such copious amounts of vom had been spilled on it, that there was no way it was ever going to smell right again – particularly not with the summers we have here.

So the next day I went to town and bought a new mattress the Mattress Factory outlet. I brought it home and put the old one in the plastic wrapping to take to the tip. I put the puke-soaked mattress in the back of the car and drove the 7km to the tip – given that the temperature outside was about 32°c, you can perhaps understand why I spent most of the journey with my head out of the car window. I approached the tip, relieved I’d be able to offload my stinking cargo – only to discover that they’d closed for Xmas and wouldn’t re-open for three days. So, as tempting as it was to sling the mattress at the gate to the dump, I drove back home, unloaded it and stowed it round the side of the house.

Jack made a full recovery the next day.

No vacancies …
The day after Boxing Day I was on patrol on the beach. Since it was the Xmas holidays and many of the club’s members were back from boarding school or college, we had a full squad for the first time this season. Which was just as well really as it turned out to be an eventful day.

The first emergency happened when a bloke came up to us and asked if we had a spare Ventolin for a friend who’d lost his and was having an asthma attack. We said we didn’t  and asked if the guy was okay. Richard sent Matt to have a look-see and it turned out the bloke was some way from okay – he’d got dumped in a wave, had face-planted on the bottom, swallowed some water and was hyper-ventilating. We got him on oxygen and called an ambulance.

Meanwhile a small girl was brought to us suffering badly from Blue Bottle stings. She’d caught a right dose of venom across her back and was, understandably, in some distress. As per guidelines, we put her in the shower with the water as hot as she could bear. After about half an hour the stings calmed down long enough for her mum to get her dressed and back to the holiday house.

While everyone else was coping with all that, I was left on the beach, on my own, with about 500 holidaymakers for company. The surf was fairly heavy and so the inevitable happened – a flash rip blew up right on the right-hand flag. I spent the next two hours in the water with a rescue tube letting people know about the rip and plucking the odd kid out of the water that floated into it.

After lunch I was in the radio room to hear a call from a small boat on the VHF to the marine rescue that their motor had conked out, their anchor was slipping and they were only about 200m off the beach, just south of the surf building. I got the binoculars out and saw the boat in question. I radioed down to the beach and Byron and Alister fired up the IRB and want to offer their assistance. No sooner had they reached the boat than the VMR vessel hoved into view and towed the stranded tinnie away.

The next message on the radio was from Mollymook SLSC, 80km south of us, letting Surfcom Kiama know that due to a large electrical storm, they’d closed the beach. I had a look at the radar on the BOM site and it clearly showed a large storm heading directly for us. Sure enough, beaches down the coast shut down one by one.

The storm front was something to behold – a huge wall of white cloud stretched from inland to way out to sea. As the first lightning and thunder burst out, we put the flags on the sand and closed the beach. The storm came directly overhead and was extremely active for the 45 minutes it took to pass northwards. No sooner had it gone, to be replaced by some light drizzle at the tale-end, than surfers appeared from nowhere to take advantage of the now wind-free conditions and glassy waves.

One of the things that takes some getting used to when you live in Australia, is the topsy-turvey seasons. This is particularly noticeable during the festive holiday season. In the UK, Christmas is a rare high-point in the otherwise bland miasma that is the British winter. In the UK, Xmas and the new year enable you to forget, temporarily, that you have another five months of low grey clouds and drizzle to go before it warms up for just long enough to remind everyone that there’s a yellow heat-giving orb in the sky. In the UK, Xmas is the interlude between acts one and two of the school year. In the UK the stores start their sales the nano-second the last late Xmas shopper is ushered out into the drizzle.

Down here though, it’s very different. In Oz, Xmas signifies the end of the year in more ways than one. The start of the Xmas break means the end of the school year and the beginning of the long summer holidays. Xmas is merely an (admittedly welcome) interlude to what, for most people, is at least two full weeks of work. It means six weeks of freedom for the kids and six weeks of keeping ‘em happy for the parents. It means driving south or north with a car stuffed to bursting with gear and a tinnie towed behind.

Took this photo of the Shoalhaven River from up on the hill at the Two Figs winery, whose website Liz recently created.

So in a very real sense, the Christmas thing gets diluted by the fact that it’s the summer holidays. In the UK, Christmas day is the whole point of the break – but down here it’s merely a party day at the start of the summer sesason. This may go some way to explaining why Xmas is much more low-key here. Sure there’s Carols by Candlelight and Xmas muzak in every shopping mall, but you don’t see supermarkets giving over whole aisles to Xmas gifts from August onwards. In fact, I was in David Jones in Sydney (the closest we’ve got to Harrods) a few days ago and, apart from the displays of chocolate novelties and the terrific window displays for the kids, it seemed like any other day in there to me. And I don’t find that depressing either – I find it refreshing.

So our little town of Barefoot Bay is bracing itself for the influx of thousands of holiday makers. Some houses here, that have stayed shuttered for the last 11 months, will have their doors flung open and the air allowed to circulate. The four caravan parks will fill up and the bowlo carpark will be full to bursting most nights of the week. Just in time, the temperatures have lifted, the rain has gone, the blue skies have arrived and summer has soared in.

Hey You, the Rock Steady Crew …
The day of Jack’s big concert at the recently built Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre has been and gone. Jack has been taking breakdancing classes for the last eight months or so, at a little dance school in nearby Nowra. He is taught by Gemma, who looks more like a boy than most of the kids at the local highschool – in fact when Liz said that the teacher was a girl, it took me a full 20 minutes to come round to her analysis. There are three other boys in his class and for the last few months they’ve been working on the dance routine they must perform at the end of season concert.

