Well. That Was Kind Of Epic.

Rincewind And Death.

Yes. The hat does have the word 'Wizzard' on it in badly-glued sequins. Just so you know.

Indeed, today was Younger Son's birthday party. And if you'd forgotten, the theme he chose was 'characters from books.' Aside from himself as Rincewind and Jake as Death from the Discworld novels, we had a Harry Potter, a colour-blind Robin Hood (grey? Whoever heard of 'Lincoln Grey?) a Joker (dodgy!) and... er... some others. Yep.

Friday was big. I made it down to the school with the kids, grabbed a few things, and promptly spent nearly four hours doing some basic stop-motion animation with some of Jake's class. In the space of an hour and a half, we took over a thousand 640x480 photos, and then for the next few hours I sat down with a little piece of wonderful freeware called "Monkeyjam", and turned the photos into avi files. Finally, I stitched the avi files into a final rough cut using the school's copies of Windows Moviemaker (which was horrid, but workable), and left it running for the kids to see. I still have to put together a clean copy here at home with my own editing software, and add a soundtrack (courtesy of Audacity - another brilliant piece of freeware). I figure by Tuesday I'll be able to duck back down to the school and hand each of the five kids in my group a DVD with their movie on it.

The movie was pretty basic. I used the kids as subjects. They rode around on 'invisible motorcycles'. We had a couple of bad bikers, a moped-riding victim who got her revenge, a couple of police (one of whom rode in a sidecar, which was funny to see) and even a train. The whole story ended in a big crash, and the moped-rider comes through at the end to laugh at the fiendish bikers who knocked her over at the start of the story.

The kids had a great time being filmed, and they were all fascinated to see the photos come together into basic video footage. Huge laughs as the ridiculous poses linked into animation and movement, exclamations of delight as the story unfolded... if you've never done basic stop-motion work with kids, you've missed out. You need a digital camera, a functional computer running Windows... and a bit of time and imagination.

If that sounds like fun to you, I really need to draw your attention to the Monkeyjam people, courtesy of this link here. It's a lovely, simple, easy and intuitive piece of software, with a surprising degree of utility and flexibility. It's small, easily downloaded, free -- and if you like it, well worth supporting it. Stop-motion animation is enormous fun, and this is the simplest, cheapest way I know to get involved.

Strangely, I can't recall a lot of Friday afternoon or evening. There was cooking. And costume preparation. And some more work on Moby Playset, though not a lot. Actually, I thought I was stymied there. According to the diagrams, I was short by three vital pieces of timber. And of course, there was a lot of other stuff going on.

Like what? Oh -- well, Saturday afternoon and evening was the pizza and Kung Fu movie night for the ju-jitsu group. The older ones, anyhow. So of course, I made a truly terrifying quantity of yeasty pizza dough, laid in a mountain of tomato, mozzarella, pepperoni, mushroom, pineapple, ham, capsicum, onion, olives, feta and so forth, and went through the movie collection. And sure enough, roundabout four in the afternoon, they arrived.

It's been a good year in ju-jitsu. We've picked up some older students - high school, and even adult - and they're a likeable crowd. I particularly wanted to give the teenage mob an entertaining evening, so the whole pizza-and-kung-fu movie thing seemed a good plan. It went over pretty well in the end.... tonnes of pizza, followed by about forty litres of popcorn, and a mass exodus to the Loft of Doom. (Carefully cleaned and tidied. And I had to pull a goddam starling nest down from one of the beams. Why didn't my wife notice that birds were nesting over her head when she's been exercising up there?)

We watched an atrocious episode of "The Samurai", providing our own vocal tracks and commentaries, which was fun. Then we cranked up the original "Street Fighter" movie, with Sony Chiba as the deadly 'Terry Tsurugi'. I'd forgotten how over-the-top that film is. There were some scenes that had us howling with laughter, and I suspect I'll be hearing students whine "Te-rrri! Terr---rri!" in piteous voices all next year, after the annoyingly pathetic death scene of one particularly crapulous character. But in general, it was good for a laugh.

