Snow in the distanceWe've had some really cold days and nights, and earlier in the week we had lots and lots of wonderful rain, so up in the high country to the east of us there's been snow.
I took the pic above (click on it for bigger view) about lunchtime today as David and I were driving home from Del Mar on the coast. The Pacific is behind us, and there's snow on the peaks in the distance. That's Southern California! Beautiful!
I'm happy to live with snow in sight and a good drive away — I like it cold, but just couldn't live with snow any more.
In March last year I went to stay with my friend Sue in Chicago, and I've never felt cold like that. — it took my breath away whenever we stepped out of her warm and cosy house. But oh! It all looked so gorgeous!
And just in case any of you haven't seen it yet (I trot it out every winter!), here's the wonderful photo I borrowed from the San Diego Union Tribune's website, showing the city of San Diego with snow in the Cuyamaca Mountains to the east.There's been lots and lots of snow up in the Pacific North-West, even on Vancouver Island in Canada. Lily's friend Grace arrived at Seattle airport and freezing weather after having left Buenos Aires and 40 degrees (104 F)!
Fingers crossed for all our friends in the north-east, with all the huge snowstorms forecast.

Morning conversation with an 18-year-old — Are my jeans clean?
— D'you know where my belt is?
— Have you seen my other jeans?
— Well, did you take the belt off to wash them?
A few minutes later:
— Where'd you put all those clean socks?
A few minutes later:
— Have you seen that letter from college with all my info on it?
A few minutes later:
— Where'd I put my iPod?
— Have you moved it? I'm sure I put it here with my phone — where's my phone?
A few minutes later:
— Is it Thursday today?

ChrissieWe went to Wayne's Tree World yesterday arvo and bought our tree.I tried to find a fraser fir, as was recommended by Jen, but settled in the end for a gorgeous noble fir that is just short of 2.5 metres (eight feet) and just the most perfect shape.
Then I spent the rest of the day trimming it, with help from David to put on the lights.
I love Christmas — as I blogged about last year.
Every year I try to find a little new something for the tree. This year it's a couple of dozen Polish crystal glass raindrops ...... I love them so much I'm tempted to go and buy a whole heap more.
It's chilly today and we're going to light the fire! Yay!
:: A friend of mine mentioned choral music yesterday — on facebook — and I've been listening to a Haydn mass non-stop ever since. Perfect for this time of the year.
I also love Sufjan Stevens' huge album, Songs for Christmas. It's just so beautiful, and he gets such a distinctive sound with all the old familiars. Do you have any Chrissie music you love?
:: We're having a day in LA tomorrow. Will's passport expires in January, so we're off to the Australian Consulate in Century City to get him a new one. Hoping to get in a couple of hours at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art as well.
I shall so miss LA when we're back in Australia!
On Friday we'll be back there again, as guests of the organisation, Australians in Film, to see a special preview screening of the new Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It's at the Warner Bros studios in Hollywood, so I'm excited!

HostThey got their wings tonight.Some of them got crowns and halos and a few other odds and ends to finish them off.They're still really spooky.I didn't intend to use butterfly wings, as they're a bit hackneyed these days. But these actually looked okay. The one below has wings of bubble-wrap.

Turkey!
It's Thanksgiving today — so happy turkey day to my American friends!
:: It's been a week since my last post ...... and I've been productive. I've got Christmas well under control, with parcels ready to go, and Christmas cards all written and ready to post.
Lily was home for a few days, and we had family dinners at the Bondi on two nights. I'm happy to report it was jumping both times, and the new winter menu is just sensational. If I do say so myself!
At home, David got cooking and I got baking, and Lily and I got stuck into her quilt and have finished piecing the top. Yay! So now I can relax and get it layered and quilted.Lily has planned a post-Christmas road-trip with friends of hers from Perth, tying in with our visit from Dace, Max and Halina. She still has the cast on her leg, and we're all hoping she'll be in good shape for her trip, which takes in the Grand Canyon and Oklahoma City for the Flaming Lips' New Year's Eve concert.
I was devastated when she flew off back up north: I'll see her just a couple more times over Christmas and the New Year and then David, Will and I will be off home to Perth.
It's been raining — oh the very sound of it dripping on the big leaves outside our bedroom window at night ... soooooothing!
We've been to the movies — last week we saw the wonderful and widely acclaimed British film, Happy Go Lucky, which I heartily recommend. Last night, we saw Australia, which was a truly entertaining three hours if a little dodgy on dialogue and music. And with a week and a good pair of scissors, I'd be more than capable of cutting a good twenty minutes out of it. But definitely worth seeing. The first Baz movie I've liked. But why the grandiose, all-encompassing title? A great film to see at an early session so you've time for lots of talk about it afterwards.
I've been sorting out my 10,000 photos stored in iPhoto, and updating my visual diary, which is definitely one of those jobs best done when there's no rush ...
... and I've been making a few bits and bobs out of papier mache for Christmas. These have turned out strange. I have doubts. They are weird and very spooky, and eventually they will get wings and then be weird and very spooky angels. The jury is out until then!
There are a few less subversive-looking birds made with the same technique, but I neglected to photograph them. Next time.
:: Horrible, horrible reports from Mumbai. And an Air New Zealand training plane down in the Mediterranean. And an Australian killed in Afghanistan. Grim times.

