Since Hayden has nothing better to say
I'll relate in rhyme our Australia day.

It all began at quarter to four
When the english clan arrived at the door
Their clocks were on Luxembourg time - out of sync
But that didn't stop us pouring a drink

More people, more food and lots of white wine
We danced and we laughed until quarter past nine
Out came the pavs that went down as a treat
And then we resolved to head out to the street

A friend of a friend told us 'walk to the square'
'There's fire and food - a fiesta right there'
So we joined all the crowd by the bonfires and heat
And noticed a queue for obtaining raw meat

They cooked on the flames for a charrèd delight
And tribal music vibrated the night
After singing and dancing in catalan
To the cuban bar went our little clan!

Mojitos and photos and drunkenish fun
They kicked us all out with the rise of the sun.
What a mix cultures and people at play
That made it a special Australia Day!


(see the photos)

There's nothing I like more than dancing around in the warm afternoon sun to Alfie and the Shins whilst intermittently whipping up a pavlova or two. I'm very excited about our little bash tomorrow. I've cleaned the deck (the roof terrace), made kindergarten decorations of Aussie flags, kangaroos and a huge map of Australia, which all my housemates are decorating (juan drew a cactus in the desert... sillyhead), tested the sound-system in which i'm dropping an extension cable through my window, and even stolen sand from the beach to make home-made paper-bag lanterns. Out of the mixed crowd (Spanish, Catalan, Colombian, Portuguese, Serbian, etc) will be a grand total of three Australians, so between snags and the cat empire, there'll be lots of educating going on.

Oh, and I even managed to procure fresh cream in Barcelona! The woman went out and came back minutes later with a tub of the stuff, as if they keep the cows out the back!

We left the very next day and travelled by bus to Madrid, where we performed our first concert. It was an exhausting experience sight-reading first flute in the actual concert, and afterwards greeted the complimentary cava with relief. This was the beginning of a trend of traveling ridiculous distances by bus, staying in a nondescript town many miles away from the city or concert destination then performing without practice and weary from the long journeys. We performed 11 almost consecutive concerts in Madrid, somewhere near Bilbao, near Burgos, near Barcelona, Badajoz, Jaca and then on into the south of France. If you look at the map of spain you can get a vague idea of the portion of our lives we wasted on that bus.

For New Years we stopped off en route to buy our own cheap snacks and drinks to pool together for an evening feast (of sorts). We arrived at our destination (a hotel in the middle of nowhere, en route to Badajoz) and it was explained that - Romanian style - the men would carry the bags into the hotel while the women would go downstairs and prepare the food. Offended to the highest degree, my Spanish roommate and I hid in our quarters and enjoyed gin & tonic and Spanish television until it was 11:30pm and safe to emerge into the sexist wingding. It was a quiet and uneventful night spent mostly avoiding the older male Romanians who were more than eager to give a kiss to the only piece of fresh meat on tour.

Post-concerts, the director would walk down the bus and hand out cash mafia-style as our payments. We had to sign a piece of paper for this, and to my surprise I noticed a Evgeny Kleiner on the list. I introduced myself to him, and it took him a while to believe that I was also a Kleiner - he made me write my name on a piece of paper and said, "but some Kleiners are Jewish. You're not Jewish are you?". After establishing that I was and that there were enough holes in both our family histories that it is quite possible that we are related, a transformation occurred. Previously a quiet and introverted man (he is Russian, so didn't interact with the Romanians so much), he sought me out at every possible point from then on, favouring me as 'familia'! He'd walk the whole length of the bus to offer me a cookie first (para familia!) and carry my bags or open doors for me whenever he could find the opportunity.

I was soon to meet his brother - also a double-bass player - who came for the France part of the tour, and immediately it struck me how much he resembled my late grandfather. I might be completely off the mark, but at the time the whole coincidence seemed fun and exciting. The brothers invited me to stay in their home in Figueres (2 hours north of Barcelona) after the tour, and I gladly accepted.

In spite of everything, the end of the tour was lots of fun. The Romanian, Spanish and Russian people I befriended were all such wonderful characters, and we shared many great moments together. It's funny how depriving yourself of certain expected luxuries (such as three meals a day) can open the door to new and crazy experiences that really leave a deep impression.

Mas muy que bien-e

I'm sick of having to deal with Sawmill which, despite my best and not inconsiderable efforts, still takes more than half a day to import three months worth of trimmed web site logs. So I decided to put my money where my mouth is and create my own lighter weight system which would provide the specific information that I am generally called upon to retrieve; namely top pages, referrers and geographical location of viewers.

In about a days worth of work, and a little waiting around, I managed to write a perl module and scripts that can import three months worth of our web site logs into a MySQL database in around 2 hours, roughly 1/7th of the time it takes Sawmill to achieve the same task. Following along with the theme, it's called Beaver - a more organic log processing system.

I have written this post waiting for a referrer report for December to run on Sawmill to compare the results, Beaver took just over 7 seconds to run the same report on the same machine. The verdict: it's close enough that I don't trust Sawmill to be producing the more correct report - I know exactly what my software does.

On the way to Andorra, a Catalan woman rang me up and asked me if I could play for two weeks with an orchestra who were to do a tour of Spain and the south of France. Rehearsals were in Barcelona and started on the 25th and they would pay me how much? more than the others, (it was the 23rd and they were desperate) so don't tell. I was not in the position to turn down a stack of money, especially at this time of year, even though it meant I was to forgo my much anticipated sojourn of excess in Valencia. I did think very hard about it...

