Thursday, April 12, 2007

Birthday Weekend

I decided to have a birthday over the Easter long weekend this year. Ok, ok. My decision had nothing to do with it. That's just the way it happened. It was really nice to have four days to do bugger all.

On Saturday we headed down to Fremantle to have some famous, high quality fish and chips at Cicerello's. Unfortunately we didn't find the famous, high quality fish and chips although we paid the price for them. Not impressed with the Cicerello's Delight, let me say.

All weekend in Fremantle it was the Fremantle Streets Arts Festival and they even closed off the main street to traffic for the street performers. There was a small area outside Cicerello's which had a different performer every hour. Once we had finished our meal we sat outside to watch Great Scott and his juggling act.



I know that Great Scott had an hour to kill so he started off fairly slowly but he had a big finale. At one stage he called for a child member of the audience to volunteer and my boy put his hand up and was chosen. I thought my kid was shy in front of strangers but it seems if you put him in front of a hundred people or so he loses his shyness altogether. He even tried to upstage Great Scott by telling him he could juggle as well and was given a go, as you can see in the video.

The big finale, which goes for nearly 11 minutes and so is slightly too big to put on youtube (I also had trouble uploading the 89MB of video), involves Great Scott standing on a board on a pipe which is on a board standing on champagne glasses which were on a board on some canisters and juggling three tennis racquets. It was quite a performance. Yu-Jin had to throw him the last tennis racquet and he was paid $5 for his part in the show, which he promptly turned around and donated to the performer. It was a very enjoyable show.

On Monday I went golfing at Marri Park with golfing friends Joe and Shayne. I haven't played with them since August last year, also the last time I played golf, although I did go to the driving range a couple of days after Christmas. I thought seeing as I hadn't played for so long and the fact that my neck was in a bad way, shouldn't really have played I guess, that if I broke 115 I would have done alright.

Marri Park is narrow and the greens aren't smooth at all. The ball bobbles around on the putting surface far too much. There are plenty of trees but not too much trouble as there is a very limited amount of undergrowth. Both Joe and I shot 48s and Shayne hit a 57 on the front nine.

I played pretty consistently and did no worse than a 7 on every hole although the par 3s were abysmal. Love to say that I powered away from Joe on the back nine but the truth is that his game went to pieces with me shooting another 48 and he a 59. So, a 96 off the stick at a course I've never played and without playing for some eight months I think I did ok. I did hit a lovely drive into a slight headwind on the last and Shayne outdrove me by 50m with a massive drive.

Straight after golf I met up with the family and some friends for a BBQ lunch in Belmont. I don't think few families there had other family members with them - nearly everyone was a mixed couple (lots of Thai wives) and some of our friends are from Mauritius with no other family members in Perth. It was very nice to get together with other people at this time of year. I guess for all of the kids in attendance the Easter egg hunt in the nearby gardens was the biggest thrill. That kept them busy for quite some time while I was cooking my BBQ lunch. We didn't get home until after six o'clock.

A nice relaxing weekend for me but Miky did some 23 hours of dressmaking over the long weekend which wore her out.

1 comment:

Susan Ham said...

As the late Jack Davey would say,(if Yu-Jin was an adult,) 'give the gentleman a cigar!' As he is only a boy, give him a HUGE pat on the back instead. Well done!