Oh Dear!!!

It's half time in Friday night football and Geelong are getting "smooshed" as Sport Boy would say! I'm so glad I swapped my cab shift until tomorrow night so I could stay home and watch the footy!! The worst part is that it's Collingwood, the most hated team in football, that is doing the smooshing! The Cats are 51 points down at half time having only kicked three goals so far, by far our worst performance of the season.
I can't see the Cats getting out of this one!

Backtracking to Yesterday.
The day started in unusual fashion, with a student protest at school. They went on strike to voice their unhappiness that the teacher's dispute has not been resolved and as a consequence they are going to miss out on going to Country Week. Country Week is just about the biggest event of their whole school lives and they're starting to realise it's not going to happen. As Country Week manager I encouraged them several weeks ago to get political, yesterday they finally sparked into action. Alas I think it will be too little too late to change things.

After that I went to Bunbury to attend a Childwise workshop on Child Sexual Abuse. Interestingly, one of the biggest news stories of the day is the closure of a photography exhibition in Sydney which contained several nude pictures of a 13 year old girl. The police are laying charges against the photographer who is one of Australia's most highly regarded artists. It's a shame he couldn't work out for himself the difference between art and pornographic exploitation of children.
In this country 1 in 4 girls is sexually abused and 1 in 6 boys. Those are chilling and damning figures.

At 12 o'clock I picked up Mrs Holt Press from the train station after her 10 days in Victoria visiting her parents. We returned home to Busselton after she forced me to stop at Spotlight first!
While I was there I at least availed myself of the opportunity to buy a frypan as a gift for my secret friend at work, this week being secret friend week. My surprises and gifts to an unsuspecting Ian included some lolly snakes, a can of soup, a packet of pink M&Ms for Breast Cancer, the fry pan, and a Leunig cartoon book, all accompanied by art cards I bought in Fremantle a couple of months ago.
My secret friend gave me chocolate, toasted sandwiches and today a footy magazine. It's a good fun activity to build staff morale and camaraderie.

Footy Update:
The Cats have kicked the first goal of the 2nd half!
And the 2nd!
And the third!
A good start but there's along way to go!

Last night I ran a quiz night for the BPW group at the Esplanade Hotel. They had plenty of people and everything went well, people seemed to enjoy themselves and there were no dramas or mistakes. Using the laptop and projector for the questions works really well and as one punter said afterwards, makes the whole thing more professional. The winners were a group of kids and adults from school; two of the boys are coming on the footy trip to Melbourne and two of them went on Rypen with The Hair last weekend so I'm getting to know them a lot more.

Footy Result:
Things did not get any better for Geelong, they ended up losing by 86 points!! A shellacking!!!
Having won 27 of our last 28 games I can't complain, we were "due" for a loss, but I'd have preferred it to be closer and not to Collingwood!!
Not surprisingly I had a message from Warren celebrating the Magpies win, thankfully it went through to voice mail!

Sport Boy's team have a bye tomorrow but The Hair is playing at 9 o'clock, it will be good to be able to watch him play as I don't see their team very often due to coaching duties with the 11's.
I'm driving the taxi from 4 tomorrow arvo.

Happy Mothers Day

We had the special pleasure of honouring two mothers today, my mum and the kid's mum. Mum came over from Bridgetown yesterday to come to the quiz night and be here for mothers day.
We went out for lunch at The Goose, overlooking Geographe Bay and had a really good time, nice food and lots of fun and laughter. fashion Boy was struggling to recover from the exertions of the school ball and afterball last night. He looked very cool in his suit and black shirt and had a wonderful time; he was high on life when he got home.

The rest of the family were at the quiz night which was a resounding success, just under 200 people came and we raised about $3000. The Heir helped Stu with the scoring, Sport Boy and Stu's daughter Emily were kept busy all night as runners, distributing and collecting puzzles and answers, collecting money etc and having a great time. Mum and Mrs Holt Press were on a table and said they really enjoyed the night.
The only bummer of the night was that some low-life swiped the three portable floodlight stands we had put out to enable people to see as they arrived and departed!!!! Not a quiz night customer I'm sure, just some passer-by siezing a dishonest opportunity!

