Fresh air needed

I have a wide tolerance for what I find attractive in a man but Robert Pattinson who attracts a lot of media attention for his appearances in a certain vampire series of movies has never done it for me.

From the outset his photographs have suggested to me a scruffiness and less than appealing standards of hygeine and now, if magazine reports are to be believed, he has admitted his personal hygeine 'is disgusting'.

A Room with a View

'Water views' is the mantra for desirable living in property obsessed Sydney and my friend Me's home meets that criterion in Sydney's ocean side suburb of Manly; or more precisely North Steyne.

I had lunch at her home today together with My, the three of us being workmates in the 1980s and later.

This is the view from her front terrace on which we ate our lunch. As you can tell from the sound, it was a breezy day.

Not a bad view to wake to every day, is it?

Look what I got at Ikea...

Lifted from Sean's blog.

Valley Lodge "All of My Loving" from Valley Lodge on Vimeo.

Class of 55

(Click to enlarge)

Here is a photo of potential 20th Century movers and shakers. Well maybe not; I don't really know. It is the Double Bay Public School Transition class of 1955 (that is, the class between Kindergarten and First Class in Primary School).

The 'cherub' second from the right in the top row would not have known what a computer was in 1955 but now in his retirement he maintains a blog. Yes that is me, aged six.

I'm done

The hospital was so, so busy today and I'm exhausted.

That's all.

Picnic in the park

We had a picnic at tiny McKell Park in Darling Point this afternoon to mark several birthdays including Sy's and Hn's. We had set ourselves up in the space above with other picnic groups around us only to have a woman inform us half an hour in that she was setting up for a wedding to commence two hours later.

We moved to another spot about twenty metres away and continued our picnic there as preparations for the wedding continued. It turned out to be a Jewish wedding with a canopy and violinist playing Jewish tunes and melodies from Fiddler on the Roof. The violinist had to compete with the thump, thump, thump music drifting off the harbour from nearby leisure craft but he provided a pleasant background to our picnic.

The fairly formal dress of the wedding guests looked a bit strange in the park environs but gave us plenty of opportunities for gratuitous bystander assessments.

Turned out to be a good afternoon.

Here they go...here they go...here they go...

I watched the New Zealand versus Bahrain qualifying match for the World Cup finals on television tonight. New Zealand won the match 1-0 to win the tie by the same score on aggregate and qualify for next years finals in South Africa.

It is the first time they have qualified for the finals series in twenty-eight years and the capacity crowd in the stadium erupted in joyous scenes at full time.

New Zealand players celebrate winning goal 2009

The scenes reminded me of the night four years ago when Australia beat Uruguay in Sydney to qualify for the finals for the first time in thirty-two years.

Australian players celebrate winning penalty 2005

Congratulations to New Zealand and best wishes to them and also to Australia who qualified again this time a few weeks ago. It would be ironic if the two countries end up in the same group at the finals.