We took a break then, and because so many of the audience were teenagers, I actually cooked up another twenty or thirty litres of popcorn. Man, did they put that stuff away!

We finished up with Bruce Lee in 'Way Of The Dragon' -- another classic film. Unfortunately, I'm never going to view it the same way again. First of all, the cries of horror at Chuck Norris's chest bathmat during the final fight sequence were kind of alarming. I mean, yeah, Chuck was a hairy bastard, but I'd never really thought about it before. Now, of course, if I watch that scene again all I'm gonna see is a walking wall of chest hair. As Jake put it: "Holy crap! I think that guy's chest hair has chest hair!"

Worse though, was Norris's first scene. He arrives on an aeroplane, and disembarks in his classic Seventies ensemble - tight brown pants, off-brown shirt, brown sunglasses, etc. As he walks across the tarmac, a kettledrum matches him step for step. Unfortunately, Bruce Lee directed the film, and I don't think he'd done any direction before. Mostly it was good -- but in this scene, Norris keeps walking towards the camera which is ostentatiously focused on his tight-trousered groin. Said groin continues to get bigger and bigger, pace by kettledrum pace, until it fills the whole fucking screen.

Which is a lot more of Chuck Norris than I ever wanted to see.

The straw that broke my brain was the sudden realisation that I wasn't actually hearing a kettledrum at all in that scene. Nope: that deep, hollow, booming sound that matched Norris stride for stride was clearly the sound of his enormous testicles swinging back and forth, clanging and gonging as they went.

I managed to explain that to everyone else. And we all kind of fell apart after that.

Today, I fed some breakfast to a couple of the lads who stayed the night - they live out at Ringarooma - and then dashed down to do some party shopping. Then, of course, it was time for Younger Son's birthday party. Costumes, cake (did I mention I baked a really good chocolate cake in between creating breakfasts and shopping this morning? 'Cause I did, yeah. Props to Natalie for frosting it, though. Damned if I could have found time.) balloons, presents, games, and an archery competition involving balloons. Younger Son did me proud: nailed a balloon with his first arrow, at about 20 metres - when even the older kids were struggling just to reach the target.

Finally, after the crowd took off, we were left with just a couple of lovely medical students, Grace and Chrissy. They'd helped us through the party and all, and then picked a bowl of fresh early raspberries, so I improvised a meal: enormous mushrooms (from the mushroom-composted strawberry patch) sliced thin, to line a casserole dish. Then a spicy mix of chicken, onion, garlic, tomato and chorizo, and then more slabs of mushroom for a lid, and a nice dusting of mozzarella on top, all baked into a delicious, tasty mass. The mushrooms were wonderfully flavoursome, and the whole dish worked out a treat.

Best of all: Natalie read the instructional notes very, very carefully, and discovered we can work without the missing bits of timber. So we're back on track with Moby Playset.

Hip hip hoofuckingray.

Mucking Fudpit

Awww. Doesn't it look nice? All lovely with banners anna stripey roof, yeah. And is that some kind of ropy laddery thing in the background....?

No. No it is not. It is a mucking fudpit from hell.

See the chunk of old carpet there - that burnt-orange hell-refugee from the seventies? That's the only thing preventing that stepladder from vanishing into a treacherous bog roughly the depth of the Mau-Mau. Today was not very productive in terms of Moby Playset.

First I had to drop the kids at school, and set up the Mau-Mau's piano at the school for her weekly lesson. Then it was off to Launceston, where I failed to buy coffee -- Natalie's gonna be cranky -- but managed a few costumes for a certain birthday party upcoming, and a few Christmas bits and pieces as needed.

Then it was home, and I put up the struts to hold that pretty roof. However, with the ladder being useless, I basically had to do my celebrated Oversize Spiderman impression with the cordless drill, which was... exciting. At least for the highest bits.

Still, if I had actually fallen, doubtless there would simply have been a terrible squelching noise, and I could then have waded to solid ground.

