Molly is going to whip my words into shape

Now I need you to pay attention because we have to deal with some housekeeping issues.
We are leaving tonight for Australia and it is possible that the blog will go silent for short periods – or long periods. While it is always my intention to blog I can get distracted quite easily because when I am travelling I have the attention span of a red ant and get sidetracked by food, coffee, wine or almost anything at all.

My daughter Molly – who lives in Paris – has taken on the task of editing my blog. When I was printing my blog I was horrified to discover – in passing – the number of typographical and grammatical errors that were present. Anyone who writes knows how easy it is to miss these when you proofread – no matter how many times you proofread the same piece of work.

Molly is a legal editor so is going to whip my words into shape. She is also unhappy that I am using American spelling – because I am Australian – so we are going to revert to real English.

Now if there is anyone out there who thinks they have been de-friended by me on Facebook – well you have. I de-friended everyone and de-activated my account after a spammer got me and I saw that Facebook was just getting deeper and deeper into the private lives of everyone on the planet.

However, I discovered that there are things you just cannot do unless you actually have a Facebook account so I have had to re-activate my account - but I am not going to have any friends and am not going to use it unless I need to do something online.

OK that’s it. In about five hours we will be sitting in business class on Emirates sipping French champagne prior to hopping into our pyjamas and sleeping in flat beds. I will think about you often – or perhaps not at all.

I will particularly think of esbboston who must simply be the busiest man on the planet. I wonder if he knows anything about plumbing. We have the occasional problem here.

Oh - I forgot to mention that in Stockholm there are an astonishing number of hotties – all of whom are tall and blonde. Now while I personally was not allowed to take any pictures of them – Cate took a picture of one so that I could use it as a sample for the blog. Cate sat in bars and drank champagne and I was allowed to look at them for research purposes.

Cate says it was quite wonderful

I spotted this in Zentralfriedhof (the main Cemetery) in Vienna yesterday – treading lightly amongst the tombstones in the old Jewish section.

Today we went to see another modern dance piece in the current Vienna festival of modern dance. I really usually do love modern dance. Cate says this performance was brilliant. She loved it. She thought it was fabulous. She thought the dancer was sensational.

To start with it was on at 8:30 in the morning. Fuck me upside down in a sparkly jump suit. Who goes to a dance performance at 8:30 in the morning? Well us obviously – but this is a seriously uncivilised time to try to comprehend modern dance.

The dance company was Marie Chouinard – but we did not see the company - we saw Marie her very self who – like me – was born in the middle of last century.

The performance was held in the old Casino in Schwarzenburgplatz and it is a lovely venue. It has been empty for some time so is rather stark and one can imagine what it was like in its heyday.  Not much was required by the set decorator who managed to rustle up a large white sheet and five pieces of wood.

At the start of the show birds started chirping and we had the sound of waves. A  lady dressed in a sack came out and started shuffling around the set.

I thought she may have been a cleaner from some Baltic state but she had no broom. She revealed herself to be Marie when after a lot of shuffling she lost the sack and went into a range of slow motion calisthenics.

She did a range of movements and I think I got the hang of most of them. She was very good at standing on one leg and did this many times so we could admire her dexterity. In fact she did most things many times so that we got the message – I think she thought that as we were Austrian we may be particularly dim in respect of the subtleties of Canadian modern dance.

Not me - I got most of them immediately.

There was the giraffe reaching for the highest branch, the lioness licking its cub, the hippopotamus giving birth, the shitting chimpanzee (very close to the hippo giving birth so you had to watch closely), the swan with OCD, the lizard with tourette syndrome and the meerkat on the ant’s nest.

My favourite was the dead beetle. With this one she lay stock still on her back on one of the four pieces of wood - with her arms and legs straight up in the air. She did this so well some of us probably thought she was dead and there was a stirring in the audience. But I saw that the performance was still going on and her big toe was moving - forever the artiste.

The pièce de résistance was the flying duck (naturally my favourite) where Marie balanced with great skill on a piece of wood. A quack would have set the piece perfectly but she was silent throughout – although she did open and close her mouth like a guppy on a number of occasions.

The music unfortunately progressed from birds and waves to an impossible crescendo of ghastliness. A shrieking - screaming wall of noise that sounded like the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Foo Fighters and two dozen leopards being fed into a jet engine.  

