On Top of the World

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This week, the theme is Celebration, so this is a photo I took at M’s aunt’s birthday party earlier this year. I took lots of photos, but they were all blurry! That cake was fantastic - chocolate mud cake with a layer of chocolate fudge between the sponge and the icing. And the icing is the sort you get on wedding cakes; I love that icing! Mmmm.

I wrote a hugely long post about our trip to Clare, but as I was reading it I felt extremely bored, so I thought I’d start again with a slightly abbreviated version. So.

Overall it was very good, despite it being very cold and wet. We paid $22 each for the shuttle bus, which ferried people around to the 15 or so wineries participating in the weekend. The bus did not come at set times, so it was a bit of a tossup as to know when to make a move when you were ready to try out the next place. The bus didn’t actually drop people off at the wineries either, but instead at the side of the road so you had to walk up the long driveway to get to the action. I didn’t think that was terribly good planning; I would much rather wait for a bit longer in between buses and have it drive you right up than have more frequent buses and have to walk a kilometre each way. So on the one hand, at least it meant that we didn’t have to worry about how much we drank, but on the other it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway because I only had 2 glasses all day and M had 3.

We went to 3 wineries - the first was the worst because it was a marquee set up outside on bare dirt, which was actually a huge pool of mud due to the rain. The second was better, because at least the marquee was set up on lawn, so there weren’t as many slushy bits. The third was the best because it was all gravel. Yes, my opinion really did rest on the condition of the ground. But we had a really nice dessert at the 2nd and third ones, so it wasn’t entirely ground-related.

We got back to the hotel at around 4, only to find that the owners weren’t there - they’d gone out to enjoy the Gourmet Weekend. We left a message for them on voicemail, and had to wait around 45 minutes in our car before they came back. When we got to our room, we were freezing and M got the open fire going. Initially a lot of smoke came into the room, so that there was a uniform haze throughout, but eventually it went where it was supposed to. We then thought a spa would be nice. And how nice it was. Aaaaaahhhh.

After the spa we spent the night curled in front of the fire watching tv, eating chocolates and drinking port. This would have been great if our eyes weren’t stinging from the smoke! So, an open fire is great in theory but not so great in practice - from our experience anyway.

In the morning we cooked our breakfast (the breakfast provisions came with the room) - bacon, eggs, tomato and toast. I had a bacon and tomato sandwich - yummy. What was a bummer was having to wash our dishes, which I guess makes sense but still isn’t the ideal end to a nice weekend. After putting some of the cereals in our bag (hey, we paid for it!), we headed off to a winery in Mintaro before driving home. A very nice weekend!

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Here is my first entry in the Photo Scavenger Hunt! The theme for this week is ‘Open’, and I’ve chosen this view from Mt Lofty in South Australia. It was a beautiful day, and this is the view we had as we were eating our picnic lunch.

We had pizza for tea tonight. I had 7 pieces. Yes, 7. All together now… OINK! It was really nice though, and a lot of the pieces I had were pretty small. Does that make it better?

I’m really looking forward to Sunday. M and I are going to Clare for their annual Gourmet Weekend. It’s a food and wine thing (for those who might not know, the Clare Valley is a major South Australian wine-making district) that’s being held on the Saturday and Sunday, but we’re going up on Sunday (since Sunday is the day when all the wineries have lots of yummy food on offer), staying the night and coming back on Monday. The place we’re staying at is a self-contained room, with an open fire and provisions for a cooked breakfast. It will be nice to sit in front of the open fire, sipping wine and eating chocolates (I bought some chocolates on Monday for us to take there).

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In other news, I’m starting an Auslan bridging course next week. The aim of the course is to give students more experience with signing to people from a whole range of backgrounds, and learn to adapt their signing according to who they’re talking to, such as different levels of education, or different age groups - much like we automatically do when we’re speaking to different people.

It’s held on Thursdays until the end of the year (with breaks during normal school holidays), which means that I’ll be studying three nights a week now. I’m looking forward to the course - I really hope that I make some improvements this year. I can’t remember whether I mentioned this before (although I’m pretty sure I did), but I decided to make some videos of myself practising my Auslan, in the hope that I’ll be able to watch at the end of the year and see how much I’ve improved. So another reason for doing the bridging course is so I can get some more practice. I need to do them more often though because I don’t think I’m getting enough practice. I’ve only made 8 so far.

In order to do the bridging course, I had to go to an interview. There were 4 people there altogether (not including me) - two hearing people who work at DeafSA, a Deaf man (who I knew already) from DeafSA, and an interpreter for him. The first part of the interview was spoken, and they just wanted to know a bit about my educational background and how much Auslan I’d done. The second part was signed, and they told me to sign a story, just so they could see my signing style and expression. The third part was readback, where I watched two videos, each with a Deaf person talking about growing up, ie their education, job etc. They stopped the video every so often and I had to tell them what was being said.

As soon as I was told about the video part I started stressing. I was so worried I wouldn’t have a clue what they were signing, but it wasn’t too bad. I did miss a couple of things, but they seemed happy enough with me. So I got in, and enrolled last Monday. I’ll know quite a few people in the class, so that will be good.

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My cat is still occasionally peeing on the floor. M got a sample today and took it to the vet after work. They rang a little while ago with the results, and said that there was a lot of blood in his urine She’s going to do some more tests on the blood tomorrow to see whether it is an infection or whether there are crystals in the urine. My poor baby.

I’ve decided to jump on the YouTube bandwagon, inspired by Steph and the videos she made of her cat. Having decided to make videos, I was faced with the dilemma of what to video, and what to use. My digital camera produces ridiculously large (ie tens of Mb for not much time) videos, and my PDA produces good-sized ones but the size of the picture itself is tiny, and the video quality isn’t very good.

Since my PDA was closest at hand, I decided to give it a try, and was then on the hunt for subject material. Well, everyone knows that when you’re trying to use up film in your camera (in the days when you still used film) you take photos of your pets, so Jack was the perfect guinea pig. So I made a video of him playing with his shoelace - click here for the result. Right at the beginning of the video he scratched me - ow! I have several scratches from playing with the shoelace with him. If you view it in its original size, the quality is passable, but it’s so tiny you have to squint to see it. The default size is quite fuzzy but oh well.

So, since that video wasn’t too great, I thought I’d video the goats near my house when I went on my walk, but this time using my digital camera. When I got there, there were two goats at the fence, and the rest were sitting over the other side of the enclosure. Surprisingly they didn’t come over while I was doing the first video: Feeding the goats Part I

Right after I stopped videoing, they started fighting - typical. I caught the last fraction of a second of it in the next one: Feeding the goats Part II

I wanted to feed the smaller one, but he kept running away! The other goat seems to have taken over from the Big Bully Goat, but only because BBG was still over the other side. Feeding the goats Part III

Finally the Big Bully Goat had had enough of being a wallflower and came to join the action: Feeding the goats Part IV

The videos are quite blocky, which they aren’t on my computer, so I don’t know whether it lost quality when it was uploaded. I didn’t know how big they were going to be (and didn’t know what the size limits for YouTube are), so I did it on a lower setting, but I’ll try the higher quality setting next time, to see how much of a difference it makes.