1st week December - in which I ace my two uni subjects

I got my results for my two uni subjects back.

I did well, although not as well as I wanted to. But I am not disappointed. I did well and I am happy with my result.

The interesting thing is that I got the same mark for both subjects. I got the same exact percentage as well as the same grade. What are the chances....?

You can't take teenagers anywhere

You can't take them to see the British Museum in London



You can't take them to see the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna



And you can definitely not take them to a Mozart concert performed in the Fortress overlooking Mozart's hometown Salzburg.





(Thanks to Tom for the photos)

My favorite joke

Husband : "What did you make us for dinner tonight darling?"

Wife : "Reservations"

Thanksgiving

As an Aussie I don't really understand Thanksgiving. It is something about Pilgrims and Indians I think?

Anyway the thing I like about Thanksgiving is the idea. It is nice to give thanks for the good things in our lives.

I would like to give thanks for my life

for my husband

for my parents

for my brother

for my friends (even those who leave me to have wonderful adventures overseas)

I know how fortunate I am and I give thanks.

Birthday Book

Tom gave me lots of lovely presents for my Birthday (Thanks love!). One of them is the latest Jamie Oliver recipe book Ministry of Food. It is a great recipe book with wonderful pictures of each dish and easy to follow instructions using simple ingredients.

The book also contains a message. A message about eating well and being healthy enough to enjoy life. The name of the book is based on UK Ministry of Food that was created during the Second World War to make sure the food rationing was working and make sure people knew how to best use the rations of food they received.

It is a great reminder that knowing how to cook nutritious food from scratch is an important skill and one that fewer and fewer people have these days.

I see great value and worth in being able to cook. It is something I enjoy almost as much as eating - and we all know I enjoy eating!

Biscuits in the swamp land

In June Tom and I visited France. We stayed in Arles and drove to a near by walled city called Aigues-Mortes which is in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. The walled city was amazing but what really caught my attention was the biscuit shop.



It is better if we don't discuss how many euros I spent on biscuits and better still that I didn't work out how many Australian dollars those euros equated to. Sometimes it is best not to do the currency conversion - it is just too upsetting.

The biscuit shop was probably the most impressive in the world. It had HUGE quantities of biscuits piled up for purchase. They all melted in your mouth - and probably, once melted, oozed straight to my thighs.



It also had all manner of sweets, lollies, fudges and other diabetic coma inducing goodness.




I have never seen anything like this in Australia and, to be fair, that is probably just as well.

Happy Birthday to ME!

Today is my Birthday. Happy Birthday to me.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

This teacup and saucer may not look like much - especially since I have posted a photo that can really only be the arse-end of it - but it is beautiful and special to me.

My Grandmother - who turns 90 in February - gave it to me. It was purchased by her mother, my Great-Grandmother when my Grandmother was a child. When it was purchased it was already over 100 years old. Apparently there was a store which was closing down and my Great Grandmother bought it in the closing down sale. This was probably in about 1930 or so. It is nice to think that some things just don't change and that stores have been having closing down sales forever.

Anyway my Grandmother inherited it from her mother and she has given it, and it's twin, to me.

I am a little bit scared to use them. I use the china I have that is 100 years old all the time but these are almost 200 years old. It seems unlikely that I would be able to replace it if it broke.....

Welcome everyone from WTBAY!

Thanks for visiting and for your comments!

Have a great day everyone.

Photo de moi

Ever have trouble finding a nice photo of yourself?

I have hundreds of photos of myself that I don't like. And I don't think that it is because I necessarily look bad in these photos - that is not why I dislike them. It is because in the photos I don't look the way I see myself.

I have a specific picture in my head about the way I look. About the way my face, hair and body looks. It coincides with the way I look at myself in the mirror when I have my stomach sucked in, my chin raised slightly and my shoulders back. Clearly I don't picture myself hunched over or mouth wide open laughing. But that is how I often appear in photos.

I am fortunate that I have a husband who takes great care to get really great photos of me. He is better than most professional photographers because he understand how I see myself. He knows the image I have in my minds eye. And he can re-create that in a photo. It is real skill.

For example


So this photo might not be how I look all the time, because the reality is that I do often sit with my shoulders hunched and I very often laugh with my mouth wide wide open. But this is how I see myself. This is what I look like to me.

Bridesmaid Surprise

I think that the best thing about being a bridesmaid is getting to spend time with the bride's other close friends and family. So essentially the best thing about being a bridesmaid is the other bridesmaids.

Don't get me wrong, being in the wedding is wonderful, making a funny speech is great, looking awesome in your flash bridesmaid dress is a blast and being so close to the celebrations as two people publicly commit themselves to each other for the rest of their lives is brilliant.

The other bridesmaids are the best because they are unexpected.

I have had the privileged of being a bridesmaid twice. Both times I was surprised and delighted to find how much fun it was to spend time with the other bridesmaids, particularly those I didn't know very well.

