A Christmas Tale

Every year before Christmas I scrummage around in the cupboards looking for our Bing Crosby 'Do You Know It's Christmas' cassette tape.  It's usually buried under a pile of redundant cassette tapes and other examples of old and even more redundant audio thing-a-majigs.  

I also scrummage around in the cupboards looking for our Bing Crosby cassette tape before writing a blog post which mentions said cassette tape, so that I can make sure I have the title right.  After wasting five minutes and coating all my fingers in dust, I have a feeling my family is constantly hiding Bing Crosby from me (but that might just be a vicious rumour).

I love Bing Crosby cassette tapes!  

The first track (is it called a track on a cassette tape?) is my very most favourite Bing song:
White Christmas.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the tree tops glisten,
And children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow....


When you grow up in Australia, it doesn't take too long to realise that this song was not written about Australian Christmases.  If it was, Bing would sing it like this:

I'm sweating during a hot Christmas,
Just like I sweat every year
The melting tree tops are shimmering
The pool full of children is glimmering
And we all set fire to the barbecueeeeeeeee 

Sorry, I couldn't resist (most Australian versions of Christmas carols are lame anyway, so I fit right in).

At about 4:00pm on Christmas Day 2011 we were slumped sitting around the pool trying to digest the large amounts of food which had been consumed for lunch (hard work).
There was a little light bantering about who was going to go for a swim, who was going to get pushed into the pool, etc.  No one actually moved.

At that point the sun also went behind a very large black mass of clouds, and the hot air suddenly felt even hotter and more stifling.

Summer Reads

I went to the library exactly three times over the last few weeks and came back with a nice pile of summer reads.

Oh look, one month of summer is gone already.

{noooooooooooooooooooo}

But that's okay - still plenty of time to read.

Oh, but there are some big ones in there.  Some seriously big reads, perfect for days like today, when the mercury is going to hit 40 degrees Celsius, and the human body can only collapse under the air conditioner and let the brain do all the exercising. 

Hmmm, I just realised that these are only the books I got from the library, not including books I got for Christmas or ones that have been loitering on my shelves during frantic days of textbook reading.

The rest:

   

Temperature update:

It is now so hot in Melbourne, that my fingertips are sweating and rendering the touchpad of my laptop unusable.

A sweltering start to 2012.

Ta ta, I'm off to read under the air conditioner.

The last day of the year...

...already.

Enough said.

How can I write about an entire year?  List all the major events I've been to?  Look at my calendar (still amnesia) and check out those days I highlighted?  Summarise each month, maybe, or as some other clever bloggers with large cameras have done:  collect my favourite photos of the year and show you all.

Actually, the latter is what I was about to do, but then I jumped on Picasa and noticed a collection of my absolute favourite photos ever.  They're some of my most recent photos, taken this month...115 photos of the same thing...

2011 is the year this little person made her entrance on our planet.  She's my honorary niece and my best memory of 2011, so her slightly blurry photos (such a wriggler she is!) will mark 2011 on the Mouse Files.

A new little life is one of the most precious things ever.  Aria Heaven's birth date means 2011 will always be celebrated by those around her.

{and to her real aunty who reads this blog - give the little pumpkin a big kiss for me!}

I'd better stop before I start gushing and gurgling like someone possessed by the cute baby bug.  Major self-control happening right now!

Here's to another year of blogging sporadically and taking slightly blurry photos with my very large camera!

Thank you SO much for reading - it means the world to me!

Gingerbread

I was a little bit obsessive about Christmas this year (I can say that now, looking back).

Obsessiveness meant I actually decided to do something Christmassy, as opposed to just waiting for the presents to appear under the tree, and the Christmas lunch to appear on the table (magically).

So for the first time ever, I decided to make some gingerbread.  Gingerbread = Christmas.

I found a few recipes which looked complicated, and then changed them all around.  I do that with recipes.  (It's fine.)

I ended up with "alternative" gingerbread, made with "alternative" syrup, and "alternative" flour and "alternative" sugar.

Gingerbread generally use golden syrup but I only had Molasses.

Molasses takes me back to my horsecrazy days.  When I smell it I immediately see the old school barn, the feed troughs, and the giant tub of molasses.  When we fed the horses after school, we would slip some molasses into the chaff to make it more edible (you know, if it's possible to make chopped up grass edible).

When I say 'slip some molasses in' I mean 'use seven different implements to get the syrup from the tub to the feed bucket while making a giant mess'.  This stuff is lethally sticky.  In fact, molasses is the embodiment of the word sticky.