The only sounds that could be heard above this cacophony were the occasional detonations of mobile phones, pacemakers and hearing aids.

The man next to me really, really wanted to leave but the only way out was across the dance floor and he was just not brave enough. I rather suspect he was afraid of being felled by the Lizard as he dashed passed Marie.

At one stage Marie left the stage and walked over to the window, opened it and climbed out on to the window sill overlooking Schubertring. My neighbour cheered up visibly but I knew she was not going to jump – she is an old lady – she needed a breather – no one can be a shitting chimp for minutes at a time without a break.

She had a look at the traffic – drank a glass of water and hurled herself back into it.

The biscuit taker was that just before the end of the show Marie disappeared for a minute – put on a mask – lost her top and showed us her breasts.

Well – really – a woman her age should not display herself like that to complete strangers – although I must say – she is in remarkably good shape. I should look so good – although I would put my buns up against hers – figuratively speaking of course.

I haven’t been this glad to see the end of a dance performance since – oh – let me see -  La la la Human Steps. This time my headache is worse.

Sissi can keep her mother alive until I get back

So a couple of days later the steam iron stopped steaming. I waved the instruction manual in front of it and told it that a steam iron that does not steam is pointless - but it sat there sullenly and steamlessly and has been relegated to the ‘almost dead’ iron cupboard. This is where I keep the irons that still function - after a fashion - and can be used in emergencies.

I am thinking that perhaps the best course of action may be to get esbboston  here on a short term assignment so that he can monitor the situation. He can stay in the guest room and continue his studies from there. He seems to be remarkably good at all this sort of stuff and he can keep an eye on the air con going into winter.

We leave for Australia on Friday and I am hoping we can get out of here before any other things start popping and fizzing and blowing smoke.

I am concerned for the welfare of Cate and the cats because she gets back a week before I do as I am going on a brief driving holiday in Victoria with my two ancient brothers and then spending some time with my children.  

Cate has not had to look after herself and the cats before for more than a day or two. Cate is not renowned for her cat nurturing and housekeeping skills and indeed has very little time to do this because of her very busy job.

Now I know she can live on toast and Vegemite but for the cats it is an entirely different matter – I know for sure that they do not like toast or Vegemite -  and then there is the kitty litter.

I don’t think there is an Austrian equivalent of ‘Meals on Wheels’ and in any event Cate would not be eligible. I can’t ask Mrs. Moneypenny to call daily as she is also on holidays so we have a significant problem.

The fallback position is that I know Sissi can open the cupboard where the spare supplies of cat food are kept and can also tear open the packets of dry food. This will keep her and her mother alive – and they can lick the moisture out of the bottom of the shower recess – or suck Cate’s towel. And it may rain - they can get on to the terrace. 

In terms of the kitty litter they will have to tough it out. If it gets too crowded in there they can use Cate’s bath mat – it is nice and woolly.

I have changed the blog settings so that anyone can comment. I did not realise I could do this until people told me.

It was Tina

It was Tina Arena who sang the Australian National Anthem at the ceremony for Cadel Evans on Sunday. There is a story here

Tina – who much to my son Lenny’s horror – has always been one of my favourite singers – now lives in Paris and is indeed very popular there.

And Tina when she was a little bit younger

I was always afraid of pastry

I made my first chicken pie. In fact it was my first pie of any type and was my first foray into pastry - which I know is astonishing given my advanced age - but I am only a novice cook – an occupation which has been thrust upon me by my forced incarceration in this hellhole in Vienna.

I can no longer bear to watch Jamie Oliver cook because of the way he constantly uses the same inane expressions – which I have now managed to forget - but I do admire the little blighter for his ability to parlay the ability to cook a lamb chop  into a multi-million dollar empire - so I bought a couple of his cookbooks – one being his 30 Minute Meals  - to expand my repertoire - and this was my first adventure.

I am in truth a terrible cook and succeed only through sheer guts and persistence. I have absolutely no flair and panache and always make dreadful mistakes which I have to cover up by saying things like – when I actually present meals that I have cooked for the first time  - ‘the recipe said 2.5 grams of paprika but I thought this would not be spicy enough so I used 25 grams. I have given you an extra glass of water in case it is a bit too hot.’