Anyway. I got the struts in place. Then I drove back to Scottsdale, picked up the post, did the grocery shopping, collected the kids (and the Mau-Mau's piano) and came home. Whereupon I thought I'd put on the nice stripey roof, and maybe hang that ropy laddery thing.

The roof was a bastard of a job. Typical: there's barely enough roofing material there to stretch over the frame. (Wouldn't want to give the clientele an extra ten mil. That would be WASTAGE!) I had to redrill one set of holding screws three goddam times before I could make it all stretch properly. And of course, the whole goddam thing was done in Spiderman mode.

Then I went to do the rope ladder thingy.

The ropes are long. They went into the mud. Then I had to pull them through the rungs, and make knots. The mud flew off in all directions. Mainly mine.

Standing on a slowly sinking stepladder on a filthy seventies carpet over the mud, tying knots, I glanced down and came to a terrible realisation. The ropes were NOT all the same length. No, indeed. Worse, the two ropes which I thought were attached to the tyre swing were, in fact, completely free agents. And they matched the length of two of the ropes I had put on that ropy laddery bastard thing.

Fuck.

Check the instructions. Nothing about different lengths of rope. Oh -- and in their illustration, the goddam ropy laddery thing has only THREE ropes, not four. But as I mentioned before: that's the generic basic unit illustrated in the instructions. Ours is a bit upmarket in places -- and so I just have to sort of guess and improvise in those places. This is one of them.

Careful examination of the rest of the instructions show that there is also a climbing rope, and by the look of it, the thing is a bit shorter than the ropy laddery ropes. Therefore I need to remove the two short ropes I've put in place, and replace them with longer ones. And one of the shorter ones will become the climbing rope. The other?

Fucked if I know. Nothing about it in the instructions that I can find.

I've had a shower now, and stopped swearing. A beer is helping. Now I have to get the dry clothes off the line, cook grilled pork meatballs for our Vietnamese spring roll dinner, then sew two costumes for Sunday, gather a few bits of software from the 'Net and install them to Natalie's computer so that tomorrow I can go to the school and do some stop-motion filming with Jake's class.

No worries. After all, it's goddam Christmastime, right?

No Photos Today

Rain today. Rather a lot of it. So much that I had to - regretfully - cancel the end-of-year ju-jitsu barbecue down at NorthEast park. I'm glad I did, though. By four pm, the rain was coming down in supertankers (as opposed to buckets) and there was thunder and lightning about. North-East park is a fine facility, with a large sheltered area and undercover barbecues... but it would have been cold, damp, dark, and relatively miserable.

As a result of the rain, I didn't get much done on Moby Swingset. The railings are now on, but I'll have to wait until tomorrow afternoon to kick off again. On the other hand, there's really not too much major assembly left to be done. I hope.

I still went to the school to cook Chili Tamarind Chicken for Jake's class, mind you. On the good side, that gave me a solid excuse to avoid the infant-school concert, in which the Mau-Mau and Younger Son both had vital roles. Natalie got to attend that one. Heh. She's getting a taste of my end of the stick this year... and I'm not at all sure she's enjoying it.

The cooking went well. Once again, I find myself surprised and pleased. I thought perhaps the enthusiasm of Younger Son's class reflected the fact that they were younger, with less fully-formed taste prejudices. But if anything, Jake's year 4/5 group were even more enthusiastic. They tasted everything, exclaimed over the ginger, nibbled the chilis and ran around gobbling up cucumber to cool their mouths -- and then they ate the entire pot of chili tamarind chicken and all the turmeric rice, and came back for seconds (and even one set of thirds!)

I had kids telling me they didn't like beans... but once they realised the beans were still crisp and crunchy ('cause I don't cook 'em to death in my stir-frying!) they sucked them down and announced that they were delicious. I had kids who didn't like capsicum who did the same. And I had at least a couple of kids who were all glum and downcast when they found out I was cooking a stir-fried dish... but when they got a mouthful, it was on for young and old, folks. (I suspect there's quite a difference between scratch-built stir-fries and stir-fries which come out of a big jar. I wouldn't know. I've never eaten one out of a jar.)