I suppose it makes sense that we would get on well since we have the same friend but both times it was unexpected and lots of fun. It made being a bridesmaid even better.

I love weddings and I loved being involved in the two weddings that I bridesmaided in.

Here is a photo from my wedding, which even for me, Bridezilla, was a really fun day.

Housedress

Everyone has their favorite clothes. My favorite clothes at the moment are my two house dresses.

I have has house dresses since I was in my mid teens. I bought two cotton dresses that looked a lot like sacks and then grew too tall for them. So they were then sack-like and prostitute short. Clearly my mother would not let me wear them out of the house - so they became house dresses.

In case you don't know, a house dress is a comfortable dress that for some reason or other can only be wore around the house. The reason it should not and can not be seen outside the home varies. It could be a bleach stain, an ill-placed tear or, as in my case, it is in some way indecent.

The reason that these dresses are kept, and not discarded, is generally because they are comfortable. Oh so soft (after being washed a thousand times) and oh so comfortable to wear.

My two original house dresses lasted me until about three years ago. I threw them both out in a wardrobe cleanse and I have been sorry ever since.

This year I decided I needed some new house dresses. It seems that for me they always come in pairs.

I bought one in the post Christmas sales. It is 100% cotton, navy blue, and has really big pockets. I think that, if I am honest, it is probably a top. But I love it. I wear it around the house in summer when it is hot and I am cool. The down side is that I can't really answer the door in it and I have to put shorts on with it to go outside to hang out the washing (or put another way, I should put shorts on with it to go outside and hang out the washing).

My other house dress I got more recently. It is 100% cotton, with navy blue and gray horizontal stripes (I know - fashion suicide), it has pockets on the front and a tie at the waist. Unlike my other housedress this one is quite long which it makes up for by being way to low at the front. But on the plus side I can answer the door in it so long as I don't bend forward.

It is great to have something so comfortable and soft wear when I am doing jobs around the house or studying.

So now you know, if you come around unexpectedly to my place, there is a reason I take so long to answer the door....

The Paris Incident

Part 2 of the funny things that happened to me while traveling in Europe and the UK

Tom and I stayed in Paris for a few nights earlier this year. We stayed in a self contained apartment in the Opera district.

It was great. Finding it was not.

Traveling can be stressful. It is difficult to find your way around in a new place when none of the signs are in your language. It is even more difficult when you don't have the correct address.

I had booked our accommodation on the internet before we left home and had the details with me. Unfortunately I didn't really pay much attention to them before we left. I knew we needed to go to a street called Bergere which was near the Grand Boulevards metro station.

Tom and I arrived by plane from Edinburgh. We had been up very early in the morning to travel to Edinburgh to catch our plane to Paris, so even before we started our travel we were tired. We had a good flight from Edinburgh to Paris and after getting our luggage from the carosel we headed to the train station to find a train.

On the way to the train station I spotted a bus service that went to the Opera district, so we hoped on hoping it would take us close to where we wanted to go. It dropped us off about 1 kilometre from the station we were after and we walked from there, daypacks on and suitcases in tow.

Once we got to the station we were after I took out our maps. I located Rue de Bergere and happily we were just nearby. So I set off to look for the apartment. By this time we were exhausted. It was late in the afternoon and we had been up since before the sun was. I had been wearing my daypack which weighed about 12 kilos and pulling my suitcase which weighed about 20.

We had some trouble locating the apartment. When we reached here


Tom and I disagreed on what number we were looking for on Rue de Bergere which lead to this conversation

Me: (with tone) We are after number 6 Tom. There is no number six here.
Tom: No. We want number 5.
Me: (loudly) No. 6. I am sure it is 6.
Tom: No it is definitely 5.
Me: (yelling) I don't f*&king care what it is! There is no number 5 or number 6 on this street and we are completely f*&king lost!

Yes. That right. I had a tantrum on Rue de Bergere in Paris. I swore (and I very very rarely swear) at my poor husband who was completely correct. We were after number 5.

The problem was that we were not after Rue de Bergere. We were after Cite de Bergere. Which we discovered after looking at the travel docs again.

This was not good. I had no idea where Cite de Bergere was. None of my maps were detailed enough to include it. I began to think that maybe we were in completely the wrong district. Would I have to drag my suitcase and my tired self across to the other side of town?

After the exchange of a few more curt words, Tom bravely asked direction from a lady in a hotel and she said

"Oui, Oui, Oui, a gauche, a gauche, a droite"


which meant - Yes you stupid Australian Tourist can't you see you are right near that street. You just need to go left, left and then right.

So when I had had my explosion at Tom we were approximately 50 meters from where we wanted to be. As you can see on the below picture. The little man is where we were arguing and Cite de Bergere is the lane nearby




..que the James Bond music...