The meals I make are always better the second time and by the third or fourth time they can actually be pretty damned good. But if I invite you to dinner and tell you that I am trying something new – fall down the steps and sprain your ankle.

I was always afraid of pastry because it looked so hard. It involved rolling pins and flour and kneading and water and letting it sit for hours and getting the right consistency and if you didn’t get it right it did terrible things - but I was watching this cooking show in German – without the sound – which indeed is the best way to watch Jamie Oliver – and this person took some pastry and dusted it with flour and painted it with egg and put it on top of a pie and I thought – I can do that!

Buying the pastry was harder than I expected and it turns out I was looking for the wrong thing. I was looking for sheets of pastry but it comes in rolls and in Austria is called Blätterteig.

Most of you would have known that it comes in rolls but when you are a complete pastry novice like me you have to start from scratch when doing things for the first time.

And before I went to Interspar at Simmering – which is a really big store - I had not looked up what Puff Pastry was in German so really had no idea – and thought that it was pointless asking because last time I tried that I discovered that no one knew the English names for anything – and I was then asking for something that simply does not exist in Austria - so it caused complete chaos as more and more people were called into the scrum and I had to sneak away before they evicted me for causing a riot.  

So I did the only thing possible and called Rozalin - and she told me what it was – and sent me a picture – and where to find it - so I was set. But – and here’s the thing – it is also called Puff Pastry on the packet – you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that.

The pie was easy to make but I discovered that if you leave the puff pastry on the bench in a hot kitchen it turns into amorphous sludge and cannot be used to make the crust - so you have to start again. I had already planned for this or a similar disaster – I am on very familiar terms with the Fuckup Fairy - and had purchased a second packet.

I also discovered that it if you cook the pie to be ready for when you think Cate will be home – at 7:00 PM – and she does not telephone to be picked up until 9:00 PM - by the time you get to the reheated pie it will be pretty much grungy goo and the formerly golden brown and crispy crust will taste like thick crust pizza left out in the rain.

Other than that – and the fact that the 30 Minute meal took me 2 hours to make – I am well satisfied with my first pie. 

Le Kangourou - Le Vainqueur

This Blog is pure self indulgence! Bear with me.

For many years – in fact since the early 1980s – I have followed the greatest bicycle race in the world – le Tour de France.

For those of you who do not know what the Tour de France is I will say only that is it the premier cycling event in the world. It is a mind numbingly difficult cycling race where the cyclists race for three weeks all over France – and into neighbouring countries.

This year there were 21 stages – over three weeks - covering 3,430 kilometres – some of which took them up to nearly 7 hours to cover in a single day – and they climbed some of the highest mountains in the Alps and the Pyrenees.

It takes an exceptional cyclist and exceptional skills, courage, strength and mental attitude to win the tour – together with  strong team, good tactics and quite often a good helping of luck.

I first became interested in le Tour when I became aware of Phil Anderson – and when SBS – an independent multicultural Australian television network started televising small segments of the Tour. This expanded until in recent years SBS was televising all of the tour live late at night. I was often sitting up until 2:00 am for three weeks watching every moment of the most fascinating bike race on earth.

(If you do not follow bike racing don’t try to understand what I am saying – just go with the flow)

Phil was the first Australian to win a stage in the Tour and the first Australian to wear the Yellow Jersey.

These are the Holy Grail of cycling. Since then there have been a whole host of Australian cyclists who have gone to Europe to make their mark.

Also since then there have been some fabulous performances from Australian bike riders such as Robbie McEwen, Stuart O’Grady, Michael Rogers - and many others who left Australia to make their careers in Europe and have excelled in the grand tours and in the Tour de France.

These guys are virtually unknown in Australia – except to cycling fans – but live in Europe and are glitterati in the cycling world and in the communities where they live.

There has never really been an Australian cyclist who could win the Tour except Cadel Evans – and he has come second twice. He has come second twice simply because he has not had a strong enough team around him to help him through the mountain stages and he has not been strong enough to do it on his own – very few ever have been.

A few years ago I attended a dinner at which Phil Anderson spoke and at that stage Cadel Evans had not featured in the places – but looked good as a prospect. I discussed this with Phil – and he said that Cadel could only win if he had a team around him that could give him the level of support that could get him there. This is indeed conventional wisdom and is the way it has always been.

Well – I am here to tell you today that Cadel did it by himself – and I watched it happen.

