So, today is already the last day of the month. It was a pretty hectic month for this 82 year old. Two years ago we celebrated my 80th birthday.
These are some of the flowers that I received for my 80th Birthday in Sept.2014
This morning Peter discovered a flower on our ‘butterfly’ bush in front of the window. We call this little tree ‘butterfly’ tree because its leaves look like butterflies.
It was still early morning when we were ready for some green tea.
When we were in Sydney two weeks ago we wanted to visit this museum but found out it opens only on Sundays. We were there on a Tuesday. So we have to go back there some other time. During this month we were in Sydney three times. Once we stayed overnight there for two nights. We stayed in a loft apartment, that meant to the bedroom and bathroom we had to climb oup these stairs. It was good exercise for us, indeed!
Alexander’s second birthday is coming up this week.It is often convenient to celebrate birthdays on a Sunday. So the birthday of Alex was celebrated already yesterday. This time we all met at The Shellharbour Club. It seems that more and more clubs provide playgrounds for the children these days. The Shellharbour Club too has a playground.
There was a Birthday Cake for Alexander
A piece of Birthday Cake
Both Alex and his four year old brother Lucas loved to play with all the toys that Alex had been given for his birthday.
This is Peter’s Hamburger and my sweet potato chips
The sweet potato chips were excellent and we shared a fruit salad that was a very good choice too. Everyone ordered their own food at the club.
Peter and I stayed in an apartment at Darling Harbour. To frolic around Sydney’s Darling Harbour was quite exciting. It was my 82nd birthday. At nighttime we strolled to an Italian restaurant and had a three course meal there with a glass of red wine. There was also some beautiful music to entertain us. We liked that very much. The food and the wine were very much to our liking as well. So we had a lovely evening. After the meal it was only a short walk back to our apartment.
Decadence is a 2006 Australian TV series examining the plummeting quality of Australian life, which director and narrator Pria Viswalingam blames on a global economic system based on frenetic consumption, fueled by debt and ridiculously long hours of work. The cinematography choreographs to perfection the self-indulgent moral degradation of a culture that has been subsumed by US political and cultural norms that reward narcissism and the vacuous idolization of celebrity.
The only critique I would have is the absence class perspective. I have a problem with Viswalingam’s blanket assertion that all Australians are working ridiculously long hours because they value the accumulation of luxuries more than family time or friendships. I think this criticism applies chiefly to the shrinking Australian middle class – which I estimate at around 20-30% of the population. From my experience, the majority of Aussies – like…
Yesterday we bought a few things for our backyard.
We already planted somef things in these boxes. We may also use some pots for more planting. At the moment Peter is still struggling to remove some spread out roots of the camphor laurel tree. The main roots we had taken out by the people who removed our three obnoxious trees from our backyard. The far away roots of the camphor laurel tree are very, very thick. They lifted up some of the earth in the backyard. So Peter took it upon himself to try and get rid of some of them. They are so very hard. Peter thought maybe a chain-saw would do the job better than his little axe. So he bought one yesterday. Sadly, he found out, it does not work very well. He still has a hard time cutting through these roots.
There is one little bush left that stood near the camphor Laurel tree. It is cut back a lot, but perhaps may come back again.Once we have levelled the area sufficiently, we may try out some of that synthetic grass.
Whenever we do some gardening,we do only a bit at a time. We cannot do too much in one day, otherwise we get too sore. After a couple of hours, we usually feel, that we have to stop.
THE MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRACY
is situated in the Old Parliament House.
We did drive to the Old Parliament House on that Friday morning after we had returned from our walk to Manuka. I wrote about this walk in my previous post.You can go back to it here:
We saw in the museum interesting historical things.
Buses did bring a lot of visitors to the museum.
1215 was the year when the MAGNA CARTA was first drafted.
At lunchtime we drove to this tavern, Wig & Pen, to have one of their delicious beers and some lunch.
Bike riding is quite popular in Canberra.Our chosen beer was Imperial Russian (like a very strong Guinness),. and we were warned it had very much alcohol in it!
While waiting for our meal I had a look in this very interesting magazine about beer brewing:
Peter is happy with his meal.I liked my spicy vegetarian meal. However it turned out, I had to leave some of it. It was just too much!
I mentioned that on Saturday, the 27th of August, we went to the Telstra Tower and later on to the National Museum.
At nighttime of that same Saturday, which was our last day in Canberra, the Museum of Australian Democracy presented
THE HANSARD MONOLOGUES (Age of Entitlement) and we had tickets for this very interesting show. As I said before, the Museum of Australian Democracy is in the Old Parliament House.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might like to have a look at this website:
We had arrived at our hotel on Thursday, the 25th of August. The following morning we wanted to walk to Manuka to have breakfast there. It was a crisp, sunny morning. We knew, Franklin Street would take us straight to Manuka Shopping Centre, however we chose a different way so that we would have a bit more of a walk.
Before we left, we placed this sign outside our door so the staff would know that we weren’t in bed any more!Our hotel was at National Circuit, Instead of turning right to Franklin Street we turned left.
The following pictures are all taken on this early morning walk to Manuka and back. On the way we noticed some early spring flowers and blossoms. We had breakfast in Manuka at a baker’s shop. We also had a look at the inside of the Catholic Cathedral in Manuka.
This was a rented car. We had to leave our car behind for it needed new spark plugs. We had left home early in the morning. Our plan had been to drive up Macquarie Pass to Moss Vale for breakfast at a cafe in Moss Vale. We found out that Macquarie Pass was closed for maintenance work. So we went up the Jamberoo Mountain Road Pass to the highlands. To arrive at our chosen cafe in Moss Vale via this pass instead of Macquarie Pass took us just an extra ten minutes.
After our very good breakfast in Moss Vale we drove straight through to Canberra where we spent a couple of hours at Parliament House before checking in at Forrest Hotel at around 2pm.
I wrote about our visit to Parliament House here in my previous post:
All hotels in Australia provide you with tea and coffee making facilities. We had bought some cake in Moss Vale for our afternoon coffee.
We liked to have coffee and cake in our room.Peter is about to unpack.Top right the air-conditioning kept the room at 22C at all times. We never had to reset it.
When the air-conditioning switched itself on, the air came out really hot. After a little while it would switch itself off again. I thought, this worked really well. I never felt cold in our room, even though the outside temperature would be a cool 5 degrees C during the night.
This is early morning Peter in bed probably with a cup of tea.
During the night we topped our bed with a woolen blanket. There were a couple of Australian made woolen blankets in our wardrobe. That these blankets were actually Australian made, was very much to my liking!
AuntyUta 