i have bruises all over my legs.  no idea how any of them happened.  i assume it must have been with the box lugging, but suspect a small team of pixies with little baseball bats attack me while i’m sleeping.

new place is extremely good and we are happy to be in it.  bonuses include:

*new kitchen with gas burners that turn on when they’re supposed to, and a light over the stove that works!

* bathroom that is so adequately ventilated that my towel is - gasp! - dry the next morning.  it also does not feature slugs, bugs or extant mould that is impossible to get rid of.

* quietness - when the doors are closed, you can’t hear the neighbours through the walls.

* perfect television reception!  so exciting to be able to watch the ABC without seeing the image repeated four times (five if there’s a strong wind).

* newness and brightness and general loveliness.

there are a couple of downsides, like the reduction in space and a bathroom fan that sounds like a plane taking off and that won’t turn off for 15 minutes after you’ve turned off the switch, but we’re adapting to our new goldfish bowl and an electrician is going to fix the fan.

it feels like a holiday living in this house.  i like it. 

am in the middle of moving house and took a few moments to delve into my computer.  the biggest mistake was to stop moving, as now i have no impetus to get back up.

it will be such a relief tomorrow when the removalists arrive to take all the big furniture over to the new place.  i get to stay at the new house all day and unpack, which is kind of cool, as then i get to put stuff where i want it (and mum has volunteered to do all the cleaning in exchange, which is totally fine by me!!).  have to do origami with all our possessions, as the place we’re moving to is a lot smaller than our current digs.  but newer and cleaner and more excellent in every way (georgia - in feel it’s kind of like brett’s flat in darlinghurst only with an upstairs.  oh...and furniture - none of that minimalist thing for us, nosiree!)

now i think i’d better go do some more before bed time.  next time i write i’ll be living elsewhere!

books:
stardust by neil gaiman
gorgeous!

(i think it’s only ‘book’ singular this month...i’m sure i read more than that but can’t tell you what it was)

movies:
many i intended to see but didn’t.

cultural input:
the pearl fishers
absolutely beautiful, tingly-sensation music.  sitting two rows from the front which was good because you could see everything onstage, but bad because you couldn’t read the surtitles (had to guess the intricacies of the plot, which seemed to be much more homoerotic than i remembered) and you could see the streaky finger marks in the lead guy’s fake tan.  other than that, wonderful!

sydney symphony
went with the lovely jackie menyhart to this concert, which was conducted by tan dun and featured his water concerto and the crouching tiger, hidden dragon concerto.  jackie had issues with the solo cellist, who was a very ‘dramatic’ and tight-leather-clad young woman with long curls she kept tossing all over the place, but she played very beautifully.  the water concerto was amazing (the first two rows had to wear raincoats), and involved three percussionists ‘playing’ huge bowls of water, using cups, gongs, hands, whatever.  very impressive (jackie didn’t have issues with the solo percussionist; she thought he was quite cute).

saving henry and crowds
saw this last week at the studio at the opera house with brett, em and bek.  interesting.  crowds was lots of fun - short, quirky and a very good use of soundscapes.  saving henry was less successful i felt, and not just because the subject matter was a little unsettling (about a young boy who had been sexually abused after his mother’s death...cheery!).  first off, it was billed as “an intensely poetic ballet”, but there wasn’t really anything you could call ballet in it.  angus cerini was very arresting and strong onstage, but there were huuuge gaps in the flow of the piece, it didn’t seem to go anywhere, i kept wanting to fall asleep (okay, i was very tired), and the stage manager’s calls could be heard very clearly in the audience.  as bek said “when there’s about to be a really suspenseful moment in a piece, i don’t want to know that lx cue 32 is standing by!” so not particularly great, but glad i went anyway, for certain moments, and for crowds.

not quite as highbrow theatre moments:
knock on wood
bek and i, led by sympathy and insanity, agreed to help my uncle out with a show he was invovled with. he is heavily into amateur theatre and having been involved with university theatre in the past i suppose it would have been churlish of me not to have offered my assistance when he was desperate for a musical director to step in at the last minute.  oh, such altruism will never be displayed again in such a fashion, i can tell you.

i managed to avoid going to rehearsals and didn’t even find out the name of the show until the dress rehearsal.  then bek and i spent three evenings at the ryde-eastwood leagues club, cueing the house band (in various states of inebriation) while my uncle and various poppets performed this show onstage.  i can’t say much more about it than that, as the memories are already sinking into oblivion, but suffice it to say that on our way home one night we developed a cocktail that captured the very essence of the show: midori and passion pop over a lite beer shandie.

class.

it’s also a good opportunity to get rid of stuff.  you live in one place for long enough and you start to line the walls with bits and pieces and eventually you’re living in your own custom built cave.  some of the stuff i have in boxes i have moved from place to place and never used, never dragged out, never done anything with except to stack more boxes on top.  so it’s gonna go!

some stuff i can’t get rid of, like a tape i found the other day of me in year 12 interviewing teachers and students at my high school about their first kisses.  not the world’s best interviews, but made me giggle.  and there is footage of a certain rupert reid with long scruffy hair and a yellow shirt.  i’m pretty sure that clip isn’t in his showreel, but he could add that to the five second clip of him in the matrix reloaded and i’m sure hollywood would beckon.