Special Birthday Edition

They are showing the Giro d’Italia on Eurosport here and yesterday it came to Austria and finished in Mayrhofen.

This was the closest I have ever been to a big bike race so you can imagine how excited Muffin and I were when we were watching it live.

The coverage is provided by English Eurosport so the commentary is in English – well part of it anyway – the second commentator is Sean Kelly who is Irish – and - while being the winner years ago in the Vuelta a España – and no doubt being very knowledgeable – is incomprehensible.

His accent is bad enough but he also apparently puts a golf ball in his mouth a gunny sack over his head before speaking – and drones on and on.

There is this droning noise which reminds me of a blow fly buzzing around the kitchen in my old home in Deniliquin.

Anyway – for some weird reason in the subtitles showing the time gaps they do not use the commonly accepted terms to describe the race. So instead of the ‘Peloton’ we have ‘The Bunch’. There can be a ‘Leading Bunch’, a ‘Second Bunch’ and the ‘Main Bunch’.

It has a certain lack of sophistication.

For those of you who need to know - Aussie Michael Rogers is in third place after the second day in the mountains.

It was too wet to ride yesterday so I made a couple of panels for my Koala quilt. This is coming along nicely and I hope to be able to exhibit it at the Royal Easter Show when we get back.

We ordered some lamps from Hitzinger and Hitzinger and these have arrived so I will enlist Melissa’s help to collect them. This is another of these places that takes only cash so it requires a visit to the bank first.

If I remember correctly one of the lamps is a figure of a person bending over and trying to stick his/her head up his/her bottom (I don’t know whether it’s a boy or a girl). I am looking forward to seeing it again to see if we made a wise choice.

Cate discovered that when I fell down the stairs I mangled one of our lamps. Not during the fall mind you but when I was staggering around after the fall trying to reattach my ear with the stapler I splashed some blood on a two metre high lamp that lurks in the corner of the room.

When I was trying to clean the blood off I managed to slip and fall on top of the lamp. (No I don’t know how I manage to do these things).

This did it no good at all so I had to try and straighten it out and then turn it around so that damage was not glaringly obvious.

Cate discovered my clumsy panel beating job – and took it very well considering - so we had to go and buy a new lamp and while we were there I saw the head up the bottom lamp and Cate saw a giant aluminum cocoon which may have been used as a prop in Alien 3. Of course she just had to have it.

This one is very large hence my need for Melissa’s help.

For my birthday Cate brought me home some Thai Airways socks and a sleep mask – together with a croissant that she saved for me from her breakfast.

Of course you can’t buy birthday cards on planes but she wrote a very nice message for me on the back of her Boarding Pass.

Tomorrow if it is sunny we will go looking for cats in cemeteries in Wien.