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| June 2-8! Another late one, but a doozy of days has past... |
| 06.08.04 (6:38 pm) [edit] |
Wednesday June 2nd, 2004 Nice day, 18C; cold night, 4C.
Another set of days come and go and, lo and behold, nothing has been reported… Back onto this horse, once again.
Today I went to school, did the requisite amount of email and journal entry writing (a genuinely massive amount of work. I also attended the ecophilosophy class, which was very informal and didn’t really consist of much except for a slide show of the hiking trips. Not many students showed up for this second-to-last class, which is understandable, seeing that it’s now pre-exam, mad-assignment-due , time of the year.
From school, I returned to my palatial surroundings in Subiaco and made myself some sort of grilled and roasted lamp loin strips in a soya sauce and onion marinade… a very good meal, except that lamb is pretty damn fatty so you end up with about a litre or so of grease from cooking a dozen strips. Some mash potato sides and chinese greens accompanied the lamb down my throat… I read a bit more of the military biography “Rommel” written by a British Major… whathisname… and followed his campaign across North Africa in Mary’s giant atlas.
It was a good thing, too, that I ate a solid meal, because I soon afterwards managed to lock myself out of my palace. What follows is a tale of complete idiocy: I left the house with wallet, mobile, change, and videos (I was going to the video store to rent that night’s entertainment) neglecting, as it turned out, to take the house keys with me. That was at about 730pm. After calling Patsy to find out Mary’s boyfriend’s phone number, I walked to the video store and rented the first five bubblegum crisis videos (for five bucks!).
Mobiles are handy to have around; after a few phone calls, I was assured by Antony, Mary’s beau, that Mary had buried a set of spare keys “directly behind the fountain, about six inches to a foot underground, in a little jam jar.” Thus, from 820pm to 1140pm, I dug behind the fountain, awkwardly hunched over the fountain’s edge, straddling the fountain, squished between it and the fence. I used my hands, tearing and ripping at plants, vines, and small ceramic pot fragments. When this began to hurt my hands, I upgraded to a small trowel that I found in the garage, but to no avail. I still couldn’t find the damn keys!
At this point, it was pretty damn cold out, my hands were caked with soil, I was lighting my way with the face of my mobile, and I had managed to break one brick off of the fountain’s edge … it now lay in the fountain itself, swimming with the gold fishes.
I called it quits; I was certain that the key was somewhere in the back yard, just not where I was looking. Of course, it was too dark out to find the right spot, so I decided to just tough it out and camp out in the backyard for the night. I was wearing a sweater and tuque, so I figured myself alright for this minor ordeal. However, as the night went on, it got a bit cold… I at first was sleeping on a bench cushion that I had drapped over a lawn chair, wrapped in a towel that was drying on the laundry line.
At 3am, it was too cold to bear any more ridiculous digging, so I retreated to the confines of the garage… there I spread my cushion on the concrete floor and discovered, belatedly, the store of long underwear belonging to Mary’s son’s. Now that I had some long johns on, it was just a matter of curling up into a ball and shivering it out until dawn…
Thursday, June 3rd. Beautiful sunrise, a very nice day, 18C.
So I woke up, shivering, somewhat stiff, and ready to look for those damn keys. Back in the garden, I surveyed the previous night’s debacle and noted that I had done a very good job of preparing the soil for planting bulbs. Indeed, the soil was free of all weeds, debris, and stones… soil was caked under my nails and I was pretty confident that there was no key-in-a-jar anywhere near where I had been digging.
Looking further abroad, then, I noticed a clear spot under a shrubbery tree located in the far corner of the garden. Beneath the tree were some leaves; underneath the leaves was the lid of jar, exposed to the sun, sky, and my bleeding fingers.
Who buries keys “six inches to a foot underground?”
I took a hot bath and then watched a few videos to start off my day… I napped a bit and then made some more of those lamb strips for the ecophilosophy class.
Today was the last EP class of the semester, so it was more of a party… However, I showed up a bit late, thanks to my slow cooking and some bad timing with public transport.
As things turned out, everyone had already eaten by the time I arrived, so my food was all for naught---and all the students had already been made aware of my travails by Patsy.
Things picked up as some of the students went to the Tav ern for some drinks…
I then made my way home, exhausted, and slept like the dead.
Friday, June 4th, 2004. Intermittent showers and 15-18C.
I started today by reading a chapter of Stephen Hawkin’s “A brief history of time” and some more of “Rommel”---things are going poorly for the Afrika Korps, but they’re putting up a great fight.
Some groceries were made and then I watched some Bubblegum crisis videos and took it easy—for this was the night of Murdoch’s Triple Crown, the end of year drinking fest held on campus. A friend came by for some pre-party dinner action—some cream veg. soup, beef shnitzel baguette sandwiches , and Florentines for desert.