In the last two stages in the mountains Cadel was battling against the two Schleck brothers and Contador who attacked him constantly. At one stage Cadel had to change bikes and lost a minute and 30 seconds and had to chase the Schlecks – and caught them and lost no time on the stage.

He went into the final time trial 57 seconds down on Andy Schleck. i.e. He had to beat Andy by more than 57 seconds to take the Yellow Jersey.

He blew him away! BLEW HIM AWAY!

It was the best performance I have ever seen!

He took the lead in the race by 1 minute and 34 seconds!

He came second in the time trial – losing by only 7 seconds!

It was the most exciting Tour I have watched – and I have watched the last 30. Cadel cried. I cried. Kangaroos sobbed into their pouches. Koalas rubbed tears from their eyes.

Of course Cadel actually has to get over the finish line tomorrow on the Champs-Élysées but this is usually a formality. There will be no challenges on the last day – it is possible but not likely.

So unless a madman leaps from behind a bush and beheads him we can assume that he is the first Antipodean to win the Tour de France. Formidable!

It's not a real Bulldog

The problem with SKY is that it takes up to a minute to change channels – and I cannot record or fast-forward. This is a problem because the only stuff I watch live is sport. The only other things I watch are from History or Discovery or National Geographic and I record these so that I can fast-forward through the advertisements.

When I am watching sport I change channels when there are advertisements on. I hate advertisements – I am already paying a vast sum of money for the service anyway – and the advertisements are totally irrelevant – they are for a UK audiences and I live in Austria – and they are completely stupid – mostly involving furry animals. When did this start?

In one there is a couple sitting in their lounge room and there is a bulldog sitting on the other lounge chair and they are looking at insurance for something and it starts to talk to them about the best insurance – and they listen to it and base their decision on what it says.  

Clearly it is a member of the family. This raises a number of interesting questions. Where did it gets its knowledge of insurance – does it have a business degree – does it work in  the industry?

If I had a bulldog that talked it would not sitting at home on the lounge chair and I would not be worried about insurance. 

But here’s the thing. I can see that it is not a real bulldog. Its movements are stilted and not natural. It is mechanical. These people are being fooled. So is the audience. It is a trick.

In another ad a woman is sitting in a restaurant with her family and a polar bear sitting at the next table starts to talk to her about sea food. She seems a bit surprised – but not as surprised as I would be.

Sure when I was younger and running trading rooms and drinking a lot I used to have experiences like this but I knew what was causing it.

This women seems to think she should buy the seafood that the polar bear recommends and seems reluctant to let her family know that she is in communication with a polar bear. Quite.

And then there are the Meerkats. I have no idea what they do but there are infestations of them and they sing and dance.

So this is all quite normal now and people just sit there and accept it? Well not me. I just move it – well I did until my SKY box broke.

Wolfgang from the local supplier took me through the very many processes necessary to find where the fault lay. This involved software and hardware resets and much farnarkling. 

I could have  solved the problem easily by asking at the outset ‘Wolfgang – what is the most expensive thing to replace?’ and he would have said ‘Why – the SKY Box of course’ and I would have replied ‘Well that’s where the problem is.’

But it took us two days of telephone discussions and a visit to his shop to get there and a new box is on its way from London at a cost – to us – of €290. See you – like me – thought that a faulty SKY box would be replaced by SKY but we were both wrong because my contract is not with SKY it is with Wolfgang.

Wolfgang said I will be pleased with the new box because it is smaller. He showed me a new box and it is indeed smaller – half the size of the old one. I am not sure what I will do with the space we have saved because it is going in the same spot as the old one. 

I asked Wolfgang if there was any way I could get BBC and he said it was theoretically possible but that I would need a dish with a diameter of six meters and it would cost about €20,000 to buy and install and that after the next storm we might have to go to Graz to get our roof back. I said I would think about it.

  

I can now make a pie

Anyway maybe the people who knew nothing about the air con apparently did something because it is reasonably cool even in really hot weather now and the cats are a bit more relaxed – or as relaxed as you can be when you get locked out of the apartment - which I have done to both of them on separate occasions in the last few days. Monika for an hour or so and Sissi for about four hours last Saturday.