I gave 'em a basic melon salad with ginger syrup and fresh mint for dessert. That disappeared too. In record time. And later, when I went home (briefly), I emailed Jake with the recipe. He tells me that his classmates were jumping with excitement and demanding copies, and that he kept "getting hugged by people" (you have to imagine a perturbed and grumpy look on a ten-year-old boy's face at this point) because he gave them the recipe.

So here we are. In a small, rural community that has a love affair with meat and potatoes, yep. Feeding two different classes of kids a spicy Malaysian dish full of ginger, garlic, chili, tamarind, sweet soy and garam masala, and absolutely loaded with fresh, still-crunchy baby corn, bok choy, green beans, capsicum and carrot. Served over brilliantly yellow turmeric-cooked basmati rice.

You'd imagine there would be some sort of reluctance or protest. I certainly thought so. But I was wrong, and I'm both pleased and dismayed by that. I'm pleased, because forty or so kids have now had a taste of fresh, healthy, somewhat exotic food and shown that they were more than ready to expand their horizons. I'm dismayed because it implies it's a lot easier to change kids' dietary habits for the better than I thought -- and that the lack of change is therefore not down to the kids, but to the people feeding them, and the systems of food production and marketing which influence those people.

It took me about forty minutes -- while answering questions, moving bits and pieces, and prepping a place to cook outside ( didn't want to stir fry inside, under the smoke detectors) to cook a nutritious, tasty meal for more than twenty kids (and a few adults.) If I'd been working in a home kitchen feeding four or five, it would have been a fifteen minute job. The total cost of the meal for all those twenty-odd people was about sixty dollars, but that includes things like the disposable plates, bowls and spoons, plus things like tamarind pulp and sweet soy and sesame oil which will go on to serve another half-dozen or more meals. Again: in a home kitchen, I'd guess this one would have cost maybe five dollars a head. Probably less.

So. Inexpensive, healthy, really tasty, prepared in fifteen to twenty minutes -- and incredibly popular with the kids.

And yet, apparently, we've still got a growing childhood obesity problem.

Something's fishy here.

Moby Swingset

The weather was not so kind today, no. Mist, drizzle, and then eventually rain. Nevertheless, local superhero Bobcat-Man turned up on time with his amazing earthmoving powers. The site was levelled in no time at all, and then, in a single breathtaking swoop, he used a couple of hardwood two-by-fours to convert the bobcat bucket into a makeshift forklift, and saved my aching muscles an hour or more of ugly work by simply picking up the entire arch and depositing it gently, neatly in position.

He went on to rip out a lot of old fence posts and wire, and followed it up with a determined entrenchment operation (so I can put some polypipe underground, away from sun, vehicles, bushfires and falling trees) which ended only when he was defeated by the villainous Bearing Failure Man. Although Bearing Failure Man escaped, I'm sure that Bobcat Man will meet him again someday, and emerge triumphant. In the meantime... thanks for the rescue, Bobcat Man!

Weather being what it was, I didn't get as much of the superstructure in place as I would have liked. I did seed the newly levelled area with grass, though. And of course, got in the daily shopping, collected kids from school, and ran up a nice risotto for dinner as well as put a few loads of laundry through the system. Oh - found a nifty present for the Mau-Mau while I was collecting the post, and something for Natalie as well, yep.

To round it off, Jake had to stand up at the school's Awards day today and accept an 'Academic Achievement' award for his class/age. He's pleased with himself, which is lovely. Report cards came in as well: all three of the kids doing very nicely, thanks, despite taking a significant chunk of the last term to go to Borneo, etc.

I doubt Younger Son will ever top the grades the way Jake does, but there's no mistaking his intelligence. He's a lot more hands-on and visio-spatial. He got in there today, handling a socket spanner and saving Nat and I a lot of fiddly, minor work. He's never happier than when he's building something, or taking something apart and figuring out how it works.

