Incidents and accidents

The bikes have been great. But there have been two recent incidents (or rather, one incident and one accident) that have dimmed their appeal.

The first is that the management company of our building is no longer allowing people to keep their bikes under the stairways in the courtyard. Under the stairways is a dead space, unused for anything else. No one has an apartment down there, and no access is blocked by bikes stored there. But management have decreed that bikes must not be kept there anymore, and they're going to take anything stored in any common areas. Now we have to lug our bikes up two stories every day, which makes them less appealing.

The accident occured as I was riding home from work on Friday. I was coming down a hill, and coming up to a red light. A taxi was stopped at the red light, but it wasn't pulled in or in any way indicating that it was about to disgorge passengers. Suddenly, the passenger opened his door into the bike lane, right in front of me. I was going at a resonable clip, downhill, and there was nowhere for me to swerve to avoid the door - there was a parked car to my left and the taxi to my right. I slammed smack into the door and flew off my bike, over the car door and landed in the street. Nothing is broken, but I have some pretty big bruises. The guy who hit me with the door was very apologetic and shaken up about the incident. I told him I was okay, but he better look the next time he's getting out of a car!

Last weekend we went down to the pub to watch an Australian rules football match. It's a hard game to follow - possession changes very quickly, and it's fast-paced all round. The ball is irregularly shaped, and it bounces all over the pitch in all sorts of crazy ways. When someone tries to pass, maybe the receiver will catch it, maybe the receiver will fall down (which seems to be the most common - they fall down an awful lot), maybe the other team will get it, or maybe it will bounce off in a completely different direction. I'm very impressed with the people who manage to play with such a greased watermelon and actually make it go where it's supposed to.

We also worked on pictures for Leslie's assignments. One was an assignment using multiple flashes, and he wanted to take a picture of himself singing under a bridge and himself on top of the bride pouring water on the singer. My job was to run in and flash light at him under and over the bridge during a long exposure. The only good source of water that was nearby was the ocean, so Leslie took off his shoes and socks and ran into the sea between takes to fill his bucket. As time went on, the pavement where he threw the water got wetter and wetter, so by the end he was sitting in a big puddle. The whole process lasted about 3 hours, ending at 1 am. He was stoic to the end, but I think he was happy to get home and put on the heat.

He also wanted to take a picture of flash showing motion, so we went out to the park and I turned cartwheels for him to photograph. I haven't done a cartwheel since I was in primary school, so while it was good to know I still have the ability, I don't remember being nearly that sore in my Nittany Gymnastics days. All my muscles were super sore the next day, and he wasn't happy with the way the picture turned out and didn't use it.

He also had to take a picture using a very fast film, so we went out to a bar that promised live music. Music was definitely a stretch, and live was a bit thin, too. It was a guy who leaned his guitar against an amp to create feedback, and then hit various buttons on the floor to make it sound even more intolerable. After such a "performance" I went home, and Les went to another bar, where he found an actual band playing real music, jazz and soul.

Today we went down to the St Kilda art market, where a bunch of artist sell their handmade crafts. We met a very interesting woodcarver who was born in Brooklyn, in East New York, and has been living in Melbourne for the last 34 years. He learned woodcarving as an apprentice to a woodcarver in Indonesia, and now makes stunning cutting boards. His accent was an interesting mix of Aussie and Brooklyn - even after all these years, the Brooklyn was still very apparent.

We also met a woman who makes clocks out of 50-year-old timber fence posts. Her clocks were absolutely beautiful. She's also a singer, and just came back from Ireland, where RTE put some of her CDs on the air. Her mother came over from Dublin when the clockmaker was just 3. The mother came over with £10 in her pocket and absolutely hated Australia. After a few months she wrote to DeValera and asked him to bring her home. She got a response, but Dev said the Irish government wasn't in the business of bringing people back from Australia.

It was a neat market, with leatherworkers, woodworkers, painters, photographers, ceramicists, jewelry-makers and all sorts of other crafts.

On our way home we saw a guy walking an alpaca on a leash. The alpaca seemed completely unfazed to be walked on one of the busiest streets in St Kilda, and was utterly unconcerned by the numerous dogs that barked at it. We stopped at one of the four bakeries on the street for cakes, and had hot chocolate and cake when we got home (it's a rainy, windy day). I have massive bruises all over, but life is still pretty damn good.

It's all relative

Before we begin, I'll tell you that I'm a relief blogger this time. Leslie had a very good, very long blog entry written, and when he went to publish it Blogger ate it. He got frustrated, so I'm now filling in.

Two weekends ago we went to visit Louise Joy, a relative of some kind of Leslie's. She's a fifth cousin or fourth cousin many times removed, or something. She lives in a suburb about 30 miles from the city. We took a tram and two buses to get there, and walked the final half mile or so. It was a 2-hour Odyssey.

She's a very nice woman, and showed us around the grounds of where she lives and made us morning tea. She has an interesting history - she spent a good portion of her childhood in India, where her parents were missionaries. She showed us yearbooks from her time there. It's kind of strange the way Britain imposes Britishness on its colonies, with no regard for the local climate or culture. The yearbook could have been from any private school in England at the time - everyone was white, and they wore the same clothes that children would have been wearing in England, not taking into consideration that England and India have vastly different climates.

I have to admit, the concept of looking up very distant relations is something of a strange one to me. I'm glad people do it, as you meet very interesting people like Louise by doing so. But I don't think I'd feel any more connection to a very distant relation than I would by choosing someone at random from the phone book. Louise knows many members of Leslie's family, so this was not a cold call to a relative. But people do look up their distant family, and I wonder why. What draws them to look for them?

Louise has a daughter, Rosemary, who is an artist. As it happened, she had a show opening at a gallery very close to our house on Thursday of the same week. We headed along to that and met Rosemary, who is also very nice. She had created miniature percussion instruments. They were very beautiful, made of a rich wood. She said it was interesting to see people's reaction to them, because many people picked them up and played with them.

We were very artistically-inclined last week. The day before Rosemary's opening we went to a exhibition opening at the gallery two doors down (between us and it is a chocolate cafe, which makes beautiful cakes, scrumptious chocolates and excellent breakfast pastries - it's a rough life here, but we are stoic). This exhibition's centrepiece was a series of life-sized (or slightly smaller) kangaroos made of ceramic tiles carrying satchels on their backs. They were really cute (I don't know if cute is a word bandied about it Real Art circles, but I thought they were extremely cute), looking very friendly and sweet. I think the woman who opened the exhibition thought they were cute too, because she said they were travellers, and they collected food on their journeys and stored it in their satchels. She also said they were eager to share their food with friends or fellow-travellers.

It's getting a bit chillier, and we've been making soups to keep us warm. We've made tomato and basil, vegetable, mushroom and carrot and coriander. If anyone has any (vegetarian) soup recipes and want to give them to us, we'd be very grateful. The market is about a 15-minute bike ride from here, and it's nice to have so much fresh produce available to us to make our soups. The market also sell fresh orange juice, which is the best I've ever had outside Florida. Victoria is a citrus-producing territory, and now that the weather has gotten colder the oranges are extremely sweet and delicious. The orange juice is squeezed that day, and there's just nothing better.

Leslie has bunch of assignments due this week, and he's working hard to get them done. He works very hard, but I think he feels rewarded and that this course is teaching him a lot of very useful stuff.