Yo yo yo, what up bitch, word to ya mamma in da hood.

So on the big day we drove to Nowra and parked close to the stage door. We dropped Jack off and then went round to the front of the building to have a coffee and wait for the big performance. The curtain was raised at 7:00pm and the first of the dance schools students took to the stage. Jack’s crew had been nudged down the order to account for the fact that they didn’t have to do a costume change. So when they did come on, to a great hip-hop track, the crowd roared their approval. Jack’s dance went as planned, there was plenty of spinning on backs and sliding across the stage and otherwise busting a move. Afterwards, Jack joined myself and Liz in the audience to watch the school’s feature performance of the Lion King which, ermm, wasn’t quite as entertaining.

HSM3
Jack’s seriously into his dancing and his favourite films at the moment are the High School Musical series. So Liz decided to treat the sprog to tickets to the live show at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney. They had tickets to the early performance, so we set off bright and early at 7:00am in order to find somewhere to park and get into the theatre on time. We arrived with plenty of time to spare, so we get jack kitted out with a souvenir programme and some snacks. then I left them to it.

I had no plans for when they were watching the show, although knowing it was getting on for three hours, I did consider watching a movie. The only thing that was any good was Quantum of Solace, however, and I saw that last week (fucking excellent film incidentally) so I decided to go shopping instead. I went into Borders bookshop in one of the malls, where they’ve helpfully put a load of comfy chairs right in front of all the magazines. I sat there for a good hour, with a coffee bought in the adjoining Gloria Jeans, reading magazines.

One of the festive window displays at David Jones. The little monitors the elf is watching show pictures of us, looking in through the window.

After I’d lost all feeling in my arse,  I went for a mooch through David Jones food hall. David Jones is the closest Sydney has to Harrods, although that’s not really a fair comparision since it feels more like Harvey Nicks or one of the Oxford Street department stores. Anyway – it’s a nice place and has a famed Oyster bar where you can sit on a stool and sup oysters from shell’s whilst sipping some expensive champers. It’s one of the few places in Australia where you can buy semi-authentic Cornish pasties too – obviously they’ve never been near Cornwall, but they do at least look the part.

Anyway – after a very satisfying mooch around the CBD, including a live demonstratation in the Apple store and another coffee in a swish street-side cafe, I walked back to the theatre to get Jack and Liz. The show was a huge hit with the sprog and even the missus’ claimed to have enjoyed it. We decided to get some lunch in the Westfield under the Sky Tower – always our favourite place to eat when we’re in Sydney. Then Liz asked if we could go to David Jones so Jack could see Santaland. As you can imagine from Sydney’s poshest store, the David Jones santa is extremely popular and the queue was about 90 minutes when we arrived, so we took Jack to Santa’s den instead. Here they have a talking tree. Josh asked it if it could dance and the tree explained that it found that quite difficult on account of its root system! Great stuff. After that we decided to head home and scrounge some tea of my parents.

Six weeks to life …
So of course, school has now wound down for the year. As always the last week is a frenzy of presentations and concerts and meetings and shows. We went into school on Wednesday for the big presentation evening, at which all students get various awards and certificates and the year 6 students are ‘farewellled’ as they get ready for senior school.

The night comes in two parts. Firstly, all the parents are invited to the classroom(s) of their child(ren) for an award ceremony for that particular class. Jack’s teacher this year was Mr Burney. For the first six months it’s fair to say that Jack hated Mr Burney. But I could clearly see how Jack was getting just the right amount of discipline and I was on his teacher’s side from the start. Here we are at year end and it’s fair to say that Jack now really lives Mr Burney. In fact he said that if he had to have him again next year (which is fairly possible due to the combined year 1/2 classes) then he’ll be happy.

Jack gets his end of year recognition certificate from his teaacher.

Anyway – the second part of the night was a big concert/award giving thing. This is more about the older students at the school, as the year 6 students are sent on their way and the new school captains are picked from the year 5′s. Various kids are singled out for special awards – the usual faces stepping up to collect them. All this goes on for 90 minutes and then, with a final up-tempo rendition of Advance Australia Fair – we all (rather aptly) bugger off.

A Grand Don’t Come For Free …
Unless you live in Australia. The global financial meltdown has, of course, affected Australia too. In order to help stave off recession, our Prime Minister – Kevin Rudd, opted to give all working familes and retirees, $1000 to spend how we wished. Tivos, washing machines, hobbs, bikes, a trip to Bali – there were no strings attached we were just given the cash and told to (and I quote) “go out and spend it.” We got ours a couple of days ago – just in time for Xmas. The timing couldn’t have been better, because last night Jack had a vomitting bug and threw up all over his mattress which I went out and replaced this morning.

And finally…
What do you think of the new site theme? In a strange roundabout sort of a way, the breaking of my old site has turned out to be a good thing, because it forced me to update the blogging software and fix the many bugs it had. It also enables me to use much more up-to-date themes like this cool one, which I love.

To all our old chums in the UK – please get Skype installed on your PCs in time for Xmas day – and we’ll hook up with you at some point. Webcam too if you have one.

As you can see, my blog’s design has changed a bit. The powers-that-be upgraded the MySQL backend on the server the site’s housed on – and it broke the old template. So I’ve switched to this one temporarily. Since it’s broken anyway, it’s probably a good time to upgrade to the latest WordPress, so there will probably be some down time over the next couple of days as I sort everything out.