Downtown art
While San Diego frequently loses out to Los Angeles when it comes to seriously good commercial galleries, it does have a fantastic Museum of Contemporary Art, with buildings downtown and at La Jolla. The MCASD has a great location at 1001 Kettner Boulevard ...... in a building which is part of the main trolley (tram) station, so browsing is frequently interrupted by the rumbling of the passing trolleys, and the red blur as they woosh past the windows of the space downstairs. It's great! That's the MCASD on the right (above), with the sign of the big yellow cross. You can catcch trolleys from here to Tijuana, and to San Diego's Old Town and various sporting arenas.
Recently, the museum expanded into a new space on the other side Kettner, which continues the station theme: this new part, the Jacobs Building, is the renovated baggage building of the historic Santa Fe train depot.This is a beautiful old railway station built in the lovely Spanish mission style. Inside the main hall there's a vaulted and beamed ceiling and the walls between the arched windows are covered in beautiful tiles. We had a quick stroll through the gallery at 1001 Kettner, but were more excited to see that the artist exhibiting across the road in the Jacobs Building was Maya Lin, the young American artist and architect who had designed and created the stunning Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington DC. (I fell over when I was taking this pic in April — effective isn't it?) Maya Lin won a big public competition in 1981 to design this memorial, when she was just 21. When the public found out her work wasn't going to be another traditional piece of sculpture — in which DC abounds — there was enormous outcry. But she seemingly won over the entire country when, at just 22 years of age, she spoke before the US Congress about her design, a representational wound in the earth that symbolises the loss of 58,000 young Americans. The names of every one of them are inscribed into the highly polished black granite wall, and it is without question one of the most moving of all the momuments and memorials in DC. Friends and families of the dead soldiers file past looking for their loved ones' names, and some even take rubbings or leave flowers and other little tributes.
Landscape and architecture play a big part in this artist's life and work, and her show in San Diego, Systematic Landscapes, combined the two in highly original ways. One room had a sculptural installation of 50,000 blocks of wood arranged on the floor in a hill, or a wave, that rose 3 m. Spectacular. Cameras weren't allowed in the museum (so I pinched the pic above from the MCASD website), but if you click here you'll see a brief video of this work being installed.
In another room, black aluminium tubing had been suspended from the ceiling in a grid of the contours of a submarine mountain, the very tip of which was an island in the south Atlantic, 1600 km from Antarctica. It was quite something to walk beneath it and look up into it.
:: We'd have finished the day with a visit to the MCA's third building, in La Jolla, but won't be venturing anywhere near there until the US Open is over. From my bedroom window, I can see the huge blimp hovering over the course on the cliffs at Torrey Pines, from which they film a lot of the aerial stuff.

Anzac DayWhen we went to bed last night, it was around the time for Australians to get up and go to the dawn service on the other side of the world. And we thought of you all down there, in the cool of the autumn morning, and wished we could be there for this day of days.
David and I both had grandfathers at Gallipoli, and in Perth, David has worn his grandad's medals on the day.
In San Diego, the Royal Australian Navy observes Anzac Day with a well-attended service on the USS Midway. This is a de-commissioned aircraft carrier that is now permanently docked in the bay at San Diego. It's so enormous that standing on the foredeck for this service was like being four or five storeys up.It was a short but moving ceremony, with all the traditional components, attended by lots of US and Australian military and brass, and the odd New Zealander. We even had a highly-decorated US rear admiral, who gave the reading.
By coincidence, two huge (and loud) US Navy helicopters provided the fly-past, just at the perfect moment after the Last Post. We sang along to recordings of the national anthems of Australia, New Zealand and the US, and I was a little sad that our recording of Advance Australia Fair was the same maudlin Julie Anthony version that gets trotted out and played in at the MCG every September for the footy Grand Final. Honest.
But that's by the by. After the ceremony, everyone retired to the Bondi where we put on a barbecue lunch — with real pavlova for dessert — that's still going strong at almost 6pm, David tells me!