Mrs Holt Press is about to board an aeroplane bound for Melbourne. She'll be away visiting her family for 10 days, leaving me in charge of domestic policy and famililal responsibilities.
Readers given to prayer may want to offer a few extra up for us, me, and the kids!
The Heir went up to Perth with her to drop her off at the airport and bring the car home. He's not back yet but shouldn't be too long now.

Volleyball

I'm feeling like the kid with no friends.

The new volleyball season started tonight and I didn't play cause I haven't got a team to play in. Miffy the Cow disbanded after last season and I haven't been able to get into a team. Yet! Hopefully I'll find a team in need soon.

In the meantime I refereed three games tonight which is handy as we raised the match payment to $20 this year! I'd rather play but $60 for blowing a whistle and pointing is not bad.

There have been two entries so far in the "Find a New Name For Fashion Boy" competition.

Birchy suggested "Air Jordan" while Sally has offered a more simple and direct moniker: "Jordan". (Not much imagination there Sal!)

Keep the suggestions coming.

Things are starting to crank up in preparation for the Big Busso Quiz Night on May 10. I've put 5 colourful signs up around town and tonight I wrote three rounds of questions. Only 5 to go.

If you're not busy on Sat May 10, get along to the high school, have some fun, win a prize, and help us raise funds for chaplaincy, what could be better than that?

I'll tell you!

I'm auctioning one of my paintings as part of the fund raising, your chance to bid on a Marcus Holt original!

And there's the famous Big Busso Quiz Night Cheat Sheets, containing the answer to every question in the quiz, available for the bargain price of $10!

How can you resist?

Local Heroes

The Heir and I have just returned from fighting a fire and saving the neighbourhood from going up in flames, or a small patch of bush near the drain at least. Mrs HP went to pick up Fashion Boy from a party (One of those wild moustached drawing parties!) when she rang to say there was a fire burning down the street and that we should go and put it out. The "little" fire she reported was well alight by the time we got there so I called 000 to report it then with the help of another bloke who'd stopped the three of us managed to beat it out with tree branches. It wasn't near any houses but it would have burnt a significant area if we hadn't extinguished it. The fire brigade arrived a few minutes later, took a look, then put their lights and siren on in a peculiar piece of timing.
They proceeded to give it a good soaking to deal with the remaining coals and embers.
Our good deed done for the day we headed for home.

We had been out at a quiz night at the hockey club and came from 5th with one round to go to storm into 3rd place. That scored us an assortment of prizes which we had to divvy up. We got a digital camera that will make a good present for one of the kids.

The big news of the day is that we have a new government in Australia with the Labor Party winning and Kevin Rudd becoming the new Prime Minister. The most amusing part of the whole deal was that the sitting PM lost his own seat, only the second time it's happened since federation!

I spent the afternoon dismantling the shed in Quindalup. Stu aka The Gardener and The Heir helped. Stu was the brains of the organisation, with me happy to follow his lead. The Heir provided material assistance, going to buy me a new key chuck when mine broke, and then when that one broke! going to get a stronger one from Bunnings back in Busselton.
While he was away I managed to fall off the wheelie bin I was standing on drilling out pop rivets and cut and scraped myself in a few places. The bleeding has stopped but my leg and arm are aching.
We managed to get the whole thing apart. The next stage is transporting it back to our place. We'll need a large trailer to do that.

Unfortunately there's been no progress on getting Sport Boy's bike back. Mrs HP did get busted inspecting a couple of bikes laying on the front lawn of a house around the corner though! The lady in the house was very nice once she explained what she was doing!

