While Not Working

Roger was glued to the laptop in a marathon effort to clock up his Professional Development hours by Professional Registration time.  I could have stayed home, watered the plants, done the laundry, and vacuumed up all the dog hair. Mind you Big Fluffy sheds like an autumn tree, so I could vacuum dog hair until it came out of my ears and still have more to do, rendering that option unpalatable. In a fine example of avoiding housework and leaving Roger to get his own cups of tea, I hopped on my bicycle and rode to Milang instead. I went the long way round, partly because the long way round was (hopefully) more interesting and had less traffic, and partly because I was foolish enough to turn a 20km cycle into a 40km slog into a headwind.  But there was less traffic, so that was good. I passed the disused railway turntable on the way out of town. Riverside Road followed the Angas river which was buried in a deep channel, festooned with the remnants of summer's scotch thistles. The...

The Adelaide Fringe Festival, the second biggest arts festival in the world, was just about to finish up. We only got to two Fringe concerts this year: the Adelaide Wind Orchestra in a swanky private school auditorium with perfect acoustics,  and the Fusion Pops Orchestra in the Norwood Concert hall which was a beautiful old hall with terrible acoustics. We finished off our Fringe involvement by taking part in a bike ride along the Amu Gillett Bikeway with a few token art installations along the way to qualify it as a Fringe event.  The bikeway was built to honour the memory of Amy Gillett, a member of the Australian women’s cycling team who was killed whilst training in Germany in July 2005.  There are plans to extend the bikeway further but for the purposes of our ride we started a shade south of Woodside and rode 15km uphill to Mount Torrens and then turned around and rode back again.  None of it was new to us, having done the same Fringe ride last year. We lear...

We had lunch with family in Mount Barker. "I'll ride my bicycle home from Mount Barker," I thought.  "Mount Barker is higher than Strathalbyn, so it will be a cruisy downhill ride." I mapped out a route that avoided main roads and off I went.  Mount Barker had a surprisingly comprerhensive network of bicycle trails so I didn't have to go on the road until I reached the edge of town. Bye bye urban riding.  Hello country lanes.   As I pedaled off along my desired network of quiet country roads I came slowly to the disturbing realisation that an awful lot of up was squeezed into my nice little downhill ride.   The camera lies.  It was steeper than it looks, promise.   I personally blamed the pesky Bugle Ranges, sitting between Mount Barker and Strathalbyn, for all the plodding that I did while pushing my bicycle up hill on my downhill ride. To add insult to injury, the beautiful dappled shadows on the road camouflaged the potholes and corrugations,...

 Looking after Chocolate was like taking a holiday from my regular life. I didn't have the laptop with me so I entertained myself by reading whatever books I found at the swapping library in Port Adelaide. I didn't have the car so I went where my feet or bicycle could take me.  In the spirit of getting out and about in the glorious weather I caught the train to Brighton and rode home along the seaside with a brisk southerly for companionship. The tide was out. All the sailing clubs were out enjoying the wonderful weather and holding their end-of-season regatta/parties. Tractors waited patiently for the ships to come back to shore.  In between the patiently waiting tractors the surf clubs had set up Marquees and were busily holding their end-of-summer carnivals with lots of megaphone noise and swarms of little nippers racing in and out of the water. Some people were taking things a little more easily, kicking back and enjoying the sunshine. And some people looked really ou...