Having returned back from Andorra, I discovered that the rehearsals were in fact an hour and a half out of Barcelona, in a remote location that you could only reach with one specific bus. I checked the sunday/holiday timetable and rocked up prompltly at 8:15am on Christmas day, to find a tacked-on sheet with the special timetable for the 25/6 December - first bus out left at 11:30am. It was freezing and the streets were dead, and I was stressed out - couldn't reach the woman by phone and worried if I should take a taxi, lest be late for the first rehearsal. One hour and a cold coffee later I finally got through to her and she told me 'no te preocupes!' (no worries mate), come when you can.

I rocked up at the hostel in Corbera (none of my friends in Barcelona knew where it was) and walked into the rehearsal tired and heavy with bags to be greeted with a stern 'you're late' by the maestro. I'd been counting my regrets for 4 hours already that morning, and was feeling very fragile when I sat among the orchestra of chav-dressed weary faced Romanians and proceeded to sight-read a violin concerto, new composition and 15 Strauss waltzes all the while being instructed in Romanian.

It was a long day, and when rehearsals wound up at 10:30pm, I suggested to my fellow flute-mate that we go to dinner together. 'There's no dinner' she said and I laughed and said come on let's go get dinner. 'There's no dinner' she said and when she saw my face she said 'Hasn't anyone told you? There's no dinner. We ate at lunchtime'.

So that's how it was. Sharing a room with four Romanians in a crappy hostel from where I could see the beckoning lights of Barcelona but couldn't touch them. I was despondently wolfing down the bag of rice crackers that I had by chance bought earlier for small change, when the older Romanian woman (who spoke only Romanian and Italian) took pity on me and signaled for me to wait a moment. Five minutes later the other four had joined forces, and our table was laid with bread, cold hunks of pork, mustard, home-made pickles and home made wine (in a plastic bottle) all brought in the bus from Romania. We had our own little Christmas feast and topped it off with some Romanian panettone and a mountain of cigarettes.

Last night 5 gay guys, Ana and I were drinking lots of red wine and watching OTT french singers on youtube. We left at 1:30am and went to a Bear Bar, then a huge gay club - both a first for me - and had a wild time! Then it was chocolate and churros and here I am, having already returned from giving my first private lesson, watching the sun shine outsite as my 5 housemates are softly snoring. Hot damn, this is the life...

I was pumped - I'd spent the last week making the glorious christmas cake (soaking the sultanas in brandy, executing my first batch of home-made marzipan and icing, making and consuming copious amounts of cake mixture and sugar sculptures), i had two bags packed - one for Andorra and the other for Valencia, xmas presents wrapped, room cleaned and was all set to go. The plan was to go to Andorra with Jordi and a friend for 1 day of skiing, return and go to Valencia the next morning where I intended to spend the festive days eating and drinking copious amounts with my various Spanish families, followed by relaxing, attending a concert and more eating and drinking.

We got half way to Andorra when I had a phone call which changed the projection of my smug little life at that point in time... But more on that later.

You understand, I have been skiing about twice in my life. The last time i remember was at Bulla when I was 14 - cruising the ice and brown mush on the green slope with complete lack of grace. In Andorra we went up and up and up and up, and having touched the sky, proceeded to descend via the RED slopes (the hardest that were open that day), Jordi sometimes holding my hand, other times forcing me with the sting of his words. I am not particularly fit, and in general am not a sporty person, so at that point the whole experience felt like torture. I admit it was exhilarating but at the time it was hard to think past the pain! At several points, Jordi took me in between his legs (he's gay - nothing sexual) and we descended together at great speed. I will never forget the time when half way down the mountain he shouted RECTO RECTO RECTO (straight, straight, straight) and we whipped through the air at a million kilometers an hour, me screaming my guts out.

You can see by my face in the aftermath photo that I couldn't do much, let alone even walk for.. hrm, 3 days after the ordeal, but like all things Jordi it was pumped with energy, intense and fun. Especially the bit where I bought two giant bottles of Gordon's and french chocolate as souvenirs on the way out.

Wouldn't you know it, there's droughts in Victoria and Northern NSW and southern Queensland are flooded this week. From the news reports shown every day it looks pretty nasty, but true Australianism shines through as usual. My favourite moment was when one man was asked if he was worried about having been cut off by the flooding, and he replied:

"Cut off? Nah, it's the rest of the world that's been cut off, we're alright."

Before you read any further, this is a geeky post about World of Warcraft - so if you don't find that interesting, you can stop reading now.

I have got into the habit of playing a Battlegrounds game with my Shaman in the mornings, before I get stuck into work (this being a habit since two days ago). It's the character that I play with Elisse, so I'm not allowed to level while she's not about. But since battlegrounds don't give experience, I figure that's okay.

Shaman's aren't a popular PvP class, and I'm often the only one in the game, but today there was a shaman called Ceren playing on the Alliance side who was really good. So after the game I created an alliance character on their server and let them know I was impressed. We both agreed we hated each other and talked tactics for a bit - each giving the other pointers.

It's nice talking to a civilised opponent who doesn't mind giving advice to the enemy, it's a shame I had to go to lengths to do so - it would have been nice to just send a note at the end of the game.

Just a quick note to say Happy New Year to everyone.