This is not really a problem as after they have done their exploring they wait patiently outside the door to be let back in but it is a bit disconcerting when the one who rings the doorbell to facilitate this process is Frau Katzenjammer - who must really think I am a complete nincompoop that I cannot keep control of two cats.

The problem is that whenever I go out to do something like shopping - and then come back inside - Sissi is waiting when I come back home and hurtles out the door as soon as I open it.

She always comes back inside after she has explored outside near the elevator - and perhaps a couple of floors down - but Monika has also become much braver of late and has also started exploring - and if I forget to check it is possible for me to close the door without making sure that Monika is also inside. 

I know to you this seems impossible but it is a big apartment and sometimes I see that the door is open and absent-mindedly close it without thinking that there could be a cat or cats outside and without actually doing a thorough search of the apartment to make sure that there are two cats in attendance. I promise to be more careful in future.

Anyway – a week prior to the air con saga the dishwasher (geschirrspüler) had expired. It would start dishwashing but never stopped. It just kept whirring away hour after hour so I had to turn it off. Rozalin did her thing and a day or two after I got back the man from Siemens came and delivered his verdict. Kaputt! He said it would cost more to fix than to get a new one - so we will need get a new one.

This is to be arranged by the owner of the apartment. Miraculously - he will pay. I am suspicious because he has never paid for anything else and under Austrian real estate law he is not really required to pay for anything. Once a tenant signs a lease in Austria on an apartment like ours the landlord usually retires to the Costa del Sol and just sits in the sun and drinks champagne.

There are a couple of procedural issues to be followed before anything happens.  As none of my children is under the age of 6 - I am not required to surrender them to the owner but I do have to sacrifice a goat on the terrace at midnight on Friday and cook the owner a pair of geese at Weichnachten.

The timing of course is another matter. At some stage a man will come to measure the existing dishwasher. He will go away and deliver this information to another man and one day in the future – no doubt after we are long gone – the new tenants will get a new dishwasher.

In the interim I am washing up using a nice pair of yellow rubber gloves. I had forgotten how much fun it was to wash up dishes without a dishwasher. I do this mainly with cold water as our kitchen sink is serviced by a teensy little water heater which holds about 10 liters of hot water.

But the purpose of dishwashing by hand is not to get dishes clean – it is to appear to get dishes clean – and I can do this nicely. All the germs are spread evenly over each and every dish an utensil.

I would not mind so much about the dishwasher except that the SKY box and the steam iron have gone out in sympathy.

On the bright side I have learned how to make pies - and it is dead easy!

  

Sissi has a forehand like Rafael

Cate went to Israel the next morning so missed the excitement but during the next few days it got up to the mid 30s in Vienna – and up to 35° in the apartment and without the two portable air conditioning units we have in the studies – which we had to buy ourselves - it would have been 45° up there.

These studies are places where Red Adair would not venture without a full crew and a Bulldozer with corrugated iron on the front of it.

I did not think too much of it because the air con has always been totally cactus so just did my usual thing of wandering about the apartment in swimming costumes – or totally naked - but on a shopping trip I saw Frau Katzenjammer outside her front door – which is also outside my front door - and she looked very unhappy.  

She is usually a pale, elegant young creature but on this occasion looked decidedly hot, sweaty and frazzled and had the aura of a plague victim in the final stages.

She asked if I had air con and I said no and that it was worse than usual. She said her apartment was like a furnace and that she had called the air con people and they had checked the thermo-thing in the basement and it had apparently been set to heat instead of cool but they were not quite sure because the man they sent did not actually know anything about air con.

Well he would certainly be the perfect one to send – and WTF is this air con thermo in the basement thing?  This is the first time anyone has mentioned this - or is this just another bullshit line to throw us off the scent of the general fucked up never will work in a million years air con crap cardboard ruse thing.  

Frau Katzenjammer was nearly hysterical because her baby son Maximilian was not sleeping and neither was she. Max was very quiet when I saw him – and a bit red in the face - but he had probably screamed all night. I was going to mention that I slept in the nude to combat the heat and had she tried this but sensed that it was probably not the right moment.

Frau Katzenjammer certainly looked like Max had screamed all night. Indeed Frau Katzenjammer looked like she had been hung upside down and pummeled with a carpet beater for eight hours – and then sprayed with strawberry juice.