Time out
Just had to take a few minutes out of cleaning the house (yeeuch — please note the elegant apron) to brag about my latest succes d'aiguille. Much more important than frigging about with the Swiffer duster.
This is my Clapotis, which I have finally finished after an entire year. I started it in April last year and knitted about eleven inches, then put it away. But when I had to rush back to Australia the second time, I packed it to take with me, thinking it would provide the brainless, rhythmic knitting therapy I might well need.
And it did. There were plenty of occasions when Mum and I sat at Dad's bedside while he drifted off into an uncomfortable, rattly sleep, and I'd knit on and on and on. I extended the length of it, partly because I couldn't bear to finish it, and partly because I wanted it to be longer than it looks on the pattern — which you can find here.
In the end, because it's so stretchy from being knit on the bias, it's turned out to be over seven feet long - room for plenty of turns around one's once swan-like neck.I cast off while I was still in Perth, and then Mum started unravelling all the dropped stitches for me, which took far, far longer than you'd imagine! Then I packed it up again, still unfinished, to take on our holiday last week. I eventually sewed in all the ends (from switching from one ball of yarn to another) and finished the last of the unravelling when I was in Washington the weekend before last, and wore it on a chilly, sunny day — it was gloriously soft and warm.
I made it out of Debbie Bliss alpaca silk dk (80% baby alpaca, 20% silk), which is extremely soft and luxurious, and it took about ten balls — maybe twelve. Fortunately, I'd bought the yarn online from WEBS where it had been discounted to something ridiculous like $3 a ball, so the whole thing was not too extravagant an exercise.
:: So these, above and below, are the chunky socks I knitted for my brother, mostly in Albany, sitting beside him in his house as he recovered from his horrible hernia operation. I also knitted a few inches here in San Diego between my trips back to Oz.They are for Garry to wear in winter with his beloved Blundies. Garry's a social worker/counsellor who travels all over the Great Southern district of Western Australia meeting his 'clients' and helping them out.
The socks are a bit big for me, but you get the picture. It's lovely soft Cleckheaton wool I bought in Australia, and just a standard old common or garden sock pattern.

:: Both Dad and Garry are on the mend now. In fact, I had a very excited call from Dad this morning to tell me that he had managed to walk 36 metres in the parallel bars at the hospital rehab unit. Such a great achievement!

:: Here are a couple of gratuitous pictures of my very spoiled little dog, Yoshi, who's very happy to have me back, especially my nice, warm bed!

Touch of the noble*The kids issued us with shopping lists while we were in Australia.
They wanted nothing very onerous or expensive — Lily asked for a few hundred Madura teabags, Redskins, Peppermint Crisps, the latest Panics CD, the new volume of Isobelle Carmody's The Obernewtyn Chronicles, and some eucalyptus oil.
Will wanted a pair of Aussie boardshorts and a cricket set. That's him, above, bowling to his delighted dad at the park yesterday.
Obviously, Will's out to persuade his mates about the joys of street cricket. And they're loving it! On Saturday, he had a big group down at the local park and they played for hours, much to the amusement of a family from India, and a New Zealander who was playing beach volleyball on the sand court in the corner.
It was a very, v-e-r-y informal game, with some weird deliveries ...
... and some great smashing hits. Justin, above, was a natural.
I was thrilled to see the Carmel Creek U-18 XI included a few bold girls who, like the boys, did their best with the eccentricities of bowling, after years and years of pitching baseballs and teeballs and softballs.
Will dressed for the occasion, in his red Queenslea House athletics top from his old school, Christ Church.
Trev, above, is clearly too much a rock star for this game. He's much more likely to end up on a stage than a cricket pitch, but he did a great job.
And this lad had the bat the wrong way, which led to hoots from the crowd.

* For the uninitiated, cricket — or criggit as it is called in Australia — is rather loftily known as 'the noble game'. I presume that this is because only toffs, the upper classes, the idle rich and those with private incomes had enough leisure time to indulge in playing and watching a game that can last five days.