The Weekend that Was

The weekend began modestly with me on my Pat Malone on the sofa with a six pack of unremarkable beer. Late accompanied by a takeaway Hawaiian Pizza from down the road and an unusual Ben Stiller movie with Alan Alda and Elliot Gould in it.

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Late brekky after a home improvements shop with a Walk Street Cafe long mac and an orange and poppyseed muffin. Good, and if you look closely you can see the face of Jeff Harvey, bandleader for the Ray Martin Show, in there.

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Fancy new pair of shorts and I'm off down the foreshore with three king browns of Coopers and two bottles of lemonade to drink shandy and watch Robbie dice it out there with a hundred other wind and kite surfers. Dry Shandy: 1 parts lemonade, 9 parts beer. Deadly. I mean it's just a shandy but before you know it, you've three empty bottles and people walking by going tut tut and telling you to get a job. And my, haven't windsurfers come a long way since the unidirectional plastic 10' jobbies of yesteryear?

Finished with a bottle of the Cascade Special Stout [pictured al fresco]. Great for lovers of toasty grained stouts, look for it in the Castrol Dot4 High Performance Brake Fluid container.




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Chips justs don't cut it so with a raging hunger I popped on a nice shirt and headed to TQR Vietnamese restaurant on Stirling Highway grabbing a bottle of wine on the way out. Have to admire the Christmas tree though those Buddhists are waving a red nose to defenders of Traditional Christmas . Nowhere, nowhere does it state that Jesus wore a conical hat or if he did, make a tree of it. Syncretic sabotage.

Dinner was yum but not as good as previous standards, but that's Saturday night and there were two tables of adolescent birthday parties (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Mexican Restaurant -come back all is forgiven and what was with the hairy eyeball table two?) putting extra pressure on things. My starters were a little singed but the rest, pinapple rice, pig in a pot, and rice noodles with vegetables, were on par and a solid combination. Let down by a poor choice of wine by me due to no chilled whites at home. A sparky Pinot Noir with a spicy meal matched that old vindictive cartoon standyby of [[Event 1] - character unwittingly consumes A, only to [Event 2] unwittingly drink B to tongue popping hilarity].



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Santa Lucia breakfast with Swedish-French Veronique. A sneaky way of having a pagan winter solstice festival by naming it after a Saint. As Robbie put it - evil christmas. More ethnic subversion.

The unlit candle is for the one more Sunday until Christmas. Highlights were the Lussekatter - saffron, walnut, and schnapps flavoured buns with lingonberry jam. Lingonberry jam is a nice and tart alternative to other berry jams. Perfectly think and speckled crepes, lots of coffee and attractively decorated ginger snap biscuits. No requirements of singing, dancing, or the wearing of candles. More functional Swedish well designed no-fuss. Love that country and it's in my top 5 countries I wouldn't mind being invaded by (the others being France, Mexico, New Zealand, and Japan - sorry Diggers but speaking Japanese is kind of fun).



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Finished a hard day's adding of equity with the sole bit of cooking for the weekend - spicy italian snaggers and onions. Marvellous.