So we found the apartment building. The next hurdle (apart from not killing each other before we had a shower and a rest) was to get into the building.

Now when I had booked our accommodation I had been given a code into the building. We had the code. We entered the code. The code got us into the first door of the building. Then we entered a second code to get us through the second door of the building.

The number was not 007 - but it should have been.

Once inside the second "chamber" we turned left and on the wall was a safe. We entered a third code into the safe and it opened to reveal an envelope with our name on it. In the envelope was our room key.

So we had the key and the note attached told us that we were in room 3. We located room 3, used the key successfully to get into the apartment and collapsed on the bed.

Ah Paris in the springtime....so romantic

The assignment is over

Finally the assignment has been completed.

I am so relived that it is over. It was horrible, or more specifically the topic was horrible.

My assignment was partly on wrongful life claims. This is the claim that where a Doctor fails to diagnose a condition which leads to a child being born disabled the child should be able to sue the Doctor for wrongful life. i.e. because the Doctor did not diagnose the condition the child was not aborted as it should have been.

Wrongful life claims are not recognised in Australia or the UK but are in some other jurisdictions.

Reading case after case about children born severely disabled who are suing on the assumption that it would be better if they were not born made me sad. I am probably the only person in my course who found it so upsetting.

Anyway the upshot of this post is that despite the tears that this topic caused me to shed in distress and frustration, it is completed. I don't have to look at it again.

A friend indeed

A clever blogger today said

Everyone "will remember how you treated them when times were tough, when they needed a break, when a little support meant everything.

No one in particular will remember how you acted during the boom times"

I think that is really true.

For example - I am super stressed at the moment about my uni exam and assignment which are both due/happening on Monday. This afternoon my boss said I could leave a little early to get home and do my assignment rather than waiting for her to finish a meeting so that she could talk to me. She remembered what was happening in my life - despite the fact that she has a billion things happening in hers and was kind when I needed the extra time and support. I could have kissed her - except she is in another state.

Small acts of consideration for others are not difficult or taxing but gee they make a big difference.

My Royal Crown Derby

I think the only appropriate word for this collection is splendid.

It was Tom's grandmother set and she left it to him when she passed away. I think he might have been her favorite because she left him quite a few very nice things. Luckily my husband is the type of man who appreciated things of beauty (which is obvious since he loves me!) and we both adore this china set.

I used it yesterday when I had a cup of tea with breakfast. It was so delightful to drink from I ended up drinking a whole pot of peppermint tea!

Saint Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

Part 1 of the funny things that happened to me while traveling in Europe and the UK

Tom and I stayed in Vienna for two wonderful nights at the beginning of June this year. Austria is my favorite country outside Australia. There is a certain irony that the two countries have such similar names.

On the day that Tom and I arrived in Vienna, Tom was exhausted from the flight from Paris and decided to have a sleep. I on the other hand was raring to explore so left the hotel with my travel book and my purse. I was fairly well dressed, in a skirt and top, and (with the exception of the guide book) didn't really look like a tourist.

I walked down the Graben (Vienna's classy equivalent of the Queen Street Mall) to the massive Saint Stephen's Cathedral.

I had read in my trusty guide book that there was a tour in English each day at 3:30 pm. All the other tours were conducted in German. As I walked into the massive church my watch read 3:35. I found the tour was only just starting. They were a group of about 20 people listening to a charming young Viennese man explain the history of the back stained glass window in English. I surreptitious joined the tour.

The tour was great. It was lovely to hear about the working of this huge church and the history behind the works of art within it.

The tour even included a look at the front alter and pulpit which was cordoned off to the public. The guide led us through the barrier to the front portion of the church and then replaced it so that no one else would follow us in. He showed us the three alters including one which they claim has the shroud of Jesus below it. There were a few churches that I visited that made this claim. Perhaps they shared it out?

Anyway as we were approaching the end of the tour one of the young girls in the group spoke up. She let the guide know that "we" (the tour group) were a choir from the US and asked if it would be ok for the group to sing a hymn.

It was at this point that I realised that I had not found the English tour. I had accidentally joined a private tour of the Cathedral.

I didn't know what to do. I briefly considered singing with them, but they had a choir master with them who, I thought, would probably dislike a random Australian girl with (at best) an ordinary voice ruining their harmonies.

I would have run immediately except I was locked in. The barrier had been closed when we came down to the front of the church and I had not paid any attention to how it was closed or how it could be re-opened.

So I thought I would just play it cool and sit down on one of the front pews and listen. It seemed like a couple of the other ladies were going to do that too. But I had no such luck. The entire group moved into lines and began singing.

So I had not other choice. I fled. I walked quickly away from the group. I hurdled the barrier (in my skirt) and I was free.

The real shame was that they sounded so beautiful. The choirs voices carried around the cathedral and everyone who was there stopped what they were doing to listen to them.

Except me. I just kept walking.