Quiz Night

Sorry this picture is so dark, the Blogger-Google-Picasa love triangle seems a bit dysfunctional tonight and this looks like the best I'm going to get!
You'll have to trust me when I say that the picture shows a room full of smiling happy faces at tonight's quiz night at the Esplanade. According to the members of the BPW (Business & Professional Women's Association) for whom I was running the night, it was "brilliant". Modesty prevents me from confirming this affirmation personally but who am I to question their judgement? The night did seem to go very well and to plan and I enjoyed myself in the process, all good signs.

Certainly the quiz night went better than events earlier in the day when I continued to have computer frustrations based on my prolonged enforced disconnection from the network due to software changeovers that have taken nearly 5 weeks to resolve! I had to work on another terminal in the front office to get the Country Week Pricing Sheet finalised and was so tied up getting that done that I COMPLETELY FORGOT my doctor's appointment!!! Considering there is usually about a two week waiting time to see this Dr I was pretty frustrated!

Things brightened when I "vented" (gently) my frustration to Rae the Principal and she referred me to the "Sweeper" (IT Guru down from Perth to help with the installation and associated problems) who proceeded to correct the problems I was having and successfully reconnected me to the network, got my email up and running and in the process made my day.
There were only 270 emails in the backlog awaiting my attention!

No time to deal with anything except the urgent stuff before I set off for Dunsborough for my rearranged Dr's appointment with an alternative Dr. As expected he confirmed the results of my blood tests as showing I have low testosterone levels and gave me a prescription to commence replacement therapy, and a second for anti-inflammatories, plus a referral to a counselor who comes highly recommended. I celebrated the end of the school week by buying a packet of chocolate and raspberry Tim-Tams and reading art magazines in the newsagency.

Quiz Night Poetry Challenge

I set the teams at the quiz night the challenge of writing a poem with a minimum of three verses with four lines each, containing a number of designated words and topics.
The response was impressive and amusing, with a mixture of humour, romance, pathos and the bizarre as people tried to include the required content, or construct rhymes around it.
Here is the winning entry which was based on audience response. The mandatory elements are highlighted.

A Brush With the Law by Table 12

I thought I'd just remove my pants
And shimmer through the night
But as I streaked across the road
The oldies died of fright

The cooking stopped in kitchens
And artists dropped their paint
And kangaroos in paddocks
Collapsed into a feint

The policeman said "explain it"
As I turned a shade of red
"It must have been marijuana scones
They went straight to my head."

My Mum she likes to cook them
And I took some for my lunch
And now I'm stuck in this small cell
With bikies and that bunch

I want to call my lawyer
To unchain me from this bed
And tomorrow when I raid the fridge
I'll steal two pies instead!

and another offering which was pithy and funny but disqualified for brevity.

I saw him remove his jacket
He shimmered pale in the light
I thought of fresh green mint
I'll explain, I'm having spuds tonight.

The Weekend Wrap

Last night we went to a quiz night where I faced the dilemma of having inadvertently said yes to two different teams. Carolyn and I had discussed one of us going with each team. Feeling bad about letting either team down I decided to stay with Carolyn and the original team, Sonia's table, and apologised to my mate Al for letting him down. I had rung earlier and left a message so they knew it was likely.
We made a slow start and were well off the pace after the first two rounds but then picked up our form and came back into contention, eventually tieing for 3rd and 4th place.
It went to a 5 question tie breaker.
Still tied.
A further 3 question tie breaker.
Still tied.
Finally it was settled with a toss of the coin, and we lost!

Al's team?
They came first!

I was on roster at the Gallery this afternoon, where I completed one painting and made major changes to another which has been hanging in the gallery for a few months. It looks better now but still needs a little more work before it is "finished" for the second time. When I got home Carolyn and I drove down to Meelup for a swim. The sky had gone grey and light rain started which was enough to disuade me from swimming but Carolyn still went in. I sat on the sand and talked to Aussie and his two daughters who were the only other family who ventured down there this evening. Meelup is such a beautiful spot it was a pleasure just to sit there for a couple of hours looking at the horizon and the clouds and the still ocean with it's many changing colours. We picked up some fish and chips for tea on the way home.