Hope I can get this stupid great swingset completed in time for his birthday party on Sunday!

Not As Easy As It Looks

I told ya there'd be more photos, didn't I?

The weather cleared up. Yesterday's gorgeous, misty, cool weather went away, replaced by Tasmanian early summer sunshine. Gaudy, green, golden. This place is just shatteringly clear and lovely the day after the rain.

Today, however, I couldn't revel in the loveliness of it all. For today I had a rendezvous with... The Play Fort.

There it is, all spread out on the ground In bits and pieces. Would it surprise anyone here if I said that the fifty-eight page assembly instructions were pure shite? No? I didn't think so. And indeed, they were shite. My work-buddy and I spent the first hour trying to figure out which of our pieces which looked NOTHING AT ALL LIKE THE PIECES IN THE STOOPID DIAGRAMS could be fit together in a fashion resembling the product.

In the end, after a few terse phone calls from Natalie, she confirmed that the thing is supposed to be a King Kong III Playhouse With Bells And Whistles. (Great forkin' name, eh?) That gave me the chance to look it up on the 'net, and print off a few photos of what it's supposed to look like. And yes, the photos were a FUCKLOAD more helpful than those diagrams.

The problem is that these Rainbow play thingies are modular, and they give you one set of instructions that's supposed to be adaptable to a dozen or so different outcomes. Except the instructions illustrate only the basic model, so you have to try and guess which of your upmarket pieces replace which of the generic pieces in the diagram.

And once you've guessed -- successfully or otherwise -- the second surprise lunges out at you. Drilling holes.

This giant pile of timber you can see -- it's got more goddam holes in it already than a leprous cheesegrater. It's more or less an enormous pine colander. And yet despite this amazing array of holes, in order to get various bits to fit together and bolt into position, you actually have to drill still MORE holes in the forkin' thing. And of course, all the goddam bolts and the required drillbits are measured in Ancient Babylonian units, as opposed to simple metric - so after an hour of cursing, swearing, separating, classifying, and lining up, we had to do a run to the hardware store to get a bunch of idiot-measure drillbits that I didn't have. GrrrRAAAHHHHHHH!

Not to worry. I am, after all, some kind of genius - and my work-buddy there is certifiable, so between us, we managed to make some kind of connection between the Internet photo and the chicken-scratching diagrammes of the assembly instructions. Holes were drilled. Things were bolted onto other things.

And then I had to lift the goddam frame into the shape you see, an arch. You bolt these things together flat on the ground, you see. Then you raise the centre span, put the corner-braces in, and tighten the major bolts, and it's solid.

Raising the end of the arch that connects to the steps and the stairs was no problem. I pulled it up to my chest height, adjusted my stance, raised it, and the braces were placed and drilled. No worries. But that other end - the one with the solid wood panel... whoa.

Every time I lifted it, the damned thing would slip back on the wet grass. Eventually, I got my work partner to brace it by ramming a pry-bar into the ground against it every time I managed to slither it up a few more centimetres. But then it got to that terrible middle point, just above the bellybutton, where you can't really pull up any more, but you can't quite switch your grip around to get under it and push.

I worked it out. I spun around until my back was to the wood slab, got my hips under it, and drove up with my legs. Then when it was braced with the pry-bar, I bent my knees again, wiggled a little farther under, and lifted again. And it worked - which was a source of considerable satisfaction, since both Natalie and my co-worker were telling me we'd have to wait until the bloke with the Bobcat turned up, tomorrow.

Fuck that. Bobcats are a convenience, not a necessity.

Once the main arch was up, Natalie decided to start tacking on the climby bits. There's a lot more superstructure to go on top, but until Bobcat Bloke levels the final site, I don't want to increase the weight of the structure a whole lot. I wanted to get it to this stage so I can simply plonk it in place on the newly-levelled earth without a lot of fuss. It's going to be damp and slippery enough. Trying to raise and assemble that arch on a bed of slippery clay would have been a real bastard. At least now, the bulk of the work to be done is well off the ground, minimising dirt and mud and slippage... but yeah, moving it into position is going to be entertaining. I'm hoping Bobcat Bloke is built like a brick shithouse.

