Close Relations

On our way from Freo to Lesmurdie yesterday we decided to take a journey down memory lane and visit the house where I spent the first nine months of life. It took us a while to find it - I'd only been there once before as an adult and that was twenty years ago.

As I was driving through the back-streets of Beaconsfield it occurred to me that during my childhood both my mother's and father's families all lived within easy walking distance of one another. That's a combined total of eight siblings, two sets of grandparents plus Mum and Dad. All living within a five kilometre diameter. That just seems so weird today. My generation tended to move as far from their relatives as they could while still living in the Perth metro area. TP and her cousins took it a step further and moved to different continents.

We've already begun preparing JOOB for life on Mars.

HNY Meanderings

Well, the grandparents have returned to their equatorial home, the shops are about to return to regular trading hours and we're about to return to work on our latest job: editing 22 hours of high-definition video down to a 48 minute (a television hour - the rest is ads) documentary. Oh boy!

But before we begin what we really need is a vacation from the vacation. We've spent more time driving and watching JOOB play with his new toys (the grandparents literally brought a suitcase full for him) in the grandparents' hotel room than we have at home. Apart from the occasional breakfast we've been eating out - mostly at small Asian restaurants in the CBD and Northbridge. I don't think I ate a vegetable between 24th December and yesterday. I feel ill. Why doesn't anyone include vegetables (apart from the tokenistic greenish leaf) in their meals anymore? BTW avoid Oleh Oleh in Hay Street. The service is shit and so is the food - they claim to have the best beef rendang in Perth but it's the worst I've tasted by a long way.

We slept through NYE celebrations but rose early to take JOOB down to Cott beach for his first real swim in the ocean. We took him previous a few weeks ago but he wasn't impressed and complained. This time he laughed and giggled at the waves splashing him in the face and was having a great time until he got cold. After the swim we had breakfast at Tropicanas before heading down to the Freo markets to pick up some vegetables. Then we got the crazy idea of heading up to Lesmurdie Falls.

From age 9 months until I was 8 I used to live near The Falls. One of the few photographs I have from this time was taken on one of the bridges that crosses the creek the feeds The Falls. It's me, and my mother (and our dog). The bridge is long gone but we used its replacement to recreate the pic (minus the dog) with TP and JOOB. Great family moment.

Anyway, Happy New Year. All the best for 2007 and beyond.