Apart from a headache I'm feeling better again than I have been. I'm still going to have time off work this week, see the Dr, and take some time out, hopefully all of which will be therapeutic.

Reporting from The Chateau d'Taffrail

We've just gotten home from the Leeming SHS Solar Car Challenge Quiz Night, we being Sally and Warren, their friends Deb and Peter, and Tony, and I, and in a bit of a surprise result, we came third, thus scoring a fist full of prizes, including a bottle of champagne, a castrol Cap, a Freddo, a free pizza and a coffee voucher, not a bad haul for a night's brain strain. As always I felt annoyed with myself for getting some easy questions wrong, like saying the Mayflower sailed in 1642 instead of 1620, and not backing my hunches such as writing William Halley as the discoveror of the famous comet instead of Edmund, a name I suggested but didn't back in!
We did get some difficult and obscure questions right, and of course there were a few we had no idea of and took wild guesses, for instance, who knew that Elvis Presley's backing band were called The Jordanaires and not the "Hip swivelling, body hugging, knee jerk comatose cowboys"? REALLY!
As usual there were little things about the way it was run that bugged me, like having spinning wheel prize draws, costing a dollar a shot between every round, admittedly a money spinner (pardon the pun) but intrusive after a while, and more frustratingly, having a break that stretched for 50 minutes between rounds 4 and 5!!! Sorry for being critical, overall the questions were good, the tone of the night was good, the company was good and we came away with prizes, can't really complain!

I had a great day, getting out to Armadale and a few other places this morning to set up some stuff for the camp, then picking up Phil and meeting Hugh for lunch (The Breakfast Club!) at a cafe in Mt Lawley, I had the prawns, which were tasty but not very filling, Phil generously shared some of his chicken and bacon panini with me which compensated.
He spoke arabic to the Iranian proprietor of the ice cream parlour when I bought dessert. Hugh had the inspiration to buy a lotto ticket for the first time in his life, with the three of us to share the proceeds. Don't know what we'll do about Broadie if we win!! His non-attendance prompted the first ever official motion in the 13 year history of the Breakfast Club, that being, that his membership of the Breakfast Club be down-graded from full to provisional status based on his irregular attendance and apparent lack of committment to the club! We'll see whether that sparks a revival of interest, or precipitates his complete withdrawal from our august organisation!!

Hugh took off to go to a wedding and Phil and I made the mistake of going to see the movie, "Borat"! My advice to anyone considering seeing this film is simple, don't ! It is offensive at innumerable levels, carries a .9 cringe factor, and is guaranteed to make you squirm in discomfort. There are 2-3 funny moments, but these are completely out-numbered by the stream of tasteless, anti-semitic, misogynistic, crude and unpleasant jokes and swipes at people hoodwinked into thinking he was a serious journalist from Khazakstan. The premise is funny, a few of the segmets are amusing, but in the main it's a movie with very few redeeming features and will not leave you feeling good.

Things improved again when we went back to Phils, chatted with Julie and the kids for a little while, surveyed the results of Phil's latest handiwork'; landscaping their backyard, and then descending into his basement shed where he proceeded to demonstrate how to make a picture frame. He made it look easy, it probably had something to do with the high quality (read expensive) tools he has at his disposal, and the fact he's very clever with his hands and most things practical. (Don't worry Birchy, you're still number 1!!!)

After the demo it was back to Sal's to get ready for the quiz night, and that's pretty much where I started this tale.

Yesterday's briefings at Carine went well, the staff seemed happy with their roles and what to expect, and the kids laughed in the right places, listened attentively and asked intelligent questions, and it didn't go more than an hour.
The only disappointment from yesterday was not getting to see my brother Bruce as planned, I couldn't reach him at home or on the mobile, so I ended up doing a little more camp reconnaisance in the city before heading round to Sally's place for the night.
I managed to get hold of him tonight and am going over to see him in the morning. I'll head home to Busso after lunch. Tomorrow night I'm speaking at a memorial service being held by the Busselton Hospice so I've got some prep to do for that.