On the Bottom Half

Cricket Without Pain

Nothing much happened on Thursday - we had a grandkid over visiting, while Bruce and I finished installing some shadecloth over the back porch. They don't have much for hardware stores here, so finding a 13 mm deep socket to finishing tensioning the cloth was a challenge. It ended with Bruce buying an entire set, just for the one socket. But, as I get my attitude toward to tools from you-know-who, I think it was a good thing to buy the set. They need a Canadian Tire here: hey, that sounds like a good business... I'll export all the Arnott's Brand cookies back to Canada and import the Canadian Tire label to Australia! Get ready for Tim-Tams.

Then, on Friday, Bruce, Helen, Grandkid 1 (Tash), and I went into the Melbourne Zoo for 'Beastly Breakfast'. They open up the zoo at 0730 and you can be there while they give the animals their morning feed. It's not yet hot enough at that time of the morning to chase the animals into their burrows or shady hollows, so everyone gets a good view. The first up were the gorillas; what a treat to see them up so close, yet inwardly saddening because they are caged like that. Zoos for me are a bit of a mixture of keen interest and profound sadness. The language has changed though - they are no longer 'cages', but 'enclosures'. That being said, the enclosures are much larger and are made to be more ecosystem/habitat-like. Next were the tigers, then the elephants - hefalumps to those Pooh fans in the crowd. We rounded out the morning with a multiude of reptiles, giraffes, zebras, roos, wallabies, koalas, butterflies, etc. The butterflies were in a cool 'hot' room so that they were all out and fluttering around. They were very pretty and some of them quite large.

We left the zoo around 1100 to get back home. Then Bruce and I quickly turned around and drove back into town to go to a one-day cricket match between Australia and Sri Lanka! The match started at 1415 and ended at 2200. Cricket fans are a dedicated bunch... We watched the entire game after first fighting our way through the hoardes of parking cars, the security kiosk where they found a pocket knife in my bag and told me that I couldn't have it, and the maze of seating arrangements in the Telstra Dome. I enjoyed it, but more importantly I never took a cricket ball to the groin! There are a few 'drinks breaks' for the players and a long 'tea break' when they stop for supper, but other than that, they play for the entire time. Australia won 5/318, to Sri Lanka's 7/202 - Sri Lanka forgot to show up.

Lastly: you put dogs in a kennel, cats go to a 'cattery', so where do platypuses go?

Now, from the comment file: what's the trip to Seattle? Sounds fun! Do you need another escort officer?

If there's still some moving in to do, I'll gladly help... Seven years is just about right!

Update complete!

posted by Kyle @ 15:50