That night, I drank a fair amount of gin and beer at this event, and was only menaced twice during the night by people whom were later identified to me as the undercover security. Once, early in the night, a man walked by me in the field outside the Tav and darkly muttered “Watch out, you’re not meant to be here.” Later, as I investigated the situation in the men’s bathroom and decided that it wasn’t worth the wait, a man standing in the lineup muttered at me with menace “Next time don’t come back in here with your beer.”
Saturday, June 5th, 2004 Sunny, intermittent showers. 18C or so. I know that it’s always 18C here—but that’s the weather: super consistent.
Super hung over, I made my way out of the Murdoch campus and into Perth—I had slept over at Caroline’s residence (another EP student, this one a Canadian on exchange from Waterloo) and was rudely awoken by the fire alarm at 750am. It turned out that someone had decided to cook some rice and some food on the stove early in the morning and had forgotten to take their dinner off of the burners… It stank and the fire trucks came… in short, residence hasn’t changed much since I was last there.
The alarms were a signal to go; so I went into Perth and bought some tickets to the WAMi concert that evening. Western Australian Music Industry throughs an eight day event which features nothing but WA musicians: that night was a big event with something like twelve acts for 15 bucks, held at two venues that interact with one another—the Amplifier and Monkey Bar. Seth came by to my palace and we were picked up by Lauren—these are both EP students. Lauren’s boyfriend plays bass in one of the bands that were on that evening. Their name is Tragic Delicate and they have a Tea Party kind of sound, except that they have a cellist thrown in the mix. Highlights of the evening were The Fuzz, a crazy heavy rock band with a female lead singer who sounds like Janis Joplin. There was a Australian pop band, Spencer Tracy that was super fun to watch: three members in the band, a skinny guy on drums, a chick guitarists, and a chubby bass player with hair in his eyes. Also, all three of them sing, and the musicianship is pretty shaky, but they had a high entertainment value. The last highlight was Fourth Floor Collapse…a loud band with two very strong guitarists and a unique sound.
A very good, all in all, and Seth and I got a ride home from Lauren! Bonus!
Sunday, the 6th of June, 2004. A nice day, but again, wettish, with intermittent showers. Winter, indeed.
I rented more of the Bubblegum crisis today, and swore that I would spend the day in: no more drinking!
I read more of “Rommel,” (things are very bad in Normandy), some more Hawkins (go Galileo!) and then took a long nap. I then made myself some pasta (defrosted some sauce from Mary’s freezer), and felt a bit lonely…luckily, I was contacted and induced to join up with some EP students who were in mid-progress through a pub crawl in Freo. I made my way there and joined up for the last part of the revelry and that was the night.
Monday, June 7th, 2004. A very nice day. 19C. And a public holiday: Foundation day (WA only).
I cleaned my palace, packed a bit, returned my videos (videos 1-9 of the Bubblegum Crisis down! Plus a cool anime, “Spriggan,” that had a really terrible, incomplete, incomprehensible, plot but absolutely amazing animation and art) then went for a long walk in King’s park. This park is something else, and I hope to walk in it regularly. A really nice park, with lots of mature trees, different sorts of areas (bush land, Victorian park land, large gardens, raised walkways, tended foot paths, roads, picnic areas, escarpments, statues, amphitheaters…) and did I already mention that it’s pretty large?
I tried to read the rest of “Rommel” before Mary got back, but alas, it was a fight between the nap and the book… so I left Rommel in Germany, bitterly embroiled in a plot with General Stolin and Dr. Steider to depose an increasingly unstable, unresponsive, Hitler…
Mary returned, brought back from the airport with Antony. She looked relaxed and lightly tanned. She had spent some time in Singapore, on a island off the coast of Singapore, in Indonesia (although they accepted Singaporean currency) , and then further north in Kuala Lampur (‘KL’ as her and Antony say).
After unpacking her luggage I helped Mary with some groceries for dinner and then helped her out with dinner itself. She made an excellent sort of lemon custard that was simple but very tasty. Earlier in the day, four little girls came up to my palace door and offered to sell me some of the largest lemons I had ever seen in my life. Although lemons grow everywhere in Subiaco, namely in Mary’s back yard and in her neighbour’s yards, I couldn’t say no to the 10cents a lemon. So I bought of them and Mary made use of them…
Dinner was good, but I was pooped after my weekend extravaganza…
Tuesday, June 8th, 2004. A rainy day, super intermittent showers. “Mid-winter weather!” as Peter says.
I woke up and packed my bags—and saw Mary and Antony off. They rise very early here—it must be because they have jobs, or something! Mary though, found the time to make a very nice breakfast of paw-paw fruit with sliced bananas in the centre and some other south-east asian fruit—dark red and very soft with small black pits.
Soon afterwards, I left for the bus station in Perth. Onto the train at Daglish station, then a ten minute ride into the city, followed by a ten minute march to the bus terminal. An hour on the bus and I was once again back in Mandurah, where Peter picked me up and we ran some errands together.
Back in South Yunderup! Good to see Patsy and Peter again, and the rest of the day was spent catching up, doing odds and ends, and then eating a great salmon dinner.
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