Sexpo left me flacid

Baba and I wandered down the road this morning to the old showgrounds intending to poke around sexpo. It’s an annual event that I’ve never been to but always planned to get around to some day. We were already feeling a bit out of place approaching the entrance noticing how many shazzas and dazzas were milling about. Then we saw it….a great big, enourmous, erect, signpost with $25 emblazened across it. Decided that there’s absolutely no way we were going to pay fifty bucks between us to jostle with the muffin topped, crimped hair brigade just to look at dildos and frilly knickers. We wandered across the park to the Saturday organic grower’s market instead for a spot of lunch. It was quite fascinating how different the crowd was at the two venues – barely 100m away from each other.

Very yummy wine

Pepper Tree 2005 Grand Reserve Orange Chardonnay.

Purchased from the Pepper Tree Hunter cellar door for around $35 a few months ago on the day trip we took to the Hunter. I still remember my spontaneous reaction and pleasant surprise when I tasted the wine at Pepper Tree. Chardonnay is considered rather passe in wine circles nowadays as people have jumped on the Sav Blanc bandwagon. I’ve often felt a bit kicked in the teeth by cheap Chardonnay, hence my surprise and sheer joy at tasting this wine. On the nose it’s pineapply and summer fruit (nothing unsual there for an Australian chardonnay). The real joy comes on the palate. Orange is a cool climate region and in very simple terms coll climate = complexity and sophisitication. This wine displays a magical integration of tropical fruit and strong buttered toast flavours. Neither one dominates the other. They intertwine absolutely beautifully. I bought two bottles. One and a half left now.

Enjoyed it tonight with homemade moussaka.

Stuff.

Went to the Arts of Islam exhibition last weekend at the Art Gallery of NSW. Overall it was quite an impressive exhibition.

This month’s Fagtag on Sunday night at the Argyle in the rocks was fun. Very pleasant, social, chatty party. The Argyle would be a brilliant venue for a club night, though being in the rocks it’s probably full of boofheads and backpackers on a typical Saturday night.

Vicky Pollard was in my Yoga class last night.

Drawn Together is definitetly the best written american TV show I’ve ever seen. It’s bloody hillarious.

Malabar on Victoria Street D’hurst is possibly the best Indian Restaurant in Sydney.

$60 to hear homeless people sing????

Yes indeed. And $60 jolly well spent. Stalls, 3rd row, centre, Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. Tears and laughter aplenty as we enjoyed a stirring performance last night by the Choir of Hard Knocks (stirring is an old fashioned word and entirely appropriate). The highlight for me was most definitely choir member Belinda Foxwell’s truly talented solo performance, and her defiant admission that the last three days in Sydney had been “shit” because she’d decided to go clean. Her song and vocal ability totally blew me away…I was balling!!!!

Really at a loss as to what else to say except go and check out http://abc.net.au/tv/hardknocks to find out more for yourself. Oh and look out for audience shots in the xmas special.

ADENDUM: We outsmarted United Airlines!!!! Baba rang their Tokyo booking office and booked our biz class tickets to India in November for 60k miles as advertised rather than the 75k miles that the call centre on Mars wanted to charge me. Still interested to see how they respond to the nasty email I sent them…Super exciting to me as an aeroplane geek is the fact that we have a chance of being among the first people in the world to fly on the A380 – in SQ J class no less!!

What i like best about my new job…

…is the fact that I can finish work at 4:30. I have the option of working 8:30 – 4:30 or 9 to 5. By a peculiar whim of quantum physics I only need to tear myself out of bed 5 minutes earlier in order to get to work at half eight instead of 9:00 and I get to walk out at half past 4. Somehow a 4:30 finish is hugely liberating. I’m looking forward to summer when daylight saving and warm weather kicks in and I can jump on a bus from the University and be at Coogee beach for an afternoon dip by quarter to 5.

Working with nice people and not having to deal with law students is also nice (have i mentioned those things before??)

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that baba and I plan to go to Kerala in India again later in the year…
…Unfortunately, i’m very pissed off tonight with United Airlines. According to their (impossible to negotiate) website, it costs 60k miles to get from Syndey to India in business class on Star aliance partner airlines. I rang them the other week to confirm this. The woman on the other end of the phone in a call centre somewhere on Mars with a thick quasi-american accent said “yes sirrrrrr it’s 60 000 miles from Sydney to Bangalorrrre India via Singaporrrrre on Singaporrrrre airrrrlines sirrrrr.” I promptly purchased around 30k “top up” miles for around $1000 thinking i was getting a bargain to be able to fly business class for less than it would ordinarily cost to buy an economy class ticket. Tonight I rang their call centre on Mars again and was told by another martian with a fake american accent that it costs 75k miles because the flight to India involves a stopover in Singapore which is in a more expensive “zone”. Long story short, I spoke to a supervisorrrr who refused to budge. I asked If I could get a refund for the $1000 I’d paid to buy miles and give my cash directly to Singapore Airlies instead. She of course rattled off the usual line about purchases being non-refundable and suggested that I could try sending an email which will be answered “within seven days” requesting a refund in my special circumstances.

Well fiddlesticks, poo, bum, wee, knickers, bollocks and tits!!!!! I’ll keep you posted on the success or otherwise of my appeal.

Finally while I write this, my hero, positively pinko-bolshy Journalist Tony Jones, is on telly tearing shreds off the completely evil right-wing doco “The Global Warming Swindle” – the film which tries to debunk the scientific consensus which says that people are screwing with the planet and it’s environment.

Here endeth the lesson.

Oh P.S. New favourite TV program: Drawn Together. SBS 9pm Monday nights. Took a while to acquire a taste for it, but its irreverent, filthy and satirical humour rocks!!!

Yoga (ouch)

For the lst couple of weeks I’ve been going to yoga classes on a Tuesday evening. I finish work at 5, do a little bit of half hearted gym exercise for half an hour or so, then go to a yoga class that starts at 6. I’m very inflexible, can’t toch my toes and all my joints crack when I bend over to tie my shoe lace, so I guess yoga is just the thing. Danny the very supple Chinese yoga instructor in his tight leotard is a bit of a spunk too – which is really one of the main reasons I keep going back week after week to put myself through the torture of bending joints backwards and trying to stand on one foot.

Happy birthday to my old school chum JW-san.

Happy 4th of July to any septics who surf by.