A Day at Home .....

We haven’t poked our heads out of the door today. We had heavy rain last night and today is not much better. I plan to be up at 4.30am to watch the World Cup final so it’s sensible to have a quiet day today so that I won’t be too tired to watch the match.

Last night was the last of our current theatre program. We went with old friends, Brian and Jenny Haslam to see the Bell Theatre Production of Twelfth Night. The weather was miserable but you have to take the bad with the good in Tasmania or you wouldn’t do anything.

We heard an interview with Max Cullen, one of the cast, on the radio and were surprised to hear that the production was drawing parallels with the devastating bushfires in Victoria last year. We knew that Twelfth Night was the story of a group of survivors of a shipwreck and wondered how they would bring in a bushfire.

Well, nothing seems to be beyond the Bell Shakespeare Company. The story unfolded as a group of survivors of a bushfire took refuge in some sort of building. The set was a pile of clothes about 2m tall, and the cast of 7 were apparently passing the time by performing the play from a book found in the building. A bit tenuous, but once the cast got past the initial few minutes, the audience became absorbed in the story.

The script was supplemented by extra lines, songs, references, snippets of TV News, and so on. Max Cullen is a great old trouper and, in our eyes, stole the show.

Again we went to the after- party to meet the cast and enjoy a glass of local wine.

We have nothing else arranged at the moment but there’s a lot more coming up in the next couple of months.

On a day like today, we tend to fall back on the freezer for meals and luckily we still have a few boxes left over from our last big cooking day. We made a soup this week in the dreampot and it was, again, terrific. Marilyn made the stock the day before from some chicken bones we had been saving and I simply added vegetables to finish it off. Five minutes cooking and then two hours in the pot and it was perfect.

We chased up some more caches this week but were stumped by one which did not give us much information to work with. We found the coordinates and stood on the spot indicated but the only clue was that there was only one possible place the cache could be hidden. In fact, at GZ (Ground Zero, I imagine) there was nowhere to hide a cache. The GPS suggested that it might only be accurate to within 12m so that wasn‘t much help. We finally gave up but went back another time for another attempt. This time, two young fellows wondered what we were doing and ended up giving us a hand, but still with no success. I think we’ll write that one off.

I’ve been catching up on some favourite books now that I have some time to spare. I have downloaded several hundred books from the internet in electronic format and stored them on my computer, Every now and again, I load eight or ten on to my e-book reader and devour them over time. There’s nothing which stretches my intellect but sometimes escapism is the way to go. At the moment, I have books by Jack Higgins, Dick Francis, Jonathan Kellerman, Faye Kellerman, Patrick O’Brian, Ellis Peters, Jeffrey Archer, Robin Cook, Stephen King and Tim Willocks. None of them will win the Booker Prize, but they are an enjoyable read, nonetheless.