Younger Son took to the climbing wall like a deranged monkey. Note his elegant climbing shoes: gumboots, spray-painted silver sometime around June for part of a birthday party costume.

Meanwhile, the Mau-Mau decided she absolutely HAD to decorate the Christmas tree. This is, I suppose, the first year in which the Christmas propaganda machine has really levelled her in its sights. She's at Kinder now, so she's hearing all about Christmas from friends and teachers and so forth - and it's really taken root. For the last month, she's been giddy with excitement over every single piece of crapulous tinsel hanging in every single store we've entered. "Oooh, look, Daddy," she gushes, as we enter the local Woolworths, pointing at a manky plastic-and-tinsel tree standing on a cardboard box, "It's Christmas things! I love Christmas things! Oooh, I can't wait until Christmas!"

Then the next shop: and there she sees a box full of tinsel, waiting to be sold - and we get the exact same lines, with the exact same degree of Oscar-winning enthusiasm, and all the cute-factors turned up to eleven. Okay, yes, I get the goddam message, kid.

Unfortunately, she's going to be slightly disappointed if she's expecting some kind of Christmas bonanza. Neither Natalie nor I has had anything like time, and frankly, with new bicycles and now this terrifying overkill playhouse, the Christmas budget is well and truly blown. I've found the Mau-Mau a nice easel and got her a big artbook of her very own (she adores painting and drawing), and I'll get her a groovy caddy for all her pencils and paints and colours, and we'll find a few silly bits and pieces to fill a stocking -- but this is going to be a low-key, family-oriented goddam Christmas if it goddam well kills me!

Still. You gotta love the decorations on that tree. There are belts from four different bathrobes there, and a silk scarf, and a couple of unfinished papier-mache baubles that Natalie was working on with the kids. When Younger Son saw what was going on, he got into the act too: that's why there are several socks and a couple of brightly coloured pairs of underpants up there.

Of course we'll have to get some tinsel and some sparkly crap for the Mau-Mau's sake. But I think I'm going to leave the underpants as well...

More Madness

But fewer photos.

Today is not a repeat of yesterday. Yesterday dawned wet and misty, and stayed alternately rainy and misty pretty much all day. Lovely stuff. But today? Sunshine -- and merciless, clear, ultra-violet laden sunshine at that.

In one sense, that was a good thing. Today is the Scottsdale Christmas Parade, a ritual much beloved by all in the area. Trucks get gussied up with all kinds of decorations. Children wedge themselves into bizarre costumes. (Elder Son is a 'Tourist', for his classroom float. Their theme is 'Outback Australia', for whatever reason. Very Christmassy. Anyway, the boy has a huge straw sombrero, large sunglasses, loud shirt, giant flowery shorts down to his knees, and camera. He insists that he follows the Way of Twoflower. I am proud of him.)

In another sense, not so good. As part of the festivities, the ju-jitsu group was asked to put on a display, so for the last two weeks, I've been putting the kids through their paces. And they rose to the occasion very nicely. But of course, on the day of the demo we're out in the middle of the street, in the full sun. The mats underfoot get hot very very quickly. And all those full-length uniforms, many of them black (including mine) are a bit of a hazard and a handicap.

It went well, though. I kept it to half an hour, out of consideration for the sunshine and the kids, but they would happily have gone much longer. We did throws, and locks, and self defense. We demonstrated games and learning techniques. Then all the kids got into the pine-board breaking (they really love snapping pine boards. I've never quite understood why. But they do.) and finally, I did a draw-cut with the katana to bisect a watermelon (which was conveniently balanced atop a bag of ice on a small table) to close the show -- and of course, to distribute pieces of chilled watermelon to the kids. Yay!