Frau Katzenjammer probably had a bad night but at least she does not have the problem of Max leaping onto the bed in the middle of the night from the ledge behind the bed and scaring the shit out her – or deciding at the crack of dawn to knock everything on the edge of the bath into the bath –or even worse – deciding that an exposed toe needs to be shredded.

It is for this reason that – no matter how hot it is – one cannot lie completely naked on our bed. Sissi has a naked foot fetish and has a forehand like Rafael Nadal that can bring tears to your eyes and cover the bedclothes with blood spatters that would fill Dexter with awe.

So – regardless of the weather – I have to keep my feet covered. But I still feel a great deal of sympathy for Frau Katzenjammer because Max looks like he could bring the house down. When I see him I am glad that he lives next door.

But the failure of the air con was a harbinger of further failures of an electronic nature.......

I have a lot to tell you

I have a lot to tell you. I have not even told you about Stockholm yet and so much else has happened.

On Friday night we went to see some modern dance. La la la Human Steps is a modern dance company from Montreal which we have seen before in Australia and I remember them as being sensational. We used to see a lot of modern dance in Australia. I don’t know why we do not go here. It does not matter whether the program is in German or not.

This production was a bit out there for me and I did not understand any of it at all. It was very chaotic and frenetic and was all conducted under spotlights and in shadows so that you could not actually see the dancers except in silhouette and the movements were as those of swans with tourette syndrome – but without sound apart from the panting of the dancers who I must say did dance their butts off.

The man next to Cate reacted badly and sat with his head in his hands a lot of the time. Some of the time he rested his forehead on the seat in front and dangled his arms down onto the floor – much like a gorilla looking for a banana he had dropped out of a tree at the zoo.

I thought it was an over reaction - although the flashing lights did give me a  bad headache as did the music which was provided by a piano and some stringed instruments which I could not see and they were often quite good when they played the same tune.

I certainly had no idea at any stage what was going on – but this is often the case with modern dance and it’s certainly not like opera which to me always has a story which could be told in two minutes but which is always sung in four acts over five hours and usually has someone dying or jumping off a cliff. This is probably an exaggeration but I really cannot get hold of a genre that has people singing the bits between the songs. Why not march the bits between songs – makes just as much sense.

Anyway we did not actually get to see the dancers until the lights stopped flashing and I found that the one who I thought was a child was indeed a child and could have been on work experience. Is it Stuvac in Canada at the moment?  I mean this kid was being tossed about all over the stage by this thug in tights and if I had been her father I would have jumped up on the stage and given him a good thrashing.

Anyway the kid got the best round of applause and would be well pleased even though she will be black and blue and the thug will have a lot to explain to child welfare when he gets back to Montreal.

Things are going the way of the US deficit talks around here at the moment. The day we got back from Stockholm we walked into the apartment and it was the hottest it had ever been – and that is pretty damned hot.

The cats were lying flat out on the floor looking at us reproachfully and inviting us to poach eggs on them and it was quite apparent that the air con was not working at all.

This is nothing new but this time it seemed to be blowing hot air.  I should mention that – generally speaking – old apartments in Vienna keep reasonably cool but ours is on the top floor and has lots of glass – and the two bedrooms on the top floor – which we use as our studies - would make ideal hothouses for growing orchids – or for glass blowing.

To be continued…….

Apparently I am addicted

Cate has said that I am not allowed to stop blogging. She says that she enjoys reading my blogs too much. Not that you would know this. I get no comments ever and only say – every Shrove Tuesday – she gives a throwaway line like ‘I enjoyed your blog today.’

Still that’s more than Dexter gets for his work. What an awful thing to do such fine work and to not be able to be appraised for it. No Annual Performance Review. Certainly no 360 – at least 180° is missing.

I think Cate’s sentiment is ‘Fuck your Spark!’

But – I am addicted to blogging. And to tell you the truth this comment from Steph brought me back to life and made me realize that I needed to pull myself together. What a girl. Stillwater will be rocking when we get together!

Some people think it is easy to write blogs and sometimes it is. Mostly it is hard.

I am not a good writer but I have read many good books and I have read many writers writing about writing and all of them without exception say it is hard. ‘real’ authors fart in the general direction of bloggers and hold us in contempt. We are not real writers. It takes a ‘real’ writer to sit down and slog through a ‘real’ book banging out page after page day after day.

