Away

Last weekend it was Adelaide, this weekend it was New York. Kinda!

David was invited to a long weekend at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, to write about it for his paper, and review a couple of the shows that will be heading to Perth.

He had a hotel room for two and two tickets to the shows of his choice, so I scrabbled together a few frequent flyer points, packed the heels and the leopard-skin coat and off we went.

Well! It was fun from the moment we landed. What a great city! What a fantastic festival! We crammed in eight shows from Friday's opening gala concert to a late Sunday night event.

We had Saturday brekkie at the Adelaide central markets and dropped in at the South Australian Art Gallery, and on Sunday we hired a car and with a new journo friend from Sydney,  headed for the beautiful hills, with another brekkie at Hahndorf (above) and lightning stops at a couple of wineries.

The rolling hills are stunningly beautiful, and it's only about 30 minutes from the CBD. So you can work in the city and live in the bush and have the absolute best of both worlds. Sigh. We loved every moment of it.

For more info about the cabaret festival, you can read David's excellent round-up here.

Last Monday, it was off the plane after a very dodgy flight in nasty weather and home in time to do a couple of hours' work, then straight back into the week.

Then, on Friday night, David and I went to a truly wonderful show, How to Succeed in Business, at the Regal Theatre in Subi, the big annual show put on by the music theatre students from the WA Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA).

We are huge fans of WAAPA shows –  as you know, I am loathe to go to live theatre in Perth, or anywhere, but I will always go to a WAAPA musical. This is a very rare chance to see a big-production Broadway musical brought to life on the stage with all the trimmings: stunning performances, faultless singing, song-n-dance routines, an orchestra in the pit, fabulous costumes, scenery changes ... it's superb. You can settle back in your seat with your choc bomb and be thoroughly entertained.

The New York state of mind continued early the next morning at the Art Gallery of WA with my best friend Shelley and her family. We had bagels and coffee at the Art Gallery of WA and a talk by the director of MoMa and our very own AGWA director, Stefano Carboni. It was to launch the gallery's big new exhibition from MoMa, From Picasso to Warhol, which we then explored before the doors opened. 

Here's a pic Shelley took of Wayne and me planning how we could make our own version of one of the wonderful Alexander Calder kinetic sculptures!

Monday

Peonies from my best friend Shelley – thanks so much! They were such a treat.

It seems odd, when I have every Monday off, for the rest of the working world to have it off as well! I feel like I should have tomorrow off as well to compensate.

I'm chipping away at the book I'm working on, and enjoying sitting at my desk with the back door open to the garden. It's a balmy 22 degrees with a little wind and just bloody perfect.

We had a quiet weekend, mainly because I've been warding off a head cold, which has been coming and going since last Tuesday. 

Saw a lovely Michelle Williams movie (Take This Waltz) on Saturday morning with my best friend Karen. While we both enjoyed it, we did sit for a few minutes afterwards and grumble about some of the odd things in it, like the really bizarre conversation Margot (Williams) has over coffee with the bloke she fancies, in which he tells her what he wants to do to her, at which point any self-respecting woman would either slap him or go "eew..." and walk quickly away. There was a sort of wacky collage of weirdly incongruous sex scenes, to boot. And we'd have trimmed it by a good 20 minutes with some judicious editing. But other than those gripes, it was fab!

David and I are off for a long weekend in Adelaide from Friday morning, he as guest of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival and me as tag-along. We love exploring a good city together, and we are really looking forward to it. I think we're going to seven or eight shows, and a gala dinner. Yay! Packing the wicked boots and the leopard-skin coat ...

Lovely stuff

There are three kaffir lime trees in our garden, and I was mystified when one of them started producing oranges. It seems the limes are grafted on to root stock, and one of our trees has two trunks – one with the distinctive kaffir lime leaves and the other, the root stock, laden with oranges.
Curious to know what sort of oranges they are – with their squat shape and roughly-dimpled peel – I summoned help from Mr Google and discovered, to my utter delight, that they are seville oranges. The actual thing. Perfect fruit for marmalade.

So yesterday, the first day of winter (we also made celebration porridge), I went gathering, and boiling and bottling, and now I have nine jars of fabulous – if I do say so myself – bitter orange marmalade.

Midway through the process, after the whole fruit had been boiled alive for two hours, filling the house with the most fantastic sharply-orange scent, the recipe blithely said: " ... then add the juice of two lemons ...". WTF? It was after 6pm by now, so David and I nicked the front lamp off Will's bike as a torch and traipsed off into the park behind our house where I happen to know there is a magnificent lemon tree with branches hanging over someone's back fence. The marmalade was saved.

Next time, I'll get a funnel to help get the scalding hot lovely-stuff into the jars without getting it everywhere. Lots of stickiness in my kitchen this morning! But YUM. Seriously. A whole planet of difference from the factory stuff.