It's all very small-town. Nobody expects Bruce Lee and a team of ninja - which is good, 'cause we're all samurai here. But it still takes energy, particularly from me.

Those of you who've seen me in full flight will know that... ahhh... not to put too fine a point on it, I'm a performer when needs be. I've done enough work on stage and similar to understand the principles. I know you have to project, to have presence, to fill the workspace and engage your audience directly. I can ad-lib pretty fluently, and speak with sufficient power to fill a country concert hall as needed.

It's odd, though. You hear about 'energy', and it certainly takes something to fill all that space, keep things moving, keep interests up. But -- it's not like actually training, or fighting, or working in the sun. You wouldn't think there was really much of a strain to it. And it's not a very stressful venue. It's a friendly crowd of people who are interested mostly in their kids, so I'm not particularly nervous or adrenal beforehand.

Despite that, without fail, half an hour after the show I'm good for nothing. Wiped out. Utterly drained.

So, here I am at home, quietly recovering. And with the boys going into town this evening for an orchestra do, I even get a night off from cooking and family. Yay!

That's okay, though. Tomorrow we dive right back into it: community bike ride involving Nat and the kids, and then Nat will go to music in the evening so I'll be Parent In charge.

Swings and roundabouts. For the moment, I'm going to get some rest.

There Is Madness Afoot

This is my esteemed cat Toxo. There is a small plastic cup balanced on his head. There are those who say that cats don't really have facial expressions. My cat disagrees with them almost as much as he disagreed with that plastic cup. Balancing things on cats heads is madness.

This is a photo of Younger Son. That isn't a cello. That's a 1/8th size double bass. This occurred because he completed his second violin exam and got a High Distinction. But he does not enjoy the violin. He enjoys the double bass. Very much.

He is quite small, being only seven years (nearly eight, I admit.) He's also small for his age. The double bass, on the other hand, is the single largest frikkin' instrument in the orchestra (if you exclude the piano, the calliope, and the Mad Scientist Pipe Organ - which last he would surely covet if he thought he could get close to one.) Nevertheless, he stuck out his time with the violin for two years in order to be able to pick an instrument he truly wanted to play... and he made us stick to our end of the bargain too.

So now, Smaller Son has a double bass. This is, of course, madness.

This particular bit of madness was at its best this morning. The Mau-Mau has her piano lesson today, so I had to pack the electronic keyboard and stand into the car. But the Younger Son desperately wanted to show his new instrument to his class, and his schoolteacher has given permission... so I had to pack the double bass in the car. Ah, but young Jake is planning to play 'Three Kings Of Orient' for the school assembly on Friday, and first had to audition for the school principal. So I had to pack the cello in the car this morning too.

Mini-piano. Double bass (one-eighth size). Cello.

Hello? Any other members of the farkin' orchestra want a lift? I can still see over the dashboard a little... we can probably fit a couple of tubas in here if we try!

Madness.

Here's Younger Son again, and a friend. He went fishing on Saturday, after the little string-student concert in our house. (The string teacher is a friend of ours. She needed a venue. More madness.) In Younger Son's proudly outstretched left hand is his first-ever wild-caught fish. It is, I am given to understand, a 'Cocky Salmon'.

He ate it, fried, for lunch the next day. With a very nice tomato chutney and some fresh bread. The smaller of the two cocky salmon was offered to the cat. Then to the other cat. Then to the dog. Then, in desperation, to the pet rats. Last I heard, the chickens were getting the opportunity to reject it too.

But Younger Son enjoyed his.

Madness.

That pile there? More madness. That's roughly 800kg of timber and plastic and metal. You can't really judge the size in this photo, but that's okay: you're going to see more photos in weeks to come. As I put it all together. Because this is the playground setup which is to replace the Legendary Lost Blackwood tree.

It is fucknormous. There are six respectable-size boxes of nuts, bolts and screws. There are bags of climbing-wall handholds. There's a periscope. Binoculars. A sunsail.

And then there's me, and my box of spanners.

Madness. Purest goddam madness.