Well I decided that while my blogs are not likely to end up in the Library of Congress – I should preserve them because I have in fact started writing a book about my life and times in Vienna and the way Google has been going lately it is only a matter of time before it vaporizes all its blogs. In fact I would not be surprised if Google loses the whole planet – it can never find my Picasa photo stream.

According to Google I can back up to hard disk - but this clags out after a couple of minutes and there are lots of potential solutions on the Internet all of which I cannot get to work so finally I just printed the fucking thing using Feedfabrik.

So for the period when I started the blog – September 2008 until June 2011 I have two volumes each of 700 odd pages contained every precious word. Some of which I am very proud. Some are crap. This is the nature of writing. The good stuff will form the basis of the book I write.

So that includes photos but if we take those out that is still a decent sized novel that I would be happy to stack up against some of the shit that I have read in my lifetime – including I might add – the Dan Brown novel Digital Fortress which was the greatest load of puerile childish nonsensical hogwash that I have ever read and that I threw half read – with uncanny accuracy – into a rubbish bin – from a distance of 10 meters - at San Francisco airport.

Admittedly I was tired and emotional at the time as we were in the middle of a 14 hour layover. Don’t ask.

Oh – and everything Jackie Collins ever wrote.

But I think that what I should not do is try to blog every day . That is the killer. I will show Cate how to play Angry Birds – that will solve the problem.   

The Spark Thing

I did not say I would not blog at all.

I said I had lost my spark – meaning my creative spark – and that I would post some photos. This was taken by Cate in Stockholm.

The following was provided to me by my son Lenny who is has no equal in finding things like this on the Internet.

Watch it with sound. http://nyan.cat/

I had to show you this

An Austrian has won the right to be photographed wearing a pasta strainer for his driving licence on the grounds of religious freedom.

Niko Alm announced the decision on his blog, saying that, after three years of struggle, a psychologist had passed him fit to drive and so he could wear the kitchen implement for the picture ID.

Mr Alm, who calls himself a "pastafarian", said he belonged to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which lampooned religion.

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"Today I was able to get my new driving licence, and in it you can clearly see that I'm wearing a colander on my head to demonstrate my allegiance to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster," Mr Alm wrote in his blog.

"My headwear has now been recognised by the Republic of Austria."

The spaghetti church was founded in 2005 in opposition to pressure on the Kansas school board in the United States to teach the theory of intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative to evolution.

It has engaged in a light-hearted campaign against religion ever since.

Pastafarians claim the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but, because the monster was inebriated at the time, it was a flawed design.

The Telegraph, London

(Badger has been a long time devotee of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster)

I have lost my spark

Discerning readers will have noticed that there has been something wrong with my blog for some time. Those readers that are still left. Most have wisely moved on and my readership is at its lowest level ever.

I have lost my spark.

I lost my spark when Jim died and I have not been functioning properly blog-wise ever since. I realized this a few weeks ago when I discovered that writing blogs was no longer fun. It had become a chore – and a difficult chore at that.  

Jim was a really good friend and I miss him terribly.

So rather than blunder on and destroy the little readership I have left I will stop blogging until I find myself again. This may happen on home leave in Australia in a few weeks. Perhaps I need a good dose of family and Australiana.

I saw a gigantic flock of wonderful birds yesterday in Djurgården in Stockholm and my immediate reaction was to take a photo for Maalie so he could tell me what they were. I had to find out on my own. They are Barnacle Geese and are quite gorgeous.

I may post some photos on the blog every now and then – but probably not many words.

It was better before the Reindeer Wrangling Championships

I thought I had worked the hotel thing out. Instead of trying to find the best three star hotel I looked for the 5 star hotel with the best deal. I have found that there are always a 5 star hotels that have special long-weekend deals which are only a teensy bit more expensive than the price you pay for a 3 star hotel.

This strategy worked brilliantly in Berlin and it was one of the best hotels in which we have ever stayed  - and at a very reasonable price. It has worked in other places as well.

The strategy failed completely in Stockholm where the hotel in which we stayed was an extremely expensive shithole. The ‘extremely expensive’ in this instance is superfluous. Stockholm – and I suppose Sweden – is the most expensive city/country we have ever visited.

It is strange how our expectations change. When we first came to Vienna we were flabbergasted by how expensive it was – then we were astonished last year by Finland – but Stockholm makes all these expensive Europeans cities seem like bazaars in Baghdad.

