My best friend Shelley gave me the Jerusalem cookbook, by Yotam Ottolenghi, for Christmas and I've already made three fab dishes from it: a chicken and cardamom rice casserole, a syrup-laden orange, coconut and semolina cake, and a kick-arse hommus. It's a brilliant inspiration: almost everything in it I'd love to try.
How was your Christmas? We had ours down south on Boxing Day so we could be with eldest son and the grandkids. It was all very merry but the start of the heatwave, and as successive days got hotter and hotter, we felt quite glad – unusually – to leave the bay and head for home and the air-con, where we rode out the worst of it in quiet comfort.
:: Lily's been home for two weeks and I'm already thinking that in just over a week she'll be back on a plane heading for winter and Osaka again. No! Does her mum's heart good to have her here!

R2BC

:: The annual craft fair at Fremantle Arts Centre (above) was on yesterday.
  It looked wonderful, and there were lots of colourful stalls, but OMG, some of the prices! And so much jewellery. I went prepared to buy lovely things for Christmas presents, but just enjoyed a browse in the shade of the lovely old trees with my best friends Dace and Jools.

:: I am reading escapist literature: the first of Joy Dettman's Woody Creek novels. Thoroughly engrossing and well written, set in a Victorian (as in Australia) timber town in the 1930s. Well-drawn, believable characters; lots of dark deeds. Do not be put off by the naff titles (Pearl in the Cage, Thorn on the Rose and so on), or the equally naff cover art.
There are three or four books in the series, so that's a fair whack of my summer reading sorted. Books one and three are on the Kindle and book two is a print copy I found at home and used all winter to prop up a coil heater which had lost a foot.
:: I am going to teach myself to make coiled baskets like these:

They were on display inside the arts centre, made by Aboriginal women who had been taught the craft by an African master basket maker – absolutely stunning.
:: I didn't do any Christmas cake making yesterday because I was having too good a time and the day just went.    

Reasons to be cheerful, part 3

:: We have assembled all the ingredients, even the St Agnes, and there will be Christmas cake mixin'n'bakin' in the morrow.

"Mixing" with the Adorables.

:: We went shopping at the Re Store this morning, and I wore my op-shop dress and felt like a real nonna. Which I am, of course. But I looked the part in my black frock. Especially as I approach my fabulous new almost-spherical shape -- attributable entirely to menopause and a desk job. Luckily, I had dealt with the moustache earlier in the morning.
:: Three weeks from today, Lily gets home. 
:: I have not one but two (2) brand-new pairs of thongs. I wore my new best, going-out ones ($7) to the shops this morning (which helped the nonna thing I had going no end), and now I'm home and I'm in my new everyday thongs ($3.50). Life is special.

Reasons to be cheerful ... continued

1. I am not at all stressed about Christmas this year. I am under orders from David not to be. It's working ... so far. Previous years have seen me making cards, making decorations making gifts, making wrapping paper, cooking feasts and wondering why no-one else in the house was getting into it while I wallied about like a banshee. Mind you, I fancy making a few wee birdy-type decorations for this year's tree on the weekend, and I'll make the cake because that is fun.
2. The blokes are back from down south, having completed firebreaks and mowing down all he winter grass. As I write this, Will is watching an ancient game of footy on the telly with the sound off and David is at a meeting.
3. I am about to try to invent something nourishing and tasty for dinner with two chicken breasts and a mango.

I shall leave you with a pic of St George's Terrace, the main thoroughfare in this mining town of ours, which, like the foolish virgin I am, I imagined would be a quicker route home. Wrong. It looked nice in the low sunshine, though.

Reasons to be cheerful

 1. Mum's home after a month in New Zealand – a trek and a half for her at 83, considering she's terrified of flying and very shaky on her pins. She had tricky stopovers in Melbourne going both ways, that were almost as long as the flying time. But it was lovely for her and my brother to see each other and, we hope, the first of many.
2. The blokes in my household are away down south doing the firebreaks and mowing the bush block in readiness for the fire season. And while I'd rather they were here, I am enjoying the lack of cricket commentary and bass rhythms.
3. A bit of sewing, above. I made this:

from this pile of Liberty offcuts from my best friend, Shelley:

and a bit I had lying around.

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 ...