It is so expensive as to be scary. Not to Cate of course – she went shopping – but then she doesn’t have to balance the housekeeping money. I never cease to be fascinated by the fact that Cate can – without any prior knowledge of the city – and without any reference to any map – find her way unerringly to the women’s fashion stores just by sniffing the breeze.

Anyway – the hotel was not – as had been advertised – 5 star. It may have been 3.5 stars before it was used for the 1979 Scandinavian Reindeer Wrangling Championships but had gone downhill considerably since then.

I have never been in a room quite like the one we had. It was sort of art deco and had many panels of colored glass and an art deco bedhead. In common with many hotel rooms of the era – the lights were designed to illuminate only themselves.

We found our way around the room mainly by the light from our iPhones – and the fact that it never got completely dark in Stockholm also helped a bit.

Some of the doors in the hallway on our floor had plastic ‘Business Class’ signs stuck on them. Most of them were at an angle so had been stuck on straight and had sagged  - or had been affixed by a drunk.

I regret that this set the tone for the whole operation.

However – Stockholm was sensational – as I shall report.

Un update on Cate's progress

I thought I should bring you up to date on what Cate has not done recently. As you know – she decided not to learn the Piano so we bought one of these and this has been a great success.

She did open it one day and discovered to her horror that they have not progressed from when she was a small girl. All the keys are still white and black and have no markings on them at all.

But this is impossible – she gasped – how can anybody make coherent sounds with something like this. Don’t they do a QWERTY keyboard yet?

I said that no they didn’t and that there were no plans to do so and that much practice would be required. I said that I could mark the keyboard up with post-it notes or a crayon to get her started but she lost interest almost immediately.

To make her feel not quite so bad – as the Piano sits next to her in her study and makes her feel a teensy bit guilty – I have taken the tag off the stool so it does not look quite so new an unused.

Mrs. Moneypenny dusts it every week but it still looks sort of – you know – unused. I am thinking of hiring some small children to come in and play it (while I am not here) so that it will look aged and make Cate feel better.

But really – she is so busy that I cannot imagine how she would have the time to sit and practice the piano. I think she will have to start on something more simple – like Angry Birds. She now has a work iPhone with all these Apps!

Now she also decided not to do Yoga and this has also been very successful. The Yoga mat was purchased and has not been unwrapped – which is just as it should be.

I have helped her with this because of my ribs which are still in a delicate state but will mend if I do not do anything else stupid – which is asking a lot from me - but I will do my best.

But – bless her soul – she has been walking to work and back again for months. A promise she made to herself and has kept.

Now I have figured out a way she can learn to play the Piano while walking to work - and keep herself fit at the same time. And if she became proficient and spent 15 minutes on the corner of Ungargasse and the Rennweg she could earn enough for Yoga lessons. I have yet to speak to her about this fabulous idea. 

The nitwitedness is hardwired

Apparently I forgot to tell you that we are going to Stockholm on Wednesday for our Anniversary.  Molly was most surprised to learn this today when I told her but I am sure I told her ages ago – but when you reach my vast age things do start to slip.

This is part of our quest to explore Scandinavia and we are doing as much as we can while we are in Europe. Denmark was last year and Norway is planned for Christmas this year.

I will of course hope to blog. I will not be doing anything dangerous and will stay away from Huskies.

I spent  tonight cocking up a trip to Dublin which we are taking when Liz and Darryl come to Europe in September.

We are all going to Washington DC for a wedding and we booked these tickets some time ago. Liz and Darryl are then going to the UK before coming to Vienna so we thought we would join them there.

We have tried without success to change our tickets so that we can fly from Washington to London. It is cheaper and easier to fly home to Vienna and then to fly the next day to Dublin. Indeed it would be cheaper and easier to built a raft and sail across the Atlantic.

We used points to get to Washington and to change flights with these is like getting an Austrian to smile.

Anyway – what I do best is cocking up flight bookings. I am so much better at this than I am at hotels. So we need to fly to Dublin on Tuesday morning and come back on Sunday evening. What could be hard about that. Nothing unless you are a nitwit.

I now allow for the fact that every time I make a booking I will have to pay a fee to change the booking with 24 hours. There is nothing I can do about.  It is hard wired nitwitedness.